The GOSPEL TRUTH RATIONAL THEOLOGY
--OR--
ETHICAL AND THEOLOGICAL ESSAYS
------------------------
BY
JOHN MILTON WILLIAMS. A. M.
----------------
CHICAGO
CHARLES H. KERR & COMPANY
BOSTON: GEORGE H. ELLIS
1888
Copyright, 1888,
by JOHN MILTON WILLIAMS
CONTENTS.
ESSAY I. OLD AND NEW CALVINISM
ESSAY II. THE CONSCIENCE
ESSAY III. VIRTUE, FROM A SCIENTIFIC STANDPOINT
ESSAY IV. REGENERATION
ESSAY V. DIVINE SOVEREIGNTY AND FREE-AGENCY
ESSAY VI. THE ATONEMENT
ESSAY VII. THE FUTURE OF INCORRIGIBLE MEN
ESSAY VIII. THE CHRIST OF NAZARETH--WHO WAS HE?
INTRODUCTION It hardly seems necessary, in justification of the title of this unpretentious volume, to say, that the author uses the word reason in accord with most metaphysical writers of the age -- as the equivalent of the intuitive faculty -- the faculty whose revelations underlie all knowledge, and constitute those logical antecedents on whose authority all other verities are conditioned. He conceives of the reason as the faculty whose intuitions, such as the existence of space, time, cause, God, obligation, the axioms of mathematics, etc., the soul must accept as absolutely true, or dismiss all idea of certainty from the empire of thought. If the reason cannot be accepted as absolutely infallible and its intuitions as unerringly true, nothing can; there are no foundations or landmarks in the moral world, -- everything is afloat; God and the universe are but an hypothesis.
Nor is it necessary to say he draws a broad line of demarcation between the reason and the understanding, or discursive faculty. The former is the unerring faculty, -- the faculty which makes its possessor an intelligent and moral being; gives him authoritative laws of thought and duty; lifts him to the awful summits of accountability, and, more that any other, constitutes his likeness to his Maker. The latter is frail and erring, to be cautiously exercised, and very limitedly relied upon.
The title of this volume -- Rational Theology -- indicates that the theology it sets forth is rational, or accords with reason as herein defined; in other words, excludes what is irrational, absurd and self-contradictory.
It will be asked: "Do you put reason above the Bible?" This question indicates some confusion of thought, -- at least, a definition of reason unlike the scientific, or, more probably, no definition at all; otherwise, the question would not be possible. He who claims to honor the Bible by putting it above reason would find his views instantly clarified by asking himself, Why do I accept the Bible as a revelation from God, and reject the Koran and the Book of Mormon? Would I accept the Bible, did it persistently represent God as unjust, untruthful, selfish, or ignorant? Why do I believe in the existence of God? Such question would soon satisfy him that there are deep underlying utterances in his soul, more authoritative than the Bible or anything else; and that it is because the Bible, its revelations and claims accord with these mysterious voices he accepts it and for no other. He who says he would accept the Bible as a revelation from God, whether reasonable or not, pays a very doubtful compliment to neither the Bible or to himself.
But it is asked, Do you put reason above the clear declarations of God? No. (1.) There is no need of doing so. The clear declarations of God do, and must, accord with the reason. It is not possible God contradicts or denies on one page of His writing what he has deeply engraved upon another. (2.) "The clear declarations of God," unless sanctioned by the reason, are not the "clear declarations of God." They are but empty noises, which no one has a right to ascribe to his Maker. The intuitions of reason are divine voices in the soul. God respects them, and was not displeased when the old Patriarch assumed that his own idea of right was the absolute standard to which the divine conduct must conform to be just. This is precisely what every moral being assumes. Who does not know that injustice, cruelty and falsehood are wrong, who ever may be the perpetrator?
There are two possible inferences from this title against which the author desire to caution his readers.
1. That he had any sympathy with what is termed Rationalism -- a phase of thought which rules from the Bible all that is supernatural, and subjects its revelations to the arbitration of frail human judgment. So far from this the author accepts the Bible, the whole Bible, as a revelation from God. Though different parts may be differently inspired, he believes the whole was prepared under the superintendence of the Holy Spirit, and that the Old Testament, as it is, received the indorsement of the Great Teacher. He accepts it because of the myriad proofs that it is the product of Him who made the soul, and is in harmony with the great rhythm of things.
2. That he deems the theology of the great Christian world irrational, and claims to have something better. While he rejects the Calvinistic system of doctrine, and believes it is rapidly becoming a thing of the past, he flatters himself that the great mass of evangelical Christians will find in these papers, with the possible exception of the last, little to which it cannot cordially subscribe. The views contained in the concluding essay respecting the person of the Christ of Nazareth have for years been forcing themselves upon his conviction, and have gained such ascendency, he finds it difficult to believe any thoughtful mind can reject them. He commends them to the thoughtful consideration of his readers, hoping they will obtain thereby a simpler concept of the Divine Man, and find "looking unto Jesus" an easier and sweeter privilege.
The author has made comparatively few quotations, has avoided technicalities, and anything like "a show of learning." He has endeavored to bring his thoughts within the easy comprehension of the ordinary reader; still, he confesses he has had chiefly in mind his brethren in the "sacred calling," whose candor and judgment he profoundly respects, to whom, with a deep sense of its imperfections, he dedicates this little volume.
Of the eight essays of which it consists four have been already published -- one in the Bibliotheca Sacra, and three in the New Englander and Yale Review. The fact that they are disconnected, and were written at different periods, will account for any possible repetition of thought.
THE AUTHOR.
March 1st, 1888.
I. OLD AND NEW CALVINISM
Is there any distinct line of demarcation between the two systems of theology known as New and Old Calvinism, or between what are usually termed Old and New School Theology?
If the question be, Is there any line dividing those who call themselves Calvinists into two distinct classes--the Old and the New?--I unhesitatingly answer, No;--there is no such line. There is a wide difference between the system taught at Oberlin and the one taught at Princeton; but every shade of theological thought lying between them, and far to the outside of both, has its representatives and strenuous advocates. Dr. Duryea describes Calvinism on one side and Arminianism on the other as two fences, upon either of which it is difficult to walk, but intimates that there is plenty of room between them. It is certainly not an easy matter to classify theological thinkers.
But may we not classify theological thought? Are there not logically two systems indicated by the names I have suggested? Starting from opposite sides of some central doctrine, if logically consistent, are we not compelled to take either the one or the other of two paths through the realm of metaphysical theology? So it seems to me, and the object of this paper is to indicate these two paths. It will be understood my remarks relate to systems rather than to men.
The ground I should otherwise have to traverse is immeasurably narrowed by the fact that these two systems embrace in common the great bulk of revealed truth, --nine-tenths, perhaps ninety-nine-hundredths, of the whole. The divine authority and inspiration of the Bible, the being, attributes, and tri-personality of God, the deity, incarnation, and atonement of Christ, the divinity, personality, and offices of the Holy Spirit, the lost and helpless state of man, his need of regeneration by the Holy Spirit, and pardon through the shedding of blood, the obligations and sanctions of the divine law, the Sabbath and Sacraments and duty of a holy and consecrated life, and the eternal awards of the life to come, belong equally to both systems. Indeed, the doctrines in dispute cover but a small segment of the whole circle of revealed truth, and even in this narrow field the difference relates, not so much to the facts, as to their underlying philosophy and explanation. Dr. Hodge well asks: "What is Pelagianism or Arminianism, or almost any other ism, but a particular system of religious philosophy, and what are the questions which divide and alienate Christians, but questions of mental and moral science?" It's not the fact of depravity, and atonement, and regeneration, about which we differ, but the philosophy and explanation of these facts.
Still, I am compelled to admit that the explanations and underlying theories are important, and open a wide field of profitable inquiry. Every scribe well instructed in the things of the kingdom will have a philosophical theory, in which all these facts will take their place in harmony with each other, and with all known truth. I can respect as a Christian, but not as a Christian teacher, the man who has no distinct self-consistent definition of sin and holiness, of repentance, regeneration and faith, who has no idea as to how God can be just, and the justifier of believing men. Every teacher of religion, to meet the sharp questionings of his hearers and satisfy his own cravings for consistency, must have a philosophy as well as theology.
But where shall we commence?--at what point does the divergence of these two systems take its rise? I answer without hesitation, with the doctrine of man's free agency, or of the freedom of the will. "In every system of theology," says Dr. Charles Hodge, "there must be a chapter de libero arbitrio. This is the question every theologian finds in his path, and which he must dispose of, and on the manner in which it is determined depends his theology." "These two systems [Calvinism and Arminianism]," says Dr. Strieby, "are characterized and determined by the views of the human will, upon which they are respectively founded." "Calvin," says Dr. Curry, "in whose mind the logical faculty was predominant, who never hesitated to follow out his own accepted premises to their legitimate conclusions, developed a complete system of philosophical theology, which so exalted the Divine sovereignty in grace and providence as to leave no room for the action of any creature, except as moved and actuated by the power of God. Whatever might occur must therefore be interpreted as the outcome of the will of God, whether of righteousness or of sin, eternal life or eternal death. The only possible law in the universe was the divine decrees, from which there was no departure. The actions of all creatures were subject to his hands, in both their inception and execution; and the whole universe, spiritual and physical, was subject to a complete order of predestination," making a necessitated will the basis of the Calvinistic system.
Here is the genesis of the controversy. Both schools call the will free, but they differ, toto cælo, as to the nature of freedom. Here is the vital pivotal point; and right here we need to do some clear thinking in order to get an adequate and comprehensive view of the two theologies.
Dr. Reid's definition of Freedom (see vol. iii., p. 326), which a writer in the Princeton Review tells us has been substantially adopted by all subsequent Pelagian and Arminian writers, is this: "By liberty of a moral agent, I understand a power over the determinations of his own will. If in any action he had power either to will or not to will, what he did, he is free. But if, in every voluntary action, the determination of his will be a necessary consequence of something involuntary in the state of his mind, or of some thing in his external circumstances, he is not free, but is the subject of necessity." New Calvinism accepts, Old Calvinism rejects, this definition; and just here theology divides into two schools.
There is something in the mind antecedent to choice, from which choices proceed; call it nature, disposition, motive, inclination, heart, taste, relish, propensity, what we will; the decisive question is what is the relation between this antecedent something and the resultant choice. Is it that of cause and effect? Do inclinations and motives coerce or merely solicit? Must the choice correspond, without the possibility of an alternative, with this preceding state, or, in given conditions, are either of opposite choices possible? In other words, does the will determine its own choices, or something behind the will? Something, answers the Old Calvinist, behind the will--the strongest motive, the most agreeable, the greatest apparent good--in every case.
The gist of the argument of Edwards--the most able exponent of the Calvinistic theory of the will,--is this: If motive is not the producing cause of choice, then choice has no cause, and we have the anomaly of an event without a cause. Dr. Hodge holds that choices are always dominated by the previous state of mind, and characterizes the opposite view as "Pelagianism," "the doctrine of contingency," "the liberty of indifference," etc. His definition of freedom is this: "Man is free when his volitions are truly and properly his own, determined by nothing out of himself, but proceeding from his own views and feelings and imminent states of mind, so that they are real conscious expressions of his own character, or what is in his mind." (See Theology, vol. ii., p. 285.) This is substantially Dr. Reid's definition of necessity.
Again, vol. ii., p. 289, he says: "The will is not independent, indifferent, or self-determined, but is always determined by the preceding state of mind, so that a man is free so long as his volitions are the conscious expressions of his own mind, so long as his activity is determined by his own reason and feelings"--a definition which would make water free, so long as its activity is determined by its own nature and laws.
Page 279 he is still more explicit: --"The whole question, therefore, is whether when a man decides to do a certain thing, his will is decided by his previous state of mind, or whether, with precisely the same views and feelings, his decisions may be one way at one time, and another at another; that is, whether the will to be free must be undetermined," and he clearly takes the ground that choices are decided by the previous state of mind, and can not but accord with it.
Professor Atwater, in his celebrated article (see Princeton Review, 1840), on "The Power of Contrary Choice," sums up the whole matter thus: "The question is whether the will is so constituted that at the moment of any given choice, under precisely the same motives and inward inclinations and external inducement, it may turn itself either way--either in the way it actually does choose, or in the opposite, either in accordance with its highest pleasure or inclination, or in direct and utter hostility to them; and whether such a property in the human will be essential to liberty, moral agency, praise and blame, reward and punishment--a question which lies at the very root, as will be perceived, of some of the chief questions in divinity and ethics." The Professor, lest he should be charged with "fighting a fiction of his own fancy," quotes to some extent from contemporary writers, to prove there are men who hold and teach the doctrine of the power of contrary choice, and then devotes the remainder of his lengthy article to an exposure of the folly and absurdity of such a theory, and earnestly contends that, in a given state of mind, the power of making either one of the two opposite choices is not possible to any human being.
Now a man, when he acts, is always in a given state of mind, and if he can not turn in either of two ways, he can, of course, turn in but one way--the way he does turn, and can do only as he does. He has no freedom, no choice, no alternative. This is the Old Calvinistic doctrine of the will, to wit: choices necessarily accord with their antecedent motive or states of mind.
But says the old Calvinist, after all, a man has ability to do as he pleases, and this is all the liberty he can ask. But if he can not do otherwise, if he can act in but one way--the way he pleases--is he in any proper sense free? The will can yield to the most pleasing, the most agreeable, to the strongest motive undoubtedly; so can the scales to the greatest weight, and there is just as much freedom in the one case as in the other.
I am aware the Old Calvinist endeavors to conceal this bald fatalism, by making a distinction between moral and physical inability. Edwards repeatedly asserts that were the sinner's inability to do right physical, he could not be held blameworthy for not doing right; but, inasmuch as it is moral, the greater the inability the greater the sin, because it is depravity or sin which constitutes this inability. Here, it seems to me, is a distinction without a difference. If this moral inability is a mere reluctance, which his will can overcome, the doctrine of contrary choice is conceded, and the whole Calvinistic theory is abandoned; but if, on the other hand, it is an inability he can not in the circumstances overcome, the distinction affords no relief.
Natural inability I understand to be the absence of natural power. Moral inability I understand to be the presence of some aversion which incapacitates one to use his natural power. And what is the difference? What boots it, if one is incapacitated to jump to the moon, whether it be in consequence of the absence of natural ability, or the presence of a hundred pound weight attached to his feet? Men may be silenced by such subtleties, but never satisfied. This doctrine of a necessitated will is the corner-stone on which rests the whole superstructure of Old Calvinism.
New Calvinism, on the other hand, rejects this whole theory of the will, as very thinly disguised fatalism. It holds, for illustration, that the thief, at the moment and in the identical circumstances in which he stole, was in full conscious possession of ability not to steal, as a fact, which challenges the assent of mankind, as an axiom which no sophistry can obscure; and it charges Old Calvinism with denying an intuitive truth, and with antagonizing all just blame and praise and accountability in the government of God.
Here, then, are the foundations of these two systems--the one a necessitated, the other a free will; the one fatalism, the other free agency. Keeping these in view, the respective superstructures will appear very simple.
I. The first timber on the Old Calvinistic foundation is the doctrine of Divine Sovereignty, which is a mere corollary of the doctrine of a necessitated will. It is this: God's control is as unlimited over the choices of mind as over the motions of matter. And, of course, He worketh all things after the counsel of His own will, and foreordaineth, as absolutely in the field of mind as in that of matter, whatsoever cometh to pass, for there is nothing to hinder. Men never resist the Holy Ghost. The doctrine "leaves no room," as Dr. Curry well remarks, "for the action of any creature, except as moved and actuated by the power of God." The universe, with all its complications, material and moral, is one vast machine under the absolute, unopposed control of one Infinite will.
New Calvinism embraces the doctrine of Divine Sovereignty, but of a sovereignty limited by human freedom. It holds that God "hath endued the will with that natural liberty, that it is neither forced nor by any natural necessity determined to good or evil," and consequently that it can, and often does, resist God, and all the influence God can consistently bring to bear upon it, and stands fearfully in the way of the consummation of His highest wishes. While it admits that God foreknows and foreordains, either permissively or otherwise, whatsoever comes to pass, it holds that sin is an evil He deprecates, and allows only because it is inevitable to the best system of things He could devise.
2. But a step logically removed from the doctrine of Divine Decrees is that of Election and Reprobation. God's power over men's choices being, according to Old Calvinism, unlimited, he can, of course, secure the repentance and salvation of any man and of all men; but, for reasons inscrutable to us, He chooses to save only a part, and leave the rest to perish. All we can say is: "Even so, Father, for so it seemeth good in thy sight," and there we must leave the most mysterious and inexplicable fact of the moral world.
The New Calvinist, on the other hand, accepts the doctrine of Election and Reprobation, but finds the ultimate ground or reason of the distinction the doctrine implies, not, as does the Old Calvinist, in the divine will, but in the human will, precisely, he claims where the Great Teacher himself puts it, in such utterances as these: "Ye will not come unto me that ye might have life." "How oft would I have gathered thy children together . . . but ye would not."
He holds that God, unwilling any should perish, did, before the foundations of the world, predestinate to be conformed to the image of his Son, all whom he foresaw it would be possible to lead to repentance. Such constitute "the elect according to the foreknowledge of God." Others He left to perish, as a mother would abandon her child to the flames, after every effort to rescue it had failed. He holds that in the very mechanism of mind, God has environed Himself with limitations, which make the loss of souls, not on His part, a matter of choice, but of awful necessity. The idea that God, in the easy possession of power to save all His children, would allow a part to perish eternally, they find it difficult to harmonize with either his character or His Word.
3. A step farther brings us to the doctrine of Sin and Holiness. According to Old Calvinism, they are qualities primarily of the nature, the disposition, the relishes, or sensibilities from which choices proceed. It ascribes to sin and holiness a kind of substantive entity, which renders them capable of being created, transmitted, and propagated. Our first parents, according to it, were created holy, but, in consequence of the fall, their nature was "corrupted in all its faculties and parts," and this corrupt nature, which has passed from them into each individual of the race by the laws of heredity, is truly and properly sin, deserving the wrath and curse of God. Their sin consisted, primarily, not in the transgression of the law, but in the results of transgression
The New Calvinists admits that men have inherited a diseased and fallen physical, and probably an imperfect and dwarfed mental nature; but this he regards as a misfortune rather than a crime, as calling for pity rather than punishment--especially so, when these inherited diseases and passions are manfully resisted and baffled. Attaching blame and ill-deserving to unavoidable appetites and innate dispositions he regards as irrational and unjust. He therefore relegates all holiness and sin, good and ill-deserving, to the voluntary department of man's nature--makes them qualities of choices and states of the will, and of nothing else. All moral character attaches primarily, he claims, to the ultimate, permanent purpose of the soul--the fountain from which all subordinate choices and actions flow.
4. The next step in advance brings us to the question what is the heart, or seat of moral character? The Old Calvinist, putting moral character primarily, as we have seen, into the nature of man--into his relishes, affections, dispositions--in other words, into his sensibility, makes it the heart. The heart he defines as the seat of feeling, desires, tastes, propensities, and passions.
The New Calvinist, holding that moral character, blame and praiseworthiness attach only to the voluntary states and exercises, makes the will the heart. According to one the sensibility, according to the other the will, is the moral faculty.
5. Here we reach the great question, What is regeneration, or a change of heart? It is, answers Old Calvinism, a mysterious work wrought by the Holy Spirit in the sensibility of the sinner, either by the infusion of some new principle, or the changing of some old. President Dwight defines it (Ser., vol. ii., p. 419) "as a relish for spiritual objects, communicated to the heart by the power of the Holy Ghost." Dr. Charles Hodge (see Theology, vol. ii., pp. 688-689) defines it as: 1st, "A physical change." (Using the word, doubtless, in its literal sense.) 2d, As "an irresistible change." 3d, As a "passive change." 4th, As "an instantaneous change." 5th, As "an act of sovereign grace, which can not be granted in sight or foresight of any good in the subject." 6th, As "a change in the production of which man in no way co-operates, any more than did the blind man in the restoration of his sight." 7th, As "one in which not even truth is a necessary instrumentality." This is the view substantially of all Old Calvinistic writers. They agree in making regeneration a work wrought by the direct power of the Holy Spirit in the affections, inclinations, impulses, and tastes of the sinner--in what the apostle calls the flesh--in something lying back of the will, from which, they claim, volitions and choices proceed.
There is probably no other doctrine in the whole Hyper-Calvinistic theology to which the New Calvinist takes more emphatic exceptions. He denies that such a change in the sensibility as this language indicates is regeneration, or any part of it, or in any way related to it. He claims that the sinner has all the powers and faculties requisite to submission and obedience to the divine law already, and needs no such change. Suppose, he asks, such a change were wrought in the sensibility of the liquor-seller, but from pecuniary considerations he should resist his better impulses and continue the traffic, is he regenerated, or morally improved thereby? Or, should he for the moment yield to his impulses, is he any the less a slave to passion and to self? Is he, by such a process, emancipated from the dominion of the flesh, or is he more hopelessly enslaved?
Regeneration the New Calvinist lifts into a higher and different department of man's nature. He makes it a change of moral character--change from ill to well-deserving--from blame to praise-worthiness, and he can not understand how a change wrought in the sensibility by another can render its object meritorious, or make a bad man a good man.
The law may punish a dishonest man, may force him to pay his debts, to restore to the owner what he has taken by fraud; but is he any the more honest? Is his moral character in the slightest degree improved? Can anything done to him, for him, or in him by another, make him honest? What is honesty? One's own purpose, self-formed, to be honest. What is truthfulness? One's own purpose to be truthful, and can not be an other's. What is holiness? One's own purpose to obey God--nothing else. A change in the sensibility may act as motive to induce a man to become honest, but that such a change is honesty, or per se makes a man honest, is simply unthinkable. No being or thing can make a man honest, truthful, holy, but his own choice. A change of heart, then, is primarily a change of purpose--a change of which the sinner himself is both the agent and the object--a change which no being can make or approximate but the sinner himself.
Or, to be more specific, here is the flesh, warring against the spirit, and the spirit against the flesh. On the one side are the fleshly lusts, appetites, dispositions, and proclivities, or, if you please, a corrupted nature. On the other are the claims of God, the tender yearnings of the Divine Spirit, the pressure of conscience, and the dictates of duty and right. Neither has the slightest compulsory influence on the will--the power of each being only that of solicitation or persuasion. The will is free, but in case of every impenitent man it is in voluntary servitude to the flesh, and it's this that constitutes his depravity. His great need is emancipation.
Regeneration is not, in the view of the New Calvinist, any sugaring over or improvement of the flesh, or the introduction of any new relish. It is not an organic, miraculous or even mysterious change. It is the will's voluntary transfer of its allegiance from the flesh to the conscience, the truth, and to the Spirit of God, as a man transfers his allegiance from one hostile government to another.
6. These two theologies agree that regeneration is in every case secured by the Spirit of God, but they differ as to the nature of the influence He employs. One makes it physical, the other moral; one force, the other persuasion. The sword of the Spirit, according to one, is physical omnipotence; according to the other, it is the Word of God.
7. We now come to the great subject of Atonement; and here we find the views of these respective schools equally divergent. Both agree that "without the shedding of blood is no remission "--that God can be just in justifying believing men only through the great sacrificial offering of Calvary. The divisive question is, How does this great transaction makes it safe to forgive sin?
The Old Calvinist places the necessity of this sacrifice in the Divine mind, its primal object being to placate the sense of divine justice. This was effected by inflicting upon Christ the penalty of sin, or its equivalent, which retributive justice demands. The divine law is honored, God is satisfied, and sin can be forgiven, because the punishment due to sins has been fully endured. In other words, Christ has purchased the pardon of his people by suffering in their stead the penalty due their sins.
It will be seen that this theory logically necessitates the doctrine, either of universal salvation, or that of limited atonement; for manifestly, if any one is lost for whom Christ died, the penalty in his case is twice inflicted--once upon the Lord Jesus Christ, his substitute, and then again upon himself. In this dilemma Old Calvinism adopts the latter theory, that of Limited Atonement, which is clearly set forth in the Westminster Confession and in the Savoy Declaration.
The fact that the sins of the elect have been adequately punished on the person of Christ would seem to be a sufficient ground for their acquittal. But Old Calvinists, not quite satisfied with this, have put another pillar under the superstructure of their hopes. They hold that Christ, who was under no obligations to obey the divine law on his own behalf, obeyed it perfectly; and that the merits of this obedience, or Christ's righteousness, as they are usually termed, are so imputed or credited over to his people that they stand legally acquitted. In other words, they are innocent on the ground that the law has been perfectly obeyed for them by their substitute.
The Old Calvinist must feel a "strong consolation:" (1.)In his case there has virtually been no violation of the divine law, no ill-deserving or sin, because through his accepted substitute he has perfectly obeyed.
(2.) The penalty of the law has been fully inflicted upon his substitute, as though it had not been obeyed at all. (3.) The debt, which had never been contracted, and which has been fully, adequately paid, is then graciously and freely pardoned.
The New Calvinist dissents from this theory of the atonement. To satisfy retributive justice, and placate the divine feelings is not, in his view, the work accomplished or aimed at by the atonement. He denies the possibility of satisfying retributive justice by inflicting suffering on the innocent. Justice demands that the murderer shall himself be punished, and the idea of satisfying that feeling by allowing him to escape, and punishing somebody else in his stead, he deems a monstrous absurdity. This theory seems to him a reflection upon the divine character. It reminds him of the German prince, who professed his willingness to forgive an enemy as soon he was hung. He holds that the giving up--the foregoing--this feeling of indignation and sense of justice is the chief element of pardon.
He listens with amazement to the assertion that Christ was not under obligation to obey the divine law on his own behalf, as he would to the assertion that the President of the United States is not under obligation to obey the laws of his country, and consequently scouts the Romish idea of supererogation, or imputed righteousness.
Perhaps all we can safely affirm is, that the great tragedy of Calvary is an event which can be substituted for the sinner's punishment, because equally efficacious in honoring the law, and sustaining the divine authority. But many New Calvinists, a little more specific, claim that the atonement pardons no one, saves no one, lays God under obligation to save no one, but that in suffering and death Christ "is set forth to declare the righteousness of God for the remission of sins . . . that he might be just and the justifier of him which believeth in Jesus." That is, the setting forth the righteousness of God, or the revelation which the sufferings and death of Christ have made of the character of God, is what makes him just in justifying. In other words, Christ has so inundated the universe with the knowledge of God, and so established confidence in his compassion and justice, he can pardon on his own terms, and the intelligent creation will join in the acclaim, "Just and righteous are thy ways, thou King of Saints," and no being will be offended.
To have forgiven the attack made upon Fort Sumter, previous to the war, would justly have subjected our Government to the charge of cowardice and pusillanimity, but after the sacrifice of three hundred thousand lives, and four billions of treasure to maintain its integrity and honor, it forgave the crime, and no such thought has ever been entertained. It was the revelation the war made of its character, which rendered it safe for our Government to pardon. May it not be the revelations of a greater event which have made God "just and the justifier of him which believeth in Jesus?"
8. In no respect are the two systems more divergent than in the instructions they give the inquirer for the way of life. The language of Old Calvinism to a lost sinner, if logically consistent, is this: You can not, by your exertions, or prayers, or anything you can do, either good or bad, effect in the slightest degree your future destiny. That, before the foundation of the world, was unalterably fixed. If one of the elect, your repentance, faith, and salvation are assured, --you can not be lost. If not, you can not be saved. "God, according to the secret counsel and good pleasure of his own will, hath either chosen you unto everlasting glory," or He "hath ordained you unto dishonor and wrath," "without any foresight of faith or good works, or any other thing in you as conditions or causes moving him thereto." This ordination is unalterable and eternal. You are but a helpless waif on the sea, and can only watch and wait and see which way the great pulses of things are carrying you; and millions under such instructions arc waiting, and perishing too.
The embassador of Christ, this system bids preach the Word, whatever that may mean, but affords no hint as to the relation existing between the preached Word and the regeneration of men. "Regeneration," says Dr. Hodge, "is a change in which not even truth is a necessary instrumentality."
The instruction which New Calvinism logically gives the inquirer may be found scattered throughout the pages of the Old and New Testament.
I have in this paper endeavored to classify theologies, not theologians. The two systems I have so imperfectly delineated seemed to me to be two paths through the realm of metaphysical theology, the one or the other of which, in its general outlines, we must, if self-consistent, adopt. If we are satisfied that the choices of the will are necessitated by states of the mind lying back of them, let us stand manfully by the whole Calvinistic system, with its arbitrary election, its imputed righteousness, its inherited sin, its forced regeneration, its limited atonement, and its changeless, remorseless fatalism. But if, on the other hand, we are satisfied that the choices of the will are free, let us repudiate the name Calvinist as one to which we have not the slightest claim, discard the Westminster Confession of Faith, and relieve ourselves of the burden and odium of all seeming indorsement of a system of doctrines which the intelligence and piety of the nineteenth century have relegated to the past, and let us adopt a symbol of faith so rational and biblical as to commend itself to the conscience of every man in the sight of God.
II. THE CONSCIENCE.
An accurate definition of conscience, and a clear apprehension of its functions, will afford, I think, a pretty satisfactory solution of most of the problems connected with the subject.
1. The theory that there is no such faculty, that what is termed conscience is the "creature of education," or a mere opinion that some actions are right and others wrong, is evidently erroneous, as it takes no account of the idea of right and wrong which makes such judgments possible. To pronounce an action right or wrong, there must be in our minds some standard of right, with which we compare it; for all we mean by the assertions "this is right," "that is wrong" is this accords, and that discords with such a standard. A definition which leaves out this primary idea is plainly superficial.
2. A popular but loose definition of conscience makes it the faculty which decides upon the rightness and wrongness of external actions. This definition is manifestly incorrect, and is the source of most of the misapprehensions pertaining to the subject. If any truth is established, it is that external actions have no character of their own, that they simply reflect that of choices, and therefore do not come within the purview of the conscience. The conscience is the arbiter only of intentions or motives. It approves of right intentions and of nothing else, and disapproves of wrong intentions and of nothing else; the question whether this or that action is right is a mere matter of classification, made by the understanding, the faculty of all others the most fallible. Here lies the error of Robert South, Pascal, John Foster, and others, who regard conscience as fallible, erring and educable. They ascribe to it judgments and imperfections which belong to an entirely different faculty.
3. A more discriminating definition makes conscience the soul's sense of right and wrong, in the sphere of its own intentions. Yet this definition is, I think, too narrow. Conscience certainly perceives the quality of choices not our own. We are as sure that a benevolent purpose is right, and a malevolent purpose is wrong, in our neighbor as in ourselves. The sphere of conscience reaches beyond the limits of our choices; its domain is the whole field of morals.
4. The definition of Joseph Cook, which makes conscience the faculty which perceives and feels rightness and obligatoriness in choices, also strikes me as defective, in that it makes conscience a complex faculty, including a function of both the intelligence and sensibility. In the interests of clear thinking, I am compelled to protest against yoking under one name faculties so dissimilar. I, by far, prefer making conscience purely intellectual, and the feelings which come from obeying or disobeying its behests simply effects--the one the faculty which inflicts the blow, the other the one which feels the pain.
The definition which thus limits conscience strikes me as the more simple,--the one in best accord with the literal meaning of the word, and the one sanctioned by common usage. We often speak, I am aware, of a tender, a peaceful, and of an aching conscience, as though it were the faculty itself that feels; but we just as often use the word where there is nothing present but the pure intellection. We call that conscience which advises us of the quality of other men's choices, and of the quality of our own before they are made, where no feeling exists. We are constantly applying the name to the pure perceptive faculty, and I can see no reason for complicating the subject by including in our definition anything more.
Another objection to this unnatural union is the diverse effects of wrong doing on these two faculties. Persistence in sin benumbs and cauterizes the one, but produces no such effect upon the other. The man who could commit murder with as little remorse as once he could steal a pin, had as undimmed a perception of right and wrong as ever he had. He was as keenly alive to any injustice done to himself as when a child. That sensibility benumbed and diseased under painful and protracted condemnation, and that clear perceptive eye in his soul, which no repetition of crime could cloud, and no deep of depravity could obscure, are certainly different things, and should be designated by different names.
No practical error is concealed in such phrases as "seared conscience," "perverted conscience," etc. In common parlance they are admissible, but strictly there is no such thing as a seared or a perverted conscience. Conscience is a sentinel in the soul, whose eye nothing can blur, and whose testimony nothing can pervert. All the other strugglings of the world are as nothing to the abortive efforts men are making to stifle its voice, or bribe it into an alliance with sin--a consummation, which, could it be effected, would eliminate hell, and sin, and nearly all suffering from the universe.
Again, all the functions usually ascribed to the conscience may readily be resolved into the one simple exercise of perceiving. (1.) It gives us the idea of right or obligation. (2.) Like a king it seems to command and forbid, to praise and blame, to promise reward and threaten punishment. (3.) It diffuses through the soul, as its behests are obeyed or disobeyed, the tenderest joy or the most poignant suffering men ever experience; but what more is all this than the vivid idea of duty, guilt, danger, merit and demerit, and their natural results involved in that dread idea of obligation? Then if all the functions of conscience may be resolved into the one exercise of perceiving, as I think they may, why not define it as the perceptive faculty?
I make conscience the faculty which perceives moral distinctions,--or, as the reader has already inferred, I identify the conscience with the reason. The faculty, in my view, which gives us necessary, absolute and self-evident truths, those fundamental postulates of the mind which lie at the basis of all knowledge, and make thinking and reasoning possible, and the conscience are the same. It is the faculty which give us the mathematical axioms, and in this particular we call it the mathematical reason; it gives us the ideal of beauty, and in this we call it the æsthetical reason; it gives us also the idea of right and obligation, and in this we term it the ethical reason, or the conscience.
I define conscience, then, as the ethical reason, or reason in the sphere of morals. I put the idea of right into the same category with that of space, and time, and cause, and God, as one of those intuitional verities, which challenge the soul's assent, and can not be doubted. It possesses all the characteristics of these intuitional truths:
1. It is unique and absolute; nothing resembles it, nothing can represent it. It can neither be simplified, defined, analyzed, or conveyed to a mind not already in possession of it. Whence comes it? How does the child know with such certainty that intentional cruelty is wrong? It must have come from within, it must be the soul's own spontaneity.
2. This idea is universal. There is not a rational being who does not understand such words as "right" and "wrong," "ought" and "ought not," or who for a moment averts his eye from their dread import. Empirical truths may be forgotten, but who ever forgets that injustice and falsehood are wrong? Make the most bewildered drunkard understand that some one has frauded you, or abused a child, and so soon as he can articulate the word, he will pronounce the deed wrong. The man whose hands are reddest in murder lives in spite of himself, in the awful presence of this idea. No flight can escape it, no exorcism cast it out. It will remain forever, a part himself, either as a singing angel or as the worm that dieth not.
3. This idea in all minds, and wherever found, is the same. Our differences about right and wrong are only seeming, never real. They relate not to the idea of right itself, but to its applications. The heathen mother, in justifying the immolation of her child, refers it to a principle we all recognize as binding. The Great Spirit, she says, or the highest good, requires the sacrifice, making it evident that it is not a question of right, but of mere classification, about which we differ from that benighted mother. The same is true in all our disputes about right and wrong. No two rational beings ever did, or ever can, differ about them. We all, consciously or unconsciously, assume the same standard, and bow before the same umpire. We are not here in this universe afloat; there are landmarks which no sophistry or depravity can alter or remove.
4. This idea of right is the Moral Law revealed in the Old and New Testament Scriptures, not in its details and applications, but in its essence and principle. The law proclaimed on Mount Sinai, and epitomized fifteen hundred years later, by the Son of God, is a transcript of this wondrous idea found in all minds. That divine law is but the demand and meaning of this dread idea, translated by the Author of the Bible, into human tongue, and by him promulged as the rule of human duty.
I express substantially the same thought in saying God made man in His own image, and wrote upon his soul the law of his own divine nature--the law of eternal rectitude--and then in the Revelation He has made, re-wrote it in human language, thus giving it on two tables, the tables of stone, and the "fleshly tables of the heart." Man is a law unto himself, his conscience is a Mount Sinai, voicing forth unceasingly the divine commands.
The identity of the law given in the conscience with that given in the Sacred Records is too apparent to need extensive proof.
(1.) It is assumed on every page of those Records. From Genesis to Revelation the terms righteousness and holiness are used interchangeably--doing right is everywhere made the equivalent of obeying God. The law, they assure us, "has gone out through all the world," and "there is no speech nor language where its voice is not heard;" and they impose upon every rational being, be he savage or civilized, by infinite sanctions, the duty of obedience. If the law of the Bible has not its duplicate in every rational soul, or does not lie somewhere within the vision of every man, where is the justice of such requirements and such threatenings?
(2.) This identity accords with the convictions of men everywhere. Every man, whatever his definition of sin and holiness, instinctively assumes that doing right is all God requires, and doing wrong is all He forbids; that this is all that, in justice, can be required of any rational being. Were the Bible to demand more, it would, I think, array against itself the honest convictions of mankind.
(3.) This identity is a very obvious truth--one which has won many an infidel from his errors, and assured him of the divine origin of the Sacred Word. Read to the savage or the civilized: "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God, and thy neighbor;" it challenges his assent; he bows before its authority and confesses his obligations to obey. In the dark hours of my own history, this fact has been to me what the cable is to the ship in the storm. I have recognized the law revealed in the Bible as the mandate of my own reason, and felt assured that it could be neither unsafe nor unwise to do what my higher nature condemned me for omitting.
(4.) This fact is manifest from the perfect correlation between the Bible and the conscience. The choices which satisfy the claims of the one perfectly satisfy those of the other. He who yields to either yields to both. Hence the peace passing understanding of him whose heart is in harmony with the precepts of the Divine Word, and the condemnation and suffering of him who tramples them beneath his feet. This the murderer has done, and how wretched! At midnight he has imbrued his hands in the blood of his fellow, he has buried the corpse, and to the best of his ability concealed the evidence of the deed; and now he retires to rest--but how restless! How like an angry maniac he tosses on his pillow! Let me lie down on a bed of fire, rather than feel the agony which wrings his heart.
"Sin is a pang where more than madness lies--A worm that can not sleep and never dies."
"He that sinneth against me wrongeth his own soul."
Why does the soul thus shrink and shriek over its violations of the divine law? Because the divine law is the soul's law; the former is the mere transcript of the latter, and can no more be violated without damaging the soul than can physical law without damaging the body.
It is not claimed that conscience gives us the Moral Law in its details and applications. It simply enjoins the great principle of love. Make the welfare of being thy supreme pursuit, is its mandate. Yet this mandate, while it does not specify, really includes all the applications of the divine law, as the generic includes the specific, and obedience to it involves and necessitates obedience to them. This is manifest from two facts: (1.) This choice of the good of being, like every other, must either be carried into execution or abandoned; (2.) The execution of this choice must include every possible duty, for it is not conceivable that doing anything but good can be obligatory. Hence love is the fulfilling of the law. In other words, following the dictates of conscience is the whole duty of man.
This somewhat startling assertion is a logical necessity. The conscience is the faculty, the only one which perceives obligation; and, as there can be no obligation which is not perceived, there can be no obligation other than it reveals. Hence meeting its claims comprises every possible duty.
I have, I think, in this paper established the fact that the idea of right, unique and incommunicable, identical with the Moral Law, universal, but the same in all minds, is a rational intuition, and the conscience which reveals it is the ethical reason.
It is the faculty which makes man accountable, lifts him into the solemn regions of the moral world, into relationship with the unseen and eternal, and exposes him to the peril of infinite issues. We are not prepared to say with Cousin: "Reason makes its appearance in us, though it is not ourselves, and can not be confounded with our personality. Reason is impersonal. Whence, then, comes this wonderful guest within us? and what is the reason which enlightens us without belonging to us? This principle is God.''1 We can not with this great thinker, make reason a synonym with "enthusiasm," [Greek spelling], it savors too strongly of Pantheism; but we must admit, as the name [Greek word], knowing with, jointly knowing, suggests, there is the semblance of duality about it. It appears in close relationship with another, in whose awful name it speaks. To say the least, it is God's viceregent. God stands behind it, almost within the field of consciousness, and invests it with his own authority. Hence men cower and tremble in its presence, and fear it more than all other tribunals. It affords us the great proof of the divine existence. From conscience to God is less than a logical step.
The so-often mooted question: Is conscience infallible? do its behests in every case accord with absolute right? has already been answered. If the view presented in this paper be correct, the question is: Are the intuitional affirmations, the fundamental postulates of the reason, which the mind is incapacitated to doubt, true? Are the mathematical axioms, are what we term first, self-evident and necessary truths, verities? In other words, are truths true? The question involves the same absurdity as the question: "Is the North Star north?" If the deep, solemn utterances of the conscience may not be relied upon as infallible--if, like the hands on our dial plates, it is sometimes right and sometimes wrong--nothing may be relied upon; the foundations are gone, the moral world is a vast chaos, and man's nature is a stupendous lie. "An erring conscience," says Kant, "is a chimera."
Is conscience a perfect guide? This is a different question. The Word of God may be infallible, but not a perfect guide in crossing the Atlantic or laying an ocean cable. In one sphere the Bible is a perfect guide; in another no guide at all. So with the conscience. In its own sphere, the realm of choices and motives, it is a perfect guide. Here it falls into no error, makes no mistakes. Choices which accord with it are perfect, and as all moral character lies in choices, the moral character of him who obeys the dictates of his conscience, is perfect. He omits no duty, commits no sin. A conscientious sin is an absurdity, a self-contradiction.
Outside this realm, in the application of this law of right to the routine of daily life, we are in the sphere of another faculty--the enfeebled, darkened understanding, and conscience ceases to be guide. Hence mistakes and blunders lie in the daily experience of every conscientious man. There is the same liability to misapply the axioms of conscience there is to misapply the principle of causation, or the axioms of mathematics. But such errors no more invalidate the authority of the former than they do that of the latter, nor do they necessarily involve any more moral delinquency.
Can the conscience be enlightened or improved? In effect it can. One's knowledge may be increased, his understanding cultured and the field for the application of the law of benevolence widened indefinitely. His sensibility may become more and more sensitive and responsive to its dictates; and perhaps the faculty itself, like others, is susceptible of growth, but its affirmations are already perfect, and no increment of light or darkness can change or modify them. The conscience of the most uninstructed Esquimau who shivers in Arctic snows is as unerringly perfect as that of the most erudite teacher of our theological schools.
This theory of the infallibility of conscience is often, I am aware, abused. It is made to countenance the somewhat prevalent notion that believing an action right makes it right, whatever the motive from which it proceeds--that if one is sincere, it is of little moment what he believes, or does, or what religion he embraces; for whatever he does in the belief that it is right--must be right.
There is some truth in this view and a great deal of error. Actions borrow whatever character they possess from the choices they execute. If one's choice is benevolent, or if he honestly intends to do right, his conduct, however imperfect, is right. But actions may be objectively right, with no such intention behind them. Nay, actions, even outwardly generous and philanthropic, may flow from the basest motives. Are such actions virtuous? They are often so regarded. Just here the millions deceive themselves. They deem their prayers and charities pleasing to God, and take the momentary feelings of self-complacency which such actions excite, to be the approbation of conscience, although their motives are profoundly selfish. This is a grave mistake. "There is a way that seemeth right unto a man, but the end thereof are the ways of death." Thinking an act right does not necessarily make it so; for its character, as every one on reflection must admit, depends upon the motive behind it. "Make the tree good and its fruit good, or make the tree corrupt and its fruit corrupt."
But if it is not always safe to do what we deem right, must we sometimes omit doing right, or do what we deem wrong? No, the only safe course is to become honest and always purpose to do right; then the stream like the fountain will be pure, the fruit like the tree will be good. No act is right, not even bestowing one's goods to feed the poor, which does not proceed from a benevolent choice, and no one enjoys the first thrill of an approving conscience until he bows his heart to the law of love, the supreme law of the universe.
Is this the error into which the great Apostle of the Gentiles was, in the days of his impenitency, betrayed? Both the old and new versions make him say: "I verily thought with myself I ought to do many things contrary to the name of Jesus of Nazareth." Does he mean to assert, as by many understood, that in persecuting the church of God he was following the dictates of his conscience? If so, one of two inferences is inevitable: either his persecutions were right, or his conscience was wrong, and should have been disregarded and resisted--either of which is too monstrous to be accepted, unless forced upon us.
But is there no escape from this dilemma? All the passage can possibly mean is, he thought it duty to persecute the church of God, he put his persecutions into the same category with his prayers and alms-giving, and thought them, as thousands of wicked men think their good deeds, pleasing to God. But does this prove that they were pleasing to God--prove that there was a benevolent choice behind them, or that he was actuated by a supreme purpose to do right? No, it proves that "a deceived heart had turned him aside," and is perfectly consistent with the theory that conscience was all the while lifting its voice, like a low funeral cry, against the madness and murder in his heart.
But does the passage mean as much as this? The word rendered "ought" is used more than an hundred times in the New Testament. It conveys the idea of necessity, and in a great majority of cases is translated "must" or "must needs." All the Apostle necessarily and probably says is: "I verily thought"--in order to subserve some ends, perhaps his own reputation, or the national honor or religion--"I must do many things contrary to the name of Jesus of Nazareth." There is no necessity for supposing the persecuting Saul intended to do right, or had the slightest regard for conscience or duty.
But whatever might have been the thought of Saul of Tarsus, the great Apostle was a wiser man. He had the profoundest confidence in the infallibility of conscience. "I exercise myself," he says, "to have a conscience void of offence toward God and man always." "I have lived [since my conversion] in all good conscience until this day." The wealth of the world could not induce him to violate his conscience to the slightest degree, and he had no fears of being misdirected by it.
Another inference equally erroneous, drawn from the infallibility of conscience, is that the Bible may be dispensed with, and a happy immortality secured under the guidance of this unerring faculty. If the inference is that, one within whose reach the Sacred Volume has never fallen, may, by the aid of the Holy Spirit reach heaven, guided by this inner light, we concede its truthfulness. Abel, and Enoch, and Abraham, and a host of worthies have been saved without the Bible. So doubtless have more or less of every age. But this fact affords no encouragement to the man who, having the Divine Word, willfully turns his back upon it. With its divine claims, and the myriad proofs which must fall within the knowledge of every man of ordinary intelligence, sustaining these claims, to treat it with other than profound and child-like reverence, is ipso facto repudiating the leadership of conscience and disregarding its most sacred behests.
Our subject throws light upon the relation which morality and the religion of Christ sustain to each other. Morality, in its true sense, is obedience to the law of right, found in the conscience. Religion, pure and undefiled, is obedience to the Moral Law found in the Bible. But these two laws are the same, therefore, religion and morality are the same. A religion which does not involve an upright, conscientious, and pure life, and a morality which does not involve obedience to the just claims of God, and the acceptance of Christ, when revealed to the soul, are equally spurious. There is an outward conformity to right which passes for morality, as there is an outward culture which passes for politeness; both are valuable, but neither secures the favor of God or the approbation of conscience.
This subject throws light upon the relation of reason and the Christian religion to each other. Infidels, in their warfare upon the Bible, have ever claimed reason as an ally, and perhaps this claim has received a quasi sanction in the opposition of Christian men to what is termed Rationalism. But no claim can be more unfounded. The reason and Christianity are in eternal concord, and can never be arrayed against each other. The great under timber of the one--the moral law--is the ever present revelation of the other. Both voice the same language, and impose upon men the same rule of life. Christians, in every age, so far from conceding this infidel claim, have regarded the reason as the bulwark of their faith, the hiding place of its power, and have ever carried upon their banners the challenge, "Come, let us reason together."
The opposition of intelligent Christian men to Rationalism is not, I think, an unwillingness to make reason final authority on all questions of religion and morals, coming within its purview. This all men do, for the sufficient reason they can not avoid doing it. They do it when they accept the Bible as a revelation from God, and reject the Koran. The old Patriarch arraigned even the divine conduct before the tribunal of reason. "Shall not," he reverently asks, "the Judge of all the earth do right?" His idea of right was the standard to which he knew God must conform his ways to be just. The same is assumed by the heavenly host in their song, "Just and righteous are thy ways, thou King of Saints," and no higher tribute ever reaches the Infinite ear. God himself appeals to the same tribunal in the question: "Are not my ways equal?" and in his condescending offer to reason with men. It is not true Rationalism which good men oppose, but a Rationalism which rejects authoritative teaching--rules the supernatural out of the Bible, discredits whatever fails to tally with a perverted understanding, and stands as the equivalent to unbelief in Revelation. To concede any antagonism between reason and Christianity has ever been regarded, by Christian men, as the act of a traitor or an enemy.
Does our subject throw any light upon the great question, What is the foundation of Obligation?
The law of obligation is plain; the Saviour announced it in the great command, "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thine heart, and thy neighbor as thyself"--in other words, make the welfare of being thy supreme end. This all intelligent beings are bound to do. The question is, Why are they bound to do it?
To this question almost innumerable answers have been returned. One reads thus: "We ought to choose the welfare of being, or to be benevolent, because God requires it." In other words, the will of God is the foundation of obligation.
Is this so? Is benevolence obligatory because God requires it; or, does He require it because it is obligatory? Which is the logical antecedent, the Will of God, or the obligation? Had there been no command would there be no obligation? or, were the command abrogated would all obligations to help and bless each other cease? The will of God is evidently not the ultimate ground of obligation, for the question instantly occurs, Why ought we to obey God? But the obvious and fatal objection to this theory is, it destroys the moral character of God, by rendering it impossible for him to do otherwise than right, and thus making him as undeserving of our praises as is the sun, which can not do otherwise than shine.
A better statement is, "benevolence is obligatory because it is right." But this is mere tautology. It is saying, we ought to love because it is obligatory, or we ought because we ought--in other words, obligation is the ground of obligation.
A better answer still is the one so ably advocated by Professor Finney [see his Systematic Theology], to wit: We ought to choose the welfare of being because it is valuable. But this answer is far from being satisfactory, for the question recurs, Why ought we to choose the valuable? and leaves the problem no nearer a solution.
I would prefer to say the nature of things is the foundation of obligation. But this is only saying, we ought to love because things are what they are--in other words, we ought to love because we ought; and really this is the substance, in the last analysis, of every answer which has been given; and if the position taken in this paper be correct, it is the only one which can be given.
The obligation to love, we have shown to be an ultimate and absolute truth. Then in asking for its ground, we fall into the absurdity of asking for something more ultimate than the ultimate, deeper than the deepest, beyond the farthest--for the ground of something, which by definition stands alone, and has no ground. When a moral being sees good, he is bound to prefer it to evil. This is one of the eternal verities of the universe. It is so, it eternally has been, and will be so. This is all we know, and all we can say about it. To ask why is as unphilosophical and useless as to ask why space, or time, or God exists, or why a straight line is the shortest distance between two points. When we come to such questions we reach the boundaries, not of knowledge, but the absolute boundaries of thought. It is well to bear this in mind, and avoid "foolish and unlearned questions which gender strifes."
Our subject, finally, affords a striking illustration of the benevolence of our Heavenly Father. The divine law was copied from man's moral constitution. "Do thyself no harm" is its heavenly injunction. The mind is a harp of a thousand strings. Patterned after the Non-created Intelligence, it is fearfully and wonderfully made. Its capacities and susceptibilities, its delicate and awful strings, its surpassing beauty, and its power of an endless life fit it for companionship with Him in whose similitude it was made. This mind, God would have rise in forever expanding beauty and bliss; but its laws must be obeyed, or its beauty will be changed to deformity, its bliss to agony, its existence to an evil. It will become--
"A wandering mass of shapeless flame,A pathless comet and a curse--
The menace of the universe."
To prevent this, its Maker has translated its laws into human tongue, and enjoined obedience by the sanction of three worlds. Who will not exclaim, "Just and righteous are thy ways, thou King of Saints." The religion of Christ is not arbitrary, unnatural, ghostly; it is health, harmony, rest, and peace unto the soul. To the weary, diseased, and despairing its glad question is, Wilt thou be made whole?
III. VIRTUE, FROM A SCIENTIFIC STANDPOINT.
THE term virtue is used in two slightly different senses: (1.) As a quality of a mental exercise or state. (2.) As a mental exercise or state itself. Using the word in the latter sense, I propose to inquire what is virtue, or what state or exercise of the mind does the word represent--a question which, though much discussed, is still unsettled, and to-day divides theology into two great schools.
Moral exercises--such as are virtuous or the opposite--"are such," says the great Edwards, "as are attended with the desert or worthiness of either blame or praise." "A moral action," says Professor Cochran, "is (1.) one of which it may rationally be said, it ought or ought not to be done; or one which a moral being may justly be required to do, or forbear doing: (2.) One for which the agent is blame or praiseworthy, and therefore deserving reward or punishment." In other words, it is an exercise to which obligation pertains, or one which accords or discords with Moral Law.
Virtue then is identical with love, the great imperative of that law. "All virtue," says Edwards, "may be resolved into love for others, God, or his creatures." "All virtue," says Dr. Dwight, "is summed up in the fulfillment of these two commands: Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thine heart, and thy neighbor as thyself." "Love," says Dr. N. W. Taylor, "is the sum of God's requirements, as it fully meets and satisfies the claims of God upon men." On these two commands--says the Great Teacher--"hang the whole law and the prophets." "Love is the fulfilling of the law," is the declaration of the inspired apostle. Love and virtue, then, I shall use as interchangeable terms, and my inquiry is, What is their exact scientific import?
Mental phenomena are divided into two classes--free and necessary. An exercise is free when the agent could, at the time and in the circumstances, do otherwise; necessary, when at the time and in the circumstances he could not do otherwise. This distinction is perfect. Every exercise of the human mind is either free or necessary. No one can be both.
In which of these classes resides the moral element? "In both, but primarily in the latter,'' answers the Hyper-Calvinist--putting, as he does, moral character into something back of the will, and making sin and holiness entities which may be created and transmitted. The question is a vital one: What does God require and forbid, and for what does he call the sinful soul to repentance?--one in reference to which no Christian teacher should remain in doubt.
Do we find the moral element in necessary phenomena? Are exercises which could by no possibility be avoided either good or ill-deserving? Is a child justly punished for remembering the experience of yesterday, or for the prevalence of the Asiatic cholera, or for any event in which it had neither choice nor voluntary agency? By definition, a necessary act is one the agent could not in the circumstances avoid; to say he ought is saying he ought to perform, not a miracle, that is thinkable, but an impossibility, that to which infinite power is inadequate. If there be a first and self-evident truth, challenging the assent of all minds, and never questioned outside the domain of theology, it is that ability is commensurate with obligation--that men are responsible for only such exercises as they could avoid. "Ask," says Professor Stuart, "all courts of justice from the highest to the lowest . . . Ask all legislative bodies who have any sense of justice, whether they make laws which render guilty those who never voluntarily transgress them, and they give but one answer. Indeed, there never has been, is not, and, from the nature of the case, there never can be any difference of opinion on this point of personal guilt.''2 "No man," says Professor Harris, "can blame or praise himself, or feel responsible for any event which is in no way dependent on his own free will."3 I will not insult the intelligence of my readers by fortifying a position so obvious, but will assume, as an axiomatic truth, that only free exercises can be either right or wrong, sinful or holy.
To what department of the mind do free exercises belong? Is freedom an attribute of the intelligence? Is perceiving, thinking, believing, remembering, knowing, or any other mere intellection a free exercise? Let us test the question: The agent, we will suppose, stands with open eyes, gazing into the cloudless sky. In these precise circumstances can he avoid perceiving it to be blue? The act of gazing and that of perceiving are distinct. The former is admittedly free. Is the latter? Evidently nothing is more necessary. In the full possession of his powers he remembers what occurred yesterday. Is there any more freedom here? Certainly not. With his present knowledge he believes the earth is round. Can he believe otherwise? He knows the whole is greater than a part. Can he avoid knowing this, or cease knowing it, as he can cease talking or writing? Is any intellectual exercise free? No: our cognitions, no sane man can doubt, fall into the category of the most iron necessity. Therefore they do not, and can not, involve the moral element.
We control, to a limited extent, it is readily admitted, the conditions of these intellections. We can gaze into the sky or decline doing so. We can turn attention to or away from truth, and render ourselves indirectly responsible for perceptions and opinions; but to attach moral character to anything beyond voluntary complicity with them would indicate a great lack of discrimination.
Is freedom an attribute of the sensibility? That feelings are helpful or hurtful, that they are a pretty accurate index of moral character, there is no doubt; but do they fall into the category of free and moral phenomena? The word love, I am aware, is used, used correctly, to designate emotions of fondness, attachment, etc. The mother, as she presses her babe to her breast, says, "I love it." She does love her darling; but are these emotions of the nature of virtue? Are they the kind of love the moral law requires? If exercised supremely toward God, and equally toward men, would they satisfy its claims?
Let us apply the test: I put my hand into the fire. The act is free; is the feeling of pain which results also free? In the precise circumstances in which I suffer, can I avoid suffering? Certainly not. No event more clearly falls into the category of necessity. Consequently, whatever may be said of the act, the feeling can be neither right nor wrong. I turn my attention to some object of suffering, and feelings of pity result. Is not the relation here between the act and feeling precisely the same? I call to mind some wrong to which I have been subjected, and feelings of indignation are aroused, plainly by a law just as necessary. I look upon some object of beauty or deformity, and feelings of admiration or aversion instantly arise; and as the current of thought changes, so changes the current of feeling, with as little fealty to my will as the flow of the river from its source. I can put into operation causes, doubtless, which will arrest or increase these feelings, as I can causes which will divert the current of the stream; but certainly moral character can be ascribed to nothing but the voluntary act.
So fixed and necessary is this relation between thought and feeling, the skillful artist can sit down and play upon the strings of another's soul, evoking from that wondrous instrument melody or discord, as he can from his cathedral organ; but the emotion and the music are equally devoid the free, consequently, the moral element.
The drunkard is indirectly responsible for his appetite--for it is the result of his own conduct; but it is in the conduct exclusively the moral element resides. When the intoxicant is swallowed, the whole guilt is incurred. Were the Divine Hand at that moment to interfere, and set aside the effect, his ill desert would neither be increased nor diminished. As well call the fire the incendiary kindles sinful as the drunkard's appetite, or any other appetite or feeling human beings experience.
But are not anger and envy, revenge and hate wrong, and fortitude and patience, and complacency in goodness right? They are desirable or undesirable, and therefore it is right or wrong to cherish them, as it is to harbor stolen property. Many of these passions also involve the voluntary element. Revenge, e.g., is a purpose as well as a feeling; but it is to the former only moral character attaches. We look in vain for the voluntary or the moral element among the phenomena of the intellect or of the sensibility. Our intellections and emotions are in the circumstances necessarily what they are, and can be neither good nor ill-deserving.
May not feeling enter as an essential element into virtue? Is not the love which fulfills the law the blending of the emotional and voluntary factors? This is the generally accepted view. "Loving God supremely," says Albert Barnes, "is fixing the affections supremely upon Him." Here are both factors, and as they are so inseparably allied, perhaps no practical harm comes of this definition. Still it is scientifically incorrect, and attended with insuperable difficulties.
(1.) As feeling is in itself a necessary phenomenon, and as no combination can change its nature or invest it with the moral element, it is difficult to understand how it can become a constituent part of virtue.
(2.) This definition makes moral character of all things the most unstable and fluctuating. It comes, and goes, and changes, as the ever restless feelings change. The cloud on the sky and the spray on the river are not more obedient to every surrounding influence.
(3.) Feeling, if an essential element of virtue--must be present in every virtuous act. An honest purpose to obey God, if they are absent, is not obedience. The tired and worn spirit, incapable through exhaustion or paroxysms of pain, of any particular emotions, is incapable of virtue, or any exercise acceptable to God.
(4.) If emotions are essential to love, it is not always easy to exercise this virtue. Can any one tell us how to love our enemies, if this be the meaning of the word; or how to put forth any feeling worthy the name toward the traducer, the evil doer, or the "evil one;" or how the hardened sinner or the dying impenitent, whose half-delirious thought can hardly reach the idea of God, can exercise toward him gratitude or affection? Would any intelligent man urge him to attempt it? Yet God requires of him supreme love even then and there, and his destiny depends upon rendering it.
(5.) We are required to love God with all the heart and mind and might. This certainly implies feelings, if they are an essential part of love, up to the very verge of one's capacities--a degree which would unfit him for the ordinary duties of life, and soon destroy life itself. Is suicide what the great commandment of the law requires? Christ loved the Father with all his soul; was he constantly wrought up to the highest point of emotion? No.
"Christ had his sorrows when he shedThose tears, Jerusalem, for thee;
And when his trembling followers fled,
In his dark hour of agony."
And he had his joys. He was the subject of all the variety and diversity of feelings which ordinarily play over the field of human consciousness; yet when roused like the billowy sea, and when calm as the summer noon, he loved with equal and perfect strength. Surely his love was deeper than the fluctuations and spray of emotion.
(6.) The law requires us to love our neighbor as ourselves, or to love every one with given, and consequently equal, strength; and if emotion is an essential element of love, to exercise equal affection for all. The wife is required to feel the same attachment to the stranger and the debauchee she does to her husband, and the loved ones who call her mother. All the special endearments which bind families together are forbidden, and the sweetest, holiest relations of this life are legislated against.
(7.) Just now it seems to me it is the ethical element of our religion, rather than the emotional, which needs to be emphasized. The latter is cheap and very common. Ancient Israel while "fasting for strife and debate," "took delight in approaching to God;" the word of the prophet, while they did it not, fell on their ear "like a very lovely song of one that hath a pleasant voice and can play well on an instrument;" and few now can gaze out on the wild bright spring or autumn day, or on the wilder and more mysterious night, spreading its great map of stars above them, without emotions of reverence and gratitude toward the Great Artificer; and fewer still can go to dark Gethsemane, where the Man of Sorrows "weeps in blood," without kindred feelings. Multitudes take this mere sentimentalism for Christian experience, and make its reproduction the ne plus ultra of Christian endeavor. The Christian teacher should avoid definitions which foster delusions so common and fatal.
Virtue or love resides in the will exclusively. Nothing is right or wrong, sinful or holy, blame or praiseworthy but its exercises and states. "The element of morality," says President Fairchild, "is found in the will alone; this is a necessary and intuitive judgment, and must be accepted as an axiom in morals."4 "The love," says Professor Harris, "which it [the Law] requires is not natural affection; it is not emotion, or desire, or passion; it is the free choice of the supreme object of service."5 How perfectly this accords with the formal definitions of the Sacred Word! "This is the love of God, that ye keep his commandments." "This is the love of God that ye walk after his commandments." "He that hath my commandments and keepeth them, he it is that loveth me." "Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends." "Let us not love in word and tongue, but in deed and in truth." "Love is the fulfilling of the law." This truth is woven into the very texture of the Bible. It stands forth on every page. It is not the thinker, the feeler, but the doer who is justified or condemned. There is not in the Sacred volume a single command which can be either obeyed or transgressed by a simple intellection or emotion.
In the realm of metaphysical theology this is a pivotal truth. It is decisive of the whole question of innate or constitutional sinfulness. Sin resides in choice alone, therefore it can not be predicted of "nature," "taste," "propensity," or of anything back of the will, and all the theories of inherited, constitutional, and transmitted sin are mere figments. The child may be born with strong animal propensities; but this is a calamity rather than a crime, and demands pity rather than punishment. On the other hand, regarding those amiable and natural traits which adorn the youth and age of so many impenitent men as virtuous, is equally illogical. Like rainbows and cloud-pictures they are beautiful, but only right choices are meritorious. The prevalent idea also that some occult holiness may be buried in the heart of one whose life is sinful, or some occult sin in the heart of one whose life is holy, is equally absurd and untruthful.
Our inquiries, then, after virtue must be limited to the will. Here we find two classes of exercises, (1) choices, (2) executive volitions. No one will claim that the element for which we are in search resides in the latter. These, therefore, we rule out, and narrow our inquiries to choices. And here we find it necessary to make another subdivision. There are two distinct classes of choices. (1.) Ultimate, or choices of ends, or of objects for their own sake. (2.) Subordinate, or choices of means to secure ends. The object of one is the good, of the other is the useful; one is the choice of absolute, the other of relative good. One, for convenience, we may call intentions, the other, choices.
We see, e.g., a man laboring in his field, or selling goods over his counter. On inquiry we ascertain that the choice which actuates him is that of money. But as money is not a good in itself, and therefore can not be chosen for its own sake, we recognize his choice as subordinate, and look for an ulterior end to which money sustains the relation of means. This, on further inquiry, we ascertain to be the welfare of the kingdom of God, or "the good of being in general." This choice we recognize at once as ultimate, for we can hardly conceive the "good of being" to be chosen for other than its own sake. In one or both of these classes we must find the moral element, for we look for it in vain elsewhere.
Does it reside in subordinate choices?
Such choices are free, and we ordinarily speak of them as good or ill-deserving. Still a little reflection will satisfy us that the moral quality we ascribe to them resides primarily in the ultimate choices, of which they are but the manifestation and expression.
(1.) It is not possible to characterize any conduct as subjectively right or wrong which fails to reflect, or somehow reveal the intention behind it. Ask the child whether one is good or ill-deserving for preaching the word, "bestowing all his goods to feed the poor," or even taking human life. "It depends upon the motive," is his answer. He knows it is the intention which determines the moral quality of actions--that purposeless conduct is as void the moral, or even the rational element, as the contortions of epilepsy.
(2.) I repeat the same thought substantially in saying that it is not possible for a man to condemn himself or for any one to condemn him, for conduct, however unfortunate in its results, knowing his intention was right; or to approve himself, or for any one to approve him, for conduct, however fortunate, knowing his intention was wrong. No man was ever justly rewarded or punished for anything but his intention, for in nothing else is he blame or praiseworthy. This principle is, I think, recognized by all just tribunals. It accords with the unerring verdict of conscience and with the Word of God. "Reward them according to their endeavors," is the decision of the highest court.
(3.) Carrying into execution one's intentions, or failing to do so, neither adds nor detracts from his merit or demerit. The assassin is none the less guilty because he is unable to strike the fatal blow; nor is the dying saint less virtuous because his hands and tongue refuse longer to execute the behests of his benevolent heart; nor has God added anything to his original holiness by peopling space with worlds. "There is," says Kant, "nothing in the world, and we can not conceive of anything out of the world, which can be held to be good without qualification except a good will. . . . This good will is good not on account of its effects or its fitness to accomplish any given end, but simply in itself as a right choice or purpose. It is therefore to be prized incomparably higher for its own sake than anything which comes to pass to gratify any desire, or even all desires together. Even if the good will is unable to carry its purpose into execution still the good will would remain, and it would have its worth in itself, like a jewel which glitters with its own luster. Success or failure neither adds to nor takes from this worth. These are like the settings of the gem, convenient for handling, and setting it forth to notice, but unheeded by the lapidary in estimating its real worth.''6
I am safe in saying there is but one right thing in itself, and but one wrong thing in itself; that is ultimate choice--the purpose lying back of executive choices and volitions, more permanent than the eternal hills, the incarnation of character, the fountain of actions, the supreme, responsible, controlling principle of the soul. Here, and here only, we find the object of our search.
The primary error of the hyper-Calvinistic school lies in not only overlooking this fact, but in ignoring any such thing as intention. It is not in all their theology. "Taste," "Nature," "disposition" have taken its place. These, and not the supreme choice, dominate the human soul; they are the primary seat of good and ill-deserving, constitute the heart, and are the fountain whence all other streams flow. Hence, by logical necessity, the doctrines of Passive Regeneration, Unconditional Election, Limited Atonement, Necessitated WiII, and Propagated Sin. The enthronement of ultimate choice, its restoration to its proper place, and a little logic would relieve this system of all such absurdities, and evolve a theology in harmony with the Word of God and the nature of man. To show that I do not overstate the importance of such a substitution, allow me to quote from Professor Charles Hodge:7 "We proceed," he says, "therefore, to state where the difference [between the Old and New Calvinist] really lies. All the old Calvinists hold that the result of the Holy Spirit's operation on the soul is a holy principle or disposition; Dr. Cox, if I understand him, holds that the result is a holy act. This is the whole ground of debate, and to Iookers-on it may appear rather too narrow to be worth disputing about. Dr. Cox, however, seems to think this is a subject of vital importance, affecting deeply our views of the whole system of divine truth, and our manner of preaching; involving the high questions of the grounds of man's accountability, the nature of sin and holiness, and of human liberty. And here we are sorry to say we agree with him. We are afraid this is a turning point. We do not see how it is possible to hold together the tattered shreds of Calvinism if this ground be assumed. Is Calvinism then a mere metaphysical system? We think not, but there are some metaphysical principles utterly inconsistent with it; that indifference is necessary to freedom, is one, and that morality consists in acts alone we fear is another."
Defining virtue then as right ultimate choice it remains to inquire what is right ultimate choice, on what object does it terminate? The answer to this question is given in the reason, and consequently there can be no difference of opinion respecting it. What is a rational being bound to choose? Good, evidently, the valuable. He can not conceive of obligation to choose anything else. Good will, then, or benevolence, is the equivalent, the synonym, the scientific definition of virtue. It is the essence of all right character, "the fulfilling of the law," and of all the claims which can rest upon a moral being. All virtuous choices and conduct are but expressions of benevolence, and borrow their moral quality from it, as the moon borrows its light from the sun. Nothing else is strictly right; nothing else secures the approbation of conscience and of God.
Just what this good is which the reason reveaIs as the proper object of choice--whether it be happiness alone, or whether other elements enter into it, it is not important to inquire. I will call it well being, or the "welfare of being in general." The choice of this for its own sake I conceive to be the essence and totality of virtue.
Is there any other virtue? Is more than one right intention possible? I answer no; virtue wherever it exists is essentially the same thing. It is the choice of good for its own sake. But good can not be chosen for its own sake without choosing the highest good--all good, good as such. Choosing more than all is impossible; choosing less is sinful; choosing anything else would not be a moral, or even a rational exercise. Benevolence then, and nothing else, is virtue.
We come to the question, what is sin, or a wrong ultimate choices--the most difficult question of ethics. (1.) It can not be a mere negation, or a refusal to choose the end intelligence dictates, for the sufficient reason such a choice is not ultimate. (2.) Nor can it be the choice of evil for its own sake. Whether such a choice is possible or not, it is so far as we know never made. (3.) Nor is it the ultimate choice of one's personal good, for this would be right, were there no other interest to choose. It can not then be per se sin. It is doubtful, also, whether one could aim at his own highest welfare without becoming benevolent, as the only rational means of securing this end. Sin must be the preference of some lesser to the greater good--a choice which carries with it a disregard of the good of being--a self-pleasing at the virtual expense and sacrifice of the general welfare--a betrayal of infinite interests at the dictates of impulse and passion. "Sin," says Professor Harris, "which is the essential evil, consists of self-isolation. . . . Sin and evil arise when a person by his own free choice isolates himself from the system, by choosing himself as his supreme object of service, and so puts himself into antagonism to both God and man, and does what he can to mar the order and beauty of the system and resist and annul its supreme law.''8
Are there degrees of virtue and sinfulness? Of the latter there certainly are. The Saviour asserts the fact, and gives the ground on which it rests, in speaking of the relative ill-desert of those who know, and of those who do not know their master's will, and yet do things worthy of stripes. He makes the guilt of sin increase with the light under which it is committed, or with the apprehended value of the good which it sacrifices. The murder of Garfield was a greater sacrifice of apprehended interests than the cheating of a landlord, and therefore a greater crime.
There are also degrees of virtue. God is infinitely more virtuous than any and all created intelligences together. The reason doubtless is, the good He apprehends and chooses is infinitely broader than that apprehended and chosen by any other being. Virtue and sinfulness then vary by the same law--one, by the apprehended value of the good regarded, and the other by the apprehended value of the good disregarded. The virtue of the Christian, then, may vary from time to time, as his sense of the value of the general interest, which he lives to subserve, is stimulated or obscured.
If the views presented in this paper are correct, it is not possible for virtue and sin to coexist in the same mind. They may alternate; the virtuous man may become sinful, and the sinful man virtuous, but they can not be both at the same time. Virtue is the choice of the welfare of being. Sin involves the refusal to make this choice. To say the two may blend, or that a choice may be both sinful and holy, or in part sinful and in part holy, involves the contradiction of asserting that one may both make a virtuous choice and at the same time refuse to make it. Sin and holiness mutually exclude each other. Moral character is either sinful or holy, wholly right or wholly wrong. A mixed moral action is in the nature of things an impossibility.
May not virtuous choices vary in intensity, and in this respect be more or less perfect? We speak, I am aware, of strong and feeble purposes, but I incline to the view that these qualities pertain to the considerations and feelings which solicit and sustain a purpose rather than to the purpose itself. A purpose or choice, it seems to me, is in its own nature complete and perfect. What can be the meaning of the injunction, "choose strongly," "purpose intensely?" Color and weight may, I think, be as properly predicated of choices as intensity.
May not the Christian, under the influence of sudden impulse, act inconsistently with his ruling choice and commit sin while retaining his benevolent intention? This question involves the absurdity of asking whether one may not sin in doing what he had no intention of doing; or whether one may not do wrong while intending to do right. In the estimation of men he possibly may, but not in the sight of God, "who seeth not as man seeth," nor in the view of conscience, or of any intelligent, impartial judge. To say he may, is a denial of the unquestioned fact that intentions determine the moral quality of actions.
We may, I think, assert as a great philosophical as well as biblical truth, that "no man can serve two masters;" that "a good tree can not bring forth corrupt fruit, nor a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit." "Make the tree good and its fruit good, or the tree corrupt and its fruit corrupt," is a precept of science as well as of revelation.
Our subject affords us the scientific definition of regeneration. The word designates a change of moral character--a change from a condition of blame-worthiness to that of praise-worthiness, or from an object of the Divine disapproval to that of the Divine approval. But moral character lies primarily in the ultimate choice; then regeneration is primarily a change of the ultimate choice. It is the acceptance of the welfare of being in place of self-pleasing as the end of pursuit. The Holy Spirit is active, doubtless, in all such changes, and we may reverently ascribe them to him, but the idea that the influences by which he secures them, are physical or compulsory, or other than persuasive, is at war with all the laws of the human mind, and all the teachings of the Sacred Word.
Regeneration sooner or later carries with it, as results, new thoughts, and feelings, and choices, and conduct, and we may, if we choose, include all these in its definition. I only contend that it is primarily a change of the supreme choice, and in the nature of things must be made by the subject himself.
It is objected that the view presented in this paper makes moral character exceedingly unstable--that like the pendulum one may swing from one moral extreme to the other, back and forth, as the hours pass. Viewing moral character, not as the prevailing predominant condition of the agent, but as the attitude of his will at the moment toward the right end of life, such fluctuations are doubtless possible and frequent. The will of the newly-made convert, in the imperfection of his knowledge and feelings, may oscillate for a season, like the disturbed needle, but its whole tendency is to permanence, and when fixed there is nothing in the universe more unchanging.
Even subordinate choices are often exceedingly persistent. The youth chooses wealth as the means of self-gratification, and when age has shed its snows on his temples his trembling hands are still reaching out for gold. If this is true of a subordinate, what shall we say of an ultimate choice! These heavens will probably pass away sooner. There is almost nothing else about a human soul so immovable. The choice of self-pleasing is made in the early years of childhood, and unless yielded through an influence greater than human the subject will bear it to another world, and retain it while life and being last. The change of such a choice may well be denominated "the new birth," for there can be none other so deep, and radical, and far-reaching. Professor Phelps has well said, "such is the imperial will of man, by which it is his privilege and peril to be what he will, that a purpose toward immutability grows out of its nature, and accumulates with time. Once bent one way, the sprig coils that way forever. Once set in the chosen mould, the compound indurates into granite. Such is character in the ultimate notion of it. A creation by man's own act--a free creation, a creation which can be reversed--yet once in being it tends to deathless being like that of God.''9 The chief danger is that we shall accept as conversion to God some change less radical than that of this "imperial will."
It is farther objected that putting religion primarily into the voluntary department of our nature makes it cold, intellectual, and simply ethical. But here is precisely where the inspired Apostle placed it. "Pure religion and undefiled before our God and Father is this: To visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and keep himself unspotted from the world." In other words, benevolence, or the principle which finds expression in benevolent and upright conduct, is, before our God and Father, pure and undefiled religion. Is such a religion as this cold, intellectual, heartless? Precisely the opposite is true. From a soul dominated by the selfish principle all the fresher springs of feeling are gradually drying up; all the tenderer, sweeter emotions, like buried embers, are dying out and giving place to the cold, gloomy and malign. This silent process is going on in every unrenewed heart. Selfishness is self-isolation, and can not but deaden the affections, wither the soul, and dissever every link which binds it to kindred being. Benevolence is the panacea. With the power of an enchantress it makes the soul's emotions gush forth like the waters from the smitten rock.
With the great Edwards and Finney, I make virtue the synonym of benevolence.
What else can it be? What else satisfies the reason, hushes the murmurs of conscience into song, fills the soul with the peace of God? What else is so fascinating? What other beauty like "the beauty of holiness?" Whose are the graves we keep fresh with our tears, the memories we weave into our songs, the names we will not let die? The men of consecrated lives, the servants of their generation. Even infidelity and atheism honor and revere such names.
With this definition of virtue how dread and obligatory the divine law! Were its great imperative "thou shall feel supreme affection toward God, and equal toward men," the question would instantly arise, "What for?" The combined feeling of the world can not feed a starving beggar, or comfort a homeless child, or control a human choice. Such a law would fail to secure the sanction of reason, for it would be neither feasible nor obligatory. The conviction that this is what the law of love requires, and that the sanctions of heaven and hell are behind it, can not but be terrible in its practical workings. On the other hand, the requirement of good will among the offspring of God, of the devotion of each to the highest welfare of all, commends itself to every man's conscience, and compels every man's intellect, whether his heart shall accord or not, to unite in the great acclaim, "Just and righteous are thy ways, thou King of Saints."
IV. REGENERATION.
THERE are few important truths more generally accepted than the divine declaration, "Except a man be born again, he can not see the kingdom of God." The sceptic, the atheist, men of every shade of opinion, admit that Adam's race, individually and collectively, need radical transformation to meet even their lowest ideal of perfect society. This truth permeates the Sacred volume. "It is," says Professor Phelps, "one of the constructive ideas of inspiration. It is pervasive, like the life-blood in the body. It is like caloric in the globe. If a tortuous exegesis shall evade it in one text, it is inevitable in the next. Wrench it from any text, where the theologians have found it, and its echo reverberates from one end of the Bible to the other.10 It is also a basal doctrine in theological science. Its true nature is decisive of the controversy between the two great schools of theology, and determines the logical mode of presenting the claims of God and the truths of the Gospel.
I propose, in this paper, to inquire, What is regeneration, or what change in the human soul is designated by the word?
There are but two theories worthy our attention.11 One--the Calvinistic,--is presented by E. H. Mclntosh thus: "Let us see clearly what regeneration is. It is a new birth; the implanting of a new life, the implantation of a new nature; the formation of a new man. The old nature remains in all its distinctness, and the new nature remains in all its distinctness. Regeneration is to the soul what the birth of Isaac was to the household of Abraham. Ishmael remained the same Ishmael, but Isaac was introduced."12
As to the Author of this new nature, the writer is equally explicit: "Regeneration is God's own work from first to last. God is the operator, man is the privileged subject. Man's co-operation is not sought in a work which must ever bear the impress of one Almighty hand. God was alone in creation, alone in redemption, and he must be alone in the mysterious glorious work of regeneration."
This definition, which probably strikes no one as satisfactory, has the sanction of many great names. It is substantially the one given by President Dwight; though clothed in his elegant diction we hardly recognize it. "A change of heart," he says, "is a relish for spiritual objects communicated to it by the power of the Holy Ghost." Of the "metaphysical nature" of this relish, he acknowledges himself ignorant, but illustrates his views thus:
"When God created Adam, there was a period after he began to be, antecedent to that in which he exercised his first volition. Every man will acknowledge that in this state, he was propense to the exercise of virtuous volitions rather than sinful ones. This state of mind has commonly been styled disposition, temper, inclination, heart, etc. In the Scriptures it usually bears the last of these names. I shall take the liberty to call it disposition. This disposition in Adam was the cause whence his virtuous volitions proceeded--the reason why they were virtuous and not sinful. . . . In regeneration the same thing is done by the Spirit of God for the soul which was done for Adam, by the same Divine Agent, at his creation. The soul of Adam was created with a relish for spiritual objects. The soul of every man who becomes a Christian is renewed by the communication of the same relish. In Adam this disposition preceded virtuous volitions. In every child of Adam who becomes a subject of virtue, it produces the same effects. . . . The communication of this relish as truly followed by virtuous willing and doing as the creative act would be which should immediately give existence to our volitions and conduct."13
His views of the continuance of the old nature after the implantation of the new correspond with those of Mclntosh. "After regeneration," he says, "the native character of the man still remains; his relish for sinful pursuits and enjoyments still continues; and his relish for spiritual pursuits is never perfected on this side the grave; . . . the regenerate man is really virtuous and really sinful--his true, entire character being a mixture of both good and evil."14
President Dwight has given us, in this quotation, a clear and able statement of the Calvinistic theory of regeneration--one in which, I think, all representative Calvinistic writers substantially concur. "In regeneration," says Dr. Bellamy, "there is a new, divine, holy taste begotten in the heart, by the immediate influence of the Holy Spirit."15 "Regeneration," says Dr. Charles Hodge. "is the influence of the Spirit of God, producing such a relish for the Divine Character that the soul spontaneously and immediately embraces God as its portion." "That regeneration consists in the production of a holy habit, a principle in the soul, disposing it to, and fitting it to, holy acts," he declares to be "the Calvinistic doctrine of regeneration."16 Professor Hyde17 says: "Regeneration is the act of God's Spirit by which He produces the beginning of a holy life in a depraved soul; . . . implanting a disposition to holiness in those whom he calls, and justifies as his children. He produces it by an inward, creative operation. The change is not self-wrought, or man-wrought." This is substantially the view of Calvin, Edwards, the Westminster divines, etc.
The theory is plain: Adam was created with a holy disposition, or nature, from which holy exercises spontaneously and necessarily flowed. In the fall, this holy nature was displaced, and a wicked one, from which only wicked exercises could proceed, was substituted, and has been transmitted to all his posterity "by ordinary generation." Regeneration is the partial re-instatement of this holy relish, by the direct operation of the Holy Spirit; but, on account of the co-occupancy of the soul by a wicked nature, the effluent products are a mixture of holiness and sin.
The theory is plain. Still, it seems to me, a principle of such transcendent importance as this relish, whether sinful or holy, deserves a distincter and severer definition. It is not, I understand, the seat of moral character simply--the fountain and source of all holy and wicked conduct--but moral character itself, sin and holiness in their essence.
"From this corruption of our nature," asserts the Westminster Confession, "proceed all actual transgressions." It also asserts that "this corruption of our nature, with all the motions thereof, is truly and properly sin."
I regret that the advocates of this view have not more clearly defined a principle, occupying so prominent a place in their system. What is its metaphysical nature? Is it an entity--a quality--or a mere exercise or state? To what department of the mind does it belong? Not to the intellect certainly. It can not be a cognition or thought. Nor is it an exercise of the will. "Adam was created," affirms Dr. Hodge, "with a holy disposition which existed prior to his first holy act;" and this, he asserts, "is fixed belief among Calvinists." We must therefore relegate it to the sensibility; and here is just where the uniform language of Calvinistic writers compels us to locate it. They represent it as "taste," "relish," "holy desire," "pleasure in, and appetency for, spiritual things," evidently classifying it with the propensities, desires, feelings, or appetites of our nature.
We readily concede, as Dr. Hodge has so ably shown, there is nothing abhorrent to reason in the theory that Adam was created with such relishes. Men are now born with propensities, tastes, and natural appetites. Nor is there anything unreasonable in the theory that these relishes were lost in the fall, and that a disrelish for holy pursuits took their place. And certainly there is nothing incongruous with things, in the idea that this relish is restored in regeneration. It doubtless is, sooner or later, and grows with Christian growth.
1. We can easily conceive of such relishes and disrelishes, but the problem is to get the moral element into them. The difficulty is like that the materialist finds in getting the not more mysterious principle of life into inert protoplasm. How can a being be good or ill-deserving, praise or blameworthy, where he has no voluntary agency? President Edwards keenly felt this difficulty. "The grand objection," he says, "against this doctrine is this, that it is utterly inconsistent with the nature of virtue, that it should be concreated with any person; because, if so, it must be an act of absolute power, without our knowledge or concurrence, and that virtue, in its very nature, implieth a choice, or consent, of a moral agent, without which, it can not be virtue or holiness; that a necessary holiness is no holiness."18 We do not wonder he was stumbled with this difficulty, for it is simply fatal to his theory. Whatever else may be true, it can not be that a moral being merits reward or deserves punishment for that with which he was created. From an idea so monstrously absurd, every human instinct revolts. Nothing could consign a man to ignominy more abysmal than that of starving or punishing a child for an enfeebled constitution inherited from an enfeebled mother--for nothing could be more unjust and cruel; and none would more loudly execrate the deed than the men who hold that that very child, for the corrupt nature inherited from Adam, "is bound over to the wrath of God and the curse of the law, and so made subject to death, with all miseries, spiritual, temporal, and eternal."
It will interest us to inquire how a difficulty so formidable is surmounted by the advocates of this theory. President Edwards does not, I think, attempt to remove it, but adopts the system in spite of it. Deeming it the less absurd of two absurdities, he accepts it, as he would nauseous medicine, rather than do worse. He rejects the theory of the self-determining power of the will, as involving the absurdity of an event without a cause, or of an event self-caused. The will, in his view, is moved from without. Motives produce and determine the character of choices, as the blow produces the vibrations of the bell. A holy choice, therefore, can proceed only from a holy motive, and a sinful choice only from a sinful motive. Adam must have been holy before he could perform a holy act; and sinful, before it was possible for him to sin. "It is the general notion," he says, "not that principles derive their goodness from actions, but actions from principles whence they proceed, so that the act of choosing that which is good is no further virtuous than that it proceeds from a good principle, or virtuous state of mind. If the choice be first, before the good disposition of mind, what signifies that choice? There can be, according to our natural notions, no virtue in a choice which proceeds from no virtuous principle.''19
But neither Calvin nor Dr. Hodge seems to see any difficulty here. "I deny," says the former, "that sin is the less criminal because it is necessary."20 "The desire for holiness," says the latter, "is holy, no matter how it rises in the mind. The common judgment of mankind is, that moral character belongs to the desire of moral objects. Its morality lies in its nature, independently of its origin. We think that a vast majority of men agree with President Edwards, in thinking such a disposition being natural, or from a kind of instinct implanted in the mind at its creation, is no objection to its being of a virtuous character. Does the maternal instinct cease to be amiable because it is natural? Does the disposition to kindness and gentleness lose its character by being innate? Are not the intuitive love of justice, abhorrence of cruelty, admiration for that which is noble, which God has implanted in our nature, objects of app