Изображения страниц
PDF
EPUB

mind would be witnessed and watched with more interest by the Christian philosopher or the Christian orator than a growing disposition on the part of the masses to listen to the strict truths, the systematic doctrines of Christianity, and to ponder upon them. And why should there not be this disposition at all times? That which is strictly true is entirely true; is thoroughly true; true without abatements or qualifications. Why, then, shall a thinking creature shrink back from the exactitudes of theology, the severities of righteousness? Why should not the human mind follow out everything within the province of religion to its last results, without reference to the immediate painful effect upon the feelings? If a thing be true, why confer with flesh and blood about it? If certain distinctly revealed doctrines of revelation, accurately stated, and logically followed out, do cut down all the cherished hopes of a sinful man, with respect to his future destiny, why not let them cut them down? Why not, with the unsparing self-consistence of the mathematician, either take them as legitimate and inevitable conclusions, from admitted sources and premises, in all their strictness and fearful meaning, or else throw sources, premises, and conclusions all away? How is it possible for a thinking man to maintain a middle and a neutral ground in doctrinal religion any more than in science?

2. But leaving this mainly intellectual argument for the Psalmist's temper towards the stern side of revelation, we pass, in the second place, to the yet stronger moral argument drawn from the nature of that great spiritual change, which the Founder of Christianity asserts must pass upon every human being in order to entrance into the kingdom of heaven.

Man, though self-ruined, is helplessly, hopelessly ruined. Loaded with guilt, which he cannot expiate, and in bondage to a sin from which he can never deliver himself, he cannot now be saved except by the most powerful methods, and the most thorough processes. What has been done outside, in the counsels of eternity and in the depths of the Triune God, to bring about human redemption, evinces the magnitude and the difficulty of the work undertaken. But of this we do not propose to speak. We speak only of what is to be done inside, in the mind and heart of the individual man, as evincing conclusively that this salvation of the human soul cannot be brought about by imperfect and slender exhibitions of truth, or by an irresolute and timorous posture of the auditor's mind. No man is compelled to suffer salvation. Pardon of all sin from the eternal God, and purity for eternal ages, are offered to him, not as a cheap thing to be forced upon an unwilling recipient, but as a priceless boon. Our Lord himself, therefore, bids every man count the cost, and make up the comparative estimate, before he commences the search for eternal life. "Either make the tree

[ocr errors]

good, and his fruit good; or else make the tree corrupt, and his fruit corrupt." Be thorough in one direction or the other. Either be a saint or a sinner. The Redeemer virtually advises a man not to begin the search at all unless he begin it in earnest. The entire Scripture representation is, that as man's salvation cost much on high and in the heavens, so it must cost much below, and in the soul of man. If, then, religion be not rejected altogether, and the hearer still expects and hopes to derive an everlasting benefit from it, he should take it precisely as he finds it, and allow its truths to wound first, that they may heal afterwards; to slay in the beginning, that they may make alive in the end.

For such is the method of Christianity. Conviction is the necessary antecedent to conversion. But how is this great process to be carried through, if the public mind shrinks away from all convicting truth, as the sensitive plant does from the touch? How is man to be conducted down into the depths of an humbling and abasing self-knowledge, if he does not allow the flashing and fiery illumination of the law and the prophets to drive out the black darkness of self-deception? It is impossible, as we have already observed, that divine truth should pour its first rays into the soul of alienated man, without producing pain. The unfallen seraph can hear the law proclaimed amidst thunders and lightnings with a serene spirit and an adoring frame, because he has perfectly obeyed it from the beginning. But Moses, and the children of Israel, and all the posterity of Adam, must hear law, when first proclaimed, with exceeding fear and quaking, because they have broken it. It is a fact too often overlooked, that divine truth, when accurately stated and closely applied, cannot leave the mind of a sinful being as quiet and happy as it leaves that of a holy being. In the case of man, therefore, the truth must in the outset cause foreboding and alarm. In the history of the human religious experience, soothing, consolation, and joy from the truth are the subsequents, and not the antecedents. The plain and full proclamation of that word of God which is "as a fire," must, at first, awaken misgivings and fears, and, until man has passed through this stage of experience, must leave his sinful and lost soul with a sense of danger and insecurity. There is, consequently, no true option for man, but either not to hear at all, or else to hear first in the poignant and anxious style. The choice that is left him is either that of the Pharisee or the Magdalen; that of the self-righteous, or the self-condemned; either to hate the light, and not come to the light, lest painful disclosures of character and conduct be made, or else to come resolutely out into the light, that the deeds may be reproved.

For this work of reproval is the first and indispensable function of religious truth, in the instance of the natural man. If there be self-satisfaction, and a sense of safety in the unrenewed human

soul, it is certain that as yet there is no contact between it and the Divine word. For it is as true of every man, as it was of the Apostle Paul, that when the law shall "come" with plainness and power to his mind, he will "die." His hope of heaven will die; his hope of a quiet death-bed will die; his hope of acquittal and safety in the day of judgment and at the bar of God, will die. That apostolic experience was legitimate and normal, and no natural man must expect that the truth and law of God, when applied with distinctness and power to his reason and conscience, will leave him with any different. experience in the outset, from that which has initiated and heralded the passage from darkness to light, and from sin to holiness, in every instance of a soul's redemption. There is no royal road across the chasm that separates the renewed from the unrenewed man. In order to salvation, every human creature must tread that strait and narrow path of self-examination, selfcondemnation, and self-renunciation, which was trodden by the goodly fellowship of the prophets, the glorious company of the apostles, and the noble army of the martyrs.

In subjecting the mind and conscience to the poignant influence of keen and pure truth, and doing everything in his power to have the stern and preparatory doctrines of the legal dispensation become a schoolmaster, to lead him to the mercy and the pity that is in the blood of Christ, any man is simply acting over the conduct of every soul that, in the past, has crossed from the kingdom of darkness to the kingdom of light. He is merely travelling the King's highway to the celestial city; and whoever would climb up some other way, the same is a thief and a robber. Even the thoughtful pagan acknowledged the necessity of painful processes in the human mind, in order to any moral improvement. Over the Delphic portal was inscribed the words, "Without the descent into the hell of self-knowledge, there is no ascent into heaven." We do not suppose that this remarkable saying exhibits its full meaning within the province of the pagan religions, or of natural religion. The heathen sage often uttered a truth whose pregnant significance is understood only in the light of a higher and supernatural dispensation. But if the agony of self-knowledge is postulated by paganism, in order to the origin of virtue within the human soul, much more then is it by Christianity. If the heathen moralist, with his low view of virtue, and his very indistinct apprehension of the spirituality of the moral law, and his utterly inadequate conception of a holy and happy state beyond the grave, could yet tell us that there is a hell of self-knowledge to be travelled through, a painful process of self-scrutiny and self-condemnation to be endured, before moral improvement can begin here, or the elysiums of the hereafter be attained-if this be the judgment of the heathen moralist, from his low point of view, and in the mere twilights of natural religion,

what must be the judgment of the human mind, when under the Christian dispensation the moral law flashes out its nimble and forked lightnings upon sin and pollution with a fierceness of heat like that which consumed the stones and dust, and licked up the water in the trench about the prophet's altir; when Divine truth is made quick and powerful by the super-added agency of the Holy Ghost, so as to discern the very thoughts and intents of the heart; when the pattern-image of an absolute excellence is seen in him who is the brightness of the Father's eternal glory; and when the heaven to be sought for, and what is yet more, to be prepared for, is a state of spotless and sinless perfection in the light of the Divine countenance! Plainly, self-knowledge within the Christian sphere implies and involves a searching and sifting examination into character, motive, thought, feeling, and conduct, such as no man can undergo without shame, and humiliation, and self-condemnation, and remorse, and, without the blood of Christ, everlasting despair.

The same course of reasoning respecting each and all the remaining processes that enter into the change from sin to holiness, and the formation of a heavenly character, would in each instance help to strengthen the argument we are urging in favour of the plainest preaching, and the most resolute hearing, of religious truth. The more a man knows of sin and of holiness, of the immense gulf between them, and of the difficulty of the passage from one to the other, the more heartily will he believe that the methods and the processes by which the transition is effected must each and all of them be of the most energetic and thorough character. And the deeper this conviction, the more hearty and energetic will be his adoption of the Psalmist's utterance, "Let the righteous smite me, it shall be a kindness."

We have thus considered the mutual relations of the Sacred Orator and the Christian Auditor. In doing this, we have passed rapidly over a very wide field, and have touched upon some of the most momentous themes that can engage the human mind. What, and how, we are to conceive of God; and particularly how we are to represent Him as affected in his own essential Being, towards the holiness or the sin of his creatures, is of all subjects the most serious and important. In closing the discussion, we are more than ever impressed with the importance of a bold and biblical theism in the Christian pulpit. Whenever the preacher asserts that God loves the righteous, let him assert it with energy, and warmth, and momentum. Let him make his hearers see and know that the great God is personal in this emotion; that he pours out upon those who are in filial sympathy with him and his law the infinite wealth of his pure and stainless affection, and that it permeates the whole being of the object so beloved with warm currents of light and life eternal. And whenever he asserts that God hates sin, and

is angry with the sinner, let him assert it without any abatement or qualification. Let him cause the impenitent and sin-loving man to see and know that upon him, as taken and held in that sinful character and condition, the eternal and holy Deity is pouring out the infinite intensity of his moral displeasure, and that, out of Christ, and irrespective of the awful passion of Gethsemane and Calvary, that immaculate and stainless emotion of the Divine. essence is now revealed from heaven against his unrighteousness, and is only awaiting his passage into the eternal world, to become the monotonous and everlasting consciousness of the soul.

Amidst the high and increasing civilization and over-refinement that is coming in upon Christendom, and especially amidst the naturalism that threatens the Scriptures and the Church, the Christian ministry must themselves realise, as did the Hebrew prophets, that God is the living God, and by God's own help and grace, evoke this same consciousness in the souls of their hearers. Let, then, these two specific personal qualities-the divine wrath and the divine love-be smitten, driven, hurled, like javelins, into the consciousness of the nations. Then will there be the piercing wail of contrition, preceding and heralding the bounding joy of conscious pardon.

PRINCETON REVIEW.

ART. VI.-CONSCIENCE.

HE subject before us is of vast importance, of extensive range,

investigation of it with the hope of affording the inquiring mind complete satisfaction, would be presumption. But if we can remove some of the difficulties which beset the subject, if we can diminish the force of others, and put into the hands of the inquirer materials that may aid him in a more thorough investigation, our labour will not be altogether in vain. That the subject is of vast importance, will be seen from the fact that it occupies a prominent place in mental, moral, and theological science. The mental philosopher, who would successfully examine and expound the laws of mind; the moral philosopher, who would build up a correct system of ethical science; and the Christian philosopher, who would frame a theological system, which, while based upon the word of God, should harmonize with the moral and intellectual constitution of man, cannot but pay special attention to this subject. It links itself with every doctrine of the Bible, and every faculty of the human mind. The difficulties naturally belonging to this subject

« ПредыдущаяПродолжить »