Theological Essays/V

"I believe in Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, our Lord," has been for eighteen centuries the creed of Christendom. The teachers to whom I alluded in my last Essay are especially active in pointing out the delusion into which we have fallen upon this subject.

"All mythologies recognise Sons of God. Every legendary person in the Greek world was the offspring of some God; the most conspicuous, of Zeus the chief God. Where is your singularity? Where are the signs of some essential characteristic divinity in your faith? It bears about it the ordinary tokens of humanity. To these it owes its general acceptance. In this instance, as in all others, it has adopted into itself those human feelings and notions which had taken various forms in different ages and races; it has adopted them free from some adjuncts and accidents which were worn out and ready to perish. It has added to them accidents of its own, which will drop off in due time by a necessary law. It has especially connected a high ideal of humanity with a particular person. That ideal will be found to belong to that ​whole race, not to him. He will retain a high place among the asserters of human rights and duties, not that which the idolatry of his disciples has assigned him."

I have admitted already that the ordinary methods of controversy are entirely out of place when statements of this kind are propounded. The question, whichever way it is decided, must concern the life and being of every one of us. It must affect the condition of mankind now, and the whole future history of the world. To argue and debate it as if it turned upon points of verbal criticism, as if the determination could be influenced by the greater or less skill in reasoning on either side, as if it could be settled by votes, must have the effect of darkening our consciences, of making us doubt inwardly whether the truth signifies anything to us, or whether we can arrive at it. To keep silence on these doubts, if this is the only mode of treating them, is not only a sign of religious reverence, but of common sense. But since there is, I believe, another way of dealing with them,—one which will be acknowledged as fairer by those who experience them, and yet one which does not require the heart and conscience to be asleep, but which asks all their help in determining whether we have received a fable, or are holding, all too weakly, an eternal verity,—I consider it much safer not to leave such a topic to the chances of ordinary conversation and popular literature, but to introduce it into solemn discourses, as if we were aware of the number of human souls which it is tormenting.

Our first plain duty is to admit the fact as it is stated, not entering into particulars for the sake of showing whether there are any exceptions to it or limitations of it. For our purpose it is not necessary to inquire ​why the Oriental spoke more of emanations from God, and the Greeks, as well as our own Gothic ancestors, more of sons of God. The question is very interesting, and even important. I may allude to it again at some other time, but it is enough here to admit the general proposition, that sons of God will be found occupying a conspicuous place in the mythology of every people which has left any strong impression of itself upon the history of the world. This being granted, the next point is to ascertain what are those general human feelings which this faith embodies. We cannot hesitate for a moment to allow that there are some; that it is very desirable to know what they are; and that they must be nearly related to Christianity.

First, then, it seems to be an instinct of men, so far as we may judge by these indications, that their helpers must come to them from some mysterious region; that they cannot be merely children of the earth, merely of their own race. If they belong to us,—so the conscience of man, interpreted by history, seems to bear witness,—they cannot understand our evils, or bring any power that is adequate to overcome them. Secondly, there seems to have been a strong persuasion among men that human relationships have something answering to them in that higher world from which they suppose their heroes to have descended. Thirdly, they seem to have been sure that unless the superior beings were not only related to each other, but in some way related to them, their mere protection would be worth very little; they would not confer the kind of benefits which the inferior asks from them. These are the obvious commonplace inferences from these stories, which suggest ​themselves to every one; they lie upon the surface of them.

And if so, it can hardly, I think, be taken for granted that we are showing our respect for the instincts and conscience of humanity when we assume that all the beings who have done it good have not come from any mysterious source, but have belonged to the common stock of human beings; that they have not been given to us, but, as to all their more transcendent qualities, created by us; that their relation to us was the ordinary one of flesh and blood; that we have glorified and deified them. These conclusions may be true, but they cannot follow from those facts to which our attention has been so eagerly directed; those facts would seem at first sight to contradict them. I am quite willing, however, to acknowledge that there is evidence, and very strong evidence, in favour of these opinions,—evidence which has made it most natural that serious thinkers should adopt them in this day and in other days. Notwithstanding that strong conviction in the minds of men that their gods and heroes must be of a nature higher than their own, and that any sympathy with them must imply a condescension and stooping, it is quite manifest that they have imputed to the beings whom they reverenced all the habits and peculiarities of the countries and races to which they belonged, all that was morbid in their own temperaments, much of the corruption and debasement to which they know themselves to be prone. About this point there is no dispute. It is no new discovery, but one which Greek sages made, more than two thousand years ago, about their own countrymen. It was the secret of the unbelief of so many of them. It led a few into the ​strongest and most settled assurance that there was that which man did not create, and to which he must be conformed. And there is no doubt that, from age to age, the tendency went on increasing, till the Gods became different from the mass of men only by being the models and ideals of a superhuman malice and cruelty.

But there is a chapter of human experience which we have not yet looked into. It is that of which I spoke in my last Essay. We found a man brought into a condition of physical and moral pain and weakness which deprived him of all advantages he might once have possessed, and confessing himself on a level with the most wretched of human creatures. There came to this man, so smitten, a consciousness of evil, which was perfectly new to him. This consciousness was strangely mixed with the assurance that there was a righteousness which he could actually claim as his. The righteousness was more deep than the evil. At times he felt that it was even more his own, though that seemed bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh. This conflict in his mind was connected with another. He could not deny that his suffering had come from God; but yet he felt it to be a plague, an evil, an enemy. It spoke to him of bondage and oppression. Could God be the oppressor? This man, we found, was gradually taught that God was not his oppressor, but the defender of his cause,—the asserter of his righteousness. How was this? Was he then righteous? Was he not the sinner he had believed himself to be? Yes; it was then first that he felt himself to be wholly a sinner,—that he became ashamed of all the pleas he had put forth on his own behalf. But there was, in some mysterious manner, a Redeemer,—an actual person connected with him,—one who he ​was sure lived,—one who was at the root of his being,—one in whom he was righteous.

I tried to show, not from a particular sentence, but from the context of the book, that this was Job's experience. I tried to show further, that Job was not a man unlike other men, placed under rare and peculiar conditions which enabled him to ascertain certain facts as true for himself, which are not true for his race; but that by hard discipline he was drawn out of that which was local and individual, brought to the apprehension of that which is human and universal. I tried to show that any other hypothesis is inconsistent with our reverence for the book of Job as part of the canon of Scripture, equally inconsistent with the testimonies which have been borne to its truthfulness by people of the most various characters, and in the most dissimilar circumstances. If so, If so, the Avenger or Redeemer whom Job confessed was not a Redeemer but the Redeemer; not one of those who came down from time to time, out of some unknown world of light, to scatter some portion of the world's darkness, but the actual source of light; not one of those who here and there puts down one of the earth's oppressors, but the asserter of man's right against the oppressor of man. He cannot be one of those whom men have called into existence, and invested with the qualities which belong to them as members of some particular race or locality. The sufferer has been compelled to feel himself simply a man. All accidents are nothing to him now. If he has not hold of a substance, he must perish in his despair.

Such are the results at which we have arrived already. But if that part of the story is true,—and no part of it can be true if that is not,—which ​represents God as Himself discovering to the innermost heart and spirit of the man his righteousness as well as his sin,—the Avenger as well as the oppressor,—the question must have forced itself upon Job, and forces itself upon us: Is this Redeemer, so closely connected with the human sufferer, not connected also with that divine Instructor who answered him out of the whirlwind? Was this righteousness which Job perceived not the righteousness of God Himself? Was He as widely separated from His creature as ever? Was there no meaning in the assertion that one was the image of the other? What did all this history of a struggle signify, if that assertion was false? Why had Job cared to know the mind and purpose of his Maker? Why had he that sense of separation from Him—that longing to plead with Him? Whence came that cry for a Daysman between them?

If the Lord and Redeemer whom Job, and thousands besides Job, in that day and in all days, in that country and in all countries, felt after and found, explains to us those many lords and redeemers whom men in different places and ages have dreamed of or hoped for, may not He also explain those many sons of God of whom I have been speaking here? May not this be the great radical experience which interprets those superficial experiences; the great universal experience which interprets those partial ones? Job could not think of this Daysman, near as He was to his very being, except as one who had come to him,—who had stooped to Him,—who belonged to a world of mystery. Job could not think of Him, except as related to the Invisible Lord of all. Job's most intimate conviction was that he was ​related to himself. These are the conditions that meet in all those dreams of demigods and heroic men which mythology presents us with. But here are not the causes which make those dreams local, temporary, artificial. It is from the One Being, the Lord of the spirit of all flesh, that this Son of God must have come. He must be spiritual like that Being; for it is the spirit and not the sense of the sufferer which confesses Him. And whatever righteousness and goodness are perceived by the erring, trusting, broken-hearted penitent to be in the One,—speaking to his sorrows and wants,—must be the image and reflex of an absolute righteousness and grace in the other, which he could only adore.

Many readers fancy that when we speak of a Person who is at once divine, and the ground of humanity, we must be assuming an Incarnation. I have not yet touched that doctrine; what I am saying here has no reference to it. Christian theology does not speak of an Incarnation, till it has spoken of "an only-begotten Son, begotten of his Father before all worlds, of one substance with Him." These words, though we unite so often in pronouncing them, and though in former times they were the strength and nourishment of confessors and martyrs, have come, in modern days, to be regarded as mere portions of a school divinity, which learned men must maintain by subtle arguments and an army of texts; which ordinary men are to receive implicitly, because it is dangerous to doubt them; but which have no hold upon our common daily life, which can be tested by no experience, which those who are busy with religious feelings and states of mind will pass by with indifference, as not concerning vital godliness. We owe it ​to those objectors of whom I have spoken (and this surely ought to convince us how faithless and heartless our dread of any objections is, and how much we are fighting against God, when we try to suppress them),—we owe it to them that this delusion has been scattered, or must soon be scattered; and that these truths are compelled to come forth from amidst the cobwebs in which we have left them, to prove that they can bear the open day, and that they bring a more glorious sunlight with them, which may penetrate into all the obscurest caverns of human thoughts and fears. If we take the Apostle St. John as our guide, we shall find that those mysteries, from which we have shrunk back, as if they must rob us of all simple and childlike faith, are the preservers of simplicity in thought, in word, in act, from the innumerable temptations to artifice and falsehood which beset religious men not less, but more, than others; that they can set us free from a host of vulgar earth-born notions and superstitions, which we have adopted from the cloister or the crowd into our Christian dialect and practice; that they can show how the one fundamental truth of God's love and charity makes all other facts,—those belonging to the most inward discipline of the heart, those concerning the most outward economy of the world,—sacred and luminous.

I can only see at a great distance that this must be so, and is so, and can hope and pray that God may raise up some in these latter days of the world who will help us to feel that it is so. The utmost I shall attempt now is to say a few words on one passage of St. John's Gospel, in which our Lord points out, as it seems to me, in a wonderful manner, the relation in which a belief in the Son of God stands to that con​sciousness of bondage which is inseparable from the consciousness of sin.

If I traced in this passage any allusion to a belief in His Incarnation, or to that Passion which had not yet taken place, I should not quote it. But the only way in which the words bear upon the first of these subjects is this: they were addressed to certain Jews who had believed on Christ as a teacher, as a man standing visibly before them. He desired to lead them into a higher and better faith, the one which true men had held before He was born into the world, the only one which could sustain any after He had left it. He had said to those Jews who believed on Him, "If ye continue in my word, then are ye my disciples indeed, and ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free." They answered, "We are Abraham's children; we were never in bondage to any man. How sayest thou, then, Ye shall be made free?" A strange question for men who were looking so earnestly for a deliverer from the Roman yoke, and yet one which had a good meaning in it. They were certain that in some way or other the privilege of being Abraham's children was the gift of a higher freedom, a nobler citizenship, which the Cæsars could not take from them. Perhaps it was this. Perhaps our Lord came to show them how it was this. But in the meantime there was a plain staring fact which they must admit. Whether they were Abraham's children or not, they had committed sin; they felt and knew that they had. And that sin did make them bondsmen. They were under a yoke, a heavy one to each of them, however he might slight his subjection to the emperor, however little that might practically or individually gall him. His will had a master; he confessed it in a thousand ​ways; he continually pleaded its subjection as an excuse for doing wrong acts, for not doing right ones. It was better simply to own the fact than to dissemble it. To own it was the beginning of emancipation. "For the servant abideth not in the house for ever, but the Son abideth ever." Over that house of theirs, not made with hands, there was a Son actually ruling, a Son of God. To Him the house belonged, not to the poor slave who fancied it was his. Let him once confess the true Lord of it, let him once give up his own imaginary claim of dominion, which was submission to a real servitude, and his chains would drop off. "For if the Son shall make you free, then are ye free indeed." All other attempts to shake off the yoke from your wills make it harder and heavier. In the confession that a Son, an actual Son of God, is your Lord, lies the secret of freedom. This is the true Hercules who takes Prometheus from his rock, and slays the vulture that is preying upon him. This is the deliverer of each man, because He is the deliverer of mankind.

I believe there never has been, is not, nor will be, any other way of asserting freedom or of preserving it than this. And I do believe that God is leading us by strange and hidden paths to seek for this freedom and to find it. Many a heart, I trust, which shrinks back from our teaching, and perhaps thinks that we are binding grievous chains on men's necks, is yet praying this prayer:—

Yes! It is deeply and eternally true that "Thou, O Lord, art more than they." And therefore it becomes us most earnestly, for the sake of our fellow-men, and of all the thoughts and doubts which are stirring in them so mightily at this time, not to let the faith in an actual Son of God be absorbed into any religious or philosophical theories or abstractions. When we lose that, we lose all hope of freedom: our own conceits become our masters, and we are at the mercy of any ingenious and skilful combiner, who can put those conceits into a system; we become liable for a time to all the caprices and fantasies of the age in which we live; we shall probably sink at last into the implicit credence which we suppose to be the characteristic of ages that are past. Let us look, therefore, courageously at the popular dogma, that there are certain great ideas floating in the vast ocean of traditions which the old world exhibits to us, that the Gospel appropriated some of these, and that we are to detect them and eliminate them from its own traditions. We have ​found these great ideas floating in that vast sea;—the idea of an Absolute God, the idea of a Son of God, who has close and intimate relations with men as their Lord and their Deliverer. We have found that these ideas demand to be substantiated; that all mischief, confusion, materialism, surrounded them when they became the creatures of men's fancy, liable to be altered, disturbed, divided at their pleasure. What we ask for is—not a System that shall put these ideas into their proper places, and so make them the subjects of our partial intellects, but—a Revelation which shall show us what they are, why we have had these hints and intimations of them, what the eternal substances are which correspond to them. We want such a Revelation for philosophers and common men, for the prince and the serf: we ask if there is such a one or no: we beseech the Father of Lights, if He is the God of infinite Charity we proclaim Him to be, to tell us whether all our thoughts of Freedom and Truth have proceeded from the Father of Lies; whether for eighteen centuries we have been propagating a mockery when we have said that there is a Son of God, who is Truth, and who can make us free indeed.

And is this all you have to say," asks a grave Unitarian of the older school, "to convince me that I must believe those mysteries, so outrageous to my reason, which you confess that even persons proud of their orthodoxy are rather eager to dismiss from their thoughts? That is really, as the lawyers say, your case?" I will tell you, friend, why I have said thus much, and why, on this topic, I mean to say no more. It is because I know that I have you on my side; because you are the principal evidence for what I have been maintaining. You never have made up ​your minds to abandon the name, "Son of God." You find it in the Gospels. Your desire to assert the letter of them, against what you suppose our figurative and mystical interpretations, forces you to admit the phrase. You not only do so, but you make the most of it. You quote all the passages in which Christ declares that the Son can do nothing of Himself, that the Father is greater than He, as decisive against the doctrine of our creeds. You do a vast service by insisting upon them, by compelling us to take notice of them. They are not merely chance sentences carelessly thrown out, inconsistent with others which occur in the same books. You are right in affirming that they contain the key to the life of Christ on earth. You have suggested the thought to us,—you could not, consistently with your scheme, bring it forward, but it was latent in your argument,—that what He was on earth must be the explanation of what He is. Never can I thank you enough for these hints, for the help they have been to me in apprehending the sense and connection of those words which you cast aside. If the idea of subordination in the Son to the Father, which you so strongly urge, is once lost sight of, or considered an idle and unimportant school tenet, the morality of the Gospel and its divinity disappear together. You have helped to keep alive in our minds the distinction of the Persons, and that, I believe, is absolutely necessary that we may confess the unity of Substance.

But, moreover, you have borne a very strong and earnest protest against Idolatry. You have said that the Christian Church is just as liable to idolatry as the Heathen world was, and that its idolatry may be, probably will be, of the same kind, one adopted from ​the other. Truths most needful to be uttered, which Christian men refuse to heed at their peril! We Protestants require them as much as Roman Catholics; we Englishmen, as much as Spaniards or Italians. May I venture to add, You need them also? In so far as you feel,—and I am sure many of you do feel,—a sincere, fervent admiration and love for the character of Jesus Christ, in so far as you believe Him to be the wisest, holiest, most benignant Teacher the world ever had, are you not in danger of setting a man above God! For I think the dim and distant vision of a Being nowise related to you, as far as your theory is concerned,—though, by a happy and noble inconsistency, you delight to call Him Father,—cannot, by any possibility, be so satisfactory as the thought of one who has actually done good and wrestled with evil, and, in some sense, for you. When you can fairly say, we are contemplating either, that is the fairer object, is it not?—the one upon which you would rather dwell, even if it must be so, to the exclusion of the other? Well! but surely here is the commencement and germ of all idolatry. For you do not mean by idolatry, plain and practical people as you are, the mere outward service of the temple, the bowing the knee to a certain name; you mean the deliberate preference of the judgment and the affections. And that, it seems to me, you will and must bestow upon Christ rather than upon God, if you do not accept the doctrine that He is God of God, Light of Light.

And do not think that it is possible for you, or for any man, to stop short at this point of idolatry. I think I could show from the history of the Christian no less than of the ancient world, that where a Son of ​Man, simply in that character, has attracted to himself the reverence, affection, gratitude, homage, which are not paid to God, those sons of men and daughters of men, who are felt to be less removed from the sins and impurities of ordinary creatures than He is, practically overshadow him. I entreat you, as resolute asserters of the worship due to the One God, seriously to consider this evidence, as history presents it to us, and then seriously to compare it with the evidence which your own hearts present to you. By utter coldness, by becoming merely men of the world, by forgetting Christ habitually, and using the name of God merely as the symbol of a formal worship, you or we may contrive to escape any fervent idolatry either of natural or human objects, because the sleepy, habitual, unconscious, all-pervading idolatry of Mammon in his grossest form takes its place. But let any earnest sympathy or affection be awakened in us, and does not the clear, definite creature supplant the dim vision of the Creator, unless, in some way or other, it suggests Him? If it suggests Him, how and why? What link is there between the human love and the divine? What and where is the Daysman? Who can it be—must there not be some one?—in whom the human love entirely represents and images the divine.

I do not wish to press this argument further, lest it should become too satisfactory to your reason, before it has satisfied your conscience. There is an ascent by another and more rugged road, which is, I believe, generally safer. In the sad hours of your life, the recollection of that Man you read of in your childhood, the Man of Sorrows, the great sympathiser with human woes and sufferings, rises up before you, I know; it ​has a reality for you, then; you feel it to be not only beautiful, but true. In such moments does it seem to you as if Christ were merely a person who, eighteen hundred years ago, made certain journeyings between Judea and Galilee? Can such a recollection fill up the blank which some present grief, the loss of some actual friend, has made in your hearts? hearts? It does not, it never did this for you, or for any one! Yet I do not doubt for a single instant, that a comfort has come to you from that contemplation. So far from denying your right to it, I would wish you and all earnestly to believe how strong and assured our right to it is. In Him, and for Him, we were created; this is our doctrine, or rather the doctrine of St. Paul; for we have said little enough about it. If so, is it wonderful that He should speak to you, and tell you of Himself? And oh! if that voice says, "You may trust me, you may lean upon me, for I know all things in heaven. and earth-I and my Father are one;" is the whisper too good to be true, too much in accordance with the timid anticipations and longings of our spirits not to be rejected?

In some of the younger Unitarians, I hope, these words (or if not these, yet the thoughts which they try to express, in some other words or without any), may find a response. I do not mean in those who have learnt to talk of the great defenders of humanity and human rights, the Moseses, the Zoroasters, the Jesus Christs, the Mahomets, the Robespierres. Men who put forth language of this kind to grieve their mothers and sisters, and insult those whom they pretend to call their brethren, are not in earnest. They use words to which they attach no meaning. They may be Unitarians or Emersonians to-day. ​After a little time they may become stiff Anglicans. Then they may take a turn with Cardinal Wiseman. One can only hope for them that in their final transmigration, after they have had a glimpse into the bottomless pit of Atheism, they may become little children again, eager to learn something, if it be but their alphabet. I do not speak of these. But there are many who are confounded with them,—who, in a kind of recklessness, adopt phrases nearly akin to theirs, or who take that course from disgust with our hard speeches and narrowness of heart, between whom and the vain coxcombs with whom they are associated there is the breadth of a whole heaven. What I fear for them is a great and vehement reaction against the opinions which they have learnt, not in orthodox, but in liberal and Unitarian nurseries. Instead of recognising an impassable chasm between the human and the divine, these become in their minds. utterly confounded. The distinction between them they describe as impalpable, impossible to discover; the plague of orthodox divinity they say is, that it has made the attempt, that it has used hard and stiff words to define the boundary. "Of course, Christ is divine? Why should he not be? How can so beautiful a conception as that which his character exhibits, be otherwise than divine?" But the vehement struggle against their earlier faith which this mode of speaking indicates, shows also how strong the impression of that early faith has been. They are working up from the earthly ground; they can recognise no basis except that; they conceive Divinity only as an apotheosis of humanity.

Now here is and must be the beginning of a very extensive and very frightful idolatry. The Straussians ​are perfectly right. There always have been sons of God; there always must be. We cannot contemplate the world without them. They always must stand in the most close relation to us; they must leave their footprints on every different soil. Buddhists, old Greeks, modern Romanists, we of this utilitarian time and country, have all traced them and confessed them. The temptation of one and all has been, by measuring and comparing these footprints, to form an abstraction which is called a God, and which may be anything, everything, nothing. The witness in all these hearts has been—It cannot be so that we arrive at Divinity. These must be the sons of a God. An abstraction, a generalisation, cannot be their Father.

"The witness of all these hearts! Why that is your old orthodox dogma, against which we have been all our lives protesting!" I cannot help that. You can help embracing that dogma. You can continue your protest. But will you not think a little of the other alternative? Will you not ask yourselves seriously if you can escape the worship of ten thousand imaginary Buddhas and demigods? Have you courage to go with me into the yet further question, whether you can avoid the acknowledgment of fleshly beings made into gods, with all their infirmities and crimes, if you are not prepared to confess that there is an only-begotten Son of God, who has been made flesh?