1

For as benevolence is the highest and noblest attribute of which we can conceive; as malevolence and self-comparison are apparently its opposites, leading, the one directly, the other indirectly, to the infliction of pains, and, according to the moral theory of pure benevolence, the greatest obstacles to moral goodness; as the infinite power ascribed to God does not allow us to suppose him to labor under the embarrassment to which men are constantly subjected of not being able to do good to some without, at the same time, inflicting evil upon others; therefore, it is concluded that the only motive by which, without dishonoring him, we can suppose God to be actuated, is, pure benevolence. God is love. He created men, not for his own pleasure, but for theirs; all his other attributes disappear; and he is gradually etherealzed into a personification of Benevolence.

The entire predominancy of the sentiment of Benevolence in the divine character being admitted, it logically follows, that the pleasure of God can only be promoted by promoting the happiness of man. In order to please him we must confer pleasure upon sensitive beings other than himself; we must be like him, purely benevolent. A mere service rendered to him personally, burnt offering and worship, even love and obedience, if merely passive, are nothing. What he demands is, acts of love towards our feldow-men. Thus forensic and mystic ideas of moral

allegorical or mythic solution of the question of the origin of evil; a solution, however, which we can hardly accept, unless we exclude the idea of benevolence from the Deity, or, with the Manichees, deny his omnipotence, and share it with the devil.

goodness approach towards a coincidence; and man's duty to God becomes identical with his duty to man.

24. Since these views began to obtain a firm foothold in the modern Christian world, practical morals, even among the mystics, have made a rapid progress. Man, who, in other mystical systems, is represented as nothing, and his pains and pleasures as of no consequence, in this system becomes every thing. The love of God and the love of man begin to be looked upon as the same love; and God is openly declared to be, what, in all systems of theology he covertly is, Man, individualized, glorified, deified. Worship, according to this theory, consists in the contemplation and admiration of infinite benevolence; and is of use only so far as it may tend to excite to the performance of benevolent actions.*

* Thus we may understand how Dr. Strauss, who, by regular descent through Pelagianism, Arminianism, Socinianism, and Rationalism, now heads the advanced guard of the supporters of the theological theory above stated, after having proved to his own satisfaction, in his celebrated "Life of Jesus," that those parts of the Christian Scriptures called the "Gospels," so far as they purport to contain a narrative of events, are not authentic, but a mere collection of myths, in other words, of traditional legends, maintains, nevertheless, that those same gospels, even in their historical narrations, teach important truths very essential to mankind. The life of Jesus, in his view of it, is an individualized personification of deified Humanity, morally true, though historically false. Nor is it easy to see how those persons who coincide with Dr. Strauss as to the metaphysics of theology, and who still hold on to the Christian Scriptures as a guide of faith and conduct, can avoid accepting his system of critical interpretation, by which alone the Scriptures can be reconciled to their theology, or to the philosophical doctrine of the immutability of the laws of nature. Tracing the theological theory of pure benevolence through the Pelagian, Arminian, Socinian, and Rational line, forensic philosophy appears to be its fostermother; but it has another genealogy, in which

Religion, which formerly aspired to control every, thing; which was made a pretence for trampling every moral obligation under foot; which taught so often that men were bound, by their duty to God, to disregard all their obligations to each other; and which scarcely served except to multiply evils and

it appears as the nurseling of pure mysticism. This theory, so far as we know, was first advanced in the writings of the ancient Gnostics, who seem to have regarded God as a joint personification of truth and goodness; and who ascribed all evil, sometimes to matter, and sometimes to the devil. This idea as to God pervades the writings of several fathers of the church, particularly St. Bernard, the last of the Latin fathers. It was reproduced in the seventeenth century, in that celebrated work, the Augustinus of Jansenius, which formed the text book of the sect of the Jansenists. At first, the Jansenists were not only pure mystics, but very ascetic and very superstitious mystics. They could not fully grasp the necessary consequences of their own theory. Not only did they adhere tenaciously to all the forms and traditions of the Catholic church, but they even claimed that miracles were wrought in their own convent of Port Royal. Presently, however, their ideas enlarged; and before long, they were found fighting side by side with the philosophers, against the infallibility of the Pope, and the pretensions of the Jesuits, who, in those days, were the representatives and advocates, as our clergy are now, of current religious opinions; and who made, as our clergy make, both religion and morals subservient to that favorite scheme of all priesthoods, the scheme of putting forward themselves as the great pillar of the public welfare, and entitled, in consequence, to have the management of every thing. Every idea subsequently developed by Channing, or by the sentimental rationalists of Germany, such as Schleiermacher and De Witte, may be found clearly stated in the work of Jansenius.

The human mind everywhere proceeds according to the same laws. The history of New England Theology is, in little, a copy of the history of European Theology. The Hopkinsians (so called) represent the Jansenists; and the theologians of that school are fast approaching towards a coincidence with that branch of the Socinians, of whom Channing was the leader. This is the secret of that recent alarming outbreak, even in the very bosom of the orthodox sects, of what is called just now in New England, Transcendentalism.

crimes, has of late, in consequence of the growing tendency towards these views, become more mild and humane, and has been compelled to walk in the train of morality. This, however, is a subserviency, to which the haughtier of the mystics, who still flatter themselves with the idea of being the peculiar favorites, the chosen servants, the appointed inter- / preters, and earthly vice-gerents of a deified image of themselves, do not submit without great reluctance, and many struggles, to throw off the yoke, and quitting the humble character of mere teachers of morality, to which, of late, they have been gradually restricted, to reëstablish themselves, as of old, with the keys of heaven and hell in one hand, and an earthly sceptre in the other.

25. As the opinions above sketched, respecting the Deity, originated in the application to theology of three different theories of morals variously modified, it has happened of course, that all the various sects of the three great theological schools above described, have held views of human nature correspondent to their theological opinions. Those who have applied to theology the selfish theory of morals, have preached with consistent zeal the total depravity of man ; while those who have employed, in theology, the theory of pure benevolence, have run into the opposite extreme of representing men as by nature perfectly amiable and good, and all the evils of society as originating from something exterior, and therefore to be wholly removed by the removal of those exterior impediments. This is the doctrine of human perfectibility, preached by the French philosophers,

or some of them, in the last century, revived in this, by the late Dr. Channing, Owen, Fourier, and others, and which gains daily a greater circulation; an opinion not only more comfortable, but what is of far greater importance, much nearer the truth, than that doctrine of total depravity, which it is so rapidly superseding.

The various sects of the great intermediate school of theology, accordingly as in their theological opinions they have approached nearer to the selfish or to the disinterested school, will be found, in their opinions of the character of man, to approximate towards the extreme of total depravity on the one hand, and of perfectibility on the other.

CHAPTER VI.

GROUNDS OF MORAL JUDGMENT AS RESPECTS INDIVIDUAL ACTIONS AND ACTORS.

1. HAVING Shown upon what principles, looking at the external event, actions in general are pronounced right and wrong; and upon what principles, looking at the motives by which they are ordinarily produced, actions in general are pronounced virtuous or vicious; it now only remains to inquire, What are the principles according to which we determine the moral character of individual acts and individual actors?

Suppose a beneficial action performed before our