Note 255.1 — CHRISTIANITY.

That which makes the ebullition and overflow of religious zeal so fatal in its effects, is not merely the excess of the zeal itself, which like all excess is bad, but the tendency of all religions to subordinate the moral element which they contain to the religious: to make religion a separate business instead of an ethical instrument; to hang it as an amulet round the neck, not to breathe it as an atmosphere of social health, to nurse it as a sacred fire in the heart, and to feel it as a power which purifies every passion, ennobles every motive, and braces the nerve to the robustness of all manly achievement. If there is one characteristic of Christianity more prominent than another, it is certainly this, that it is essentially an ethical religion; other religions favour certain virtues, or give a certain sanction to all virtues, but Christianity is morality; the moral regeneration is the religion. There are religions which profess to possess a power by which its priests can bring down rain, banish the pestilence, make the devil speak truth, and charm a murderer into heaven. Christianity knows nothing of these tricks. Its ministers supply no passports by which knaves and sluggards, when they escape from the body, may pass the celestial police without question. The Christian religion is not a special training which pious persons are to go through in order to prepare themselves for a future world; it calls upon every man with a loud voice to do the work of God in this world, here where alone work is possible for us; and not until our assigned task has been bravely done here, can there be any question of what promotion may await us there. Had the gospel been intended according to the vulgar prejudice now under consideration, as a religion having an existence apart from the details of everyday morality, John the Baptist certainly would never have been sent as its precursor, nor the Sermon on the Mount been given forth as its manifesto. Neither again does the famous doctrine of St. Paul, that men are saved by faith not by works, in any wise contradict the essentially ethical character of the faith which he preached. The works which in the Epistle to the Romans he so unconditionally denounces, are works either of self-conceit or of sacerdotal imposition, by which persons uninspired by a lofty moral ideal seek to recommend themselves to God. From such a germ no moral good can possibly grow; for as in the realm of speculation the oppressive sense of ignorance is the commencement of true knowledge, so in the practical world, the honest confession of sin is the commencement of sanctification. But how little Christian faith can have any significance apart from works, the same Apostle shows largely in the 11th chapter of the Epistle to the Hebrews, the only part of the New Testament by the way in which a formal definition of faith is given, and a chapter at the same time from whose copious historical illustrations, it is plain to any child that faith is merely a religious synonym for what we in secular language call moral heroism, a heroism peculiarly marked as Christian only by the distinct recognition on the part of the actor that the moral law which he obeys is the accredited will of the Moral Governor whom he serves. Clear as this is, however, there has always been manifested in the Christian church a tendency to separate faith from works, a tendency which, like other aberrations, has sometimes had the hardihood to stilt itself up into the dignity of a dogma, and in this attitude has been known in these latter times under the name of Antinomianism. Of a leaning towards this monstrous doctrine, the Calvinistic churches have been specially accused; and there can be no doubt, that in Scotland and other countries where a Calvinistic creed is professed, notions of this kind will always find an open soil in souls of a certain nature, notions too that will often be practically acted upon even where they are not theoretically professed; but it is historically certain, that of all Christian teachers the great Genevan reformer himself was the least chargeable with any absurdity of this kind. On the contrary, he found himself involved in a serious war with the city to which he ministered, just because he insisted that his religion should be practical, and his faith if it meant anything, should mean good works; and he carried his point too in the end in spite of those who stoutly protested that the stern limitations of gospel law marked out by the preacher, should have nothing practically to do with the broad licence that might be convenient for the libertine and the publican. And indeed, it would be the greatest reform that could be made in the Christian church at the present moment, if our popular preachers were to give us fewer sermons, and when they did preach, take care, like St. Paul in his Epistles, to have some distinct practical point to speak to. For the difficulty of Christian as of all ethics, lies not in the general rules, but in the special application of the rules; and vague condemnations of sin however severe, and commendations of holiness however fervid, will have little effect if people are not to be made to understand distinctly what those phrases so awfully sounded forth on Sunday are meant to signify on Monday. The dignity of the pulpit, I suspect, like the dignity of history, has often made it dull; certain it is, that whether from a false sense of dignity, or from a religious zeal without ethical depth, or from ignorance of those affairs to which ethical maxims must be applied, or from fear to offend those whose support is thought necessary, the ministrations of the Christian pulpit lose not a little of their efficiency from dealing more in the generalities of sin and holiness, than in special vices and virtues, and from yielding to the easy temptation of expatiating on scholastic subtleties or ecclesiastical crotchets, instead of unravelling the perplexities of social practice, or unmasking the disguises of individual character. Many things are left to be handled lightly by the novel-writer, which with much more effect might have been handled seriously in the pulpit; and in fact, I have found not a few excellent sermons in novels, which I should have sought for in vain in our pulpits; but the misfortune is, that people read novels mainly to be amused, and will see the living portrait of their own follies painted in the firmest lines, and with the most glowing colours, without making the slightest attempt to amend their faults. But of this enough. One thing is certain, that no amount of faith, no amount of preaching, and no amount of prayer, can be taken as a true measure of the genuine Christianity of any country, unless the faith professed shall be found to be permeating every form of social life, and elevating every trait of individual character. To any one who wishes to see what real Christianity can do for a district in the person of a truly evangelic and wise man, I recommend the perusal of the life of the Rev. John Frederick Oberlin, who, in the latter half of the last century, was, during the course of a long life, pastor of the mountain district of the Ban de la Roche in Alsace. This remarkable man was not content with the common ministerial routine of preaching and praying; he saw that in the circumstances in which he was placed, nothing was to be done by mere talk; so with pick-axe in hand he set himself to make roads; he became the forester of his parishioners, and planted trees; their schoolmaster, and built them schools; their architect, and reformed their cottages; their deacon, and taught them trades; their professor, and lectured to them on science; their physician, and taught them to live according to the laws of health. Thus the faith which he professed turned a neglected parish in a few years into a perfect museum of all good works, of which a religion of the purest love was the soul; and the unobtrusive Christian worker, who of this wilderness made a garden, was perhaps the greatest man in France at a time when the thunders of Napoleon were shaking the world from west to east, while his own fame had scarcely travelled beyond the bleatings of the sheep of his own parish. So little has the noisy applause of the world to do with some of the highest forms of Christian virtue.[255.1]