DR. ABBOTT ON LIBERAL AND CONSERVATIVE CHRISTIANITY.
TO a new and striking volume of sermons preached before the University of Oxford, Dr. Abbott, the very able head- master of the City of London School, has prefixed some preliminary remarks on Liberal Christianity. By "Liberal Christianity," Dr. Abbott means the Christianity which believes in growth, which does not regard St. Paul's pre- cept "to stand fast in the Lord" as meaning the same thing with "to stand. still in the Lord," but 'to stand fast in the liberty" to which we are called. He distinguishes Christian Liberalism, again, from the so-called Liberalism of the Agnostic by this,—that the Liberal Christian regards Christ as a growing force in human society, not as an exhausted illusion; while the Destructive substitutes for God and Christ, mere subordinate agencies created by God ; explodes religion because it is mingled with illusions ; rejects the Old Testament for its miracles, and rejects the Now Testament, partly for the same reason, partly because in the grandeur of the character of Christ, it discovers "not a man, but a myth." Liberal Christianity Dr. Abbott distinguishes, on the other hand, from Con- servative Christianity by this,—that it believes in the growth, from age to age, of the religion revealed by Christ, which Con- servatives do not; that it accepts the teaching of nature gladly, which Conservatives do not, so that the world. to Conservative Christians too often becomes, and has need to become, "the light of the Church ;" and that it regards it as the first duty of a national Church to raise the national morality, which, again, Conservatives do not ; again, that it recognises the • prevalence of illusions among the Christians of all ages as the husks of valuable truths, which, again, Conservatives decline to do; and most of all, that it regards the teaching of nature as an important commentary on the Bible, while Conservatives try to wrench nature into agreement with the Bible. As the positive characteristics of Christian Liberalism, Dr. Abbott lays down, then, theme characteristics That it recognises in history, in literature, in science, a running commentary on revelation, which positively adds to our knowledge of its meaning, and helps us to surpass the first Christians in our apprehensions of the Gospel; (2), that it recognises that in religion, as well as in science, truth is almost always found in combination with partial error, so that illusion is apt to be the outward crust of truth ; (3), that, as a consequence of this, Liberals should expect to find an admixture of error in the Old and New Testaments; and (4), that they can regard the question of miracle or no miracle, with neutral impartiality, as a mere question of fact, the - issue of which does not involve the higher question of worship. For (5), to a Liberal Christian, Dr. Abbott
thinks that worship should not depend in the least on ab- stract propositions of any kind, but solely on the activity of the trust, love, and reverence which constitute worship. We, the Liberals,—worship Christ, says Dr. Abbott, "because we feel more trust, and love, and reverence for Him than for any other, and because we cannot think of the Father unless our thoughts pass upwards through the thought of the Son. For us, He sits at the right hand of God, not merely because St. Stephen saw Him there eighteen hundred years ago, but because our spirits place Him, and cannot but place Him, by the side of the Majesty on high. To Him, and through Him, we offer up our petitions, not because of the Protomartyr's precedent, but because when we lift the wishes of our heart to heaven, He is our treasure there,—and where our treasure is, there must our hearts be also.' Surely, this, the natural worship of Jesus, is the purest and highest, as well as the safest,—to worship Him because our instincts dictate it I Were a father to ask his children why they loved him, which answer would please him best,—' Because I cannot help it,'—or, Because of the Fifth Commandment'? And can we doubt which answer from us, who have been taught to call ourselves the children of God, would be most acceptable to the Father in Heaven and to the Eternal Son, if we were asked to give our reasons for worshipping Jesus of Nazareth,—' Because we cannot help it,'—or, Because of thirteen texts of Scripture which we interpret rightly, though the Unitarians say we are wrong." Thus the general outline of Dr. Abbott's teaching is, that Liberal Christianity will not be affected by the rejection of all that is miraculous in the Old and New Testaments "with the reservation of some of the works of healing, and of some visible manifestations of the spiritual resurrection of the Saviour;" nay, though lie still holds to the latter himself, we understand him to think that even the rejection of these last would involve no serious loss,—no loss of what is other than an accident as regards the essence of Christianity,—to the life of the Christian.
We do not agree at all with Dr. Abbott in his conclusion, though we do agree heartily with him in thinking that Christianity should welcome the teaching of science, history, and criticism; that transient illusions have often been held by Christians, as by other men, in close combination with very deep truths, and that such illusions have been sometimes, and in particular states of mind and of society, almost inseparable from such truths ; and finally, that the question of the reality of miracle is a ques- tion of fact, which should be judged of without allowing the mind to be biassed by the desire to believe in it. But we break off from Dr. Abbott here,--that we cannot answer the question, "Why do I worship Jesus of Nazareth P" as he answers it, —namely, "Because I cannot help it,"—any more than we could in the fashion in which he supposes the conservative Churchman to answer it. In the first place, we can help worshipping any bein g,—G odor man. Worship is not a mere com- pound of love, trust, and reverence, but involves acts of constant and voluntary turning of the mind to the object of this love, trust, and reverence,—and this I can withhold, if I will, and often do withhold from impotence or disorder of will. Worship is not merely an involuntary feeling, it is a voluntary devotion. And any man who pleases can abstain,—often too easily,— from fixing his heart and mind even on one whom he recognises as a true object of worship. Hence the answer to a question why you worship God, or Christ, cannot simply be, "Because I cannot help it," but must be something more,—" Because I will not help it." In the next place, before we can say, in answer to such a question as to the reason of our worship, "Because I will not help it," we ought to be quite sure that this submission of the will to the feeling excited by the object of our worship, is a right submission. And before this assurance can be felt, though both our love and reverence may be very limited quantities, and in need of much increase, our trust ought to be practically unlimited
and absolute. Supposing this to be so, then, indeed, the answer should be, "Because, even so far as I could help it, I would not, for I desire to put myself more and more into the hands in which alone I am safe." But is it con- ceivable that such an answer as this could be honestly or rightly returned by any one to the question, "Why do you worship Jesus of Nazareth ?" unless he were sure that Christ had not only the perfect love requisite to redeem him, but also the perfect power requisite to guide, and discipline, and educate, and illuminate him? And this, we suppose, is a question, not of feeling at all, but of fact. If Jesus Christ was only a noble, but mistaken man, we should regard the Unitarians as wholly right in disapproving, as a sort of idolatry, the devotion of the will and life to an absent and in himself powerless being, —who could never even hear the prayers addressed to him,— and in insisting that the spiritual way to the Supreme right- eousness, should not be limited by the impressions derived from any finite being, however noble. It may be right to help ourselves on in that way as best we can, but it cannot be right to turn the helping hand of a man, however perfect, into the end and aim of all our aspirations.
What we find missing in Dr. Abbott's conception of an object of worship,—namely, divine power,—is, though some- thing much less essential, much less needful to the heart of perfect worship, than any spiritual perfection, never- thelese absolutely necessary to perfect trust, and with- out it worship is sure to fail "such creatures as we are, in such a world as the present." Two of the sermons in this volume are upon the text, "What manner of man is this P" a question to which, with Dr. Abbott's characteristic views, he does not venture to add the conclusion of the sentence containing the real motive of it, namely, "that even the winds and the seas obey him." We suppose that this may be, perhaps, one of those miracles which Dr. Abbott—though it is given with the most vivid force in the Gospel which he regards as the earliest, St. Mark's—explains as a later rendering of misunder- stood metaphor. Anyhow, he clearly does not believe that, as a matter of fact, Christ ever walked upon the water or stilled the storm. Yet the question of the Disciples was one which, though not indicating that deepest sense of spiritual adoration which they afterwards felt for their Master, does represent one side of the awe of true worship, without which it could not in its perfect form exist at all. Unless all nature is as plastic in the hand of God as the moral world itself,—nay, more so, for while the human will both retains its freedom and abuses it, there must be one portion of the moral world which is not plastic in the hand of God,—we cannot believe ourselves enveloped in his power. . The persistent and, as the present writer strongly holds, the quite unscientific tendency of modern science, is to wrench the physical world at least, if not out of the power, at least out of the disposal of God, on the plea that in the discoveries of unchanging law, God really shows us not merely his moral pur- pose, but the very essence of his final and absolute will, But the teaching of revelation, from the first chapter of Genesis to the last chapter of Revelation, is wholly in a contrary direc- tion; and history, to our minds, considered soberly, and not in the spirit of the scientific fanatic, bears out revelation, and not the modern view. The Scriptures teach the common phenomena of nature, in all their awful regularity, to be the appointed order of a Divine command ; but they show us ever and again the power of him who decreed that regularity, over- ruling even the most rigorous of the uniformities of nature by a spiritual force which is above and within nature, and turning in a moment the solemn spectacle of what appeared to be changeless, into the startling utterance of a divine purpose If the belief were ever to fail mankind that God can mould nature at his will, we do not think that worship, in its true sense, could possibly survive it long. In its place would be sub- stituted, at best, a comparatively dubious spiritual admira- tion, which would trust doubtfully in the power of him who
could inspire the conscience but who could not "beset us behind and before," by reason of the obstruction of the very universe which he had himself made, or it may be, only moulded. To ou? minds, miracle means not an interruption of law, but a proof of the absolute .subservience of the physical to the spiritual;
and without its conspicuous presence in the whole chain of revelation, we sincerely believe that the conscience of man would be in danger of feeling imprisoned, instead of merely embodied, in his physical organisation ; and that man himself would at best yield to God nothing better than a faint spiritual loyalty, in place of that hearty devotion of both body and. soul which is the life of true worship. That is what might happen at best. At worst, the physical might regain that com- plete ascendency over the moral, which revelation seems to have been granted us chiefly to reverse.
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