XXVII
My dear ——,
I will begin this letter by quoting the end of your last. For when you have thought over the matter I am sure your mind will be so completely changed that unless I send you an exact copy of your own words you will hardly believe you could ever have written them. You are speaking about the theology of St. Paul, and this is what you say: "I presume that Natural Christianity, however glad it may be to shelter itself under Pauline authority in the low estimate it sets on miracles, will find it difficult to digest or swallow Pauline theology. The abstruse and artificial doctrines of the imputation of righteousness, justification by faith, and the atonement, must surely stand at the very antipodes of any religion, Christian, or other, that can claim the name of natural."
I do not believe you can ever have given five minutes of attention to these subjects: or if you have, you must have attended, not to St. Paul, but to some voluminous commentator who has buried St. Paul's text under his own and other people's annotations. Cast your commentaries away. Read St. Paul for yourself in the light of his own works and the Old Testament (especially the Septuagint version), and I will guarantee that his general drift shall come out clear and definite enough; and, what is more, you shall acknowledge that his religion is perfectly natural, so natural that you meet exemplifications of it every day of your life, in every family, in your own home, in your own heart. It would be tedious if I were to give you a scheme of Pauline theology and then shew you the naturalness of each part of the scheme. For me it would be long and wearisome; and you too would be inclined to stop me at the end of every other sentence and say "I know that St. Paul says this or that, but how is it natural?" I will therefore begin at the other end, that is to say, with Nature, and endeavour to shew you that the natural history of a child, under favourable circumstances, exhibits the general features of St. Paul's theology, the scheme of Redemption by which the Apostle believed mankind to have been led to God.
We begin then with a baby—a creature wholly selfish (in no bad sense), say, "self-regarding." He is of course "in the flesh," or "walks according to the flesh;" that is to say, he obeys every impulse of the moment, and these impulses are what we call animal impulses. He is conscious of no Law, and therefore of no error: being "without the Law" he "knows not sin." As he grows up, he finds himself making mistakes, trespassing against Nature's rules, playing with fire, for example: and Nature's punishment makes him conscious of mistake, and desirous of avoiding mistake for fear of being punished; that is to say, he learns to avoid playing with fire because he has been burned for it. This is his first introduction to "the Law;" and if he obeys Nature's Law, through fear of Nature's punishment, or hope of Nature's reward, so much the better for him. Hitherto, however, there is no question of sin, only of mistake. But now comes in the parental Law, saying "Do this," "Do not do that." Sometimes he obeys: sometimes, when "the flesh" is too strong, he disobeys. In the latter case he is punished. This new kind of Law is not a machine-like reward or punishment like that of Nature: it is connected with a Will, which is dimly felt by the child to be higher and better than his own, yet constantly opposed to his own. Here then arises a conflict between his strong animal impulses, i.e. "the flesh," and a weak nascent impulse of conscience, i.e. "the spirit;" the former bidding him disobey the higher Will, the latter bidding him obey. Even when he disobeys, the spirit has at least the power to make him uneasy in his disobedience, and this uneasiness for the first time reveals in him the nature of sin. Until the Law of the higher Will was thus placed side by side with his own will, and until the deflections of his own will from the higher Will were thus made manifest and rebuked by conscience, the child had no notion of sin. Now he knows it: "by Law has come the knowledge of sin."
As long as he is thus "under the Law" he cannot possibly be righteous; he can neither be "justified" nor feel "justified." When he is disobedient under the Law, he is conscious of sin; but when he is obedient under the Law, he is not conscious of peace or inward harmony: the Law stands up, for ever antagonistic to his natural impulses, and he cannot but dislike it, although he acknowledges its claims upon him: consequently, even when he obeys it, he obeys it with a sense of servitude, obeying in the fear of punishment or in the hope of reward. Such actions as are performed in this spirit have no spontaneousness or grace; they are the tasks of a hireling, mere piece-work—"works," as St. Paul more shortly calls them, or "the works of the Law;" and "by the works of the Law shall no flesh be justified." During this period he finds no guidance from the spirit of loving obedience, but has to trust in formularies and prescriptions, "do this," "avoid that;" he fears lest he may do too little, and grudges lest he may do too much: he is in the condition, not of a son, but of a servant working for wages. Just as the Stoic said of the man who was not "wise," that whatever he did, even to the moving of his little finger, was sure to be wrong, so St. Paul taught—and it is the truth—that our every action, as long as we are "under the Law," is void of harmony, beauty, freedom, and spiritual life: it is but obedience to a dead rule; such actions are of the nature of sin and tend to spiritual destruction: "the wages of sin are death."
During this state the raw, half-developed, ungraceful, unharmonized, and ever-erring boy of fifteen appears to have retrograded from the perfectly graceful and unconscious selfishness of the innocent child of four. But it is not so. The knowledge of sin is the stepping-stone to a higher righteousness than could have been obtained by perpetuating the innocence of childhood. Even during the period of the "bondage to the Law" there were occasional intervals of freedom, prophetic of a higher state. Duty, sometimes, shining out before the child as something purer and nobler than a mere inevitable debt, appeared "sweet and honourable;"[1] and whenever Duty thus revealed herself, the child, in freely and ungrudgingly obeying her, was obeying no unworthy emblem of the Father in heaven; and by such obedience his character was strengthened and matured. But now the time has come for another step upwards. The boy disobeys and is forgiven. At first, forgiveness makes no impression on him. He does not understand it, does not believe in it, because he does not quite believe in the author of it; he regards his father as one too far above him to be able to sympathize entirely with his boyish desires and impatience of restraint, too much like a Law to be capable of feeling real pain at his faults. As long as he is in this condition, forgiveness comes to him as the mere remission of penalty; he is glad to "get off," but his heart is not yet touched, and there is therefore no real remission of sin, partly because he has no sufficient sense of sin, partly because he has no faith in the forgiver.
But at last comes the revelation of the meaning of forgiveness. Some outward sign, a mother's tear, the mere expression of the father's face—it may be this, or it may be something of much longer duration and far more complex—but something at last brings home to him the fact that his sin weighs like a crushing burden upon the heart of some one else, who, in spite of his sin, still loves him and still trusts in him. His parents, he finds—or it may be some brother, sister, or friend—are bearing his sin and carrying his iniquity as if it were their own: the shame and the pain of it, which he feels as a mere unpleasant uneasiness, are causing to others an acute sorrow of which he had not dreamed before. Instead of being savagely angry with him, furious at the mischief he has done, and at the disgrace which he has brought upon them, instead of visiting upon him all the consequences of his fault, his parents are themselves suffering some part of it, themselves crushed down by it: if they punish him, they are not punishing him vindictively but for his good—it is hard indeed to believe this, but he believes it at last—the chastisement of his peace falls upon them as well as upon him; their heart is broken and contrite for his sake; their souls are a sacrifice for his; they feel his sin as if it were their own; they have appropriated his sin; have been identified with his sin; they are "made sin" for him.
Now if the youth has not in him the germ of faith or trust whereby he can believe in the sincerity of these (to him) mysterious and at first inexplicable feelings, why then the parental forgiveness is worse than nothing to him. If he resists its influence and calls it cant or humbug, it hardens instead of softening the boy's heart; and then the little spiritual sensitiveness that he once had, dies rapidly away. In this case "from him that hath not there hath been taken away even that which he seemed to have," and the good-tidings or Gospel of forgiveness has proved, in this case, "a savour of death unto death." But if he has the germ of faith to begin with, then the Gospel works its natural result: "to him that hath there is added, and he hath more abundantly." "Proceeding from faith" the message of forgiveness tends "to the increase of faith."[2] Insensibly he finds himself raised up from his former position to the level of those who have forgiven him; he is identified with his forgivers in spirit, so that he now sees things as they see them, and for the first time discerns the hatefulness of sin, and hates it as they hate it, and longs to shake it off as a burden alien to his nature. At the same time, finding himself trusted by those in whose truth as well as goodness he himself places trust, he learns a new self-respect even in the moment when he awakens to his past degradation; he has (he feels it to be true) something within him that may be trusted, some possibility of better things which at once springs up into the reality of fulfilment under the warm breath of affectionate and trustful forgiveness. In other words, righteousness is "imputed to him," and he becomes righteous. The gulf between the parental will and himself is now bridged over by a kind of atonement. The relations which he imagined and created for himself before between his parents and himself, were angry justice on the one side, sullen obedience or open disobedience on the other side: all this is now exchanged for an entirely different relationship, love on both sides, kind control from the one, willing, zealous obedience from the other, resulting in perfect peace and in an atmosphere of mutual goodwill, happiness, joy, favour. For this kind of "favour" we have no exact word in English, but in the Greek Testament it is called by a word which we must translate "grace:" the youth then is "no more under the law but under grace." No longer now is he a servant, performing "works;" a community of feeling unites him with those above him, whom he had once regarded as hostile and despotic. No longer the slave of rules and orders, no longer fearing punishment nor drudging for reward, he is quickened by a spirit within him which guides him naturally to do, and to anticipate, not only the bidding, but even the unexpressed wishes, of that higher Will. His whole life is now a service devoted to this new Master; yet he is not a servant, but free, because he serves willingly in a service which is the noblest freedom. The simplest actions are performed in a fresh spirit; all things have become new; the life of the flesh is ended, the life of the spirit has begun. Looking back upon his former self he finds that it is dead; he has died unto sin and risen from the dead that he may live again to righteousness.
Is it necessary for me to trace the parallelism between these phenomena in the life of the individual and the Pauline scheme of the redemption of man? You must have recognized in each step of the development sketched above some feature of the Pauline doctrine. My fear is, not so much that you may fail to acknowledge this, as that you may doubt whether the individual always passes through these phases. But I am confident that it must be so for all who are to be saved: there is no royal road of privilege or miracle by which a man can pass from the innocent selfishness of childhood to the practised righteousness of manhood, without passing through the narrow defiles of the flesh and fighting his battle with sin; nor do I believe that any man has ever been "saved," that is to say, has passed through that struggle so far safely as to attain some thoughtfulness for others, some love of righteousness for its own sake, unless he has received through the Word of God some such revelation as I have described.
The typical revelation of this kind, which sums up all others, is the revelation made by the atonement o Jesus Christ; but that revelation has been a silence for the myriads who have died in ignorance of the very name of Jesus: is there no other way then in which the Word of God has taught them, redeemed them, forgiven them, made atonement for them? Yes, assuredly the Word of God has been mediating between God and men since men first existed—long before the time when the children of Israel "drank of that Rock which followed them, and that Rock was Christ"—and the chief vehicle of His mediation has been the influence of the righteous on the unrighteous, especially of parents on children. In this influence, the bright and central point has been the power which each man has, in some poor degree, of forgiving, and making atonement for, the sins of others—a power so weak and small, compared with the same power in Christ, that it may be easily ignored by superficial observers; and some may think to do God honour by ignoring it. But in reality whoso ignores it is ignoring the best gift of God to man. This undeveloped power of forgiving has been that uneffaced likeness of God in which He created us; and every act of forgiveness, from Adam down to John the Baptist, has been inspired by the Word of God to be a type and prophecy of that great and unique act which sums up and explains all forgiveness, the Atonement made by the Word's own sacrifice. I said above that the mother's tear might for the first time reveal to a child the meaning and power of forgiveness. What the tear of a mother may be to her child, that the Cross of Christ has been to mankind; the expression as it were, of the Father's pitifulness for His sinful children, revealing to them the meaning, and the pain, of forgiveness.
St. Paul (you will find) in all his epistles recognizes the analogy between the human race and the individual; and all that he teaches about mankind corresponds to the development I have tried to sketch above. You will be told indeed that the attempt to trace such a parallelism as I have traced above, is an attempt to "read modern thoughts into an ancient author." But do not be in haste to call St. Paul an "ancient author," not at least in any disparaging sense, as if we had outgrown the antiquated limits of his thoughts. Being a man of realities St. Paul dived deep down below the surface of language, cant, and formularies; he reached the very source and centre of the human heart where righteousness is made. He realized the making of righteousness as a visible process. Others, who have not realized it, think his writings misguided, antique, occasionally untrue. But do not you fail to distinguish between St. Paul's style and St. Paul's thought. He wrote in a hurry; he did not think in a hurry. The general scheme of his theology needs no excuse, nor allowance, nor patronage. His illustrations of it, arguments in defence of it, even his expressions of it, are, from our point of view, often inadequate; but his spiritual truths are the deepest truths of human nature, as it may be seen ascending through illusion and frailty to divine knowledge and divine righteousness. St. Paul has been wonderfully obscured by formularizing commentators. The best commentary on him that I know is an ordinary home; but for a young man, away from home, and in danger of forgetting his childhood, the next best commentary is Shakespeare, and the next to that is Wordsworth, or, from a different point of view, the In Memoriam.
Tell me now; was I wrong in saying that the Pauline scheme of salvation is eminently natural? I do not of course mean materialistic, but natural in the sense of orderly. Where, in the whole of this doctrine, is there any necessity for believing that the Son of God—"born of a woman" and manifested "in the flesh that he might destroy the works of the devil"—did or said anything that involves a suspension of the laws of nature? I have already shewn that the "miracles" wrought by St. Paul himself were in all probability works of healing, and natural; and the manifestations in which Christ "appeared" to him and to the other disciples have been shewn to be, in all probability, visions in accordance with the laws of nature, though representing an objective reality. There is no reference in St. Paul's works to the Miraculous Conception, nor to any of those miracles of Jesus which, if historical, must be admitted to be real miracles. On the other hand there runs through all his epistles an acknowledgment of a continuous spiritual Law, predetermined and inviolable. What else does St. Paul mean by the continual assertion that the calling of the Gentiles, and the "election" of all men, are "predestined?" Perhaps you have never yet appreciated the circumstances which led the Apostle to lay so much stress on the "predestination" apparent in history. I do not think you can ever understand St. Paul's teaching on this subject, as long as you fasten your attention on two or three isolated texts which appear to set it forth. You must look at it as a whole, and have regard to the motive of the author; and then you will find that it is to be understood negatively rather than positively. When St. Paul says "God predestined this, or that," he means, "God did not make a mistake, or change his mind, about this or that: the gifts and calling of God are without repentance."
In setting forth Predestination, St. Paul is always mentally protesting against two tendencies already perceptible to him in the Church, the tendency of the Jews to regard the admission of the Gentiles into the Church as an after-thought, perhaps as a mistake; and the tendency of the Gentiles to regard the Law of Moses as a complete and useless failure. It was one of St. Paul's main objects to shew that the history of Israel and of the Gentile world revealed a thread of immutable purpose of salvation running through the whole—a purpose to subordinate evil to good, the flesh to the spirit, the Law to the Gospel; so that there has been no mistake, no dislocation of the divine scheme, nor change of the divine will. Although the Apostle always refers things to a Will and not a Law as their ultimate origin, yet the whole tenour of his argument exhibits that Will as being not liable to caprice or accidental shifting, but a Will of predestination, a Law, so to speak, tinged with emotion. No doubt St. Paul, sometimes, in the attempt to shew the immutability of the divine purposes, puts forward somewhat baldly and repellently the insoluble problem of the origin of evil, as if God Himself predestined not only rejection but also the sin that was the cause of rejection. But it was not his intention to exhibit God as originating evil; and the cause that leads him so to do, or so to appear to do, is his intense desire to exhibit God's mysterious plan of not at once annihilating evil but of utilizing it and subordinating it to good. The foreordained purpose of God before the foundation of the world is the redemption of mankind; and in order to help men to attain to this height, the flesh, the law, death, yes, even sin itself, are forced to serve as stepping-stones. Hence even in rejection, as well as in election, the Apostle cannot fail to discern the hand of God. There is a Law in all God's doing, and especially in His election. God hath chosen the weak things of this world to confound the strong and the foolish things of this world to confound the wise; the first-born is rejected, the younger son is chosen. This is not accident; it is a type of the general law exemplified in the vision of Elijah. Not by the whirlwind or the fire or the earthquake but by the quiet and neglected processes of nature does God perform His mightiest works. This deep truth pervades the doctrine of St. Paul. Pierce through the antique and Oriental integument of his expression, and you will find no other Christian writer who so clearly brings out that the Christian religion is not according to caprice but according to Law.