The Christian Conscience

IT seems to me that, in these days, our thoughts on the Christian Conscience want reviewing and clearing. Its origin, its description, its operation, and present extent of influence on public and private opinion and action, may perhaps profitably be made matter for an essay.

“The good that I would, I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do.” (Rom. 7:19.) Who are these two—the I that desires—the I that acts? Not two persons: for it is one and the same Paul that both desires and acts. Nor can we say that both are the simple and consistent doings of one and the same person. There is a complication, there is a conflict, there is a coercion. A desire to act in one way arises within: this desire is thwarted, and action is hindered. A reluctance to act in another way is felt: the reluctance is overborne, and action takes place. And this is not as when the body refuses the bidding of the will; when energy is suspended by lassitude, or the desire of quiet broken by nervous excitement. Those conflicts, those defeats, are temporary; but this is enduring. Those are between the flesh and the will: this is within the will itself. For in this description, there are two wills. We will one way, we act another way. But no man can be properly said to act without willing; the motion of conscious action is voluntary, abstinence from that motion is voluntary also. So that within the man is a will saying, “I will,” and protesting against the will which is carried out in action: sitting, so to speak, bound, and witnessing its own defeat. And when we come to inquire about this deposed, this frustrated will, there can be no question that it is the nobler, the higher of the two, though it be thus defeated. For it bears testimony for good and against evil: whereas its victorious adversary thwarts the good, and carries out the evil.

So then we find ourselves in the presence of these two phenomena in man: a higher will, a nobler consciousness, testifying to good, protesting against evil, but overborne; and a lower will, a less noble consciousness, putting aside the good, choosing the evil, and commonly prevailing. And we may observe that both these are resident in the inner man, not belonging the one to the inner, the other to the outer. However the lower will may become entangled with, and enslaved by, the bodily emotions, it is yet a decision given not in nor by the body, but in and by the mind.

But now let us go a step further, and let us suppose that in some given case the higher will obtains the mastery, and that the word of command which the mind gives to the body to act or not to act, proceeds not from the lower will but from the higher; or, if necessarily from the lower, then from the lower subordinated to and absorbed into the higher. Let us suppose, in other words, a state of things which would be expressed by “The good that I would do, that do I: and the evil which I would not do, that do I not.” Manifestly, this is no impossible supposition, but one which is often, though not ordinarily, realized in fact.

What have we now obtained? Why this: that my practical will, the ruler of the acts which I do, and the non-acts which I refuse to do, lies open to two distinct influences—one drawing it upward, in the direction of good and to the avoidance of evil, the other drawing it downward, in a direction which may lead to the adoption of evil, and to the avoidance of good. And there can be no question that this my practical will emanates directly from, and is the expression of, my personality: that it is the exponent of myself.

But let us advance a step further in this preliminary examination. This practical will, of which we have spoken, is the result of thought, is the issue of determination. Are thought and determination peculiar to man? Certainly not. Every kind of organized animal life, in its measure and after its kind, possesses them. The practical will may be as limited as in the oyster, or as free as in the eagle; but it is equally in obedience to it, that conscious animal action takes place. In man, of all animals, its capacities are greatest; but its nature is not distinct. In man, with all its intellectual powers and wide-reaching susceptibilities, it is but the animal soul; in the lowest organized being, with all its narrowness and dulness, it is the animal soul still. The Greeks, in their wonderfully accurate language, expressed by the same term (ψυχή, psyché), the soul of man which he has to save, and the life of the reptile which man crushes under his foot. And it would have been immensely for our profit if we had done the same. For then we should have understood what very few now do understand, the true nature, the true place, of this our intellectual and emotional being. We then should have read in our Bibles not only, “Whosoever will save his life shall lose it; and whosoever will lose his life for my sake, shall find it;” but also (for the same word is used), “For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own life? Or what shall a man give in exchange for his life?” For it is this life of man that carries his practical will, with all those motions of intellect and feeling which set it at work: it is the life, which is mysteriously bound up with the body, and which is reft from it at death; it is this life, which if a man spend upon God and upon good, he shall save to life eternal.

Infinite misunderstanding, infinite mischief, has arisen from confounding this animal soul of man with his immortal part. We hear frequently, in fact it is the usual and still commonly-received notion, that man is compounded of two parts, the mortal body, and the immortal soul. Whole sermons, whole treatises, proceed on this view of man. Books of argument have been written to prove the immortality of the soul; and have been for the most part written in vain. The reasons alleged have been acute enough in themselves, but capable of the easiest refutation. The soul, it was maintained, was immortal because it was indivisible, or because of some of the functions which it performs independently of the body in which it dwells. It was easy to see that this, if it proved anything, proved too much. For how is my animal soul more indivisible than the animal soul of my dog? And what faculty have I that, after his kind, he has not? No consideration of this sort in fact proved more than the pretty conceit of our metaphysical poet,—

“Thoughts whose very sweetness yieldeth proof

That they were born for immortality.”*

There is absolutely no reason for believing, if man is compounded only of body and soul, that he continues to exist after this present life. The powers and faculties of the soul decay with the decay of the body. The same blow which ends the corporeal organism, ends also the existence of animal self-consciousness, which, as far as we know from any inductive argument, is bound up with that organism.

Even the witness of nature herself was against this twofold division of man. We do not, we cannot, account ourselves a mere higher form of the brute, as on this theory we must do. For according to it we differ from the brute only in degree of intelligence and higher bodily endowment, and not in any matter of kind at all. Whereas it is the impregnable conviction of our race, unaffected by any adverse theories of philosophers, that between the lowest intelligent man, and the highest intelligent animal, there is a gulf fixed, impassable by any mere intensification or depreciation of existing faculties.

And wherein does the difference consist, that places man on the one side of this gulf, and the brute on the other? man on the heavenward side, the brute on the earthward? Wherein, but in this, that whereas man and the brutes have body and soul in common, man has a third and higher part, which none of the brutes possesses?

And this third and higher part is, man’s SPIRIT; that portion of him in and by which he is conscious of God. No created being on this earth is conscious of God, but man.

“Of all the creatures, both on sea and land,

Only to man Thou hast made known Thy ways,

And put the pen alone into his hand,

And made him secretary of Thy praise.”*

And he is thus conscious of God, not by virtue of a higher degree of that which he possesses in common with the lower tribes of animal life, but by virtue of something which he alone is endowed with. No mere animal has a conscience. An animal may be trained, by hope of reward and fear of punishment, to simulate the possession of a conscience—to behave nearly as if conscious of right and wrong. An animal may be acted on by its affections, all situated in the animal soul, so as to lead it to consult, to be united to, even to anticipate, the wishes and feelings of another animal, or of a human master; but no animal ever knew wrong as wrong, or right as right; ever shrunk from inflicting pain on principle, or practiced self-denial except emotionally. Conscience, the source of the will that would do the good, that would not do the evil, is entirely a function of that nobler part, the spirit, which man possesses exclusively.

How do we know this? What has enabled us to detect, to describe, to reason upon, this higher portion of the threefold nature of man? I answer, We know it by revelation. Holy Scripture has revealed to us not God only, but our own nature. This its threefold division was not recognized, was not perceptible, by the Greek philosophers. Wonderfully accurate and keen as were their investigations, they could not attain to this discovery, for it was altogether above them. Neither again was it entirely made known in Old Testament days; nor could it be, in the gradual unfolding of God to man, and of man to himself. It is matter of Christian revelation. We are first led into the secrets of our own nature, when the entire redemption and renewal of that nature are disclosed.

And in this disclosure, the Christian Scriptures, as they stand entirely alone, so are they throughout consistent with themselves in asserting this triple nature of man. In fact, this consistency is kept in all the anticipatory notices in the Old Testament also. From the first description of man’s creation, to the latest notice of his state by redemption, the Scripture account of him is one and the same, and is found nowhere else. The body, created by the Almighty out of the dust of the earth; the divine nature breathed into this body already organized, by God Himself; the animal soul, common to man and the brute creation, expressed by the same term in speaking of the brutes and of man, carrying his personality, being that which he was made to be, “and man became a living soul.”

I cannot refrain from further commenting on this very important description, because the comment lies so directly in our course of making plain this matter.

Man became this living soul. This was his characteristic: this was the hue which his being took. He became this living soul, connected in its upper portion with the Divine spirit breathed into him, connected in its lower portion with the organized body, with the inlets of the senses, with the earthly and the bestial. Let us mark this well. He was not at first mainly spiritual, but mainly animal; an example, not of the spirit that gives life, but of the soul, that lives by life given. This, we are told by St. Paul in his grand reasoning on the words, was necessary: necessary, that the man should not be put first into the sphere of the spiritual, but into the sphere of the soulish, animal, nature. If we may venture to supply the link missing here, we should say it was necessary, because all God’s works have an upward progress, not a downward. Our race had to emerge, not to be submerged: from being headed by an Adam who was a living soul, to be headed by an Adam who is a life-giving spirit,—not vice versâ.

Well, then, what followed? Man being thus constituted, drawn upward, drawn downward,—himself, so to speak, standing on the platform of the animal life,—the downward influence prevailed; the solicitations of sense overcame the pleadings of the Father of his spirit. And what has been the result? Had the spirit prevailed, life would have been his characteristic: the Divine Spirit would have endowed with immortality the animal soul, and its vessel the body; but, the flesh having prevailed, death became the characteristic. The earthly body was not lifted above its natural infirmity of decay; the animal soul, with its emotions and its intelligences, passed into a living death, bereft of the leading light of the spirit, and having left only light enough to make its darkness visible. The spirit, the informing, guiding, elevating principle, shrunk up and dwindled almost to nothing; nay more, became corrupted by contact with corruption, as well as by loss of its first guiding principle. And in this shrunken and dwarfed and corrupted state the spirit, the nobler part of man, has continued; not extinguished, but subsisting, as the comparison has been aptly made, in the same way as certain rudimental organs subsist in bodies which use them not. Man has been, everywhere and in every age, animal, or, as Scripture would say, psychical,—the creature of his animal soul, not of his divine spirit; led by reason, led by imagination, led by emotion, but not led by consciousness of God. And yet, stunted and corrupted as man’s spirit was and is, it has never been extinct, nor has its better voice been utterly silenced. Even when its higher functions have been in abeyance, it has testified by the conscience. Right, because it is right, has been approved, even by men who did not practice it; wrong, as being wrong, was disapproved, even while it was being done.

But I said that conscience, in the ordinary natural man, does little more than make the darkness visible; and so it is. Even in the savage; the spark remains smoldering, but nothing more. As man rises in civilization, and in the training of the intellect, the spark brightens and spreads, but it is a spark still. It possesses no guiding light, no warming power. In Christian lands first it breaks into a flame, and begins to enlighten and cheer, because there first it is that the law of the Spirit of life sets men free from the law of sin and death; there it is that the man’s spirit is revivified and endowed with its proper growth, no longer stunted and dwarfed; is put into union with Him who is the principle of all life and all growth, and in virtue of that union becomes partaker of His prerogative, and, with Him, is waiting for all things to be put under its feet.

It is a grand and a glorious thing, this higher and nobler part of man, dwelling in perpetual sunshine; this, of which we may say, almost with the poet, that—

“Its great bright eye most silently

Up to the Throne is cast;”

looking evermore above the letter of law to its spirit; casting its bare arms, free from the fetters of precedent and human tradition, ever up into the pure blue sky; feeling for love, feeling for truth, feeling for justice:—a grand and glorious, but a wayward and a fitful thing: slumbering for centuries in nations, dormant for long years of a man’s life; but when it wakes, when it speaks, leading, at any cost, however perilous, straight into conflict, straight into solitude, straight into bereavement.

A strange thing too; for it may speak ever so low, and armies cannot silence it. Its utterances may savor of folly, or of imprudence, or of inaptitude for practical life; but they drop like seeds into the great heart of mankind: they fashion policies, they rule empires: that which was erewhile shouted as the nickname of an enthusiast, that which was just now branded upon the flesh of a martyr, shall before long glitter in gems on a scepter, and float out to the breezes as the righteous emblazonment of a realm. And a fearful and a dangerous thing it is too; for in the midst of successful iniquity, or disregarded equity, let it but lift up its voice, and brave men turn cowards; let but one note of that voice be heard from the lisping tongue of a child, and bold workers of wrong, and busy toilers for gain, and the world’s idols, and the world’s idlers, shrink and shrivel up, as if the icy north had blown upon them; because they know that a power, swifter than the telegraph, and keener than the lightning, prints all its words in that book of remembrance which the angel shall hold open when all mankind shall meet before God.

But we must not treat of men’s conscience, even in Christian countries, as being infallible, or universally enlightened. It is clear in its testimony, it is trustworthy in its verdict, only in proportion as men have become Christians. In every Christian land there are a certain number of persons, greater or less, according to the purity or corruption of its Christianity, who form, as it were, the focus of the bright light of the Christian conscience. Sometimes they are banded together, and acting on the public: but this can only be where the utterance of opinion is free. And even in such lands, the men of pure and clear Christian conscience often know not one another, and work not together. They are separated by barriers of rank, or of sect, or of other circumstance, and it is not till God’s Providence has made utterance inevitable, that it is discovered how irresistible a power was gathering in secret. Thoughts that it would take a bold man to utter on a platform to-day, may to-morrow be carried like a tide-wave over the land, and may the next day have become a confessed basis of national action. Of course, in lands where utterance is not free, the Christian conscience is repressed and borne down. But even there, it is, in the long run, repressed and borne down in vain. Like the up-bursting of the boiling granite from the central heat, it will find its way through the chinks and leaks of the thickest and tightest impost of artificial rule; or, if it cannot, it will end by up-heaving and shattering in a moment the compacted crust of ancient and prescriptive wrong.

But our immediate concern is happily not with repressive despotisms. We dwell in a land which is of all lands the freest as to this matter. The Christian conscience here may utter its voice, and act unrestricted on society. It is as thus free, and as thus acting, that we have to consider it. The winning of this its charter of freedom has been, of all others, the work which we as a people have had to do in the world. In many of the elements of a nation’s greatness, others may have surpassed us; in arts, and in arms, it would be mere vanity to vaunt ourselves as first in the world; but in this one thing we stand unapproached and unrivalled—that of all the nations, we alone have thoroughly come to understand the rights of the Christian conscience, and are in the main acting according to that our understanding.

And from the moment when our eyes begun to be opened to these rights, we among the nations have taken the lead in bringing about moral changes, and reforms in the direction of the gentler feelings of humanity, in the practice of men. We have had our seasons of torpor, nay, our seasons of apparent retrogression: but even these latter were preparing the way for advances yet to come, bringing about their own reaction in the Christian mind of the people. And in some of these periods, retrogression and progression have remarkably acted on, and prepared the way for, each other. The assertion of the right, made as it was by imperfect men, who imagined, as those who are impassioned always will do, that man’s wrath works God’s right, contained in itself elements of wrong; so that while the right was waxing strong and becoming the axiom of the nation, the wrong, even while it was being wrought, was raising for itself adversaries, and so preparing men for another assertion of the right on the other side.

We might find striking examples of that which we are asserting, in the great struggle of the seventeenth century. There can be no doubt that the Cavaliers, amidst much that was foul, and unjust, and unfaithful to God’s law, had on their side also a noble spirit of chivalrous loyalty and love of constituted rule. There can be no doubt again, that their adversaries, while none can admire their close and narrow views, and their superstitions adherence to the ill-understood letter of Scripture, yet were endowed with a grand sturdiness and unbending independence of spirit; were men who, first and best of their time, knew and valued the inner testimony of a God-fearing conscience. What has been the result? We have inherited the chivalrous loyalty of the Cavalier, we have inherited the unflinching independence of the Roundhead. The Briton is a strange, but surely a happy compound of the principle of obedience and the principle of resistance.

I might draw further illustration of these remarks from what has happened since the date last referred to. But time admonishes me to hasten onward; and besides, I am not writing in order to praise the achievements of our national conscience. I am no optimist in this matter, as will ere long be discovered. It is only that I may have ground to start from, that I state these facts—that I go on to acknowledge our sense of that which the free utterance of the Christian conscience has done for us. There is no use in denying that it has accomplished great benefits in our own times, and that it is going on even now to accomplish more and greater. It spoke, and the fetters dropped from the bondsman; it spoke, and the lifted weapons of alienated friends fell down powerless, and the vaunted code of worldly honor was torn to shreds amidst the scorn of mankind. It spoke again, and man’s ill-judged restrictions no longer denied free course to God’s provision of food for the great human family. On another dark place of our national life has its bright light long been turned. Age after age, the hosts of its army of truth have been, as it were, circling the “strong cemented walls” of the fortress of our national intolerance; year by year battlement and bastion are crumbling down, until at last the ponderous ruin shall fall, and the righteous nation which keepeth the truth shall enter in.

All this I thankfully acknowledge: but I submit that these are only partial triumphs, only flashes in the midnight, compared with what ought to he, what might be, the result of the spiritual life which is growing and bearing fruit among this great people. Whole realms of thought and action are as yet in utter darkness, as far as any illumination by the Christian conscience is concerned. And this, with the light shining in the midst of them. Look at private life, look at public morality: and what a strange disparity appears. There is, thank God, no lack in our land of the pure clear life of the spirit of man, led in the light of God’s countenance, guided by the gentle whisper of His Spirit. Thousands of British families are thus guided, thus travelling, walking on in the Spirit through temptation to victory: Christian parents, Christian lads and girls, Christian children, fearing God, and obeying God

But where, when we look abroad over public morality, shall we find an exercise of the conscience of this Christian nation, at all in proportion to its undoubted individual and family life? Shall we seek for it in commerce? Where shall we find it, to cite an example from the things of our day, in any public action taken with regard to the stupendous failures occurring through what every Christian man must call by the plain name of dishonesty? Echo may well answer, “Where?” when public walls can receive, and public assemblies applaud, studied apologies for men who have been well called “high-minded and honorable pickpockets,” men who have brought ruin on the unhappy thousands who have been simple enough to trust them. Shall we find the working of the Christian conscience in those who tell us that such evil doers “must not be blown upon,” for fear the salvage from their wreck should be lessened?

I wish we were able to say that unprincipled commercial conduct was discouraged and dying out among us. But I much fear that this is far from being the case. I fear that the number of instances is even multiplying, in which the family is upheld in opulence, and is respected and looked up to for high Christian example of charity and good works, while the head of it is increasing the gains whereon this benevolence is fed, by means which he could not justify, and dared not confess.

If we regard public conduct in another great matter of honour and trust, I fear our idea of the power of the Christian conscience among us will hardly be strengthened. It would be difficult of belief if reported in a written history, that the English legislature is continually passing enactments against the practice of bribing electors for their votes, and that a great portion of those who pass these laws deliberately and systematically violate them every time that the occasion occurs. And on the other hand it would be hardly credited that there are in almost every constituency a certain number of persons, patent to all, and distinctly defined, whose votes are known to be purchasable by money. No one presumes to justify this state of things, yet no one concerned appears really earnest in wishing to put an end to it. That there would be great difficulty in doing so, is not to be alleged in excuse. Conscience, when once awakened, does not stick at difficulties. It is only where a compromise with evil is resolved on, that their existence is put forward to palliate inaction.

But let us raise our eyes higher—from secular to religious life. Let us ask whether in the practice of the churches of this land the Christian conscience speaks clearly and is obeyed.

What is the state of things among us in England? I am asking the question not with any view of passing a criticism on existing arrangements. I take them as accomplished fact—as the basis of what I have to remark. We have in England one form of Church established, and in connection with the State. We have many other forms existing as voluntarily associated bodies; existing by recognized right of the Christian conscience. This recognition has, historically, not been arrived at without considerable difficulty, and a struggle which has lasted for ages. Though a legitimate and necessary corollary from the principles of our Reformation, it was not seen to be such by the dominant party, till the course of Providence proved too strong for the self-will of men. We began by persecuting in order to enforce conformity; we advanced to a meagre and ungracious toleration; and, notwithstanding that our nonconforming brethren have now, thank God, acquired equality of civil rights, at this point of ungracious toleration we for the most part remain still. The State has been more recognisant of, more loyal to the Christian conscience, than the Church, which ought to have been its most jealous and watchful guardian. Nothing is more strongly impressed on my mind, when I look over the religious state of England, than that we, who are members of her Established Church, have need to face the whole important question of our relations to Nonconformists, with a view to a re-adjustment, in the light of the Christian conscience, of our words and our acts respecting them. There is a very wide basis of doctrine, there is a still wider basis of Christian morality, on which we are absolutely at one. As far as those bases extend, our aim is identical. We may not be able to work together; our instruments may be different; our tastes may be incompatible. Allow the utmost force to these considerations; and the utmost force also to the consideration, that our very differences are themselves points of conscience, and that we are bound to stand up for them, and not to merge nor compromise them. Still, allowing all this, it seems to me that there is no justification for the present alienation of affection, the present virtual suspension of intercourse, the present depreciating tone and manner, which prevail on the part of English Churchmen towards Dissenters, and towards Churches which differ from ourselves in organization. That such a tone does prevail, needs, I suppose, no proof; but how far it is carried can hardly be imagined but by help of illustration. In the last number but one of a weekly Church newspaper, occurred the following sentence, forming part of a review of a work by Dr. Preuss, a Lutheran divine holding a distinguished academical office in Berlin: “His position as a member of a body of religionists without the pale of the Catholic Church, naturally places him without the range of the Church’s sympathies.” It would be difficult to say whether the insolence, or the ignorance, of this sentence be the greater, or whether both be not surpassed by its utter opposition to the whole spirit of our Blessed Lord and his Apostles. The confession implied in the words “without the sympathies of the Church” is, I need hardly say, a sign that he who makes it has yet to learn his first lesson in the nature and attributes of that Church of Christ of which he speaks so flippantly. If her sympathies be not with all whom Christ died to save, she has deserted the office to which he appointed her—that of being His body, and the habitation of His Spirit.*

There lies at the root of all this arrogance a most mischievous, but I grieve to say a widely prevalent fallacy. We of the Church of England have absolutely no right to assume our own form of church government to be the only lawful one, and to look askance upon other forms, whether in England or elsewhere. We have not this right, because we distinctly proclaim, as to all things required of necessity to be believed, an appeal to Holy Scripture; and in Scripture as much, or as little, is found for one form as for another. If depreciation of Nonconformists is excused on the ground of our possessing superior means of education and endowment, then the plea itself involves a violation of the dictates of the Christian conscience; for, if the fact be as stated, it is mainly owing to our having excluded our brethren from the national advantages which we ourselves possess; and it is high time that such exclusion should come to an end.

We have, I conceive, a curious example of the perversion of conscience in the English Church, in the fact that a large and increasing party of her members are at this time agitating for union and intercommunion with the Roman and Eastern Churches, from both of which we are separated by important doctrinal differences—that this desire for union is justified by them on the most solemn grounds, as furnished by the words of our Lord’s own intercessory prayer, and yet that no mention whatever is made of any desire for union, on the basis of mutual allowance of differences, with our Christian brethren in the British islands.

I have believed it not out of place to treat of these matters in Scotland, because they affect us all, Churchmen and others, alike. It is impossible, with the present rapid transmission of knowledge by the press, but that such movements as are now going on in the Church of England should excite emotions adverse or favorable in every intelligent mind: as it is also impossible but that the effects of any deadening or awakening of the Christian conscience in the Church of England should be felt, for evil or for good, among other religious bodies also.

Being persuaded of this, I go on to notice one more fact which serves, in my opinion, to show anything but a healthy state of the ecclesiastical conscience among ourselves. It is, that in connection with the High Church movement of the last thirty years, there has sprung up, and has now become widely prevalent, a sort of dealing with words which I know not how to characterize except, again, by the plain epithet “dishonest.” The shortest description of this method is, that it consists in interpreting rules and formularies so as to suit a pre-arranged theory, not in accordance with fair dealing and common sense. In many instances of this which might be given, the data whereby to arrive at the true meaning of the words in question were abundant, and sufficient for all men’s common sense: it was well known what the framers of the words wished to secure, and what they wished to prevent: to any ordinary ear, their words plainly expressed both; but because those words admit of some far-off and undreamt-of sense, we are called upon to believe that this, and not the meaning which grammar and history alike attach to them, is to be received by us. Simply for the sake of illustrating my meaning, I quote a crucial instance. The framers of the Articles of the Church of England had said that “the Romish doctrine concerning purgatory was a fond, vainly invented thing.” No man in his senses need be told that their intention was to condemn the doctrine altogether, and that the epithet “Romish” was prefixed in order to identify the doctrine condemned with that commonly known in this country. Not so, said our special pleaders; we will take the words differently: it is the Romish doctrine, and no other, which is here stigmatized: therefore if we can find any other doctrine about purgatory which is not Romish, that is not here condemned: and by not being condemned, is left open for English Churchmen to hold. As if a man should say that, because the second commandment runs, “Thou shalt not make to thyself any graven image,” if a man did not make a graven image to himself, but got another man to make it for him, it would be no breach of the commandment. This, which I have quoted, was one of the earliest specimens of the non-conscientious mode of arguing; it occurred in the famous Tract No. 90 of the ‘Tracts for the Times.’ But it is only a fair specimen of the interpretations ever since, and now, put forth in abundance by the same party. As far as regards the interpretations themselves, they might safely be left to the contempt of mankind. The only importance attaching to them is, that they form part of the recognised tactics unblushingly avowed by a powerful body of learned and able men in our land: and I ask whether this can be the case, without a wide-spreading and baleful effect on the Christian conscience of the realm? When I see the tortuous and disingenuous advances of the party which adopts these practices, and at the same time contemplate the paralysis of the commercial conscience already noticed, together with those other indications that we know the good and follow the worse, I cannot help feeling that some among us who think that they are doing God’s work, and the Church’s work, have, and will have, more to answer for than they suspect.

There is another matter, one on which the Christian conscience of all the churches in our realm needs awakening. I mean the duty of bringing our Authorised Version of the Holy Scriptures into closer proximity to the text in which those Scriptures were written. This has become a matter of very serious import. It is now well known to most persons of any information and intelligence, that there are very many passages in which our version either represents a text which is not the genuine one, or misrepresents that genuine text in rendering it. We are reading and preaching on, as the word of God, sayings which are demonstrably no part of that word: we are giving to its texts meanings which any scholar can see they will not bear. We of the Church of England are using two different versions of the Book of Psalms, in one of which are some verses that yield no assignable sense in themselves, and some, the sense of which flatly contradicts the sense of the corresponding verses in the other version.* And yet both these versions, the one asserting, the other denying, the same fact, are read and preached from indifferently.

I know it is the custom to depreciate and minimize the importance of these variations and errors. And this is one of the very things of which I complain. I never saw this method of argument followed without very great unfairness. Not to mention that in the esteem of those who set the highest possible value on Scripture, no assignable deviation from its actual meaning ought to be a trifle,—it is distinctly not the fact, that the variations and errors are of slight account. In very many parts of St. Paul’s Epistles, the inattention, on the part of our translators, to the force of words and the accuracy of constructions, has rendered the Apostle’s argument unintelligible to English readers. And the first duty of a faithful expositor is to assure his hearers, on his own authority, that St. Paul does not say what they read in their Bibles, nor mean what those English words would appear to convey.

Nor can I regard as any more conscientious the miserable argument against touching the Authorized Version, which is often raised on the ground of expediency. There is danger, we are told, in unsettling the minds of those who simply rely on their English Bibles as the word of God. I am amazed at hearing this plea from lips which frequently utter it. For what abuse, for what dereliction of unwelcome duty, may it not be made an apology? And even if we descend to its own cowardly level, and begin to weigh expediencies, which of the two, think you, is the greater danger—manfully to meet the present unsatisfactory state of things by an authorized revision, or to allow a text which we vaunt as the word of God to be continually either held back because it will not bear examination, or brought into doubt and contempt by being disavowed from our pulpits?

And the matter is one not presenting any insuperable difficulty. Let a Royal Commission (for I see no other way of gaining for the new version the same authority as the old possesses)—let a Royal Commission call together the most capable men out of all reformed denominations, and set them on this work, and (I speak from having been engaged in it with others of differing views and habits of mind) they will be astonished how soon practical terms of agreement will be arranged, and a basis of operations settled. There are few things that I hope and pray for so much as that He who has men’s hearts in His hand, would cause the conscience of His Churches to awaken to this their bounden duty. But alas, while I hope and pray, there are few things which I less expect. There seems to have settled down on our Churches such a spirit of secularity and timidity, especially with regard to the treatment of Scripture, that I cannot see the faintest prospect of such a work being undertaken in our time.

And now, in drawing towards a close, I must say something of the Christian conscience in individuals. Let us remember that, the higher and more delicate the organ, the more liable it is to be strained or deranged. And the more so, beyond doubt, if it happen to have been thoroughly put out of order and action before. Now both these are the case with the Christian conscience. It is a limb which has but newly come out of paralysis, but it is a limb which has our whole weight to sustain, and of which the finest and most delicate work is required. No wonder if it be soon enfeebled, soon strained and distorted. It needs training for its work; it needs careful tending, and strict watching. We are accountable for the healthiness of our consciences, and have no right to play tricks with, or to neglect them. We are far too apt to forget that conscience is not a vague, ever-shifting thing, hut is judged by the fixed rule of God’s revealed will. One man’s conscience, he supposes, leads him to persecution; another man’s conscience leads him to charity. In this extreme case, perhaps, few of us would maintain that both were right: but in cases quite as plain if fairly regarded, we do continually maintain this. We suffer ourselves quite to forget that saying of Scripture, “There is a way which seemeth right unto a man, but the end thereof are the ways of death.” And even while we are quoting and urging this fact, we frequently behave as if we thought men’s consciences, and especially our own, infallible. It must be plain to all that the general practical issue of this last consideration ranges very wide. But so far as it affects us individually, its lesson is soon stated. And that lesson is, self-distrust, and its two great fruits, modesty and charity. We are very apt to be over confident in matters of conscience. We have been brought up to think this or that; or, we have for ourselves, independently of our bringing up, arrived at this or that conclusion. Therefore, we say—and the young mind is especially apt to say it—therefore my view is right, and I will make it matter of conscience, and nothing on earth shall stir me from it. It is a sore temptation, and a grievous hindrance of usefulness, this starting in life with decided opinions. Show me a young man whose views and maxims are all cut and dried, and I will show you one whose years of strength will be spent, at the best, in getting rid bit by bit of his sham wisdom; who will not be ready for Providence’s work, till his more modest compeers have half done their allotment of it. Conscience has its duties as well as its rights; and its first duty is towards itself. It is set to rule us, not despotically, but constitutionally; not by strong arbitrary commands, but by mature and well-grounded decisions, given according to the laws of our nature, and the leadings of Revelation and Providence. It is just as much trifling with conscience to obey its fitful whispers when it grumbles about trifles, as it is to disregard its voice when it warns us in more serious matters. Its healthiest discipline is to be found in the exercise of plain manly common sense.

And as this is true of all times, so is it especially of our time. In many cases our views of men and things are too artificial. I was struck the other day with the parting word of one of the excellent American bishops who have been with us this autumn. My friend is what is called a missionary bishop—one whose work it is to travel for months over the wilds of Arkansas, and set up prayer and preaching where neither was ever heard before. He had been some days my guest, and as we walked to the train which was to take him away, he said, “I’ll tell you what would do you a vast deal of good, and that’s two thousand miles with me in my buggy. You here are too civilized by half; you want some good honest barbarism put into you, and you would get along a vast deal better.”

Good honest barbarism: that is, I suppose, a way of looking at things themselves direct, and not through the mist of eight centuries of institutions. Well, I believe we do want some of this kind of barbarism; only we can’t get it as barbarism; we can’t put back the historical clock, nor can we make the stream of Providence run upwards to its source. We must get at the result by simple honesty and single purpose; by a casting off of timidity and timeserving, and being bold for truth; by ourselves going back, in every social and religious question, past the mere runnel-pipes of sect and precedent, up to the fountain-heads in God’s everlasting hills.

I must apologize for having dwelt so much on the more serious, and I fear less generally interesting, portions of my subject. That subject might have been taken in various social aspects, and illustrated by incidents of our daily life. I might have brought before my readers the constant and admitted petty breaches of the rule of conscience, in which we live, and by which most of us suffer. Which of us, if he thought honestly over the clay, could go to bed at night quite clear of having dealt hardly with some neighbor’s reputation, of having exaggerated some fault of a friend, or extenuated some fault of his own?

We might also have noticed faults which we call by the somewhat milder epithet “unconscionable;” and among them, the inroads on time and on good nature daily and relentlessly perpetrated by average men and women:—the case of the “won’t detain you a moment” man, who is sure to occupy half your morning; the platform speaker, whose “one word more and I have done,” is the sure prelude to a dreary half hour of incoherent platitudes; the preacher who, though he knows that half an hour would be better for his people, for himself, and for his subject, yet somehow always gives them three-quarters. We might have satirized those numerous little compromises with the thing that is not, which are spread thick over our habits of visiting and greeting one another; those lies to which I can only concede the epithet “white,” inasmuch as they certainly are unblushing. We might have dwelt, one by one, on those pious frauds and one-sided representations prevalent among our religious coteries, whereby the same honest zeal, if it happens to be with us, is made out to be angelic, if against us, diabolic.

All these, and many other of our weaknesses and inconsistencies, would have to be touched on in any full treatment of my present subject. I thought it best to put that subject before my hearers in what I believed to be its true position, to give them its definitions and laws, and to illustrate them by a few of the graver examples furnished by passing things.

Whether what I have spoken be approved or disapproved, if it shall have excited thought and inquiry on so serious a matter, my object will have been gained.

* Wordsworth—‘sonnet in King’s College Chapel’.

* Dryden—‘Annus Mirabilis.’

* An attempt was made in a subsequent number of the paper to explain away the words here stigmatised. Unsuccessful as it was, it testified at least to a wholesome dread of Christian public opinion on the part of the writer.

* As an example of the former kind: can any acuteness extract sense from Ps. 58:8 in the Prayer-book version? As an example of the latter, compare Ps. 105:28 in the two versions.

Alford, H. (1869). Essays and Addresses: Chiefly on Church Subjects (pp. 45–79). Strahan & Co. (Public Domain)