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Two Defects Of Historical Christianity
Two Defects Of Historical Christianity
The First Defect Of Historical Christianity
In this point of view we become very sensible of the first defect of
historical Christianity. Historical Christianity has fallen into the error
that corrupts all attempts to communicate religion. As it appears to us, and
as it has appeared for ages, it is not the doctrine of the soul, but an
exaggeration of the personal, the positive, the ritual. It has dwelt, it
dwells, with noxious exaggeration about the person of Jesus. The soul knows no
persons. It invites every man to expand to the full circle of the universe,
and will have no preferences but those of spontaneous love. But by this
Eastern monarchy of a Christianity, which indolence and fear have built, the
friend of man is made the injurer of man. The manner in which his name is
surrounded with expressions, which were once sallies of admiration and love,
but are now petrified into official titles, kills all generous sympathy and
liking. All who hear me, feel that the language that describes Christ to
Europe and America is not the style of friendship and enthusiasm to a good and
noble heart, but is appropriated and formal, - paints a demigod, as the
Orientals or the Greeks would describe Osiris or Apollo. Accept the injurious
impositions of our early catechetical instruction, and even honesty and self
denial were but splendid sins if they did not wear the Christian name. One
would rather be "A pagan, suckled in a creed outworn," than to be defrauded of
his manly right in coming into nature, and finding not names and places, not
land and professions, but even virtue and truth, foreclosed and monopolized.
You shall not be a man even. You shall not own the world; you shall not dare,
and live after the infinite Law that is in you, and in company with the
infinite Beauty which heaven and earth reflect to you in all lovely forms; but
you must subordinate your nature to Christ`s nature, you must accept our
interpretations, and take his portrait as the vulgar draw it.
That is always best which gives me to myself. The sublime is excited in
me by the great stoical doctrine, Obey thyself. That which shows God in me,
fortifies me. That which shows God out of me, makes me a wart and a wen. There
is no longer a necessary reason for my being. Already the long shadows of
untimely oblivion creep over me, and I shall decease forever.
The divine bards are the friends of my virtue, of my intellect, of my
strength. They admonish me that the gleams which flash across my mind are not
mine, but God`s; that they had the like, and were not disobedient to the
heavenly vision. So I love them. Noble provocations go out from them, inviting
me to resist evil, to subdue the world, and to Be. And thus by his holy
thoughts Jesus serves us, and thus only. To aim to convert a man by miracles
is a profanation of the soul. A true conversion, a true Christ, is now, as
always, to be made by the reception of beautiful sentiments. It is true that a
great and rich soul, like his, falling among the simple, does so preponderate,
that, as his did, it names the world. The world seems to them to exist for
him, and they have not yet drunk so deeply of his sense as to see that only by
coming again to themselves, or to God in themselves, can they grow
forevermore. It is a low benefit to give me something; it is a high benefit to
enable me to do somewhat of myself. The time is coming when all men will see
that the gift of God to the soul is not a vaunting, overpowering, excluding
sanctity, but a sweet, natural goodness, a goodness like thine and mine, and
that so invites thine and mine to be and to grow.
The injustice of the vulgar tone of preaching is not less flagrant to
Jesus than to the souls which it profanes. The preachers do not see that they
make his gospel not glad, and shear him of the locks of beauty and the
attributes of heaven. When I see a majestic Epaminondas or Washington; when I
see among my contemporaries a true orator, an upright judge, a dear friend;
when I vibrate to the melody and fancy of a poem, - I see beauty that is to be
desired. And so lovely, and with yet more entire consent of my human being,
sounds in my ear the severe music of the bards that have sung of the true God
in all ages. Now, do not degrade the life and dialogues of Christ out of the
circle of this charm, by insulation and peculiarity. Let them lie as they
befell, alive and warm, part of human life, and of the landscape, and of the
cheerful day.
The Second Defect Of Historical Christianity
The second defect of the traditionary and limited way of using the mind
of Christ is a consequence of the first; this, namely, that the Moral Nature,
that law of laws, whose revelations introduce greatness, yea, God himself,
into the open soul, is not explored as the fountain of the established
teaching in society. Men have come to speak of the revelation as somewhat long
ago given and done, as if God were dead. The injury to faith throttles the
preacher, and the goodliest of institutions becomes an uncertain and
inarticulate voice.
It is very certain that it is the effect of conversation with the beauty
of the soul, to beget a desire and need to impart to others the knowledge and
love. If utterance is denied, the thought lies like a burden on the man.
Always the seer is a sayer. Somehow his dream is told; somehow he publishes it
with solemn joy; sometimes with pencil on canvas; sometimes with chisel on
stone; sometimes in towers and aisles of granite his soul`s worship is
builded; sometimes in anthems of indefinite music; but clearest and most
permanent, in words.
The man enamored of this excellency becomes its priest or poet. The
office is coeval with the world. But observe the condition, the spiritual
limitation of the office. The spirit only can teach. Not any profane man, not
any sensual, not any liar, not any slave can teach, but only he can give, who
has; he only can create, who is. The man on whom the soul descends, through
whom the soul speaks, alone can teach. Courage, piety, love, wisdom, can
teach; and every man can open his door to these angels, and they shall bring
him the gift of tongues. But the man who aims to speak as books enable, as
synods use, as the fashion guides, and as interest commands, babbles. Let him
hush.
To this holy office you propose to devote yourselves. I wish you may feel
your call in throbs of desire and hope. The office is the first in the world.
It is of that reality, that it cannot suffer the deduction of any falsehood.
And it is my duty to say to you, that the need was never greater of new
revelation than now. From the views I have already expressed, you will infer
the sad conviction, which I share, I believe, with numbers, of the universal
decay and now almost death of faith in society. The soul is not preached. The
Church seems to totter to its fall, almost all life extinct. On this occasion
any complaisance would be criminal which told you, whose hope and commission
it is to preach the faith of Christ, that the faith of Christ is preached.
It is time that this ill-suppressed murmur of all thoughtful men against
the famine of our churches; this moaning of the heart because it is bereaved
of the consolation, the hope, the grandeur, that come alone out of the culture
of the moral nature, - should be heard through the sleep of indolence and over
the din of routine. This great and perpetual office of the preacher is not
discharged. Preaching is the expression of the moral sentiment in application
to the duties of life. In how many churches, by how many prophets, tell me, is
man made sensible that he is an infinite soul; that the earth and heavens are
passing into his mind; that he is drinking forever the soul of God? Where now
sounds the persuasion, that by its very melody imparadises my heart, and so
affirms its own origin in heaven? Where shall I hear words such as in elder
ages drew men to leave all and follow, - father and mother, house and land,
wife and child? Where shall I hear these august laws of moral being so
pronounced as to fill my ear, and I feel ennobled by the offer of my uttermost
action and passion? The test of the true faith, certainly, should be its power
to charm and command the soul, as the laws of nature control the activity of
the hands, - so commanding that we find pleasure and honor in obeying. The
faith should blend with the light of rising and of setting suns, with the
flying cloud, the singing bird, and the breath of flowers. But now the
priest`s Sabbath has lost the splendor of nature; it is unlovely; we are glad
when it is done; we can make, we do make, even sitting in our pews, a far
better, holier, sweeter, for ourselves.
Wherever the pulpit is usurped by a formalist, then is the worshipper
defrauded and disconsolate. We shrink as soon as the prayers begin, which do
not uplift, but smite and offend us. We are fain to wrap our cloaks about us,
and secure, as best we can, a solitude that hears not. I once heard a preacher
who sorely tempted me to say I would go to church no more. Men go, thought I,
where they are wont to go, else had no soul entered the temple in the
afternoon. A snow-storm was falling around us. The snow-storm was real; the
preacher merely spectral; and the eye felt the sad contrast in looking at him,
and then out of the window behind him, into the beautiful meteor of the snow.
He had lived in vain. He had no one word intimating that he had laughed or
wept, was married or in love, had been commended, or cheated, or chagrined. If
he had ever lived and acted, we were none the wiser for it. The capital secret
of his profession, namely, to convert life into truth, he had not learned. Not
one fact in all his experience had he yet imported into his doctrine. This man
had ploughed and planted, and talked, and bought, and sold; he had read books;
he had eaten and drunken; his head aches; his heart throbs; he smiles and
suffers; yet was there not a surmise, a hint, in all the discourse, that he
had ever lived at all. Not a line did he draw out of real history. The true
preacher can be known by this, that he deals out to the people his life, -
life passed through the fire of thought. But of the bad preacher, it could not
be told from his sermon what age of the world he fell in; whether he had a
father or a child; whether he was a freeholder or a pauper; whether he was a
citizen or a countryman; or any other fact of his biography. It seemed strange
that the people should come to church. It seemed as if their houses were very
unentertaining, that they should prefer this thoughtless clamor. It shows that
there is a commanding attraction in the moral sentiment that can lend a faint
tint of light to dulness and ignorance, coming in its name and place. The good
hearer is sure he has been touched sometimes; is sure there is somewhat to be
reached, and some word that can reach it. When he listens to these vain words,
he comforts himself by their relation to his remembrance of better hours, and
so they clatter and echo unchallenged.
I am not ignorant that when we preach unworthily, it is not always quite
in vain. There is a good ear, in some men, that draws supplies to virtue out
of very indifferent nutriment. There is poetic truth concealed in all the
common-places of prayer and of sermons, and though foolishly spoken, they may
be wisely heard; for each is some select expression that broke out in a moment
of piety from some stricken or jubilant soul, and its excellency made it
remembered. The prayers and even the dogmas of our church are like the zodiac
of Denderah, and the astronomical monuments of the Hindoos, wholly insulated
from anything now extant in the life and business of the people. They mark the
height to which the waters once rose. But this docility is a check upon the
mischief from the good and devout. In a large portion of the community, the
religious service gives rise to quite other thoughts and emotions. We need not
chide the negligent servant. We are struck with pity, rather, at the swift
retribution of his sloth. Alas for the unhappy man that is called to stand in
the pulpit, and not give bread of life! Everything that befalls, accuses him.
Would he ask contributions for the missions, foreign or domestic? Instantly
his face is suffused with shame, to propose to his parish that they should
send money a hundred or a thousand miles, to furnish such poor fare as they
have at home, and would do well to go the hundred or the thousand miles to
escape. Would he urge people to a godly way of living; and can he ask a
fellow-creature to come to Sabbath meetings, when he and they all know what is
the poor uttermost they can hope for therein? Will he invite them privately to
the Lord`s Supper? He dares not. If no heart warm this rite, the hollow, dry,
creaking formality is too plain, than that he can face a man of wit and
energy, and put the invitation without terror. In the street, what has he to
say to the bold village blasphemer? The village blasphemer sees fear in the
face, form, and gait of the minister.
Let me not taint the sincerity of this plea by any oversight of the
claims of good men. I know and honor the purity and strict conscience of
numbers of the clergy. What life the public worship retains, it owes to the
scattered company of pious men who minister here and there in the churches,
and who, sometimes accepting with too great tenderness the tenet of the
elders, have not accepted from others, but from their own heart, the genuine
impulses of virtue, and so still command our love and awe, to the sanctity of
character. Moreover, the exceptions are not so much to be found in a few
eminent preachers, as in the better hours, the truer inspirations of all, -
nay, in the sincere moments of every man. But with whatever exception, it is
still true that tradition characterizes the preaching of this country; that it
comes out of the memory and not out of the soul; that it aims at what is usual
and not at what is necessary and eternal; that thus historical Christianity
destroys the power of preaching, by withdrawing it from the exploration of the
moral nature of man, where the sublime is, where are the resources of
astonishment and power. What a cruel injustice it is to that Law, the joy of
the whole earth, which alone can make thought dear and rich; that Law whose
fatal sureness the astronomical orbits poorly emulate, that it is travestied
and depreciated, that it is behooted and behowled, and not a trait, not a word
of it articulated. The pulpit in losing sight of this Law loses its reason,
and gropes after it knows not what. And for want of this culture the soul of
the community is sick and faithless. It wants nothing so much as a stern,
high, stoical, Christian discipline, to make it know itself and the divinity
that speaks through it. Now man is ashamed of himself; he skulks and sneaks
through the world, to be tolerated, to be pitied, and scarcely in a thousand
years does any man dare to be wise and good, and so draw after him the tears
and blessings of his kind.
Certainly there have been periods when, from the inactivity of the
intellect on certain truths, a greater faith was possible in names and
persons. The Puritans in England and America found in the Christ of the
Catholic Church, and in the dogmas inherited from Rome, scope for their
austere piety and their longings for civil freedom. But their creed is passing
away, and none arises in its room. I think no man can go with his thoughts
about him into one of our churches, without feeling that what hold the public
worship has on men is gone, or going. It has lost its grasp on the affection
of the good and the fear of the bad. In the country, neighborhoods, half
parishes are signing off, - to use the local term. It is already beginning to
indicate character and religion to withdraw from the religious meetings. I
have heard a devout person who prized the Sabbath say in bitterness of heart:
"On Sundays it seems wicked to go to church." And the motive that holds the
best there, is now only a hope and a waiting. What was once a mere
circumstance, that the best and the worst men in the parish, the poor and the
rich, the learned and the ignorant, young and old, should meet one day as
fellows in one house, in sign of an equal right in the soul, - has come to be
a paramount motive for going thither.
My friends, in these two errors, I think I find the causes of a decaying
church and a wasting unbelief. And what greater calamity can fall upon a
nation than the loss of worship? Then all things go to decay. Genius leaves
the temple, to haunt the senate or the market. Literature becomes frivolous.
Science is cold. The eye of youth is not lighted by the hope of other worlds,
and age is without honor. Society lives to trifles, and when men die we do not
mention them.
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