John Stuart Blackie

?? p?? ? ????? ?? ????e, ????e, e?se?e?seta? e?? t?? as??e?a? t?? ???a???? ???? ? p???? t? ????a t?? pat??? ?? t?? ?? t??? ???a????.—? SO???.

Man is characteristically a religious animal; in fact, as Socrates teaches, the only religious animal;¹³ for, though a dog has no doubt reverential emotions, it cannot be said with any propriety that he has religious ideas or ecclesiastical institutions, for a very good reason, because he has no ideas at all: observation he has very keen, and memory also wonderfully retentive; instincts also, like all primal vital forces, divine and miraculous; but ideas certainly none, for ideas mean knowledge; and brutes that have no language properly so called that is a system of significant vocal signs expressive of ideas, but only cries, gesticulations, and visible or audible signs expressive of sensations and feelings, can by no law of natural analogy be credited with the possession of a faculty of which they give no manifestation. Language is the outward body and form of which thought and reason and knowledge and ideas are the inward soul and force; and hence the wise Greeks, unlike our modern scientists, who delight in confounding man with the monkey, expressed language and reason with one word ?????, while what we dignify with the name of language in birds and other animals was simply f???, or significant voice. If, therefore, there is any thing most human that history has to teach, it must be about religion. All the great nations whose names mark the march of human fates have been religious nations. A people without religion does not exist, or, if it does exist, it exists only as an abnormal and deficient specimen of the genus to which it belongs, which is of no more account in the just estimate of the type than a fox without a tail, or a lawyer without a tongue; and as for individual atheists, who have been talked about in ancient times, and specially in these latter days, they are either philosophers like Spinoza, the most pious of men, falsely baptized with an odious title from the stupidity, prejudice, or malice of the community, or, if they really are atheists, they are monsters which a man may stare at as at an ass with three heads or with no head at all in a show.

The form in which religion generally presents itself in early history is what we commonly call Polytheism, though it is quite possible—a matter about which I am not careful curiously to dogmatise—that there may have been in some places an original Dualism, like the ancient Persian, or even a Monotheism, out of which the Polytheism was developed. For there cannot be the slightest doubt that, whatever may have been the starting-point, there lay in the popular theology a tendency to multiply and to reproduce itself in kindred but not always easily recognisable forms, like the children of a family or the cousinship of a clan. But, taking Polytheism as the type under which history presents the objects of religious faith in the earliest times, we have to remark that under this common name, as in the case of Christianity, the greatest contrasts, both in speculative idea and in social efficiency, stare us everywhere in the face. In the eye of the Christian or the monotheistic devotee the worships of Aphrodite and of Pallas Athene are equally idolatrous; but, allowing that these anthropomorphic forms of divine forces and functions of the universe are equally destitute of a foundation in fact or reason, the reverence paid to them by a devout people might be as different as passion is from thought, and sense from spirit. As the ideal of wisdom in counsel and in action, the Athenian Pallas no doubt exercised as beneficent a sway over her Hellenic worshippers as the ideal of Christian womanhood, in the person of the Virgin Mary, does at the present day over millions of Christian worshippers. It is only when the cosmic function impersonated in the polytheistic god, being of an inferior order, leaps from its proper position of subordination and usurps the controlling and regulating action belonging to the superior function, that polytheistic idolatry becomes immoral; though, of course, the very facility of this usurpation, and the stamp of a pseudo divinity that may thereby be given to beastly vice, is a sufficient reason for the denunciations of the heathen idolatries so frequent in the Old Testament, which ultimately ripened into the spiritual apostleship and monotheistic aggression of St. Paul. One other striking feature of all polytheistic religions may not be omitted. They are naturally complete—more catholic, more sympathetic with universal nature and universal life than monotheistic religions; if they make a philosophical mistake in worshipping many gods, they do not make a moral mistake in excluding any of his attributes. With the polytheistic worshipper everything is sacred: the sun and the sea and the sky, dark earth and awful night, excite in him an emotion of reverence. If the Greek polytheist was devout at all, he was devout everywhere; whereas, under monotheistic influences, there is a danger that devout feelings may respond exclusively to the stern decrees of an absolute lawgiver and the awful threatenings of a violated law. Polytheistic piety, whatever its defects, was always ready to add a grace to every innocent enjoyment; monotheistic religiousness, as we see its severe features in some modern churches, contents itself with adding a solemn sanction to the moral law—a severity which here and there has not been able to keep itself free from the unlovely phase of regarding the innocent enjoyments and the graceful pleasantries of life as a sin.

So much for the soul of the business; the body is what we call the Church. And here the very word is significant. In one sense, as a separate ethical corporation, the ancients had no Church. Why? Because Church and State were one; or, if they were two, they were too like the famous Siamese twins that used to be carried about the country as a show, two so closely connected that they could no more be torn from one another and live than the limpet can be separated from the rock to which it clings. With the peoples of the ancient world the State was the Church and the Church was the State; the priest was a magistrate and the magistrate was a priest. This identity of two things, or loose intercommunion and fusion of two things in modern association so instinctively kept apart, arose from the common germ out of which both Church and State grew—viz., as we saw in the previous lecture, the Family. Every father of a family, in the normal and healthy state of society, is his own priest as well as his own king. In religion and morals, as well as in all domestic ordinances, he is absolute and supreme; and the functions which necessarily belonged to him as supreme administrator in his own family would, under the influence of family feelings, naturally be conceded to him when the family grew to a clan, and the clan to a kingdom. And this is the state of things which we meet with in the Book of Genesis, long before the promulgation of the Mosaic law, where we read (xiv. 18) that Melchizedek, king of Salem, went out to bless Abraham, and he was priest of the Most High God; the distinction between priest and layman, to which our ears are so familiar, being in this, as in a thousand other well-known instances, altogether ignored. Not only in Homer, where we find Agamemnon, the king of men, performing sacrificial functions without even the presence of a priest,¹⁴ but in the sober historical age we find the King of Sparta performing all the public sacrifices—being, in fact, in virtue of his office, high priest of Jove.¹⁵ So closely indeed was the State religion identified with the person of the supreme magistrate that, when the kingship was abolished in Greece, and three principal archons and seven secondary ones shared his functions, one still retained the title of as??e??, king, and had the supervision, or, as we would say, supreme episcopacy and overseership of all matters pertaining to religion.¹⁶ The same thing took place in Rome, where the name of king was even more odious than in Greece; but nevertheless a rex sacrificulus, or king-sacrificer, with his regina or queen, took rank in all the public pontifical dinners above the pontifex maximus himself. The college of pontiffs in Rome, which had the supreme direction of all religious matters, was not a board of priests, but of laymen—or at least of laymen who, without any qualification but some inaugurating ceremony, might be assumed into the pontifical college; whence the title of pontifex maximus, which the emperors assumed, was no more of the nature of a usurpation than the title of imperator, which belonged to them as supreme commanders of the army. Who, then, were the priests, and what need of them, at all if the laity might legally perform all their functions? The answer is simple. Both in Greece and Rome there were priests and priestly families, as the EumolpidÆ in Eleusis, specially dedicated to the service of certain local gods; but there was no order, class, or body of persons having the exclusive right to officiate in sacred matters over the whole community. No doubt the social position of priests in democratic Greece and monarchical Egypt was extremely different, but in one respect they were identical: in Athens Church and State were one as much as in Memphis. In Egypt there was a remarkably strong body or clan of priests enjoying the highest dignities and immunities; but there is no proof that they were a caste, in the strict sense of the word; and their virtues were so far from being incommunicable that, when the Pharaoh did not happen to be a born priest, but of the military class, he was obliged to be made a priest before he could be a king; and when once king he became ipso facto the high priest of the nation, and took precedence of all priests in all great public acts of religious ceremonial. It must not be supposed, however, that, though he was supreme in all sacred matters and the actual head of the Church, to use our language, he could set himself, like our Henry VIII., to carve creeds for the people, and imprison or burn devout persons for refusing to acknowledge his arbitrary decrees. The exercise of sacred functions in the hands of the masterful Tudor and his Machiavelian minister was a usurpation tolerated by a loyal people as their readiest and most effective way of getting rid of the masterdom of the Roman Pope, which in those days pressed like an incubus on the European conscience; it was invoking one devil to turn out another, and was successful, as such operations are wont to be, in a blundering sort of way. But the worshipful “Sons of the Sun”—for so they were betitled—on the banks of the sweet-watered Nile, had no monstrous pretension of this kind, and could not even have dreamt of it. They did not sit on the throne to reform religion, but to maintain it. Neither in Egypt nor in Greece in those days was any such thing known as the rights of the individual conscience; but both kings and people received religious laws and consuetudes as we do Magna Charta; reasonable people, in the long course of the centuries before Christ, would no more dream of disturbing the ancestral belief about the gods than they would think of influencing the settled courses of the stars. It was their very deep-rooted permanency, in the midst of the startling mutabilities to which human affairs are liable, that made the fundamental truths of religion so valuable to their souls; and as to the particular forms under which these fundamental truths might have been symbolised by venerable tradition, the people were not given to form themselves into hostile camps on the ground of any local difference, as we do in Scotland about ecclesiastical conceits and crotchets; and every devout Egyptian allowed his neighbour without offence to pay sacred honours to a crocodile or a cat, convinced that these honours were equally legitimate and equally beneficial whenever the sacred symbolism peculiar to the worship was wisely understood. Collisions, therefore, between Church and State, or between priesthood and kingship, such as signalised the medieval struggles of the Popes and Emperors, and the convulsions of our infant Protestant freedom in England, could not take place amongst the ancient polytheists. A wise Socrates was equally willing with the most superstitious devotee, when pious gratitude called, to sacrifice a cock to Æsculapius; and the ??? p??e??, by the custom of the State, was the direction which he gave to all who inquired of him by what rites they ought to worship the gods.¹⁷ Only amongst the Hebrews, as a people in whose religious habitude polytheistic and monotheistic tendencies had never come to any decisive settlement of their inherent antagonism, do I find a record of a very serious collision between Church and State, after the fashion of our German Henries and Transalpine Hildebrands in the days of Papal aggression. Scotsmen familiar with their Bibles will easily see that I allude to the case of Uzziah, as recorded in 2 Chron. xxvi. 16-20:—“But when he was strong, his heart was lifted up to his destruction: for he transgressed against the Lord his God, and went into the temple of the Lord to burn incense upon the altar of incense. And Azariah the priest went in after him, and with him fourscore priests of the Lord, that were valiant men: And they withstood Uzziah the king, and said unto him, It appertaineth not unto thee, Uzziah, to burn incense unto the Lord, but to the priests the sons of Aaron, that are consecrated to burn incense: go out of the sanctuary; for thou hast trespassed; neither shall it be for thine honour from the Lord God. Then Uzziah was wroth, and had a censer in his hand to burn incense: and while he was wroth with the priests, the leprosy even rose up in his forehead before the priests in the house of the Lord, from beside the incense altar. And Azariah the chief priest, and all the priests, looked upon him, and, behold, he was leprous in his forehead, and they thrust him out from thence; yea, himself hasted also to go out, because the Lord had smitten him.”

So much for Polytheism. That it should have served the spiritual needs of the human heart so long—five thousand years at least, from the first Pharaoh that looked down from his Memphian pyramid on the mystic form of the Sphinx, to the last Roman Emperor that sacrificed white bulls from Clitumnus at the altar of the Capitoline Jove—is proof sufficient that, with all its faults, it was made of very serviceable stuff; but creeds and kingdoms, like individuals, must die. At the commencement of the eighth century of the Roman Republic heathenism was doomed in all Romanised Europe, in all Northern Africa, and in Western Asia, and that for four reasons. The polytheistic religions of the Old World, created as they were in the infancy of society, no doubt under the guidance of a healthy instinct of dependence on the ruling power of the universe, but in the main inspired by the emotions and formulated by the imagination, without the regulating control of reason, could not hope to hold their ground permanently in the face of that rich growth of individual speculation which, from the sixth century before Christ, spread with such ample ramification from Asiatic and European Greece over the greater part of the civilised world. If it was a necessity of human beings at all times to have a religion, it was a no less urgent problem, as the range of vision enlarged with the process of the ages, to harmonise their theology with their thinking. And if, on the intellectual side, the polytheistic religions of that cultivated age were threatened with a collapse, the sensuous element, always strongly represented in emotional faiths, was in constant danger of being dragged down into a disturbing and degrading sensuality. Then, again, when the Roman Republic, in the age of Augustus CÆsar, had completed the range of its world-wide conquests, two social forces, unknown in the best ages of Greece and Rome, viz., wealth and luxury, added their perilous momentum to the corrupting elements which were already at work in the bosom of the polytheistic system. And in what a hot-bed of fermenting putridity these evil leavens had resulted at this period, the pages of Suetonius and many chapters in St. Paul are witnesses equally credible and equally tragic. Add to all this the fact that the motley intermixture of ideas and the inorganic confusion and forced assimilation of creeds which, accompanied the universal march of Roman polity, brought about a vague desire for some sort of religious unity which might run parallel with the political unity under which men lived; and this desire could be gratified only by placing in the foreground the great truth of the unity of the Supreme Being, which to vindicate in pre-Christian ages had been the special mission of the Hebrew race, and which the Greeks themselves had not indistinctly indicated by placing the moral government of the world and the issues of peace and war in the hands of an omnipotent, all-wise, all-beneficent, and absolute Jove. These and the like considerations will lead the thoughtful student of history easily to understand how the appearance of such an extraordinary moral force as Christianity was imperatively called for at the period when our Saviour, with His divine mission to a fallen race, began His preaching on the shores of a lonely Galilean lake; and the most superficial glance at the contents of His preaching, as contrasted with the heathenism which it replaced, will show how wonderful was the new start which it gave to the moral life of the world, and how effective the spur which it applied to the march of the ages—a spur so potent that we may, without the slightest exaggeration, say that to Christianity we owe almost exclusively whatever mild agencies tempered the harshness and sweetened the sourness of crude government in the Middle Ages; and no less, whatever hopeful elements are at the present moment working among ourselves to save the British people, at a critical stage of their social development, from the decadence and the degradation that overtook the Romans after their great military mission had been fulfilled. Let us look articulately at the main constituents of that new leaven wherewith Christianity was equipped to regenerate the world. These I find to be—

(1.) By asserting in the strongest way the unity of God, it at once cut the root of the tendency in human nature to create arbitrary objects of worship according to the lust or fancy of the worshipper, and accustomed the popular intelligence to a harmonised view of the various forces at work in the constitution of a world so various and so complex as to a superficial view readily to appear contradictory and irreconcilable.

(2.) By preaching the unity of God, not as an abstract metaphysical idea, but as what it really is, a divine fatherhood, Christianity at one stroke bound all men together as brethren and members of a common family; and in this way, while in the relation of nation to nation it substituted apostleships of love for wars of subjugation, in the relation of class to class it established a sort of spiritual democracy, in which the implied equality of all men as men gradually led to the abolition of the abnormal institution of slavery, on which all ancient society rested.

(3.) Christianity, by starting religion as an independent moral association altogether separate from the State, at once purified the sphere of the Church from corrupting elements, and confined the State within those bounds which the nature of a civic administration furnishes. Religion in this way was purified and elevated, because in its nicely segregated sphere no secular considerations of any kind could interfere to tone down its ideal, direct its current, or lame its efficiency; while the State, on the other hand, was saved from the folly of intermeddling with matters which it did not understand, and professing principles which it did not believe.

(4.) Christianity, by planting itself emphatically at the very first start, as one may see in the Sermon on the Mount, in direct antagonism to ritualism, ceremonialism, and every variety of externalism, and placing the essence of all true religion in regeneration, or, as St. Paul has it, a new creature—i.e. the legitimate practical dominance of the spiritual and ethical above the sensual and carnal part of our nature—broke down the middle wall of partition which had so often divided piety from morality; so that now a man of culture might consistently give his right hand to religion and his left hand to philosophy, an attitude which, so long as Homer was all that the Greeks had for a bible, no devout Hellenist could assume.

(5.) By placing a firm belief in a future life as a guiding prospect in the foreground, the religion of Christ gave the highest possible value to human life, and the strongest possible spur to perseverance in a virtuous career.

(6.) By appealing directly to the individual conscience, and making religion a matter of personal concern and of moral conviction, it raised the value of each individual as a responsible moral agent, and placed the dignity of every man as a social monad on the firmest possible pedestal.

(7.) By making love its chief motive power, it supplied both the steam and the oil of the social machine with a continuity of moral force never dreamt of in any of the ancient societies—a force which no mere socialistic schemes for organising labour, no boards of health, no political economy, no mathematical abstractions, no curiosities of physical science, no democratic suffrages, and no school inspectorships, though multiplied a thousand times, apart from this divine agency, can ever hope to achieve.

Thus equipped with a moral armature such as the world had never yet seen, it might have been expected that the triumph of Christianity over the ruins of heathenism would have been as complete and as pure from all admixture of evil as it appears in the great evangelical manifesto commonly called the Sermon on the Mount. But it was not to be so; nor, indeed, created as human nature is, could possibly be. The miraculous virtue of the seed could not change the nature of the soil, and the sweet new wine put into old bottles could not fail to catch a taint from the acid incrustations of the original liquor. Corruptia optimi pessima is the great lesson which history everywhere teaches, and nowhere with a more tragic impressiveness than in the history of the Christian Church. What a rank crop of old wives’ fables, endless genealogies, ceremonial observances, worship of the letter, voluntary humilities, and disputations of science, falsely so called, started into fretful array before the spiritual swordsmanship of St. Paul, no reader of the grandest correspondence in the world need be told; but it was not so much from Jewish drivel, Attic subtlety, or Corinthian sensualism, that the corrupting forces were to proceed which in the post-Apostolic age insinuated themselves like a poison into the pure blood of the Church. It is from within that, in moral matters, our great danger flows: if the kingdom of heaven is there, the kingdom of hell is there no less distinctly. The doctrine of Aristotle, and the teaching of history that all extremes are wrong, is ever and ever repeated to passion-spurred mortals, and ever and ever forgotten. In the green ardour of our worship we make an idol of our virtue; the strong lines of the particular excellence which we admire are stretched into a caricature; our sublime, severed from all root of soundness, reels over into the ridiculous; we revel and riot and get into an intoxicated excitement with the fruit of our own fancy; and work ourselves from one stage of inflammation to another, till, as our great dramatist says,

The excess into which Christianity at its first start most naturally fell was ultra-spiritualism, asceticism, or by whatever name we may choose to characterise that high-flying system in morals which, not content with the regulation and subordination, aims at the violent subjugation and, as much as may be, the total suppression of the physical element in man. How near this abuse lay is evident, not only from the general tendency of every man to make an idol of his distinctive virtue, and of every sect to delight in the exaggeration of its most characteristic feature, but there are not a few passages of the New Testament which plainly show that the masculine Christianity of St. Paul had not more occasion to protest against those Greek libertines who turned the grace of God into licentiousness, than against those offshoots of the Jewish Essenes who professed a self-imposed arbitrary religiosity (Col. ii. 18, 23), even forbidding to marry and commanding to abstain from meats (I Tim. iv. 3).¹⁸ There is, indeed, something very seductive in these attempts to acquire a superhuman virtue, whether they be made by a poet casting off the vulgar bonds that bind him to his fellows, like Percy Bysshe Shelley, that he may feed upon sun-dews and get drunk on transcendental imaginations, or by a religious person, that he may devote himself to spiritual exercises, free from the disturbing influence of earthly passions. Such a renunciation of the flesh gratifies his pride, and has, in fact, the aspect of a heroic virtue in a special line; while, at the same time, it is with some persons more convenient, inasmuch as when the resolution is once formed and a decided start made, it is always easier to abstain than to be moderate. Nevertheless, all such ambitious schemes to ignore the body and to cut short the natural rights of our physical nature must fail. It never can be the virtue of a man to wish to be more than man; and every religion which sets a stamp of special approval on superhuman, and therefore unhuman, virtue, erects a wall of separation between the gospel which it preaches and the world which it should convert. In fact, it rather gives up the world in despair, and institutes an artificial school for the practice of certain select virtues, which only a few will practise, and which, when practised, can only make those few unfit for the social position which Providence meant them to occupy.

The second excess into which Christianity, under the action of frail human nature, easily ran was intolerance. This intolerance, as in the previous case, is only a virtue run to seed; for, as all asceticism is merely a misapplication or an exaggeration of the virtue of self-denial and self-control, so all intolerance, or defect of kindly regard to the contrary in opinion or conduct, is merely a crude or an impolitic extension of the imperative ought which lies at the root of all moral truth, and specially of all monotheistic religions. There is, indeed, a certain intolerance in truth which will not allow it to hold parley with error; and every new religion with a lofty inspiration, conscious of a divine mission, is necessarily aggressive: it delights to pluck the beard of ancestral authority, and marches right into the presence of hoary absurdity and consecrated stupidity. No doubt there is a boundary here which the divine wisdom of the Son of God pointed at emphatically enough when he was asked to bring down fire from heaven on those who taught or did otherwise; but the evil spirit of self-importance which prompted this request was too deeply engrained in human nature to be eradicated by a single warning of the great teacher. This spirit of arrogant individualism asserted itself at an early period in the disorderly Corinthian Church very much in the same way as it does amongst ourselves, specially in Scotland, at the present moment—viz. by the multiplication of sects, the exaggeration of petty distinctions, and the fomenting of petty rivalries,—“Now this I say, that every one of you saith, I am of Paul; and I of Apollos; and I of Cephas; and I of Christ” (I Cor. i. 12),—a spirit which the apostle most strongly denounces as proceeding manifestly from the overrated importance of some secondary specialty, or some accessory condition, of the body of believers, who thus clubbed themselves into a denomination, and resulting in an unkindly divergence from the common highway of evangelic life, and an intolerant desire to override one Christian brother with the private shibboleth of another, and to stamp him with the seal of their own conceit. The field in which this intolerant Spirit displayed itself was of course different, according to the influences at work at the time; but there is one field which, if church history is to teach us anything, we are bound to emphasise strongly, that is the field of dogma; for, if there be any influence that has worked more powerfully to discredit Christianity than even the immoral lives and selfish maxims of professing Christians, it is the fixation and glorification and idol-worship of the dogma. No doubt Christianity is far from being that system, or rather no system, of vague and cloudy sentiment to which some persons would reduce it: it has bones, and a firm framework; it stands upon facts, and is not without doctrines, but it does not make a parade of doctrines; and the faith which it enjoins, as is manifest from the definition and historical examples in Hebrews xi., is not an intellectual faith in the doctrines of a metaphysical theology, but a living faith in the moral government of the world and a heroic conduct in life, as the necessary expression of such faith. The mere intellectual orthodoxy on which the Christian Church has, by the tradition of centuries, placed such a high value, is, in the apostolical estimate, plainly worth nothing; for the devils also believe and tremble, as St. James has it, or as our Lord himself said in the striking summation to the Sermon on the Mount, “Not they who call me Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom, but they who do the will of my Father who is in heaven. By their works, not by their creed, ye shall know them.”¹⁹ Nevertheless, the exaltation of the dogma has always been a favourite tendency of the Church, and the besetting sin of the clergy. With the mass of the people, to swear to a curious creed is always more easy than to lead a noble life; while to the clerical intellect it must always give a secret satisfaction to think that the science of theology, which is the furthest removed from the handling of the great mass of men, has in their hands assumed a well-defined shape, of which the articulations are as subtle and as necessary as the steps of solution in a difficult algebraic problem. The late Baron Bunsen, for many years Prussian ambassador in London, one of the most large-minded and large-hearted of Christian men, in the preface to his great Bibel werk, devotes a special chapter to Dogmatism as a vice of the clerical mind leading to false views of Scripture; over and above what he calls the modern revival of scholastic theology in Germany, he enumerates four dominant epochs of ecclesiastical life in which this anti-evangelical tendency has prominently asserted itself. These are—(1) the dogmatism of the great Church councils in the reigns of Constantine, Theodosius, and Justinian; (2) the medieval scholasticism of the Western Church; (3) the Protestant scholasticism of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; (4) the dogmatism of the Jesuits, Perron, Bossuet, and others. Had this dogmatic tendency of the Church contented itself with tabulating a curious scheme of divine mysteries, though it might justly have been deemed impertinent, and here and there a little presumptuous, yet it might have been condoned lightly as a sort of clerical recreation in hours which might have been worse employed; but it could not be content with this: it passed at once into action, and in this guise prevailed to deface the fair front of the Church with gashes of more bloody and barbarous inhumanity than ever marked the altars of the Baals and Molochs of the most savage heathen superstitions.

Another monstrous abuse born out of the bosom of the Church, though not so directly, is Sacerdotalism. I say not so directly, because the genius of Christianity is so distinctly negative of all priesthood that, had there been even an express prohibition of it, its contradiction to the whole tone of the New Testament could not have been more apparent. Not more certainly are the sacrifices of the Jewish law abolished in the sacrifice of Christ, according to the Pauline theology, than the Levitical priesthood stands abolished in the priesthood of Christ and in the priesthood of the individual members of his spiritual body (2 Peter v. 9).²⁰ Whence, then, came our Christian priesthood? Partly, I suspect, as the Jewish Sabbath was interpolated into the Christian Lord’s Day, from the nearness and external similitude of the two things—the presbyter being to the outward eye pretty much the same as the priest was to the Jewish worshippers; partly from the self-importance which is the besetting sin of all bodies of men prominently planted in the social platform, and which induces them to magnify their vocation, and in doing so stilt their professional pride up into the attitude of a very stately and a very reputable virtue. The proper functions of the office-bearers of the early Christian Church, call them overseers, bishops, or what you will, were so honourable and so beneficent that, especially with an unlearned and unthinking people, the reverential respect due to the actors might easily pass into a superstitious belief in the mystical virtue of the operations of which they were the conductors; and this ready submission on the part of the people, holding out a willing hand to the natural self-importance and potentiated self-estimate of the clerical body, resulted in a four-square system of sacerdotal control, sacerdotal virtue, and sacerdotal influence, to which we shall search for a parallel in vain through all the annals of Asiatic and African heathenism. Nay, I can readily believe that those who can find a priesthood in the genius of the gospel and the apostolic institution of the Christian Church, will naturally be inclined to maintain that the superior power of the Gregories, Bonifaces, and Innocents of the medieval Church, as contrasted with anything that we read or know of the Egyptian, Hebrew, and Roman pontiffs, is the natural and necessary outcome of the superior excellence of the Christian religion; and this, no doubt, is the only comfortable belief on which all forms of Christian sacerdotalism can repose.

So much for the corruptions of the Christian religion proceeding from what, in theological language, might be called the indwelling sin of the Church, unstimulated by any strong external seduction. But this seduction came. After three centuries of hardship, manfully endured in the school of adversity, the more severe trial of prosperity had to be gone through. The Church, which had been declared to be not of this world, and had stood face to face with the greatest political power the world ever knew in a position of sublime moral isolation, was now adopted by the State, and formed a bond of the most intimate connection with its hereditary persecutors. The starting-point of the oldest heathen social attitude, the identity of Church and State, seemed to be recalled; and a Justinian on the shores of the Bosphorus seemed as really a head of the Church as a Menes or an Amenophis on the banks of the Nile. But under the outward likeness a radical difference lay concealed. As an essentially ethical society, with its own special credentials, its separate history, and its independent triumph, the Christian Church might form an alliance with a purely secular institution like the State, but it could not be absorbed or identified with it. That alliance might be made beneficially in various ways and on various terms; the civil magistrate might be proud to be called the friend and the brother of the Christian bishop, or he might humble himself to be its servant, but he never could be its master. The alliance therefore was, as it ought to be, all in favour of the spiritual body; the Church gained the civil power to execute its decrees and to patronise its missions; but a Christian State could never gain the right to dictate the creed or perform the functions of the Church. The idea that there is anything absolutely sinful, or necessarily pernicious, in the conception of an alliance between the Church and the State, is one of those hyperconscientious crotchets of modern British sectarianism at which the Muse of history can only smile. There can be no greater sin in an Established Church than in an Established University or an Established Royal Academy. Religion and Science and Art have their separate and well-marked provinces, in the administration of which they may wisely seek for the co-operation, though they will always jealously avoid the dictation, of the State. But, though there could be no sin in the Church receiving the right hand of fellowship from the State, there might be danger, and that of a very serious description. Nothing strikes a man so much in the reading of the New Testament as the little respect which it pays to riches and the pomp and pride of life, and worldly honours and dignities of all kinds. “How can ye believe who receive honour one from another?” is a sentence that cuts very deep into the connection between the Church and State, which might readily mean the alliance of a secular institution, delighting in pomp and parade and glittering show, with a religion of which, like the philosophy of the porch, the most prominent feature was unworldliness, humility, and spirituality. Here unquestionably was danger: an alliance in which, as in an ill-consorted marriage, the lower element was as likely to drag down the higher as the higher to lift up the lower. And so it actually happened. The Church was secularised. Alongside of the hundred and one monkeries of stolid asceticism and the hundred and one mummeries of sacerdotal ceremonialism, there grew up in the process of the ages a consolidated hierarchy of such concentrated, secular, and sacred potency that the loftiest crowned heads of Europe ducked beneath its shadow and quailed beneath its ban. To understand this, we must take note of the change by which the scattered presbyters of the primitive Church were gradually massed into a strong aristocracy, which in due season, after the fashion of the State, found its key-stone in an ecclesiastical monarch. It was the wisdom of the founders of the Christian Church not to lay down any fixed norm of official administration, but to leave all the external machinery of a purely spiritual institution free to adapt itself to the existing forms of society as time and circumstance and national genius might demand. The form of government natural to the Church in its earliest stages was democratic, with a certain loose, ill-defined element of presidential aristocracy. But in an age which had bidden a long farewell both to the spirit and the form of democracy in civil administration, such a form of government in the Church could not hope to maintain itself. Under the influence of the magnificent autocracy of Rome in its decadence, the simple overseer or superintendent (?p?s??p??) of a remote provincial congregation of believers gradually grew into a metropolitan dignitary, and culminated in the wielder of a secular sovereignty sitting in council with the most influential monarchs of Europe. The epiphany of an absolute monarch with a triple tiara on his head when contrasted with the simplicity and unworldliness of the primitive bishops wears such a strange look that it has been judged, especially in Protestant countries, with a more sweeping severity than it deserved. As a mere form of government, no man can give any good reason why the Church should not be governed by a monarch as well as the State; the bishop of Rome, as supreme head of the body of bishops all over Christendom, and guided by them as his habitual advisers, was at least as natural and as reasonable a guide for the direction of the conscience of Christendom in the Middle Ages as the Council of Protestants who at Dort, in the year 1618, condemned the greatest theologian and jurist of the day to pine in a Dutch prison, or the Assembly of Divines in Westminster who empowered the supreme magistrate to suppress the right of free thought in the breasts of all persons who were not prepared to set their seal to the damnatory dogmas of extreme Calvinism. Nay, so far from there being anything anti-Christian or anti-social in the Popedom as a form of Church government, we may safely say that in ages of general turmoil, confusion, and violence, the admitted supremacy of the visible head of a church founded on principles of peace and conciliation could not act otherwise than beneficially. But when the person in whom this moral supremacy was vested became the acknowledged head of a secular princedom, the case was altered. It was an unhappy day for the Christian Church, the most unhappy day perhaps in its whole eventful history, when Pepin, the ambitious minister of the last of the Merovingian kings, in the year 751, contrived to get out of Pope Zachary a spiritual sanction for his usurption of his master’s throne. From that moment the Church was doomed to a blazing and brilliant, but a sure career of downfall. The spiritual abetter of a secular crime had to be rewarded for his pious subserviency: he received the exarchate of Ravenna, and became a temporal prince. From that time forward the head of the Christian Church, who ought to have stood before the world as a model of all purity, truthfulness, peacefulness, and ethical nobility, was condemned to serve two masters, God and Mammon, unworldly morality and worldly power, which was impossible. From this time forward there was not a single court intrigue in Europe, nor a single plot of any knot of conspirators, into whose counsels the supreme bishop of the gospel of peace might not be dragged, or, what is worse, into whose lawless and ungodly machinations he might not be officially thrusting himself, in order to preserve some accessory interest or gain some paltry advantage altogether unconnected with his spiritual function. If there is any one element, always of course excepting the element of gross sensuality and absolute villainy, which more than another is adverse to the spirit of Evangelical Christianity, it is the element of court intrigue, political contention, and party feuds. In this region love, which is the life of the regenerate soul, cannot breathe; truth is put under ban; lies flourish; conscience is smothered; and low expediency everywhere takes the place of lofty principle. So it fared not seldom with the Popes; and much worse in the last degree; for wickedness, like everything that lives, must live by growing, and the seed of secular ambition which was sown in lies, will grow to robbery, blossom in lust, and ripen into murder. This anywhere, but specially in Italy, where from the time of the patrician Scipio, who suppressed the elder Gracchus, the hot contenders for absolute power, in the eager pursuit of their object, have never shrank from the free use of the assassin’s dagger and the poisoner’s bowl. In fact, if the love of mere animal pleasure makes a man a beast, it is the love of power that translates him into a fiend; and of this sort of human fiends Italian history presents as appalling a register as can be found anywhere in the annals of our race; and at the top of this register stand some of the Popes, whose names are as prominent in the story of ecclesiastical Rome as those of Nero, Domitianus, and Heliogabalus are in the story of the imperial decadence. When we cast a rapid glance—for it deserves nothing more—on the revolting record of the Roman Popes in the age immediately preceding the Reformation, we hear the solemn voice of history repeating again the maxim above quoted—corruptio optimi pessima: when priests are bad, they are very bad; when the salt of the gospel, which was meant to preserve the moral life of society from putrescence, has lost its savour, if not cast out, it is worse than useless—it becomes a poison.

Before proceeding to the modern history of the Church, we ought to emphasise in a special paragraph the fact that one unfortunate result of the incorporation of the Church with the State was that the Church was now in a position to request the State to lend its potent aid in establishing the true doctrine of the gospel and suppressing all heresies. That the State had a right to do so no man doubted; even in democratic Greece free-thinking philosophers, such as Anaxagoras, Diogenes, and Socrates, were banished or suffered death on charges of impiety; and though, no doubt, political elements, as in the case of the Arminians in Holland, worked along with the strictly religious feeling to set the brand of atheism on those men, there cannot be any doubt that where the State and the Church were so essentially one, persecutions for unauthorised religious observances were perfectly legitimate, as indeed the memorable case of the forcible suppression of the Dionysiac mysteries, more than two hundred years before the earliest of the Christian martyrdoms in Rome, abundantly testifies. But there was a double horror in the religious persecution, after the establishment of Christianity, now inaugurated for the first time—the horror of a conduct so diametrically opposed to the spirit and the express injunction of the Founder of the Gospel, in whose defence it was practised, and the horror also that what was now violently suppressed was not, as in the case of the Dionysiac mysteries, rather immoral practices than erroneous beliefs, but simply and nakedly metaphysical objections against metaphysical propositions in theology, which, whether true or false, could not be made the subject of State action, or, in my opinion at least, of ecclesiastical censure, without a flagrant violation of that law of charity which a large philosophy and a catholic Christianity equally enjoin. The banishment of Arius to Illyria, as the civil consequence of the formal signature of the Trinitarian creed by the decision of the Council of Nice in the year 325, though it made no small noise in the world in those days, was a very innocent overture to the barbarous dramas of fire and blood that were in after ages to be enacted on this evil precedent. There are many grand places rich with historical lessons in London, and not a few sad ones; but the saddest of all is Smithfield. I can never pace the stones of this memorable site, where our noblest Scot, Sir William Wallace, was disembowelled and quartered to gratify the vengeance of an imperious Norman, without thinking of the sad fate of the young and beautiful Anne Askew. This lady, the daughter of a knight of good family in Lincolnshire, under some of those stimulants of thought which were stirring up the stagnant traditions of medieval piety, had been led to conceive serious doubts with regard to the Scripture authority for some of the most universally received doctrines of the Roman Church. This pious scepticism coming to the ears of certain leading persons in Church and State, who, after the example of the Nicean doctors, considered it a sacred duty in matters pertaining to religion to tolerate no contradiction, first brought this lady before the Lord Chancellor, who tore her limb from limb on the rack, because she would not say that she believed what she could not believe without denying her senses, and then dragged her to the blood-stained pavement of Smithfield, where she was girt with gunpowder bags and fenced with faggots, to be burnt to death, as if the God of Christians were a second and enlarged edition of the old Moloch of Palestine. And what was her offence—beautiful, young, pure, and truthful woman, not more than twenty-five years of age—that she should be treated in this worse than cannibalic style in the name of the gospel of Jesus Christ? Simply that Henry VIII., in that style of insolent masterdom which he showed so royally, and conceiting himself, like a Scotch fool who came after him, to be a considerable theologian, assumed the right to put the stamp of absolute kingship on the doctrine of the Church that a piece of bread, over which a priestly benediction had been pronounced by a priest, was by the mystical virtue of this benediction changed into flesh, while the fair young lady persisted in seeing nothing but bread. Let it be granted that the lady was in the wrong and the churchly tradition right, it never could be right to tear her flesh to shreds and to burn her bones to ashes because she held an opinion which, to say the least of it, looked as like the truth as its opposite. How sad, how sorrowfully sad, and what a commentary on what we are ever and anon tempted to call poor, pitiful, prideful, and presumptuous human nature, that Christianity had at that time been more than fifteen hundred years in the world, sitting in high places, and walking with triumphal banners over the earth, and yet neither the princes of the earth nor the rulers of the Church should have retained even a slight echo of that reproof from a mild Master to a zealous disciple, to the effect that no man who knew the spirit of the divine religion which He taught, would ever propose to bring fire down from heaven or up from hell to consume the unbeliever.

Such enormities in the doctrine and practice of the Church, as we have indicated rather than described, could lead to only one of two issues—Reform or Revolution. The change brought about, though contenting itself with the milder name, was in fact the more drastic procedure. The European reformation of Martin Luther in 1517 was a revolution in the Church, much more radical and much more worthy of so strong a designation than the political revolution of 1688 in Great Britain. It is needless to recapitulate the causes of offence; they were only too patent—insolence, secularity, sensuality, venality, idleness, vice, and worthlessness of every kind in the Church; but there were two causes which, in addition to corruption from within, tended to open the ears of Christendom largely to the cry for Church reform. These were the stir in the intellectual movement from the days of the author of the Divine Comedy downwards, enforced by the invention of printing in the middle of the fifteenth century, which was amply sufficient to become a danger to even a much less vulnerable creed than that which had satisfied the crude demands of medieval intelligence; and, in the second place, the hostility which the insolence and ambition of Churchmen had roused in the secular magistracy—that is, not only the monarch and his official ministers, but the great body of the higher nobility who found themselves ousted from their place in the familiar counsels of the monarch by the advocates and ambassadors of a foreign potentate. Thus the two best friends of every Established Church in its normal state were converted into enemies; and the natural indignation of the common people at the licentious lives and gross venality of the clergy was stimulated into an explosion by the desire of the secular dignities to curb the pride of the clergy, and, it might lightly happen also, to rob them of part of their overgrown wealth, nominally for the public good, really for the aggrandisement of the Crown and the nobility. The shameless nepotism of Pope Sixtus IV., the flagitious lives and abhorrent practices of the Borgias, more fit for a sensational melodrama in the lowest Parisian theatre than for the home of a Christian bishop; the military rage of a Julius, who turned the Church of Christ into a travelling camp and the bishop’s crozier into a soldier’s sword; the literary dilettantism of the Court of Leo X., more eager to distinguish itself by the elegant trimming of Latin versicles than by apostolic zeal and Christian purity,—all this, so long as it disported itself on Italian ground, the aristocracy of England and Scotland might have continued to look on with indifference; but that the son of anybody or nobody, in a county of unvalued clodhoppers, should jostle them in the antechamber of the monarch, and claim precedence in the hall of audience, simply because he was the supple instrument of an insolent Italian priest, this was not to be borne; and so the Reformation came, with the mob of the lowest classes, the mass of the respectable middle classes, the most influential of the nobility, and the power of the Crown, all in full cry against the ecclesiastical fox. The revolution thus volcanically effected, and known in history under the name of Protestantism, meant simply the right of every individual member of the Christian Church to take the principles and the practice of his Church directly from the original records of the Church, without the intervention of any body of authorised interpreters; and the necessary product of this right when exercised was first to declare certain practices and doctrines that had grown up in the Church through long centuries to be unauthorised departures from the original simplicity and purity of the gospel; and, further, to deny that there existed in the Christian Church, as originally constituted, any class or caste of men enjoying the exclusive privilege to perform sacred functions, and endowed with a divine virtue to perform sacramental miracles by their consecrating touch,—in a word, that there was no priesthood, properly so called, in the Reformed Christian Church. Nor is this doctrine, as some may think, the teaching only of the Helvetic confession, what certain persons have been fond to call extreme Protestantism; for, though the word priest has been retained in the English prayerbook as a minister in sacred things of a particular grade and exercising a particular function, the attempt made by Archbishop Laud and the Romanising party in the Reformed Church of England to retain in the bosom of the Anglican Church the ideas which the ancient Jews and the Romish Christians attached to the word priest, proved a signal failure; and for the sacerdotal despotism which it implied, as well as for the secular despotism which the priest advised and encouraged the unfortunate king to assert, the adviser and the advised justly lost their heads. Of all the teachings of Church history, from the Waldenses in the twelfth century down to the present hour, there is nothing more certain than this, that between Popery and Protestantism there is no middle term possible. They may agree, in fact they do agree, in many essential things, and in a few accidental; but in the fundamental principle of Church administration they are diametrically opposed. The principle of the one is sacerdotal authority, absolute and unqualified; the principle of the other is individual and congregational liberty. The one form of polity is a close oligarchy, the other either a free democracy or an aristocracy more or less penetrated by a democratic spirit.

The practical outcome of this great Protestant movement, in the midst of which we live, cannot fail to a reasonable eye to appear in the highest degree satisfactory. Never was the life of the Christian Church at once more intensely earnest and more expansively distributive than at the present moment. On the one hand, the Roman Church, wisely taught by the experience of the past, though obstinately cleaving to that stout conservatism of doctrine and ritual inherent in the very bones of all sacerdotal religions, has been, in the main, studious to avoid those causes of offence from which the great rupture proceeded. On the other hand, the Protestant Churches, shaken free from the distracting influence of sacerdotal assumption and secular ambition, have found themselves in a condition to permeate all classes of society with a moral virtue, of whose regenerative action Plato and Socrates, in their best hours, could not have dreamed. Some people, while gladly admitting the immense amount of social good that is done by the various sections of the Protestant Church, never cease to sigh for a lost ecclesiastical unity, and to lament the unseemly strifes that arise among those that should be possessed by one spirit and strive together for a common end. But the persons who speak thus are either sentimental weaklings, being Protestants, or are Romanists and sacerdotalists in their heart. Variety is the law of nature in the moral no less than in the physical world; and the absorption of all sects into one results in a stagnation which will never be found amongst moral beings, unless when produced by weakness of vital force from within, or unnatural suppression from above. The two dominant types of church polity recognised in this country since the Reformation—the Episcopal and the Presbyterian—of which the one boasts a more aristocratic intellectual culture, and the other a more fervid and forcible popular action, may well be allowed to exist together on a mutual understanding of giving and taking whatever is best in each, and thus, in apostolic language, provoking one another to love and to good works. Competition is for the public benefit as much in churches as in trades. Dissent from any dominant body, even though it may proceed from the exaggerated importance given to a secondary matter, will always produce the good result that the dominant body will thereby be stirred to greater activity and greater watchfulness; so that, in this view, we may lay it down as one of the great lessons of history that the best form of church government is a strong establishment qualified by a strong dissent. As to the proposals which have in recent times been made for the formal separation of Church and State, they bear on their face more of a political than of a religious significance. Impartial history offers no countenance to the notion that Established Churches, when well flanked by dissent, and in an age when the spiritual ruler has ceased to make the arm of the State the tool of intolerance, are contrary either to piety or to policy; and in the desire so loudly expressed at election contests to lay violent hands on the valuable organism of church agency existing in this country, the venerated inheritance of many ages of patriotic struggle, the student of history, with a charitable allowance for the best motives in not a few, feels himself constrained to suspect in all such movements no small admixture of sectarian jealousy, fussy religiosity, and domineering democracy. Christianity, of course, stands in no need of an Established Church; religion existed for three hundred years in the church without any State connection, and may exist again; but Christianity does, above all things, abhor the stirring up of strife betwixt Church and Church from motives of jealousy, envy, or greed; and, along with the highest philosophy and the most far-sighted political wisdom, must protest in the strongest terms against the abolishing of a useful ethical institution to gratify the insane lust of levelling in a mere numerical majority.

The Church of the future, whether established or disestablished, or, as I think best, both together, provoking one another to love and to good works, has a great mission before it, if it keep sharply in view the two lessons which the teaching of eighteen centuries so eloquently enforces. Our evangelists must remove from the van of their evangelic force all that sharp fence of metaphysical subtlety and scholastic dogma, which, being ostentatiously paraded in creeds and catechisms, has given more just offence to those without than edification to those within the Church; the gospel must be presented to the world with all that catholic breadth, kindly humanity, and popular directness which were its boast before it was laced and screwed into artificial shapes by the decrees of intolerent councils, and the subtleties of ingenious schoolmen. And, again, they must not allow the gospel to be handled, what is too often the case, as a mere message of hope and comfort in view of a future world; but they must make it walk directly into the complex relations of modern society, and think that it has done nothing till the ideal of sentiment and conduct which it preached on Sunday has been more or less practised on Monday. In fact, there ought to be less vague preaching on Sunday, and more specific and direct application through the week of gospel principle in various spheres of the intellectual and moral life of the community. If, in addition to this, our prophets of the pulpit take care to keep abreast of the intellectual movement of the age, so as not only to stir the world in sermons, but to guide them in the wisdom of daily life, they have nothing to fear from all the windy artillery that the speculations of a soulless physical science, the imaginations of a dreamy socialism, or the dogmatism of a cold philosophical formalism, can bring to bear upon them. Let them grapple bravely with all social problems, and prove whether Christianity, which has done so much to purify the motives of individuals, may not be able also to put a more effective steam into the machinery of society. If they shall fail here, they will fail gloriously, having done their best. It is not given to any people, however great, to solve all problems. When Great Britain shall have played out her part, there will be scope enough in the process of the ages for another stout social worker to place the cornice on the edifice of which she was privileged to raise the pillars.

The End