126 Unbelief, undesignedly the servant of the Church.

discipline for the hearts and lives of men, can take the place of that which it seeks to destroy. Leaving some of the deepest, most legitimate, and most ineradicable needs of the human soul utterly unsatisfied, modern unbelief can never really hope permanently to establish a popular 'religion of humanity. Thus the force of its intellectual onset upon revealed dogma is continually being broken by the consciousness, that it cannot long maintain the ground which it may seem to itself for the moment to have won. Its highest speculative energy is more than counterbalanced by the moral power of some humble teacher of a positive creed for whom possibly it entertains nothing less than a sovereign contempt. Thirdly, unbelief resembles social or political persecution in this, that, indirectly, it does an inevitable service to the Faith which it attacks. It forces earnest believers in Jesus Christ to minimize all differences which are less than fundamental. It compels Christian men to repress with a strong hand all exaggeration of existing motives for a divided action. It obliges Christians, sometimes in spite of themselves, to work side by side for their insulted Lord. Thus it not only creates freshened sympathies between temporarily severed branches of the Church; it draws toward the Church herself, with an increasingly powerful and comprehensive attraction, many of those earnestly believing men, who, as is the case with numbers among our nonconformist brethren in this country, already belong, in St. Augustine's language, to the soul, although not to the body, of the Catholic Communion. Lastly, it unwittingly contributes to augment the evidential strength of Christianity, at the very moment of its assault upon Christian doctrine. The fierceness of man turns to the praise of Jesus Christ, by demonstrating, each day, each year, each decade of years, each century, the indestructibility of His work in the world; and unbelief voluntarily condemns itself to the task of maintaining before the eyes of men that enduring tradition of an implacable hostility to the kingdom of heaven, which it is the glory of our Saviour so explicitly to have predicted, and so consistently and triumphantly to have defied.

The attempt of M. Auguste Comte, in his later life, to elaborate a kind of ritual as a devotional and æsthetical appendage to the Positivist Philosophy, implies a sense of this truth. M. Comte however does not appear to have carried any large section of the Positivist school with him in this singular enterprise. But a like poverty of moral and spiritual provision for the soul of man is observable in rationalistic systems which stop very far short of the literal godlessness of the Positive Philosophy.

Intensity of our Lord's work in souls.

127

(3.) For these and other reasons, modern unbelief, although formidable, will not be deemed so full of menace to the future of the kingdom of our Lord as may sometimes be apprehended by the nervous timidity of Christian piety. This will appear more certain if from considering the extent of Christ's realm we turn to the intensive side of His work among men. For indeed the depth of our Lord's work in the soul of man has ever been more wonderful than its breadth. The moral intensity of the life of a sincere Christian is a more signal illustration of the reality of the reign of Christ, and of the success of His plan, than is the territorial range of the Christian empire. 'The King's daughter is all glorious within.' Christianity may have conferred a new sanction upon civil and domestic relationships among men; and it certainly infused a new life into the most degraded society that the world has yet seen z. Still this was not its primary aim; its primary efforts were directed not to this world, but to the next a. Christianity has changed many of the outward aspects of human existence; it has created a new religious language, a new type of worship, a new calendar of time. It has furnished new ideals to art; it has opened nothing less than a new world of literature; it has invested the forms of social intercourse among men with new graces of refinement and mutual consideration. Yet these are but some of the superficial symptoms of its real work. It has achieved these changes in the outward life of Christian nations, because it has penetrated to the very depths of man's heart and thought; because it has revolutionized his convictions and tamed his will, and then expressed its triumph in the altered social system of that section of the human race which has generally received it. How

y 2 Thess. i. II, 12, where the Apostle's prayers for the moral and spiritual growth of the Thessalonians are offered ὅπως ἐνδοξάσθη τὸ ὄνομα τοῦ Κυρίου ἡμῶν Ἰησοῦ ἐν ὑμῖν.

St. Aug. Ep. cxxxviii. ad Marcellin. n. 15: 'Qui doctrinam Christi adversam dicunt esse reipublicæ, dent exercitum talem, quales doctrina Christi esse milites jussit, dent tales provinciales, tales maritos, tales conjuges, tales parentes, tales filios, tales dominos, tales servos, tales reges, tales judices, tales denique debitorum ipsius fisci redditores et exactores, quales esse præcipit doctrina Christiana, et audeant eam dicere adversam esse reipublicæ, immò verò non dubitent eam confiteri magnam, si obtemperetur, salutem esse reipublicæ.'

a St. Hieronymus adv. Jovin. lib. ii. tom. iv. pars ii. p. 200, ed. Martian: 'Nostra religio non TUктν, non athletam (St. Jerome might almost have in his eye a certain well-known modern theory) non nautas, non milites, non fossores, sed sapientiæ erudit sectatorem, qui se Dei cultui dedicavit, et scit cur creatus sit, cur versetur in mundo, quo abire festinet.'

128 Intensity of our Lord's work in souls.

complete at this moment is the reign of Christ in the soul of a sincere Christian! Christ is not a limited, He is emphatically an absolute Monarch. Yet His rule is welcomed by His subjects with more than that enthusiasm which a free people can feel for its elected magistracy. Every sincere Christian bows to Jesus Christ as to an Intellectual Master. Our Lord is not merely listened to as a Teacher of Truth; He is contemplated as the absolute Truth itself. Accordingly no portion of His teaching is received by true Christians merely as a 'view,' or as a 'tentative system,' or as a 'theory,' which may be entertained, discussed, partially adopted, and partially set aside. Those who deal thus with Him are understood to have broken with Christianity, at least as a practical religion. For a Christian, the Words of Christ constitute the highest criterion and rule of truth. All that Christ has authorized is simply accepted, all that He has condemned is simply rejected, with the whole energy of the Christian reason. Christ's Thought is reflected, it is reproduced, in the thought of the true Christian. Christ's authority in the sphere of speculative truth is thankfully acknowledged by the Christian's voluntary and unreserved submission to the slightest known intimations of his Master's judgment. High above the claims of human teachers, the tremendous self-assertion of Jesus Christ echoes on from age to age,—'I am the Truth.' And from age to age the Christian mind responds by a life-long endeavour 'to bring every thought into captivity unto the obedience of Christc.' But if Jesus Christ is Lord of the Christian's thought, He is also Lord of the Christian's affections. Beauty it is which provokes love; and Christ is the highest Moral Beauty. He does not merely rank as an exponent of the purest morality. He is absolute Virtue, embodied in a human life, and vividly, energetically set forth before our eyes in the story of the Gospels. As such, He claims to reign over the inmost affections of men. As such, He secures the first place in the heart of every true Christian. To have taken the measure of His Beauty, and yet not to love Him, is, in a Christian's judgment, to be self-condemned. 'If any man love not the Lord Jesus Christ, let him be Anathema Maranatha d' And ruling the affections of the Christian, Christ is also King of the sovereign faculty in the Christianized soul; He is Master of the Christian will. When He has tamed its native stubbornness, He teaches it day by day a more and more pliant accuracy of

b St. John xiv. 6.

c 2 Cor. x. 5.

d I Cor. xvi. 22.

'Christ is Christianity.

129

movement in obedience to Himself. Nay, He is not merely its rule of action, but its very motive power; each act of devotion and self-sacrifice of which it is capable the energy of Christ's Own moral Life. to His servants, 'ye can do nothing e;' servants reply, 'I can do all things strengtheneth Mef'

is but an extension of Without Me,' he says and with St. Paul His through Christ Which

This may be expressed in other terms by saying that, both intellectually and morally, Christ is Christianity 8. Christianity is not related to our Lord as a philosophy might be to a philosopher, that is, as a moral or intellectual system thrown off from his mind, resting thenceforward on its own merits, and implying no necessary relation towards its author on the part of those who receive it, beyond a certain sympathy with what was at one time a portion of his thought h. A philosophy may be thus abstracted altogether from the person of its originator, with entire impunity. Platonic thought would not have been damaged, if Plato had been annihilated; and in our day men are Hegelians or Comtists, without believing that the respective authors of those systems are in existence at this moment, nay rather, in the majority of cases, while deliberately holding that they have ceased to be. The utmost stretch of personal allegiance, on the part of the disciple of a philosophy to its founder, consists, ordinarily speaking, in a sentiment of devotion to his memory.' But detach Christianity from Christ, and it vanishes before your eyes into intellectual vapour. For it is of the essence of Christianity that, day by day, hour by hour, the Christian should live in conscious, felt, sustained relationship to the Ever-living Author of his creed and of his life. Christianity is non-existent apart from Christ; it centres in Christ; it radiates, now as at the first, from Christ. It is not a mere doctrine bequeathed by Him to a world with which He has ceased to have dealings; it perishes outright when men attempt to abstract it from the Living Person of its Founder. He is felt by His people to be their Living Lord, really present with them. now, and even unto the end of the world. The Christian life springs from and is sustained by the apprehension of Christ present in His Church, present in and with His members as a πνεῦμα ζωοποιοῦνί. Christ is the quickening Spirit of Christian f Phil. iv. 13; cf. i. 19.

• St. John xv. 5.

* See Newman, Grammar of Assent, p. 457.

h Luthardt, Grundwahrheiten des Christenthums, p. 227: 'Er ist der

Inhalt seiner Lehre.'

i I Cor. xv. 45.

130 Is the Sermon on the Mount a dead letter? humanity; He lives in Christians; He thinks in Christians; He acts through Christians and with Christians; He is indissolubly associated with every movement of the Christian's deepest life. 'I live,' exclaims the Apostle, 'yet not I, but Christ liveth in mej.' This felt presence of Christ it is, which gives both its form and its force to the sincere Christian life. That life is a loyal homage of the intellect, of the heart, and of the will, to a Divine King, with Whom will, heart, and intellect are in close and constant communion, and from Whom there flows forth, through the Spirit and the Sacraments, that supply of light, of love, and of resolve, which enriches and ennobles the Christian soul. My brethren, I am not theorizing or describing any merely ideal state of things; I am but putting into words the inner experience of every true Christian among you; I am but exhibiting a set of spiritual circumstances which, as a matter of course, every true Christian endeavours to realize and make his own, and which, as a matter of fact, blessed be God! very many Christians do realize, to their present peace, and to their eternal welfare.

Certainly it is not uncommon in our day to be informed, that 'the Sermon on the Mount is a dead letter in Christendom.' In consequence (so men speak) of the engrossing interest which Christians have wrongly attached to the discussion of dogmatic questions, that original draught of essential Christianity, the Sermon on the Mount, has been wellnigh altogether lost sight of. Perhaps you yourselves, my brethren, ere now have repeated some of the current commonplaces on this topic. But have you endeavoured to ascertain whether it is indeed as you say ? You remark that you at least have not met with Christians who seemed to be making any sincere efforts to turn the Sermon on the Mount into practice. It may be so. But the question is, where have you looked for them? Do you expect to meet them rushing hurriedly along the great highways of life, with the keen, eager, self-asserting multitude? Do you expect, that with their eye upon the Beatitudes and upon the Cross, they will throng the roads which lead to worldly success, to earthly wealth, to temporal honour? Be assured that those who know where moral beauty, aye, the highest, is to be found, are not disappointed, even at this hour, in their search for it. Until you have looked more carefully, more anxiously than has probably been the case, for the triumphs of our Lord's work in

j Gal. ii. 20.