Theological Essays/IV

Every thoughtful reader of the book of Job must have been struck by two characteristics of it, which seem at first sight altogether inconsistent. The suffering man has the most intense personal sense of his own evil. He makes also the most vehement, repeated, passionate, protestations of his own righteousness. It cannot be pretended that he defends his innocence as far as men are concerned, but that he confesses himself guilty in the sight of God. On the contrary, he appeals again and again from men to God. He calls for His judgment. He longs to go and plead before Him. There would have been no need of clearing himself before a human tribunal. His friends do not, as it has been customary to say, attack him. They try, in their way, to console him. They are as much astonished at the vehemence of his self-accusations as they are shocked at his self-righteousness. They are quite convinced that God is ready to forgive those who make their prayer to Him. That is what they would do, if they had fallen into Job's calamities. The ​ancients, who were much wiser than he or they have assured them that it is the right course. Why does not the stricken man take it? Why does he indulge in such dreadful wailings, which must be offensive to the Judge who has afflicted him? Above all, how dares he talk as if a man might be just before God? How could he, who complained that he possessed the sins of his youth, nevertheless declare that there was a purity and a truth in him, which the Searcher of all hearts would at last acknowledge? What did this contradiction mean? How could he justify it against all their precedents and arguments?

He could not justify it at all. The contradiction was there. He felt it, he uttered it, he found in it the secret of his anguish. He could only tell his friends: "Your precedents and your arguments do not clear it away in the least. I knew them all before. I could have poured them out upon you if you had been in my case. But when one is brought face to face with suffering, they prove to be mere wind. These words of yours buzz about me, torment me, sometimes leave their stings in me, but they have nothing to do with me. They do not show me where I am wrong and where I am right. I am before a Judge who does not appear to recognise your maxims and modes of procedure. Oh! that I might order my cause before Him!"

Nor was it only the self-righteousness of Job which shocked Eliphaz, and Bildad, and Zophar. Their theory of the nature of pain was also thoroughly outraged by his language. I do not see any proof that they thought it merely a judgment from God for his transgressions. They would have been quite willing to call it, as we do, a merciful visitation. ​What offends them is, that Job groans under it as if it were an evil, that he seems to speak of it as if it came from an enemy. How can this be? Did not God send it? Is not all this suffering permitted,—even ordained by Him? What possible right can a poor creature, a worm of the earth, have to remonstrate and complain that anything is amiss?

Again, it is clear that the friends have the advantage. Job cannot at all explain how it is that pain should seem to him so very intolerable, and yet that it should be from God. It is the secret he wants to discover. But the demands for submission which his friends make upon him are not the least helps to the discovery. He cannot satisfy these demands; he cannot do what they tell him to do. He must and will cry out. He is sure that all is not right,—let them pretend to think so as much as they will. This pain, however it may have come to him, is an evil. No one shall force him to belie his conscience by saying that it is a good.

It does not appear from the story that, in either of these points, Job grows into more consent with their opinion, as his discipline becomes more severe and his experience greater. His confidence that he has a righteousness, a real substantial righteousness, which no one shall remove from him, which he will hold fast and not let go, waxes stronger as his pain becomes bitterer and more habitual. There are great alternations of feeling. The deepest acknowledgments of sin come forth from his heart. But he speaks as if his righteousness were deeper and more grounded than that. Sin cleaves very close to him; it seems as if it were part of himself, almost as if it were himself. But his righteousness belongs to him still more entirely. However strange the paradox, it is more himself than ​even that is. He must express that conviction; he does express it, though he knows, better than any one can tell him, how much it is at variance with what he had been thinking and saying the moment before.

So also of the suffering. He has wonderful intuitions, ever and anon, of the mercy and goodness of God. He believes that He is trying him, and that He will bring him forth out of the fires. And yet, why does this happen to him? What is it all for? He will not cheat God and outrage His truth by uttering soft phrases which set at nought the conviction of his heart. There is that about him from which he feels that he ought to be delivered,—an anguish of body and soul which he cannot reconcile with the goodness he yet clings to and trusts in.

There comes a moment in the life of Job when these two thoughts, the thought of a righteousness within him which is mightier than the evil, the thought of some deliverance from his suffering which should be also a justification of God, are brought together in his mind. He exclaims, "I know that my Redeemer liveth; in my flesh shall I see God, whom I shall see for myself, and mine eyes shall behold, and not another."^[1] He expects that this Redeemer will stand at the latter day upon the earth. But he evidently does not rest upon an expectation. It is not what ​this Redeemer may be or may do hereafter he chiefly thinks of. He lives. He is with him now. Therefore he calls upon his friends to say whether they do not see that he has the root of the matter in him.

At length, we are told, God answers Job out of the whirlwind. He shows him a depth of wisdom in the flight of every bird, and in the structure of every insect, which he cannot dive into. He shows him an order which he is sure is very good, though he is lost in it. Then he says, "I have heard of Thee by the hearing of the ear: but now mine eye seeth Thee. Wherefore I abhor myself, and repent in dust and ashes." A wonderful conclusion follows. God justifies the complaining man more than those who had pleaded so earnestly for His power and providence. They are forgiven when he prays for them. And the last days of Job are better than the beginning.

The early passages in the book of Job respecting Satan seem to anticipate what I said was especially New Testament theology. They do so only, I believe, because the story is more simply human, less Jewish, than any in the Old Testament. Job is represented as living outside of the limits within which the posterity of Abraham was confined. No words are used to identify him with them, or to show that he possessed any of the privileges with which their covenant and history invested them. We have here, therefore,

​what is at least meant to be a history of human experience. Whether it is biographical or dramatical, or, as I conceive, both, this must be the intention of it. Job is shown, and we are shown, by an experimentum crucis, what in him is merely accidental, what belongs to him as a man. Christendom has received the book in this sense. Doctors have taken pains to illustrate it, and have left it much as they found it. Plain, suffering men have understood it with all its difficulties much better than the most simple tracts written expressly for their use. You will see bedridden women, just able to make out the letters of it, feeding on it, and finding themselves in it. You will hear men who regard our Theology as a miserable attempt to form a theory of the universe, expressing their delight in this one of our theological books, because it so nobly and triumphantly casts theories of the universe to the ground. How it squares with our hypotheses they cannot imagine, but it certainly answers to the testimony of their hearts.

And I believe most clergymen, most religious persons who have conversed at all seriously with men of any class, from the most refined to the most ignorant, in any state of mind, from that of the most contented Pharisee to that of the lowest criminal, have another test of the authenticity of the book as a record of actual humanity. They hear from one and all, in some language or other, the assertion of a righteousness which they are sure is theirs, and which cannot be taken from them. They may call themselves miserable sinners; some of them may feel that they are so; some may tremble at the judgment which they think is coming upon them for their sins. But in all there is a secret reserve of belief, that there ​is in them that which is not sin, which is the very opposite of sin. When you tell them that the feeling is very wrong, that "God be merciful to me" is the only true prayer, that God's law is very holy, that they have violated it, and so forth,—they will listen; they may assent. From prudence or deference to you they may suppress the offensive phrase, or change their tone. Those will not be the best and honestest who do so. The man who cries, Till I die you shall not take my integrity from me, and who makes his teacher weep for the fearful deceitfulness of the human heart, may be nearest, if the Bible speaks right, to the root of the matter,—nearest to repentance and humiliation. But be that as it may, the fact in each case is nearly the same. Each man has got this sense of a righteousness, whether he realises it distinctly or indistinctly, whether he expresses it courageously or keeps it to himself.

Not less true is it that each man has that other conviction which Job uttered so manfully—that pain is an evil and comes from an enemy, and is contrary to the nature and reason of things,—however, from a stoical maxim, or a sense of duty, or a habit of patience, he may submit to it,—however much, to please his teacher, or to get rid of him, he may assent to phrases which appear to affirm an opposite doctrine. The witness of the conscience, of the whole man, on this point, is too strong for any cool, disinterested reflections. It is no time for school distinctions about soul and body. Both are confounded in one mortal anguish.

And when the man sends forth a bitter cry towards heaven, when he expresses his faith that he has a Deliverer somewhere, it is not a Redeemer ​for his soul that he asks, more than for his body. It is from the condition in which he finds himself that he cries to be set free; he feels that he has a kind of right to be set free from it. To be as he is, is not, he thinks, according to nature and order. He asks God, if he asks at all, to show that it is not according to His will.

If we did believe that there is a divine process, such as the Book of Job describes to us,—if we might take that book as an inspired history of God's ways to men, we should not surely stop at this point of the application. We should suppose God was really answering His creature and child out of the whirlwind; and by wonderful arguments, drawn, it may be, from the least object in nature, from the commonest fact of the man's experience, or from the whole Cosmos in which he finds himself, addressed to an ear which our words do not reach, entering secret passages of the spirit to which we have no access, was leading him,—the instincts and anticipations of his heart being not denied but justified,—to lay himself in dust and ashes. When a man knows that he has a righteous Lord and Judge, who does not plead His omnipotence and His right to punish, but who debates the case with Him, who shows him his truth and his error, the sense of Infinite Wisdom, sustaining and carrying out Infinite Love, abases him rapidly. He perceives that he has been measuring himself and his understanding against that Love, that Wisdom. A feeling of infinite shame grows out of the feeling of undoubting trust. The child sinks in nothingness at its Father's feet, just when He is about to take it to His arms.

But it is a Father, not a vague world, before which ​he has bowed. Oh! if we would preserve our brethren from a dark abyss of Pantheism, when their spirits are beginning to open to some of the harmonies of the universe, let us not pause till we understand how it should be the end of God's discipline to justify Job more than his three friends; how it can be possible for Him to sanction that conviction of an actual righteousness, belonging to the man himself, which we were so anxious to confute. I believe, for this purpose, we must lay the foundations of our faith deeper, not than they are laid in the Scriptures or in our Creeds, but very much deeper than they are laid in modern expositions. We say we wish to bring the sinner, weary, heavy-laden, and hopeless, to Christ. What can be a more blessed, or more benevolent, or more divine desire? But do we mean that we merely wish to bring the sinner to know what Christ did and spoke, in those thirty-three years between His birth and His resurrection? I fear we shall never understand the infinite significance of those years, or be able to take the Gospel narratives of them simply as they stand, if we have no other thought than this, or if there is no other which we dare proclaim to our fellow-men. Do we not really believe that Christ was, before He took human flesh and dwelt among us? Do we not suppose that He actually conversed with prophets and patriarchs, and made them aware of His presence? Or is this a mere arid dogma, which we prove out of Pearson, and which has nothing to do with our inmost convictions, with our very life? How has it become so? Is it not because we do not accept the New Testament explanation of these appearances and manifestations; because we do not believe that Christ is in every man, the source of all light that ​ever visits him, the root of all the righteous thoughts and acts that he is ever able to conceive or do?

I am afraid, not only that we are letting this truth go, but that we are actually disbelieving it, and that we shall therefore fall, not into the doctrine about Christ which prevailed in the last century, not into a belief of Him as a man and nothing more than a man, —various experiences have been making it difficult, almost impossible, for us to acquiesce in such a theory, —but into the notion of Him as a shadow-personage, whom the imagination has clothed, as it does all its heroes, with a certain divinity, really belonging to and derived from itself. That notion, when it is presented to our divines, strikes them at first with amazement, as an hypothesis which cannot by possibility gain acceptance with reasonable people. Then they dis- cover how much acceptance it has gained; how naturally men in our day fall into it; how many of them seem to receive it as if it was that which they had always been holding, only they had not courage to tell themselves so, or skill to put their thoughts into words.

The next step is to look about for some method of confuting the theory; to see whether we can prove that Strauss and his disciples have misquoted the New Testament or abused ancient authorities. Perhaps, if we cannot establish these points sufficiently by our learning, our German friends, who have been more closely engaged in the battle, may help us. I daresay they can, and that we also may do something for ourselves in that line if we try. But I am convinced, also, that the effort will be worth next to nothing, if it is made ever so skilfully, if our blows are ever so straight and well directed. That which is a tendency and habit of the heart, is not cured by detecting ​fallacies in the mode in which it is embodied and presented to the intellect. If you have no other way of showing Christ not to be a mythical being, or a man elevated into a God by the same process which has deified thousands before and since, except by convicting the propounder of the hypothesis of some philological and historical blunders, you may be quite sure that he will prevail, though those blunders were multiplied a thousandfold.

I would earnestly entreat our divines to think well whether they are not to blame for the prevalence of this theory; and whether, if they would eradicate it, they must not, in the first place, deal much more honestly with the facts of human experience, and secondly, connect those facts with principles which they admit to a certain extent, when they are arguing with those who deny them, but which they seldom fairly present to themselves, and still more rarely bring home to the consciences of their suffering fellow-men. The facts I have tried to present in the light in which Scripture exhibits them to us,—Scripture abundantly confirmed by daily observation. We apply the principle to those facts when we say boldly to the man who declares that he has a righteousness which no one shall remove from him—"That is true. You have such a righteousness. It is deeper than all the iniquity which is in you. It lies at the very ground of your existence. And this righteousness dwells not merely in a law which is condemning you; it dwells in a Person in whom you may trust. The righteous Lord of man is with you—not in some heaven to which you must ascend that you may bring Him down, in some hell to which you must dive that you may raise Him up, but nigh you, at your heart."

​The principle is expressed again when we say, "You maintain that the pain you are suffering is not good but ill,—a sign of wrong and disorder. You say that it is a bondage from which you must seek deliverance. You say that you cannot stop to settle in what part of you it is, that it is throughout you, that it affects you altogether, that you want a complete emancipation from it. Even so. Hold fast that conviction. Let no man, divine or layman, rob you of it. Pain is a sign and witness of disorder, the consequence of disorder. It is mockery to say otherwise. You describe it rightly; it is a bondage, the sign that a tyrant has in some way intruded himself into this earth of ours. But you are permitted to suffer the consequence of that intrusion, just that you may attain to the knowledge of another fact,—that there is a Redeemer, that He lives, that He is the stronger. That righteous King of your heart whom you have felt to be so near you, so one with you, that you could hardly help identifying Him with yourself, even while you confessed that you were so evil, He is the Redeemer as well as the Lord of you and of man. Believe that He is so. Ask to understand the way in which He has proved Himself so. You will find that God, not we, has been teaching you of Him, that He has been talking with you in the whirlwind, while we were darkening counsel with words without knowledge; leading you to the sight of His glory, that He might make you willing to confess your own baseness. He has taught you that you have been in chains, but that you have been a willing wearer of the chains. To break them He must set you free. Self is your great prison-house. The strong man armed, who keeps that prison in safety, must be bound. The rod of the ​enchanter, who holds your will in bondage, must be broken by some diviner spell before the arms can be loosed, and the captive rise and move again.

"If you have carried away this lesson from your hours of suffering, and resolve to keep it, your latter days will be better than the beginning. The gray hairs of the stricken, worn-out, desolate man, though no new children should crowd his hearth in place of those that are departed,—though no flocks and herds should be restored to him for those which the robbers have taken away,—will be fresher, freer, more hopeful than the untaught innocence of his childhood. But you have had in those hours a glimpse into the deep mystery, how God may use the consequences of the evil to which you have yielded,—and can make also the deliverance, if it be at present only a partial one, from those consequences,—instruments in your emancipation from the evil itself; because, through His discipline, these have become the means of leading you to the apprehension of Himself, and of that Daysman between us and Him, whom Job saw that he needed, and who must be as much yours as He was his."

The remarks I made in my last Essay show that I do not undervalue the testimony which the elder Unitarians bore against some of the phrases and opinions respecting human nature and human corruption, into which our popular religious teachers have fallen. They maintained stoutly that ordinary men do good acts, and that we have no business to call such acts splendid sins. "Either," they said, "words mean nothing, and human language, when it is turned to religious purposes, is used to conceal, not to express, ​our thoughts; or else the epithets, gentle, brave, just, to whomsoever they are applied, must be taken as expressing sincere moral commendation, and must not be explained away because we have some mental reservation about the religion or irreligion of the person to whom we apply them." All such protests seem to me honest appeals to the conscience, and to the truth of God,—denunciations of a style of thinking and judging which leads to the most fatal moral confusions.

But the Unitarians, I think, were very little able to sustain these useful assertions of theirs against an earnest and thoughtful man, who had known what evil was in himself, and who had adopted St. Paul's language, not only because it was St. Paul's, but because it expressed the deepest thoughts of his own heart, In me, that is, in my flesh, dwelleth no good thing. Such expressions seemed to them merely extravagant and foolish; indications of a temporary insanity in the person who resorted to them, which time or change of air would probably cure. Sometimes they saw that these remedies were effectual. The man's judgment of himself was connected with much that was morbid; his judgments of others, and the theories which he deduced from his experience, he gradually perceived to be uncharitable and untenable; his vivid impressions yielded to such discoveries and passed away. There were others whom neither time nor change of air, nor the observation of their own rashness, nor repentance for it, at all shook in this strong and solid conviction. They had found the Apostle's assertion to be true. They could abandon it for no Pelagian refinements. With them these Unitarians felt themselves utterly at a loss. They could only talk to them about an ex​ternal morality, of which the hearers made no account. The disputants were speaking of different subjects; but subjects between which there existed a close con- nection; one of which, if rightly understood, would have been of the greatest help in explaining the other. The Unitarians discoursed concerning the doings of a man; those they called enthusiasts concerning his being. But how poor are his doings if they do not draw life from his being! how much he will deceive himself about his being, if it does not make itself manifest in doings! How soon will even commercial honesty perish, if you have not found out the secret of making the man honest! But how easy is it for a man to frame for himself a certain internal standard, which shall be compatible with the greatest external fraud and wrong!

I am sure people are coming to some discoveries of this kind; and that they are almost equally dissatisfied with that flimsy doctrine about behaviour which was all that the religion of rewards and punishments could produce, and with that assertion of truths as belonging to the believer and not to other men, which is its antagonist. Both systems are falling by their own weight. The external moralist fails to produce the results' he says are all-important; the exclusive religionist shows himself more worldly than his neighbours. But while each is separately perishing, was there no truth in each which cannot perish? What is it? How shall we find it out?

I have been led in this Essay to seek for this reconciliation by a method which will seem to the Unitarian to the last degree strange and monstrous. What infinite pains Priestley and his school took to disprove the pre-existence of our Lord! How satis​factorily they showed that that pre-existence must imply something more than the Arians said it implied; that there was no resting in their half-conclusion! How indefatigably they strove to exhaust Scripture of all expressions which savoured of this mystical imagination! With what rapture they hailed a bad translation, or a doubtful reading! How resolved they were that even the early Church and the early heretics should not mean what all previous students of their language thought they must mean! They exhibited great diligence undoubtedly, and diligence not without its reward. For their orthodox antagonists, eager to confute these statements, made a concession which, for their purposes, was quite invaluable. They argued as if you might start from the Unitarian hypothesis of our Lord's nature, and then prove Him to be something more than that hypothesis affirmed Him to be. It was to be taken for granted that the New Testament spoke of Jesus of Nazareth first as a good man and a great prophet; it was to be contended that it also spoke of Him as divine.

To be involved in such a controversy is to be involved in the necessity of arguing, refining, special-pleading for a principle which, at the same time, we affirm to be the substance of the Gospel, to be connected with the very life of man. What an utterly false position for men to be thrown into! How could the spectators help thinking that it was a fencing-match, the interest of which depended upon successful parries and thrusts; unless, as was too often the case, the combat acquired a deadly interest when one of the combatants was persuaded into the crime of Laertes, when, changing their rapiers, they struck each other with the poisoned instrument? And where there was ​on the one side the advantage of academical fame, of ecclesiastical dignity, the shouts of the crowd, the patronage of the State, the sympathies of the lovers of fair play would of course be bestowed on the opposite.

It was not exactly that the supporter of the orthodox side chose a bad standing-ground. In the last age this was felt to be the natural standing-ground. Some men were driven from it by spiritual convictions; some found it inconsistent with a scholar-like study of the Bible; but most spoke as if it were the reasonable position. You yielded it up in deference to an invincible array of texts or authorities, or to some power which directly bore upon your own spirit. Those who maintained it were supposed to be adopting the faith which every philosopher and every simple man would adopt, unless he were prepared for a very bold infidelity, or unless, in deference to Scripture and tradition, he gave up his common sense.

In what I have said of Strauss, I have hinted how much the case is altered now in this respect. The habit of thought which made the arguments of the Humanitarians seem so strong and decisive, which was always ready to supply any gaps in their reasoning, is subverted. Through whatever influence the change has come to pass, philosophers recognise it; all feel it. There is no eagerness now to show that the disciples of Jesus did not attach a mysterious and supernatural dignity to His character; the labour is to prove that they did. Philology is discovered to have been in favour of the older notion of their opinions; only philosophy failed in accounting for them. The modern Unitarian has strong motives for looking favourably upon statements of this kind. They meet the discon​tent with which he has learnt to regard the dryness of his own creed. They justify his traditional dislike of the orthodox creed. They gratify his desire for a religion which shall point less to external conduct, more to internal life. If he can look upon Jesus as connected in some way with the experiences of his own heart, with those spiritual conflicts of which he has learnt to see the significance, what an emancipation it will be from the formalism which he hates in his own school and ours! How much more easily than Priestley or Belsham, with how much less of outrage upon scholarship, he can get rid of mere texts and narratives; with how much more of delight than they ever betrayed, can he recognise all that was divinest in the life of him who is called the Son of Man; with how much more of freedom and less of exclusiveness can he connect him with all the other great champions of the race!

Yes; these are great temptations, irresistible temptations to one who, as Bunyan says, "has not a burthen on his back." I may easily persuade myself that the Christ I was taught to believe in is a creation of the human intellect or imagination. That hypothesis will come to me clothed with a wonderful plausibility when I stumble all at once, in my walks through this common world, upon mines of which I had not suspected the existence,—mines in which the most busy processes are going on, and must have been going on for generations. But if by chance, while I am exploring these rich mines in myself, I am brought to a stand-still by the discovery that I am the worker of them; that I have worked them ill; that I am the steward of some one who is the possessor of them; that I am bankrupt, and guilty ;—then it becomes a necessity, not of my traditional faith, or of my fears, but—of my inmost spirit, that I should find ​some One whom I did not create, some One who is not subject to my accidents and changes, some One in whom I may rest for life and death. Who is this? What name have you for Him? I say it is the Christ, whose name I was taught to pronounce in my childhood; the Righteous one, the Redeemer in whom Job, and David, and the Prophets trusted, the ground of all that is true, in you, and me, and every man; the Source of the good acts,—which are therefore not splendid sins,—of you, and me, and every man; the Light that lighteth every man who cometh into the world. Apart from Him, I feel that there dwells in me no good thing; but I am sure that I am not apart from Him, nor are you, nor is any man. I have a right to tell you this: if I have any work to do in the world it is to tell you this. And now I will tell you further why I hold that this righteous Being is the Son of God.