We long to be one with those who have the same ends, and feel it to be a principal point of unity, that we are co-workers, actuated by a common zeal for the salvation of man. And so, by a silent process of liquefaction, the throne of dogmatism is visibly melting away from under it. In all that I have said respecting it, I have only spoken out that sentence in words, which you all are passing in your works. And the question is not, any longer, whether dogmatism is to lose its authority and cease; but simply this, whether any thing is to be set in its place, that will save us from a state of indifference and dissipation that is frightful to contemplate? And just here it is, that I have found so great interest in the views presented in my book. Seeing that the transition must be made, and can not be arrested, or rather that it is virtually made already, I consent to it, and look about to find a new organific principle that will impart a better vigor than we have lost, and condense our dissipation into a more genuine, broader Christian Unity; viz., the unity generated by faith, or what is called, in scripture, the unity of the Spirit. As we have undertaken apostolic works, I suppose that God will have us receive the apostolic spirit in the apostolic liberty, and go to our works, endued with power from on high. There is nothing peculiar in the views I have presented, save that they better agree with an age of beneficent activity, and the comprehensive or catholic tendency, inseparably connected with it. I have only not pushed the great Christian truths of the Incarnate Person, the Trinity, and the Sacrifice of Christ, to their last limit, in the terms of reason or theory. I have only not said that we have reasoned out and know all that is inmost or most interior, in these deep mysteries that lie between us and the infinite. I present them as symbolic or instrumental truths, and not as scholastic abstractions or results of theory. To raise a defense against all those extravagances which ignorant and overheated enthusiasts are wont to indulge, in the name of spiritual teaching, I endeavor to ascertain exactly how much may be known of these truths by the natural understanding; and then allow them, for what remains, to discover their virtue and yield their holy anointing to faith. Accordingly, we are allowed never to be in them, simply as yielding them the assent of the head; but only as having a present realization of their power, in the state of fellowship with God they open in our experience. We can easily agree, in the natural understanding, to receive these truths in their symbolic instrumental forms; and then we can as easily meet in their spiritual import, by being in the Spirit under them. And this is Christian unity, apostolic, vital, practical, energetic,-unity cemented in God; and really I know not where to look for any other. It is simply in this practical, experimental view of the truths in question that I have spoken, many times, in these discussions, of our relations to the Unitarians. I have done it, not as suggesting terms of ecclesiastical adjustment; but because they have the same spiritual interest in the truths discussed that we have, and because it is under these truths, insufficiently conceived, that we have suffered some common disasters. God forbid that we should think to be as Jews and Samari tans, and look on that as the end of our Christian duty. We have a common history, which is the history, in a sense, of our nation itself. We are brethren and kinsmen according to the flesh, and for such an apostle was able, if it could do any good, even to wish himself accursed from Christ. Having the same free polity, in religion, derived from our fathers, it is greatly to be desired, both for the fathers' sakes and our own, that this free polity should be seen to have a self-remedial principle in its freedom, and a power from God to restore its own casual aberrations. I wish I were not obliged to add, as I do with some mortification, that the admirable dignity and candor exhibited, on their side, in the strictures they have made upon my book, compel a contrast with the violent and, it seems to me, rather extravagant severities indulged in our own, that too little favors our supposed purity in the truth. The case now, brethren, is before you. It is very possible for you, I know, to have a different judgment of what I have done, from that which I entertain myself. But it can not be difficult for you to see, that whoever of Christ's true friends and followers may undertake, in this manner, to commend a less academic faith and open the way to a higher and more transforming experience, will, if they are right, have much of odium to encounter. But if they consent to suffer gladly, if they take their part, in this manner, with God and lay themselves upon his altar, it is not your belief that He will reject them, and as little to be imagined that they will be rejected by you. |