|
Christianity has its
symbols as well as Judaism. Spiritual, reflective, subjective as the
dispensation under which we live is commonly supposed to be, it is one,
nevertheless, in which, as truly as in that older and less perfect
dispensation which it supersedes, spiritual thought is clothed, and
spiritual impressions are conveyed under sensuous forms. The difference,
in this point of view, betwixt the Mosaic and the Christian economy, is
not that the former had an elaborate ritual, a vast and complicated
apparatus of symbols, ceremonies, artistic rites in which spiritual ideas
were lodged in material forms, and that the latter is a purely mental or
spiritual religion devoid of form, and appealing directly to the
understanding and heart. But the real distinction is rather that the forms
of Judaism were artificial, whilst those of Christianity are natural. In
the former case, an elaborate machinery of symbolic rites was constructed,
and authoritatively prescribed. In the latter, man is left, in the main,
to the grand, universal, unarti-ficial symbols of nature and providence
and human life; and in the only two symbolic rites that have been
prescribed authoritatively, nothing more is done than merely to adopt and
stamp with spiritual meaning and impressiveness two usages of our common
life—the act of ablution and a family meal. For two things are to be
considered—first, that man cannot do without symbols, or symbolic language
of some sort; and secondly, that the peculiar genius and spirit of
Christianity is this, that it elevates all nature and life, the whole
outward daily experience of man, into a grand system of spiritual
teaching, glorifying and spiritualising common sights and sounds, common
actions and relations, making the whole world one glorious sacrament
through which the spiritual mind holds communion with God. I shall make a
few observations on each of these two points.
1. The first and general
remark which I have made is, that man cannot do without symbols. In all
intercourse, secular or spiritual, in all interchange of thought and
feeling, whether in religion or in common life, we need not only ideas,
but also forms—not only conceptions and feelings, but also a material
mould in which to cast them—a sensible dress of symbols, figures, material
shapes and images in which to clothe and embody them, and give to the
ethereal and impalpable creations of mind a local habitation and a name.
This necessity is rooted in our nature as deeply as the connexion between
mind and body. Souls cannot see into each other. No communication between
two spirits can take place save through the intervention, the go-between,
of material organisation. Two pieces of wood, or stone, or iron may be
brought into immediate contact, but two souls can never touch or be
brought into any sort of apposition. A bridge must be built, a material
telegraph must be set up between them. Each soul is shut up in its own
castle, and a great gulf fixed between it and other souls, and only by
hanging out signals, or constructing fleet messengers out of material
forms and sounds, can these mysterious dwellers in their individual
isolation convey thought and feeling to each other. Unless each Christian
soul, therefore, is to receive all knowledge and impression by direct
inspiration from God—in other words, if religious instruction is to be
conveyed to us through human minds, spiritual teaching and discipline
through the Church—the only way in which it can reach us is by outward
forms and symbols, by picturing out, as is done in Baptism and the Lord's
Supper, inward, invisible ideas by material emblems and analogies.
But what, then, becomes of
language? Do not minds communicate with each other through verbal speech?
Do not spoken words constitute a medium of thought of the greatest power,
compass, and flexibility? Surely symbols, pictures, emblems,
hieroglyphics, are not to be compared with articulate speech as a medium
of mental experience?
To this it must be
answered, for one thing, that, even on the supposition that teaching by
language is essentially different from teaching by symbols, the latter is
of far superior power and impressiveness as a vehicle of thought to the
mere arbitrary sounds of spoken language. The language of symbols is in
great part natural, instructive, rooted in the very nature of things; the
language of words is in great part arbitrary and conventional. Betwixt the
word "smile" or "tear," and the emotion of joy or sorrow, there is no
necessary and natural connexion; but betwixt the feeling of joy and the
form or symbolic expression on the countenance which we call a
smile—betwixt the feeling of sorrow and the particular look of gloom, or
the physical symbolic process of weeping, there is an original, real, and
natural connexion. One word designates joy or sorrow in one nation,
another in another, but bright or sad and gloomy looks, smiles and tears,
are part of a universal language; they are symbols which correspond to the
things all the world over, wherever there is a heart to grieve or gladden.
Man is not born into the world with a vocabulary of words and names, and
the power to utter them—that is the result of artificial training and
experience — but man is born into the world with the power to understand
and employ the language of signs. The little child discerns the
intimations of thought and feeling in the mother's face, and by responsive
signs, by the bright or beclouded face, by the clinging embrace or the cry
of alarm, by the restless, ever-varying play of expression, motion,
gesticulation, it indicates the possession of a most copious and
inartificial exponent of mind.
But besides this, it is to
be further considered that language, uttered speech, in so far as it has
any power to express mental ideas and feelings, is in itself symbolic. The
words that describe our inward being, our souls and their workings, would
have no meaning to us if it were not that they are names for outward
pictures that have some mysterious resemblance or analogy to the things of
mind. The word "spirit" is no more like a soul than a piece of money is
like the goods you can buy with it; but the way in which it comes to stand
for soul is, that the word spirit means literally "breath" or "air in
motion;" and that in all languages, amongst all nations, the impalpable,
viewless air, the wind that bloweth where it listeth, is the picture or
symbol which men have fixed upon as likest to mind, and best fitted to
convey a notion of what they meant when they would speak to each other of
that mysterious something, the immaterial principle within each human
breast. So, again, the word "righteousness,"
or rectitude, has in itself
no more resemblance to, or natural power to designate, the inward quality
of goodness, than any other collocation of letters or combination of
sounds; but the word in this case stands for and summons up an idea of the
thing, because men have ever perceived a mysterious analogy betwixt the
inward condition of a man of integrity, betwixt the action of an honest,
just man who will not swerve for any temptation from the path of duty, and
a straight or right line, going right on from one definite point to
another; and so an act such as this came gradually to be designated a
"right" or straight act; and the quality in general, "righteousness"—i.
e., Tightness or straightness. And so, not to dwell upon this any longer,
the principle here to be remembered is, that as we cannot see thought or
feeling, we can only try to find out pictures, symbols, or analogies for
it; and, to meet this want, God has constructed this wondrous material
world in which He has placed us replete with resemblances and types of the
inner world of thought. All nature is to the soul a vocabulary of symbols,
a ready-prepared repository of signs by which it may tell forth its inward
consciousness to others. The world without is as the shadow of the world
within; and when we want to describe to others what we are thinking and
feeling, it is by borrowing images from the mirror of nature, and so
speaking of inward light and darkness; of mental elation and depression;
of a lofty and exalted, or a base and degraded nature; of inward purity or
foulness; of struggles and conflicts, or rest and stillness of mind; of
ardour and coldness of heart; of conscience soft or hard, acute or
blunted; of inward health or disease, life or death,—in all which, as in
innumerable other instances, we convey to others what is passing within
the breast, by pointing, as it were, to things, objects, actions,
processes in the world without, that serve as symbols, or pictures, or
scenic representations of our inward thoughts.
2. Now, turning to the more
specially religious bearing of this principle, what I have to remark, in
the second place, is, that God ever has taught, and does teach and hold
communication with man, as He does in the sacraments, by symbols. He who
made our nature, and knows its needs, has in all dispensations of religion
conveyed spiritual thought and impression to His creatures by outward
signs and material shadows, types, semblances. Heavenly thought comes down
to man on earthly wings. The ethereal essence of spirituality is contained
and conveyed to us in the alabaster box of materialism, without which it
would evaporate in the empty air. We cannot see heaven, but images and
shadows of heavenly things everywhere surround us, earthly tabernacles
made like unto the pattern shewed upon the mount. We cannot visit the
world of glory, and gaze on its unearthly splendours; but heaven has a
copy in every Christian home, Christ a representative in every church; and
all around us, would we but open our eyes to see them, in our common toils
and duties, our daily work and care, there are reflections, photographs,
vivid symbols of eternal and heavenly truths. And the distinction betwixt
Judaism and Christianity is, not that Judaism had an elaborate symbolic
ritual and Christianity a simple one—for in Christianity the symbolic
ritual is far the more elaborate, vast, comprehensive, minute,—but that,
as I have said, the ritual of the old economy was an artificial
contrivance, whilst in the new and more glorious economy, all the world,
with its scenes and forms and objects, all human life, with its
multifarious relations, its homes and families, its kings and subjects,
its sorrows, joys, sicknesses, its sleep and waking, its festivities and
fastings, its birth and bridal and death, constitute one grand ritual, one
noble temple symbolism for Christian souls. The ritual of Judaism was an
intricate, complex system of religious symbols and exercises mechanically
constructed in order to bring down truth to babes. The idea of God was
embodied in a temple or sacred structure erected for His peculiar
residence; of His holiness, in an awful shrine fenced off from curious
gaze and unhallowed step. The notion of a Divine order pervading human
life was lodged in artificial regulations for food and dress, conventional
distinctions between things clean and unclean, prescriptions and rules for
all the varied relations and exigences of social existence. The
conceptions of sin, guilt, penitence, of atonement, pardon, purity, were
formally forced on the senses, and drilled into minds otherwise incapable
of rising to them, by laws of ceremonial exclusion, priests, costly
sacrifices, sprinklings, lustrations, by victims dying in scenic
representation of the penal desert of sin, or yielding their life's blood
to be offered up on the altar in mimic expression of the self-devotion of
a penitent soul to God. Without these and such like artificial shows and
scenic pictures as aids to thought, spiritual ideas to such a race would
have been unattainable. And just as a feeble mind may be impressed by
stage effect, by the exaggerations and forced sentiments of the mimic
heroes and heroines of a play, whilst it is incapable of perceiving and
being moved by the far more profound pathos, the truer and more tragic
interest of real life, so a race of men of feeble spiritual intelligence
might be taught and impressed by the stage effect of the Jewish
ceremonial, who could not have comprehended the far deeper and truer
symbolism of nature and Providence and the daily life of man.
But this last is the true
Christian symbolism— the large, free, and natural ritualism of our
spiritual manhood. God has not now in any one land on earth a special
fabric set apart for the scenic teaching of religious ideas by shrines,
and altars, and mystic lamps, and lavers, and gorgeous vestments, and
solemn postures and processions; but this is only because in all lands on
earth, by the broad, natural, spontaneous actions and institutions of
life, religious ideas are pictured in a nobler and universal symbolism.
Every Christian home, for instance, is a temple in which, by the
institution of family life, God is helping us to rise to spiritual
thoughts and ideas, giving us types and pictures of Divine and heavenly
things. Not by a local dwelling in a material temple does He teach us the
relation and nearness of God to man; but in every earthly home, and by
every earthly parent, does He typify His own fatherhood. Every wise and
loving father is to his own home a type, a symbol of God. When Christ
spoke of God as a Father, when He told His disciples, "I go to my Father
and your Father;" when He declares, ''The Father loveth you;" when it is
written, ''We have had fathers of our flesh, and we gave them reverence;
shall we not much rather be in subjection to the Father of our spirits,
and live?" or again, ''I will be a Father unto you, and ye shall be my
sons and daughters, saith the Lord Almighty;" when in these and many other
passages we find the one prominent representation of God's relation to man
in the New Testament to be that of "a father," what notion of God is thus
intended to be conveyed to our minds ? It is simply this, that in no
abstract or general terms could the relation in which Cod stands to man be
described; that we cannot rise to this high conception without a picture
or symbol; but that no arbitrary or artificial symbol, no far-drawn shrine
or mystic light gleaming from a holy of holies, can teach it half so well
as that living portrait which every home contains. For here the ideas of
God's oneness of nature with this soul within my breast, of my being as
emanating from and supported by Him, of a profound and inalienable
connexion of tenderest love, and interest, and guardian care on His part,
and of mingled reverence, affection, trust, dependence, submission on
mine,— here in every domestic circle all these ideas are grouped around
the one universal relation of parent and child. That is the likest thing
to God on earth—that the nobler than temple type or symbol by which He
would help us to conceive of Him, to know Him, and in reverential
affection to approach Him. So if we would have a visible, earthly symbol
of that unfathomable tenderness, that protecting fondness, that
self-devoted, self-sacrificing love which Christ bears to His own, then
within every domestic circle where the light of love is burning, there is,
as over the altar of the household, ever displayed to eye and
contemplation, a picture, a living, breathing, acting representation of
that love. For is it not written, ''Christ is the head of the Church, as
the husband of the wife;" "A man shall leave his father and mother, and
shall cleave unto his wife;" "This is a great mystery; but I speak
concerning Christ and his Church?" And again, of the everlasting union of
the glorified with their Lord—"Come, and I will shew thee the Bride, the
Lamb's wife;" "Let us be glad, and rejoice; for the marriage of the Lamb
is come, and His wife hath made herself ready?" And, to name no other
example of this New Testament symbolism, all nature and life have been
constructed by God so as to furnish manifold types and symbols of that
great waking to immortality, that passage from death to life, that awaits
every redeemed soul. The eye of Christian reverence may behold divinely -
arranged pictures of Christian doctrine in "the seed that is not quickened
in the earth until it die;" in the resurrection of nature, each returning
spring from the winter grave; in the morning freshness with which, from
the unconsciousness and stillness of night, the sleeper wakes with
reinvigorated energies for the work of life. Therefore, if we have no
elaborate temple services, no conventional altars, and priests, and
pompous ceremonial, it is not because all outward sensible teaching, all
visible embodiment of religion has been swept away, but it is rather
because, in the light of Christian knowledge, we are permitted to see the
whole world transformed into one grand temple, hung round with pictures of
God and heavenly things; it is because ever as we sleep or wake, as we sit
within our homes or go forth to the throng and thoroughfare of life, the
temple scenes and the temple services are going on around us; we breathe
its incense in the living air; its mystic lights fall on us from the
noontide sun and from the stars of night; our common work is transformed
into its worship, and our domestic and social life into its holy
sacramental rites. |
