BOOKS.
MR. ARNOLD ON ST. PAUL."
IT is not easy to express strongly enough either the depth of our agreement with, or the depth of our dissent from, the doctrine of these remarkable essays. On the one side, they teach what we have always held as of the very essence of St. Paul's theology,—that instead of expounding the forensic system which might almost be described, in the old legal terminology, as Christ "suffering a fine and recovery" in order to free mankind from the lien laid by the law upon the human conscience, St. Paul's whole effort is to show how the inner spirit of man may become truly righteous and holy, and to describe with the utmost fulness what the true signs of that righteousness and holiness are, that nobody may mistake the nature of the end in view. On the other hand, the distinction between that in St. Paul's teaching which Mr. Arnold says that science' acknowledges as founded on genuine facts of human nature, and that in it which he intimates that it does not acknowledge, and cannot be expected to acknowledge, and of which, therefore, he does his best to attenuate the emphasis and importance in St. Paul's letters, seems to us to strike at the very root of that teaching, and to reduce it back again from a fountain of inex- haustible freshness to a mere dried-up spring in the desert.
But first let us say a word on Mr. Arnold's very thoughtful and instructive but patronizing preface on the attitude of the Dissenters towards the Church of England. He makes, we think, a somewhat unfair use of Mr.Winterbotham's confession in Parliament as to the spirit of "watchful jealousy" which had grown up among Dissenters towards the Church of England, calling it a "hideous confession," and putting to those who feel it St. Paul's question, "When there is jealousy and strife among you, are ye not carnal ?" The present writer had the advantage of hearing that speech as well as Mr. Arnold, and he assuredly did not interpret it as a boast made by Mr. Winterbotham in the name of the Dissenters, but as an admission made with regret, but which he thought it wiser for all parties to be candidly made, in order that we Churchmen who, through carnality of another kind, are (as Mr. Winterbotham holds, and as, we confess, we too hold), in some considerable measure the cause of that carnal feeling among Dissenters, might
St. Paul and Protestantism, with an Introduction on Puritanism and the Church of England. By Matthew Arnold, MA., LL.D. London: Smith, Elder, and 0o. 1870. clearly understand the situation with which the Legislature has to deal. It may be true, we think, that Mr. Winter- botham admitted the feeling of watchful jealousy with too little of regret, — though it was with regret, and a's an excusable, not as an intrinsically worthy attitude of mind, that he spoke of it. But of this we are quite sure, that Mr. Arnold is utterly blind to the unworthy spirit in the Church of England which has fomented this unworthy feeling among Dissenters,—and we cannot but think that he as a Churchman would be better employed in trying to enforce upon us Churchmen the spirit of Christ's teaching, "How wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me pull the mote out of thine eye, and behold a beam is in thine own eye," than in lecturing the Dissenters thus :- "And now let us turn to Mr. Winterbotham and the Protestant Dis- senters. He interprets their very inner mind, he nays; that which he declares in their name, they are all foaling, and would declare for them- selves if they could. There was a spirit of watchful jealousy on the part of the Dissenters, which made them prone to take offence; therefore states- men should not introduce the Established Church into all the institutions of the country.' That is positively the whole speech ! 'Strife, jealousy, wrath, contentions, backbitings,'—we know the catalogue. And the Dissenters are, by their own confession, so full of those, and the very existence of an organization of Dissent so makes them a necessity, that the State is required to frame its legislation in consideration of them ! Was there over such a confession made ? Here are people existing for the sake of a religion of which the essence is mildness and sweet reasonableness, and the forbearing to assert our ordinary self; and they declare themselves so full of the very temper and habits at which that religion is specially levelled, that they require to have even the occasion of forbearing to assert their ordinary self removed out of their way, because they are quite sure they will never comply with it! Never was there a more instructive comment on the blessings of separation, which we are so often invited by separatists to admire. Why does not Dissent forbear to assert its ordinary self, and help to win the world to the mildness and sweet reasonableness of Christ, without this vain con- test about machinery ? Why does not the Church ? is the Dissenter's answer. What an answer for a Christian ! We are to defer giving up our ordinary self until our neighbour shall have given up his ; that is, we are never to give it up at all. But I will answer the question on more mundane grounds. Why are we to be more blamed than the Church for the strife arising out of our rival existences ? asks the Dis- senter. Because the Church cannot help existing, and you can I There- fore, contra ecclesiam nemo pacilicus, as Baxter himself said in his better moments. Because the Church is there ; because strife, jealousy, and self-assertion are sure to come with breaking off from her ; and because strife, jealousy, and self-assertion are the very miseries against which Christianity is firstly levelled ;—therefore we say that a Christian is inexcusable in breaking with the Church, except for a departure from the primal ground of her foundation: Let every one that nameth the name of Christ depart from iniquity."
That is more or less true, we think. The Dissenters, had it been written by a Dissenter, might have learned much by it. Those of them who have magnanimity enough to learn from one who sedulously refuses even to hear of the beam in his own eye, how to pluck the mote out of their eyes, may learn by it. But we confess that we think "the mildness and sweet reasonableness" of Christ would better be illustrated in a Churchman by self-exam- ination of his own sins and those of his communion, than by a forcible exposition to Dissenters of the impossibility of their being in the right, and the necessarily unassailable position of the Church. Mr. Arnold has no hating power in him, but we can- not help suggesting that the lists of Christian gifts on which St. Paul lays so much stress, and on which Mr. Arnold, following accurately in his wake, wisely and eloquently insists so much, con- tain some which condemn us and the pervading spirit of our Church, at least as severely as those he quotes condemn the "watchful jealousy" of the Dissenters. Take this, for example, "I, therefore, the prisoner of the Lord, beseech you that ye walk worthy of the vocation wherewith ye are called, with all lowliness and meekness, with long-suffering, forbearing one another." Now, can any honest man describe the attitude of the national Church towards Dissent in these terms ? Can Mr. Arnold's own book, so far as it touches the Dissenters, be described in these terms ? Is it not much nearer to a book written in all exaltation and patronage, with impatience upbraiding the Dissenter and his scruples ? A more one-sided lecture we never perused than this able preface. "Let nothing be done," says St. Paul in another epistle, "through strife and vainglory, but in 'lowliness of mind let each esteem other better than themselves." Can a precept of the great apostle's be more neatly and expressly con- tradicted in spirit than it is in the preface and some parts of the first essay of this book ? As for strife, Mr. Arnold no doubt hopes to 'remove it by showing his antagonists how completely they are in the wrong and he in the right ; but for the rest, there is the very spirit which has in these latter days prolonged Dissent,—the spirit of bland superiority, the calm attitude of a higher caste, the loftiness of mind which deems the Dissenter indefinitely, though perhaps involuntarily, lower than ourselves, in the whole tone of
Mr. Arnold's disputation. At the root of his false conception of the Dissenters and their position, we take to be Mr. Arnold's assumption that separation from the Church on points of dogma is wrong, because neither the Church nor those who separate from it "have the means of determining such points adequately." Even if Mr. Arnold were right in this assumption, his use of it in rela- tion to periods when any Churchman who had held with him would probably have been a worthless indifferentist, immeasurably inferior to the Dissenter who held that there wces the means of attaining absolute truth on matters of dogma and that the Church had neglected that means, is surely the grossest of moral anachroniams 9 Altogether, while we heartily hold with Mr.
Arnold as to the vital error of the Calvinists, and the superior sobriety and wisdom of the Church in refusing to crystallize the Calvinistic view into Church symbols, we utterly differ with him in supposing that the men who did take the Calvinistic view could with honesty have remained in the Church. A man who believes, like Mr. Arnold, that all theological dogma is premature, has hardly the right to arbitrate on differences between men the noblest of whom cling with their whole hearts to the belief that dogmatic truth on theological subjects is not only attainable by all men, but that inability to attain it has been due to some deep moral delinquency in the spirits of those who have confessed it.
But to come back to what is immeasurably the best part of this book, the two essays on St. Paul. We have said that we concur entirely with the thesis that St. Paul, so far from being in spirit Antinomian or verging in that direction, writes with one sole object in view,—the object of bringing righteousness home to the heart of man with a power that will make it no longer a yoke,—a law to be obeyed,—but an inspiration and a joy. Nothing can be finer and truer than this :—
" St. Paul's piercing practical religious sense, joined to his strong intellectual power, enabled him to discern and follow the range of the commandment, both as to man's actions and as to his heart and thoughts, with extraordinary force and closeness. His religion had, as we shall see, a preponderantly mystic side, and nothing is so natural to the mystic as in rich single words, such as faith, light, love, to sum up and take for granted, without specially enumerating them, all good moral principles and habits ; yet nothing is more remarkable in Pant than the frequent, nay, incessant lists, in the most particular detail, of moral habits to be pursued or avoided. Lists of this sort might in a less sincere and profound writer be formal and wearisome ; but to no atten- tive reader of St. Paul will they be wearisome, for in making them he touched the solid ground which was the basis of his religion,—the solid ground of his hearty desire for righteousness and of his thorough con- ception of ik—and only on such a ground was so strong a superstructure possible. The more one studios those lists, the more does their signifi- cance come out. To illustrate this, let anyone go through for himself the enumeration, too long to be quoted here, in the four last verses of the first chapter of the Epistle to the Romans, of 'things which are not convenient ; ' or lot him merely consider with attention this catalogue, towards the end of the fifth chapter of tho Epistle to the Galatians, of fruits of the spirit: 'love, joy, peace, long-suffering, kindness, goodness, faith, mildness, self-control.' The man who wrote with this searching minuteness knew accurately what he meant by sin and righteousness, and did not use these words at random. His diligent comprehensiveness in his plan of duties is only,less admirable than his diligent sincerity. The sterner virtues and the gentler, his conscience will not let him rest till he has embraced them all. In his deep resolve to make out by actual trial what is that good and perfect and acceptable will of God,' he goes back upon himself again and again, he marks a duty at every point of our nature, and at points the most opposite, for fear he should by possibility be leaving behind him some weakness still indulged, some subtle promptings to evil not yet brought into captivity."
Nothing, too, can be truer than the emphasis which Mr. Arnold lays on the spiritualized sense in which St. Paul speaks of Christ's death and resurrection, as referring not solely or chiefly to his physical death and physical resurrection, but to that death to sin, and resurrection to a divine righteousness, in which the apostle himself strove to participate daily,—speaking of himself as dying daily with Christ, and daily rising with Christ to spiritual life. It is impossible for us to render again Mr. Arnold's exposi- tion, which on both these points is, indeed, as admirable as possible; and nothing can be more important for the understanding of St. Paul than to remember that " dying " to the anarchy of what St. Paul calls "the flesh," by which he means all inordinate desire, and rising to that life above "where the heart is hidden with Christ in God," is a process which he conceived of as to be repeated every day in the long struggle for perfection, and as having reference to Christ's physical death and resurrection only in so far as that death and resurrection were specially repre- sentative of the spiritual renunciations and the spiritual trans- figurations of which our Lord's whole life on earth was made up.
But profoundly as we concur in this conception of St. Paul's ultimate thought, and of the meaning he attached to dying with Christ and rising again with Him, we are removed as far as possible from Mr. Arnold in our interpretation of the motive. power by which, according to the apostle, the great revolution from a legal and virtually impossible righteousness of conscience, to the daily crucifixion of the flesh and daily resurrection to the love and joy and mildness and "sweet reasonableness" of Christ was to be accomplished. That motive-power, as every one knows, St. Paul calls faith.' Mr. Arnold interprets him as meaning by this, a power of steadfast attachment to the spirit visible in Christ's earthly life,—a power of sympathy and emotion educed by the spectacle of that life. That St. Paul, in various passages of his writings, identified Christ with the 1Vord or Wisdom of God, and also with the expected Messiah of the Jewish dispensation, Mr. Arnold admits, but these views he regards as utterly non-essential in his thought. Had they been essential, St. Paul could not have had the same interest, he thinks, for modern feeling. - "The very terms of which these propositions are composed are such as science is unable to handle. But that the Christ of the Bible follows the universal moral order and the will of God, without being let and hindered as we are by the motions of private passion and self-will, this is evident to whoever can read the Bible with open eyes. It is just what any criticism of the Gospel-history, which sees that history as it really is, tells us ; it is the scientific result of that history. And this is the result which pre-eminently occupies Paul." And accordingly, the motive-power to which St. Paul virtually looked for a reconciliation of man with God is, ac- cording to Mr. Arnold, the power of "fast attachment" to an absent and unseen power of goodness which St. Paul thought and spoke of—therein unfortunately limiting its real scope, as we understand Mr. Arnold— as a fast attachment to Christ. "it is evident that some difficulty arises," says Mr. Arnold, "out of Paul's adding to the general sense of the word faith—a 1wIding fast to an unseen power of goodness—a particular sense of his own, identification with Christ." And Mr. Arnold makes the three essential terms of the Pauline theology, not "calling, justification, sanctification;" but "dying with Christ, resurrection from the dead, growing into Christ." But the peculiarity of our author's view is that the true agent, in all these spiritual processes, is thought of by him astho soul itself,—its motive being its own sympathy with spiritual life as ex- emplified in Christ, its own fast attachment to the absent and unseen goodness as illustrated in that life. As we understand Mr. Arnold's interpretation, the whole conception of St. Paul is psycho- logical and subjective, and not what we should call theological at all. Mr. Arnold gives no importance at all to the rapture of St. Paul's thankfulness for the work of God and Christ on the soul, the power which made "the weak things of the world to confound the mighty," and the things which are not to bring to naught the things which are." He lays no stress on the exultation with which St. Paul even refuses to believe his life his own. "I am crucified with Christ, nevertheless, I live, yet not I, hut Christ liveth in me." He appears to us to interpret even the exulting joy of such passages as the conclusion of the eighth chapter of the Epistle to the 'toluene as referring to a love proceeding front us, instead of a love finding us and carrying us away with it,—" I am persuaded that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord." If we under- stand Mr. Arnold aright, he would say that " science " knows nothing and can know nothing of St. Paul's spiritual recognition of the personal agency of Christ as revealed in him,—that this is a question of ontology into which it is impossible to follow him,— that all we can recognize as scientific in St. Paul was his own love of the righteousness of Christ, and his yearning for a moral identification with the spirit of Christ's life. Even to St. Paul's word ' sanctification ' Mr. Arnold denies,—imperiously, and to us unaccountably,—any implication of a divine stream of influence emanating from God and transforming man. "rho endless words which Puritanism has wasted," he says, "upon sanctification, a magical filling with goodness and holiness, flow from a mere mis- take in translating ; &rue/14; means consecration, a setting apart to holy service." Does it ? Mr. Arnold's distinction is of course between the idea that a stream of influence flows from God, altering the inner life, and the idea of a mere dedication or setting apart to goodness, without reference to any positive stream of ex- ternal spiritual life. Well, when St. Paul speaks of Christ, "who of God is made unto us wisdom, and righteousness, and sanctification, and redemption" (1 Cor. i. 30), is it possible to range with "wisdom, and righteousness, and redemption," which are either positive spiritual qualities, or positive transforming influences, a notion so negative as a mere "setting apart to holy service "? Is it possible to interpret the words of St. John, "Sanctify them through Thy truth,—Thy word is truth," and "For
their sakes I sanctify myself," as of a mere setting apart to holy service, and not rather of a positive imbuing and penetration with the divine life? To our minds, Mr. Arnold wholly and fatally misinterprets St. Paul when he subordinates the direct personal agency of Christ, working in man the utmost marvels of spiritual change, to a mere human attachment for "an absent and unseen power of goodness." St. Paul's" faith" is, we believe, a mere recep- tiveness, a willingness to receive this wonderful stream of divine agency,—a readiness to let it work in us without active hindrance of ours,—is, in short, far less ' attachment ' to Christ on our side, than trust in the love of Christ for us. Whether ' science ' can admit the validity of such a view or not, we are satisfied that if it cannot, it should deny all permanent meaning to St. Paul's life and writings, with the remark, 'So much the worse for St. Paul ;' —to which we should be disposed to reply that it would not be the first time that science has prided itself on its nescience.
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