Theological Essays/Note

There are those who will say, "Your explanation of the word eternal in the New Testament may be the true one. It certainly accords with what we have been wont to think its peculiar characteristics better than the one which is given in popular sermons. It even seems to throw a light on a phrase which is very common in those sermons, the loss of the soul, which ought to have a spiritual sense, one would suppose, and which continually receives a very carnal and material one. And it is at least possible that if Eternal punishment denotes in Scripture Spiritual punishment, portions of its language which seem to contain threatenings of outward sufferings may, without losing their literal force, receive a new character by being referred to this leading principle. We can understand this; we may be glad at least to try your method, and see whether the words of Apostles and Evangelists will bear the application of it. But can you accept it honestly? Are you not tied by formularies which bind you to another maxim? Must not these be thrown aside before you can freely and fairly give a force to the words Eternal or Everlasting Punishment, Fire, Death, or Damnation, which they do not convey to the ears and eyes of ordinary hearers and readers?

It will be perceived that I have already given a partial answer to this question. To the Articles one naturally turns for definitions of words, for assertions of doctrines. In the Articles we find no definition of the word Eternal or Everlasting. They are not merely silent on the doctrine of everlasting punishment. The framers of them have refused to pronounce upon it. But the Articles are only ​one part of our formularies. We have Prayers which we are expected to use daily; we have Creeds which have descended to us from the early ages—the ages of anathemas. What do these say?

First, as to the Prayers. It is assumed that I am teaching a meaning of the word Eternal, which the ordinary person, the peasant or woman, cannot take in, which can only be understood by the most learned theologian or meta- physician. I utterly deny the charge. I say that I have been forced into the belief of an Eternal world or kingdom, which is about us, in which we are living, which has nothing to do with time, by prayers. These common prayers which I offer up with peasants and women and children, have taught me that there is an Eternal Life which is emphatically a present life (not according to a doctrine which I have listened to lately with astonishment, alike for its logic and theology—a future life begun in the present); and that this Eternal Life consists in the knowledge of God; and that the loss of the knowledge of God is the loss of it. And I say that simple people do believe in this life, do grow in the perception of it as they pray, do cast aside, as they pray, that other notion which is so plausible to the senses and the carnal understandings, and which doctors find it so hard to escape. Negatively, then, the Prayers define nothing about Eternity, for definition is not the office of prayer. Positively, they are the great means of leading thousands into a practical apprehension of that meaning of Eternity which I have deduced from the New Testament. But these prayers carry us farther still. We have no prayers, thank God! for the dead as such; how can we, when Christ says that all live to God? We have no masses for the dead. How can we? The sacrifice is complete; we cannot make it more perfect than it is. But prayer does break down the barriers between the visible and invisible world; and in prayer we cannot set it up again, however in our theories we may. Christ's sacrifice compasses the whole universe; we cannot limit the extent of its operations by measures of space or time. When we pray for "all men," how dare we limit the ​Spirit who is teaching us to pray, and affirm that we will not pray for any but those who are in certain conditions with which we are acquainted! When we meet to hold communion with Him who has given Himself for the world, how dare we declare for whom He shall or shall not present His all-embracing sacrifice? Are we wiser or more loving than He is? Do we wish better things for mankind than He does, from whom all our good and loving thoughts proceed?

Next, as to the Creeds. The negative evidence for the Apostles' and the Nicene—our daily popular Creeds—is decisive. They speak of a judgment of quick and dead. They speak of Eternal Life. They contain no sentence about future Punishment. But the positive evidence, from their effect on those who utter them, is stronger still. They are expressions of Trust—Trust in a Father, a Son, and a Spirit. Augustine taught them to the heathens in Africa, as witnesses that there is a God of Infinite Charity, utterly unlike the gods whom they worshipped. Our missionaries, I hope, use them for the same purpose. All who say them with their hearts feel that they are flying to God from their enemies—Death, Hell, the Devil.

But the Athanasian Creed? Does not that settle the question? I think it does. There, indeed, we find no more definition of Eternity than we do in the other Creeds. But we do find sentences about Punishment to which there is nothing corresponding elsewhere. They are such sentences as I affirm could not have been introduced and could not be repeated by any honest or Christian man, if the idea of Eternal Life, as consisting in the knowledge of God and of Eternal Death, as consisting in the absence of that knowledge, were not practically the idea of the old time as well as of our own, however in our formal writings we may deny it.

Eleven years ago I expressed what were then my opinions on this subject, in a book not addressed to Unitarians. I said that I could not agree with Mr. Coleridge in thinking that this Creed contradicted the Nicene, on the subject of the subordination of the Son to the ​Father; that, if it forced me to pronounce judgment on any person, I would not have laid myself under the obligation of reading it,—whatever Church might adopt it,—because I should be violating an express command of Christ; that I never had felt myself encouraged or tempted by it to pass sentence on those who differed with me most on the subject of the Trinity; that, on the contrary, I had felt it was passing sentence on my own tendencies "to confound the persons, and to divide the substance"; that these tendencies in me, I knew, had nothing to do with intellectual formulas, but with moral corruptions, from which many who are called heretics may be freer than I am; that I doubted whether we should gain in Truth or Charity by casting away this Creed, because I looked upon it as a witness that eternal life is the knowledge of God, and that eternal death is Atheism, the being without Him.^[1] I have not seen any cause to alter these opinions. I feel, indeed, that every year of fresh experience, as it should ground us more in principles, should make us more diffident of our own judgment on questions of expediency. Though the Creed, instead of tempting us to condemn others, has, I think, often overcome our inclination to condemn them—(for the more tremendous its language, the less we can dare to bring any individual within the scope of it (though some sentences of it, those especially concerning "the taking of the Manhood into God, the reasonable soul and flesh, the persons, and substance," have thrown a clear, broad light into dark passages of my mind, and I doubt not have taught my brethren more; yet, if it does cause any of those for whom Christ died to stumble, if it hinders any from entering into the mystery of God's love, I hope He will not suffer us to retain it. For that which is meant as a witness of Him must be given up, like the brazen serpent, if it ceases to be so, or is made an instrument of turning men's eyes from Him. Still, I cannot help thinking that the reasons generally urged for abandoning it are not charitable, and that submission to them will not conduce ​to charity. I find persons objecting, first, that the basis of our fellowship should not be laid in Theology,—in principles concerning the nature of God. Secondly, that Eternal Punishment or Death may be denounced against those who hold certain opinions on certain subjects,—probably on the subject of the Trinity,—but should not be denounced against those who do not think "thus" or "thus" concerning it.

On the first proposition I have spoken much in these Essays, and have endeavoured to show that any basis of fellowship but a Theological one,—any basis of human consciousness, or of mere materialism,—must be narrow and exclusive, one on which an edifice of superstition will certainly be reared, one which must be protected by persecution. On the second point I would observe, that if the Creed had meant that the not holding certain intellectual notions concerning the Trinity involved the penalty of everlasting death, it would consign to destruction, not heretics,—extreme or moderate,—but every peasant, every child, nearly every woman in every congregation in which it is read, seeing that these (thank God!) have formed no such intellectual conceptions, that the majority are not capable of forming them. And the few persons it would count worthy of eternal life are a set of schoolmen, the best of whom pray every day and hour that they may become as little children, and have the faith which those have who do not look upon the subject from a logical point of view at all. Lastly, it would directly contradict its own most solemn assertions. If we could comprehend this truth in an intellectual statement, the Father would not be incomprehensible, the Son incomprehensible, the Holy Ghost incomprehensible. But since there is no alternative between this utterly monstrous imagination and that which supposes the Creed to affirm the knowledge of God and eternal life to be the same; and therefore the denial,—not in the letter, but in the spirit,—not intellectually and outwardly, but morally and inwardly, of the Father, Son, and Spirit, to be eternal death;—I cannot help thinking that, with all its fierce language, it has a gentler heart than ​some of those who get themselves credit for Toleration, by wishing the Church well rid of it. They leave us free to judge occasionally, to assume a portion of God's authority, only protesting against any excessive intrusion into it. The Creed obliges us to give such a meaning to eternal life,—or rather to adhere so closely to our Lord's explanation of it,—that we have no power of saying, in any case, who has lost it, or incurred the state which is opposite to it.

If I am asked whether the writer did not suppose that he had this power, I answer, When you tell me who the writer was, I may possibly, though probably not even then, be able to make some guess whether he supposed it or not. At present I am quite in the dark about him and his motives. If I adopt the theory, which is as reasonable as any other, that he lived in the time of the Vandal persecution, I think it is very likely that, along with a much deepened conviction of the worth of the principle for which he was suffering, he had also a mixture of earthly passion and fierceness, and that he was tempted to show his opponents, or those who were apostatising, that there were more terrible penalties than those of scourging the back or cutting out the tongue. In that case, I should say I was giving up that part of his animus which he would wish me to give up, that part which was not of God, and could not be meant to abide; and was clinging to that which made his other words true and consistent with themselves, when I interpreted his Creed in conformity with our Lord's sentence. I should not be imitating the treatment which Mr. Ward (in his Ideal of the Church) applied to our Articles ("I have no doubt he is one of those on whom Romanism has conferred a benefit, by making him at least respectful to the formularies by which he is bound,") when he maintained that a non-natural sense might be put on them, because the compilers of them meant to cheat Catholics, and Catholics might pay them in their own coin. I should apply just the opposite rule. If I found a general scope of meaning which was important and precious, and which belonged to all times, I should not sacrifice that for the sake of a portion which belonged to the circumstances and ​feelings of a particular time or a particular man. To use Mr. Canning's celebrated simile, I should not follow the example of those worshippers of the Sun, who chose the moment of an eclipse to come forth with their hymns and their symbols.

This rule is necessary, I suspect, that we may do justice to the Church of the Fathers generally, and prove our reverence for it. I cannot honour that age too much for its earnestness in asserting and defending theological principles. I believe no other age has had precisely the same task committed to it. Of course, I have most sympathy with those (like him to whom this Creed is erroneously attributed) who fought at fearful odds for that which was dear to them, who exposed themselves to imperial, episcopal, and popular indignation for the sake of it. It is not only more pleasant to contemplate them than the prosperous men,—and them in their adversity than when they were threatening and excommunicating others; but their weak time was certainly the time in which all their chief work was done. Nevertheless, I cannot say that their anathemas were indications of a cruel spirit; that these did not show, like their endurance of persecution, how much they were in earnest, and how precious the truths which they had realised were to them; or that the distinctions which were the excuses for them were not very valuable for Theology and for Humanity. There, I believe, they were wiser than we are, unless we are willing to profit by their wisdom. But there are points on which I know we ought to be wiser than they were. They could not foresee how God would govern His world, what methods He would see fit to use for bringing His truth to light. We ought to see that doubts, questions, partial apprehensions, denials of one principle for the sake of affirming another, have been, through His gracious discipline, means of elucidating that which would otherwise have been dark. Would the sentence of the Nicene Council have sufficed to illustrate the faith of Athanasius? Was not a century of strife in the Empire—three centuries of Arianism among the Barbarians—needful for that purpose? And if I find this to be so, ​and find also much horrible sin among the orthodox mixed with their excellences, many virtues among the heretics mixed with their denials and contradictions, I am bound to believe God was using both. I dare not deny History any more than the Theological truth, which, I believe, History has expounded. That truth will suffer if I do. How was the noble heart of Dante crushed by the thought that his dear master, and all the men whom he reverenced in the old world, were outcasts, for not believing in the Trinity? That thought evidently shook his faith in the Trinity. And it would shake mine, because it would lead me to suppose that Truth only became true when Christ appeared, instead of being revealed by Him for all ages past and to come; so that, whoever walked in the light then, whoever walks in it now, seeking glory and immortality, desirous to be true, has glimpses of it, and will have the fruition of it, which is Life Eternal.

I have spoken of the possible animus of the writer of this Creed; but I must repeat that I know nothing of him, and therefore my guesses are good for very little. The animus imponentis concerns us, as all casuists admit, much more; and of that we have no right to pretend ignorance. Our Church has given us great helps for understanding what her meaning is, and what spirit she wishes us to be of. So long as I am commanded to repeat her prayers, no one shall compel me to put a construction upon this formulary which contradicts them, and makes me consciously false in the use of them. And I will add, once for all, in reference to those who wish to bind us by the current and floating opinions of this age, on the topics I have discussed in these Essays; I hold to that which I have confessed already; I hold to the prayers in which I find that confession made living and effectual for me and for all my brethren. If you say my faith is not distinct enough, bring forth your substitute for it. Do not talk about a perfect Atonement, or a divine Satisfaction, or an Eternal Death; these I believe in as much as you can do. Put forth distinctly before your own consciences, and before the conscience of England, the meaning which you attach to ​these words. See whether what you intend is not either that assertion of God's infinite Charity, which is contained in St. John's express words, in the whole Bible, in our forms, or something so flagrantly in contradiction with that, as to make the duty of rejecting it, and protesting against it, one from which no Churchman and no man ought to shrink.