Theological Essays/VII

It will be evident, I hope, by this time, on what grounds I object to the so-called Theology of Consciousness. Not, surely, because I am not anxious to observe all the experiences and consciousnesses which the history of the world bears witness of. Not because I do not desire that all these should be understood, as they can only be understood, through the conscience of each man. Not that I do not ask of theology that it should explain these consciousnesses, and clear and satisfy that individual conscience.

But I find that a theology which is based upon consciousness, which is derived out of it, never can fulfil these conditions. In former Essays I have tried to indicate the feelings and demands of a man who has been awakened to know sin in himself. He asks for deliverance from a plague, which seems part of his own existence. He asks that some power, which is crushing him and vanquishing him, and making free thought and action impossible, may be put down. He is in despair, because he is sure that he is at war, not merely with a Sovereign Will, but with a perfectly ​good will. He is convinced that, in some way or other, he has a righteous cause, though he is so deeply and inwardly evil. He thinks a righteous Being must be on his side, though he has grieved Him and been unrighteous. He thinks he has an Advocate, and that the mind of this Advocate cannot be opposed to the mind of the Lord of all, the Creator of the universe, but must be the counterpart of it. He thinks that the true Son of God must be his Redeemer. He thinks he must stand at some day on the earth, to assert His Father’s righteous dominion over it, and to redeem it from its enemies.

Here are strange, conflicting “consciousnesses,” all of which are actually found in human beings, all of which must be heeded, which will make themselves manifest in strange ways if they are not. The consciousness of sin will lead to a consciousness of con- sequences flowing from sin, stretching into the farthest future. And when this consciousness tries to construct a theology for itself, those consequences, apprehensible, tangible, material, will determine the character of the theology. How can I escape from these? will be the question. Who shall sever the consequences from the cause? The consciousness that the Creator has linked the one to the other suggests the thought that pain, suffering, misery, are especially His work, the signs which denote His feelings towards His creatures. The consciousness of a tyrant and oppressor leads to the supposition that He is that tyrant and oppressor. The consciousness of an Advocate leads to the supposition that He may be the instrument of delivering us out of the hand of the Creator, of saving us from the punishment which the Creator has appointed for transgression, The consciousness that we ​share our sin with our fellow-creatures, and that we are obnoxious to a punishment which belongs equally to them, leads to the reflection, "How can we put ourselves into a different position from theirs? how can we escape from the calamities with which God has threatened them?"

What I wish the reader to observe is, that in each of these cases a notion or maxim respecting theology is likely to be generalised from the consciousness, which will oppose and outrage the conscience. Building on his own ground, assuming all his own vague and contradictory impressions as data, the man of necessity works out a system, on which he afterwards gazes with horror, from which he longs to break loose, which he charges priests and doctors with having created. No doubt they have contributed their wicked aid to the fabric; their guilt is heavier than that of the poor bewildered creatures who have consulted them. But their guilt has consisted in the willingness which they have shown to create a religion out of consciousnesses; to endorse all the conceptions and conclusions about God which the diseased heart fashions for itself, while they have a witness within them of truths which contradict these conceptions and conclusions; to supply intellectual links which may fasten together what would be loose, incoherent, fragmentary fancies; to devise rules and ethical practices which may meet the morbid and selfish cravings of the heart, and be justified by the theory the understanding has moulded from them; finally, to stamp with the name, dignity, and sacredness of faith, that which is grounded, in great part, upon fear and distrust.

I believe that priests, in all lands, have been ​chargeable with this great crime of accommodating themselves to the carnal notions and tendencies of those whom they might have raised and educated. For I believe they have had an intuition of a higher truth, which it was their calling to proclaim, and which alone gave substance to the opinions with which they and their disciples disfigured it. I dare not deny that this crime has been the greatest in the priests in Christendom, precisely because I hold that they have a theology revealed from Heaven, which perfectly satisfies the demands of the human heart; which explains to men the contradictions in their own impressions and experiences; which presents such a God as the conscience witnesses there must be and is, not such a one as the understanding tries to shape out from its own reflections on the testimony of the conscience; which shows what the relation between Him and men is, what the cause of the separation between Him and men is, what he has done to establish the relation, to destroy the separation.

I have now reached the subject which is the test of all that I have been saying hitherto. Those who cry for a theology based upon consciousness, which shall supersede the theology of Christendom, say that the doctrines respecting sacrifice and atonement which prevail in Christendom, among Protestants as well as Romanists, prove more clearly than anything else what need there is of the reform which they seek. "These doctrines," they say, "darken the sense of right and wrong in the minds of Christians; bewilder their understandings; sanction the most false conceptions concerning sin, the most cruel conceptions concerning God. The conscience of human beings is in revolt against them. Civil authority owns that it can defend ​them no longer. Ecclesiastical authority tries to defend them. They have a certain public opinion on their side—that which has resisted in every age every great moral improvement, that which has sustained every false religion. They derive a support from those who half believe them, who dare not say how much of them they do not believe. But they are doomed. Texts of Scripture will not preserve from burial that which is already dead. No appeal to the verdict of centuries will galvanise doctrines which do not represent our convictions, We must have a theology which embodies them, or none.

On this point I join issue with them. I say that they are right in imputing to Romanists and Protestants a set of notions—some of them common to both, some peculiar to each—which deserve the epithets they bestow on it; which outrage the conscience, which misrepresent the character of God, which generate a fearful amount of insincere belief, of positive infidelity—also, I think, of immorality. I see, with them, that these notions are becoming more and more intolerable to thoughtful and earnest men; that those who are neither, often maintain them merely because they do not care to look at them, or to question themselves about them. I cannot conceal from myself that our want of courage in saying whether we regard these as parts of our creed or not, is leading thousands to identify them with it, and to reject it as well as them. But I maintain that these notions are not parts of God’s Revelation, or of the old Creeds, but belong to that Theology of Consciousness which modern enlightenment would substitute for the Theology of the Bible and of the Church; that their rise can be distinctly and historically traced to this source; that the protest ​on the part of the conscience against them in other days has been a confession of its own inability to con- struct a Theodicea, a claim that God should remove its confusions by revealing Himself; that the protest of the conscience against them in our day is of the same kind, and must have the same issue, if it is not unnaturally silenced; that Christian theology, as ex- pressed in the language of the Bible and of the Creeds, construed most simply, is a deliverance from these oppressive notions, and is the only one which has yet been or ever will be found.

1. The account which I have given of the way in which different consciousnesses, beginning with the consciousness of sin, have worked themselves out into a scheme, is precisely that which has been given over and over again by liberal historians, who have wished to describe the growth of the Romish system. "Men," they have said, "who were stung with the recollection of evil acts, thought they might do something to win the favour or avert the wrath of the Divine Being. They must make sacrifices, the greatest they could think of, or which any could suggest to them, that their sins might be forgiven. What sacrifices these should be they could very imperfectly guess; they must ask wiser people to tell them. They found an organised hierarchy established for the very purpose of explaining the relations between the visible and the invisible world, and of maintaining the intercourse between them. Those who composed it ought to know what they should do, And these devised indulgences to soothe the pains of the diseased patients, penances that irritated them. At first the suggestion might be merely benevolent, even suitable to the case, grounded on a knowledge of the symptoms. Then ​came in the love of power, with the discovery how much of that (which presented itself to the vulgar priest in the form of material riches) might be obtained by catering to the cravings of a morbid appetite. If the regular practitioner did not meet them, popular confessors, appearing in new orders, supplied the defects of the original system. But neither one nor the other was sufficient. The poor offender felt, all confused as he was, that his sacrifices could never of themselves move the mind of God. He must ask the aid of those who had prevailed in the fight, in which he seemed likely to be worsted. Saints must be invoked, who would themselves invoke the Highest of all to be merciful. A number of accidents of time, place, occupation, education, would dictate which should be besought by any particular person. The Virgin Mother would be a more general pleader, especially for the female suppliants. Those who habitually sought her intercession with the Divine Son might hope that His infinite sacrifice would remove the sins which they had contracted, after the great original sin had been purged away in baptism."

Something like this is the natural history of Romanism, past and present, which we find in books not pretending to be specially theological, but trying to look at the subject fairly, from an ordinary human point of view. To make the statement quite fair, I suppose most persons would admit,—I, at least, as a very vehement Protestant, should—that there is an immense amount of moral and spiritual influences acting upon those who are tied and bound in this system, which does not proceed from it, and is not expressed by it. Romanists will be found, in no ambiguous phrases, acknowledging the love of God and ​His free grace as the only source of good human acts, submission to His will as the only acceptable sacrifice. They will make these confessions, not as if they were conceding something to us, but as the proper expression of their own faith, as implied in the very nature of a Catholic church; they will prove the sincerity of them by their lives. All such facts are to be admitted, not reluctantly, not as if it was a shock to our belief that we were obliged to make them, but with the most unspeakable delight; as well for the sake of those to whom they apply, as because they prove how utterly the notions which oppose these confessions are at war with the deepest and truest convictions of men, how unnatural it is to associate them with any faith. Multiply proofs of this kind a thousandfold, you increase the evidence that it is a duty to labour continually that a cancer may be extirpated which is eating out the heart of Christendom, the poisonous quality and deadly effects of which our most vehement Protestant declaimers do not exaggerate, but underrate.

2. Nor can I discover that those declaimers are the least mistaken in the explanation which they commonly give of the means whereby this mischief was detected, and by which some were enabled to escape it. They say that when Luther found out that he was a sinner, when he knew that fact in the length and breadth of it,—not by the hearing of the ear, but by his own tremendous experience,—he could no longer be content with any of the priestly inventions for putting away sin; that he then knew that he could only be delivered from it if God delivered him; that he demanded to know whether He had proclaimed forgiveness of sin; whether there was any sacrifice which He had appointed and accepted? They say ​that Luther found the answers to these questions in the Bible; that he was content when he was told, on its authority, that the Son of God had taken away sin; that this might be received and preached to all men as His Gospel. The person who differs most with Luther must accept this as a statement of notorious facts; it is as much acknowledged by Michelet as by Marheineke, or Merle d’Aubigné. I accept it also as being entirely in accordance with internal evidence,—with the law which I am endeavouring to establish. Luther’s conscience did not make a system. It protested against one which had been made in compliance with apparent necessities of the conscience. It said that the real necessity of the conscience was, that God should speak to it, declare Himself to it,—should proclaim Himself as its reconciler, should show how and in whom He had accomplished that work on its behalf.

3. But I admitted that there were grave and earnest protests against much of what is called our doctrine of the Atonement. "You hold," it is said, “that God had condemned all His creatures to perish, because they had broken His law; that His justice could not be satisfied without an infinite punishment; that that infinite punishment would have visited all men, if Christ in His mercy to men had not interposed and offered Himself as the substitute for them; that by enduring an inconceivable amount of anguish, He reconciled the Father, and made it possible for Him to forgive those who would believe. This whole statement," the objector continues, "is based on a certain notion of justice. It professes to explain, on certain principles of justice, what God ought to have done, and what He actually has done. And this notion of justice outrages the conscience to which you seem to offer your ​explanation. You often feel that it does. You admit that it is not the kind of justice which would be expected of men. And then you turn round and ask us what we can know of God’s justice; how we can tell that it is of the same kind with ours? After arguing with us, to show the necessity of a certain course, you say that the argument is good for nothing; we are not capable of taking it in! Or else you say that the carnal mind cannot understand spiritual ideas. We can only answer, We prefer our carnal notion of justice to your spiritual one. We can forgive a fellow-creature a wrong done to us, without exacting an equivalent for it; we blame ourselves if we do not; we think we are offending against Christ’s command, who said, 'Be ye merciful as your Father in heaven is merciful,' if we do not. We do not feel that punishment is a satisfaction to our minds; we are ashamed of ourselves when we consider it is. We may suffer a criminal to be punished, but it is that we may do him good, or assert a principle. And if that is our object, we do not suffer an innocent person to prevent the guilty from enduring the consequences of his guilt, by taking them upon himself. Are these maxims moral, or are the opposing maxims moral? If they are moral, should we, because God is much more righteous than we can imagine or understand, suppose that His acts are at variance with them? Should we attribute to Him what would be unrighteousness in us?”

These questions are asked on all sides of us, Clergymen are exceedingly anxious to stifle them. "We know," they say, "by experience whither such doubts are leading. ‘The objector begins with disputing some views of the atonement, which may perhaps be extreme. He goes on to deny the doctrine itself; ​to say that it has no place in the scheme of Christianity. He knows, however, that his fathers held it to be a vital doctrine. He suspects that it is in the Bible. The end is, that he denies the Bible itself." Such a conclusion may well startle a good man. He feels that principles which his experience has proved to be infinitely precious are in hazard. He has never visited the dying bed of a humble penitent who did not cling to the cross of Christ as her dearest hope, who did not feel that without His sacrifice and death she could have no peace. He asks whether he is to rob the poor and meek of these jewels because certain proud men do not like the casket which contains them, because they cannot bring the teachings of the Bible to the level of their understandings?

Debates are going on in every corner of our land suggested by these difficulties. What misery, what alienation of heart, arises from them no one can tell. On the one side, the consequence of the strife is an ever-increasing hardness and dogmatism blighting all the fruits of the Spirit; on the other, a barren, hopeless infidelity. It must, then, be the most serious of all duties to labour, so far as in us lies, that the sound and deep convictions which evidently are in the heart of the divine and the moralist may not become utterly destroyed through their separation, that each should confess the error which was mingled with that truth in his mind, and is threatening to make it inoperative.

The statement of the clergyman is certainly not exaggerated, that the best, the humblest, truest hearts are those which rest with most childlike faith upon the belief that "God has reconciled the world unto Himself, not imputing their trespasses unto them;" that the death of Christ is the death of that "Lamb of God ​who taketh away the sins of the world." To tell such persons that no atonement has been made between man and God, would be to tell them that the future is only a perpetual lengthening out of the anguish of conscience, which is and must be bitterer to them than all other anguish; that there is an impassable gulf between them and all truth and righteousness. What is it to assure them that transgressions are forgiven by a bare act of amnesty, unless the sin of the heart and will, the separation from God which is the root of these transgressions, is at an end? How can you ever persuade them that it is at an end unless God Himself has removed it? How can God have removed a separation unless there is some One in whom we are bound more closely to Him than our evils have put us asunder?

The broad, simple Gospel, that God has set forth His Son as the propitiation for sin, that He has offered Himself for the sins of the world, meets all the desires of these heart-stricken sinners. It declares to them the fulness of God’s love, sets forth the Mediator in whom they are at one with the Father. It brings divine Love and human suffering into direct and actual union. It shows Him who is one with God and one with man, perfectly giving up that self-will which had been the cause of all men’s crimes and all their misery. Here is indeed a brazen serpent to which one dying from the bite of the old serpent can look and be healed. The more that brazen serpent is lifted up, the more may we look for health and renovation to the whole of humanity, and to every one of its palsied and withered limbs.

I do not deny that besides these leading convictions which take possession of the heart as it contemplates ​the Cross of Christ, there are others apparently of a different kind. Since nowhere is the contrast between infinite Love and infinite Evil brought before us as it is there, we have the fullest right to affirm that the Cross exhibits the wrath of God against sin, and the endurance of that wrath by the well-beloved Son. For wrath against that which is unlovely is not the counteracting force to love, but the attribute of it. Without it love would be a name, and not a reality. And the endurance of that wrath or punishment by Christ came from His acknowledging that it proceeded from love, and His willingness that it should not be quenched till it had effected its full loving purpose. The endurance of that wrath was the proof that He bore in the truest and strictest sense the sins of the world, feeling them with that anguish with which only a perfectly pure and holy Being, who is also a perfectly sympathising and gracious Being, can feel the sins of others. Whatever diminished his purity must have diminished his sympathy. Complete suffering with sin and for sin is only possible in one who is completely free from it.

But is the clergyman who preaches this gospel, and sees the effect of it upon some of his flock, therefore bound to adopt those conclusions respecting the reasons of Christ’s death which have so shocked the conscience of the sceptic whom he is condemning? Properly speaking, his business is simply to proclaim the good news of reconciliation. Reasons may occur to him besides those which the Bible gives us. Some may be plausible, some may be tolerable. But they do not belong to the essence of his commission. Woe be to him if he mistakes the best of them for that which it tries to account for. Since, however, it is inevitable ​that his understanding and imagination will be busy with this and every other subject, divine or human, that he handles, it is very necessary that he should perceive what conclusions of theirs may contradict the truth which God has committed to him. For this purpose I would beseech him to observe carefully which portions of his statement come home to the hearts of the really humble and contrite—which afford delight and satisfaction to the conceited, self-righteous, self-exalting men and women of his flock, who in ease and health think that they are safe, because they are condemning others, who in sickness and on a death- bed discover that in seeming to believe everything they have actually believed nothing. This comparison, if it is faithfully pursued, and never separated from self-examination, will lead him, I believe, to precisely the same result at which he would arrive by the other method of considering what is demanded by the principles which Protestants and Romanists recognise in common. On this last subject I wish to speak a little more at large. I wish to show that the orthodox faith, as it is expressed in the Bible and the Creeds, absolutely prevents us from acquiescing in some of those explanations of the Atonement, which both in popular and scholastic teachings have been identified with it.

1. It is involved in the very method of theology, as the Bible and the Creeds set it forth to us, that the Will of God should be asserted as the ground of all that is right, true, just, gracious. There is no acknow- ledged difference of opinion on this point. It would be accounted heresy in all orthodox schools to deny that the Father sent the Son to be the Saviour of men; that the Father set forth the Son to be the propitiation for our sins; that Christ, by His life, proved that God ​is light, and that in Him is no darkness at all. These declarations of St. John are admitted as fundamental truths, to which all others must do homage, which no other passages can contradict. All I ask is, that we may hold fast this profession without wavering; that no feeble compromiser may be suffered to come in and say, "All this is true in a sense," without telling us in what sense; and if it is such a sense as clearly is not meant to govern all our thoughts, determinations, conclusions, he may be dismissed as one who has no business to call himself an orthodox man.

2. It is admitted in all schools, Romanist and Protestant, which do not dissent from the Creed, that Christ the Son of God was in heaven and earth, one with the Father,—one in will, purpose, substance; and that on earth His whole life was nothing else than an exhibition of this Will, an entire submission to it. There is no dispute among orthodox people about this point, more than about the other. And there is no dispute as to the principle being a fundamental one—that on which the very nature of Christ’s sacrifice must depend, as the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews declares that it does. What we have a right to insist on is, that no notion or theory shall be allowed to interfere with this fundamental maxim. If we would adhere to the faith once delivered to the saints, we must not dare to speak of Christ as changing that Will which He took flesh and died to fulfil.

3. It is confessed by all orthodox schools that Christ was actually the Lord of men, the King of their spirits, the Source of all the light which ever visited them, the Person for whom all nations longed as their Head and Deliverer, the root of righteousness in each man. The Bible speaks of His being revealed in this character; ​of the mystery which had been hid from ages and generations being made known by His Incarnation. If we speak of Christ as taking upon Himself the sins of men by some artificial substitution, we deny that He is their actual Representative.

4. The Scripture says, Because the children were "partakers of flesh and blood He also Himself took part of the same." He became subject to death, "that He might destroy him who had the power of death, that is the Devil." Here are reasons assigned for the Incarnation and the death of Christ. He shared the sufferings of those whose head He is. He overcame death, their common enemy, by submitting to it. He delivered them from the power of the Devil. All orthodox schools, in formal language,—tens of thousands of suffering people, in ordinary human language,—have confessed the force of the words. Instead of seeking to put Christ at a distance from themselves, by tasking their fancy to conceive of sufferings which at the same moment are pronounced inconceivable, they have claimed Him as entering into their actual miseries, as bearing their griefs. They have believed that He endured death, because it was theirs, and rose to set them free from it, because it was an evil accident of their condition, an effect of disorder, not of God’s original order. They have believed that He rescued them out of the power of an enemy by yielding to his power, not that He rescued them out of the hand of God by paying a penalty to Him. Any notion whatever which interferes with this faith; any explanation of Christ’s sufferings which is put in the place of the Apostle’s explanation, or does not strictly harmonise with it; far more any that contradicts it, and leaves us open to the awful danger of confounding the Evil Spirit with God,—we ​have a right to repudiate as unorthodox, unscriptural, and audacious.

5. The Scripture says, "The Lamb of God taketh away the sin of the world." All orthodox teachers repeat the lesson. They say Christ came to deliver sinners from sin. This is what the sinner asks for. Have we a right to call ourselves scriptural or orthodox, if we change the words, and put "penalty of sin" for "sin"; if we suppose that Christ destroyed the connection between sin and death,—the one being the necessary wages of the other,—for the sake of benefiting any individual man whatever? If He had, would He have magnified the Law and made it honourable? Would He not have destroyed that which He came to fulfil? Those who say the law must execute itself, must have its penalty, should remember their own words. How does it execute itself if a person against whom it is not directed interposes to bear its punishment?

6. The voice at Christ’s baptism said, "This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased." Christ said, "Therefore doth my Father love me, because I lay down my life for the sheep." All orthodox schools have said, that a perfectly holy and loving Being can be satisfied only with a holiness and love corresponding to His own; that Christ satisfied the Father by presenting the image of His own holiness and love, that in His sacrifice and death all that holiness and love came forth completely. There is no dissent upon this point among those who adhere to the Creed. But it cannot be an accidental point; it must belong to the root and essence of divinity. How, then, can we tolerate for an instant that notion of God which would represent Him as satisfied by the punishment of sin, not by the purity and graciousness of the Son?

​7. Supposing all these principles gathered together; supposing the Father’s will to be a will to all good;—supposing the Son of God, being one with Him, and Lord of man, to obey and fulfil in our flesh that will by entering into the lowest condition into which men had fallen through their sin;—supposing this Man to be, for this reason, an object of continual complacency to His Father, and that complacency to be fully drawn out by the Death of the Cross;—supposing His death to be a sacrifice, the only complete sacrifice ever offered, the entire surrender of the whole spirit and body to God; is not this, in the highest sense, Atonement? Is not the true, sinless root of Humanity revealed; is not God in Him reconciled to man? Is not the Cross the meeting-point between man and man, between man and God? Is not this meeting-point what men, in all times and places, have been seeking for? Did any find it till God declared it? And are not we bringing our understandings to the foot of this Cross, when we solemnly abjure all schemes and statements, however sanctioned by the arguments of divines, however plausible as implements of declamation, which prevent us from believing and proclaiming that in it all the wisdom and truth and glory of God were manifested to the creature; that in it man is presented as a holy and acceptable sacrifice to the Creator?

"I am not nearer, then, to Unitarians, because I have joined them in repudiating certain opinions which they and many of us have supposed inseparable from the doctrine of the Atonement?" Not nearer to them, certainly, in any one of their negative conclusions. On the contrary, I have used the articles in the Creed which they most dissent from as my weapons against ​the representations of God which we agree in thinking horrible. I have appealed to the Creed as my protection from dogmas which I have attributed to the active workings of the consciousness and the intellect; one or other of which they are generally inclined to deify. Nor can I help further offending them by saying that the tenacity with which my orthodox brethren have maintained notions, at variance, as I think, with their inmost faith, has been owing in great measure to their Unitarian opponents. They have heard the faith and the opinions assailed together; they have supposed that there must be an intimate connection between them; they have feared to ask whether there is or not. Men of the Evangelical school, who did not like Archbishop Magee’s book because they found nothing in it which responded to the witness of their hearts, yet accepted it on the poor calculation that it was a learned book, and might defend what they were pleased to call the outworks of the faith. Men of the Patristic school, who knew how little it accorded with the divinity they most admired, yet argued, œconomically, that it might serve the purposes of such an age as ours is, and might confute objectors who did not deserve to be acquainted with any higher truth. I acknowledge the dishonesty and faithlessness of both decisions; I feel most deeply the mischiefs which have followed from both; but I see how much there was to make them plausible. I believe it is only a peculiar discipline, and some very painful experience, which has led me to abandon them, and to say boldly, "I must give up Archbishop Magee, for I am determined to keep that which makes the Atonement precious to my heart and conscience; to keep the theology of the Creeds and of the Bible."

But though I should be dishonest if I pretended that ​I was approximating a step nearer to Unitarianism, because these seemingly impassable barriers are removed, I do think that they have separated us from the hearts and reasons of Unitarians most unnecessarily and mischievously. When the Atonement is defended as an opinion of ours which they are setting at nought,—as a conception respecting the method of God’s government, and the reasons of His conduct, which they are disputing,—the indignation against them becomes greater, because the question at issue becomes more involved with our personal credit, ingenuity, security. We are on one side, they are on the other; the assurance that the divine Atonement is infinitely wonderful mixes with a consciousness that we are making it petty by our mode of fighting for it We revenge ourselves for the painful contradiction by increased violence, hoping so to convince ourselves that we are in earnest. When the Atonement is contemplated as the ground of a Gospel to men,—when I dare to say, God so loved the world as to give His only-begotten Son for it,—how closely does that belief bind me to Unitarians of every class and hue! They may build their theology upon certain deductions of the intellect, or upon certain individual consciousnesses ; mine rests on the Eternal Love which overlooks all distinctions, which embraces the universe. They may glorify this or that material—this or that spiritual—notion and conception. I am bound to acknowledge a Son of God, who is the Lord of their spirits and souls and bodies as He is of mine, who took their nature as He did mine, who died upon the cross for them as He did for me. They may argue about the degree of sin in one or another of us; I am bound to think that I am as much a sinner as any of them can be, and that Christ is the Lamb of God who took away ​the sin of the world. They may think there is some other way to the Father than through the cross of the Son; I must confess that there He is as willing to meet and bless every one of them, as He can be to meet and bless me. I can only hope to know Him while I seek Him in One who perfectly humbled Himself; what a lie and a blasphemy to exalt myself on the plea of possessing that knowledge!