CHRIST AND CIVILIZATION.*
THERE la a certaindi fficulty in reviewing the thoughtful and masterly sermons in which Mr. Church has discussed the great problems of the day, how far Christianity and Civilization can co-exist. The subject in itself is as wide as our nature and history. The diffi- culties that perplex thinking men are apt to take different forms with each. Many start from the belief that science has undermined the foundations of faith, and that while the moral elements of Christianity are taken up into our customs and laws, sensible men can only regard the doctrines of the Incarnation and Passion as among the legends of a later time,.when mythology was informed by a higher thought. Others of a less speculative bent find them- • Sermons. Preached Before the reirersity of Oxford By B. W. Chum]; 3LA. Loudon : Macmillan and Co. 1868.
selves face to face in their daily lives with the question, how the Sermon on the Mount can be reconciled with the laws that seem to keep society together. How are we to guard our homes from pauper- ism, or to hand down the improvements that seem bound up with accumulated wealth, if we "take no thought for the morrow"? Afew hold that the Christian scheme of morals is not the highest, that it omits certain obvious duties, such as that of resistance to tyranny, and takes no account of that subtle sentiment of honour which we call the chivalrous. Mr. Church deals especially with the second of these problems, but he keeps all of them in view. It is difficult to compress an argument which covers so wide a field, which is so austerely reticent that there is not a superfluous word or illustration, and where the preacher seems throughout to rely on his power of calling up kindred associations and memories. It is harder still to do justice to a style whose charms are a perfect simplicity and sustained elevation of tone, and which is so flexible and sympathetic in its modulations that its reasoning, its eloquence, even its irony seem almost the reflex of our own thoughts as we read. We can only profess to give very generally the outlines of Mr. Church's argument ; he must be studied in himself to be understood.
The first sermon is on " the gifts of civilization." " Civiliza- tion to us means liberty and the power of bearing and using liberty It means the strength of social countenance given, on the whole, to those virtues which make life nobler and easier ; it means growing honour for manliness, unselfishness, sin- cerity, growing value for gentleness, considerateness, and respect
for others It means the willingness, the passion to amelio- rate conditions, to communicate advantages, to raise the weak and low, to open wide gates and paths for thdm to that discipline of cultivation and improvement which has produced such fruit in others more fortunate than they." It means further, as Mr. Church explains at length, all that is added to the wealth of thought and feeling and inventive faculty. Are we to renounce this ? "It is an easy thing to say, as has before now been said, Leave it. A wiser thoughtfulness, a braver and deeper faith will say, Use it, only believe that there is something greater beyond." " Civilization runs its great and chequered course influenced by religion or independent of it Yet, after all, henceforth that will always be more excellent which comes nearest to the Spirit of Jesus Christ." Nor is it merely that the way of perfec- tion is that which leads to the Cross. " Serious and thoughtful men, however much they may be the children and the soldiers of an advancing civilization, must feel, after all, their indivi- duality. As one by one they die, so one by one each must live much of his life. And when a man enters into his closet and is still, if ever, from the glories and the occupations of a great part
in the world's business he withdraws up into his mind, and in silence and by himself looks in the face his awful destiny, the awful endless road which lies before him, the purpose for which be was called into being, the law he was meant to live by
he can hardly help feeling that the gifts of God for this life are for this life, they cannot reach beyond, they cannot touch that which is to be." " We want a tie, a bond deeper than that of society," and we find it in the religion given us in the Incarnation and on the Cross ; the religion of "a love which
makes us lose ourselves when we think of it Love for those made in the image of God, and whom God has so loved, love self-surrendering, supreme."
As Mr. Church has stated the case for civilization as strongly as even its warmest apologist could put it, he proceeds in his second sermon to draw a picture of the ideal of Christian society in the first ages of the Church. A society which espoused poverty, renounced family ties, offered no resistance to injury, discouraged the building-up of wealth, shrank from law, war, and political ambition, and steadily looked to the things that were not seen, such was the Early Church in its main outlines ; and Mr. Church notes finely that it shrank from selfishness even more than from suffering, and seemed not to proscribe slavery, while its voice never paused in denouncing litigation and the lust of gold. It is a strange transition from this to the Church of modern times, which recognizes all ordinary occupations as right and lawful ; and which, after many fears and misgivings, has deliberately taken art, literature, and science into education. The Sermon on the Mount seems to have become impossible. We cannot follow it and sacrifice society, we cannot keep it as an esoteric religion, we can- not explain it away as a code of moral precepts, or as merely figurative. Are we dishonest in all this ? " Christiani ad con- tumeliam Christi ?" or " is Christian civilization a true and fair growth ?" The answer is that our secular life is a part of God's plan, and that when Ile came among us to
widen our prospects of thought and hope, He yet passed his days below chiefly in ministering to temporal wants. Having taken possession of the world, Ile has sanctified and transformed human society. Our worldly occupations, even war and riches, even the Babel life of our great cities, " shadows as they are compared with the ages that are before us, and tainted with evil, we believe that they have felt the hand of the Great Healer." The Church has outlived the conditions of its first growth, the necessities of breaking up a depraved society, and the season when none could serve it who were not prepared to accept literal poverty. Then were the days of heroic abnegation, now are times of quiet equable growth ; yet the Cross can only mean one thing. Christianity can ally itself with riches or poverty, the life of enterprise or seclusion; it can bear power; it can bear the strain and absorption of great undertakings, but it recoils from selfishness. "Every- where it implies really great thoughts, great hopes, great at- tempts." Such devotion is not confined to Christians. " The Great Master, who first made men in earnest about these things, has taught some who seem not to follow Him." But Christians have a wider horizon, a strength not of their own, and " the inheritance of these words and counsels by which at first the world was overcome." Those who shall best catch the meaning of the Gospels, and follow it most fearlessly, " will be the masters of the future."
In the third sermon, on " Christ's Example," Mr. Church shows that the great fitness of Christianity to adapt itself to all persons and times is connected with the fact that our Lord gave us a life to imitate rather than a code of precepts to follow, and that His "character is the Christian law." Moral laws and creeds, how- ever admirable in themselves, have an element of finality, and are in some sense limited by the conditions under which they were first framed. But there are unsounded depths in a character, and we can trace it through all varieties of shifting circumstances, and carry its spirit with us into all extremes of fortune and tasks of life. Take, for instance, the seeming antagonism of the lives of action and contemplation. " No recluse conveys so absolutely the idea of abstraction from the world as our Lord in the thick of His activity." Or take the life of philosophical speculation, and con- trast it with that " life, governed by its end and purpose, in which shows or illusions have no place, founded on unshrinking, unex- aggerated truth, facing everything as it is without disguise or mis- take." " Unless it is all one at last to be a trifler or in earnest . that life is the one which all conditions want and all may use as their guide." In a passage of fervid eloquence Mr. Church goes on to point out how even the miracle always present among us, that Christ can be the one standard to rich and poor, to wise and ignorant, is as nothing to the wonder that he has been the constant standard to distant and different ages, in whom each has seen its best idea embodied. Au age of intellectual confusion recognized him as the great teacher and prophet ; the monk followed his steps into poverty ; the Reformer worshipped Him as "the quickener of the dead letter, the stern rebuker of a religion which had forgotten its spirit ;" and we in modern times look to Him as the ideal exem- plar of perfect manhood. He is all this, and He is infinitely more. "That one and the same Form has borne the eager scrutiny of each anxious and imperfect age, and each age has recognized with boundless sympathy and devotion what it missed in the world, and has found in Him what it wanted."
In the fourth and last sermon on " Civilization and Religion," Mr. Church sweeps away the arguments by which a timid faith will sometimes meet the claim that the world has outlived Christianity. He thinks it possible " that very excellent things planted in the first instance by Christianity may yet thrive and grow strong, where there is little reference to their historical origin." The real charge against civilization is not that it is immoral, but that it is incomplete. It may even, in many respects, take upon itself the functions which were at first discharged by religion, and as it has made the repression of crime its own peculiar domain, may vindicate education as a province. But in widening the sphere of its energies it will merely be conquering fresh kingdoms to the Church, calling forth fresh energies to be Chris- tianized, laying bare deeper spiritual wants, which can only find in- terpretation and sympathy in religion. "Civilization is the wisdom and wit of this world, and its office is for this world. . . . Beyond the present,—and I include in this the futurity, as far as we can conceive it, of our condition here,—it does not pretend to go." Considering the great hold which the present has, and must have, upon us,the constant record of moral failure and moral deterioration, the perpetual growth of conventions and subtle forms of materialism, it is a miracle of human history that religion should still have preserved itself the same, and " be able to make men hold fast by faith and hope in the invisible." Never was this function more necessary, never was it more urgent to retain our hold on " the highest and central truths of humanity" than at a time when the very greatness of this world and its kingdoms appears to narrow our horizon. Again, the peace of our family life depeuds very much on its purity, that idea " which had its birth for us in that wonderful mixture of severity with tenderness, of inexorable and exacting holiness with boundless pity for the sinner, tolerance for the weak and welcome for the penitent, which marked the Son of Man." Civilization, which represents essentially the idea of individual liberty, does not condemn or brand offences against the virtue of purity, "in the sense in which with religion it condemns injustice, cruelty, and falsehood." To religion alone, always instinct with the finer spiritual senses, never losing sight of discipline, can we look for an effectual safeguard against the revolt which is only not proclaimed. How the functions of the Church are to be dis- charged in the actual world is a problem which we can only dimly forecast, but we may believe that a great part will always be assigned to the personal influence of individuals, to truth incorpo- rate in human character. " There are many things which we have not in our hands ; what we have is this, whether we will act out our belief." "No doubt signs are about us which mean some- thing which we dare scarcely breathe But awe is neither despair nor fear, and Christians have had bad days before. A faith which has come out alive from the darkness of the tenth century, the immeasurable corruption of the fifteenth, the religious policy of the sixteenth, and the philosophy commenting on the morals of the eighteenth, may face without shrinking even the subtler perils of our own. Only let us bear in mind that it is not an abstraction, a system, or an idea, which has to face them ; it is we who believe."
It is the great charm of Mr. Church's sermons that they seem to carry about them a perfume of many men's thoughts and tempera- ments, as if the preacher had lived out of himself, taking passion- less survey of what was best and wisest around. In the careful limitations by which he strips his argument of all adventitious aids, giving up all that an adversary could fairly claim, and much that might seem defensible to a less thoughtful or less honest apologist, we recognize the disciple of Bishop Butler. The com- pressed fervour of the style recalls Father Newman in the old days at St. Mary's ; the hearty recognition of the personal element in religion has a familiar ring to pupils of Mr. Maurice ; and there is something in the serene wisdom of the reflective passages that reminds us of Mr. Martineau. Nevertheless, no one can doubt that Mr. Church's mastery of his subject is due to himself alone, and that where he seems most indebted, he rather incorpo- rates and fuses than borrows and wears. We dare not say that his theology will solve the problem of every man's life and con- science to more than a very few ; but as a sign that there are still men among us who understand what civilization is, and can yet believe in something that is above it, and who can write about what they think holiest without raising a single party watchword, we regard these sermons as a landmark in religious thought. They help us to understand the latent strength of a Christianity that is assailed on all sides ; and when we remember that the preacher has lived hitherto without any recognition from governments, from ecclesiastical superiors, or from the University which he once saved from the commission of a deplorable folly, we begin to understand the weakness of the Anglican Church.
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