SPIRITUAL ELECTIONS.
A BISHOP of the English Communion said a few months ago, 11 in a remarkable sermon, noticed by us at the time, and re- published in a recent number of Good Words,* that the Kingdom of God will, after all, be founded like, and yet very unlike, some
• Good Words for September, 1868.
of the grandest of modern empires, on " universal suffrage,"— that God is waiting to be " elected King," and will not have His kingdom in any other way. The Kingdom of Heaven, said the Bishop of Argyll and the Isles, in the very place where English Sovereigns are crowned, Westminster Abbey,—is one " of which the triumph comes not by force, not by its King putting his foot on the necks of his enemies, but by their laying them willingly beneath his feet,—a kingdom whose establishment is not by obligation or necessity, but by the will and choice of those who are within it. It is God's kingdom, and this is the way He triumphs. God elected by the universal suffrage of Creation is to be hailed as King, and crowned Lord of All ; He will not have his kingdom in any other way, because in no other way would He be truly King. But thus will He be truly King, and for this kingdom He waits. For this God waits, and will wait. He waits for his kingdom, — the kingdom which comes by the choice of Creation, not by order from above." To many this language will sound grotesque, and to some almost the opposite of the truth ; yet we believe it is full of the most curious spiritual truth, and of that very spiritual truth which makes the English nation cling to the coarse machinery of political elections with a true and loyal instinct. No doubt there is another side to the truth. We could not choose God, if He had not first chosen us. " You have not chosen Me, but I have chosen you," said Christ to his own chosen companions, the Apostles,—and they had not chosen Him then, though they chose Him deliberately after- wards. That election of the King of Heaven of which the Bishop spoke, could only be possible if the other election,'—the ' election' known to theologians, but by them corrupted to mean an act of partiality,—had taken place first. The highest and final result of any man's election by God may be said to be God's election by him,—this last, however, an election needing repetition every hour, —to be his true Ruler and King. Yet there is plenty of foundation for the mixture of scorn and pity with which Mr. Carlyle and men of his school are apt to speakof the anarchyof popular self-government, and for the earnestness with which they beseech us to put aside the empty form of asserting a power for the use of which we are quite incompetent, and, instead, to be loyal and faithful to the first ruler with any divine capacity for rule in him whom we can dis- cover. If we listen to that school,—and we may listen to them often with great benefit,—there is no more conspicuous proof of the radical insanity of modern civilization than its affectation of self-government and its parrot-cries against despotism. " Govern- ment by committee" is said by them to be the maddest of all govern- ments; and the best of all, government by any one with a divine faculty to govern, and the still diviner faculty of putting down all anarchical resistance with a high hand. To such preachers as these, the type of true government is always despotic ; and we are reminded sometimes, with a certain grim humour, that had the universal order, the moral government of man, been in committee, instead of in the Supreme Will, we should not have come to grief only because we should not have come up at all. Yet this is only half of the truth, of which the noble passage we have extracted from Dr. Ewing's sermon contains the other half. Doubtless the universal order is rooted in one supreme and perfect Will, but then the first and deepest fiat of that Will is that the object of creation shall be not to conquer, but persuade the lower creatures into voluntary subjection, to wring from them not mere obedience, but sympathy, not punctual observance, but free and joyful con- sent. If it were otherwise, creation need not have been, we might almost say, could not have been, at all. For there is no sort of difference between the existence of God " Himself," alone and of a universe which merely reflected Him, without embodying any new and independent volition, without being at liberty to go astray and liable to be persuaded and redeemed. A creation without real freedom within it, a creation which should have been all God, or, what is the same thing, all emanation from God, 'without any new " cause" at all, would have been quite indistinguishable from Hint who created it. It would have been a mere procession of the thoughts and volitions of the Divine mind ; following the law of His solitary consciousness ; and just as great and infinite if it had remained within his mind, in the region of spiritual conception as if it had come out of that mind into a merely material existence, (if, indeed, there could have been any dis- tinction between spiritual and material existence in a universe containing only one Will, only one spring of events, only one root of causation,—God himself). Fichte used to maintain that the whole material order of the universe, the revolution of the earth, the phenomena of day and night, of the stars, and the mountains, and the snow, and of the cities and their throngs of life, their virtues and vices, and pleasures and pains, are all due to mere laws of individual consciousness, to phenomena of the indivi- dual mind, all, in short, not laws of being, but " laws of thought." Fichte's paradox would, however, be true, not of us, but of God, if we could suppose a creation without any germ of truly indepen- dent life, without any free will, any power of dissent or, therefore, of real assent, to the Supreme Will. Could that be so, Creation would be nothing but the Creator,—could not be outside the Creator's self, whether it were material or spiritual, or whatever it might be called. He would be all, and there could be nothing else that was not He.
As it is, however, the more we study the laws of nature and the laws of moral life, the more clearly do we see that the Bishop of Argyll is right, and that Calvinism when it put forth the elec- tion of man by God as all in all, missed the very object and purpose of that election, namely, that He in his turn might eventually be elected by us. We have not chosen Him yet, though He has chosen us ; but He has chosen us in order that eventually we may choose Him. He rules us in order that we may desire to be ruled by Him, that we may choose Him for our ruler. It is for this that God manifests himself so dimly, so much by glimpses, and that He keeps behind the seeming veil of nature and law ; that He refuses to let us see him as he is ; that he loves, as it were, to assume an incognito in his own world ; that to scientific men spelling out his methods of action one by one, He seems to be only " the Unknown and Unknow- able ;" that men only who have done his will freely with- out the overpowering vision of his presence He grants for a moment to see whose will it is that they have really done. It seems to us that the universe is carefully prepared to foster the weak freedom, the poor volition, the faint independence, of finite beings, by disguising and veiling the mighty personality behind, in the full conscious presence of which we could not grow, but .should be extinguished. Now and then, here and there, in order that we may have the faith which is as much the condition of growth, as sight would be the condition of paralysis, a corner of the veil is withdrawn, and we see the Infinite Will behind. But the judgments,—whether approval or condemnation,—in which the Divine hand is seen, are only periodic. " Judging that He may teach,—not teaching that He may judge," as Dr. Ewing says, the great Ruler soon leaves us again to our own limited free- -dom. He punishes, not to turn us as a helmsman turns a ship, but in order that we may be dissatisfied with ourselves, and turn our- selves. He desires us to share his counsels rather than merely recognize Him. He prefers even the man who, fancying himself without God in the world, acts in God's own spirit, to him who, recognizing Him fully, merely bends without consenting to his will. There seems to us that real sovereignty, in the despotic and -Oriental sense, is not the object of the divine government. If we may say it without irreverence, He rules the world absolutely at first, only that He may rule it constitutionally afterwards. He Ivies most as He would, when Ile gains consent instead of impos- ing a destiny. Intellectually we could never have learned the method and meaning of his laws, if his person had not been with- drawn behind those laws. The sort of study given to physical, and chemical, and vital laws, would have been impossible, if the -omnipotence of the divine personality had been manifest in them. The familiarity with his methods, with his undeviat- ing order, with his minute and thickly-crossing threads of causa- tion would have been impossible to the imagination of a finite being, if the overwhelming personality behind had been un- veiled before the investigating mind. The whole sphere of moral freedom, and moral originality, as we may say, would have been -obliterated by the visible dominance of so supreme a purity. Vision, knowledge of Him, follows, instead of preceding, every right act done in his spirit,—is its reward, not its cause and ante- cedent. He shows himself to those who elect Him, and hides himself in order that they may elect Him the more freely.
We have little patience, then, with those who see in popular elections only the anarchy of helpless and ignorant wills. They are really the highest act of national life, where they are the response to a great and searching question put by the State to the people,—a national equivalent for that which the Bishop of Argyll so finely calls " electing" God. In the present instance, we firmly believe that those who have chosen their side, gravely, and deliberately, and as a matter of duty, have truly been -deciding on no less a question than that of the hastening of God's kingdom. He gives us opportunities of resist- ing his rule, of delaying his kingdom, because they are really essential, if we are to have opportunities of accept- ing his rule and hastening his kingdom. He waits for us to decide for ourselves, because no decision is really for Him
which is not made for ourselves. We may say, not profanely, but with profound reverence, that God's whole plan in this world is so to rule us as to avoid intimidation not only by evil, but by good, not only by selfish power, but by the most perfect of all powers, his own infinite will. It could not be his will that we should obey his will without entering into his will, and making it our own. He is so secret with us that Ile may not intimidate us by his infinitude, but gain us over without any act of abject sub- mission to his decree. lie neither bribes us by offering imme- diate gains, nor overpowers us by dark threats. Ile trains us without showing himself, that we may be really free, and elect Him, if we will, because he is good, and not because he is supreme. Are we saying too much in asserting that in these elections, though many may have voted really for Him who have voted mistakenly, yet the question submitted to the country has been one of a morality so clear and simple, and of a choice between statesmen whose whole conduct and spirit have been so utterly contraries of each other, that by far the greater number of votes gravely and conscientiously given, or to be given, for one alternative, have really been, and will be, votes for hasten- ing the kingdom of God, while the greater number of those given on the other side, though they may not have been, and we hope have not been, and will not be, given for an evil end, yet have been and will be given carelessly, recklessly, by party routine, and without realizing at all that a great question of moral life and death is before us ? Have the mass of the so-called Conser- vatives realized at all that we as a nation are now called upon for an act of grave and solemn national choice ? Have their votes not rather been given under the influence of a minister who has the art of making all solemn things look trivial illusions ? of a charmer who so charms the understandings of his followers as to make all deliberate fiats of the political conscience seem mere throws in an idle, though dangerous, but exciting, game of chance ?
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