Imagens das páginas
PDF
ePub

of the hypocrite. Now so long as any one believes that such men are the genuine representatives of the teaching of Christ, can you censure him for rejecting what he conceives to be Christianity? Surely not. He would be acting irreligiously in accepting it. I for one admire and reverence that moral integrity which shudders at the very idea of accepting for true a blasphemous, or even an unworthy, representation of the Deity.

"There dwells more faith in honest doubt,
Believe me, than in half the creeds."

But, sirs, you inflict on Christ a grievous wrong if you judge Him by every travesty or caricature which chooses to call itself Christian. You do not blame light for your experiences in a fog; nor should you blame the Nazarene for such diabolical doctrines or practices as those to which I have referred. On the contrary, it is mainly owing to His teaching that we so utterly loathe and execrate them. The kingdom which He founded is one of the most perfect ideal beauty. The loftiest conceptions of Plato or Aristotle, of Buddha or Confucius, sink into insignificance, when compared with the Christianity of Christ. Passing from the society of those

who are utterly destitute of His spirit, into the company of those who are somewhat imbued with it, is like migrating from the cutting east winds of our English climate to the gentle, sweet-scented breezes of the South. Nay, it is like going into another and a grander world. "Christ's kingdom," as He said, "is not of this world." It is the kingdom of God. It is the kingdom of Heaven,

152

Works.

"Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling: for it is God who worketh in you both to will and to do of His good pleasure."-PHILIPPIANS ii. 12, 13.

OF

F all the spurious forms of Christianity there is none worse than the doctrine that men are saved, if they are saved, and lost, if they are lost, according to the will of God, and not according to their own. If God were the author of the goodness of the good, He would of course be to blame for the badness of the bad. If He could compel one man to do right, He ought to compel all. If it were really the doctrine of the Bible that God forced some men into the kingdom of Heaven, and only some, leaving the rest bad and wretched when He might have made them good and happy,—if this were the teaching of the Bible, we should feel that that book was not the Word of God, but, on the contrary, the word of the wicked one.

[ocr errors]

I had the curiosity to look into Calvin's Institutes' to see what he would make of our text. Calvin maintained, as you are aware, like the old Greek dramatists, that men were not free agents, but necessitated compelled to act continually according to the will of a higher Power. Calvin taught that men are made heirs of eternal life if God wants them in heaven; and that, on the other hand, if they remain heirs of death, it is because He prefers their going to hell. Our text, one would think, must have puzzled him. At any rate he explains it by explaining it away. "God, he says, works all things, therefore we are to submit ourselves to Him with fear. Paul requires nothing of the Philippian Christians, but that they submit themselves to God with true self-renunciation." see Paul says we are to work; Calvin says we are not to work, but to leave our salvation to God. It is sufficient confutation of Calvin's doctrine to say that its logical outcome would be, that that men are helpless hapless puppets, played with according to the caprice of a Being who is the very opposite of Love,-a Being in comparison with whom Nero was kind-hearted, amiable and beneficent.

You

The teaching of the New Testament is, that

our salvation or wellbeing depends, in the last resort, upon ourselves. Christ has explained to us that the law can only be fulfilled by love. But it is for us to decide whether we so fulfil it. Christ "left us an example;" but it depends upon ourselves whether we follow in His steps."

[ocr errors]

The meaning of the expression, "God worketh in you to will and to do of His good pleasure," is, I apprehend, that, according to His good pleasure-i.e., in harmony with His love-He gives us free will, He makes us free agents. The freedom of the will is a conception of Christian origin.1 We find Aristotle, in his 'Ethics,' groping his way towards it; but he never attained any clear or consistent conceptions. The Stoics, no doubt, talked of the virtuous man as "a free man;" but they used the term only in a complimentary and metaphorical sense, just as they said the virtuous man was rich and handsome and a king. A distinct idea of moral freedom arose only with Christianity, of which

1 This, I may mention by the way, is a bad and misleading expression. A will, of course, must be free, or it would not be a will. A necessitated will is a contradiction in terms. He who has a will is free, and, conversely, he who is free has a will. Hence the correct phrase would be, not freedom of the will, but freedom of the man.

« AnteriorContinuar »