ON SOME OF THE CAUSES BY WHICH EVANGELICAL LETTER I. MY DEAR FRIEND, IT is striking to observe, under what various forms of character men are passing through this introductory season of their being, to enter on its future greater stage. Some one of these, it may be presumed, is more eligible than all the rest for proceeding to that greater stage; and to ascertain which it is, must be felt by a wise man the most important of his inquiries. We, my friend, are persuaded that the inquiry, if made in good faith, will soon terminate, and that the christian character will be selected as the only one, in which it is wise to advance to the entrance on the endless futurity. Indeed the assurance of our permanent existence itself rests but on that authority which dictates also the right introduction to it. The christian character is simply a conformity to the whole religion of Christ. This implies a cordial admission of that whole religion; but it meets, on the contrary, in many minds not denying it to be a communication from God, a disposition to shrink from 2 some of its peculiar properties and distinctions, or an effort to displace or neutralize them. I am not now to learn that the substantial cause of this is that repugnance in human nature to what is purely divine, which revelation affirms, and all history proves, and which perhaps some of the humiliating points of the christian system are more adapted to provoke, than any other thing that bears the divine impress. Nor do I need to be told how much this chief cause has aided and aggravated the power of those subordinate ones, which may have conspired to prevent the success of evangelical religion among a class of persons that I have in view, I mean those of refined taste, whose feelings, concerning what is great and excellent, have been disciplined to accord to a literary or philosophical standard. But even had there been less of this natural aversion in such minds, or had there been none, some of the causes which have acted on them would have tended, necessarily, to produce an effect injurious to the claims of pure christianity.-I wish to illustrate several of these causes, after briefly describing the antichristian feelings in which I have observed that effect. It is true that many persons of taste have, without any formal disbelief of the christian truth, so little concern about religion in any shape, that the unthinking dislike to the evangelical principles, occasionally rising and passing among their transient moods of feeling with no distinctness of apprehension, hardly deserves to be described. These are to be assigned, whatever may be their faculties or improvements, to the multitude of triflers relatively to the gravest concerns, on whom we can pronounce only the general condemnation of irreligion, their feelings not being sufficiently marked for a more discriminative censure. But the aversion is of a more defined character, as it exists in a mind too serious for the follies of the world and the neglect of all religion, and in which the very sentiment itself becomes, at times, the subject of painful and apprehensive reflection, from an internal monition that it is an unhappy symptom, if the truth should be that the religious system which excites the displacency, has really the sanction of divine revelation. If a person in this condition of mind disclosed himself to you, he would describe how the elevated sentiment, inspired by the contemplation of other sublime subjects, is confounded, and sinks mortified into the heart, when this new subject is presented to his view. It seems to require almost a total change of his mental habits to admit this as the most interesting subject of all, while yet he dares not reject the authority which supports its claim. The dignity of religion, as a general and refined speculation, he may have long acknowledged; but it appears to him as if it lost that aspect of dignity, in taking the specific form of the evangelical system; just as if an ethereal being were reduced to combine his radiance and subtility with an earthly conformation. He is aware that religion in the abstract, or in other words, the principles which constitute the obligatory relation of all intelligent creatures to the Supreme Being, must receive a special modification, by means of the addition of some other principles, in order to become a peculiar religious economy for a particular race of those creatures, especially for a race low in rank and corrupted in nature. And the christian revelation assigns the principles by which this religion in the abstract, the religion of the universe, is thus modified into the peculiar form required for the nature and condition of man. But when he contemplates some of these principles, framed on an assumption, and conveying a plain declaration of an ignominious and deplorable condition of our nature, he can hardly help regretting that, even if our condition be so degraded, the system of our relations with the Divinity, though constituted according and in adaptation to that degraded state, is not an economy of a brighter character. The gospel indeed appears to him like the image in Nebuchadnezzar's dream; it is refulgent with a head of gold; the sublime truths or facts of religious theory, which stand antecedent and superior to every peculiarity of the special dispensations of religion, are luminously exhibited; but the doctrines which are added as distinctive of the peculiar circumstances of the christian economy, appear less splendid, and as if descending towards the qualities of iron and clay. If he must admit this portion of the system as a part of the truth, his feelings amount to the wish that a different theory had been true. It is therefore with a degree of shrinking reluctance that he sometimes adverts to the ideas peculiar to the gospel. He would willingly lose this specific scheme of doctrines in a more general theory of religion, instead of resigning every wider speculation for this scheme, in which God has comprised, and distinguished by a very peculiar character, all the religion which he wills to be known, or to be useful, to our world. It is not a welcome conviction, that the gospel, instead of being a modification of religion exhibited in competition with others, and subject to choice or rejection according to his taste, is peremptorily and exclusively the religion for our lapsed race; insomuch that he who has not a religion conformed to the model in the New Testament does not stand in the only right and safe relation to the Supreme Being. He suffers himself to pass the year in a dissatisfied uncertainty, and a criminal neglect of deciding, whether his cold reception of the specific views of christianity will render unavailing his regard for those more general truths, respecting the Deity, moral rectitude, and a future state, which are necessarily at the basis of the system. He is afraid to examine and determine the question, whether he may with impunity rest in a scheme composed of the general principles of wisdom and virtue, selected from the christian oracles and the speculations of philosophy, harmonized by reason, and embellished by taste. If it were safe, he would much rather be the dignified professor of such a philosophic refinement on christianity, than yield himself a submissive and wholly conformed disciple of Jesus Christ. This refined system would be clear of the undesirable peculiarities of christian doctrine, and it would also allow some different ideas of the nature of moral excellence. He would not be so explicitly condemned for indulging a disposition to admire and imitate some of those models of character which, however opposite to pure christian excellence, the world has always idolized. I wish I could display, in the most forcible manner, the considerations which show how far such a state of mind is wrong. But my object is, to remark on a few of the causes which may have contributed to it. I do not, for a moment, place among these causes that continual dishonour which the religion of Christ has suffered through the corrupted institutions, and the depraved character of individuals or communities, of what is called the christian world. Such a man as I have supposed, understands what the dictates and tendency of that religion really are, so far at least, that in contemplating the bigotry, persecution, hypocrisy, and worldly ambition, which have been forced as an opprobrious adjunct on christianity during all ages of its Occupancy on earth, his mind dissevers, by a decisive glance of thought, all these evils, and the pretended |