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asserted of Christianity, it is certainly a taunt brought against those who, in modern times, have named themselves Christians, that their religion countenances and embraces a selfish theory of morals; that it aims at rendering a man virtuous by setting behind him Fear, with a picture of Dante's hell, and before him Hope, with a picture of Milton's heaven. With individual cases we have nothing to do, but, as we proceed, the foul imputation will be seen totally to fall away from Christianity.

Whence this torment of self-accusation and alarm, concerning which we have heard so much? It arises, says Christianity, in its strictly personal reference, from a twofold source; from a sense of imperfection, and a consciousness of guilt. This last word is not named by Mr. Carlyle or Fichte; yet surely history, reason, and conscience, authorize us to impute to it a weighty significance. Why is it that in every age man has striven to propitiate his God? What mean those altars whose smoke lies so darkly along human history, the shrieks of those children whom they pass through the fire to Moloch? What specter is that which the human eye has always seen setting a crown on the head of Death, a crown of terrors? Most explicitly and conclusively of all, what is the word which reason utters, when compelled, by its very nature, to seek a cause for this torment, whose existence is granted? Are we not, by complicated and overpowering evidence, led to acknowledge the fact, however mysterious, of guilt? We deny not that this result is one of exhaustless melancholy; but, alas! our tears will not wipe out the statutes of the universe; and the man of real fortitude will, of all things, scorn intellectual legerdemain, and refuse to accept no fact. Of a sadness not so profound, but still sad, is the other source of personal anguish recognized at this stage by Christianity. It is this on which

Mr. Carlyle and Fichte lay stress, but without giving it any explanation, and virtually or expressly regarding it as natural and right. It is the awakening sense in the bosom of man, that he is a stranger here, an exile from a home where a spirit could expatiate; it is the dim agony that comes with returning consciousness, when he begins to perceive the iron grating, and the chain, and the couch of straw, and when the eye which he turns toward the azure is pained and dazzled by the once natural light.

Better is this agony, because it is the pain of one returning to consciousness, reason, and health, than any wild dreams of maniac joy, yet it too is unnatural; and we shall deem no theory of man's life as anywise satisfactory, which tells us not how it became necessary, how this imperfection originated, how man came into that dungeon. Without comment or exposition we state, that Christianity affords a simple, natural, and adequate explanation, both of the guilt and the imperfection, by its doctrine of the fall. Of the origin of evil, we say not one word. But so profoundly does the theory that man is now in a state of lapse and distemper, seem to us to agree with all that can be gathered from consciousness and history; so perfectly does it explain the glory of his sadness, and the sadness of his glory; so definitely does it intimate why the prostrate column and the shattered wall tell of a mind in ruin, while yet the gold, and gems, and ivory that shine amid the fragments hint that it was once an imperial mansion; so well does it explain the sublime home-sickness which has led earth's loftiest sons, despising all that grew on a soil accursed that pleasure by which sense strove to wile away the faint reminiscences of other scenes, that wealth which but represented the perpetual struggle against death-to go aside. from the throng, and seek the joys of spirit and the embrace

of truth in lonely thought and contemplation; so satisfactorily does it harmonize the loveliness of the dawn, and the horror of the battle-field, as existing in one world, that it seems to us worthy to be ranked among profound mysteries that it can at all be called in question.

Christianity thus accounts for, and recognizes as seasonable, the action of fear on the human mind, which is unable to feel itself at peace with God. How does it remove it? Does it enjoin a calculation of advantage? Does it declare that a certain amount of duty performed on the compulsion of terror will avert danger, or say that it is possible to perform one virtuous action on this compulsion? We can, in one or two sentences, render a full and conclusive answer. The Christian scheme of morals does not recognize as deserving the name of virtue what is produced by any external motive, what has not its root in the heart. This it intimates in a twofold manner, by express declarations; and by the whole nature of that salvation which it offers to man. It explicitly declares that the glory of God is to be in all cases the unconditional motive of action, the deep and all-pervading spring of life. And the whole tenor of its descriptions of that salvation which it proclaims, renders the idea of its morality being produced by external inducement absurd; it demands a new birth, a new creation, a new life; upon no action will it set its seal of approbation, unless it is the fruit of the Spirit, and springs from holiness and truth in the inward parts. Scripture being thus clear and decided, it might be well to know to what extent theologians have given color to the charge that Christianity is thus selfish. The mode in which Christian writers during last century wrote did, to some extent, lend it countenance; the enforcement of virtue by rewards and punishment was, it is probable, too exclusively

insisted on; although it has, we think, been somewhat hardly treated, the school of Paley and Butler did tend to give Christianity rather the aspect of a mechanism than of a life, did rather seek for it a place beside a refined Epicureanism, than claim for it its right and natural position, in a more lofty and ethereal region than was ever reached by the sublimest speculation of Platonism. But we have no hesitation in claiming for the Puritan theology a freedom from any such error; and in the conclusion of the second chapter of the first book of Calvin's Institutes, we have his express declaration that, were there no hell, yet, since the Christian loves and reveres God as a Father, the dread of offending Him would alone suffice to render him abhorrent of vice. Fear does not produce virtue; the fact that a man restrains himself from sin to avoid the punishment of hell, is no proof that he is converted. Yet fear is not without a function in the system of things. It bears not the wedding-garment, and no hand but that of the Divine Spirit, working faith in the Christian, and so enabling him to appropriate that garment, and clothe himself in it, can effect in him that renovation which leads to godly action and spiritual joy; but it goes out into the highways of a blighted and delirious world, and there, like a terrible prophet of the wilderness, who foretells the coming of the mild Redeemer, startles and arouses men. Its office is preliminary, external, awakening; it is the beginning of wisdom. Since, indeed, on this earth, the deep-lying disease which renders it necessary is never altogether removed, its warning voice is never altogether silent; but the humiliating remedy will vanish utterly with the disease of which it is a sign, and by which it became necessary; when the Christian goes to take his place among the angelic choirs, he will be able to join them in a melody that is only love; and it does not admit of doubt,

that every feeling of slavish fear with which any being regards God, is strictly of the nature of sin.

By fear, or by whatever means the Spirit of God may employ, the soul is brought to lie down in perfect abasement before God, to acknowledge its want, its woe, its weakness, and its unreserving consent to receive all from His hand. This is what, in the Christian scheme, corresponds to the self-annihilation of Goethe and Carlyle; now is the soul brought to that stage of utter desolation and bareness which agrees with the critical stage of the wanderer's trouble. We can not doubt that here we are at the point where the essential nature of Christianity is revealed; that we come within sight of its great distinctive virtue, humility. Now it is that the sinful finite being, to use the words of Pascal, "makes repeatedly fresh efforts to lower himself to the last abysses of nothingness, while he surveys God still in interminably multiplying immensities;" this is what Vinet pronounces the end of all Christian preaching, "to cast the sinner trembling at the foot of Mercy." In the melodious, yet heart-wrung wailings which float down the stream of ages from the harp of the poet-king of Israel, the feelings of such moments found expression; such feelings were in the heart of the Pilgrim, when, fleeing from the City of Destruction, and fainting under his burden, he knelt with clasped hands before the Cross; and it was in this same attitude that the New England Puritan, in utter self-abandonment and feeling of the majesty and holiness of God, judged himself worthy of damnation, and had scarce power to pray. It is but the unqualified acknowledgment that man, as he exists in this world, requires the aid of Divine power to raise him to that higher state of being to which he aspires. It is the disrobing of itself by the soul of all the raiment of human virtue; which, however pure and beauti

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