MAURICE ON ST. JOHN. * "I HAVE made many attempts," says
Mr. Maurice in the short preface to this volume of sermons, "to write a commentary on the Gospel of St. John. All of them proved abortive." He adds, with an unmistakeable touch of sarcasm—" Critics, I doubt not, will know excellent reasons why a book of Scripture cannot be satisfactorily expounded in pulpit discourses. I certainly shall not dispute their opinion. No one is more aware than myself that I have not satisfactorily expounded this book of Scripture." No one can know better than Mr. Maurice what he is able to do, or how he ought to communicate to the public the facts and ideas he has to communicate ; we certainly are not among the critics who pretend to teach him either the fittest methods for his own special business, or to understand better than he does the fittest method for expounding Scripture generally. But we may perhaps be permitted, without incurring a charge of presumption, to express our own decided preference for the commentary over the sermon, on the double ground that oral discourses lose by being read in the study just in proportion as they are good and stirring from the pulpit; and that in a commentary, following section by section, verse by verse, word by word, the text of the Scripture, there is less possibility of evading difficulties, of escaping from the actual language before the commentator into generalities more or less vague, and substituting for an explanation of the very words of the sacred writer an expansion of such parts of his words as present little or no difficulty of interpretation in themselves or in their connexion with the whole. St. John, too, is a writer who more than the other three evangelists demands explanation. He dwells emphatically throughout his Gospel on a set of antitheses of thought and phrase running through those discourses of Christ which he reports, familiarized to us neither by the narratives of the other evangelists nor by the common English speech of our day. He abounds in verbal paradoxes, which are his way of presenting the profoundest mysteries of Christian theology to the human apprehension. He is supposed, on good grounds, to have written Ins Gospel to meet subtile forms of speculation afloat in his time and neighbourhood that were connected with Alexandrine Judveo-Platonism, and branched off afterwards into the multifarious shades of Gnostic Christianity. If any well-known writer of our day could be supposed more than another competent to translate the language of St. John's Gospel into modern phraseology, to follow it in its double aspect of an answer at once to the practical wants of the heart and the speculative doubts of the mind, Mr. Maurice would have seemed to be the man. Indeed, we may say more—he has in these sermons proved that he is the man. We are at a loss, after reading the sermons, to understand his alleged inability to write the commentary ; unless indeed it be, that he would not choose to write a commentary without going more deeply and more minutely into questions of the relation of this or that phrase of St. John, and of St. John himself, to the contemporary philosophy and modes of thought, than his other avocations permitted him to do satisfactorily. Whatever the reasons that have influenced him, whatever the inability may be, it certainly is not that he does not understand St. John in as true a sense of the word as he understands St. Paul, on whom he has written a commentary, and whose relation to contemporary modes of thought is quite as perplexing and quite as interesting. Perhaps the solution lies in the prominence given in St. John's Gospel to those mysterious subjects, his treatment of which has earned for him the title of "the divine " ; and Mr. Maurice may shrink from discussing such deep matters as the union of the Father and the Son, the union of the believer with Our Lord through the Spirit, and all that class of doctrines, in any less solemn connexion than as part of the worship of God, and in a form which admits more properly than an exegetical commentary, of personal appeals to the conscience, and intermingled prayer to the "Father of Light" for continual guidance into the mysteries of the faith.
A feeling of this kind is natural to a reverent mind, which has not been blunted by familiarity with sacred names to the awful character of the truths conveyed, and is at the same time alive to the danger which besets us all of losing this wholesome reverence through discussing the mysteries of theology in a simply curious and speculative spirit. In our notice of Mr. Maurice's volume, we might indeed escape the difficulty by ignoring altogether its peculiar theological element, and content ourselves with general phrases descriptive of Mr. Maurice's style as a writer, and such interesting extracts from his sermons—which we could find in plenty—as only involve matters fairly open to intellectual discussion, and not without their intellectual interest for all persons who amuse themselves with watching the methods of ingenious and cultivated minds in dealing with curious problems. It would be to criticize and comment upon the frame and appendages of a
The Gospel of St. John: is Series of Discourses. By Frederic Denison Insti nct., Chaplain of Lincoln's Inn. Published by Macmillans. Cambridge. picture and be silent on the painter's work; to talk of the metres and geography of Hamlet, and say nothing of his speculative melancholy, of his morbid inaction. Mr. Maurice is indeed a literary artist, but it were bettor simply to announce that he had published a volume of sermons on St. John's Gospel, than to treat them as so much clever talk, or even as so much wise practical morality. At the same time, as we are absolutely debarred from discussion of Christian theology in a secular newspaper, our alternative must be to state without discussion some of the leading thoughts which Mr. Maurice traces throughout St. John's Gospel, in the gradual unfolding of which consists the revelation of which the l'Sible is, in Mr. Maurice's opinion, the record, and by the fullest development of which St. John's Gospel has ever vindicated its claim to be an inspired book, whether the appeal has been to the heart of the Christian peasant or to the reason of the Christian philosopher. The more we can do this in Mr. Maurice's own language, the better we shall indicate the distinctive peculiarities of his teaching, and the better guard ourselves against the danger, particularly to be guarded against, in such matters, of altering his doctrine while we fancy we are explaining it. St. John himself—supposing it granted, as Mr. Maurice believes with no doubt or hesitation, that the ." beloved. apostle" wrote this Gospel in his old age, and that it was not the work of some philosophizing Christian of the second century—tells us, in the twentieth chapter, the object and leading idea of the narrative. "And many other signs truly," says the author, "did Jesus in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book : but these are written, that ye might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing ye might have life through his name." He thus marks at once that his narrative is a selection from a large mass of facts, and a selection made with a special purpose. Mr. Maurice, in an appendix to one of the sermons, thus contrasts this special purpose with that of St. Paul
" While St. Paul's main work was to set forth the fact of atonement, laying its groundwork always in the righteousness of God manifested in Christ, and ascending, in the Epistle to the Ephesians especially, to the purpose which he purposed in Christ before the worlds were ; St. John's calhng was to trace this last idea to its source in God himself; to exhibit the original constitution of man in the Divine Word ; to set forth atonement as the vindication of that constitution, and the vindication of the right of all men to enter into it ; to set forth the union of the Father with the Son in one Spirit, as the ground of the reconciliation of man, and of his restoration to the image of his Creator."
Mr. Maurice is probably quite as well aware as any of his readers of the extreme difficulty which the phraseology of this extract presents to the ordinary English apprehension of the present day. He at the same time is singularly earnest in his desire to bring home the deepest truths of his theology to ordinary apprehension. Notwithstanding, he consistently for many years past has been using this language, and will doubtless go on to the end using it. He therefore deliberately adopts it as the only language that adequately conveys his meaning—the best language which he can find to impress upon his contemporaries the truth which he believes St. John was divinely inspired to communicate to the world. Sometimes propositions are brought into clearer light by considering what they are intended to deny than what they are intended to assert. Thus, when Mr. Maurice tells us that St. John's mission was to trace the idea of God's purpose in Christ before the worlds were, we can scarcely be far out if we conclude that he intends to combat that theory of the atonement which would make it an alteration of God's original scheme of the universe, devised subsequently to the fall of the human race, as a remedy for that disaster. Mr. Maurice considers St. John to teach that man was originally "at one" with the Father through the Son ; that this was his true constitution, in abandoning which his sin and fall consisted ; and that his restoration must therefore consist in the reparation of the broken relation. The method and instrument of this restoration lay in the revelation to man of the true nature of God, and involved in this of his own true relation to his Maker. As this relation was from the beginning that of union with the Father through the Son, the revelation also necessarily was the revelation of God the Father and God the Son; and the coming of Christ in the flesh was but the manifestation of a fact in the relations between God and man which was always true, always the truth to which the whole progressive revelation pointed, but which was then brought clearly out and unmistakeably evidenced. But this idea of the restoration of man's "original constitution in the Divine Word " was not only to be traced back to an origin beyond time, "before the worlds were " ; it was to be traced back "to its source in God himself." Here again, if we are not mistaken, is a statement intended to counteract popular modes of thought and expression, that involve, in Mr. Maurice's opinion, a practical disbelief of the unity of the Godhead. The popular theology represents Christ as sacrificing himself to his Father's vengeance in the place of the sinful human race. Not that the exponents of that theology would dream of deliberately denying that the sacrifice of Christ was in accordance with his Father's will, but that their habitual mode of expression brings Christ's sacrifice into such prominence and isolation as to imply a forget
fulness that throughout the whole process of this sacrifice his will and his Father's are one ; that his sacrifice is not to change his
Father's will, butte do it—not to mollify his anger, butte execute his love. It is this point, which every attentive reader of St John's Gospel will acknowledge to be very distinct and prominent in his tenrhing, that Mr. Maurice dwells upon with an emphasis and a reiteration that prove how important he considers it as a positive doctrine, and as a protest against the popular theology of our day. And we may remark, that the key to much of the difficulty of Mr. Maurice's writing lies in the firm hold he has of the doctrine of a Trinity in Unity ; which for most persons however orthodox they may fancy themselves, dissolves into two contradictions, between which they oscillate, instead of remaining the mystery which reconciles opposing aspects of truth, while it is itself, by the very nature of a mystery, transcendent and unintelligible.
The atonement is not only thus made part of the original scheme of the universe, and. the Father himself represented as originating it, but it is represented as "the vindication of the tame constitution of man' and of the right of all men to enter into it." That is to say, that the atonement does not act by making God willing to admit the human race again to the love which they had forfeited, but by enabling the human race to recognize that their true inheritance and birthright always consisted in that love; that their sin and misery lay in not acknowledging this, and in not claiming their birthright. And furthermore, by enabling them not only to recognize this as a speculative truth, but each one to claim for himself his share of the inheritance, by freeing them from the selfish nature in which they were each looked up and alienated at once from their fellow men and the true centre of humanity. How directly opposed this view is to the statements of the popular theology,—though here again the exponents of that theology would scarcely refuse to admit the doctrine of St. John as expounded by Mr.Maurice,—it is needless to show in detail.
We are now come to the last clause of the summary which we have been somewhat expanding. It states St. John's object to have been, "to set forth the union of the Father with the Son in one spirit, as the ground of the reconciliation of man, and of his restoration to the image of his Creator." This, in one form or another, is a doctrine upon which Mr. Maurice dwells emphatically, as at once the deepest mystery of theology, and by consequence the profoundest explanation of humanity. It implies, that man could. not be "at one" with God, and restored to the image of his Creator, but for that transcendent fact expressed in the doctrine of the Trinity. We can only dimly perceive the train of thought of which these phrases are the expression. But, so far as we fancywe perceive it, it amounts to saying that all the relations of God's creatures to their Maker must be grounded on truths appertaining to the Divine nature itself; that no fact in creation but is transcendently exhibited. by the Divine nature in its highest possible form; that if the human race can stand towards its Maker in the relation of children to a father, it can only be because this relation is transcendently exhibited from eternity in the Divine nature ; that if communion between God and man is possible, it is only because a communion similar in kind, but transcendent in degree, is eternally manifested among the persons of the Godhead.
These, then, are the doctrines, so far as our exhibition of them is correct, which Mr. Maurice considers to form the momenta of St. John's theology. The narrative of his Gospel brings them out in the acts and discourses of Our Lord, revealing Jesus of Naza reth as the Divine Word, Lord over nature, Lord and King of the hearts and spirits and bodies of men ; proving to them that their true constitution is union with God through him the Son, and enabling them to recognize that constitution, and to enter into that union, which is declared to be " life eternal." If in stating these doctrines we have deviated from the ordinary course of a secular journal, the influence exercised. by Mr. Maurice on the social and political opinions of our day, and the intimate connexion of his influence with the abstrusest doctrines of his the ology, must be our apology to those who think an apology needed. It is impossible to understand Mr. Maurice's books if his theology be ignored; and those books are powerfully influencing a large class of persons whose acts and opinions may to a great extent determine the future of England.
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