Studies of Christianity; Or, Timely Thoughts for Religious Thinkers - Martineau James

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and altar cannot be built, naturally draws to it minds of marked vigor, and trains men in self-subsisting habits. By giving scope to the forces of private character, it sets in action the real springs of healthy progress, and happily with such intensity as to defy the checks it often seeks to impose in later moods of repentant alarm. This emancipation of the personal life from theocratic control, at first achieved in connection with the doctrine of justification, was sure to present itself in other forms. In its spiritual application Protestant egoism assumes the shape of reliance on inner faith; in its political, of voluntaryism; in its intellectual, of free inquiry and private judgment. These several directions may be taken separately or together, but where, as in the Church of England, not one of them is unambiguously marked, the very principle of reformed Christianity is unsecured, and Protestantism is present, not by charter, but by social accident. Puritanism everywhere—conforming or nonconforming, English or Continental—exhibits the first direction; "Evangelical" Dissenters add the second; while Unitarians occupy the third—not perhaps completely, and not altogether exclusively, but characteristically nevertheless. For it is impossible to unite the orthodox with the intellectual egoism. So long as the inner faith, which is the presumed condition of justification, includes a controverted doctrine, like the scheme of Atonement, the need of faith imposes a limit on the right of judgment: and you are only free to think till you show symptoms of thinking wrong. But when the sacrificial Christianity has passed into the ethical, and no other condition of harmony with God is laid down than purity of affection and fidelity of will, then honest thought can peril no salvation, and the devotion of the intellect to truth and the heart to grace is a divided allegiance no more.

      It was for some time doubtful how far this Protestant egoism was likely to go. Luther was clear and positive that it was faith that justified; and fetching this doctrine out of a deep personal experience, he paid little respect to any one who contradicted it, and regulated by it his first choice of religious authorities. Led by this clew, he arrived at results strangely at variance with modern canons. He neither accepted as a standard the whole Bible, nor at first rejected the whole tradition of the Church; loosely attempting to reserve the Augustinian authorities, and to repudiate the Dominican. When he had renounced altogether the appeal to councils and patristic lore, it was in favor, not of the external Scriptures, unconditionally taken as the rule of faith, but of the private spirit of the Christian reader, who was himself "made king and priest," and could not only find the meaning, but pronounce upon the relative worth, of the canonical books. Accordingly, the Reformer made very free with portions of the Old Testament, and with the more Judaic elements of the New—the Epistle to the Hebrews, that of James, and the Apocalypse; and avowedly did this because he disliked the flavor of their doctrine, and felt its variance from the Pauline gospel. He thus tampered with his court before he brought forward his cause, and incapacitated the judges whose verdict he feared. In short, the religious life of his own soul was too intense and powerful to be prevailed over by any written word: he appropriated what was congenial, and threw away the rest. Uneasy relations were thus established between the subjective rule of faith found in the believer's own mind, and the objective standard of a documentary revelation: they were soon constituted, and have ever since remained rival authorities, commanding the allegiance of different orders of minds. The vast majority of Protestants, of less profound and tumultuous inner life than Luther, and less knowing how to see their way through it, subsided into exclusive recognition of the sacred writings; denying alike the regulative authority either of church councils or of the private soul. In every branch and derivative of the Genevan Reformation, throughout the whole range of both the Puritan and the Arminian Churches, a rigorous Scripturalism prevails; and the Bible is used as a code or legislative text-book, which yields, on mere interpretation, verdicts without appeal on every subject, whether doctrine or duty, of which it speaks. But Luther's spiritual enthusiasm kindled a fire that he scarce could quench; and while he himself, flung into perpetual conflicts with opponents, was obliged more and more to refer to evidence external to his personality, others had learned from him to look upon their own souls as the theatre of conscious strife between heaven and hell, and to recognize the voice of inspiration there. Carlstadt was the first to catch the flame of his teacher's burning experience, and, touched by prophetic consciousness, to set the Spirit above the Word. Luther, so often recalled from the tendencies of his own turbulent teaching by seeing their mischiefs realized in other men, instantly turned on Carlstadt with his overwhelming scorn: "The spirit of our new prophet flies very high indeed: 't is an audacious spirit, that would eat up the Holy Ghost, feathers and all. 'The Bible?'—sneer these fellows—'Bibel, Bubel, Babel!' And not only do they reject the Bible thus contemptuously, but they say they would reject God too, if he were not to visit them as he did his prophets." Carlstadt had got hold of a doctrine that was too much for his ill-balanced mind, and Luther easily destroyed his repute. But a principle had been started which has never been dormant since; the very principle which afterwards constituted the Society of Friends, and finds its best exposition in the writings of their admirable apologist, Barclay; and which in our times reappears in more philosophic guise, and fights its old battles again as the doctrine of religious intuition. No period of awakened faith and sentiment has been without some increasing tincture of this persuasion; and under modified forms, with more or less admixture of the ordinary Puritan elements, it has played a great part among the Quietists in France, the Moravians in Germany, and the Methodists in England. In all these, far as they are from being committed to the notion of an "inner light," spiritualism has predominated over Scripturalism, and permanent life in the Spirit has engaged the affections more than the transition into the adoption of faith.

      In this endeavor to lay out the ground-plan of modern Christian development, and trace upon it the chief lines both of psychological and of historical distinction, our design is to prepare the way for a series of sketches exhibiting the sects and types of religion in England. It is scarcely possible to notice the phenomena present here and to-day without referring to their antecedents in a prior age, their counterparts in other lands, and their permanent principles in human nature; and if our chart be tolerably correct, our future course will be rendered less indeterminate by the relations and points of comparison which have been established. The age, and even the hour, is teeming with new interests and pregnant auguries in relation to the highest element of human well-being. From a desire to approach these in a temper of just and reverential appreciation, we have abstained from recording the first impression of them, and sought rather, by a preliminary discipline, to detect some criteria by which prejudices may be checked, tendencies be estimated, and criticism acquire a clew.

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      "To whom coming, as unto a living stone, disallowed indeed of men, but chosen of God, and precious; ye also, as lively stones, are built up a spiritual house, a holy priesthood, to offer up spiritual sacrifices, acceptable to God by Jesus Christ."—1 Peter ii. 4, 5.

      The formation of human society, and the institution of priesthood, must be referred to the same causes and the same date. The earliest communities of the world appear to have had their origin and their cement, not in any gregarious instinct, nor in mere social affections, much less in any prudential regard to the advantages of co-operation, but in a binding religious sentiment, submitting to the same guidance, and expressing itself in the same worship. As no tie can be more strong, so is none more primitive, than this agreement respecting what is holy and divine. In simple and patriarchal ages, indeed, when the feelings of veneration had not been set aside by analysis into a little corner of the character, but spread themselves over the whole of life, and mixed it up with daily wonder, this bond comprised all the forces that can suppress the selfish and disorganizing passions, and compact a multitude of men together. It was not, as at present, to have simply the same opinions (things of quite modern growth, the brood of scepticism); but to have the same fathers, the same tradition, the same speech, the same land, the same foes, the same priest, the same God. Nothing did man fear, or trust, or love, or desire, that did not belong, by some affinity, to his faith. Nor had he any book to keep the precious deposit for him; and if he had, he would never have thought of so frail a vehicle for so great a treasure. It was more natural to put it into structures hollowed in the

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