A UNITARIAN PREACHER.*
THESE are pleasing and thoughtful sermons, the production of a reverent, tasteful, and reflective mind. But they leave upon us the same defective and cloudy impression which all the best writings of the ablest men of the Unitarian sect of Christians never fail to produce. They may be divided into two classes, the high and ideal, and the low and rationalistic. The latter are hardly theoretically Christians at all,—in the sense of attributing any special power and influence to Christ ; they are simply Theists, boldly accepting the miracles of Christ as historically true and as bearing witness to his divine mission, or rejecting them altogether, and in either case chiefly moralists, who ascribe to him their moral aims and principles; while the former hold that incomprehensible middle ground between Theists and believers in the Deity of Christ as the divine Son of God, which we find it more difficult to under- stand and appreciate with every fresh study of Scripture and every fresh experience of human nature. These ideal Unitarians seem to be, in the true sense, sentimentalists ; we can find no other epithet • et Spiritual Religion; Sermon; on Christian Faith and Ate. By James Drummond, EA. London: Longmans.
that will adequately describe them. In writing of Christ they use language which seems applicable to a divine being, but wholly inapplicable to one whose nature, on their own showing, whatever his extraordinary powers might be, they hold to be entirely and exclusively human. To us the difficulty lies here. As a figure in history, a perfect man set forth in the Gospels, Jesus may naturally be an object of reverence and admiration ; and those who turn to him thus, as an historical figure preserved to us in the New Testament story, are rational and consistent ; but if he be spoken of as he is by the ideal Unitarians, as a present Power and personal Influence in the world, known and felt day by day, we are perplexed to the last degree to make out how such a faith is consist- ent with their theology. Omniscience, or omnipresence at least, is absolutely essential to a spirit "around and above and within us," who is and is to be to all continually a "very present help in trouble." The following passage in Mr. Drummond's sixth sermon, entitled "Christ, a Quickening Spirit," is very true and real to the majority of Christians, who believe Christ's spirit and presence to be as real and efficacious as the Father's, though operating some- what differently upon us, rather in our natures than over them ; but sounds fanciful and sentimental from a Unitarian point of view, which refuses to the soul the right of appeal or prayer to Christ :—
" Under the consciousness of sin he changes our selfish dread into a sad sense of the long-suffering love which we have wounded; by his tender sympathy he consoles ; and when in utter self-distrust and anguish of heart we cry, 'Make us as thy hired servants," he lifts our bowed heads to see a Father's smile of welcome resting on us. He brings us to God, and having filled our souls with the peace of renewed faith and love, leaves us in this blessed communion. Further, he helps us to break the yoke of sin, and does not mock us with hopes of an illusory pardon while the gift of life itself is denied. He breathes into us his own spirit, and while with the frank uncovered face of sons of God we gather round him, we are changed into the same image from glory to glory. It is difficult to construct any theory which will express the influence of spirit on spirit, but of the reality of such influence we all are conscious. There are men whose look, or voice, or action by some mysterious power enters our souls and breaks up the ice-bound fountains of our better life. And who can spend an hour in calmly meditating upon Christ's teaching, or in endeavouring to penetrate the meaning of his life, or in affectionate memory of his love and of his cross, and not be a humbler, a wiser, and a stronger man?" (pp. 71-75.)
Now, all this seems, if true assertion, the experience of one realiz- ing the presence of Christ as a living Spirit, who promised to be with his followers till the end of the world, though deluding him- self with the idea that his sense of help is derived simply from the study of a past history lying before him in a lifeless volume. The stern denial of Christ's power to supply any such fresh vigour and life is far more intelligible from Unitarians, as being much more real and conformable with their religious doctrine and rationalistic theology. In this passage the effect of spirit on spirit through the human look and voice is very justly referred to, but the immediate application of it to reading a history utterly destroys the force of the illustration. It is the living and present spirit that touches our own ; but you do not summon back the dead by perusal of their writings or memoirs. We have referred to this subject first, because it seems to us the most vital point of differ- ence between us and the author ; and we could ourselves adopt in large measure Mr. Drummond's language as our own, were we not assured by him that he does not at all mean to be understood in the only sense in which his language seems to us true and powerful.
To say that the term "Son of God" suggests first spiritual likeness (p. 29) is surely a little wide of the mark. To any simple mind not already indoctrinated into a certain form
of Christian belief, it would suggest, as "Son of Man" does, a similarity or absolute community of nature and origin with the Father. And when Mr. Drummond goes on to say, "If we turn to the writings of St. John, we receive, though in a different phraseology, substantially the same idea" (i.e., as his own, which he believes contains the sum and substance of St. Paul's notion also, spiritual sonship, the likeness to the Father in truth, love, and holiness), we must demur. The Unitarian interpretation of the first chapter of St. John's Gospel is wonderfully loose and unsatisfactory, and this is admitted, we believe, by the clearer.
sighted Unitarians who follow Baur and the Tubingen school in denying the authenticity of the fourth gospel. If" the Word" which "was with God and was God," "was made flesh and dwelt amongst" the men of St. John's age and country, so that they "beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth," this can mean nothing, unless it mean that the Son who was in the bosom of the Father through all eternity, assumed our human nature, and came and dwelt as a man upon earth ; and what else does St. Paul mean by that de- claration of his in his Epistle to the Philippians, that Jesus "being in the form of God, thought it not robbery [or a thing to be eagerly seized] to be equal with God, but made himself of no reputation, and took upon him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men, &c' ?—a passage utterly without significance, if Jesus were, like ourselves, no arbiter of his own destiny, but brought into the world without any will of his own, and carried out of it by the same inevitable decrees of Providence ; in which case, as it seems to us, his own conscious personal influence with and over the world must have ended, as ours does, totally in death. The abler Unitarian divines are beginning to see this, and to traverse the intellectual capacity of the Scripture writers, rather than to claim them as having believed what they themselves be- lieve.
But we must pass on to Mr. Drummond's singular views and definitions of Revelation, which, we imagine, are more exclusively his own than those to which we have hitherto referred. We always considered that Revelation was the unveiling of God to the world ; Mr. Drummond makes it the unveiling to the individual.
Here he sadly overrates the value of the individual above the race. All spiritual Christians, and many spiritual Theists who are not Christians, believe in the touches of the Holy Spirit on the human soul, which Mr. Drummond identifies with the notion of Revelation. We do not conceive that this is the meaning of Revelation. Unquestionably the faithful and righteous, or, using Scriptural phraseology, the "chosen of God," do enjoy special light and peace from immediate contact with the Source of all things. But the world surely has not less received an un- veiling of God, because those nearest to him receive a vivider light than the world at large has experienced, or can as yet experience. It is injustice to God, and to the breadth and universality of his care and thoughtful energy, not to insist on the fact, so self-evident, we should think, that he does unveil himself to all mankind,—(1) in his works and laws, which are a revelation of his power, as the Great Artist or Poet of the natural world ; (2) in the history of a special people, the Jews ; in the prophets who preceded his Son ; in his Son above all,—throwing light on his character, his wisdom, beneficence, and love ; and in the Apostles of his Son, who, at his bidding, devoted themselves to the work of spreading abroad the light of that revelation which Christ's own brief stay among men had only just unfolded. No doubt, what Mr. Drummond says is true,—that a revelation from God will have no effect unless the eye or the mind be open to read it. But if the book needs the eye, so does the eye need the book. Seeing that the same God made man, and suited his revelations to the human nature he had made, we may suppose the bulk of mankind fitted (as indeed history partly proves) to perceive and acknowledge both Revelations of God, the first imperfect one of his creative power and skill, and the second fuller and richer one of his, we may almost say, passion of love for man. The teaching of the Holy Spirit (to which the significance of revelation is confined in this volume) seems far more expressive when looked upon as the spiritual reward granted to the faithful and devout of all faiths and countries, by which peace is permitted to follow fidelity of heart and spirit ; while Revelation is no Revelation, properly so called, unless it be given to the world and for the world, the universal light of God,— universal as the light of the sun to our world, first showing to all the creative Will, with its infinite power, and secondly, the Divine goodness and holiness and love, in the person and passion of God's Son.
We cannot but admire these sermons as sermons full of the purest spirit, and in a certain sense of affluent faith ; but to us it is a faith that, though it may be sweet as the odour of flowers, and soft as the sweet breath of spring, would be "baseless as the fabric of a vision that leaves not a rack behind," if Mr. Drurnmond's own rationale of it were true. The language of the best writers of this small and often highly refined sect of Christians, flies, on Christian subjects, so far beyond its own assigned intellectual limits as to seem thin, aerial, and sublimated, too ethereal for this hard-tried working world. We can understand intellectually the feeling of those more rationalistic Unitarians who say they hate the words 'spirituality' and 'aspiration.' Nothing is so trying to the reader as the effort to keep up the tension of the religious thought to the atmospheric elevation of a system which seems to outfly all its solid grounds of intellectual conviction, and live in the haze of a light that seems to be borrowed from a faith not its own. Christ is either an historical figure of the past, whose lessons are fitted, of course, for our moral guidance now, but whose personal influence and sway has long been removed, or the very essence out of which and in which our natures are constituted : "Jesus Christ, the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever."
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