God through faith, and the surrender of the will and affections to him-a futurity of blessedness as the reward of patient and victorious virtue ;-this is its spirit-these are its essential principles-these are the considerations and views which lead to its peculiar effects, and produce the distinguishing features of the Christian character. If we abstract the doctrines and usages peculiar to different sects-this is what remains as common to them all, though sometimes obscured and enfeebled by the extraneous matter associated with it. It is the excellence of pure Christianity, that it has arrested in the simplest and most intelligible form the general spirit of Theism on those great and unchanging relations, which embrace all the conceivable conditions in which human beings can be placed their moral relation to God, their moral relation to each other, the moral relation of time to eternity-and has embodied and exemplified these great principles in the living and dying of a faultless specimen of humanity.

This then is the spirit of Christianity, adapted to the immutable relations of man and God; and the perfection of Christ's character arises from his distinct consciousness of those relations, and his acting and feeling in entire consistency with them. But Christ stands above our ordinary humanity, in intimate union with God; and the principles which he revealed in his teachings and his life-to be reduced to practice-must pass through a tempering medium, and be adjusted to the conception and capacity of inferior natures. Hence the changing forms in which the spirit has expressed itself. For our intellectual nature is progressive, and the conceptions which it forms of all objects change with its own development. Thus, while the moral relations which the spirit of Christianity embraces are in themselves eternally the same-the mode in which men render those relations intelligible to their minds, and clothe them with the hues of their own feelings and imaginations, is continually varying. It is obviously desirable that there should be a harmony between the forms in which the most important moral relations are conceived and the general state of intellectual advancement on other subjects. It is very unfortunate, when these forms have been so rigidly fixed as to be incapable of expansion with the general growth of the understanding. For the same forms which may have been appropriate and unavoidable in one age, become useless and even pernicious in another.

It may seem a startling position, but it is confirmed by the whole history of human society-that errors and prejudices, as they are afterwards found, are in their time and place necessary and beneficial instruments in the hand of Providence for ac

celerating the progress of civilization and preparing the way for the reception of the greatest truths. We are too much in the habit of applying our own standard of things, which will itself be abandoned in time by our more enlightened descendants, to states of manners and opinion wholly different from that in which we live. Great injustice is thus often done to past ages; and invincible difficulties are gratuitously heaped on Christianity -by assuming, that because it comes ultimately from God, it can escape the universal laws of human development-and by retaining beyond their time the forms, which belonged to its infancy, but now only encumber and depress the free unfolding of its spirit. Prejudice (by which term we here understand limited and partial views) is often the only practicable vehicle for the earliest communication of truth. Prejudice itself we must not retain one moment after we perceive that it is prejudice; but we must carefully cherish the truth which God has commissioned it to bring to us, and which we shall now extricate more clear and bright, after separating the ore in which it was encrusted. It is difficult, no doubt, to make the separation, though the distinction really exists. Thoughtfulness, selfculture, and an attention to the practical effects of religion without respect to sectarian predilections-furnish the best means of distinguishing between the transient error and the permanent truth-the varying form and the immutable spirit.

We shall now proceed to apply these principles to the doctrinal system of the apostle Paul-endeavouring to discover through the conceptions immediately presented to the mind, the positive result of truth which has been thus introduced into the world. We shall take his most important doctrines in succession.

(1.) He teaches very distinctly, that God is the author of all things, and absolutely omnipotent; and at the same time that man deserves condemnation for the sin that he has committed. These positions drawn into their consequences, as conceived by us, seem to involve a metaphysical and a moral incongruity; and their true relation to each other cannot be apprehended by the mind of man, in its present state of advancement. If God be strictly the universal cause, the remote sources of sin itself must be traced back to him; and to suppose that he could subject a creature to suffering, not leading to a good beyond itself, and otherwise unattainable-for the unavoidable consequences of a system, which he had himself devised-must obviously involve an impeachment of his moral attributes. Yet both doctrines express convictions which seem to arise spontaneously in the mind, and are perhaps faint anticipations of VOL. III. No. 13.-New Series.

2

some great truth which we are at present unable to grasp.-The spirit of the practical inference which they deposit in the mind, is this; that God must ever remain in this life the unsearchable object of human reverence and awe, and that man must use his free agency for the pursuit of truth and right.

(2.) Paul speaks of Christ as the image of the invisible God, the first-born of the creation, in whom dwelleth all the fulness of the divine power bodily, the Lord of all things in heaven and earth, raised above all principality and power, all things put under his feet. The conception in the apostle's mind seems to have been, that Christ was the archetypal man-the head of the spiritual creation. This was the form of his conception of Christ; and it has been succeeded by other forms in other ages-Athanasianism, Sabellianism, Arianism, and, as a negation of other forms, simple Humanitarianism.

But what

may we regard as the lasting truth, involved in all these forms? That Christ is the ideal of humanity in its state of ultimate perfection and complete union with God—the model to which we must unceasingly strive to conform ourselves—our medium of access to God-the more we resemble whom the more we become one with God. If we retain this view of Christ, we possess the spirit of the apostle's doctrine; all else is form, changing with the age, the country, or the individual.

(3.) We have the doctrine of justification by faith. Now, what is this doctrine? Not the worthlessness of morality-the vulgar Antinomianism of fanatics-this is a gross and dangerous error; not simply the inefficacy of the ceremonial works of the lawthis was a doctrine of the time-the particular form of a general principle suggested by the apostle's own circumstances :—but the universal truth involved is this-that we must live in faith and act from conviction; that true virtue cannot be inspired by fear, commanded by authority, or secured by calculation, but that it must come from a heart filled with kind and pure affections, and governed by a calm and honest reason.

(4.) Atonement or reconciliation through Christ, "whom God hath set forth to be a propitiation through faith in his blood." (Rom. iii. 25.) This is the form of the apostle's conception. Must we abide by that form? or can we pass through it to a deeper and holier truth, of which it has served merely as the vehicle and the introduction? The idea of atonement, propitiation, satisfaction, is inconsistent with that of free mercy, which is equally ascribed by Paul to God. It does not accord with our notion of a Father, that he should be induced to remit the punishment due to any portion of his human family, in con

sideration of another's sufferings, gratuitously incurred. It gives to suffering for itself a sort of abstract value in the sight of God. Such conduct in a human father, tried by the general spirit of the Christian morality, would certainly not enhance our esteem for his character. The notion is altogether anthropomorphitic, and derived from that principle of retaliation which pervaded all the earliest systems of retributive justice-an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth-and which, governing the relations of human society, was transferred to the relations supposed to subsist between God and his creatures. These sacrificial and propitiatory notions were so deeply blended with the earliest religions of the world, and entered so essentially into every conception of the relations between God and man-that they could be expelled, and juster views substituted in their place only by a sort of moral homeopathy-by the exhibition of a conception which gathered, as it were, their collective influence into itself, and exhausted their power in one final effortby holding up Christ's death as the one all-sufficient sacrifice, by which he made atonement once for all, and opened a free passage for all men to the throne of God. This was the form in which a great truth could in that age be brought home most cogently and impressively to the minds of men. And what was that truth?-the free access to God, without priest or sacrifice, through simple penitence and faithof all human beings who turn to him with a truly childlike heart and a sincere purpose of obedience. This quick and vigorous idea, once implanted in the heart, ultimately expelled by the power of its own vitality the grosser elements originally associated with it; and in its progress towards that final result, it has contributed in the successive adaptations of its forms to the wants and capacities of various states of individual character and social condition, to strengthen the love of God and the hatred of sin, and to encourage spirituality of mind.

(5.) It was the doctrine of the apostle, that believers only could be saved. This was his conception of the salvation that is in Christ. Not looking beyond the circumstances in which he was immediately called to act-his sincere and earnest mind saw in Christianity the only means of deliverance from sin; the means and the end were one in his view; and the exclusion of unbelievers from the hope of salvation was only a form of the indisputable truth, that sin is an effectual bar to the favour and acceptance of God. But the retention of the form has furnished a pretext in later ages for the worst intolerance. The real truth involved is this; that a religious spirit is essential to the highest virtue and happiness-that in this sense believers only can at

tain to salvation; but all who turn to God, and seek the right and the true with singleness of heart, and sincerely follow the light that is afforded them, must be comprehended in the definition of believers.

(6.) Paul's doctrine of Christ's descending from heaven to raise the dead and to judge the world appears to us to furnish a sort of touchstone of the principle we have been advocatingand to prove beyond a question the necessity of distinguishing between the form and the spirit of a doctrine. Paul certainly believed and taught, that the future age was near at hand, though he disclaims a knowledge of the precise time of its commencement,--and that those who were living with himself upon the earth would be caught up with the risen dead, to meet their descending Lord in the air, and to share the glory and felicity of his Messianic reign. From these conceptions, implicitly embraced in their primitive form, was derived the Chiliasm or belief of Christ's reign of a thousand years on earth-which was so prevalent among the early Christians, and which some of the Fathers, as Papias, Justin Martyr, and Irenæus, did not hesitate to adopt. It would seem, that the expectation was only worn out by degrees through repeated disappointments. This was made a subject of ridicule with unbelievers. Peter (2 Ep. iii. 4) speaks of scoffers who asked, "Where is the promise of his coming? for since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning of the creation." From time to time this expectation has again sprung up in the Church-the form of the doctrine predominating in men's minds over the spirit which it was designed to announce. Even Dr. Priestley believed in the approaching advent of Christ and the speedy restoration of the Jews to the land of their fathers. Here then we have the outward form of a great truth perpetuating itself from age to ageand continually renewing an expectation, which has been as continually deceived. If we insist on retaining the literal formwhat becomes of Christianity? Is it a delusion ?-But that Paul taught this doctrine cannot be doubted; and with him it was no accommodation, but a simple earnest conviction. We must therefore penetrate to the spirit contained in that form, and say, that the essential truth so conveyed was clothed in this particular form by the feeling and belief of the apostolic age-that it was left in some of its attendant circumstances vague and undefined -that it was allowed to assume the shape and movement impressed on it by the time, that it might operate more powerfully on the actual state of public opinion, and, through the force of error temporarily allied with truth, propel it with a greater force and vigour in that heavenward and spiritual direction, out of