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There is danger lest you
should. If, in the times of the apostles—in the very childhood of
Christianity—the tares sown by the enemy were so rank in their luxuriant
growth, that there were some who denied the Divinity of Christ, and some
who allied impurity to devotion, and some who rejoiced in imagined release
from all obligation to personal obedience, surely the peril is not less
imminent now, when almost every man deems himself inspired, and has some
formative theory of his own. When we consider the close and indissoluble
connexion between faith and practice, and how a man's life is of necessity
shaped and moulded by his sentiments, we cannot look upon it as a thing
indifferent that he should have an orthodox creed. We cannot forget that
the Moslem enters upon fierce wars of extermination; and the Japanese,
amid barbarous rites, holds festival to spurn the cross; and the Thug
strangles on principle, and finds his merit in the multiplication of his
murders; and the Hindoo, personally merciful, defends infanticide, and
mourns that widows are no longer burnt nor victims immolated, as over some
lost privilege —all because of their opinions ; and that, even where the
sentiments have no direct, causal influence upon the practice, they are
collaterally and always influential, leavening the nature and evolving the
tone of the entire man. We cannot, therefore, regard it as a trifling
matter to "err from the truth," by a departure from "the faith once
delivered to the saints." By many in the present day this will be thought
a scrupulous and old-world fear, altogether inconsistent with the breadth
and liberality of the present times. There are those even among the
teachers of religion who denounce creeds and denominations almost as
vehemently as infidelity and sin; and who seem to think it their special
mission to pull down, not only the "middle walls of partition," but the
ancient landmarks which guard the poor man's heritage. If, by the idolatry
of creed, which they denounce, they mean a blind and traditional adhesion
to a system of unfelt truth—a thing of rubrics and genuflexions—something
which heats the fierce feelings of the partisan, but which clasps not the
truth in its affections, as the tendril clasps the tree; if, by
denominationalism, they mean the churlish narrowness, which, in a time of
drought, vaunts selfishly of its own wringing fleece, and can see no good
or blessing beyond the curtains of its own tent—then have at them, brave
iconoclasts!—and, as things which ought to pass away, and which are
unworthy of the Christianity which they disfigure, root them out of our
Churches, if you can. But if creeds be, as they ought to be, but
expressions of an inner life, "forms of sound words," draping the living
truth; and if denominations, careful to preserve that charity which is the
"bond of perfectness," are but, as they ought to be, towers of strength
for combined resistance and aggression—then, in proportion as we value our
Christianity, these, its expressions and habitations, will be regarded and
sustained. We are jealous of that pantheistic benevolence to which all
religions are of equal esteem, and which renders its sentimental
adoration, whether the deity be libertine or holy, whether the altar be
crowned with flowers, or red with the dripping blood. The man who
professes universal love without some central affection, has a selfish
heart within him. The large charities of our land—the tireless compassions
which are swift in the relief of suffering—the beneficence, which, in its
abandonment to generosity, would almost "coin its heart, and drop its
blood for drachmas," —whence do they spring? Who are the men who sustain
them? Not the loungers at the cafe or the club, to whom life is an endless
migration, an eccentric orbit, a perpetual quarantine, — their affections
are too diffuse and frittered for such practical action. No; but the men
of local ties, and central attractions, and happy homes, who have learned,
from the preciousness of their own family treasures, the worth of such
blessings to the world ; and, from their own agonising anxiety in some
crisis of trouble, to sympathise with the homeless and the desolate around
them. And so it is in the developments of the religious life. It is
dangerous to loose off from quiet anchorage in matters of belief, and from
the communion of saints in matters of Christian fellowship. "We have seen
men in our own day who have imbued themselves with the sentiment of Pope's
hackneyed and heretical couplet—
"For modes of faith let
graceless zealots fight,
He can't be wrong whose life is in the right."
And, in their new privilege
of fancied intellectual freedom, they have cast from them the restraints
of creed; and they have outgrown the stature of the sects; and they have
gathered round them a company of congenial spirits, as motley and
equivocal as that of David in the cave of Adullam; and for a while they
have leaped and shouted in the intoxication of their liberty. But we have
followed those men in their melancholy progress; and, one by one, they
have shifted from the foundation-truths of Christian faith and hope; and
they have rushed, irreverent, into the holy place; and licence of thought
has induced laxity of life, until, homeless and wild as any Bedouin of the
desert, they have prowled about among the Churches— spiritual
Ishmaels,—"their hands against every man, and every man's hand against
them." It is no light thing to err from the truth; for in the heart of
error there is sin. In this wondrous age —this age of enormous publicity,
and of bold thinking, and of unbounded revelry of speculation —this danger
assails all. Some, it may be, from an old-fashioned honesty of ignorance,
which is unable to comprehend, (here and there one, perhaps, but very,
very few,) some from intellectual pride, some from stubbornness of soul,
but most from sheer love of evil, and hatred of the restraints of
godliness, thus err from the truth. The chief source of infidelity is not
in the head, but in the heart—not that the understanding is bewildered by
the feebleness or lack of evidence, but that the heart "loves darkness
rather than light, because its deeds are evil." Reader, art thou in
danger? Is there one, whose eye is upon this page, on whom a cloud of
doubt has darkened, or who, by the bland and jesuitical suggestions of
some infidel acquaintance, has had his faith in gospel verities unsettled
and shaken? My brother, haste thee to cast out the demon from thy soul.
Crush it, like a serpent, for there is death in its gripe and in its fang.
It behoves us all, in the impending struggle of the times—a struggle, if
we mistake not, fiercer than the world has known—to take care that,
"rooted in the faith," we "hold fast the form of sound words." We do not
ask—the genius of Christianity would rebuke us if we did—your feudal or
traditional submission to its sovereignty. Build not your faith upon
ancestral reverence, nor educational bias, nor customary orthodoxy, nor
upon a minister's unsupported words. Search the Scriptures for yourselves.
Only, take care to come to the investigation stripped of carnal prejudices
and preconceived hostility, with your spirit softened into a docile frame,
and your pride humbled into a willinghood to learn—and, above all, seeking
the guidance from on high in all the fervency of prayer; and the promised
Spirit shall "lead you into all truth;" and you "shall know of the
doctrine, whether it be of God." It is marvellous how much the conversion
of the soul tends to the correctness of the theology, as if the
regenerating grace took the scales from the eyes, as well as the veil from
the heart. We have known a man, whose dwelling was on the shores of a
lovely lake, beneath the shadow of a beetling hill, in one of the most
secluded and beautiful parts of our island-home. The preachers of the
gospel had failed to penetrate among the sparse population, and the man's
only teachers were the heir-loom of an old family Bible, and G6d, as His
own Interpreter. But the Holy Spirit arrested that man under the arching
sky; and, in the shade of the brown woods, he wrestled for pardon, and
obtained it, and walked in the light of God's countenance for years,
before he knew that there were any in the world of like experience,
consciously happy in a Saviour's love. And in the after-time, when the
truth was carried into that pleasant vale, that man—a ready agent in its
spread—was found to have a correct creed, as well as a consistent life. He
had sat at the feet of Jesus. He had heard many "sermons on the mount." In
the woodland aisles of one of nature's many-pillared minsters, the Spirit
had "opened to him the scriptures;" and he had become a disciple of God's
own teaching, filled with those grand and inspiring beliefs, which only
needed arrangement to become a vital and accurate system of theology. Try
this experiment for yourselves. Submit yourselves, in personal surrender,
unto God. Cry penitently for mercy. Embrace the reconciliation of the
great atonement, and the truth will be its own witness. Ascending into a
region sublimer than that of induction, yours shall be the evidence, not
of testimony only, but of consciousness—the satisfying feeling of the
truth, which reason fails to compass; and your triumphant answer to all
cavil and to all compromise will be, in the language of the Book, ''He
that believeth on the Son of God hath the witness in himself." |
