THEOLOGY FOR A VILLAGE.*
THOSE who believe in no infallible human basis for divine truth, who hold that God has not delegated either to documents or to any human institution His own infinite command over the human conscience and heart, who regard the Bible as the human record of divine acts and lessons, liable, like all human writings, to a large admixture of refracting and disturbing influences which warn us that we can never be absolved from the duty of con- sulting God's Holy Spirit for ourselves as to the drift and general scope of its teaching, are constantly taunted with the criticism :
It is all very well for cultivated men capable of inquiring into subtle distinctions to take up such a position as that, but if Christianity is meant for the ignorant, the miserable, the degraded, you must go to them with some broad and simple answer to the question,—why do you believe this?' And if you cannot answer either with the Evangelical Because this book, which is absolutely infallible, tells me so,'—or with the Romanist or Puseyite 'Because this 'great Church, which has held a
* rakes &room. By a Northamptonshire Rector. With a Preface on the Inspiration of Holy Scripture. Maemillan and Co., London and Cambridge. monopoly of the right of declaring God to man from the first communication made by God to man, tells me so,'—you are in no position to impress minds which look for some tangible end easy test of divine truth.' It is easy enough to answer such objections, and more than answer them, expose them, theoretically ; but it mast be admitted that comparatively few of the theulogiuns who put the question of inspiration on the most satisfactory basis throw their theology into the form that is best adapted to go home to the hearts and, minds of the most ignorant and vulgar of those who need it. Such a volume as the present, therefore, which seems to us to preach the pure essence of Christ's GoTel in the simplest language, and yet with a warmth and force that cannot fail to drive it home to men cultured or uncultured alike, and this without any admixture of false or confusing theory as to the true sources of divine authoritativeness, is as great an accession to the cause of a deep theology as the most refined exposition of its fundamental principle. The Northamp- tonshire Rector seems to us to combine in an unusual degiee the depth and insight of a true theologian with the fervour and apostolic simplicity of a true pastor. By far the larger num- ber of these sermons aro so plain and homely that any village population might follow the force of every word,—so distinctly founded on personal experience and conviction that the most cultivated man would find in them new light and a new fresh- ness of apprehension for old light.
We do not indeed wholly agree with the too sharply out themy of inspiration which the Northamptonshire Rector enforces in his preface. Thererhe maintains that wherever prophets, or apostles, or evangelists profess to reveal the character anti life of God, in other words, speak as prophets, divines, and apostles, they are infallible ; but where they only narrate human events they are to be regarded simply as human witnesses, more or less credible in proportionto their opportunities for accuracy, like other witnesses. The defect of this sharply cut theory seems to us to be that it requires an absolute lino of distinction which does not exist. God reveals Himself so often by acts as well as by lessons, by symbols as well as by thoughts, that it is in a vast number of cases absolutely impossible to separate the divine from the hum an,— and this, too, increasingly, as we approach the climax of revelation, where the divine and human are absolutely blended in the Incar- nation. Our author points us of course to passages where the prophet begins his teaching with "Thus said' the Lord," and where St. Paul himself distinguishes between what he says out of his own head and what he says under the direct influence of Christ's Spirit upon his own ;—but in the first place few comparatively of the writers in the Bible venture to draw such distinctions, and even St. Paul, who sometimes does, knows how very difficult a distinction he was drawing, as our author must have himself observed when he quotes St. Paul's own language, "And she is happier if she so abide after my judgment ; and I think also that I have the Spirit of God,"—intimating that he himself was often unable to tell where the controlling force of the divine inspiration ceased and the gropings of his own Christianized judgment and understanding began. Moreover, as we said, thought the prophets and St. Paul do sometimes distinguish between what they say under a divine constraint and what they say without such divine constraint,— time narratives of both the Old and New Testament are often even more important as organs for revealing the character and will of God than even the prophecies or epistles, and yet we have no attempt at any distinction between inspired history and history simply supplementary and filling up the lacunm of inspiration.
The Northamptonshire Rector feels the difficulty, and has to supplement it by a now canon :—" So far as the history contained in the Bible is the basis of any spiritual truth, it falls within the scope and object of inspiration, but as regards all purely secular history contained in the sacred books, it is to be regarded as below the level of inspiration, the Holy Spirit not stooping to teach such subjects as these." This seems to us to raise a host of new difficulties. What aro we to say, for instance, of the evangelists'. narratives? Is not every detail in them "the baths of spiritual truth?" Can we possibly sever the fact from the spiritual teaching of our Lord's life ? Yet, on the other hand, can any honest critic who has studied the various "harmonies" deny for a moment inaccuracies of the records, in- consistencies even in the report of His own words, and accounts contradictory as to details of time, place, and fact, of the self-same events? We see no escape from the truth that revelation was never meant to have any infallible human organ at all,—that it was committed absolutely to the keeping of man to answer thery,/ deepest wants of man, that it was necessarily coloured more 9 less by the minds through which it passed, and that the verifica- tion of its deepest truths is the work of the Holy Spirit on the mind of those who hunger and thirst after them. The Northamptonshire Rector himself holds by this last position, and we conceive that, with its aid, he might have dispensed with that unsatisfactory and almost arbitrary distinction between what is divine and what is human which it is so great a part even of the purpose of the Gospel to do away with. We may well distrust a broad line of distinction between the divine and human, the sacred and the secular, in a revelation which culminates in the " Word made flesh," the divine become human, the sacred become secular. When the Northamptonshire Rector tells us that "there is within the spiritual nature of man a spiritual faculty of hearing, an inner ear,—which God Himself has implanted in the soul, and which therefore has power to catch the utterance of the divine voice,"—to which "our Lord Himself spoke when He said, 'He that hath ears to ear, let him hear,' "—he reaches, we believe, a far surer and safer prin- ciple,—one, too, always recognized by our Church,—than the one he has before laid down ;—though it may be one which the shy sobriety of the English understanding is exceedingly reluctant to insist upon, even if by no means reluctant practically to use. Say what we will, it comes to this after all,—that Revelation must reveal God to us, or it is nothing ; and if it does reveal God to us, no apparent insufficiency in the external human evidence will shake our spiritual bold of the divine truth.
Though differing thus from our author in his theory of inspi- ration, we may say that we heartily accept his actual teaching as a true picture of what revelation teaches us, and thank him for it as one of the most profound that was ever made perfectly simple and popular. He begins with the broadest statement of the whole object of religion, whether called natural or revealed—that it is to give us a real and personal knowledge of God ; and the broadest statement of its method, that this knowledge of God is to be given us not by any vain beating of aspiring human wings, but by the self-unveiling of God. Instead of assuming man to be naturally an alien to God, and only capable of taking up the relation of child to Father, he starts with asserting in the most emphatic way, on the authority of revelation, that this is the actual, and in the truest sense natural, relation of man to God, and that so far as sin disturbs it, or ignorance impairs it, this is in derogation of the divine claim, not in virtue of any other. In one of his sermons he says, with his usual simplicity and force :— "It is a common view among Christians to hold that God's Fatherly love is extended only to those who are living in the right use and exercise of Christian privileges. They cannot think that this love is extended to the ignorant savage while still a heathen, or to the equally ignorant and heathen man among ourselves. They limit God's Love to the good, and look upon the Church of Christ not as existing for the sake of the world at large, but only for the sake of those individuals within it who make a right use of its privileges. They consider that the Church has (if we may say it without irre- verence) the monopoly of God's Love. They forget that the leaven is hid in the meal for the sake of the whole. They forget that the Church has been established in order to bring tho world to God. And so they get to think and speak of their own great privileges is being a sign that God loves them to the exclusion of all who do not share those privileges. This is quite contrary, I believe, to the Gospel of Christ. Instead of my Christian privileges being a sign that God loves me to the exclusion of those who do not enjoy the same privileges, it is just the reverse. My privileges are a pledge not only of God's Love to me but also of God's Love to those who have not these privileges. He has made me His child at baptism. He has given to me the great and precious gift of the New Birth, and made me partaker of the Divine nature. Why has He done this ? Because I was His child and He was my Father before. This is why He has come near to me and raised me out of my fallen state, and claimed me for His child once more by adoption, and gifted me with a new nature, and made me partaker of His exceeding great and precious promises in Christ Jesus. It has all been done because He was my Father and I was His child before."
But while thus taking the love of God as the ground-motive of all revelation, and as at the basis of human nature itself, there is none of that humanitarian shrinking from the truth of divine justice which we are apt to find in the sentimental reli- giousness of the day. While proclaiming, as our author truly expresses it, that "God's love is higher than Heaven, deeper than Hell," he feels no temptation to lose the depth of that teach- ing in a doctrine of mere divine good nature. He tells us in a fine sermon on the curse of sin :—
" I speak with all reverence when I say, that even God Himself could not separate the curse from sin, so as to make sin not to be accursed ; because the very essence of sin is a curse. We know that sin brings its own punishment ; we see it, as I have said, in the world, in the misery and wretchedness which it inflicts upon its miserable victims. This is only part of the curse of sin ; in that curse there is a deeper depth of misery yet. For not only does sin bring its own punishment, but it is its own punishment. There does not need any sentence to be pronounced upon it—in itself it bears its curse. And this is by far the worse part of that curse. The worldly rain that follows sin is part of the curse, it is the necessary fruit of sin ; but the intense misery of sin is that the very core of the curse is in the heart of the sinner. What- ever his outward lot, within him he bears that curse. Now why is sin thus a curse to the sinner, even apart from all outward punishment ? It is because sin is the very opposite of God. God is the only source of happiness, as He is of life. He is the one only fountain of blessing. Just as without God there can be no life, so without God there can be no happiness. Sin is the opposite of God, as darkness is thl opposite of light, or death of life. Nay more, sin is the active opponent, the enemy of God. Here then is the reason why sin is itself a curse : it is the enemy of God. Therefore it must be a curse. He is the only source of happiness : His opposite must be misery. He is the only source of blessing; that which is at war with Him must be a curse !"
Nor does the Northamptonshire Rector confine himself to that part of revelation which only tells us what our birthright is, and not how we may keep it. Some of the best sermons in the book are on the power of the Incarnation to subdue temptation and doubt, to manifest for us the strength by which alone we can be the children of God. There is nothing more difficult than to ex- press the teaching of the Gospel in modern language without either frittering away its force or tinging it with a foreign and self-conscious colouring. It is part of the beauty of these ser- mons that while they apply the old truth to the new modes of feeling they seem to preserve the whiteness of its simplicity. Take, for instance, this short extract from a beautiful sermon on Christ's promise to "manifest Himself "to those who keep His commandments :— " The world has seen Him no more ; it has forgotten Him ; yet there has stood One in the midst of it whom it knew not. It has thought of Him only as among the things that are past and gone, yet one by one those whom He has called out of the throng have been learning the secret of His abiding presence. By many a painful lesson they have learnt how Ho would manifest Himself unto them, and not unto the world ; by the persecution and unkindness of men ; by sufferings patiently borne, looking unto His cross; by many a bitter conflict with their own hearts ; by the tears shed over past sins ; by prayers and watchings ; by a humble, lowly walking in the way of His command- ments ;—by all these they have step by step been led within the veil which guards the Shechinah of His Presence. He has drawn them to Himself by the loving discipline of sorrow and suffering in their out- ward lot, by the strength and consolations of His grace within. He has come to them, and manifested Himself unto them ; not in the wild trans- port of excited feelings, but in the calm, deep consciousness of a serene and most tranquil companionship ; a companionship itself unseen, but of which the fruits were visible to men. And the world which saw Him not, and did not believe in Him, could not help but take knowledge of these His companions ; now doing them honour, now hating and persecut- ing them even unto death, yet ever forced to admire the holiness it could not imitate, and constrained in the person of the servant to yield an involuntary homage to the Lord. Thus have they been witnesses to the world for the reality of that unseen Presence."
There will be plenty of critics to accuse this volume of inade- quacy of doctrine because it says no more than Scripture abou.t vicarious suffering and external retribution. For ourselves we welcome it most cordially as expressing adequately what we be- lieve to be the true burden of the Gospel in a manner which may take hold either of the least or the most cultivated intellect with- out any artificial warranty from infallible book or infallible Church. We shall never be rid of what we may call artificial doubt,—doubt arising not from the intrinsic grandeur of revela- tion when compared with our feeble powers, but the false theo- ries of evidence with which it is bound up,—till we can believe that God Himself can show us the truth as much now as before the rise of priesthoods or the composition of books, without dele- gating absolutely His own spiritual authority either to a book or an Order,—without catching up either authors or hierarchies into any participation in His omniscience.
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