Theological Essays/II

Clergymen seem to take it for granted that their Congregations understand what they mean when they speak of Sin. I am afraid some of us do not ourselves quite understand what we mean by it. Perhaps, if we would attend more to the doubts and objections of others, they might assist in clearing and deepening our own thoughts.

They frequently take this form: "We find a number of crimes, outward, palpable, interfering with the existence of society; these we try to check by direct penalties. We find that these crimes may be traced to certain habits formed in the man, beginning to be formed in the child; these we try to extirpate by some moral influences. There is scope There is scope for infinite discussion as to the nature, measure, and right application, of these direct penalties, and these moral influences; as to the evils which most demand either. But scarcely any one doubts that both these methods are necessary; that there are disorders which need the one and not the other. It is different when a third notion is thrust upon us, one which we can refer to the head neither of Legislation nor of Ethics.

​"The Theologian speaks of Sin. What is this? You say it is committed against God. Does God, then, want anything for His own use and honour? Does He crave services and sacrifices as due to Him? Is not doing justice and mercy to the fellow-creatures among whom He has placed us the thing which He requires and which pleases Him? If not, where would you stop? Do not all Heathen notions, all the most intolerable schemes of propitiation, all the most frightful inventions and lies by which the conscience of men has been defiled and their reason darkened, and from which crimes against society have at last proceeded, force themselves upon us at once? What charm is there in the name or word 'Christianity' to keep them off, if they are, as we know they are, akin to tendencies which exist in all men, whatever names they bear, and which, for their sakes, need to be abated, if possible extinguished, certainly not fostered? But, if once we admit good feeling and good doing towards our neighbour to be the essence and fulfilment of God's commandments, why are not the ethical and legal conceptions of evil sufficient? What room is there for any other?"

Those of us who have had these thoughts, and have expressed them, have probably heard answers which have satisfied us very ill. We have been told, perhaps, "that the Commandments speak of a duty towards God as well as of a duty towards our neighbour; that there is no reason why He, from whom we receive all things, should not demand something in return; that, à priori, we could not the least tell whether He would or not; that if He did, it would be reasonable to expect that He would enforce very heavy punishments upon our failure,—especially if it might ​have been avoided; that those punishments may be infinite,—at all events, that we can have no reason to allege why they should not be; that if we have any authority for supposing they will be so, we ought to do anything rather than incur so tremendous a risk."

There is something in us all which resists these arguments. I believe great part of the resistance comes from conscience, not from self-will. There is a horror and heart-shrinking from the doctrine that we are to serve God because we are ignorant of His nature and character. There is a greater horror and heart-shrinking from the notion that we are to serve Him because, upon a fair calculation, it appears likely that this course will answer better than the opposite course, or that that will involve us in ruin. He who says, "I cannot be religious on these terms,—it is my religion to repudiate them," may not prize the Commandments very highly. He may look upon them merely as the words of an old Jewish legislator. But he will at least feel that this legislator meant more by duty to God than his interpreters suppose him to mean, nay, meant something wholly and generically different from this. He may not acknowledge the name of Christ, or may attach to that name quite another signification from that which we attach to it; but he will at least be sure that Christ did not come into the world to tell men that they cannot know anything of their Father in heaven; or that He is to be served for hire, or through dread of what He will do to them.

Most earnestly would I desire that each man should hold this conviction fast, that he should suffer no arguments of divines or of lay people, however plausible, to wrest it from him. And if he does not yet perceive ​any reality in the word "Sin," or in the thoughts which his teachers associate with it, by all means let him not feign that he does. For the sake of the sincerity of his mind, for the sake of the truth which may come to him hereafter, let him keep his ethical or his legal doctrine, if he really has some grasp of it, not exchange it for any that has a greater show and savour of divinity. But I would conjure him also, for the sake of the same sincerity, not to bar his soul against the entrance of another conviction, if it should come at any time with a very mighty power, because he is afraid that he may be receiving some old tenet of Theology which he has dreaded and hated. At some moment,—it may be one of weakness and sorrow, it may also be when he is full of energy, and is set upon a distinct and decided purpose,—he may be forced to feel; "I did this act, I thought this thought; it was a wrong act, it was a wrong thought, and it was mine. The world about me took no account of it. I can resolve it into no habits or motives, or if I can, the analysis does not help me in the least. Whatever the habit was, I wore the habit; whatever the motive was, I was the mover." At such a moment there will rush in upon him a multitude of strange thoughts, of indefinite fears. There will come a sense of Eternity, dark, unfathomable, hopeless, such as he fancied he had left years behind him amidst the pictures of his nursery. That Eternity will stand face to face with him. It will look like anything but a picture; it will present itself to him as the hardest, driest reality. There will be no images of torture and death. "What matter where, if I be still the same?"—this question will be the torture; all death lies in that. Yes, brother, such a death, that you will gladly fly from it to any devices which men have thought of for making ​their gods gracious, to any penances which they have invented for the purpose of taking vengeance on them- selves. These are all natural,—oh, how natural!—there is not one of them which the coldest, most unimaginative man may not have coveted; there are few which, in certain periods of confused restless anguish, he may not have believed would be worth a trial. And why? Because anything is better than the presence of this dark self. I cannot bear to be dogged by that, night and day; to feel its presence when I am in company, and when I am alone; to hear its voice whispering to me,—"Whithersoever thou goest, I shall go. Thou wilt part with all things else, but not with me. There will come a day when thou canst wander out in a beautiful world no longer, when thou must be at home with me."

This vision is more terrible than all which the fancy of priests has ever conjured up. He who has encountered it, is beginning to know what Sin is as no words or definitions can teach it him. When once he arrives at the conviction, "I am the tormentor,—Evil lies not in some accidents, but in me," he is no more in the circle of outward acts, outward rules, outward punishments; he is no more in the circle of tendencies, inclinations, habits, and the discipline which is appropriate to them. He has come unawares into a more inward circle,—a very close, narrow, dismal one, in which he cannot rest, out of which he must emerge. And I am certain he can only emerge out of it when he begins to say, "I have sinned against some Being,—not against society merely, not against my own nature merely, but against another to whom I was bound." And the emancipation will not be complete till he is able to say,—giving the words their full and natural meaning,—Father, I have sinned against Thee."

​I know there are some who will say, "There is no occasion for a man ever to be brought into this strange sense of contradiction. He need not be thus confronted with himself: he need not see a dark image of Self behind him, before him, above him, beneath him. Very few people, in fact, do pass through this experience. Some of a particular constitution may. But how absurd it is of them to make themselves the standards for humanity! How monstrous, that a few metaphysicians or fanatics should lay down the law for all the busy men, the merchants, tradesmen, handicraftsmen, who get through the world, and must get through it somehow, without ever knowing anything of these torments of conscience, internal strifes, or by whatever other names philosophers or divines like to describe them!"

Very well! but were you not complaining—have you not a right to complain—-of those priestly inventions which interfere so much with the peace of society, which interrupt the merchants and handicraftsmen in their employments, which beget so many horrors, especially such dreadful anticipations of divine punishment and vengeance, in human hearts? Is it not your object to sweep these away as fast as you can, because you find them so troublesome, taking so many different forms, reappearing when you least expect them, in periods and countries whence they seemed to have been driven for ever? Do you not complain that Christianity gives you no security, that Protestantism gives you no security, against the invasion of superstitious terrors, and against all the sacerdotal powers which are acknowledged wherever they prevail? Do you not say that they interfere with the progress of science, and that science needs an aid against them, which neither itself, ​nor civil rulers, nor public opinion can give? Would it not be well, then, to look a little more deeply into the matter, and instead of raving at certain pernicious effects, to examine from what cause they may have sprung.

I tell you the cause is here. That sense of a Sin intricately, inseparably interwoven with the very fibres of their being, of a Sin which they cannot get rid of without destroying themselves, does haunt those very men who you say take no account of it. This is not the idiosyncrasy of a few strange inexplicable temperaments. It is that which besets us all. And because we do not know what it means, and do not wish to know, we are ready for all deceits and impostures. They may come in various shapes. They may be religious impostures, or philosophical; they may appeal to our love of the outward world, or to our craving for mysteries; but they will not permit us to be at rest, or to be acquainted with our own hearts, or to understand one another. All you can boast is, that preachers of religion have not a monopoly of these influences in this time; that here, as elsewhere, there is unrestricted competition; that Mormonists, Animal Magnetists, Rappists, take their turns with us, and often work their charms more effectually than we work ours. As long as men are dwelling in twilight, all ghosts of the past, all phantoms of the future, walk by them: I want to know, as I suppose you do, how they can come out of the twilight? The passage is the same, friend, for them as for you and me; we are not of different flesh and blood from theirs: that within us which is not flesh and blood is not more different, but more closely akin, whatever you, in your philosophical or literary or religious exclusiveness, may think. The ​darkness which is blended with the light must, in some way, be shown to be in deadly contrast with it,—the opposites must be seen one against the other.

Think of any sermon of a Methodist preacher which roused the heart of a Kingswood collier, or of a dry, hard, formal man, or of a contented, self-righteous boaster of his religion, in the last century. You will say the orator talked of an infinite punishment which God might inflict on them all if they continued disobedient. He may have talked of that, but he would have talked till doomsday if he had not spoken another language too, which interpreted this, and into which the conscience rapidly translated it. He spoke of an infinite Sin; he spoke of an infinite Love; he spoke of that which was true then, whatever might become true hereafter. He said, "Thou art in a wrong state: hell is about thee. God would bring thee into a right state: He would save thee out of that hell." The man believed the words; something within him told him they were true: and that for the first time he had heard truth, seen truth, been himself true. I cannot tell what vanities and confusions might come to him afterwards, from his own dreams or the crudities of his teachers. But I am sure this was not a delusion—could not be. He had escaped from the twilight; he had seen the opposite forms of light and darkness no longer miserably confused together. Good was all good; evil was all evil: there was war in heaven and earth between them; in him, even in him, where the battle had been fiercest, the odds against the good greatest, good had gotten the victory. He had a right to believe that the morning stars were singing together at the news of it; otherwise, why was there such music in his, the Kingswood collier's, heart?

​If such processes are rare in our days, it is, I believe, because the descendants of these Methodist preachers, and we in imitation of them, fancy that the mere machinery, whether earthly or divine, which they put in motion, was the cause of them,—because we do not thoroughly understand or heartily believe that there is that war of Life and Death, of Good and Evil, now in every man's heart, as there was of old. Therefore, we do not speak straightly and directly to both. We suppose men are to be shown by arguments that they have sinned, and that God has a right to punish them. We do not say to them, "You are under a law of love; you know you are, and you are fighting with it.

Benevolent men wish that the poor should know more of Legislation and Ethics and Economy. I wish heartily that they should. But I believe that you will never bring them to that knowledge unless you can point them to the deeper springs of humanity, from which both Ethics and Laws and Economics must be fed, if they are to have any freshness and life. I do not think it dangerous that any man should get any knowledge of any subject whatever; the more he has the better. And I often think that what is sincerely communicated to him of Economics or Physics may bring him sooner to a right moral condition,— may startle him into apprehensions respecting his own being, sooner,—than insincere artificial theological teaching. But yet I cannot help seeing also, that Legislation, Ethics, Economics, even Physical Science, may themselves contribute to the foundation of superstitions, if the man is not first called into life to receive them and to connect them with himself. am sure, at all events, that an infinite responsibility ​rests upon us,—not to be interfering with other men, or to be checking their efforts, whatever direction they may take,—but to be calling forth, by that power which, I believe, we possess, if we will use it, the heart and conscience of men, so that being first able to see their Father in heaven truly, and themselves in their true relation to Him, they may afterwards man- fully investigate, as I am sure they will long to do, the conditions under which they themselves, His children, exist, and the laws which govern all His works. I am convinced, indeed, that the message will be, in some respects, different from that which the Methodists delivered, even when theirs is stripped of all its foreign and enfeebling accidents. Men are evidently more alive now to their social than to their individual wants; they are therefore more awake to the evils which affect society, than to those which affect their own souls. To him who merely, or mainly, preaches about the soul, this is a most discouraging circumstance,—to him whose purpose is to awaken men to a knowledge of God and a knowledge of Sin, it need not be discouraging at all.

For if God presents Himself to us as the Father of a Family, it is not necessary for the knowledge of Him, that we should force ourselves to forget our relations to each other, and to think of ourselves as alone in the world. And though, as I have admitted and asserted, the sense of Sin is essentially the sense of solitude, isolation, distinct individual responsibility, I do not know whether that sense, in all its painfulness and agony, ever comes to a man more fully than when he recollects how he has broken the silken cords which bind him to his fellows; how he has made himself alone, by not confessing that he was a brother, ​a son, a citizen. I believe the conviction of that Sin may be brought home more mightily to our generation than it has been to any former one; and that a time will come, when every family and every man will mourn apart, under a sense of the strife and divisions of the body politic, which he has contributed to create and to perpetuate. The preaching Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand, has always been the great instrument of levelling hills and exalting valleys. It will be so again. The priest and the prophet will confess that they have been greater rebels against the law of love than the publican and the harlot, because they were sent into the world to testify of a Love for all, and a Kingdom for all, and they have been witnesses for separation, for exclusion, for themselves.

My Unitarian brother!—You believe that, at least, respecting us. You have often told us so. And how is it you have no power to work on the minds and hearts of men, and to convince them of God's love, when, as you say rightly, we are forgetting or denying it? How is it, that in the last age you were in sympathy with all our feeble worldly tone of mind, and thought we were right in mocking at spiritual powers, and in not proclaiming a Gospel to the poor? Why did you talk just as we talked, in sleepy language to sleepy congregations, of a God who was willing to forgive if men repented, when what they wanted to know was, how they could repent, who could give them repentance, what they had to repent of? You had a mighty charm in your hands. You spoke of a Father. Why could you not tell men that He was seeking them, and wishing to make them true instead of false? You did not, you know you did not. Why was it? I beseech you, do not turn round and ​say, "You were as guilty as we." I have said already, "We were much more guilty." Every creed we pro- fessed, every prayer we uttered, told us that this Father was an actual Father, actually related to us by the closest, most intimate bonds. We did not believe much of those creeds and prayers; you wished us to believe less than we did. Thank God, neither you nor we could get rid of the witnesses which He had established, or of the deep necessities which corresponded to them. The earnest preachers of the day beat us both, because they believed in a Father, while we repeated His name, and you argued to prove that He was the One God.

And now you have, many of you, changed your language. You see that there is a spiritual power in the world; these preachers have proved that there is. You point out powerfully and skilfully, what dull, drowsy priests we were who denied it. But you say that those who asserted it were narrow, that they are worn out, that spiritual power is much more widely at work than they supposed, that it is to be felt everywhere. Be it so,—the lesson is most impressive; we accept it. But why are you still powerless; why cannot you stir the hearts of the people by your message more than your fathers did? Why must it be proclaimed, not exactly like theirs, in the ears of comfortable merchants and dowagers, wanting a not too troublesome religion,—but at least in the ears of those chiefly who crave for some new thing, not of those who are hungering and thirsting for life? The secret of both failures seems to me this. You of the older school knew something of transgression; almost nothing of Sin. But the transgression was of a rule rather than of a law; breaches of social etiquette and ​propriety, at most uncomely and unkind habits, seemed to compose all the evils you took account of, which did not appear in the shape of crimes. Those who must be treated, not as members of some class of men, but as men, have no ears for discourses about conventions and behaviour; if you cannot penetrate below these, you must leave them alone. You who believe in spiritual powers, do you yet acknowledge spiritual evil? Can you speak to us as persons? Can you tell me of myself; what I am; who is for me; who is against me? I have not found that you can. You have a religion for us, I know, apparently a graceful and a refined one. It is a luxury, if we can afford it. But we have an enemy who tries to deprive us even of necessaries. Unless you can teach us how to procure them, in spite of him, I and my fellow-fighters must for the present let your religion alone.