Theological Essays/XVI

My first Essay was on Charity; this will also be on Charity. I could not find that a charity which believed all things, hoped all things, endured all things, had its root on this earth, or in the heart of any man who dwells on this earth. Yet it seemed to me that such a Charity was needed to make this earth what it ought to be, and that human hearts have a profound sense of its necessity for them, an infinite craving to possess it, and be filled with it. Something stood in the way of the good which the earth sighs for, and which man sighs for. A vision of Sin rose up before us, confronting the vision of Charity. It was portentous, for it seemed part of the very creature who had the dream of a perfect good. But he disclaimed it; he tried to account for it by some accidents of his position, or by some essential error in his constitution; at last he said, I have yielded to an oppressor; an Evil Spirit has withdrawn me from my true Lord. Then arose the question, Who is this true Lord? where is He to be found? Righteousness was felt to be even more closely interwined with the being of the man ​than Evil; for awhile he was disposed to claim it as his own; suffering, and the sense of an infinite contradiction, did not deliver him from that belief. But some one there was who led him to cry for a Redeemer, to be sure that He lived, to be sure that Righteousness was in Him, and therefore was Man's.

Was this Redeemer, so near to man, so inseparable from man, of earthly race? The vision of a Son of God rose upon us; a thousand different traditions pointed to it; it took the most various forms; but the heart of man said, "There must be One in whom all these meet; there must be One who did not rise from manhood into Godhead, but who can exhibit the perfection of manhood, because He has the perfection of Godhead." Is the perfection of manhood then compatible with the infirmities and corruptions of which men have become heirs? The mythologies of the world said, "It must be so, we need Incarnations; our deliverers must share our flesh, our sorrows; yes! they could not stop there—our sins." The philosophers said, "It cannot be so; the Divine Nature must be free from the contact of that which debases us, of that from which we ourselves need emancipation." They could show how men, forming the Gods after their own images, had glorified and deified what was most immoral and base. The Scripture spoke to us of the Son of God taking the flesh of man, entering into all the infirmities of man, bearing the sins of man, so showing forth the purity, compassion, love, of His Father.

But the sense in men of a separation from the God to whom they were meant to be united, had, we found, produced innumerable schemes for bringing about a reconciliation. The Scriptures told us of an Atone​ment, originating with God; made with men in His Son, who entirely trusted and entirely obeyed His Father; who willingly entered into the death of man; who made the perfect Sacrifice which took away Sin; whose death was the satisfaction to the Divine Love of the Father; the expression of that wrath against Evil which is a part of Love; the satisfaction of man's yearnings for reconciliation with God. Yet Death, the Grave, the Abyss beyond, are the dark contradictions for human beings; He could not be a perfect deliverer who had not entered into them, or who remained under their power. The idea of a bodily Resurrection, we found, had been accepted by men, not as a fact to be attested by a great amount of evidence, but as the inevitable issue of the previous revelation. If there is a Son of God, a Lord of man, He must rise. What did such a Resurrection imply? The Scripture speaks of it as implying a Justification of Gentile as well as of Jew; that is, of every man who might therefore believe in Christ and acquire His Righteousness. We saw how Christians had evaded this declaration, and the evidence of it which their baptism offered, limiting the blessing by certain rules and measures of theirs, even using the witness of it as an excuse for doubt, and for new efforts of their own to make themselves righteous; then, at last, discovering that faith in God's Justification is the only condition of doing any good acts. But this faith of each individual man, that God had justified him by the Resurrection of Christ, and was inviting him to habitual trust, implied something more. We discovered in the belief of Christians the acknowledgment of a Regeneration, effected not for individual men merely, but for human society in the true Lord and Head of it.

​This belief, however feebly and imperfectly held by the Church, had nevertheless vindicated itself by the experience of history, and enabled us to reconcile the doctrines of eminent moralists respecting the constitution of man with the fullest admission of actual departures from it. For, if the Resurrection of Christ declared that men, in spite of all that seemed to put them at a distance from God, were recognised by Him as His children on earth, the Ascension of Christ in their nature proclaimed that they did not belong to earth; that they were spiritual beings, capable of holding converse with Him who is a Spirit; able to do so, because that Son who had taken their flesh, and had offered it up to God, and had glorified it, had said that His body and blood should be their food and nourishment. This belief of the Ascension as the great. triumph for man, was greatly shaken by a prevalent notion that Christ, being absent now, and not exercising the functions of royalty or judgment, will assume them at some distant day, and be subject again to earthly limitations. It was therefore needful to show that the Judgment spoken of in the Bible and the Creed implied the continual presence of Christ, the daily exposure of men and nations to His cognisance and censure, the assurance that He will be manifested, not in some humbler condition, but as He is, to the consciences and eyes of men, for the putting down of all evil, and the establishment of righteousness. But though the minds of men had always felt that they must look upwards to some Ruler above them, they had equally confessed the presence of an Inspirer within them. The Christian revelation, we found, corresponded as much to these anticipations as to any which we had considered before. It explained to us ​whence all Inspirations had proceeded, who was the Author of them, how they are to be received, how they may be abused. The full Revelation, with that which was the preparation for it, had been recorded to us in a book which had been the treasure of the Church, the witness of the emancipation of mankind, the assurance of a Comforter who should come to the ages following Christ's Ascension, in a way He had not come to those which preceded it. I inquired whether events have justified this assurance. I endeavoured to show that there had been such a sense of sin, of righteousness, and of judgment in the later periods of the world's history, as cannot be traced in the earlier, and as could only have proceeded from the teaching of a Person, such as our Lord describes to us. But finally, we were told this Person would not only convince a world, but be the establisher of a One Holy Catholic Church. The difficulty of accepting this statement was very great. A certain body had claimed to be the one Catholic Church, a number of bodies had claimed to be Churches; they had denounced each other; there had been that in all which contradicted the idea the Scripture sets forth of holiness, unity, universality. But this contradiction showed that the Scripture had revealed the true law of human society; for that one body and these different bodies had not become partial, tyrannical, godless, by maintaining too strongly that Earth and Heaven had been reconciled, and that the Spirit had come down from the Father and the Son to establish that reconciliation; but by acting as if Heaven and Earth were still separated, as if we had still to effect for ourselves that which the Scripture declares that God has effected, as if there were no Spirit to unite us with the Father and the ​Son, and with each other. To this cause,—no other was adequate,—we could trace the want of holiness, catholicity, unity in the Church. This unbelief being removed, all that man has dreamed of, all that God has promised, must be accomplished.

I have not, then, to enter upon a new subject in this Essay. I am not speaking for the first time of the Trinity in Unity. I have been speaking of it throughout. Each consciousness that we have discovered in man, each fact of Revelation that has answered to it, has been a step in the discovery and demonstration of this truth. I should be abandoning the method to which I have endeavoured strictly to adhere, if I admitted that now, at last, I have come upon a mere dogma, which had no support but tradition, or inferences from texts of Scripture; or, on the other hand, upon a great philosophical tenet which wise men may deduce from reason or find latent in nature, but with which the poor wayfarer has nothing to do. We may owe much to tradition for giving expression to the faith in a Trinity; texts of Scripture may confirm it; the context of Scripture may bring it out in beautiful harmony with all the divine discoveries to man. Philosophy may have seen indications of a Trinity in the forms and principles of the universe, in the constitution of man himself. But unless we are utterly inconsistent with all that has been said hitherto, these can be but indexes and guides to a Name which is implied in our thoughts, acts, words, in our fellowship with each other; without which we cannot explain the utterances of the poorest peasant, or of the greatest sage; which makes thoughts real, prayers possible; which brings distinctness out of vagueness, unity out of division; which shows us how ​in fact, and not merely in imagination, the charity of God may find its reflex and expression in the charity of man, and the charity of man its substance as well as its fruition in the Charity of God. What I have to do in this Essay, then, is certainly not to bring forward arguments against those who impugn this doctrine, but only to show how each portion of that Name into which we are baptized answers to some apprehension and anticipation of human beings; how the setting up of one part of the Name against another has been the cause of strife, unrighteousness, superstition; why, therefore, the acknowledgment of that Name, in its fulness and Unity, is Eternal Life.

I. It often seems to us a great contradiction in Greek Mythology, that the chief of the Gods should be represented as himself subject to Fate. We do not enough consider what a real and deep comfort the Polytheist found in this thought. A ruler of the Elements might have in himself all the vicissitudes which nature exhibits. If he were like a human sovereign, he might have all the caprices of a human sovereign. This faith in necessity told the Greek that the Universe was not, after all, dependent on those natural vicissitudes or human caprices,—that a law fixed and unchangeable was beneath them all. At times it seemed to him as if Jove, the king of earth, was chaining down all the aspirations of man, was fastening to a rock, and tormenting with a vulture, the champions who sought to do him good, to make him freer and wiser. What a relief to think that Destiny had determined the period of this captivity, and of the tyranny which had imposed it! And yet there were times when the sense of a hard, dry, iron rule,—an irresistible necessity,—became more intoler​able than the government of the most uncertain king; when the heart fled from that as a horrible oppression, to this as human and sympathetic. Especially these words, "Father of Gods and men," touched chords which at once responded to them. There was the hint of something not only more friendly than Fate, but more mighty. The will in man leaps up to acknowledge a Will that is akin to its own, and that may govern it.

Through all the Jewish History, fixed law, grounded on the name of the I AM, had been coming forth in conjunction with a course of discipline which the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob was declared by prophets and holy men to be carrying on for the children of His Covenant. The Law asserted that which was right; nothing could alter it; to violate it was death. The Judge of the whole earth was doing right; His design was to make His people right. Christ on the Mountain announced the Will of which that law was the expression. He said it was the Will of a Father. Here is the root and substance of His revelation. He does not proclaim a Will which dispenses with law or changes it, but that absolutely righteous and true Will of which it affirms the existence, but which it cannot make effectual. And this Will is the Will of the Father. Beneath the name of the God of Abraham, this was concealed. The sound of it was from time to time caught, not only by holy men in their closets, but by the ordinary worshipper. The Greek heard the echo of it from his Thessalian hill. Christ uttered it.

For those who receive His message, the two conceptions which were always fighting with each other, always trying to be one, are actually united. There is the perfect rest which comes from the thought that there can be no caprice in the order of the ​Universe,—that right can never become wrong, or wrong right; there is the comfort that no hard fate controls caprice, that the Divine Will excludes it. The fixed and the absolute, which man craves for as the support of his being, and of all creation, is there. It is bound inseparably with a name which speaks of Relation, which tells him what he was sure must be; that his own Will has an author; that he is not merely a creature of the highest God, but a Child.

All is peace if we accept this as a Revelation,—as a Gospel from God. Reduce it again into the conceptions of your own mind,—make your anticipations not the test, that they must be, but the measure of the Revelation,—and all becomes war again. An iron necessity for the nineteenth century after Christ, as much as for all before it, becomes that to which you refer the world's life and your own. It is your best comfort to do so. And yet it is such miserable comfort that you will be continually seeking a refuge from it. The vision of some present helper, some one to whom you can address cries and litanies,—rises up whether your philosophy has taught you to banish it or not. To such a one you will give the name of Father; it will seem the most natural name; you will feel that you must use it, or that your words die in the utterance. But that name will be associated, as it was among old Polytheists, with thoughts of the clouds and the changes of Nature; if your heart insists upon more human associations, then with the turbulence and irregularity you find in yourself. Deal honestly with your own experiences,—it is all I ask,—and then say whether the old name, the given name, is not that which you need, and which you are trying to spell out. You are sure it is there; it must be very near to you. ​But speculation does not bring it nearer. The child must confess its Father, and confess itself to Him; then it knows whose Will rules it, and with what Will it has been striving.

All our past inquiries into the superstitions of the Christian world have brought us to the same conclusion. From whatever quarter they have proceeded, their tendency has been the same. The notion of a sovereign Necessity has taken the place of a Will of absolute truth and goodness; the notion of a capricious Power to be made placable by some agency of ours has superseded the belief in a Father, whose will Christ came on earth to manifest and to fulfil. Each opinion gives birth to the other as a deliverance from it; one is supposed to be more philosophical, the other more practical, than our Baptismal Faith; that remains as a refuge for those who have found the first utterly offensive to their reason, the second subversive of their morality. The more simply it is proclaimed, the less pains we take to sustain it by our proofs,—the more it will commend itself to the hearts that are needing it. If we substitute for a belief in a Father a belief in a notion of ours about a Father, we shall turn a confession which should be the greatest witness that the Kingdom of Heaven has been opened to all, into a means of excluding our brethren as well as ourselves from it.

II. There can be no Mediator between a man and a mere Fate or Necessity. A multitude of mediators will be conceived between a man and the capricious Power who seems to be dealing with him at his pleasure. These mediators will be all, more or less distinctly, felt to be the helpers of the creatures against their Creator; they may be regarded as having some natural relationship to him, or as having by some ​merit obtained an influence or a right over him; but they will be always the benignant patrons of those whom he is disposed, for some reason, to injure. When the word "Father" has taken any strong hold of a man anywhere, when it has displaced the notion of a mere sovereign, there will be a counteraction to this feeling. Those who plead for man with Him must be felt in some sense to express His mind; they will be acknowledged as His sons. But this counteraction, though great, will be inadequate till we have learnt the lesson of which I was speaking just now,—the lesson that the Will of this Father is as steadfast as any Fate can be; that its steadfastness consists in its righteousness; that there cannot be variableness in it, because it is good, and can only seek to do good. This Will demands that which the Necessity excludes. It must speak, it must utter itself. A Will cannot be without a Word. A Will that is, and lives, must utter itself by a living Word. That is what St. John, in his divine theology, declares to us. But if he speaks in one sentence of a Word, he speaks in the next of a Son. The names are used interchangeably; but we should, I believe, lose more than we know, if either had been used exclusively. Experience has shown that those who determinately prefer the first soon fall into that notion of a mere emanation from some mysterious abyss of Divinity, which haunted the oriental mystics and the early heretics, or else into the notion of a mere principle indwelling in man. The Word becomes impersonal: the Will becomes impersonal: very soon the man forgets that he is a person himself, and becomes a mere dreamer or speculator. The blessed name of Son, which connects itself with all human sympathies and relationships, is the deliverance from this phantom ​region. While we cleave to it, we can never forget that only a Person can express the Will of the Absolute Being; that only in a Person He can see His own image. But the Son of God will soon be merged for us in the Son of man,—we shall refer His relationship to ours, not ours to His,—if we do not recur to that other name, if we do not, by meditating upon it, save ourselves from the unspeakable dangers into which those fall who think of the Son only as their Saviour, and not as the brightness of His Father's glory. Both these perils are besetting us now as much as they beset any former age. I think they are besetting us more; often when we are not conscious of either as a theological tendency, it is affecting our moral and social feelings, and our ordinary acts, in innumerable ways.

There is an abstract way of thinking about the Son of God which is hurrying some of us into Pantheism, and multitudes partake of the effect who are not in the least alive to the cause. There is a popular way of thinking about the Son of God, which is hurrying us into idolatry; and parents are startled at seeing their children fall over a precipice, to the edge of which they have walked under their guidance. Nor do I see how either evil can be averted if we do not more earnestly consider what is involved in the faith of little children; whether the name of the Son into which we are baptized is not our redemption from all vagueness, and from all partial, separate, self-seeking worship, a witness that we are adopted into Him as members of His body, and must therefore seek the things that are above, where He sitteth at the right hand of God. This faith is not notional, but practical; not for this and that man, but for mankind. If we were forced to form conceptions about a Son of God, or Son of man, there ​would be a perpetual strife of intellects; there could be no consent; each man must think differently from his neighbour, must try to establish his own thought against his neighbour's. If He is revealed to us as the ground of our intellects,—the creative Word of God from whom they derive their light: as the centre of our fellowship, the only-begotten Son of God, in whom we are made Sons of God; the weary effort is over; our thoughts may travel to the ends of the earth, but here is their home; apart from Him men have infinite disagreements: in Him they have peace.

III. A mere Fate or Necessity of course communicates no life or energy to those who are the subjects of it. Life and energy are excluded from the very idea of Necessity. A Ruler or Lord of Nature may impart powers or energies to particular men. It will be the great sign of his favouring them, above others, that he does so. A free and imaginative people like the Greeks would account it a much greater proof of a man's being dear to the Gods, that he was able to perform rare achievements, and exhibit unusual wit and prowess, that he possessed houses and land, and an outward good fortune. High gifts were felt, as I showed before, to indicate an Inspirer, and that Inspirer was acknowledged to have descended from the highest God. Here, again, the name of Father greatly modified the previous belief. The gift of Inspiration was generally taken as an evidence that the man who received it stood in some real relation to the Divine Power; it was not merely bestowed from choice or favouritism—it was a kind of inheritance.

The moment a Will drives out a Fate, an absolute will to good, mere irresistible decrees, the belief that this Will must seek to make other wills like its own ​forces itself upon us. "This is the will of God, even your sanctification," becomes the deepest conviction of the reason.

At first these words may be reflected on with much inward satisfaction, without any great awe. But when a man remembers that holiness in its fullest sense, holiness as involving truth and love, by involving separation from what is false and unlovely, must be the innermost nature of God, he may well wonder and tremble while he hears that of this it is the will of God to make him partaker. This gift is so amazing, so essential, that he is utterly baffled when he tries to meditate how he can ever be possessed of it. Can he become a God? While he dreamed of God as a being of mere power, he might dream also of measuring his own power with His. But as soon as the belief of God's holiness has at all entered into him, his desire is to sink rather than to rise. The consciousness of his pride is that which alarms him most. And that pride haunts him perpetually. If he became the most abject of men, he feels as if he should be proud of that abjectness,—more proud than he had ever been before. This is a perplexity concerning himself; there is another concerning God. It is wonderful that the inmost life of God should be communicated; but it would be a contradiction that it should not be communicated. We cannot think of a Being of perfect love as wrapt up in Himself, as dwelling in the contemplation of His own excellence and perfection: we can as little think of His being satisfied with any lower excellence or perfection. The belief of a Spirit proceeding from the Father and the Son meets both the human and the divine difficulty. To think of the Father resting in the Son, in the deepest sense know​ing the Son, and of the Son knowing the Father, we must think of a uniting Spirit. And if there is such a Spirit, it must be capable of being imparted; that must be the way in which holiness is imparted. And if this gift comes to men through the Son, we are sure that the Spirit which they receive must be the Spirit of lowliness, and meekness, and obedience. We are sure that it cannot be a Spirit which exalts any one man above his fellow. It must bring all to a level. In so far as they confess it to be the Spirit of a Father, they must confess that it is meant to make them Sons of God; in so far as they confess that it is the Spirit of Christ, they confess that it is meant to make them brothers. But the more this Spirit quickens them, the more they will delight to own it as distinct from them; the more our Lord's words respecting a Comforter will seem to them the truest and fullest of all; the more they will be compelled to feel that there is a Divine Person with them to whom they owe reverence and worship.

So wonderfully,—if our baptismal faith is true,—are Divinity and Humanity blended; so awfully are they distinguished. Each step in the revelation of the distinct Persons comes out to meet and satisfy some infinite need of man; some witness which has been awakened within him of his own grandeur, and of his own weakness; of his belonging to a society, and of his being an individual; of his dwelling in a world, subject to all the accidents of time; of his right to a state that is free from these accidents. The more near he is brought to God, the greater he feels is the necessity for adoration and worship; while he contemplates Him at a distance there is terror, but not reverence or awe.

​And it is equally true that while he beholds Him at a distance from himself, as the heathen did, and as we are always prone to do, there can be no acknowledgment of His Unity. As long as a Jove, or some Lord of Nature is worshipped, he must be divided into a multitude of forms. The conception of such a being shows what a need the heart and reason have of Unity, but also how impossible it is for them to find it, or create it for themselves. The multitude of forms which we behold in the world will make, in spite of all reasonings and theories, a multitude of world-gods. It is only when we ask in wonder whence we ourselves are; to what law we are subject; in whom it is that we are living, and moving, and having our being; who is guiding us; whither he would lead us;—that we begin to escape from darkness into light, from division into Unity. When the Gospel was preached, when the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost was uttered, when men had been baptized into it, idols fell down; the worship of the visible became intolerable; the sense of Unity profound. The separation of that name has been, in all ages since, the secret of division, the commencement of idolatry. If we watched our own minds more we should find that it is so with them. We have sometimes fancied we could dwell simply on the thought of a Father; all others should be discarded as unnecessary. But soon it has not been a Father we have contemplated: it has been a mere substratum of the things we saw, a name under which we collected them. How rejoiced is the heart to pass from such a cold void to the thought of a Son filled with all human sympathies! But how soon does the sin-sick soul frame a thousand images and pictures of its own as a substitute for the perfect ​Image; dream of Mediators closer and more gracious than the One who died for all! What a relief to fly from these fancies to a Divine Spirit! How we wonder that we should ever have thought that God could be anywhere but in the contrite heart and pure! Alas, the heart does not long remain contrite and pure! Its holiness disappears: then the Object of its worship disappears; for that Object was becoming more and more itself. And the man either is content with that miserable condition, and amuses himself with high phrases about humanity to hide the facts of it from his own conscience; or he asks for some mortal to tell him what he should believe, because he discovers that he has come to believe nothing.

He will find many ready to meet that craving. He will hear voices saying to him, "To what a con- dition you have reduced yourself by forsaking the one safe guide, the only Teacher who can enable you to obtain Eternal Life! For does not Christ say that we can only obtain eternal life by knowing God and Him? And what knowledge, what certainty, have you on these subjects? How can you get that cer- tainty unless there is an infallible guide who will say to you, This is true, believe it?" What a powerful, almost irresistible, argument to one who fancied that he believed everything, and is beginning to find that he scarcely believes in a God! And if the new teacher could restore him that belief, what else does he want, what might he not sacrifice for such a gift? But can that be, when he begins with assuming our Lord to have uttered words which He never did utter, and which directly set at nought His actual words? He did not say, "Men obtain eternal life by knowing God;" but, "This is life eternal, that they may know ​Thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom Thou hast sent." The knowledge does not procure the life, but the knowledge constitutes the life.

We fancy we attach a distinct meaning to these words, Eternal Life; they are such precious words, that every one tries to form some notion of them. But surely if there is any subject on which we want a guide,—an infallible guide,—it is on this. We feel that we are under a law of change and succession; that we live in days, and months, and years. We feel also that we have to do with that which is not changeable, which cannot be represented by any divisions of time. A long life, the poet says, may be curdled into an hour. Every great and serious event of our lives has taught us that this is so. We experience the utter vanity and emptiness of chronology as a measure of suffering, of thought, of hope, of love. All these belong to another state of things. We perceive that Scripture is speaking to us of that state of things; that it is educating us into the apprehension of it. The more we attend to the New Testament, the more we find to confirm the witness of our reason that eternity is not a lengthening out or continuation of time; that they are generically different; as St. Paul so beautifully expresses it, "that which we see is temporal; that which we do not see is eternal." The spiritual world,—we are obliged to confess it in a thousand ways,—is not subject to temporal conditions. This is no discovery of philosophers. Every peasant knows it as well as Newton. If you have listened with earnestness to the questions of a child, you may often think that it knows more of eternity than of time. The succession of years confounds it; it mixes the dates which it has been instructed in most strangely; ​but its intuition of something which is beyond all dates makes you marvel. Scripture, in like manner, illustrates and makes clear our own thoughts about Life and Death. It teaches us to think that the healthy activity of all our powers and perceptions, and their direction to their right object, is the living state; that the torpor of these, or their concentration on them- selves, is a state of Death.

With these hints, which every day's reading of the Scriptures, by an earnest student, will multiply and expand, what need we have of some direct words to bring together the two thoughts of Eternity and of Life. If I spoke of defining Eternal Life, I should feel, and I think all would feel, that I was using an improper word; for how can we define that which is out of the limits of time? But in the depth of prayer and communion with His Father, our Lord gives us that which corresponds to the most accurate and divine definition,—an exposition which we are bound henceforth, if we reverence His authority, to apply on all occasions, and to use as the correction of our loose and vague conceptions. Instead of picturing to ourselves some future bliss, calling that eternal life, and determining the worth of it by a number of years, or centuries, or millenniums, we are bound to say once for all: "This is the eternal life, that which Christ has brought with Him, that which we have in Him, the knowledge of God; the entering into His mind and character, the knowing Him as we only can know any person, by sympathy, fellowship, love." And so the meaning and order of the Divine revelation become evident to us; God has been declaring Himself to us that we might know Him, because He would have us partakers of this eternal life. And the final Revela​tion, that which is expressed in our Baptismal name, tells us what all the experience of ourselves and of the world tells us also, that unless the Spirit of the Father and the Son were with us, we could not break loose from the fetters of Time, the confusions of Sense, the narrowness of Selfishness; that if we yield to that Spirit we can have fellowship with those who are nigh and those who are far off; with men of every habit, colour, opinion; with those whom the veil of flesh divides from us; with Him who is the Perfect Charity; with the Father and the Son who dwell in the Unity of one blessed and eternal Spirit.

Many Unitarians still think, as their fathers did, that the idea of a Trinity involves an utter contradiction,—that every rational man must reject it. Many of them are aware that some of the deepest minds in the world have felt that the acknowledgment of a Trinity was necessary to their reason. But they are careful to observe that this is not the Trinity of which we speak; if they should ever come to accept a Trinity as a portion of their belief they would still, they say, not be stooping to a creed. That act would be a sign of Progress, not of retrogression; they would welcome a discovery of philosophy, not surrender themselves to a religious tradition.

Such language is lofty; I would beseech every earnest Unitarian to consider whether it is wise. Does he mean by a discovery of philosophy, the discovery of a verbal formula? If he does, I must leave him to any advantage he may get from it, only reminding him that he has now become the worshipper of formulas; that he cannot henceforth cast that charge upon us. But if it is a truth he discovers, may it not be a truth ​for mankind? And may not a living and true God have taken some way of making that truth known to the creatures whom He has made capable of knowing it? When we speak of a Creed which may be taught and believed, we say that He has done this. We say that in Christ the Trinity is revealed substantially. It is not a doctrine, unless it is more than a doctrine. Either real Persons are declared to us, or nothing is declared about those Persons. Either a real Unity is declared, or nothing is made known to us about a Unity. Supposing philosophy to have perceived a Trinity, or the shadow, or the hint of one, it cannot appropriate this perception to itself,—any more than Gravitation is a truth which Newton could appropriate to himself. The philosopher must ask to what reality the perception or intuition corresponds; of what substance that which he sees is the shadow. No one is bound to assume the position of a philosopher; few have any call to assume it; but supposing a man becomes one, this must be the condition of his work:—he must seek for that which is human and universal; for Truth itself, not for some image of it, or some logical expression of it. And he must ask how truth in this sense,—truth as the equivalent of substance or being,—can be made known, so that all shall be partakers of it. I leave that thought to the modern Unitarian philosopher. I would not have him abandon his task, if he thinks that he is appointed to it. I would have him pursue it steadily. For I believe he will find that the philosopher must ascend to knowledge by the same steps as the man; that if he is to find truth, God must reveal Himself to him.

These last words suggest a subject upon which I should like to say a few words. I have used the ​phrase that a belief in the Trinity makes "Prayer possible." Do I mean that it is impossible to every person who has not received our Creed,—that the Unitarian cannot pray? I mean no such thing. My great desire has been to show that we are dwelling in a Mystery deeper than any of our plummets can fathom,—a Mystery of Love. Our prayers are not measured by our conceptions; they do not spring from us. He who knows us teaches us what we should pray for, and how to pray. Therefore, of all transgressors of our Lord's command "not to judge," they are the greatest who pretend to pronounce upon the depth or sincerity of their neighbour's prayer, who think they can ascertain it by the professions which he makes, by his apparent pride or humility.

But the more I have seen of Unitarians, or have read of their books, the more have I been convinced that this was the great difficulty of their Creed—that in which its other difficulties begin and terminate. "Is God's Will good,—then why attempt to move it by petitions and intercessions? Is it not good? then how hopeless the effort must be, seeing that He is omnipotent!" These logical icebergs continually move away for human sufferers who are trying to force a passage between them. They pray because they cannot help it. Whether the effort is a reasonable one or not, they must make it. When the necessity has passed away, the understanding finds a justification for the violence which has been put upon it, and for the habitual repetition of such violence, by saying that though our prayers cannot move God, they are useful for their action upon our minds. But conscience then comes in with its protest: "What, practise a pious fraud in order to effect an improvement in your moral ​condition! Pretend that you are praying to some Being beyond yourself, when you are, in fact, your own object? What charms, what Buddhist praying-machine can be more insincere than such a process? Can the adoption of it make us more serious and truthful? If not, what is that reaction upon our own characters which is urged as a defence of it?"

I do not think the Unitarian has ever been able to answer these objections, and yet I am nearly sure that many Unitarians would sooner die than give up the act of prayer, and that they believe it not to be the falsest, but the truest of all acts, that which is necessary to make them sincere, and keep them sincere. do not doubt that the greater part of Unitarians, even those who retain Dr. Priestley's dogma of Necessity in their speculative creed, contrive to separate the idea of Him they call Father from that Necessity. They confess a Will; they do not worship a mere God of Nature. And they can believe that this Will may govern them, in some different way from that in which He governs the trees and flowers and streams. This belief implies the impossibility of some intercourse; yes! they must use that name, however much it savours of what they have been wont to call fanaticism; no other will avail. But again the doubt occurs. "How can this intercourse take place? Am I sure that I have any relation to this mysterious Will? Are the words 'speech and hearing' applicable to this subject?" Consider these questions in all ways. You are afraid of traditions: I do not ask you to receive mine. You long to be rational: use your reason upon this subject, and see whether the doctrine of a Mediator, one with the Father, one with you, does not meet it,—whether anything else can.

​But think again; some anguish drove you to prayer. I do not ask what it was. It might be the loss of reputation; it might be the loss of a friend or child. Whatever it was, I am certain a sense of wrong, of remorse, of repentance, mingled with your sorrow: you had been hardly treated, but you were not quite blameless; the friend was very dear, but you might have done more for him. That misery. drove you to God; but did it not also keep you from Him? There was a feeling of separation, not merely from the human being that was gone, but from Him. Was it overcome? I do not say that it was not, for I believe that God has given the Son in whom He sees us, and in whom we may see Him, to be a ransom for all, to be testified in due time. But if you acknowledged that ransom,—if you accepted Christ's Sacrifice as the assurance of His reconciliation with you,—would not that explain the sense of strife; the union which is mightier than it; the possibility, the infinite truth of prayer? And will not the thought, "Such an one is ever presenting His Sacrifice, not for me, but for the whole family; it is binding me to men as well as to God,"—put an end to the struggle and selfishness of your prayers in time to come, without making them less earnest, less individual? For you must know, then, that you are not striving to get something which God is unwilling to give; that you are crying out for the victory of His Will over your own and over all others. And if you believe this Will is that all should be saved, and should come to the knowledge of the truth, and that Christ has fulfilled this Will on earth, and is fulfilling it now, is it not an infinite comfort that your wishes are but the feeble echoes of His?

​Yet there is something more wanted still to make your prayers real, and to explain that "reaction on your own minds" which you have talked of. Are not you conscious very often of utter powerlessness, of a mind anything but disposed to good, anything but disposed to love or aid your fellow-men as you think God is loving and aiding them? Would it not be a satisfaction,—not to your feelings only, but to your sincerity,—to believe that there is a Spirit who is urging us to those higher impulses to which we are so indisposed, who is lifting us above ourselves, who is drawing us to the Father of our spirits? I ask you to ponder these thoughts. If you entered into them you would not at all be adopting the doctrines of this book. You might be leaving them and me far behind you. You might be entering into a knowledge of God which I have never attained; might be contemplating Christ's sacrifice as I have been unable to contemplate it; might be seeing the future condition of the world and God's judgment of it under aspects altogether different from mine. But you would be realising all that I desire for myself, for you, for my brethren, because you would be committing us and yourselves to God.

I should, indeed, be contradicting all I have said hitherto, and the deepest testimony of my soul, if I persuaded any Unitarian to pray as if that was true which as yet he does not believe to be true. Let him cling to his belief in a One God; let him hold fast to the name of Father. I do not dread his zeal, but his indifference; not his grasp of his own convictions, but his inclination to use them as weapons against other men. While we use the doctrine of the Trinity in that way, I am certain we shall not believe it, ​whatever we may pretend. While they think they know what that awful name "Father" means, because they can pronounce it, or what that wonderful word "Unity" means, because they can fight for it, they will not only not enlarge the circle of their convictions, but they will lose those that they have. Let them pray the Lord's Prayer, determining that the first words of it shall not be mere words to them,—that they shall be such as sick people want who sigh for the morning; as poor men want who toil in mines; as captives want who are chained together in loathsome prisons; and I have no fear of their coming to acknowledge the whole name which we confess. Let them sigh for that Unity which all the strifes and divisions of the world are rending, and I have no doubt they will learn to pray to as well as for a Spirit of Unity, or that their prayer will take the form of the old hymn of which we have this simple and noble version:—

Note.—As the remark in this passage on Romanist arguers applies directly to some Sermons of Mr. Manning's on John, c. 17, v. 3, I cannot let it go forth without saying, that I entirely acquit him of that which would be a great sin, the intention of interpolating our Lord's words. I can quite conceive that vehement opponents of Rome have read his Sermons without discovering that flaw in them. For the truth is, that we adopt this paraphrase as much as the Romanists do. Mr. Manning probably learnt it among English divines, and is making fair use of it against them now. What I hoped and believed was, that he had risen out of such a low notion of orthodoxy, to whatever society it belongs. In the fourth volume of his ​Sermons, published shortly before he left the English Church, there was such a vein of true Catholicity, such an assertion of the highest Theology as the possession for all men, such a vindication of the truth that the knowledge of God is Eternal Life, as it did one's heart good to meet with anywhere. Though there were sufficient indications in that volume, that the writer might not stay very long amongst us, I could not help hailing it as a far nobler addition to the stores of English divinity than those very exquisite, probably more popular, but it seemed to me less masculine, discourses which Mr. Manning had put forth previously. I ventured to hope, almost to prophesy,—that he might only be breaking the fetters of our Anglican system, and that even the new fetters of Romanism would not hinder him from being Catholic. Nor will I abandon that hope now. In a still more recent Sermon he has asserted the doctrine which I have maintained in these Essays, that Love is the groundwork of all Divinity, with a breadth and fulness which I should rejoice to find in the Discourses of those whom he has forsaken. I trust that he believes himself, and will teach others, that the Spirit of Love is also the Spirit of Truth, and that no lie is of the truth: when he and we are possessed by that conviction, we cannot long be separate.

In illustration of what I have said on the generical distinction between Time and Eternity, I should wish my readers to meditate these lines of Milton:—