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   Title: Theological Essays of the Late Benjamin Jowett: Seleted,
   Arranged, and Edited by Lewis Campbell
   Creator(s): Jowett, Benjamin (1817-1893)
   Print Basis: London: Henry Frowde (1906)
   CCEL Subjects: All;
   LC Call no: BT15 .J6
   LC Subjects:

   Doctrinal theology
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                               THEOLOGICAL ESSAYS

    OF THE LATE

BENJAMIN JOWETT

SELECTED, ARRANGED, AND EDITED BY

LEWIS CAMPBELL

  LONDON

  HENRY FROWDE

  1906

OXFORD: HORACE HART
PRINTER TO THE UNIVERSITY
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    TO

HALLAM LORD TENNYSON

    THIS REPRINT

    OF ESSAYS BY HIS FATHER’S FRIEND

    IS RESPECTFULLY INSCRIBED
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PREFACE

   THE little volume of Select Passages from the Theological Writings of
   Benjamin Jowett has been well received; and it is hoped that a more
   extensive reprint of some of the dissertations in his edition of St.
   Paul’s Epistles may find acceptance.

   The Essays on St. Paul and the Twelve, and on Casuistry, have been
   slightly abridged. The remaining five are given here as they appear in
   Professor Jowett’s second edition (1859).

   L.C.
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CONTENTS

   PAGE
   PREFACE v
   INTRODUCTION ix
   ESSAY ON THE CHARACTER OF ST. PAUL 1
   ” ON ST. PAUL AND THE TWELVE 23
   ”

   ON CONVERSION AND CHANGES OF CHARACTER (Romans VII)
   39
   ” ON CASUISTRY (Romans XIV) 73
   ” ON NATURAL RELIGION 100
   ” ON RIGHTEOUSNESS BY FAITH 180
   ” ON ATONEMENT AND SATISFACTION 209
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INTRODUCTION

   THE present Bishop of Oxford, to his lasting honour, preaching in
   Christ Church Cathedral, as Dean, in October 1893, exhorted his hearers
   to ‘praise God for the strenuous ungrudging energy, the hidden
   bountifulness, the true kind heart, the public spirit, the
   unworldliness, the deep reserve of strength, which were in Benjamin
   Jowett‘ [1] . The Regius Greek Professor of the years from 1855 to 1893
   had triumphantly ‘lived down’ [2] the obloquy which, from conscientious
   motives, had been commenced by a former Canon of Christ Church [3] ,
   and promulgated by a former Bishop of Oxford [4] . His greatness as an
   educational and moral force could no longer be gainsaid; and his place
   in the literature of scholarship had been secured by his translations
   of Plato and Thucydides. But the injury to his reputation as a
   theologian was not thus repaired. The clergy of his own generation had
   been warned to avoid his teaching as ‘unsound’, and in the following
   years the younger men, whether theologically inclined or the reverse,
   were listening to other voices—sacerdotal, mystical, positivist, or
   aesthetic. The firstfruits of his ripe manhood were in danger of being
   buried in oblivion—the labour of his best years wasted. Yet there were
   not a few to whom his writings on religious subjects appeared
   invaluable; and there are some even to-day who are ready to endorse the
   words of A. P. Stanley in reviewing the work from which these essays
   are taken [5] : ‘The cynical and sceptical spirit of the time will have
   met with an antidote such as we shall vainly expect from any other
   quarter.’ Nor only the cynical spirit; but the neopagan hedonist
   temper, which saps the moral strength of many, meets here with a more
   searching humanism which penetrates to the inmost marrow of the mind
   and heart, and reaches that which is ‘far more deeply interfused’. What
   Wordsworth said ‘with invincible confidence’ of his own poetry [6] may
   be affirmed of Jowett’s theological writings. They ‘co-operate with the
   benign tendencies in human nature and society wherever found, and will,
   in their degree, be efficacious in making men wiser, better, and
   happier’.

   Some part of what he expected from his own method in theology may be
   inferred from a passage towards the end of the essay on the
   interpretation of Scripture [7] :—

   ‘Is it a mere chimera that the different sections of Christendom may
   meet on the common ground of the New Testament, or that the individual
   may be urged by the vacancy and unprofitableness of old traditions to
   make the gospel his own—a life of Christ in the soul, instead of a
   theory of Christ which is in a book, or written down? Or that, in
   missions to the heathen, Scripture may become the expression of
   universal truths rather than of the tenets of particular men or
   churches? That would remove many obstacles to the reception of
   Christianity. Or that the study of Scripture may have a more important
   place in a liberal education than hitherto? Or that the ‘rational
   service’ of interpreting Scripture may dry up the crude and dreamy
   vapours of religious excitement? Or that, in preaching, new sources of
   spiritual health may flow from a more natural use of Scripture? Or that
   the lessons of Scripture may have a nearer way to the hearts of the
   poor when disengaged from theological formulas?’

   That essay was contributed to a volume whose professed object was ‘to
   illustrate the advantage derivable to the cause of religious and moral
   truth, from a free handling in a becoming spirit of subjects peculiarly
   liable to suffer by the repetition of conventional language and from
   traditional methods of treatment’. In some such attempt as this Jowett
   saw the only hope of making Christianity a universal religion (see
   below, p. 220).

   The essays which are here presented to the reader may be said to have
   had a threefold purpose:—(1) While interpreting St. Paul, to call up as
   far as might be, a true image of the Apostolical age; (2) to apply the
   lessons of that age, and the teaching of the Apostle to actual life;
   and (3) to find such an expression for the theological doctrines which
   have been derived from that teaching, as may appeal to modern, or, if
   possible, to universal experience.

   (1) The nature of the first endeavour may be best described in the
   words of Arthur Stanley, who, as Arnold’s pupil, had the same problem
   in his eye. He says of Jowett in the article already quoted:—

   ‘He has approached the Apostolic writings with the view, not of
   imposing his meaning on them, but of learning their own meaning from
   themselves. He has placed himself not merely on the external scene, but
   in the living atmosphere of the Apostolic age. He. . . prepared himself
   for his work by committing to memory the whole of St. Paul’s Epistles
   in the original Greek. But this is not enough. . . the immense layers
   of Papal, scholastic, and Puritan philosophy which intervene between
   ourselves and the Apostolic times; the elevation of the Apostolic point
   of view above the petty disputes in which we are absorbed; the very
   familiarity of the words of Scripture—all aggravate the difficulty of
   such an effort. . . . So to reproduce the past by the microscopic power
   of scholarship, and by the telescopic power of genius and learning, is
   the very purpose for which Universities are endowed, and for which
   Theology exists,

   (2) The second element or factor in Jowett’s work belonged to the
   insight of a man of large experience and profound religious feeling,
   whose power of sympathy was equal to the width and clearness of his
   mental vision. It is this which stamps a work of erudition with the
   character of genius. The growth of an intrinsic faculty, it was the
   fruit of his devotion to the educational work to which he had been
   called, and in which from the first he had been aware of possibilities
   that are hidden from less original minds. Whatever he had gained from
   his own early struggles with self, with temptation, or with
   circumstances, had been transfused into a means of helping others—of
   ‘strengthening his brethren’. Amongst his pupils had been men of
   genius, and his own experience was enlarged by theirs. These gifts,
   together with the rich and varied culture accumulated in student days,
   were now concentrated on what he had long regarded as his chief
   life-work. See, for example (below, p. 62):—

   ‘No one with a heart open to human feelings, loving not man less, but
   God more, sensitive to the happiness of this world, yet aiming at a
   higher—no man of such a nature ever made a great sacrifice, or
   performed a great act of self-denial, without impressing a change on
   his character which lasted to his latest breath. No man ever took his
   besetting sin, it may be lust, or pride, or the love of rank and
   position, and, as it were, cut it out by voluntarily placing himself
   where to gratify it was impossible, without sensibly receiving a new
   strength of character. In one day, almost in an hour, he may become an
   altered man; he may stand, as it were, on a different stage of moral
   and religious life; he may feel himself in new relations to an altered
   world.’

   Or consider the following passage from an essay not included here:—

   ‘There is a state in which man is powerless to act, and is,
   nevertheless, clairvoyant to all the good and evil of his own nature.
   He places the good and evil principle before him, and is ever
   oscillating between them. He traces the labyrinth of conflicting
   principles in the world, and is yet further perplexed and entangled. He
   is sensitive to every breath of feeling, and incapable of the
   performance of any duty. Or take another example: It sometimes happens
   that the remembrance of past suffering, or the consciousness of sin,
   may so weigh a man down as fairly to paralyse his moral power. He is
   distracted between what he is and what he was; old habits and vices,
   and the new character which is being fashioned in him. Sometimes the
   balance seems to hang equal; he feels the earnest wish and desire to
   act rightly, but cannot hope to find pleasure and satisfaction in a
   good life; he desires heartily to repent, but can never think it
   possible that God should forgive. “It is I and it is not I, but sin
   that dwelleth in me.” “I have, and have never ceased to have, the wish
   for better things, even amid haunts of infamy and vice.” In such
   language, even now, though with less fervour than in “the first
   spiritual chaos of the affections” does the soul cry out to God—“Oh
   wretched man that I am, who shall deliver me from the body of this
   death?”’ [8]

   In this and other adaptations of the Apostle’s thoughts the interpreter
   is guided by what he frequently calls ‘the analogy of faith’ [9] .

   (3) The remaining purpose was one which made a more severe demand on
   strenuous thought and spiritual imagination. It was nothing short of
   the endeavour to give to the truths which darkly join 1 in Christian
   theology, and which the Church of the fourth century, or the reformed
   churches in the sixteenth, had formulated in a manner suited to that
   age, an expression which may appeal to the heart and intellect of
   modern times, and may not be found to clash with other truths, or with
   the highest standard of morality. It was through this attempt that
   Jowett gave offence to the religious world of his day by departing at
   once from ‘Patristic’ and from ‘popular’ theology.

   Bishop Kaye, of Lincoln (1827-1853), had said that the decree of the
   Council of Nicaea ‘was the greatest misfortune that ever befell the
   Church’. On this Jowett quietly remarks ‘that is, perhaps, true; yet a
   different decision would have been a greater misfortune’. His method in
   this respect has much in common with that recommended by the late M.
   Auguste Sabatier in his sketch of a Philosophy of Religion. See, for
   example, the following passage:—

   ‘Par ces discussions, par ces controverses mêmes auxquelles
   heureusement aucun pouvoir extérieur ne vient mettre fin, le dogme est
   sans cesse mis à l’épreuve, refondu en quelque sorte au feu de la
   forge; il perd sa dureté de loi extérieure; il reste chaud, malléable;
   il se dépouille des superstitions mortes du passé pour répondre aux
   besoins du présent, se di versifier naturellement avec les esprits,
   s’ouvrir à la philosophie du siècle, la pénétrer à son tour, participer
   au progrès laborieux de la pensée moderne et rester toujours en
   harmonie et en communion avec elle [10] .’

   In the present volume a certain progress may be traced from the first
   of these endeavours to the third,—the first two essays dealing more
   directly with the Apostolical age, while the third and fourth dwell
   more on religious experience generally, and the last three are mainly
   concerned with theology. The seven dissertations here reprinted are in
   this way representative of the whole work. It may be mentioned that the
   essay on the Character of St. Paul gave the motive for an ideal work of
   sculpture by Woolmer, and that on Conversion was pointed out at the
   time by H. J. S. Smith as likely to conciliate the Evangelical School.
   The essay on Casuistry should be compared with the account of Loyola in
   the volume of Biographical Sermons. Much else, of equal interest, might
   have been included, but would have extended the volume beyond the
   limits assigned to this series. Readers whose interest is awakened by
   what is here contained may be led to examine other portions of the
   original work,—such as the essay on Predestination, full of subtle
   disquisition, that on The Law as the Strength of Sin, where modern
   analogies are drawn out with deep observation, or that on Contrasts of
   Prophecy, or above all the essay on the Interpretation of Scripture,
   originally contributed to Essays and Reviews, and reprinted in the
   posthumous third edition of the Epistles. This last, comprising matter
   which the author had intended to include in his second edition, throws
   abundant light upon his general method and point of view. Minor
   excursuses such as that on the Belief in the Coming of Christ, or on
   the State of the Heathen World (not reprinted in the 3rd edition),
   would also still repay perusal.

   Professor Jowett was far from thinking that his work in theology was
   complete or final. Posterity, he said, ‘will remark that up to a
   certain point we saw clearly; but that no man is beyond his age—there
   was a circle which we could not pass’ [11] . Yet a disciple may be
   pardoned for believing that his writings may have even now an influence
   for good. The time for such endeavours is not yet past; and it is hoped
   that the present reprint may be received with better quiet, better
   opinion, ‘better confirmation’, than was accorded to these essays when
   they first appeared.

   Many persons still require to be taught that ‘the whole world, and all
   things in it, instead of being secular and external to revelation,
   needs to be brought back to within the sphere of revelation’ [12] . And
   although in fifty years much water has passed the mill—though
   marvellous progress has been made both in the acquisition and diffusion
   of knowledge,—yet the whole has not yet been harvested in the interest
   of religion. In ‘these slow-paced changes’ (the phrase is Dr. James
   Martineau’s) speculations, and even discoveries about human origins, or
   about the constitution of the material universe, do not add much
   appreciably to the long result of time. It may still be worth while,
   even for the most enlightened, to consider what a mind of exceptional
   fulness, of keen discernment and sincere piety, regarded as the main
   outcome of all that was known and felt half a century ago.

   Students of Professor Jowett’s book on St. Paul may have much besides
   to learn, but they will not have much to unlearn. Historical studies
   have greatly advanced and so has Natural Science; but Gibbon and
   Humboldt are still worth reading. The very extent of the field makes
   concentration difficult. The success of special inquiries renders it
   harder for philosophy and for the religious mind to take all into one
   view. But, as Plato said, comprehensiveness belongs to the only kind of
   knowledge which takes lasting root. [13]

   And religious thinking ebbs as well as flows. The past sometimes
   prevails over the present and dims the forecast of the future. There is
   a real danger lest Obscurantism should divide the ground which Religion
   and Science ought to occupy harmoniously together. The serene spirit
   which breathes through Jowett’s writings may give courage to the timid
   and calmness to the bold.

   The two large volumes published in 1855 (second edition, 1859) were
   after all only a fragment of the work which their author had in view.
   There are those amongst his friends who will always regret that the
   labours of the Oxford Vice-Chancellorship, and the exhaustion which
   followed, should have deprived him first of the leisure, and then of
   the mental vigour, that was requisite for the execution of his literary
   designs. He never lost his interest in theology; and the strong vein of
   reverent thoughtfulness, which pervades the book on St. Paul, was the
   same which carried him onward through many trials to the attainment of
   the Christian graces so eloquently commended by Bishop Paget.

   Professor Jowett was less inclined indeed in later years to engage in
   controversy. He used to say, ‘when we were younger, religious doctrines
   such as that of the Atonement were often presented in a form repugnant
   to the moral sense. That is not equally so now.’ But it were much to be
   wished that he had written the treatise he so long contemplated on
   Moral Ideas, or had worked out his views on the Religions of the World;
   or had been able to substantiate the dream that was suggested to him by
   the Imitatio Christi:—

   ‘Would it be possible to combine in a manual of piety religious fervour
   with perfect good sense and knowledge of the world? This has never been
   attempted and would be a work worthy of a great religious genius. . . .
   Is it possible for me, perhaps ten years hence, to write a new Thomas a
   Kempis, going as deeply into the foundations of human life and yet not
   revolting the common sense of the nineteenth century, by his violent
   contrast between this world and another?’

   Will Jowett some day have a successor an inheritor of his unfulfilled
   renown—to sum up with calm insight, and with unclouded faith in God,
   the spiritual outcome of the last fifty years?—A Christian philosopher,
   gifted with knowledge of the world and human nature, yet not worldly;
   loving truth unflinchingly, and not despairing of it; accomplished, not
   only in theology, but in history and science, full of devotion to God
   and Christ, and also to the good of man?—Who knows?

   LEWIS CAMPBELL.

   ALASSIO, ITALY,

   March, 1906.
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   [1] Studies of the Christian Character, by Francis Paget, D.D., 1895.

   [2] See Life of Benjamin Jowett, I, 239.

   [3] E. B. Pusey.

   [4] Samuel Wilberforce.

   [5] In the Times of Oct. 15, 1859.

   [6] Letter to Lady Beaumont, 1807.

   [7] Essays and Reviews, p. 423. Reprinted in 3rd edition of the
   Epistles, vol. ii, p. 91.

   [8] Epistles, 3rd edition, vol. ii, p. 297.

   [9] Cf. Rom. xii. 6.

   [10] Esquisse d’une Philosophie de la Religion, 7^e édition, p. 332.

   [11] 3rd edition of Epistles, vol. ii, p. 138.

   [12] See Life of Benjamin Jowett, vol. i, p. 372.

   [13] Plato, Rep. 537 c.
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ESSAY ON THE CHARACTER OF ST. PAUL

   Oidate de hoti di' astheneian tēs sarkos euēngelisamēn humin to
   proteron, kai ton peirasmon humōn en tē sarki mou ouk exouthenēsate
   oude exeptusate, alla hōs angelon theou edexasthe me, hōs christon
   Iēsoun.—Gal. iv. 13, 14.

   THE narrative of the Gospel gives no full or perfect likeness of the
   character of the Apostles. Human beings do not admit of being
   constructed out of a single feature, nor is imagination able to supply
   details which are really wanting. St. Peter and St. John, the two
   Apostles whose names are most prominent in the Gospels and early
   portion of the Acts, both seem to unite two extremes in the same
   person; the character of St. John combining gentleness with vehemence,
   almost with fierceness; while in St. Peter we trace rashness and
   timidity at once, the spirit of freedom at one period of his life, and
   of narrowness and exclusiveness at another. He is the first to confess,
   and the first to deny Christ. Himself the captain of the Apostles, and
   yet wanting in the qualities necessary to constitute a leader. Such
   extremes may easily meet in the same person; but we do not possess
   sufficient knowledge to say how they were really reconciled. Each of
   the twelve Apostles grew up to the fullness of the stature of the
   perfect man. Even those who to us are little more than names, had
   individual features as lively as our own contemporaries. But the
   mention of their sayings or acts on four or five occasions while they
   followed the footsteps of the Lord on earth, and then on two or three
   occasions soon after He was taken from them, then once again at an
   interval of twelve or fourteen years, is not sufficient to enable us to
   judge of their whole character. We may distinguish Peter from John, or
   James from either; but we cannot set them up as a study to be compared
   with each other.

   More features appear of the character of St. Paul, yet not sufficient
   to give a perfect picture. We should lose the individuality which we
   have, by seeking to idealize and generalize from some more common type
   of Christian life. It has not been unusual to describe St. Paul as a
   man of resolute will, of untiring energy, of logical mind, of classic
   taste. He has been contrasted with the twelve as the educated with the
   uneducated, the student of Hebrew and Greek learning, brought up in
   Jerusalem at the feet of Gamaliel, with the fishermen of Galilee
   ‘mending their nets’ by the lake. Powers of government have been
   attributed to him such as were required, and in some instances
   possessed, by the great leaders of the Church in later ages. He is
   imagined to have spoken with an accuracy hardly to be found in the
   systems of philosophers. Not of such an one would the Apostle himself
   ‘have gloried’; he would not have understood the praises of his
   commentators. It was not the wisdom of this world which he spoke, but
   ‘the hidden wisdom of God in a mystery’. All his life long he felt
   himself to be one ‘whose strength was perfected in weakness’; he was
   aware of the impression of feebleness which his own appearance and
   discourse made upon his converts; who was sometimes in weakness and
   fear and trembling before them, ‘having the sentence of death in
   himself’, and at other times ‘in power and the Holy Ghost and in much
   assurance’; and so far from having one unchanging purpose or insight,
   that though determined to know one thing only, ‘Jesus Christ and Him
   crucified’, yet in his manner of teaching he wavers between opposite
   views or precepts in successive verses. He is ever feeling, if haply he
   may find them, after the hearts of men. He is carried away by sympathy,
   at times even for his opponents. He is struggling to describe what is
   in process of revelation to him. ‘Rude in speech but not in knowledge’,
   as he himself says. The life of the Greek language had passed away, and
   it must have been a matter of effort for him to write in a foreign
   tongue, perhaps even to write at all; yet he puts together words in his
   own characteristic way which are full of meaning, though often
   scattered in confusion over the page. He occasionally lights also on
   the happiest expressions, stamping old phrases in a new mould, and
   bringing forth the new out of the treasury of the old. Such are some of
   the individual traits which he has left in his Epistles; they are
   traits far more interesting and more like himself than any general
   image of heroism, or knowledge, or power, or goodness. Whatever other
   impression he might have made upon us, could we have seen him face to
   face, there can be little doubt that he would have left the impression
   of what was remarkable and uncommon.

   There are questions which it is interesting to suggest, even when they
   can never receive a perfect and satisfactory answer. One of these
   questions may be asked respecting St. Paul:—‘What was the relation in
   which his former life stood to the great fact of his conversion?’ He
   himself, in looking back upon the times in which he persecuted the
   Church of God, thought of them chiefly as an increasing evidence of the
   mercy of God, which was afterwards extended to him. It seemed so
   strange to have been what he had been, and to be what he was. Nor does
   our own conception of him, in relation to his former self, commonly
   reach beyond this contrast of the old and new man; the persecutor and
   the preacher of the Gospel; the young man at whose feet the witnesses
   against Stephen laid down their clothes, and the same Paul disputing
   against the Grecians, full of visions and revelations of the Lord, on
   whom in later life came daily the care of all the Churches.

   Yet we cannot but admit also the possibility, or rather the probable
   truth of another point of view. It is not unlikely that the struggle
   which he describes in the seventh chapter of the Romans is the picture
   of his own heart in the days when he ‘verily thought that he ought to
   do many things contrary to Jesus of Nazareth’; the impression of that
   earlier state, perhaps the image of the martyr Stephen (Acts xxii. 20),
   may have remained with him in after years. For men seem to carry about
   with them the elements of their former lives; the character or nature
   which they once were, the circumstance which became a part of them, is
   not wholly abolished or done away; it remains, ‘even in the
   regenerate’, as a sort of insoluble mass or incumbrance which prevents
   their freedom of action; in very few, or rather in none, can the old
   habit have perfect flexure to its new use. Every where, in the case of
   our acquaintance, who may have passed through great changes of opinion
   or conduct, we see from time to time the old nature which is underneath
   occasionally coming to the surface. Nor is it irreverent to attribute
   such remembrances of a former self even to inspired persons. If there
   were any among the contemporaries of St. Paul who had known him in
   youth and in age, they would have seen similarities which escape us in
   the character of the Apostle at different periods of his life. The
   zealot against the Gospel might have seemed to them transfigured into
   the opponent of the law; they would have found something in common in
   the Pharisee of the Pharisees, and the man who had a vow on his last
   journey to Jerusalem; they would perhaps have observed arguments, or
   quotations, or modes of speech in his writings which had been familiar
   to them and him in the school of Gamaliel. And when they heard of his
   conversion, they might have remarked that to one of his temperament
   only could such an event have happened, and would have noted many
   superficial resemblances which showed him to be the same man, while the
   great in ward change which had overspread the world was hid from their
   eyes.

   The gifts of God to man have ever some reference to natural
   disposition. He who becomes the servant of God does not thereby cease
   to be himself. Often the transition is greater in appearance than in
   reality, from the suddenness of its manifestation. There is a kind of
   rebellion against self and nature and God, which, through the mercy of
   God to the soul, seems almost necessarily to lead to reaction. Persons
   have been worse than their fellow men in outward appearance, and yet
   there was within them the spirit of a child waiting to return home to
   their father’s house. A change passes upon them which we may figure to
   ourselves, not only as the new man taking the place of the old, but as
   the inner man taking the place of the outer. So complex is human
   nature, that the very opposite to what we are has often an
   inexpressible power over us. Contrast is not only a law of association;
   it is also a principle of action. Many run from one extreme to another,
   from licentiousness to the ecstasy of religious feeling, from religious
   feeling back to licentiousness, not without a ‘fearful looking for of
   judgement’. If we could trace the hidden workings of good and evil,
   they would appear far less surprising and more natural than as they are
   seen by the outward eye. Our spiritual nature is without spring or
   chasm, but it has a certain play or freedom which leads very often to
   consequences the opposite of what we expect. It seems in some instances
   as if the same religious education had tended to contrary results; in
   one case to a devout life, in another to a reaction against it; some
   times to one form of faith, at other times to another. Many parents
   have wept to see the early religious training of their children draw
   them, by a kind of repulsion, to a communion or mode of opinion which
   is the extreme opposite of that in which they have been brought up. Let
   them have peace in the thought that it was not always in their power to
   fulfil the duty in which they seem to themselves to have failed. These
   latter reflections have but a remote bearing on the character of St.
   Paul; but they serve to make us think that all spiritual influences,
   however antagonistic they may appear, have more in common with each
   other than they have with the temper of the world; and that it is
   easier to pass from one form of faith to another than from leading the
   life of all men to either. There is more in common between those who
   anathematize each other than between either and the spirit of
   toleration which characterizes the ordinary dealings of man and man, or
   much more the spirit of Christ, for whom they are alike contending.

   Perhaps we shall not be far wrong in concluding, that those who have
   undergone great religious changes have been of a fervid imaginative
   cast of mind; looking for more in this world than it was capable of
   yielding; easily touched by the remembrance of the past, or inspired by
   some ideal of the future. When with this has been combined a zeal for
   the good of their fellow men, they have become the heralds and
   champions of the religious movements of the world. The change has begun
   within, but has overflowed without them. ‘When thou art converted,
   strengthen thy brethren’ is the order of nature and of grace. In secret
   they brood over their own state; weary and profitless their soul
   fainteth within them. The religion they profess is a religion not of
   life to them, but of death; they lose their interest in the world, and
   are cut off from the communion of their fellow creatures. While they
   are musing, the fire kindles, and at the last—‘they speak with their
   tongue’. Then pours forth irrepressibly the pent-up stream—‘unto all
   and upon all’ their fellow men; the intense flame of inward enthusiasm
   warms and lights up the world. First they are the evidence to others;
   then, again, others are the evidence to them. All religious leaders can
   not be reduced to a single type of character; yet in all, perhaps, two
   characteristics may be observed; the first, great self-reflection; the
   second, intense sympathy with other men. They are not the creatures of
   habit or of circumstances, leading a blind life, unconscious of what
   they are; their whole effort is to realize their inward nature, and to
   make it palpable and visible to their fellows. Unlike other men who are
   confined to the circle of themselves or of their family, their
   affections are never straitened; they embrace with their love all men
   who are likeminded with them, almost all men too who are unlike them,
   in the hope that they may become like.

   Such men have generally appeared at favourable conjunctures of
   circumstances, when the old was about to vanish away, and the new to
   appear. The world has yearned towards them, and they towards the world.
   They have uttered what all men were feeling; they have interpreted the
   age to itself. But for the concurrence of circumstances, they might
   have been stranded on the solitary shore, they might have died without
   a follower or convert. But when the world has needed them, and God has
   intended them for the world, they are endued with power from on high;
   they use all other men as their instruments, uniting them to
   themselves.

   Often such men have been brought up in the faith which they afterwards
   oppose, and a part of their power has consisted in their acquaintance
   with the enemy. They see other men, like themselves formerly, wandering
   out of the way in the idol’s temple, amid a burdensome ceremonial, with
   prayers and sacrifices unable to free the soul. They lead them by the
   way themselves came to the home of Christ. Some times they represent
   the new as the truth of the old; at other times as contrasted with it,
   as life and death, as good and evil, as Christ and anti-Christ. They
   relax the force of habit, they melt the pride and fanaticism of the
   soul. They suggest to others their own doubts, they inspire them with
   their own hopes, they supply their own motives, they draw men to them
   with cords of sympathy and bonds of love; they themselves seem a
   sufficient stay to support the world. Such was Luther at the
   Reformation; such, in a higher sense, was the Apostle St. Paul.

   There have been heroes in the world, and there have been prophets in
   the world. The first may be divided into two classes; either they have
   been men of strong will and character, or of great power and range of
   intellect; in a few instances, combining both. They have been the
   natural leaders of mankind, compelling others by their acknowledged
   superiority as rulers and generals; or in the paths of science and
   philosophy, drawing the world after them by a yet more inevitable
   necessity. The prophet belongs to another order of beings: he does not
   master his thoughts; they carry him away. He does not see clearly into
   the laws of this world or the affairs of this world, but has a light
   beyond, which reveals them partially in their relation to another.
   Often he seems to be at once both the weakest and the strongest of men;
   the first to yield to his own impulses, the mightiest to arouse them in
   others. Calmness, or reason, or philosophy are not the words which
   describe the appeals which he makes to the hearts of men. He sways them
   to and fro rather than governs or controls them. He is a poet, and more
   than a poet, the inspired teacher of mankind; but the intellectual
   gifts which he possesses are independent of knowledge, or learning, or
   capacity; what they are much more akin to is the fire and subtlety of
   genius. He, too, for a time, has ruled kingdoms and even led armies;
   ‘an Apostle, not of man, nor by men’; acting, not by authority or
   commission of any prince, but by an immediate inspiration from on high,
   communicating itself to the hearts of men.

   Saul of Tarsus is called an Apostle rather than a prophet, because
   Hebrew prophecy belongs to an age of the world before Christianity. Now
   that in the Gospel that which is perfect is come, that which is in part
   is done away. Yet, in a secondary sense, the Apostle St. Paul is also
   ‘among the prophets’. He, too, has ‘visions and revelations of the
   Lord’, though he has not written them down ‘for our instruction’, in
   which he would fain glory because they are not his own. Even to the
   outward eye he has the signs of a prophet. There is in him the same
   emotion, the same sympathy, the same ‘strength made perfect in
   weakness’, the same absence of human knowledge, the same subtlety in
   the use of language, the same singleness in the delivery of his
   message. He speaks more as a man, and less immediately under the
   impulse of the Spirit of God; more to individuals, and less to the
   nation at large; he is less of a poet, and more of a teacher or
   preacher. But these differences do not interfere with the general
   resemblance. Like Isaiah, he bids us look to ‘the man of sorrows’; like
   Ezekiel, he arouses men to a truer sense of the ways of God in his
   dealings with them; like Jeremiah, he mourns over his countrymen; like
   all the prophets who have ever been, he is lifted above this world, and
   is ‘in the Spirit at the day of the Lord’. (Rev. i. 10.)

   Reflections of this kind are suggested by the absence of materials such
   as throw any light on the early life of St. Paul. All that we know of
   him before his conversion is summed up in two facts, ‘that the
   witnesses laid down their clothes with a young man whose name was
   Saul’, and that he was brought up at the feet of Gamaliel, one of the
   few Rabbinical teachers of Greek learning in the city of Jerusalem. We
   cannot venture to assign to him either the ‘choleric’ or the
   ‘melancholic’ temperament. [Tholuck.] We are unable to determine what
   were his natural gifts or capacities; or how far, as we often observe
   to be the case, the gifts which he had were called out by the mission
   on which he was sent, or the theatre on which he felt himself placed ‘a
   spectacle to the world, to angels, and to men’. Far more interesting is
   it to trace the simple feelings with which he himself regarded his
   former life. ‘Last of all he was seen of me also, who am the least of
   the Apostles, that am not worthy to be called an Apostle, because I
   persecuted the Church of God.’ Yet there was a sense also [in which it
   is true] that he was excusable, and that this was the reason why the
   mercy of God extended itself to him. ‘Yet I obtained mercy because I
   did it ignorantly in unbelief.’ And in one passage he dwells on the
   fact, not only that he had been an Israelite, but more, that after the
   strictest sect of the Jews’ religion he lived a Pharisee, as though
   that were an evidence to himself, and should be so to others, that no
   human power could have changed him; that he was no half Jew, who had
   never properly known what the law was, but one who had both known and
   strictly practised it.

   We are apt to judge extraordinary men by our own standard; that is to
   say, we often suppose them to possess, in an extraordinary degree,
   those qualities which we are conscious of in ourselves or others. This
   is the easiest way of conceiving their characters, but not the truest.
   They differ in kind rather than in degree. Even to understand them
   truly seems to require a power analogous to their own. Their natures
   are more subtle, and yet more simple, than we readily imagine. No one
   can read the ninth chapter of the First, or the eleventh and twelfth
   chapters of the Second Epistle to the Corinthians, without feeling how
   different the Apostle St. Paul must have been from good men among
   ourselves. We marvel how such various traits of character come together
   in the same individual. He who was ‘full of visions and revelations of
   the Lord’, who spake with tongues more than they all, was not ‘mad, but
   uttered the words of truth and soberness’. He who was the most
   enthusiastic of all men, was also the most prudent; the Apostle of
   freedom, and yet the most moderate. He who was the strongest and most
   en lightened of all men, was also (would he have himself refrained from
   saying?) at times the weakest; on whom there came the care of all the
   Churches, yet seeming also to lose the power of acting in the absence
   of human sympathy.

   Qualities so like and unlike are hard to reconcile; perhaps they have
   never been united in the same degree in any other human being. The
   contradiction in part arises not only from the Apostle being an
   extraordinary man, but from his being a man like ourselves in an
   extraordinary state. Creation was not to him that fixed order of things
   which it is to us; rather it was an atmosphere of evil just broken by
   the light beyond. To us the repose of the scene around contrasts with
   the turmoil of man’s own spirit; to the Apostle peace was to be sought
   only from within, half hidden even from the inner man. There was a veil
   upon the heart itself which had to be removed. He himself seemed to
   fall asunder at times into two parts, the flesh and the spirit; and the
   world to be divided into two hemispheres, the one of the rulers of
   darkness, the other bright with that inward presence which should one
   day be revealed. In this twilight he lived. What to us is far oft both
   in time and place, if such an expression may be allowed, to him was
   near and present, separated by a thin film from the world we see, ever
   ready to break forth and gather into itself the frame of nature. That
   sense of the invisible which to most men it is so difficult to impart,
   was like a second nature to St. Paul. He walked by faith, and not by
   sight; what was strange to him was the life he now led; which in his
   own often repeated language was death rather than life, the place of
   shadows and not of realities. The Greek philosophers spoke of a world
   of phenomena, of true being, of knowledge and opinion; and we know that
   what they meant by these distinctions is something different from the
   tenets of any philosophical school of the present day. But not less
   different is what St. Paul meant by the life hidden with Christ and
   God, the communion of the Spirit, the possession of the mind of Christ;
   only that this was not a mere difference of speculation, but of
   practice also. Could any one say now—‘the life’ not that I live, but
   that ‘Christ liveth in me’? Such language with St. Paul is no mere
   phraseology, such as is repeated from habit in prayers, but the
   original consciousness of the Apostle respecting his own state. Self is
   banished from him, and has no more place in him, as he goes on his way
   to fulfil the work of Christ. No figure is too strong to express his
   humiliation in himself, or his exaltation in Christ.

   Could we expect this to be otherwise when we think of the manner of his
   conversion? Could he have looked upon the world with the same eyes that
   we do, or heard its many voices with the same ears, who had been caught
   up into the third heaven, whether in the body or out of the body he
   could not tell? (2 Cor. xii. 1-5.) Must not his life have seemed to him
   a revelation, an inspiration, an ecstasy? Once and again he had seen
   the face of Christ, and heard Him speak from heaven. All that followed
   in the Apostle’s history was the continuation of that first wonder, a
   stream of light flowing from it, ‘planting eyes’ in his soul,
   transfiguring him ‘from glory to glory’, clothing him with the elect
   ‘in the exceeding glory’.

   Yet this glory was not that of the princes of this world, ‘who come to
   nought’; it is another image which he gives us of himself;—not the
   figure on Mars’ hill, in the cartoons of Raphael, nor the orator with
   noble mien and eloquent gesture before Festus and Agrippa; but the
   image of one lowly and cast down, whose ‘bodily presence was weak, and
   speech contemptible’; of one who must have appeared to the rest of
   mankind like a visionary, pierced by the thorn in the flesh, ‘waiting
   for the redemption of the body’. The saints of the middle ages are in
   many respects unlike St. Paul, and yet many of them bear a far closer
   resemblance to him than is to be found in Luther and the Reformers. The
   points of resemblance which we seem to see in them, are the same
   withdrawal from the things of earth, the same ecstasy, the same
   consciousness of the person of Christ. Who would describe Luther by the
   words ‘crucified with Christ’? It is in another manner that the
   Reformer was called upon to war, with weapons earthly as well as
   spiritual, with a strong right hand and a mighty arm.

   There have been those who, although deformed by nature, have worn the
   expression of a calm and heavenly beauty; in whom the flashing eye has
   attested the presence of thought in the poor withered and palsied
   frame. There have been others again, who have passed the greater part
   of their lives in extreme bodily suffering, who have, nevertheless,
   directed states or led armies, the keenness of whose intellect has not
   been dulled nor their natural force of mind abated. There have been
   those also on whose faces men have gazed ‘as upon the face of an
   angel’, while they pierced or stoned them. Of such an one, perhaps, the
   Apostle himself might have gloried; not of those whom men term great or
   noble. He who felt the whole creation groaning and travailing together
   until now was not like the Greek drinking in the life of nature at
   every pore. He who through Christ was ‘crucified to the world, and the
   world to him’, was not in harmony with nature, nor nature with him. The
   manly form, the erect step, the fullness of life and beauty, could not
   have gone along with such a consciousness as this, any more than the
   taste for literature and art could have consisted with the thought,
   ‘not many wise, not many learned, not many mighty’. Instead of these we
   have the visage marred more than the sons of men, ‘the cross of Christ
   which was to the Greeks foolishness’, the thorn in the flesh, the marks
   in the body of the Lord Jesus.

   Often the Apostle St. Paul has been described as a person the furthest
   removed from enthusiasm; in capable of spiritual illusion; by his
   natural temperament averse to credulity or superstition. By such
   considerations as these a celebrated author confesses himself to have
   been converted to the belief in Christianity. And yet, if it is
   intended to reduce St. Paul to the type of what is termed good sense in
   the present day, it must be admitted that the view which thus describes
   him is but partially true. Far nearer the truth is that other quaint
   notion of a modern writer, ‘that St. Paul was the finest gentleman that
   ever lived’; for no man had nobler forms of courtesy, or a deeper
   regard for the feelings of others. But ‘good sense’ is a term not well
   adapted to express either the individual or the age and country in
   which he lived. He who wrought miracles, who had hand kerchiefs carried
   to him from the sick, who spake with tongues more than they all, who
   lived amid visions and revelations of the Lord, who did not appeal to
   the Gospel as a thing long settled, but himself saw the process of
   revelation actually going on before his eyes, and communicated it to
   his fellow men, could never have been such an one as ourselves. Nor can
   we pretend to estimate whether, in the modern sense of the term, he was
   capable of weighing evidence, or how far he would have attempted to
   sever between the workings of his own mind and the Spirit which was
   imparted to him.

   What has given rise to this conception of the Apostle’s character has
   been the circumstance, that with what the world terms mysticism and
   enthusiasm are united a singular prudence and moderation, and a perfect
   humanity, searching the feelings and knowing the hearts of all men. ‘I
   became all things to all men that I might win some’; not only, we may
   believe, as a sort of accommodation, but as the expression of the
   natural compassion and love which he felt for them. There is no reason
   to suppose that the Apostle took any interest in the daily life of men,
   in the great events which were befalling the Roman Empire, or in the
   temporal fortunes of the Jewish people. But when they came before him
   as sinners, lying in darkness and the shadow of God’s wrath, ignorant
   of the mystery that was being revealed before their eyes, then his love
   was quickened for them, then they seemed to him as his kindred and
   brethren; there was no sacrifice too great for him to make; he was
   willing to die with Christ, yea, even to be accursed from Him that he
   might ‘save some of them’.

   Mysticism, or enthusiasm, or intense benevolence and philanthropy, seem
   to us, as they commonly are, at variance with worldly prudence and
   moderation. But in the Apostle these different and contrasted qualities
   are mingled and harmonized. The mother watching over the life of her
   child, has all her faculties aroused and stimulated; she knows almost
   by instinct how to say or do the right thing at the right time; she
   regards his faults with mingled love and sorrow. So, in the Apostle, we
   seem to trace a sort of refinement or nicety of feeling, when he is
   dealing with the souls of men. All his knowledge of mankind shows
   itself for their sakes; and yet not that knowledge of mankind which
   comes from without, revealing itself by experience of men and manners,
   by taking a part in events, by the insensible course of years making us
   learn from what we have seen and suffered. There is another experience
   that comes from within, which begins with the knowledge of self, with
   the consciousness of our own weakness and infirmities; which is
   continued in love to others and in works of good to them; which grows
   by singleness and simplicity of heart. Love becomes the interpreter of
   how men think, and feel, and act; and supplies the place of, or passes
   into a worldly prudence wiser than, the prudence of this world. Such is
   the worldly prudence of St. Paul.

   Once more; there is in the Apostle, not only prudence and knowledge of
   the human heart, but a kind of subtlety of moderation, which considers
   every conceivable case, and balances one with an other; in the last
   resort giving no rule, but allowing all to be superseded by a more
   general principle. An instance of this subtle moderation is his
   determination, or rather omission to determine the question of meats
   and drinks, which he first regards as in different, secondly, as
   depending on men’s own conscience, and this again as limited by the
   consciences of others, and lastly resolves all these finer precepts
   into the general principle, ‘Whatever ye do, do all to the glory of
   God’. The same qualification of one principle by another recurs again
   in his rules respecting marriage. First, ‘do not marry unbelievers’,
   and ‘let not the wife depart from her husband’. But if you are married
   and the unbeliever is willing to remain, then the spirit of the second
   precept must prevail over the first. Only in an extreme case, where
   both parties are willing to dissolve the tie, the first principle in
   turn may again supersede the second. It may be said in the one case,
   ‘your children are holy’; in the other, ‘What knowest thou, O wife, if
   thou shalt save thy husband?’ In a similar spirit he withdraws his
   censure on the incestuous person, lest such an one, criminal as he was,
   should be swallowed up with overmuch sorrow. There is a religious
   aspect of either course of conduct, and either may be right under given
   circumstances. So the kingdoms of this world admit of being regarded
   almost as the kingdom of God, in reference to our duties towards their
   rulers; and yet touching the going to law before unbelievers, we are to
   think rather of that other kingdom in which we shall judge angels.

   The Gospel, it has been often remarked, lays down principles rather
   than rules. The passages in the Epistles of St. Paul which seem to be
   exceptions to this statement, are exceptions in appearance rather than
   in reality. They are relative to the circum stances of those whom he is
   addressing. He who became ‘all things to all men’, would have been the
   last to insist on temporary regulations for his converts being made the
   rule of Christian life in all ages. His manner of Church government is
   so unlike a rule or law, that we can hardly imagine how the Apostle, if
   he could return to earth, would combine the freedom of the Gospel with
   the requirements of Christianity as an established institution. He is
   not a bishop administering a regular system, but a person dealing
   immediately with other persons out of the fullness of his own mind and
   nature. His writings are like spoken words, temporary, occasional,
   adapted to other men’s thoughts and feelings, yet not without an
   eternal meaning. In sending his instructions to the Churches he is ever
   with them, and seems to follow in his mind’s eye their working and
   effect; whither his Epistles go he goes in thought, absent, in his own
   language, ‘in the body, but present in spirit’. What he says to the
   Churches, he seems to make them say: what he directs them to do, they
   are to do in that common spirit in which they are united with him; if
   they live he lives; time and distance never snap the cord of sympathy.
   His government of them is a sort of communion with them; a receiving of
   their feelings and a pouring forth of his own: he is the heart or pulse
   which beats through the Christian world.

   And with this communion of himself and his converts, this care of daily
   life, there mingles the vision of ‘the great family in heaven and
   earth’, ‘the Church which is his body’, in which the meaner reality is
   enfolded or wrapt up, ‘sphered in a radiant cloud’, even in its low
   estate. The language of the Epistles often exercises an illusion on our
   minds when thinking of the primitive Church; individuals perhaps there
   were who truly partook of that light with which the Apostle encircled
   them; there may have been those in the Churches of Corinth, or Ephesus,
   or Galatia, who were living on earth the life of heaven. But the ideal
   which fills the Apostle’s mind has not, necessarily, a corresponding
   fact in the actual state of his converts. The beloved family of the
   Apostle, the Church of which such ‘glorious things are told’, is often
   in tumult and disorder. His love is constantly a source of pain to him:
   he watches over them ‘with a godly jealousy’, and finds them ‘affecting
   others rather than himself’. They are always liable to be ‘spoiled’ by
   some vanity of philosophy, some remembrance of Judaism, which, like an
   epidemic, carries off whole Churches at once, and seems to exercise a
   fatal power over them. He is a father harrowed and agonized in his
   feelings; he loves more and suffers more than other men; he will not
   think, he cannot help thinking, of the ingratitude and insolence of his
   children; he tries to believe, he is persuaded, that all is well; he
   denounces, he forgives; he defends himself, he is ashamed of defending
   himself; he is the herald of his own deeds when others neglect or
   injure him; he is ashamed of this too, and retires into himself, to be
   at peace with Christ and God. So we seem to read the course of the
   Apostle’s thoughts in more than one passage of his writings, beginning
   with the heavenly ideal, and descending to the painful realities of
   actual life, especially at the close of the Second Epistle to the
   Corinthians—altogether, perhaps, the most characteristic picture of the
   Apostle’s mind; and in the last words to the Galatians, ‘Henceforth let
   no man trouble me, for I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus’.

   Great men (those, at least, who present to us the type of earthly
   greatness) are sometimes said to possess the power of command, but not
   the power of entering into the feelings of others. They have no fear of
   their fellows, they are not affected by their opinions or prejudices,
   but neither are they always capable of immediately impressing them, or
   of perceiving the impression which their words or actions make upon
   them. Often they live in a kind of solitude on which other men do not
   venture to intrude; putting forth their strength on particular
   occasions, careless or abstracted about the daily concerns of life.
   Such was not the greatness of the Apostle St. Paul; not only in the
   sense in which he says that ‘he could do all things through Christ’,
   but in a more earthly and human one, was it true, that his strength was
   his weakness and his weakness his strength. His dependence on others
   was also the source of his influence over them. His natural character
   was the type of that communion of the Spirit which he preached; the
   meanness of appearance which he attributes to himself, the image of
   that contrast which the Gospel presents to human greatness. Glorying
   and humiliation; life and death; a vision of angels strengthening him,
   the ‘thorn in the flesh’ rebuking him; the greatest tenderness, not
   without sternness; sorrows above measure, consolations above measure;
   are some of the contra dictions which were reconciled in the same man.
   It is not a long life of ministerial success on which he is looking
   back a little before his death, where he says, ‘I have fought the good
   fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith’. These words
   are sadly illustrated by another verse of the same Epistle, ‘This thou
   knowest, that all they which are in Asia be turned away from me’ (2
   Tim. i. 15). So when the contrast was at its height, he passed away,
   rejoicing in persecution also, and ‘filling up that which was behind of
   the afflictions of Christ for his body’s sake’. Many, if not most, of
   his followers had forsaken him, and there is no certain memorial of the
   manner of his death.

   Let us look once more a little closer at that ‘visage marred’ in his
   Master’s service, as it appeared about three years before on a
   well-known scene. A poor aged man, worn by some bodily or mental
   disorder, who had been often scourged, and bore on his face the traces
   of indignity and sorrow in every form—such an one, led out of prison
   between Roman soldiers, probably at times faltering in his utterance,
   the creature, as he seemed to spectators, of nervous sensibility;
   yearning, almost with a sort of fondness, to save the souls of those
   whom he saw around him, [14] —spoke a few eloquent words in the cause
   of Christian truth, at which kings were awed, telling the tale of his
   own conversion with such simple pathos, that after-ages have hardly
   heard the like.

   Such is the image, not which Christian art has delighted to consecrate,
   but which the Apostle has left in his own writings of himself; an image
   of true wisdom, and nobleness, and affection, but of a wisdom unlike
   the wisdom of this world; of a nobleness which must not be transformed
   into that of the heroes of the world; an affection which seemed to be
   as strong and as individual towards all mankind, as other men are
   capable of feeling towards a single person.
     __________________________________________________________________

   [14] Gal. ii. 20; iv. 14; vi. 17: 1 Cor. xv. 32: 2 Cor. i. 9; vi. 12;
   x. 10; xi. 23-27; xii. 7-10: Philem. ver. 9.
     __________________________________________________________________

FROM AN ESSAY ON ST. PAUL AND THE TWELVE

   EVENTS of the greatest importance in the annals of mankind are not
   always seen to be important, until the hour for preserving them is
   past. There is a time before biography passes into history, when a
   society has not yet learned to register its acts, and individuals have
   not awoke to the consciousness of national or ecclesiastical life. In
   this intermediate period, events the most fruitful in results may lie
   buried (the unfolding of the germ in the bosom of the earth is not the
   least part of the growth of the plant); they may also be reproduced in
   a new form and their spirit misunderstood by the imperfect knowledge of
   after ages. Two or three centuries elapse; documents are lost or
   tampered with, or confused; there is no eye of criticism to penetrate
   their meaning. The historian has ‘the veil upon his face’ of a later
   generation; he cannot see through the events, institutions, opinions in
   the circle of which he lives. Who can tell what went on in a ‘large
   upper room’ about the year 40? which may, nevertheless, have had great
   consequences for the world and the Church. Who, when Christianity was
   triumphant in the fourth century, would comprehend the simple ways and
   thoughts of believers in the first? Nor is there anything more likely
   to be misunderstood, than the differences between the first teachers of
   a religion, and the disputes of their respective followers about a
   matter of discipline or doctrine which has passed away. The transition
   may be too gradual to be observed while it is going on. Literature is
   of a later date; beginning when the Church has already arrived at its
   full stature, it cannot describe the stages of its infancy and growth.
   In the extreme distance the objects of earth are no longer
   distinguishable from the clouds of heaven.

   All history receives a colour from the age in which it is written. This
   is the case with ecclesiastical history even more than secular; it
   glows with the faith and feelings of the historian; it reflects his
   principles or convictions—it is sometimes embittered by his prejudices.
   Eusebius, ‘the father of ecclesiastical history’, believing as he did
   that the constitution of the Church which he saw around him had existed
   from the first, was not likely to give a consistent account of its
   origin or growth. Nor was it to be expected that he should trace the
   history of doctrines, who, within the Church at least, could have
   admitted of no doctrinal difference or development. It was impossible
   for him to describe that of which he had no conception. Had he been
   disposed to write an accurate account of the progress of the Christian
   faith in the first two centuries, the scantiness of his materials would
   have prevented him from doing so. The antiquarian spirit had awoke too
   late to recover the treasures of the past. Those who preceded him had a
   similar though less definite impression of the first age, of which they
   knew so little, and wrote in the same way. It would be an anachronism
   to expect that he should sift critically the few cases in which the
   earlier authorities witness against themselves. In point of judgement,
   he is about on a level with the other ‘Father of History’; that is to
   say, he is not wholly destitute of critical power: yet his criticism is
   accidental and capricious; most often observable in the case of
   ecclesiastical writings, which his literary tastes led him to explore.
   But real historical investigation is unknown to him. No resisting power
   of inquiry prevents his acceptance of any facts which fell in with the
   orthodox faith of his age, or seemed to afford a witness to it. Mira
   cles are believed by him, not upon greater, but upon rather less
   evidence than ordinary events. He catches, like Herodotus, at any
   chance similarity, such as that between the first Christians and the
   Therapeutae of Egypt (ii. c. 17). He feels no difficulty in receiving
   the statement of Justin Martyr, that Simon Magus was honoured at Rome
   under the title of the Holy God (Semo Sancus); or the testimony of
   Tertullian, that the Emperor Tiberius referred the worship of Christ to
   the senate. He sees the whole history of the Church through the medium
   of that victory over Paganism and heresy which he had witnessed in his
   own day. He carries the struggle back into the previous centuries, in
   which he finds almost nothing else but the conflict of the truth with
   heresy, and the blood of martyrs the seed of the Church. No one can
   suppose that the heresiarchs were such as he describes them, or that he
   has truly seized the relation in which they stood to the primitive
   Church. The language in which he denounces them is a sufficient
   evidence that he could not have investigated with calmness the
   character of the ‘wolf of Pontus’, or the false prophet Montanus and
   his ‘reptile’ followers. Though living at a distance of a century and a
   half, he repeats and adopts the conventional abuse of their
   contemporary adversaries.

   Records of the earliest heretics have passed away; no one of them is
   fairly known to us from his own writings. Their names have become a
   byword among men; at another tribunal we may believe that many
   judgements passed upon them have been reversed. The true history of the
   century which followed the withdrawal of the Apostles has also
   perished, or is preserved only in fragmentary statements. It is a
   matter of conjecture how the constitution of the Church arose; it is a
   parallel speculation, out of what simpler elements the earliest
   liturgies were compiled. But it does not follow that nothing happened
   in an age of which we know nothing. The least philosophy of history
   suggests the reflection that in the primitive Church there must have
   existed all the varieties of practice, belief, speculation, doctrine,
   which the different circumstances of the converts, and the different
   natures of men acting on those circumstances, would be likely to
   produce. The Church acquired unity in its progress through the world;
   it was more scattered and undisciplined at first than it after wards
   became. Even the Apostles do not work together in the spirit of an
   order; they and their followers are not an army ‘set under authority’,
   of which the leaders say to one man ‘come, and he cometh’, and to
   another ‘go, and he goeth’. The Church of the Apostles may be compared
   more truly to ‘the wind blowing where it listeth’, or even to ‘the
   lightning shining from one part of the heaven to the other’. Paul and
   Barnabas and Apollos, and even Priscilla and Aquila, have their
   separate ways of acting; they walk in different paths; they do not
   attempt to control one another. Whatever caution is observable in their
   mode of dealing with each other’s spheres of labour is a matter of
   courtesy, not of ecclesiastical discipline. It is not certain, perhaps
   on the whole improbable, that those who came from James to Antioch
   (Gal. ii. 12) represented the community at Jerusalem. There is no
   Church which claims to be the metropolis of other Churches; nor any
   subordination within the several Churches to a single authority. The
   words of the Epistle to the Ephesians (iv. 11), ‘He gave some apostles,
   and some prophets, and some evangelists, and some pastors and
   teachers’, are hardly reconcilable either with three orders of clergy,
   or with the distinction of clergy and laity. They describe a state of
   the Church in which there was less of system and more of impulse than
   at a later period; in which ‘all the Lord’s people were prophets’, and
   natural or spiritual gifts became offices ‘in the beginning of the
   Gospel’. Compare Rom. xii. 6; 1 Cor. xii. 28, 29.

   Many doubts and possibilities arise in our minds respecting the age of
   the Apostles when we look on the picture ‘through a microscope’, and
   dwell on those points which are commonly unnoticed. We are tempted to
   frame theories and reconstructions, which are better, perhaps,
   represented by queries. Did those who remained behind in the Church
   regard the death of the martyr Stephen with the same feelings as those
   who were scattered abroad? or was he in their eyes only what James the
   Just appeared to be to the historian Josephus? Were the Apostles at
   Jerusalem one in heart with the brethren at Antioch? Were the teachers
   who came from Jerusalem to Antioch saying, ‘Except ye be circumcised,
   ye cannot be saved’, commissioned by the Twelve? Were the Twelve
   absolutely at one among themselves? Are the ‘commendatory epistles’
   spoken of in the Epistle to the Corinthians, to be ascribed to the
   Apostles at Jerusalem? Can ‘the grievous wolves’, whose entrance into
   the Church of Ephesus the Apostle foresaw, be other than the Judaizing
   teachers? Were ‘the multitude’ of believing Jews, who were all zealous
   for the law, and liable to be quickened in their zeal for it by the
   very sight of St. Paul, engaged in the tumult which follows? Lastly,
   how far does the narrative of the Acts convey the lively impression of
   contemporaries, how far the recollections of another generation? These
   questions cannot have detailed answers; to raise them, however, is not
   without use, for they make us regard the facts in many points of view;
   they afford a help in the prosecution of the main inquiry, ‘What was
   the relation of St. Paul to the Twelve?’

   If we conceive of the Apostles as exercising a strict and definite rule
   over the multitude of their converts, living heads of the Church as
   they might be termed, Peter or James of the circumcision and Paul of
   the uncircumcision, it would be natural to connect them with the acts
   of their followers. One would think that, in accordance with the spirit
   of the concordat, they should have ‘delivered over to Satan’ the
   opponents of St. Paul, rather than have lived in communion and company
   with them. To hold out the right hand of fellowship to Paul and
   Barnabas, and yet secretly to support or not to discountenance their
   enemies, would seem to be treachery to their common Master. Especially
   when we observe how strongly the Judaizers are characterized by St.
   Paul as ‘the false brethren who came in unawares’, ‘the false Apostles
   transforming themselves into Apostles of Christ’, ‘grievous wolves
   entering in’, and with what bitter personal weapons they assailed him
   (1 Cor. ix. 3-7). Indeed, the contrast between the vehemence with which
   St. Paul treats his Judaizing antagonists, and the gentleness or
   silence which he preserves towards the Apostles at Jerusalem, is a
   remarkable circumstance.

   It may be questioned whether the whole difficulty does not arise from a
   false conception of the authority of the Apostles in the early Church.
   Although the first teachers of the word of Christ, they were not the
   rulers of the Catholic Church; they were not its bishops, but its
   prophets. The influence which they exercised was personal rather than
   official, derived doubtless from their ‘having seen the Lord’, and from
   their appointment by Him, yet confined also to a comparatively narrow
   sphere; it was exercised in places in which they were, but hardly
   extended to places where they were not. The Gospel grew up around them
   they could not tell how; and the spirit which their preaching first
   awakened passed out of their control. They seemed no longer to be the
   prime movers, but rather the spectators of the work of God, which went
   on before their eyes. The thousands of Jews that believed and were
   zealous for the law would not lay aside the garb of Judaism at the
   bidding of James or Peter; the false teachers of Corinth or of Ephesus
   would not have been less likely to gain followers, had they been
   excommunicated by the Twelve. The movement which, in twenty years from
   the death of Christ, had spread so widely over the earth, they did not
   seek to reduce to rule and compass. It was beyond their reach,
   extending to communities of the circumstances of which they were hardly
   informed, and in which, therefore, it was not to be expected that they
   should interfere between St. Paul and his opponents.

   The Apostolic name acquired a sacredness in the second century which
   was unknown to it in the first. We must not attribute either to the
   persons or to the writings of the Apostles the authority with which
   after ages invested them. No Epistle of James and Paul was received by
   those to whom it was sent, like the Scriptures of the Old Testament, as
   the Word of God. Nor are they quoted in the same manner with books of
   the Old Testament before the time of Irenaeus. We might have imagined
   that every Church would have preserved an unmistakable record of its
   lineage and descent from some one of the Twelve. But so far is this
   from being the case, that no connexion can be traced certainly, between
   the Gentile Churches of the second century and that of Jerusalem in the
   first. Jerusalem was not the metropolis of all Churches, but one among
   many; acknowledged, indeed, by the Gentile Christians with affection
   and gratitude, but not prescribing any rule, or exercising authority
   over them.

   The moment we think of the Church, not as an ecclesiastical or
   political institution, but, as it was in the first age, a spiritual
   body, that is to say, a body partly moved by the Spirit of God,
   dependent also on the tempers and sympathies of men swayed to and fro
   by religious emotion, the perplexity solves itself, and the narrative
   of Scripture becomes truthful and natural. When the waves are high, we
   see but a little way over the ocean. The first fervour of religious
   feeling does not admit a uniform level of Church government. It is not
   a regular hierarchy, but ‘some apostles, some prophets, some
   evangelists, others pastors and teachers’, who grow together ‘into the
   body of Christ’. The description of the early Church in the Epistles
   everywhere implies a great freedom of individual action. Apollos and
   Barnabas are not under the guidance of Paul; those ‘who were
   distinguished among the apostles before him’, could hardly have owned
   his authority. No attempt is made to bring the different Churches under
   a common system. We cannot imagine any bond by which they could have
   been linked together, without an order of clergy or form of Church
   government common to them all; this is not to be found in the New
   Testament. It was hard to keep the Church at Corinth at unity with
   itself; it would have been still harder to have brought it into union
   with other Churches.

   Of this fluctuating state of the Church, which was not yet addicted to
   any one rule, we find another indication in the freedom, almost levity,
   with which professing Christians embraced ‘traditions of men’. The
   attitude of the Church of Corinth towards the Apostle was not that of
   believers in a faith ‘once delivered to the saints’. We know not
   whether Apollos was or was not a teacher of Alexandrian learning among
   its members, or what was the exact nature of ‘the party of Christ’, 1
   Cor. i. 12. But that heathen as well as Jewish elements had found their
   way into the Corinthian community, is intimated by the ‘false wisdom’,
   and the sitting at meat in the idol’s temple. It is a startling
   question which is addressed to a Christian Church: ‘How say some among
   you that there is no resurrection?’ (1 Cor. xv. 12). It is not less
   startling that there should have been fornication among them, such as
   was not even named among the Gentiles. In the Church at Colossae again
   something was suspected by the Apostle, probably half Jewish and half
   heathen in its character, which he designates by the singular
   expression of a ‘voluntary humility and worshipping of angels’. And
   mention is made in the Roman Church of those who preached Christ of
   envy and strife, as well as those who preached Christ of peace and
   goodwill (Phil. i. 15).

   Amid such fluctuation and unsettlement of opinions we can imagine Paul
   and Apollos, or Paul and Peter, preaching side by side in the Church of
   Corinth or of Antioch, like Wesley and Whitfield in the last century,
   or Luther and Calvin at the Reformation, with a sincere reverence for
   each other, not abstaining from commenting on or condemning each
   other’s doctrine or practice, and yet also forgetting their differences
   in their common zeal to save the souls of men. Personal regard is quite
   consistent with differences of religious belief; some of which, with
   good men, are a kind of form belonging only to their outer nature, most
   of which, as we hope, exist only on this side of the grave. We can
   imagine the followers of such men incapable of acting in their noble
   spirit, with a feebler sense of their high calling, and a stronger one
   of their points of disagreement; losing the principle for which they
   were alike contending in ‘oppositions of knowledge’, in prejudice and
   personality. And lastly, we may conceive the disciples of Wesley or of
   Whitfield (for of the Apostles themselves we forbear to move the
   question) reacting upon their masters and drawing them into the vicious
   circle of controversy, disuniting them in their lives, though incapable
   of making a separation between them.

   A subject so wide is matter not for an essay but for a book; it is the
   history of the Church of the first two centuries. We must therefore
   narrow our field of vision as much as possible, and content ourselves
   with collecting a few general facts which have a bearing on our present
   inquiry.

   First among these general facts, is the ignorance of the third and
   fourth centuries respecting the first, and earlier half of the second.
   We cannot err in supposing that those who could add nothing to what is
   recorded in the New Testament of the life of Christ and His Apostles,
   had no real knowledge of lesser matters, as, for example, the origin of
   Episcopacy. They could not understand, they were incapable of
   preserving the memory of a state of the Church which was unlike their
   own. The contemporaries of the Apostles have nothing to tell of their
   lives and for tunes; the next generation is also silent; in the third
   generation the license of conjecture is already rife. No fact worth
   mentioning can be gathered from the writings of the Apostolical
   Fathers. Irenaeus, who lived about fifty years later, and within a
   century of St. Paul, has not added a single circumstance to what we
   gather from the New Testament; he has fallen into the well-known error
   of supposing that our Lord was fifty years old at the time of His
   ministry; he has stated also that ‘Papias was John’s hearer, and the
   associate of Polycarp’, though Papias himself, in the preface to his
   discourses, by no means asserts that he was ‘hearer and eyewitness of
   the holy Apostles’ (Euseb. H. E. iii. 39); he has repeated as a
   discourse of Christ’s the fable of Papias respecting the bunches of
   grapes; this he would have literally interpreted. Justin, who was
   somewhat earlier than Irenaeus, has given a measure of the knowledge
   and criticism of his own age in the story of Simon Magus. Tertullian,
   at the close of the next century, believed that the emperor Tiberius
   had consulted the Roman senate respecting the worship of our Lord
   (Euseb. H. E. ii. 2). Eusebius himself verified from the Archives of
   Edessa the fabulous correspondence of Abgarus and Jesus, and the
   miraculous narrative which follows (H. E. i. 13). In at least half the
   instances in which we are able to test his quotations from earlier
   writers, they exhibit some degree of inaccuracy or confusion. It is
   hard to believe the statement of Poly crates of Ephesus (about A.D.
   180), that ‘John, who rested on the bosom of the Lord, was a priest,
   and bore the sacerdotal plate’ (Euseb. H. E. iii. 32), or that Philip
   the Evangelist was one of the Twelve Apostles. But what use can be made
   of such sandy materials? It is idle to have recourse to remote
   reconcilements when the facts themselves are uncertain; equally so to
   argue precisely from turns of expression where language is rhetorical.

   The second general fact is the unconsciousness of this ignorance, and
   the readiness with which the vacant space is filled up, and the Church
   of the second century assimilated to that of the third and fourth.
   History often conceals that which is discordant to preconceived
   notions; silently dropping some facts, exaggerating others, adding,
   where needed, new tone and colouring, until the disguise can no longer
   be detected. By some process of this kind the circumstance into which
   we are inquiring has been forgotten and reproduced. Nothing has
   survived relating to the great crisis which Christianity under went in
   the age of the Apostles themselves; it passed away silently in the
   altered state of the Church and the world. Not only in the strange
   account of the dispute between the Apostles, given by Origen and
   others, is what may be termed the ‘animus’ of concealment discernible,
   but in fragments of earlier writings, in which the two Apostles appear
   side by side as co-founders of the Corinthian, as well as of the Roman
   Church (Caius and Dion, of Corinth, quoted by Euseb., ii. 25), pleading
   their cause together before Nero; dying on the same day, their graves
   being appealed to as witnesses to the tale, probably as early as the
   first half of the second century. The unconscious motive which gave
   birth to such fictions was, seemingly, the desire to throw a veil over
   that occasion on which they withstood one another to the face. And the
   truth indistinctly shines through this legend of the latter part of the
   second century, when it is further recorded that St. Paul was at the
   head of the Gentile Church at Rome, Peter of the circumcision.

   Bearing in mind these general considerations, which throw a degree of
   doubt on the early ecclesiastical tradition, and lead us to seek for
   indications out of the regular course of history, we have to consider,
   in reference to our present subject, the following statements:—

   1. That Justin, who is recorded to have written against Marcion, refers
   to the Twelve in several passages, but nowhere in his genuine writings
   mentions St. Paul. And when speaking of the books read in the Christian
   assemblies, he names only the Gospels and the Prophets (Apol. i. 67).

   . That Marcion, who was nearly contemporary with Justin, is said to
   have appealed to the authority of St. Paul only.

   (On the other hand, it is true that in numerous quotations from the Old
   Testament, Justin appears to follow St. Paul. It is difficult to
   account for this singular phenomenon.)

   3. That in the account of James the Just, given by Josephus and
   Hegesippus (about A.D. 170), he is represented as a Jew among Jews;
   living, according to Hegesippus, the life of a Nazarite; praying in the
   Temple until his knees became hard as a camel’s, and so entirely a Jew
   as to be unknown to the people for a Christian; a description which,
   though its features may be exaggerated, yet has the trace of a true
   resemblance to the part which we find him acting in the Epistle to the
   Galatians. It falls in, too, with the fact of his peaceable continuance
   as head of the Church at Jerusalem, in the Acts of the Apostles; and is
   not inconsistent with the spirit of the Epistle which bears his name.
   (Comp. Euseb. ii. 23.)

   4. That the same Hegesippus regards the heresies as arising out of
   schism in the Jewish Church. He was himself a Hebrew convert; and after
   stating that he travelled to Rome, whither he went by way of Corinth,
   and had familiar conversation with many bishops, he declares ‘that in
   every succession and in every city the doctrine prevails according to
   what is declared by the law and the prophets and the Lord’ (Euseb. iv.
   22). This is not the language of a follower of St. Paul.

   5. That in the Clementine Homilies, written about the year 160, though
   a work generally orthodox, St. Paul is covertly introduced under the
   name of Simon Magus, as the impersonation of Gnostic error, as the
   enemy who had pretended ‘visions and revelations’, and who ‘withstood’
   and blamed Peter. No writer doubts the allusion in some of these
   passages to the Epistles of St. Paul. Assuming their connexion, we ask,
   What was the state of mind which led an orthodox Christian, who lived
   probably at Rome, about the middle of the second century, to affix such
   a character to St. Paul? and what was the motive which induced him to
   veil his meaning? What, too, could have been the state of the Church in
   which such a romance grew up? and how could the next generation have
   read it without perceiving its true aim? Doubtful as may be the precise
   answer to these questions, we cannot attribute this remarkable work to
   the wayward fancy of an individual; it is an indication of a real
   tendency of the first and second centuries, at a time when the flame
   was almost extinguished, but still slumbered in the mind of the writer
   of the Clementine Homilies. It is observable that at a later date,
   about the year 210-230, in the form which the work afterwards received
   under the title of ‘the Clementine Recognitions’, which have been
   preserved in a Latin translation, the objection able passages have
   mostly vanished.

   6. Lastly, that in later writings we find no trace of the mind of St.
   Paul. His influence seems to pass from the world. On such a basis ‘as
   where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty’, it might have been
   impossible to rear the fabric of a hierarchy. But the thought itself
   was not present to the next generation. The tide of ecclesiastical
   feeling set in another direction. It was not merely that after-writers
   fell short of St. Paul, or imperfectly interpreted him, but that they
   formed themselves on a different model. It was not only that the
   external constitution of the Church had received a definite form and
   shape, but that the inward perception of the nature of the Gospel was
   different. No writer of the latter half of the second century would
   have spoken as St. Paul has done of the law, of the sabbath, of
   justification by faith only, of the Spirit, of grace, of moderation in
   things indifferent, of forgiveness. An echo of a part of his teaching
   is heard in Augustine; with this exception, the voice of him who
   withstood Peter to the face at Antioch was silent in the Church until
   the Reformation. The spirit of the Epistles to the Romans and to the
   Galatians has revived in later times. But there is no trace that the
   writings of the Apostle left any lasting impress within the Church, or
   perhaps any where in the first ages.

   Yet the principle of the Apostle triumphed, though at the time of its
   triumph it may seem to have lost the spirit and power of the Apostle.
   The struggle which commenced like Athanasius against the world, ended
   as the struggle of the world against the remnant of the Jewish race.
   Beginning within the confines of Judea, it spread in a widening circle
   among the Jewish proselytes, still wider and more faintly marked in the
   philojudaizing Gentile, fading in the distance as Christianity became a
   universal religion. Two events had a great influence on its progress.
   First, the destruction of Jerusalem, and the flight to Pella of the
   Christian community; secondly, the revolt under Barchocab; both tending
   to separate, more and more, both in fact and the opinion of mankind,
   the Christian from the Jew.

   It would be vain to carry our inquiry further, with the view of
   gleaning a few results respecting the first half of the second century.
   Remote probabilities and isolated facts are not worth balancing. The
   consciousness that we know little of the times which followed the
   Apostles is the best part of our knowledge. And many will deem it well
   for the purity of the Christian faith, that while Christ Himself is
   clearly seen by us—as a light, at the fountain of which a dead Church
   may receive life, and a living one renew its strength—the origin of
   ecclesiastical institutions has been hidden from our eyes. In the
   second and third centuries Christianity was extending its borders,
   fencing itself with creeds and liturgies, taking possession of the
   earth with its hierarchy. Whether this great organization was
   originally every where the same, whether it adopted the form chiefly of
   the Jewish worship and ministry or of the Roman magistracy, or at first
   of the one and afterwards of the other, cannot be certainly determined.
   A cloud hangs over the dawn of ecclesiastical history. By some course
   of events with which we are not acquainted, the Providence of God
   leading the way, and the thoughts of man following, the Jewish
   Synagogue became the Christian Church; the Passover was superseded by
   Easter; the Christian Sunday took the place of the Jewish Sabbath.
   While the Old Testament retained its authority over Gentile as well as
   Jewish Christians, the law was done away in Christ, and the Judaizer of
   the first century be came the Ebionitish heretic of the second and
   third.
     __________________________________________________________________

ON CONVERSION AND

CHANGES OF CHARACTER

  ROMANS VII

   THUS have we the image of the lifelong struggle gathered up in a single
   instant. In describing it we pass beyond the consciousness of the
   individual into a world of abstractions; we loosen the thread by which
   the spiritual faculties are held together, and view as objects what
   can, strictly speaking, have no existence, except in relation to the
   subject. The divided members of the soul are ideal, the combat between
   them is ideal, so also is the victory. What is real that corresponds to
   this is not a momentary, but a continuous conflict, which we feel
   rather than know,—which has its different aspects of hope and fear,
   triumph and despair, the action and reaction of the Spirit of God in
   the depths of the human soul, awakening the sense of sin and conveying
   the assurance of forgiveness.

   The language in which we describe this conflict is very different from
   that of the Apostle. Our circum stances are so changed that we are
   hardly able to view it in its simplest elements. Christianity is now
   the established religion of the civilized portion of mankind. In our
   own country it has become part of the law of the land; it speaks with
   authority, it is embodied in a Church, it is supported by almost
   universal opinion, and fortified by wealth and prescription. Those who
   know least of its spiritual life do not deny its greatness as a power
   in the world. Analogous to this relation in which it stands to our
   history and social state, is the relation in which it stands also to
   the minds of individuals. We are brought up in it, and unconsciously
   receive it as the habit of our thoughts and the condition of our life.
   It is without us, and we are within its circle; we do not become
   Christians, we are so from our birth. Even in those who suppose
   themselves to have passed through some sudden and violent change, and
   to have tasted once for all of the heavenly gift, the change is hardly
   ever in the form or substance of their belief, but in its quickening
   power; they feel not a new creed, but a new spirit within them. So that
   we might truly say of Christianity, that it is ‘the daughter of time’;
   it hangs to the past, not only because the first century is the era of
   its birth, but because each successive century strengthens its form and
   adds to its external force, and entwines it with more numerous links in
   our social state. Not only may we say, that it is part and parcel of
   the law of the land, but part and parcel of the character of each one,
   which even the worst of men cannot wholly shake off.

   But if with ourselves the influence of Christianity is almost always
   gradual and imperceptible, with the first believers it was almost
   always sudden. There was no interval which separated the preaching of
   Peter on the day of Pentecost, from the baptism of the three thousand.
   The eunuch of Candace paused for a brief space on a journey, and was
   then baptized into the name of Christ, which a few hours previously he
   had not so much as heard. There was no period of probation like that
   which, a century or two later, was appropriated to the instruction of
   the Catechumens. It was an impulse, an inspiration passing from the
   lips of one to a chosen few, and communicated by them to the ear and
   soul of listening multitudes. As the wind bloweth where it listeth, and
   we hear the sound thereof; as the lightning shineth from the one end of
   the heaven to the other; so suddenly, fitfully, simultaneously, new
   thoughts come into their minds, not to one only, but to many, to whole
   cities almost at once. They were pricked with the sense of sin; they
   were melted with the love of Christ; their spiritual nature came again
   like the flesh of a little child’. And some, like St. Paul, became the
   very opposite of their former selves; from scoffers, believers; from
   persecutors, preachers; the thing that they were was so strange to
   them, that they could no longer look calmly on the earthly scene, which
   they hardly seemed to touch, which was already lighted up with the
   wrath and mercy of God. There were those among them who ‘saw visions
   and dreamed dreams’, who were ‘caught up’, like St. Paul, ‘into the
   third heaven’, or, like the twelve, ‘spake with other tongues as the
   Spirit gave them utterance’. And sometimes, as in the Thessalonian
   Church, the ecstasy of conversion led to strange and wild opinions,
   such as the daily expectation of Christ’s coming. The ‘round world’
   itself began to reel before them, as they thought of the things that
   were shortly to come to pass.

   But however sudden were the conversions of the earliest believers,
   however wonderful the circumstances which attended them, they were not
   for that reason the less lasting or sincere. Though many preached
   ‘Christ of contention’, though ‘Demas forsook the Apostle’, there were
   few who, having once taken up the cross, turned back from ‘the love of
   this present world’. They might waver between Paul and Peter, between
   the circumcision and the uncircumcision; they might give ear to the
   strange and bewitching heresies of the East; but there is no trace that
   many returned to ‘those that were no gods’, or put off Christ; the
   impression of the truth that they had received was everlasting on their
   minds. Even sins of fornication and uncleanness, which from the
   Apostle’s frequent warnings against them we must suppose to have
   lingered, as a sort of remnant of heathenism in the early Church, did
   not wholly destroy their inward relation to God and Christ. Though
   ‘their last state might be worse than the first’, they could never
   return again to live the life of all men after having tasted ‘the
   heavenly gift and the powers of the world to come’.

   Such was the nature of conversion among the early Christians, the new
   birth of which by spiritual descent we are ourselves the offspring. Is
   there anything in history like it? anything in our own lives which may
   help us to understand it? That which the Scripture describes from
   within, we are for a while going to look at from a different point of
   view, not with reference to the power of God, but to those secondary
   causes through which He works—the laws which experience shows that he
   himself imposes on the operations of his spirit. Such an inquiry is not
   a mere idle speculation; it is not far from the practical question,
   ‘How we are to become better’. Imperfect as any attempt to analyse our
   spiritual life must ever be, the changes which we ourselves experience
   or observe in others, compared with those greater and more sudden
   changes which took place in the age of the Apostle, will throw light
   upon each other.

   In the sudden conversions of the early Christians we observe three
   things which either tend to discredit, or do not accompany, the working
   of a similar power among ourselves.—First, that conversion was marked
   by ecstatic arid unusual phenomena; secondly, that, though sudden, it
   was permanent; thirdly, that it fell upon whole multitudes at once.

   When we consider what is implied in such expressions as ‘not many wise,
   not many learned’ were called to the knowledge of the truth, we can
   scarcely avoid feeling that there must have been much in the early
   Church which would have been distasteful to us as men of education;
   much that must have worn the appearance of excitement and enthusiasm.
   Is the mean conventicle, looking almost like a private house, a better
   image of that first assembly of Christians which met in the ‘large
   upper room’, or the Catholic church arrayed in all the glories of
   Christian art? Neither of them is altogether like in spirit perhaps,
   but in externals the first. Is the dignified hierarchy that occupy the
   seats around the altar, more like the multitudes of first believers, or
   the lowly crowd that kneel upon the pavement? If we try to embody in
   the mind’s eye the forms of the first teachers, and still more of their
   followers, we cannot help reading the true lesson, however great may be
   the illusions of poetry or of art. Not St. Paul standing on Mars’ hill
   in the fulness of manly strength, as we have him in the cartoon of
   Raphael, is the true image; but such a one as he himself would glory
   in, whose bodily presence was weak and speech feeble, who had an
   infirmity in his flesh, and bore in his body the marks of the Lord
   Jesus.

   And when we look at this picture, ‘full in the face’, however we might
   by nature be inclined to turn aside from it, or veil its details in
   general language, we cannot deny that many things that accompany the
   religion of the uneducated now, must then also have accompanied the
   Gospel preached to the poor. There must have been, humanly speaking,
   spiritual delusions where men lived so exclusively in the spiritual
   world; there were scenes which we know took place such as St. Paul says
   would make the un believer think that they were mad. The best and
   holiest persons among the poor and ignorant are not entirely free from
   superstition, according to the notions of the educated; at best they
   are apt to speak of religion in a manner not quite suited to our taste;
   they sing with a loud and excited voice; they imagine themselves to
   receive Divine oracles, even about the humblest cares of life. Is not
   this, in externals at least, very like the appearance which the first
   disciples must have presented, who obeyed the Apostle’s injunction, ‘Is
   any sad? let him pray; is any merry? let him sing psalms’? Could our
   nerves have borne to witness the speaking with tongues, or the
   administration of Baptism, or the love feasts as they probably existed
   in the early Church?

   This difference between the feelings and habits of the first Christians
   and ourselves, must be borne in mind in relation to the subject of
   conversion. For as sudden changes are more likely to be met with
   amongst the poor and uneducated in the present day, it certainly throws
   light on the subject of the first conversions, that to the poor and
   uneducated the Gospel was first preached. And yet these sudden changes
   were as real, nay, more real than any gradual changes which take place
   among ourselves. The Stoic or Epicurean philosopher who had come into
   an assembly of believers speaking with tongues, would have remarked,
   that among the vulgar religious extravagances were usually short-lived.
   But it was not so. There was more there than he had eyes to see, or
   than was dreamed of in a philosophy like his. Not only was there the
   superficial appearance of poverty and meanness and enthusiasm, from a
   nearer view of which we are apt to shrink, but underneath this,
   brighter from its very obscurity, purer from the meanness of the
   raiment in which it was apparelled, was the life hidden with Christ and
   God. There, and there only, was the power which made a man humble
   instead of proud, self-denying instead of self-seeking, spiritual
   instead of carnal; which made him embrace, not only the brethren, but
   the whole human race in the arms of his love.

   But it is a further difference between the power of the Gospel now and
   in the first ages, that it no longer converts whole multitudes at once.
   Perhaps this very individuality in its mode of working may not be
   without an advantage in awakening us to its higher truths and more
   entire spiritual freedom. Whether this be so or not; whether there be
   any spiritual law by which reason, in a measure, takes the place of
   faith, and the common religious impulse weakens as the power of
   reflection grows, we certainly observe a diminution in the collective
   force which religion exercises on the hearts of men. In our own days
   the preacher sees the seed which he has sown gradually spring up; first
   one, then another begins to lead a better life; then a change comes
   over the state of society, often from causes over which he has no
   control; he makes some steps forwards and a few backwards, and trusts
   far more, if he is wise, to the silent influence of religious education
   than to the power of preaching; and, perhaps, the result of a long life
   of ministerial labour is far less than that of a single discourse from
   the lips of the Apostles or their followers. Even in missions to the
   heathen the vital energies of Christianity cease to operate to any
   great extent, at least on the effete civilization of India and China;
   the limits of the kingdoms of light and darkness are nearly the same as
   heretofore. At any rate it cannot be said that Christianity has wrought
   any sudden amelioration of mankind by the immediate preaching of the
   word, since the conversion of the barbarians. Even within the Christian
   world there is a parallel retardation. The ebb and flow of reformation
   and counterreformation have hardly changed the permanent landmarks. The
   age of spiritual crises is past. The growth of Christianity in modern
   times may be compared to the change of the body, when it has already
   arrived at its full stature. In one half-century so vast a progress was
   made, in a few centuries more the world itself seemed to ‘have gone
   after Him’, and now for near a thousand years the voice of experience
   is repeating to us, ‘Hitherto shalt thou go, but no further.’

   Looking at this remarkable phenomenon of the conversion of whole
   multitudes at once, not from its Divine but from its human aspect (that
   is, with reference to that provision that God himself has made in human
   nature for the execution of his will), the first cause to which we are
   naturally led to attribute it is the power of sympathy. Why it is that
   men ever act together is a mystery of which our individual
   self-consciousness gives no account, any more than why we speak a
   common language, or form nations or societies, or merely in our
   physical nature are capable of taking diseases from one another. Nature
   and the Author of nature have made us thus dependent on each other both
   in body and soul. Whoever has seen human beings collected together in
   masses, and watched the movements that pass over them, like ‘the trees
   of the forest moving in the wind’, will have no difficulty in
   imagining, if not in understanding, how the same voice might have found
   its way at the same instant to a thousand hearts, without our being
   able to say where the fire was first kindled, or by whom the
   inspiration was first caught. Such historical events as the
   Reformation, or the Crusades, or the French Revolution, are a
   sufficient evidence that a whole people, or almost, we may say, half a
   world, may be ‘drunk into one spirit’, springing up, as it might seem,
   spontaneously in the breast of each, yet common to all. A parallel yet
   nearer is furnished by the history of the Jewish people, in whose
   sudden rebellion and restoration to God’s favour, we recognize
   literally the momentary workings of, what is to ourselves a figure of
   speech, a national conscience.

   In ordinary cases we should truly say that there must have been some
   predisposing cause of a great political or religious revolution; some
   latent elements acting alike upon all, which, though long smouldering
   beneath, burst forth at last into a flame. Such a cause might be the
   misery of mankind, or the intense corruption of human society, which
   could not be quickened except it die, or the long-suppressed yearnings
   of the soul after something higher than it had hitherto known upon
   earth, or the reflected light of one religion or one movement of the
   human mind upon another. Such causes were actually at work, preparing
   the way for the diffusion of Christianity. The law itself was beginning
   to pass away in an altered world, the state of society was hollow, the
   chosen people were hopelessly under the Roman yoke. Good men refrained
   from the wild attempt of the Galilean Judas; yet the spirit which
   animated such attempts was slumbering in their bosoms. Looking back at
   their own past history, they could not but remember, even in an altered
   world, that there was One who ruled among the kingdoms of men, ‘beside
   whom there was no God’. Were they to suppose that His arm was
   straitened to save? that He had forgotten His tender mercies to the
   house of David? that the aspirations of the prophets were vain? that
   the blood of the Maccabean heroes had sunk like water into the earth?
   This was a hard saying; who could bear it? It was long ere the nation,
   like the individual, put off the old man—that is, the temporal
   dispensation—and put on the new man—that is, the spiritual Israel. The
   very misery of the people seemed to forbid them to acquiesce in their
   present state. And with the miserable condition of the nation sprang up
   also the feeling, not only in individuals but in the race, that for
   their sins they were chastened, the feeling which their whole history
   seemed to deepen and increase. At last the scales fell from their eyes;
   the veil that was on the face of Moses was first transfigured before
   them, then removed; the thoughts of many hearts turned simultaneously
   to the Hope of Israel, ‘Him whom the law and the prophets foretold’. As
   they listened to the preaching of the Apostles, they seemed to hear a
   truth both new and old; what many had thought, but none had uttered;
   which in its comfort and joyousness seemed to them new, and yet, from
   its familiarity and suitableness to their condition, not the less old.

   Spiritual life, no less than natural life, is often the very opposite
   of the elements which seem to give birth to it. The preparation for the
   way of the Lord, which John the Baptist preached, did not consist in a
   direct reference to the Saviour. The words ‘He shall baptize you with
   the Holy Ghost and with fire’, and ‘He shall burn up the chaff with
   fire unquenchable’, could have given the Jews no exact conception of
   Him who ‘did not break the bruised reed, nor quench the smoking flax’.
   It was in another way that John prepared for Christ, by quickening the
   moral sense of the people, and sounding in their ears the voice
   ‘Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand’. Beyond this useful
   lesson, there was a kind of vacancy in the preaching of John. He
   himself, as ‘he was finishing his course’, testified that his work was
   incomplete, and that he was not the Christ. The Jewish people were
   prepared by his preaching for the coming of Christ, just as an
   individual might be prepared to receive Him by the conviction of sin
   and the conscious need of forgiveness.

   Except from the Gospel history and the writings of Josephus and Philo,
   we know but little of the tendencies of the Jewish mind in the time of
   our Lord. Yet we cannot doubt that the entrance of Christianity into
   the world was not sudden and abrupt; that is an allusion which arises
   in the mind from our slender acquaintance with contemporary opinions.
   Better and higher and holier as it was, it was not absolutely distinct
   from the teaching of the doctors of the law either in form or
   substance; it was not unconnected with, but gave life and truth to, the
   mystic fancies of Alexandrian philosophy. Even in the counsels of
   perfection of the Sermon on the Mount, there is probably nothing which
   might not be found, either in letter or spirit, in Philo or some other
   Jewish or Eastern writer. The peculiarity of the Gospel is, not that it
   teaches what is wholly new, but that it draws out of the treasure-house
   of the human heart things new and old, gathering together in one the
   dispersed fragments of the truth. The common people would not have
   ‘heard Him gladly’, but for the truth of what He said. The heart was
   its own witness to it. The better nature of man, though but for a
   moment, responded to it, spoken as it was with authority, and not as
   the scribes; with simplicity, and not as the great teachers of the law;
   and sanctified by the life and actions of Him from whose lips it came,
   and ‘Who spake as never man spake’.

   And yet, after reviewing the circumstances of the first preaching of
   the Gospel, there remains some thing which cannot be resolved into
   causes or antecedents; which eludes criticism, and can no more be
   explained in the world than the sudden changes of character in the
   individual. There are processes of life and organization about which we
   know nothing, and we seem to know that we shall never know any thing.
   ‘That which thou sowest is not quickened, except it die’; but the
   mechanism of this new life is too complex and yet too simple for us to
   untwist its fibres. The figure which St. Paul applies to the
   resurrection of the body is true also of the renewal of the soul,
   especially in the first ages, of which we know so little, and in which
   the Gospel seems to have acted with such far greater power than among
   ourselves.

   Leaving further inquiry into the conversion of the first Christians at
   the point at which it hides itself from us in mystery, we have now to
   turn to a question hardly less mysterious, though seemingly more
   familiar to us, which may be regarded as a question either of moral
   philosophy or of theology,—the nature of conversion and changes of
   character among ourselves. What traces are there of a spiritual power
   still acting upon the human heart? What is the inward nature, and what
   are the out ward conditions of changes in human conduct? Is our life a
   gradual and insensible progress from infancy to age, from birth to
   death, governed by fixed laws; or is it a miracle and mystery of
   thirty, or fifty, or seventy years’ standing, consisting of so many
   isolated actions or portions knit together by no common principle?

   Were we to consider mankind only from without, there could be no doubt
   of the answer which we should give to the last of these questions. The
   order of the world would scarcely even seem to be infringed by the free
   will of man. In morals, no less than in physics, everything would
   appear to proceed by regular law. Individuals have certain capacities,
   which grow with their growth and strengthen with their strength; and no
   one by taking thought can add one cubit to his stature. As the poet
   says,—‘The boy is father to the man’. The lives of the great majority
   have a sort of continuity: as we know them by the same look, walk,
   manner; so when we come to converse with them, we recognize the same
   character as formerly. They may be changed; but the change in general
   is such as we expect to find in them from youth to maturity, or from
   maturity to decay. There is something in them which is not changed, by
   which we perceive them to be the same. If they were weak, they remain
   so still; if they were sensitive, they remain so still; if they were
   selfish or passionate, such faults are seldom cured by increasing age
   or infirmities. And often the same nature puts on many veils and
   disguises; to the outward eye it may have, in some instances, almost
   disappeared; when we look beneath, it is still there.

   The appearance of this sameness in human nature has led many to suppose
   that no real change ever takes place. Does a man from a drunkard become
   sober? from a knight errant become a devotee? from a sensualist a
   believer in Christ? or a woman from a life of pleasure pass to a
   romantic and devoted religion? It has been maintained that they are the
   same still; and that deeper similarities remain than the differences
   which are a part of their new profession. Those who make the remark
   would say, that such persons exhibit the same vanity, the same
   irritability, the same ambition; that sensualism still lurks under the
   disguise of refinement, or earthly and human passion transfuses itself
   into devotion.

   This ‘practical fatalism’, which says that human beings can be what
   they are and nothing else, has a certain degree of truth, or rather, of
   plausibility, from the circumstance that men seldom change wholly, and
   that the part of their nature which changes least is the weakness and
   infirmity that shows itself on the surface. Few, comparatively, ever
   change their outward manner, except from the mere result of altered
   circumstances; and hence, to a superficial observer, they appear to
   change less than is really the fact. Probably St. Paul never lost that
   trembling and feebleness, which was one of the trials of his life. Nor,
   in so far as the mind is dependent on the body, can we pretend to be
   wholly free agents. Who can say that his view of life and his power of
   action are unaffected by his bodily state? or who expects to find a
   firm and decided character in the nervous and sensitive frame? The
   commonest facts of daily life sufficiently prove the connexion of mind
   and body; the more we attend to it the closer it appears. Nor, indeed,
   can it be denied that external circumstances fix for most men the path
   of life. They are the inhabitants of a particular country; they have a
   certain position in the world; they rise to their occupations as the
   morning comes round; they seldom get beyond the circle of ideas in
   which they have been brought up. Fearfully and wonderfully as they are
   made, though each one in his bodily frame, and even more in his
   thoughts and feelings, is a miracle of complexity, they seem, as they
   meet in society, to reunite into a machine, and society itself is the
   great automaton of which they are the parts. It is harder and more
   conventional than the individuals which compose it; it exercises a kind
   of regulating force on the wayward fancies of their wills; it says to
   them in an unmistakable manner that ‘they shall not break their ranks’.
   The laws of trade, the customs of social life, the instincts of human
   nature, act upon us with a power little less than that of physical
   necessity.

   If from this external aspect of human things we turn inward, there
   seems to be no limit to the changes which we deem possible. We are no
   longer the same, but different every hour. No physical fact interposes
   itself as an obstacle to our thoughts any more than to our dreams. The
   world and its laws have nothing to do with our free determinations. At
   any moment we can begin a new life; in idea at least, no time is
   required for the change. One instant we may be proud, the next humble;
   one instant sinning, at the next repenting; one instant, like St. Paul,
   ready to persecute, at another to preach the Gospel; full of malice and
   hatred one hour, melting into tenderness the next. As we hear the words
   of the preacher, there is a voice within telling us, that ‘now, even
   now, is the day of salvation’; and if certain clogs and hindrances of
   earth could only be removed, we are ready to pass immediately into
   another state. And, at times, it seems as though we had actually passed
   into rest, and had a foretaste of the heavenly gift. Something more
   than imagination enables us to fashion a divine pattern to which we
   conform for a little while. The ‘new man’ unto which we become
   transformed, is so pleasant to us that it banishes the thought of ‘the
   old’. In youth especially, when we are ignorant of the compass of our
   own nature, such frames of mind are perpetually recurring; perhaps, not
   without attendant evils; certainly, also, for good.

   But besides such feelings as these, which we know to be partly true,
   partly illusive, every one’s experience of himself appears to teach
   him, that he has gone through many changes and had many special
   providences vouchsafed to him; he says to himself that he has been led
   in a mysterious and peculiar way, not like the way of other men, and
   had feelings not common to others; he compares different times and
   places, and contrasts his own conduct here and there, now and then. In
   other men he remarks similarity of character; in himself he sees
   chiefly diversity. They seem to be the creatures of habit and
   circumstance; he alone is a free agent. The truth is, that he observes
   himself; he cannot equally observe them. He is not conscious of the
   inward struggles through which they have passed; he sees only the veil
   of flesh which conceals them from his view. He knows when he thinks
   about it, but he does not habitually remember, that, under that calm
   exterior, there is a like current of individual thoughts, feelings,
   interests, which have as great a charm and intensity for another as the
   workings of his own mind have for himself.

   And yet it does not follow, that this inward fact is to be set aside as
   the result of egotism and illusion. It may be not merely the dreamy
   reflection of our life and actions in the mirror of self, but the
   subtle and delicate spring of the whole machine. To purify the feelings
   or to move the will, the internal sense may be as necessary to us as
   external observation is to regulate and sustain them. Even to the
   formula of the fatalist, that ‘freedom is the consciousness of
   necessity’, it may be replied, that that very consciousness, as he
   terms it, is as essential as any other link in the chain in which ‘he
   binds fast the world’. Human nature is beset by the contradiction, not
   of two rival theories, but of many apparently contradictory facts. If
   we cannot imagine how the world could go on without law and order in
   human actions, neither can we imagine how morality could subsist unless
   we clear a space around us for the freedom of the will.

   But not in this place to get further into the meshes of the great
   question of freedom and necessity, let us rather turn aside for a
   moment to consider some practical aspects of the reflections which
   precede. Scripture and reason alike require that we should entirely
   turn to God, that we should obey the whole law. And hard as this may
   seem at first, there is a witness within us which pleads that it is
   possible. Our mind and moral nature are one; we cannot break ourselves
   into pieces in action any more than in thought. The whole man is in
   every part and in every act. This is not a mere mode of thought, but a
   truth of great practical importance. ‘Easier to change many things than
   one’, is the common saying. Easier, we may add, in religion or
   morality, to change the whole than the part. Easier because more
   natural, more agreeable to the voice of conscience and the promises of
   Scripture. God himself deals with us as a whole; he does not forgive us
   in part any more than he requires us to serve Him in part. It may be
   true that, of the thousand hearers of the appeal of the preacher, not
   above one begins a new life. And some persons will imagine that it
   might be better to make an impression on them little by little, like
   the effect of the dropping of water upon stone. Not in this way is the
   Gospel written down on the fleshly tables of the heart. More true to
   our own experience of self, as well as to the words of Scripture, are
   such ideas as renovation, renewal, regeneration, taking up the cross
   and following Christ, dying with Christ that we may also live with Him.

   Many a person will tease himself by counting minutes and providing
   small rules for his life, who would have found the task an easier and a
   nobler one, had he viewed it in its whole extent, and gone to God in a
   ‘large and liberal spirit’, to offer up his life to Him. To have no
   arrière-pensée in the service of God and virtue is the great source of
   peace and happiness. Make clean that which is within, and you have no
   need to purify that which is without. Take care of the little things of
   life, and the great ones will take care of themselves, is the maxim of
   the trader, which is sometimes, and with a certain degree of truth,
   applied to the service of God. But much more true is it in religion
   that we should take care of the great things, and the trifles of life
   will take care of themselves. ‘If thine eye be single, thy whole body
   will be full of light.’ Christianity is not acquired as an art by long
   practice; it does not carve and polish human nature with a graving
   tool; it makes the whole man; first pouring out his soul before God,
   and then casting him in a mould’. Its workings are not to be measured
   by time, even though among educated persons, and in modern times,
   sudden and momentary conversions can rarely occur.

   For the doctrine of conversion, the moralist substitutes the theory of
   habits. Good actions, he says, produce good habits; and the repetition
   of good actions makes them easier to perform, and ‘fortifies us
   indefinitely against temptation’. There are bodily and mental
   habits—habits of reflection and habits of action. Practice gives skill
   or sleight of hand; constant attention, the faculty of abstraction; so
   the practice of virtue makes us virtuous, that of vice vicious. The
   more meat we eat, to use the illustration of Aristotle, in whom we find
   a cruder form of the same theory, the more we are able to eat meat; the
   more we wrestle, the more able we are to wrestle, and so forth. If a
   person has some duty to perform, say of common and trivial sort, to
   rise at a particular hour in the morning, to be at a particular place
   at such an hour, to conform to some rule about abstinence, we tell him
   that he will find the first occasion difficult, the second easy, and
   the difficulty is supposed to vanish by degrees until it wholly
   disappears. If a man has to march into a battle, or to perform a
   surgical operation, or to do anything else from which human nature
   shrinks, his nerves, we say, are gradually strengthened; his head, as
   was said of a famous soldier, clears up at the sound of the cannon;
   like the grave-digger in Hamlet, he has soon no ‘feeling of his
   occupation’.

   From a consideration of such instances as these, the rule has been laid
   down, that, ‘as the passive impression weakens, the active habit
   strengthens’. But is not this saying of a great man founded on a narrow
   and partial contemplation of human nature? For, in the first place, it
   leaves altogether out of sight the motives of human action; it is
   equally suited to the most rigid formalist and to a moral and spiritual
   being. Secondly, it takes no account of the limitation of the power of
   habits, which neither in mind nor body can be extended beyond a certain
   point; nor of the original capacity or peculiar character of
   individuals; nor of the different kinds of habits, nor of the degrees
   of strength and weakness in different minds; nor of the enormous
   difference between youth and age, childhood and manhood, in the
   capacity for acquiring habits. Old age does not move with accumulated
   force, either upwards or downwards; they are the lesser habits, not the
   great springs of life, that show themselves in it with in creased
   power. Nor can the man who has neglected to form habits in youth,
   acquire them in mature life; like the body, the mind ceases to be
   capable of receiving a particular form. Lastly, such a description of
   human nature agrees with no man’s account of himself; whatever
   moralists may say, he knows himself to be a spiritual being. ‘The wind
   bloweth where it listeth,’ and he cannot ‘tell whence it cometh, or
   whither it goeth’.

   All that is true in the theory of habits seems to be implied in the
   notion of order or regularity. Even this is inadequate to give a
   conception of the structure of human beings. Order is the beginning,
   but freedom is the perfection of our moral nature. Men do not live at
   random, or act one instant with out reference to their actions just
   before. And in youth especially, the very sameness of our occupations
   is a sort of stay and support to us, as in age it may be described as a
   kind of rest. But no one will say that the mere repetition of actions
   until they constitute a habit, gives any explanation of the higher and
   nobler forms of human virtue, or the finer moulds of character. Life
   cannot be explained as the working of a mere machine, still less can
   moral or spiritual life be reduced to merely mechanical laws.

   But if, while acknowledging that a great proportion of mankind are the
   creatures of habit, and that a great part of our actions are nothing
   more than the result of habit, we go on to ask ourselves about the
   changes of our life, and fix our minds on the critical points, we are
   led to view human nature, not only in a wider and more generous spirit,
   but also in a way more accordant with the language of Scripture. We no
   longer measure ourselves by days or by weeks; we are conscious that at
   particular times we have undergone great revolutions or emotions; and
   then, again, have intervened periods, lasting perhaps for years, in
   which we have pursued the even current of our way. Our progress towards
   good may have been in idea an imperceptible and regular advance; in
   fact, we know it to have been otherwise. We have taken plunges in life;
   there are many eras noted in our existence. The greatest changes are
   those of which we are the least able to give an account, and which we
   feel the most disposed to refer to a superior power. That they were
   simply mysterious, like some utterly unknown natural phenomena, is our
   first thought about them. But although unable to fathom their true
   nature, we are capable of analysing many of the circumstances which
   accompany them, and of observing the impulses out of which they arise.

   Every man has the power of forming a resolution, or, without previous
   resolution, in any particular instance, acting as he will. As thoughts
   come into the mind one cannot tell how, so too motives spring up,
   without our being able to trace their origin. Why we suddenly see a
   thing in a new light, is often hard to explain; why we feel an action
   to be right or wrong which has previously seemed indifferent, is not
   less inexplicable. We fix the passing dream or sentiment in action; the
   thought is nothing, the deed may be everything. That day after day, to
   use a familiar instance, the drunkard will find abstinence easier, is
   probably untrue; but that from once abstaining he will gain a fresh
   experience, and receive a new strength and inward satisfaction, which
   may result in endless consequences, is what every one is aware of. It
   is not the samen