This system allows no ultimate evil, as a background of God; believes in no vindictive punishment. The woes of sin are but its antidote. Suffering comes from wrongdoing, as well-being from virtue. If there be suffering in the next world, it is, as in this, but the medicine of the sickly soul. It allows no contradiction between God's Justice and Mercy. We require to be reconciled with Him, not He with us. We love Him soon as seen. It makes religion inward; of the life and heart; the Son's service, not the Slave's; a sentiment, as well as principle; an encouragement no less than a restraint. God seeks to pour himself into the heart, as the sun into the roses of June. These are no vulgar merits.[1]
2. The Defects and Vices of this Party.
So far as this system is derived from its fundamental Idea, it has no defect nor vice, for the Idea is absolute and answers to the fact that God is good. But the absurdities of other forms mingle their pestilent breath with the fragrance of truth; and the party that poorly espouses this divine idea has its defects. Men do not see the sinfulness of sin; underrate the strength of human passion, cupidity, wrath, selfishness, intrenched in the institutions of the world, and belonging to the present low stage of civilization. They reflect too little on the evil that comes from violating the law of God; overlook the horrors of outraged conscience, and do not remember that suffering must last as long as error, and man only can remove that from himself. They are not sufficiently zealous to do good to others, in a spiritual way.
This party has also its redundancies. It has taken much from the ungrateful doctrines of the darker system. Its followers rely on Authority, as all Protestants have done. They make a man depend on Christ, who died centuries ago—not on himself, who lives now; forgetting that it is not the death of Jesus that helps us, but the death of Sin in our heart; not the life of Jesus, the personal Christ, however divine, but the life of Goodness, Holiness, Love, in our own heart. A Christ outside the man is nothing; his divine life nothing. God is not a magician to blot sin
- ↑ Theism, &c., Sermons V.-X.
