Volume 5 — Mercersburg Philosophy. By A. Protestant.

[As allusion having been made in the article on Dr. Bacon, which appeared in our April number, "to the German Reformed Presbyterians and Dr. Nevin," has called forth the following communication. We publish it as interesting to our readers who will bear in mind in its perusal that it is from a Protestant source, and while making, therefore, an allowance for some of its statements, will at the same time be not a little surprised that one who sees so much Catholic truth should fail to identify what he sees with the Catholic Church.—Ed. C. W.]

From the mountain village of Mercersburg in Pennsylvania emanated a philosophy—theology we, who are its prophets and adherents, call it—which has done much, and is destined to do more, to unprotestantize Protestantism. Nor do we, who are Protestants, regret this. The longer we ponder our work the more are we convinced of its utility, and confirmed in our resolution to pursue it. Well aware, as we are, that the Reformation has proved a failure, except it be as a preparation for a higher form of Christianity to follow nearer the old landmarks, and free from the democratic tendencies that have crept into the Protestant Church from the institutions of the state, or which, perhaps, more properly have moulded the institutions of the state themselves as the natural outgrowth of the system taught by Luther and Calvin, we cannot but rejoice that this is so. Our people have a natural desire to worship, instead of being compelled to give an intellectual assent to arguments on points of doctrine, and the teachers of the Mercersburg philosophy are determined to gratify them.

We see clearly, what many others have failed to see, that New England Unitarianism, and after it infidelity, to which it leads, are not only the logical but the actual consequences of Protestantism. But we believe in historical development; and as this is development in the wrong direction, we see nothing before us but to profit by the lesson and retrace our steps. We know that a cult which rejects the Christ and elevates the Jesus will soon degrade the Jesus too, and that, following an attempt to attain to merely human excellence, will be a society distorted by the vices of vanity, avarice, and selfishness, and then a gradual obliteration of all the virtues. Men are beginning to see, dimly enough, that this age is a transition period in the world's history, when all our conceptions of truth, that is, Protestant conceptions of truth, are unsettled and passing through crucible, as it were, to come out in new and untried forms. But they do not understand the law of transition periods, and, while they acknowledge that the last great transition was the Reformation, they fail to perceive that the theories embraced at that time have failed. A certain feeling of disappointment at the work sectarianism has wrought sometimes oppresses them, but, instead of attempting to bridge over the chasm, they endeavor to tear away the broken arches which remain.

Everybody can see that Protestantism had a grand start during the first thirty years of its existence. That Rome would soon give its last convulsive gasp seemed patent to the eyes of all reformers; but now, after three hundred years of Protestant endeavor, a leading Protestant clergyman of New York is constrained to say that "Protestant Christendom betrays signs of weakness in every part," and to declare, and rejoice in the declaration, that "Modern life is not 'Christian' in any intelligible sense. The industrial interest is openly averse to it both at home and abroad. Political life is, if possible, still more unchristian." But continues the same authority: "If industry, politics, literature, art, have abandoned Christ, they have as fully and unreservedly embraced Jesus." Now this is either sheer nonsense or it is downright infidelity. About the premises there can be no doubt. It is but a small part of the so-called Christian church that looks to Christ as the central fact of the system—the super-natural agency working through the church for the salvation of men. But the broad churchmen, when they have as fully and unreservedly embraced what they understand by Jesus as they now believe they have, will discover that the "touching devotion to the cause of humanity," about which they talk so eloquently, will develop itself into pure selfishness, and the rapacity of Wall street and the heartlessness of Madison square will extend their ramifications through every order of society.

Seeing that ostentatious wealth is about to be at a premium, and unobtrusive piety at a discount, we, who believe in the Mercersburg philosophy, are endeavoring to interpose our hands to stay the sweeping tide.

I hope I have now laid the grounds with the readers of THE CATHOLIC WORLD for an enunciation of what we believe and teach.

The cardinal principle of the system we inculcate is the incarnation, viewed not as a mere speculative fact, but as a real transaction of God in the world. Thus, our belief is peculiarly christological in its character, all things being looked at through the person of the crucified and risen Saviour. The church which he founded is an object of faith—a new creation in the natural world working through the body of Christ and mediating super-naturally between him and his people. Its ministers hold a divine commission from him by apostolical succession. Its sacraments are not mere signs, but seals of the grace they represent. Baptism is for the remission of sins. The Eucharist includes the mystical presence of Christ by the power of the Holy Ghost; that is, the real presence in a mystery. With these dogmas we started, contending that we had all the attributes that were ascribed to the church in the beginning—unity, sanctity, catholicity, and apostolicity.

It is now many years since the work was started—as many, indeed, as were required for the Reformation in Europe to reach the acme of its success. Since then a growing culture and enlarged views of doctrine and of worship have seemed to require an enlargement of the range within which the movement was originally intended to be confined, and beyond which we did not conceive of its expansion. The time has been spent in educating the backward up to the starting-point, and in preparing a better form of worship for them when they are sufficiently advanced to receive it. The movement commenced at Marshall College. "Old Marshall," which started as a high school for boys and was soon after endowed, though sparingly, as a college, has since been merged with another with more money, but without the prestige, and, alas! without the true spirit of the philosophy of the mountain college. In the same village with this institution is the theological seminary of a church, respectable for numbers and influence, though without fashionable appointments or pretensions to popular favor, which still retains the true ring of the old metal. Some time after its foundation, it came to be presided over by a man of rare genius as a theological writer and thinker, who was also president of the college. Profound in his conceptions of truth and logical in his reasoning, be possessed an unbounded influence over those who came under his instructions, and but few young men have sat at the feet of this Gamaliel without going away fully indoctrinated with his peculiar opinions, and zealous standard-bearers in carrying forward the work which he had begun.

Many prejudices had to be encountered and overcome in carrying forward this work. Bigotry and prejudice are barriers against which reason and religion strike in vain. Many who placed their hands to the plough turned back in the furrow. Opposition made the seed strike deeper root, and in the very slowness of the work is an earnest of its ultimate triumph. It may take us us nearer to Rome than we contemplate just now; it may bring Rome nearer to us than she at present desires. Come what will of it, it is plain sailing to us, although we cannot see land on either horizon. Nor do we see such cause for terror in the "horrors and superstitions of popery" which many men believe constantly lurks there. It seems to us that what men call Romanism may not be such a bad thing after all. We know it has done much good. A church that was a power in the days of the old Roman empire, and could not be overwhelmed by the tide of barbarism that overturned the power of the Caesars, but could finally roll back that tide of darkness, preserving Christianity through ages which have not left a vestige of the universal wreck behind, has certainly claims upon our profoundest gratitude and most reverential awe. To us, it would seem strange, indeed, that the vehicle for the preservation of Christianity through ages when civilization was blotted out, and which did preserve not only its essence but its form, should be the mystical Babylon and the man of sin.

Were this, indeed, so, we know in what desperate straits we would be placed. The form of the primitive church is generally flippantly declared by Protestants to have been nearer the system of New England than old England; and the Roman hierarchy is regarded as a long distance from either, which it certainly is. It is easy to assume that in the earlier ages of the church there was no papacy, no priesthood, no liturgy, no belief in a supernatural virtue in baptism, nor of the real presence in the sacrament, and that everything was quite in accordance with modern ideas of private judgment, popular freedom, and common sense; but it is not so easy to prove it, nor indeed is it desirable even for Protestants that it should be proved. The Reformation has always been understood to have been the historical product of the church itself; but if these assumptions were well founded, the church out of whose bosom the Reformation sprang would be no church at all, and the Reformation no reformation, but only a revolution. Thus, indeed, Christianity would be the theory of a philosopher, but not the life of a Christian.

The work we have been doing is different from Puseyism even in its spirit. The simplicity of Keble and the earnestness and power of Newman, in the days of their early zeal when these two wrought together, is nearer to what we intend if different from what we have accomplished or may yet accomplish. We thank the Roman Catholic Church for its Christian year, its symbols of faith, its traditions of battle and of conquest, its early martyrology, and its unceasing and undying purpose. Nor do we conceal that there are some things in the Roman Catholic Church to which we object. These are rather historical defects than present imperfections, and we see as much in our own history to regret and to condemn.

I well remember the unpretending little church in which it was my privilege to worship in a country town of Pennsylvania. The Episcopalians had no foothold there, and the Presbyterians consequently, combining together at once the imperiousness and the exclusiveness for which they have ever been distinguished, pretended to monopolize the fashion and the piety, the society and the religion, of the village. They, of course, contemned us, and opened wide their doors for our disorganizers, who were crying out against innovation when we were seeking to make our church a place of worship, instead of a bazaar for the display of fine clothing and false curls. The Methodists, living only the false life of a sickly sentimentality, and the Lutherans degraded even from the doctrines and practices Luther taught in his fiery zeal, were absorbed in their childish schemes of marrying and giving in marriage, engaged in special efforts at reform by revivals and meetings of religious inquiry, and busied in raising subscriptions for objects like Mrs. Jellaby's mission at Borrioboola-Gha or Sunday-school libraries which would not be sectarian, had little time to think of us after they received their quietus in the "anxious bench" controversy of 1843. There were, indeed, many solemn conclaves over our affairs by gossips who neither understood nor wished to understand the work we were doing, and half in fear that we should be lost for too much reverence for mother church, and half in joy at the prospect of a few proselytes, everybody affected to commiserate us. But these, though often working mischief among our "weaker vessels," were not seriously opposed by us. Our purpose was steadily kept in view, notwithstanding.

It was by preaching principally that we hoped to accomplish our task, and, after the stubborn fallow of an unworked field had been broken, to recur gradually to the forms of the church. But the furrows, we felt, would be an empty mockery without the teachings that give them force. To inculcate truth was then our first duty. This was often done by the more earnest and intelligent of our clergy, by following up the seasons of the Christian calendar and deriving lessons from each. Incidentally was urged, with more or less boldness according to the courage and temper of the man whose duty it was to enforce them, doctrines which for many years sounded strangely to Protestant ears. Among these, besides those already noticed in this paper, I may instance, as an example least expected by Catholics to be urged anywhere outside of mother church itself, the dogma of the Immaculate Conception. Starting with the proposition that that which is holy cannot be born of that which is unclean and sinful, I have time and again heard this theme urged upon his people with force and fervor by an earnest and fervent pastor. Not with equal boldness, perhaps, but with no less sincerity and fervor have I heard him urge the ministrations of the Virgin. Often in declaring these doctrines he would enforce a proposition by putting it in the form of a question, and one of these, I believe, I shall continue to hear ringing in my ears while the words of men remain intelligible to me: Why should we not reverence the mother of our Lord?

These things may be news to Catholics, and may be news even to many in whose ears they have been thundered for a quarter of a century. The latter hear without understanding, but the words will be re-echoed in their hearing until they are not terms without meaning. The Mercersburg philosophy is the antagonism in thought and in its social aspects of New England transcendentalism and Plymouth Rock conventionalisms, and receives no favor, and merits none, from a people among whom Dr. Holmes's Elsie Venner is an exponent of the life and practice of the present, as Cotton Mather's Wonders of the Invisible World was of past generations. And Pennsylvania, where this philosophy has its stronghold, being unlike New England, of which Dr. Mather said, "Being a country whose interests are remarkably inwrapped in ecclesiastical circumstances, ministers ought to concern themselves in politics," the body of the people who compose the German Reformed Church, and who look back to the Heidelberg Catechism as their earliest enunciation of faith, and the Mercersberg theology as their latest development of truth, have never felt the need of political preaching. A simple motto includes all their aspirations, their hopes, and their fears, their preaching, their practice, and their eternal reward—CHRIST CRUCIFIED.