MR. MAURICE AS HERESIARCH.
THOSE of our readers who may have known nothing of Mr. Maurice except what they found said of him in our columns last week, will probably have asked themselves the question how such a religious teacher as we described could have been feared as he was,—could have been regarded as a great heresiarch, could have been condemned in these loose-thinking latter days by an obscure college council, and even to the last always held as a dangerous man unfit for Church promotion by the official scrutineers of Church opinion. We should be disposed even to think that the Dean of Westminster has been far less feared by those curious in the arts of safe ecclesiastical navigation than Maurice. The reason no doubt is, that while the Dean of Westminster is regarded as a latitudinarian whose teaching ignores all the finer distinctions of theology as not worth the study, Maurice teaches nothing that he does not teach intensely, and that his mind was so spiritual, that when he seems to the anxious theologian to err at all, his error is a sunken rock on which the unwary voyager may not only strike, but stick. Even the Guardian, cordially as it writes of Maurice this week, is profoundly permeated by this feeling. It speaks of him as something high, and deep, and sweet, but for all that dangerous,—to be held a little in awe and fear for the depth of his errors, as well as in love for his noble personal qualities "it is the work of the future to pronounce on his influence and teaching ; at the present moment, almost over his grave, we shrink from the task ;"—" there was much, very much in his teaching with which we could not sympathise, which we think unsound in itself and dangerous in the inferences which more logical minds will draw from it. But his career was remarkable, and in some sense so entirely unique in its influence on English thought and life, and the character of the man himself stands out so nobly, that," &c. Evidently the fear he inspired, as of a not only great, but deep heresiarch, whose fervour and intensity constituted the very danger of his fascination, survives him. The safe men still think of him as a sort of theological maelstrom, by which it is pretty certain that you will be sucked in if you go too near it. What is the warrant for this half-fearful wonder with which Maurice is still regarded by 'sound' Churchmen ? No one ventures for a moment to deny the profound humility which made so striking a fea- ture in Mr. Maurice's character, yet humility has never been the characteristic of any heresiarchs. No one denies the extreme and shrinking aversion which he felt to ad- mitting the existence of actual error in Scripture, yet a deep and even mystical faith in the literal divinity of Scripture has certainly never been the characteristic of modern heresiarchs.
We believe that the real foundation for this fear of Maurice as a great distracting force in the world of theological thought, is caused by that intense inwardness of his spiritual faith which almost snatches away theology from the purview of the mere in- tellect, and makes men who are hardly capable of approaching it from any other than an intellectual side sensible that they are no-
where, as it were, in his writings ;—nay, that the very essence of their mode of thought is almost branded by Maurice as "of the nature of sin," as something which he has often been " tempted " to acquiesce in, but which in the depth of his reverence for God's revealed truth he never "dared" to acquiesce in. Theologians of the ordinary type coming to the study of Maurice are not only apt to be bewildered as to his real meaning; but to feel themselves reproached for that external and " notional " view of things divine which they find him rebuking as the lowest element in himself, whereas they had rather taken a pride in their masterly specula- tive apprehension of matters so transcendental. Now this sort of impression that the intellectual and systematic view of theology was denounced by Maurice as a moral danger, was very trying to men whose theological conceptions were saturated with speculative and logical ideas. They hardly knew how to deal with such a point of view. It embarrassed and it alarmed them. They thought theology would not often be studied by "such beings as we are in such a world as the present," if it was not to be learnt as a system and connected together by intellectual generalizations. Mystics, they did not deny, have their place in relation to any faith of which the whole cannot be adequately grasped ; but here was a mystic who, not contented with his own province of thought, invaded theirs and made them feel unspiritual because they approached theology from the intellectual and not from the spiritual side. This is, we believe, in a great degree the real account of the distaste and fear with which safe Churchmen regard Maurice's teach- ing; but it was of course greatly increased and brought to a focus by his special heresy, as it was thought, in relation to the Eternal punishment of the wicked,—a point on which his doctrine was both profoundly misapprehended, and, so far as it was appre- hended, dreaded and condemned. Mr. Haweis endeavoured the other day, in a letter to the Pall Mall, to define Maurice's true position on that subject ; but as we have heard it remarked that the explanation was as difficult as the teaching itself, we will in our turn try our hand at elucidating the most critical point of this great religious thinker's teaching.
When Mr. Maurice was asked what he meant by 'eternal' as distinguished from ' endless ' or everlasting,' he always replied in effect that it was related to 'everlasting' as the spiritual source is related to the outward form ; as, for instance, the depth and truth of a principle are related to its durability and influence on human society ; as the vital germ of a tree that lives for cen- turies is related to its length of days ; as the inward character of a great man is related to his age-long ascendancy over human thoughts, — in a word, as the constitution of any-
thing is related to its outward duration. Eternal ' he held was properly applied solely to God. 'Everlasting "is simply our translation of the divine essence into the language of time. It is impossible for us to conceive God, if we conceive him in time at all, as ever having had either beginning or end ; he is at the heart of everything, so that nothing whatever is conceivable with- out him ; hence, if we do translate 'eternal,' which is applicable only to him, into the language of time at 'all, we must translate it as 'everlasting,' as having neither beginning nor end. He pre- ferred the word 'eternal,' because be did not think the time-view the original one, but a derivative one. 'Eternal' took you, he held, into the depths of the invisible life behind the world,—while 'everlasting' only bewildered the imagination with a futile attempt to strain back into the past beyond our reach, and forward into the future beyond our ken. Still, if time-language were to be used at all, ' everlasting ' was the right translation for eternal.' He did not think it a very instructive translation, he thought we lost by not keeping to the qualitative essence of God, rather than insisting on the quantitive duration. But the word ' endless ' he re- pudiated altogether, because it is applicable to things clearly not divine,—signifying duration which, though it has begun, will never cease,—and so losing the necessary reference to God which he regarded as embodied in the word 'eternal,' and not lost in 'ever- lasting,' since ' ever ' goes back as infinitely as it goes forward, and is only applicable therefore to him without whom all existence is inconceivable. Such being Mr. Maurice's view of these three words, he maintained that 'eternal life' and eternal death' meant nothing more or less than 'life in him who is eternal,' and death from him who is eternal,'—life in God, and death from God. His groat Scriptural authority of course was St. John's report of our Lord's prayer, "This is life eternal, to know thee the only true God." If eternal life' were knowledge of God, 'eternal death,' he inferred, must be loss of the knowledge of God. If, therefore, any attempt were made to translate 'eternal life' and eternal death' into the language of time, we must remember that the everlastingness is only the attribute of God, not of the relation between the individual and God. A man may have 'eternal life' even in this world, and may again lose it, may fall from eter- nal life into eternal death, may cease to live in the divine righteous- ness, and be immured again in the hell of self. Mr. Maurice's most emphatic teaching was, that to be immured in self,—to have no vision of the 2ource of life and redemption,—is hell, the worst conceivable hell, the most terrible of all tortures. In this world indeed he would say this hell can never be quite complete ; there is always the sensible world at least to draw one out of oneself ; but if anyone gives way to the tendencies which make self supreme, the time may come when the self has not even this distraction, when, after death, it is immured wholly in its own ugly and impotent thoughts, when its perfect solitude becomes intolerable anguish. This was his notion of 'eternal death.' It did not mean everlasting death, it meant the loss of life in God. So eternal life did not mean everlasting life, it meant life in the everlasting,—in God,—but which might yet assuredly be severed from the everlasting,—from God. As to the duration of this death, Mr. Maurice would never express any opinion, except that it must last till the evil will was overcome, and that as God had expressed his will that all men be saved, he would not dare to affirm that the will of God would fail to triumph over all the evil wills that resisted it. Still he felt no wish to measure the enormous power which might be contained in the evil will of man. He admitted that God himself could not triumph over that power without the willingness of man to submit, and he did not " dare " measure the power of resistance. His whole mind, however, revolted against the conception that God himself ever casts any man's soul into the hell of self-imprisonment. He was horrified at that interpretation of our Lord's words in the Sermon on the Mount, which supposes him to represent God as killing and casting into hell. "I say unto you, my friends, be not afraid of them that kill the body, and after that have no more that they can do ; but I will forewarn you whom ye shall fear : Fear him which, after he hath killed, bath power to cast into hell; yea I say unto you, fear him." "We are come," said Mr. Maurice, " to such a pass as actually to suppose that Christ tells those whom he calls his friends not to be afraid of the poor and feeble enemies who can only kill the body, but of that greater enemy who can destroy their very selves, and that this enemy is,—not the Devil, not the spirit who is going about seeking whom he may devour, not he who was a murderer from the beginning,—but that God who cares for the sparrows ; they are to be afraid lest He who numbers the hairs of their head should be plotting their ruin." This interpretation horrified Maurice. He always asserted that ' eternal ' life,—life in God,— was never withheld from any one who would give up the evil will which his own sin, or a tempter more powerful than his own will, had corrupted ; that eternal death was never God's decree, but the doing only of evil powers resisting God.
How far this teaching is, in an ecclesiastical sense, heretical, the present writer is hardly theologian enough to know, especially in re- lation to the very fluid and variable standards of the English Church. A great deal in very orthodox writers comes very near to it. Dr. Newman, forinstance, in his beautiful story of the martyr " Callista," represents eternal death from very much the same point of view, as not inflicted by any decree of God, but simply the natural result of an immersion in self so habitual and complete that the vision of God, if it could be granted, would be more exquisite pain than even the loss of it. Only he does not recoil as Maurice did from the thought that God's will to save every man could ever be finally defeated by the powers of evil. If Maurice were an heresiarch, be was so from his inability to piece together the spiritual truths he had so powerfully grasped, by a tissue of intellectual system in which he could not feel any spiritual force ; from his inability to let intellectual tradition dominate his direct spiritual apprehensions. It was a groutid of heresy, if heresy it was, which he shared with Fenelon,—the teacher of the past whose spirit was most like his, though in fire and force of personal con- viction he was greatly Maurice's inferior.
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