Volume 2 / Part 4 — Chapter XX. The Holy Ghost.

A Hanover relic—Mr. Atkinson on the Dove—The Dove in the Old Testament—Ecclesiastical symbol—Judicial symbol—A vision of St. Dunstan’s—The witness of chastity—Dove and Serpent—The unpardonable sin—Inexpiable sin among the Jews—Destructive power of Jehovah—Potency of the breath—Third persons of Trinities—Pentecost—Christian superstitions—Mr. Moody on the sin against the Holy Ghost—Mysterious fear—Idols of the cave.

There is in the old town of Hanover, in Germany, a schoolhouse in which, above the teacher’s chair, there was anciently the representation of a dove perched upon an iron branch or rod; and beneath the inscription—‘This shall lead you into all truth.’ In the course of time the dove fell down and was removed to the museum; but there is still left before the children the rod, with the admonition that it will lead them into all truth. This is about as much as for a long time was left in the average christian mind of the symbolical Dove, the Holy Ghost. Half of its primitive sense departed, and there remained only an emblem of mysterious terror. More spiritual minds have introduced into the modern world a conception of the Holy Ghost as a life-giving influence or a spirit of love, but the ancient view which regarded it as the Iron Rod of judgment and execution still survives in the notion of the ‘sin against the Holy Ghost.’

It would require a volume to explain fully all the problems suggested in this brief note, but the more important facts may be condensed.

The far-seeing and wonderful character of the pigeon as a carrier was well known to the ancients. On Egyptian bas-reliefs priests are shown sending them with messages. They appear in the branches of the oaks of Dodona, and in old Russian frescoes they sometimes perch on the Tree of Knowledge in paradise. It is said that, in order to avail himself of this universal symbolism, Mohammed trained a dove to perch on his shoulder. As the raven was said to whisper secrets to Odin, so the dove was often pictured at the ear of God. In Nôtre Dame de Chartres, its beak is at the ear of Pope Gregory the Great.

It passed—and did not have far to go—to be the familiar of kings. It brought the chrism from heaven at the baptism of Clovis. White doves came to bear the soul of Louis of Thuringia to heaven. The dove surmounted the sceptre of Charlemagne. At the consecration of the kings of France, after the ceremony of unction, white doves were let loose in the church. At the consecration of a monarch in England, a duke bears before the sovereign the sceptre with the dove.

M. Didron finds this confirmed in the legends of every country, and especially refers to a story of St. Dunstan, Archbishop of Canterbury, in the tenth century. Three men, convicted of coining false money, had been condemned to death. Immediately before the celebration of mass on the day of Pentecost, the festival of the Holy Ghost, St. Dunstan inquired whether justice had been done upon the three criminals: he was informed in reply that the execution had been delayed on account of the solemn feast of Pentecost then in celebration. ‘It shall not be thus,’ cried the indignant archbishop, and gave orders for the immediate execution of the guilty men. Several of those who were present remonstrated against the cruelty of that order; it was nevertheless obeyed.

In this history of the symbolism of the Dove the theological development of the Holy Ghost has been outlined. We have seen in the previous chapter that the Holy Spirit is in opposition to the Natural Air,—repository of evils. The Dove symbolised this aspect of it in hovering over the world emerging from its diluvial baptism, and also over the typical new Adam (Jesus) coming from his baptism. But in this it corresponds with the serpent-symbol of life in Egyptian mythology brooding over the primal mundane egg (as in Fig. 23, vol. i.). Nathaniel Hawthorne found a mystical meaning in the beautiful group at Rome representing a girl pressing a dove to her bosom while she is attacked by a serpent. But in their theological aspects the Dove and the Serpent blend; they are at once related and separated in Christ’s words, ‘Be ye wise as serpents and harmless as doves;’ but in the office of the Holy Ghost as representing a divine Intelligence, and its consequent evolution as executor of divine judgments, it fulfils in Christendom much the same part as the Serpent in the more primitive mythologies.

In fact, they needed no explanation: it was an old story; the unpardonable sin was a familiar feature of ancient Jewish law. Therein the sin excluded from expiation was any presumptuous language or action against Jehovah. It is easy to see why this was so. Real offences, crimes against man or society, were certain of punishment, through the common interest and need. But the honour and interests of Jehovah, not being obvious or founded in nature, required special and severe statutes. The less a thing is protected by its intrinsic and practical importance, the more it must, if at all, be artificially protected. This is illustrated in the story of Eli and his two sons. These youths were guilty of the grossest immoralities, but not a word was said against them, they being sons of the High Priest, except a mild remonstrance from Eli himself. But when on an occasion these youths tasted the part of the sacrificial meat offered to Jehovah, the divine wrath was kindled. Eli, much more terrified at this ceremonial than the moral offence, said to his sons, ‘If one man sin against another, the judge shall judge him, but if a man sin against Jehovah, who shall entreat for him?’ In protecting his interests, Jehovah’s destroying angel does not allude to any other offence of Eli’s sons except that against himself. But when the priestly guardians of the divine interests came with their people under the control of successive Gallios,—aliens who cared not for their ceremonial law, and declined to permit the infliction of its penalties, as England now forbids suttee in India,—the priests could only pass sentences; execution of them had to be adjourned to a future world.

The doctrine of a future state of rewards and punishments is not one which a priesthood would naturally prefer or invent. So long as a priesthood possesses the power of life and death over the human body, they would not, by suggesting future awards, risk the possibility of a heresy arising to maintain Deorum injuria diis cura. But where an alien jurisdiction has relegated to local deities the defence of their own majesty, there must grow up the theory that such offences as cannot be expiated on earth are unpardonable, and must, because of the legal impunity with which they can be committed, be all the more terribly avenged somewhere else.

In one of his sermons Mr. Moody said, ‘Nearly every day we have somebody coming into the inquiry-room very much discouraged and disheartened and cast down, because they think they have committed a sin against the Holy Ghost, and that there is no hope for them.’ Mr. Moody said he believed the sin was nearly impossible, but he adds this remarkable statement, ‘I don’t remember of ever hearing a man swear by the Holy Ghost except once, and then I looked upon him expecting him to fall dead, and my blood ran cold when I heard him.’ But it is almost as rare to hear prayers addressed to the Holy Ghost; and both phenomena—for praying and swearing are radically related—are no doubt survivals of the ancient notions which I have described. The forces of nature out of which the symbol grew, the life that springs from death and grows by decay, is essentially repeated again by those who adhere to the letter that kills, and also by those who ascend with the spirit that makes alive. It is probable that no more terrible form of the belief in a Devil survives than this Holy Ghost Dogma, which, lurking in vagueness and mystery, like the serpent of which it was born, passes by the self-righteous to cast its shadows over the most sensitive and lowly minds, chiefly those of pure women prone to exaggerate their least blemishes.

In right reason the fatal Holy Ghost stands as the type of that Fear by which priesthoods have been able to preserve their institutions after the deities around whom they grew had become unpresentable, and which could best be fostered beneath the veil of mystery. They who love darkness rather than light because their deeds cannot bear the light, veil their gods not to abolish them but to preserve them. Calvinism is veiled, and Athanasianism, and Romanism; they are all veiled idols, whose power lives by being hid in a mass of philology and casuistry. So long as Christianity can persuade the Pope and Dr. Martineau, Dean Stanley and Mr. Moody, Quakers, Shakers, Jumpers, all to describe themselves alike as ‘Christians,’ its real nature will be veiled, its institutions will cumber the ground, and draw away the strength and intellect due to humanity; the indefinable ‘infidel’ will be a devil. This process has been going on for a long time. The serpent-god, accursed by the human mind which grew superior to it, has crept into its Ark; but its fang and venom linger with that Bishop breathing on a priest, the priest breathing on a sick child, and bears down side by side with science that atmosphere of mystery in which creep all the old reptiles that throttle common sense and send their virus through all the social frame.

In demonology the Holy Ghost is not a Devil, but in it are reflected the diabolisation of Culture and Progress and Art. It was these ‘Devils’ which compelled the gods to veil themselves through successive ages, and to spiritualise their idols and dogmas to save their institutions. The deities concealed have proved far more potent over the popular imagination than when visible. The indefinable terrible menace of the Holy Ghost was a consummate reply to that equally indefinable spirit of loathing and contempt which rises among the cultured and refined towards things that have become unreal, their formalities and their cant. It is this ever-recurring necessity that enables clergymen to denounce belief in Hell and a Devil in churches which assuredly would never have been built but for the superstition so denounced. The ancient beliefs and the present denunciation of them are on the same thread,—the determination of a Church to survive and hold its power at any and every cost. The jesuitical power to veil the dogma is the most successful method of confronting the Spirit of an Age, which in the eye of reason is the only holy spirit, but which to ecclesiastical power struggling with enlightenment is the only formidable Satan.