18

of the ancient Christian Materialists. lxxvii opinion. Justin Martyr argues against Platonic notions of the soul in his Dialogue with Trypho. As for the vulgar, they have ever been in the habit of calling the soul incorporeal, yet reasoning and thinking about it, as if it had the properties of body. The common conception of a ghost accords exactly with Tertullian's description of the soul-a lucid aerial image of the outward man. Thus did these good Fathers change soul into body, and condense spirit into matter; thus did they reverse the order of nature, contradict the wisdom of ages, and even run counter to the instinctive belief of mankind, in recoiling from Gnosticism; thus deeply did they enter into the sense of St. Paul's high sayings about the heavenly body and the utter incompatibility of flesh and blood with the Kingdom of Heaven! As they conceived the soul to be material, so they may very naturally have conceived it capable of receiving and retaining the Spirit, as a material vessel may receive and retain a liquid or any other substance; and, in their conception, within the soul may no more have implied any affection of the soul itself, than within the box or bason implies any change in the stone or metal of which the receptacle was made. Indeed this sensuous way of conceiving spiritual subjects is apparent in some of the passages from old writers that are appealed to in support of what Archdeacon Hare happily calls, "baptismal transubstantiation;" as, for instance, one cited in the Tract for the Times called, by a misnomer, as I think, Scriptural views of Holy Baptism,19 the

18 Ven. 1747. pp. 106 and 111. Justin Martyr and Tatian denied the original immortality of the soul on religious grounds,. and the former affirms that it is not simple, but consists of many parts, p. 271.

19 If the sun being without, and fire by being near or at a

author whereof is so fervent, so scriptural in spirit and intention, that he almost turns all he touches into Scripture, as Midas turned all he touched into gold. How the gold looked when Midas was away I know not; but to me Dr. Pusey's Scriptural views, apart from his persuasive personal presence, which ever pervades his discourses and constitutes their great effect upon the heart,-seem but brass beside the pure gold of Holy Writ; his alien piety gilds and hides them. The more we polish brass the more brassy it appears; and so, these views only seem to my mind the more discrepant from Holy Writ, the more clearly and learnedly they are set forth. In Scripture faith is required as the condition of all spiritual influence for purely spiritual and moral effects, and that primary regeneration, which precedes a moral one in time, and

little distance from bodies, warmeth our bodies, what must we say of the Divine Spirit, which is indeed the most vehement fire, kindling the inner man, although it dwell not within but be without? It is possible then, in that all things are possible to God, that one may be warmed, although that which warmeth him be not in himself." From Ammonius. Scriptural Views, p. 264, 4th edit. This writer evidently supposes the proper Indwelling to be distinct from influence. My Father, in his MS. remains, declares against the opinion of those who make "the indwelling of the Spirit an occupation of a place, by a vulgar equivoque of the word within, inward, &c." ple," says he, "a bottle of water let down into the sea.-The water contained and the surrounding water are both alike in fact outward or without the glass, but the antithetic relation of the former to the latter is expressed by the preposition in or within and this improper, sensuous, merely relative sense of within, indwelling, &c. it is alas! but too plain that many of our theological Routiniers apply, though without perhaps any distinct consciousness of their Thought, to spiritual Presence!"

"For exam

on the development of Christian Doctrine. lxxix

is not necessarily the ground of a change of heart and life, was never derived from the Word of God, but has been put into it by a series of inferences, and is supported principally by an implicit reliance on the general enlightenment of the early Christian writers. The doctrine may not be directly injurious to morality, since it allows actual faith to be a necessary instrument in all moral renovation; but the indirect practical consequences of insisting upon shadows as if they were realities, and requiring men to accept as a religious verity of prime importance a senseless dogma, the offspring of false metaphysics, must be adverse to the interests of religion. Such dogmatism has a bad effect on the habits of thought by weakening the love and perception of truth, and it is also injurious by producing disunion and mutual distrust among Christians.

The subtlest matter has all the properties of matter as much as the grossest. Let us see how this notion, that the soul consists of subtle matter, affects the form of doctrine, by trying it on that of baptism. The doctrine insisted on as primitive by a large party in the Church, nay set forth as the very criterion stantis vel cadentis Ecclesiæ Anglicanæ, by some of them, is this, that, in the moment of baptism, the soul receives the Holy Spirit within it; that the Holy Spirit remains within the soul, even though the baptized, as soon as he becomes capable of moral acts, proves faithless and wicked, until it is expelled for ever by a large but indefinite amount of wickedness, entitled utter reprobacy. How intolerable this doctrine is in its moral and spiritual aspect, how it evacuates the Scriptural phrase, Christ in us, of its emphatic meaning, it is useless to urge upon those, who believe it to have been taught by the Apostles. I now only allege that no man origi

nally could have framed such a conception as this, who had our modern conceptions of spirit, or had considered what is the idea involved in the words, presence of the Holy Spirit to our spirit. When the doctrine is unfolded and presented to the masters and doctors of it, they fly off to the notion of an inward potential righteousness. But this mere capability of being saved and sanctified, we have from our birth, nor can it be increased, because it is essentially, extra gradum,-not a thing of degrees. Our capability of being spiritualized by divine grace is unlimited. Who are they that explain away the baptismal gift into a shadow ? 20

My Father, in his latter years, looked upon baptism as a formal and public reception into a state of spiritual opportunities, (at least so I understand him), which is equivalent, I suppose, to the doctrine of some of our divines, Waterland among others, that it is a consignment of grace to the soul. It is conceivable that in consequence of such consignment, the soul, by the will of God, may have more outward means of receiving spiritual influence than it would otherwise have had; if prayer can affect the course and complex of events in favour of those who are not praying, so may the rite of baptism influence it in favour of the baptized, though he be passive in baptism. The objection to the Antiquitarian doctrine is not that it implies a mystery, not that it implies the reception of a spiritual opportunity independently of the will of the receiver, but that, as it is commonly stated, it contradicts the laws of the human understanding, and either af

20 See remarks on this subject in the Mission of the Comforter, pp. 476-7.

tially accordant with that of the Church. lxxxi firms what cannot be true,-what brings confusion into our moral and spiritual ideas,—or else converts the doctrine into an ineffectual vapour-" a potentiality in a potentiality or a chalking of chalk to make white. white." 21 My Father, as I understand him, continued to deny that the gift of baptism is a spiritual re-creation

21 See this whole argument given at greater length in the Essay on Rationalism appended to the 5th edition of the Aids to Reflection.

Two fallacies are current on the subject of momentary baptismal transubstantiation. First-men say, that as we are passive in our original creation, so we are passive in our spiritual recreation. The answer may be given from the Angelical Doctor, who teaches that we are not passive in our original creation; and indeed it needs not the wisdom of an angel to see, that neither man nor any other animal can become alive without a corresponsive act on his part-a sub-co-operation. If we throw a stone into the still unmoving pool, the waters leap up: the pool has not stirred itself, but it co-operates in the production of motion. The second commonplace fallacy is this:—as a seed is set in the ground and remains inert and latent for a time, then germinates, shoots up and bears fruit, so grace may be poured into the soul of a child incapable of moral acts, may remain latent for a time, then, when reason and the moral sense have come into play, may produce good thoughts and good works, the fruit of the Spirit. The objection to this is that a spiritual being is not in a spiritual being as a material thing is in a material thing; it is in it or present to it only inasmuch as it acts upon it. It is the heart itself which, by the power of the Spirit, must bear the fruit of virtue, not a something lodged within it, as the seed in the ground. Spiritual effects in the soul may exist unperceived by men,-may not produce outward works of holiness till long after they have been produced; but when the deeds are evil, as they are in many who were baptized in infancy, we may fairly say that the effects were not produced -in other words, that the person who shews such an unspiritual mind, was not spiritually regenerated in baptism.