HERESY ON ITS TRIAL IN NEW ENGLAND.
IN the old sense of the word "heresy," America would be, far more even than France or England, the very land for it. We used to be often reminded twenty years ago by Dr. Newman and his companions that "heresy," strictly speaking, means "choice," and that its sin consisted in choosing for yourself out of the harmonious whole of catholic or complete truth whichever side, aspect, fragment, or morsel of it you might prefer, to isolate, carica- ture, and feed upon for your own pleasure. Heresy wail, then, setting up for yourself and retailing theological half-truths which had some particular fascination for you in the place of the perfect whole. To this old sense of the word our modern English heresies scarcely correspond ; for they consist more in a general atrophy of faith,—more in blanching, thinning away, and flattening down all the expressiveness of divine teaching than in theological crotchets, or the diversion of the believing power into single branches and one- sided shoots. But America, where life of all kinds is vigorous to excess, but as yet harmonious culture is rare, is the very country for energetic detail, and the spontaneous inventions of intellectual ingenuities adapted to all possible circumstances, physical and mental. In America, too, political "heresy," or voluntary choice and arbitrary popular bias, are so much the supreme law and so ingrained in the national imagination, that one would scarcely be surprised to find a sect that chose its theological "ticket" in a creed- caucus, and finally balloted for its God. And, no doubt, there is no other country where so many genuine heretics in both the best and worst sense exist,—men, that is, who have really chosen something individually, instead of remaining, like the mass of Englishmen, in the paralyzing bonds of a dead custom, but also men who have chosen what suited them rather than submitted to the choosing of the divine will,—who have set up for themselves in religious
opinions, rather than gratefully accepted from above a divine theology.
A recent trial for heresy before the Congregationalist tribunal in Magsue•husetts is a curious illustration of these remarks. As
America is probably in the special sense we have indicated the most active-minded and heretical of countries, the one most disposed to spawn creeds and patent new religious "persua- sions," like Mormonism, Shakerism, and Spirit Rapping, as well as to adopt every shade of Rationalism, Calvinism, and Romanian, so we are not surprised to find that in the strongest intellectual society of America, amongst the vigorous New England Puritans, the growth of heresy is at least as vigorous as elsewhere, though less capricious and less relaxed in its moral tone. The trial of the Rev. Charles Beecher (brother of the Rev. H. Ward Beecher, the editor of some of Mrs. Stowe's works) for heresy in Georgetown, Massa- chusetts, is an instructive affair, and not devoid of a _certain humorous character of its own. The Beechers are appa- rently characteristically heretical, full, that is, of American freedom, activity, and pertinacity of mind, and not by any means destitute of a certain American self-will in these as in other matters. The Rev. Edward Beecher, D.D., has published a work called "The Conflict of the Ages" in which is sub- stantiated to his own and, it appears, also to his brother's satis- faction, the old Platonic doctrine of the pre-existence of the soul before the present earthly life—a doctrine of which he seems to have availed himself to account morally for man's fallen condition on this earth as a retribution for former sins, and also for the differences between the original moral start of different men in this life. This philosophical hypothesis appears to have taken a strong hold of the Rev. Charles Beecher, and his earnest proclamation of it has been one of the main grounds of the complaint made against him and the condemnation passed upon him. Unlike one or two of the Essayists and Reviewers, who are said to have cast doubts on the future life and judgment, the Rev. Charles Beecher has eagerly con- tended for an additional life and judgment already past, supple- menting the Bible from Plato, and prefixing a "Prologue in Heaven" to the drama of earth. His people, of course, found it dangerous and newfangled. A deaf elder, who could not hear the preacher, and therefore had the more time to watch the effect of his preach- ing on the influential families, magnanimously signed the complaint (although himself well satisfied with the doctrine as reported to him), because he thought the church was suffering. Indeed of this there were tangible proofs, for the wealthy, who usually like "safe" doc- trine, began to withdraw their support. "When Mr. Beecher came the society owed one hundred and nineteen dollars, the debt of the society was now thirteen hundred and fifty dollars." And this being the case, it was natural that the one hundred and seventy- six ladies who were devoted to Mr. Beecher's heresies, and the "Sabbath School," which "had been greater since Mr. Beecher's ministry," weighed little in the balance. Opulence is conservative, and is as little pleased with being encouraged to believe more about itself than it is accustomed to, as with being shaken from the old positions. How could a substantial man, who had accumulated investments all his life-time, be comfortable in thinking that his "birth was but a sleep and a forgetting" of a previous bankruptcy in good works, of which he was set to work out the deficiency in this state of existence ? Better even to inherit a curse from Adam than for highly respectable and substantial per- sona to think they are actually falling from ledge to ledge of existence, and confessing that they hid their talent in a napkin in a previous world, by the very fact of their contributions to M. Beecher's heresies. With this heresy, indeed, Dr. Lushington, in our own Court of Arches, could not have interfered, so long as it was so put as not to clash with the Articles. It is more like a heresy of Cudworth's time than of our own. The Essayists found it quite enough to give some paler equivalent for what the faith enjoined upon them, and never emulate that plethora of believing power which wants to annex a new joint or two to this life, in order to add a corresponding joint or two to its creed.
But, of course, this heresy of Mr. Beecher's does not stand alone. It hangs together with his doctrine, both of the person of Christ, of the Atonement, and of future punishment. The idea of periodic forms of existence in which the one, as it were, earns the next, by either its merits or demerits, has entered so deeply into his mind that he applies it to explain the original fall of Satan and the rise of Christ to the second personality in the Trinity. Mr. Beecher believes that "Lucifer remained in Heaven until Christ came, that Christ was younger than Lucifer and his younger brother," that "he had an angelic nature with the divinity of the second person in the Trinity added, and only a human body
given in the incarnation." Here, no doubt, the Court of Arches •
. would have been obliged to come down very sharply on Mr. Beecher, for this is clearly contrary to Nicene theology ; indeed, it is hardly theology of any kind, but a viewy bit of cloud-com- pelling philosophy attempting to scale Heaven and subject it to a fanciful intellectual system. This, however, does not appear to have made so much impression on the distressed 'Congregationalists as the imputation of a previous existence to themselves, which probably made them feel nervous, and certainly made them feel confused. The drift in this latter theological fancy which seems to have alarmed even Mr. Beecher's judges the most was a healthy one enough, though to many earnest students of revelation by no means needing so dreamy a foundation,—the subversion, namely, of the vicarious or substitutive doctrine of Christ's punish- ment in the place of man, to appease the divine vengeance. Mr.
• Beecher denies this, it seems, deducing from his quaint theology that all the punishment fell on the "elder brother" Lucifer, and that Christ's sufferings were only of the nature of divine sorrow for human sin,—not vicarious, but essential to the purity and love of the divine nature. Mr. Beecher's judges say that he considers our Lord's sufferings as "only argumentative and suasory," which, we think, must be an injustice to Mr. Beecher. The Congregationalist tribunal is very much opposed to his doctrine of divine sorrow, saying that it presents to us "a God deficient in His nature and imperfect and finite in His blessedness," which we think Mr. Beecher might well impute rather to the pseudo-orthodoxy which condemns him. Whether revelation gives the least hint of a God so blessed as to be without the very highest blessedness,—that of warring against the evil of His free creatures, and sorrowing over their voluntary sins ; or whether this narrow metaphysical idea of divine blessedness be not a pure invention of one of the Calvinistic schools, Mr. Beecher might ask his judges with startling effect.
The most serious, however, of Mr. Beecher's heresies is his last,— again a natural consequence of his crotchet that every state of exist- ence is the exact moral consequence, in the way of reward or punish- ment, of some other state. He conceives justly enough that from this follows the inference that in the future state there will be all -degrees of good and evil, that the imperfect below a certain line will not be suddenly levelled with the wicked, and the imperfect above it elevated to the level of the perfect. He thinks the various orders of good and evil will probably be as much mixed together -" as in New York or London,"—the very evil getting, perhaps, for evil purposes into an evil quarter by themselves, a voluntary In- ferno like St. Giles's, and the good associating chiefly with the good,
• —the real good and evil bringing in both cases their own reward, the joy of God's love, the anguish of His displeasure, and worst of all the degradation which is too low to feel the anguish of His dis- pleasure. "A pig in a pigstye," says Mr. Beecher, "would be happy in wallowing in the mire, so the debased in the other world might find happiness even in hell." Well, this, of course, sounds heretical enough, and perhaps does seem to limit the divine power and will to search with spiritual pangs the debased and disobedient conscience.
But the great heresy remains. "He stated also that God had greatly exaggerated future punishment. As a canoneer would ele- vate his piece to reach a great distance, so God had exaggerated future punishment in order to make men fear it. It would not be so great as represented in the Bible." The idea hovering in Mr. Beecher's mind evidently is that just as he himself had to roar very loud in order to make his deaf deacon hear his voice as an ordinary sound, so that God had to threaten the dull human conscience with more than the truth, because so much of the threat would be lost on its way through the medium as to produce only the true effect. We could not wonder if some of Mr. Beecher's people had felt this a very irreverent and very shallow sort of teaching; but it does not seem to offend either the judges or the people ao much because it directly libels the Eternal Righteousness,—presenting God
disseminating false alarms in order to make us honest,—as because it is supposed to "weaken and undermine the doctrine of future punishment." We are not surprised at this ; for we know that, in England too, the evil doctrine that the divine "economy," as it is called, requires Him to make statements which are false to Him but " as true as we can bear," is by no means uncommon amongst the most eminent theologians. But it certainly does seem astonishingthat the gospel of a systematic divine exaggeration should be condemned by any set of theologians, not because it darkens the face of the Al- mighty, but because it "diminishes the certainty of human punish- ment." In fact, Mr. Beecher's doctrine appears really to mean that God passes nominal sentences on human souls in order to terrify the human conscience into imagining as much pain as it can, while all the time He really intends to relax that sentence like a ticket-of-leave judge—a humane artifice, which Mr. Beecher has fortunately discovered, so that he can relieve the Divine Judge of
the imputation of cruelty at the expense both of His sincerity and of His foresight. We confess this-seems to us very silly and de- testable doctrine, which has no business amongst Mr. Beecher's amiable if rather fanciful heresies. But it is not he who is to blame for it so much as all the divines in both hemispheres, who have so long been trying to convince us that the Gospel does not show us the face of God, but con- tains a highly artificial message from Him, consisting of hints and menaces as to our own conduct. Mr. Beecher's doctrine, that man estimates his own guilt too low, God purposely too high, and that a true divine will split the difference, is only a coarse form of the " economical " theory advocated by English divines of the greatest name. As far as we can gather from the record of Mr. Beecher's trial, his express teaching is more fanciful than that of his people and his judges ; but substantially not at all further from what seems to us the teaching of Christ. But we should be very sorry to judge how far that may be tested by "express doctrinal teaching at all ;"—the trial seems to show that there is a far truer Christian spirit in all parties than it is at all possible to recognize in the curious travesty of the Christian Gospel which each in turn presents under the name of Christian truth.
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