That there is progress in knowledge, in civilization, up to a certain point in man's development as a race, is partially true. That a part of the race has been placed under progressive religious light is also true. But that this is the obliteration of individuality, or of individual responsibility in and according to that state, is utterly and degradingly false.
Now I suppose no intelligent person would deny, that where European civilization has prevailed, the acquirements of one age become in many points (that is, when discoveries are concerned) the elements of the next. Every child who learns astronomy learns the Newtonian, or, if you please, the Copernican system, not the Ptolemaic. But when you say the history of man, it is entirely false. The vastly greater part of the human race remains in statu quo. The Chinese are not more advanced than they were centuries ago. Nor indeed, we may say, any of the Asiatic nations, that is, the greatest part by far of the population of the globe. Indeed, they have in many respects retrograded. None of the Africans have advanced; on the contrary, there also they have fearfully retrograded. In America, Europeans have supplanted the native population, but there has been no advance save in the conquerors. It is a question if Mexico and Peru be as civilized as when Aztecs and Tezcucans possessed the country of Anahuac, and Incas exercised their mild despotism as the legitimate descendants of the sun.
There has been a history of man in those races that have come in connection with the despised people of God, but nowhere else. Somehow or other, the people whose records rationalism delights to call in question are the necessary center, and, I may say, foundation of all known history. The mind of man may speculate with interest on other histories, the ruins of Nineveh, and the hundred-gated Thebes; and Babylon may furnish evidence for antiquaries to build dynasties and histories on; but a documented history of those early days belongs to Israel only. It may, of course, be attacked, and conjectures hazarded to disprove it, as they may be hazarded to make kings out of tombs, and centuries out of priestly traditions; but in Israel alone are the documents there to be disproved. In this history only do we find the principles spoken of as the true education of man. We will speak afterward of the influence of Greeks and Romans on the present age and education of man, but they have nothing to do with man's analogy of educational epochs, which are the law, Christ, and the Spirit: for, of course, we must decently Christianize everything—that is, reduce Christianity to the level of man and his progress.
And this introduces another immensely important point, carefully suppressed in the rationalist's account of the progress of man—I mean, the fact of revelation. The progress of man is spoken of; but the facts in which his progress is estimated are really and exclusively revelations and interventions of God: first, the law, then the Son of man, then the gift of the Spirit. Is this progress essential to a spiritual being? Is this each generation receiving the benefits of the cultivation of that which preceded it?
But let us consider the facts. However man may borrow the principles of his education of the human race from scripture, except to array himself in these borrowed plumes, revelation is totally ignored and all it contains. If there has been a fall, the progress of the human race, save in its lower aspects, comes to nothing at once. We are fallen beings; there is a guilty soul before God; the whole scene is one departed from and out of the condition He set it in. It is in progress: in what, then? It wants, and wants individually, and in every way, restoration—progress in its highest relationship. Christianity treats man as in this state of alienation from God. It is false, or the theory is false. The law was given, but broken. The Son of man was in the world, but rejected out of it by man, and a work of redemption revealed for a being not in progress, but lost. I reserve the consideration of what thoughts that man must have of God, who, looking at this world's universal state, does not believe in the fall of man.
But further, as to the world's history. The flood has taken place: so the Old Testament teaches, so the Lord declares, as Peter warns that it is by willful ignorance it is forgotten. But if the flood has taken place, the whole race has been judged once, and judged for the progress it had made. That judgment will, it is true, not be repeated, but the now world is reserved for fire. At what point of progress will that come? Have they ever heard of days in which mockers will be, who say, Where is the promise of His coming? for all things continue as they were? of perilous times that will come in, which the scriptures will be the resource of the faithful who continue in the things they have learned?
But I am wrong to reason on scripture with them, as if they believed it. Let us take their own system as they take it up professedly from scripture. That I am not unjust in charging them with ignoring this mighty dealing of God with the world, which, while keeping the place they do, they have not the honest boldness to deny, while introducing what sets it aside, you may easily see. Their words are these: “The education of this early race may strictly be said to begin when it was formed into the various masses out of which the nations of the earth have sprung. The world, as it were, went to school, and it was broken up into classes.” Now this refers to the confusion of tongues at Babel. You would suppose that, before this education of the race, when a wiser master began to deal with and educate it, in order that there might be some hope of the race's turning out well, it had been, as yet, nurtured in the graceful affections and first confiding impressions of the home of its childhood. Alas! no. It was a world outcast from God, so bad that He had to destroy it. The childhood of man before it went to school was violence, and that followed by sensuality, fallen or not. But the flood—no trace of it is found.
We are told, that the earliest commands almost entirely refer to bodily appetites and sensual passions. This may, suit the theory, because they have to be corrected as children, but is otherwise a dream. There is no command before the flood, and after it the one declaration is, “Whoso sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed.” It appears that willfulness of temper, germs of wanton cruelty, characterize childhood, and are easily corrected by a mother; but here there was no education, no wise educator. The Governor of the world left the childhood of man to itself, to run into wanton violence unrestrained, to perfect its evil education without any restraint at all. This was a singular system of the education of the human race. “Each generation receiving the benefit of the cultivation of that which precedes it.” “The easily corrected cruelty was here,” we are told, “developed into a prevailing plague of wickedness.” Now let the reader remember that this was (to take Hebrew dates) as long a period nearly as since Christ—some 1656 years. But this is not all; from thence to the giving of the law there were some 800 years. That is, during some 2500 years the race did not get any education at all; and if that history is to be believed, the whole race, save eight persons, had been destroyed because of the result of the education they had given themselves. But this is not only a discrepancy in the analogy, but it upsets the whole system. There was no such education going on. The world went on upon another principle, leaving man, not without witness indeed from God, but otherwise to himself and with no education. And (if scripture is to be believed as to one of the most solemnly attested facts in it) the whole world was judged once, before its alleged education began.
But here we stumble on another strange instance of the falseness of all this. Not only were there 2500 years of the race without any education at all, if we pass over the flood, and the whole world judged if there was, and the theory an absurdity; but, even supposing this left aside, the facts are misstated.
“The education,” we are told, “of this early race, may strictly be said to begin when it was formed into the various masses out of which the nations of the earth have sprung.” That was at Babel, or in Peleg's time; but there were some 700 years between Peleg and the law, so that the education of the human race began 700 years before it began. And I pray you to remark, that this is not a question of confounding chronology with a great principle. The theory is, that the dividing into nations strictly begins the education; it was the forming them into classes. But the very vital principle of this system of analogy with individual education is that it began with law, though there were more than seven centuries between the two.
Scripture treats man as a sinner, to be restored to God or judged: rationalists, as a race to be educated, and the previous parts sacrificed to the condition of a little fragment at the end. It is a base idea, but it is its justness we have now to think of. Now, in scripture we are carefully told that, in the sense in which there was an education and progress in it, law was not the beginning. The promise came 430 years before it. Now, this is an all-important principle. It brings in God, whom rationalism leaves out. Grace (only in germ, it is true) precedes law, and law comes in by the by, as a needed convincer of the conscience. That is the divine, the blessed form of education revealed in the word, because it reveals God, and must reveal, therefore, love and grace. Law may be needed. It was needed. The question of righteousness must be raised. But God had to say to it, and grace, and goodness, and love must be the point of departure with Him, because He is it, and is it with man. Theirs is an education of man without God; and therefore, as they cannot deny “the prevailing plague of wickedness,” they begin with man's only remedy, commandments, to an unintelligent nature. But think of such a scheme which lets the person to be educated get to a prevailing plague of wickedness before they begin to educate him. It is well they leave God out. But this confusion of Peleg's time and the law, this lapse of some seven centuries, omits facts which show, in another respect, the falseness of the whole system. After Babel, or Peleg's time, when nationalities and races had been formed, a kind of departure from God came in of which we find no trace before.
It was not violence and evil; that is the recorded state of man before the flood. Now, man had been forced to recognize divine judgments. But far from the true God, yea, not liking to retain the true God in his knowledge, he changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshipped and served the creature more than the Creator; changed the glory of the incorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man, and to birds, and four-footed beasts, and creeping things. Your fathers, says Joshua, worshipped other gods beyond the flood; Terah, the father of Abraham, and the father of Nahor. Now the God of glory appears to Abraham, and calls him to leave entirely the system into which, as is justly remarked, God had formed the world—countries, and kindreds, and father's house. The world was broken up into classes, but when God began to educate, He called out of all the classes one to be for Himself; not indeed by law, but then He gave the promises. The principle of a called people, or saint, was brought out, and Abraham became, as an immense principle, the father of the faithful, who were known as called out of the world. That the world was educated by it is absolutely false. The world, or the nations, had rejected God altogether, and taken devils to be their gods; and God, patient in mercy, begins a race of His own, calls Abraham and his seed, be they in the flesh or in the Spirit.
I have partially noticed some particular proofs of the progress of the world according to the rationalists; but, as they belong to this epoch, I will refer to one or two of their discoveries here. Lamech makes no comparison of himself with God whatever. It is all a dream. Unless taking vengeance is comparing oneself with God, because vengeance belongs to Him. If so, many are guilty of it still, I fear. At any rate, he compares himself with Cain, and he is not God, I suppose.
As to building a tower high enough to escape God's wrath, it is rationalist ignorance, not that of the sons of Noah. They acted very wisely according to man. They made, what Nebuchadnezzar tried afterward, and a man who founds empires ever does, a great public center which could be a name—which God alone ought to have or give—that they might not be scattered, but have united force. It was to be a Rome in the world. It was not ignorance, but profound political skill, met the power of One who had other purposes; and under His hand it brought on the very thing they wished to avoid. They built a city and a tower, a central capital to unite them all as one great company, and a tower which should distinguish itself, and to which all should be bound as belonging to it.
But to return to our history. God separates a people carefully from the world, and gives them a law when He has separated them. The world was never under tutors and governors at all. When God dealt with the world, He returned, and returned necessarily, to the principle of grace, on which alone, even if law existed, He could really deal with a sinner. The education of the world never began with law. The world never had any law. God did give a law to a carefully isolated people, and carefully isolated them by it—made, as it is expressed, a middle wall of partition, so that, if a Jew associated himself with the world, be was a defiled and guilty Jew. No doubt in this law great principles of moral government lay, I may almost say, concealed; but this only proves still more the great truth. God must separate a people out of the world to deposit, in a system carefully excluding others, the perfect rule of creature estate; and to preserve the knowledge of one true God in a world given to idols in their will, and given up by Him to a reprobate mind to work all uncleanness with greediness (as every one who has studied the working of heathen idolatry knows they were, and indeed are; and the whole system to be a consecration of vice in its filthiest and most abhorrent shapes). Yet these efforts of God with Israel were fruitless, and the law given in vain. Israel first went after idols; and when that unclean spirit was gone out, their house was empty, swept, and garnished; they neglected the pearl which the blessed Lord drew out of the setting of the law, turned its outward ceremonies, which unregenerate flesh could perform, into their righteousness, and hardened themselves against grace and Him that brought it. So true is it that the law was not given to the world to educate it, and that the education of the world is not in God's thought, but Israel, in order to be taken as a people, is redeemed out of it. Till that redemption there is no dwelling of God with man—not in Paradise, nor even with Abraham. When redemption is even figuratively presented, it is said (Ex. 29), I have brought them out of the land of Egypt that I may dwell among them. Hence, as God's dwelling with man is never seen, so holiness is never spoken of till then. Because redemption is necessary to man's being near to God, and that is (morally understood) holiness. The moment (Ex. 15) Israel is out of Egypt, holiness is spoken of. No doubt, all this was in an outward carnal way then; but the principle taught is all-important. Doubtless there were holy persons before; but here great principles are revealed.
It is a point to me most striking in the character of this system. You may have the law for a schoolmaster; Christ and the primitive church for an example; the Spirit to set you free, and leave you to yourself to be guided by the Spirit within. You may have Greece to teach you taste, cultivation, and logic; Rome, self-restraint, obedience, and patriotism; medieval popery, to keep Clovis in order. But God revealing Himself, revealing Himself in love, so as to draw out the heart, to teach it goodness by its enjoying Him, so as to link the heart with Himself, and raise it above the carnal and worldly and selfish interest of this low and sin-ridden world; God producing the reflection of His own nature in the thankful and enlightened heart; God revealing Himself to man, so that he should taste and enjoy what He is—no, that must not be. The thought of being thus imitators of God as dear children—you must not seek it here. Everything but God, everything for man to think well of himself by, to be what Paul calls gain to him (that is, the nurture of self); but God, no! no revelation of Him must enter into the education of man.
And then if he be a sinner, introducing God must be accompanied by that which reconciles the sinner to His nature, according to its own holy and blessed qualities. This brings in redemption; and the education of the world is trifling, immoral nonsense. You must give up that which alone elevates man, his association with God or associate him with Him according to what He is. The nature and character of God must be maintained, or it is not with Him I am associated. And I must have morally the qualities which judge of good and evil, as He does, to be really associated with Him. But I do judge the evil, and see the guilt. Now Christianity meets this, and gives me a full blessing, because it gives me life. “He that hath the Son hath life.” He is a life-giving Spirit. But then, besides that, it takes away all guilt from me. I can judge evil fully in my heart and conscience, because I know that I shall never be judged for it—that Christ has by Himself purged my sins, and sat down on the right hand of the Majesty on high. I affirm that, without these two principles (a new life and the perfect purging of sins according to God's nature by redemption), no real moral elevation of man can take place, because he cannot be spiritually associated with God according to the perfection of God's nature. The communication of the divine nature, though absolutely necessary, does not suffice, because the communication of that nature makes one judge evil as God does, at any rate in principle. I see the selfishness and impurity that is in man's mind—that is now in mine. And for that very reason, I see guilt and wretchedness in myself. I have the conscience of evil or guilt (not necessarily by crimes or vices, but by comparing my whole inward life with the loveliness of the divine nature) on my soul; my conscience must be purged for God, as a consciously responsible creature before Him, that my heart may be free before Him, that His holy nature, which must repel evil, and which is the very source of my delight, may be maintained even for my soul to enjoy.
Sin separates from God, though we see He is love; but the purging the conscience by a work done without us, and which is perfect in glorifying God, gives me an unhindered delight in Him, and, I may add, in the love which has done it. God has put this in the simplest way, blessed be His name, for simple souls, but it is of the deepest moral necessary truth. You may have amiable men, but no God, if you have not this.
Holiness is the quality of a nature which repels evil in its nature, and delights in what is good. Righteousness is founded really on the same principle, but brings in the authority of God, which judges of this and the responsibility of the creature. Now, man will admit holiness, because that exalts man, makes him like God, excellent in himself; he has “no guile.” Righteousness he does not, because this asserts God's authority, the creature's responsibility. It is making good God's authority against evil by judgment, our real relationship to God. This man will not submit to. He is willing to be free from guile; it exalts him in his own sight. But to be under guilt, no; that humbles him. How subtle evil is! But a personal conscience makes all simple. I do not discuss with a bad conscience; I can principles with my reason. With a bad conscience I want cleansing, and, because I have offended a loving Father and God, forgiveness too; and, thank God, I have it in Christ. There is no personal having to do with God without this. I may theorize and honestly enjoy my ideas; but theorizing is not the knowledge of God. A truly upright soul, a divinely taught soul has a moral need that the love of God, the favor which is its light and its joy, should be a righteous favor (as scripture speaks, grace reigns through righteousness), and hence, that God should righteously not see sin upon it—has need, therefore, that the conscience should be purged. And this it has through the truth, that the blood of Jesus Christ, His Son, cleanses from all sin. Without it, God's love would be an unholy love—would not be God or love at all. We walk in the light, as God is in the light; and the blood of Jesus Christ, His Son, cleanses us from all sin. Hence comes that bright and blessed testimony, though there in outward figures—He hath not seen iniquity in Jacob, nor beheld perverseness in Israel.
The principle of the theory is each successive age incorporating into itself the substance of the preceding. The analogy is: the law, Christ, and the Spirit. But this wholly contradicts the principle. These are no incorporations of past growth or acquirements, but specific revelations of a full and absolute character in themselves—indeed, as to the last two, the actual coming of divine persons. Not only so, but the law was given when men had plunged into every loathsome wickedness, and had learned to worship devils instead of God; so that God had given them up to a reprobate mind, even as to what became them as men. And it was given, therefore, to a people carefully separated out from the rest of the world. It was no progress; it was a revelation to a peculiar people. When Christ came, it was after this had been broken, and the people become a whited sepulcher. He likewise, though introducing universal principles, separates a people to Himself, and is entirely rejected by men. When the Holy Ghost comes, we know on the Lord's own authority, that the world cannot receive Him, because it seeth Him not, neither knoweth Him.
In a word, it was no progressive incorporation by one age of the acquirements of the last; but revelations given to a people separated to receive them. The first, because men had departed utterly from; the second, because the depositaries of the first had broken and falsified it, as they crucified Him who came. As to the third, it was manifested in power at the first; and instead of progress or development, there has been a corruption by the denial of the pre. sense of the Spirit, and setting aside the word, which has made the annals of the Church the most painful history the world can show (as has been insultingly said, the annals of hell); and if the degradation of heathenism was more open, it was not so morally abominable, nor clothed with the forms of Christian grace. Sin among heathens was horrible to the last degree, and consecrated to deities who were only devils to help men's lusts; but there were no Christian indulgences to allow or forgive it, no tax for what it was to be compounded at, no selling of grace and license for what was condemned. This was reserved for what is called the Church, and in the outward sense justly.
And remark here another point of vast importance in the present day, when development is so much spoken of. What God reveals is revealed perfect in its place and for its purpose at first; and man declines from it. There is progress in the character of God's revelations, compared with one another; but in themselves none. There cannot be progress in a revelation. It is itself. There may be in revelations. A revelation is given perfect. Man declines from it or corrupts it. That man should make progress in a revelation denies its nature. Now the things rationalism speaks of were revelations; different in nature; but still revelations. And when I come to Christ, I find another immensely important truth—to talk of progress here is blasphemy. He is God manifest in flesh. He is perfection. Hence the apostle John tells us to abide in that which we have heard from the beginning.
And I find here too a principle of scripture, the ignorance and denial of which is the root of all these errors and modern reasonings. The scripture (I am not now to inquire whether its whole system be false) presents Christ as a second man, a new starting-point of the human race, the last Adam. There is no progress of man in flesh spoken of. He is to put off the old man, or has done so, and put on the new, which after God is created in righteousness and true holiness. He is to reckon himself dead, he is crucified with Christ. Paul speaks of when we were in the flesh. That is, the blessed and admirable doctrine of scripture is the absolute moral judgment of man as man, a child of Adam in flesh, because sin is there; and, in the delight the new man has in God, he cannot bear sin. He has crucified the flesh with the affections and lusts, and lives as alive to God in the last man. I am crucified with Christ; nevertheless, I live: yet not I, but Christ liveth in me.
And, accordingly, the great ordinances of Christianity declare this as its nature. We are buried in baptism unto death, and, risen in Christ, we celebrate a Christ in the Lord's supper, not who has instructed us (though blessedly He has done so those who are quickened, and warned the dead), but died for us. Thus Christianity is founded on the total condemnation of the old man (only that Christ has died for it in grace, and thus as a sacrifice for sin condemned sin in the flesh), and the introduction of a new man, and this connected in the power of Christ's resurrection with that which is heavenly, where Christ now sits. The object of this new life is not here, though its display is. It is the true character of power in a creature to live in the circumstances it is in, from motives and a power which are not found in them, or else he is governed by them (that is, is weak). So with the Christian: with peace in his conscience through a dying Christ, he has a heavenly Christ before him; and his motives being wholly out of this world, he has, through grace, power to live in it according to the character of the motives which govern him.
This is not the place to unfold all the exquisite internal beauty of this principle, wrought out for its perfecting in dependence on grace, in the midst of the conflicts in which we are in a world of evil, with a lower nature in itself prone to it; and the continual association with Christ, our glorified Head, the Man at God's right hand, in which it is made good, so as to grow up to Him who is the Head of all things. This would be to unfold the contents of all the epistles, as the development of it in teaching, and the gospels as the exhibition of the perfection of it in Christ.
But I have said enough to show that the system of the New Testament is the setting aside of the old man, the flesh, the first Adam, because there is sin (and sin is become unbearable when the true light, Christ, is in the heart as life), and the possession, the substitution for that, of the new man, Christ our life, unfolded in a life which we live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved us, and gave Himself for us. Was He a point of progress in the development of human nature, or Adam-fallen life, or the perfect exhibition of a new thing, that eternal life which was with the Father, and was manifested to us, and became the source of it to others, while He has died for the guilt and sin which characterized the old?
Life and incorruptibility were brought to light by the gospel but this life did not begin to exist then. Christ, who is the Lord from heaven, is a life-giving Spirit—has not merely a living soul, though that He had of course. And He communicated this life to others from Abel, I may well say and doubt it not, from Adam downwards. But then, for that very reason (though the great contrast, the enmity of man, of the carnal mind, against God was not brought out till the Cross, when the perfection of God revealed in flesh was fully presented), those who partook of this life through grace were hated and rejected of the world, whose boasted progress is depicted to us by the new philosophy. He that was born after the flesh persecuted him that was born after the Spirit. They were moral contradictions: one loved God, judged self, and owned God's authority; the other sought self, and would have none of God for that reason. Conscience there was and is in all: conscience judges good and evil: but a new life is good in a divine way. Hence you will find that, with all this modern school of rationalism, even in its most infidel forms, Christ will be recognized, provided He be a restorer of what the scripture denounces as flesh. They will use what appears to many a simple mind Christian language; but the just condemnation of a sinner, the absolute condemnation of flesh, and a new life in Christ, and atonement for the sin of the old—all this will not be heard of; and into this anti-Christian system even Christians fall. It exalts man; and all the blessed light of God, the heavenly place into which Christ is entered, is lost.
Discoveries, by which the knowledge of nature or the power of man over it is advanced, are undoubtedly multiplied. We know more physical facts than our ancestors. Astronomy, geology, on the one hand, and railroads, telegraphs, chemistry, on the other hand, have enlarged, not the domain, but the appropriation of the domain allotted to man. And with every increase of knowledge there is a reaction. There is more reality and less hypothesis on all these subjects; but I doubt the development of much more than materialism by this. That this is a progress I more than doubt. As regards taste and cultivation, or intellectual powers, I should think also progress more than doubtful. All now is, at best, imitation. Take Grecian architecture or Gothic styles, whose ideal conceptions are the opposite side of one another;
take even Italian, all attempted is imitative. In intellectual power, I suppose Grecian and Roman was as developed in itself as any now. Plato, Aristotle, or (what was more profound than either) the British triads or Bardic philosophy, present the expression of as powerful thought. And as to language it is admitted, that as an instrument of thought, the Greek stands, of all commonly known languages, unrivaled. The powers of Sanscrit I am unacquainted with, and but little with the capacities of the daughter which most resembles it, they say, the Irish. In philosophy there is more truth in modern times, so far, not, as there has been progress, but as revelation has exercised an influence on it, and no farther. So that I do not see great progress even in these earthly things.
As to philosophy, all is necessarily false at all times, because it reasons upon the present state of man as a normal one, or else it becomes theology, and, thereupon as its necessary point of departure, upon his relationship to God, and what God is. Hence it is all necessarily false, both as to God and as to man. It is in vain to say that you must not bring religion into philosophy, because unless religion be fable it is the truth, so that it is only saying that you must not bring in truth. There, I believe they have told the truth. That man is not fallen is a calumny against God. A God who made this world directly as it is would be a weak or a cruel God. But if man be fallen and in rebellion and have to say to God in that state; if his whole moral condition be the acquired knowledge of good and evil, far from the source of good, then reasoning upon his relationships to God to prove what they are normally is to reason always against the truth. And that goes far deeper into the whole system than men are generally aware of It affects every possible relationship of life. It is the reason there are magistrates, the origin of property, of labor, death, inheritances. I take the commonest, everyday, outward things on purpose. Philosophy, since it ceased to be cosmogony, is reasoning on morality, ignorant of the groundwork of the highest obligations, and of the whole state of things on which moral relationships are founded. Nothing can be right or set right if the world has departed from God because all its state is wrong; the central obligation is lost which was the groundwork of all others, though those others be true—unless we bring in the restoring power of revealed goodness applied to that state, and this is Christianity. Hence it is a necessary consequence, that all philosophy is, and must be, false, There is evidence enough that evil exists, that sin exists; the man who will say that things are morally as they ought to be is a devil, and not a man, take heathens or Christendom. If they are not, there is no sense in not beginning with the truth of this state and its remedy, if there be one. But this is religious truth.