THE BROAD CHURCH ON SALVATION BY FAITH'.
WE have always objected to the term " Broad Church" as characterizing the essence of the deepest theology now preached in our national communion. You may get a great breadth of gold by beating it very fine, and latitudinarianism properly means that you have got breadth in theology by fining away the meaning and power of the true Gospel of Christ. But, again, you may get large comprehensiveness by a different process. The nearer you go to the centre of the earth or sun, the nearer you are to a point at which you hold equally the approaches to the most widely- severed latitudes ; and the nearer you penetrate to the true centre of Christ's thought the more perfectly do you command the divergent threads of Christian faith. It is only in this sense in which wa accept the phrase " Broad Church " as in any way de- scribing what we hold to b3 the truest school in our modern theo- logy, and it is in this sense we use the term in referring to the masterly pamphlet we are now going to discuss.
The controversy which has so vecently terminated in our pages, but which has not ceased and will not cease in the minds of either clergy or laity, on the true meaning of eternal life and eternal fire or punishment, is opened at a new point, and one perhaps even nearer to the root of the matter than that at which it was then discussed, in a very remarkable essay by a country clergyman,* now lying before us, and which is introduced to the notice of the public in a beautiful preface by Mr. Maurice. It is not easy, we think, to speak too highly of the depth, clearness, brevity, and force with which the writer disposes of the excuses invented by the narrow theological systems of later days for curtailing and explaining away the universal promise given by Christ of "light at last, soon or late, here or hereafter, to all who seek and cry for it." There is the vigour of a man who has tried every word by the painful experience of his own heart and mind, in these brief but weighty pages. Nor do we propose for a moment to condense a train of thoughts already so closely linked and nervously expressed that it will not bear further condensation. We desire only to take up a single thread in the argument. —the true scope of that " faith " which grows into so great an importance in tha New Testament as the condition of salvation. It is scarcely possible to conceive that the great con- dition of access to eternal life should be otherwise than com- mensurate with the while moral and spiritual life of man. That which bestows the fulness of being must surely spring from every side of the poor and finite life we lead here, and yet the ordinary Protestant teaching would lead us to suppose that, limited as the nature of man is, that part of his nature by virtue of which he may grasp the infinite life of God is far more limited still. Instead of showing us a perfect labyrinth of avenues from every thought, and wish, and voluntary act of human life, towards the more perfect light or the more perfect darkness, the ordinary Protestant teaching makes "faith" a narrow intellectual isthmus between the life of this world and the life of the next,—a narrow footway • Post T. nebras Lux ; or, the Gospel message to him who desires t, believe. By the Rev. G. D. Snow, with an intr,eluetiou by the Bev. F. D. Maurice. Smith and z Elder. ..of intellectual belief, with very few approaches, difficult to keep with perfect sincerity of inward thought, bounded by precipices of everlasting damnation on both the right hand and the left, absolutely forbidden to us for all the ages after the lapse of our threescore years and ten of earthly life, and after all not connecting our whole inward life with the divine life, but only one rather insignificant part of it—that part, namely, which has .reached the clear and settled stage of conscious and decisive con- viction. Considering that few indeed, of the millions who have lived on earth have reached that stage in the higher regions of character at all,—considering that, of those who have, very few indeed are occupied with those conscious convictions during a tenth part even of their waking hours,—considering that even of the moments of conscious conviction, such as those in which a Christian creed is intelligently repeated, exceedingly few are moments of kindled and regenerated life,—considering, neverthe- less, that gradual moral and spiritual changes are probably almost always in progress in every human heart, whether heathen or Christian, and that these forces of moral and spiritual change are, however closely wrapped up with our own moral freedom, gene- rally embedded deep beneath the surface of our conscious life and constituted chiefly of minute acts of indifferentism, or of yearning, or of recoil, wholly lost to individual memory, and of which the only register is the resulting character,—considering all this, it seems a wonderful assertion that the great spiritual regenera- tion of man is effected exclusively by an assent, however eager, to propositions which only touch our characters dis- tinctly in one or two points, and touch them keenly there only for a few hours at best out of the whole of our divinely ordered life. We believe that there is no possibility of giving the true meaning to " faith" as a saving power which does not make it include an infinite area of unconscious as well as conscious life, which does not make it cover every stirring, however slight, of our human nature in the right direction, which does not make it a force that begins in the acts and thoughts of infancy, and that is interwoven everywhere with the better yearn- ings even of savage or of heathen life—though it has its highest and most perfect earthly expression to the Christian in the full trust which throws him at the feet of the Son of God, and which confesses the pervading inspiration of a divine spirit. Mr. Snow states this with a broad and genuine simplicity before which the in- quisitorial Evangelical cross-examinations into the state of the soul might stand confounded. Wants, he says, however mean, which drove the countrymen of Christ to Him during His life on earth were initial acts of faith—such as the partly selfish, partly trust- ful eagerness to be cured of physical diseases, or to see the cure of others. "Neither the meanness of their wants," says Mr. Snow, "nor the meanness of their conceptions of Him, prevented their finding His goodness and being themselves made good by His influence,"—and if the impulse had this effect, and was there- fore of the nature of faith,—the same alloyed stirrings of a better life in those who, never having heard, or never having realized, or not at the moment realizing, the meaning of His Gospel, still seek the same kind of aid, though unable to turn consciously to Him for that aid, must be also held to be of the nature of faith. Nothing can be more explicit or more beautiful than the passage in which Mr. Snow pushes this teaching to its largest consequences That sense of need that brought them to the needy man's friend, however vulgar it might seem to our superficial vision, concealed under it the attractive power of the Father, who was bringing men to Himself through His Son. Sense of need !' I can imagine one saying, Sense of need !' Why, the young birds in their nests have a sense of need. Yes ; and does not the Bible call their sense of need a prayer ? He feedeth the young ravens who call upon Him.' Is not the hungry lion's roar called a prayer? Look at the unconscious birds and beasts, and than look at the still more unconscious babe, whose cry has the force of a prayer with its mother. Ponder these things, and then admit that no one can say,—here first begins that sense of need that grows up into prayer and faith. Well, I think if you look at the eleventh of Hebrews you will see that the writer does not attempt to say, 'It begins here or there—at this point of human education faith first be- came possible.' He simply takes the fact that a sense of want, a desire of a better country, was the thing that brought mon to their God. Those who were driven by this sense of need were men of faith, for they had in them that which made them lay hold firmly of such tidings of an unseen friend as they could get at."
In a word, wherever is the first faint stirring of that " hunger and thirst after righteousness " to which Christ promises an abso-
lute satisfaction, there, deep in the unconscious though not involu n- tary part of man's nature, is the beginning of the faith which, in its highest and most perfect form, is to transform the earthly into the heavenly life. To those who think that though this may be very fine' philosophy it is utterly at variance with the substance of Scripture, we heartily recommend a little deeper study of that letter, to which some of Mr. Snow's hints will give them a very useful clue. We hold that there is no instance in which theologians have more wantonly curtailed the absoluteness and universality of God's promises than by blocking up some ninety-nine out of every hundred of the natural avenues of man to Christ with a forbidding notice of " No road," and narrowing that faith which is of all degrees, and as universal as the hunger of the heart for righteousness, and which can only be extinguished, where, if anywhere, such desires are absolutely extin- guished, into a defined intellectual assent to propositions which may be accepted even by those in whom no such hunger stirs at all.
But even if this be so, how does it bear upon the controversy in which Mr. Lyttelton engaged us ? Thus, —that if this trust of all degrees, from vague yearning for an unknown righteousness to perfect reliance on a perfect Lord, is Christ's only condition for our being " made whole " by Him,—the cure beginning with the faintest leaning towards Him, and being completed only with such a yielding of the heart to Him as this life perhaps never sees,— it is obvious that such fanciful conditions as are generally con- nected with salvation, such as, for instance, that this turning of the heart must not only happen during the short life of the body, but must be the final act of the soul when in the body, so 'that if a penitent and trustful thought flashes through you before the clock marks the departure of the soul you have a chance, but if only after the mortal eyes are closed you have none,—or again, so that those who lived at the mouth of the Nile after the coming of Christ had a chance, but those who lived at its sources had none, —it is obvious, we say, that all these fanciful conditions depending on physiological and geographical, not spiritual, principles, are mere parodies of Christ's promises, not those promises themselves. " He that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet should he live, and he that liveth and believeth in me shall never die,"--that is the great spiritual law which, by providing a real resurrection for the spirit from spiritual death, and on one condition only, ex- pressly excludes all hopelessness. Mr. Maurice has somewhere finely said that while Death is a hard visible fact for us all, the preachers of the Gospel too often unconsciously foster the belief that Life is only a dream. Mr. Snow has done much in this fine essay to show that Life is in the midst of Death for us all, that it is stronger than Death, and that this is of the very substance of the Gospel of Christ.
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