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prominence, not as an arbitrary creation, but as a natural growth.

The Founder of our Faith did not erect it as a system, carefully elaborated, sharply defined, and incapable of modification or expansion. This was not the Divine idea — however frequently it may have been assumed; and it needs no remarkable foresight to perceive that such a religion could never have adapted itself to the diversities of human societies, or to the extremes of culture and experience. Jesus Christ planted his Word as a seed, in which the cardinal truths of the religion lay as germs, to be quickened and cultivated agreeably to the temperature of individuals, the laws and limitations of human nature, and the social status of any given epoch. The Apostles were governed by the same idea. From all that we can gather out of the surviving records of the first Christian age, and especially from the book of Acts, it is evident that the early missionaries made no attempt to unfold their religion in all its amplitude, or to trace out its ulterior relations. They did not teach it on any scientific plan, or exhibit it as a complete system of divinity. Like their Master, they planted the new faith as a seed, in which many of its ultimate applications were hidden-as the majestic proportions of the oak are hidden in the acorn. Laboring, as they were, amid allpervading heathenism, they were content to have the simple principles of the Gospel accepted, even in the crudest form-leaving to their distant successors the task of refining the Christian doctrines, and expanding them into a harmonious system.

Let us notice how little was required, in that age, to transform a man into a nominal Christian: He had only to profess a belief in Jesus Christ, as the Son of God, divinely commissioned and raised from the dead, and to exhibit a certain propriety of moral conduct; and he was joyfully received into the company of the faithful. If he had been a Jew, his mind still retained the stamp of his former training, being only so far modified as to admit his new convictions. He became a Judaizing Christian. If he had been a Greek, hitherto, he retained almost all the Pla

6 Neander-"Life of Christ."

7 Universalist Quarterly, Vol. i., pp. 87–91.

tonic philosophy, and incorporated the speculations of the great Athenian with the teachings of the Galilean Prophet. He became a Gnostic Christian, in that case. Or, finally, if he had tasted the golden wine of Persian thought, previous to his conversion to Christianity, his mind still sparkled with the luminous penumbra of Zoroastrianism; and he became an Oriental Christian.

These various, and even opposite, opinions, the converts to Christianity brought over from their respective quarters. All these heterogeneous elements were mingled in the Primitive Church, which really sheltered, under the Christian name, nearly all the speculations, and a large portion of the superstition, then known to the civilized world. Estimating the notions of those early converts, in the aggregate, they were probably more imbued with heathenism than with Christianity, even after their baptism; and so the germs of the heavenly faith, as they sprouted toward the Middle Ages-modified by the soil in which they grew, and bent by the mental habitudes of the nations-impelled the vitality of Christ into a new mythology, and alternately ruled and obeyed the vigorous tendencies of society.

The history of Christianity is the narrative of the gradual development of its seminal principles into broader applications and more abundant results, as the history of a tree would be the tracing of its growth from the quickened germ to the rising trunk, the spreading branches, and the perfect fruitage. But what if those who affect to administer Christianity, and who are the acknowledged interpreters of its doctrine and spirit, fail to apprehend this primal law, this divine idea, of growth or development? What if they passively receive the interpretations of past ages as the complete conception of the Gospel, and insist on imposing them upon the living age as absolute finalities? What if they regard the researches and ideas of their predecessors, not as contributions to an ever-augmenting treasury of truth, but as exhausting all the springs of that divine wisdom vouchsafed for the culture of mankind. What if they insist on retaining the dire superstitions and crude philosophies, indigenous to the barbarous periods through which our religion has passed, thus confounding the excrescences incidentally engendered in the process of its development with its essential principles and permanent dominion? Such views and

efforts on the part of the churches, must inevitably provoke rebellion, in a rational and humane age; and they go far to explain, in our judgment, the recoil from religion, now experienced and deplored.

Should it be esteemed at all remarkable that such vast multitudes are destitute of piety, when we reflect what a God is exhibited to them in that mediæval theology which still disfigures the Christian religion? How can you love a Being, who deliberately creates you in the exercise of omnipotent power, without having your own welfare in view, but simply his own sovereign glory; who exposes you to eternal torment, on account either of Adam's sin, or of a depraved nature which you inherited and could not avoid; and who sweeps the larger part of the human family into hell, and perverts the existence which he compelled them to receive into the fuel of an immortal curse? How can you trust a Being, who knew so little of coming events as to be surprised by the entrance of sin, although he had left Satan free to bring it with him into Eden, and shed the mortal poison into the fountain head of humanity; who, under the first impulse of his indignation, intended to have destroyed the whole race; who subsequently took vengeance upon them by proxy, and announced a plan for their escape; and who, finally, discriminates, and saves only a remnant, while he rewards the Devil's vigilance with the spoils of a dismembered Universe? Without loving and trusting God, there can be no piety; and here is no basis for either love or trust. The aspect of the Divine Being is such, as he is presented in the dominant theology, that it is next to impossible to have the requisite emotions inspired. Men may stand in awe of such a God; they may fear him; they may serve him with lip-service and dreary sacrifices; but they can not love him, or trust him, except by growing insensible to his dreadful nature. These obstacles to piety are all the more disastrous, because they touch the reason less acutely than the moral sense. "It is not the speculative reason of the few," observes a late writer, "but the natural conscience of the many, that questions the extirpation of the Canaanites, or the eternity of hell-torments. These are points of divinity that are at once fundamental and popular." 8

8 Recent Inquiries in Theology, p. 313.

Nor should it occasion surprise that there is so little benevolence—so much selfishness-operating in society, when we reflect that the burden of preaching has been, in all ages, a perpetual exhortation to people to get their own souls saved-in other words, to look out for their private interests, in this world and in the world to come,-instead of an exhortation to identify their well-being with that of their community and their race, and generously to share the weal and woe of mankind. There is the God of our traditional theology-an infinite embodiment of selfishness, injustice, and caprice; what people can worship him, in spirit and in truth becoming perfect as he is perfect, and being partakers of his nature without having all their selfish and vindictive propensities fostered, the claims growing out of our social relations undervalued, and a demoralizing blight diffused over their noblest impulses and affections?

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The acute author of the "Philosophy of the Plan of Salvation," affirms, as one of the grand propositions framed into his argument, that "Man becomes assimilated to the moral character of the object which he worships. This is an invariable principle," he says, "operating with the certainty of cause and effect. The worshipper looks upon the character of the object which he worships as the standard of perfection. He therefore condemns every thing in himself which is unlike, and approves of every thing which is like, that character. The tendency of this is to lead him to abandon every thing in himself, and in his course of life, which is condemned by the character and precepts of his god, and to conform himself to that standard which is approved by the same criterion. The worshipper desires the favor of the object worshipped, and this, reason dictates, can be obtained only by conformity to the will and the character of that object. To become assimilated to the image of the object worshipped, must be the end of desire to the worshipper. His aspirations, therefore, every time he worships, do, from the nature of the case, assimilate his character more and more to the model of the object that receives his homage. To this fact the whole history of the idolatrous world bears testimony. Without an exception, the character of every nation and tribe of the human family has been formed and modified, in a great degree, by the character attributed to their gods.""

9 Pp. 37, 38. See, also, Quarterly, Vol. I. pp. 256-293.

In thus elaborating the broad proposition, this writer has in view the influence of the worship of the heathen deities; but we see no reason why its application should be limited to them. If the worship of

"Gods partial, changeful, passionate, unjust,

Whose attributes were rage, ravenge and lust,"

has been obviously deleterious, in all ages and among all nations, how can we avoid the conclusion that the motives and feelings popularly ascribed to the Almighty, in our dominant theology-such as anger, jealousy, hatred and revenge-tend to debase the moral character of Christendom?

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Thus it should seem that if multitudes of our people are irreligious wanting in both piety and benevolence - the Orthodox churches are palpably disqualified, as regards their unhappy theology, for supplying the spiritual instruction, and wielding the salutary authority, demanded by the crisis. We do not deny as will be seen farther on that certain beneficial influences emanate from these churches, - the fruit, not of their speculative dogmas, but of the devotional fervor that kindles under hallowed rites, and of the consecrated lives that grow under all sectarian names. We can not fail to notice, in the Gospel, that subtle power characteristic of light and heat, by virtue of which it penetrates even hostile elements-neutralizing, to some extent, the malignity of superstition, mitigating the asperities of bigotry, and toning down the savage features of the speculative landscape till they cease to appall and repel. Moreover, the irrepressible dictates of common sense, in society at large, are always checking the extreme impertinence of unreason, on the part of the framers of theology; and it is the constant tendency of our unsophisticated nature to qualify the speculative nonsense of those mole-eyed scholastics, who presumed to interpret in monastic dungeons the resplendent universe of God.

It has long been the subject of remark, among moderately sagacious people, that Orthodox preaching is far in advance of Orthodox creeds; or, in other words, that the conservative clergy teach a higher morality than is authorized by their articles of faith. We have known more than one minister, nursed under the most judicious Orthodoxy now extant, and

VOL. XVIII.

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