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at least, flowed spontaneously from the exuberance of his trust; and the action of his soul in clinging to God he would not have to be an action at all. What was greatest in him, and most Protestant too, was the perfect clearness of heart with which he estimated the relation between God and his own instrumentality in setting forth the truth of God. He not merely said, but realized, that the Lord he preached would declare himself without his aid; and that were it not so, he were no Lord at all. There was no anxiety about success. In the spirit of true Protestantism, he was anxious that those who had felt the power of God should acquit themselves of their obligation to reveal it,—not solicitous about it, as if there were no other channel for the Eternal Word. Smaller men are anxious to mould their age-to construct some artificial reservoir for perpetuating their faith before they die. As if there could be any such reservoir except the living Spirit of God, as if any faith which is not ever springing fresh out of that infinite life would not stagnate or dry up before their own bodies had crumbled into dust! It was not thus with Luther. He had no cast-iron views of faith. He was not a semiProtestant, with a Romanist reserve, that God could not get on, after all, without a formula and a human representative. We tell our Lord God," he said, "that if He will have His church, He may uphold it; for we cannot uphold it, and even if we could, we should become the proudest asses under heaven.”* Therefore he could stand free and declare the Lord who was in him,- planning nothing, dreading nothing. The vast strength of his nature was all due either to the warmth of his impulses and the vividness of his sensibilities, or to the power of his trust. It was all natural or supernatural; none of it was of the stern voluntary cast of Rome-none of it of the preternatural, fanatic cast of a "child of destiny." He had none of the inflexible marble strength of iron purpose-nothing of the blind impetuosity of men possessed by their own notions. His most stormy force, as Archdeacon Hare most truly said, was never violence. The gusts of such a spirit

Tischreden, vol. ii. P. 330.

After quoting Luther's saying that he would not be deterred from riding to Leipsic, though "it were to rain pure Duke Georges for nine days, and each of them were nine times more furious than this," Archdeacon Hare remarks: "To our nicer ears such expressions may seem in bad taste; be it so. When a Titan is walking about among the pigmies, the earth seems to rock beneath his tread. Mont Blanc would be out of keeping in Regent's Park; and what would be the outcry if it were to toss its head and shake off an avalanche or two! Such, however is the dulness of the elementary powers, they have not apprehended the distinction between

might well shake the earth, but it was, as it were, an accident of his power, not its aim. These whirlwinds of vehemence issued from the depths of a spirit in which elements were stirring such as had scarce existed in any other man; but they were not summoned forth by the cold resolve of a determined will. They "proceeded" from him-they were not "created" by him. The vast social power of Luther, and the social power of his religion, was the mere natural expansion outwards of inward, elastic, uncontrolled affections; all its voluntary power was spent in the act of faith, and even this was claimed as involuntary.

Luther (in this, too, the very genius of Protestantism) had a breadth, and tenderness, and vigour of nature, physical and moral, which set the problem of self-discipline, the misery of inward disorder, in its full difficulty and its sharpest outline. His was a nature in which the flames of inward strife were easily kindled, and the occasion of no common anguish. He knew only too well that the seed of evil was not in the outward mould of his nature, not in the forms of human desire and affection, but deep below them, at the very sources of the will, and therefore he protested against every attempt to force nature into new channels. The rich endowments of the natural man he neither trusted nor dreaded. He admitted their rights, and left them to find their own channels in the world. This alone might have given the Protestant faith its physical superiority over the Roman (which depresses nature, and shears away her overflowing energies). But this alone would not, and will not, now or ever, give Protestantism its moral superiority. It was the complementary truth, that though the life of sin cannot be reached from below by any blockade of nature-by any hermetical sealing of its outlets-it may be reached from above through the opened heart of trust, by unroofing the soul to the clear, calm love of God-that has given Protestantism its moral power. Wherever this faith has faded away, the moral superiority of Protestant nations is due to the mere vital force of unimpeded national characteristics; only where it remains, and so far as it remains, does the true spirit of Luther still preach to us that trust is stronger than action-that the shortest, nay the only way to conquer sin is to wrestle with God for his blessing first, that it is both arrogant and hopeless to wrestle in our own strength with sin that we may be blessed by God.

There is scarcely anything so melancholy, even in the per

force and violence. In like manner, when the adamantine bondage in which men's hearts and minds had been held for centuries was to be burst, it was almost inevitable that the power which was to burst this, should not measure its movements by the rule of polished life."-Vindication of Luther, p. 172.

version of the Roman Church, as the perversion of the early Protestant theology. Rome was indeed corrupted on a grander scale; and, by virtue of her vaunted unity, the evil spirit in her spread like a plague till the whole church was pestilential. Protestantism began by teaching men that their religious faith must be individual and distinct. And thus the centres of life were multiplied, and the unity of disease was interrupted. But if the fall to pseudo-Protestantism has been less general and calamitous, it has been a fall from a greater height. Yet it was only a fall from a precipice on the very edge of which Luther stood." Only believe that your sins are forgiven, and they are forgiven," said Luther, meaning, as his whole life and teaching show, that to believe this was impossible without a moral delivery of the whole spirit into God's hands. In his thought, the one great conflict of life was to believe this; and how did he set about it? Not, certainly, by convincing himself that highly probable reasons could be accumulated in favour of this proposition; but by throwing into the act of trust all the intensity of moral and spiritual power which the pious Romanist would have spent on duty,— by making trust the first right action and the postulate of all right action, by withstanding, as the most awful sin, the thought that God had provided no way of escape to each of his children, from the evil of their own nature,-by summoning up before his heart the infinite treason of doubting that God's desire for our holiness is immeasurably deeper than our own,— in short, by absorbing every other moral and spiritual struggle into this most central and passionate of struggles with his distrust of God, knowing perfectly, that wherever that enemy is absolutely beaten, there can be no choice for any other enemy but instant flight. Before Luther's intense thought every scene of moral conflict, however apparently trivial, was at once transfigured into that final battle-field. Every temptation dilated before his inward eye into the threatening form of that one great Tempter, and with passionate defiance he drove before him, at the first symptom of danger, the enemy he durst not delay to crush at once. This, and nothing less, was what Luther implied in the assertion, "Only believe that your sins are forgiven, and they are forgiven." Yet though he was safe, he was, as we have said, near the margin of a great abyss. In his passionate eagerness to vindicate all the mercy and the love of human salvation for God, he theoretically denied that man could even co-operate with the Spirit which drew him on to spiritual victory. All was God's doing, he ejaculated, as with a soldier's heart he cast himself sternly into the thickest fray. Man could only be helplessly

grateful and believing.' And that which Luther said in theory, but by his life belied, men were soon found to accept in theory and in practice too. And thus came that horrible corruption of his faith which may be called the doctrine of passive salvation by correct notions concerning the nature and policy of God. And it is with this corrupted form of Protestantism that the ordinary bibliolatry which is its complement is associated.

We know well that every great and good man, who, like Luther, overleaps the mark in vindicating for God's grace the absolute and unmixed authorship of man's salvation, repudiates, like Luther, the practical inference that the faith by which he is saved is mere inevitable acquiescence in the authoritative statements of a supernatural oracle. Nevertheless, the one doctrine cannot be preached by large minds, without the corresponding attenuated form of it immediately spreading among narrow minds. The way by which natures of small calibre are most often enlarged so as to receive a wider faith, is through the ennobling life of effort after a voluntary co-operation with the Spirit of God. And if they be taught that this is impossible, that they can only attend upon it-that if they are to be chosen they will be chosen-nothing can prevent them from accepting the practical inference, contracting into a mild content with such degree of general conviction as they happen to attain, and substituting a little leisurely reading and "inquiry" for the throes and the travail of spirit from which a faith like Luther's was generated. Deny the active and voluntary element in faith-deny that men have real voluntary power to follow the promptings of the Holy Spirit by cleaving to God, and throwing themselves upon His purifying mercy and love as the last hope of their soul,—and you open the way for all the dryness and sterility of the dogmatic orthodoxy, because not being able to move their own affections, men will naturally suppose that their only road to a fuller conviction is through the intellect, and so lose the rich elements of new spiritual life which are really opened to them through the secret history of the will. And then all the vast issues of trust and distrust are narrowed into the miserable controversy about accurately hitting the true mark in doctrine, and as to the sufficiency or insufficiency of certain records of inspired life and history to ensure this fine skill in archery. If ordinary men once cease to believe in the divine and supernatural freedom of their own inward responsible relation with the Spirit of God, they lose the principal experience in which He can become to them a present reality; for very few are originally constituted for a life of deep religious emotion, such as would pour conviction on their spirits, without the experience of duty and

sin. And then, as a necessary consequence, revelation becomes --not an unveiling to us now, but a declaration that such an unveiling has happened once and will again—that there is a God still living behind the veil of nature, if we could but see Him. And of course the evidence of this truth becomes a question for natural theology, and the mode of His government a point of investigation for biblical criticism.

What the life of the church was to Rome, the life in the Bible was to Luther and his first followers. To the Roman Christians God was first realized in the social power and external organization of the church. Looking on all power as capable of incarnation, they could not believe fully in divine power till they saw it embodied in the young and expansive energy of a social institution. It explained their yearnings, their hope, their trust. But in the age of Luther it had become a weary and feverish dream, explaining nothing, most difficult to explain itself. Moreover, the individual cast of the Protestant character needed the history of the highest individual life in order to reflect its own questionings, and to resolve the mystery in which it was shrouded. Luther came to the Bible, and there he found the history of a class of men more near to the German nations in the mould of their moral nature, in the intensity of their conscience, in the close personal relations they sustained to the infinite God, than any the world had ever known. And, moreover, he found them one after another struggling for life and for salvation with Pharisaism, which was the very prototype of the Roman formalism. He found the history of simple families of which God had been the real bond and living head. He found the history of a selfish and wilful nation, whose every crime was chronicled,--not from the historic point of view as the mere breaking foam of popular passion,—but as a sinful resistance to their spiritual King. He found the history of statesmen who rendered the strictest account of their government and their misgovernment in prayer to God, and who asked counsel of his Spirit ere they advised an alliance, or proclaimed a war. He found there, amidst many similar histories, the inward and outward experience of one, who, like himself, had to break a yoke of ordinances, to resist and upbraid his own people, to destroy for others and lose for himself the tradition of unity with an ancient church, to announce the abrogation of the dead tribute of actions, and to demand in its place the surrender of the citadel of the heart, and then to see with anguish that his own disciples had been held more securely to their allegiance by the outward bond than by the inward trust. Such a history of individual religion, unrolled to the yearning eyes of a nation thirsting vainly for an inward religion, was

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