1846.] Philosophical Unbelievers. 83 of the speculations which have been entertained among Christians, and it will be found very fertile. Religion has for ages been distinguished, in its lessons. and its evidences, under the division of natural and revealed. This is a distinction with a difference. By natural religion is meant all of faith and duty, all of truth and hope, which the outward universe, the course of events, and the unaided reason of man will teach. By revealed religion is meant all the exposure of dangerous, though prevailing and established errors, all the confirmation of supposed and imagined truths, and all the addition of new or undiscovered truths, and all the new applications, uses and sanctions of all truths, which have been given to the world through the life and lessons of a child of God miraculously endowed. Such is a distinction which once. was as clear to the minds of men as the difference between light and darkness. Ancient books record the sum of natural religion, and the date when revealed religion intermingled its new teachings. Natural religion embraces what many men have learned by their own inquiries, and have taught in their own names. Revealed religion embraces what was taught by Jesus Christ in the name of the Father. The lapse of time, the influences of long use, and more than all, the harmony of truth have wel! nigh blended the lessons taught by both forms of religion. But the distinction may still be distinguished. Cunning artifice may confound them, but watchful criticism and candid truth will keep them apart. Now it has long been the effort, designed or undesigned, of those who bear the title of philosophical unbelievers, to merge the lessons of revelation in the revelations of nature. That is, they will either reject what Jesus Christ taught in the name of the Father, or they will receive what they please of it because they can teach it in their own names. With great positiveness has the position been assumed, that the pages of nature and the consciousness and intellect of man are adequate to make known and to confirm all of moral and religious and spiritual truth that is found in the religion of Christ. If this assertion could be sustained, it would not be the undoing of Christianity; but it would detract from the dignity and authority of the Founder of Christianity. It would give to every student of nature and every philosopher the right to set his name in rivalry with that of our Lord and Master. But let us see how this attempt at resolving revelation into natural religion is pursued, and let us question its method. We have very many treatises on Natural Religion, understanding that phrase in its widest sense, as embracing the study of God's works, the phenomena of nature, the consciousness of man, and the experience of man's life. These treatises, or materials for them, form a large portion of the literature of all lands and of all people, through all time. All that we now possess relating to natural religion more or less closely, may be divided into two parts, one part including that which was written before the introduction of Christianity, the other embracing what has been written since that event, whether by those who, like Wollaston and Durham and Butler and Paley and others, have been Christians, or by those who, living under the influences of Christianity, have been philosophical unbelievers, or as the same persons seem now to prefer to be called, philosophical believers. Now the only proper way to decide what Natural Religion will teach us, and all that it will teach, is to take that part which was written on the subject before the birth of Christ. There are two sufficient reasons for this restriction. The first reason is, that the works and operations of nature, the providence of God, the heart, mind and experience of man-which are the materials of natural religion-were all as available before the birth of Christ as now, and there were men of as mighty intellect then as there have been since, to use them. The other reason for restricting the compass of natural religion to what it taught before the birth of Christ is, that since his birth his teachings have in ten thousand ways, sensibly and insensibly, directly and indirectly, influenced the thoughts and the lives of men; his teachings have been almost inseparably confounded and identified with our common thoughts and feelings, our instinctive convictions, and our natural rules of duty. Restricting then the sum of what Natural Religion will teach to what it did teach or has taught in times before the Saviour, or in regions or islands where he has not yet been revealed, we can readily estimate how much men can teach 1846.] Natural Religion. 85 in their own names. We may leave unnoticed all those barbarous and hideous devices, all those gross and brutalising superstitions, and all those innocent and fanciful conceptions, which have prevailed as religion in Pagan continents and isles, and we may take the writings and the lives of the noblest men in the most civilized nations of antiquity, as the issues of natural religion. We have before us the writings and teachings of Homer and Hesiod, of Socrates and Plato, of Cicero and Plutarch, and a few others, and we find that their wisdom, their characters, their lives, and their sorrows, lacked just those views, virtues, lessons and hopes which the revelation of Jesus Christ has brought to millions and millions of the humblest children of God. Cicero sat in his elegant country-seat, on the lovely shore of the Mediterranean, near the spot which Heathen taste chose as the earthly representation of Elysium or heaven, and there, with all the honors of a republic hung upon his brows, and all the wisdom of his age at his service, he wept and mourned in his declining days the death of a beloved daughter, dearest to him of all that the earth included. There, he himself tells us, he read every piece of written parchment which he could meet with on the subject of moderating grief. There he received letters of consolation from such noble friends, and such eminent Romans, as Cæsar and Brutus, and Lucceius and Sulpicius. But they were letters which did not reach to the woe of his heart, nor suggest the hope which now beams over the humblest Christian death-bed. The only solace of his grief he found in the purpose of erecting to the memory of his daughter a costly temple, where she might receive for her virtues a semi-idolatrous worship from his and her friends. Has not every one whose eye may fall on these remarks beheld sufferers in lonely homes, without wealth or honors, visited with ten-fold more of woe than that great Roman endured, yet sustained by a faith which cometh not of philosophy or man's wisdom? And what was Natural Religion then-what did it teach, not only of hope in death, but of duty in life? Did it then contain the lessons of revelation? Now a class of writers, called Philosophical Unbelievers, Infidels, or Free Thinkers, made it quite fashionable in England a century ago, to take the belief of simple VOL. XL. 4TH S. VOL. V. NO. I. 8 Deism, but to embrace under that belief the substance of revelation, not however as coming through Jesus Christ in the name of the Father, but as certified by their own names. Some of the treatises written by these men, on what they called the Religion of Nature, are exceedingly beautiful and impressive. In their admiration of Christian doctrines and views of life, and in the spontaneous assent and approbation of their minds to Christian truths, they fell into the delusion of supposing that they had discovered and wrought them all out from the light of nature. They resemble those described by Milton, who in their approbation of a discovery wondered that they themselves had not made it: "The invention all admired, and each how he To be the inventor missed ;-so easy it seemed, Once found, which yet unfound, most would have thought Christianity had been breathed in by those writers from the atmosphere around them, its spirit and its lessons glide gently from their pens, they are earnest in maintaining that all that man needs to believe and know and do is signified by the pages of Natural Religion, and they are just as earnestly engaged in writing those pages over with transcripts from the New Testament. They are indebted to the Bible for their natural religion, as much as Kamehameha III., the King of the Sandwich Islands, would be if he were to undertake to write a treatise on religion of any sort. Among ourselves too, here and there may be found a person who does the same as did those Deists, teaching Christianity without Christ, and sometimes even religion without God, because he relucts at admitting the miraculous. sanction of religion. Such persons prefer to substitute their own names and theories to accepting the special authority of Christ, though they would freely appropriate to themselves what he taught. We will not attach any bad name to this violation of a rule which was well established before the rights of inventors and discoverers and the law of patents were settled. Call it an eccentricity, or at worst a delusion. They who thus appropriate the teachings of Christ as their own intuitions, and put their own names before his, forget that they owe all to Christianity; they may forget how they have learned what they know, and what sacred 1846.] Philanthropy. 87 example of faith first revealed to them the realms of belief and taught their spirits to soar. They forget that they once stood by the knee of a Christian mother to hear of Christ. They forget all the little hymns, the Sunday services of youth, and the thousand influences which have wrought upon them in life. There is ingratitude to Christ, there is peril to the sincerity and the character of the philosopher or speculatist, in thus substituting a mortal name for the name of Christ. To such a deplorable length has this wrong been carried in some quarters, that we may say, even the withered hand which Christ has restored and made whole has been lifted up against him; the dumb man's tongue, just loosened from the bonds of silence, has mocked the power that set it free.' Speculation, free and rash speculation, under the name of philosophy, has given a literal fulfilment of the Saviour's reproach, that other names would be preferred to his. While the dissensions and the speculations of those who walk in the light and enjoy the blessings of Christ do thus verify his own reproach, by putting other names and sanctions before that which he offered, the same wrong is exemplified in the practice of Christians. Even philanthropy, Christian philanthropy, has parted with the name of Christ. Those deeds of benevolence done to others which he expressly said he regarded as done to himself, are now urged apart from his name and authority. Some of our reformers have indeed given up the spirit and the title of Christians. Some wonderful facts present themselves here for our notice. Jesus Christ designed that his Church should be a vast institution of holiness, charity and mercy, that all should be its members who were actuated by these sentiments, and that all should receive their kind deeds, who were in any sort of necessity or suffering. This is the Christian Church: embracing every good man, and every good work-with open arms, with free invitations, with an unbounded charity, with the promise of a blessing from on high. This institution, with the sacred name of Christ upon it, languishes, but there spring up all around it institutions designed to do a part of his work-not called by his name, but entitled the Orders of Free Masons, of Odd Fellows, of Rechabites, etc. We know nothing of these institutions save what they publish to the world. We say |