LECTURE III.
I ENDED my last discourse, gentlemen, with these words: — ** Deal with Christianity as you deal with Theism." I wish to remind you of the same again to-day, and to show you the reasonableness of it, and add a few words to show you the reasons why such acts of the Almighty as appear rather startling to some men are so frequently recorded in the Old Testament.
It is, then, I say, most reasonable on your part, and is your bounden duty, to deal with Christianity as you deal with Theism.
You believe in the Author of nature, and believe that He is Almighty, Most Holy, Most Just, Most Merciful, &c. And you are right in believing so. It may be very difficult for any of us to draw out in words reasons for this our belief and set them forth according to the laws of logical demonstration. But though we may be incapable (and certainly the mass of men are incapable) thus to draw out in words reasons for this our belief, yet we are convinced in our hearts that it is right. Being thus convinced in our hearts, though ten thousand facts in nature are brought before us as presenting great difficulties^ we are not at all moved. For we find no difficulty in believing that He who has made this immense universe, being so great, and His thoughts and counsels being so far above our conception, there may be reasons fully to justify all His ways, and yet we may be ignorant of them.
A proud logician, however, like John Stuart Mill, will not believe so, as I showed you in my last discourse. It requires humility and the principle of faith. But you believe so because you are not at present wanting in humility and faith towards the Author of nature.
But now I say that to be consistent both in your reasoning as well as in the exercise of humiHty and faith towards Almighty God, you ought to deal in the same way with His revelation, i;liat is, Christianity. God has given us sufficient proofs to show that Christianity is from God. And this fact I wish jou to notice carefully, and to keep always in your mind. For it is then when we know that we are dealing with the things of Ood that we ought to be very distrustful about our own j udgment, and be ready, submitting our understanding to Him, to «,ccept them in humility and faith, knowing the nothingness of our wisdom and knowledge compared with the wisdom, knowledge and counsels of the Almighty. And this is my answer to a man that might say to me that if you require others to exercise humility and faith towards Christianity, why do you not do so towards the Vedas or the Bhagavata, or other books of other religions, but freely criticise their teaching? I would answer such a man that God Almighty has not given us any reasons to make us feel that in dealing with the contents of the Vedas or the Bhagavata we are dealing with the things of God. Now if you ask what those proofs are which show that Christianity is from God, I answer, that they are those which are called the internal and external evidences of Christianity. But I must tell you here also that you must deal with the proofs of Christianity in the same way as you deal with the proofs of Theism. Many a proud logician, who, as a punishment for his pride and for his too great reliance on his own reason, has been deprived of those natural instincts, and that intuitive sense of divine truths, which enable men to believe in those truths; many a logician, I say, of this description will tell you, as John Stuart Mill does tell us in his essay on Theism, that though there are some arguments in favour of the idea that this world is arranged by an intelligent Being, yet they do not come up to the force of a proof, and as to the proofs for the omnipotence and other moral attributes of God, there is ** a total blank/^ If, then, you would deal in the same way and in the same spirit with the proofs of Christianity, I should not wonder to hear you say that they do not convince you.
But if one will take great care to remove from his mind those things which blind our eyes to discern the truth, namely, pride, prejudice, fear of men, &c., and will not allow that instinct in human nature to be stifled which draws men to truth whenever it is clearly presented to them, though they may not be able to draw out in words all its grounds and set them in order before others according to the laws of logical demonstration, if, I say, one will not allow that instinct to be stifled by a wanton and hard-hearted habit of unbelief and will examine the question of Christianity, he will be impressed in his inmost soul that it comes from God.
Now I do not profess to be able to set forth in words all the grounds upon which a Christianas faith is built, and I think no one is able to do so, yet some portions of them can be shown, and I have tried to set before you one great proof for Christianity in my first address, by showing that it is only from the light of Christianity that man can learn true religion in its purity. Of course in order to feel the full force of this argu-» ment you must cast your glance over the history of religions-, which have appeared in the world, without borrowing any light from Christianity, and you must realize the great weakness and defects that are in the understanding of man. So that without coming in contact with Chi'istianity, whenever man attempts to. frame and teach a religion he is sure to go astray and fall intoall sorts of erroneous and absurd notions about religious, truths. And this fact I tried to prove in my first discourse.. If you will fully realize it and call to your mind in what gross, and miserable darkness we were groping, and into what precious light Christianity has brought us, and that nothing but Christianity could have brought us into this light, since it is impossible that any system invented by men could have done it; if, I say, you will think of, and realize, these things, they alone wUl appear sufficient to prove that Christianity is the revelation of God. " In Him was life/' says St. John, " and the life was the light of men, and the light shineth in darkness, and the darkness comprehended it not/' " No one hath seen God at anytime," says the same Evangelist, "the Only Begotten Son which is in the bosom of the Father, He hath declared Him.'* And you cannot say to me that those acts which the Old Testament ascribes to God, and which appear to us contrary to the justice and goodness of God, are the very things which go to prove that Christianity also teaches us wrong notions about God, and therefore does not teach us pure religion. You cannot say this, I say, because I showed you in my last discourse that those acts are of the same kind as those which we see Almighty God always doing in His providence. The apparent severity, indiscriminateness, and the apparent capriciousness in God's judgments recorded in the Old Testament are seen on a far larger scale and in a far higher degree and in a far more startling character in God's providence. But a pious mind never can entertain the notion that these acts of God are really unjust or capricious or cruel. A man could say so if he could be sure that he knows all their reasons and that there was none to justify them. But what man, unless his reason is depraved by atheistical pride, could say that he knows all the mysteries of Providence, and all the reasons which move the Almighty to do what He does in heaven above or on the earth below?
You must consider that there are certain actions which in themselves can neither be pronounced just or unjust, but according to the motives by which they are done. To take away a man's life is a murder when it is done without reason or out of revenge. But when a man is hung, by the order of a government, for doing some great crime, it is considered an act of justice. Again, to give even a little pain to any creature out of malice is sin, but when a surgeon performs an operation upon a man's diseased limb, though he may give him the severest pain, it is thought" an act of mercy to him. Suppose a very ignorant man, who has never heard of the benefits of surgical operations, were to see a surgeon performing some most painful operation upon a man, would he not call him a most cruel monster? Men of piety, then, find no difficulty in believing that they and their knowledge are less than nothing compared with the knowledge of God, and that His plans and reasons, in conducting the course of His creation, are too deep and too mysterious for them to pass any judgment on them, and that there must be good reasons to justify all His ways, but that they do not and cannot know them. And in the same way you may be quite sure that similar acts, ascribed.to God in the
Bible, can never in the least vitiate the notions which Christianity teaches about God's goodness, justice, holiness, &c.
And I am thankful to say, gentlemen, that I feel quite confident that I shall be able to convince you fully of the truth of this assertion. John Stuart Mill, after charging God -with all sorts of moral defects, thus writes, with reference to those who believe in and worship God, " It is impossible,^^ he says, '' that any one who habitually thinks, and who is unable to blunt his inquii'ing intellect by sophistry, should be able without misgiving to go on ascribing absolute perfection to the Author and Ruler of so clumsily made and capriciously governed a creation as this planet and the life of its inhabitants. The adoration of such a Being cannot be with the whole heart unless the heart is first considerably sophisticated. The worship must either be greatly overclouded by doubt, and occasionally quite darkened by it, or the moral sentiments must sink to the low level of the ordinances of nature: the worshipper must learn to think blind partiality, atrocious cruelty, and reckless injustice, not blemishes in an object of worship, since all these abound to excess in the commonest phenomena of nature." Now you know that all this is false. You know that neither you nor the great leaders of Brahmism in Bengal, Baboo Kesava Chandra Sen and others, have any '^misgiving" whatever about the moral perfection of God whom they worship, on account of many startling facts in His providence. You will not believe that the " adoration " which they pay to God is " not with the whole heart,^' as Mill imagined; you will not acknowledge that their worship is " either greatly overclouded by doubt," or is '' occasionally quite darkened by it." You will not believe that the worship of the God of nature makes a man's " moral sense sink to a low level," and leads men to " think blind partiality, atrocious cruelty, and reckless injustice to be no blemishes in an object of worship," because a man like Mill fancies that " these abound to excess in the commonest phenomena of nature."
If so, then I will never consider you unprejudiced and impartial judges if you will not also acknowledge that those acts of
God recorded in His Word, similar to those in His providence in all those points in which they appear to you objectionable, do not in the least vitiate our notions about the goodness, mercy, justice, and holiness of God.
Now although it is not for us. His creatures, to ask for reasons for what the Almighty does, yet it is good to be acquainted with them where we may. I will therefore suggest to you what appears to me to be the reason why in the history of the Old Testament such acts of God are so frequently mentioned which appear so severe and startling.
In order then to know this reason, you must know the object of the Old Testament and of its history, that is, of that particular providence of God which He manifested in the history of Israel and of those nations with whom Israel came in contact. That object was to ti'ain up a nation in the knowledge of true religion and to prepare them for the reception of the perfect revelation of God, that is, Christianity. Again, you must notice this particularly, that the chief office of the Old Testament was to set forth the Law of God, but the chief office of the New Testament is to set forth the Gospel, that is, the good tidings of salvation, offered to sinful man, by grace, though there is Gospel in the Old Testament and also Law in the New, for the Law and the Gospel cannot be separated from each other. But man must first be convinced, by law, of his sinfulness and weakness, and of the claim of Divine justice upon him, before he can either appreciate the Gospel or be benefitted by it. Now you must understand what the state of the world was when God called Abraham. The whole world was sunk in dense darkness of heathenism. The light of that revelation which God fii'st gave to the first man, and which was handed down by tradition from father to son for a few generations, became almost extinct from the face of the earth. Men forgot the true religion, and first began to worship the sun and the moon and the elements, as our own forefathers did, at the time of the Vedas, and afterwards began to worship idols. God Almighty purposed to bring men again out of this darkness into the light of true religion. He first called Abraham and promised to give him a numerous posterity and to establish them in the land of Canaan. It was His purpose to teach them the true religion, first in an elementary and imperfect form as Judaism was, and afterwards in its perfect form, which is Christianity, when they are prepared to receive it, and then afterwards, through them, to spread it through the whole world. And this God intimated to Abraham when he said to him, " In thy seed shall all the nations of the earth be blessed." Now these descendants of Abraham, the Israelites, taken out of the rest of the world, which was sunk in dense darkness of ignorance, were themselves like little children, and they needed a long training and an instruction like that given to children. Hence you see that to teach them the necessity of holiness and moral purity God wished to exercise them in the observance of a ceremonial law which taught them to be strict in keeping themselves pure from certain outward things which they were told to consider as polluting. Thus God trained them up by outward and earthly figures and types to understand things spiritual and heavenly. There was, however, another object why God gave such a law to Israel which was full of types and figures of the spiritual realities which were to be revealed by the Gospel, and not only did He give them such a law, but by a particular Providence He made even persons and events in the history of Israel to be typical of those realities. It was not only to train up their minds for the knowledge of those realities and to impress them deeply on their minds as already said, but God also had this other object, namely, to make the law and the whole Old Testament history a grand prophecy, pre-announcing by those typical ceremonies, events, and persons, the great mysteries and the glorious realities about Christ and His Kingdom, which is His Holy Catholic Church. And so if you will read the Gospels, and the epistles of S. Paul, and the expositions of the Holy Fathers and Doctors of the Church, you will see that the Law of Moses, the Psalms, the Prophets, and the whole history of the Old Testament, are full of figures and types of the truths which were to be fully revealed through the Gospel.
Thus S. Paul in his Epistles to the Galatians, after alluding to the history of the births of Isaac and Ishmael, says, " which things are an allegory, " and then explains how they typified the spiritual realities of the kingdom of God, that is, Christianity. And if you will carefully examine this subject, you will see how wonderfully it is true. Thus what was the bondage of the children of Israel in Egypt, but a type of the bondage of the whole of mankind under sin and Satan, Pharaoh being the great type of the Prince of darkness? And what were their deliverance from the Egyptian bondage, and their slaying the paschal lamb and marking the two side posts and the upper door posts of their houses with its blood; and God passing by their houses thus marked by the blood, and their escaping from the punishment wherewith God punished the whole land of Egypt?-^ What were these but the types of the deliverance of men from sin and Satan, and from the punishment which is hanging upon the whole world on account of sin, through the atonement which Christ was to make by shedding His own blood on the cross, who is called, in Scripture, " The Lamb of God that taketh away the sins of the world? "
That marking of the houses by the Israelites by the blood of the lamb was especially a type of a Christian's partaking of the virtue of the atonement of Christ, which He made by shedding His own Blood upon the cross. So again, when the Israelites were in the wilderness and they were dying from the poison of serpents sent among them on account of their transgressions, God commanded Moses to put a brasen serpent on a pole, and said that whoever will look upon it will be cured of the effect of that poison. Now Jesus Christ Himself declares in the Gospel according to S. John that it was a type of Him. For He says, " As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have eternal life." Now you know that in the Old Testament Satan is said to have tempted man in the form of a serpent and caused him to fall into sin. He is also called the Old Serpent in the New Testament. The serpents, then, by which the Israelites were bitten in the wilder- ness were true types of Satan, and their poison was a type of sin, which, he has injected, as it were, into the whole human race, and by which mankind are perishing. But the brasen serpent which Moses put on a pole was a type of Jesus Christ, lifted up on the cross. For as Satan, symbolized by a serpent, is under the curse of God on account of sin, so Jesus, though sinless in Himself, being made in the likeness of sinful flesh> " was made a curse for us," as S. Paul says. And " as a brasen serpent," says a Father of the Church, " was like a serpent, but had not the venom of a serpent, so the only begotten Son of God took our flesh, but without spot of sin." Looking upon Him, lifted up upon the cross, men are saved from sin.
I cannot however now go through the whole history of the Old Testament and explain the typical nature of everything in it as set forth in the writings of the deepest exponents of God's Word, the ancient Catholic Fathers of the Church, but I will just tell you briefly that the passage of the Israelites through the Red Sea was a type of Christian Baptism, as S. Paul says in his first Epistle to the Corinthians; and their feeding upon manna in the wilderness and their drinking of the water which gushed out of the rock, were most clear types of the other great Sacrament of the Church. Again, the wandering of the Israelites in the wilderness for forty years was a type of Christians wandering in this world of their pilgrimage, and of trials and temptations; and their passing through the Jordon with dry feet was a type of Christians passing through death unhurt; and their going into Canaan, which is called in Scripture, " My [i.e. God's] rest," was a type of the Christians entering into heaven, the eternal rest of God. • So you see that all the great truths of Christianity and the reahties of the invisible world were as it were acted before the eyes of men by means of types or certain typical events brought to pass by the will or command of God. To sum up what I have said, the chief object of the Old Testament was to set forth the law of God in order to prepare men to receive the Gospel. Now what is the work of the law with sinful man? To show him his sinfulness, weakness, and helplessness, to make him feel that he deserves punishment, and to impress upon his mind deeply the dreadful nature of the punishment which he deserves, so that on the one hand he might dread sin, and on the other hand renounce all reliance on his own supposed goodness and strength, and flee for mercy to God. But man, who is hardened by sin, cannot easily be impressed with these things. He must be taught not only by words, but by making him experience also, in some measure, by temporal judgments, the bitter fruits of sin. Hence those severe judgments which are so frequently mentioned in the Old Testament. Those severe temporal judgments were, moreover, types and figures of that punishment which hardened impenitent sinners will receive hereafter, and which Christianity has clearly revealed.
Since, then, the business of the law is to impress these things upon sinful man, and the object of the Old Testament and of the whole course of that special providence of God which Ho manifested in the history of Israel, was to set forth the terrors of the law, it is in keeping with that object that you find in the Old Testament, beginning from the history of the fiood, and » so through the whole course of its history, frequent occurrence of severe judgments inflicted by God on sinners; and the great prophets of God, like Samuel, Elijah, and Elisha becoming the chosen instruments for the execution of many terrible judgments. You must remember that as God^s mercy is great, so His holiness is also great. As the blessings that come from His mercy are great, so it is no matter of surprise that the punishments too which come from the infinite justice of God upon sinners who sin against God's infinite holiness should be great and terrible beyond our conception. And after all the real punishment of sin is never given here. That punishment is given in the next world, and though, I know, you object to the doctrine of the eternity of that punishment, yet you ought at least to acknowledge that the punishment which God's infinite justice demands must bo very great, so great that all the sufferings of this life must be as nothing when compared with it. Therefore those temporal judgments of God which come upon men in this life are not properly judgments but only types of it, and are often even mercies, for they are often meant to turn sinners from their sinful course. And so if any sinners would turn from sin by their means and so escape the punishment of the next world, would they not be mei'cies to them?
However, if any are not satisfied with these remarks, I would then remind them that I have completely removed all objections to such acts of God, or of his servants done by the command of God, recorded in the Old Testament, which appear to them too severe and even cruel, and to which, therefore, they raise objections. I say I have completely removed all objections to such acts themselves by reminding them that God Almighty is constantly doing such acts before our eyes in His providence which might, according to the language of such objectors, be called infinitely more severe and cruel and unjust, aud which are called so by men void of piety. Since, then, God does these acts in His Providence, no one has a shadow of reason to say that God would not do such acts or would not command Samuel or Elijah or any others to do such acts as are recorded in His Word. No one, therefore, has the slightest reason to say anything against these acts. All that I wanted to do was simply to show that it was in keeping with the character of the Old Testament, which is chiefly to manifest the majesty of the law of God, that it sets forth so prominently the terror of the law of God and the severity of punishment which guilty sinners draw down upon themselves.
But you must not suppose from what has been said that there are no revelations of God's mercy and graciousness in the Old Testament. O no; it would be a great mistake to think so. In the very Law, in the 34th chapter of Exodus, when God showed His glory to Moses, he proclaimed Himself in the following words, " The Lord, the Lord God, merciful and gracious, longsufiering, and abundant in goodness and truth, keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin." I cannot here quote the innumerable passages from the Law, the Psalms, and the Prophets, which set forth the abundance of
God's goodness and graciousness. Yes, there is sufl&cient and more than sufficient revelation of God's graciousness in the Old Testament for those humble minded and pious souls who lived under it, but, as I said, its principal object seems to be to set forth the Law and its severity and terrors in order to bring hardened sinners to the sense of their sins and of the severity of God's j ustice.
And likewise even the New Testament, while its principal office is to manifest God's amazing love and free grace to sinners, does sometimes set before us the terror of God's law and justice too. So in the Acts of the Apostles, that history which sets forth the love, the tenderness, the meekness, and the patience of Christ manifested, marvellously, in the lives and acts and sufferings of the Apostles and martyrs, there is found the manifestation of the rigour of God's justice in the instant death of Ananias and Sapphira for telling a single lie before the Apostle St. Peter. Thus, as I said before, there is Law in the New Testament, and there is Gospel in the Old also. But to set forth the Law is the chief office of the Old, and to set forth the Gospel the chief office of the New Testament. And you see this characteristic difference in the very initiatory Sacraments of the Old and New Testaments.
The very initiatory rite of the Old Testament is circumcision, in which there is a shedding of blood; and that of the New Testament, baptism, i.e. washing with water, an element whose property is to cleanse, refresh, and revive. Again, the principal worship of the Old Testament consisted in the sacrifices of animals, always reminding the worshipper of the death which he himself deserved from the justice of God, though at the same time preaching to an humble minded believer the gospel of God's mercy, by pointing to the future sacrifice of the Lamb of God for the sins of the whole world. For I said above that all things in the Old Testament were figures and types of the things which were to be revealed by Christianity, and so all the animal sacrifices of the Old Testament were types exhibiting, in various ways, the various aspects of the one future sacrifice which the Son of God was to offer Himself on the altar of the cross.
And let not this also surprise you that Almighty God should command the sacrifices of animals. For you must recollect that it is by His own will and appointment that millions and millions of animals daily die. It is a difficulty connected with Theism as much as with Revelation why animals which are incapable of committing any moral fault should suffer even the least pain or should die. It is however a fact that God Almighty does make them too sharers in the miseries of man^ His rational and guilty creature, and it is His will and appointment that they should die, and, if left to themselves, die mostly with pain and suffering. There is then nothing incredible that God, commanding men to offer them as sacrifices, should make their death subservient for the spiritual advantage of men. His highest creatures on earth, for whose use animals and all other things evidently seem to have been intended. And in this way the fate of animals is not made more hard but rather far more easy. For according to the appointment of God in nature the animals would die if not sacrificed, but die after much suffering and pain, whereas when they are sacrificed they die an easy and almost painless death.
While, however, the principal worship of the Old Testament consisted in the sacrifices of animals, the principal worship of the Catholic Church consists in that unbloody sacrifice of the Holy Eucharist in which we plead before the Eternal Father the merits of the great sacrifice offered on the Cross for the whole world once for all, and in which the church offers thanks and praise to the Almighty Father for His wondrous and unspeakable love in giving His only Begotten Son for our Salvation and for all the graces and gifts springing from that love; for which reason this sacrifice, this great ^ of the the Catholic Church, is called Eucharist, and a " sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving."
There is also a remarkable incident related in the gospel of St. Luke, that when once Jesus Christ, in His journey to Jerusalem, passed through a village of Samaria and the Samaritans did not receive him, his two zealous disciples, James and John, not bearing this indignity offered to their Master, asked him if they might pray for fire to he sent down from heaven to burn the village of such wicked men, as the great prophet Elijah had done before, and punished the godless servants of the godless king of Israel, Ahaziah. But Jesus Christ, it is said, "rebuked them, and said, ye know not what manner of spirit ye are of. For the Son of man is not come to destroy men's lives but to save them," that is to say, you do not know the nature of the gospel dispensation whose minister I am^ and whose minister I intend to make you, and you do not exhibit the spirit befitting this dispensation. For it is a dispensation of mercy, and its ofl&ce is to proclaim salvation to sinners and not punishment. Whereas those holy men of God like Elijah and others were ministers of a dispensation in which it pleased the Almighty to manifest the majesty of His law, and the judgments upon those who transgressed that law, though those judgments were, let it be remembered, only of this world, and therefore, while calculated to awaken sinners, by pointing out to them the terrible consequences of sin, yet did not really hurt the souls of such as would repent and turn to God, but were rather means of purifying them, as all sufierings of this world are, and so of making them partakers of the true and everlasting happiness hereafter. Those holy men of God, then, like Samuel, Elijah, and Elisha, being minsters of such a dispensation, though in themselves full of love, and tender-hearted, as is clear from other parts of their history, were obliged to execute the commands of the Almighty, their King, and so became ministers of His judgments. And that you may be sure that these holy men were really tender-hearted, though they executed the terrible judgments of God, I will adduce one instance to show it. It is stated in the first book of kings that in order to punish the Israelites for their wickedness, God commanded Elijah to " anoint Hazael to be King over Syria.'' This was done by Elijah, not in his person, but through his disciple, the great prophet Elisha, who went to Damascus for that very purpose. But when Hazael came to him, and Elisha saw him, it is said, that he settled his countenance upon Hazael stedfastly and wept. When Hazael asked him
" Why weepeth my lord, " Elisha answered, saying, «' I know the evil that thou wilt do unto the children of Israel; their strongholds wilt thou set on fire, and their young men wilt thou slay with the sword, and wilt dash their children, and rip up their women with child."
I hope, gentlemen, these remarks about the peculiar nature of the Old Testament dispensation will have explained to you why we find in it so frequently the terrible judgments of God sent down upon individuals or nations, like which, however, and even far more severe and terrible we constantly see Almighty God sending in His ordinary providence also. And believe me that the lessons which that part of God^s word, namely, the Old Testament, imparts were not only needful for men of that age, but they are as needful for us also. And whoever will read it even now, not in the spirit of hard-hearted impiety^ like that of John Stuart Mill, proudly sitting in judgment on the acts of Almighty God, but in the spirit of profound humility, acknowledging the utter nothingness of his own understanding and knowledge compared with the incomprehensible wisdom and deep counsels of the most High, with which He does all things in heaven and in earth to accomplish His own wise, j ost, and merciful purposes; whoever, I say, will read in this spirit the Old Testament, he will find by experience what a new sense it gives him of God's awful holiness and justice, and of the heinousness and hatefulness of sin in God's sight, and oi the necessity of our becoming holy if we wish to be His, a sense which no religion or philosophical system invented by men, can ever impart.