Theological Essays

Il s'en faut peut-être que le christianisme, à cette heure qui nous paraît si avancée, ait produit dans la conscience et dans la vie de l'humanitè toutes ses applications, ait exprimé toute sa pensée, ait dit son dernier mot. Dans un sens, il a tout dit dès l'abord ; dans un autre sens, il a beaucoup à dire encore, et le monde ne finira que quand le christianisme aura tout dit.—Vinet.

My dear Sir,

I have maintained in these Essays that a Theology which does not correspond to the deepest thoughts and feelings of human beings cannot be a true Theology. Your writings have taught me to enter into many of those thoughts and feelings. Will you forgive me the presumption of offering you a book which at least acknowledges them and does them homage?

As the hopes which I have expressed in this volume are more likely to be fulfilled to our children than to ourselves, I might perhaps ask you to accept it as a present to one of your name, in whom you have given me a very sacred interest. Many years, I trust, will elapse before he knows that there are any controversies in the world into which he has entered. Would to God that in a ​few more he may find that they have ceased! At all events, if he should ever look into these Essays, they may tell him what meaning some of the former generation attached to words which will be familiar and dear to his generation, and to those that follow his,—how there were some who longed that the bells of our churches might indeed

A Lady, once a member of the Society of Friends, who died some years ago, desired me in her Will to apply a small sum to purposes in which I "knew that she was interested." It was not difficult to comply with the letter of this command, as she was interested in many benevolent undertakings. But I was aware that the words of her bequest had a special meaning, and that she intended to lay me under the obligation of writing, or procuring to be written, some book especially addressed to Unitarians.

I have made several efforts to execute this task, but have never done anything which gave me the least satisfaction. A mere controversial work I felt that I could not compose. Such works, so far as my experience has gone, do little else than harm to those who write, and to those who read them. Still, it has been a great weight on my conscience, that I was neglecting a request so solemnly conveyed to me.

​Some months ago I seemed to see a way in which I might acquit myself of the obligation. A series of Discourses which had occurred to me as suitable for my own Congregation, in the interval between Quinquagesima Sunday and Trinity Sunday, might, I thought, embrace all the topics which I should wish to bring under the notice of Unitarians. It was suggested by a friend that I should throw each discourse into the form of an Essay, after it had been preached. By following this advice, I have been able to avail myself of criticisms which were made on the sermons when they were delivered; to introduce many topics which would have been unsuitable for the pulpit; and at the same time, I hope, to retain something of the feeling of one who is addressing actual men with whom he sympathises, not opponents with whom he is arguing. I did not allude to Unitarians while I was preaching. I have said scarcely anything to them in writing, which I do not think just as applicable to the great body of my contemporaries, of all classes and opinions. Nearly every Essay has been re-written, and greatly enlarged in its passage out of the sermon state. Two were originally composed in their present form.

Though I have printed the Essays one after another, before the whole work was completed, that I might be compelled to perform a task which I had deferred ​so long, I cannot ask for any toleration on the plea of haste. The book expresses thoughts which have been working in my mind for years; the method of it has not been adopted carelessly; even the composition has undergone frequent revision. No labour I have been engaged in has occupied me so much, or interested me more deeply. I hope it may be the means of leading some to a far higher knowledge than their guide has ever attained.

May 24, 1853.

The illustrious poet to whom these Essays were dedicated had asked—

The old Theology of the Church, it was said, forbids this "larger hope." But might not a Theology be found which is adapted to modern notions and feelings? Some, perhaps, were induced to read my book under the impression that I had produced a scheme of this kind. I am sure that if they were, they experienced a grievous disappointment.

I do indeed accept, with all my heart and soul, the belief that it is what is "likest God within the soul" ​which cherishes the poet's amazing expectation. If men stood in no relation to God, if they did not feel, however faintly, that they were made in His image, that they may call Him Father, it would seem the idlest of all fancies, either that mankind does form a "living whole," or that each life has a preciousness and sanctity which He will acknowledge. But I cannot find that modern opinions—the current philosophies—give us any hint that we are related to God; that His image is stamped upon us; that we have a right to call Him Father. I do find all the warrants and pledges of our likeness to God, of our fellowship with Him, in the old Theology of the Bible and the Creeds. I strove in these Essays to assert the principles of that old Theology, and to set them in contrast with certain notions which have been grafted upon them, and which, it seems to me, are destroying our faith in them. If I did not accept the revelation of God in Christ—if I did not acknowledge the Redemption and Reconciliation of the World in Him—if I considered it a mere idle phrase that He had destroyed death—if I thought that He had not gone into the grave and to hell, and come back as their conqueror— ​if I was not convinced that He had sent His Spirit to dwell among men, and to bind them into one family— if I considered the Baptism into the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, an empty formula, and the Communion of Christ's body and blood a pledge of a victory which has not been won, and is not to be completed,—then the facts of Sin and Misery which I witness around me, which I feel within me, would be far too mighty for any dreams of a restoration which may sometimes visit me. Though I might own that these dreams were dear to that which is likest God within me, I must then yield them up to the voice which comes from what is likest the devil in me; from the depth of a despair for mankind and for myself. Knowing my own evil as I do not know that of any other man, how dare I think of a better fate for me than for my race? If God has shown no care for my race, if He has left it to perish, we must sink together. And, oh, how much deeper is the abyss which the conscience opens to a man, which it shows to be yawning for himself, than all the pictures of torments with which the most eloquent preachers have terrified for a few moments ​a few of their hearers! If the torments could be pictured, how much they would be abated. The undying worm is preying on thousands of hearts whose faces are merry. The unquenchable fire is burning within them. What is any talk of the future compared with this actual, present experience? If you dare tell men and women of One who has come to deliver them from this worm, to raise them out of this fire, they may welcome you as heavenly messengers, for are you not announcing that there is an escape from sin and the devil to Righteousness and God? But if all you can say to these men and women is, "Unless you believe what we tell you, God will keep you in hell for ever and ever," they must understand the words to mean "God will keep you in Sin for ever and ever." Can these tidings have been brought from the region of life and purity? Must they not have ascended from the bottomless pit?

These Essays were not intended, as I mentioned in the introduction to them, primarily for those who accept the current dogma respecting the future state of the wicked; but for Unitarians who reject it. I grew up among them. I look back with reverence ​and thankfulness to many lessons which I learnt from them. But I cannot say that their teaching on this subject had the attraction for me which it might be supposed to have. It gave me a dreamy sense of something pleasant to be enjoyed somewhere after death; it stood in no relation with my experiences of inward evil, and of the evil which prevailed so mightily in the world. Unless I could find some link between our existence here and the promised bliss hereafter, it seemed to me better to face the problems of the world as I could—even if the unfathomable gulf which the popular divinity spoke of was the only solution of them—than resort to what I thought was a subterfuge for evading them. I saw, indeed, that a number of Unitarians had found in actual trust in a God without iniquity, and an enemy of all iniquity, what no vague anticipation of future felicity could have given them. It was a fact on which I have pondered since with great satisfaction. But it did not show me what ground I had for such trust, or how I could call on other men to exercise it. Not till I took refuge from their easy interpretations of the Universe, in those Creeds which ​they pronounced to be antiquated and absurd, did I find what gave me a valid ground of hope for me, for them, for all the children of men.

I am bound, however, to say, that in finding my way back to those Creeds, I derived much help from their instructions. Immensely valuable as I hold the Methodist preaching of the last age to have been, with the Evangelical movement in the Church and among the Dissenters which was the result of it,—utterly dead as I conceive the faith of the English Nation would have become without this rekindling of it,—I cannot but perceive that it made the sinful man and not the God of all Grace the Foundation of Christian Theology. What help a man tied and bound with the chain of his iniquity could get to rise out of it was the question; all others were subordinate to that. When the modern Oxford School rose up in reaction against the school which had been born of this teaching, it spoke much of the Church, still more of the Church System. Its most devout champions laboured to show how much more might be done for the sinner by their processes than by those which the preachers of justification had made popular. No one of them ​recalled the minds of their disciples to the method of the Creeds—Apostles' or Nicene. No one said, "See how all begins from the Father, goes on to the Son, find its completion in the Holy Spirit." On the contrary, some of the most eminent of them did more to invert this order than any of their predecessors. They said, some of them explicitly, most of them by implication, "We believe in the Father, the Son, and the Spirit because we have first believed in the holy Catholic Church. Without its authority we could know nothing trustworthy about God."

Now, having learnt in the Unitarian school to feel and think first of the Father, that order which had been practically abandoned by both our leading Church schools commended itself to me as the reasonable and natural one. And having once felt that a Father could not be a mere name, could not be a mere synonym for Creator," that belief in a filial Word became necessary to me which had been exchanged by Unitarians for a mere human Christ,—retaining, possibly, the name of Son of God, and many of the associations which have been linked through ages to that name,—retaining even a dangerous amount of the affection ​and worship which yet they said it was treason to bestow on any one not divine. Again; I perceived that the idea of Unity, which they had taught me to regard as of infinite worth, was in manifest peril—was always in hazard of becoming a mere name or the shadow of a name—unless there were such a fellowship between the Father and the Son as surpassed all other fellowship, and yet explained the meaning of all. The Unity in the Spirit appeared to me the Unity after which the Unitarian was seeking, which was haunting him continually; and yet which his theory compelled him always to exchange for a dead material conception—for a mere exclusive Unit.

I make these remarks which, in one form or another, I have sought for many years to impress on the few who have listened to me, because they will show how well-founded was one of the charges which was brought against these Essays when they appeared, that there was no novelty in them. They were an effort, if ever so feeble an effort, by one who, when they were first published, was a professed teacher of Theology, to lead young men back to the principles of Christian ​Theology as they are expounded in its oldest forms. They were intended, unquestionably, for the generation in which they were written, not for some other generation. I have felt a little of what its struggles are. I hope I shall never cease to sympathise with them; shall never wish that I had been born into some other time, or could revive the fashions and modes which belong to some other. But the cry which I hear most loudly about me, which rings most clearly within me, is this: Has this Age any connection with the Permanent and the Eternal? Is there any link between our present, our past, and our future, in One who unites the past, the present, and the future in Himself? Is there an Eternal God? Has He made Himself known to us? Has He given us a right to trust Him now and for ever? These are the questions which I have discussed in these Essays. All other questions, I think, must be subordinate to them, and are nothing in comparison with them.

I have omitted in this Edition of the Essays a preface which was prefixed to the Second Edition. It alluded to circumstances which were of some interest ​to the public as well as to me at that time, but which have been long forgotten. Part of it was an answer to a very able criticism, in a review which has ceased to exist,—a criticism, I have reason to suppose, written by one who is now one of my most honoured and valued friends. I should be ungenerous and cowardly if I did not say that it also referred to the great kindness and manliness of another friend—the Bishop of Natal—of whom, however he may dissent, from some of my strongest and deepest convictions, I hope never to think without gratitude and affection.

September 1871.