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Anonymous Gift
1824

THE

INNER KINGDOM.

BY

A MEMBER OF THE NEW YORK BAR.
AUTHOR OF "THE DIVINE HUMAN," "THOUGHTS ON THE ATONEMENT," ETC
J

"The kingdom of God is within you.7

il?

CAMBRIDGE:
PRESS OF JOHN WILSON AND SON.
1870.

Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1870, by
FLAGLER AND VAN VLEIT,
In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the United States for the Southern
District of New York.

£>eutcatfcm.

TO MARY IN HEAVEN.

While this little book was being printed, the loving Christ
took you from our family circle to himself, and into the ful
ness of that kingdom of which your own heart was the
Temple and Home. If a life full of high principles and pure
affections, dedicated to duties patiently fulfilled, and gentle
ministries accomplished, through which many a path was
haloed with new resplendencies, and Sadness and Sorrow
robbed of their sting, — if charities, silent, yet refreshing as the
dew, and a heart that loved Nature with filial fondness, — ¦
if afflictions borne with patience and sanctified by prayer,
— if these constitute the elements of Christ's kingdom, then
do we know that you now inherit its royalties and have
entered upon its rewards. With the great crowd of witnesses
you will await our coming, not long delayed ; and while your
good example moulds the lives that linger yet this side the
river, your glorified spirit, seeing it, will be glad with unutter
able joy. ,  *** 
POUGHKEEPSIE, January 26, 1870.

THE INNER KINGDOM.

THE INNER KINGDOM.

CHAPTER I.
~D ELIGION, as the term implies, consists in a
rebinding of the soul to God, not simply in
the submissions of a legal obedience, but in the
spontaneity of a loyal and loving homage, em
bracing an internal harmony with his law, from
which springs an outward conformity, and show
ing forth of it in a life and character moulded
and beautified by its adoption. Whatever terms
of reproach are cast upon what is called natural
religion, there is in the heart an instinctive con
sciousness of spiritual need, faculty, and function,
not to be filled or satisfied by any animal or in
tellectual fruition, — a soul-thirst to be slaked
only by waters from the upper springs ; moral
heart-hunger that demands bread from heaven.
True, the unaided Reason cannot discover the
supply, and furnish humanity with the hidden
manna of the heart, or appease its cravings by
adequate satisfactions ; but this only discovers

4 THE INNER KINGDOM.
the hand of God in man's creation, that he was
moulded on a diviner scale as to want than his
own invention can supply ; that his spiritual
necessities constantly outrun what the human
Reason in its highest moods has ever furnished :
so, sending him back to those higher sources
that spring from a heavenly inspiration, whose
waters well up from fountains at once infinite and
exhaustless. In the ruder stages of national and individual
life, men are educated religiously by and through
the aid of sensuous imagery, either in outward
embodiment, or in those ceremonial observances
which suggest and typify the inward and recon
dite truths aimed at, — which paganism every
where uses, which with a nicer application and a
wiser forelook made up. the Hebrew polity, and
which the Church of Rome now so largely re
tains in her ritual, — or in those less gross and
ideal forms which make the staple of our modern
creeds and practices ; and it remains yet a pro
found problem* whether, dispensing with them,
society could have attained the spiritual culture
and intellectual elevation which now characterize
it. Yet, with all the admitted advantages which
have flowed from such a machinery, it has been

THE INNER KINGDOM. 5
liable to the most serious abuse, when not closely-
watched and guarded by divine counteractants,
in landing the devotee into 1he depths of a de
graded and besotted idolatry. The reason is
apparent : between the idea or truth aimed at, and
the human mind on which it is to be impressed,
stands the symbol, the rite, the agency, the insti
tuted means; by ceremony, by picture, by cross,
by altar, by temple, by whatever of sensuous
appliance designed to aid the imagination and
impress the sensibilities, which tradition or custom
may have introduced and sanctioned. Here inter
vening as by authority, they gain for themselves
a lodgment, which gradually obscures the truth
they were originally designed to symbolize ; and
so the agency supplants the principle, and what
was intended as the scaffolding comes in process
of time to be regarded as the building; and, by a
degeneracy easily understood, the imagination
dominates every other faculty, and leads to the
worship ofthe altar, instead of God ; the cross,
instead of Him who died on it ; or wastes the
sensibilities in an absurd flutter of robes and
tippets of sacred millinery, and the ritualistic
posture — putting of head and hands and knees
to ape the external form of a devotion which

6 THE INNER KINGDOM.
has wholly escaped the heart : and thus worship
becomes a thing of pomp and parade, — a mere
idolatry, however disguised ; no more forceful
or vital in respect of spirituality or character,
than a show of wild beasts, or the parade of a vil
lage regiment. And the evil is not limited to this ;
for when the true idea once escapes, and the mind
lodges upon its substituted symbol, it does not
long rest in mere emptiness and simple parade ;
but — robbed of its appropriate and health
ful nutriment, that which satisfies its immortal
thirst in the communicated life of God — it re
sents the wrong so done to it, and, swinging off
from its moorings, dashes with reckless daring
upon the rocks and shoals of Diabolism. The
moral sentiments perverted, the conscience
blunted and befooled, it reaps its revenges upon
humanity, in rushing upon the rough antagonisms
of all that is devout and tender and truthful ;
revelling in a worship and groping in a morality
that grows sadder and darker as the ages wane.
Sacrifice, from being frivolous or meaningless,
soon becomes sanguinary. Mankind cannot
subsist upon chaff, and foiled in the right di
rection hastens with earnestness upon the con
trary path ; and this is true of peoples whom Art

THE INNER KINGDOM. 7
has refined with aesthetic culture, Law has in
formed with juridical knowledge, and Science
illumined with widest discoveries. The reli
gious sense turned awry, all is disordered and out
of harmony. Egypt — Greece — Rome ! what
a sad worship, and a sadder morality, when the
keen eye of Paul rested on the Acropolis, or
scanned the magnificence of the palaces of the
Caesars ! And just as the religion of mankind
is withdrawn from common life and practice,
and becomes a thing of parade and priestcraft, —
a liturgical and transactional economy carried on
for its own sake, and apart from the people, — it
becomes an institution builded — every wall,
and tower, and turret — to subserve the personal
or corporate power and aggrandizement of those
who conduct its mysteries or minister at its altars !
And lo ! we have at once repeated a historic pic
ture of Dagon and Juggernaut, the priestcraft of
India, Egypt, and Rome. Yet all this spiritual
darkness and despotism, which has rested so long
upon the nations, originated in a simple perver
sion of the religious instincts of humanity, from
supplanting the substance by the symbol, and
enthroning the means in place of the end ; mak
ing the institutions of religious culture to take

8 THE INNER KINGDOM.
on all the reverence and consequence which
rightfully belongs to the higher purposes they
were originally given to subserve, putting the
inventions of man in the room of what only
could satisfy the demands of Heaven. We some
times talk largely about the reign of ideas, and
the play of our intellectual forces, without being
aware how largely we are indebted to sensu
ous images and impressions for the materials and
elements of thought. All language, tropes, fig
ures, imagery, illustration, almost every phrase
and expression, is grounded on a sensuous basis,
or springs from a sensuous root. What is
thought but the use which the mind makes of
these sensible images and impressions, the tools
she uses to construct her theorems or reach her
conclusions? And therefore we are in no way
astonished that society is so swayed, moulded,
and stimulated by its social, political, and
religious symbolism ; by its hearth-stone and
flags, its altars and crosses ; and no more fatal
mistake can be made than for a Revolution in
State or Church to organize and look for support
and enthusiasm by discarding and trampling
upon all the accustomed machinery of political
and religious life, with which whatever is sacred

THE INNER KINGDOM. 9
in sentiment and imagination is associated. The
old flag, with its heroic associations and sa
cred memories, has a power to stimulate to highest
achievements, as the bugle-nste wakes the war-
horse to snuff the battle from afar. Hence a
successful revolution always makes its nest with
in the domain it would revolutionize ; it catches
and holds on all that lies nearest the national
heart, and sloughs off what is irritating and offen
sive. Nothing can be safely discarded and left
behind of custom or habit, until, like an old gar
ment, the wearer sees on it the mutilations of time,
and the marks of a by-gone fashion, which of
fends rather than gratifies its taste or its pride.
Then indeed it may go ; and so what is associa
ted with ignorance or tyranny or crime, or has
lost its significance or usefulness, may therefore
be laid aside. It has become a husk instead of
clothing, and has rotted away like the fading
blossoms from the life it once nourished and
protected. This is the reason, moreover, why all
safe and healthful progress is and must be or
ganic. Like the growth of a tree, society is a
living organism, which outgrows its institutions as
the tree its young bark and leaves. The vitality
within demands a larger development ; and some-

IO THE INNER KINGDOM.
thing without must give way and fall from
around its expansion : it can spare nothing that is
vital ; its dead matter must go, and the sooner the
better, — in the State, its nobilities, lords, stars,
garters, royalties, — in the Church, its parades
and gewgaws, its dolls and images, its genuflec
tions and ceremonials, which no longer make its
life or its power. Matter dead and insensate
may move like the planets in circles everlast
ingly alike, impelled by forces out of itself; no
changes from age to age, no advancement, the
same points of arrival and departure reached in
unvarying repetition, — the universe a simple
machine. But society is not a machine : it is
rooted in, and filled with life, which acts and
reacts while it is acted upon ; which has an inter
nal law of growth and expansion as well as an
external law of protection and conservation,
which move spirally, arriving after each circuit
at a higher point, from which it sees further and
aspires to higher still : it can therefore move in
no leading-strings, but must have as free play as
the swinging blossom that crowns the tops of the
wind-swept forest.
Returning to the fact, and the uses of sensuous
imagery as well as its abuses, we find it aided in

THE INNER KINGDOM. II
controlling society by means of didactic rules or
laws, which in a moral code are principally de
clarative of what is of eternal and necessary obli
gation independently of such enunciation. Law
and penalty are in their nature immutable. Va
riableness, fickleness, change, in either, would
vitiate and destroy them. Uniformity is essential
to the existence of law : abberration there may be
to some extent; but the aim and principle of the
law must stand as true to their end as the needle
to the pole. These laws, however they may touch
society in their application at various points, are
yet one and the same in their essential demands,
embracing the great law of love, that holds all
being — God, angels, and men — in its everlasting
arms. This law is not simply a divine -pronunci-
amento : it is vital to God's existence and nature, —
a law in which he lives, and moves, and has his
being ; an organic law before instituted govern
ment, and of which statutes and ordinances are
but the expression, substance, and revelation.
Thus the first and second commandments — love
to God and love to man — were obligatory upon
humanity as soon as it had an intelligent con
sciousness, and will be for ever ; and the test of
obedience given to Adam was to keep him within

12 THE INNER KINGDOM-
their blessed constraints without a repetition of
their understood obligations.
Our intent and object now is to show that love,
as well as other virtuous principles, being the state
and exercise of the soul toward God and man, is
wholly subjective in the soul ; and that all systems
of thought, feeling, and culture, all ordinances and
dogmas, all institutions of learning, politics, or re
ligion, are only means to an end, — objective appli
ances and tools to produce in us this subjective state
of feeling and of character ; that, in other words,
the kingdom of God is not an ecclesiasticism ; not
an instituted hierarchy with its ranks and orders
of spiritual nobility ; not a politico-religious state
with inlaws and lessons of allegiance and penal
ties for disloyalty : but is a kingdom set up in
each separate soul, which is at once the temple
and altar of the living God ; and that mankind
belong to this kingdom only, and as far, as this
kingdom reaches and is in them. This principle,
it will be seen, by necessity divides men who ac
knowledge divine obligation into two classes :
those who look chiefly to what is external, and
those who are more intent upon what is inter
nal ; those who are absorbed in the ceremonial ,
and those who are concerned for the spiritual ;

THE INNER KINGDOM. 13
those who are occupied with the form, and those
who look for the substance ; those who are swal
lowed in the objective, and those who seek to pro
duce in themselves and in others the subjective. It
may be said truly, that these desirable subjective
states cannot be produced without the objective
truths, ceremonies, and instruments appropriate,
any more than the intellect can work without
using the imagery which the sensuous world pro
duces and furnishes. But it maybe answered that
these moral and spiritual subjective states are in
a measure independent of any special cultus or
agency ; that they have existed under all conceiv
able systems of religious observance, from the
daj^s of Abel to this hour ; and that the life of God
in the soul may dwell and grow on the scantiest
of materials, and under almost any system that
recognizes a personal God and a human brother
hood. If indeed one ecclesiasticism could show,
that humanity grows in wisdom, goodness, vir
tue, truth, purity, and love, only in and through
them ; and that all other systems left it in igno
rance and vice, — then indeed we should soon see
that the special objective form it presented was
truly divine, and the only road back to God and
heaven. But when no such pretence dare be

14 THE INNER KINGDOM.
made, and the best and wisest men of their day
have come to their intellectual and moral stature
under divers forms of religious belief and practice,
this monstrous pretence, if ever made, becomes a
sham and folly. With all the vaunting of conceited
sectarists, none dare submit their respective sys
tems to this crucial test. The great question for
any system is, What are your human fruits? for
what is best for humanity is most acceptable to
God. What virtue, truth, courage, honesty, holi
ness, benevolence, lies in one form of baptism
more than in another? or in one administration
of the Eucharist more than in another? or in one
code of dogmatism more than in another? by
their fruits ye shall know them. Fruit is not
creed, or profession, or ecclesiastical connection;
but life and character. Fruits of the Spirit are
love, peace, long-suffering, goodness, &c. : against
such there is no law, because, rising above the
law of a carnal commandment, the subject has
the law of love written on his heart, and so works
and thinks and acts spontaneously, in the large-
hearted liberty wherewith Christ makes his people
free. Overlooking the fields which the different forms
of religious thought have occupied through the

THE INNER KINGDOM. 15
historic ages, we discover different systems of
culture appropriate to the divers types of civiliza
tion obtaining among a people, as if there was
a natural law of relation between them ; and the
higher culture, the more advanced stages, were
opened as soon as the former and more imma
ture had prepared the people to receive them :
nay, the new has ever borne the same relation to
the old, that the faintest dawn has to the past day,
because humanity makes no advance without first
groping. There must be effort to find the way :
the path must be sought out by the sweat and toil
of head and heart and brain ; and so this twilight
is at first better for man than the sunlight. Storms
purify the atmosphere, and the way to heaven is
better for him here, than would be its full fruition :
because character does not grow unconsciously ;
it comes out of and is built up of discipline. Love
cannot grow in most of us until the heart is soft
ened by the ministry of sympathy and sorrow :
victory comes after temptation and trial, virtue
from conflict with vice, and confidence and hope
stand over the graves of doubt and despair.
What could a rude and unintellectual people
do with a religion of principles, abstract and
recondite? Standing on the confines of barbar-

1 6 THE INNER KINGDOM.
ism, they can only receive and appropriate a
culture which substantially touched that barbar
ism, or its penumbra, which is in it in its forms,
but leads out of it in its principles ; which, looking
back into its night, has an outlook also for tht
day that is to come. And so nothing but iron
rules and sensuous imagery, and the stimulus of
rewards and punishments is applicable where
obedience is to be learned ; and a language, drawn
from symbols and ceremonies, formed that shall
one day be put to higher uses, and subserve ends
of larger significance. The moral sentiments,
slumbering yet in embryo, are forming the ele
ments of expression. The earliest teaching is of
the conscience, which is to be made to feel the
force of law, and the validity of its retributive
sanctions ; and so God through Moses taught a
nation of slaves — who, miraculously fed and
guarded, had nothing else to learn — his sovereign
ty and Fatherhood ; his truth, justice, mercy, and
love, — by a minute civil and personal ritualism,
which has no parallel in the annals of the race.
This ritualism subserved a double purpose, — the
habit of obedience and the training of the con
science, on the one hand ; and the creation of a
new train of ideas and new elements of thought,

THE INNER KINGDOM. 17
to be interwoven into the better civilization which
after years were to develop, on the other hand.
And so, in process of time, after God had re
vealed himself in law to humanity, he came
nearer to our race in humanity, in the person of
his Son, who stands for evermore as God's wisdom
and power in winning back many sons to himself
through the force of those moral ideas and influ
ences which the aspect of God manifest in the
flesh, when fully apprehended, creates. Before, it
was command : now, superadded, is sympathy ; the
beat of God's loving heart heard by the quick ear
of the pining soul, which sees, in Christ's life and
death and resurrection, the pledge and prophecy
that man is still, though a wanderer and prodigal,
the object of the divine love and solicitude ; and
upon this has supervened a code of principles,
enforced by the law of a spontaneous affection,
which out of these evolves all those acts and feel
ings of loyalty and love which make humanity
meet for the indwelling and companionship of
God. Now all these systems of training and culture
are adopted, not on their own account, or for their
own honor or praise, but because they were and
are adapted to lift us each into a higher range of

l8 THE INNER KINGDOM.
character and attainment. It is first the blade,
then the ear, then the full corn in the ear ; first
childhood, then youth, then manhood : and we do
well to remember, just here, that this divine edu
cation, like secular, is to produce and bring out
the strength of the soul ; is to develop its higher
powers and faculties ; is to make man acquainted
with himself, and stimulate and nerve him with
an inward strength, to be used in any exigency,
rather than to give him the materials of knowl
edge and virtue. True, he needs these materials
to work with and upon ; but they are instrumental
and secondary, while the state to be produced in
him is primary and final. In the culture of art,
are the pictures, the statues, the poetic fires, the
concourse of sweet sounds, the final cause of their
own creation? Is beauty formed for itself alone,
or has it a ministry, in its effect on human taste
and character, to polish, refine, soften, and spiritu
alize? Do all these agencies end in themselves,
or are they means to an end? That is the ques
tion which touches us in our religious character
and hopes, and gives significance to all the agen
cies it employs. Can it be shown that the sense
of beauty grows only by the tuition of a single
master, or in the study of one picture or statue ?

THE INNER KINGDOM. 19
Has one special course a diploma that it only can
bring out and set in play all the assfhetic faculties ?
Are not all the resources of nature and art har
nessed to this end? and has not that a divine
stamp which produces most largely in the human
soul these beatitudes? Is there one law for the
intellect, and another for the heart; one for the
taste, and quite a different one for the moral sen
timents ? God's training of humanity is systematic
and harmonious : after religious culture begins, it
is regulated and grows by the same processes
that mark intellectual and scientific progression.
Informations, knowledges, sciences, must be used ;
but they are instrumental to something beyond
themselves, valuable for their uses in the capaci
ties they produce in the man : and so a subjective
state of the soul is the end of all religious and
moral culture, without which, whatever our
forms of devotion or our creeds of faith, we are
fitted for good companionship neither on earth
nor in heaven.

20 THE INNER KINGDOM.

CHAPTER IL
TT may aid us somewhat in the elucidation of
our theme, to notice more specifically some
of the perversions of our religious faith which
have obtained, and which so far as they have
been influential have given force to the dogma,
that religion is rather a means than an end, an
objective thing to be possessed rather than an
internal state to be attained ;. that our concern
should be chiefly expended on taking heed to our
ecclesiastical connections, leaving all the rest to
come as it may. Let it not be objected that we
disparage means, in our zeal for what means are
to produce ; we hold that means are vitally essen
tial, but their adaptation and worth will always
be found in what they effect on character ; if they
are deficient in this, they are counterfeit, though
stamped all over with apostolic signatures ; and be
sides, means, institutions, organizations change
from age to age, and are left behind as the advan
cing civilizations have cast them off after they have

THE INNER KINGDOM. 21
had their day and performed their appropriate
function ; as civil society is tied to no specific
form of government, — monarchical, republican,
democratic, — while the spirit of liberty, law, jus
tice, prevailing in either, gives a healthy life
to the State, and these wanting, any form is
oppressive; so in the Church, while no specific
organization was instituted by our Saviour, yet
truth and love and charity may and have existed
under forms and creeds divers and many, and
under forms of ecclesiastical governments as rad
ically diverse as monarchy and democracy in the
State. The spirit of Christianity has lived and
can live under any form. All hierarchies when
most despotic and worldly have been her abode.
In the darkness of 1500 years many a pure
heart and noble faith enshrined her, — she can
live beneath all draperies, and yet without them ;
worship in the dim light of lofty cathedrals, in the
rude structures of puritanic sanctity, or beneath
the open dome of heaven ; despotism cannot
crush, fanaticism cannot annihilate her ; em
bodying the divine wisdom, truth, and mercy, her
aim and her mission is to give to man a paradise
regained, and to make earth smile again like the
garden of the Lord.

22 THE INNER KINGDOM.
i. A primary mistake is often made in our
theologies in respect to law and penalty. We
speak of the laws of matter, and the laws of
mind, of natural laws, and of spiritual laws. And
in the admirable treatise of the Duke of Argyle
on the Reign of Law, he notices five different
senses in which we use the word law. I. As an
observed order of facts; 2. That order as pro
duced by an unknown force ; 3 . As applied to
that order where the force is defined ; 4. To com
binations of force, fulfilling a purpose or function ;
and 5. The abstract conception of law in the
mind, — all ranging about the three great ques
tions which science is asking of Nature, — the
What ; the How ; and the Why? The first three
senses are simply phenomenal, setting forth an
order in obedience to some force, as maybe illus
trated by the law of gravitation and chemical
affinity. "Not a drop of water can be formed
except under rules which determine its weight,
its volume, its shape, with exact reference to the
density ofthe fluid, to the structure of the surface
on which it may be found and formed, and to
the pressure of the surrounding atmosphere ; not
one of the countless varieties of form which pre
vail in clouds and which give to the face of

THE INNER KINGDOM.

23

Heaven such infinite expression ; not one but is
ruled by law, woven, braided, torn, scattered,
gathered, folded up again by forces which are
free only within the bounds of law." But phys
ical laws, immutable in their action and design,
are not less immutable in their penalties : they
avenge unsparingly their own violation ; no the
ologie system has been able to obscure or deny
this fact. The retribution is sure, and falls upon
the violator; a limb thrust into the flames will
burn, and no force can separate the pain from the
transgressor. He who plunges beneath the
water drowns, the penalty adheres to the crime ;
he who dashes from a precipice dies by the law
of gravity ; he who riots in drunkenness and
debauchery debilitates and ruins body and soul,
and none can deliver him out of the hands of
retribution. We easily see and admit the con
nection of penalty with the breach of natural law :
here we acknowledge that "whatsoever a man
soweth that shall he also reap." But now, as
we pass over into the realm of spiritual laws . and
forces, we are taught that the laws of retribution
may be suspended or evaded, that a scheme of
mercy requires a shifting off and assumption of
the penalty by one other than the violator : that

24 THE INNER KINGDOM.
a breach of spiritual and moral law may be
visited by punitive inflictions upon an innocent
party who has not transgressed, in the way of
payment or expiation for the actual transgressor,
and that thus he may go free : whereas true reli
gion and philosophy teach that one law lays its
imperative sanctions alike upon the realms of
matter and of mind ; that men can no more live
in the breach of spiritual law, and escape the
force of its retributions, or turn them over upon
a substitute, than they can walk unhurt through
the flames, or have them consume a companion
who at that very instant is far beyond their
reach. Let us look a little more closely into the
composition of a spiritual law, — a law to direct
and control the affections and acts of a spiritual
agent. i. The declarative precept of such a law
either announces an existing obligation founded
in the nature of things, or an obligation resting
solely on the law, and which would not be a duty
but for the law. This last embraces all ceremo
nial acts and duties which begin and end in them
selves, and have no moral force except in build
ing up habits of obedience in the subject ; but
what are called the precepts of the moral code —

THE INNER KINGDOM. 25
love to God, and love to man — were of eternal
obligation, and no more binding after they were
written in stone by the finger of Jehovah than when
first written in the constitution and creation
of man by the same divine fashioning ; as obliga
tory in Eden as on Sinai, in the paradise of the
young creation as amidst the burning sands and
lonely rocks and thunderous voices of the Ara
bian desert. And now we come to the vital ques
tion, Is the retribution which follows, sooner or
later, every breach of the spiritual law, like
the law itself, of necessary and eternal fixedness
and obligation, inhering in the nature of things ;
or, may it be evaded or cheated or counteracted,
or shifted off upon another who is at the same
time guiltless of any violation? In other words,
is the penalty arbitrarily annexed, so that it might
have been something else, and something differ
ent, as well? and could God, in the moral and
spiritual system under which his creatures must
live or not live at all, have connected happiness
and joy with a life of selfishness and vice ; and
misery and grief eternal with one of virtue and
self-denial? Does it rest in- the simple will of a
law-giver to make the unrestrained exercise of all
the diabolism of humanity a source of unending

26 THE INNER KINGDOM.
felicity, and love to God and man an eternal crime
and agony? If not, if the soul that sins dies, —
dies in sinning and by sinning, and can live only
as sin is eradicated, — what becomes of the theory
of transferred guilts and penalties, and all the
scholastic machinery of imputations and satisfac
tions invented to uphold it? In the order of the
divine government, spiritual laws execute them
selves ; wreak their own retributions on the soul
that violates them, in time or in eternity : other
wise they are without an}' penalty at all : if arbi
trarily annexed, they might as well be wanting.
On what, and by what, does the penalty operate?
Upon the soul : but how upon the soul, unless in
its intelligent consciousness of ill desert and crim
inality, conviction of its sin, and unavailing re
morses for its crime and ruin? Is it exclusion
from God in place? But he is everywhere pres
ent, and must be for ever. It can therefore only
be in self-conscious exclusion from his favor and
love, through its incorrigible sin. Sin and penalty
work in and upon each other, and generate a
perpetuity of remorses by the perpetuity of their
desperate defiances of God and his law. Human
penalties are arbitrary, often disproportionate and
excessive, often inadequate. What penalty, in

THE INNER KINGDOM. 2>]
degree and duration, is adequate to sin, is meas
ured in the divine councils by as accurate an ad
justment as the weight of a planet to its periods
and cycle ; meted out in the scale of an equitable
and all-wise administration, that apportions all
things by the rules and compensations of a divine
and righteous law. As the breach of law was in
the motivities and consciousness, so the retribution
must have its operation on the same plane, and
cover the same exercises. The one stands over
against the other, — the flaming sword guarding
the way to the tree of life. We know not what
outward elements of place and disfavor may be
added ; but this is clear, that the scope and range
of retribution is mainly subjective. The kingdom
of God is in the soul ; and the kingdom of evil
has the same field of exercise, in time and in eter
nity. Sin and suffering are therefore eternal
correlatives, married in everlasting union in the
divine councils, and inseparable by the fiat of
an immutable law, no divorce possible in either
world. Remorse of conscience ; — can that be
transferred to another spiritual pollution ; — does it
stain other than its own dwelling-place through
and through? And the same train of reasoning
is applicable to the rewards of obedience : the

28 THE INNER KINGDOM.
samelawof subjective recompense, making heaven
and holiness and happiness, obtains, as in the sad
and awful retributions of the lost. True, we are
promised seats of glory and crowns sparkling with
jewels ; cities with streets of glass and gates of
pearl, and all the gorgeous emblazonry as of an
Oriental dream : but we take it all as a figure, by
and through which the soul grasps the truth it
embodies. For, if literal, how soon would the
heart weary of it all, as the victims of worldly
pomp and luxury ache and pine amidst surround
ing splendors ! And so, when we are led through
the green pastures and beside the still waters;
when we walk the golden streets with the immor
tal harpers, in the divine promise, we seize the
idea and hope of a spiritual repose and enjoyment,
of which these are but faint emblems ; and of
soul-royalties in the city of God, too sublime
for language, and too exhilarating for human
thought. The adjustments of penalty, therefore,
in the divine economy, are always exact, and
always certain; are always adapted to prevent
violation and disregard of heavenly mandates :
nay, they in fact spring out of those violated man
dates, and would do so largely if not previously
announced : their enhancement resting mainly in

THE INNER KINGDOM.

29

the thought of personal outrage of Jehovah after
his great sacrifice and provisions of merGy are
known and disregarded.
How are penalties adjusted in civil governments
and under municipal codes? Do they vindicate
law? Did the code of Draco vindicate the wisdom
of ancient legislation ; or the edicts of Nero, Ro
man law; or the death or transportation of a
poacher for shooting a bird, the integrity of British
statutes? Penalty never vindicates law : itisonlyan
impersonal police, commanding its own executive
enforcement. The grand problem, not yet solved
in human legislation, is so to apportion penalty to
crime, as to arm law with adequate sanctions,
and yet restrain the needless cruelties of ven
geance ; for human governments are then most
like divine when there is neither friction nor heat
nor passion in their noiseless sway : there is no
vengeance grinding in the wheels of God's retri
butions. A law is magnified and made honorable
in obedience to the precept, nor is the law dis
honored when broken, so that the sweep of its
penal exactions touch the soul : the sinner is
dishonored, not the law. So, also, expiation or
penalty executed does not necessarily or usually
work any moral cleansing : it is only when it is

30 THE INNER KINGDOM.
seen and accepted as just, and contrition follows
such conviction, under a new economy of grace,
that law operates as a schoolmaster to bring us to
Christ. It is only in the amazing processes of the
redemptive system that penalty is remitted and
forgiven by the cleansing of the soul, on which
it would otherwise have taken its sweep : and
this, not because the penalty has been satisfied by
the sinner or a substitute ; but because, when sin
is cast out of the heart, there is nothing on which
penalty can operate. Its power is gotten only in
its cutting upon the antagonisms of God ; and
therefore a soul in harmony with him is free as
an angel from the sweep of its inflictions : for an
gelic natures are not held to their allegiance by
penalty, either threatened or executed ; for in
stantly desire reaches penalty on the path of dis
obedience, thej' have already sinned : their loyalty
lies not in fear but in its spontaneity.

THE INNER KINGDOM.

31

CHAPTER III.
if^HE subjective character of religion appears
not more from the nature of law and retribu
tion, than from an examination of the manner
in which God's redemptive system of grace, in
Christ Jesus, operates upon man. No one is
turned from darkness to light against his will ;
our freedom is never invaded by God's working
in us to will and to do ; every spiritual exercise
is in accordance with the laws of our spiritual
nature and life. God enables us to believe, as
he enables us to think ; but faith and intellection
are exercises not of God, but ofthe soul of man.
Why the will is exercised more readily at one
period than at another, is attributed usually to
God's sovereignty : it would be wise perhaps to
say that it is owing to the presence and working
of laws too subtile and recondite for the human
intellect to trace or comprehend. If our mental
and moral exercises are under law, as we believe,
-then we are not moved by forces above law, or

32 THE INNER KINGDOM.
against law, but by forces in accordance with a
higher law, whose workings we see only in its
effects, while the play of its wheels is hidden
wholly from our view : and thus our idea of the
miraculous may be as profoundly devout as it is
philosophical, if we refer it to a divine contrivance-
and working, above human comprehension, by
using immutable laws as inter-workers control
ling, modifying, counteracting, and shaping each
other so that this inter-play and combination of
forces brings out the most astounding and unan
ticipated issues. Did our Lord present his mira
cles as a violation of his own laws in nature, or may
he be regarded as using higher laws or forces, with
which we are unacquainted, to modify those we
do comprehend? so that in our ignorance and
amazement we say truly, " This is the great
power of God," but a power lying all the while
within the range of law. And, if so, infidelity
as to miracles may stand aghast, for her last
hiding-place is demolished. The superhuman
may yet be seen to range the higher plains ofthe
natural ; and God's government of spiritual as of
natural agencies be vindicated as being without
caprice and without surprises, and his adminis
tration without variableness or the shadow of

THE INNER KINGDOM.

33

turning. By the law is the knowledge and con
viction of sin ; but the glad tidings of forgive
ness and renovation, and the new law in the
heart by a new birth, come by Jesus Christ. The
means and agencies for this are objective, but
their work and operation, from first to last, is
wholly subjective in the human soul. Salvation
is termed a " great feast ; " but it is a feast only
as it is eaten, and gives to the recipient spiritual
life and power. It is a " garment," but only as
it is wrapped around the wearer's soul. It is
" living water : " but he dies of thirst unless it
passes his parched lips. It is the " remission of
sin," but this forgiveness is accorded only to pen
itence and prayer. It is " wisdom, righteousness,
sanctification, redemption." The provisions of
it are the result of God's wisdom : the reception of
it is the wisdom of man. It is Christ's plan or
method of making a sinner righteous, not by
making over in his behalf his own supererogatory
merit, — which is a thing wholly of theologie
imagination, — but by enabling the soul to exer
cise right principles and dispositions, which,
however immature and undeveloped, will in the
end constitute a real, not a sham righteousness.
And so men are "sanctified," set apart, dedicated,
3

34 THE INNER KINGDOM.
to a Christian life, and so "redeemed" from the
captivity of sin, to which they are in bondage,
not by an external payment of a ransom, but by
an internal and subjective renunciation of this
slavery, and taking in its stead the yoke of
Christ. True, we are redeemed by the blood or
work of Christ, — which stands for and includes
the whole redemptive economy, and which takes
its place instrumentally as an indispensable means
of conviction, conversion, and sanctification, —
but these exercises and dispositions are wholly
subjective, and are not real except as they ripen
and solidify into character.
We shall obtain a clearer view of this important
truth, if we consider the nature of those elements
which enter into and constitute the power of the
new life, — conviction of sin, penitence, prayer,
self-denial, charity, , faith : not one of them all
objective in its nature, only in its manifestation ;
all fed and nourished subjectively, — soul quali
ties. Take, as an instance, the "grace of re
pentance."' Is it any thing but a comparison of
the objective truth with the subjective conscious
ness, — a clear apprehension of the rule, law,
principle, and want of conformity to it, which
is the intellectual, or first stage of repentance ;

THE INNER KINGDOM. 35
followed by a genuine contrition, self-reproach,
remorse, which is the second or moral stage ;
and this, again, succeeded by restitution and
amendment, which is the final and practical part
of repentance, and without which it is incom
plete. Each stage or state, so far as the mind or
soul is concerned, is wholly subjective in the disci
ple. Of what avail is the mere outward show,
the lip-service, of repentance, — repeated a thou
sand times in all modes and postures of priestly
discretion, — failing to reach the hidden springs,
the deepest sources of being?
So also in respect to prayer, which has been
so long regarded as a myster}', in which the be
stowal of answers was supposed to conflict with
the decrees and immutability of Jehovah; —
prayer! commanded as a duty, enforced by pre
cept and example, the cry of the thirsty heart
after living waters ; — prayer ! standing sen
tinelled by an array of promises, confirmed by the
consentaneous evidence of the ages ; — prayer !
the ladder of faith trodden by ascending and de
scending angels ; — prayer ! the pathway of the
fiery chariots of God ; — prayer ! the atmosphere
which the lightning-tipped wings of Seraphim
traverse ; and yet it pierces the ear of the Im-

36 THE INNER KINGDOM.
mutable, and strikes upon an iron chain of causa
tion, every link of which was preordained from
before the foundation of the world. Can human
want, or human agon}', or human cry, alter the
divine purpose, or make one hair white or black?
The logical reason is staggered and baffled
in this labyrinth of perplexity, and runs up a
path of thought that terminates in darkness. If
we credit each proposition, they seem separately
true, and yet charged with irreconcilable antag
onism. Is there any way out? it depends upon
what we mean by God's unchangeableness. If
that respects results mainly, or a will that makes
him unchangeably good and merciful, loving and
just, — then the divine wisdom may have a thou
sand agencies which this goodness may employ
to produce results of mercy and grace in man ;
and the exercise of this divine will may be al
tered by devout prayer from what it would have
wrought without it : and so the human will, ex
pressed in prayer, becomes a force which modi
fies, by a mysterious law, the manifestations of
the divine. He changes the agency, but not the
purpose : in truth, works out the purpose by this
very means. But, however this may be, and al
though this explanation may not be satisfactory,

THE INNER KINGDOM. 37
prayer, as a Christian duty and privilege, is no
sham and hollow sound poured on the impassive
ear of a Sovereignty that marches serenely on a
path which no importunity can alter, and no effort
change. Like its cognate doctrine ofthe freedom
of the will, it lies imbedded in divine disclosure,
as well as in human consciousness ; and the un
apprehended reconciliations must be submitted to
a higher intelligence, or be left for future revela
tion. Nevertheless the subjective influence of
prayer is open both to observation and experi
ence. It has been supposed degrading by some
if prayer was, after all, only "preaching to one's
self," an audible meditation taken as in the eye
of Heaven. It thus becomes a means of Christian
discipline, by and through which the whole men
tal and moral forces are trained to their appropri
ate action. It is through prayer the soul expresses
and receives its moods of adoration, its lofty hom
ages, its exalted and superhuman glimpses ofthe
unutterable glories. The visions of God flooding
the soul find some exit from the lips through
prayer and praise, which is often but lyric prayer.
Thus thankfulness finds expression, and thus the
mind takes up and recounts the mercies of God,
contrasted with human ingratitude and sin ; and

38 THE INNER KINGDOM.
so follows confession and supplication for forgive
ness, and a sense of need and dependence open
ing up for continued supplies. And by this means
our best thoughts, and purest and sweetest emo
tions, become embodied, and take on the forms
of speech, and are fitted as tangible instruments
for future use and expression. And through this
ritual, the soul comes into her filial attitudes of
receptive love : and, the intellect and heart work-
ing together, the conception of the first passes
into feeling, and principle and character are thus
builded up in the man. It is by these perpetual
interactions of the soul that she is made wise and
strong. It is not only spiritual food, but digestion
and assimilation as well, bringing moreover the
naked soul into the presence of the great Heart-
searcher, that all its hypocrisies and deceptions
may be discovered and corrected, and the man
stand fast in his integrity of purpose. So also it
tends to give us what we sincerely ask. He who
prays that he may be forgiving and merciful may
become so in the act ; he who asks that he may
be charitable, loving, and pure begets charity,
love, and purity, by his petition, in himself: and so
of all other spiritual qualities and characteristics.
The idea, conception, and desire tend to fix these

THE INNER KINGDOM. 39
moral features in the soul ; and if they are not in
answer to prayer, it is because it lacks sincerity.
In the Minute Philosopher of Bishop Berkeley
he put these words into the mouths of his charac
ters. " Ale. To what purpose are these prayers
and praises and thanksgivings and singing of
psalms which the foolish vulgar call serving God?
what sense, or what use or end is there in all
these things ? "
Crito answers, " We worship God, we praise
and pray to him, not because we think he is
proud of our worship, or fond of our praise or
prayer, and affected by them as mankind are ;
or that all our service can contribute in the least
degree to his happiness or good : but because it is
good for us to be so disposed toward God ; be
cause it is just and right and suitable to the nature
of things, and becoming the relation we stand in
to our supreme Lord and Governor." p. 189. If
prayer be imposed as a penance and enforced by
the punitive sanctions of church authority as to
time, manner, length, repetition, — so many to be
repeated for such an offence, or to obtain such a
blessing in the way of payment or barter, — its
best influence is wholly gone as it respects both

40 THE INNER KINGDOM.
God and man. It becomes " fetish," and is de
graded into a charm or incantation, which, with
out any rational connection with the result sought,
is to secure it, after the same intelligent fashion
prevailing among the savage priests of Timbuc-
too ! It might as well be standing on one foot,
or swinging on hooks in the air, or any imagina
ble mortification of the flesh or spirit : self-torture
is not prayer. If prayer degenerates into form,
and becomes simply ritualistic, a parroting of
vocables in the way of a perfunctionary service,
although it may be a decorum, it is no more a
worship : it is a dead body out of which the life
and soul have gone ; a shell of sanctity encasing
a lifeless formalism hardly better than nothing.
And yet among Christians tied to no liturgy
how stereotyped is the language of supplication,
learned by rote from each other, and so marked
and characteristic that one can seldom mistake
the denominational status of the suppliant from
the clique phrases that roll so volubly from his
tongue ! Vagueness and indefiniteness, what
characteristics of prayer ! how little ordering of
speech before the Holy One ! How the somno
lent soul labors to rise out of her secular dreami
ness, and yet falls back nerveless and defeated !
Imagine men attempting to grow in secular knowl-

THE INNER KINGDOM.

41

edge, as they do in the knowledge and grace of
Christ, what would be the measure of their attain
ments, and their power in using them? A math
ematician, painter, musician, where theory and
practice go together as in a religious life !
Prayer, to be any thing, must be charged with
sincerity, fervor, enthusiasm, — must stir the soul
in its deeps, and take hold upon its subjective
feelings : it then encompasses earth while it
reaches heaven, and, covering the mercy-seat
with the wings of Cherubim, dwells in the glory
of the uncreated light that plays perpetually
around God's consecrated altars. What is com
munion with God but the contact of our thoughts
and feelings in loving harmony with those re
vealed by Jehovah, and especially in Christ?
Meditation may do this; and much meditation is
prayer of the soul, its silent utterances when the
spirit has an insight and discernment that exalts it
with a deep, strange blessedness, like the com
panionship of an angel. Some cutting care has
been corroding, and weariness hangs over the
drooping wings ofthe soul; but, alone with God,
healing breezes sweep from the hills of strength,
and the pinions are lifted once more to their royal
altitudes, far above where the clouds linger or
the lightnings play.

42 THE INNER KINGDOM.

CHAPTER IV.
CO also faith, the core and marrow of Chris-
tianity, is peculiarly and by eminence wholly
subjective. It is faith in objective truth, but this
truth is wholly separable from faith, and may and
does exist without it. It is the state of the inter
nal man, manifested by his external character.
Faith is shown by works : but it is not works :
neither is it intellection, idea, or sentiment mere
ly. It is more than all these, because it combines
them all : it is the whole soul carrying with it the
life poured through the channels of God's appoint
ment, and trusting its all implicitly to God's ve
racity and love. It is easy to see how faith saves,
and why nothing else can, — because it opens the
soul to the life of God, and sets it upon courses
of thought, affection, and action which destroy
within it the power of sin, and start it upon its
heavenly career under the power of an endless
life. Why is he saved who grasps the rope
thrown to him in the waters? Because he has

THE INNER KINGDOM. 43
faith in the sufficiency of the means offered by
his helpers, and their ability to save him ; now
experience proves, the world over, — did not
revelation do it explicitly, — that our lapsed hu
manity never did, and never will, take up and
appropriate the divine remedies provided for its
recovery without possessing this faith, this nerve-
force of the soul. • It is the result of a deep
spiritual insight, and our Lord uttered no more
frequent or vehement reproaches to his followers,
in the days of his flesh, than those respecting
their lack of faith. They were slow to believe
in his divine sonship, although so wonderfully
attested by his works ; nor did their slowness of
heart depart until after his resurrection, and the
spiritual enlightenment sent through the baptism
of pentecostal fires. Without an influential —
i.e., a real — faith, sin is not seen to be sinful, or
repented of; a virtuous life is not sought as de
sirable ; self is not conquered as our worst enemy ;
passion and pride are not subdued ; and man
gropes on under the sway of all these native and
noxious principles and impulses which pollute
and emasculate the soul, and he is not saved,
because the only lifting and redemptive agencies
are not applied. Salvation from suffering is first

44 THE INNER KINGDOM.
and only salvation from sinning, and the disposi
tion to transgress. Sin is not a thing : it is the
free act of a voluntary agent ; and when we speak
of it in the abstract, we mean always its manifes
tation in the concrete, as something said or done
or felt by a free intelligence. Heaven is no pagan
paradise of place simply, into which entering we
are safe from the avenging angel, like the shed-
der- of blood in a city of refuge. No : that aveng
er stands at the open door of every soul in all
worlds, — heaven and hell alike, — and will
wreak his retributions anywhere in the highest
heaven of delights, and beneath the very throne
if sin be found there, as it was in our earthly par
adise. True, there may be beauty of place and
adornments, such that the eye shall never be
weary of seeing ; and melodies so rich and de
licious that no ear shall ever be weary of hear
ing : although these figures are doubtless intended
to contrast sights and sounds which sadden and
afflict us here. But Heaven is the consumma
tion and outflow of a perpetual love, — "ofthe
eternal, co-eternal beam," — filled and lost in the
blessed tides that play around all beings that live
and breathe in accordant harmonies with his
boundless benevolence. Every soul will be filled

THE INNER KINGDOM. 45
with all the richness its capacities will allow.
Yet, even there, what wide diversities of enjoy
ment and of power ! What are we beside the el
der-born of that vast empire of spiritual powers,
thrones, dominions, principalities, — witnesses at
once of creation and of redemption, from whose
lips pealed the anthem of the morning stars, and
from which rolled through the starry vault, and
over Bethlehem's plains, the song of peace on
earth and good-will to men ! What are we in
the august presence of the nobility of a realm
which may spread its boundaries by successive
creations, until space is peopled by flashing orbs
and countless suns, that sweep the heavens in
every direction, traced by these minds from neb
ulous star-dust to worlds of light and order and
intelligence ! Should we not be confounded and
overborne in such company, unless kept in the
home-love of One who was our kin and brother,
and to whom all these transcendent royalties ren
der homage and obeisance? —
" The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven."
It is clear, therefore, that the future enjoyments,
as well as retributions of the soul, spring out of
its subjective states in time, and are their neces-

46 THE INNER KINGDOM.
sary correlatives. Sin, — i.e., in the concrete, —
the disposition to rebel, is a bomb thrown into
eternity, ready to explode, and sure to explode,
on the arrival of its owner. " What have I done
so much," says the easy-going man, "that I
should not be saved, and reap the blessedness of
Heaven?" Nothing! well, that is all you need
for ruin. Salvation is the child of Time. It may
not be happiness here ; it may not be peace ; it
may not be assurance or joy : but it will bring all
of them in full fruitage ere the long ages wax and
wane, if the germ be implanted in this life. But
doing nothing — what is that, as the world goes,
but floating on the currents of selfishness and
corruption, which sweep out into the wide sea of
reprobation, reaping the harvest of a godless
eternity ? There must be striving and effort and
spiritual combat, before these come out, which
are reached only by prayer and fasting. Salva
tion is no conditional reward of certain acts to be
done, by way of payment for labor or the like :
it is the necessary and normal state of a sinless
soul ; it is the extirpation of evil in the heart
by the indwelling life of God, implanted, cher
ished, incorporated in thought, purpose, feeling,
and act. It is not separable from these, because

THE INNER KINGDOM.

Al

these beatitudes are salvation. The "poor in
spirit," the " pure in heart," the " peace-makers,"
the "righteous," are now entered into that king
dom which is to flood eternity and fill all sentient
being with its riches and royalties. To get with
in the salvable lines, the disposition to sin must
be cast out, that "damnable mystery of evil,"
which when once conquered by the internal war
fare ofthe soul, aided by the grace and spirit of
Christ, is so broken in its power that every sub
sequent assailment is more and more easily baffled
and overcome. We talk of salvation and damna
tion, rewards and punishments, often as if they
rested simply in the will of the law-giver, and
might or might not be annexed to certain courses
of human conduct or of feeling ; but such language
is employed only to accommodate the poverty
and rudeness of popular conception, which does
not at first sight perceive that to have a " pure
heart," is to be saved, and to have " an evil heart
of unbelief," is damnation. How joyous or how
terrible these divergent states may hereafter be
come, when their present restraints are removed,
the awful imagery breaking from the lips of Jesus
most significantly shows.
It might be further shown, that not only is it

48 THE INNER KINGDOM.
true that without faith it is impossible to please
God, or reap his blessedness, but that it is not
within the limits of the divine power to make a
soul happy devoid of this elemental state, and the
spiritual character it implies and creates. We are
said to be justified by faith. This phrase is wholly
figurative, having reference to a supposed forensic
transaction, and means simply that one who has
and exercises faith is regarded as " just " and
righteous : but the reason is not because faith is
one thing by way of condition, and justification
another thing by way of payment, but because
faith is germinal righteousness, which justifies;
and its possessor as to law, after forgiveness is
realized through faith, stands in the same position
as if he had never sinned, — "he is not under
law, but under grace." In a life of faith, the
motive and effort are taken as the fact, constitute
the character, and so God justly regards the be
liever in Christ, notwithstanding his imperfections
and aberrations, as having the character after
which he is striving, and as perfect in Christ,
because the Saviour is his ideal and pattern, both
of head and heart. How simple and sweet is this
Scriptural view, lying on the surface of its teach
ings, contrasted with " Christ's justifying righteous-

THE INNER KINGDOM.

49

ness imputed to his people," before the fact -and
against the fact, as if infinite wisdom and mercy
must deal in imaginary figments and unrealities, in
order to accomplish ends much more consonant
with the simplicity of truth and reason. God's
spiritual empire admits of no shams : every move
ment is marked with reality and truth. Christ's
righteousness is not credited or imputed to us,
unless we first have it in the heart or life, or both.
The principal and most important office of justi
fication by iaith is its subjective influence upon
the believer. His supposed trial and acquittal
is doubtless a figure used simply by way of illus
tration, as it is supposed to take place eo instanti
he is converted ; but he is not to await the awards
of this or a more general assize to discover his
position. " Some day, you believe," says Ruskin,
"within these five or ten or twenty years, for
every one of us the judgment will be set, and the
books opened. If that be true, far more than that
must be true. Is there but one day of judgment?
Why, for us, every day is a day of judgment,
every day is a Dies Irce, and writes its irrevoca
ble verdict in the flames of the west. Think you
that judgment waits till the doors of the grave are
opened? It waits at the doors of your houses,
4

50 THE, INNER KINGDOM.
— k waits at the corners of your streets. We
are in the midst of judgment; the creatures whom
we crush are our judges ; the elements that feed us
judge as they minister ; the pleasures that deceive
us judge as they indulge." ("Mystery of Life,"
p. 38.) His trial is, first and principally, in the
forum of his own conscience under t'.ie enlighten
ments of God's word and spirit. The peace that
follows a sense of forgiveness must rest upon a
solid basis of truth. Justification to him is not
any shallow pretence that he is really just before
the law by putting on (as if this was possible)
the personal justice or righteousness of another as
his own ; but he is justified or delivered from the
law's penalty by forgiveness, and a sense that
God has obliterated, wiped out, pardoned freely,
the past errors and sins of his life, — as if, when
execution was demanded, a full pardon from the
sovereign made it impossible, even by the letter
of the law. It is the faith or belief of this that
gives him peace. God, like the Prodigal's father,
was always willing to be reconciled ; but the un
willing feet of the rebel trod in the paths of the
swine-herd until "hunger clung him," — soul-
hunger, — when he sought to be reconciled to his
father, and received, like the falling dew upon

THE INNER KINGDOM. 51
his parched and wounded soul, the sense of di
vine love and forgiveness ; and this again is the
reconciliation of the Scriptures, not the placation
of God's wrath, by a substitute or satisfaction, or
wreaking of penalty to the glut. This is undi
luted paganism, and renders forgiveness or m rcy
impossible. Unfallen spirits are justified by their
works of love and obedience to law; man, by
grace or favor through faith, operating only in the
way of pardon, which precludes expiation in itself,
or by substitution, which can never take place,
and the subject at the same time receive pardon.
The idea is absurd, and as self-contradictory as
that a circle and triangle are the same figure.
Among the dogmas and phrases external toman,
and classed with objective truths, is the expres
sion " the infinite merits of Christ ; " but the term
"merit" has no place or significance in a re
demptive system. If rebels were pardoned on
condition of repentance and renewed loyalty, and
an ambassador or herald was commissioned to
convey to them the glad tidings, they would
hardly speak of being saved "by the merits of" the
ambassador or herald. It is even more absurd in
the case of Christ: in truth, the word is a misno
mer, and conveys a false idea, when applied

52 THE INNER KINGDOM.
to God or man. It borders on the blasphemous
to speak of God as meritorious, either as Father
or Son : he is infinitely above all reach of phrases
which imply comparisons of excellence, on ac
count of which favors are bestowed on mortals.
If Christ be God, then he pours his rich benefac
tions out of his own loving nature, and not on
account of any merits he discovers in himself which
prompt the bestowal. We speak of being saved
"by the merits of Christ." Though so common
on the tongue, it is a phrase which does not occur
in the word of God. Christ is not spoken of in
this manner, as having merited human salva
tion. His supreme excellence and glory are
always and everywhere insisted on. Language
droops under the weight of phrase and figure em
ployed to show forth his wisdom, power, suprema
cy, and glory ; but merit — as implying something
earned, on account of which, or in considera
tion of which, certain blessings are conferred
upon mortals — is a human conceit, liable to the
greatest abuse, and has no legitimate place in a
correct system of religious thought. Yet it is
easy to say, "You, then, deny Christ's merits as
infinite, and on account of which God forgives

THE INNER KINGDOM. 53
sin." We do not deny his infinite excellence and
mercy ; but we deny the application of the word
"merit" to him at all, in the sense in which we
are speaking ; and we deny, moreover, that we are
forgiven "on account of" Christ, but solely by
repentance wrought in us by a view of what he did
and suffered, and is now doing for us. This
whole cast of thought and expression is essentially
Romish, and takes its place legitimately beside the
" supererogatory righteousness " and the " over
much merit " of the saint, stored up in the Church,
to be doled out to supply the poverty of souls, who
can command the priestly keys that unlock the
receptacles where it is supposed to lie in sacerdotal
keeping. The idea that Christ supplies or over
looks all our deficiencies ; that by spiritual com
munication and aid he pours his strength into our
weakness to make us strong, light into our dark
ness, to make us see, and so nerves human imper
fection with a power superior to its own, so that
God's infinite completeness flows, not round, but
into, our incompleteness, — in our restlessness his
rest ; and we become his by the sympathy of this
intercommunion and identity, — all this is pro
foundly and philosophically true, and is widely

54 THE INNER KINGDOM.
different from the " merit " scheme we have been
considering. It is more scriptural to ask spiritual
or temporal blessings " for the sake of," or " in the
name of Christ;" i.e. by his warrant, direction,
and authority.

THE INNER KINGDOM. 55

CHAPTER V.
TT may, perhaps, be doubted, whether the
doctrine of the Trinity, — a matter utterly
incomprehensible in dogmatic statement, and
inconceivable as it respects the eternal genera
tion of the Sou ; for we cannot see how a gener
ation can be eternal, as it implies an act since
a beginning, — it may admit of question whether
the apprehension of the one God in a triune mani
festation be not on account (among other reasons)
ofthe ideas which it is necessary humanity should
have of Jehovah, subjectively. What an uproar
throughout Christendom, both before and since
the Council of Nice, to define the doctrine of the
Trinity, and formulate in logical and dogmatic
statement, what is, and always will be, simply
incomprehensible. Men, who would be wiser
than Jesus or his apostles, must have a creed
which they did not see fit to make, and when " I
believe that thou art the Christ, the son of the
living God " was sufficient " credo ; " and so the

56 THE INNER KINGDOM.
battle, renewed with Socinus, was more fiercely
fought, as the combatants could not understand
their own phrases. Suppose it should have oc
curred to them that the infinite Jehovah could not
be found out by human search, and that no mind
could grasp or comprehend his nature manifold
and many-sided, and that the human soul needed,
for its lifting, a threefold manifestation of God, —
as a father, as a brother, as a spiritual force ; and
so he is presented as a vast obelisk on the plains
of humanity, imbedded in the eternities, and lift
ing itself above the highest heavens, lost in the
splendors of the ineffable glory. And as man
gazes on the one side it is all written over with
the sovereignty and fatherhood of the Almighty ;
and these ideas gain a lodgment, standing forth in
creation, providence, and history. But these ideas
alone, grand and sweeping as they were, are not
sufficient : they generate, when alone, awe, fear ;
they overpower, and so repel. Not thus can
fallen man get back to his lost heritage and home :
there needs the stir of another class of emo
tions, when slowly the pillar turns, and, from base
to pinnacle, stands forth God in humanity, —
Christ, the manifestation of the Father, sweetly
displaying these tender and fraternal relations

THE INNER KINGDOM. 57
which waken and attach human sympathy, pour
ing over the heart the unstinted waves of the di
es
vine love, and opening up to man's astonished eye
and melting heart the omnipotence of the great
law of sacrifice, in which divinity essentially
dwells. Oh, the mystery, as well as majesty, of
this amazing, reconciling condescension ! Will
God indeed dwell with men, in the intimacy of a
common and sympathetic nature? Will he pene
trate the depths of human suffering, and fathom
the darkness and loneliness of human woe? Will
he endure and conquer the assailments of temp
tation, and grapple even with Death? that by its
conquest he may lead his people to hope they,
too, shall rise again, in the bloom of an immortal
vigor, to the fruitions of an endless life. Before,
how dark and sad the grave, over which brooded
the silence of an eternal and unfathomed mystery !
from the ancient legends, and the flashing glimp
ses of prophecy, how fitful and uncertain the light !
Did the fretful and wayward spirit rest for ever, or
did it commence a new career in an untried and
unimaginable existence ? " Did it walk amidst the
heavens, a part of their glory, — a new link in a
new order of beings, breathing amidst the ele
ments of a more gorgeous world, arrayed in the

58 THE INNER KINGDOM.
attributes of a purer and diviner nature ; a wan
derer among the planets, an associate of angels,
— redeemed, regenerate, and immortal? Upon
that unknown and voiceless gulf of inquiry
brooded an impenetrable gloom : no wind breathed
over it ; no wave agitated its stillness ; over the dead
and solemn calm broke no change propitious to
adventure ; there went forth no vessel of research
which was not driven, baffled, and broken again
upon the shore." It was not in the old economies
of Pagan or Hebrew to open the book, and loose
the seals ; but the Son of God, who dwelt in the
bosom of the Father, he could reveal the throb
of that heart, and disclose the many mansions of
his spiritual and supernal home, prepared for
those who love him. But not yet is man fully
equipped for his life voyage : he needs to feel the
breath of Heaven upon his brow and in his heart ;
he needs to know there are gales from the far-off
shore that will sweetly waft him to his desired
haven. And so, as he gazes upon that Pillar,
another side is presented : lo ! another mode of
divine communication through the Spirit, which
bows him reverently to the Father in divinest
homage ; which links him sweetly and lovingly to
the Son, in sympathetic communion; and which

THE INNER KINGDOM. 59
opens to his soul those mysteries of the kingdom,
God, — enabling it thus to apprehend more of his
nature and excellence, with a truer insight and
power, than is possible from all theological defi
nitions, or all the wisdom of the schools.
So also the law of spiritual progress may be
shown to have its operation on the field of our sub
jective nature, analogous to that regulating our
social and political advancement. This law is
one of heterogeneity and specialization. It has
ever been, by the influx of foreign elements, com
ing in and breaking up all homogeneous incrus
tations, that the state, the class, the family, have
admitted the liberty and progress of the individ
ual. It is by an accommodation of society to its
external emergencies that it leaves its cyclical,
and advances upon its pathway of progressive
changes : so the history of scientific progress is
that of an advance toward complete correspond
ence between our mental conceptions and out
ward relations. Truth, the end of all honest and
successful research, is attained when subjective
relations are perfectly adjusted to objective rela
tions : when, in other words, the impression cor
responds accurately to the die. A nation, family,
tribe, person, without intercourse, isolated, thrown

„6o THE INNER KINGDOM.
simply upon a process of development from
within, grow feeble, halting, lose the vigor
of their youth, and pine under the lassitude of
civil and moral decay : but, now, bring in a class
of ideas from without ; and the rank soil that pro
duced only weeds fructifies these ideas, and they
spring up at once into a hale and flourishing
vigor, illustrating not only the law of spiritual
and moral, but of animal and vegetable, life as
well. It is this correspondence and interplay of
the objective truth with the subjective conscious
ness that ripens into principle and character ; but
remember always it is not the truth of form or
symbol or parable or figure, but the spirit of
truth, which they embody and express, that is
essential to accomplish these results. "There
are many elements in every idea which come,
and can come, only from without ; there are other
elements, and among them the formative power,
which come, and can come, only from within."
The mind stands in pre-established relation to the
things around it, bound to them by the infinite
adjustments, which may be called eternal corre
lations of growth : out of these relations it is not
itself, nor do its powers possess the materials
whereon to work. We cannot conceive of a mind

THE INNER KINGDOM. 6 1
having no points of contact with the external
world. From that world must come all exciting
causes of thought and of emotion : but the form
into which they are cast, the tissues into which
they are woven, the force by which ideas become
a power, — all, in short, that constitutes thought,
as distinguished from the things about which we
think, — all these come from and belong to the
mind itself.
We take, as a further illustration, self-denial
and sacrifice, the strongest forces of religion.
Taking the leadership as royal powers, in this
new kingdom, these have their most effectual
operation subjectively. True, when they are
once lodged in the soul as principles, they stand
forth objectively as character, and become qual
ities exciting sympathy, and provoking emulation
by others. The eye of suffering may, and does,
look abroad and without for its objects and motives ;
but the heart of suffering throbs within, and sacri
fice is the expenditure and cost of the heart —
soul-offering — before the hand touches the object
which is to manifest and prove it. Nay, the soul-
offering, as in the case of Abraham, may be per
fect, while yet the hand is arrested and the knife
stayed : the subjective state of implicit faith has

62 THE INNER KINGDOM.
been reached by an instrumentality as yet imma
ture and inchoate, and which never comes to its
completion. By faith, the obedience it includes
and implies is made perfect without its external
manifestations. The motive and the sacrifice run
before the act and make it unnecessary ; for the
divine omniscience sees the perfect tree, loaded
with fruitage, in the seed out of which it springs.
All voluntary sacrifice and suffering is first done
and borne by the mind and soul : the outward
act, so beneficial to others, is but the showing
forth of what the heart has already accomplished.
The terrible struggle and sacrifice are made in
the garden : the consummation only is on the
cross. The soul has its agonies in its Gethsem
ane, where its great life and death battles are
fought : afterwards, it gains a calmness and
thought for others, and resumes its poise, even
while the flesh is torn, and dissolution drawing
near. The martyrs' struggles were not in the
arena, or in the flames, or on the rack ; but in
the dungeon's solitude, when the timid or treach
erous heart cried out, Relent ! and temptation
stood by to write its recantations. When these
foes were once thoroughly conquered, the flame
and the wild beast had little they could do. And

THE INNER KINGDOM. 63
so, the great agony of our Lord was doubtless an
agony of temptation ; for as he came out of it,
with all the marks of the conflict streaming from
his brow, he said to his followers, " Pray that
ye enter not into temptation," this — this is the
hottest furnace of the soul : these flames penetrate
deepest, burning up from the lowest hell.
Sufferings and sacrifices, not first offered by the
heart, are a surprise wrung out by the force of
providential circumstances, and not offerings at
all : they are only torn away, not given, and lose
all the flavor of sacrifice by their involuntari-
ness. Nothing moves humanity, in its emotive
and sympathetic forces, like the idea of sacrifice.
Suffering willingly encountered for us ; loss of
advantage, property, health, enjoyment ; loss of
reputation and popular esteem ; loss of position,
and even of life, — nothing on earth, in all the
motivities that touch the soul, goes so deep as
that. . This idea of sacrifice it is on which the
deep tenderness of a mother's love and tears are
imbedded, and which can reach the prodigal's
heart in the far-off land where he wanders ; and
so, our heavenly Father, who knew the souls he
had formed,' embodied his great sacrifice in the
person of his; Son, and permitted him to pass

64 THE INNER KINGDOM.
through the gates of ignominy and death, that
so he might become the power of God on the
affections to move and melt, as he was the wis
dom of God in his life and teachings to lead in
paths of rectitude and peace. Now in the renew
ing of the soul through the introduction of the
life of God, while the reason is satisfied with
evidences, the affections must be moved to do
their appropriate work ; for godly sorrow for
wrong-doing, and love to God for his mercy,
must have their sweep in this department of
humanity ; and this, be it remembered, is the de
partment that should first be cultivated. As soon
as the soul knows good from evil, as soon as the
paradise of young innocence is passed, and the
flaming swords of remorse for wrong flash behind
to avenge it, — before reason is mature enough to
grasp and sift and comprehend the revelations of
God, — should the affections be set in play toward
the good they should seek, and from the evil they
should shun ; for if deprived of their appropriate
food they will cling to idols, and become wedded
to the forbidden fruits that hang temptingly along
the waysides of the world. The wise training of
the young is through their affectional nature first,
and the understanding afterwards ; as they are

THE INNER KINGDOM. 65
formed first to love and obey, and in later years
to think and reason; and therefore God, in the
means and processes of his redemptive love, lifts
before the heart of humanity the cross of sacrifice.
The reason may not at first comprehend its dread
ful mystery ; the understanding staggers un
der the weight of its terrible significance ; but the
heart instinctively bows to the bleeding, suffering
spectacle, and melts itself into penitence for the
evil that made such God-enduring agony a neces
sity and a fact. The why and the how, the rea
son and the philosophy, do not disturb the integrity
and genuineness of those emotions of sorrow and
repentance which link themselves to the appre
hension of the idea that "Christ lived and died
and rose again for sinners, and I am one," as it
rolls in upon the conscience with a power which
no hardness of the soul can resist. Habits of
crime may have dulled and blunted the sensibili
ties ; years of obduracy may have prevented the
genuine impulses of the heart ; but when it stands
face to face on the summit of Calvary with the
cross ofthe Redeemer, every thorn in his crown
of suffering goes rankling through the soul, and
the healing of repentance and love comes flowing
out of the stripes of his afflictions. It was not the
5

66 THE INNER KINGDOM.
hidings of his Father's face ; it was not his wrath
inflicted on him, for he loved him even to the end,
and took the spirit committed to him from the
cross : it was a deeper tragedy than all this. It
was God the Father, and God the Spirit, suffer
ing in sacrifice in the person of the Son ; — it was
the triune Jehovah laying bare his arm and heart,
that he might reach the heart of humanity, and
lift it up into heights of purity, felicity, and joy.
This is the power ofthe cross : it draws, attracts,
by a spiritual gravitation grounded in its sympa
thies and heart-throbs ; and so stands for ever
apart from all philosophies and systems of reform,
that take their range on the field of man's civil
and social relationships.

THE INNER KINGDOM. 6>J

CHAPTER VI.
~|V /TOREOVER, beneficence, benevolence in act,
nobleness, generosity, manliness, Christian
courage, — all come under the rule of this same
principle, and are worthless, mere simulations,
unless grounded in the subjectivities of the soul,
and so of the character ; and this is the reason
why character is so much insisted on by our Lord,
— " a righteousness" to be had "exceeding that
ofthe scribes and Pharisees," a "mercifulness," a
" purity " welling up from the deep fountains of
the soul, — because character, illustrated by acts,
embraces and implies all these virtues as soul
qualities, and is in us as a well of water, bubbling
up into life everlasting.
Character is the real man, as he is builded in
substance and verity ; character cannot long be
feigned : it comes out in relief and aspect, how
ever many the subterfuges invented to disguise
and cover its deformities ; and if this showing is
of virtue, goodness, victory over temptation, self-

68 THE INNER KINGDOM.
denial, and sacrifice, it stands as a pillar in God's
temple for strength and support as well as orna
ment, — a blessing to all who witness its useful
ness and beauty. The church ; the state ; civil
and social, as well as professional and commer
cial, life, — rest mainly upon character. The
restraints of statutes and penal codes, what are
these in all those nicer and finer relations that
exist between man and man, and make the sweet
ness and the charm of life, — the delicate sense of
honor; the keen feeling of rectitude, far above
all "law honesty;" the purity of sentiment and
of principle that can tolerate no stain : the mag
nanimity and nobleness that anticipate distress
and relieve it ; the virtue so courtly, and yet so
true, that reminds us of the brave days of old,
"when Adam delved and Eve span," the lady
and the gentleman, — it is these that lubricate the
ongoing of civil and social life, give it harmony
and blessedness above the watchfulness of law
or the guardian care of constitutional protection.
It is Christian character that does all this, grounded
in principle "subjective" in the soul; for honesty,
virtue, nobleness, according to law, may possibly
make a just man, but never " the good man for
whom one might even dare to die." He might

THE INNER KINGDOM. 69
command respect, but not love ; law reverence,
but no spontaneous affection. He is a Grecian
pillar, finely chiselled, but cold ; not a living tree,
trellised and glorified with clinging vines, that
swing their golden cups in every breeze of
heaven, — the home of humming-bees and sing
ing birds, that feed their young in its coverts, and
rejoice in sunshine and in shower.
What does it mean, " that it is more blessed to
give than to receive," — a maxim at which an in
credulous and grasping avarice smiles in sover
eign contempt? What is a man born for but to
get something? Why does he grapple in fierce
conflict and rivalry with his fellows in the arenas
where business counts its gains, and commerce
makes her exchanges, but to clutch and hold all
he can of what his heart covets, and his hand
grasps ; that more may come to him than he parts
with ; that houses and lands and gains may re
ward his skill, and minister to his pride? Ah,
avarice is the grasping Getter, but charity is the
noble Giver ! And now the deep philosophy un
derlying this,' like the golden pavement of heaven,
is known in the fact, which experience verifies as
well, that we are most blest and elevated, toned
up to the chords which make the music of the

70 THE INNER KINGDOM.
better land, by our bestowments, and not by our
gettings. True, we must get, that we may give ;
but what we speak of is the love and lust of accu
mulation, the grasp not to be relaxed, the hoarding
to keep. But the outgoing, — that it is that blesses
the heart that prompts it, and the hand it leaves :
be it large or small, the rain or the dew, the
princely largess or the widow's mite, it invigorates
the parched soul like a divine bounty, and glori
fies it as with sunlight through an evening mist.
Tongues shall fail and prophecies shall cease;
clouds shall darken the sun, and shut out the
stars; nature shall doff her livery of beauty, and
the pomp of empire shall slowly change with the
changing ages, as Time writes his wrinkles on
the dust that covers the monuments which wealth
and power have builded : but charity is eternized
in the heart once made her home, and goes out
no more from the holy shrine, sanctified and made
pure by her presence and power. It matters little
comparatively what becomes of her bestowments ;
her sacrifices and benefactions may be perverted
or lost, may even serve the purpose of villanv
and fraud : but it matters much, that the heart
suffers that it may relieve, and takes upon itself
the burdens that oppress its fellows. So charity

THE INNER KINGDOM. 71
" is twice blessed : it blesseth him that gives and
him that takes ; " but the giver more surely than
the taker, and hence its subjective work takes the
crown from its objective benefits, and becomes
grander and deeper in its sublime and precious
ministrations. What a change would pass over
society, could we only believe this ; get it so into
us that it should work out in act and character !
True, much" giving is no charity ; it is not the
outgrowth of love or sacrifice ; it is rooted in pride
or ostentation, or comes on the careless flow of a
stream of abundance, that must expend itself
somewhere, or drown its possessor in destruction
and perdition. But better this than no outward
flow at all ; for the habit may yet germinate the
principle, and the heart learn to follow the hand
and direct it.

72 THE INNER KINGDOM.

CHAPTER VII.
T TAVING thus considered briefly, and rather
by suggestion than argument, the necessa
rily subjective nature of those mental" and moral
states and exercises that enter into the texture of
a good man's life, let us now glance at the influ
ence of those ceremonial practices and duties and
institutions which make the outward show of a
religious life.
The first presentation which most forms of reli
gion make to us is that of a Priesthood, — a sacred
guild or order of men claiming authority and
assuming prerogatives which they announced
as vitally essential, and to be incorporated into
dogma, and to regulate practice. They claim
the keys of the kingdom as in their keeping.
They talk like other men ; they look like other
men ; they love to eat and to drink and to be
merry ; they seem like unto their fellows on the
path of life : but no ; they gather about them cer
tain robes and signs of official dignity ; they stand

THE INNER KINGDOM. 73
forth as the defenders of an ecclesiasticism ; they
intervene between God and the soul ; they talk
confidently and mysteriously of authority and
grace, of powers to bind and to loose, to absolve
and to retain ; they build lofty structures for wor
ship, that both stimulate and subdue the imagina
tion ; they subsidize music until the ear intoxicates
the senses ; they lay on their hands to transmit
these mysterious functions to others ; and when we
ask who are these, men ? we are informed that they
are Priests of heaven by divine ordainment, into
whose keeping the souls of men have been com
mitted, and whose interference is vital to their
salvation, as mediators between God and his out
cast children. But if the kingdom of God be
"righteousness and peace," how do these claim a
monopoly of these soul-qualities, or the sovereign
dispensation of them to others? and how is a
question of authority of any application in refer
ence to moral ideas ? Isa life of truth and purity
and virtue less desirable because some one with
authority fails to recommend it? or a life of sen
suality and crime disastrous only because some
one with authority so announces? What has one
claiming authority to do but to make plainer to
the popular mind and heart God's messages to

74 THE INNER KINGDOM.
men, which derived all the authority they have
from his words of love contained in the Record
he has sent us? This claim of a priesthood is a
fraud upon credulity : the priesthood was closed
for ever upon earth when the great High Priest
of our profession was offered once for all. Every
devout Christian is now both king and priest, and
may enter the sacred presence without other offer
ing or intervention of man. The rites and cere
monies of a by-gone age have done their work,
created their language, shaped their spiritual
ideas, which run like a golden thread through the
warp and woof of society, which is informed and
stimulated by their results ; and, because their
feet are planted on spiritual heights, they assisted
it to reach by a ladder function, which, once af
forded, can afterwards, if continued, operate only
as a retarding force and clog upon the wheels.
The priestly function is essentially exhausted in
the vicarious offering of gifts and sacrifices, and
is, when employed, essentially mediatorial: —
prophetical under the ancient economy of the
great Mediator to come ; who now having suf
fered, once for all, there remaineth no more sacri
fice for sin. Henceforth, all priestly interference
sunk and gone, the soul brought face to face with

THE INNER KINGDOM. 75
God ; the veil of exclusion from the holiest of all
rent from the top to the bottom, and humanity
brought nigh to the eternal Spirit, from whom it
must receive, by a direct and subjective in-breath
ing and in-dwelling, the forgiveness of sin and
the life everlasting. How wide is all this from
that complacent and easy-going pietism which
gives itself little or no concern about its religious
estate or exercises ; which does the nice decorums
of an outward Christianity ; which practises such
of the moralities as do not seriously interfere with
its selfish aims and interests, but which turns
over into priestly hands its creeds and theologies
as something too high and abstruse for common
comprehension, and expects to be taken care of
in the dies irce by the interest made for it above,
through priestly intervention or intercession, pur
chased, it may be, by charities and church attend
ance ! It is simply shocking to think ofthe millions
who live and die in the faith that they are to be
saved somehow through the skilful manipulation
of priestly hands. This faith may not be clearly
defined ; but it is still their faith, and all they have.
Alas ! the priest might as well minister at Pagan
as at Christian altars for any results or benefit
that either priest or altar can convey to a non-

76 THE INNER KINGDOM.
receptive soul. By all their objective machin
ery, they supplant, and only supplant, a true
theory of approach to God, and leave the soul a
prey to childish imaginings, which lead only to
endless ruin and disaster. Priest and altar are
gone from earth, lifted to the right hand of
God, in the heavens ; and a highway thereto
opened, sentinelled by ascending and descending
angels, on which the pilgrim may go ; and which,
when he approaches, becomes, not an altar drip
ping with blood, and heated with flame, but a
throne of grace, canopied by the glory of the
great. High Priest, who alone presides over the
whole redemptive economy he wrought out, and
gives that grace without grudge or stint to every
penitent and humble soul. As well might the
Greek trust to his Athena, Queen of the Air, and
her gentle ministries, — folded in clouds, or borne
on the blue of her native hills, — to open to him
the purple gates of Elysium, " spanned by the
vermilion of the cloud-bar, and the flames of the
cloud-crest woven into films and threads of
flame," as well may the devout Catholic trust
to the favor of the Madonna, or any of the ten
thousand saints of the calendar, to lift him on
celestial pinions from the self-torture of hair-shirt

THE INNER KINGDOM. 77
and knotted rope and thorny girdle, into the gor
geous realms which Art has pictured upon his
imagination, — as the Christian to pass over to his
priest or his pastor the work of his salvation, or
the responsibilities of his intelligent soul. What
is a priest, claiming "divine authority," but a sub
lime impertinence and humbug ; a mediaeval waif
on the stream of civilization, fitted rather for the
slime of the morass than the life of the leaping
wave ; an anomaly in Pagan dress, threading
human thoroughfares with his back to the future
and his face to the past, singing his owl song iri
the darkness and superstition he is leaving, and
blinded and dazed by the millennial splendors
which science, intelligence, and religion are pour
ing over his path? What, then, is a priest but a
pretender, without commission, field, or function,
amidst the stirring movements of the day, — a
shadowy remembrance of days when terror and
cruelty hunted the soul with a tiger scent for
heresy and blood ; when men and women crept
awe-struck from the glance of his evil eye, and
the savagery of his tender mercies ; when his
stealthy foot stole along the corridors of power,
waking the vengeance of fire and sword to exe
cute his stern behests, — a human tiger, with his

78 THE INNER KINGDOM.
claws clipped, his teeth drawn, and his treachery
counteracted, — a blind, bigoted blot on the face
of the moral landscape, grown powerless in the
advancing intelligence he could not prevent, and
useless in a system he has lost the craft of pervert
ing? Is this the language of intemperate zeal
otry? Witness the wail of human hearts, for
fifteen hundred years, going up into the ear of
the Lord of Sabbaoth, — witness the rack, the
stake, the thumb-screw, the iron boot, the devil
ish ingenuity of scientific torture by the slow fire,
the wail of mothers and maidens ; the piteous
cries for help, as the sinews snapped, and bones
were crushed by cowled fiends, as they slowly
ground the wheel, — heartless, relentless, — sad
only that they could not prolong these merci
less agonies for ever : and these wretches claim
ing the exclusive priesthood and authority of
Christ, who said, "Be ye merciful as your Father
which is in heaven is merciful," and "gave us an
example, that we should tread in his steps ! " We
blush for them, — we are ashamed of them : but
let us beware of any system that warms such
monsters into being, and arms them with powers
at once so terrible and cruel ; for not one whit to
day, with many, are these pretensions ofthe tenth

THE INNER KINGDOM. 79
century abated. They claim the keys of heaven
as in their exclusive keeping, with power to shut
or open ; they thrust their interference boldly
into all personal, domestic, social, and public
walks of life ; they claim jurisdiction over thought,
belief, sentiment, and conduct, to mould and reg
ulate according to church formularies, and priestly
dictation ; a thousand times refuted, the old false
hood is repeated, and the old folly re-enacted ; and
" Authority ! Authority ! " rung on all the notes of
the ghostly gamut, until the devotee is penetrated
through and through with a chronic timidity that
fears to stand alone, and trust his own judgment
in any thing, and looks abjectly for permission to
breathe, to think, or to be.

8o THE INNER KINGDOM.

CHAPTER VIII.
"jVTEXT in the outward machinery of church
organization, are its ordinances. Is the
view entertained by many Christians of their
nature and efficacy any higher, wiser, better?
What is this dogma of baptismal regeneration but
a "fetish," spiritual jugglery, not a whit higher,
as to an intelligent effect from an adequate cause,
than the charms practised by an Indian necro
mancer, — the type and symbol literalized into a
fact which all experience disproves, and no scrip
ture warrants? The baptism of repentance, was
not the fact of repentance, but its outward evi
dence. The baptism of the Christian was as
distinct from the spiritual cleansing it typified as
the water was from the Holy Ghost, the agent of
that cleansing. What a supreme folly to give to
the type, either as to its modes or its effect, the
consequence of a vital dogma ; implying without
daring to assert its indispensablenessto salvation !
And yet how sects higgle and wrangle over the

THE INNER KINGDOM. 8 1
mode of typifying a fact, when the fact only is of
supreme importance, and may and often does
occur without the type by water at all; even as,
on the other hand, the ordinance may be carried
to the grave without insuring the substance, the
soul-cleansing, it typifies. Christian order and
decorum unite them, and it is well ; but remember
always the "pure heart" is subjective, and the
baptism which professes and signifies it, but an
objective ceremony, and proved by its daily ad
ministration in the churches to be that only, and
nothing more. Thousands of rebels and apos
tates have been baptismally regenerated ; and
yet made a covenant with death and hell. Thou
sands more have been regenerated by the Holy
Ghost on whom the ceremony of baptism has
never been performed ; but yet they are walking
the celestial streets in white, for they are worthy.
"No rational man can think," says Jeremy Tay
lor, "that any ceremony can make a spiritual
change, without a spiritual act of him that is to
be changed ; nor that it can work by way of
nature or charm, but morally and after the man
ner of reasonable creatures."
"You remember," says Coleridge, "the saying
of an old divine, that a ceremony duly instituted

82 THE INNER KINGDOM. '
is a chain of God's around the neck of faith ;
but if, in the wish to make it co-essential and
con-substantial, you draw it closer and closer, it
may strangle the faith it was meant to deck and
designate." Who are subjects of baptism? what is the prop
er mode of baptism? what accompanies baptism
and succeeds it? — these are questions yet divid
ing the Christian world, on the opposite sides of
which cliques and parties are arranged : and yet
no true Christian brain at the present day, not
heated by controversy, will affirm that salvation
vitally depends upon it ; because it is seen to be
but a ceremony, which mayor may not take hold
upon the subjectivities of the soul, having no
uniform and necessary connection with its intelli
gent and moral consciousness. One who sincere
ly adopts one mode to express his faith in the
spiritual cleansing it typifies, is as true to the idea
of baptism, as if he had caught the water flowing
round the person of Christ and been baptized with
it after the precise model of John the Baptist.
What does it mean? is the question. Is the life
of God in it, or is it typical of it? Every thing
essential to humanity goes into character. Can
you tell from the way in which a professed Chris-

THE INNER KINGDOM. 83
tian lives and walks, after what manner he was
baptized, and when? But you can tell whether
he has in and upon him the spiritual cleansing
which baptism shadows. Let Protestantism take
care, that, in denouncing Papal superstitions, it
does not in the very act demolish and discard
many of its own cherished dogmas ; for it is un
deniable that, at the reformation, about as many
errors of faith were retained as were rejected.
Says Lecky, in his " History of European Mor
als "(Vol. 1. p. 98) : "It is at present the professed
belief of about four-fifths of the Christian church,
and was for some centuries the firm belief of the
entire church, that on a certain night the founder
of the Christian faith, being seated at a supper
table, held his own body in his own hand, broke
that body, distributed it to his disciples, who pro
ceeded to eat it, the same body remaining at the
same moment seated intact at the table, and soon
after proceeding to the garden of Gethsemane ! "
The contradiction and moral absurdity of the
statement is perceived ; but men are taught that
some church or inspired person has so asserted,
and that faith is higher than reason, and nothing
is to be deemed impossible. History apart, it
might well be asked what possible influence such

84 THE INNER KINGDOM.
a stupendous absurdity could have upon Christian
morals. None at all upon morals truly, but
much upon dogmatism and priestly domination.
It has crimsoned more altars with human blood ;
it has occasioned more inhumanity and suffering,
more sad and damnable atrocities of wickedness
by man upon man and woman, — than any other
one cause since the opening up of the Christian
era. For century after century, the profession
or rejection of this dogma was the crucial test
which determined whether the subject should live
or die. The inquisition was established mainly
for its support; the fagot was lighted that it might
have sway ; the home robbed and desolated that
none should dare question it.
Nor is this the extent of the superstition ; but
the material Christ — so held in his own hand,
distributed, and eaten — is believed to be created
anew, continually, out of every wafer over which
the priest makes certain prayers and passes, in
which transubstantiated guise it is eaten by the
faithful, and so becomes aliment, by a mysterious
appropriation, to both body and soul : for which
reason the Christians of the third century were
often reported to be cannibals : and slight won
der, when the devotee professed he was eating

THE INNER KINGDOM. 85
his own founder and Lord ! The idea of a spirit
ual Christ in the eucharist is somewhat less gross,
but is fully as superstitious. Christ is present in
all religious exercises, when the human heart and
brain realize him in thought and affection ; not
otherwise, except as he is omnipresent in all his
creation. This touching memorial of his great sacrifice,
so significant, so simple ; through which the im
agination re-creates and re-produces the scenes
of the supper, the garden, and the cross ; over
which penitence weeps, and love and sorrow pour
their tributary offerings of gratitude and praise ;
whence the mind is led backward through all the
sad days of that wearisome pilgrimage, from its
preparatory steps to its final and bloody issues,
and forward, to Jesus seated at the right hand of
God in the heavens and sending abroad the Com
forter, the check to despondency, and the inspira
tion of hope, — this it is which — by its simplicity
and natural adaptation to " show forth the Lord's
death," in accordance with the laws of mind, with
out the aid of mystery or magic — has really
been the aliment and stimulant to the faith and
devotion of the church since the going away of
her ascended Lord : — this simple memorial, pro-

86 THE INNER KINGDOM.
ducing its subjective influences upon the soul,
without which all ceremonialism of wine and
wafer is a delusion and a sham.
I need hardly refer to the grosser superstitions
of the " sign of the cross," which in times past
was supposed to work such marvels, as detailed
in the legends of monks, and the history of the
church ; to the efficacy of " holy water " as a pious
charm or incantation ; to the " horse-shoes " for
witches; the teeth and bones of saints, the wood
ofthe true cross, and all the priestly machinery of
a miracle-mongering age, — puerile and childish,
and yet cherished and advocated on account of
the hold they get upon the ignorant. They all
belong to the trumpery of spooks and witches,
bogle and fairy, — not one of them to be routed
from his stronghold by reason or experience, for
they live in the face of all experience ; but to dis
appear finally and fade away in a new atmosphere
clarified by science and impregnated by a higher
and spiritual faith.
But how then, it is asked, have they lasted so
long, and obtained such wide credence, unless
they were of God? Is the wide prevalence of a
superstition an infallible mark of its divinity? Has
God permitted no error in other departments of

THE INNER KINGDOM. 87
human knowledge? Is man a model of accuracy
in his industrial, social, and civil relations, and
therefore not to be deemed at fault in his ecclesi
astical and spiritual? For how many centuries
did the witchcraft mania prevail ; the victims ad
mitting, on the rack and in the flames, that they
were veritable witches, and had ridden astride of
broomsticks in the air, and gone to the witches'
sabbath, and been guilty of tormenting their
neighbors? Yet when this ghastly popular in
sanity, which made both the facts and their evi
dence, had passed away, what mind believed a
word of it all, hasting away from its black and
bloody records as from a hideous nightmare out
of which they had awakened to returning sense
and reason?
Yet the witch, mania had not become built in
an ecclesiasticism, walled and buttressed about by
the " hoar of ages," and linked to ceremonies and
doctrines on which the foundations of the super
structure rested. It was only an outwork and
appanage ; although clerical throats grew hoarse
in denouncing witchcraft, and priest and layman
alike joined fire and sword for its extirpation. If it
lasted so long in spite of the reason and common
sense that protested vainly against it, and when it

88 THE INNER KINGDOM.
was no integral part of a system, how is it at all
wonderful that practices, ceremonies, and doc
trines on which the church was supposed, and is
yet supposed, to be founded should have lived so
long defying all the enlightenments of philosophy,
and only crumbling slowly at last before the sci
entific and critical spirit of the age ?

THE INNER KINGDOM. 89

CHAPTER IX.
\T/"HAT has been said in reference to law,
faith, repentance, charity, and other spirit
ual exercises, in regard to the priesthood and
ordinances, applies with even greater force to
certain dogmas of the church held by thou
sands in her communion without knowing why,
or on what they rest, — stereotyped forms of be
lief handed down from generation to generation,
and now insisted on, as the test of a sound Ortho
doxy, with the same pertinacity formerly exhib
ited by the priesthood in respect to the chemical
change of the elements in the sacrifice of the
mass. We shall examine some of these directly ;
meantime we notice how easily devotees substitute
the church as an ecclesiasticism for homage, in
stead of looking to what the church is to do for
them. She is so pretentious; has such a presence
and prestige ; is. so sentinelled with offices and
royalties, rank upon rank, and order over order,
as a corporate institute ; has such a history, and

90 THE INNER KINGDOM.
such wide ramifications penetrating into every
social walk, and holds such a vast grasp upon
the consciences of men, — how natural and easy
to look to such an organization for safety without
exactly knowing why, and to concentrate upon it
the profoundest homages of the soul ! As the
state, in its constitutional and organized form,
protects us in our civil rights, so, it is easy to
imagine that the church will have an equal care
of our religious interests ; and hence our devotion
to God often degenerates into barren loyalty to an
ecclesiastical corporation. It is the church as
a party to which we are devoted — beautifully
builded, sumptuously decorated : our feet tread
her aisles ; our eyes are gratified with the
gorgeous tints of light that stream through her
windows ; our nerves move and play responsive
to .her organ tones ; we are rapt and delighted
with the aesthetic taste and elegance everywhere
predominating. Need it be affirmed that all this
may be, without one true sentiment of loyalty to
God or love to man in the heart? The pomp,
parade, and glitter — the outward and sensuous
— gather to themselves all the service and all the
fidelities the soul has to render.
We now approach our examination of some

THE INNER KINGDOM.

91

dogmas which in most churches, Papal and Prot
estant, have been sedulously cultivated since the
Reformation, — as the'y were to some extent, vet
not prominently before, — concerning atonement,
satisfaction, redemption, justice, reconciliation,
justification, piacular appeasements and expia
tions ; and we hope to satisfy every mind, not
hopelessly emasculated and corrupted by a twisted
and perverted theology, that, as taught and be
lieved in most churches, they are not one whit
more sound or spiritual than the machine-reli
gionisms we have been considering : nay, when
taught in connection with the eternal election of
the vast mass of humanity, adults and children, to
remediless damnation for the glory of God, — of
which dogma they form a logical part, — are they
as credible or tolerable as many of the supersti
tions which Protestantism glories in having dis
carded? Atonement: — Dr. Hodge, of Princeton, the
improver upon Calvin, insists that it should be
called Satisfaction, as the word atonement is am
biguous, and occurs but once in the New Tes-
tament (Rom. v. 4). Now it is clear, that the
word originally referred to the ceremony or
means employed by the priest, under the Hebrew

92 THE INNER KINGDOM.
ritual, to effector signify a ceremonial cleansing,
or forgiveness. A pertinent example of each will
be sufficient.
Lev. xvi. 16, 17, 18, 19: the priest by the
sprinkling of blood made an atonement for, —
1, the holy place; 2, the tabernacle; 3, the
altar; 4, for himself; 5, his household; 6, all
the congregation. Why was this done? "Be
cause of their uncleanness and sins, and to hallow
them from their uncleanness "(v. 30) ; for on that
day "shall the priest make an atonement for you,
to cleanse you, that ye may be clean from all
your sins before the Lord." The whole cere
mony, from beginning to end, was a typical
cleansing, a lustration, and pointed to the spirit
ual purity of heart which the redemptive sacrifice
of the great atoner or mediator was to effect in-
strumentally in the believer. True, in half the
instances referred to, that which was atoned,
reconciled (ver. 20), made clean, was inanimate,
insensate matter, — the holy place, the taberna
cle, the altar. Did these feel that justice was
satisfied by the shedding and sprinkling of blood
for them? and so it indicated no more either for
priest or people.
Here, then, atonement and reconciliation are

THE INNER KINGDOM. 93
used to express and typify the cleansing of place
and people. Exodus xxxii. 30 : Moses chides
the Israelites for their great sin in making the
golden calf, and says, "I will go up unto the
Lord ; peradventure I shall make an atonement
for your sin." And when he went up he prayed,
" Yet now, if thou wilt forgive their sin — ; and if
not, blot me, I pray thee, out of thy book; " and
so God withheld his judgments in answer to the
mediatorship of Moses. Their sin was atoned
or forgiven, as their hearts were cleansed and
purified by a godly sorrow for their crime. In
both of these passages an atoner is a daysman,
a mediator, or middler, between Sovereign and
subject,- to bring them into terms of concord, with
out special reference to the agency employed.
In the.one case, it is the sprinkling of blood; in
the other, it is by the offering of prayer ; in both
the effect is reconciliation, a change, not in God,
but in the people. What but the most grovelling
superstition could attribute to these ceremonies
the fetish of working a placation of divine wrath,
and a satisfaction to justice, even prophetically,
and which these rough Hebrews were supposed
to see, in the far ages ahead, consummated on
Calvary? In place of the simple and natural

94 THE INNER KINGDOM.
foreshadowing of an atonement analogous to this
by Christ, we have proposed as follows : —
(Hodge on the Atonement, p. 29.) " 1. As to
its motive. God, in consistency with his truth and
justice, determined to assume himself, in the per
son of his Son, the responsibility of bearing the
penalty and satisfying justice. The same iden
tical essence and attributes are common to the
Father and the Son. The justice demanding
satisfaction, and the love prompting to the self-
assumption of the penalty, are co-existing states
of divine feeling and purpose."
It would seem impossible to crowd such a mass
of folly and falsehood into the space taken by the
above sentence. Such lame logic, bad morals,
inconsequential reasoning, and false premises,
were never witnessed in all the theological bal
derdash with which the creeds of Christendon have
been cursed.
First. It is not true that God, in consistency
with all his truth and justice, determined to as
sume the penalty of man's sin, because, — 1. The
penalty of sin was death ; and this penalty in
heres in the sin. It is a moral impossibility, there
fore, for any soul or person to assume this penalty
without not assuming, but having the sin ; and

THE INNER KINGDOM. 95
then the penalty is the result of its own sin, not
another's. The essence of sin lies in the mo
tive or intent of the soul committing it. How
can this be assumed by one who had no such in
tent, but one directly opposite, whose whole moral
nature was opposed to the sin ; nay, whose au
thority enacted the very law which the sin vio
lated? It is a moral contradiction and confusion
to say that either the sin, or the penalty can be
assumed : if so, the party assuming, by that act
ipso facto, becomes by consent a particeps crim-
inis, and is in actual and active disobedience to
the law ; which cannot be predicated of Christ
without blasphemy. It would be no more absurd
to hold that God could assume to be a demon,
which many hold him to be, putting in the pious
saving clause, "yet without sin." But to give this
assumption theory a show of logical consistency, it
is asserted that Christ assumed not only the pen
alty, but the guilt of sin; i.e., being holy and
pure, without sin in fact, he assumed or pre
tended to be guilty, that the universe might not
be shocked by the punishment ofthe innocent for
the guilty, and the obliteration of all moral dis
tinction in the rewards of sin, and the wreaking
of its dues upon innocence : thus erecting a " gov-

96 THE INNER KINGDOM.
ernmental prop" out of a sublime cheat, of such
evident transparence that this same universe of
loyal orders, to be kept in check by it, can see at
a glance its utterly false and delusive character.
They knew all the while he was not guilty in
fact, and therefore could not be justly punished;
— knew also that he never suffered any punish
ment at all ; that he was wickedly murdered by
men, not punished by God. But another and
deeper reason why God did not assume the pen
alty of man's sin, was that he could not: that
penalty was spiritual death, the death ofthe soul,
alienation from God, remorse and upbraiding of
conscience, to say nothing of the wrath of God so
much insisted on by these system-builders. Christ
was God incarnate, the giver of this law in Eden,
which when broken began to work its penalty
upon the soul that had sinned. Could the heart
of Christ be punctured with remorse for Adam's
sin, or feel the gnawings of death, or wither un
der its own wrath ? Could God's own suffering
in any wise appease his own indignation? for
remember, says Dr. Hodge, "it was God in the
person of Christ, the same identically in essence
and attributes." So that we have the spectacle
of God's announcing a holy law for humanity,

THE INNER KINGDOM.

97

and, when it was broken by man, God assumes,
against the fact, that the guilt of this violation
was his own ; and so punishes himself for the
breach of a law he was all the while honestly
endeavoring to enforce and uphold ! And this
muddle and medley of absurdity and contradiction
men call systematic divinity, scientific soteriol-
ogy ; and minds impregnated with this nonsense
are ablaze with holy wrath at any who hold that
the redemptive economy was God manifest in the
flesh, that he might teach man the way to heaven
without crowding his brain with schemes of sub
stitutions, satisfactions, imputations, and assump
tions utterly absurd to reason and without any
warrant in the divine records.
2. "This assumption," says Dr. Hodge, "is to
be made consistently with truth and justice."
Let us see ; what saith the law : " The soul that
sinneth it shall die." But scholasticism substi
tutes, or slips in, another soul that never sinned.
This violates truth ; for it is not what was threat
ened, but something widely different : the law is
foiled and cheated. This also violates justice :
it is cruel, wicked, unjust, to punish innocence
for guilt. It is beyond belief how minds of or
dinary mental integrity, not to say of moral truth-
7

98 THE INNER KINGDOM.
fulness, can so evade the force of these simple
propositions. How is justice satisfied by not ful
filling his threatenings? How is truth maintained
by doing what it did not promise, but the oppo
site? Substitution! echoes the theologue ; but
who talks of substitutions not provided in or con
templated by the law? Neither truth nor justice
is upheld or satisfied by a theory of substitution
or assumption. And just here commences a sys
tem of theologie juggling that would do credit to
the annual reddening of St. Januarius' blood, or
the virtues of saints' bones, or the wood of the
true cross; going in fact far beyond them. An
innocent substitute is thrown in, and misnamed
"the sinner," to satisfy the truth of a law which
threatened the sinner, himself and only, with the
penalty ; a wholly different being from the one
who broke the law is substituted to satisfy divine
justice, which wreaks its indignations upon him for
sins he never committed, and guilt he did not
have and could not assume ! What authority is
there for this substitutional theory ; and how is
the dreadful chasm between what " truth and jus
tice " demand, and what truth and justice are
supposed actually to receive, bridged? Our the
ologie doctors sail lightly over on the back of

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99

such texts as these : " He was slain for us ; " " He
bore our sins in his own body on the tree ; " " He
gave his life a ransom for all ; " " He was made
sin for us, who knew no sin ; " and the like, which
are supposed to carry the weight of this dogma.
When seeking for a principle of Biblical interpre
tation of these figurative expressions, it might oc
cur to any sane mind to seek for it in consistency
with those everlasting laws of truth and justice in
which God himself lives and moves, which are the
same everywhere, — in all worlds, through time
and eternity : — with which to reconcile and har
monize these singular utterances, which get
their full force and meaning by the evils and sor
rows, persecutions and death, that befell our
Saviour in his mission of love to our race, — with
out putting them to the strain of authorizing or jus
tifying a system which, on the face of it, is a
transparent fraud and cheat of the truth and justice
it is supposed to satisfy and fulfil. "All true scien
tific development ofthe doctrine ofthe atonement,"
says Prof. Shedd, vol. ii. p. 216., "it is very evi
dent must take its departure from the idea of divine
justice." But how substitution, assumption, and
imputation against the fact (which is simple sham
and pretence, by whatever scientific name it may

IOO THE INNER KINGDOM.
be called) , can satisfy justice, we have never been
told, from the first hour this heresy afflicted the
church of God to this. If God's sovereignty, as
Grotius claimed, could accept a substitute by "re
laxation of penalty," it could equally forgive free
ly without any penal substitute at all, as the New
Testament abundantly shows. The examination
of the various theories invented to rationalize this
absurd doctrine, so ably reviewed by Prof. Shedd,
in his " History of Christian (it should have been
called Pagan) Doctrine," is interesting, as show
ing the absurdities to which the ablest minds re
sort when things are out of joint, and dogmas are
admitted so essentially vicious and false. There
is the "judicial" theory, the "commercial" theory,
the "governmental" theory, the " sovereignty " the
ory, the "relaxation" theory, the "infinite-merit"
theory, and every theory, but that of God's free
forgiveness of a repentant soul without money and
without price. The theory of the prodigal son
was wholly ignored and forgotten : it stands in di
rect antagonism to them all. Christ is not sup
posed to have been conversant with the "principles
of scientific soteriology," according to Prof. Shedd
and Dr. Hodge : the first of whom is not satisfied
that even Augustine was sound (vol. ii. p. 258) ;

THE INNER KINGDOM. IOI
and the last of whom (Hodge on Atonement, p.
388) is clearly of opinion, that Calvin was far below
the Orthodox mark, and " has left no clear or
consistent statement of his views," on this point,
holding rather with Zwingle that Christ was not
the causa meritoria of salvation, but only the
causa instrumentalis in carrying out the purpo
ses of redemption. And so we are to pass by
the incompleteness of our Saviour's teachings,
the shortcomings of Augustine, and the incon
sistencies of Calvin, and accept, as divine, the
developments and improvements of the Westmin
ster Assembly, the Heidelberg doctors, and Prof.
Hodge ! We say, devoutly, " Good Lord, deliver
us." These "improvers " may well be left to
their own crude imaginings. According to them,
when the Prodigal returned, the father should
have thrown himself upon his dignity, and de
manded satisfaction ; the eldest son should have
offered his back to the lash of justice, until the
penalty of his recreant brother's sin should have
been satisfied or expiated ; by the governmental
theory, the family should have been called around
to see how the father " propped his throne " by an
equivalent, so as to hold them to their loyalty ;
and then the amount of forgiveness should have

102 THE INNER KINGDOM.
been accorded, and no more, than was exactly
earned by the brothers' suffering. This would " pa
cify God," and pacify the " Prodigal's conscience at
the same time," according to Dr. McCosh, in his
"Methods of Divine Government, p. 468. Can
men never see the folly of talking about "God's
vindicating his moral government " by substituted
suffering before he could forgive? He might as
well be called on to vindicate his physical govern
ment of the universe, — the law of gravitation,
the nature of light, heat, chemical affinity. God's
laws vindicate themselves : they need no shows or
shams or imputations to give them force and
sovereignty.

THE INNER KINGDOM. 103

CHAPTER X.
' I ^HIS whole system of supposed vindications
by substitution rests upon the radical error
of supposing that no provision was made for for
giveness under the old economy unless justice
was first satisfied. Over and over again does
God declare that every soul shall bear its own
iniquity ; yet if the man turn from his iniquity,
and do that which is lawful and right he shall not
die ; and so the history runs of Abraham and
Jacob and David and Solomon pardoned on re
pentance and doing the commands of Jehovah.
And it would seem that none but the blindest
could fail to see the infinite fitness of extending
pardon to the penitent, without any pay or satis
faction to justice or other attributes. If the fitness
and holiness of the law is to be acknowledged,
what is the most suitable mode of procuring this?
by inflicting misery upon a substitute? or by
writing this law on the tablets of the penitent
'heart, whereby it consents unto the law, that it

104 THE INNER KINGDOM.
was holy and just and good, adopting and loving
it henceforth as the rule of its life? This is a
most blessed vindication, and is that which Christ
afforded by his obedient and loving life and char
acter, and not by enduring the penalty ofthe law,
which he never did. We almost feel as if infidel
ity might be pardoned as we pore over the sad
and sickening record of these frivolous controver
sies and dogmas hinging upon this substitutional
satisfaction of justice, — a theory such that, if pro
pounded in the department of law or of morals,
its author would be deemed simply insane. Much
has also been made by theologians of the sup
posed sense of justice in the sinner, which would
not admitof the pacification of his own conscience
unless he could feel that the " debt was paid," and
he legally justified in the court of Heaven for his
past sins. If Christ paid the debt to justice, then
clearly the sinner needs no pardon ; for a debt
cannot be paid by one and forgiven to the other,
for the evident reason there is nothing remaining
to forgive. If A., the sinner, owes B., justice,
$1,000, and cannot pay, and C. pays the debt,
and takes up the bond, — it is a burning insult
for B. to talk complacently of forgiving A. the
debt : he forgives nothing ; for he has no claim

THE INNER KINGDOM. 1 05
any more than if he had never been creditor.
But, in addition to this, sin is not a debt, except
figuratively. We are debtors to the law to do it,
and so are angels as much debtors as men. When
debt and debtor are spoken of by our Saviour, it
was to illustrate and enforce forgiveness to one
another, even as God forgives us. And so, in the
Lord's Prayer, " forgive us our debts as we for
give our debtors " : the idea that Christ paid our
debts is not there ; he came to show us how they
might be renounced and forgiven, — not paid or
expiated by certain terms of equivalence. If a
soul has become pacified only by the idea that
payment and satisfaction has been made for its
sins, it had better have remained anxious and
stormy. The debt, as we have seen, is a figura
tive charge, to be paid only by forgiveness : it is
expunged, without payment, by the obliterating
tears of mercy, — ceasing to do evil and learning
to do well ; and this forgiveness is waiting for all
who by repentance and faith come within its blessed
provisions. We are debtors to God's law every
hour to do it ; but grace through Christ enables
us to make it the rule and ideal of life, and sin
cerely aim at its performance more and more ;
and this sincere effort to obey is accepted as the

106 THE INNER KINGDOM.
proof of our loyalty, arid " that God is working in
us to will and to do his good pleasure. This is a
surer and safer token of divine favor, than all the
dogmatic beliefs of payment to divine justice for
our past sins, which rest in dogma and figure,
without any inherent fitness" to pacify the con
science or reform the life.
"Justice demanding satisfaction," says Prof.
Hodge, " and love (or mercy) prompting to the
self-assumption of the penalty, are co-existing
states of divine feeling and purpose." Iri other
words, Calvary was in the heart of God before it
had its transactional showing among men ; but
this is not what the writer means, — not at all, —
but it is that God became the victim of his own
attributes ! There was conflict in the divine coun
cils until the substitutional scheme was devised,
and God's love satisfied God's justice by the pun
ishment of God himself! ! If this is simply shock
ing, it is so because no naked statement of this
doctrine can be made which does not border on
blasphemy. To be admitted at all, it must be
disguised in theological verbiage, and baptized in
phrases which are invented as covers to conceal
its revolting features.
But one ofthe strangest features of this .theory

THE INNER KINGDOM. 107
is, that it makes a transaction' — to wit, the cruci
fixion of our Lord — to carry a twofold series of
acts on its bosom : one visible and outward, in
the unmitigated barbarity of man, — the outcome
of his envy, hatred, jealousy, lying, perjury,.
treachery; of his suppleness, cowardice, mean
ness ; of his prostitution of the forms of law to
the vilest of judicial murders, by the cruellest of.
methods ; the joint tragedy of priest, procurator,
and people, the envy of scribes, the cowardice
of Pilate, and the ignorant wrath ofthe instigated
rabble ; — the other, invisible to mortal eyes ; an
inner tragedy witnessed by a concourse of unseen
powers, holding a dreadful carnival of horrors
around that rude cross and its blood-stained suf
ferer ; Justice there crying for satisfaction ! Wrath
there bathing his sword in blood ! Holiness there
blazing with indignations ! the Father there, for
saking the desolate heart that was breaking on
the cross ! angel and archangel, principalities,
powers, and holy hierarchies of heaven there, to
see what a terrible expiation was all the while
enfolded in, and buried under, this outward cru
elty of man ! ! Which was it, — man's murder,
or God's expiation; or both in one? As a causa
instrumentalis, we can well see that no hands did

108 THE INNER KINGDOM.
it but "wicked hands," and in wicked hearts was
it conceived. Did God instigate that wickedness,
or his arch Enemy and ours? But as an expia
tion it has no fitness, merit, or meaning; and as
a governmental show of power and penalty, it is
simple murder of innocence for guilt, in the face
of truth and justice, and in defiance of every other
moral attribute of God. For after all the " digni
ty ofthe sufferer " theories, and methods of equiv
alence, the Man only died on the cross. When
the God left him, if he left him at all, we are not
informed, unless at the instant of his cry, "Eloi,
lama," &c. If Deity however remained in the
expiation, then it was made indeed by himself
to himself, and all reasons are baffled and con
founded in its dreadful issues. Whatever else it
may mean, it cannot mean expiation or payment ;
for no suffering by one person can pay for anoth
er's sin, while God reigns, and law and truth and
justice are the pillars of his throne. It has been
laid down as a rule by writers on this subject,
that any remedial scheme, or intervention by the
Almighty, for human recovery, must not only
have reference to man, but also, "provide for the
vindication of the divine government and the dis
honored law." But in all the creeds, symbols,

THE INNER KINGDOM.

109

and treaties with which the world is filled, no one
has ever yet shown that the divine government or
law was ever yet in need of vindication. A good
law is never dishonored by disobedience : the sin
ner is dishonored, not the law ; that is vindicated
always by its intrinsic excellence. If the " law is
holy and just and good," holiness, justice, and
goodness vindicate it. Human consent and obe
dience may in a certain sense honor it; but man
by disapproval and disobedience cannot put upon
the law the necessity of vindicating itself, by some
one satisfying its penalties in his behalf. How
much more honored is the law if Christ suffered
its penalties for man, than it was declared to be
by his fulfilment of all its precepts? It is only
the consent of the same being that God's law was
perfect ; or, in other words, it was God consent
ing to the perfection of his own law, a consent in
the one and best mode, obedience, affording as
decisive a vindication as could be wrung out of
executed penalty even upon the guilty. The idea
that the mind of man, in its "unsophisticated mus
ings," feels that there must be some satisfaction
to God and his law," is without foundation. The
soul awakened to a consciousness of sin, by a
comparison of its duty as seen in the law and its

HO THE INNER KINGDOM.
wickedness 3s seen in its life, asks instinctively,
Will my heavenly Father treat me, on my re
pentance and amendment, like my earthly father?
Is there forgiveness with him that he may be
feared and loved? And when it finds him say
ing, "Like as a father pitieth his children, so the
Lord pitieth them that fear him," it flies to him
with the cry, " I have sinned against heaven, and
in thy sight." This is ever the course of its " un
sophisticated musings." It has no concern or
thought of satisfaction or appeasements until it is
enveloped in the fogs of a false theology, out of
which it seldom finds its way without ignoring in
its consciousness every profession on this point
it had been made to subscribe in its creed. Pen
alty executed does not satisfy law ; it is only a
motive force added to secure obedience to the
precept, which alone satisfies law. The man that
lives in disobedience incurs the penalty, and will
receive it, unless he turn from his evil ways. Sin
is death; holiness is life, made eternal because
the life of God is established and grows in the
heart. What simplicity in all this ! how like the
teachings of Christ ! how unlike the array of
scholasticisms consisting of vindications of govern
ment and law by satisfactions, appeasements, sub-

THE INNER KINGDOM. Ill
stitutions, imputations, assumptions, and the whole
rank and file of conflicting dogmatisms ; making
a more confused Babel that that surrounding the
old tower, and with which polemic theology has
been afflicted for twelve hundred years.

112 THE INNER KINGDOM.

CHAPTER XI.
AS to its nature, i. Says the author, Prof.
~^^ Hodge, "Christ assumed the law place of his
people. He owed no personal obedience, but as
sumed our legal responsibilities." The simple an
swer to all this naked, unsupported, unscriptural
series of assertions, is that they are not true : for
no one in a moral and spiritual system can assume
the law place of another, — neither to obey or to
suffer ; and he can assume the first, and release
the subject from his obligation to obey the law,
as easily as he can assume the last, and release
him from the penalty of disobedience. There
must be moral guilt, or penalty cannot touch the
soul : a sinless soul cannot feel the penalties of
sin as penalties. The consequences of vice may
roll over upon him by reason of his social rela
tionships, or his voluntary sacrifice for others
vicariously endured ; but he can no more feel its
penalties as implying personal demerit to himself,
and demanding his legal suffering in the way of

THE INNER KINGDOM. 113
substitution, than could Satan demand the reward
of virtues he does not possess. "He owed no per
sonal obedience," says the professor; and he fair
ly states the system he is advocating. What a
monstrous proposition ! for, whatever the nature
of Christ, he was as much bound to obey his own
holy law, as any intelligence to whom it was
addressed : or do these persons mean to assert
that the moral code stands on the same footing as
the ceremonial, and virtue and vice are only such
by positive statute, — malum prohibitum, and
not malum in se ? " I have glorified thee on the
earth." How? by obedience to every, precept of
the law, so that he could say to the Jews, "Which
of you convinceth me of sin ? " for thus only could
he be perfect, — fulfilling every jot and tittle of
the law, — and manifest the Father in his love
and power to man. Was Christ then above the
law, which was the expression of his own nature?
How could he rise above himself? " He learned
obedience by the things which he suffered," says
the apostle. Oh, no ! says Prof. Hodge, he owed
no obedience at all : it was all supererogatory ;
and that, too, in the papal sense, that it might be
an offset to his people's sins, and so square their
account with justice. For if the obedience he

114 THE INNRR KINGDOM.
rendered was due from him, and "he ought thus
to have suffered," that he might enter into his
glory, then what are the elected to do, without
this stock of imputed righteousness, drawn from
the reservoir of supererogatory merit, with which
to cover over the corruptions of their native di
abolism? If every tub stands on its own bottom,
how are they to be justified by Christ's merits
or worthiness, — not instrumentally, as we hold,
but by way of transference and imputation? The
large credits of Christ on the ledgers of heaven,
parcelled out and credited to each sinner as if it
was his own ; how revolting all this commercial
system of salvation becomes when stript of its
theological garb ! It has lately been presented in
a new dress, taking the shape of salvation accord
ing to Euclid, —
Given — a right line to follow :
Humanity falls io° below it ; Christ rises io°
and more above it ; as this is imputed to his peo
ple, ergo, io° subtracted, and io° added, the
account is squared, by an arithmetical or math
ematical average ; and justice on the whole has
no cause to complain. What he loses on the one
page, he gains on the other ! Is this a system of
divinity to hold the faith, and satisfy the reason

THE INNER KINGDOM. 115
of a human soul? If moral law, and the distinc
tions of vice and virtue, could have been other
than they are ; if sin could have brought order
and harmony, and holiness evil and derange
ment, — there might have been some logical ba
sis for these absurdities ; but when the demands
of the moral law are imbedded in the divine
nature, and founded in the eternal fitness of
things, the harmony they contemplate and seek
embraces all being, God and man : they are fitted
to humanity because they are first fitted to divinity,
and bring them into concord and unison, holy
and blessed for evermore.
Not only is it true that " Law has her seat in
the bosom of God, and her voice is the harmony
of the world ; " but that, " all beings in heaven
and earth are bound to do her homage, — the
least as feeling her care, the greatest as not ex
empt from her power ; " in which the judicious
Hooker differs widely from Prof. Hodge and the
" commercial system." It might, as well be urged
that in a State the legislature were under no obli
gation to obey the laws they framed for the citi
zens, as that Christ was above and independent
of the moral law. If he " owed no personal obe
dience,", then personal disobedience would have
been no crime.

Il6 THE INNER KINGDOM.
So again, an argument in favor of assumed
guilt and punishment is sought to be drawn by
making a distinction between penal and pecuniary
satisfaction. "The payment of a pecuniary debt,"
says Turretin, " ipso facto, discharges the obli
gation ; but substituted penal satisfaction does
not ! " why not? if substituted ; for if not, it is not
a substitute at all ! "Yet," he continues, "being
accepted, it is regarded as a satisfaction ! " i.e.
Justice agrees to take less than the debt (say
half) from a substitute, and give a receipt in
full ! half is taken for the whole and the balance
is forgiven ! and this is a fair statement of what is
understood by " commercial theologians," when
speaking of justice and mercy being exercised
toward the same being at the same time. What
an infamy, bringing the august doings of the
great God to such a higgling and peddling stand
ard,! If fifty stripes have been threatened to A.,
is justice satisfied with ten? and if so, why not
with one as well? There would be just as much
"infinite merit" in Christ's suffering one as many,
or none at all. "Yet being accepted, it is re
garded as satisfactory," says Turretin.
The whole stress of this argument, which has
been quoted a thousand. times as a clincher, rests

THE INNER KINGDOM. 117
upon the assumption, that a part-payment coming
from a dignified surety is regarded and accepted
by justice as the whole ; but where is it so said
to be accepted? Not a word in the Scriptures on
the subject. Justice never said he would accept
part and forgive the rest: no, never! God for
gives it all, fully, freely ; no miserable Popish
compromises by the sinner or his surety. Once
the prodigal returns broken-hearted, the heart of
the father breaks over him in floods of rejoicing
pardon. He was dead, and is alive again; he
was lost, and is found. But it is needless to pur
sue this theme : it has no authority from Scripture
or reason. The root of the error lies in regard
ing the redemptive economy as an external ob
jective transaction, between the different persons
of the Godhead , in order to bring attributes into
some sort of harmony, as a scheme external to
man and with which he has nothing to do, — to
regard it as a sublime mystery by which he is
somehow bought, redeemed, saved by name, from
the foundation of the world, being one of the
elect ; while his brother is left for damnation, not
being included in the covenant, within the pro
visions of which nothing can bring him ; and this
is called making Christ the causa mcritoria of
salvation.

Il8 THE INNER KINGDOM.
Now look at Christ's mission, as he himself
represents it, — he, sent by the Father to mani
fest him ; to preach repentance and remission of
sin ; to call all that labor and are heavy laden to
partake of his rest, soul-rest ; to open the gates
of heaven, on golden hinges turning, to Jew and
Gentile alike, to the race without distinction; to
persist in this grand enterprise of redeeming man
from sin and showing him how to do it, at the
expense of ease, comfort, life itself; to submit to
the murder of himself by man, even though he
had power to lay down his life and to take it
again, that so he might, as in no other way was
possible, gain a twofold leverage upon his heart
and character, — in the first, by the power of
sympathy and gratitude ; in the other, by the
showing forth of his Godhead in the resurrection,
that so a grand confirmation of all he had taught
might be gathered, and the world believe that he
was indeed the great power of God, as he was
the wisdom of God unto salvation. Thus he ful
filled all righteousness ; thus what Prophet, Poet,
and Seer had seen of him in vision, and written
in the Law, the Psalms, and the Prophets, was
consummated ; thus God the Father was revealed
not only in power and wisdom, in justice and

THE INNER KINGDOM.

II9

holiness, but in self-sacrificing love, by this amaz
ing scheme of linking God and man together in
the person of his Son, that humanity might hear
the beat of his own loving heart, and feel that he
was nigh to comfort and heal, in all the dark
ways of his sorrowful pilgrimage. Thus, from
the manger to the cross, he bore every affliction ;
drank every cup of woe ; endured despite, cru
elty, scorn, rejection, injustice, — that from all
these deeps he might lift humanity by the tie of
a common experience, as well as a godly sympa
thy ; — thus, his mocking trial and death of shame,
that he might stand by the martyr in the flames,
and show him how to die for a principle and a
faith; — thus he rose again, that immortality,
which he taught, might be exemplified as a fact,
round which the faith, affection, and hope of his
people might cling for comfort and joy in all suc
ceeding ages, so that our buried ones might be
known as living, and to rise again; — thus he
healed and taught and toiled ; asserting his unity
with the Father, and yet his subordination ; his
omnipotence, and yet his Sonship ; his omni
science, and yet its strange limitations as to future
events ; his eternity, and yet his derivative nature ;
his authority over nature and man, and yet all

120 THE INNER KINGDOM.
received from the Father; praying for strength
and comfort as a man, yet imparting gifts and
graces to others as a God ; rebuking and chain
ing devils, and yet suffering under human tyran
ny ; commanding the forces of the elements, yet
betrayed by a traitor's kiss : — • who can look on
the graphic picture of this wonderful life, and not
see the blending and commingling of the human
and the divine, such as no other life on earth ever
presented, intertwined like threads of gold and
silver, now clear and shining, now lost in the
foldings and unfoldings of act and speech and
character? And so the faith that saved all who
believed in his day had no relation to his death ;
for even his disciples did not believe he was so to
die, and rebuked him for predicting it. No : it took
hold upon the grander fact " that he was the Son
of God, and had power on earth to forgive sin,"
a subjective belief in an objective truth, standing
in natural, direct, and logical relation to each
other. There is such a simple downright honesty and
naturalness in all this, that the crude legerdemain
of dogmatic theology, with its schemes and cov
enants and foreordinations, satisfactions and ap
peasements, has no place or power by the side of

THE INNER KINGDOM. 121
it. Truly did he say, "The Kingdom of God is
within you : " other schemes are all from man, or
have a worse paternity !
One capital reason why the scheme we are
considering cannot be true, is the fact that it
springs out of, and is of the essence of, a narrow
and bigoted spirit. It has no warmth, no gener
osity, no charity; it is exacting', severe, rigid,
exclusive ; there is in it no melting of a father's
heart, only the exactions and stipulations of a
jealous sovereignty. It invokes terror only, not
love ; it begets slavery, not Sonship ; it grasps
for its pound of flesh, though the heart of human
ity goes with it ; it feeds on the egotism of a per
sonal selection and ransom, and sees only God's
glory in nations born for perdition. It has been
a dry-rot in the morals of Christendom, and given
a false coloring to some of the most sublime teach
ings of Christ. It prostitutes for itself " what was
meant for mankind," and befogs and entangles
the grandest of thoughts in the tethers and cob
webs of a pettifogging logic. It is born of spir
itual conceit, and grows fat on its ostentatious
pronunciamentos of what God can or cannot do :
it thus dwarfs the divine councils to the dimen
sions of human conceit, and belittles the designs
of heaven with the imperfections of earth.

122 THE INNER KINGDOM.
And so again as the soul only has on it the
stamp of immortality, as that alone survives; so
all the machinery which contributed to its building
and evolution will pass away with the things that
perish, when they are no longer needed for its
training, when it has reached those thoughts and
conclusions at first so slowly and painfully ac
quired, yet at last so easy ; so the soul, when she
shall have arisen to her royal destinies, shall lay
off and forget perchance all those instrumentali
ties which were to her the leading-strings of her
immaturity, and sweeping abroad on her supernal
wing shall come into relations at once astonishing
and sublime, where the cultus of time shall be,
as the letters of the alphabet, no longer needed,
or used in the full-orbed vision which eternity
shall open before it. The eternal only shall sur
vive : the temporary shall fade and vanish away.
What then becomes of our sectarian and party
names? If they are useful as a mode of spiritual
culture suited to our social states or relations, they
are well; but as vital, as things to fight for and
die for, they are a delusion and cheat. The de
nomination we unite with is determined more by
accident, by education, by our social position and
surroundings, than by any independent and dis-

THE INNER KINGDOM. 123
passionate examination ever given to its merits or
¦claim. How rarely one breaks away from these
encompassing influences ; and when witnessed it
is regarded as a marvel. That a Catholic should
become Protestant, or a Presbyterian turn Bap
tist, almost surpasses belief; and so the fences
that divide Christians are builded higher and
stronger* and the doctrines and ceremonies on
which they differ are more strenuously main
tained, than the great cardinal virtues they must
all have and practice ere they can be saved. For
salvation is the state of the soul ; faith is the
state of the soul ; and he that believeth hath eter
nal life abiding in him. What now becomes of
Pope and Cardinals, of cross and holy water, of
new moons and Sabbaths, of priest and altar,
creed and dogma? What is vital, is to have the
life of God abiding in the soul, giving joy to its
activities, and immortality to its rapture.
How much greater, then, is humanity than its
environments! How supereminently grand a
soul in the full play of its powers, lifting itself
above all the sensuous machinery by which it is
surrounded ! For unless the man is greater than
all the complicated forms, creeds, and symbols
he uses; unless the Presbyterian, the Catholic,

124 THE INNER KINGDOM.
the Baptist, the Methodist, can rise above his
ecclesiasticism, and become grander than Presby
terian or Catholic or Baptist or Methodist, — he
is no man, but a slave, fettered, cribbed, confined,
bound down to the narrow confines of a clique ;
a sectarian dogmatist buried in the rubbish of
forms ; busied only with the tools of his trade,
and all unconcerned about the great object and
end for which they were given. Ah ! what a
temple becomes the human soul when its altar
blazes with the shechinah ; when its dome flash
es back the glory of heaven ; when its aisles are
trodden by angel thoughts, that sweep in and out
in bands of blessedness and beauty ; when the
knowledge and love of God make its atmosphere
luminous with uncreated beams, and all that the
wisdom and power of the loving Christ, its
indweller, can communicate, garnish it as his
-appropriate and eternal dwelling-place ! How
clique and sect and division will disappear, how
men will try, perchance, to sweep from memory
the narrowness, bigotry, and dogmatism in which
they prided themselves on earth, or think of it
only as a memorial of humility and shame !
To be a Christian man, lifted to the grandeur
of such a royalty, the companion and joint-heir of

THE INNER KINGDOM. 125
the indwelling divinity; made not superhuman
merely, not super-angelic, but in the likeness of
him that created him ; one with the divine in a
mysterious union of nature and of soul, that links
humanity to God's throne, and fills it through and
through with the light and wealth of his ineffable
perfection, — language droops and thought stag
gers under the weight of imagery employed to set
forth this high heritage of the sons of God. But
figure and symbol all centre and culminate, not
in what the soul is to get, but on what the soul is
to be ; and the sublime climax is reached only by
the stimulating assurance that "when we see him,
we shall be like him ; for we shall see him as he
is." And then again, as our party and sectarian.
bands may be strong, and bind us fast in union
to one another, operating as a social tether ; so
let us remember while they may exist in unbroken
integrity, and our ecclesiastical relationships
enable us to present a uniform front, yet all the
while we may have no connection with the divine,
our great army below have no relationship to the
great army above, and our care to increase our
numbers and prestige may have left us bankrupt
of any part or lot in the riches of hereafter. Par
ty may aid us now, where party is omniuotent ;

126 THE INNER KINGDOM.
but the rays of the divine glory are not under
mortgage to mundane powers, or within the con
trol of any earthly ecclesiasticism ; they stream
from the heavens into the individual soul, not
through corporate favor or behest, but according
to the fitness of the personal soul for its reception ;
its receptive condition alone fitting it for the inher
itance of the saints in light. In so far as forms and
ceremonies and churches and creeds are efficient
in bringing the soul into this divine communion,
the}- are well and not to be disregarded ; but re
member they are means to an end, human means
mostly to a divine end. But the Holy Spirit is
not bound, nor is the Word of God. That Spirit
bloweth and breatheth where it listeth, in all
churches and forms, through all symbols. It fires,
melts, purifies, by instruction, by example, by
providence ; in prosperity and in affliction, in rest
and in weariness, in the severity of discipline, in
the smiles of fortune, sometime in one guise and
sometimes in another; and fettered by none, it
broods over the soul charged with bounty, and
rich with blessings. When will the human soul
recognize its liberty, and lift itself to its royal
altitudes, where it may walk upon its high places,
gilded and lustrous ever with the radiance of

THE INNER KINGDOM. 127
heaven? When leave the shadows for the sub
stance, the letter that killeth for the spirit that
maketh alive ; trampling under foot these laws
of a carnal commandment as it expands with
and illustrates the power of an endless life?
Let it not be said, that, in our zeal for what
man is to be, we lose sight of all the necessary
agencies to produce in him the virtues that must
adorn his character ; that we repudiate the neces
sity of churches and ordinances and a ministry,
and the means designed by Heaven for the puri
fication of our moral nature. By no means : we
believe with our whole heart in churches and or
dinances and a ministry. As we reject a false
ecclesiasticism, so we believe in the continued
presence and power of Christ in his true church,
the body of believers. As we reject the "fetish"
of ordinances, so we believe more firmly in the
spiritual subjective efficacy of baptism and the
Lord's Supper. As we deny and reject the pre
tentious authority of a priesthood, so we sincerely
love and revere those true and faithful servants
of Christ and of his church, who aspire not to be
"lords over God's heritage," but ensamples to the
flock; teaching, exhorting, guiding, comforting,
and leading in paths of holiness.

128 THE INNER KINGDOM.
We reject, with the repellency of our whole
nature, the insufferable arrogancy of a worm
"whose foundation is in the dust, and who is
crushed before the moth," attempting to wield
the thunder-bolts of the Almighty, and to parcel
out his divine mercies and judgments by the scale
of his ignorant preferences and spites. How
much better is God to us always than we are to
each other ! How would heaven be peopled if
one of our sects stood at the door ! Is not the
church the school of Christ? Is it not time to quit
the rudimental " first principles," and to go on to
perfection? Is there not danger that our piety
may expend itself in church building, adorning,
and attending ; and our charity in making strong
our party ; and our fervor in spreading the influ
ence of our adopted creed, — until instead of
finding our hearts enlarged over the wants and
sorrows of our race, and our zeal and sympathy
sweeping over fields where our brethren die in
ignorance, or live in guilt, we find our vision
walled in by obstructions our own hands have
builded, and our feet fettered by impediments our
own hands have wrought. How universal are the
beatitudes which prepare the soul for heaven !
" Blessed are the pure in heart : " what bodv has

THE INNER KINGDOM.

129

all these within its borders? "Blessed are the
peace-makers :" do these all dwell with any sect?
" Blessed are the merciful : " come all of these
from one ecclesiasticism? "Blessed are they
which do hunger and thirst after righteousness : "
are these all impregnate with the principles of
"scientific soteriology," according to Augustine-
or Calvin or Hodge? What is the meaning to-day
of this mighty stir and unrest in the ranks of
Christendom? What does all this unquiet up
heaval portend, that comes from the deeps where
elemental and central forces work far beneath the
disturbance of surface agitations ? Anxious hearts,
indeed, labor and pray for the divine pncuma or
breath, that can make dry bones live; but those
of longer vision and deeper insight have a sense
that Christianity has been drifting away from the
" firm foundations " on which her Founder placed
her, and is dragging her anchors over the shifting
sands of an unstable and false philosophy of re
ligion. Neither the reunion of churches, nor the
councils of bishops and cardinals, will effect any
thing for humanity or for God, until they return
from their departures to the principles of a spirit
ual Christianity, that ignores and repudiates all

130 THE INNER KINGDOM.
outward kingdoms, and is supremely anxious
about that which reigns within the soul.
As Christ's mission was to erect a spiritual
kingdom, and become himself a power over souls,
not only by what he effected while on the earth,
but by what he has effected since through the
Holy Ghost sent into men's hearts ; so let every
Christian feel and know that he is Christ's, not
by his color or his creed ; not by the height of
the spire, or the beauty of the building where he
worships ; not by the numbers that crowd its tes
sellated pavements, or lift reverent eyes to the gor
geous fretwork that fringes its springing arches ;"
not by the title he derives from subscriptions to
covenants or the absolutions of a priesthood : but
by gathering upon his soul, and putting into his
life, those Christian virtues which assimilate him
to his Master, and which display the marks of
his sonship in the Spirit which he has given him.

THE INNER KINGDOM. 131

CHAPTER XII.
We close this already too protracted thesis by showing the
Adaptation of Humanity to a Spiritual Economy.
' I "'HOSE who read modern books, know that
the great controversy now raging is be
tween Sense and Reason ; between empirical
science and the verities of faith ; between the
constitution and course of nature, as we see it
outwardly and in its material manifestations, and
those higher deductions and inferences which are
drawn by the soul taking cognizance of its own
nature and necessities, and the place it holds in
the spiritual empire of God. This controversy
will never be settled by an appeal to mere natu
ralistic proofs ; these deal only with matter and
its laws, but we are more than matter. If there
be a spiritual Being, then are we his spiritual
children ; and thought and affection, knowledge
and love, are something beside physical states of
the brain, or psychological conditions of ganglionic
centres. There are certain basal truths which

I32 THE INNER KINGDOM.
lie at the foundation of our nature, corresponding
to its aspirations, premonitions, and needs ; and
falling in, by a most wonderful fitness, to those
which Revelation unfolds, consistent with them
only and none other, and which harmonize all
together as one system, with a spiritual Chris
tianity ; and have no place or scope or meaning
in a merely natural, unspiritual, and ritualistic
system of religious thought or action. We there
fore seize upon this principle in the law of adap
tation to prove, — as we legitimately may, — from
the existence of certain facts, in human experi
ence and life, that a religion adapted by infinite
wisdom to such a nature must be, by eminence,
a spiritual religion ; that, in fact, all its chief
benefits to man and to society lie in the line of
its spirituality. We find this law in full play in
all other departments, and the severest logic au
thorizes its application to that of moral, not less
than to material nature. Remove the shell from
the incubated egg, and you find within the folded
chick. Without experience even you might ask,
Is this designed as the permanent abode of this
dweller? Here are limbs and claws, what do
they indicate but that it shall walk? Here are
wings, the instruments of flight ; here are eyes,

THE INNER KINGDOM. 133
the faculties of sight ; here is a perfect digestive
apparatus, — it must be intended for food; and
so through the whole range of organism and
faculty : and you would judge wisely a priori,
before experience, what you soon learn by it,
that these organisms and faculties are to have
their appropriate function and place in a sphere
fitted to their uses ; that these are Nature's proph
ecies of what is to come in the history and life of
this embryo bird ; and however it is limited and
confined at present, however strange and unpro-
phetic its existing habitation when outwardly
seen and considered, the germ of its real being
lies hidden within ; and it is only by getting
among the mysteries of its internal structure that
you can predict to what a life, amidst sun and
air, and flowers and song, it is. to come in the
full play of its developed and soaring faculties.
See that root, how rough, and dark, and hard
it is, without beauty or promise to the eye; but,
wrapped within its coatings, lie untold wealth of
beauty, and unimagined pomp of bloom; and
with air and earth and moisture, with the baptism
of sunshine and shower, it shall put on its coronal
of glory, its more than Tyrian purple and crim
son, and load down every zephyr's wing with its

134 THB INNER KINGDOM.
exhaling sweetnesses ; and so the acorn holds the
oak, and future forests lie wrapped in those germs
which a school-boy gathers in his nutting.
There are no great chasms in God's empire :
this wondrous law of adaptation with which Na
ture is everywhere crammed, which carries its
premonitions and prophecies on its fore-front
through the realms of matter and of mind, does
not fail or vanish when we enter upon the spirit
ual, but rather asserts and vindicates itself with
a more distinct and commanding emphasis. As
the spiritual is higher and mightier in its elements
and action, as its grasp is wider and its hold
deeper, so are all its laws and analogies of
sterner and more unbending sway. In the clam
or of worldly excitement, we may ignore or
forget this ; we may even stifle and bury out of
sight, for a season, all reflection upon, and all
sense of, spiritual faculty and need ; we may give
no time in the whirl of business and pleasure for
these voices to speak in us : but they are not
dead, only held in abeyance; smothered sounds
that will grow louder and louder, and ring through
eternity, perchance, wailings of desire, that will
echo along the corridors of the soul with deeper
notes as the unending ages wax and wane, —

THE INNER KINGDOM. 135
moanings of affection, loaded with irrepressible
grief at the lost portion, always sought but never
found, — remorses that sting without mercy, that
exclude all penitence, and cannot take on pardon,
— guilt that flies frantic through all the hot cham
bers of a blazing conscience, — horrors in which
all the elements of the second death lie wrapped
and festering, taking on new forms as stages
and epochs of being pass away. Ah, this fearful
boon of a spiritual nature ! It is our pride to count
ourselves immortal ; but who can tell what all
this grand endowment means? It means eternity
with God and hope and love and joy ; or eter
nity lost and lamented, alas, too late ! It means
the bird released from its natal prison-house, jubi
lant on soaring wing, pouring out its life in sweet
ness and song, sipping the dew from the blossom,
and bathing its bosom in the cloud ; or the bird
helpless, bruised, and dead in the snare of the
fowler. It means the root sending out its fibres be
neath, and shooting up its stem above, putting on
its drapery of beauty, its garniture of gold, or its
white, pure as an angel's robe, loading the air
with a fragrance distilled in its mysterious alem
bic from soil and sun and dew. It is the acorn,
burst through its coating, and tough in fibre and

136 THE INNER KINGDOM.
affluent of sap, stretching its giant arms in the
rough winds of heaven, and holding out its
myriad leaves to drink moisture from cloud and
rain : or the root and the seed crushed into dust
by the stamping heel ; or the tree riven and
burned bare and leafless by the lightning's flash,
fit only for fuel or decay. It indicates derange
ment, disappointment, something awry and out
of harmony and play, when this law of fitness
and adaptation is frustrated : such abortive results
baffle and stagger us ; it creates a discord in the
music of nature ; there is a sense' of unfitness
and incompleteness saddening and painful ; it op
erates as a surprise upon calculation, as well as
experience, and baffles our reason, as well as
staggers our faith.
The reason is clear, — the design was of God,
and perfect; the marring is of man. God adapts
perfect means to perfect ends ; man frustrates
and defeats them. Where human volition does
not operate, failure of results adequate to causes
are infrequent and exceptive. Where human
will creates new combinations, and brings new
and foreign forces in play, there, alas ! are the
marks of a deranged and tangled order. And
yet, sad as it appears, this very freedom of man

THE INNER KINGDOM. 137
to follow the law of his being to happiness and
holiness and heaven ; or to frustrate and defeat
the end of his creation in disaster and ruin, is
essential to and indicates that man lives and acts
under the responsibilities and girding force of a
spiritual system.
Is there, then, such a thing or state as human
freedom, — intellectual, moral, and spiritual lib
erty? It is stoutly denied by three schools of
philosophy : —
1. By that known as the Christianly metaphysi
cal, at the head of which stands Jonathan Ed
wards, who maintained that every human volition
was not only foreseen and foreordained, but that
men were so interlinked in the chain of events,
and so under the absolute sway of the dominant
motive, that they were without natural or moral
abilitv to do otherwise than as thus impelled ;
that Adam set them (they being, however, rep
resentatively present and consenting to it) on this
direful path, with no liberty in it and hell at the
end ! This is called Necessarianism. Its logic
is specious, and makes man a machine. He
maintained, however, at the same time, human
obligation to obey the divine law, and the suprem
acy of Revelation ; but with what consistency you
can determine.

138 THE INNER KINGDOM.
2. By the Atheistic and Deistic schools com
posed of Comte, Hegel, Spinoza, and the meta
physicians of Germany and France, who maintain
and promulgate the same doctrine, — that men
are so woven into the moving chain of events as
to be powerless to perform acts different from
those which flow from them ; from which they
infer that, if there be a Supreme Being, he can
not consistently impress one law upon humanity
which necessarily dominates it, and proclaim and
insist upon a different law, out of man, annexing
severe penalties to its transgression when its vio
lation was a preordained certainty. Hence, moral
evil, as a sin, is annihilated: it is only a mistake
or misfortune, to be corrected by a higher wis
dom and larger intelligence !
3. By the naturalistic school of Buckle, Dra
per, and others, who — because they deal more
largely in material facts, cognizable by the popu
lar understanding — are just now commanding
wider attention, and drawing after them a larger
train of disciples. Their theory may be stated
as follows : —
Man is the creature of circumstances, and is
determined in his moral and spiritual relations by
his physical surroundings. That climate, soil,

THE INNER KINGDOM. 139
and material condition determine the character
of his mental and moral being ; that the physical
always precedes the moral and shapes it ; that
religion and philosophy, so far from aiding a
people's development, are arch-enemies which
have ever retarded it ; that religion is priestcraft,
and inimical to science, which is the True Divin
ity ; that history as well as nature, human action
as well as God's handy work, is reducible to
certain wide and accurate generalizations, which
may claim the dignity and certitude of scientific
formulae ; that man has no proper freedom, be
cause he is limited, restrained, and directed by
certain forces out of himself, set in motion thou
sands of ages agone, which enter without his
consent into his very being, his temperament,
feelings, and intuitions, as well as into his volun
tary acquisitions ; that the everlasting cycles roll
on apace, and man with them under a law of
imperative ordainment, growing out of the nature
of things, which he may perchance ignore, but
against which it is madness to rebel. In all this
you will perceive the true and the false are so
inextricably blended, that, like some of the prop
ositions of Edwards used to reach the same
fatalistic conclusions, it requires a close observa-

140 THE INNER KINGDOM.
tion and nice scholarship to detect the difference
and unravel the skein of perplexity.
The result of all these several metaphysical and
naturalistic schools is, that the Supreme Being, if
there be any such personality, at some period far
remote, set a going the forces of nature, under cer
tain conditions and laws, and then retired from his
universe into some awful realm of seclusion, never
again to interfere with the operation of these forces
and laws; that human, as well as. all forms of
animal and vegetable life, is the outgrowth and
product of nature, like the blossom on the tree,
and with as little title to praise or blame for his
doings as the bloom on the bough ; that conse
quently virtue and vice are imaginary, and the
terms are as misplaced over against human action
as they would be against the sun for light or the
cloud for rain. And these men write beautiful
works, and call themselves philosophers; — ay,
more than that, these opinions and generaliza
tions, clothed in enchaining rhetoric, are given as
gems in the pages of our magazines, and the
minds of the young are being imbued with their
quasi-philosophic and blighting influence.
Now, in respect to the school of Edwards, we
have this one criticism to offer, — his grand error

THE INNER KINGDOM.

I4I

lies in applying the methods of logic to prove or
disprove the experiences of life. It is as absurd
as to weigh sunbeams with scales, or pack a
cloud in a half-bushel. The methods of logic are
well enough in all simple processes of the under
standing, for they stand upon a logical basis, and
may be put into syllogistic form ; but who man
ages and guides his moral and spiritual nature
upon a logical plane? Who loves or hates or
desires or hopes upon any such basis? The will
is the whole man in spiritual exercise, under the
impulse of a determined choice ; and that choice
is free. It may be logical or illogical, you may
prove it metaphysically out of existence ; but it is
nevertheless there, asserting its existence and its
power in a consciousness that no clouding can
obscure ; connected with approval, or a remorse
out of which no philosophy can take the fang.
Like the client in prison who sent for his counsel
and inquired, after stating his case, how. he should
get out : " But," said the lawyer, " they can't put
you here ; it is impossible on such a state of facts."
" Hold," said the client, " your legal logic won't
do ; for I am here, and only want to get out."
Legally, the man was not there at all; but his
flesh and blood and bones were actually within the

142 THE INNER KINGDOM.
bars, notwithstanding it was all illogical. So the
great fact of human freedom may be impossible,
according to the play of certain words in a sen
tence ; but as a controlling fact, by which society
has been moulded since Abel worshipped and the
world began, it is impossible to overlook it : it is
as patent and potent as gravitation.
Its proof is threefold, —
1. The consciousness of every man that he is
free to choose, and does in fact choose freely.
2. The satisfaction or regret he feels after he
has chosen.
3. The praise or blame, the reward or punish
ment, he accords to others on the principle that
their acts are voluntary, or of their own choos
ing. And all this, remember, enters into society
social and political ; informs law, guides legisla
tion, and is one of the controlling forces of the
world. It accords moreover with God's dealing
with us, in the shape of motive, warning, entreaty,
, incentives to obedience, and threats of doom for
wrong-doing, — all predicated upon freedom to
obey ; but all as absurd as to entreat a mountain
to arise and depart, if humanity has no freedom.
The sense of responsibility is instinctive, and
thunders with a voice at which guilt trembles and
cowers.

THE INNER KINGDOM. 143
But as this freedom is that of our spiritual being,
it brings us by necessity under the sway of a
spiritual economy, and proves that we are adapted
to a spiritual religion.
"Virtue, vice, praise, blame, law, government,
retribution are conditions proper to the treatment
of a being who, by his use of arbitrary signs, his
employment of complicated means, his manifold
employment of the power of Nature to his advan
tage, makes it evident that he possesses a faculty
of moral freedom, self-originating reformation,
which, in connection with his moral sensibilities,
renders virtue, vice, praise, blame, law, govern
ment, retribution, the true correlatives of his
nature." But a second argument, as conclusive as the
first, to prove the existence of a spiritual economy
from the law of adaptation, arises from the fact
that God manifests himself supernaturally, or on
a plane above nature, interfering for a purpose
with Nature's ordinary movements ; and thus that
Nature and the supernatural constitute together
the one system of God.
This is the great battle-ground of modern infi
delity. It was assumed and argued by Hume
about a century ago : 1. That such supernatural

144 THE INNER KINGDOM.
interference had never occurred; and, 2. That
whether it had or no it was impossible to prove it ;
because, as he asserted, the experience of the
world lay in the path of Nature's uniformity, and
the testimony of a few witnesses could never equal
or counterbalance that of all the world beside.
And we have known Christian thinkers so be
fogged and bewildered in the mazes of this meta
physical logic, as to admit that the argument was
unanswerable. But a moment's consideration
will show its entire speciousness ; and, like the
argument of Edwards to prove man's want of
moral liberty, it is an ingenious play upon words
and phrases, i. It assumes as true the very
question to be proved, — to wit the absolute uni
formity of Nature, ->— and, after starting with a
sophism, next places negative testimony, however
loose, on a par as to weight and importance with
positive. For instance, suppose fifty competent
and credible witnesses testify to the turning of
water into wine by Jesus. They saw the water,
in fact brought it, tasted it, saw it and tasted it
after it was turned into wine, — this all goes for
nothing by the Hume argument, if he can show
fifty thousand people in Cana who did not see it,
and who never saw water turned into wine. His-

THE INNER KINGDOM.

I4S

torical evidence is sufficiently uncertain without
this kind of metaphysical rubbish to overlay it :
no new fact in history could ever be proved, or
even in science, by such a rule. How could Watt
be fool enough to think he could get motive power
out of boiling water, when the uniformity of nature
up to that point of time had never witnessed it?
How could Morse think of writing by electricity,
when the uniform experience of the world was
against it? You perceive upon Hume's principle
there can be nothing new under the sun;. and in
this same track march the . hosts of metaphysical
and scientific unbelievers in the supernatural, who
are so wise, in their time, that they have eliminated
God from the universe, except they give that polite
name to some law or property of matter or of mind ;
but, as a propounder of moral law, he has no ex
istence. True, men once believed in miracles ;
but they were just' as credulous in respect to
ghosts and hobgoblins, witches and fairies; to
myths and legends ; to astrology and alchemy ; to
the elixir of life and the philosopher's stone ; and
as science, like the daylight, has routed all these
children of an ignorant* diseased, and superstitious
imagination, so the supernatural passes away in
¦the same train, — all disappearing for ever over

146 THE INNER KINGDOM.
the bright frontiers of scientific discovery, like the
motley rear of a routed and retreating army.
Well, if the hammer and the crucible are to kill
out all these beautiful creations called into being
as symbols of some higher truth by the wants of
a poetic heart and brain ; if fay and fairy are no
longer to linger in grove and grotto ; if the naiad
deserts her fountain, and the nymph no longer
meets her mortal lover in the mists ofthe iris, or
where the sea-winds moan and murmur, — let the
time of their abdication come. Weare, however,
of a different opinion. While the child prattles
to her doll, and holds grave colloquies with pussy,
these little folk of yore will still hold revelry by
moonlight, and play their pranks as in the wildest
mid-summer night's dream ; Imagination will yet
be too strong for Science, and will people her
own realm with her ancient creations, never to
be excluded wholly from walking the earth,
both when we wake and when we sleep. Is there
no premonition of the truth in these creations of
fancy, born anew, perpetually, in every soul
where the faculties are working in their glow and
integrity? But what have all these things to do
with historic facts, which meet us face to face on
the plane of the supernatural, demanding recog
nition?

THE INNER KINGDOM. 147
We are willing for the present to lay out of view
all other and more recondite lines of argument,
and to rest the reality of this supernatural inter
ference upon three distinct facts ; not theories,
not inferences, but facts, which meet and force
themselves as facts upon the most incredulous.
The first of these is that ofthe creation of man.
We are here peopling the earth with our genera
tions for more than six thousand years, — perhaps
much longer. Human existence, body and soul,
is a fact: how was it originated? Did it grow?
was it developed out of monkeyhood? In what
form, — infancy, to die for want of protection ; or
manhood, with matured and perfected faculty and
function? If Nature could develop one man, she
could one thousand ; if six thousand years ago,
then every subsequent year would produce devel
oped fruitage from this tree of Nature, — men and
women full grown as at first. How do our modern
magi answer these questions, — by silence, or ves
tiges of creation, or other romantic quibbling.
"Nature," says Renan, "happened to be in her
creative mood, — parturient." But the great fact
stares them in the face, — Nature before man had
no germinant or rudimental humanity in its bosom ;
and so we may as well deny that we exist at all,

148 THE INNER KINGDOM.
with Berkeley and the school of no-matter philoso
phers, as to deny that God interfered supernatu-
rally , and by a direct fiat of omnipotence completed
his crowning work by creating man out of the
dust of the earth, breathing into his nostrils the
breath of life, so that he became a living soul.
The argument is short, decisive, unanswerable;
and sweeps over all the creations of worlds and
of animal life as well. Propagation lies in the
realm of the natural : creation in that of the super
natural. The second great fact indicating this super
natural interference, is the existence of the moral
law in the form in which it is presented to us in
the Hebrew oracles. The existence of the law, or
moral code, without divine interference, among
the people, and at the time at which we find it, is
a miracle equal to speaking a world out of nothing.
It is a simple impossibility. That enslaved prog
eny of an Oriental family, steeped in ignorance
and besotted by the disgusting superstitions of the
Egyptians ; with no science, no philosophy, no
art, no mental training, no faculty of abstract
thought, no spiritual development ; conscious only
as a nation of concrete forms of thought, and
wholly unconscious of its abstract or philosophic

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149

forms, subjected to a minute ceremonial and
ritualistic culture, because not elevated enough to
take on a higher style of moral training, — where
is this code of sublime moral statutes to come
. from ? Not out of Egypt with the tramping hosts,
or some shreds of this robe of glory would have
been scattered behind. Did it grow on Horeb or
Sinai? Was it concocted by the makers and
worshippers of the golden calf ? There it is, as a
fact, kept in the ark of the covenant in the early
ages, as their histories record, and sacredly pre
served as a copy when the original was gone. It
is admitting the smallest miracle (if large or small
are terms admissible), to say, It was written by
the finger of God on rocky tables, indestructible
as his own eternity, and perfect as his own holi
ness ; that it came from the hand that was sowing
the heavens with stars, and his universe with intel
ligence and light. It is the only rational mode of
explanation. The third fact of which we are to speak is, that
man, in Christian lands, lives and acts under the
forces and agencies of a redemptive economy,
which, when seen in all its beauty and operative
power upon spiritual natures, is the very " wisdom
of God, and power of God unto salvation." Sin is

150 THE INNER KINGDOM.
in the moral system as an influence or power of
derangement and disorder, loaded with sorrow and
retributive evil and disaster, bringing not only
death penally, but being death itself intrinsically,
— Janus-faced, being sin in the one aspect, and
death in the other : souls die in sinning. That
humanity so gone awry and lapsed from goodness,
and. without self-recovery, needing, crying out for
help from without, — crying through the lips of
Socrates and Plato, of Seneca, Cicero, and Lucre
tius, and all gifted minds, to whom moral prob
lems were a reality ; weary in its long trial period
of sin, "that damned miracle and misery of the
groaning creation," looking and longing and
hungry of soul, through the misty premonitions
of nature, for the dawn, — when, lo, God is sud
denly with men ! Humanity puts on its divine
apparelling ; glory breaks in through his incar
nate person to chase away the darkness. "In him
peace and order descend to rebuild the realm be
low they have maintained above, and the great
good minds of this and the "upper worlds behold
integrity and rest returning, and the peace of uni
versal empire secure." Thus the redemptive sys
tem needs neither apology nor advocate : it blazes
all over with the triumphs and trophies of self-

THE INNER KINGDOM. 151
vindication. It finds moral death, and life springs
forth at its touch. It finds a wreck of humanity,
and puts on it the harmony and beauty of recon
structed perfectness. It finds disorder, degenera
cy, and retributive wrath working in all personal
and social states, and corrects them all by the
reign of its orderly counteractions : instead of an
external reformatory process which was stamped
with failure, it captured first the citadel of man-
soul, and, marshalling its forces there, com
menced within to build anew a character after
the divine model in which it all centred. How
futile all these speculations about Christ ! Look
at him ; see the colossal shadow he projects over
the world ! See
"Truth, Love, and Mercy in triumph descending,
And Beauty immortal awake from the tomb ; "
a stern arrest put upon the workings of sin ; the
body of death severed from the emancipated
soul ; virtue, purity, and disinterested love brought
again to resume their disordered empire ; life made
valuable and happy, and death hallowed with
the brightness of eternal peace and joy. We do not
argue any thing, now and here, from Christ's per
sonal nature, whether of the essence ofthe God
head " create " or " uncreate ; " we insist not now

152 THE INNER KINGDOM.
upon his miracles wrought in attestation of his
mission. The argument is strong enough, with
out the confirmation they would give, but we
plant ourselves upon the greatest miracle of all,
— the fact of his existence at all, and the redemp
tive agencies he instituted, as seen in their trial
and effects after one thousand eight hundred years
of experiment. Was there ever a power like the
power of God in Christ, except the power of evil
which it humbles, conquers, and destroys? And
remember this is a power working in humanity,
not out of it, — a power over soul, principle, mo
tive, affection, over life and character, getting its
hold on the sources and springs of action, and
where, if it fails, it fails entirely. How these
redemptive agencies work in accordance with the
laws of mind and the freedom of man, we cannot
now stop to explain. You will not fail to notice,
that, in the three instances of supernatural inter
ference we have been considering, the result in
each was the creation, not of natural but super
natural agencies. You are supernatural, as well
as a natural product. Your body is material, and
lives and moves on the plane of the natural. Your
mind or soul, what is it? Where did it come
from? In the two great departments of creation,

THE INNER KINGDOM. 153
of powers and things, to which does it belong?
Is it a machine to be acted on simply, or is it
highest in the class of powers to originate and set
on foot new forces, and so allied to God of which
it is the image? And thus of all souls, persons,
spirits, intelligences, who crowd the astronomic
world, and the outlying populations of the sky,
whose stellar spaces of infinity are interspersed
and filled with their prodigious tides of life and
motion, angels and departed spirits, seraphim and
thrones and lofty hierarchies of God's spiritual
empire, consciously moving out of and superior
to Nature, streaming into it in currents of free
causality, harnessing its forces, and detecting and
using its secret laws.
And so God's moral code stands and works as
an ever-potent force on the field of the supernatu
ral ; and so, his redemptive economy has its play
on the same lofty plane : supernatural interference
to create supernatural forces, to complement and
finish out a system else partial, fragmentary, and
inharmonious ; Nature and the supernatural con
stituting together the one system of God.
Well has it been said, "Nothing is solid or
great or high but these transcendent powers,
whose eternities are -the main substances of the

154 THE IN]*ER KINGDOM.
world ; Nature only the stage, the field, the vehicle
for the universe ; that is, for God and his powers.
The grand, universal, invisible system of God
centralizes itself in these, subordinating all mere
things as its instruments. For the serving and
training of these he loosens the bands of Orion,
and the sweet influences of Pleiades ; spreading
out the heavens not for the heavens' sake, but as
a tent for these to dwell in. Is it any thing new
that the tent is a thing less solid, and of meaner
consequence, than the occupant?" — Bushnell's
Nature and Supernatural, p. 90.
3. The last and final proof of God's supernat
ural interference in nature, lies in the fact that
we now move and act under the agency of God's
Holy Spirit, — operating in the way of enlighten
ment, conviction, restraint, guidance, courage,
strength ; informing and energizing the whole
range of spiritual function ; an influence upon
saint and sinner, both in Christian and in heathen
lands. For what is the dispensation of the Spirit
but Christ continued on the earth, — disembodied,
unincarnate,not localized, but omnipresent, speak
ing to man in all providences, in the smiles of
prosperity, in the stern and retributive discipline
of sorrow, speaking in nature and providence

THE INNER KINGDOM. 155
without, in intellect and conscience within ; and
never weary, never ceasing, until the stony heart
is too hard to feel, and the dull ear too deaf to
hear. And this spiritual intuition, monition,
warning, and suggestion is not a theory, but a
matter of experience and consciousness ; in other
words, a fact. It can be proved by any soul,
Christian or not Christian ; and there will appear
to be further, not only no contrariety in the evi
dence, but none in the voice ofthe Spirit : always
protesting against temptation and sin, — always
urging to duty and gratitude and love, — always
on the side of righteousness, — always for God
and against evil. Who that has an ear for these,
voices of the soul, has not listened many and
many a time to their converse? They talk to
him by the way ; they encourage his hope ; they
give strength to his step. In the crowd they are
there ; in the silent night-watches, they sit round
his pillow, and sentinel his couch with a heavenly
protection. Think you that the bright-eyed babe
nipped like a withered bud from your bosom,
comes to you in dreams? Think you that the
gentle wife, the loving father, the sweet mother
or sister, are watching from their high abodes
the path you are treading, to aid you as they

156 THE INNER KINGDOM.
may in your life-struggles? Well, it is God in
them, or perchance without them. It is Christ
that lays all this gentle ministry close to your
heartstrings, and gets, by this intimate and tear
ful relationship, beneath the deepest and tenderest
springs of your being. Conscience is our heart's
echo to God's voice. "If I go away, I will send
the Comforter, even the Spirit of truth, who shall
abide with you for ever." This explains it all,
harmonizes and hallows all with the signet of
divine superintendence and benediction. Who,
that gives reverent heed to this voice, goes far
astray? For it opens sources of knowledge which
are as the voice of God speaking aloud, and say
ing, " This is the way : walk ye in it." What
perversity when our chief business in life lies in
stifling these voices, in excusing disobedience to
their dictates, in getting beyond the range of their
utterances ! Now the work of this Spirit of Christ
lies, by eminence, in those departments of human
nature, which are not moved or stirred by any
other agency.
1. In the line of conviction of sin. Without
the moral law, and God"s Spirit applying it,
there is no such thing felt or experienced. Were
Socrates or Cicero, or any of the wisest and best

THE INNER KINGDOM. 157
of the ancients ever brought to say with David,
"Against thee, thee only, have I sinned ? " Neither
the basis nor the means were there for this feeling.
If they violated a natural or social law, they be
wailed their ignorance, or mistake, and sought
its correction ; but there was no sense of guilt or
blame or retribution by a personal God, to whom
breach of moral law is an offence ; no thought of
moral government, or its just administration, in
it all. It is when the reality, spirituality, and
extent of the divine law are seen extending to the
thoughts and intents of the heart, and contrasted
with our doings, that conviction of sin can take
place. Ordinarily we look at our goodness
through a magnifier, and our evil lives through
inverted lenses ; but, by spiritual enlightenment,
this process is reversed, and we are painted true
to the life, and as we actually are.
2. This spiritual economy brings to us through
its effectual working soul renovation, conversion,
the new birth; not subject to philosophical analy
sis, but judged by its effects. Now it is most
remarkable that no such thing was ever dreamed
Of in the pagan religion. Creeds were sub
scribed, tenets adopted, rites and ceremonies
performed, with wonderful exactitude : but such

158 THE INNER KINGDOM.
a thing as a renewal of the heart by God's Spirit
had no place in their beliefs ; and it is largely
lost sight of in practices and creeds at the present
day, where it is perverted into a general provi
dence assisting all good endeavors, or a myste
rious influence hid in the keeping of priestly
hands. But the discourse of Christ to Nico
demus established two things, — 1. That this
renovation was a special creation in each indi
vidual case, — a new birth; and 2. That its
genuineness was to be tested by the fruits of
holy living, and not by any supposed magic or
afflatus stimulating or elevating the soul. Well
is it said "Christianity has abler advocates than
its professed defenders, in those many quiet and
humble men and women who in the light of it,
and the strength of it, lead holy, beautiful, and
self-denying lives. The God that answers by
fire is the God whom mankind will acknowledge ;
and so long as the fruits of the Spirit are visible
in charity and self-sacrifice, in those graces which
raise human creatures above themselves and in
vest them with the beauty of holiness which only
religion confers, thoughtful persons will remain
convinced that with them, in some form or other,
is the secret of truth." What reverses sometimes

THE INNER KINGDOM. 1 59
in a day — perhaps an hour — the whole currents
of life, conquers inveterate habit, loosens the hold
of the affections, breaks the chains and cords of
sin ; sets the whole spiritual nature on a new and
upward course of thought and action, softening
every asperity of Nature and bringing back the
bloom of virtue to the heart, followed afterwards
by a tenacity of hold, and a continuance of en
largement that sets the man apart as an anomaly
in nature? Does not this fruitage show that the
planting of the tree on which it grew was of
God's hand?
3. Our growth and culture in virtue depends
as effectually upon the presence and agency of
this same heavenly assistant.
What the Spirit originated he must complete ;
what was born of the Spirit must be fed by the
Spirit. He is not only a renovator, but an in-
dweller ; not the garnisher of a resting-place,
but the orderly occupant of a home. He oper
ates by interfusion, interpenetration : we live in
the Spirit, and walk in the Spirit, while he
dwells in us, and we become his by similarity of
nature, as well as by devout consecration. No
Christian lives who does not profoundly believe
and acknowledge that Christ's spirit is the life of

160 THE INNER KINGDOM.
his life, his joy and his song in the house of his
pilgrimage. The necessity of this makes prayer
a philosophy as well as a duty and a need.
Whence comes our strength in weakness, our
wisdom, our courage, our consolation, our peace,
but by the administration to us, through the
Spirit, of all these heavenly gifts and graces?
The spirit of man pines for fellowship with a kin
dred spirit, and is at rest only when held to the
heart of God. The spirituality of Christ's king
dom is apparent when we thus examine the agen
cies and culture which it invariably pro .luces in
the human soul, because we see it primarily ad
dresses not the intellectual, but the emotional and
moral, nature of man ; not presenting him with
theorems for solution, but truths to believe and
duties to practise; because it says, You are a
sinner, and must repent. God will pardon : you
must believe. God is love : you must love him.
God is your father : you must obey. Humanity
is your kin and brother : you must be kind, affec
tionate, charitable. And as a consequence all
these ranges of influence look to character and
motive, and are subjects of praise or blame, reward
or punishment. And so we find, when we have
arrived at the root of them, that all religious sys-

THE INNER KINGDOM. 161
terns hold that, if a man lack these virtues, his
connection and conformity outwardly to and with
any ecclesia cannot save him ; and so the great
conflict, after all, is between the natural and the
supernatural : between objects of faith and objects
of sight ; spirit and matter ; the world here and
the world hereafter.
These are some of the evidences that we live
and move in a spiritual economy ; that there are
more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt
of in our philosophy ; that men who vaunt their
scientific acquirements, and the bearings they
have upon religious truth, have not yet seen over
the horizon of Nature ; for what does Science yet
know of Nature? — hardly her a, b, c. What
impudent assumption to stalk into the presence
of venerable Faith, like a child with its rattle, and
seek the unhingement of this vast spiritual system,
of which she knows nothing, through some shal
low inference from nature, of which she knows
little more !
You will perceive also that the subjective Chris
tianity we insist on does not, like the sublimated
nonsense of Hegel, ignore objective truth. On the
contrary, it is its complement and finish. Both
objective truth, and subjective intelligence and

1 62 THE INNER KINGDOM.
feeling, make up the one spiritual system of God.
Either is nugatory and imposssible without the
other. The objective is the die, and the subjec
tive the impression : the one the' agency, the other
its result ; and he has studied Coleridge to no pur
pose who has not drank in the beauty and truth
fulness of all this.
" The truth revealed through it has its evi
dences in itself, and the proof of its divine authority
in its fitness to our nature and needs ; the clearness
and cogency of this proof being proportioned to
the degrees of self-knowledge in each individual
hearer. Christianity has likewise its historical
evidences, and these as strong as is compatible
with the nature of history, and with the aims and
objects of a religious dispensation ; and to all these
Christianity itself as an existing power in the world,
and Christendom as an existing fact, with the no
less evident fact of a progressive expansion, give
a force of moral demonstration that almost super
sedes particular testimony. These proofs and
evidences would remain unshaken even though
the sum of our religion were to be drawn from the
theologies of each succeeding century, on the prin
ciple of receiving that only as divine which should
be found in all." — Vol. V. p. 605.

THE INNER KINGDOM. 163
We have together traversed a realm of loveli
ness, full of beautiful imagery and crowded with
passionate delights. God is leading us through no
deserts to a far-off heritage, to which his people
journeyed under the regimen of law ; but the
gospel places our feet in the green vales of Beulah,
and by the delectable fountains of Siloam. Here
on our ears, if we listen, there breaks the song of
angels, and the minstrelsy of heaven. Our spirit
ual nature prophesies, as well as pines for, its
spiritual heritage and rest.
" So is it with the land beyond
This earth we press with step so fond.
Upon those faintly outlined hills
God's sunshine sleeps, His dew distils.
The dear beatitudes of home
Within the heavenly boundaries come;
The hearts that make life's fragrance here
To Eden-haunts bring added cheer;
And all the beauty, all the good,
Lost to our lower altitude,
Transfigured, yet the same, are given
Upon the mountain-heights of heaven.
" O cloud-swathed hills the flood across,
Ye hide the mystery of our loss. —
Yet hide it but a little while :
Past sunlit shore and shadowy isle,
Out to the still lake's furthest brim
Ere long our bark the wave shall skim.

164 THE INNER KINGDOM.
And what the vigor and the glow
Our earthly-torpid souls shall know,
When, grounding on the silver sands,
We feel the clasp of loving hands,
And see the walls of sapphire gleam,
Nor tongue can tell, nor heart can dream.
" But in your rifts of wondrous light
Wherewith these lower fields are bright,
In every strengthening breeze that brings
The mountain-health upon its wings,
We own the gift of Pentecost,
And not one hint of heaven is lost."

Cambridge : Printed by John Wilson and Son.