SPIRITUAL PHRASEOLOGY.
IT has often been observed of the words of the greatest writers, like those of St. Paul, Augustine, and Luther, that they seem to have a life of their own, that they have "hands and feet," and vital force and motion. The same thing is tree of almost all the English Words chosen by our translators of the Bible to express the thoughts
of the original. The reason is, no doubt, that in all these cases the reality named is felt and known by the highest class of minds to be so real and infinite, so independent of their own thought that they instinctively select words conveying almost the impression of bodies inhabited by, but not trammelling or confining, an independent spirit. That which gives us the sense of independent life, is the great re- serve of unexhausted power which we feel to be at the disposal of all living beings. With dead things this is not so; the number of pro- perties and characteristics can be enumerated and exhausted without any fear of a new ebullition of unexpected power. But where there is life, there is an inward reserve of strength at the control of the living creature. And in greater or less degree this applies to all names of living powers, and applies to them the more, the more there is of infinitude and incalculable depth about the living force so named. Hence the words which were first chosen to express super- natural realities by men who had a fresh apprehension of these realities, were more like living bodies than mere names; they were but signs of powerful and present agencies. The name was the token of some- thing beyond itself, and was approached with a reverence which cannot attach to anything that can be exhaustively defined. The word, indeed, might be defined and killed. But no logical analyis or limitation of the word would limit the thing. The "Name of the Lord" is used as the symbol of His Life. If there existed a reality too great for definition, then the strict limitation of the name would simply destroy its utility as a sign; but would not and could not affect the living power which it had been used to express.
Hence the astonishing force of the original words of Scripture, and also of the words chosen by our translators to render Scripture. They were words indicating and expressing, wile not confining or hampering, infinite powers, personal agencies, divine acts. But two very different series of influences have attended these words in modern times, and robbed them of their depth ; one scholastic—the thinning process of dry logical abstraction, which has torn away the words for separate examination and forgotten that they are the organs of a divine life; the other vulgarizing—the degrading process of a certain coarse and almost sensual familiarity with these words, the root of which lies partly in the passion for strong sensations, and partly in the vulgar fancy of monopolizing God. Both these classes of influences have in different directions equally corrupted the spiritual language of Scripture, the one attenuating and petrifying— depriving the living words of their power and life, and reducing them to definitions; the other animalizing—leaving them their life, but pulling it down to our own level.
(1.) ,Almost all educated men are familiar and weary with the pallid scholastic paraphrases of spiritual phraseology, which ra- tionalizing interpreters of Scripture, who have not the courage to face its simple meaning, either in opposition or otherwise, pour forth in painful profusion. Every reality vanishes at their touch into a " great idea," and its name, instead of being the token of some- thing inexhaustible, becomes its measure and its limit. This is the school which " explains away" all the difficulties of an infinite world by simply ignoring what is inconsistent with some fanciful system or theory which it has learned to expound as Christianity. It differs from the modern school of Essays and Reviews chiefly in this, that while the latter frankly and broadly acknowledges the wide dis- crepancy between the actual meaning of Scripture and the residuum of truth which it distils out of that meaning, the old rationalizing school did not admit the difference, but wished to make out that St. Paul really meant nothing more than their own watery paraphrases of his meaning. But both schools alike use a blanched and ideal spiritual phraseology, exceedingly different in kind from that of Scripture, and exceedingly far removed from the words of vital force and original freshness which distinguish the writings of all the great spiritual reformers. Abstract words take the place of personal names, attributes supersede the living beings to whom they belong, and the religious phraseology of cultivated men falls into a style which would certainly never take any hold of common men's con- science or affections. It is what we may call an inorganic phraseology. Instead of having " hands and feet," that grasp us with a living touch, it has the transparency of crystal, and the smooth surface of ice. We take the following specimen at random from one of the most elegant and cultivated writers of the school to which we allude : " We can conceive no healthy bond of comprehensive union in faith and wor- ship, but such as springs from sympathy in great fundamental spirituakpm- ciples, which have an undying root in humanity., and exist in our highest consciousness as the revelation of something above and beyond ourselves. Earnest and thoughtful natures feel there is a mysterious awfulness in these principles, and pray with trembling for a more complete realization of them in heart and life. lien call them by various names,—conscience, the voice of God, the moving of the Spirit, the highest reason ; but they mean at bottom one and the same thing: a profound sense of relationship and responsibility to an in- visible Power, in whom their highest conceptions of excellence terminate, in self-devotion to whose will they find the strongest incentive to virtuous exertion, and from reliance on whose justice and mercy comes their firmest support under sorrow and trial. When these principles stand before us in the light of history, fixed and embodied in a life of perfect religiousness, like that of the Christ of the New Testament, they acquire a distincter aspect and more decisiveiuflnence; human reverence and affection more largely mingle in them ; the Divine itself ° ' humanized ; and the spiritual sympathy which grows out of them, and unites men in faith and worship, becomes at once purer and more intense."
This is a tasteful and sincere religious style, but of the pure idealistic stamp that is now so widely spread—an abstract kind of language that no more lays hold on man with any force of its own than philosophy itself. Compare it with the sort of language Luther used : " We tell our Lord God that if He will have His Church, He must uphold it; for we cannot uphold it, and if we could, we should become the proudest asses under heaven." There you have .the living language again which grasps the mind with force of life. We know that the man who said that, realized the immediate rule of God over His Church; and did not merely feel after the mighty shadows of divine ideas. The abstract school sublimates divine realities into spacious ideas.
(2.) But there is an opposite danger quite as great to an Englishman, especially to an uncultivated Englishman—that of appropriating and dwarfing the measure of divine things to our own powers of ap- prehension, by ignoring entirely all that we cannot see. And the effect on spiritual phraseology of such vulgarizing and selfishly appropriating impulses in the uneducated sects is far more repulsive, though we do not know whether it is, for the quarter in which it arises, at all more morbid, than the paralysis of the abstract school. To those who do not know the extent and depth of that vein of religions literature in England, which Mr. Dickens has scarcely caricatured in " the Shepherd" and " Mr. Chadband," it would cause a positive shock to read the style of communication which runs habitually through some of the antinomian organs of the uncultivated sects. Against sack publi- cations as the Earthen Vessel and Zion's Witness, there certainly can be no complaint made of any want of realistic language. The phraseology is living enough, and we have no doubt that in a large number of in- stances, repulsive as it is, it is founded on sincere personal experience. But though fastening a living touch upon you, it is not the subdu- ing touch of manly faith like Luther's, but a crawling fleshy religious sensuousness that curdles all the higher elements of the mind and conscience, as the touch of a snail curdles the blood. When religious men say, "My covenant God kept me awake nearly the whole of the night in opening up and unfolding to my mind this dear portion of his own word, 'The wind bloweth where it listeth, " we feel a real thrill of disgust which is not, we think, due to any mere revolt against uneducated sentiment. There is a gloating and appropriating tone about such phraseology which seems the very opposite of true faith. Where the same writer maintains, as lie does very gravely, the shocking assertion that when, as a boy, lie stole a halfpenny, his " cove- nant God," who foresaw his election, interfered to prevent the expo- sure of his guilt by putting it into the heart of his employer to give him a halfpenny, which made up the deficiency,* we have a key to this vulgarizing tendency in the phraseology habitually used. It vulgarizes so fast, because it is the expression of minds greedy of spiritual atten- tions from their "covenant God." The whole language is that of men on the look-out for exciting and individual-sensations that they can have all to themselves. We do not mean to deny that the same spiritual greediness ascends into higher levels both of culture and ability. The whole "spiritual experience" school, of which Bunyan is the most distinguished representative, abounds with it. But it is a gross parody on even the most subjective language of Scripture ; for even the most touching Psalms, and the most fervent of St. Paul's Epistles, always merge the religious sensation in the infinitude of the divine life which causes it. Solomon's Song, accordingly, is the favourite repertory of this phraseology. The divine influences are uniformly spoken of with the horrid lusciousness of an epicure's vigilant senses. " Oh, the Bethel visits, the rich anointings, the sweet smiles of our precious Jesus !" writes one gentleman in the Earthen Vessel. On the other hand, all the most abhorrent physical epithets are lavished upon human nature. " What is man morally ? Naturally a worm, intellectually a glowworm, morally a worm in corruption and filth—a worm in the mud," is the language of the most temperate of these writers. Some sensuous epithet always accompanies either praise or blame. " Our smiling and truly happy brother, D. Wilson of Clare," is the name for one Baptist minister ; the pamphlet of another has been " read with much unction and dew ;" the mind of a third "was sweetly led out," previously to leading "four females and one male into the watery grave" [of baptism]; a fourth teaches in " the lovely cot of the Clare cure of souls ;" and so forth. -Ralf the sermons preached by these good people speak of religion as if it were a choice dainty which not everybody may eat. Zion's Witness itself is called "a feast of fat things." "No great enjoyment of Christ to-day," they register in their journals, " but the mind sweetly fixed on the unchangeability of Jehovah's love." We do not mean that such lan- guage is a bit worse, though rather coarser, than the sentimental equivalents in the fashionable sects; we only wish to show :in its Plainest form the source of this degradation, in the sensuous egotism of men. For our own part, if it were devoid of this sensuous self-regarding taint, we might prefer the narrow realism of pare_ ignorance to the broad idealism of excessive culture. We should not object more to the quaint mode of thought in the following sentence,—" Why did He, instead of keeping me
apprenticed to a grocer for four years without a salary, open .a way in His providence for me not only to have a salary, but to learn the drapery business? Because He loved me in Christ,"—than to the vague disquisitions in favour of general laws and against special providenees which we hear in its place from the cultivated Rationalists ;—were there not, perhaps, rather more of fundamental selfishness in the general cast of the vulgarer tone of thought. But
• Zion's Witness, g 27,28.
to both,—the fever of the one and the coldness of the other,—the intensely living and yet calm, tranquil, unsubjective phraseology of Scripture stands in the most striking contrast.
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