Note 198.1 — CHRISTIANITY.

The distinct proof of what we have here stated will be found everywhere in the New Testament, but in the Acts of the Apostles specially rather than in the Gospels. For the ideal of Christian character we refer naturally to the Sermon on the Mount and to the character of our Lord as exhibited in the evangelic narrative; but for the manner in which Christianity was presented to men, for the method of operation by which in so short a time it so wonderfully overcame the stern ritualism of the Jew and the fair sensualism of the Greek, we must look to the actual facts of the great early conversions as they are presented to us in the apostolic memoirs of Luke. Let us see therefore, in the first place, what we can learn from the early chapters of that most interesting narrative. Now, the starting-point here plainly is the effusion of the Holy Ghost, an influence which, whether we take it on this first occasion as miraculous, according to the traditional understanding of the Church, or as something extraordinary but in the course of nature, is a phenomenon altogether different in kind from the action of arguments upon the ratiocinative faculty of the mind, and had indeed been preceded not by inductions or deductions, or analytic dissections, or any scholastic exercitations at all, but by meetings for social prayer (i. 14)—prayer which is the great feeder of the moral nature of man when reverting to the original source of all moral life in the form of religion. It was therefore not in the philosophic way of debate and discussion, but in the religious way of inspiration that the regenerative afflatus of the first Christian Ethics came upon the Jewish and Hellenic world; and it worked, let us say, by a fervid moral contagion, not by the suasion of cool argument. And there can be no doubt, that if even in the intellectual world a wise ancient might justly say, Nemo vir magnus sine aliquo afflatu divino unquam fuit, much more in the world of moral and political action it is by the infection of noble passions that men are moved to any grand issues, not by the cogency of strong arguments. Melanchthon was as good a reasoner as Martin Luther, perhaps a better, but he had not the volcanic fire of his fellow; and it was an eruption of this fire only that could prevail to shake the stout pillars of the Popedom. And it was by an influence manifestly quite akin to the impetuous energetic eloquence of the great Saxon reformer, that by the first sermon of the Apostle Peter, as we read, great masses of men were suddenly pricked in their hearts, conscience-stung as we phrase it, and in one day three thousand human beings, previously indifferent or hostile, were added to the new moral community afterwards called the Christian Church. Precisely similar in modern times has been the action of the so-called religious revivals, which, from the days of the Methodists downwards, have done so much in this country to rouse from a state of moral lethargy the most neglected and the most abandoned portions of the community. Of Martin Boos, the celebrated Bavarian evangelist, we are told that his “sermon was as if he poured forth flame;”[198.1] and not less striking were the moral effects of the eloquent Whitefield when he drew the tears in white gutters down the grimy cheeks of the congregated Bristol colliers, and, what is even more significant of his power, in Savannah elicited from the prudential pockets of sage Benjamin Franklin, sitting before the preacher with a stiff determination not to contribute, first a handful of coppers, then three or four silver dollars, and then five golden pistoles![198.2] Preachings of this kind have been the subject of scoffing with light-witted persons in all ages; but they stand firm as grave attestations of the fact that the Christian method of conversion, not by logical arguments, but by moral contagion and the effusion of the Holy Ghost, has, with the masses of mankind, always proved itself the most effective. Socrates did much more perhaps as a reformer of sinners than any preacher in the guise of a philosopher ever did; but he could not have done what Whitefield did with the colliers. The arguments of Socrates convinced the few; but the fervour of Peter, the loftiness of his religious position, and the felt firmness of his historical foundation converted the many.