Chapter II (2)

That Paul, as we have said, accepted the physical miracle of Christ's resurrection and ascension as a part of the signs and wonders which accompanied Christianity, there can be no doubt. Just in the same manner he accepted the eschatology, as it is called, of his nation,--their doctrine of the final things and of the summons by a trumpet in the sky to judgment; he accepted Satan, hierarchies of angels, and an approaching end of the world. What we deny is, that his acceptance of the former gives to his teaching its essential characters, any more than his acceptance of the latter. We should but be continuing, with strict logical development, Paul's essential line of thought, if we said that the true ascension and glorified reign of Christ was the triumph and reign of his spirit, of his real life, far more operative after his death on the cross than before it; and that in this sense, most truly, he and all who persevere to the end as he did are 'sown in weakness but raised in power.' Paul himself, however, did not distinctly continue his thought thus, and neither will we do so for him. How far Paul himself knew that he had gone in his irresistible bent to find, for each of the data of his religion, that side of moral and spiritual significance which, as a mere sign and wonder, it had not and could not have,--what data he himself was conscious of having transferred, through following this bent, from the first rank in importance to the second,--we cannot know with any certainty. That the bent existed, that Paul felt it existed, and that it establishes a wide difference between the earliest epistles and the latest, is beyond question. Already, in the Second Epistle to the Corinthians, he declares that, 'though he had known Christ after the flesh, yet henceforth he knew him so no more;'[74] and in the Epistle to the Romans, shortly afterwards, he rejects the notion of dwelling on the miraculous Christ, on the descent into hell and on the ascent into heaven, and fixes the believer's attention solely on the faith of Christ and on the effects produced by an acquaintance with it.[75] In the same Epistle, in like manner, the kingdom of God, of which to the Thessalonians he described the advent in such materialising and popularly Judaic language, has become 'righteousness, and peace, and joy in the holy spirit.'[76]

[Footnote 74: II _Cor._, v, 16.]

[Footnote 75: _Rom._, x, 6-10.]

[Footnote 76: _Rom._, xiv, 17.]

These ideas, we repeat, may never have excluded others, which absorbed the most part of Paul's contemporaries as they absorb popular religion at this day. To popular religion, the real kingdom of God is the New Jerusalem with its jaspers and emeralds; righteousness and peace and joy are only the kingdom of God figuratively. The real sitting in heavenly places is the sitting on thrones in a land of pure delight after we are dead; serving the spirit of God is only sitting in heavenly places figuratively. Science exactly reverses this process. For science, the spiritual notion is the real one, the material notion is figurative. The astonishing greatness of Paul is, that, coming when and where and whence he did, he yet grasped the spiritual notion, if not exclusively and fully, yet firmly and predominantly; more and more predominantly through all the last years of his life. And what makes him original and himself, is not what he shares with his contemporaries and with modern popular religion, but this which he develops of his own; and this which he develops of his own is just of a nature to make his religion a theology instead of a theurgy, and at bottom a scientific instead of a non-scientific structure. 'Die and come to life!' says Goethe,--an unsuspected witness, assuredly, to the psychological and scientific profoundness of Paul's conception of life and death:--'Die and come to life! for, so long as this is not accomplished, thou art but a troubled guest upon an earth of gloom.'[77]

[Footnote 77: Stirb und werde!
Denn so lang du das nicht hast,
Bist du nur ein trüber Gast
Auf der dunkeln Erde.]

The three cardinal points in Paul's theology are not therefore, we repeat, those commonly assigned by Puritanism, _calling_, _justification_, _sanctification_; but they are these: _dying with Christ_, _resurrection from the dead_, _growing into Christ_. And we will venture, moreover, to affirm that the more the Epistle to the Romans is read and re-read with a clear mind, the more will the conviction strengthen, that the sense indicated by the order in which we here class the second main term of Paul's conception, is the essential sense which Paul himself attaches to this term, in every single place where in that Epistle he has used it. Not tradition and not theory, but a simple impartial study of the development of Paul's central line of thought, brings us to the conclusion, that from the very outset of the Epistle, where Paul speaks of Christ as 'declared to be the son of God with power according to the spirit of holiness by resurrection from the dead,'[78] to the very end, the essential sense in which Paul uses the term _resurrection_ is that of a rising, in this visible earthly existence, from the death of obedience to blind selfish impulse, to the life of obedience to the eternal moral order;--in Christ's case first, as the pattern for us to follow; in the believer's case afterwards, as following Christ's pattern through identifying himself with him.

[Footnote 78: _Rom._, i, 4.]

We have thus reached Paul's fundamental conception without even a glimpse of the fundamental conceptions of Puritanism, which, nevertheless, professes to have learnt its doctrine from St. Paul and from his Epistle to the Romans. Once, for a moment, the term _faith_ brought us in contact with the doctrine of Puritanism, but only to see that the essential sense given to this word by Paul Puritanism had missed entirely. Other parts, then, of the Epistle to the Romans than those by which we have been occupied must have chiefly fixed the attention of Puritanism. And so it has in truth been. Yet the parts of the Epistle to the Romans that have occupied us are undoubtedly the parts which not our own theories and inclinations,--for we have approached the matter without any,--but an impartial criticism of Paul's real line of thought, must elevate as the most important. If a somewhat pedantic form of expression may be forgiven for the sake of clearness, we may say that of the eleven first chapters of the Epistle to the Romans,--the chapters which convey Paul's theology, though not, as we have seen, with any scholastic purpose or in any formal scientific mode of exposition,--of these eleven chapters, the first, second, and third are, in a scale of importance fixed by a scientific criticism of Paul's line of thought, sub-primary; the fourth and fifth are secondary; the sixth and eighth are primary; the seventh chapter is sub-primary; the ninth, tenth, and eleventh chapters are secondary. Furthermore, to the contents of the separate chapters themselves this scale must be carried on, so far as to mark that of the two great primary chapters, the sixth and the eighth, the eighth is primary down only to the end of the twenty-eighth verse; from thence to the end it is, however eloquent, yet for the purpose of a scientific criticism of Paul's essential theology, only secondary.

The first chapter is to the Gentiles. Its purport is: You have not righteousness. The second is to the Jews; and its purport is: No more have you, though you think you have. The third chapter announces faith in Christ as the one source of righteousness for all men. The fourth chapter gives to the notion of righteousness through faith the sanction of the Old Testament and of the history of Abraham. The fifth insists on the causes for thankfulness and exultation in the boon of righteousness through faith in Christ; and applies illustratively, with this design, the history of Adam. The sixth chapter comes to the all-important question: 'What _is_ that faith in Christ which I, Paul, mean?'--and answers it. The seventh illustrates and explains the answer. But the eighth, down to the end of the twenty-eighth verse, develops and completes the answer. The rest of the eighth chapter expresses the sense of safety and gratitude which the solution is fitted to inspire. The ninth, tenth, and eleventh chapters uphold the second chapter's thesis,--so hard to a Jew, so easy to us,--that righteousness is not by the Jewish law; but dwell with hope and joy on a final result of things which is to be favourable to Israel.

We shall be pardoned this somewhat formal analysis in consideration of the clearness with which it enables us to survey the Puritan scheme of original sin, predestination, and justification. The historical transgression of Adam occupies, it will be observed, in Paul's ideas by no means the primary, fundamental, all-important place which it holds in the ideas of Puritanism. 'This' (the transgression of Adam) 'is our original sin, the bitter root of all our actual transgressions in thought, word, and deed.' Ah, no! Paul did not go to the Book of Genesis to get the real testimony about sin. He went to experience for it. '_I see_,' he says, 'a law in my members fighting against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity.'[79] This is the essential testimony respecting the rise of sin to Paul,--this rise of it in his own heart and in the heart of all the men who hear him. At quite a later stage in his conception of the religious life, in quite a subordinate capacity, and for the mere purpose of illustration, comes in the allusion to Adam and to what is called original sin. Paul's desire for righteousness has carried him to Christ and to the conception of the righteousness which is of God by faith, and he is expressing his gratitude, delight, wonder, at the boon he has discovered. For the purpose of exalting it he reverts to the well-known story of Adam. It cannot even be said that Paul Judaises in his use here of this story; so entirely does he subordinate it to his purpose of illustration, using it just as he might have used it had he believed, which undoubtedly he did not, that it was merely a symbolical legend, having the advantage of being perfectly familiar to himself and his hearers. 'Think,' he says, 'how in Adam's fall one man's one transgression involved all men in punishment; then estimate the blessedness of our boon in Christ, where one man's one righteousness involves a world of transgressors in blessing![80] This is not a scientific doctrine of corruption inherited through Adam's fall; it is a rhetorical use of Adam's fall in a passing allusion to it.

[Footnote 79: _Rom._, vii, 23.]

[Footnote 80: _Rom._, v, 12-21.]

We come to predestination. We have seen how strong was Paul's consciousness of that power, not ourselves, in which we live and move and have our being. The sense of life, peace, and joy, which comes through identification with Christ, brings with it a deep and grateful consciousness that this sense is none of our own getting and making. No, it is grace, it is the free gift of God, who gives abundantly beyond all that we ask or think, and calls things that are not as though they were. 'It is not of him that willeth or of him that runneth, but of God that showeth mercy.'[81] As moral agents, for whom alone exist all the predicaments of merit and demerit, praise and blame, effort and failure, vice and virtue, we are impotent and lost;--we are saved through that in us which is passive and involuntary; we are saved through our affections, it is as beings _acted upon_ and _influenced_ that we are saved! Well might Paul cry out, as this mystical but profound and beneficent conception filled his soul: 'All things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose.'[82] Well might he say, in the gratitude which cannot find words enough to express its sense of boundless favour, that those who reached peace with God through identification with Christ were vessels of mercy, marked from endless ages; that they had been foreknown, predestinated, called, justified, glorified.

[Footnote 81: _Rom._, ix, 16.]

[Footnote 82: _Rom._, viii, 28.]

It may be regretted, for the sake of the clear understanding of his essential doctrine, that Paul did not stop here. It might seem as if the word 'prothesis,' _purpose_, lured him on into speculative mazes, and involved him, at last, in an embarrassment, from which he impatiently tore himself by the harsh and unedifying image of the clay and the potter. But this is not so. These allurements of speculation, which have been fatal to so many of his interpreters, never mastered Paul. He was led into difficulty by the tendency which we have already noticed as making his real imperfection both as a thinker and as a writer,--the tendency to Judaise.

Already, in the fourth chapter, this tendency had led him to seem to rest his doctrine of justification by faith upon the case of Abraham, whereas, in truth, it needs all the good will in the world, and some effort of ingenuity, even to bring the case of Abraham within the operation of this doctrine. That righteousness is life, that all men by themselves fail of righteousness, that only through identification with Jesus Christ can they reach it,--these propositions, for us at any rate, prove themselves much better than they are proved by the thesis that Abraham in old age believed God's promise that his seed should yet be as the stars for multitude, and that this was counted to him for righteousness. The sanction thus apparently given to the idea that faith is a mere belief, or opinion of the mind, has put thousands of Paul's readers on a false track.

But Paul's Judaising did not end here. To establish his doctrine of righteousness by faith, he had to eradicate the notion that his people were specially privileged, and that, having the Mosaic law, they did not need anything farther. For us, this one verse of the tenth chapter: _There is no difference between Jew and Greek, for it is the same Lord of all, who is rich to all that call upon him_,--and these four words of another verse: _For righteousness, heart-faith necessary!_--effect far more for Paul's object than his three chapters bristling with Old Testament quotations. By quotation, however, he was to proceed, in order to invest his doctrine with the talismanic virtues of a verbal sanction from the law and the prophets. He shows, therefore, that the law and the prophets had said that only a remnant, an _elect remnant_, of Israel should be saved, and that the rest should be blinded. But to say that peace with God through Jesus Christ inspires such an abounding sense of gratitude, and of its not being our work, that we can only speak of ourselves as _called_ and _chosen_ to it, is one thing; in so speaking, we are on the ground of personal experience. To say, on the other hand, that God has blinded and reprobated other men, so that they shall not reach this blessing, is to quit the ground of personal experience, and to begin employing the magnified and non-natural man in the next street. We then require, in order to account for his proceedings, such an analogy as that of the clay and the potter.

This is Calvinism, and St. Paul undoubtedly falls into it. But the important thing to remark is, that this Calvinism, which with the Calvinist is primary, is with Paul secondary, or even less than secondary. What with Calvinists is their fundamental idea, the centre of their theology, is for Paul an idea added to his central ideas, and extraneous to them; brought in incidentally, and due to the necessities of a bad mode of recommending and enforcing his thesis. It is as if Newton had introduced into his exposition of the law of gravitation an incidental remark, perhaps erroneous, about light or colours; and we were then to make this remark the head and front of Newton's law. The theological idea of reprobation was an idea of Jewish theology as of ours, an idea familiar to Paul and a part of his training, an idea which probably he never consciously abandoned. But its complete secondariness in him is clearly established by other considerations than those which we have drawn from the place and manner of his introduction of it. The very phrase about the clay and the potter is not Paul's own; he does but repeat a stock theological figure. Isaiah had said: 'O Lord, we are the clay, and thou our potter, and we are all the work of thy hand.'[83] Jeremiah had said, in the Lord's name, to Israel: 'Behold, as the clay in the potter's hand, so are ye in mine hand, O house of Israel.'[84] And the son of Sirach comes yet nearer to Paul's very words: 'As the clay is in the potter's hand to fashion it at his pleasure, so man is in the hand of him that made him, to render to them as liketh him best.'[85] Is an original man's essential, characteristic idea, that which he adopts thus bodily from some one else? But take Paul's truly essential idea. 'We are buried with Christ through baptism into death, that like as he was raised up from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also shall walk in newness of life.'[86] Did Jeremiah say that? Is any one the author of it except Paul? Then there should Calvinism have looked for Paul's secret, and not in the commonplace about the potter and the vessels of wrath. A commonplace which is so entirely a commonplace to him, that he contradicts it even while he is Judaising; for in the very batch of chapters we are discussing he says: 'Whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved.'[87] Still more clear is, on this point, his real mind, when he is not Judaising: 'God is the saviour of all men, specially of those that believe.'[88] And anything, finally, which might seem dangerous in the grateful sense of a calling, choosing, and leading by eternal goodness,--a notion as natural as the Calvinistic doctrine of predestination is monstrous,--Paul abundantly supplies in more than one striking passage; as, for instance, in that incomparable third chapter of the Philippians (from which, and from the sixth and eighth chapters of the Romans, Paul's whole theology, if all his other writings were lost, might be reconstructed), where he expresses his humble consciousness that the mystical resurrection which is his aim, glory, and salvation, he does not yet, and cannot, completely attain.

[Footnote 83: _Is._, lxiv, 8.]

[Footnote 84: _Jer._, xviii, 6.]

[Footnote 85: _Ecclesiasticus_, xxxiii, 13.]

[Footnote 86: _Rom._, vi, 4.]

[Footnote 87: _Rom._, x, 13.]

[Footnote 88: I _Tim._, iv, 10.]

The grand doctrine, then, which Calvinistic Puritanism has gathered from Paul, turns out to be a secondary notion of his, which he himself, too, has contradicted or corrected. But, at any rate, 'Christ meritoriously obtained eternal redemption for us.' 'If there be anything,' the quarterly organ of Puritanism has lately told us in its hundredth number, 'that human experience has made certain, it is that man can never outgrow his necessity for the great truths and provisions of the Incarnation and the sacrificial Atonement of the Divine Son of God.' God, his justice being satisfied by Christ's bearing according to compact our guilt and dying in our stead, is appeased and set free to exercise towards us his mercy, and to justify and sanctify us in consideration of Christ's righteousness imputed to us, if we give our hearty belief and consent to the satisfaction thus made. This hearty belief being given, 'we rest,' to use the consecrated expression already quoted, 'in the finished work of a Saviour.' This doctrine of imputed righteousness is now, as predestination formerly was, the favourite thesis of popular Protestant theology. And, like the doctrine of predestination, it professes to be specially derived from St. Paul.

But whoever has followed attentively the main line of St. Paul's theology, as we have tried to show it, will see at once that in St. Paul's essential ideas this popular notion of a substitution, and appeasement, and imputation of alien merit, has no place. Paul knows nothing of a sacrificial atonement; what Paul knows of is a reconciling sacrifice. The true substitution, for Paul, is not the substitution of Jesus Christ in men's stead as victim on the cross to God's offended justice; it is the substitution by which the believer, in his own person, repeats Jesus Christ's dying to sin. Paul says, in real truth, to our Puritans with their magical and mechanical salvation, just what he said to the men of circumcision: 'If I preach resting in the finished work of a Saviour, _why am I yet persecuted? why do I die daily? then is the stumbling-block of the cross annulled._'[89] That hard, that well-nigh impossible doctrine, that our whole course must be a crucifixion and a resurrection, even as Christ's whole course was a crucifixion and a resurrection, becomes superfluous. Yet this is my central doctrine.'

[Footnote 89: _Gal._, v, 2.]

The notion of God as a magnified and non-natural man, appeased by a sacrifice and remitting in consideration of it his wrath against those who had offended him,--this notion of God, which science repels, was equally repelled, in spite of all that his nation, time, and training had in them to favour it, by the profound religious sense of Paul. In none of his epistles is the reconciling work of Christ really presented under this aspect. One great epistle there is, however, which does apparently present it under this aspect,--the Epistle to the Hebrews.

Paul's phraseology, and even the central idea which he conveys in that phraseology, were evidently well known to the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews. Nay, if we merely sought to prove a thesis, rather than to ascertain the real bearing of the documents we canvass, we should have no difficulty in making it appear, by texts taken from the Epistle to the Hebrews, that the doctrine of this epistle, no less than the doctrine of the Epistle to the Romans, differs entirely from the common doctrine of Puritanism. This, however, we shall by no means do; because it is our honest opinion that the popular doctrine of 'the sacrificial Atonement of the Divine Son of God' derives, if not a real, yet at any rate a strong apparent sanction from the Epistle to the Hebrews. Even supposing, what is probably true, that the popular doctrine is really the doctrine neither of the one epistle nor of the other, yet it must be confessed that while it is the reader's fault,--a fault due to his fixed prepossessions, and to his own want of penetration,--if he gets the popular doctrine out of the Epistle to the Romans, it is on the other hand the writer's fault and no longer the reader's, if out of the Epistle to the Hebrews he gets the popular doctrine. For the author of that epistle is, if not subjugated, yet at least preponderantly occupied by the idea of the Jewish system of sacrifices, and of the analogies to Christ's sacrifice which are furnished by that system.

If other proof were wanting, this alone would make it impossible that the Epistle to the Hebrews should be Paul's; and indeed of all the epistles which bear his name, it is the only one which we may not, perhaps, in spite of the hesitation caused by grave difficulties, be finally content to leave in considerable part to him.[90] Luther's conjecture, which ascribes to Apollos the Epistle to the Hebrews, derives corroboration from the one account of Apollos which we have; that 'he was an eloquent man and mighty in the Scriptures.' The Epistle to the Hebrews is just such a performance as might naturally have come from an eloquent man and mighty in the Scriptures; in whom the intelligence, and the powers of combining, type-finding, and expounding, somewhat dominated the religious perceptions. The Epistle to the Hebrews is full of beauty and power; and what may be called the exterior conduct of its argument is as able and satisfying as Paul's exterior conduct of his argument is generally embarrassed. Its details are full of what is edifying; but its apparent central conception of Christ's death, as a perfect sacrifice which consummated the imperfect sacrifices of the Jewish law, is a mere notion of the understanding, and is not a religious idea. Turn it which way we will, the notion of appeasement of an offended God by vicarious sacrifice, which the Epistle to the Hebrews apparently sanctions, will never truly speak to the religious sense, or bear fruit for true religion. It is no blame to Apollos if he was somewhat overpowered by this notion, for the whole world was full of it, up to his time, in his time, and since his time; and it has driven theologians before it like sheep. The wonder is, not that Apollos should have adopted it, but that Paul should have been enabled, through the incomparable power and energy of religious perception informing his intellectual perception, in reality to put it aside. Figures drawn from the dominant notion of sacrificial appeasement he used, for the notion has so saturated the imagination and language of humanity that its figures pass naturally and irresistibly into all our speech. Popular Puritanism consists of the apparent doctrine from the Epistle to the Hebrews, set forth with Paul's figures. But the doctrine itself Paul had really put aside, and had substituted for it a better.

[Footnote 90: Considerations drawn from date, place, the use of single words, the development of a church organisation, the development of an ascetic system, are not enough to make us wholly take away certain epistles from St. Paul. The only decisive evidence, for this purpose, is that internal evidence furnished by the whole body of the thoughts and style of an epistle; and this evidence that Paul was not its author the Epistle to the Hebrews furnishes. From the like evidence, the Apocalypse is clearly shown to be not by the author of the fourth Gospel. This clear evidence against the tradition which assigns them to St. Paul, the Epistles to Timothy and Titus do not offer. The serious ground of difficulty as to these epistles will to the genuine critic be, that much in them fails to produce that peculiarly _searching_ effect on the reader, which it is in general characteristic of Paul's own real work to exercise. But they abound with Pauline things, and are, in any case, written by an excellent man, and in an excellent and large spirit.]

The term _sacrifice_, in men's natural use of it, contains three notions: the notion of winning the favour or buying off the wrath of a powerful being by giving him something precious; the notion of parting with something naturally precious; and the notion of expiation, not now in the sense of buying off wrath or satisfying a claim, but of suffering in that wherein we have sinned. The first notion is, at bottom, merely superstitious, and belongs to the ignorant and fear-ridden childhood of humanity; it is the main element, however, in the Puritan conception of justification. The second notion explains itself; it is the main element in the Pauline conception of justification. Jesus parted with what, to men in general, is the most precious of things,--individual self and selfishness; he pleased not himself, obeyed the spirit of God, died to sin and to the law in our members, consummated upon the cross this death; here is Paul's essential notion of Christ's sacrifice.

The third notion may easily be misdealt with, but it has a profound truth; in Paul's conception of justification there is much of it. In some way or other, he who would 'cease from sin' must nearly always 'suffer in the flesh.' It is found to be true, that 'without shedding of blood is no remission.' 'If you can be good with pleasure,' says Bishop Wilson with his genius of practical religious sense, 'God does not envy you your joy; but such is our corruption, that every man cannot be so.' The substantial basis of the notion of expiation, so far as we ourselves are concerned, is the bitter experience that the habit of wrong, of blindly obeying selfish impulse, so affects our temper and powers, that to withstand selfish impulse, to do right, when the sense of right awakens in us, requires an effort out of all proportion to the actual present emergency. We have not only the difficulty of the present act in itself, we have the resistance of all our past; fire and the knife, cautery and amputation, are often necessary in order to induce a vital action, which, if it were not for our corrupting past, we might have obtained from the natural healthful vigour of our moral organs. This is the real basis of our personal sense of the need of expiating, and thus it is that man expiates.

Not so the just, who is man's ideal. He has no indurated habit of wrong, no perverse temper, no enfeebled powers, no resisting past, no spiritual organs gangrened, no need of the knife and fire; smoothly and inevitably he follows the eternal order, and hereto belongs happiness. What sins, then, has the just to expiate?--_ours._ In truth, men's habitual unrighteousness, their hard and careless breaking of the moral law, do so tend to reduce and impair the standard of goodness, that, in order to keep this standard pure and unimpaired, the righteous must actually labour and suffer far more than would be necessary if men were better. In the first place, he has to undergo our hatred and persecution for his justice. In the second place, he has to make up for the harm caused by our continual shortcomings, to step between us foolish transgressors and the destructive natural consequences of our transgression, and, by a superhuman example, a spending himself without stint, a more than mortal scale of justice and purity, to save the ideal of human life and conduct from the deterioration with which men's ordinary practice threatens it. In this way Jesus Christ truly 'became for our sakes poor, though he was rich,' he was truly 'bruised for our iniquities,' he 'suffered in our behoof,' 'bare the sin of many,' and 'made intercession for the transgressors.'[91] In this way, truly, 'he was sacrificed as a blameless lamb to redeem us from the vain conversation which had become our second nature;'[92] in this way, 'he was made to be sin for us, who knew no sin.'[93] Such, according to that true and profound perception of the import of Christ's sufferings, which, in all St. Paul's writings, and in the inestimable First Epistle of St. Peter, is presented to us, is the expiation of Christ.

[Footnote 91: II _Cor._, viii, 9; _Is._, liii, 5; I _Pet._, ii, 21; _Is._, liii, 12.]

[Footnote 92: I _Pet._, i, 18, 19.]

[Footnote 93: II _Cor._, v, 21.]

The notion, therefore, of _satisfying and appeasing an angry God's wrath_, does not come into Paul's real conception of Jesus Christ's sacrifice. Paul's foremost notion of this sacrifice is, that by it Jesus died to the law of selfish impulse, parted with what to men in general is most precious and near. Paul's second notion is, that whereas Jesus suffered in doing this, his suffering was not _his_ fault, but ours; not for _his_ good, but for ours. In the first aspect, Jesus is the _martyrion_,--the testimony in his life and in his death, to righteousness, to the power and goodness of God. In the second aspect he is the _antilytron_ or ransom. But, in either aspect, Jesus Christ's solemn and dolorous condemnation of sin does actually loosen sin's hold and attraction upon us who regard it,--makes it easier for us to understand and love goodness, to rise above self, to die to sin.

Christ's sacrifice, however, and the condemnation of sin it contained, was made for us while we were yet sinners; it was made irrespectively of our power or inclination to sympathise with it and appreciate it. Yet, even thus, in Paul's view, the sacrifice reconciled us to God, to the eternal order; for it contained the means, the only possible means, of our being brought into harmony with this order. Jesus Christ, nevertheless, was delivered for our sins while we were yet sinners,[94] and before we could yet appreciate what he did. But presently there comes a change. Grace, the goodness of God, _the spirit_,--as Paul loved to call that awful and beneficent impulsion of things within us and without us, which we can concur with, indeed, but cannot create,--leads us to _repentance towards God_,[95] a change of the inner man in regard to the moral order, duty, righteousness. And now, to help our impulse towards righteousness, we have a power enabling us to turn this impulse to full account. Now _the spirit_ does its greatest work in us; now, for the first time, the influence of Jesus Christ's pregnant act really gains us. For now awakens the sympathy for the act and the appreciation of it, which its doer dispensed with or was too benign to wait for; _faith working through love towards Christ_[96] enters into us, masters us. We identify ourselves,--this is the line of Paul's thought,--with Christ; we repeat, through the power of this identification, Christ's death to the law of the flesh and self-pleasing, his condemnation of sin in the flesh; the death how imperfectly, the condemnation how remorsefully! But we rise with him, Paul continues, to life, the only true life, of imitation of God, of putting on the new man which after God is created in righteousness and true holiness,[97] of following the eternal law of the moral order which by ourselves we could not follow. Then God justifies us. We have the righteousness of God and the sense of having it; we are freed from the oppressing sense of eternal order guiltily outraged and sternly retributive; we act in joyful conformity with God's will, instead of in miserable rebellion to it; we are in harmony with the universal order, and feel that we are in harmony with it. If, then, Christ was delivered for our sins, he was raised for our justification. If by Christ's death, says Paul, we were reconciled to God, by the means being thus provided for our else impossible access to God, much more, when we have availed ourselves of these means and died with him, are we saved by his life which we partake.[98] Henceforward we are not only justified but sanctified; not only in harmony with the eternal order and at peace with God, but consecrated[99] and unalterably devoted to them; and from this devotion comes an ever-growing union with God in Christ, an advance, as St. Paul says, from glory to glory.[100]

[Footnote 94: _Rom._, v, 8.]

[Footnote 95: _Acts_, xx, 21.]

[Footnote 96: _Gal._, v, 6.]

[Footnote 97: _Eph._, iv, 24.]

[Footnote 98: _Rom._, v, 10.]

[Footnote 99: The endless words which Puritanism has wasted upon _sanctification_, a magical filling with goodness and holiness, flow from a mere mistake in translating; +hagiasmos+ means _consecration_, a setting apart to holy service.]

[Footnote 100: II _Cor._, iii, 18.]

This is Paul's conception of Christ's sacrifice. His figures of ransom, redemption, propitiation, blood, offering, all subordinate themselves to his central idea of _identification with Christ through dying with him_, and are strictly subservient to it. The figured speech of Paul has its own beauty and propriety. His language is, much of it, eastern language, imaginative language; there is no need for turning it, as Puritanism has done, into the methodical language of the schools. But if it is to be turned into methodical language, then it is the language into which we have translated it that translates it truly.

We have before seen how it fares with one of the two great tenets which Puritanism has extracted from St. Paul, the tenet of predestination. We now see how it fares with the other, the tenet of justification. Paul's figures our Puritans have taken literally, while for his central idea they have substituted another which is not his. And his central idea they have turned into a figure, and have let it almost disappear out of their mind. His essential idea lost, his figures misused, an idea essentially not his substituted for his,--the unedifying patchwork thus made, Puritanism has stamped with Paul's name, and called _the gospel_. It thunders at Romanism for not preaching it, it casts off Anglicanism for not setting it forth alone and unreservedly, it founds organisations of its own to give full effect to it; these organisations guide politics, govern statesmen, destroy institutions;--and they are based upon a blunder!

It is to Protestantism, and this its Puritan gospel, that the reproaches thrown on St. Paul, for sophisticating religion of the heart into theories of the head about election and justification, rightly attach. St. Paul himself, as we have seen, begins with seeking righteousness and ends with finding it; from first to last, the practical religious sense never deserts him. If he could have seen and heard our preachers of predestination and justification, they are just the people he would have called 'diseased about questions and word-battlings.'[101] He would have told Puritanism that every Sunday, when in all its countless chapels it reads him and preaches from him, the veil is upon its heart. The moment it reads him right, a veil will seem to be taken away from its heart;[102] it will feel as though scales were fallen from its eyes.

[Footnote 101: I _Tim._, vi, 4.]

[Footnote 102: II _Cor._, iii, 15, 16.]

And now, leaving Puritanism and its errors, let us turn again for a moment, before we end, to the glorious apostle who has occupied us so long. He died, and men's familiar fancies of bargain and appeasement, from which, by a prodigy of religious insight, Paul had been able to disengage the death of Jesus, fastened on it and made it their own. Back rolled over the human soul the mist which the fires of Paul's spiritual genius had dispersed for a few short years. The mind of the whole world was imbrued in the idea of blood, and only through the false idea of sacrifice did men reach Paul's true one. Paul's idea of dying with Christ the _Imitation_ elevates more conspicuously than any Protestant treatise elevates it; but it elevates it environed and dominated by the idea of appeasement;--of the magnified and non-natural man in Heaven, wrath-filled and blood-exacting; of the human victim adding his piacular sufferings to those of the divine. Meanwhile another danger was preparing. Gifted men had brought to the study of St. Paul the habits of the Greek and Roman schools, and philosophised where Paul Orientalised. Augustine, a great genius, who can doubt it?--nay, a great religious genius, but unlike Paul in this, and inferior to him, that he confused the boundaries of metaphysics and religion, which Paul never did,--Augustine set the example of finding in Paul's eastern speech, just as it stood, the formal propositions of western dialectics. Last came the interpreter in whose slowly relaxing grasp we still lie,--the heavy-handed Protestant Philistine. Sincere, gross of perception, prosaic, he saw in Paul's mystical idea of man's investiture with the righteousness of God nothing but a strict legal transaction, and reserved all his imagination for Hell and the New Jerusalem and his foretaste of them. A so-called Pauline doctrine was in all men's mouths, but the ideas of the true Paul lay lost and buried.

Every one who has been at Rome has been taken to see the Church of St. Paul, rebuilt after a destruction by fire forty years ago. The church stands a mile or two out of the city, on the way to Ostia and the desert. The interior has all the costly magnificence of Italian churches; oh the ceiling is written in gilded letters: '_Doctor Gentium_.' Gold glitters and marbles gleam, but man and his movement are not there. The traveller has left at a distance the _fumum et opes strepitumque Romæ_; around him reigns solitude. There is Paul, with the mystery which was hidden from ages and from generations, which was uncovered by him for some half score years, and which then was buried with him in his grave! Not in our day will he relive, with his incessant effort to find a moral side for miracle, with his incessant effort to make the intellect follow and secure all the workings of the religious perception. Of those who care for religion, the multitude of us want the materialism of the Apocalypse; the few want a vague religiosity. Science, which more and more teaches us to find in the unapparent the real, will gradually serve to conquer the materialism of popular religion. The friends of vague religiosity, on the other hand, will be more and more taught by experience that a theology, a scientific appreciation of the facts of religion, is wanted for religion; but a theology which is a true theology, not a false. Both these influences will work for Paul's re-emergence. The doctrine of Paul will arise out of the tomb where for centuries it has lain buried. It will edify the church of the future; it will have the consent of happier generations, the applause of less superstitious ages. All will be too little to pay half the debt which the church of God owes to this 'least of the apostles, who was not fit to be called an apostle, because he persecuted the church of God.'[103]

[Footnote 103: I _Cor._, xv, 9.]

* * * * *

PURITANISM

AND THE

CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

In the foregoing treatise we have spoken of Protestantism, and have tried to show, how, with its three notable tenets of predestination, original sin, and justification, it has been pounding away for three centuries at St. Paul's wrong words, and missing his essential doctrine. And we took Puritanism to stand for Protestantism, and addressed ourselves directly to the Puritans; for the Puritan Churches, we said, seem to exist specially for the sake of these doctrines, one or more of them. It is true, many Puritans now profess also the doctrine that it is wicked to have a church connected with the State; but this is a later invention,[104] designed to strengthen a separation previously made. It requires to be noticed in due course; but meanwhile, we say that the aim of setting forth certain Protestant doctrines purely and integrally is the main title on which Puritan Churches rest their right of existing. With historic Churches, like those of England or Rome, it is otherwise; these doctrines may be in them, may be a part of their traditions, their theological stock; but certainly no one will say that either of these Churches was made for the express purpose of upholding these three theological doctrines, jointly or severally. A little consideration will show quite clearly the difference in this respect between the historic Churches and the churches of separatists.

[Footnote 104: In his very interesting history, _The Church of the Restoration_, Dr. Stoughton says, most truly of both Anglicans and Puritans in 1660: 'It is necessary to bear in mind this circumstance, that _both parties were advocates for a national establishment of religion_.' Vol. i, p. 113.]

People are not necessarily monarchists or republicans because they are born and live under a monarchy or republic. They avail themselves of the established government for those general purposes for which governments and politics exist, but they do not, for the most part, trouble their heads much about particular theoretical principles of government. Nay, it may well happen that a man who lives and thrives under a monarchy shall yet theoretically disapprove the principle of monarchy, or a man who lives and thrives under a republic, the principle of republicanism. But a man, or body of men, who have gone out of an established polity from zeal for the principle of monarchy or republicanism, and have set up a polity of their own for the very purpose of giving satisfaction to this zeal, are in a false position whenever it shall appear that the principle, from zeal for which they have constituted their separate existence, is unsound. So predestinarianism and solifidianism, Calvinism and Lutherism, may appear in the theology of a national or historic Church, charged ever since the rise of Christianity with the task of developing the immense and complex store of ideas contained in Christianity; and when the stage of development has been reached at which the unsoundness of predestinarian and solifidian dogmas becomes manifest, they will be dropped out of the Church's theology, and she and her task will remain what they were before. But when people from zeal for these dogmas find their historic Church not predestinarian or solifidian enough for them, and make new associations of their own, which shall be predestinarian or solifidian absolutely, then, when the dogmas are undermined, the associations are undermined too, and have either to own themselves without a reason for existing, or to discover some new reason in place of the old. Now, nothing which exists likes to be driven to a strait of this kind; so every association which exists because of zeal for the dogmas of election or justification, will naturally cling to these dogmas longer and harder than other people. Therefore we have treated the Puritan bodies in this country as the great stronghold here of these doctrines; and in showing what a perversion of Paul's real ideas these doctrines commonly called Pauline are, we have addressed ourselves to the Puritans.

But those who speak in the Puritans' name say that we charge upon Puritanism, as a sectarian peculiarity, doctrine which is not only the inevitable result of an honest interpretation of the writings of St. Paul, but which is, besides, the creed held in common by Puritans and by all the churches in Christendom, with one insignificant exception. Nay, they even declare that 'no man in his senses can deny that the Church of England was meant to be a thoroughly Protestant and Evangelical, and it may be said Calvinistic Church.' To saddle Puritanism in special with the doctrines we have called Puritan is, they say, a piece of unfairness which has its motive in mere ill-will to Puritanism, a device which can injure nobody but its author.

Now, we have tried to show that the Puritans are quite wrong in imagining their doctrine to be the inevitable result of an honest interpretation of St. Paul's writings. That they are wrong we think is certain; but so far are we from being moved, in anything that we do or say in this matter, by ill-will to Puritanism and the Puritans, that it is, on the contrary, just because of our hearty respect for them, and from our strong sense of their value, that we speak as we do. Certainly we consider them to be in the main, at present, an obstacle to progress and to true civilisation. But this is because their worth is, in our opinion, such that not only must one for their own sakes wish to see it turned to more advantage, but others, from whom they are now separated, would greatly gain by conjunction with them, and our whole collective force of growth and progress be thereby immeasurably increased. In short, our one feeling when we regard them, is a feeling, not of ill-will, but of regret at waste of power; our one desire is a desire of comprehension.

But the waste of power must continue, and the comprehension is impossible, so long as Puritanism imagines itself to possess, in its two or three signal doctrines, what it calls _the gospel_; so long as it constitutes itself separately on the plea of setting forth purely _the gospel_, which it thus imagines itself to have seized; so long as it judges others as not holding _the gospel_, or as holding additions to it and variations from it. This fatal self-righteousness, grounded on a false conceit of knowledge, makes comprehension impossible; because it takes for granted the possession of the truth, and the power of deciding how others violate it; and this is a position of superiority, and suits conquest rather than comprehension.

The good of comprehension in a national Church is, that the larger and more various the body of members, the more elements of power and life the Church will contain, the more points will there be of contact, the more mutual support and stimulus, the more growth in perfection both of thought and practice. The waste of power from not comprehending the Puritans in the national Church is measured by the number and value of elements which Puritanism could supply towards the collective growth of the whole body. The national Church would grow more vigorously towards a higher stage of insight into religious truth, and consequently towards a greater perfection of practice, if it had these elements; and this is why we wish for the Puritans in the Church. But, meanwhile, Puritanism will not contribute to the common growth, mainly because it believes that a certain set of opinions or scheme of theological doctrine is _the gospel_; that it is possible and profitable to extract this, and that Puritans have done so; and that it is the duty of men, who like themselves have extracted it, to separate themselves from those who have not, and to set themselves apart that they may profess it purely.

To disabuse them of this error, which, by preventing collective life, prevents also collective growth, it is necessary to show them that their extracted scheme of theological doctrine is not really _the gospel_; and that at any rate, therefore, it is not worth their while to separate themselves, and to frustrate the hope of growth in common, merely for this scheme's sake. And even if it were true, as they allege, that the national and historic Churches of Christendom do equally with Puritanism hold this scheme, or main parts of it, still it would be to Puritanism, and not to the historic Churches, that in showing the invalidity and unscripturalness of this scheme we should address ourselves, because the Puritan Churches found their very existence on it, and the historic Churches do not. And not founding their existence on it, nor falling into separatism for it, the historic Churches have a collective life which is very considerable, and a power of growth, even in respect of the very scheme of doctrine in question, supposing them to hold it, far greater than any which the Puritan Churches show, but which would be yet greater and more fruitful still, if the historic Churches combined the large and admirable contingent of Puritanism with their own forces. Therefore, as we have said, it is out of no sort of malice or ill-will, but from esteem for their fine qualities and from desire for their help, that we have addressed ourselves to the Puritans. We propose to complete now our dealings with this subject by showing how, as a matter of fact, the Church of England (which is the historic Church practically in question so far as Puritanism is concerned) seems to us to have displayed with respect to those very tenets which we have criticised, and for which we are said to have unfairly made Puritanism alone responsible, a continual power of growth which has been wanting to the Puritan congregations. This we propose to show first; and we will show secondly, how, from the very theory of a historic or national Church, the probability of this greater power of growth seems to follow, that we may try and commend that theory a little more to the thoughts and favour of our Puritan friends.

The two great Puritan doctrines which we have criticised at such length are the doctrines of predestination and justification. Of the aggressive and militant Puritanism of our people, predestination has, almost up to the present day, been the favourite and distinguishing doctrine; it was the doctrine which Puritan flocks greedily sought, which Puritan ministers powerfully preached, and called others _carnal gospellers_ for not preaching. This Geneva doctrine accompanied the Geneva discipline. Puritanism's first great wish and endeavour was to establish both the one and the other absolutely in the Church of England, and it became nonconforming because it failed. Now, it is well known that the High Church divines of the seventeenth century were Arminian, that the Church of England was the stronghold of Arminianism, and that Arminianism is, as we have said, an effort of man's practical good sense to get rid of what is shocking to it in Calvinism. But what is not so well known, and what is eminently worthy of remark, is the constant pressure applied by Puritanism upon the Church of England, to put the Calvinistic doctrine more distinctly into her formularies, and to tie her up more strictly to this doctrine; the constant resistance offered by the Church of England, and the large degree in which Nonconformity is really due to this cause.