This was not my only reason, yet it was soon a sufficient and at last an overwhelming reason, against returning to the East. The pertinacity of the attacks made on me, and on all who dared to hold by me in a certain connexion, showed that I could no longer be anything but a thorn in the side of my friends abroad; nay, I was unable to predict how they themselves might change towards me. The idea of a Christian Church propagating Christianity while divided against itself was ridiculous. Never indeed had I had the most remote idea, that my dear friends there had been united to me by agreement in intellectual propositions; nor could I yet believe it. I remembered a saying of the noble-hearted Groves: "Talk of loving me while I agree with them! Give me men that will love me when I differ from them and contradict them: those will be the men to build up a true Church." I asked myself,—was I then possibly different from all? With me,—and, as I had thought, with all my Spiritual friends,—intellectual dogma was not the test of spirituality. A hundred times over had I heard the Irish clergyman emphatically enunciate the contrary. Nothing was clearer in his preaching, talking and writing, than that salvation was a present real experienced fact; a saving of the soul from the dominion of baser desires, and an inward union of it in love and homage to Christ, who, as the centre of all perfection, glory, and beauty, was the revelation of God to the heart. He who was thus saved, could not help knowing that he was reconciled, pardoned, beloved; and therefore he rejoiced in God his Saviour: indeed, to imagine joy without this personal assurance and direct knowledge, was quite preposterous. But on the other hand, the soul thus spiritually minded has a keen sense of like qualities in others. It cannot but discern when another is tender in conscience, disinterested, forbearing, scornful of untruth and baseness, and esteeming nothing so much as the fruits of the Spirit: accordingly, John did not hesitate to say: "We know that we have passed from death unto life, because we love the brethren." Our doctrine certainly had been, that the Church was the assembly of the saved, gathered by the vital attractions of God's Spirit; that in it no one was Lord or Teacher, but one was our Teacher, even Christ: that as long as we had no earthly bribes to tempt men to join us, there was not much cause to fear false brethren; for if we were heavenly minded, and these were earthly, they would soon dislike and shun us. Why should we need to sit in judgment and excommunicate them, except in the case of publicly scandalous conduct?

It is true, that I fully believed certain intellectual convictions to be essential to genuine spirituality: for instance, if I had heard that a person unknown to me did not believe in the Atonement of Christ, I should have inferred that he had no spiritual life. But if the person had come under my direct knowledge, my theory was, on no account to reject him on a question of Creed, but in any case to receive all those whom Christ had received, all on whom the Spirit of God had come down, just as the Church at Jerusalem did in regard to admitting the Gentiles, Acts xi. 18. Nevertheless, was not this perhaps a theory pleasant to talk of, but too good for practice? I could not tell; for it had never been so severely tried. I remembered, however, that when I had thought it right to be baptized as an adult, (regarding my baptism as an infant to have been a mischievous fraud,) the sole confession of faith which I made, or would endure, at a time when my "orthodoxy" was unimpeached, was: "I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God:"[2] to deny which, and claim to be acknowledged as within the pale of the Christian Church, seemed to be an absurdity. On the whole, therefore, it did not appear to me that this Church-theory had been hollow-hearted with me nor unscriptural, nor in any way unpractical; but that others were still infected with the leaven of creeds and formal tests, with which they reproached the old Church.

Were there, then, no other hearts than mine, aching under miserable bigotry, and refreshed only when they tasted in others the true fruits of the Spirit,—"love, joy, peace, long-suffering, gentleness, goodness, fidelity, meekness, self-control?"—To imagine this was to suppose myself a man supernaturally favoured, an angel upon earth. I knew there must be thousands in this very point more true-hearted than I: nay, such still might some be, whose names I went over with myself: but I had no heart for more experiments. When such a man as he, the only mortal to whom I had looked up as to an apostle, had unhesitatingly, unrelentingly, and without one mark that his conscience was not on his side, flung away all his own precepts, his own theories, his own magnificent rebukes of Formalism and human Authority, and had made himself the slave and me the victim of those old and ever-living tyrants,—whom henceforth could I trust? The resolution then rose in me, to love all good men from a distance, but never again to count on permanent friendship with any one who was not himself cast out as a heretic.

Nor, in fact, did the storm of distress which these events inflicted on me, subside until I willingly received the task of withstanding it, as God's trial whether I was faithful. As soon as I gained strength to say, "O my Lord, I will bear not this only, but more also,[3] for thy sake, for conscience, and for truth,"—my sorrows vanished, until the next blow and the next inevitable pang. At last my heart had died within me; the bitterness of death was past; I was satisfied to be hated by the saints, and to reckon that those who had not yet turned against me would not bear me much longer.—Then I conceived the belief, that if we may not make a heaven on earth for ourselves out of the love of saints, it is in order that we may find a truer heaven in God's love.

The question about this time much vexed me, what to do about receiving the Holy Supper of the Lord, the great emblem of brotherhood, communion, and church connexion. At one time I argued with myself, that it became an unmeaning form, when not partaken of in mutual love; that I could never again have free intercourse of heart with any one;—why then use the rite of communion, where there is no communion? But, on the other hand, I thought it a mode of confessing Christ, and that permanently to disuse it, was an unfaithfulness. In the Church of England I could have been easy as far as the communion formulary was concerned; but to the entire system I had contracted an incurable repugnance, as worldly, hypocritical, and an evil counterfeit. I desired, therefore, to creep into some obscure congregation, and there wait till my mind had ripened as to the right path in circumstances so perplexing. I will only briefly say, that I at last settled among some who had previously been total strangers to me. To their good will and simple kindness I feel myself indebted: peace be to them! Thus I gained time, and repose of mind, which I greatly needed.

From the day that I had mentally decided on total inaction as to all ecclesiastical questions, I count the termination of my Second Period. My ideal of a spiritual Church had blown up in the most sudden and heartbreaking way; overpowering me with shame, when the violence of sorrow was past. There was no change whatever in my own judgment, yet a total change of action was inevitable: that I was on the eve of a great transition of mind I did not at all suspect. Hitherto my reverence for the authority of the whole and indivisible Bible was overruling and complete. I never really had dared to criticize it; I did not even exact from it self-consistency. If two passages appeared to be opposed, and I could not evade the difficulty by the doctrine of Development and Progress, I inferred that there was some mode of conciliation unknown to me; and that perhaps the depth of truth in divine things could ill be stated in our imperfect language. But from the man who dared to interpose a human comment on the Scripture, I most rigidly demanded a clear, single, self-consistent sense. If he did not know what he meant, why did he not hold his peace? If he did know, why did he so speak as to puzzle us? It was for this uniform refusal to allow of self-contradiction, that it was more than once sadly predicted of me at Oxford that I should become "a Socinian;" yet I did not apply this logical measure to any compositions but those which were avowedly "uninspired" and human.

As to moral criticism, my mind was practically prostrate before the Bible. By the end of this period I had persuaded myself that morality so changes with the commands of God, that we can scarcely attach any idea of immutability to it. I am, moreover, ashamed to tell any one how I spoke and acted against my own common sense under this influence, and when I was thought a fool, prayed that I might think it an honour to become a fool for Christ's sake. Against no doctrine did I dare to bring moral objections, except that of "Reprobation." To Election, to Preventing Grace, to the Fall and Original Sin of man, to the Atonement, to Eternal Punishment, I reverently submitted my understanding; though as to the last, new inquiries had just at this crisis been opening on me. Reprobation, indeed, I always repudiated with great vigour, of which I shall presently speak. That was the full amount of my original thought; and in it I preserved entire reverence for the sacred writers.

As to miracles, scarcely anything staggered me. I received the strangest and the meanest prodigies of Scripture, with the same unhesitating faith, as if I had never understood a proposition of physical philosophy, nor a chapter of Hume and Gibbon.

[Footnote 1: Very unintelligent criticism of my words induces me to add, that "the credentials of Revelation," as distinguished from "the contents of Revelation," are here intended. Whether such a distinction can be preserved is quite another question. The view here exhibited is essentially that of Paley, and was in my day the prevalent one at Oxford. I do not think that the present Archbishop of Canterbury will disown it, any more than Lloyd, and Burton, and Hampden,—bishops and Regius Professors of Divinity.]

[Footnote 2: Borrowed from Acts viii. 37.]

[Footnote 3: Virgil (AEneid vi.) gives the Stoical side of the same thought: Tu ne cede malis, sed contra audentior ito.]



CHAPTER III.

CALVINISM ABANDONED.

After the excitement was past, I learned many things from the events which have been named.

First, I had found that the class of Christians with whom I had been joined had exploded the old Creeds in favour of another of their own, which was never given me upon authority, and yet was constantly slipping out, in the words, Jesus is Jehovah. It appeared to me certain that this would have been denounced as the Sabellian heresy by Athanasias and his contemporaries. I did not wish to run down Sabellians, much less to excommunicate them, if they would give me equality; but I felt it intensely unjust when my adherence to the Nicene Creed was my real offence, that I should be treated as setting up some novel wickedness against all Christendom, and slandered by vague imputations which reached far and far beyond my power of answering or explaining. Mysterious aspersions were made even against my moral[1] character, and were alleged to me as additional reasons for refusing communion with me; and when I demanded a tribunal, and that my accuser would meet me face to face, all inquiry was refused, on the plea that it was needless and undesirable. I had much reason to believe that a very small number of persons had constituted themselves my judges, and used against me all the airs of the Universal Church; the many lending themselves easily to swell the cry of heresy, when they have little personal acquaintance with the party attacked. Moreover, when I was being condemned as in error, I in vain asked to be told what was the truth. "I accept the Scripture: that is not enough. I accept the Nicene Creed: that is not enough. Give me then your formula: where, what is it?" But no! those who thought it their duty to condemn me, disclaimed the pretensions of "making a Creed" when I asked for one. They reprobated my interpretation of Scripture as against that of the whole Church, but would not undertake to expound that of the Church. I felt convinced, that they could not have agreed themselves as to what was right: all that they could agree upon was, that I was wrong. Could I have borne to recriminate, I believed that I could have forced one of them to condemn another; but, oh! was divine truth sent us for discord and for condemnation? I sickened at the idea of a Church Tribunal, where none has any authority to judge, and yet to my extreme embarrassment I saw that no Church can safely dispense with judicial forms and other worldly apparatus for defending the reputation of individuals. At least, none of the national and less spiritual institutions would have been so very unequitable towards me.

This idea enlarged itself into another,—that spirituality is no adequate security for sound moral discernment. These alienated friends did not know they were acting unjustly, cruelly, crookedly, or they would have hated themselves for it: they thought they were doing God service. The fervour of their love towards him was probably greater than mine; yet this did not make them superior to prejudice, or sharpen their logical faculties to see that they were idolizing words to which they attached no ideas. On several occasions I had distinctly perceived how serious alarm I gave by resolutely refusing to admit any shiftings and shufflings of language. I felt convinced, that if I would but have contradicted myself two or three times, and then have added, "That is the mystery of it," I could have passed as orthodox with many. I had been charged with a proud and vain determination to pry into divine mysteries, barely because I would not confess to propositions the meaning of which was to me doubtful,—or say and unsay in consecutive breaths. It was too clear, that a doctrine which muddles the understanding perverts also the power of moral discernment. If I had committed some flagrant sin, they would have given me a fair and honourable trial; but where they could not give me a public hearing, nor yet leave me unimpeached, without danger of (what they called) my infecting the Church, there was nothing left but to hunt me out unscrupulously.

Unscrupulously! did not this one word characterize all religious persecution? and then my mind wandered back over the whole melancholy tale of what is called Christian history. When Archbishop Cranmer overpowered the reluctance of young Edward VI. to burn to death the pious and innocent Joan of Kent, who moreover was as mystical and illogical as heart could wish, was Cranmer not actuated by deep religious convictions? None question his piety, yet it was an awfully wicked deed. What shall I say of Calvin, who burned Servetus? Why have I been so slow to learn, that religion is an impulse which animates us to execute our moral judgments, but an impulse which may be half blind? These brethren believe that I may cause the eternal ruin of others: how hard then is it for them to abide faithfully by the laws of morality and respect my rights! My rights! They are of course trampled down for the public good, just as a house is blown up to stop a conflagration. Such is evidently the theory of all persecution;—which is essentially founded on Hatred. As Aristotle says, "He who is angry, desires to punish somebody; but he who hates, desires the hated person not even to exist." Hence they cannot endure to see me face to face. That I may not infect the rest, they desire my non-existence; by fair means, if fair will succeed; if not, then by foul. And whence comes this monstrosity into such bosoms? Weakness of common sense, dread of the common understanding, an insufficient faith in common morality, are surely the disease: and evidently, nothing so exasperates this disease as consecrating religious tenets which forbid the exercise of common sense.

I now began to understand why it was peculiarly for unintelligible doctrines like Transubstantiation and the Tri-unity that Christians had committed such execrable wickednesses. Now also for the first time I understood what had seemed not frightful only, but preternatural,—the sensualities and cruelties enacted as a part of religion in many of the old Paganisms. Religion and fanaticism are in the embryo but one and the same; to purify and elevate them we want a cultivation of the understanding, without which our moral code may be indefinitely depraved. Natural kindness and strong sense are aids and guides, which the most spiritual man cannot afford to despise.

I became conscious that I had despised "mere moral men," as they were called in the phraseology of my school. They were merged in the vague appellation of "the world," with sinners of every class; and it was habitually assumed, if not asserted, that they were necessarily Pharisaic, because they had not been born again. For some time after I had misgivings as to my fairness of judgment towards them, I could not disentangle myself from great bewilderment concerning their state in the sight of God: for it was an essential part of my Calvinistic Creed, that (as one of the 39 Articles states it) the very good works of the unregenerate "undoubtedly have the nature of sin," as indeed the very nature with which they were born "deserveth God's wrath and damnation." I began to mourn over the unlovely conduct into which I had been betrayed by this creed, long before I could thoroughly get rid of the creed that justified it: and a considerable time had to elapse, ere my new perceptions shaped themselves distinctly into the propositions: "Morality is the end. Spirituality is the means: Religion is the handmaid to Morals: we must be spiritual, in order that we may be in the highest and truest sense moral." Then at last I saw, that the deficiency of "mere moral men" is, that their morality is apt to be too external or merely negative, and therefore incomplete: that the man who worships a fiend for a God may be in some sense spiritual, but his spirituality will be a devilish fanaticism, having nothing in it to admire or approve: that the moral man deserves approval or love for all the absolute good that he has attained, though there be a higher good to which he aspires not; and that the truly and rightly spiritual is he who aims at an indefinitely high moral excellence, of which GOD is the embodiment to his heart and soul. If the absolute excellence of morality be denied, there is nothing for spirituality to aspire after, and nothing in God to worship. Years before I saw this as clearly as here stated; the general train of thought was very wholesome, in giving me increased kindliness of judgment towards the common world of men, who do not show any religious development. It was pleasant to me to look on an ordinary face, and see it light up into a smile, and think with myself: "there is one heart that will judge of me by what I am, and not by a Procrustean dogma." Nor only so, but I saw that the saints, without the world, would make a very bad world of it; and that as ballast is wanted to a ship, so the common and rather low interests and the homely principles, rules, and ways of feeling, keep the church from foundering by the intensity of her own gusts.

Some of the above thoughts took a still more definite shape, as follows. It is clear that A. B. and X. Y. would have behaved towards me more kindly, more justly, and more wisely, if they had consulted their excellent strong sense and amiable natures, instead of following (what they suppose to be) the commands of the word of God. They have misinterpreted that word: true: but this very thing shows, that one may go wrong by trusting one's power of interpreting the book, rather than trusting one's common sense to judge without the book. It startled me to find, that I had exactly alighted on the Romish objection to Protestants, that an infallible book is useless, unless we have an infallible interpreter. But it was not for some time, that, after twisting the subject in all directions to avoid it, I brought out the conclusion, that "to go against one's common sense in obedience to Scripture is a most hazardous proceeding:" for the "rule of Scripture" means to each of us nothing but his own fallible interpretation; and to sacrifice common sense to this, is to mutilate one side of our mind at the command of another side. In the Nicene age, the Bible was in people's hands, and the Spirit of God surely was not withheld: yet I had read, in one of the Councils an insane anathema was passed: "If any one call Jesus God-man, instead of God and man, let him be accursed." Surely want of common sense, and dread of natural reason, will be confessed by our highest orthodoxy to have been the distemper of that day.

* * * * *

In all this I still remained theoretically convinced, that the contents of the Scriptures, rightly interpreted, were supreme and perfect truth; indeed, I had for several years accustomed myself to speak and think as if the Bible were our sole source of all moral knowledge: nevertheless, there were practically limits, beyond which I did not, and could not, even attempt to blind my moral sentiment at the dictation of the Scripture; and this had peculiarly frightened (as I afterwards found) the first friend who welcomed me from abroad. I was unable to admit the doctrine of "reprobation," as apparently taught in the 9th chapter of Paul's Epistle to the Romans;—that "God hardens in wickedness whomever He pleases, in order that He may show his long-suffering" in putting off their condemnation to a future dreadful day: and especially, that to all objectors it is a sufficient confutation—"Nay, but O man, who art thou, that repliest against God?" I told my friend, that I worshipped in God three great attributes, all independent,—Power, Goodness, and Wisdom: that in order to worship Him acceptably, I must discern these as realities with my inmost heart, and not merely take them for granted on authority: but that the argument which was here pressed upon me was an effort to supersede the necessity of my discerning Goodness in God: it bade me simply to infer Goodness from Power,—that is to say, establish the doctrine, "Might makes Right;" according to which, I might unawares worship a devil. Nay, nothing so much distinguished the spiritual truth of Judaism and Christianity from abominable heathenism, as this very discernment of God's purity, justice, mercy, truth, goodness; while the Pagan worshipped mere power, and had no discernment of moral excellence; but laid down the principle, that cruelty, impurity, or caprice in a God was to be treated reverentially, and called by some more decorous name. Hence, I said, it was undermining the very foundation of Christianity itself, to require belief of the validity of Rom. ix. 14-24, as my friend understood it. I acknowledged the difficulty of the passage, and of the whole argument. I was not prepared with an interpretation; but I revered St. Paul too much, to believe it possible that he could mean anything so obviously heathenish, as that first-sight meaning.—My friend looked grave and anxious; but I did not suspect how deeply I had shocked him, until many weeks after.

At this very time, moreover, ground was broken in my mind on a new subject, by opening in a gentleman's library a presentation-copy of a Unitarian treatise against the doctrine of Eternal Punishment. It was the first Unitarian book of which I had even seen the outside, and I handled it with a timid curiosity, as if by stealth, I had only time to dip into it here and there, and I should have been ashamed to possess the book; but I carried off enough to suggest important inquiry. The writer asserted that the Greek word [Greek: aionios], (secular, or, belonging to the ages,) which we translate everlasting and eternal, is distinctly proved by the Greek translation of the Old Testament often to mean only distant time. Thus in Psalm lxxvi. 5, "I have considered the years of ancient times:" Isaiah lxiii 11, "He remembered the days of old, Moses and his people;" in which, and in many similar places, the LXX have [Greek: aionios]. One striking passage is Exodus xv. 18; ("Jehovah shall reign for ever and ever;") where the Greek has [Greek: ton aiona kai ex aiona kai eti], which would mean "for eternity and still longer," if the strict rendering eternity were enforced. At the same time a suspicion as to the honesty of our translation presented itself in Micah v. 2, a controversial text, often used to prove the past eternity of the Son of God; where the translators give us,—"whose goings forth have been from everlasting," though the Hebrew is the same as they elsewhere render from days of old.

After I had at leisure searched through this new question, I found that it was impossible to make out any doctrine of a philosophical eternity in the whole Scriptures. The true Greek word for eternal ([Greek: aidios]) occurs twice only: once in Rom. i. 20, as applied to the divine power, and once in Jude 6, of the fire which has been manifested against Sodom and Gomorrha. The last instance showed that allowance must be made for rhetoric; and that fire is called eternal or unquenchable, when it so destroys as to leave nothing unburnt. But on the whole, the very vocabulary of the Greek and Hebrew denoted that the idea of absolute eternity was unformed. The hills are called everlasting (secular?), by those who supposed them to have come into existence two or three thousand years before.—Only in two passages of the Revelations I could not get over the belief that the writer's energy was misplaced, if absolute eternity of torment was not intended: yet it seemed to me unsafe and wrong to found an important doctrine on a symbolic and confessedly obscure book of prophecy. Setting this aside, I found no proof of any eternal punishment.

As soon as the load of Scriptural authority was thus taken off from me, I had a vivid discernment of intolerable moral difficulties inseparable from the doctrine. First, that every sin is infinite in ill-desert and in result, because it is committed against an infinite Being. Thus the fretfulness of a child is an infinite evil! I was aghast that I could have believed it. Now that it was no longer laid upon me as a duty to uphold the infinitude of God's retaliation on sin, I saw that it was an immorality to teach that sin was measured by anything else than the heart and will of the agent. That a finite being should deserve infinite punishment, now was manifestly as incredible as that he should deserve infinite reward,—which I had never dreamed.—Again, I saw that the current orthodoxy made Satan eternal conqueror over Christ. In vain does the Son of God come from heaven and take human flesh and die on the cross. In spite of him, the devil carries off to hell the vast majority of mankind, in whom, not misery only, but Sin is triumphant for ever and ever. Thus Christ not only does not succeed in destroying the works of the devil, but even aggravates them.—Again: what sort of gospel or glad tidings had I been holding? Without this revelation no future state at all (I presumed) could be known. How much better no futurity for any, than that a few should be eternally in bliss, and the great majority[2] kept alive for eternal sin as well as eternal misery! My gospel then was bad tidings, nay, the worst of tidings! In a farther progress of thought, I asked, would it not have been better that the whole race of man had never come into existence? Clearly! And thus God was made out to be unwise in creating them. No use in the punishment was imaginable, without setting up Fear, instead of Love, as the ruling principle in the blessed. And what was the moral tendency of the doctrine? I had never borne to dwell upon it: but I before long suspected that it promoted malignity and selfishness, and was the real clue to the cruelties perpetrated under the name of religion. For he who does dwell on it, must comfort himself under the prospect of his brethren's eternal misery, by the selfish expectation of personal blessedness. When I asked whether I had been guilty of this selfishness, I remembered that I had often mourned, how small a part in my practical religion the future had ever borne. My heaven and my hell had been in the present, where my God was near me to smile or to frown. It had seemed to me a great weakness in my faith, that I never had any vivid imaginations or strong desires of heavenly glory: yet now I was glad to observe, that it had at least saved me from getting so much harm from the wrong side of the doctrine of a future life.

Before I had worked out the objections so fully as here stated, I freely disclosed my thoughts to the friend last named, and to his wife, towards whom he encouraged me to exercise the fullest frankness. I confess, I said nothing about the Unitarian book; for something told me that I had violated Evangelical decorum in opening it, and that I could not calculate how it would affect my friend. Certainly no Romish hierarchy can so successfully exclude heretical books, as social enactment excludes those of Unitarians from our orthodox circles. The bookseller dares not to exhibit their books on his counter: all presume them to be pestilential: no one knows their contents or dares to inform himself. But to return. My friend's wife entered warmly into my new views; I have now no doubt that this exceedingly distressed him, and at length perverted his moral judgment: he himself examined the texts of the Old Testament, and attempted no answer to them. After I had left his neighbourhood, I wrote to him three affectionate letters, and at last got a reply—of vehement accusation. It can now concern no one to know, how many and deep wounds he planted in me. I forgave; but all was too instructive to forget.

For some years I rested in the belief that the epithet "secular punishment" either solely denoted punishment in a future age, or else only of long duration. This evades the horrible idea of eternal and triumphant Sin, and of infinite retaliation for finite offences. But still, I found my new creed uneasy, now that I had established a practice (if not a right) of considering the moral propriety of punishment. I could not so pare away the vehement words of the Scripture, as really to enable me to say that I thought transgressors deserved the fiery infliction. This had been easy, while I measured their guilt by God's greatness; but when that idea was renounced, how was I to think that a good-humoured voluptuary deserved to be raised from the dead in order to be tormented in fire for 100 years? and what shorter time could be called secular? Or if he was to be destroyed instantaneously, and "secular" meant only "in a future age," was he worth the effort of a divine miracle to bring him to life and again annihilate him? I was not willing to refuse belief to the Scripture on such grounds; yet I felt disquietude, that my moral sentiment and the Scripture were no longer in full harmony.

* * * * *

In this period I first discerned the extreme difficulty that there must essentially be, in applying to the Christian Evidences a principle, which, many years before, I had abstractedly received as sound, though it had been a dead letter with me in practice. The Bible (it seemed) contained two sorts of truth. Concerning one sort, man is bound to judge: the other sort is necessarily beyond his ken, and is received only by information from without. The first part of the statement cannot be denied. It would be monstrous to say that we know nothing of geography, history, or morals, except by learning them from the Bible. Geography, history, and other worldly sciences, lie beyond question. As to morals, I had been exceedingly inconsistent and wavering in my theory and in its application; but it now glared upon me, that if man had no independent power of judging, it would have been venial to think Barabbas more virtuous than Jesus. The hearers of Christ or Paul could not draw their knowledge of right and wrong from the New Testament. They had (or needed to have) an inherent power of discerning that his conduct was holy and his doctrine good. To talk about the infirmity or depravity of the human conscience is here quite irrelevant. The conscience of Christ's hearers may have been dim or twisted, but it was their best guide and only guide, as to the question, whether to regard him as a holy prophet: so likewise, as to ourselves, it is evident that we have no guide at all whether to accept or reject the Bible, if we distrust that inward power of judging, (whether called common sense, conscience, or the Spirit of God,)—which is independent of our belief in the Bible. To disparage the internally vouchsafed power of discerning truth without the Bible or other authoritative system, is, to endeavour to set up a universal moral scepticism. He who may not criticize cannot approve.—Well! Let it be admitted that we discern moral truth by a something within us, and that then, admiring the truth so glorious in the Scriptures, we are further led to receive them as the word of God, and therefore to believe them absolutely in respect to the matters which are beyond our ken.

But two difficulties could no longer be dissembled: 1. How are we to draw the line of separation? For instance, would the doctrines of Reprobation and of lasting Fiery Torture with no benefit to the sufferers, belong to the moral part, which we freely criticize; or to the extra-moral part, as to which we passively believe? 2. What is to be done, if in the parts which indisputably lie open to criticism we meet with apparent error?—The second question soon became a practical one with me: but for the reader's convenience I defer it until my Fourth Period, to which it more naturally belongs: for in this Third Period I was principally exercised with controversies that do not vitally touch the authority of the Scripture. Of these the most important were matters contested between Unitarians and Calvinists.

When I had found how exactly the Nicene Creed summed up all that I myself gathered from John and Paul concerning the divine nature of Christ, I naturally referred to this creed, as expressing my convictions, when any unpleasant inquiry arose. I had recently gained the acquaintance of the late excellent Dr. Olinthus Gregory, a man of unimpeached orthodoxy; who met me by the frank avowal, that the Nicene Creed was "a great mistake." He said, that the Arian and the Athanasian difference was not very vital; and that the Scriptural truth lay beyond the Nicene doctrine, which fell short on the same side as Arianism had done. On the contrary, I had learned of an intermediate tenet, called Semi-Arianism, which appeared to me more scriptural than the views of either Athanasius or Arius. Let me bespeak my reader's patience for a little. Arius was judged by Athanasius (I was informed) to be erroneous in two points; 1. in teaching that the Son of God was a creature; i.e. that "begotten" and "made" were two words for the same idea: 2. in teaching, that he had an origin of existence in time; so that there was a distant period at which he was not. Of these two Arian tenets, the Nicene Creed condemned the former only; namely, in the words, "begotten, not made; being of one substance with the Father." But on the latter question the Creed is silent. Those who accepted the Creed, and hereby condemned the great error of Arius that the Son was of different substance from the Father, but nevertheless agreed with Arius in thinking that the Son had a beginning of existence, were called Semi-Arians; and were received into communion by Athanasius, in spite of this disagreement. To me it seemed to be a most unworthy shuffling with words, to say that the Son was begotten, but was never begotten. The very form of our past participle is invented to indicate an event in past time. If the Athanasians alleged that the phrase does not allude to "a coming forth" completed at a definite time, but indicates a process at no time begun and at no time complete, their doctrine could not be expressed by our past-perfect tense begotten. When they compared the derivation of the Son of God from, the Father to the rays of light which ever flow from the natural sun, and argued that if that sun had been eternal, its emanations would be co-eternal, they showed that their true doctrine required the formula—"always being begotten, and as instantly perishing, in order to be rebegotten perpetually." They showed a real disbelief in our English statement "begotten, not made." I overruled the objection, that in the Greek it was not a participle, but a verbal adjective; for it was manifest to me, that a religion which could not be proclaimed in English could not be true; and the very idea of a Creed announcing that Christ was "not begotten, yet begettive," roused in me an unspeakable loathing. Yet surely this would have been Athanasius's most legitimate form of denying Semi-Arianism. In short, the Scriptural phrase, Son of God, conveyed to us either a literal fact, or a metaphor. If literal, the Semi-Arians were clearly right, in saying that sonship implied a beginning of existence. If it was a metaphor, the Athanasians forfeited all right to press the literal sense in proof that the Son must be "of the same substance" as the Father.—Seeing that the Athanasians, in zeal to magnify the Son, had so confounded their good sense, I was certainly startled to find a man of Dr. Olinthus Gregory's moral wisdom treat the Nicenists as in obvious error for not having magnified Christ enough. On so many other sides, however, I met with the new and short creed, "Jesus is Jehovah," that I began to discern Sabellianism to be the prevalent view.

A little later, I fell in with a book of an American Professor, Moses Stuart of Andover, on the subject of the Trinity. Professor Stuart is a very learned man, and thinks for himself. It was a great novelty to me, to find him not only deny the orthodoxy of all the Fathers, (which was little more than Dr. Olinthus Gregory had done,) but avow that from the change in speculative philosophy it was simply impossible for any modern to hold the views prevalent in the third and fourth centuries. Nothing (said he) WAS clearer, than that with us the essential point in Deity is, to be unoriginated, underived; hence with us, a derived God is a self-contradiction, and the very sound of the phrase profane. On the other hand, it is certain that the doctrine of Athanasius, equally as of Arius, was, that the Father is the underived or self-existent God, but the Son is the derived subordinate God. This (argued Stuart) turned upon their belief in the doctrine of Emanations; but as we hold no such philosophical doctrine, the religious theory founded on it is necessarily inadmissible. Professor Stuart then develops his own creed, which appeared to me simple and undeniable Sabellianism.

That Stuart correctly represented the Fathers was clear enough to me; but I nevertheless thought that in this respect the Fathers had honestly made out the doctrine of the Scripture; and I did not at all approve of setting up a battery of modern speculative philosophy against Scriptural doctrine. "How are we to know that the doctrine of Emanations is false? (asked I.) If it is legitimately elicited from Scripture, it is true."—I refused to yield up my creed at this summons. Nevertheless, he left a wound upon me: for I now could not help seeing, that we moderns use the word God in a more limited sense than any ancient nations did. Hebrews and Greeks alike said Gods, to mean any superhuman beings; hence derived God did not sound to them absurd; but I could not deny that in good English it is absurd. This was a very disagreeable discovery: for now, if any one were to ask me whether I believed in the divinity of Christ, I saw it would be dishonest to say simply, Yes; for the interrogator means to ask, whether I hold Christ to be the eternal and underived Source of life; yet if I said No, he would care nothing for my professing to hold the Nicene Creed.

Might not then, after all, Sabellianism be the truth? No: I discerned too plainly what Gibbon states, that the Sabellian, if consistent, is only a concealed Ebionite, or us we now say, a Unitarian, Socinian. As we cannot admit that the Father was slain on the cross, or prayed to himself in the garden, he who will not allow the Father and the Son to be separate persons, but only two names for one person, must divide the Son of God and Jesus into two persons, and so fall back on the very heresy of Socinus which he is struggling to escape.

On the whole, I saw, that however people might call themselves Trinitarians, yet if, like Stuart and all the Evangelicals in Church and Dissent, they turn into a dead letter the generation of the Son of God, and the procession of the Spirit, nothing is possible but Sabellianism or Tritheism: or, indeed, Ditheism, if the Spirit's separate personality is not held. The modern creed is alternately the one or the other, as occasion requires. Sabellians would find themselves out to be mere Unitarians, if they always remained Sabellians: but in fact, they are half their lives Ditheists. They do not aim at consistency; would an upholder of the pseudo-Athanasian creed desire it? Why, that creed teaches, that the height of orthodoxy is to contradict oneself and protest that one does not. Now, however, rose on me the question: Why do I not take the Irish clergyman at his word, and attack him and others as idolaters and worshippers of three Gods? It was unseemly and absurd in him to try to force me into what he must have judged uncharitableness; but it was not the less incumbent on me to find a reply.

I remembered that in past years I had expressly disowned, as obviously unscriptural and absurd, prayers to the Holy Spirit, on the ground that the Spirit is evidently God in the hearts of the faithful, and nothing else: and it did not appear to me that any but a few extreme and rather fanatical persons could be charged with making the Spirit a third God or object of distinct worship. On the other hand, I could not deny that the Son and the Father were thus distinguished to the mind. So indeed John expressly avowed—"truly our fellowship is with the Father, and with his Son Jesus Christ." I myself also had prayed sometimes to God and sometimes to Christ, alternately and confusedly. Now, indeed, I was better taught! now I was more logical and consistent! I had found a triumphant answer to the charge of Ditheism, in that I believed the Son to be derived from the Father, and not to be the Unoriginated—No doubt! yet, after all, could I seriously think that morally and spiritually I was either better or worse for this discovery? I could not pretend that I was.

This showed me, that if a man of partially unsound and visionary mind made the angel Gabriel a fourth person in the Godhead, it might cause no difference whatever in the actings of his spirit The great question would be, whether he ascribed the same moral perfection to Gabriel as to the Father. If so, to worship him would be no degradation to the soul; even if absolute omnipotence were not attributed, nay, nor a past eternal existence. It thus became clear to me, that Polytheism as such is not a moral and spiritual, but at most only an intellectual, error; and that its practical evil consists in worshipping beings whom we represent to our imaginations as morally imperfect. Conversely, one who imputes to God sentiments and conduct which in man he would call capricious or cruel, such a one, even if he be as monotheistic as a Mussulman, admits into his soul the whole virus of Idolatry.

Why then did I at all cling to the doctrine of Christ's superior nature, and not admit it among things indifferent? In obedience to the Scripture, I did actually affirm, that, as for as creed is concerned, a man should be admissible into the Church on the bare confession that Jesus was the Christ. Still, I regarded a belief in his superhuman origin as of first-rate importance, for many reasons, and among others, owing to its connexion with the doctrine of the Atonement; on which there is much to be said.

* * * * *

The doctrine which I used to read as a boy, taught that a vast sum of punishment was due to God for the sins of men. This vast sum was made up of all the woes due through eternity to the whole human race, or, as some said, to the elect. Christ on the cross bore this punishment himself and thereby took it away: thus God is enabled to forgive without violating justice.—But I early encountered unanswerable difficulty on this theory, as to the question, whether Christ had borne the punishment of all or of some only. If of all, is it not unjust to inflict any of it on any? If of the elect only, what gospel have you to preach? for then you cannot tell sinners that God has provided a Saviour for them; for you do not know whether those whom you address are elect. Finding no way out of this, I abandoned the fundamental idea of compensation in quantity, as untenable; and rested in the vaguer notion, that God signally showed his abhorrence of sin, by laying tremendous misery on the Saviour who was to bear away sin.

I have already narrated, how at Oxford I was embarrassed as to the forensic propriety of transferring punishment at all. This however I received as matter of authority, and rested much on the wonderful exhibition made of the evil of sin, when such a being could be subjected to preternatural suffering as a vicarious sinbearer. To this view, a high sense of the personal dignity of Jesus was quite essential; and therefore I had always felt a great repugnance for Mr. Belsham, Dr. Priestley, and the Unitarians of that school, though I had not read a line of their writings.

A more intimate familiarity with St. Paul and an anxious harmonizing of my very words to the Scripture, led me on into a deviation from the popular creed, of the full importance of which I was not for some time aware. I perceived that it is not the agonies of mind or body endured by Christ, which in the Scriptures are said to take away sin, but his "death," his "laying down his life," or sometimes even his resurrection. I gradually became convinced, that when his "suffering," or more especially his "blood," is emphatically spoken of, nothing is meant but his violent death. In the Epistle to the Hebrews, where the analogy of Sacrifice is so pressed, we see that the pains which Jesus bore were in order that he might "learn obedience," but our redemption is effected by his dying as a voluntary victim: in which, death by bloodshed, not pain, is the cardinal point. So too the Paschal lamb (to which, though not properly a sacrifice, the dying Christ is compared by Paul) was not roasted alive, or otherwise put to slow torment, but was simply killed. I therefore saw that the doctrine of "vicarious agonies" was fundamentally unscriptural.

This being fully discerned, I at last became bold to criticize the popular tenet. What should we think of a judge, who, when a boy had deserved a stripe which would to him have been a sharp punishment, laid the very same blow on a strong man, to whom it was a slight infliction? Clearly this would evade, not satisfy justice. To carry out the principle, the blow might be laid as well on a giant, an elephant, or on an inanimate thing. So, to lay our punishment on the infinite strength of Christ, who (they say) bore in six hours what it would have taken thousands of millions of men all eternity to bear, would be a similar evasion.—I farther asked, if we were to fall in with Pagans, who tortured their victims to death as an atonement, what idea of God should we think them to form? and what should we reply, if they said, it gave them a wholesome view of his hatred of sin? A second time I shuddered at the notions which I had once imbibed as a part of religion, and then got comfort from the inference, how much better men of this century are than their creed. Their creed was the product of ages of cruelty and credulity; and it sufficiently bears that stamp.

Thus I rested in the Scriptural doctrine, that the death of Christ is our atonement. To say the same of the death of Paul, was obviously unscriptural: it was, then, essential to believe the physical nature of Christ to be different from that of Paul. If otherwise, death was due to Jesus as the lot of nature: how could such death have anything to do with our salvation? On this ground the Unitarian doctrine was utterly untenable: I could see nothing between my own view and a total renunciation of the authority of the doctrines promulgated by Paul and John.

Nevertheless, my own view seemed mere and more unmeaning the more closely it was interrogated. When I ascribed death to Christ, what did death mean? and what or whom did I suppose to die? Was it man that died, or God? If man only, how was that wonderful, or how did it concern us? Besides;—persons die, not natures: a nature is only a collection of properties: if Christ was one person, all Christ died. Did, then, God die, and man remain alive! For God to become non-existent is an unimaginable absurdity. But is this death a mere change of state, a renunciation of earthly life? Still it remains unclear how the parting with mere human life could be to one who possesses divine life either an atonement or a humiliation. Was it not rather an escape from humiliation, saving only the mode of death? So severe was this difficulty, that at length I unawares dropt from Semi-Arianism into pure Arianism, by so distinguishing the Son from the Father, as to admit the idea that the Son of God had actually been non-existent in the interval between death and resurrection: nevertheless, I more and more felt, that to be able to define my own notions on such questions had exceedingly little to do with my spiritual state. For me it was important and essential to know that God hated sin, and that God had forgiven my sin: but to know one particular manifestation of his hatred of sin, or the machinery by which He had enabled himself to forgive, was of very secondary importance. When He proclaims to me in his word, that He is forgiving to all the penitent, it is not for me to reply, that "I cannot believe that, until I hear how He manages to reconcile such conduct with his other attributes." Yet, I remembered, this was Bishop Beveridge's sufficient refutation of Mohammedism, which teaches no atonement.

* * * * *

At the same time great progress had been made in my mind towards the overthrow of the correlative dogma of the Fall of man and his total corruption. Probably for years I had been unawares anti-Calvinistic on this topic. Even at Oxford, I had held that human depravity is a fact, which it is absurd to argue against; a fact, attested by Thucydides, Polybius, Horace, and Tacitus, almost as strongly as by St. Paul. Yet in admitting man's total corruption, I interpreted this of spiritual, not of moral, perversion: for that there were kindly and amiable qualities even in the unregenerate, was quite as clear a fact as any other. Hence in result I did not attribute to man any great essential depravity, in the popular and moral sense of the word; and the doctrine amounted only to this, that "spiritually, man is paralyzed, until the grace of God comes freely upon him." How to reconcile this with the condemnation, and punishment of man for being unspiritual, I knew not. I saw, and did not dissemble, the difficulty; but received it as a mystery hereafter to be cleared up.

But it gradually broke upon me, that when Paul said nothing stronger than heathen moralists had said about human wickedness, it was absurd to quote his words, any more than theirs, in proof of a Fall,—that is, of a permanent degeneracy induced by the first sin of the first man: and when I studied the 5th chapter of the Romans, I found it was death, not corruption, which Adam was said to have entailed. In short, I could scarcely find the modern doctrine of the "Fall" any where in the Bible. I then remembered that Calvin, in his Institutes, complains that all the Fathers are heterodox on this point; the Greek Fathers being grievously overweening in their estimate of human power; while of the Latin Fathers even Augustine is not always up to Calvin's mark of orthodoxy. This confirmed my rising conviction that the tenet is of rather recent origin. I afterwards heard, that both it and the doctrine of compensatory misery were first systematized by Archbishop Anselm, in the reign of our William Rufus: but I never took the pains to verify this.

For meanwhile I had been forcibly impressed with the following thought. Suppose a youth to have been carefully brought up at home, and every temptation kept out of his way: suppose him to have been in appearance virtuous, amiable, religious: suppose, farther, that at the age of twenty-one he goes out into the world, and falls into sin by the first temptation:—how will a Calvinistic teacher moralize over such a youth? Will he not say: "Behold a proof of the essential depravity of human nature! See the affinity of man for sin! How fair and deceptive was this young man's virtue, while he was sheltered from temptation; but oh! how rotten has it proved itself!"—Undoubtedly, the Calvinist would and must so moralize. But it struck me, that if I substituted the name of Adam for the youth, the argument proved the primitive corruption of Adam's nature. Adam fell by the first temptation: what greater proof of a fallen nature have I ever given? or what is it possible for any one to give?—I thus discerned that there was a priori impossibility of fixing on myself the imputation of degeneracy, without fixing the same on Adam. In short, Adam undeniably proved his primitive nature to be frail; so do we all: but as he was nevertheless not primitively corrupt, why should we call ourselves so? Frailty, then, is not corruption, and does not prove degeneracy.

"Original sin" (says one of the 39 Articles) "standeth not in the following of Adam, as the Pelagians do vainly talk," &c. Alas, then! was I become a Pelagian? certainly I could no longer see that Adam's first sin affected me more than his second or third, or so much as the sins of my immediate parents. A father who, for instance, indulges in furious passions and exciting liquors, may (I suppose) transmit violent passions to his son. In this sense I could not wholly reject the possibility of transmitted corruption; but it had nothing to do with the theological doctrine of the "Federal Headship" of Adam. Not that I could wholly give up this last doctrine; for I still read it in the 5th chapter of Romans. But it was clear to me, that whatever that meant, I could not combine it with the idea of degeneracy, nor could I find a proof of it in the fact of prevalent wickedness. Thus I received a shadowy doctrine on mere Scriptural authority; it had no longer any root in my understanding or heart.

Moreover, it was manifest to me that the Calvinistic view is based in a vain attempt to acquit God of having created a "sinful" being, while the broad Scriptural fact is, that he did create a being as truly "liable to sin" as any of us. If that needs no exculpation, how more does our state need it? Does it not suffice to say, that "every creature, because he is a creature and not God, must necessarily be frail?" But Calvin intensely aggravates whatever there is of difficulty: for he supposes God to have created the most precious thing on earth in unstable equilibrium, so as to tipple over irrecoverably at the first infinitesimal touch, and with it wreck for ever the spiritual hopes of all Adam's posterity. Surely all nature proclaims, that if God planted any spiritual nature at all in man, it was in stable equilibrium, able to right itself when deranged.

Lastly, I saw that the Calvinistic doctrine of human degeneracy teaches, that God disowns my nature (the only nature I ever had) as not his work, but the devil's work. He hereby tells me that he is not my Creator, and he disclaims his right over me, as a father who disowns a child. To teach this is to teach that I owe him no obedience, no worship, no trust: to sever the cords that bind the creature to the Creator, and to make all religion gratuitous and vain.

Thus Calvinism was found by me not only not to be Evangelical, but not to be logical, in spite of its high logical pretensions, and to be irreconcilable with any intelligent theory of religion. Of "gloomy Calvinism" I had often heard people speak with an emphasis, that annoyed me as highly unjust; for mine had not been a gloomy religion:—far, very far from it. On the side of eternal punishment, its theory, no doubt, had been gloomy enough; but human nature has a notable art of not realizing all the articles of a creed; moreover, this doctrine is equally held by Arminians. But I was conscious, that in dropping Calvinism I had lost nothing Evangelical: on the contrary, the gospel which I retained was as spiritual and deep-hearted as before, only more merciful.

* * * * *

Before this Third Period of my creed was completed, I made my first acquaintance with a Unitarian. This gentleman showed much sweetness of mind, largeness of charity, and a timid devoutness which I had not expected in such a quarter. His mixture of credulity and incredulity seemed to me capricious, and wholly incoherent. First, as to his incredulity, or rather, boldness of thought. Eternal punishment was a notion, which nothing could make him believe, and for which it would be useless to quote Scripture to him; for the doctrine (he said) darkened the moral character of God, and produced malignity in man. That Christ had any higher nature than we all have, was a tenet essentially inadmissible; first, because it destroyed all moral benefit from his example and sympathy, and next, because no one has yet succeeded in even stating the doctrine of the Incarnation without contradicting himself. If Christ was but one person, one mind, then that one mind could not be simultaneously finite and infinite, nor therefore simultaneously God and man. But when I came to hear more from this same gentleman, I found him to avow that no Trinitarian could have a higher conception than he of the present power and glory of Christ. He believed that the man Jesus is at the head of the whole moral creation of God; that all power in heaven and earth is given to him: that he will be Judge of all men, and is himself raised above all judgment. This was to me unimaginable from his point of view. Could he really think Jesus to be a mere man, and yet believe him to be sinless? On what did that belief rest? Two texts were quoted in proof, 1 Pet. ii. 21, and Heb. iv. 15. Of these, the former did not necessarily mean anything more than that Jesus was unjustly put to death; and the latter belonged to an Epistle, which my new friend had already rejected as unapostolic and not of first-rate authority, when speaking of the Atonement. Indeed, that the Epistle to the Hebrews is not from the hand of Paul, had very long seemed to me an obvious certainty,—as long as I had had any delicate feeling of Greek style.

That a human child, born with the nature of other children, and having to learn wisdom and win virtue through the same process, should grow up sinless, appeared to me an event so paradoxical, as to need the most amply decisive proof. Yet what kind of proof was possible? Neither Apollos, (if he was the author of the Epistle to the Hebrew,) nor yet Peter, had any power of attesting the sinlessness of Jesus, as a fact known to themselves personally: they could only learn it by some preternatural communication, to which, nevertheless, the passages before us implied no pretension whatever. To me it appeared an axiom,[3] that if Jesus was in physical origin a mere man, he was, like myself, a sinful man, and therefore certainly not my Judge, certainly not an omniscient reader of all hearts; nor on any account to be bowed down to as Lord. To exercise hope, faith, trust in him, seemed then an impiety. I did not mean to impute impiety to Unitarians; still I distinctly believed that English Unitarianism could never afford me a half hour's resting-place.

Nevertheless, from contact with this excellent person I learned how much tenderness of spirit a Unitarian may have; and it pleasantly enlarged my charity, although I continued to feel much repugnance for his doctrine, and was anxious and constrained in the presence of Unitarians. From the same collision with him, I gained a fresh insight into a part of my own mind. I had always regarded the Gospels (at least the three first) to be to the Epistles nearly as Law to Gospel; that is, the three gospels dealt chiefly in precept, the epistles in motives which act on the affections. This did not appear to me dishonourable to the teaching of Christ; for I supposed it to be a pre-determined development. But I now discovered that there was a deeper distaste in me for the details of the human life of Christ, than I was previously conscious of—a distaste which I found out, by a reaction from the minute interest felt in such details by my new friend. For several years more, I did not fully understand how and why this was; viz. that my religion had always been Pauline. Christ was to me the ideal of glorified human nature: but I needed some dimness in the portrait to give play to my imagination: if drawn too sharply historical, it sank into something not superhuman, and caused a revulsion of feeling. As all paintings of the miraculous used to displease and even disgust me from a boy by the unbelief which they inspired; so if any one dwelt on the special proofs of tenderness and love exhibited in certain words or actions of Jesus, it was apt to call out in me a sense, that from day to day equal kindness might often be met. The imbecility of preachers, who would dwell on such words as "Weep not," as if nobody else ever uttered such,—had always annoyed me. I felt it impossible to obtain a worthy idea of Christ from studying any of the details reported concerning him. If I dwelt too much on these, I got a finite object; but I yearned for an infinite one: hence my preference for John's mysterious Jesus. Thus my Christ was not the figure accurately painted in the narrative, but one kindled in my imagination by the allusions and (as it were) poetry of the New Testament. I did not wish for vivid historical realisation: relics I could never have valued: pilgrimages to Jerusalem had always excited in me more of scorn than of sympathy;—and I make no doubt such was fundamentally Paul's[4] feeling. On the contrary, it began to appear to me (and I believe not unjustly) that the Unitarian mind revelled peculiarly in "Christ after the flesh," whom Paul resolved not to know. Possibly in this circumstance will be found to lie the strong and the weak points of the Unitarian religious character, as contrasted with that of the Evangelical, far more truly than in the doctrine of the Atonement. I can testify that the Atonement may be dropt out of Pauline religion without affecting its quality; so may Christ be spiritualized into God, and identified with the Father: but I suspect that a Pauline faith could not, without much violence and convulsion, be changed into devout admiration of a clearly drawn historical character; as though any full and unsurpassable embodiment of God's moral perfections could be exhibited with ink and pen.

A reviewer, who has since made his name known, has pointed to the preceding remarks, as indicative of my deficiency in imagination and my tendency to romance. My dear friend is undoubtedly right in the former point; I am destitute of (creative) poetical imagination: and as to the latter point, his insight into character is so great, that I readily believe him to know me better than I know myself, Nevertheless, I think he has mistaken the nature of the preceding argument. I am, on the contrary, almost disposed to say, that those have a tendency to romance who can look at a picture with men flying into the air, or on an angel with a brass trumpet, and dead men rising out of their graves with good stout muscles, and not feel that the picture suggests unbelief. Nor do I confess to romance in my desire of something more than historical and daily human nature in the character of Jesus; for all Christendom, between the dates A.D. 100 to A.D. 1850, with the exception of small eccentric coteries, has held Jesus to be essentially superhuman. Paul and John so taught concerning him. To believe their doctrine (I agree with my friend) is, in some sense, a weakness of understanding; but it is a weakness to which minds of every class have been for ages liable.

* * * * *

Such had been the progress of my mind, towards the end of what I will call my Third Period. In it the authority of the Scriptures as to some details (which at length became highly important) had begun to be questioned; of which I shall proceed to speak: but hitherto this was quite secondary to the momentous revolution which lay Calvinism prostrate in my mind, which opened my heart to Unitarians, and, I may say, to unbelievers; which enlarged all my sympathies, and soon set me to practise free moral thought, at least as a necessity, if not as a duty. Yet I held fast an unabated reverence for the moral and spiritual teaching of the New Testament, and had not the most remote conception that anything could ever shatter my belief in its great miracles. In fact, during this period, I many times yearned to proceed to India, whither my friend Groves had transferred his labours and his hopes; but I was thwarted by several causes, and was again and again damped by the fear of bigotry from new quarters. Otherwise, I thought I could succeed in merging as needless many controversies. In all the workings of any mind about Tri-unity, Incarnation, Atonement, the Fall, Resurrection, Immortality, Eternal Punishment, how little had any of these to do with the inward exercises of my soul towards God! He was still the same, immutably glorious: not one feature of his countenance had altered to my gaze, or could alter. This surely was the God whom Christ came to reveal, and bring us into fellowship with: this is that, about which Christians ought to have no controversy, but which they should unitedly, concordantly, themselves enjoy and exhibit to the heathen. But oh, Christendom! what dost thou believe and teach? The heathen cry out to thee,—Physician, heal thyself.

[Footnote 1: I afterwards learned that some of those gentlemen esteemed boldness of thought "a lust of the mind," and as such, an immorality. This enables them to persuade themselves that they do not reject a "heretic" for a matter of opinion, but for that which they have a right to call "immoral". What immorality was imputed to me, I was not distinctly informed.]

[Footnote 2: I really thought it needless to quote proof that but few will be saved, Matth. vii. 14. I know there is a class of Christians who believe in Universal salvation, and there are others who disbelieve eternal torment. They must not be angry with me for refuting the doctrine of other Christians, which they hold to be false.]

[Footnote 3: In this (second) edition, I have added an entire chapter expressly on the subject.]

[Footnote 4: The same may probably be said of all the apostles, and their whole generation. If they had looked on the life of Jesus with the same tender and human affection as modern Unitarians and pious Romanists do, the church would have swarmed with holy coats and other relics in the very first age. The mother of Jesus and her little establishment would at once have swelled into importance. This certainly was not the case; which may make it doubtful whether the other apostles dwelt at all more on the human personality, of Jesus than Paul did. Strikingly different as James is from Paul, he is in this respect perfectly agreed with him.]



CHAPTER IV.

THE RELIGION OF THE LETTER RENOUNCED.

It has been stated that I had already begun to discern that it was impossible with perfect honesty to defend every tittle contained in the Bible. Most of the points which give moral offence in the book of Genesis I had been used to explain away by the doctrine of Progress; yet every now and then it became hard to deny that God is represented as giving an actual sanction to that which we now call sinful. Indeed, up and down the Scriptures very numerous texts are scattered, which are notorious difficulties with commentators. These I had habitually overruled one by one: but again of late, since I had been forced to act and talk less and think more, they began to encompass me. But I was for a while too full of other inquiries to follow up coherently any of my doubts or perceptions, until my mind became at length nailed down to the definite study of one well-known passage.

This passage may be judged of extremely secondary importance in itself, yet by its remoteness from all properly spiritual and profound questions, it seemed to afford to me the safest of arguments. The genealogy with which the gospel of Matthew opens, I had long known to be a stumbling-block to divines, and I had never been satisfied with their explanations. On reading it afresh, after long intermission, and comparing it for myself with the Old Testament, I was struck with observing that the corruption of the two names Ahaziah and Uzziah into the same sound (Oziah) has been the cause of merging four generations into one; as the similarity of Jehoiakim to Jehoiachin also led to blending them both in the name Jeconiah. In consequence, there ought to be 18 generations where Matthew has given as only 14: yet we cannot call this on error of a transcriber; for it is distinctly remarked, that the genealogy consists of 14 three times repeated. Thus there were but 14 names inserted by Matthew: yet it ought to have been 18: and he was under manifest mistake. This surely belongs to a class of knowledge, of which man has cognizance: it would not be piety, but grovelling superstition, to avow before God that I distrust my powers of counting, and, in obedience to the written word, I believe that 18 is 14 and 14 is 18. Thus it is impossible to deny, that there is cognizable error in the first chapter of Matthew. Consequently, that gospel is not all dictated by the Spirit of God, and (unless we can get rid of the first chapter as no part of the Bible) the doctrine of the verbal infallibility of the whole Bible, or indeed of the New Testament, is demonstrably false.

After I had turned the matter over often, and had become accustomed to the thought, this single instance at length had great force to give boldness to my mind within a very narrow range. I asked whether, if the chapter were now proved to be spurious, that would save the infallibility of the Bible. The reply was: not of the Bible as it is; but only of the Bible when cleared of that and of all other spurious additions. If by independent methods, such as an examination of manuscripts, the spuriousness of the chapter could now be shown, this would verify the faculty of criticism which has already objected to its contents: thus it would justly urge us to apply similar criticism to other passages.

I farther remembered, and now brought together under a single point of view, other undeniable mistakes. The genealogy of the nominal father of Jesus in Luke is inconsistent with that in Matthew, in spite of the flagrant dishonesty with which divines seek to deny this; and neither evangelist gives the genealogy of Mary, which alone is wanted.—In Acts vii. 16, the land which Jacob bought of the children of Hamor,[1] is confounded with that which Abraham bought of Ephron the Hittite. In Acts v. 36, 37, Gamaliel is made to say that Theudas was earlier in time than Judas of Galilee. Yet in fact, Judas of Galilee preceded Theudas; and the revolt of Theudas had not yet taken place when Gamaliel spoke, so the error is not Gamaliel's, but Luke's. Of both the insurgents we have a dear and unimpeached historical account in Josephus.—The slaughter of the infants by Herod, if true, must, I thought, needs have been recorded by the same historian,—So again, in regard to the allusion made by Jesus to Zacharias, son of Barachias, as last of the martyrs, it was difficult for me to shake off the suspicion, that a gross error had been committed, and that the person intended is the "Zacharias son of Baruchus," who, as we know from Josephus, was martyred within the courts of the temple during the siege of Jerusalem by Titus, about 40 years after the crucifixion. The well-known prophet Zechariah was indeed son of Berechiah; but he was not last of the martyrs,[2] if indeed he was martyred at all. On the whole, the persuasion stuck to me, that words had been put into the mouth of Jesus, which he could not possibly have used.—The impossibility of settling the names of the twelve apostles struck me as a notable fact.—I farther remembered the numerous difficulties of harmonizing the four gospels; how, when a boy at school, I had tried to incorporate all four into one history, and the dismay with which I had found the insoluble character of the problem,—the endless discrepancies and perpetual uncertainties. These now began to seem to me inherent in the materials, and not to be ascribable to our want of intelligence.

I had also discerned in the opening of Genesis things which could not be literally received. The geography of the rivers in Paradise is inexplicable, though it assumes the tone of explanation. The curse on the serpent, who is to go on his belly—(how else did he go before?)—and eat dust, is a capricious punishment on a race of brutes, one of whom the Devil chose to use as his instrument. That the painfulness of childbirth is caused, not by Eve's sin, but by artificial habits and a weakened nervous system, seems to be proved by the twofold fact, that savage women and wild animals suffer but little, and tame cattle often suffer as much as human females.—About this time also, I had perceived (what I afterwards learned the Germans to have more fully investigated) that the two different accounts of the Creation are distinguished by the appellations given to the divine Creator. I did not see how to resist the inference that the book is made up of heterogeneous documents, and was not put forth by the direct dictation of the Spirit to Moses.

A new stimulus was after this given to my mind by two short conversations with the late excellent Dr. Arnold at Rugby. I had become aware of the difficulties encountered by physiologists in believing the whole human race to have proceeded in about 6000 years from a single Adam and Eve; and that the longevity (not miraculous, but ordinary) attributed to the patriarchs was another stumbling-block. The geological difficulties of the Mosaic cosmogony were also at that time exciting attention. It was a novelty to me, that Arnold treated these questions as matters of indifference to religion; and did not hesitate to say, that the account of Noah's deluge was evidently mythical, and the history of Joseph "a beautiful poem." I was staggered at this. If all were not descended from Adam, what became of St. Paul's parallel between the first and second Adam, and the doctrine of Headship and Atonement founded on it? If the world was not made in six days, how could we defend the Fourth Commandment as true, though said to have been written in stone by the very finger of God? If Noah's deluge was a legend, we should at least have to admit that Peter did not know this: what too would be said of Christ's allusion to it? I was unable to admit Dr. Arnold's views; but to see a vigorous mind, deeply imbued with Christian devoutness, so convinced, both reassured me that I need not fear moral mischiefs from free inquiry, and indeed laid that inquiry upon me as a duty.

Here, however, was a new point started. Does the question of the derivation of the human race from two parents belong to things cognizable by the human intellect, or to things about which we must learn submissively? Plainly to the former. It would be monstrous to deny that such inquiries legitimately belong to physiology, or to proscribe a free study of this science. If so, there was an a priori possibility, that what is in the strictest sense called "religious doctrine" might come into direct collision, not merely with my ill-trained conscience, but with legitimate science; and that this would call on me to ask: "Which of the two certainties is stronger? that the religious parts of the Scripture are infallible, or that the science is trustworthy?" and I then first saw, that while science had (within however limited a range of thought) demonstration or severe verifications, it was impossible to pretend to anything so cogent in favour of the infallibility of any or some part of the Scriptures; a doctrine which I was accustomed to believe, and felt to be a legitimate presumption; yet one of which it grew harder and harder to assign any proof, the more closely I analyzed it. Nevertheless, I still held it fast, and resolved not to let it go until I was forced.

A fresh strain fell on the Scriptural infallibility, in contemplating the origin of Death. Geologists assured us, that death went on in the animal creation many ages before the existence of man. The rocks formed of the shells of animals testify that death is a phenomenon thousands of thousand years old: to refer the death of animals to the sin of Adam and Eve is evidently impossible. Yet, if not, the analogies of the human to the brute form make it scarcely credible that man's body can ever have been intended for immortality. Nay, when we consider the conditions of birth and growth to which it is subject, the wear and tear essential to life, the new generations intended to succeed and supplant the old,—so soon as the question is proposed as one of physiology, the reply is inevitable that death is no accident introduced by the perverse will of our first parents, nor any way connected with man's sinfulness; but is purely a result of the conditions of animal life. On the contrary, St. Paul rests most important conclusions on the fact, that one man Adam by personal sin brought death upon all his posterity. If this was a fundamental error, religious doctrine also is shaken.

In various attempts at compromise,—such as conceding the Scriptural fallibility in human science, but maintaining its spiritual perfection,—I always found the division impracticable. At last it pressed on me, that if I admitted morals to rest on an independent basis, it was dishonest to shut my eyes to any apparent collisions of morality with the Scriptures. A very notorious and decisive instance is that of Jael.—Sisera, when beaten in battle, fled to the tent of his friend Heber, and was there warmly welcomed by Jael, Heber's wife. After she had refreshed him with food, and lulled him to sleep, she killed him by driving a nail into his temples; and for this deed, (which now-a-days would be called a perfidious murder,) the prophetess Deborah, in an inspired psalm, pronounces Jael to be "blessed above women," and glorifies her act by an elaborate description of its atrocity. As soon as I felt that I was bound to pass a moral judgment on this, I saw that as regards the Old Testament the battle was already lost. Many other things, indeed, instantly rose in full power upon me, especially the command to Abraham to slay his son. Paul and James agree in extolling Abraham as the pattern of faith; James and the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews specify the sacrifice of Isaac as a firstrate fruit of faith: yet if the voice of morality is allowed to be heard, Abraham was (in heart and intention) not less guilty than those who sacrificed their children to Molech.

Thus at length it appeared, that I must choose between two courses. I must EITHER blind my moral sentiment, my powers of criticism, and my scientific knowledge, (such as they were,) in order to accept the Scripture entire; OR I must encounter the problem, however arduous, of adjusting the relative claims of human knowledge and divine revelation. As to the former method, to name it was to condemn it; for it would put every system of Paganism on a par with Christianity. If one system of religion may claim that we blind our hearts and eyes in its favour, so may another; and there is precisely the same reason for becoming a Hindoo in religion as a Christian. We cannot be both; therefore the principle is demonstrably absurd. It is also, of course, morally horrible, and opposed to countless passages of the Scriptures themselves. Nor can the argument be evaded by talking of external evidences; for these also are confessedly moral evidences, to be judged of by our moral faculties. Nay, according to all Christian advocates, they are God's test of our moral temper. To allege, therefore, that our moral faculties are not to judge, is to annihilate the evidences for Christianity.—Thus, finally, I was lodged in three inevitable conclusions:

1. The moral and intellectual powers of man must be acknowledged as having a right and duty to criticize the contents of the Scripture:

2. When so exerted, they condemn portions of the Scripture as erroneous and immoral:

3. The assumed infallibility of the entire Scripture is a proved falsity, not merely as to physiology, and other scientific matters, but also as to morals: and it remains for farther inquiry how to discriminate the trustworthy from the untrustworthy within the limits of the Bible itself.

* * * * *

When distinctly conscious, after long efforts to evade it, that this was and must henceforth be my position, I ruminated on the many auguries which had been made concerning me by frightened friends. "You will become a Socinian," had been said of me even at Oxford: "You will become an infidel," had since been added. My present results, I was aware, would seem a sadly triumphant confirmation to the clearsighted instinct of orthodoxy. But the animus of such prophecies had always made me indignant, and I could not admit that there was any merit in such clearsightedness. What! (used I to say,) will you shrink from truth, lest it lead to error? If following truth must bring us to Socinianism, let us by all means become Socinians, or anything else. Surely we do not love our doctrines more than the truth, but because they are the truth. Are we not exhorted to "prove all things, and hold fast that which is good?"—But to my discomfort, I generally found that this (to me so convincing) argument for feeling no alarm, only caused more and more alarm, and gloomier omens concerning me. On considering all this in leisurely retrospect, I began painfully to doubt, whether after all there is much love of truth even among those who have an undeniable strength of religious feeling. I questioned with myself, whether love of truth is not a virtue demanding a robust mental cultivation; whether mathematical or other abstract studies may not be practically needed for it. But no: for how then could it exist in some feminine natures? how in rude and unphilosophical times? On the whole, I rather concluded, that there is in nearly all English education a positive repressing of a young person's truthfulness; for I could distinctly see, that in my own case there was always need of defying authority and public opinion,—not to speak of more serious sacrifices,—if I was to follow truth. All society seemed so to hate novelties of thought, as to prefer the chances of error in the old.—Of course! why, how could it be otherwise, while Test Articles were maintained?

Yet surely if God is truth, none sincerely aspire to him, who dread to lose their present opinions in exchange for others truer.—I had not then read a sentence of Coleridge, which is to this effect: "If any one begins by loving Christianity more than the truth, he will proceed to love his Church more than Christianity, and will end by loving his own opinions better than either." A dim conception of this was in my mind; and I saw that the genuine love of God was essentially connected with loving truth as truth, and not truth as our own accustomed thought, truth as our old prejudice; and that the real saint can never be afraid to let God teach him one lesson more, or unteach him one more error. Then I rejoiced to feel how right and sound had been our principle, that no creed can possibly be used as the touchstone of spirituality: for man morally excels man, as far as creeds are concerned, not by assenting to true propositions, but by loving them because they are discerned to be true, and by possessing a faculty of discernment sharpened by the love of truth. Such are God's true apostles, differing enormously in attainment and elevation, but all born to ascend. For these to quarrel between themselves because they do not agree in opinions, is monstrous. Sentiment, surely, not opinion, is the bond of the Spirit; and as the love of God, so the love of truth is a high and sacred sentiment, in comparison to which our creeds are mean.

Well, I had been misjudged; I had been absurdly measured by other men's creed: but might I not have similarly misjudged others, since I had from early youth been under similar influences? How many of my seniors at Oxford I had virtually despised because they were not evangelical! Had I had opportunity of testing their spirituality? or had I the faculty of so doing? Had I not really condemned them as unspiritual, barely because of their creed? On trying to reproduce the past to my imagination, I could not condemn myself quite as sweepingly as I wished; but my heart smote me on account of one. I had a brother, with whose name all England was resounding for praise or blame: from his sympathies, through pure hatred of Popery, I had long since turned away. What was this but to judge him by his creed? True, his whole theory was nothing but Romanism transferred to England: but what then? I had studied with the deepest interest Mrs. Schimmelpenninck's account of the Portroyalists, and though I was aware that she exhibits only the bright side of her subject, yet the absolute excellencies of her nuns and priests showed that Romanism as such was not fatal to spirituality. They were persecuted: this did them good perhaps, or certainly exhibited their brightness. So too my brother surely was struggling after truth, fighting for freedom to his own heart and mind, against church articles and stagnancy of thought. For this he deserved both sympathy and love: but I, alas! had not known and seen his excellence. But now God had taught me more largeness by bitter sorrow working the peaceable fruit of righteousness; at last then I might admire my brother. I therefore wrote to him a letter of contrition. Some change, either in his mind or in his view of my position, had taken place; and I was happy to find him once more able, not only to feel fraternally, as he had always done, but to act also fraternally. Nevertheless, to this day it is to me a painfully unsolved mystery, how a mind can claim its freedom in order to establish bondage.