Note 213.1 — CHRISTIANITY.

There is one marked peculiarity about Christian Ethics, growing directly out of a religious root, and closely connected with certain theological doctrines, which, though indicated in some of the previous paragraphs, demands special mention here. We mean what Dr. Chalmers called its aggressive attitude. The idea of Duty is not necessarily aggressive; a man may perform his duty quietly, as the spheres move in their orbits, without daring, or even desiring, to meddle with the movements of other members of the great social machine. Even Christian Churches in quiet and flat times, as the last century for instance, have been known to content themselves with the unobtrusive performance of a certain round of familiar pieties, undisturbed by any desire to make moral inroads into the domain of remote or even adjacent heathenism. But this is certainly not the normal or flourishing state of any Christian Church; not the natural state indeed of any sect or society, whether religious or philosophical, professing to possess a healing medicine for the cure of diseased souls. We accordingly found in the first discourse that Socrates was in his attitude, however pleasant and playful on the surface, at bottom very earnestly aggressive; it was this aggressiveness, in fact, that raised up against him the hostility of those spiteful little individuals to whom more than to popular ill-will he owed his martyr-death. He asserted, as we have seen, a divine mission, and acted as a missionary, though always in the manner of a reasoner rather than as a preacher. But the aggressive element in early Christianity was much stronger than in Socrates; as any one may see at a glance by comparing the biographical career of St. Paul with that of the Athenian philosopher. And the causes of this were more than one. In the first place, the whole Hebrew nature was more fervid, more impassioned, more prophetic than the Hellenic; and again, the autocratic character which belongs to all monotheism, imparted to the moral message of the missionaries an urgency and a lofty intolerance, which in an atmosphere compounded of polytheism in its lower sphere and of logic in its upper sphere was impossible. A divine command superadded to fervid human sympathies necessarily creates a mission in the person who is the subject of them; but the divine command is much more stringent from an autocratic Jehovah than from a limited monarch like Jove, and the fervour of human sympathy is more intense in proportion as the offence of the rebels against the sovereign authority is looked upon as more heinous. We are brought back therefore again to the great doctrine of the Divine Unity, if we would make it fully evident to ourselves why St. Paul was so much more aggressive than Socrates: Socrates was only partly a missionary, and the messenger of a god whose authority was limited by an inferior but acknowledged authority in other gods; St. Paul was a missionary of the one true God, to whose authority there could be no limit, and to whose command there could be no contradiction. From this principle of divine autocracy there necessarily grew up the conception of sin, not as folly merely and imperfection, but as contumacy, rebellion, and treason; and the conviction of the exceeding sinfulness of sin and the exceeding misery of the sinner became the strongest spur to the missionary activity of the Christian preachers, and gave a true moral sublimity to an aggressive attitude, which in a mere reasoner had appeared impertinent. Nothing indeed is more remarkable than the contrast between the strong colours in which sin is painted by the writers of the New Testament and its more venial aspect in the mild regard of the philosopher. Aristotle can surrender a whole generation of young men to the dominion of πάθος and think nothing more about it. They are as incapable of moral ideas, these young sensualists, as swine are of cleanliness; let them wallow in the mire for a season; we shall speak to them, when they have outgrown their animalism. But the converted Pharisee who wrote his burning epistles to the young Christian churches in magnificent Rome and luxurious Ephesus used very different language. Sin with him is a very serious offence, on account of which the curse of God lies on the whole world. Sinners, whether old or young, are by nature the children of wrath; and by the act and fact of the transgression of divine law, so utterly cast down and degraded from the proper human dignity, that they require to be born again, and baptized with a fire-baptism before they can be purified from their foulness and restored to the original rights and privileges which belonged to them, as to all men, in right of their divine fatherhood. Hence the strongly accentuated opposition between flesh and spirit (Romans vii. viii.; 1 Pet. iv. 3, 4) which no doubt Aristotle, as we have seen above, also mentions; but in the Stagirite it is only an incidental recognition; in the New Testament it is a pervading and overwhelming power, a force which possesses the atmosphere, a moral storm, which, swooping violently down from the dark-throned seat of the Supreme Regent, tears the cloak of self-righteousness from the shivering sinner, and exposes him in all his bareness. Plato also and Plotinus use very Christian language when they tell us that to be partakers of true moral beauty the soul requires a κάθαρσις or purification from its natural or acquired foulness, and that the necessity of this purification was symbolically indicated in the mysteries.[213.1] Very true; but here again Plato wrote calmly for the few, Paul preached fervidly for the many. And this word purification, as connected with the Christian idea of the exceeding sinfulness of sin, and the necessity of an ingrafting of a higher moral life by the operation of the Divine Spirit, leads me necessarily to specialize the doctrine of the Atonement as performing a peculiar function in the ethical attitude and moral efficiency of the gospel. The doctrine of the Atonement arises as the necessary consequence of the Christian conception of sin as a polluting, perverting, rebellious, and treasonable principle. An error is reasoned away, but filth must be washed away; guilt must be atoned; the offender must pray for forgiveness; and the free grace of the Sovereign must restore the traitor to the place and the protection which belong to him as a loyal subject. Put into a strictly articulate form, this doctrine of atonement, not less than its correlative the exceeding sinfulness of sin, especially when pushed to its extreme of logical consistency by the so-called federal theologians, is apt to give, and has always given, more or less just cause of offence to speculative minds; but in that broad practical aspect in which it was originally presented to the world, before men began to turn a fervid faith into a curious theology, there can be no doubt that it operated most beneficially in intensifying that hatred of sin which is the mother of all holiness, and in enabling many a guilt-laden soul to start on the career of a regenerate life with a comfortable lightness and an unfettered speed, which from no other source could have flowed so readily.