Imágenes de páginas
PDF
EPUB

ARTICLE V.

FEAR AS A CHRISTIAN MOTIVE.

-"for a great fear, when it is ill-managed, is the parent of superstition; but a discreet and well-guided fear produces religion."

Jeremy Taylor's Holy Living.

WE often hear it said, "If I ever become a christian, I shall not be frightened into it." It is with us the independence, the contempt of consequences which has become an American characteristic; the "who's afraid?"— which might very well stand for our national motto. Of course, this trait is not peculiar to our people, though common to us in unusually exaggerated development; still less, we need hardly add, is it the token (but quite the reverse) of a true manliness, wherever it is found.

This tendency has further been fostered by a one-sided philosophy and a maudlin philanthropy, the prime law and mission of which would seem to be to try the power of rose-water as a universal disinfector; that is, to straighten all crooked things and to rectify all wrong things by what we must be suffered to call a system of general coaxing. We greatly regret that the recent "Plummer" professor at Harvard has lent his name to something very like this theory. He introduces with approbation, in a recent occasional sermon, the story of the crazy woman at Cincinnati, who rushed into the cars, with a bowl of water in one hand and a torch in the other, saying that she wanted with these to drown out hell and burn up heaven, that people might do right because they ought to, without reference to consequences. And this the reverend rector would have us believe is the next great improvement in pulpit-practice. We would be respectful, but honestly we conceive the comment to be as bereft of sense as the text. We prefer not to go to crazy people for our theology. The good old bishop who gives us a motto was wiser than the late novitiate. While then, on the one hand, all appeal to the influence of fear in morals and religion is repulsed as degrading our free and self-governing manli

ness which acknowledges "no man master," and no God either, too often; on the other hand we are gravely told that this motive is at war, as well, with correct ethical principles and the working of christian benevolence. We purpose to examine the soundness of these assumptions.

We begin by observing, that the basis of fear, in our experience, is a constitutional susceptibility. We were so made as to feel, under certain conditions, this emotion. It is as original with us as is the power to love, to trust, to enjoy. For the most part it acts involuntarily, as when you spring to avoid a falling body, or start back from a serpent. Its object is, to guard from danger; then it must often act too quickly for deliberation or thought. But, it also results from processes of calm reflection revealing to the mind aspects of life which involve peril, and exciting the feeling of aversion and avoidance. Thus, you would not be likely to go into a plague or fever district; nor to embark on a voyage in a leaky ship; nor to leap from a rail-car in full motion. Why not? Simply because you would be afraid of the effects. That would be the reason, and you would not be ashamed to own it. You recognize and confess this susceptibility as a most beneficent protective from injury.

But is it probable that God would invent a guard like this against evil to operate only in some inferior and temporary concerns, but with no design of its intervention in the principal interests of humanity? That is, would he put within us a power of self-defence from a broken bone, a contagion of disease, an unsafe confidence in some enemy, while no alarum shall spring its rattle to warn us of the risks and ruins of our immortal hopes? If a salutary apprehension may do us good service in the minor affairs of every-day life, why not in our vastly superior relations to God and moral obligation? It is not natural to believe that any such limitation of this sense of fear from a religious application was designed. We argue from the less to the greater, that God would not do more, in setting up our complex mechanism, for the bodily than for the spiritual safety of his offspring; that, therefore, fear as a motive was given us as well for the one set of wants as for the other; that it has as legitimate a field of action in determining questions of christian con

duct as in cautioning us against fire or deep water. The philosophy of the subject is manifestly on our side. We take another step:

There is nothing unbecoming our manhood in yielding to this influence on any real occasion of alarm. We are not to lose our self-possession in the presence of peril: that is a panic fear which defeats its own object, as it wholly unfits one to meet or avoid the threatening evil. But to see, to realize, to dread, to shun any danger, which it is not a clear duty to encounter, is entirely in keeping with our highest endowments of mind and heart. Here, a thoughtful consideration of things comes into play, to help out our mere instinctive impulses of caution. This reflective faculty is ours peculiarly. The lower animals have the instinct of fear; so have we. But, not like us, they have no forecast to discern, to measure, to elude impending troubles. As we have this ability in many directions, it is not beneath us to use it. It was given us for use. We keep it in constant service for all manner of worldly purposes, never dreaming that this is an unmanly painstaking. We set a watch against the prowling burglar calculating narrowly his chances of escape from our carefully prepared means of his detection and arrest, and never think it any disgrace to own that fear prompts our vigilance. Courage is not a foolhardy recklessness of consequences in any matter. It is closely and naturally allied to cautionary tendencies and dispositions.

"Fear to do base, unworthy things, is valor."

The bravest man feels that he is entitled to whatsoever helps he can thus throw between himself and harm.

It is not ingenuous nature, then, but an atheistic pride, which suggests that fear is a questionable motive to be resorted to in the province of religious duty. The idea has nothing analogous to it elsewhere in human life. It is a wrong sentiment, the effect of which is not to ennoble our intellectual or moral state, but to debase, to brutify us, by a hardening, deadening process; turning us not into heroes but desperadoes, by destroying our sensibilities, and by the disuse of an original and important power which has a right to be exercised wherever in the relations and facts of our being there is anything for it to do.

Is there any christian work, then, for this functionary? This is our next question; and we are now ready to entertain it.

We affirm that there are just occasions of alarm involved in our spiritual circumstances as conditioned by transgression. Had obedience continued, as it began, to control the human will, that perfect love to duty would have excluded all fear which is allied to terror. So, as grace restores us to purity, this emotion finds less and less place within us, until in a perfectly sanctified heart it will not have a conscious existence; as in heaven it must be an entire stranger. In a word, it does not belong to a right, but to a wrong and rebellious posture of humanity. As is the wrongness, therefore, of a man religiously, so is the occasion of fear with respect to his prospects under the righteous government of God.

[ocr errors]

It springs legitimately from facts like these; that the first obligation of every soul, in virtue of its creation in God's image, is to be like God in spirit and character; that, contrariwise, all flesh does actually and by preference corrupt its way upon the earth. It glances from the infinite pureness of God to the fathomless vileness of man, and gathers paleness at the terrible contrast. Here begins the revelation of God and of our own consciousness. Here we are lost in sin and condemnation. We are not lost unless we are condemned. We are not condemned unless we are sinful. But this is Heaven's word against us- that by nature we are children of disobedience and wrath. "For all have sinned and come short of the glory of God; cause and effect interacting continually to deepen the crime, to multiply the default; men falling short, more and more of the Divine glory by added sins; and sinning more and more, by thus failing to glorify eternal, faultless Excellence. This is the case; that, bound by every bond to do everything for and in God, we naturally do nothing thus, but always reversely, for self and the world; and every such choice, purpose, act, is sin, of which God has said: "The soul that sinneth it shall die." And man is "dead in trespasses and sins" until Christ gives him life. This is the objective basis of Christ's work. He saves the lost. His mission attests, demonstrates the utter ruin of our race. He entered our world as into a vast hospital of

tors.

the death-smitten, as into the prison-cells of sentenced malefacHe came to nothing short of a scene of universal moral destruction. The prophet's valley of the slain is history here. He stood as on the shore of a wild ocean, with the whole destiny of mankind crowded on board one struggling, sinking wreck in the offing, and he launched the only life-boat which could reach the foundering ship to bring off the drowning company. And the ship has not gone down yet, and the lifeboat has been rowing around her from the first, never going ashore to rest her oarsmen, nor missing the smallest chance to pick up another and another of the perishing, under her pilot's steady hand and loving eye. Here only does our Lord's human life find its explanation, does his death find its vindication. This is the key which unlocks "the mystery of God manifest in the flesh," that "when we were yet without strength, in due time Christ died for the ungodly."

Were this, however, all the truth upon this subject, it might go rather to allay apprehension than to excite it. But additional considerations come in to complete the facts involved. Redemption shows us how real and total is human ruin which could demand such a measure of recovery. Now, if by that act or event man's salvation is positively secured to him without further effort, he has nothing to concern himself about. His passage is taken and his ticket is paid for; and like Jonah he may go to sleep for the voyage "in the sides of the ship." This is not all. In a vital sense, that passage is to be worked all the way into port. into port. Grace must be penitently accepted. The teaching is unequivocal. "Except ye repent ye shall all likewise perish," likewise-as surely as they whom the tower of Siloam crushed. Texts need not be multiplied. The doctrine of mercy is this, that God intends our conversion and sanctification by our own earnest coöperating with him to this result; that to this we must seek deliverance from past guilt and safeguard from future, at Christ's hand; that, this not done, the sin of our lives presses upon us; our sentence of execution hangs over us; we are still absolutely and hopelessly undone; we are ever increasing our crime by refusing the release offered; we are thus despising God in his compassions, and resisting his Holy Spirit, and treasuring up wrath against the day of wrath, and

[blocks in formation]
« AnteriorContinuar »