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OUR NEW DEPARTURE:
OK,
THE METHODS AND WORK
UNIVERSALIST CHURCH OP AMERICA,
AS IT ENTERS ON
ITS SECOND CENTURY. fTHE library
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ELBRIDGE GERRY BROOKS, D.D.,
PASTOR OF THE CHURCH OF THE MESSIAH, PHILADELPHIA.
" Whereto we have already attained, let us walk by the same rule, let us mind the same thing."
3 J
BOSTON: V
UNIVERSALIST PUBLISHING HOUSE,
NO. 37 CORNHILL.
1874.
Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1873,
BY ELBRIDGE GERRY BROOKS,
In the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington.
Stereotyped at the Boston Stereotype Foundry, 19 Spring Lane.
TO
Carrie:
OUR BEAUTIFUL MEMORY O N E A R TH ;
OUR FLOWN 'DOVE' AWAITING US IN HE A VEN
PREFACE
This book was planned early in 1871, and was to have been published a few months after. I regret that it could not have been so published. But under the peremptory order of my physician, I was compelled as nearly as possible to suspend all mental labor during the fall and winter of 1871-72, and much of the ensuing spring. In August following, my eyes failed, and during the autumn and early winter, when I had hoped to finish the work, no reading or writing was permitted me. Except for these causes, the book would have appeared much closer upon our Centenary Year, and ere the leading title had become so nearly hackneyed. But though the title — selected, I may be ex- cused for saying, a considerable time before I had ever seen it used in such an application — has lost in freshness, it has lost nothing insignificance; and though our Centenary is three years behind us, we are still so on the thresh- old of our Second Century, that the book is no less appropriate as an at- tempt to indicate something of what our methods and work should be as we enter upon it.
I make no apology for these pages. For nearly forty years, a humble par- ticipant in our church- work, I have been not only an observer, but a student of our denominational life — our condition, hinderances, needs, prospects. I have watched events, and tried to trace effects to causes. These pages re- cord my conclusions — conclusions carefully, some of them, unwillingly, reached. I wish the presentation had been better done. But for the conclu- sions themselves, I plead neither explanation, nor excuse. They are, I be- lieve, in the main, impregnable. As such, it is my profound conviction, they are what Universalists need, beyond everything else, solemnly to ponder. They indicate, I am satisfied, alike the explanations to be considered so far as we have failed to witness the practical religious results we had a right to ex- pect, and the conditions upon which alone any vitalizing and saving influence is possible to us. These being my convictions, I have uttered them as I have ; * according as it is written, I believed, and therefore have I spoken."
And having so written, I lay this book as an unpretending offering on the altar of our Faith, to suggest what, as it seems to me, the further growth and power of our Church demand. I solicit for it the consideration to which it is entitled by virtue of the importance of the interests it concerns. The off- spring of no hasty impulse, or immature thinking, I ask that it be dealt with in no hasty or superficial way. It does but give voice, in such fashion as I
5
6 PREFACE.
could, to what is deepest — and long has been deepest — in many minds and hearts among us. Not for the sake of speaking, but under an imperative sense of duty, I have spoken frankly, sometimes using "great plainness of speech," though in no instance, I trust, speaking otherwise than courteously and kindly. If any occasion is seen to criticise or disapprove the book, let it be criticised or disapproved in the same spirit. My appeal is to the Bible, and reason, and spiritual law — often to simple common sense. In this court, let whatever issue is raised be fairly tried. I am content to abide the verdict.
"Whatever criticism the book may receive, I shall enter into no controversy to defend it. For the reasons already mentioned, growing out of the state of my health and my impaired eyesight, the work has been done, amidst my par- ish cares, at long intervals of time, and in a broken and desultory manner. These circumstances have not been favorable to connected writing — on which account, any repetitions that may possibly be observed must be pardoned. But as to substance, every sentence has been weighed, and what I have writ- ten, is written. I think it sufficiently explains and vindicates itself. Let its mistakes and errors be exposed — and forgotten. Its truth will take care of itself.
With these introductory words, I commend the book to the blessing of God, and to the welcoming sympathy of all who love our Church. May I com- mend it, also, to the candor and reflection of those who, not Universalists, would know something of Universalism in its present form and tendencies, or who, however they may reject some of our conclusions, would find ground for giving us recognition and fellowship as one of the divisions of Christ's army of redemption ? The time, probably, is not far distant when I shall no longer personally labor for our Church on earth. Many years of work for it may be — and if such is God's will, I hope are — before me. I have plans for other pages, which I would gladly be spared to accomplish. But on the west- ern side of the hill, I am not without serious admonitions that my ministry, if not my life, may at any moment be ended. And should either event occur before I can send forth other pages, I know of no form in which I would rather speak my last word than in what is herein said. It is at the same time the utterance of my deepest faith, and a testimony of my love for the Church into which I was born and to which my whole life has been given. Nor, con- sidering what may possibly be said by way of objection to this book, can I better close this preface than in words I wrote, in effect, many years ago : — Universalism is the highest concern of the world to me. I know, or wish, no better work than to labor for it while I live ; and when I am dead, I desire no higher praise than to have it said of me, Holding it as the Gospel of Christ, he loved and was always faithful to it.
Philadelphia,
November 26, 1873.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. The New Departure 9
II. A Survey of the Field 41
III. The Goodness op God 59
IV. Bought with a Price 68
V. Christ Essential * . 76
VI. Sin 85
VII. Salvation 99
VIII. Conversion 112
IX. Experimental Religion 130
X. Consecration * 147
XL The Bible 156
XII. Prater 175
XIII. Our Ministry 194
XIV. The Church 228
XV. The Sunday School 251
XVI. Man and Woman 268
XVII. Unity 285
XVIII. Giving 293
XIX. Doing 306
XX. Three Words 315
7
" Come, Holy Spirit, from above, And from the realms of light and love
Thine own bright rays impart. Come, Father of the fatherless, Come, Giver of all happiness,
Come, Lamp of every heart.
" O Thou, of comforters the best, O Thou, the soul's most welcome guest,
O Thou, our sweet repose, Our resting-place from life's long care, Our shadow from the world's fierce glare,
Our solace in all woes.
" 0 Light divine, all light excelling, Fill with Thyself the inmost dwelling
Of souls sincere and lowly : Without thy pure divinity, Nothing in all humanity,
Nothing is strong or holy.
" "Wash out each dark and sordid stain, Water each dry and arid plain,
Raise up the bruised reed. Enkindle what is cold and chill, Relax the stiff and stubborn will,
Guide those that goodness need.
" Give to the good, who find in Thee The Spirit's perfect liberty,
Thy seven-fold power and love. Give virtue strength its crown to win, Give struggling souls their rest from sin, Give endless peace above."
Veni, Sancte Spiritus,
Dean Stanley's Translation.
8
OUR NEW DEPARTURE.
CHAPTER I.
THE NEW DEPARTURE.
Every live movement, in proportion as it is alive, en- larges as it proceeds. And so enlarging, it necessarily creates constantly new circumstances, out of which grow fresh demands.
The important question concerning every such movement, therefore, is, How far will it successively adjust itself to these new circumstances, and meet these fresh demands ? On the answer to this question, under God, the final breadth and power of the movement wholly depend.
Principles never change. Neither do the ultimate pur- poses of any enterprise whose relations and issues have, at the outset, been fully perceived. But methods, instru- ments, directions of labor, bases of operation must perpet- ually change, or weakness and failure ensue. No wise commander adheres to any line of march save only with reference to his objective point. His tactics vary with the progress and varying exigencies of the campaign. Every day he studies the situation, to determine his strategy accordingly. New departures, by flank, detour, or ad- vance, are made after every fight. How else do campaigns end in victory ? Or, who doubts the consequence should any commander obstinately persist that, as he began, so, in every particular, he must push on ? As little is victory possible for any movement that aims at growth or conquest, except on similar terms.
9
10 OUR NEW DEPARTURE.
The Universalist movement is no exception to these necessities. Of the nature or importance of this move- ment it is not requisite here to speak at length. It is enough to say that no reasonable words can exaggerate what it is, what it has done, or what it may do. Broadly viewed, it is, intellectually and morally, the grandest move- ment of these last centuries. Since Luther, there is noth- ing comparable to it. It was the resurrection of the long- slumbering moral consciousness of the Church. It was reason and common sense once more re-asserting them- selves amidst the contradictions and absurdities of tjie creeds. Beginning as a protest of the uneducated popular heart against the cold and cruel scholasticism of the tradi- tional theology, and providentially designed to give the world a more humane and harmonious interpretation of the Gospel, it has swept, a modifying and reconstructive power, through the realm of opinion, and spread as a subtile influ- ence, for the most part unrecognized, but none the less actual, permeating society with broader principles, and a tenderer and more sympathetic spirit, to an extent that no human foresight could have dared anticipate. When John Murray was being stoned in Boston, or when his friends in Gloucester, or, later still, the handful of Universalists in New Hampshire, were battling before the courts for their rights as a distinct denomination, had some one ventured to predict that in the year 18 70 Universalism would have so leavened the country, including even the churches, or that the Universalist Church of America would to-day be what it is in all the elements of Christian power, none would have been more ready than the Universalists themselves to pro- nounce him wildly visionary. What has thus been realized, seen and unseen, considering the circumstances, is almost without parallel. All honor to those who, in any way, have helped to make the movement thus potent. A brave and sturdy company, for the most part, they have been. Seldom has any work had workmen braver, or more deserving the world's remembrance.
But, exalted as are the terms in which this movement is to be spoken of, and much as all interested in it have occa- sion to be proud of the record which, in most respects, it
THE NEW DEPARTURE. 11
has made for itself, it is obvious, in the nature of the case, that, if it is to continue effective, its methods must change with the changed circumstances it has helped to create. What has been cannot suffice for what is, or is to be ; nor can the experiment of making it suffice be insisted on, except at the peril of the whole movement as thus far organ- ized.
At first, our work was of necessity controversial. Occu- pied as the religious field was,- our call was to assail and denounce — to oppose, dispute, pull down. We were noth- ing if not aggressive. As the consequence, we have ar- raigned, discussed and controverted the old theology as none others have been willing to do. We have exposed its sophisms ; have made manifest its inconsistencies and con- tradictions ; have denounced the grossness of its barbarous principles, and the fallacy of its narrow assumptions. We have wrested from it the Scriptures it has misapplied, and have demonstrated by our reiterated expositions — reiter- ated, as some have thought, to very weariness — how posi- tively the Bible announces quite other conclusions. We have shown how reason and conscience, and nature and Providence, and every humane instinct, array themselves against it. In few words, we have so kept in agitation this entire question of God, and man, and destiny, in all its in- tellectual, moral, and scriptural aspects and relations, as to compel the public attention to it. We have had allies, it is true. We readily concede all that can be justly claimed for them. But, without stopping now to enumerate them, or to analyze the precise ratio of their and our comparative influ- ence, it is not too much to allege that we have accomplished more than any other one agency — probably more than all other agencies combined. There could have been no Ward Beecher without Hosea Ballou. The result is obvious. That single name — Ward Beecher — better symbolizes it than whole volumes could describe it. ' Orthodoxy ' still has its nominal believers — many of them ; and considerable numbers, despite the growing breadth and liberality, adhere immovably to the ancient standards. Dr. Hodge's "Sys- tematic Theology," and the recent action of little knots of ministers in various localities, are among the latest, as they
12 OUR NEW DEPARTURE.
are sufficient, witnesses of this ; and, looking at catechisms and text-books, we may still find many of them as harsh as ever. But the sway of the sacrificial system is none the less broken. Dr. Hodge's book and the ministerial demon- strations no doubt have sympathizers ; and there are those who are satisfied with the catechisms and the text-books, or they could not hold their place ; but they are anachronisms, nevertheless — as little in keeping with the existing drift of popular and church thought as Dr. Emmons's cocked hat and knee-breeches, if to-day reproduced, would be with the present style of dress, or as some extinct monster of the Silurian epoch, should it return to perambulate our city streets, would be with the life amidst which it would walk. Speaking of those portions of the country where our — and other — modifying influences have really asserted themselves, how many minds, at all considerate, do not now revolt from the doctrines which Dr. Hodge is so grimly re-affirming ? How many are now affrighted with visions of God's impla- cable wrath, or with the smoke and flames of an endless hell ? How many, who actually think of God at all, now ever think of Him as an arbitrary Sovereign, creating souls on purpose to damn them forever, or as a Being who is weakly permitting the larger portion of His creation to drift to help- less ruin ? Notwithstanding the creeds and catechisms, He is now practically thought of as the merciful Friend and Father of all ; and the number of intelligent people — in the fields referred to — who, without question or reservation, believe in the absolute endlessness of sin and suffering, is comparatively very small. What is the significance of the ministerial demonstrations, — so far as they have any signifi- cance, — except that they point to these facts ? Perhaps the state of the public mind, in the churches and out, in these respects, has never before been put to so significant a test as by the recent books of George Macdonald, especially his "Robert Falconer." This book is an express onslaught against all that is characteristic in 'orthodoxy' and is not only saturated with the spirit of Universalism, but is full of vigorous and unanswerable arguments for it. But who, or how many, have objected to it on these accounts ? News- papers and reviews of all shades of opinion have praised it.
THE NEW DEPARTURE. 13
The most strenuously ' evangelical y pastors have advised their people to read it ; and thousands, of all names and sects, have taken it to their hearts as an exceeding refreshment and joy. Could this have been forty, or even twenty, years ago? Look, too, at the new departure which ' orthodoxy' has made in the welcome which all the churches are willing to give to Universalists, notwithstanding their Universalism ; in the readiness of some of them to tolerate it even in their ministers ; and in the larger and kindlier fellowship for Uni- versalists which is finding so many advocates. I know a prominent Methodist church in whose Sabbath-school an avowed Universalist is the teacher of one of the Bible- classes ; and the significance of the ordination of the Rev. Mr. Jackson among the Congregationalists, and of the debate among them and others whether the doctrine of end- less woe is, in any real sense, essential, is too clear to be mistaken. The old rigors, to a wide extent, have undeni- ably softened.
The circumstances amidst which we have to work, then, being so changed, the direction and methods of our work, manifestly, if we are to work to best effect, must be modi- fied accordingly. Argument and exposition, attack and defence, are unquestionably still required as much as ever in some localities — in all localities on some occasions. But these are no longer our chief business. As well might one persist in swinging his axe when only an occasional tree is to be felled, and when his pressing need is to till his ground for harvests. Not that we have been altogether negligent of harvests. It is sometimes charged that we have been ; and writers and speakers of our own have not been lacking, who, in a culpable neglect to qualify and discriminate, have joined in the charge. But any such representation, come it whence it may, is false, and does us great injustice. We have had earnest affirmative aims ; and our organization, now so complete, but attained only after so many j^ears of struggle and experiment, is demonstrative proof that we have sought to build as well as to tear down. But what harvests have we chiefly cultivated ? To what ends have we mainly built ? For the awakening of the thoughtless ? For the conversion of sinners ? For the salvation of souls ?
14 OUR NEW DEPARTURE.
For these ends to some extent, certainly ; and those there have been among us — in number not a few — second to none in the devotion and energy with which they have given themselves to such work. But can it be said that this has been the general animus, the characteristic spirit of our Universalist effort ? On the contrary, while it would be slanderous to say that there has been no thought — or even to say that there has not been a good deal of thought — among us with reference to these ends, has not our labor, as the rule, concerned doctrines more than souls, except, of course, as it has always been understood that it is for, the interest of souls to know the truth ? Has not our effort been to convince the head that ' orthodoxy ' is not true, and that God is good, and that all men are to be saved, rather than so to present the fact of God's persistent and pleading love, and of the ultimate repentance and obedience of all, as to convict the heart of sin, to quicken the con- science to a sense of guilt, and to bring the people, in peni- tence and a confession of personal need and obligation, to their knees ? In a word, has not our labor been theological more than experimental, aiming to make Christian Univer- salists, and to build and consolidate a Universalist denomi- nation, rather than to make Universalist Christians, com- pacted and consecrated in the Universalist Church ? It is believed that no contradiction is hazarded in saying that these last questions can be truthfully answered only in the affirmative. The deepest and most interior meanings of Christ's work have never been wholly overlooked among us ; but, as the rule, we have given more attention to the fact that he is to save, than to the question, How ?
When I entered the ministry (1836), and for several years after, I found few with any clear and settled answer for this question, How ? — for the reason that it was generally held to be of only incidental importance ; and I well remember with what a trembling sense of treading on very uncertain — and almost forbidden — ground, I ventured once to read an essay in which — in a very crude way, as I now see — I had tried to work out some answer to this question for my own satisfaction. It was not until some time after the pub- lication of Dr. Ballou's weighty and every way admirable
THE NEW DEPARTURE. 15
paper on
the " Expositor " of January, 1840, that the misty and inco- herent state of thought on this subject began to give place to a more distinct and intelligent view. And even since, as before, that paper — which did more than any other one thing to clarify and systematize our denominational thinking on this point — the very large proportion of our ministers and people have been much more occupied with the certainty than with the method of salvation. God and what He has purposed, rather than man and the conditions which he must fulfil, have constituted the burden of our thought ; and while our pulpit — from which have spoken a succession of men, as a whole, second to no others in purity and unselfish zeal — has been filled with argument in the direction of faith, more than with unction in the direction of conversion and work, our people • have been intelligent, conscientious, benevolent, morally reputable, comfortably confident that everything is to come out rightly at last, rather than pious, prayerful, spiritually vital, eagerly asking, "Men and breth- ren, what shall we &0V
Nor, however much there may be in all this to regret, could it, in the nature of the case, have been otherwise. Consider the facts. The entire theory of God and the uni- verse, when our movement began, and for many subsequent years, was such as to insult every rational and moral in- stinct, and to render all that bore the name of religion unattractive, if not a disgust. Chiefest of all, perhaps, an appalling uncertainty hung over the future. Nothing was definite. Above no grave could a sure word of prophecy be uttered. Not even to the saintliest soul, it was thought, was there authority to say, " Fear not : " for time and eter- nity, God is your Friend. Ours it was to pour light into this darkness. The word providentially put upon our lips was, Look up : God rules in infinite love, and Christ, as his messenger, will certainly triumph. Was it strange that, at first, we were mainly engrossed with the errors we opposed, and the glad tidings we proclaimed ? Recalling how we were not only doctrinally assailed, but personally maligned, misrepresented, denounced as the religious pariahs of the country, the enemies of God and all good, would it not
16 OUR NEW DEPARTURE.
have been remarkable if we had had much thought for any- thing* save the assertion and justification of our truth on the one hand, and the arraignment of ' orthodoxy ' and its mischievous power on the other ? And, full of our message of certainty, as we had occasion to be amidst the prevailing suspense and gloom, is it surprising that we did not always stop carefully to weigh in detail all the conditions involved in the result we heralded, or to emphasize the personal spiritual necessities it imposed ?
But it is one of God's methods that every work educates its workers. So our work has been educating us. More and more, as the years have passed, the conditions upon which all moral results depend have been asserting them- selves in our thought. The question, How ? or, What have we to do ? has commanded continually increasing attention. And now, entering upon the second century of our history, we have, as a body, very generally reached conclusions in the light of which the answer to this question assumes momentous importance. What we are at this point to determine is, whether or not this answer shall have the enforcement its importance calls for. Not that we are to lose any interest in the grand fact in which Universalism culminates. We are to abate nothing from the emphasis or the constancy with which we proclaim it. To do so would be to abandon the position we have conquered, and to re- linquish the chief element of our power. The Gospel of Jesus Christ, without the doctrine of his certain ultimate triumph in the conquest of sin and the reconciliation of all souls to God, is the arch without the keystone, is the lever without the fulcrum, is the sky without the sun, is the body without the soul. But, while this result must still have its due place, its cognate — and, in their place, no less impor- tant— facts must have greater prominence. What is to precede this result, and what, therefore, it implies as an antecedent experience and purpose in every soul, must be more urgently pressed. In other words, the demand is that, more keenly apprehending and appreciating the inner- most significance and personal requirements of the truth we teach, we shall take another step forward in the adoption of such methods of labor as the spiritual facts underlying what
THE NEW DEPARTURE. IT
we affirm suggest and require ; and on our decision in re- spect to this demand our future influence and fortune as a Church are suspended.
Another step forward, I say ; for it is no new thing for us to take a " new departure " denominationally. As was in- timated in opening, it is the law of all live movements thus to go forward by stages, either because principles are grad- ually more clearly perceived, or because of a ripening un- derstanding as to the best instruments. There were such new departures in the apostolic church, as when Peter, after the vision of the sheet, went and preached to Cornelius and his friends ; as when Paul and Barnabas, being rejected of the Jews, "turned to the Gentiles.'7 Every church which has grown in the apprehension of its truth, or profited by its experience, has had similar new departures. We have had them with the rest. Let us look back a moment, and see what they have been.
There are four well-defined periods in the history of our Church, each successively marking the new departures we have made: — 1. The patristic period, during which the whole type of thought and faith was ' orthodox/ with the single exception of the doctrine of universal salvation ; 2. The period of transition, extending from 1795 to (per- haps) 1818, during which the ' orthodox ? type of faith was supplanted by the Unitarian theory of God and the atonement, and related points (so making us the first body of Unitarian Christians in the country), the doctrine of "future punishment'7 being still retained; 3. The Ballou- ian period, extending from 181*7-18 to (perhaps) 1845, during which the. influence of Mr. Ballou was dominant, and his theory as to the immediate felicity of all souls at death became the general sentiment of our body ; 4. The period of reaction, -extending from 1845 to the present time, during which Father Ballou's theory has, in its turn, been gener- ally superseded, and, as Dr. Ballou once phrased it, "the current of opinion has run in favor of a moral connection of the present life with the future."
Here, then, we have four distinct departures : — the first, our departure from ' orthodoxy/ and each of the others a departure, quite as marked, from grouud we had been occu- 2
18 OUR NEW DEPARTURE.
pying, to a new position. Each of these was an advance. Putting their own interpretation upon them, our friends of other churches talk much of our shifting theology ; and, suiting themselves in their assumptions thereupon, they moralize, greatly to their own satisfaction, on the instability of error, holding up their hands in wonder at the fatuity which imagines that a system so vacillating can have any future. It is easy at any time to retort by pointing these friends to their own shifting positions, some of them fatal to the very substance of their theology. But, not now to step aside for this, it is sufficient to say that these several departures warrant no such unfavorable inferences. They are only the stages through which our Church has grown into the perception of the adjuncts and relations of its basic truth. It is the fortune of all truth, history teaches, to be progressively perceived and formulated. The apostles walked personally with Christ as their instructor, but who of them at once understood the spiritual and universal pur- pose of the Gospel ? So with Luther's followers : how many on the instant took in the full scope of his principles, or the meaning of his work ? And so of all crusades against error or wrong, and all moral or spiritual reforms. Of which of them, that has attained any considerable proportions, has the deepest significance ever been perceived by those who have first burned and thrilled with its new message, or fought and 'roughed it' in its earlier battles ? In common with all great movements of thought, or religious life, we, as a Church, have only illustrated the natural order of things. We have not happened. Nothing in our history is the result of accident. We have come of laws as absolute as gravitation, or any law of growth ; and these successive changes or departures simply show how Universalism has been historically developed. They indicate no modification of final principles, and therefore justify no reflections as to the fickleness of our theology in respect to such principles. They only show the different phases of interpretation and statement in which other and more purely modal principles have been held upon these as their common foundation, much as the varieties of soil and vegetable growth on the globe have no significance as to what is primary in its struc-
THE NEW DEPARTURE. 19
tare, only as to what has, from time to time, been deposited upon its surface. Whether God exists in one or in three persons or manifestations ; whether he is so sovereign that all human action is necessitated, or so sovereign as to leave action free ; whether sin is exclusively of the flesh, or of the soul ; whether the character we here form has all its moral importance in this world, or goes, with its conse- quences, into the future, — these and like inquiries are very grave, and, in a sense, vital. But they are not primal ; they do not touch bottom, like those which concern the character of God, and the spirit and issues of his govern- ment. In respect to these, Universalism has never changed. On other points, differences have been numerous, and opin- ion has fluctuated, and our theology has been protean in its forms, so that the Universalist Church has, at various peri- ods, stood for quite diverse ideas. But as regards these final principles, there has been no difference or fluctuation. Murray, and Ballou, and Turner, and Hosea Ballou 2d, and all whom they represent, have clasped hands, in one un- broken line, in the unity of a faith "without variableness, or the shadow of turning ; " and, from the hour of its in- ception till now, the Universalist Church has steadily stood for precisely the same thing, viz., the impartial and immiuta- ble love of God, destined surely to triumph through Christ in the ultimate redemption of all soids. Our successive depart- ures, it thus appears, have been simply as to the form, never as to the substance, of faith. Instead, therefore, of furnishing any occasion for adverse criticism, they have quite another meaning'. Fossils never grow. Only live things develop and mature. These departures reveal the processes of our spiritual evolution. That reactions, crudi- ties, and various fanciful and extreme opinions, should appear, was inevitable in such a breaking up of old beliefs as the past hundred years have witnessed ; and it speaks honorably for the vitality and elasticity of our Church that, amidst these things, while immovably fixed as to our funda- mental faith, we have been, each for himself, so free to search God's word, and to follow the light given us. Thus, enslaved by no creeds and hindered by no traditions, thought has clarified, our great principles have gradually
20 OUR NEW DEPARTURE.
pushed themselves into fuller and clearer expression, the relations and proportions of truth have become more and more manifest, till, as the result, logic, sentiment, the Bible, and spiritual law having contributed each its part, Universalism stands forth rounded and balanced into the coherent and harmonious system it is.
And now, having attained to so much through our several preceding departures, the time — returning to our statement — has fully come for another step forward. Hitherto, our departures have been mainly doctrinal, though naturally they have each somewhat affected our type of life and methods of labor. That to which we are now called is vital and experimental. It is demanded of us that, having reached certain definite conclusions, we shall distinctly and systematically give ourselves to a style of work and appeal such as they logically suggest and require. There is no room for doubt as to what has come to be the predominant conviction of our body. It is that death, as such, works no moral change ; that character is continuous, except as moral agen- cies modify it ; and that salvation, being a change of charac- ter, is possible anywhere only as the result of such agencies, acting through faith and penitence, and inducing self-surren- der. There was a period in our history when these were regarded as debatable positions. With the most of us, that period some time ago ceased ; and these positions are now held to be axiomatic truths, as little open to legitimate debate or question as the fact that there is such a thing as character, or that mechanical or chemical causes are incom- petent to produce moral effects. And, this being so, should not these conclusions give inspiration and purpose to our ministry, and be henceforth the basis of our systematic effort as a Church ?
Is it said that there are those, — among them brethren honored and beloved, — with their equal rights in our fel- lowship, who do not yet accept these conclusions? But are these brethren more honored or beloved, or more enti- tled to hold back our Church from the kind of labor befitting its general convictions, than were Murray and his coadju- tors, when, notwithstanding they adhered to the old theo- ries, the denomination, under the lead of Ballou and Turner,
THE NEW DEPARTURE. 21
planted itself on the Unitarian platform ? or than were Turner, and Dean, and Loveland, and Willis, and Hosea Ballou 2d, and those in sympathy with them, when, follow- ing" Father Ballou, the denomination so generally committed itself to the 'no-future punishment' theory ? The question as to what a church shall do is never — or ought never to be — a question of persons, but always of principles; and the equal rights of those who no longer represent the pre- vailing sentiment of the body are summed up in the right to hold, and with entire freedom to state and defend, what seems to them the truth. On no just plea, surely, either of cour- tesy or of right, can the exceptional claim to annul or over- ride the common in determining the tone and purpose of a church.
It is the law of every developing movement, of whatever nature, that the thought and methods of each stage in its progress must in turn give way to those of the stage succeed- ing. This has been signally manifest in our history. With its peculiar philosophy and scriptural interpretations, each of our four periods has had its peculiar processes of argu- ment, and, equally, its peculiar methods of labor and appeal. Was it, in either of these periods, in any sense a violation of the rights of — or a disregard of what was due to — those still holding the philosophy and interpretations of former periods, that methods and appeals in keeping with its own convictions were supplanting those of the period preceding? Clearly, the only rule in any such case is that the predom- inating convictions of a church must of right give character and direction to its life and work.
Hence alike the propriety and necessity of the New De- parture herein contemplated. Many among us have al- ready, individually, taken this departure ; and the tone and methods of our Church are, in important respects, to-day very different from what they were twenty years ago. But notwithstanding these changes, and though the Ballouian philosophy has been generally discarded, we are still, as a church, mainly in the ruts of the Ballouian period as to methods and appeals. What is now required of us is that we leave these ruts, and, in a concerted and systematic direc- tion of our labor, strike out into aims and efforts better cor-
22 OUR NEW DEPARTURE.
responding with the existing state of our denominational thought : — just as Murray, Adam Streeter, and Rich followed their convictions, and struck out from orthodoxy ; just as Ballou and Turner struck out from Murray ; and just as Ballou, loyal to his new views, struck out from himself and Turner. New wine must be put into new bottles ; and if, as is indisputable, the current of new or modified conclusions is running through our Church, we must adjust our wheels and give direction to our machinery with distinct reference to the power thus supplied.
Conceding the soundness of these new or modified con- clusions, what but this can we do, if, as the stewards of God, we would be faithful ? Are we not imperfectly administer- ing the Gospel, and culpably neglecting important spiritual leverage, so far as we fail duly to use the means of influence thus placed at our command ? If what is thus affirmed be true, death in itself is a concern only of the body ; it inter- rupts or cancels no spiritual law ; and hence nothing is to be expected from it in the way of release from moral penalty, or a more facile admission to the company of the just, since it puts no man into any easier or more desirable relations with God, and absolves no one from any condition on which salvation here depends. The good man disembodied, pass- ing into the more manifest presence of God, loses none of his moral attributes ; is a good man there, precisely as he was a good man here — that is, in the activity of his own moral faculties ; and because, carrying in himself the harvest of his prayers and saintly endeavors, he still loves and chooses to go forward in the good life. The bad man, just as certainly, passing on in like manner, loses none of his impiety, selfishness, or sin in the passage ; is inevitably the same bad man at his first moment of consciousness on the other side as he was at his last moment of consciousness here. He leaves his body behind, but nothing of what he morally was, because character is not of the body, but of the soul. Character, as the one actual thing in us, is to be changed, here or hereafter, only by our own moral choice. Death has no alchemy to touch it. True, death does strip off the flesh, from the suggestions and lusts of which char- acter for evil to some extent here comes, and in the use of
THE NEW DEPARTURE. 23
which character here manifests itself. It does introduce us into new circumstances, amidst new, and probably mightier, influences ; and precisely how these are to affect us, — of what awakenings and uplifting impulses and resolves they are to be the occasion, or what ' disinthralment of our spirit- ual powers ' is thus to follow, no one can certainly say. It is reasonable to anticipate something from the facts to be thus taken into account, though in respect to these things, he is the wisest man who dogmatizes least. But in itself, death is simply transition, with no transmuting moral effi- cacy. Except, therefore, as the bad man, passing on, puts off sin and rises into a new character, just as he was called to put off sin and rise into a new character here, the curse of sin, so far as he was a sinner, still abides upon him, and will abide, — perhaps intensified as he stands consciously revealed in the sight of God and before the tribunal of the Saviour.
And these things being true, are they things to be ig- nored, or put to no use ? On the contrary, how grave is their import, and how urgent the need of wise action for ourselves and others which they enforce ! We have some- thing, they show us, indefinitely at stake upon the charac- ters we here form. Our salvation, under God, is in our own hands. There is peril in carelessness and sin — not for time only, but beyond. Faith, penitence, and prayer, what we mean by spiritual culture and the Christian life, are not merely things of a few days' concern to us here, to be with impunity balanced against the listlessness, or the imagined pleasures of a worldly or godless life, if we are willing to wait for death to put us right. Death cannot put us right ; and these are things, therefore, on our wise choice concerning which, here and now, unspeakable interests hang: just as " now, while it is called to-day, " our welfare is suspended on any decision we are called to make between right and wrong ; just as always something is every hour at stake on our choice of action as to what the next hour our experience and character are to be. Choosing right in respect to God and the Saviour, every day of thoughtfulness and growing spirit- uality is so much gained towards that life and felicity which are to be perfected in heaven. Choosing wrong, every day
24 OUR NEW DEPARTURE.
of indifference, unbelief, or sin is a day of darkness, of hardening sensibility, of shrivelling capacity, of increasing spiritual emptiness and death — stretching on, on, so long- as our choice is perverse, or we fail to cry out for God, and to turn our faces towards Him. If, then, mere physical paralysis, destitution, blindness, or pain be a thing for us to shrink from ourselves, or demanding our effort for its re- lief and cure in others, how much more this darkness, pov- erty, and death of the soul ! What penalties such a condition incurs, on the other side of death no less surely than here ! What hazards are thus involved ! What judgments invited ! What losses sustained ! What suffering chosen ! And all this being granted, is any ministry or any church faithful, which, holding these convictions, declines to conduct its labors and frame its appeals accordingly ?
The reference just now made to them sufficiently shows that I am not unmindful of those among us who have not yet accepted this general view, and some' of whom oppose it as a serious error. With these brethren, however, I have here no debate. " Let every man be fully persuaded in his own mind." I am not now making an argument, — only stat- ing a position, and what consistency with it requires. My concern, therefore, is wholly with those who do accept this view, that I may illustrate with what emphasis all such of us are called of God and the welfare of souls, to use the con- clusions we have reached, as, if they are true, their impor- tance demands.
We have been, for many years, proceeding upon a false assumption. Contenting ourselves with a general, and often vigorous, enforcement of truth and duty by such sanctions as the present furnishes, we have quite extensively taken it for granted that any attempt to influence conduct by con- siderations drawn from its consequences, one way or another, in tlie future world, is somehow inconsistent with our funda- mental principle that we must do right because it is right, and not from any mercenary motive. But what is there to justify this assumption ? That we are to do right because it is right, is certain. Equally certain is it that to do right, or to abstain from doing wrong, solely because of reward or punishment anywhere, is, in either case, to be a hireling,
THE NEW DEPARTURE. 25
rendering to God no acceptable service. But are the con- sequences of action to be, therefore, put altogether out of the case ? Why, then, does God so constantly appeal to them ? Is He seeking to determine action on false princi- ples ? It is only in view of its consequences that the in- trinsic nature of any course is to be best understood. How are pupils fully to appreciate what knowledge and ignorance respectively are, as related to their welfare, if teachers are never to urge them to diligence by explaining the blessings of the former and the penalties of the latter ? Or, how are children to understand what industry or virtue is for its own sake, if they are never to be told of the disabilities of poverty, or the advantages of wealth, or if the disgrace and wretchedness of vice, and the beauty and joy of a good life, are to be forbidden themes in their instruction ? Universal- ists have never been backward in proclaiming the certain earthly consequences of action, both of penalty aud reward ; and if any consequences may be legitimately appealed to, why not all ? If consequences here, why not, with equal propriety, — it being granted that there are such, — conse- quences hereafter ? Why should death be the line across which the appeal must not reach ? or how can the whole case be fairly made up, either in favor of a Christian life, or against a godless one, except as all that both involve is duly exhibited ?
Paul shows us the true method. It is needless to say that he would persuade no man to a mercenary discipleship. It is quite as needless to remind those for whom these chap- ters are specially penned how decided were his convictions as to the results of God's government. Nothing was more cer- tain to him than that Christ is to " put down all rule, and all authority, and power " antagonistic to God, and that God is thus to be " all in all." In his distinct foresight of this issue, and therefore in the assurance that his " labor was not in vain in the Lord," he found that which constantly sustained and inspired him ; which, when he was weak, made him strong, and, amidst hostilities and discouragements, lifted him, un- appalled, into victory. But with no less distinctness, he saw, too, the conditions precedent, and his sermons and epistles attest the zeal and constancy with which he empha-
26 OUR NEW DEPARTURE.
sized these conditions, and with a soul all aglow, called those whom he addressed to the thoughtfulness and effort required. See what he says in his figure of the Christian race, Philippians iii. 1-16 ; and again, in his First Letter to Timothy, vi. 9-19 ; and still again, in his Second Epistle, iw 5-8. See especially the picture he gives of himself, and of his motives, in his Second Epistle to the Corinthians, v. 1—11, and particularly in these words : " Wherefore we labor, that, whether present or absent, we may be accepted of him. For we must all appear before the judgment-seat of Christ, that every one may receive the things done in his body, according to that he hath done, whether it be good or bad. Knowing, therefore, the terror of the Lord, we per- suade men.''* Repeated attempts have been made to show that this language has no allusion to immortality, and thus to turn aside the point the Apostle makes. As well might one allege that this whole grand connection is only a pleasant talk about an intended visit to some fair island in the Medi- terranean ! The theme unmistakably is our passage out of the mortal into the immortal realm ; and the point is, that there as well as here, an acceptance with Christ is some- thing to be won. This acceptance, the Apostle gives us to understand, does not come as a matter of course. It is not something indiscriminately given, without regard to antece- dent conduct or character. It is something accorded only to those who struggle for it. The Apostle represents him- self as struggling for it, therefore — in no mercenary spirit, but in a spirit of earnest aspiration towards harmony with God and the Redeemer.
And mark what it is in view of which he not only thus struggles himself, but is moved to persuade and animate others : " For we must all appear before the judgment-seat of Christ. . . . Knowing, therefore, the terror of the Lord, we persuade men." This does not mean that he had, for the moment, forgotten the love of God, nor that he would frighten anybody into religious living. It means simply that he recognized the continuousness of Christ's offices of instruction and judgment ; that he perceived severities as well as tenderness in God's dealings ; facts to arouse and startle as well as to attract and comfort. Considering
THE NEW DEPARTURE. 27
these things, and looking- forward to the conscious reve- lation of souls; as, released from the environments of the flesh, they pass into the personal presence of the Redeemer, for approval or condemnation according to the character in which they there appear, he caught a new impulse to plead with and persuade men, that they would give themselves in holiness to God.
And administering the same Gospel as Paul, can we do better than to administer it in the same way ? He sought not to hire or terrify. Such effort belonged neither to his moral philosophy, nor to his theory of a regenerate life. It belongs as little to ours. It is "the goodness of God" that " leadeth to repentance/' he declared ; and we accept the statement as the fundamental axiom he meant it to be. The soul is. moved for its redemption only by that which awakens conscience and takes hold of the affections. But there is something terrible in a life of sin, in absence from God, in spiritual insensibility, collapse and decay ; there is something beautiful and blessed in a life of faith, and love, and heavenly sympathy, and divine communion ; and to portray the peril of the one and the attractions of the other,
— to emphasize the permanence of spiritual law, and the unescapable certainty of its retributions, — to tell men that God will never deal with them for their salvation in any mechanical way, as if they were things, but that they must work out their own salvation, in the use of His helps, as accountable souls, — to insist that the consequences of a material or atheistic life must, in the nature of things, con- tinue until such a life, by one's own choice, is repented of and abandoned, — to preach that the judgment-seat of Christ is erected wherever souls are answerable to him, and that, passing out of the flesh, we pass into his immediate pres- ence, to experience in his approval and the spiritual harmo- nies of our own being, or in his condemnation and our own self-condemnation, the fruits of what we have done and are,
— to do either or all of these things is not to attempt to ter- rify or to hire. It is simply to state facts, as most of us believe — that those whom we seek to influence may be in- duced to act wisely in view of them. It is, indeed, to pro- ceed upon the identical principle on which those proceed
28 OUR NEW DEPARTURE.
who most protest against any appeal to consequences in the future world, as often as they take up the burden of the Bible, and say with the prophet, " It shall be well with the righteous, for they shall eat the fruit of their doings/' or, "• Woe unto the wicked ! for the reward of his hands shall be given him."
In view, then, of these several considerations, has not the time fully come when, appreciating the nature of our posi- tion, and the demands of the principles and conclusions we hold, we shall go forward in the New Departure which has here been outlined ?
Three things are likely to be urged by way of objection : — 1. It will be said by some that we shall thus be ' imita- ting/ or ' going over to the orthodox/ But for any such plea, I confess my utter want of respect. It has already done us much mischief;" and if we have any conscience, or common sense, we shall henceforth treat it with the con- tempt it deserves. God has given us a work. What is it to us whom we 'imitate/ or to whom we 'go over/ if it is but clear that we are following the indications of His Providence as to the best means of doing it? Our business is to be faithful ; and if anywhere there is truth for us to learn, or serviceable action for us to copy, we are recreant to our trust if we do not make the most of it. Who are we that we should assume to be above profiting by the experi- ence of others ? Or, who are we that, wherever a truth may be found which we have not accepted, or which for any reason we have failed duly to enforce, we should draw our- selves up in a pompous self-sufficiency, and say, We will have none of it ? Our duty is to harvest instruction from every possible field, be it Romanism, or Methodism, Presby- terianism, Episcopalianism, or any other branch of the one common Church of Christ. ' Orthodoxy/ as organized in all these forms, has much to teach us. We shall wickedly stultify ourselves if we refuse to learn.
But the step here advocated is no ' imitation ' of any^ body, and no ' going over ; to anybody. It implies only consistency with the logic of our own convictions. We have our pronounced principles. These involve certain definite practical conclusions ; and these, again, suggest
THE NEW DEPASTURE. 29
and enjoin certain motives and appeals equally definite. The simple question is, whether we will be true to ourselves and to the interests of souls in the use of the moral instru- mentalities thus put into our hands.
There is a sense, I have no doubt, in which all Protes- tant churches are approaching each other. The ' evangel- icals ' are moving towards us, theologically : we are mov- ing towards them, in a wiser distribution of our empha- sis, and in a better choice of methods. In the name of the dear Christ who would have us all one, let the good work go on. Let us make the most of our agreements, and be alienated as little as may be by our differences. So will the unity the Master prayed for come ; and over every partition- wall broken down and every difference removed, and as every new sign appears, telling that the now sundered members of Christ's body are becoming more "fitly joined together ... to the edifying of itself in love/7 let every good man shout, Thank God ! — as every angel in heaven will surely say, Amen !
Any accord of ours with ' orthodoxy ' — as to methods, however, let it be understood, argues no accord in doctrine. The methods belong to Christianity, — not to ' orthodoxy ; ' and to approach 'orthodoxy7 — not byway of imitation, but in a clearer apprehension of what the best administra- tion of the Gospel requires, ■ — in the use of these common Christian methods, is one thing ; — to approach it in princi- ple or ultimate conclusion, is quite another. We thus ap- proach it in principle or conclusion, only when we limit the extent of salvation, or materialize its substance. We do not so approach it, however we may emphasize the fact that salvation has its conditions. ' Orthodoxy/ partial, arbi- trary, judicial in spirit, proceeds on one plane of principle and purpose, to one end. The conception of Christianity which we represent, impartial and parental, proceeds on a very different plane, to a very different end. One counts law, the other counts souls, as God's paramount care. That thinks chiefly of vengeance, miscalled justice ; this of reconciliation. That makes it its business to save souls from hell ; this to deepen and magnify a sense of the intrin- sic peril and curse of wrong. That points to Christ as cur
30 OUR NEW DEPARTURE.
substitute in the endurance of the penalty of God's law, and calls us to faith in him as the expedient to get us into heaven when we die ; this presents Christ as the messenger of God's love and truth, and calls us to faith in him as the power of God to build up heaven within ourselves wherever we may be. That seeks to have us ' make our peace witl God ' by doing something to change His feelings and atti- tude towards us ; this by quickening us to a change of feel- ing and attitude towards Him. And, finally, that portray s a flaming abyss which God has built for the endless tor- ture of sinners after death, and, leading us to its brink, essays to terrify us into a religious life ; this shows first that all separation from God, or lack of sympathy with Him, is darkness, death, and hell, and then, proclaiming that the mere decease of the body avails nothing to release us from it, seeks to persuade us by the love of God and the Saviour, by the blessings of goodness and by the curse of sin, to turn straightway to God through Christ, since, whether present or absent, in the flesh or out, he is the sole gate into a divine acceptance and the best life.
It is clear, then, that the New Departure here urged in no way involves any sacrifice of our Universalist identity. It means sirnpty a consistent enforcement of our own princi- ples, in no assimilation to ' orthodoxy,' except that we are to be willing to profit by every example of earnestness, of systematic and effective work, and of whole-hearted conse- cration, wherever it may appear. They, it is worth while to remark in passing, are the only Universalists at all open to the charge of approaching the old ' orthodoxy ' in prin- ciple, who insist that salvation is something to be conferred upon us at death without any condition of faith or effort, here or elsewhere, on our part.
2. It will be alleged, perhaps, that the New Departure here urged involves a cessation of our doctrinal work. But it is not so. I have already said that we are to abate noth- ing from the emphasis or constancy with which we proclaim our grand result, and that argument and exposition, attack and defence, will still bo required ; and as to our work of Christian teaching, I have seriously failed in what I intended, if it has not been implied, as the underlying thought of all
THE NEW DEPARTURE. 31
that has been said, that this is, of course, to proceed. What is contemplated in this plea for a New Departure, as will more fully appear in the chapters that are to follow, is — only less of antagonism, denial, and controversy, for mere doctrinal ends, and a great deal more of affirmative, constructive, applying labor, for vital and practical re- sults.
I am free to confess, indeed, that there seems to '•me to be little occasion for us to preach doctrine as a means of indu- cing a rejection of the sacrificial theology, or of making con- verts to Universalist ideas. Numerous outside agencies are rapidly doing these things for us. Years ago one of our thoughtful laymen (Ex-Governor Washburn), speaking of such agencies, truly said that they are accomplishing more for Universalism, in these respects, than Universalists themselves. But large numbers, including not a few who bear the Universalist name, have only the crudest concep- tions of what Universalism is. The grounds, relations, and arguments of the truth, and the meaning of the Bible as bearing upon it, are not understood. For these reasons, Universalism should still be preached as a doctrine. And there is another reason. Universalism, we believe, is only another name for Christianity ; and Christianity, though it culminates in a life, is, in essence, a system of principles — that is, of doctrines. Hence only as these doctrines are ap- prehended is Christianity apprehended, or can it become most effectually a power for the salvation of souls. To preach about Christianity, or about what it requires, is not to preach Christianity, nor for the fulfilment of Christian ends. Christianity is preached only as its doctrines are preached, and only thus are the materials and inspiration for the Christian life supplied. " Sanctify them through thy truth" was our Lord's prayer for his disciples ; and we never find him or his apostles preaching for the conversion and sanctification of men except by preaching doctrines as the basis of the precepts they enjoined. They preached prin- ciples, and not about principles, showing men how and why to be good, instead of talking about goodness. And what was wise in them is no less wise in us. Nor can we, or any other church, do God's work of translating His truth
32 OUR NEW DEPARTURE.
into life, except as they sought to do it — upon a doctrinal foundation.
But observe, they never preached doctrine simply as doc- trine, nor with reference to any mere intellectual contest or victory. Neither should we. They preached it only to rebuke sin, and impel to holiness. We should preach it only for the same purpose. Like theirs, our business is to quicken and save souls. What the time and the world most call for is moral inspiration. It is important what one believes concerning" God, and the spirit and issues of His government. But the question of transcendent concern is, not whether one believes in Universalism, but whether, believing it, or professing to believe it, he is showing him- self experimentally a believer. Is he filled with a sense of obligation to God and the Saviour ? Is he a man of prayer ? Does he abhor sin ? Is he melted and humbled at the foot of the cross ? Does his soul glow with religious affection ? Is his being instinct with spiritual life ? These are the only results for which any church has a right to exist ; and only to produce these should we preach doctrine, or any- thing else.
This is the fact to which the New Departure here outlined would call attention : not to induce any neglect or over- sight of doctrine, but that the purpose of all Christian teaching may be more distinctly recognized, and that Uni- versalism as a doctrine may be so conceived and adminis- tered as to do more in religiously quickening souls, and leading them to God.
3. The other objection I anticipate is, that what is here proposed is no new departure at all. This may come from two entirely opposite quarters.
On the one hand, those in sympathy with the general pur- pose here in view may say that what is urged should not be spoken of as a 'new departure/ for the reason that so to designate it is to fail to do justice to the actual condition of our church-thought, is to overlook what has already oc- curred, and is thus to imply what is not true. What is proposed, they may say, has been for a considerable time in progress ; and for themselves, they may add, they took the departure long ago. But if these brethren will turn back a
THE NEW DEPARTURE. 33
few pages (p. 21), they will see that I have distinctly said that many among us have already individually taken this departure, and that, in important respects, the tone and methods of our Church to-day are very different from what they were twenty years ago. Moreover, the whole plea I here make proceeds on the ground that the change of senti- ment which has taken place among us demands it. What I am anxious to see, as I intimated in the connection re- ferred to, is a concerted, systematic movement, by common consent striking out into the new style of labor that is called for, and distinctively committing us as a church to it. As a matter of personal conviction and method, what is recommended has, to some extent, already been done by not a few of us. As a denominational movement, it has yet to be done. Only in this latter sense do I speak of it as a new departure, and in this sense it clearly is so.
Then, on the other hand, it will be said by those opposed to the course here recommended, that it would be no new departure, only a return of our Church to the old doctrine of ' future punishment/ and thus a going back to ground we have once abandoned. But any such objection is with- out basis in fact. I can conceive, indeed, that it might have in it some element of fact, and yet be no objection. In the violence of its reaction from existing opinions, a movement may for a time swing away from some truth to which it finds it necessary afterward to return ; and such a return, in its place, is a going forward as really as though the truth were then first announced. In this case, however, the objection has not even so much to make it valid. The theory of 'future punishment,' as it prevailed in our early history,* — and as it has usually prevailed, — proceeds on the 'orthodox' predicate that God's administration is not now one of just and equal moral awards ; that this earthly life is one of probation, not of exact retribution ; and that,
* Murray and his followers, it should he said, disclaimed the doctrine of future punishment as a penal infliction, as they disclaimed all pun-, ishment in any penal sense. Christ, they held, has paid our debt under the law, and hence, in justice, there can he no more punishment for sin. Sufferings do, indeed, follow transgression, after death, as here; but these, it was alleged, are consequential, not penal. 3
34 OUR NEW DEPARTURE.
in the case of those who die unsaved, the account is to be squared only as they are still further punished on the other side of the grave. In other words, the theory is one of debt and credit, affirming in effect that the sinful and unbe- lieving at death stand charged with so much punishment due, and that the books can be balanced only as this is here- after visited upon them. But all such theorizing is now happily exploded among us, as it is fast passing out of the thought of all well-informed and reflective minds.
The Ballouian period, in the order of our development, did incalculable service, not alone to us, but to the whole Christian world, in this respect. Herein, doubtless, was its providential purpose. Up to that period, the whole interest of our being was focalized in the future world. Everything here was thought to be morally at loose ends — the wicked not punished ; the good not rewarded ; every man left to live as he might list, with occasion only to think of that ter- rible day of account yonder, when the books are to be opened, and all are to be brought to judgment. So far as this world is concerned, the whole current of theological teaching averred, there is no motive to live a godly life, the preponderance of motive being rather on the side of a life of sin, were it not for the terrible hour of recompense that is coming ; but then all the hardships and sacrifices of the good are to be paid for by the felicities of heaven, and all the rejoicings and prosperities of the bad are to be balanced by the torments of hell. Thus time was nothing. Eternity was everything. Hosea Ballou — speaking of him as leader and representative — made war against all this. lie pro- claimed God's instant and constant moral rule. He ap- pealed to the Bible, and familiarized the popular ear with the statements, long overlooked, that God "verily is a God that judgeth in the earth;" that, "though hand join in hand, the wicked shall not be unpunished ; " that " the way of transgressors is hard;" that "there is no peace, saith the Lord, to the wicked ; " and that, while " to be carnally- minded is death, to be spiritually-minded is life and peace." He did not fail to recognize the fact that time is often re- quired for certain judgments to culminate and burst upon evil-doers, as also for certain fruits of righteousness to
THE NEW DEPARTURE. 35
ripen into most conspicuous display. But, he iterated and reiterated, God reigns nevertheless, holding every soul to rigid account. He never suspends payment, or does busi- ness on credit ; but by inviolable laws, according to what one is in character, must, every moment, be his experience of loss and pain, or peace. And, thus preached, how this doctrine was ridiculed and denounced ! What weapons of sarcasm, and argument, and misapplied Scripture were launched against it ! What idiocy and ' moral insanity ' it was alleged to indicate ! What appeals to appearances and seeming facts were made, often ''with great, swelling words," to demonstrate how opposed it was to the lessons of actual daily life ! But, despite all, the testimony was persistently given, and, with untiring pertinacity, the Bible was cited, history and experience were invoked, and the nature of things, and the necessities of spiritual law, were adduced in its support and demonstration. As the result, no moral philosophy would now be thought sound that did not include this doctrine as one of its cardinal ideas ; and no intelligent pulpit, at all abreast of the time, fails more Or less positively to enforce it. Had Hosea Ballou done noth- ing else except so to put into the thought and consciousness of Christendom this vital fact concerning the instant and constant operation of God's moral government, he would deserve to be honored as one of the world's great reform- ers ; and while most of us now are compelled to think, and on occasion do not scruple to say, that in our judgment some of the theorizings and conclusions of the Ballouian period have been exceedingly mischievous as practical ele- ments of our denominational life, we hold it as undeniable that, on the whole, it has helped us and helped the world onward, and that these undesirable speculations, inevitably incident to such a drift-period of thinking, have been more than counterbalanced by the result thus accomplished, — a result, it is perhaps for us to consider, that could have been so widely and thoroughly reached only as attention was arrested, and discussion engendered, and feeling stirred by the extreme putting of this idea in the doctrine of 'no future punishment.' The evil of overstatement is not unfre- quently thus overruled for the permanent advance of truth.
36 OUR NEW DEPARTURE.
At all events, the Universalist church is now immovably fixed in this position ; and what is here urged is no going back to any outgrown and abandoned doctrine, but really a new departure, because a more logical and strenuous affir- mation of the principle underlying this position as always and everywhere true. And if, as this principle alleges, God does actually deal with us so rigidly according to our char- acter, holding us instantly and constantly to account, to what but the very thing here pressed are we called as the duty most imperatively devolving on us ? For, if God does so hold us to account, then, no matter where we may be, character becomes the one grand concern on which every- thing in our moral experience depends. And, this being so, how can we, as a Christian church, at all discharge our obligations, unless we hold up this fact, and summon men to act in view of it, as the fact of solemn and perpetual significance it is ?
Contenting myself, then, with these rejoinders to the objections likely to be made to the purpose of these pages, the question returns, lias not the time fully come for the New Departure here sketched ? If the Gospel of Christ be indeed God's ministry of healing and life to a perishing world, — if sin really is a wrong, on account of which we should feel guilty, and a curse, without regard to time or place, from which we need escape, — if especially it be true, as we have come so generally to believe, that there is un- speakable peril in sin, that every human soul has something at stake on its character and choice, not simply for this world, but for all worlds, and that, till it heartily repents, and gives itself to God through Christ, it is and must be, according to its lack of religious quickening and purpose, in darkness and spiritual death, whether in this world or any other, — is it not alike the call of God and of needy souls that we give ourselves as never before to the enforce- ment of these truths, and thus to the endeavor to make them, to the widest possible extent, " the power of God unto salvation " in the world ?
Let no one raise the cry that this is a proposition to dis- turb the existing harmony of our Church, or to set up new
THE NEW DEPARTURE. 37
standards of Universalist fellowship. Nothing is here said of any new terms of fellowship ; and it is preposterous to suppose that the harmony of our Church is to be disturbed by any honest effort to call us more perfectly to meet the demands of any convictions to which we have generally arrived. Our Church, thank God, is at length one ; and palsied be the hand or tongue that, except on some issue of overmastering principle, would divide it. Our platform is laid ; and as it is, so in substance it must be. We need no new departure in this respect. Whoever believes in the Bible as the record of God's successive revelations, in the Lord Jesus Christ as the authoritative Son of God, and in the final redemption of all souls through Christ, is a Uni- versalist, however he may interpret the Bible on incidental points. We have always had the largest liberty of opinion on this common platform. This liberty of opinion must continue. But it is clearly not only fit, but obligatory upon us, that the dominant state of opinion shall give distinctive tone and direction to our church-life. It would be both a very factious and a very unreasonable minority that should deny this, be the dominant opinion what it might ; and, while no one's freedom of opinion or of utterance is to be trenched upon, our general conviction as to the nature of salvation, and as to what is dependent on faith and prayer and spiritual co-operation with God, must, unless we are to fail of the errand appointed us, henceforth determine our estimate as to what we have to do, and how we shall seek to do it.
This, then, is the New Departure for which it is the pur- pose of this book to plead. It is not, indeed, the only new departure to which we are called, as we go forward to make up the record of another century. Intellectually we need to make such a departure, and, not less, practically.
The Universalist believer should be second to no other in the breadth and freshness of his thinking, in the largeness of his mental hospitality and acquirements, or in the warmth and comprehensiveness of his moral and philanthropic con- cern. And the Universalist church must be nowhere ex- celled in its zeal for education ; in the ripeness and fulness
38 OUR NEW DEPARTURE.
of its culture ; in its superiority to prescription and preju- dice ; in its readiness to welcome light, come it whence it may ; or in its wise and free-handed plans for the instruc- tion of the ignorant, and the rescue of the perishing. Our record in these respects is creditable, but we must be am- bitious for far better things.
Sympathetically, Universalism is the synonyme of a love that includes all souls, and of a saving purpose which leaves not one out ; and it will be a shame to us if, as our numbers and resources increase, we do not put ourselves, in respect to all philanthropic and practical Christian activities, in the van of the church, where, as the representatives of such a gospel, we belong.
And so, theoretically, Universalism is equally the syno- nyme of " ivhatsoever is true;77 and, as its disciples, it is incumbent on us to be open, receptive, inquiring, accord- ingly. There are religionists who are afraid of science, and who, amidst the jostlings of modern discovery, are con- stantly putting forth their hands to steady the ark of God. And occasion enough they have for apprehension. But a true religion has nothing to fear from any true science. Science is the knowledge of God's doings demonstrated to our reason ; religion is the knowledge of the same God re- vealed to our faith. Let science explore -and demonstrate wheresoever or whatsoever it may, then, the religion that really has God7s truth in it can possibly come to no harm. For this reason, we have nothing to apprehend, only, in the way of illustration and confirmation, everything to expect. We should welcome discovery, therefore, and keep abreast of the most advanced knowledge, that we may see how all truth harmonizes, and be led up every shining path which it opens, with strengthened faith, into sweeter nearness to God.
Speculations there are, indeed, calling themselves. science, irreverent, self-sufficient, which, skimming the surface, or jumping at conclusions, set themselves, "with malice pre- pense,77 to undermine all religion, and relegate the world back to Paganism. And a habit of scientific assumption, too, there is, and a disposition to insist that all inquiries must be pushed in an exclusively scientific spirit, both of
THE NEW DEPARTURE. 39
which repudiate faith as a rightful element in any conclu- sion. AH these we must be able to estimate at their real worth, and to dispose of as they deserve. But true science we must hail as always our ally and friend, to be not simply accepted, but loved, served, in every legitimate way fur- thered and encouraged.
And so in respect to all that is highest and broadest in the intellectual activities of the age, and of the coming ages. Not only must we have our scientists and educators. We must have our philosophers, our discoverers, our historians, our thinkers and workers in every field, kings and priests among the most regal and priestly leaders of the world, to whom none who wish to know the best things can afford to be indifferent. We shall have them.
And, so led, our whole Church must be pervaded by a kindred spirit. We know not, indeed, to what momentous office, in relation to the Bible and Christianity, this Church of ours is, in the providence of God, yet to be called. With ' orthodoxy/ science and all progressive thought are in irrepressible conflict. All the discoveries and tendencies of the time are at war with its old statements and interpre- tations. Ere we are aware of it, therefore, the fortunes of Christianity as a historical religion, humanly speaking, may be in our keeping ; and upon us, reviled as we have been as the enemies and rejecters of the Bible, its final defence and vindication may devolve. Ours it should be to prepare for so grave a trust, ready and waiting to keep step with every new advance, that whatever results earnest thought and legitimate investigation may anywhere furnish, may be made by us to tell for the further verification of truth and the glory of God.
All this, however, will come naturally in the order of events, if we keep ourselves in other respects a live and faithful people. Our deepest and most imperative need is spiritual awakening and impulse. This is the deepest and most imperative need of all Christendom. The old theolo- gies are dying. Souls are adrift. Minds are questioning and doubting. Hearts are hungering. Life is largely with- out centre or mastery, except from beneath. What they
40 OUR NEW DEPARTURE.
need is spiritual arrest, quickening, anchorage. Ours it is, if we actually have any business in the world, to answer these great uses. We must arrest, attract, religiously sat- isfy, and vitalize what will else be without any spiritual ministry or direction. And, to do this, we must be a peo- ple profoundly conscious of spiritual realities, and glowing with spiritual life. Our principles are final and eternal. Our standards of fellowship are all we require, if honestly interpreted and faithfully enforced. In every outward par- ticular we are well equipped for the work assigned us. Our one thing wanting is that, taking up the words of the apostle, we shall say with high resolve, " Whereto we have already attained, let us walk by the same rule ; let us mind the same thing." We have thus far carried the torch of God's universal and immutable love to dissipate the shadows and burn up the errors of the old interpretations, disclosing afar off the issue to which, under His guardianship, all things surely tend. We are now called to use this torch more clearly to disclose the conditions on which all spiritual results depend, and on which alone the prophesied fact of Christ's efficiency can become a fact accomplished in any soul. We are to emphasize spiritual law. We are more specifically to aim at definite spiritual ends. More posi- tively recognizing the work of saving souls as the work of every Christian church, we are to address ourselves as never before to this labor. In one word, having fought the battle and won the position we have, ourselves meanwhile growing into greater distinctness of intellectual and moral perception, we are to avail ourselves of the position we have reached to enter on our second century seeing more clearly precisely what, as the servants of the world's Re- deemer, we have to do, and using more earnestly the new and higher means of influence at our command.
Why and how this is to be done, it will be the purpose of succeeding chapters to show.
CHAPTER II.
A SURVEY OE THE FIELD.
What is the net result ? This is the question after every battle. It is equally the question after every straggle of whatever sort, and especially after every moral or religious •contest, or as there comes a time in its progress for a pause and a survey of the field. Naturally, therefore, it is the question that comes to us at the opening of our second century.
Theologically, as we have seen in the preceding chapter, the result of our work is surprising. Scarcely less surprising is the change which, out of a handful of unlettered ministers and scattered believers, during a period comparatively so short, and against hostile influences so numerous and power- ful, has made us in standing and resources what, as a church, we to-day are. But what of moral and spiritual re- sults 1 What of the religious effectiveness of our methods and motives ? Christ came a quickening spirit, to be the world's Saviour ; and Christianity, as his instrument, aims steadily at one purpose, viz., the religious awakening and salvation of souls. Every church, therefore, that is really a Church of Christ, stands invested with this meaning ; and so far as it fails in this respect, whatever else it may do, it fails in its final design. Our net result in this respect, then, what is it ?
In part, it is a result every way creditable. To multi- tudes, Universalism has been- a ministry of divine awaken- ing and power. Oppressed, many of them despairing, amidst the gloom and discouragements of the traditional creeds, or walking in the darkness of unbelief, or liv- ing in indifference or sin, its light has shone upon them, and suddenly they have found themselves in a new world. The thought of God has grown beautiful to them. Christ has become more precious. A new meaning has glorified
41
42 OUR NEW DEPARTURE.
the cross, and sent home the pathos of its appeals to their hearts. Duty has become more attractive ; sin more repug- nant ; prayer a privilege and a strength of which they had never dreamed ; religion an unspeakable joy. " All their lifetime subject to bondage," trembling at the thought of death, or asking with anxious and moaning hearts, Are our beloved safe ? they have seen heaven opened, as it were a fresh revelation, disclosing its certain reunions and the blessedness of God's perfect service, and have been attracted towards God and the redeemed in a holier life. Others, born in the atmosphere of Universalism and nurtured in its spirit, have illustrated its influence as an element of Chris- tian culture, as they have knelt from their youth at the feet of the Saviour, saying, like Samuel, " Speak, Lord ; thy ser- vant heareth thee," and giving themselves to the work of the Church. A rich record Universalism has made for itself in these respects ; and could we but see the long procession of those — young, middle-aged, and old — stretching through the past hundred years, who have thus been reached and benefited by it, we should need no other evidence that God is in it.
But while this is one side — and a very gratifying side — of the case, and while we thus have many reasons to be proud of Universalism and of the Universalist Church, and to thank God for what they have done, we cannot close our eyes to the fact that, religiously, the result of our first cen- tury's work is not all we could wish. We are improving in this particular, and are every year becoming a more re- ligious people, with more of insight and spiritual life. But our failure at this point is none the less the one great occa- sion of sorrow to many of our ministers and the more thoughtful of our people, as they look over the field and sum up the outcome of our labors ; nor is it to be concealed that many are anxiously asking, What is the explanation ? As concerns all the moralities, respectabilities, and charities of life, Universalists may challenge comparison anywhere. The benevolence of their faith broadens their sympathies, and — despite some mischievous speculations which will be duly noticed in a future chapter — its philosophy of moral obligation and award cultivates an ethical conscience, so
A SURVEY OF THE FIELD. 43
that, as a class, they are conspicuous in these regards. But when we look for what is deeper and more experimen- tal, to an extent at all corresponding, we do not find it.
Looking outside what we have been accustomed to call our denomination, but what we are hereafter to designate as our Church, we discover that multitudes who say they be- lieve Universalism are identifying themselves with other churches, helping to support what they profess to regard as false ; and still worse, if possible, other like multitudes are content to have no religious associations, and with their children, are helping to swell the number of those who en- joy the blessings of our Christian institutions, but do noth- ing for their support.
And looking within the lines of our organization, while we can truthfully say that no church shows a higher average of people upright in business, kind to the poor, every way reputable, it cannot be said that devout affections and a re- ligious conscience are by any means general among us. We are not a praying people — that is, in the sense in which this phrase is commonly employed. Praying Universalists, in this sense, there are, many of them ; how many there are who pray in the voiceless secrecy of their communion with God, it is for no human pen to assume to say. But the custom of family, social, or stated private prayer does not, to any considerable extent, prevail among us, because there is no prevailing sense of duty in these directions ; and how rare it is to find those in our congregations who can be called to lead in public prayer, we all know. We have opinion rather than faith ; more nominal assent than spirit- ual impulse or purpose. Our parishes far outnumber our churches ; and where churches exist, they, as the rule, are very small, with a male membership lamentably dispropor- tionate to that of the congregations. And then look abroad: what mean the so-called Universalist societies — alas, so many of them ! — dead or dormant ? What mean the Univer- salist meeting-houses sold, or rented, or standing unused, given up to decay, monuments to our dishonor ? And last, but not least, what mean the fields where for years Univer- salism— or what has borne that name — has been preached to no visible effect in the spiritual vitality of the people,
44 OUR NEW DEPARTURE.
and only to result in a sickly and struggling life for the congregations, or in final wreck and dispersion ? For two successive years, not long since, I spent several vacation Sundays with one of our oldest parishes in New England, trying to make the dead bones live. The community is a thriving one, and the Universalists, so-called, have all the advantage of numbers, wealth, and position. But having sold their house of worship, the most of them first allowed themselves to be bodily transferred to an attempt to build up a Unitarian society ; and this experiment having failed, they have since sunk into comparative apathy, and though having occasional preaching, seemed, the last I heard of them, to be dying of spiritual inanition. Nor, unfortunately, is this a solitary case — so far as the substantive facts of apathy and inanition are concerned. The question presses, then, What mean these things ? And still further, how are we to account for the religious deadness and the indisposition to do anything for the organization of parishes, or the sup- port of public worship, in so man}7 sections where a nominal Universalism widely prevails ? There are counties in my native state (New Hampshire), where what is called Univer- salism may almost be said to be the prevalent form of re- ligious thought, and where there is no lack of pecuniary ability, which are complete wastes as regards any active Christian effort, save as an occasional Sunday's preaching may intermit the dearth. Other states show similar dis- tricts.
These are some of the facts we are compelled to contem- plate. They must, there being so many of them, have some common meaning. What is it ? I hesitate to say it ; but I do not see how we can avoid the conclusion, that what large numbers of people hold as Universalism is thus practically proved to lack penetrative, awakening, mastering power. Those who profess it are in no way possessed by it. They are not melted or smitten, are not "pricked in heart," or brought to their knees by it. It is of the head, — not of the deepest or inmost life. It begets no intensity of con- viction. It fills with no sense of religious obligation. It prostrates with no consciousness of sin. It stirs to no pen- itence. It inspires no consecration. In a word, it fails to save soul?.
A SURVEY OF THE FIELD. 45
These are hard things for me to say. But, unfortunately, they are indisputable facts — the reverse side of the net re- sult of our first hundred years' labor. I shall, no doubt, be thought by some of my brethren injudicious, — perhaps shall be charged by others with overdrawing, because I state them so unreservedly. But we have long enough talked about them in private, and hinted at them in our public ut- terances. The time has come for them to be plainly set forth, and for the probe to be fearlessly applied, to reveal their cause or causes. I am not unaware, of course, that statements so free are likely to be used to our disadvantage •by unscrupulous sectarists, who will give no attention, for themselves or others, to the explanations which are to fol- low ; and I shall, no doubt, be represented as having said that Universal ism is religiously a failure, with no power to save souls. But whoever so represents me, directly or by implication, will deliberately violate the nfnth commandment, and allege what I neither say nor mean. As an honest man, I could no longer preach nor advocate Universalism, if I could either make or believe any such statement. While, however, full}7 recognizing this liability to a misrepresen- tation of the statement which I really make, it has not seemed to me any reason why it should be withheld or qualified. It is a cowardly friendship for any truth that fears to deal honestly with its hinderances, or to point out the errors and mistakes of its nominal adherents, lest some enemy should be dishonest enough to pervert or misrepre- sent what may be said. The only way to treat a disease is, first of all, to face it at its worst, and then to look after its remedy.
Some of the causes of the state of things I have glanced at are common to our human nature, without regard to sect or creed. They are such, therefore, as are afflicting all churches, more or less, with the evils complained of. Every denomination has its wayside hearers, its stony ground, its thorny ground, as well as its good ground. Regarding other churches at a distance and from the outside, every- thing ma}7 appear roseate as to their earnestness and spirit- uality ; but going inside, we find matters quite different, and learn that they have their lacks and their failures as
46 OUR NEW DEPARTURE.
well as we : a statement, as I once made it in substance from the pulpit, emphatically indorsed by an Episcopal clergyman who heard it, and that was attested with equal emphasis, some years ago, by a New England minister who left the Unitarians to join the Orthodox, and more recently by a good, but unstable brother, now deceased, who went from us to the Swedenborgians, expecting to find them far more spiritual than we, but in a year or two returned, wofully disappointed.
The whole history of religious truth abounds in just such two-sided results as we have to confess. It was so with the ministry even of the apostles. Not only were there those who were hearers and not doers of the word, but there were those who heard and believed only to misappre- hend, and who, failing to perceive the guiding and cleansing purpose of what they nominally received, were made rather worse than better. The Epistles abound with references and exhortations which show that there were such in all the early churches : those to whom their new Christian freedom meant only license, and who, released from their old motives, and failing to be reached by the new, were morally lawless, with no positive sense of obligation anywhere. As the result, in part, what now are the very fields in which Christianity was first preached? Moral wastes, giving no sign in the life of the people of the divine ministry of Christ, or of the heroic labors of apostles, by which the ground has since been hallowed to every Christian heart. Does it, therefore, follow that Christianity is not of God ? And following it down, has Christianity even yet altogether ceased to be misapprehended, or to be held in unrighteousness ? Or, would it be too much to say of forms of Christianity which the most ' evangelical ' will admit come within that definition, that what large numbers thus hold to be Christianity is practically proved unequal to the work of saving souls ? The Reforma- tion furnished evidence to the same effect. Numerous ex- travagances of doctrine and action followed the emancipation of religious thought from its long thraldom. Luther himself seems not always to have discriminated very closely between non-allegiance to the authority of the Church, and non-alle- giance to the authority of God's Word ; and as he contem-
A SURVEY OF THE FIELD. 47
plated the crudities and fanaticisms of opinion, and the moral looseness and lawlessness growing out of the causes which he had been the means of setting in operation, he is said to have wrung his hands at times in his distress and mortifica- tion, almost repenting what he had done. The early annals of Methodism give similar witness. Charles Wesley con- fesses himself ''much discouraged by the disorderly walk- ing of some who have given the adversary occasion to blas- pheme," and records that many insisted " that a part of their Christian calling is a liberty from obeying, not liberty to obey;'7 and John Wesley had much trouble with "dis- orderly walkers," of some of whom he said that "the spirit of Ham, if not of Korah, fully possessed them ; " while of others, his biographer records that they "fell into extrava- gant notions, and ways of expression, more proper to be heard in Bedlam than in a religious society." *
These are but examples of a general rule. Every move- ment towards a fresh statement of truth, while attracting some who will catch its spirit and be helped by it to a better life, is sure to attract others who will do neither. Some, more or less correctly perceiving it intellectually, will hold it only as a lifeless theory, a lump of so much lead in the brain, and still others, totally misapprehending it, will accept it only as an occasion of license, or of indifference and neglect. Nor is any doctrine, claiming to be truth, responsi- ble for such consequences, except as they are the clear and legitimate fruit of some principle essential in it. Paul thanked God for the success of his labors, though what he preached was to some " a savor of death unto death." Preaching what he believed to be the truth, he felt that he and his labors were approved of God, though some did hear only to disbelieve, or to believe in a misunderstanding of the new faith, and thus to be injured rather than benefited. And this is the law always. " What though some were faithless to their trust? " asked Paul, concerning the Jews. " Shall their faithlessness destroy the faithfulness of God ? " (Rom. iii. 3, Conybeare & Howson's Version.) All truth is liable to perversion, misconstruction, abuse. But the truth
* Whitehead's Life of Wesley, pp. 128, 135, 436, 453.
48 OUR NEW DEPARTURE.
is none the less the truth on account of either of these things, and is to be preached, notwithstanding — because it is the truth, and because it is sure, in time, to purge itself of all such concomitants.
There are, moreover, some special considerations to be taken into account in our case, aside from the point of chief interest in it.
In the first place, it must not be forgotten how much this Universalist movement involves. It is commonly thought of as a mere change of opinion concerning a single doctrine. But it is far more than this. It is a breaking up of "all the established habits of religious thinking. Still holding on to God and Christ and the Bible, it is a new theory of them all ; a reconstruction of the whole system of Christian theology, substituting new principles of action, appealing to a new set of motives, making life, as to its foundation and spirit, a totally different thing. And this being so, consider how much ground is thus covered, and how many are the conditions, alike as to what must be done and what must be undone, which have to be fulfilled before Universalism can become thoroughly appreciated, and so be fairly put into life. No ship, leaving its anchorage, at once gets the wind and goes straight on its course. It always drifts more or less before the canvas sets, and the rudder makes itself felt. So, by similar necessities, in every moral and intellectual movement. It takes time for new principles fully to assert themselves ; for loosened minds to get wonted to freer and broader channels ; for heart and conscience to feel the pressure of higher appeals, and thus for the new motives to obtain mastery.
Then, too, it must be borne in mind how, from the first up to a very recent period, we have been arguing and fight- ing, — important employments, without which we could not have leavened and modified religious opinion as we have, but not emploj^ments favorable to spiritual culture, or to a high order of religious life. For a long time, on this account, what passed under the name of Universalism, — what many preachers exclusively preached, and what solely filled far too many pews, was simply anti-orthodoxy. It had little or no sympathy with any affirmative faith, and as little
A SURVEY OF THE FIELD. 49
interest in any positive practical Christian aims. It cared only to deny and argue and pull down, and began to lose whatever life or zeal it had, as soon as labor was turned towards personal spiritual experience, or definite religious ends. It and its dying out among us furnish the sufficient explanation for many of the so-called Universalist meeting- houses transferred, or surrendered to decay, and for many of the nominal Universalist societies dead or dormant.
Another thing in this same direction : Because of this antagonistic and controversial attitude to which we were for years in part compelled, and which, unfortunately for us, this anti-orthodoxy still further ■ intensified, it is to be con- sidered what kind of material, for a time, with much that was better, drifted into formal connection with us — some of it coarse, some of it corrupt, all of it eager only for a game of fisticuffs with ' our opposers/ without religious sensibility or purpose, and, wherever it touched, poisonous and destructive to every best interest of our cause. It is the penalty of all new movements to take along more or less such material, — as every freshet gathers into its current all kinds of lumber and rubbish as it sweeps along. But the rubbish is not the stream. As little does this sort of material make part really of any worthy movement which may, for a season, be cursed with it. But it is a curse, none the less ; and this curse, we, like others, have not failed to experience.
Nor is this all. It must be remembered how widely Universalism has been compelled to do its work, hindered and neutralized by the influence and false education of 1 orthodoxy.' " I know," said a little four-years-old son of one of our ministers, as his Sunday school teacher was talk- ing with his class about bad boys, " I know what becomes of bad boys. They go to hell, and are burned up forever. " And this talk from a child of one of our ministers — and a minister most watchful over his children and their associa- tions, well illustrates how the whole atmosphere of society has been pervaded by the doctrines and spirit of the tradi- tional creeds. Universalism has not been permitted to as- sert itself as an element of Christian nurture uncontaminated by these creeds, even in our own homes. What has been 4
50 OUR NEW DEPARTURE.
the consequence ? With numerous other mischievous im- pressions, the public mind has been saturated with the idea that were it not for hell, and our exposure to endless woe, there would be no good reason why we should be religious, or at all concerned in religious work. Of course, the fear of hell being removed, people so trained have had little or no conception of any other motive sufficient to control them. What wonder, then, that Universalism has not been so successful as, under other circumstances, it might have been in lifting the popular mind up to the level of its ap- peals, and so in putting its own spirit and motives into those theoretically converted to its doctrines ? And what have we, really, in much of the neglect and irreligion or- dinarily charged to the account of Universalism, but the direct harvest of ' orthodox ' training, or of the principles which it has sown and tilled ? Nor is it a fact to pass without mention here, that the Universalism of large num- bers who have dishonored our name has been wholly learned from the slanders of ' evangelical ? pulpits. Such pulpits, falsely representing the teachings of Universalism to be what they never were, have sent away the profane and the vicious with the impression that Universalism is favorable to their low and vicious life, and they have said, If this is Univer- salism, then we are Universalists ; and we have had to bear the odium of their professed friendship, though they knew no more of Universalism than Simon the sorcerer knew of the Gospel, and were without even so much of right to bear its name as he had to call himself a Christain. Still further : Until within a few years, comparatively, we have been without any system of religious culture and work. In the reaction of our denominational fathers from the doctrines they renounced, there was, naturally, — almost unavoidably, — a quite general reaction from all existing re- ligious methods. Prayer-meetings, the church, the Sunday school, tracts, missionary societies, family prayer, a formal profession of religion, everything but the simple service of preaching, was, to a wide extent, opposed, or, if not op- posed, ridiculed or neglected, as savoring of cant, fanati- cism, or priestcraft. The pendulum had begun to return from this mischievous reaction just before I entered the ministry ;
A SURVEY OF THE FIELD. 51
but its consequences long continued, and even now have not wholly ceased. If there are to be religious results, there must necessarily be some system of means to secure them. So long lacking any such system, then, and not simply lack- ing, but to a large extent deriding and fighting against it, how could it be but that the consequences should be re- ligiously disastrous to us ?
Particularly must it be taken into account, in this connec- tion, to how small an extent we have had any thorough and systematic training of our children, even in the doctrines of the Bible as we understand them, — much less with refer- ence to religious obligation and experience, and a distinctively religious life. Some of them, from their very infancy, have been carefully and prayerfully educated in Universalism, not only theoretically, but as a religious power : and how many such have anywhere failed to be devout, earnest, con- secrated men and women ? But as the rule, has it not been thought sufficient that children growing up in our homes should be trained in a general way to respect God and the Bible and the Sabbath, and to be kind, honest, truth- ful, morally upright, and when this has been done, have they not been left to themselves as to anything else ? And though we have had Sabbath schools, and have come of late years, almost universally, to institute them, as a matter of course, wherever we have had established congregations, has it not been equally the rule, up to a very recent period, even if it is not the fact quite so widely now, that they have taught Jewish history, Scripture biography and ge- ography, with some occasional smattering of doctrine, and some talk about being good, leaving the more vital and spiritual applications of our truth to the conscience and the heart with comparatively little attention ? Is it, then, very strange that such sowing has not resulted in the best re- ligious harvests ?
All these things have unquestionably had their impor- tance in our case, and they severally serve to explain, in part, the failure in purely religious results which we are now noting. But the consideration which, as I believe, alone goes to the root of the matter, and explains, as none of these does, what is saddest and most perplexing in this state of
52 OUR NEW DEPARTURE.
things, is yet to be mentioned. It is, that there has been among us a wide-spread lack of sufficiently serious views of irreligion and sin as related to God and the inmost life of souls — of which a chapter further on will duly treat. As the consequence, all the effects of sin have, to a similar ex- tent, been supposed to end with the body, and Universalism has thus been apprehended as simply a proclamation that all souls, at death, however they may have lived, pass at once to certain felicity, without regard to any conditions of faith, char- acter, or effort here.
Under any circumstances, it was inevitable, as was just now intimated, considering in what ideas the people had so long been educated, that the announcement that there is no endless hell should seem to some minds to remove all imper- ative reason for religious living, however conditioned or qualified salvation might have been. In a sense, motives are the nerves of life ; and it is obvious that, under no cir- cumstances, could it be a light thing, or a task wholly unat- tended with danger, to take out from our physical frames one set of nerves and substitute another. A child brutal- ized under a regime of kicks and blows does not at once and readily appreciate the force of purely moral influence. At the best, therefore, it was inevitable that large numbers, be- cause of their false and pernicious ' orthodox ' education, on becoming convinced by Universalist argument to the nega- tive extent of believing that there is no endless woe to be afraid of, should feel that the strain of religious motive was loosened, and that they were somewhat more at liberty, if they so pleased, to take things easily, and to give only so much attention to religion as they might find convenient, or as might seem to them needful to be respectable. There could not be such a transition without something of immedi- ate moral harm. But when it came to be so almost univer- sally understood that Universalism means not simply that there is no endless punishment, but that there is absolutely nothing for even the most sinful to be anxious about on the other side of death, — that live as negligently, or as wickedly, as one may here, it makes no difference as to his immediate felicity when he dies, it is not surprising — at least, to me — that the effect should be, religiously, very
A SURVEY OF THE FIELD. 53
unfavorable, and that we should see what we have seen, and still do see, of listlessness and unconcern.
Those there have been, indeed, holding this doctrine, who have been among the saintliest and most consecrated souls that ever blessed the world with their presence — just as there have been such among the believers of the terrible doctrines of ' orthodoxy/ But these last are no examples of what such doctrines are fitted to make their believers, — only examples of what those believing these doctrines, but feeding upon the truth associated with them, may become in spite of them — as even in the most poisonous flower the bee finds that which it transmutes into honey. And for much the same reason, never thinking of reward or punish- ment, — only living in habitual communion with the best and sweetest things in the Gospel, these saintly and conse- crated souls among the disciples of this theory which confines all the peril of sin to this world, and which puts even the most profane and unbelieving directly into heaven at the moment of death, in no way illustrate the natural tendency of such a belief, — only illustrate what power there is in strong religious instincts, and a positive sympathy with God and the Saviour, to neutralize even very mischiev- ous error, and to come to beautiful spiritual flower and fruit in spite of it.
If we are to test the real influence practically of such a theory, we must look to those on quite another moral level. And taking the world as it is, we cannot convince men that there is actually no peril in sin beyond this life, and that there are no conditions of salvation there to be here fulfilled, — that no matter how badly they live, or what they neglect, they will certainly slough off all unpleasant consequences of their misconduct with the body the instant they die, and go straight to glory, faring just as well as though they had lived the most self-denying and Christian life, with- out paralyzing their spiritual concern, and leaving them to be swayed as appetite, or the supposed interests or pleas- ures of this world, may suggest. Even those who think somewhat of their highest obligations are prone to put off any decided step religiously till circumstances shall be somehow more favorable, or till sometime when, as they
54 OUR NEW DEPARTURE.
think, it will be easier for them to make the effort or the sacrifices required. Satisfy even them, therefore, that they have only to wait till they die, to find themselves ' all right ' without any effort on their part, and, in many cases of every hundred, they will say, Why trouble ourselves about what is then so certainly to take care of itself ? And, if even such will be so affected, how much more those who seldom give a moment's thought to their religious duties, save as they occasionally think what they are hereafter likely to suffer on account of their neglect !
It is true that every day is a day of reckoning, under the moral government of God, and that whoever chooses a life of worldliness or sin is making a great mistake, every day attested in his or her experience as a soul. It is no less true that every day of a saintly life is its own sufficient compensation, and that one who has attained the elevation of such a life never stops to think what he or she is to get for it hereafter. ''The backslider in heart shall be filled with his own ways ; and a good man shall be satisfied from himself. " And, these things being so, it is very easy to say what should be, and how people ought to live with no thought of consequences after death, certain that every day's Jiving pays for itself. But, as the fact, people do not so live without regard to consequences. As the fact, the less one has of spiritual impulse and culture, the more he depends upon consequences to determine his choice towards good. As the fact, if men are to be up and doing, they must feel that they have something at stake. So it ever has been, as all experience testifies ; and so, by every law or theory of motive upon which men are most accustomed to act, it ever must be. Even with reference to this world, as people average, they will not work unless some necessity is laid upon them ; and, however superior to such stimulus some of rare constitution, or of a high order of spiritual development, may be, the mass of mankind, tempted and dragged down as they are by the immediate solicitations of material and sensual appeals, will not, in affairs of the soul, rise so far above the ordinary plane of motive as to deny themselves, and renounce their easy indulgence or uncon- cern, and put themselves to struggle and effort towards a
A SURVEY OF THE FIELD. 55
better life, except as the spur of consequences presses into them, and they are compelled to feel that, hereafter and always, as here, what they shall be must depend, under God, wholly upon themselves, and depend there, for a period no one can say how long, upon what they are and do here.
Had there been any room for doubt on this point before, the result of our experience would render any further doubt impossible. The several considerations recited by way of explaining the absence of the religious results we fain would see, but do not, at the close of our first hundred years, are, as has been said, important in their place ; and each of them does something — some of them do a great deal — to solve the problem presented us. But when we have made the most possible out of the explanations thus furnished, there still remains much in our condition that is not touched ; and this, as a large majority of our most thoughtful ministers and people have unquestionably come to believe, is to be directly charged to the account of the idea of certain immediate salvation at death without regard to conduct or character. Not that it is meant to say that the absence of any such idea would have saved us from all which we now have to deprecate. Not by any means that it is designed even to intimate that the idea of the continuity of character, and of responsibility for it, beyond death, necessarily insures re- ligious life. We have all known persons and congregations theoretically committed to this doctrine, who were very far from oeing patterns of religious devotion, or even of moral uprightness. As no opinion, however false, will make all who avow it bad, so neither will any opinion, however true, spiritually vitalize all who hold it. The question in respect to all moral or religious ideas is, first, as to their truth, and then as to their general tendency, their natural and legiti- mate results. And what it is intended here to say is only this — that the natural tendency of the idea referred to has been to spiritual lethargy and unconcern, and that, had more philosophical and scriptural convictions concerning sin and its consequences prevailed instead of it, results more favorable would doubtless now be seen. This idea, it is meant to say, has taken away the stimulus of necessity as a
56 OUR NEW DEPARTURE.
motive to religious interest or effort. It has fostered the impression that such interest or effort is entirely a matter at our private option, since it has taught those accepting it that, if they preferred to serve the world, or sin, willing to take the consequences here, they would be just as well off at death. It has thus begotten a false sense of security. It has been an opiate, lulling to slumber a religious con- science. It has enervated religious force; weakened the sense of religious responsibility ; relaxed the strenuousness of religious inducement ; undermined religious life ; and — mourning, as we have such occasion to mourn, over IMiver- salist societies once thriving (as it was thought), now apathetic or dead, — over Universalist meeting-houses sold, rented, or going to decay, — over nominal Universalist be- lievers, religiously sluggish and unconcerned, — over all that tells religiously to the dishonor of our Church, and seems to attest the failure of Universalism itself as a religious power, — we are unmistakably pointed to this idea as the most fatal and effective among the causes which have wrought to produce this state of things. All our waste and desolate fields, so far as I know, are fields where this idea has reigned. In a word, the doctrine of a fixed and uncondi- tional salvation, certain for all at death, has had a fair trial in our history, and the verdict is, Tekel. It has been weighed in the balances, and found wanting.
I hold in high respect — some of them, in warm and af- fectionate regard — the brethren who are still supposed to entertain this doctrine. In speaking of it, I wouM not even in seeming violate any demand of love or courtesy towards them. But I have no words to express my profound and growing conviction as to what this theory has been as a mischievous element in the life of our Church. Nor can I sufficiently put into language the intensity of my conviction that, while the largest liberty of thought and speech is to be maintained, we owe it to ourselves, and all that is at stake in the salvation of souls, to have it henceforth every- where understood that Universalism means, and that the Uni- versalist Church stands for, no such thing.
Nor am I alone in this conviction. With different degrees of intensity, it has come to be the prevailing conviction
;a survey of the field. 57
among us. Should it be so much as a question, then, what we will do ? Surveying the field, and summing up the net result religiously of our first century, are we not imperatively called to a new departure, as we are entering upon another stage in our history ? — a departure that will duly emphasize our now general conviction that salvation is offered, not secured, except as each soul complies with the conditions on which God has planned it for His children, and thus a departure that will henceforth make Universalism a call to activity, under the lead of Christ, in co-operation with God, and not a proclamation of results to be somehow wrought out by Christ, because unconditionally decreed by God, with which we have nothing to do.
I am sure I cannot err in saying that there is no thought- ful Universalist who would not be unspeakably saddened if, forecasting the horoscope of the next hundred years, he should see only a similar net result as we now have to con- template. Thank God, he would exclaim, for any good our Church may have done, but, alas ! we do not touch the vital spot ; the great work to which every church of Christ is appointed in his behalf is left undone. Shall we hesitate, then, to change the administration of the truth given us, so as to touch this vital spot, and do Christ's great work ? Our truth remains unchallenged. Everything proclaims it true ; and there is no occasion to doubt or to distrust it. We have only erred in administering it. The sublime anthem of a complete salvation, written of God, is still to be chanted amidst the discords of sin and sorrow in our world, and we are to lead the chorus.- It is only required that we pitch it to another key-note. Never before, though our net result is not all we ought to witness, have we had so much reason as now to thank God and take courage. All thought, all philosophy, all theology, all the best life of the time, is tend- ing in our direction. Considering ourselves, moreover, not only are we greatly increased in numbers : we are more compact, better organized, more definite in aim, better equipped in means, wiser and more resolute in methods than ever before ; and, better than all the rest, we are ripening morally, and deepening and becoming more alive spiritually. It is only needed that, committing ourselves
58 OUK NEW DEPARTURE.
to this New Departure, we go forward, mighty in the power of our great truth as thus better administered, and working so as to secure God's blessing, in order that we may effec- tually retrieve any mistakes or omissions of the past, and be the conquering and redeeming Church God is inviting us to become.
CHAPTER III.
THE GOODNESS OF GOD.
The first condition of a religious life is a right sense of God, and an awakening of the heart towards Him ; and in its very essence, Universalism presents God in such aspects and relations as cannot fail to touch any heart, if fittingly enforced and duly reflected upon. In respect to God, there- fore, we need to take no new departure except — 1. Per- haps, to make our exposition of Him less exclusively intel- lectual, for purposes of mere argument, and more directly and personally an appeal to conscience and the affections, as a means of spiritual influence ; and, especially, 2. To dis- criminate more closely in our ideas of His goodness, so as more distinctly to include the fact of His severity as well as His kindness. What is implied in the first of these specifi- cations is being so anticipated in the current drift of our church-life, and will, besides, in so many ways run through these pages, that it is not necessary here to dwell upon it ; but the second is on every account so important as to be en- titled to a prominent place in this general discussion.
Heading the report of a lecture on Abyssinia,* some time ago, I was much struck with the following sentences, and particularly with the statements here italicized : " The Abys- sinians, though zealous observers of fast-days, which make up nearly one third of the year, are nevertheless a very in- temperate people, and many diseases are to be attributed solely to their excesses. The practical doctrines which they derive from Christianity seem to be that there is no limit to the mercy of the Almighty, and that, as life is short and pleasure fleeting, it is desirable to seize every opportunity for enjoyment. Acting on this plausible theory, they eat more raw meat, drink more mead, . or small beer, commit more breaches of the moral
* By E. Hepple Hall, before the Traveller's Club, New York City.
59
60 OUR NEW DEPARTURE.
law, and particularly of the seventh commandment, than any other Christians, in Christendom or out of it." The lecturer was represented to be an Abyssinian traveller ; and assum- ing that the statements are reliable, they signally illustrate how the doctrine of God's illimitable mercy may be so unqualifiedly, and therefore falsely, held as to become an oc- casion of license rather than a motive to holiness. Our great doctrine of God's goodness has probably never been subject to any such extreme perversion ; but is it too much to say that there have been approaches to some such misap- prehension of it ?
One of the seed-errors of ' orthodoxy ' is, that it so tears the justice of God from its relations, and so exaggerates its proportions and demands, as to make it an infinite malignity ; and in the earnestness of our protest against this, we have almost unconsciously been carried towards the other ex- treme. As the result, we have, — not exaggerated God's love, for infinite Love cannot be exaggerated, but have, to some extent, failed to keep duly in mind its qualifying attributes and the various methods it employs. A some- what too rose-colored and sentimental view of God's char- acter has been the consequence — as if His goodness were only an easy and infinite good-nature, a boundless and all- approving complacency, overlooking all distinctions of char- acter, — an invincible and invariable indulgence, too tender to be rigorous, too loving to be stern and terrible. To this, rather than to any mere emphasis we have given to God's love, is due, it is believed, the wide-spread impressions — 1. That, as distinguished authority has recently expressed it, Universalism is simply " an outgrowth of the diseased sentimentalism of the period," — ''the exaggeration, or, perhaps, the perversion of philanthropy," sure, "if severely left alone," to " run to seed after a little," as this " diseased sentimentalism " shall be cured by the access of a little more common sense ; and 2. That Universalism is of course impeached, and Universalists necessarily unhorsed, if God's punitive justice is proved, or if anything but this easy and infinite good-nature is attributed to Him.
All such impressions, whether existing as one-sided con- ceptions of the truth, among ourselves, or as grounds of ob-
THE GOODNESS OF GOD, 61
jection against us, among others, we must, if we are to administer the Gospel more effectively for religious ends, studiously correct, careful in the mean time to give no fur- ther justification for them. Dr. Ballou, of blessed memory, left a brief paper on this topic, not very familiar, I imagine, even to Universalist readers, but one of the best products of his wise and thoughtful mind. Let me invoke the authority of his name, and the vigor and discrimination of his pen, to set forth, so much better than I can, the view of the sub- ject which should hereafter give character to our thinking and labor. He first deals briefly with the philosophy of criminal reform ; and though it does not directly treat of the love of God, what he thus writes serves so important a pur- pose as an introduction to what follows, that it should not be omitted. He says, —
" It appears to us that any general system of measures for the re- form of the vicious, or for the correction of the criminal, must prove futile in the end, unless it provide for the use of sharp, and sometimes terrible, severity. If we attempt to get wholly rid of this unwelcome agent in the work of human discipline, and rely exclusively on forbear- ance, inoffensive gentleness, and the attraction of sympathy, to effect the purpose, we shall find that they soon lose their power ; when taken thus alone, they will at length exert even an injurious, because enerva- ting, influence on the public. Human nature is such that, in order to acquire consistency and strength, it needs a great amount of hardship mingled in with its more pleasant experiences; just as we need the immense pressure of the atmosphere to stimulate the functions of animal life, or as the universal order of physical nature depends on the nice adjustment of repulsion and attraction. How would it do to dispense with either of these ? In the existing state of human society, together with the arrangements of Divine Providence, there are indeed many instances of a wonderful reform of individuals effected by the exhibition of gentle persuasion alone ; but, even in these instances, it is because there is already furnished a dark background of suffering, or of conscious danger, to contribute its part towards the result, and to give the gentler element a chance to penetrate the heart. Shut up the criminal in a gloomy prison, under the ban of the world, or let him anxiously fear this doom ; let the general order of things be such that the vicious man shall feel that he is under the stern censure of the com- munity in which he lives, that he has by his own fault lost the respect and fellowship for which his social nature yearns, that he has wickedly ruined his health or his business ; or let him be harassed by apprehen- sions of these results ; let the sinner be oppressed with guilt and with the consciousness of self-desolation ; and then the voice of individual sympathy and encouragement may indeed come home to him with a di-
62 OUR NEW DEPARTURE.
vine power, because his previous discipline, together with his present environment, has driven him to appreciate it. But how, if he had never been subjected to such unwelcome discipline ? Suppose that a mistaken philanthrophy were to bring about such a state of things, that criminality should at once secure to the offender, not the ban of the world, nor the repelling censure of society, but universal sympathy, a tender, patronizing assiduity, and that all sin were to be treated simply as a misfortune, till the very sense of guilt should thus be allayed as far as possible in the sinner's own petted conscience ; suppose that the element of stern penal justice should be exorcised from society, and the work of human discipline be carried on, from first to last, by soothing processes only ; it is easy to see that, in this case, the gentleness would lose all its efficacy. There would need a background of severity as its complement.
" It may be well to consider the relations of the subject to the doc- trine, that the spirit, in which God made and governs the world, is in- finite goodness, and that the manifestation of this goodness is the means recognized by the Gospel for reconciling mankind to their Maker. Should it be asked, whether the principles we have illustrated be not inconsistent with this doctrine, we should answer, Yes, if the goodness of God were simply complacency, or were it never exhibited under any other form than that of tenderness. Here is a point on which, we think, there is want of discrimination, with many, in assuming their premises. They seem to forget the other forms in which this divine perfection is manifested. Now, we have only to look out into Nature, or into the actual course of Providence, to see the different aspects in which it appears. God created the world in infinite goodness ; He al- ways deals with us in infinite goodness ; and if we but observe how He has constructed His creation, and how He administers His govern- ment, we shall see how, as matter of fact, His goodness operates.
" How, then, does it appear in Nature ? Not exclusively in the form of gentleness. There is the terrible earthquake that strikes all hearts with mortal fear, and that sinks whole cities into a yawning gulf, crush- ing thousands under falling ruins and in the opening jaws of the earth. There is the raging hurricane that sweeps its path of desolation ; the howling storm that buries the trembling, praying, and exhausted sea- men in the bosom of the deep ; there is the thunderbolt that smites down the unwarned victim. The solid globe itself is made of million tons of impracticable granite and rock to one of fertile soil; and it is the law proclaimed by Nature, as well as by Revelation, that man shall toil and suffer till he returns to the dust. God brings sickness upon us, and we linger through months and years of excruciating pain. He sends disappointment into our long-cherished schemes, and a blight into our fondest affections. Though we pray Him to avert the blow, and struggle in desperation to turn aside His descending rod, it is often in vain ; He strikes home into our little circle of joys, and leaves us heartbroken. If we sin, He follows us with the punishment as stanch as death ; if we involve ourselves in ruin, He lets us take the consequences of our folly or wickedness, without sparing. Now, all
THE GOODNESS OF GOD. 63
this is but the manifestation of His goodness, for He always acts from the same unchanged principle, how different soever the outward dispen- sations. ' God is love ; ' but to us His love is as awful, in some of its workings, as it is pleasant in others. These, let it be remarked, are known facts, which it will not do to ignore.
" We must add that the Scriptures also represent His goodness in the same two-fold light. We sometimes hear language which seems to imply that the thought of God ought not to be associated with any- thing like severity or terrible infliction ; that nothing, indeed, but ideas of the most fond and tender nature ought to enter into our conceptions of Him. This, however, is not the teaching of facts, as has been seen ; and certainly it is not the presentation which we find in the Bible. According to the writers of the New Testament, God, who ' is love,' is at the same time, 'a consuming fire,' and ' it is a fearful thing to fall into His hands,' that is, for punishment. While they * beseech us by the mercies of God,' they also admonish us in language intended to alarm-, like the following : ' Despiseth thou the riches of His good- ness, and forbearance, and long-suffering ; not knowing that the good- ness of God leadeth thee to repentance ; but, after thy hardness and impenitent heart, treasurest up to thyself wrath against the day of wrath, and revelation of the righteous judgment of God ? ' Goodness, manifesting itself in the most fearful judgments, as well as in gentle aspects, — this is the view which the writers of the New Testament, when read continuously, present us of the subject ; and we cannot but see that, in this, they perfectly agree with the facts of Nature and Provi- dence. It is unquestionably the right view.
" There is a fanciful assumption that has been sometimes taken, with respect to the Bible, and dilated in various forms, namely, that the Old Testament speaks only in tones of sternness and dread, and de- scribes God only as an object of terror, implacable, taking vengeance on His foes ; while, on the other hand, the New Testament discards everything of the kind, and is all gentleness, seeking only to win. We suppose that this account of the matter can have been intended only for a fancy sketch ; though it is questionable whether good taste will allow, even in a fancy sketch, so obvious a departure from the known facts in the case. Notwithstanding that the Gospel gives the fuller revelation of the character and purposes of God, yet the same principles are recognized by both parts of the Bible, we mean so far as they go. The New Testament abounds in ideas as terrible as any that we meet with in the Old, though the greater refinement of the later age may have softened, in some degree, the dress in which they are clothed. And, on the other hand, the Old Testament often speaks the language of that noted text in the Psalms, ' The Lord is good unto all, and His tender mercies are over all His works.' What can be more dreadful than those words of our Saviour, referring to the destruction of the Jewish nation, ' Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels ' ? or that passage of St. Paul, with respect to the same event, ' The Lord Jesus shall be re- vealed from heaven, with his mighty angels, taking vengeance on them
64 OUR NEW DEPARTURE.
that know not God, and that obey not the Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ ; who shall be punished with everlasting destruction from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of his power ' ? What can be more tender and encouraging than the words of the prophet, ' Can a woman forget her sucking child, that she should not have compassion on the son of her womb ? Yea, they may forget, yet will not I forget thee ! ' Either Testament would be altogether one-sided, and there- fore practically false, did it aim only to soothe and console, or only to terrify and repress.
" Perhaps it will now be said, according, then, to these views, God is good but in part, and He is, in part, otherwise. No ; this is not the proper conclusion, nor is it the doctrine of the Scriptures. ' God is love ; ' He is wholly good in every act and in every purpose. But the important truth on which we would fix attention, and which embraces all we have said on the subject, is this : that His goodness works by se- verity as well as by indulgence. All true goodness operates in this way. It is not goodness, it is a mischievous dotage, which is so weakly tender that it cannot employ harsh and even terrible methods when occasion demands. In such cases, it always does harm whether it at- tempt to govern on the broad theatre of a nation, or in the narrower circle of a community, school, family, or individual, — in civil, or in moral and religious affairs. Wherever human nature is to be dealt with, in the present existence, we can see that the removal of all grounds of fear, or of painful necessity, would at length prove an evil incomparably greater than any which we now encounter ; it would be like dissolving the spheres by abrogating the law of repulsion as the complement to that of attraction." *
These are weighty and momentous words. As thus ex- pounded, Universalism will hardly be thought by anybody to give signs of ' diseased sentimentalism/ or of being ' the exaggeration or perversion of philanthropy ; J and upon the basis of these facts and principles, it can alone be made most potent for the work of human redemption. It is un- deniable that so the Bible holds and sets forth the goodness of God. Can we improve upon its method ?
There is another view of the subject, too, which must not be overlooked — a view very clearly involved, indeed, as Dr. Ballou puts the case, but that has not hitherto received the recognition to which its importance entitles it. The goodness of God, in its very nature, is unappeasable, unre- lenting, in its demands. A love less determined and endur- ing would tire in the work of human recovery, abandoning the obdurate and impenitent to themselves. But His love is inexorable, unconquerable. It never will let go, steadily
* Universalist Quarterly, vol. vii. pp. 286-290.
THE GOODNESS OF GOD. 65
pursuing its purpose to bring all souls into harmony with itself, however benumbed or obstinate any may be, through whatever terrible furnaces of penalty and pain it may be- come necessary to lead them,
Better than any dogmatic statement or argumentation, on this point, are the words of George McDonald, in Robert Falconer's talk with his poor, weak, lost father,* — words that none of us would accept as to precise form, perhaps, but that in spirit are not only richly suggestive concerning this persistent, consuming love of God, but also as to the moral inertness which is one of the chief hinderances in the way of the confirmed sinner's return : —
" ' Father,' repeated Robert, ' you've got to repent, and God won't let you off, and you needn't think it. You'll have to repent some day.'
" ' In hell, Robert,' said Andrew. . . .
" ' Yes, either on earth or in hell. Would it not be better on earth ? '
" ' But it will be no use in hell,' he murmured.
"In those few words lacy the germ of the preference for hell of poor souls, enfeebled by wickedness. They will not have to do any- thing there — only to moan and cry, and suffer forever — they think. It is effort, the outgoing of the living will, that they dread. The sorrow, the remorse of repentance, they do not so much regard. It is the action it involves ; it is the having to turn, be different, and do dif- ferently, that they shrink from ; and they have been taught to believe that this will not be required of them there, in that awful refuge of the will-less. I do not say they think thus ; I only say their dim, vague, feeble feelings are such as, if they grew into thought, would take this form. But tell them that the fire of God without and within them will compel them to bethink themselves ; that the vision of an open door beyond the smoke and the flames will ever urge them to call up the ice-bound will, that it may obey ; that the torturing spirit of God in them will keep their consciences awake, — not to remind them of what they ought to have done, but to tell them what they must do now, — and hell will no longer fascinate them. Tell them that there is no refuge from the compelling love of God, save that love itself, — that. He is in hell, too, and that, if they make their bed in hell, they shall not escape Him, and then, perhaps, they will have some true presentiment of ' the worm that dieth not, and the fire that is not quenched.'
" ' Father, it will be of use in hell,' said Robert ; ' God will give you no rest even there.' " f
* Pp. 493, 494.
f As these pages are about leaving my hands for the printer's, our papers give us the admirable sermon of Rev. J. M. Pullman, before the Convention at Washington, in which, with others, both these points 5
66 OUR NEW DEPARTURE.
There is much in the spirit of all this, as I said, for us to think of. The love of God is, beyond all controversy, the central and most precious truth of the Gospel. No jot must we lessen the stress and prominence we have given it. The most influential ' evangelical ? pulpits in the land to-day, those that are most mightily touching the keys of the popu- lar heart, are made what they are by the preaching of this truth. We must not surrender a whit of its power to them. There would be no Gospel without it. But the Abyssinians — to say nothing of others nearer home — demonstrate how
made by McDonald are strongly presented. " Love," says Mr. Pull- man, " is changeless ; it is inexorable. Forever and ever, in any world, under any and every circumstance, it must pursue its objects till its continual desire respecting them is accomplished. . . . God has pun- ished you. While He has seemed in so doing to be devoid of pity, . . . there has always been the alternative of repentance and reconciliation. . . . The possibility of reunion has never been closed." He well says, too, that this doctrine of God's pursuing and inexorable love furnishes " the true terror " for the sinful. " To the awakened mind, God's prom- ise that it shall be restored to virtue comes to bless ; but to the unawak- ened heart that promise comes as a threat, and there can be no terror in all the world so awful as that which comes when one is made to feel that his darling sin ... is to be withdrawn. . . . Let the dungeons of the prison and the lunatic asylum, let the walls that have echoed with horrible shrieks, let the ears that have become hardened with such cries, tell us what they know of the terrors of restoration. Then shall we understand that it is no holiday matter, that it is nothing for us to throw ourselves laughingly upon, that God has issued His decree that He will at last have all souls redeemed, and brought back pure into His kingdom." And, commenting upon this sermon, the Christian Leader well says : " We get down to the core of our theology when we recog- nize that the love of God is inexorable. As the preacher pertinently put it, the Divine Xove is a consuming fire. . . . The statement that God will by no means clear the guilty is only half understood until it is construed to mean that He will by no means permit him to remain in his guilt. The most momentous truth of revelation is that no soul can escape the decree which has ordained that it shall be holy, harmless, undefiled. And what an irresistible power is in this searching truth ! Once get it fairly before the minds of men that there is absolutely no escape from the decree that they shall be good, and how mightily will your appeal for purity, honor and righteousness move them ! It is the delusion that there is some way out of this inflexible grasp of Immortal Love that permits the vain artifices to which men so generally resort. Universalism teaches that there is no escape from the purpose of God to have all men saved and come unto the knowledge of the truth. It thus teaches what the saintly Henry Scougal felt when he exclaimed, ' To go anywhere wrong is to run against the love of God, which every Way circumvents us and drives us back.' " So the New Departure has, in this respect, begun.
THE GOODNESS OF GOD. 67
it may be held only for evil. Universalisru, we must cause it to be everywhere understood, is no ministry of this truth in any such direction. It is a gospel of love, we must insist, but of no mere good-nature, of no sentimental laxity, that simply pities wrong-doing, and talks only in gentle and persuasive tones, and sprinkles its delicate perfumes, and dilutes God's administration into a reign of mere sympa- thetic indulgence, as if there were no such thing as sin to be punished, and no such severe and terrific facts as make up one side of God's appointments. His government has many sides and many instruments, we are to remember. The Bible talks of His wrath as well as of His love, because, in a mere natural view, His retributions seem to indicate displeasure. But though His love tempers and explains the expression as symbolic, it does not wholly explain away its significance as a symbol. There is always grave and some- times fearful meaning in it ; and any theory of God or His government which fails to recognize this meaning, and to give it due place, is so far one-sided, and to this extent false. This, then, is the New Departure whereunto we are called in this particular. God's words to us include ' Woe ! ' as well as ' Blessed ! ' We are summoned henceforth more discriminatingly to enforce both, availing ourselves, as some have always done, of all the grounds of appeal thus fur- nished ; only bearing constantly in mind, and never failing duly to emphasize, the fact that, however God may deal with us, He is our Father, perpetually true to a Father's name and obligations, and, even amidst His severest inflic- tions, however relentlessly, still always beneficently seeking our welfare. In a word, the Goodness of God must so take form in our thought, and so be presented to others, as to lead alike us and them up to His throne, to adore that mar- vellous Love, and that infinite, unwearied, inflexible Patience, which, numbering the very hairs of our heads, clings to us, watches over us, pleads with us, punishes us as we deserve, disciplines us as we need, and, through whatever terrible paths of sorrow or of suffering He may lead us, never lets us go, and never will let us go, till, availing ourselves of His helps, and responding to His appeals, we all come home, to fulfil His purpose, and find our peace in harmony with Him forever.
CHAPTER IV.
♦•BOUGHT WITH A FKICE."
There is no saving power in Christianity, except as there is first a personal interest in. Christ ; and such an interest is possible only as there is to inspire it some fitting sense of what Christ has done for us, and of the reality and magnitude of the obligations under which he has placed us.
If, then, Universalism is to be made more religiously ef- fective, this is one of the points to which increased atten- tion must systematically be given. We have always made Christ prominent. But, as the rule, have we not made him prominent chiefly in his general relations — as the means of God's appointment, destined certainly to re- deem our race ? Have we equally pressed his personal relations and claims, and our personal obligations ? These questions found their answer in our first chapter.
How shall we, to best purpose, press these personal relations and claims, and our consequent obligations ? is, therefore, I believe, just now, one of the inquiries of most urgent interest to our future usefulness. And, as I state the inquiry, Paul's words to the Corinthians, " Ye are not your own, for ye are bought with a yrice" seem to me to suggest the best answer. Ingratitude is univer- sally held in odium. So far as any moral sentiment asserts itself, mankind are always touched by undeserved sacrifices in their behalf. To the same extent, then, that we can penetrate men with the feeling that they belong to Christ by virtue of what it has cost him to serve them, we shall awaken them to a sense of these personal relations and obligations to him. Herein is the explanation of the efficacy of what is called evangelical preaching, so far as it has ever moved and won hearts. It assigns to Christ a specific work for our sake, and so compels the feeling of obli- gation to him. Much of its apparent success, it is true, is due to fright, and nervous excitement, and mercenary
68
BOUGHT WITH A PRICE. 69
and terrific appeals, quite out of place in any Christian pulpit, producing results only seemingly religious, and not seldom working injury alike to the convert and the church. But that it has been instrumental in the real conversion of many souls, inducing their genuine consecration to God, is equally undeniable. Proceeding on a false theory of our exposure, such conversions have nevertheless been wrought by a true sense of Christ's self-sacrifice. The exposure has been assumed to be, our liability to endless perdition, under God's wrath and curse ; but as the cross has been pictured, and the pitying Saviour has been portrayed hanging upon it, forgetful of himself in his love for us, willing to die that we might live, and the appeal has been urged, Can you be indifferent to such an interest in your welfare ? the loving spirit of Christ has shone through all encompassing errors, and the effect has invariably been to awaken to penitence and attract to a religious life, in pro- portion as attention has been secured, and the reality of the sacrifice has come home to thought and con- science. Much as we may abhor its theory of redemption, justice compels the confession that, as so administered, ' orthodoxy ; has proved itself widely — and despite its terrible misconceptions, beneficently — potent for religious ends ; and a host of devoted and saintly souls, won many of them from open and flagrant courses of sin, have, through the centuries, been wedded to Christ by it in a sense of obligation which has mastered every faculty, and made their whole subsequent lives one continued and chivalric purpose to love and serve a Saviour who has done so much for them. It is for us, on the basis of our better interpretation, if we wish to have our labors ac- companied with similar signs following, to be equally spe- cific in setting forth what Christ has done for us, and in urging home its appeal. Generalities move nobody. Talk to a man in a vague, miscellaneous way about favors conferred upon him, and, ordinarily, little or no impression is made ; but let some one leap into the water to save his life, or lose a limb, or shed so much as a drop of blood for him, and the probability is, that he will ever after feel himself in debt to his benefactor. With a like direct-
TO OUR NEW DEPASTURE.
ness of appeal, we must seek to impress people with as vivid and realistic a sense of what Christ has done to be- friend and save them. For all religious purposes, we might as well cease to be, if we do not.
Hence the importance of this fact that we are " bought with a price. " It is the central fact in Christ's relations to us. The entire plan of redemption, so far as he is a party in it, grows out of this — that he loved us and gave him- self for us, "a ransom for all, to be testified in due time." There was, indeed, as we believe, no bargain in the case. The ' evangelical ' theory has always assumed that there must have been ; that a price could really be paid only in some such commercial sense. On this account, as the Bible speaks of our bondage to Satan, it was at one time supposed that the ransom was paid to him. Then, as the absurdity of this became apparent, the theory now current obtained — the theory, scarcely less absurd and even more barbarous, that Christ had to buy off God from His re- lentless purpose of vengeance, by suffering in our stead an equivalent for our endless woe. We hold no such theories. We pronounce them as derogatory to God as they are de- grading to the conception of our salvation. But the price at which we have been bought, we insist, is none the less real. There was no wrath or curse of God, no impending sword, no endless woe, from which it was needful for Christ to purchase our escape. But there was sin ; there was ignorance ; there was selfishness with its canker and its curse ; there was pain for which there was no healing, and sorrow that had no consolation ; there was spiritual darkness, destitution, death. These were more than any material hell could be. From these we needed deliverance, and because of these the world needed the infusion of some fresh moral force, an element of Divine life, for its regeneration. Therefore Christ came — to teach us ; to awaken and inspire us ; to make us con- scious of God and spiritually self-conscious ; and thus to save us by putting us into electric contact with im- perishable realities, by making sin abhorrent to us, and by so shedding something of his own vitality into us " that we might have life, and have it more abundantly."
BOUGHT WITH A PRICE. 71
But all this could be done only at the cost of loneliness and pain, of obloquy and toil, of the ignominy and anguish of the cross. And this was the price at which he bought u§ — this giving of himself, a willing sacrifice, to suffer and to die for our salvation ; — a price paid to no being or law, as a consideration for our release, but paid as mothers pay weary days and sleepless nights in the sick rooms of their children, for their recovery ; paid as the patriots of our revolution paid their hardships and blood to ran- som us from British oppression, and as later soldiers and patriots paid their valor and their lives to maintain the institutions thus founded ; paid as sacrifice has ever been the price of privilege, and as hazard and suffer- ing are the usual cost at which great blessings are bought.
Christ is an idea and a principle. But he is more. He is a pervading fact. Asking as to the origin of the world and the wonderful phenomena of which it is so full, every- thing points to God. God is written in an alphabet of light and beauty on the heavens, and in hieroglyphics of verdure, grandeur and use on all the face of the earth. God is whispered by the breeze ; is sung by the birds and the waving corn ; is preached by the rolling thunder and by the everlasting throbbing of the ocean. And so, if we ask as to the origin of the ideas, institutions and influences by which we are most enriched and bene- fited, we are just as certainly pointed to Christ. Ef- forts have been made to eliminate him as a factor in modern progress ; to explain it on various grounds of climate, geographical position, intellectual conditions, and other hypotheses. But he is not to be eliminated. What- ever simulation of facts may be contrived, whatever spe- cious web of appearances may be woven, to get rid of him, he meets us everywhere ; and every stream of good by which our lives are watered and fertilized, if followed up to its source, leads us back to the tomb in Joseph's garden, — to the cross on Calvary, — to the sea-shore where Christ taught, or to the mountain where he prayed, — and finally to the manger in Bethlehem where he was born. All modern history is full of him. As a distin- guished historian has said, his life " is the greatest event
72 OUR NEW DEPARTURE.
in the annals of time. The former ages had been a prep- aration for it ; the latter unroll from it." Whatever we may know, believe, or have, worth the having or keeping, no man can say that it would have been ours without Christ. He has quickened thought ; animated investigation ; ed- ucated taste ; created a new conscience ; refined and ameliorated law ; sanctified home ; suggested and in- spired every moral and social reform. He has shed abroad a new class of convictions, hopes and expecta- tions ; has furnished a new ideal of character, and the materials and incentives for attaining it ; has lifted life into grander relations, filled it with more exalted aspirations, clothed it with loftier meanings. Like the sunlight and the rain, his religion sheds its blessings for the benefit of all ; and no neglect is gross enough, no unbelief per- verse enough to hinder it from shedding something of its benediction upon us, or to enable any one to say, It does nothing for me. As a spiritual essence pervades all material forms, as the air we breathe surrounds the globe, vitalizing, beautifying all, so Christ pervades every- thing about us, encompassing us with his benign ministries, bathing our lives with refreshment, and filling them with whatever makes them most a joy.
And whatever thus points us back to Christ is somehow a reminder of the price at which we have been bought. Not one of these gifts or blessings in which, directly or indirectly, we so share, could have been ours if Christ had not purchased it by the life of weariness and deprivation, of contempt and sacrifice which he lived for us, and by the death of shame and agony, and yet of sublime endurance and forgiving love, which he died for us. All that is meant by our Christian knowledge, and every privilege peculiar to our Christian birth, — our faith in G-od, our familiarity with the terms of Divine pardon and acceptance, our assurance of immortality, — all our means of Christian culture, and all that renders our Christian civilization so superior to every other, and so affluent in the elements of personal and social welfare, — in one word, all that is included in our redemp- tion, here or hereafter, bears the impress of the cross, and comes to us at Christ's cost — as the fruit of some pang
BOUGHT WITH A PRICE. 73
by which he was tortured, of some drop of the blood that trickled from his brow or side, of some sorrow that he bore, or of some self-denial that he accepted for our sake : and could we but for once distinctly gather up in our thought all that this price involved — the wrestle and the travail, — the homelessness and the weariness, — the isola- tion from all human sympathy, because his best friends even could so little understand him, — the haunting sense of being constantly dogged, hunted, hated, without cause, — the garden agony, — the betrayal and the desertion, — the stripes and mockery and buffetings, — the walk to Calvary, fainting beneath the cross, and the excruciating anguish of slowly dying upon it, and then feel, each one of us, All this was for me, we should never again be indifferent, or fail to feel, or to make others feel, what such a price demands.
To make real to ourselves and others, then, this price at which we have been bought, is the one thing we have to do, if we would have our Church mighty in winning souls to Christ, feeling that they belong to him. " Christ and him crucified ,? was the burden of Apostolic faith and labor. It must be no less the burden of ours ; and if God is speaking any word to us as a Church, this clearly is part of it, " By this conquer." The cross is the symbol of Christ's power: and always, we shall, personally, have the richest Christian experience in proportion as we cling to it, appreciating its meaning ; and as a Church, we shall attract and help to save souls on the same condition. Nor must the cross lose a whit of its New Testament significance, or glory, at our hands. Our failure is certain so far as it does. Mothers, watching in the sick rooms of their children, and patriots, periling life for their country, were just now referred to as exemplifying how Christ has bought us. But all such ex- amples fall far short of paralleling his whole work in our salvation. They indicate only the general nature of the price he paid. They do not at all illustrate its exact rela- tions and spiritual efficacy. Christ suffered and died as a martyr, but not simply as a martyr, nationalize upon the subject as we may, we still have to say with Paley, "that the death of Jesus Christ is spoken of in reference to human salvation in terms and in a manner in which the death of no
74 OUE NEW DEPARTURE.
person whatever is spoken of besides. Others have died martyrs as well as our Lord. Others have suffered in a righteous cause as well as he. But that is said of his death and sufferings which is not said of any one else. An efficacy and a concern are ascribed to them in the business of human salvation which are not ascribed to any other. " * It is a part of the honorable record of the Universalist Church, that to this view of the subject it has been, theoretically, steadfastly committed. Our call is, if we are more effect- ually to do the work of a Church, that not only shall we continue thus theoretically committed to this view, but that we give it increased stress and prominence, and therefore increased power.
Increased power, I say : for let it not be forgotten that the crucified Christ is the final power by which the world is to be saved. " And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto me/5 said our Lord (John xii. 32). Only in the cross did his ability to save souls, and therefore the means for the world's redemption, become complete. And why ? For many reasons — chief among which was the fact that only thus could a superior ownership in us be best asserted, and we be brought to surrender ourselves to its will. " We are not our own: " this is the grand lesson of the cross. The general assumption is, first, that we are our own, and second, that we have a right, therefore, to be, or to do, what we please. Hence the unbridled self-asser- tion which is the one root of all wrong and sin. Of course, there is a sense in which both these assumptions are true. But in the highest sense neither is true. Even in our mere human relations, considering the vast net-work in which we are woven, we are not our own. We belong to the Past, as the heirs of its blessings ; to the Present, as the stewards of its responsibilities ; to the Future, as the guardians of its welfare. We belong to our parents ; to our brothers and sisters, if we have them ; to our families and homes ; to our associates and friends ; to every human being who has done us a kindness, or who needs our aid ; to our country ; to our race. How much more, then, to Christ and to God ! We have not a faculty — of body or of mind, we have not a gift
* Sermon on " The Efficacy of the Death of Christ," Part I.
BOUGHT WITH A PEICE. 75
— of money, position, or privilege, which we are at liberty to use with sole reference to our own wills, without regard even to these human relations, — much less as if we did not belong to God, and to the Saviour who has so purchased us. This is the central fact of which God, through Christianity, is seeking to make us aware. This is the meaning of His Fatherhood. It is equally the meaning of our Brotherhood. The cross is the consummate proclamation of this fact, in concrete. It is God's sense of ownership and His great consequent interest in us, — it is Christ's marvellous love, willing at any price to gain possession of us, put into sensible form ; and in whomsoever its power is at all felt, self-asser- tion is so far vanquished, and the will of God, as expressed in Christ, becomes supreme.
Here, then, summarily, in this particular, is our new work
— to so hold and preach the crucified Christ as to fill souls with the consciousness that they are not their own, because bought with a price, and thus to inspire them with the purpose in all things to make God's will in Christ supreme. Theoretically, there is little occasion for labor on these points. Theoretically, whoever believes in God and Christ, more or less accepts the lessons of the cross as to their ownership in us ; and Universalists especially, however nominal, are fond of appealing to these ties which link us to God and the Saviour as, in their nature, indissoluble, and thus to demonstrate that no soul can be finally lost. And in our distress and sorrow, when disappointment comes and our earthly props fail us, who does not find it pleasant to think of what Christ has done to comfort and save us, and to fall back on God, assured that through whatever gloom we may be led, or however we may seem to be forsaken, He reckons us as His own, and will never leave nor forget us ? What we want is a practical faith in what is now, to a great extent, only theory. What we want is a new unction and emphasis in urging these conceded truths as elements of a sanctifying experience — so that theory, argu- ment, and comfortable assurance shall be translated into reverent and holy living, and become the intellectual basis upon which our Church shall make itself widely felt in Christ's behalf for the salvation of souls.
CHAPTER V.
CHEIST ESSENTIAL.
The fact that Christ has bought us at so great a price, establishes his claim on our grateful service ; and the nature of his appointment and the purpose of his relations to us be- ing what they are, he is, clearly, if we owe him any such ser- vice, entitled to be enthroned as paramount in the mastery of our lives. But is he, in any sense, essential to us ? Do we, for any reason, owe it to ourselves as well as to him to become his disciples, and thus to make him the life of our being ? It is one of the gravest of the many allegations to be made against the sacrificial theology, that it has poisoned the popular mind with the idea that he is not essential — ex- cept as an insurance against fire, or as the shelter of an overcoat or an umbrella amidst a storm, or as any expedient to save us from outward exposure or harm, is essential. One of the ever-recurring questions by way of objection to Universalism, as is well known, long has been, What is the use of Christ, or of faith in him, or of worship, or of any- thing we call religion, if there be no wrath of God, and no everlasting perdition, from which we need to be rescued ? Only because we are under the condemnation of the Divine law, and Christ is an " expedient by which God can consist- ently and honorably forgive " us, the prevalent teaching has been, have we any occasion for him ; and thousands of pro- fessed Christians — many of them far better people than such language would indicate — have habitually said, and thousands are still saying, Convince us that Christ has no such use to answer in our behalf, and we will give him no further thought or service ; we will henceforth defy God, and revel in sin. In other words, as -a contrivance enabling us to ' make our peace with God/ and evade the demands of justice, as a rescue from the fires of an endless hell, Christ is a convenience, — in a sense, a necessity ; but in no other sense is he essential, or at all important to us.
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CHRIST ESSENTIAL. 77
Happily, in the growing Christianization of opinion, this idea is giving place to a clearer insight into his relations to- our interior spiritual life ; but this is still, in substance, the doctrine of the creeds, as it is the wide-spread and mischiev- ous popular impression.
Against all such teaching we have vigorously battled. Christ, we have affirmed, is God's provision for intrinsic human needs. This is our providential message, amidst the misleading theories of the Church — put upon our lips by every page of the Bible which explains man's condition or Christ's work. He is, we exist on purpose to proclaim, the bread of life ; the light of the world ; the water of which if any drink they shall thirst no more ; the rest and peace of souls. And charged with this message, our business is to arouse men, as nothing else can, to understand that in no sense is he an expedient, or a convenience ; that the need for him is vital, imperative, universal ; that by no possi- bility can anything be successfully substituted in his stead ; that to possess and appropriate him is to fulfil every condi- tion of highest life and sweetest joy ; and that not to have him, whoever one may be, or whatever else one may have or know, is inevitably to lack that which can alone give the ripest character, the most blessed experience, the com- pletest manhood or womanhood to any soul ; and the New Departure to which we are called in this regard is, a new and more determined effort so to give emphasis to these things, that, wherever our influence goes, it shall, to the same extent, be understood and felt, as never before, that Christ is thus, intrinsically and indispensably, a necessity to every soul.
That Christ is such a necessity is proved, look for the facts of human experience where we will. Let it suffice here to ask, in what state he found the world when he came into it ? On many accounts, the period was a splendid one — the culmination of the finest possibilities, alike Jewish and heathen, in the way of human culture and civilization ; rich in artistic taste, in external refinements, in purely intellectual ability and attainments. Bat spiritually the world was empty and decaying. A frequent New Testament term to represent its condition is 'perish' ; and the word has a
78 OUR NEW DEPARTURE.
depth of meaning, as thus applied, which has been but feebly apprehended. Even the Jews, privileged as they had been, were sunk into an inane formalism, out of which all soul of genuine emotion or service had departed. Those whose only sustenance was in the mythologies or philosophies of the time were in a still worse case. " The world by wis- dom knew not God." Human reason and conscience had demonstrated their insufficiency, unaided, for the highest purposes of morals and religion. The moral vigor of the race was exhausted. Its manhood was dying out. It had no principle or power competent to quicken it into ' new- ness of life.' Its recuperative energies, its ability for self- recovery, its spiritual stamina were, gone ; and but for God's succor, infusing some new life-blood, some saving force into it, the world would have rotted and collapsed in its utter degeneracy and corruption.
That this is the state of things everywhere indicated in the New Testament, is known to all who read it. The Apostle puts the sum of it all into few words when he says, "When we were without strength," — i. e., morally impo- tent, unable to help ourselves, — "in due time, Christ died for the ungodly." And history outside the New Testament only too sadly confirms its representations. Alas ! we have but to turn over the pages which - tell of the inner life of Greece or Rome, — have but to go abroad among the nations, and study the spectacle, morally and religiously, everywhere presented, not merely to find wickedness, for much of that exists now even in our most Christian commu- nities, and always will exist until the world's regeneration is accomplished, but to be shocked at the coarseness of the debauchery and debasement which characterized even the best life of the most advanced peoples, or to be somehow furnished with impressive evidence of the world's need of a Quickener and Redeemer. Paul's epitome (Rom. i. 21-32 ; ii. 1, 17—24) does but graphically present the undeniable facts.
Christ came as the succor thus required : God's remedy for the decaying energies as well as for the sin of the world ; the fresh life-blood, to quicken ; " the power of God and the wisdom of God," to vitalize and redeem. Our fourth chap-
CHRIST ESSENTIAL. 79
ter briefly glanced at what he was as an answer to then ex- isting- needs, and at what he has since been in the world. We cannot rationally explain the facts of history, either in their personal or their social, in their moral or their political aspects and significance, except as we confess his presence and power. And what has been will be. The decadence into which the world had spiritually fallen before Christ came does but show in what state it would now, or at any time, be, were he and what he has done withdrawn. Now, or in the future, as in the past, there is help or hope for souls only in Christ and the life that is in him ; only in Christianity and God's redeeming energy in it.
There are those, indeed, who tell us that the world has outgrown Christianity. As well might they allege that the earth has outgrown the sun, or that human nature has outgrown itself. Stages and processes in the progress of our education may be outgrown ; but do we, therefore, out- grow either the capacity to know, or the need of instruction, that we may know ? In like manner, the world may out- grow certain forms of thought about God, and duty, and im- mortality ; but it does not, therefore, outgrow them, nor the necessity of being- informed concerning them. No doubt some interpretations of Christianity, and some accompany- ing theories of miracle and inspiration as connected with it, have been outgrown. But to outgrow these, is one thing ; to outgrow Christianity, is quite another. Christianity is founded in our very nature, and miracle and inspiration were necessities, if Divine instruction was to be specially communicated, or we were to have any assurance of its genuineness and truth. To outgrow these, or our need of them, is, therefore, as impossible as it is that our finite nature shall outgrow its finite limitations ; as impossible as it is that the human understanding shall outgrow its need of a superior illumination, if it is to have any clear or satisfactory knowledge of spiritual things ; or that sorrow shall outgrow its need of consolation ; or that tempted and sinful souls shall outgrow the need of some help to arouse and strengthen, to vitalize and save them.
Science may enlarge the horizon of its discoveries, more and more ■ reading God's thoughts after Him/ and those
80 OUR NEW DEPARTURE.
there may be who will imagine that Christ is to be thus supplanted, — some of them, possibly, that God is to be shown as having no longer a place in the universe. Others may talk vauntingly of reason and philosophy, of the intui- tions of conscience and the soul, of human progress and development, insisting that these will fulfil every use which it has been thought Christianity is requisite to serve. All this has been, and is likely to be again. But so long as the human soul remains what it is, and the conditions of human quickening and regeneration abide what they are, Christianity is the one thing which cannot be outgrown. The world will outgrow theories in science, and systems of philosophy, and forms of speculative thought, and inductions from reason and conscience — for all these it has, many times, successively outgrown and cast aside ; but Christ, or Christianity, never. Just as soon may the worlds out- grow space. Suppose them possessed with the idea that they want more room ; where will they find it ? With equal pertinence, we may ask, what field is there for growth out- side the infinite scope of Christ's spirit, or the comprehen- siveness of his plans ? What is there beyond the universal Fatherhood and the universal Brotherhood, which are the sum of his teachings ? What better than the golden rule which he lays down, — or than the love which he en- joins, — or than the regard for man which he enforces as the condition of acceptance with God ? What purer, more unselfish, more magnanimous than the character on which he insists ? What tenderer or more inclusive than his sym- pathy ? What more ample than his consolations ? What simpler than the way to God which he opens ? What more certain or more inspiring than his disclosures of the life immortal ? What grander or more encouraging than the spiritual enfranchisement and redemption of our race of which he assures us ?
Those who talk so much about outgrowing Christ should answer these questions, and tell us how we are to outgrow what is so illimitable and universal, — tell us into what, hav- ing outgrown him, as they allege, they have advanced, or into what, outgrowing him, we are to go. Let the man who com- bines most of intellect and heart unfold into his loftiest possi-
CHRIST ESSENTIAL. 81
bilities, and still, alike in thought and affection, he will find Christ immeasurably above him, saying1, Come up higher. Or, let any man — the wisest, the most ' advanced/ the most accustomed to boast himself of what he imagines is to sup- plant Christ, and thus to think himself superior to any need of him, be stricken into helplessness, or be humbled or prostrated by pain, or sickness, or some great sorrow pier- cing into the quick of his being, — by the agony of bereave- ment, — by the awakening of conscience and a disturbing sense of sin, — by no matter what, so that the shell of learned or materialistic assumption in which he is encased be broken, and the bubble of his conceit be made to collapse, and he be brought to some genuine consciousness of what he is and of his real needs ; and amidst all that he has been accus- tomed to think sufficient — -lacking only the Christ he has flattered himself he has outgrown — he will find himself, spiritually, in the condition of the traveller, who, famishing in the desert, pushed from him the bag which he had hoped contained water or food, exclaiming, " Ah me ! it is only pearls ! " Retort and crucible, telescope and microscope, philanthrophy, and philosophy, reason and nature and schemes for human improvement are severally important in their places and for their legitimate uses ; but when grief is to be assuaged, when starving hearts are to be fed and soothed, when a pitying God is to be found, and pardon is to be assured, or when even the least of the spiritual crav- ings which Christ fully satisfies is to be ministered to, these things are to the soul only as so many stones to one who is dying for bread. In these straits, whatever else one may have outgrown, his experience will demonstrate that he has not outgrown a need for Christ ; and give but him to this humbled, awakened man, brought down from his inflated self-sufficiency, so that he shall clasp his hand and feel the inflowing of his presence, and he will have, in him, a sense of God's nearness and pity, an assurance of God's helpful grace and pardon, an experience of God's peace, and a power lifting him above all his vanity and broken-hearted- ness and sin, that, while enabling him to see a new meaning in every revelation of science and every suggestion of phi- losophy, in every delight of human knowledge and every 6
82 OUR NEW DEPARTURE.
indication of human progress, will put him into spiritual heights and satisfactions of which he had never dreamed before.
" Lord, to whom shall we go? " once said Peter to Christ; " thou hast the words of eternal life." And this but puts into speech the universal outcry of our spiritual conscious- ness, however or in whomsoever awakened. The same ne- cessities of human nature continually assert themselves ; and, whatever changes or modifications may occur in opin- ions about him, or in the interpretation of his words, Christ, "the same yesterday, to-day and forever," will be the one sole sufficient answer to these necessities, so long as men have need of God and the assurance of His fatherly love, and the conscience has need of guidance, and the heart has need of peace, and the erring have need of forgiveness, and the dying have need of " the power of an endless life."
It is this fact that we are called to emphasize and enforce, summoning men to that practical appropriation of Christ which is essential to their best life. Ignorant, tempted, weak, suffering, sinful, they are to be made to feel it is in vain that we turn to reason or philosophy, to science or our own intuitions ; in vain that we invoke any power of prog- ress or f development ' in ourselves. ' None but Christ, none but Christ,7 reiterated the brave old martyr, amidst the tortures of the stake ; and so, attempt what substitutes we may, that which is deepest in us will compel every one of us, like him, at some time to say. Christ is the quickening spirit, and only he. He is "the way, the truth and the life ; n " the light which lighteth every man ; " " the foun- tain of living water ; " " the bread of life ; " " wisdom, and righteousness, and sanctification, and redemption." In our weakness there is no hand like his to make us strong. On the bed of pain, his ministries alone can soothe us to rest. When our hopes are shattered, no voice like his can com- pose our disappointment, or inspire us with resignation and trust. When our hearts are wounded, there is no balm like his to heal. Standing above our dead, only he transfigures death, and shows us the path of our departed illumined in the radiance of an immortal life. *And in our moral impo- tence and disease, in the waywardness of our wills, in our
CHRIST ESSENTIAL. 83
conflicts with temptation, in our bondage to sin and our in- subordination to God, our only sufficient help, no less surely, must come from him. Only at the foot of his cross can we have that loathing of sin, or be melted into that condi- tion of penitence and consecration, essential to newness of life ; and only in contact with him, as the medium of God's regenerative grace, can we effectively learn the lesson of duty, or be invigorated, vitalized, saved. None like him, none but he, cau fill us with the idea of excellence, or give us ' power to become the sons of God/
And what is thus true of individuals is equally true of the race. Humanity is but the aggregate of individuals, and there is help or redemption for it only where help and redemp- tion are to be found for the feeblest soul that makes part of it. Nations and the race can be lifted up only as individuals are lifted up. Why is Turkey 'the sick man' of Europe? Why, mainly, but that Christianity has not been, for these many centuries, an element in the thought and life of the people ? And what is it that, by common consent, as we watch the wondrous change in progress in Japan, is so as- suring us of a nobler destiny for that hitherto exclusive nation ? What but the indications that Christianity — first, in the ideas and usages of our Christian civilization, and then through the introduction of the Bible, and as a trans- forming faith — is to become a power in minds and hearts there ? Christ is the one answer to the universal need. In him alone the conditions for the world's spiritual cure and elevation anywhere are fulfilled. " Without him we can do nothing." Human wisdom, and the pride of reason, and the vanity of ' culture/ and the pompous self-sufficiency of men unwilling to acknowledge their dependence, may dream their dreams, and propose their plans, for the amelioration of society, and the regeneration of the world, without him ; but they will prove, every one of them, like the empty lamps of the virgins — prove only dreams and failures ; and from them all the world must turn at length to Christ : " Neither is there salvation in any other, for there is none other name under heaven given among men, whereby we must be saved."
In the power of this truth we are to make ourselves
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morally mighty ; and only as we become possessed and in- stinct with this power, as ministers, as a people, as an organized and evangelizing Church, whatever else we may have or be, is there any positive and saving work, or any desirable Christian future, for us. In this be strong, is the one word that comes from all God's voices to us.
CHAPTER VI.
SIN.
It is the penalty of all reform that those who wage it, opposing one error or abuse, necessarily incur the risk of swinging into another. Perhaps this has had no more strik- ing illustration than- is furnished in the rebound from the exaggerated doctrines of the sacrificial theology concerning sin, — as to its infinite enormity, on the one hand, and as to the vindictive and horrible punishment by which only can God duly attest His hatred of it, on the other. Not to enter into the broad field thus opened, however, it is enough now to ask whether we, as a people, have not shared in this extreme rebound. Arraigning and controverting these doctrines, have we not had speculations among us, and even definitely de- clared conclusions, the inevitable effect of which, logically, has been either to make sin an inconsiderable affair, a slight disturbance which is to be beneficently overruled, or to deny that there is really any such thing? Have there not been periods in our history, indeed, when such theories have to no small extent determined the burden of our pul- pits, and the thought of our people ? And do they not yet quite largely mingle in the opinions that prevail among us ? ■
But are such theories morally healthful ? Are they favor- able to quickness of conscience, or to a propelling and inex- tinguishable sense of obligation? Do they tend to distress us with a rebuking consciousness of the guilt of sin, or to induce humiliation and penitence on account of it ? In few words, are they fitted spiritually to arouse and stimulate anybody? to fill anybody with a loathing and abhorrence of sin ? to move anybody to feel himself a sinner, and to cry out with Paul, " 0 wretched man that I am ! who shall deliver me from the body of this death ? " or to stir be- lievers or churches to zeal for the conversion of souls ?
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These are important questions : is it not time that they should be seriously pondered ?
Paul speaks of sin as "exceeding sinful": is it so? Conscience recognizes force in the word ought, and there- fore recognizes the desert of goodness, and the demerit of sin : is conscience thus intimating facts, or only suggesting phantasms ? The Bible is a continuous rebuke of sin, de- nouncing God's retributions upon it, expostulating against it, and pleading that we will abandon it as not only a curse, but as in itself a heinous wrong : is the Bible, in all this, imposing upon us by using words without meaning ? "These inquiries touch points that are vital to all that bears the name of moral science, and therefore vital to the whole sub- ject of character and life. Of course, I am not ignorant of the answers made to them on behalf of the views of sin at which they are aimed. But with these answers, and the metaphysics they involve, I have now no concern. Such metaphysics, splitting hairs, throwing dust, pressing half- truths as if they were the whole, or the side of a truth with- out regard to its relations, proportions, or qualifications, using words that keep their seeming to the ear, but lose or change their meaning to the sense, and eliminating the very life out of every fundamental moral idea, have been our bane. It is time that we were wholly emancipated from them. I shall be tempted into no discussion with them here. I propose only to deal with the subject practically, as it meets us on the pages of the Bible, in our unperverted consciousness, and in the instinctive judgments of conscience and common sense. I have a conviction — the result of years of observation, and that, for some time past, has been every year growing deeper and stronger — that we have widely failed to feel and enforce the enormity and " exceed- ing sinfulness " of sin. Not that we have been indifferent to moral obligation, for, as the fact, no people have been more keenly alive to such obligation, or more observant of it, on its human side ; not that we have not had much sen- sitiveness, much faithful preaching, and much sincere shame and contrition on account of sin ; but that we have not, as a people, been pervaded by any such deep and remorseful sense as the Bible demands of what it is as an offence
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against God, and thus of what it is to be a sinner, an unawakened and spiritually thoughtless soul, in His pure sight. We have never said, or acted as if we believed, that sin is right. Very far from it. But we have quite extensively dallied with it, theoretically, as if it were not very wrong ; and, naturally, the effect of such theoretical dalliance has been a proportionally languid sense of the guilt of sin, a proportionally feeble realization of the ne- cessity of repentance, and a corresponding indifference to the obligations which require a pronounced religious life.
Under these circumstances, I am satisfied, we need a changed style of thinking on this whole subject. A pro- founder sense of the absolute wrong of sin — not only in its grosser forms, but in all its forms, even in its lightest shadings, a keener consciousness of guilt on account of it, and a deeper and more thoroughly prostrating conviction of the solemnity and imperativeness of the calls which are summouing us to penitence and consecration to God, are, I believe, among the conditions upon which alone is there for us the increase of spiritual power which we so much clesire ; nor, I am confident, can our possible destiny as a Church be at all fulfilled except as we at once and henceforth take higher ground than we have been accustomed to occupy in these particulars, and thus commit ourselves to a New Departure, theoretically and practically, in this regard.
A theory was, years ago, extensively current among us, which, happily, is now obsolete, to the effect that sin is exclusively of the body, not of the soul ; that, amidst all the contaminations of wickedness and evil indulgence, the soul remains unpolluted, the pure image of God, no party in the evil, as a diamond, imbedded in the mire, in no way partakes in itself of the surrounding defilement. This theory was, and is, so superficial, as well as so opposed — as it seems to me — to every dictate of common sense as applied to the subject, that it could not retain its hold on intelligent minds when even the least degree of moral and intellectual science, or psychological knowledge, began to assert itself. But it was a mischievous element of our denominational life, so far as it ever did prevail ; and if it anywhere finds belief now, it finds belief only to the same
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mischievous effect. It is hardly a doctrine to be in these days seriously argued against ; and yet, should there chance to be those anywhere still addicted to it on the supposition that Paul (Rom. vii.) teaches it, I must beg them to consider these weighty words of Dr. Ballou, transposing two or three of them at the outset : —
" It would be a gross mistake to suppose that St. Paul confines sin to the body alone, or regards the mind, the spirit, of man as incorrupt. He means nothing of this kind, even when he says that he delights in the law of God after the inward man, while the law in his members wars against the law of his mind, bringing him into captivity 'to the law of sin. Indeed, the mere body, or flesh, strictly speaking, can never sin, though it may work temptations. When taken by itself, it is neither intelligent nor conscious, and is as incapable of moral trans- gression as any other unintelligent mass of matter. And even when united with mind, as it is in every rational person, it is the mind which feels, knows, and acts through the body as its instrument. It is the mind which recognizes motives, controls impulses, or yields to them ; it is the mind which forms within itself the purpose, whether good or bad, and then executes it in overt acts, by means of the body. The mind is the real agent ; and it is the mind alone that is guilty and condemned, in the case of sin. If it should be said that this contra- dicts St. Paul's assertion, that with the mind he served the law of God, but with the flesh the law of sin, — we will, for the argument's sake, grant, what is not strictly true, that there is a contradiction in words ; but is there any in the meaning ? Will any one contend, seriously, that, in serving the law of sin, the mind takes no part, neither pre- meditates, nor desires, nor balances motives, nor comes to a determina- tion, nor wills, nor puts forth the effort ; but that all this is done by about a hundred or two pounds of mere bone, flesh and blood, without any co-operation of the mental power ? The utter absurdity of the supposition ought, of itself, to be a sufficient guard against such a misapprehension of the passages referred to. But if this be not enough to satisfy every one, the matter will be put at rest by appealing to St. Paul's habitual recognition of corrupt, defiled, lustful, reprobate, filthy, vain, unrenewed minds and spirit in man. The other writers of the New Testament agree with St. Paul on this point. St. James says, ' The spirit that dwelleth within us, lusteth to envy.' ... St. John says, ' Believe not every spirit ; but try the spirits, whether they be of_ God.' ...
" Neither can the blind appetites and propensities of the body sin. The farthest they can go in this direction, is, to operate on the mind as impulses or incitements to wrong. If the mind does not consent to an improper indulgence of them, there is no sin, how strongly soever they rage; if it does consent, there is sin, how slightly soever they be felt. . . . To use the phrenological nomenclature, ... is it the blind propensity, say of destructiveness, or of amativeness, that is conscience-smitten,
SIN. " 89
struck with remorse, made wretched, and that sometimes repents ? or is it the person, he who indulged these impulses unlawfully ? Which of the two is it that commits the sin, and suffers the consequences ? It is not the impulses that are either good or bad, except as means. There must be an intelligent person to whom they belong, and whose mind, whose will, directs them, before they can have any moral character; and he alone is either the agent, or the responsible subject. ... It is evident [then], that, by the flesh, the body, its members, &c, Paul means the domination of the senses, in the mind, to the neglect of the spiritual development of our nature. . . . These senses always lie in contact with the mind, with the will ; and they communicate to it impulses, which must be either controlled or yielded to, by some exertion of the mental power. ... If the person voluntarily follows these impulses too far, or neglects to restrain them within their proper limits, then sin begins, and not till then, — begins and continues in his will, or governing faculty." *
Leaving the notion thus disposed of, out of the case, there are two other views which have largely divided our church-opinion upon this subject of sin: 1. That which assigns sin and every other thought, or aim, or act of man directly to God ; and 2. That which, though not directly charging sin to Him, represents God as complacent and quite well-satisfied with it, because He can so easily, and will so certainly, overrule it for good. Both these views are to be deprecated, I believe — as grave errors, to be re- nounced, and especially as serious hinderances, to be cast aside.
I. The first strikes at the root of all moral verities, and transforms the world into a stupendous machine, in which men and women, divested of all self-determining power, are simply serving the uses of so many wheels and springs. What though it is insisted on as the logical sequence of the predicate that God reigns, and is alleged to be the inevitable conclusion if God is to be at all recognized as a factor in human affairs ? The premises are unquestionable ; but the conclusion does not follow. The error is in so emphasizing God as to ignore man, and in so affirming the Divine Will as a factor in human affairs as to make the human will nothing but a name. That the Divine Will is a factor in all human affairs, no one who believes in a Divine Will doubts ; but
* Universalist Quarterly, Vol ii., pp. 416, 417, 418, 421.
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because there is a Divine Will, is there, therefore, no human will, except in terms ? Or, because God is sovereign, has man, as a distinct and responsible agent, no existence ? The sovereignty of God is, doubtless, the foundation on which all theology must build, or be, finally, no theology. Either there is a God, God over all possible contingencies, or there is no God. But man, in his place, is as real as God in His ; and to construct a theological system that is also an ethical system in fact as well as in name, recognizing the play of moral forces and ground for praise or blame, man must be assigned a separate, and in a sense, independent individuality, and must be so reasoned from, as well as God. Alike the Bible and our own consciousness attest that we have, each of us, such a distinct personality ; and if there is anything I can be said to know, I know that, within certain limitations, I am the master of my own actions, and therefore -accountable for them. Every moral instinct of my being is a lie, if it is not so.
But the theory before us denies me any such real self- hood, and resolves me and everything pertaining to me into God. All I do, or will, or think, it avers, is God's will, act, or thought, expressing itself through me, as the click of the telegraph is the expression of the electric fluid behind it. Where, then, is my will ? or my individuality ? or my accountability ? Not one of these attributes can, in any actual moral sense, be alleged of me, except as it can just as well be alleged of the crank of a steam engine, or of a falling stone. However the word may be used, there is in fact no such thing.
Nor is this the worst of it. In thus stripping us of all power of self-determination, and giving the lie to the Bible and our ineradicable sense of freedom and accountability, this theory also strips God of His glory as a moral governor. He is, if this be true, only an infinite mechanic, or the master of a stupendous puppet-show, using souls as so many passive pieces of intelligence, precisely as a machinist uses his pieces of brass and iron, or as the manager of an automatic exhibition directs the movements of his manikins by his touch of the wires, or his adjustment of the springs. Give whatever name you please to such a system, or call the
SIN. 91
means by which God so acts in us, or through us, determin- ing what we shall do, motives, influences, or whatever you will, looking beneath words to things, the purely mechanical nature of the arrangement is manifest. - We are clearly not moral beings, — only so many lay figures, curiously con- structed to think ourselves self-acting, but going through our appointed motions, obeying or disobeying, reverencing God, or blaspheming and defying Him, loving and serving man, or trampling, defrauding, murdering him, as God adjusts and injects the mechanical forces over which He presides, and in the midst of which He is all.
•I hold that these several consequences, not to mention others, place the theory which necessitates them outside the pale of legitimate argument, as any hypothesis which con- travenes known and accepted facts is universally conceded to be no subject of argument. Treating the subject on common-sense principles, in any fair use of words in their ordinary meaning, these consequences are inevitable and undeniable, if any result in logic or mathematics can be said to be inevitable or undeniable ; and in view of them, it is impossible not to ask what there is from which evidence can come, that does not protest against such a view of God's relations to human life, so issuing in our non-responsi- bility, when, stripped of all its metaphysical verbalisms and entanglements, it is fairly and nakedly considered ? Espe- cially should it be noted as the final fact which closes the case against this theory, that it necessarily invalidates all moral distinctions, and renders all action, at bottom, of precisely the same quality. " Well, then," once asked a brother minister of one of the most distinguished advocates of this philosophy, at the close of a long debate upon it, "to sum up the whole matter in few words, virtue and vice, if I understand you, are only names which we give to different phases of human activity, that, in their nature, are essentially the same, inasmuch as both are equally neces- sitated?" " Yes," frankly responded the disputant. And to this conclusion, disguise, or seek to evade it, as its advo- cates may, the argument at last irresistibly conducts us.
And these things being so, is it not clear what the prac- tical influence of such speculations must be, and that if, as
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a Church, we are to have any spiritual vitality and power, we must be rid of them ? Grant that there have been, and are, those holding, or professing to hold, this philosophy, in whom conscience and an invincible integrity have been stronger than their dangerous theory ; grant even that there have been those holding some such theory, who, in an exalted consciousness of God's instant and constant pres- ence, and under the inspiration and guidance of the re- ligious principle thus glowing and regnant within them, have so far risen superior to the natural tendency of such a method of thinking as to be among the world's examples of a rugged and heroic virtue, can there be any reasonable doubt as to what its natural tendency is 1* Really taken as a direct and positive element into life, must it not impair the sense of responsibility, lessen the strenuousness of re- ligious motive, and leave one at the mercy of impulse, im- pression, or inclination, however it may prompt ? In the nature of things, if I actually live out of this philosophy, testing myself by its standards, can I, however much a sinner, feel guilty, or be moved to prostrate myself before God, asking His forgiveness, or be stimulated to self-denial, or struggle, or prayerful consecration and work ? Believing that there is no separate, personal i", and that what seems to be me is only God behind me, can I feel merit, or demerit, do what I may ? Or, if some such feeling will assert itself in me, in spite of my philosophy, can I do otherwise than laugh at it as a curious sensation which has no basis, or jus- tification ?
II. The second of the two theories adverted to, though not so fatally mischievous as the first is fitted to be, is nevertheless open to much the same condemnation. We cannot believe that God is complacent, or satisfied, in view of sin, and at the same time feel very seriously troubled ourselves because of it. Inevitably, as the human mind operates, and under the law of influence to which we are subject, attributing such complacency, or satisfaction to Him, we shall more or less share in it, and our repugnance at sin and our feeling of guilt on account of it will be cor- respondingly abated. This being so, no one can affirm such complacency, or satisfaction, on God's part, or even
SIN. 93
entertain it as a possible hypothesis in respect to sin, with- out moral peril. There is moral safety, because there is any poignant self-condemnation on account of sin, and any abhorrence of it, for us, only as we see it condemned and abhorrent in God's sight.
And if God be the Infinite Holiness, how can sin be otherwise than abhorrent to Him ? Being sin, — supposing it to be, according to the Bible and the universal moral consciousness, man's act or intention, and not His own through man as an automaton, it is a denial of Him, or rebellion against Him, aiming to pull down what He would build up, and to build up what He would destroy. How, then, except by denying himself, can He be satisfied or complacent with it ? Looking upon His finished creation, indeed, if we may credit the record, He "saw everything that He had made," and pronounced it "very good." This, necessarily, was a satisfaction with man as a part of the creation, and this, too, notwithstanding a clear fore- sight of his sinfulness ; but the satisfaction was not with sin, — only with man in spite of sin, in view of the sublime destiny he would ultimately fulfil. With sin, then as now and always, God was in essential antagonism. Everything in His nature is opposed to it. Every law He has ordained is arrayed, eternally and inexorably, against it. It is the one element in His universe against which He is everywhere in conflict, and for the prevention and expulsion of which He is perpetually at work. His enmity to it is thus shown to be absolute, unappeasable, — something that cannot be qualified, or cease, except as He becomes himself qualified, or ceases to be what He is. There is no significance or worth in the Bible, if it is not so. If it be not so, there is no meaning in language, no such thing as duty ; all the invitations and threatenings of God's Word, the life and cross of Christ, and all that God has done and is doing os- tensibly to persuade us against sin, or to save us from it, are but so many pretences ; the voice of conscience and the sense of responsibility are deceits ; we are not moral agents, but things, without personal centre or value ; and in all His so-called moral dealings with us, God is but playing an empty game of make-believe, or a monstrous masquerade.
94 OUR NEW DEPARTURE.
These being the facts, I submit that no man, or company of men, is at liberty to theorize, or to speculate in any way, directly or indirectly, to implicate God with sin, or to com- promise this hostility to it so intrinsic and unappeasable in Him. Here, unfortunately, is the perversion to which a be- neficent interpretation of the universe is — we may almost say, unavoidably — liable. Men easily fail to discriminate. They are prone to overlook conditions and qualifications, and to jump hastily at conclusions. Because we are assured that all things are pervaded with a merciful meaning", and that even sin is to be somehow made, in spite of itself, to sub- serve ultimate purposes of good, far too many leap straight- way to the inference that sin is not, then, so very bad, or, at most, that while a present curse, it is only the negative side of good, — good, like sorrow, with its reverse side towards us. Against this perversion, or any approach to it, all who reach the sublime assurance of the ultimate tri- umph of good have need carefully to guard ; and it is be- cause of a failure duly to guard against this that we have, so widely, the idea of God's complacency, or satisfaction with sin.
Is it asked, how it happens, conceding God's sovereignty, that sin is in the world, if He is not satisfied that it should exist ? For myself, I have an answer entirely sufficient for my own thought ; but it has no place here. Admit, if the reader pleases, that it is impossible for us to answer the question except by saying that God is satisfied with sin. I hold that answer forbidden by what God is, as well as by the moral consequences which inevitably follow. It is a contradiction in terms, and as such, in the nature of the case, inadmissible — just as much as to say that God can. lie. God's intrinsic and invincible antagonism to sin, which is but another name for His unshadowed Holiness, is not to be impeached because of the limitation of our powers. We impugn established human integrity only upon the most direct and indubitable proof, however difficult we may find it to explain unfavorable appearances, because, as we say, what the man is absolutely interdicts suspicion, so long as demonstration fails to warrant it. Shall we count God's character as something to be less carefully considered ?
sin. 95
It is often asked, Why does God permit so much suffering,
— i. e., why has He chosen a system into which it so ne- cessarily enters, if He is not pleased to see the suffering ? and, however we may say, and find comfort in saying, that He proposes to overrule it, we can give no answer that goes to the bottom of the problem, and absolutely solves it. Do we, therefore, say that God is pleased to see His chil- dren suffer ? The fact that He is Love forbids. Hence, we say, We cannot answer, — and are content to trust where we cannot see. So with numerous other questions
— unanswerable except by impeaching God's character. We say, Any such answer in effect destroys God, and, being thus a self-evident contradiction, becomes, of course, ex- cluded from the case. And this