The Young Minister
Seminary life at Newton — Influence of Dr. Hackett— Pastor of the Jamaica Plain Church — Letters — Called to Clarendon Street—Criticism of Robertson on baptism— The Church Unity Society examined THE time for special preparation for life-work had now arrived. In i860 Gordon entered the theological school at Newton. Located on a commanding hilltop, the institution buildings afforded one a view of real beauty. An undulating country of meadow and pasture, not yet built over with the suburban villas of Boston merchants, stretched in all directions. The faint blue top of Monadnock could be descried in the north, while the flashing dome of the state-house sent its reflection into the west o' summer afternoons.
Contiguity to Boston brought the new-comer into new climates of opinion. Speculation and the standing discussions of New England were in the sixties, however, brushed aside by portentous public events. The nation was entering into the valley of darkness. The remission of sin which it had hoped to find in interminable compromises was to come now in the blood of a thousand battles. Walking into Boston to browse among the old book-stores of Cornhill, Gordon is attracted by a vast crowd about the entrances to Tremont Temple. He asks the cause of the gathering, and is told that they are mobbing Phillips within. At another time he goes in to see the immense night parade organized during the first Lincoln campaign. As he stands at the gates of the Common, an unending stream of torches pours past him over the historic slopes. He can think only of the vast musterings in
Milton. We find him eagerly reading Gasparin's new book,
" The Struggle of Christianity with Slavery," and later, with every one else in the North, the second series of the " Bigelow Papers." The martyrdom of John Brown sets his correspondence fairly ablaze. This, after all, is not strange; for he had been bred in the strictest sect of the abolitionists, his father of the woolen-mill being an antislavery debater and lecturer in the local lyceums of New Hampshire; while the Providence home, whither most of his letters are directed, had from early days been visited by Garrison and his confreres. As the gloomy tragedy deepened, he was led to consider personal accountability in the crisis. Almost all of his male relatives were at the front, and he himself seriously meditated joining a New Hampshire regiment. But the family investment had been placed in his education, and the family verdict decided finally against the project.
Of the new surroundings, with their somewhat subdued atmosphere, he speaks half jocularly as follows
" Newton is such a contrast to college. I am almost lost when I go into recitations and find such stillness and decorum. I have never in my life longed so much for some genuine outburst of fun, and I am really afraid that in an unguarded moment I shall break over all the proprieties and disturb the still air with the tones of some jolly college psalm. Yet I cannot but rejoice in the quiet of the place and in the advantages for study which it affords."
The special advantages to which he refers were larger liberty in the use of time, enabling him to rummage about in libraries, and the companionship and direction of the great master, Dr. Hackett, in his favorite study, New Testament exegesis. We find him more deeply immersed than ever in hymnology, devotional literature, and the Fathers. Krummacher, " The Hymns of the Ages," and A Kempis fed his spiritual life. Patristic literature he searched to find, not buttresses for ecclesiastical pretension, but fellowship in a common love and service.
" I have been reading," he says, " with a delight which is to me of the very highest kind, the writings of the old Fathers. Their quaintness is only equaled by their sweetness. I have perhaps a peculiar taste in this respect, and were I to buy all my favorite books, I am sure my library would be of quite an antique cast. St. Augustine's ' Confessions ' afford delineations of almost seraphic raptures. They give one an idea of what Christianity is able to impart to him who is willing to bear its sternest self-denials. ... I feel, with him, what we most of all need is the power to commune with God. I know of no greater attainment than the ability to hold unbroken communion with the Saviour, closing up those avenues through which sinful thoughts and vain desires steal in, and, as A Kempis says, making of the soul a tabernacle with but one window, and that for Christ."
Of those other Fathers, the Fathers of Reformed Christianity, he made fast friends. Rutherford's " Letters " were discovered in an old issue of 1826, uncut and thick with dust. Its jewels of meditation and ecstasy were gathered with eager hands. This volume held him throughout life with the charm of an abiding fascination. Reference is made again and again, in his Newton letters, to " sweet Rutherford." And with these references, in a contrast which is almost grotesque in its extreme remove, are coupled appreciative allusions to contemporary humorists
" I wish Artemus Ward would bring out something new. What should we do without those benefactors of the human race, the humorists? Wouldn't society stagnate? Wouldn't sanctimoniousness become soon the presiding genius where
THE YOUNG MINISTER 37
now only a decent gravity and a moderate decorum reign? I see an advantage in trying to weave a little of this element into the texture of my clerical web that is now making."
The influence of the great teacher, Hackett, that extraordinarily erudite rabbi, with his little, shrunk frame, mobile face, and spectacled eyes, was the most important of those years. With him were made those laboratory studies in Greek, as exacting and as scientific as if the two were scrutinizing a tissue or a cell with the most powerful Zeiss microscope. It was said of Hackett that " he never went into his class, during the whole forty years of his career as a teacher, without a new investigation and revision of the lesson for the hour," and " that no man has lived, in America at least, who has been able to impress the most minute and recondite indications of the Greek original upon the minds of New Testament students." From him Gordon learned that " every phrase of the New Testament has a meaning definite and single— a meaning that can be accurately ascertained and clearly expressed according to fixed and settled laws of human speech." From him he got " that reverent regard for divine revelation which, on the one hand, brooks no mystical importation of human fancies into the sacred text, and, on the other, does not permit the smallest Greek article or conjunction to be treated as an idle or ambiguous thing in that Word, which holy men of old \vrote as they were moved by the Holy Ghost." *
The years at Newton passed smoothly. Gordon writes frequently of visits to Providence—" visits," as he said, " which form pleasant little inns for hope and anticipation to rest themselves in as they journey out into the future." The letters which he sent to the same home, like faded rose-leaves long kept, full of suggestions of hfe and color, exhale an aroma of contentment and gratitude.
* Memorial Address by Dr. A. H. Strong on Horatio Balch Hackett, D.D.
38 ADOXIRAM JUDSON GORDON
Health was returning. " I am better than for a long time," he writes. " Trials are good, but I sometimes think happiness makes me more religious even than grief. I know I never felt more devoutly thankful for blessings which seem clearly to have come from God." And again: " I have concluded to avoid brooding over any anxieties. I have learned to believe it wrong. It is gathering and pressing together into an intolerable burden the troubles which God has mercifully scattered over years of time. I confess I cannot see so far and so distinctly the path of my future life as I was confident I could in boyhood, before I thought of the possibility of such a thing as adversity or disappointment. Still when I have taken one step I have always had light enough to see where to take the next. So I try quietly to adopt the words of Christ, ' Take no thought for the morrow.' ' Do the duty that lies nearest to thee ' has become quite a motto for me. We need to be patient above all things. I am anxious, too, that you as well as myself may learn that generous and self-denying labors for others bring the sweetest and richest rewards. The smallest action may thus be made noble, and the very drudgery of life become divine. I sometimes hope that it is one of the lessons which experience is gradually teaching me, that if I am to be anything that is truly good and noble, it must be by conquering those narrow and sordid ambitions by which the world is so much controlled. Still I am aware I have enough of them."
To those three too frequent intruders into the contemporary pulpit, a metaphysical jargon, a shallow Pelagianism, and a uniformed officialism, he makes references in different letters. Going into Boston, he strays into church, and listens to the philosophical essay of a distinguished pulpiteer. He remarks that it is "too full of scholastic terms and metaphysical technicalities, which are even more objectionable than cant and slang; for ordinary people can comprehend the latter, but very rarely the former "; adding confidentially to the pro-
THE YOUiXG MINISTER 39
spective minister's wife, " which would you rather have me use? "
On the receipt of a hand-wrought sermon-case from the same intimate correspondent, he says, mingling theology and love-making in a way not necessary to divulge here
" I will try to do as you request, and write some good sermons for it, practical because spiritual. There is nothingpractical in religion hit the spiritual. I feel that I must not disguise the fact that men are sinners, though that may seem to be an antiquated idea and an exploded theory of Jonathan Edwards. If they are as much so as I am, I am quite safe in making the statement."
The next extract repels the bantering imputation of clericalism with some heat
" There is one thing about which I am going to remonstrate with you. I don't wish you to use the term ' white cravat in any way to me. It is no more a symbol of the ministry than a bald head or a sore finger. It is worn, I know, but generally by the men who need something to bring them up to the standard of a decent debility."
The seminarist was now beginning to preach in small country and suburban churches— entering upon a sort of pastoral clinic introductory to his coming career. He had preached occasionally in the church of his own village. Often in later years did he describe that first placid morning when with fluttering heart he stood up before a full congregation of critically curious neighbors and relatives. His own two grandmothers, impartial and rigid as two Norns stepped out of an Icelandic saga, occupied the front seat, to pass judgment upon his orthodoxy. When asked after service as to their opinion, the one kept ominous silence; the other retorted that she " had known it all before." But such unresponsiveness must, after all, have been the child of an honest family pride that refused to betray itself from very self-consciousness; for everywhere else he was received 40 ADONIRAAI JUDSON GORDON
with kindly appreciation, though with popular expressions of surprise at his apparently extreme youth. "The people,
D tells me, were quite astonished to see such a boy in
the pulpit, and made various conjectures about his age, none of them going above seventeen or eighteen. In passing down the middle aisle to-day after meeting, I was accosted by an estimable, near-sighted lady, who was apparently considering the current opinion as to my age, with the somewhat confusing question, ' Do you suppose that that young man really wrote the sermon himself? ' "
The Sundays were spent in this way among the various churches of eastern Massachusetts. Now and again he felt disheartened. " There seems to be so little real appreciation of what has cost so much toil of brain, and so little apparent good from the words spoken." At other times he was greatly encouraged. One day, just previous to his graduation, a letter was received from the Baptist society in Jamaica Plain, asking the young minister to " supply " the pulpit there. The gentle, open face and thoughtful sermon won the hearts of all; at the month's end he was " called."
On the evening of the 12th of June, 1863, the little church was hung with greenery, and the people were assembled for the ordination service. We have before us the faded printed " Program for the Installation of Mr. Adoniram Judson Gordon as Pastor of the Jamaica Plain Church, West Roxbury." There was the usual formal sermon, the charge, the blessing by the older ministers present. Then all united in the familiar, fervent hymn:
" Gird thou his heart with strength divine; Let Christ through all his conduct shine;
Faithful in all things may he be,
Dead to the world, alive to thee,"
and the simple exercises were over.
The village of Jamaica Plain was at that time perhaps the most delightful spot in the outskirts of Boston. It was a suburb of close-shaven lawns, well besprinkled, across which querulous robins ran, and over whose walks spirea, flaming rhododendrons, and gorgeous, golden forsythia hung in profusion. Bending elms and thick-fohaged chestnut-trees lined the roads. Pleasant homes, deep bedded in shrubbery, and filled with books and all the comforts of an ample, affluent life, welcomed the new pastor in his round of calls. His own house stood just at the edge of a sedate little pond, not far from the place where the heroic Parkman, battling with disease, raised incomparable roses and wrote incomparable histories. The church where Theodore Parker preached lay off a mile or two in West Roxbury, and in the same direction the undulating meadows of Brook Farm, long since deserted of its idealist and book-writing tenantry, stretched their grassy slopes under the sun. Altogether the new surroundings were well suited to a man of quiet tastes. His marriage, which occurred soon after his settlement at the Plain, heightened the joy of the new home. And with all these circumstances contributing to his happiness, there went along a deep gratitude to God for his mercies— a gratitude reflected in the letters written to his wife when he was called away from his own church to speak. In the note from which the following is taken, after dwelling on his recent marriage he says
" But I look back on the time when I first realized that we were one in Christ, and a higher gratitude fills my heart for that. Dear wife, I wonder now, when the thought of our life /in Christ so fills my soul, that we do not talk more about it. 1 Oh, what is it to be joined together in the Lord, to be the
privileged guests of the constant bridal of the Lamb? My
heart is filled with love to Jesus while I write. ' Whom have \ I in heaven but him, and there is none on the earth that I desire beside him.' I want to go everywhere trying to persuade men to be reconciled to God through him."
And again " I sometimes fear that my perfect happiness and contentment in my home, and my complete earthly bliss with my wife, may lead me to forget God. Let us make it a special subject of prayer that God may keep us from forgetting him or neglecting our duty to him. And when you come back to me, may I find you with a heart not only glowing with a love for me, but kindled with a more intense devotion to our dear Lord and Master Jesus Christ. How I thank God that you love him with me! and I do believe that even in heaven I shall rejoice that these hands were permitted to bury you in death with him by baptism, and raise you up in the likeness of his resurrection. Bless the Lord."
We get an idea of the young minister's personal appearance from a portrait painted about this time. It shows us a wealth of chestnut hair brushed across a high forehead, grave though kindly eyes of an indeterminate blue-gray shade, spare cheeks, a full under lip suggestive of meditative moods, and a mouth mobile and genial, ready at any moment for harmless pleasantry, with jaws behind it locked in the decision of strongly held convictions. His height was above the medium. The years of study, however, had left him with a frame somewhat scantily clothed upon, which contrasted markedly with the massive mould of after-years. His voice was full, rich, flexible, yet a little roughened, they said, as a Cremona violin before it attains the mellow timbre of maturity. The old sexton of the Jamaica Plain Church still recalls him walking to and fro in the church vestry week-days persistently working to overcome this defect. In manner he was shy and reserved, though delightfully genial when once the restraints of new acquaintance were well melted. The social duties of a pastor— calling, giving in marriage, and the like— demanded an expenditure of real effort, and were the source of much misgiving. We get a glimpse of this in the following letter
" I have just been interrupted by another couple to be married. One of the parties was Miss R. It is painful to stand in the presence of such a modest, shrinking couple with no possibility of getting up a conversation. I greatly wished you had been here to speak your piece beginning, ' I trust you may be as happy in your married life as I,' etc. I really missed it, and was so embarrassed after I got through the service in thinking to myself, ' Well, there is something I have forgotten; I am sure it does not seem quite complete.' I couldn't for the life of me think what it was till they had gone; then it flashed upon my mind, ' Why, it's my wife's speech! '
If timid in the parlor, he was certainly not so in the pulpit. In an address given at this time, he reproaches " those ministers who start with ghostly horror at the thought of taking weapons against the iniquities which infest our land, who refuse to speak out against such sins as slavery and corruption in high places, but, with wonderful dexterity of conscience, dodge behind the shadow of what they call the dignity of the pulpit, and spend their days writing metaphysical disquisitions on long-forgotten theological jangles." He did not hesitate then more than in later life to "preach politics" when "politics" was but the synonym for righteousness. In the dark days of '63 his voice rang out constantly and unequivocally in behalf of freedom and the Union, much to the disgust of many of his lukewarm parishioners. On a certain occasion, during the climax of one of these appeals, a " leading member " rose up in the body of the house, drew forth, with utmost deliberation, hymn-book, Psalter, and Testament from the rack in his pew, placed them resolutely under both armpits, and marched slowly down the main aisle and out of the church. Thus did he shake the dust from off his feet as a witness against this infamous commingling of the sacred with the secular, of the things of the Bible with those of the newspaper.
Never afterward was he seen in the church. Years passed Gordon had long since left the scene of his early ministry, and was settled over his Boston charge; the solitary secession of that Sabbath morning was completely forgotten. One day he received a note asking him to attend a funeral in the suburbs. Street and number alone were given. On entering the house he was surprised to learn that the dead man was the stiff dissenter of war times. He had insisted on his death-bed that none other should conduct his funeral exercises than the young pastor of former days, "who never feared to preach what he believed."
As a pastor, Gordon's relations with his people were most familiar, tender, intime. Formality had here no place. He was wont to gather his little flock around him in the Friday evening prayer-meetings, conferring, instructing, opening the Word, encouraging all in " the practice of the presence of God," and in the conflict with the temptations incident to the daily walk. The second year he preached a series of sermons on the development of the higher life, which indicated thus early the trend of his opinions and of his aspirations. Of one of these he writes
" I find it is so hard to preach as I desire, so many little ambitions thrusting themselves in to influence and shape my
sermons. A right heart has, I believe, as much to do with
the matter as anything. I think yesterday's sermon was well received. I only hope the doctrine was according to the mind of the Spirit, and that God was not displeased with it. I feel more and more the worthlessness of man's applause, and I have a deepening desire to please Christ in all such works. I send you a little notice of it (very flattering). It is only for you, dearest, not for myself."
Six years flew by— years of study, of faithful pastoral work, of continuous growth. The little church developed in numbers and power. Pastor and people were bound together in the bonds of a heart-deep affection. Three children were born into the home by the pond. We get a peep into that home hfe now and then through the aperture of the father's correspondence.
" You will naturally ask," he writes on one occasion, "with your jealous disposition, if I have paid attention to any lady in your absence. I answer solemnly, none! Only your old dress fell at my feet as I was brushing through the closet, and in picking it up I involuntarily embraced it, and even clutched a kiss from the eloquent emptiness that protruded from the neck. I gazed this morning, I confess lovingly for a married man in his wife's absence, on one sweet face that crossed my path; but it was in gilt and hung, and therefore I plead no guilt for myself, or at least a suspension of judgment. I will make a clean breast of it. I have stopped several times a day before a certain window, and gazed perhaps too admiringly on a beautiful maiden face that has looked out therefrom. But you will forgive me. It's only ' Wosa,' seated just as Haley left her in the little rocking-chair at the parlor window. What touching reminders of the loved ones these little things are! ' Wosa ' sitting so demurely, waiting for the return of her little mistress, and your winter dress pendent from the nail in the closet— these can hold enough of the subtle element to impart a strong shock to one who comes en rapport.
" P. S.— I send you the money, thereby showing my fidelity to my marriage vow, to love, honor, and buy things for you."
But the cloud that was to overcast his sky had now appeared above the horizon. Seated alone in his study one evening in the fall of '67, writing on his Sunday sermon, and rocking now and then the cradle of his last baby, who slept placidly beside him, he was suddenly startled by a sharp pull at his door-bell. That ring was to resound in his ears for the next two years, keeping him in a distress of doubt and hesitation. For it was the first summons to a new field of labor. The servant was even then ushering into his diminutive parlor the accredited delegates from an important pastorless Boston church, who came to tender him a call " hearty and unanimous." Should he accept? Impossible! No man was ever more loved by his people. No home was ever dearer to father and husband than the one where he was sitting. No field of usefulness could offer more opportunities for a measured, yet none the less vital, religious activity. His declination was given out of hand, and was soon followed by a more formal
and decisive refusal. But the end was not yet. A year
passed, and still the city church was without a head, and still the delegations continued to call at the suburban manse.
" Why will they not let me alone," he writes, " and not press
their suit? I wish I were out of it. If you will go to them and get me off in my absence, and agree that they shall never trouble me again, I will give you half of my kingdom. I am well-nigh insane over the matter. Tell all my flock how I love them, and how I loathe the pastures of Boston and the bulls of State Street, which are worse than those of Bashan. Thank God, their call cannot divide me from you, though it may thrust me forth from my Paradise. What a comfort it must have been to Adam that, though expelled from Eden, Eve went with him! "
At the expiration of the first year he yielded, and wrote out a letter of acceptance. But this step was followed by a revulsion of feeling. The letter was torn to pieces with many expressions of self-recrimination for his disloyalty to the church of his first love. Finally, however, the pressure became too strong, and, after two years of waiting, he agreed to become pastor of the Clarendon Street Church. In the month of December, 1869, amid the universal mourning of the flock, he left Jamaica Plain to take up the work the completion of which was to constitute the capital achievement of his life.
His Meisterjahre had now begun!
Two long-buried and long-forgotten essays, contributed to the " Baptist Quarterly " in these years, give one a glimpse into the things which then occupied his mind. In his after ministry he distinctly abandoned all that would suggest polemics, aiming to be, not a champion, but a proclaimer of the gospel. That he could reason closely and hit strongly— that he had a keen appreciation of his opponent's weak points, and of the opportunities which these offered— is seen in the subjoined extracts. To lay aside the tempting weapon of wit and of aggressive discussion, so easily and so admirably used, must indeed have cost much self-restraint. It evidences, too, a clearly changed conviction as to the duty of a Christian: to endure reproach, to disregard opposition, and to preach the simple gospel without turning to right or left— this was to be the program of the maturer years.
In the first of these articles he outlines and criticizes the position which F. W. Robertson had taken on the question of baptismal regeneration. He follows the anise-seed bag of Robertson's reasonings in its whole tortuous career, doubling with it when it doubled, running down upon it on every straight course of honest logic, detecting the scent where it seems least perceptible, and where a less close reasoner would be surely confounded. He breaks the ice, and beneath the shining rhetoric shows us the black, chill current of sophistry. We take from this paper the following suggestive extracts:
" It was a favorite theory of Robertson's that truth is a union of two contradictories. Rejecting that method in theology which seeks to go between two opposite views, and to find the truth in a kind of middle region, or temperate zone, removed alike from either extreme, he regarded all great truths as having such a latitude that they can embrace within themselves every zone and every temperature of belief. He would tell the Calvinist and the Arminian, the Romanist and the Protestant, that, however widely they may be separated from each other, their separation is, after all, only geographical; and that the belief of each is, in a certain sense, necessary for the equipoise and completeness of Christian doctrine. One is constantly discerning the influence of this pernicious maxim in his aversion to sharp discriminations and radical separations between the true and the false; in his fondness for seeking the soul of goodness in things evil; in his tendency to locate error on the extreme confines of truth rather than within another and totally different kingdom, and to look upon human depravity as rather a misconception by the soul of its true position, than an actual perversion from the right. In his discussions of the subject of baptism, this fault is everywhere apparent, and, though there is a great and admirably stated truth running through them all, it is always seen writhing, Laocoon-like, in the folds of the two ' contradictories,' and is therefore so disfigured and contorted that it presents no very engaging aspect....
" Robertson reduces regeneration to an exceedingly small matter. It is with him simply the giving of full credence to a piece of information. Baptism is the bearer of that information. It comes to a man who is stupidly sleeping in sin, and before he has ever asked for the portion of goods that falleth to him, or ever thought whether he has any portion, it puts its hand upon his head and says, ' You are hereby informed that you are a child of God and have a right to all the privileges and emoluments of sonship.' If perchance the person thus addressed is incredulous, and refuses to believe, the message immediately becomes practically reversed, and announces to him that he is a child of wrath; that is, the ' eternal fact,' which was to be iransmitted in the ' baptismal dew,' by coming in contact with the chilling unbelief of the candidate is precipitated into a practical fiction....
" ' Baptism does not create the fact; it reveals it.'' It is the divine philosopher's stone, whose touch transmutes a de jure condition into a de facto one. The pure gold of grace was present, however, just as really before as after the subtle process of spiritual alchemy, but undiscerned by its fortunate
possessor and unrecognized by God. Now it is discovered,
assayed, and stamped with God's image and superscription, and put into circulation.
"All this is beautiful and satisfactory enough till some person brings back one of these rare coins to this ecclesiastical mint, and, displaying it all rusted and corroded with the pomps and vanities of this world, protests that it is spurious. In such a case it would seem that our author would be driven to the admission that some of his de jure material was not genuine, and that the stamp upon it was the symbol of an unreal value. Not at all. The whole difficulty lies in a want of confidence in it, and in a failure by the owner to recognize God's mark upon it. Let him believe that it is genuine, and it is genuine; or, in Robertson's language, ' to believe the fact (declared in baptism), and to live it, is to be regenerate.'
" Here is the same confusion of ideas introduced into the doctrine of baptism which the transubstantiator has introduced into the Lord's Supper. The thing demanded by the church in each case is the bringing in of the real presence into that which was designed simply for a sign and symbol. But in this instance both priest and people revolt from the materialism which an open, literal introduction of it involves, and attempt, therefore, to bring it in by a metaphysical sleight of hand, the belief in a practical falsehood being the sine qua non condition to the realization of the truth.
Believe that you eat the body of Christ in the eucharist,' said Sir Thomas More, in his discussion with Erasmus, ' and you eat it.'
Believe that you are regenerated in your baptism,' says Robertson, ' and you are regenerated,' The divergence here
so ADONIRAM JUDSON GORDON
from Scripture may be stated very briefly. The Bible represents men as 'believing a lie, that they might be damned.' Robertson would have them believe a lie, that they might be saved....
" There is a saying of an old divine that a ' ceremony duly instituted is a chain of gold around the neck of faith; but if, in the wish to make it coessential and cosubstantial, you draw it closer and closer, it may strangle the faith it was meant to deck and designate.' This, we believe, is exactly what Robertson's argument does. He did not wish to make baptism coessential and cosubstantial with regeneration, but his creed required it. And so, while attempting to take off the coarse and cumbersome chain which Rome has forged upon the neck of regeneration, he has substituted another, wrought of finer substance, and forged into an almost invisible tenuity; whose delicate links of sophistry and error, while they bind in a less oppressive bondage, suffocate with no less certain death.
" The doctrine of a radical renewal by the Holy Ghost, of a thorough revolution and reconstruction of the moral nature by the sovereign agency of the Spirit of God— a change wrought in time, and made recognizable to the consciousness —has no place in this theology....
" The strict Episcopal view makes baptism, when it has been performed, stand ever after for regeneration, as the currency represents the coin in the vault; but, at the same time, the church is so strongly convinced that her issue vastly exceeds the piety which she can show for it, that she asks the 'judgment of charity,' and so virtually goes into ecclesiastic insolvency, though meanwhile still continuing to send forth her bonds.
" The Pedobaptist who denies baptismal regeneration usually puts the rite for a hoped-for renewal, thus making it simply promissory, with no security but the unmortgageable piety of Others. Those who carry out Robertson's definition to its legitimate results make baptism stand for regeneration, vouched for by the best possible evidence in an inward experience and in the external life. At the same time, they stand ready to recall the act when they are convinced that, through a mistake of judgment, it has been wrongly applied. So that, while, according to each view, the ordinance professes to represent the same thing, we believe that the last has every advantage for representing it most fairly, and hence is least open to the stigma of being a hollow form.... The view which is most scriptural, however, regards the act as proceeding not from God, but from the candidate himself. It is not God's call or annunciation to him, but his sacramentutn, or oath of allegiance, to Christ. If, through hypocrisy or selfdeception, it is unworthily assumed, it is simply a false oath, and hence a totally invalid act; and that is all that need be said concerning it. No elaborate device of logic is demanded for releasing God from a seeming breach of his covenant nor, on the other hand, any subtle mystification of words for endowing a baptized man with a character which is out of harmony with both his Hfe and his consciousness.
" Baptism being, in our view, simply a divine symbolic language, given us for expressing certain spiritual ideas, can be truthful only as it is idiomatic— the vernacular, so to speak, of the new life. If strangers and foreigners use it, their expression is to be taken as the expression of those who know not what they say. If deceivers employ it, it is simply wrested to the uses of perjury... ."
The other article has in it just a trace of severity, which is not unnatural if one remembers the complacent assumption which characterizes the periodical summons to an Episcopal Canossa. In later years, when the subject of " church unity " was mentioned. Dr. Gordon was quite likely to tell goodhumoredly the story of a quaint relative, a Congregational preacher, who defended " the validity of his ordination " by the contention that he was the best blacksmith who could make the best horseshoe, whether or no he could trace his descent from Tubal Cain. The hauteur of churchmen who " desire to be Catholic as well as Protestant, like those churchmen of evil memory who would be neither hot nor cold," ceases to irritate when one estimates it properly. No Christian experiences any difficulty in realizing the most vital unity if only he has grace and honesty enough to treat his fellow-Christians as common followers of a common Lord, and if his sense is sufficiently acute to comprehend that money is money whether it be broken into silver bits or dressed in the pretentious garb of the greenback. That the young pastor, in his study and among his periodicals, was, perhaps, unduly incensed by " the eddy of purposeless dust " which the advocates of " unity " were raising, is evident from the extracts which follow. That he valued, however, to the utmost, the communion and cooperation of the saints in the fxeydXr] eKKXrjala— that unity of the Spirit so far removed from a factitious uniformity, " icily regular, splendidly null "— is clear from his whole subsequent career.
This article was called out by the appeal of a recently formed " Christian Unity Society "; of the appeal he says:
"The spirit of the address is kind and conciliatory, as of course it could well afford to be. It denies in words that the unity sought requires ' absolute absorption and conversion into identity' with the church— conformity and uniformity in all things— but clearly proves the same in its arguments. In words it pays an appreciative tribute to the zeal and efficiency and usefulness of various Christian denominations, but in argument declares their existence to be an evil. In words it seems to have an enthusiasm for the work proposed that is totally disinterested and magnanimous; in argument it proves that its zeal is for its own church and for the welfare of its own dearest cause. All this is natural enough. It does not offend. Only the whole subject suggests certain difficulties to our mind that the writer has failed to solve. These we propose at this time to consider,
" The fundamental idea of the association is this: that nonconformity in religion is the great evil of the church, and that the highest success of the gospel can be attained only in ecclesiastical uniformity. We believe, on the contrary, that there is much that is good, and much that calls for profound gratitude, in the present economy of an externally divided church. It undoubtedly gives free scope to her varied and otherwise conflicting activities, brings harmony out of her antagonisms, ajid economizes forces by separating them, which must else be wasted by their own friction. How much, too, does the church owe to the existence of sects for clearness and compactness in the statement of her doctrines; how many crude and unphilosophical symbols have been ground down and polished by the attrition of controversy; how much of error and misconception have been sifted out of the creeds by polemical winnowings and threshings; how repeatedly have the accretions of falsehood, which in the course of time gather about religious truth, been removed by the sharp antagonisms of sectarian strife; how many ideas, in fine, the most vital and precious to the church, have, humanly speaking, been kept alive by the jealous circumspections of the denominations! The evils which result from monopoly of the gospel, perversions of it in the interest of a single church, biased interpretations and one-sided expositions, have unquestionably been very largely prevented by the presence and watchfulness of differing religious orders.
" ' Christianity,' says Bunsen, ' proves itself to be the religion of the world by its power of surviving the inherent crises of development through which it has had to pass.' Yes, and, we add, by its power of fully meeting those crises out of its own resources; of fitting itself into all the convolutions of history; of pushing itself out into the ever-varying want and woe of humanity. And how has it been able to do this? By the diversity of its outward organizations; by its abiUty to assume manifold forms of operation, and work successfully through them.
" Methodism is an exact illustration of what we mean. It is perfectly clear that, at the time when it arose, the establishment had become so unwieldy, so hampered with civil and ecclesiastical rules, that it was utterly unable to meet the prevailing demand for a free and missionary gospel. If, here and there, a preacher was to be found who had true evangelical zeal, his jurisdiction was so prescribed by the fences of the church that his zeal profited him nothing. When John Berridge undertook to carry salvation to the poor and unprivileged about him, on the ground that his conscience impelled him to seek to preach the gospel to every creature, he was summoned before the bishop with the rebuke, ' As to your conscience, you know that preaching out of your parish is contrary to the canons of the church.'
" But Providence met the exigency. Out of the church, and in spite of her opposition, came forth that noble system of itinerancy which has carried salvation to thousands and tens of thousands, and has continued until this day one of the most potent agencies for reclaiming lost men,
" But the churchman sees nothing in the origin of this society to rejoice over. * All must feel,' says our author, * how needless and how fearfully mixed with wrong on both sides was the Wesleyan separation.' Needless, forsooth! No power on earth can forever check a living stream in its course. From the very dams that have restrained it, it will every day gain strength for the inevitable rupture. Similarly, no device of priest or bishop can so choke the life of Christianity in the church as completely to shut it off from those who are panting for its blessings. It must break out somewhere, and if it becomes irregular in its course, the fault lies with those who attempted to repress it. It is not a wrong on both sides. If the blood cannot flow in the arteries of the church because of the pressure of some human obstructions, then there must be an anastomosis. Vitality must be supplied to all the members of Christ's body.
" There are evils of which this address makes no mention, and for which it proposes no remedy— the dull immobility, the stagnation of religious thought and of reUgious hfe, which have been invariable accompaniments of ecclesiastical uniformity. Against these, sectarianism has been in constant antagonism. And if it had performed no other office, this were enough to secure it from the imputation of being an unmitigated evil.
" When the question comes between a dead uniformity and a living diversity, it would seem as if there could be very little difficulty in choosing. And yet we believe that the first of these conditions is the alternative offered us by this society.
" As though the illustration which Romanism has given of a Christianity completely paralyzed by the clamps and constraints of ritualism were not sufficient, it is now proposed to repeat the experiment: to take the faith of Christendom as it is held in solution by the various sects, and crystallize it about the Thirty-nine Articles or the Nicene Creed; to constrain its varied devotion into exact and rigidly defined channels; to put all its worship into regulation dress; to compress its free and plastic life into concerted formulas and modes; to sacrifice a variety which fully accords with a true unity to a unity that has no variety; and to call back all the 'children of the dispersion ' from their widely different yet spiritually accordant labors, and bid them all march to the music and measure of the 'historic church.' Theoretically the proposition is untenable enough, but practically it is even more so.
' To ask Methodism, with its splendid record of fidelity to the claims of a missionary gospel, with its noble history of
$6 ADONIRAM JUDSON GORDON
self-sacrificing and evangelic labor, to come back and be absorbed again into the church from which it sprang, abandoning that organism which, however faulty it may be in some respects, has penetrated a stratum of society that the cumbersome machinery of the Anglican Church never did, and never could, efifectually reach; to ask Congregationalism, after having stamped its polity upon our rising institutions, and done more than anything else to mould and determine that noble republicanism which we now enjoy, to return into a church whose whole genius and history has been so manifestly on the side of monarchy— is to ask simply that Romulus and Remus, after having grown to manhood, should go back and be suckled on that creed which nourished them kindly enough in their infancy, but which was never designed to feed them in maturer life.
"And this suggests another grave objection to the theory of the address; namely, that it presupposes the possibility of a harmless return from spirituality to ritualism. That symbols have done much to develop ideas, that types have had a blessed mission in helping to bring forth spiritual conceptions, and to lead them through adolescence into maturity, is a fact too obvious to be denied. But to suppose that ideas that have once sloughed off their skins can be made to crawl back into them and still maintain a healthy life is quite another matter. It is to imagine that manhood can return to the swaddhngbands of infancy— that the church can leave the more ' stately mansions * into which, by discipline and training, by reformations and revolutions, Providence has brought her, and crouch down again into her ' low-vaulted past.'...
" Since episcopalism professes to regard the Romish Church as corrupt and degenerate, the inference is that they hold it to be only a medium of communication, and not in any sense a vital part of the succession. So that, within its decay and corruption, the germ of the true organic unity has been preserved, wrapped up, like the Egyptian wheat, in the swathes of the mummy, waiting for Providence to bring about the necessary conditions for its growth and development. This theory seems certainly to be philosophical, perfectly consistent with the analogies of history.
" But the hypothesis being once admitted, why cannot those denominations which have sprung from the Episcopal Church, and which charge that church with being a perversion, rise up and claim that they have been derived from the true germ— the germ of which episcopacy was the repository— and hence that they have the only true succession? What then becomes of the claims of the churchman? If, by a legitimate process of exogenous growth, they who once constituted the heart of Christianity find themselves pushed outward to its exterior, into the bark and tegument of mere formalism, surely they cannot complain that there is anything anomalous in the position of those who have supplanted them. Least of all can they with good grace press their own claim of still constituting the pith and marrow of the church.
" And the Scripture argument for any such succession of the priesthood is still more unsatisfactory. It impresses one as almost unparalleled in the annals of forced interpretation, two or three texts being made to bear up the whole superstructure of argument against hundreds whose genius is most obviously opposed to it. Nine parts of conclusion are found to every one part of premise, reminding us most forcibly of Coleridge's description of such interpretations as ' smoke-like wreaths of inference,' or an ' ever-widening spiral ergo from the narrow aperture of perhaps a single text.'
" The boon, therefore, which is offered us in organic unity as here defined has, we are constrained to say, no special value to us, because we cannot appreciate our need of it.
" We see no necessity of drawing the life which we receive from Christ through a channel so long and tortuous that to explore it is an impossible task, or of tracing our descent from his apostles through a lineage so obscure that we cannot tell whether we are sons or bastards. We believe in a Christ as the Head of the church, who lives and reigns forever, who not only holds his mysterious union with his church still unbroken, but constantly energizes and reinforces that church by fresh infusions of his life; so that the vitality of the children does not depend upon the vitality of their ancestors. We believe his union with his church is direct, not mediate a union of incorporation, not of remote connection. And hence it matters little whether we are connected with the original branches of the True Vine, so long as that Vine is capable of thrusting out fresh shoots alike for the church and for its ministry.
" For any one of the coordinate branches of the church, therefore, to attempt to bring about unity by setting forth its own pattern and polity as the one to be conformed to, exactly or
approximately, by all, will necessarily be of little use. No
sectarian plea against sectarianism, no partizan tirade against religious partizanship, will avail. But whatever brings the church into nearer accordance with the spirit of Christ and his gospel, whatever exalts the central and centralizing truths of our common faith, will do most toward promoting that unity for which we all hope and pray. In the beautiful words of the author of ' The Patience of Hope,' ' The bosom of Christ is the grave, the only grave, of religious acrimony; we learn secrets there which render it possible for us to be of one heart, if we may not yet be of one mind, with all who lean upon it with us. For, slightly as we may think to heal long-festering hurts, there is no cure for religious dissension except that of spiritual acquaintance with God, as revealed to us in the mind and spirit of Christ Jesus. To acquaint ourselves thus with God is to be at peace, for it is to learn how far more strong than all which separates is that which unites us in him. So long as the external is more to us than the vital, the accidental dearer than the essential, so long as we are more churchmen, more Protestants, more anything than Christians, religious acerbity will continue.' "