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CHAPTER IV.

CHRISTIANITY INTELLIGIBLE, RATIONAL, AND PRACTICAL.

SECT. I. THE TEACHINGS OF THE SAVIOUR DISTINGUISHED FOR THEIR CLEARNESS AND SIMPLICITY.

All the doctrine which Christ taught and gave
Was clear as heaven from whence it came.

GEORGE HERBERT.

In many of the quotations introduced into the preceding chapter, the duty of tasking, to the utmost extent, the faculties of the human understanding in the study and interpretation of Holy Scripture, is strongly urged on the attention of Christians; and rules and directions are given for the purpose of facilitating inquiry, of guarding against error, and of leading to the possession of truth. All this implies, that the Bible is not to be regarded as a volume which "he who runneth may read," — which one may hastily or passively peruse, and at the same time perfectly understand; but as a collection of sacred books, for the due appreciation of which, and for the comprehension of its various and important contents, our intellectual powers and our moral affections should alike be devoted. Indeed, apart from the value of the facts it records, or the principles it develops, no book requires more assiduous and patient study to understand than the Bible; for there is none perhaps which as a whole is so hard, difficult, or obscure.

The documents of which it consists are very ancient, some of them the oldest of extant compositions. They were written in languages or in dialects which have long ceased to be spoken, and with which the best educated men are but imperfectly familiar. They abound in allusions to customs, manners, opinions, and modes of thought, which are very different from those which prevail at the present day in Western Europe and in the New World. They have been more or less corrupted in their passage to our times. They have been transferred into innumerable versions, all differing one from another in a vast variety of particulars. They have been commented on by fathers, by schoolmen, by priests, and by critics; by adherents of the Romish, Greek, and Protestant churches; hy Athanasians and Arians, Sabellians and Socinians, Lutherans and Calvinists; by fanatics, ranters, rationalists, and transcendentalists; and, widely as these disagree in opinion,

they have lent to each and all of them such real or apparent support as hath sufficed to satisfy the consciences and the minds of them all. However some Protestants, in their zeal against Popery, may affect to controvert the fact, a book from which such a variety of conflicting opinions as those held by these sectaries has been professedly taken, must be difficult to understand. It would be idle to deny it. Even persons who are classed under the same category have elicited, from the Bible, dogmas which are far from being the same. Neither the philosophers who have found in the Scriptures the truths of astronomy and geology, or of moral and mental science; nor the mystics, with their doctrine of a double sense, their correspondences, their spiritual influences, their reveries, and their dreams, are at one in their respective interpretations of the contents of the Bible. The first chapter of Genesis, so simple in phraseology and so sublime in conception, will, if we judge of the future from the past, never be so explained as to meet the unanimous consent of astronomers, geologists, and theologians. The precise boundary between the myths and the histories of the Hebrews has not yet been ascertained, and perhaps never will be. The prophecies of the Jewish bards, obscure to those who uttered them, have not been rendered altogether clear by the light of facts accomplished; and a portion of doubt and mystery may still hang over them. No Harmony has harmonized, or probably ever will harmonize, the discrepancies existing in the divine and truthful Gospels. The proem to John's beautiful narrative of the Saviour, for the comprehension of which such vast stores of ancient learning have been in countless modes ransacked and displayed, and from which have been derived opinions the most varied in hue and texture, may never find a solution which will be altogether satisfactory to the scholar and the Christian. The Epistles of Paul-"in which are some things hard to be understood, which they that are unlearned and unstable wrest, as they do also the other Scriptures, unto their own destruction"-have been made to speak the strangest, the most uncouth and contradictory dogmas; and the man is yet to come who will give such a representation of the apostle's views as will settle the controversies which have so long afflicted the church. The contents of the Apocalypse, which have so often baffled the prying ingenuity of good and wise men, may be fully revealed to the human mind only when "time shall be no more.”

Some of these, or similar difficulties and obscurities, may, as we have intimated, remain for ever on the pages of the Bible; but there are others which have undoubtedly arisen more from the prepossessions and the passions of interpreters than from any imperfection in the book itself; and it may reasonably be anticipated that a reduction of their number will be gradually effected by the labors of ingenuous and liberal-minded men.

But, even now, the Bible is not, throughout its various portions, a book only of dark and intricate passages leading to no certain conclusion. It abounds in narratives, whose beautiful simplicity and tender pathos are grateful to the ear of childhood; in pictures of divine heroism and disinterestedness which arrest the eye of youth; in songs of purity and piety which lift to higher realms the common mind of manhood; in words of

comfort and consolation which impart heavenly strength and holy trust to the heart of feebleness and age.

The Bible is a difficult book; or, rather, it is a collection of books, portions of which are very dark and doubtful in their import, if not erroneous in some of their statements. But it contains various revelations of the Supreme Wisdom and Infinite Goodness; and all revelations must, to those for whom they were intended, be, from their very nature, resplendent with light, and impart it to the organ of moral and intellectual vision if in a normal or undiseased state. Clouds and darkness may seem to us, in some measure, to brood over the communications of God to the antediluvians and the patriarchs, for these were personal or family revelations; or over such as were vouchsafed to the Jews through Moses and the prophets, for these were national; though many of them speak, in characters the most perspicuous, of the pure spirituality, the impartial justice, and universal government of the one Jehovah.

But the gospel of Jesus Christ- including in the term not only the teachings of the Saviour, but his life and his character, his labors and his sufferings, his death and his resurrection - was a revelation, designed, not for particular persons or families, or for a peculiar nation, but for all mankind; and the impress of universality and legibility are therefore stamped on its divine lineaments. By a few simple strokes from the pens of the evangelists, Jesus is still seen, as he was some eighteen or nineteen hundred years ago, walking on the hills and the plains, or by the rivers and the lakes, of Palestine; mixing with his countrymen in their lofty temple and humbler synagogues, in their cities and villages, in their streets and roads, in their houses and in their fishing-boats; familiar with seamen, with publicans, with the erring and abandoned, with the pious and the gentle-hearted; telling them, in no equivocal terms, of the care and providence of their allbountiful Father, of their solemn responsibleness to God for all they think and feel and say and do, and of their various duties to themselves and their brethren of mankind; speaking words of comfort and hope to the penitent, but of warning and woe to the self-righteous; imparting health and energy and life to the sick, the feeble, the dying, and the dead; and pronouncing benedictions on little children, on the humble-minded, on the mourners, on the meek, on the hungerers and thirsters after righteousness, on the merciful, on the pure in heart, and on those who suffer for the name of Christ. We see this good being murdered for his goodness by the proud priests of his nation. We see his body taken from the cruel cross, put into a tomb, and in a few hours rising again with renewed life. We see him, "from the mount called Olivet," ascending to that Being who commissioned him, and leaving, as a sacred legacy, the image and remembrances of himself, and the spirit of his benign religion, not to the narrow-minded Jews, but to the world at large. This great Revealer of the will of God - this best Representative and Manifestation of Immortal Goodness spoke not, indeed, in the AngloSaxon or in any other modern tongue, but in the now-obsolete Syro-Chaldaic; yet its translated tones of love and righteousness sound on the ear, and address the heart, of our common humanity. Though he wore a Jewish

garb, alluded to local and temporary usages, accommodated his words to unphilosophical ideas, and spoke in Oriental parables and paradoxes, he stands before us, in the pages of the simple evangelists, as the clearest expounder of God's messages and the most perfect teacher of eternal truth. No corruption of the Greek text, and no false rendering, have obscured, or can obscure, the import of the term "Father," which, with so profound yet so clear and expressive a meaning, Jesus applied to God in his discourses; which he uttered in his prayers and in his thanksgivings; and which he taught his disciples to use in their daily petitions to Heaven. It contains within itself a universal revelation,· a revelation intelligible to the capacities of the human mind and to the affections of the human heart in all stages of development, and growing more significant and luminous as men and women advance in the scale of intelligence, virtue, and holiness.

It would be easy to pursue the same strain of remark, by exhibiting the perspicuity and the practicability of other principles which our Lord taught and exemplified; and by showing that he avoided the presentation and discussion of topics, which, from their inherent obscurity or mysteriousness, could not generally be understood, or be brought home to the minds and hearts of all men. But the sentiments of eminent Trinitarians on this subject, which we are about to introduce, will render any further observations on our part unnecessary.

He delighted not to discourse of sublime mysteries (although his deep wisdom comprehended them all), nor of subtle speculations and intricate questions, such as might amuse and perplex rather than instruct and profit his auditors, but usually did feed his auditors with the most common and useful truths, and that in the most familiar and intelligible language. DR. ISAAC BARROW: Works, vol. i. p. 404.

Surely, the way to heaven, that Christ hath taught us, is plain and easy, if we have but honest hearts: we need not many criticisms, many school distinctions, to come to a right understanding of it. Surely, Christ came not to ensnare us and entangle us with captious niceties, or to puzzle our heads with deep speculations, and lead us through hard and craggy notions into the kingdom of heaven. I persuade myself that no man shall ever be kept out of heaven for not comprehending mysteries, that were beyond the reach of his shallow understanding, if he had but an honest and good heart, that was ready to comply with Christ's commandments. Say not in thy heart, Who shall ascend into heaven?" that is, with high speculations to bring down Christ from thence; or, "Who shall descend into the abyss beneath?" that is, with deep-searching thoughts to fetch up Christ from thence; but, lo! "the word is nigh thee, even in thy mouth and in thy heart.".... I speak not here against a free and ingenuous

inquiry into all truth, according to our several abilities and opportunities. I plead not for the captivating and enthralling of our judgments to the dictates of men. I do not disparage the natural improvement of our understanding faculties by true knowledge, which is so noble and gallant a perfection of the mind. But the thing which I aim against is the dispiriting of the life and vigor of our religion by dry speculations, and making it nothing but a mere dead skeleton of opinions, a few dry bones, without any flesh and sinews, tied up together; and the misplacing of all our zeal upon an eager prosecution of these, which should be spent to better purpose upon other objects. DR. RALPH CUDWORTH: Sermon 1, appended to Intellectual System of the Universe, vol. ii. pp. 554, 556.

The Lord Jesus, in wisdom and tender mercy, established a law of grace, and rule of life, pure and perfect, but simple and plain; laying the condition of man's salvation more in the honesty of the believing heart than in the strength of wit, and subtlety of a knowing head. He comprised the truths which were of necessity to salvation in a narrow room; so that the Christian faith was a matter of great plainness and simplicity. By the occasion of heretics' quarrel and errors, the serpent steps in, and will needs be a spirit of zeal in the church; and he will so overdo against heretics, that he persuades them they must enlarge their creed, and add this clause against one, and that against another, and all was but for the perfecting and preserving of the Christian faith. . . . He had got them, with a religious, zealous cruelty to their own and others' souls, to lay all their salvation, and the peace of the church, upon some unsearchable mysteries about the Trinity, which God either never revealed, or never clearly revealed, or never laid so great a stress upon. Yet he persuades them, that there was Scripture-proof enough for these; only the Scripture spoke it but in the premises or in darker terms, and they must but gather into their creed the consequences, and put it into plainer expressions, which heretics might not so easily corrupt, pervert, or evade. RICHARD BAXTER: The Right Method; in Practical Works, vol. ix. pp. 192-3.

Of the divine Founder of our religion, it is impossible to peruse the evangelical histories, without observing how little he favored the vanity of inquisitiveness; how much more rarely he condescended to satisfy curiosity than to relieve distress; and how much he desired that his followers should rather excel in goodness than in knowledge. DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON: Rambler, No. 81.