III. THE CHRISTIAN REVELATION AND THE CHRISTIAN LIFE.

N introducing this last division of our general subject, a few

bring together into one focus, and render clear to a single glance, the whole extent of the movement under consideration. Our starting-point was the tacit assumption of certain modern writers, that Christianity is, for all practical purposes, simply a moral scheme; that the whole content of Christianity, as a religion, is merely a means to a moral end. We began, then, with an analysis of morality in the abstract, and found that that term names the relation between abstract free-will, or indeterminate volitional capacity, and the abstract right, viewed as an absolute, and expressed to universal consciousness in the moral law. This relation is, necessarily, persistently antithetic. Proceeding to Christian morals, as set forth in the New Testament, we found at once a distinctive peculiarity. Christianity brings into morality a new principle, the purpose and the effect of which is no less than to resolve the antithesis, which asserts itself as an ultimate. This principle of spiritual freedom (or Christian liberty, in Apostolic phrase) annuls the separatedness of the moral object and subject, and reconciles their constant opposition by embracing both within the circle of personality as its common factors. It declares objectivity to be the very nature of the subject

itself, so that the distinction between subject and object is purely a formal one in the vital unity of spiritual being. This discovery of the unity of subject and object as the root of morality-its underlying vital truth—and as the explanation, or raison d'être, of the moral law, led to the transition from the moral to the spiritual sphere. And in this way: The moral sphere is that of the dualism of subject and object. This dualism is cancelled by the principle of spiritual freedom. But this cancelling is a purely speculative result; it falls wholly within the objective element; it pertains wholly to spirit in its ideality; it brings no practical, no subjective change. Hence arises a new opposition between the ideality and the reality of human spirit; or, rather, the old opposition of subject and object passes into this new phase. The unrest produced by this disturbance of equilibrium between the ideal and the real, the cognitive and the active [it is just this which is described in the seventh chapter of Romans] is then the direct spring of the transition to spirituality. As we see, the old dualism, while speculatively cancelled, practically abides, though in another form. That is to say, the first resolution of the antithesis has only produced another. Following, then, the persistent dualism, the transition is also twofold, speculative and practical; or, returning to the old determinations, objective and subjective. First, we go back to the idea called law, which we have found by the first resolution to be the ideality, or essential nature of human spirit, and fill out the circle of its complete totality, in order to discover what it is in itself, as a self-subsistent, or actual. As such it is found to pass from the condition of an abstract conception, merely opined,1 to the thoroughly genetic, self

1It is as such that Mr. Matthew Arnold names it the "not-ourselves that makes for righteousness." This definition Mr. Arnold offers as expressing such an idea of God as is verifiable by experience. "The masses," he says, "with their rude practical instinct, go straight to the heart of the matter. . . . They begin by asking what proof of God we have at all. Moreover, they require plain experimental proof, such as that fire burns them if they touch it." The instinct and the requirement here are certainly "rude" enough, but they go heaven-wide of the "heart of the matter." But what notion of religion can a man have, who admits the reasonableness of this demand? and what notion of philosophy can a man have, who thinks proof of the sort required can be furnished for "the Power, not ourselves, that makes for righteousness? Certitude in the one case is gained by outward experience (sense-perception), and in the other case by inward experience (self-consciousness). Mr. Arnold is evidently unaware that on this little distinction of inward and outward the whole question hinges; and that, by letting in the validity of inward experience, he has, in principle, let in all that "metaphysic" he is so anxious to

explicit notion of absolute personality. Secondly, as the moral law has been seen to be not external, but only objective to the concrete human spirit, so now, when, in its actuality, it is found to be God, it still remains only objective, not external. The essential being of the concrete relative spirit resides in its unity with the concrete absolute spirit; the inward ideality of human spirit is Divinity. The consciousness of this truth is the religious consciousness, in which the pure self-consciousness is completed. Here we finally reach the subject, announced by the title of these papers, that essence of Christianity which was spoken of in the first one, as contradistinctive from morality as such. It is simply the unity in essence of God and man, through the homogeneity of spiritual being. Although morality is the starting-point, yet this position is only reached by abandoning that of morality proper, and, in fact, by contradicting

exclude. For, as matter of fact, the experience to which he refers is spiritual as well as moral. To that experience, the existence of a personal God is a fact of equal certitude with that of moral law, or an ŋ in things, or an abstraction "making for righteousness." "Religion," Mr. Arnold says, "means simply a bin ling to righteousness, or else a serious attending to righteousness, according to the view we take of the word's derivation." But etymology does not carry us so far. Religion simply means a binding to, or an attending to; to what, is not said. When we look to human history for this "what," we find that religion is essentially a binding to a Person; it is the human spirit's sense of his essential relation to a not himself, which is also a like himself. And it is mere wilful blindness on the part of Mr. Arnold to read the Old Testament, and the teaching of Christ, as if this conception of personality were, in the one case, only a poetic accretion to the idea of righteousness, and, in the other, only introduced in language of accommodation to the common belief of the Jews. The personal strain, the cry of heart to heart, the appeal to "One who, like as a father pitieth his children, is merciful to them that fear Him, "-this is the key-note of Jewish, as of Christian, religion. Righteousness is, undoubtedly, the essential qualification of the idea of God; but fatherhood is its very core.

The whole essay ("Literature and Dogma ") strikingly exemplifies the crude vagueness incident to the thinking of the purely literary mind. Indeed, in his introduction, Mr. Arnold sets forth this vagueness as the special excellence and special recommendation of the "literary" treatment of theology. His description of a literary term, as one that aims at no scientific precision, but one merely "thrown out at an object of consciousness not fully grasped by the mind," applies quite accurately to the literary method, which he desires should supersede the scientific. That while making merry at the expense of scientific methods, and those who employ them, he should fall himself into the most genial but most utter confusion of very simple distinctions, is therefore only a natural consequence-perhaps, in Mr. Arnold's view, a further excellence of the method he employs.

it; for morality must, necessarily, always remain at the separation of God and man, as moral object and moral subject. Morally, man's relation to God is an external one; spiritually, it is an internal relation.

As the transition, following the antithetic duplicity, was at once speculative and practical, so the spiritual sphere, when reached, contains a like distinction, not from any further persistence of antithesis, but according to the organic distinction of spiritual faculty into cognitive and active powers.1 Thus, the Christian revelation is, in its generality, a declaration that the unity of the Divine and human is the ideal truth of humanity, and the Christian life is man's practical relation to this revelation; or the actualization of this ideal. We conclude, then, with a brief drawing out of these two heads.

1. We may sketch the outline of the Christian revelation, so far as it refers directly to our subject-the relation of man to Godin few words. It will suffice to touch upon three general points: (a) the original relation, unity with God; (b) the breaking of that unity through sin; (c) its restoration through redemption by Christ.

(a) Man's native unity with God results from the essential homogeneity of spiritual being. God is pure spirit; in this truth man's relation to this truth is also posited. For since man himself is spirit, he is mirrored to himself in God, and in Him finds his own essential being. Thus man is comprehended in the idea of God. In saying this, we touch on the metaphysic of One and Many. We shall not enter upon it here; for metaphysic is explanation, and we are concerned only with statement. The statement then is, that the One, and its Many units, are absolutely only the same thing. The plurality in which they appear is qualitatively indifferent to them,

1 It is to be remembered that this distinction constitutes no separation. Intelligence and will are not to be conceived as lying side by side, and independent of each other; they are but action and counter-action of the one spiritual life. When intelligence has comprehended outward objects, it has made them inner; it has determined them as its. But intelligence that determines objects, is will. Hence, spirit is constantly transcending its organic distinction; there is constant transition from intelligence to will, or constant conversion of the former into the latter; will is only thought in act: thought is only will in potentia. Thus the revelation addressed to the intelligence is at the same time addressed to the will; the life is only the acting out of the new comprehension. Herein is seen the necessity of "dogma," or definite objects of intellectual apprehension, to religion, although religion is a practical concern; in fact, just because it is a practical concern. And hence appears the impotence of all attempts to divorce religion from theology, and the inevitable evaporation of religion in the process.

for it remains external to their common essentiality. Now this immediate unity of God and man is only the implicitness of their ideal unity. It is the momentum of Identity from which Difference is excluded, but it is as certain that Difference is not extinguished by such exclusion, as it is that Identity, in spite of Difference, subsists. The unity of God and man is not to be superficially conceived, as if God were only man, and man without further condition were God. On the contrary, man becomes divine only in so far as he annuls the merely natural in him, and renounces his merely natural being, for the natural is the unspiritual.' It is with the immediate, implicit unity, however, that the Christian revelation begins. Man came from heaven and the bosom of his Father, as it were a Divine infant. He awoke to life on the earth, in the immaculate purity of innocence. The crowning work of creation, he, above all other creatures, was "very good." Heaven lay about him; he breathed the native air of angels; he lived in the light of God's presence, and, in the peace of that intimate communion, his soul opened like a flower to all Divine influences. This was original righteousness,-man's natural, unconscious, instinctive union with God. He followed his objective or Divine nature but blindly; merely because his subjectivity was not awakened, and he did not know himself to be a self-determining being. Such estate of innocence could not, in the nature of the case, be the lasting condition of a spirit; for it kept dormant, and in abeyance, one half of his essential being.

(b) Hence came the Fall, the severance of the original unity through sin. What is sin, or the sinful? It is simply the usurpation by subjectivity of that supremacy in the spiritual life which rightfully belongs to the objective principle. In other words, it is the attempt to give material validity to the spirit's purely formal freedom, by setting up the individuality which we are against the universality which is us. But this assertion of subjectivity is necessary to the process of self-consciousness. Man's being is in its nature self-cognizant, and man's existence (like all existence) is simply the expression and realization of his inward being. The first step toward that realization must be his acquirement of the consciousness of his abstract freedom, in contraposition to his uncon

"To be carnally minded is death; but to be spiritually minded is life and peace. . . . If ye live after the flesh, ye shall die: but if ye through the Spirit do mortify the deeds of the body, ye shall live. For as many as are led by the Spirit of God, they are the sons of God."