But there is another class, quite different from either, to which this sudden renunciation of a spiritual birthright will give surprise, perplexity, and pain,- surprise, because they have associated the name Christian only with what is generous, pure, and free; perplexity, because it starts the question whether they are logically honest in their own profession of Christian fellowship, which means to them the dearest privilege of their lives; and pain, because it puts a visible parting and a line of antagonism among those to whom they are about equally drawn in respect and mental sympathy. On one hand, if Christianity does not include that largeness and freedom of thought, if it does not mean that pure and high ideal of the religious life, if it is true that we cannot have a Type without making it a Dogma, or a brotherhood without a creed, what value remains to the name, or what sweetness to the fellowship, that they should continue to cherish it? On the other hand, the world of mere intellectual freedom and unrest, crude, large, vague, meets the want only of one-half their nature, that which is soon and often weary. The household of believers has been their home, but not their cage. Loyal, as they are in spirit, to the Christian standard and name; recognizing, as they do, that inspiration which has flowed. with the life of Christ into human history, - they feel it as an injury and a loss if they should be cut off from a fellowship which is theirs by birthright and by choice; and, while they challenge the right of any dogmatist to bar them out by the bolts and limits of a creed, they equally defend their right against any bolder thinker, who would compel them by his logic upon the ground outside, which he is led to occupy. If Christianity were a speculation merely, and if religious fellowship only meant identity of opinion, their choice would be quickly made. But that is the very interpretation of it they have been fighting against all along; and it is a little hard when they find their position suddenly assailed by those whose right to occupy it had seemed the very thing in controversy. The position, distinctly taken and held among us as “liberal Christianity," for the last five-and-twenty years, has been, that the name Christian is not merely a profession of belief, but a privilege of inheritance or a thing of choice; and that no person, on dogmatic grounds, has a right to withhold that name from those who honestly claim it. The grounds on which they claim it may be contested: to the title itself there is no just dispute. For the name is one of allegiance to a symbol, a fellowship, or an idea, and allegiance is in its very nature a voluntary thing; and this ground of fellowship, in simple voluntary profession, and the desire to join in doing common work, has been very dear to those who have taken it. It has given a sweetness, freedom, and breadth to the feeling of fellowship. It has kept the sense of religion distinct from dogma. It has relieved us from the painful attitude of partisans in attempting to understand the past, and thrown a broad track of light on the interpretation of the Christian history. It has relieved the mind from torturing questions as to the purposes of Divine Providence towards humanity at large; and from that sense of dread, allied to guilt, with which some minds have watched the courses of human thought in the field of criticism and science. Instead of an inexorable condition of salvation, it has made the name Christian a happy and free privilege. It has baptized the purest ideal and the noblest hope that could be cherished for mankind, with the name, and sanctified with the memory, of one noblest Man; and so, in the inevitable drift and change that pass upon all human things, it has seemed to insure to Christianity itself an exemption from the decay that must befall all dogma, a lease of fresh, uncounted ages, and a new birth into a larger life than the former ages of faith could once imagine. -- This is liberal Christianity, as we have understood and defended it, a mode of faith absolutely without exclusion for any who seek its comfort and fellowship; a mode of faith, moreover, which has fairly vindicated its right as a legitimate development of the Christian idea, and its consistency as an order of speculative thought. As a form of belief, it was far from being satisfactory or complete; as a method to think by, and an inspiration to work by, it has amply proved its claim. It has kept at once fidelity to the past and hope for the future. If not the accepted interpretation of Christianity, it is at least a legitimate interpretation; and one, too, which, in common literature and the common thought, is fast supplanting every other. It is, as we say, a new and somewhat sudden phase of what we knew not long ago as "Christian Theism," that it turns round and refuses, even assails, the title which seemed so fully vindicated. Till now, it was left to the dogmatists and sectarians and ritualists to assert that Christianity was a limited and narrow thing; that it is in essential antagonism to freedom of thought or breadth of fellowship. His own position, outside the Christian lines, a man may take, as Mr. Abbot has taken, with a manly and simple fidelity to the demands of his own strict logic, and with a courageous willingness to accept whatever of loss or evil-speaking that position may incur. Or, in combinations like the "Free Religious Association," whose special aim necessarily invites the co-operation of religionists of every race or creed, there would be folly and weakness, as well as a certain insolence, in insisting on the adoption of a name even as vague and wide as "Christian," as long as one honest religious thinker can be found, to whom that name should be a bar. In declining to take this ground, the Unitarian Conference simply assumed that it had another and more limited work. Choosing to do that work within certain lines, it passed no judgment on those who stood outside those lines. Some of the best men in it would have chosen that it should attempt a larger or a different thing: but it was surely competent to elect what it would attempt; and at least, whatever of exclusiveness there was in its action, has not prevented some from working in it very heartily, who are quite as ready and as free to join on that larger platform, in that grander fellowship, which the other title implies. In the first important publication sent forth under the auspices of that Association, the position which we have held so long securely is challenged and denied. Not many pieces of theological discussion have been more thoroughly and ably done, than this little tract of Mr. Johnson. Its bulk is no gauge either of its reach of scholarship or its keenness of exposition. As an argument, it is enough, with none to spare. Its survey of the elements of pagan thought contemporary with the establishment of Christianity, and of the tendencies which set towards the forms of the Christian organization and belief, is compact, clear, and masterly, beyond any presentation of the same topics to which we can easily refer. How satisfactory the argument is, how far it succeeds in resolving that organization and belief into the elements set forth, may be matter of question. In particular, it seems to us to be warped by the disposition it shares with most of the current scientific criticism of history; namely, to ascribe every thing to "tendencies" and impersonal "forces," and little or nothing to powerful personal convictions as the inspiration of character and of will. A truly dramatic presentation of the same thing, even from the same speculative point of view, would make a very different story of the establishment of Christianity in the world. Still, the reason must go before, and mark out the field where imagination may follow. Assuming the writer's aim, and given his limits, the discussion is not only remarkably compact; it is also remarkably clear and full. Take the following passage, from which we are obliged to omit a large cluster of special references: "In all the better minds of that epoch, those of the stamp of Lucretius excepted, there was a deep conviction of primal Unity and Fatherhood, as God. It was the precious legacy of 'pagan' thought. The shining track came broadening down through every great poet, teacher, school, of Greek antiquity. . . . This was the noblest interpretation of Polytheism by these, its noblest children. They were bound to find the highest faith germinating in all lower forms and processes of spiritual life. It was not for lack of faith in the Fatherhood of God or in the Brotherhood of Man that the great stoic and eclectic philosophers of that day were not found welcoming the Christian dogma ; but because, in that search for a divine centre for the soul, which was universal in their age, they were too enlightened to stop short in the worship of a Man. It "But this is precisely where the search did stop in the masses. had to struggle upwards, bound by the old polytheistic love of palpable, concrete, human gods. It wanted a deity who should set aside those inexorable laws of nature, that were not yet loved or trusted as good, with the touch of a human hand; bearing men's sorrows like Isis and Ceres, overcoming their foes like Hercules; a god of whose earthly life traditions could be handed down, and mythologies believed. One human deity it wanted, instead of many; one man gifted with the supernatural powers, so dear to the familiar hopes and fears. Into this one form of anthropomorphism it was yearning to fuse all that remained of the older forms. Out of this state of feeling grew that restless expectation of the advent of some such redeeming Person, which filled the imaginations of men, both in the East and the West.". pp. 21-24. It is the special polemic interest of this essay, that it insists on recognizing in Christianity only the technical and limited meaning which belonged to it in that era, only the "worship of Jesus" in a more or less strict orthodox sense. The writer denies that broad and somewhat loose signification, which has come to be almost the accepted sense of Christianity in our day. He insists on seeing in it only "a special form of religion; a special Church built around the person of Jesus of Nazareth; a corporation organized for his worship." In thus forsaking the liberal interpretation we have been accustomed to put upon the phrase, and giving in his adhesion to that which dogmatists and bigots have always insisted on, he easily makes good his argument. The premise contains whatever, controversially, he wishes to prove. The rest is mere illustration and historical exposition; and, in general, it contains nothing which an intelligent reader need quarrel with. The leading thesis, that not only the dogmatic form but the very name of Christianity must pass away in favor of a wider Theism, nay, that it stands at this day in the way, to bar the advance of a purer faith, is simply the assumption with which the writer starts, and gains no new force from any thing that he has said. It is, then, as a symptom of the time as the distinct and earnest expression of what lies in many minds-that this essay has its chief interest. It seems to bring us to the threshold of a new controversy, in which the lines of old parties will find themselves strangely broken up. The name Christian has come to be too wide in its purport, too rich in its associations, to be surrendered, even by the freest thinker, on |