Our New Departure

Front matter

Our New Departure:

or,

of the

The New Departure

Every live movement, in proportion as it is alive, enlarges as it proceeds. And so enlarging, it necessarily creates constantly new circumstances, out of which grow fresh demands.

The important question concerning every such movement, therefore, is, How far will it successively adjust itself to these new circumstances, and meet these fresh demands? On the answer to this question, under God, the final breadth and power of the movement wholly depend.

Principles never change. Neither do the ultimate purposes of any enterprise whose relations and issues have, at the outset, been fully perceived. But methods, instruments, directions of labor, bases of operation must perpetually change, or weakness and failure ensue. No wise commander adheres to any line of march save only with reference to his objective point. His tactics vary with the progress and varying exigencies of the campaign. Every day he studies the situation, to determine his strategy accordingly. New departures, by flank, detour, or advance, are made after every fight. How else do campaigns end in victory? Or, who doubts the consequence should any commander obstinately persist that, as he began, so, in every particular, he must push on? As little is victory possible for any movement that aims at growth or conquest, except on similar terms.

The Universalist movement is no exception to these necessities. Of the nature or importance of this movement it is not requisite here to speak at length. It is enough to say that no reasonable words can exaggerate what it is, what it has done, or what it may do. Broadly viewed, it is, intellectually and morally, the grandest movement of these last centuries. Since Luther, there is nothing comparable to it. It was the resurrection of the long-slumbering moral consciousness of the Church. It was reason and common sense once more re-asserting themselves amidst the contradictions and absurdities of the creeds. Beginning as a protest of the uneducated popular heart against the cold and cruel scholasticism of the traditional theology, and providentially designed to give the world a more humane and harmonious interpretation of the Gospel, it has swept, a modifying and reconstructive power, through the realm of opinion, and spread as a subtile influence, for the most part unrecognized, but none the less actual, permeating society with broader principles, and a tenderer and more sympathetic spirit, to an extent that no human foresight could have dared anticipate. When John Murray was being stoned in Boston, or when his friends in Gloucester, or, later still, the handful of Universalists in New Hampshire, were battling before the courts for their rights as a distinct denomination, had some one ventured to predict that in the year 1870 Universalism would have so leavened the country, including even the churches, or that the Universalist Church of America would to-day be what it is in all the elements of Christian power, none would have been more ready than the Universalists themselves to pronounce him wildly visionary. What has thus been realized, seen and unseen, considering the circumstances, is almost without parallel. All honor to those who, in any way, have helped to make the movement thus potent. A brave and sturdy company, for the most part, they have been. Seldom has any work had workmen braver, or more deserving the world's remembrance.

But, exalted as are the terms in which this movement is to be spoken of, and much as all interested in it have occasion to be proud of the record which, in most respects, it has made for itself, it is obvious, in the nature of the case, that, if it is to continue effective, its methods must change with the changed circumstances it has helped to create. What has been cannot suffice for what is, or is to be; nor can the experiment of making it suffice be insisted on, except at the peril of the whole movement as thus far organized.

At first, our work was of necessity controversial. Occupied as the religious field was, our call was to assail and denounce—to oppose, dispute, pull down. We were nothing if not aggressive. As the consequence, we have arraigned, discussed and controverted the old theology as none others have been willing to do. We have exposed its sophisms; have made manifest its inconsistencies and contradictions; have denounced the grossness of its barbarous principles, and the fallacy of its narrow assumptions. We have wrested from it the Scriptures it has misapplied, and have demonstrated by our reiterated expositions—reiterated, as some have thought, to very weariness—how positively the Bible announces quite other conclusions. We have shown how reason and conscience, and nature and Providence, and every humane instinct, array themselves against it. In few words, we have so kept in agitation this entire question of God, and man, and destiny, in all its intellectual, moral, and scriptural aspects and relations, as to compel the public attention to it. We have had allies, it is true. We readily concede all that can be justly claimed for them. But, without stopping now to enumerate them, or to analyze the precise ratio of their and our comparative influence, it is not too much to allege that we have accomplished more than any other one agency—probably more than all other agencies combined. There could have been no Ward Beecher without Hosea Ballou. The result is obvious. That single name—Ward Beecher—better symbolizes it than whole volumes could describe it. 'Orthodoxy' still has its nominal believers—many of them; and considerable numbers, despite the growing breadth and liberality, adhere immovably to the ancient standards. Dr. Hodge's "Systematic Theology," and the recent action of little knots of ministers in various localities, are among the latest, as they are sufficient, witnesses of this; and, looking at catechisms and text-books, we may still find many of them as harsh as ever. But the sway of the sacrificial system is none the less broken. Dr. Hodge's book and the ministerial demonstrations no doubt have sympathizers; and there are those who are satisfied with the catechisms and the text-books, or they could not hold their place; but they are anachronisms, nevertheless—as little in keeping with the existing drift of popular and church thought as Dr. Emmons's cocked hat and knee-breeches, if to-day reproduced, would be with the present style of dress, or as some extinct monster of the Silurian epoch, should it return to perambulate our city streets, would be with the life amidst which it would walk. Speaking of those portions of the country where our—and other—modifying influences have really asserted themselves, how many minds, at all considerate, do not now revolt from the doctrines which Dr. Hodge is so grimly re-affirming? How many are now affrighted with visions of God's implacable wrath, or with the smoke and flames of an endless hell? How many, who actually think of God at all, now ever think of Him as an arbitrary Sovereign, creating souls on purpose to damn them forever, or as a Being who is weakly permitting the larger portion of His creation to drift to helpless ruin? Notwithstanding the creeds and catechisms, He is now practically thought of as the merciful Friend and Father of all; and the number of intelligent people—in the fields referred to—who, without question or reservation, believe in the absolute endlessness of sin and suffering, is comparatively very small. What is the significance of the ministerial demonstrations,—so far as they have any significance,—except that they point to these facts? Perhaps the state of the public mind, in the churches and out, in these respects, has never before been put to so significant a test as by the recent books of George Macdonald, especially his "Robert Falconer." This book is an express onslaught against all that is characteristic in 'orthodoxy' and is not only saturated with the spirit of Universalism, but is full of vigorous and unanswerable arguments for it. But who, or how many, have objected to it on these accounts? Newspapers and reviews of all shades of opinion have praised it. The most strenuously 'evangelical' pastors have advised their people to read it; and thousands, of all names and sects, have taken it to their hearts as an exceeding refreshment and joy. Could this have been forty, or even twenty, years ago? Look, too, at the new departure which 'orthodoxy' has made in the welcome which all the churches are willing to give to Universalists, notwithstanding their Universalism; in the readiness of some of them to tolerate it even in their ministers; and in the larger and kindlier fellowship for Universalists which is finding so many advocates. I know a prominent Methodist church in whose Sabbath-school an avowed Universalist is the teacher of one of the Bible-classes; and the significance of the ordination of the Rev. Mr. Jackson among the Congregationalists, and of the debate among them and others whether the doctrine of endless woe is, in any real sense, essential, is too clear to be mistaken. The old rigors, to a wide extent, have undeniably softened.

The circumstances amidst which we have to work, then, being so changed, the direction and methods of our work, manifestly, if we are to work to best effect, must be modified accordingly. Argument and exposition, attack and defence, are unquestionably still required as much as ever in some localities—in all localities on some occasions. But these are no longer our chief business. As well might one persist in swinging his axe when only an occasional tree is to be felled, and when his pressing need is to till his ground for harvests. Not that we have been altogether negligent of harvests. It is sometimes charged that we have been; and writers and speakers of our own have not been lacking, who, in a culpable neglect to qualify and discriminate, have joined in the charge. But any such representation, come it whence it may, is false, and does us great injustice. We have had earnest affirmative aims; and our organization, now so complete, but attained only after so many years of struggle and experiment, is demonstrative proof that we have sought to build as well as to tear down. But what harvests have we chiefly cultivated? To what ends have we mainly built? For the awakening of the thoughtless? For the conversion of sinners? For the salvation of souls? For these ends to some extent, certainly; and those there have been among us—in number not a few—second to none in the devotion and energy with which they have given themselves to such work. But can it be said that this has been the general animus, the characteristic spirit of our Universalist effort? On the contrary, while it would be slanderous to say that there has been no thought—or even to say that there has not been a good deal of thought—among us with reference to these ends, has not our labor, as the rule, concerned doctrines more than souls, except, of course, as it has always been understood that it is for the interest of souls to know the truth? Has not our effort been to convince the head that 'orthodoxy' is not true, and that God is good, and that all men are to be saved, rather than so to present the fact of God's persistent and pleading love, and of the ultimate repentance and obedience of all, as to convict the heart of sin, to quicken the conscience to a sense of guilt, and to bring the people, in penitence and a confession of personal need and obligation, to their knees? In a word, has not our labor been theological more than experimental, aiming to make Christian Universalists, and to build and consolidate a Universalist denomination, rather than to make Universalist Christians, compacted and consecrated in the Universalist Church? It is believed that no contradiction is hazarded in saying that these last questions can be truthfully answered only in the affirmative. The deepest and most interior meanings of Christ's work have never been wholly overlooked among us; but, as the rule, we have given more attention to the fact that he is to save, than to the question, How?

When I entered the ministry (1836), and for several years after, I found few with any clear and settled answer for this question, How?—for the reason that it was generally held to be of only incidental importance; and I well remember with what a trembling sense of treading on very uncertain—and almost forbidden—ground, I ventured once to read an essay in which—in a very crude way, as I now see—I had tried to work out some answer to this question for my own satisfaction. It was not until some time after the publication of Dr. Ballou's weighty and every way admirable paper on "The New Testament Doctrine of Salvation," in the "Expositor" of January, 1840, that the misty and incoherent state of thought on this subject began to give place to a more distinct and intelligent view. And even since, as before, that paper—which did more than any other one thing to clarify and systematize our denominational thinking on this point—the very large proportion of our ministers and people have been much more occupied with the certainty than with the method of salvation. God and what He has purposed, rather than man and the conditions which he must fulfil, have constituted the burden of our thought; and while our pulpit—from which have spoken a succession of men, as a whole, second to no others in purity and unselfish zeal—has been filled with argument in the direction of faith, more than with unction in the direction of conversion and work, our people have been intelligent, conscientious, benevolent, morally reputable, comfortably confident that everything is to come out rightly at last, rather than pious, prayerful, spiritually vital, eagerly asking, "Men and brethren, what shall we do?"

Nor, however much there may be in all this to regret, could it, in the nature of the case, have been otherwise. Consider the facts. The entire theory of God and the universe, when our movement began, and for many subsequent years, was such as to insult every rational and moral instinct, and to render all that bore the name of religion unattractive, if not a disgust. Chiefest of all, perhaps, an appalling uncertainty hung over the future. Nothing was definite. Above no grave could a sure word of prophecy be uttered. Not even to the saintliest soul, it was thought, was there authority to say, "Fear not:" for time and eternity, God is your Friend. Ours it was to pour light into this darkness. The word providentially put upon our lips was, Look up: God rules in infinite love, and Christ, as his messenger, will certainly triumph. Was it strange that, at first, we were mainly engrossed with the errors we opposed, and the glad tidings we proclaimed? Recalling how we were not only doctrinally assailed, but personally maligned, misrepresented, denounced as the religious pariahs of the country, the enemies of God and all good, would it not have been remarkable if we had had much thought for anything save the assertion and justification of our truth on the one hand, and the arraignment of 'orthodoxy' and its mischievous power on the other? And, full of our message of certainty, as we had occasion to be amidst the prevailing suspense and gloom, is it surprising that we did not always stop carefully to weigh in detail all the conditions involved in the result we heralded, or to emphasize the personal spiritual necessities it imposed?

But it is one of God's methods that every work educates its workers. So our work has been educating us. More and more, as the years have passed, the conditions upon which all moral results depend have been asserting themselves in our thought. The question, How? or, What have we to do? has commanded continually increasing attention. And now, entering upon the second century of our history, we have, as a body, very generally reached conclusions in the light of which the answer to this question assumes momentous importance. What we are at this point to determine is, whether or not this answer shall have the enforcement its importance calls for. Not that we are to lose any interest in the grand fact in which Universalism culminates. We are to abate nothing from the emphasis or the constancy with which we proclaim it. To do so would be to abandon the position we have conquered, and to relinquish the chief element of our power. The Gospel of Jesus Christ, without the doctrine of his certain ultimate triumph in the conquest of sin and the reconciliation of all souls to God, is the arch without the , is the lever without the fulcrum, is the sky without the sun, is the body without the soul. But, while this result must still have its due place, its cognate—and, in their place, no less important—facts must have greater prominence. What is to precede this result, and what, therefore, it implies as an antecedent experience and purpose in every soul, must be more urgently pressed. In other words, the demand is that, more keenly apprehending and appreciating the innermost significance and personal requirements of the truth we teach, we shall take another step forward in the adoption of such methods of labor as the spiritual facts underlying what we affirm suggest and require; and on our decision in respect to this demand our future influence and fortune as a Church are suspended.

Another step forward, I say; for it is no new thing for us to take a "new departure" denominationally. As was intimated in opening, it is the law of all live movements thus to go forward by stages, either because principles are gradually more clearly perceived, or because of a ripening understanding as to the best instruments. There were such new departures in the apostolic church, as when Peter, after the vision of the sheet, went and preached to Cornelius and his friends; as when Paul and Barnabas, being rejected of the Jews, "turned to the Gentiles." Every church which has grown in the apprehension of its truth, or profited by its experience, has had similar new departures. We have had them with the rest. Let us look back a moment, and see what they have been.

There are four well-defined periods in the history of our Church, each successively marking the new departures we have made:—1. The patristic period, during which the whole type of thought and faith was 'orthodox,' with the single exception of the doctrine of universal salvation; 2. The period of transition, extending from 1795 to (perhaps) 1818, during which the 'orthodox' type of faith was supplanted by the Unitarian theory of God and the atonement, and related points (so making us the first body of Unitarian Christians in the country), the doctrine of "future punishment" being still retained; 3. The Ballouian period, extending from 1817–18 to (perhaps) 1845, during which the influence of Mr. Ballou was dominant, and his theory as to the immediate felicity of all souls at death became the general sentiment of our body; 4. The period of reaction, extending from 1845 to the present time, during which Father Ballou's theory has, in its turn, been generally superseded, and, as Dr. Ballou once phrased it, "the current of opinion has run in favor of a moral connection of the present life with the future."

Here, then, we have four distinct departures:—the first, our departure from 'orthodoxy,' and each of the others a departure, quite as marked, from ground we had been occu- pying, to a new position. Each of these was an advance. Putting their own interpretation upon them, our friends of other churches talk much of our shifting theology; and, suiting themselves in their assumptions thereupon, they moralize, greatly to their own satisfaction, on the instability of error, holding up their hands in wonder at the fatuity which imagines that a system so vacillating can have any future. It is easy at any time to retort by pointing these friends to their own shifting positions, some of them fatal to the very substance of their theology. But, not now to step aside for this, it is sufficient to say that these several departures warrant no such unfavorable inferences. They are only the stages through which our Church has grown into the perception of the adjuncts and relations of its basic truth. It is the fortune of all truth, history teaches, to be progressively perceived and formulated. The apostles walked personally with Christ as their instructor, but who of them at once understood the spiritual and universal purpose of the Gospel? So with Luther's followers: how many on the instant took in the full scope of his principles, or the meaning of his work? And so of all crusades against error or wrong, and all moral or spiritual reforms. Of which of them, that has attained any considerable proportions, has the deepest significance ever been perceived by those who have first burned and thrilled with its new message, or fought and 'roughed it' in its earlier battles? In common with all great movements of thought, or religious life, we, as a Church, have only illustrated the natural order of things.

We have not happened. Nothing in our history is the result of accident. We have come of laws as absolute as gravitation, or any law of growth; and these successive changes or departures simply show how Universalism has been historically developed. They indicate no modification of final principles, and therefore justify no reflections as to the fickleness of our theology in respect to such principles. They only show the different phases of interpretation and statement in which other and more purely modal principles have been held upon these as their common foundation, much as the varieties of soil and vegetable growth on the globe have no significance as to what is primary in its struc- ture, only as to what has, from time to time, been deposited upon its surface. Whether God exists in one or in three persons or manifestations; whether he is so sovereign that all human action is necessitated, or so sovereign as to leave action free; whether sin is exclusively of the flesh, or of the soul; whether the character we here form has all its moral importance in this world, or goes, with its consequences, into the future,—these and like inquiries are very grave, and, in a sense, vital. But they are not primal; they do not touch bottom, like those which concern the character of God, and the spirit and issues of his government. In respect to these, Universalism has never changed. On other points, differences have been numerous, and opinion has fluctuated, and our theology has been protean in its forms, so that the Universalist Church has, at various periods, stood for quite diverse ideas. But as regards these final principles, there has been no difference or fluctuation. Murray, and Ballou, and Turner, and Hosea Ballou 2d, and all whom they represent, have clasped hands, in one unbroken line, in the unity of a faith "without variableness, or the shadow of turning;" and, from the hour of its inception till now, the Universalist Church has steadily stood for precisely the same thing, viz., the impartial and immutable love of God, destined surely to triumph through Christ in the ultimate redemption of all souls. Our successive departures, it thus appears, have been simply as to the form, never as to the substance, of faith. Instead, therefore, of furnishing any occasion for adverse criticism, they have quite another meaning. Fossils never grow. Only live things develop and mature. These departures reveal the processes of our spiritual evolution. That reactions, crudities, and various fanciful and extreme opinions, should appear, was inevitable in such a breaking up of old beliefs as the past hundred years have witnessed; and it speaks honorably for the vitality and elasticity of our Church that, amidst these things, while immovably fixed as to our fundamental faith, we have been, each for himself, so free to search God's word, and to follow the light given us. Thus, enslaved by no creeds and hindered by no traditions, thought has clarified, our great principles have gradually pushed themselves into fuller and clearer expression, the relations and proportions of truth have become more and more manifest, till, as the result, logic, sentiment, the Bible, and spiritual law having contributed each its part, Universalism stands forth rounded and balanced into the coherent and harmonious system it is.

And now, having attained to so much through our several preceding departures, the time—returning to our statement—has fully come for another step forward. Hitherto, our departures have been mainly doctrinal, though naturally they have each somewhat affected our type of life and methods of labor. That to which we are now called is vital and experimental. It is demanded of us that, having reached certain definite conclusions, we shall distinctly and systematically give ourselves to a style of work and appeal such as they logically suggest and require. There is no room for doubt as to what has come to be the predominant conviction of our body. It is that death, as such, works no moral change; that character is continuous, except as moral agencies modify it; and that salvation, being a change of character, is possible anywhere only as the result of such agencies, acting through faith and penitence, and inducing self-surrender. There was a period in our history when these were regarded as debatable positions. With the most of us, that period some time ago ceased; and these positions are now held to be axiomatic truths, as little open to legitimate debate or question as the fact that there is such a thing as character, or that mechanical or chemical causes are incompetent to produce moral effects. And, this being so, should not these conclusions give inspiration and purpose to our ministry, and be henceforth the basis of our systematic effort as a Church?

Is it said that there are those,—among them brethren honored and beloved,—with their equal rights in our fellowship, who do not yet accept these conclusions? But are these brethren more honored or beloved, or more entitled to hold back our Church from the kind of labor befitting its general convictions, than were Murray and his coadjutors, when, notwithstanding they adhered to the old theories, the denomination, under the lead of Ballou and Turner, planted itself on the Unitarian platform? or than were Turner, and Dean, and Loveland, and Willis, and Hosea Ballou 2d, and those in sympathy with them, when, following Father Ballou, the denomination so generally committed itself to the 'no-future punishment' theory? The question as to what a church shall do is never—or ought never to be—a question of persons, but always of principles; and the equal rights of those who no longer represent the prevailing sentiment of the body are summed up in the right to hold, and with entire freedom to state and defend, what seems to them the truth. On no just plea, surely, either of courtesy or of right, can the exceptional claim to annul or override the common in determining the tone and purpose of a church.

It is the law of every developing movement, of whatever nature, that the thought and methods of each stage in its progress must in turn give way to those of the stage succeeding. This has been signally manifest in our history. With its peculiar philosophy and scriptural interpretations, each of our four periods has had its peculiar processes of argument, and, equally, its peculiar methods of labor and appeal. Was it, in either of these periods, in any sense a violation of the rights of—or a disregard of what was due to—those still holding the philosophy and interpretations of former periods, that methods and appeals in keeping with its own convictions were supplanting those of the period preceding? Clearly, the only rule in any such case is that the predominating convictions of a church must of right give character and direction to its life and work.

Hence alike the propriety and necessity of the New Departure herein contemplated. Many among us have already, individually, taken this departure; and the tone and methods of our Church are, in important respects, to-day very different from what they were twenty years ago. But notwithstanding these changes, and though the Ballouian philosophy has been generally discarded, we are still, as a church, mainly in the ruts of the Ballouian period as to methods and appeals. What is now required of us is that we leave these ruts, and, in a concerted and systematic direction of our labor, strike out into aims and efforts better cor- responding with the existing state of our denominational thought:—just as Murray, Adam Streeter, and Rich followed their convictions, and struck out from orthodoxy; just as Ballou and Turner struck out from Murray; and just as Ballou, loyal to his new views, struck out from himself and Turner. New wine must be put into new bottles; and if, as is indisputable, the current of new or modified conclusions is running through our Church, we must adjust our wheels and give direction to our machinery with distinct reference to the power thus supplied.

Conceding the soundness of these new or modified conclusions, what but this can we do, if, as the stewards of God, we would be faithful? Are we not imperfectly administering the Gospel, and culpably neglecting important spiritual leverage, so far as we fail duly to use the means of influence thus placed at our command? If what is thus affirmed be true, death in itself is a concern only of the body; it interrupts or cancels no spiritual law; and hence nothing is to be expected from it in the way of release from moral penalty, or a more facile admission to the company of the just, since it puts no man into any easier or more desirable relations with God, and absolves no one from any condition on which salvation here depends. The good man disembodied, passing into the more manifest presence of God, loses none of his moral attributes; is a good man there, precisely as he was a good man here—that is, in the activity of his own moral faculties; and because, carrying in himself the harvest of his prayers and saintly endeavors, he still loves and chooses to go forward in the good life. The bad man, just as certainly, passing on in like manner, loses none of his impiety, selfishness, or sin in the passage; is inevitably the same bad man at his first moment of consciousness on the other side as he was at his last moment of consciousness here. He leaves his body behind, but nothing of what he morally was, because character is not of the body, but of the soul. Character, as the one actual thing in us, is to be changed, here or hereafter, only by our own moral choice. Death has no alchemy to touch it. True, death does strip off the flesh, from the suggestions and lusts of which character for evil to some extent here comes, and in the use of which character here manifests itself. It does introduce us into new circumstances, amidst new, and probably mightier, influences; and precisely how these are to affect us,—of what awakenings and uplifting impulses and resolves they are to be the occasion, or what 'disinthralment of our spiritual powers' is thus to follow, no one can certainly say. It is reasonable to anticipate something from the facts to be thus taken into account, though in respect to these things, he is the wisest man who dogmatizes least. But in itself, death is simply transition, with no transmuting moral efficacy. Except, therefore, as the bad man, passing on, puts off sin and rises into a new character, just as he was called to put off sin and rise into a new character here, the curse of sin, so far as he was a sinner, still abides upon him, and will abide,—perhaps intensified as he stands consciously revealed in the sight of God and before the tribunal of the Saviour.