MR. MACCOLL ON THE ATHINASIAN CREED.* MR. MACCOLL writes well
and vigorously, and has a very strong grasp of the close connection between faith and morals. No one can say that to Mr. Maccoll the Athanasian Creed is a lesson of abstract dogma, apart from life. He has shown very powerfully the num- ber of points at which doctrinal truths of that highest kind which- deal with the nature of God, touch on actual human life, and in his exposition of some of them, to the illustration of which he- brings a curiously wide acquaintance with both old and modern writers in very different fields of literature, he seems to us to leave little to be desired. Yet Mr. Maccoll appears to be a High-Churchman, so high that he has, we regret to say, committed himself to the course of retiring from the Church, in case the very mild policy of allowing the clergy an "option " as to the recital of the Creed should be adopted. However, we must confine our notice of his book, which ranges far beyond this special topic, though, as we gladly admit, not from any looseness of thought in the writer, to this particular question of the Damnatory Clauses of the Athanasian Creed,—a question upon which Mr. Maccoll appears to us to take up an exceedingly unsound and vulnerable, though perfectly frank and intelligible position.
Mr. Maccoll's main position appears to be that "wilful perver- sion of the Christian faith is as perilous to man's everlasting inte- rests as wilful transgression of the moral law," and yet he concedes to Dean Stanley that in all probability " wilful rejection of the Catholic faith,"in the sense of its conscious rejection by a mind con- vinced of its truth, is an impossibility. Of course it may be dis- owned or dissembled for worldly purposes, as it constantly was in the days of persecution, and as it still occasionally is by men afraid of the ridicule of the world ; but that is simply the sin of unfaithfulness, not of heresy, and it is of heresy alone that Mr. Maccoll has to speak in this little book. What, then, Mr. Maccoll means by "wilful rejection" of the truth is a rejection of the truth due to some former sin of commission or omission, which had incapacitated the mind for accepting what other- wise it would have embraced eagerly. " By deliberate rejection," he says (p. 52), "I mean rejection which might have been avoided if the man had made more use of his opportunities." And doubtless the time is passed when any first-rate thinker would assert that there is no free moral (or immoral) element in opinion. In all schools alike, all of us, who believe in moral freedom at all; heartily recognise that our opinions are in considerable measure determined by our own actions; that there may be truths to which we have blinded ourselves by habitual yielding to conscious pre- judice; that there are others against which we are prepossessed by that evil instinct of self-apology which makes us unwilling to recognise as true that which would condemn ourselves. In other words, moral action modifies opinion by making men shrink from considering many of the most important of the data of opinion. We are too averse to look into certain corners of
* 77ze Damnatory Claws of the Athanasian Creed rationally explained in a Letter to the Right Hon. WE. Gladstone, M.P. By the Rev. Malcolm Maecoll, MA. London: Riving-Goma. our own minds, to see all we ought to see before making up our minds what is true and what is false. So far we heartily go with Mr. Maccoll. But we do not on that account admit that there is no distinction between direct moral transgression and that rejection of the truth which may (or may not) be the consequence of previous moral trans- gression. We are quite sure that the former deserves and will result in suffering of some sort. We are not quite sure that the latter does. We are only sore that it does so far as it is the consequence of previous moral transgression, and how far that is we do not know. Mr. Maccoll seems to say that we are as much responsible for the uncalculated and perhaps incalculable con- sequences of sin, as for the sin itself. But that is hardly conceivable. It no doubt greatly increases the guilt of violent passion or of drunkenness, that it often leads to sets for which the agent is, at the moment, irresponsible, like murder for instance. Yet whatever the legal crime may be, it is a legitimate ground of pity and recommendation to mercy that a man was at the moment irresponsible for the murder, and only guilty of the smaller sin of putting himself in the condition in which his acts were uncon- trolled by his own reason and will. And so, too, doubtless, it increases the guilt of all wrong-doing that it renders our minds duller for the apprehension of divine truth ; but still nobody could fairly say that every man who mines true faith through a perver- sion of his intellect arising from (say) some very small habitual sin like moral heedlessness, is guilty of voluntarily reject- ing true faith. Unquestionably the indirectness of the mis- chief exerted by moral faults on the intellect, does diminish the responsibility for intellectual perversion. For you know when you do wrong, and know how, as far as possible, to undo it by repentance ; but you don't know all the indirect results of doing wrong, and can't always undo them even when you have repented of the moral wrong which was the cause of the misbelief. A man through fear of ridicule misses his hold in youth of some great truth. In his maturity he sees the weakness and evil of his fear of ridicule, repents of and overcomes it ; but the time is passed for his apprehension of the truth ; his intellect is stiffened, and he can grasp it no longer. Is he to "perish ever- tingly" for the indirect result of a sin of which he has re- pented? The Athanasian Creed, in regarding unbelief or misbelief as, at least, one direct fount and origin of "perishing everlast- ingly," certainly exaggerates gravely the moral responsibility of man for an erroneous faith. If a "wilful perversion of the Catholic faith" only means, as Mr. Maccoll admits, misappre- hending it through indirect consequences of some other wilful sin, then the responsibility for the misapprehension is certainly less grave than for the sin which caused it. And whatever punishment falls on you, it ought undoubtedly, to be the punish- ment rather of the guilty cause, than of the consequence which is only indirect and unforeseen. But the Athanasian Creed unques- tionably seems to treat heresy as if it were direct and intentional sin, recognisable as sin at the moment by the man who embraces the heresy ; and in so doing, it is, we take it, itself in grave error, and a legitimate stumbling-block to the Christian.
And next, what does Mr. Mecca mean,— i.e., what does he explain the Creed as meaning,—by the doom of "perishing ever- lastingly" denounced against the misbeliever or unbeliever? He makes it, if we understand him rightly, only amount to this,— that the heretic, so far as he is identified with his heresy, shall perish everlastingly. In other words, if he were all heretic, if his whole heartand soul had passed into the false belief, and were identified with it, then Mr. Maccoll thinks he would be all evil, and would go into the everlasting fires ; but if he were, so to say, disengageable from his false belief, if it had only imposed itself accidentally on his understanding, or by some comparatively weak ties on his moral nature, which weak ties admitted of being dissolved through higher influences, then it would be not he, but only his heretical thought, which would "perish everlastingly." Now of course this cannot only mean so little is this,—that what- ever is false in a man's creed must eventually disappear before the divine light of the eternal world ; for no one would think of denouncing the doom of "perishing everlastingly" against the devotee of a mere mistaken philosophical system or other human opinion, not closely connected with religious truth. But the in- capacity of man for receiving God's own revelation, affords, as Mr. Maccoll and the Athanasian Creed assume, a really strong-presumption of evil within. There is something in our in- capacity for accepting God's own account of himself which, according to the Athanaaianist, suggests at least the most lively suspicion of something worse even than sin, the reluctance to be healed of sin. As the theology of the Gospel is con- feasedly given as a remedy for human sin, the assumption is not unnaturally made that those who cannot avail themselves of the remedy, cannot do so from some moral evil of a deeper than ordinary dye. And this is evidently Mr. Memoirs own belief, for though he tries to relieve the sinner, as distinguished from the sin, of the fearful doom of perishing everlastingly, and makes out that Arius may be saved, though in that case his Arianism must have fallen from him, he yet maintains that the specific danger of false belief, i.e., we suppose, of the special kind of sin which he sup- poses to be usually implied in false belief, is even greater than that of ordinary sin ;—" for my own part, I do not scruple to say that, of the two, I would rather see a people in pos- session of a true faith and given over to immorality, than in possession of a false faith or of no faith at all, and living morally." We conclude Mr. Maccoll here means 'living a life of external morality,' for if he really means that he would rather see a. people sinning against light, than living according to their higheat natural light, but still in involuntary ignorance of divine truth, we- take it that he has all true morality and all true theology against him ; for theology, no leas than morality, has far more hope for those who obey the imperfect law written in the heart, than for those who resist the more perfect law written in heart au& intellect alike. But we do not doubt that really Mr. Maccoll, like every true Athanasianist, thinks that in the vast majority of cases unbelief is not only due to past guilt, but to the most serious kinds of past guilt, on the grouni that the guilt which renders. the remedy inapplicable, must be even deeper than that which con- stitutes the disease. Indeed he quotes, in evidence of the fearful gravity of unbelief, St. John's admonition that no hospitality is to be shown to anyone who impugns the Incarnation :—" If there come any unto you and bring not this doctrine, receive him not into your house, neither bid him God speed, for .he that biddeth him God speed is partaker of his evil deeds" (John, 2nd Epistle, v. 10 and 11). Now, we would ask Mr. Maccoll how far he acts on this admonition, or would urge his correspondent, the Prime Minister, to do so? Does he seriously think that the Prime Minister ought not to invite to his house anyone who does not confess "that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh?" The answer to this question would be a perfectly fair test of the difference between the modern and the early Christian view of unbelief. The first Christians regarded it as a sort of moral wilfulness which might, in rare cases, like St. Paul's, be palliated by invincible ignorance,. but which was presumptively, at all events, moral evil, and moral evil of a deeper than ordinary dye. Does Mr. Maccoll seriously think that a modern Englishman would do well to accustom him- self to the same tone of mind,—that a statesman, for instance, should govern his hospitality by the orthodoxy of his acquaintances? If Dr. Maccoll holds this, his whole moral judgment of our exist- ing life is so different from that of most of his contemporaries, that we hardly know how he can get on amongst us at all. If he does not, then he must admit that even the apostles and evan- gelists may have been hasty in their moral judgments on unbelief ; and whether they were so or not for their own time, were certainly so for ours. Mr. Maccoll will ask us to refer back our questioa from the Apostles to their Master, but he has very little to show for his doctrine that Christ ever spoke of unbelief as intrinsically sinful. He did no doubt condemn those who were not personally drawn towards him, as "loving the darkness rather than the light, because their deeds were evil ;" but he said nothing about the duration of that condemnation, and, moreover, the teat of per- sonal attraction to the perfect life was a very different test frons that of intellectual acquiescence in the theology of the Gospels. However strange it may seem, it is to us mere 'natter of fact that to the mass of the present generation the divine faith which was given as a remedy against moral evil, is at least as difficult of attainment as the vivifying moral power which it ought to supply ; and if this be so, a creed which declares that an shall "perish everlastingly" who believe amiss, as well as, and on the same level with, all who do evil, is surely not one to carry. much light and life into the hearts of men.
Finally, though we quite admit that the question of the meaning of "perish everlastingly" is not raised specially by the Athanasian Creed, —for it must mean of course as applied to misbelief in this Creed whatever it means, as applied to evil life by our Lord,— we do think the Athanasian Creed objectionable as being the only creed to force that very difficult question on the consciences of Church- men,—a question, to our mind, best left alone. Nor can we admit that Mr. Macao!' gets rid of the difficulty by saying that the ever- bating punishment denounced is not inflicted by God, but invited by man, since man renders himself incapable of forgiveness and re-
pentance. We admit, indeed that there is some force in what he says on this head in the following fine passage :—
" When the Pharisees asked our Lord, When the kingdom of God should come?' He answered, ' The kingdom of God is within you.' 'With equal truth it may be said that the kingdom of Satan is also within as. Each man has within himself, during the period of his probation, the elements of his own final condition. His character is developed from within, and outward circumstances are but the passive materials on which it feeds. They are necessary to its growth, but they do not determine the direction in which it shall grow ; that is the province of man's free-will, which makes him master of his circumstances, not their slave. In this respect man differs essentially from all else that lives upon this earth. He possesses a conscious, self-determining, power, and can shape all external influences after the fashion of the governing principle which rules his conduct from within. In one sense indeed all organic existences may be said to have a self-determining power. Every form of created life in the universe is built upon a certain type, and aspires, consciously or unconsciously, to some ideal as the final cause of its existence ; and any life, from an acorn to an archangel, which fails to realise the end of its being, may truly be said to 'perish ever- lastingly.' It happened to me, not long ago, to wander through a forest by the sea, in which all the trees were misshapen and stunted. They bad been exposed to the withering blasts of an eastern ocean during their period of growth, and so they were not able to reach the perfection of which their nature was potentially capable. They had passed their probation, they had arrived at maturity, and had no longer any possibility of amendment. The tempest might break or root them up; but no force of man or nature could ever again change their shapes without destroying them. They perished everlastingly.' Have we not here a parable of human life? Man's soul, like a tree, or like the body which clothes it, has its period of growth, and tends to a state of un- changing fixedness. It is as true of him as of the trees of the forest that the influences of a comparatively short period determine the cha- racter of a period indefinitely long. Exposure to a demoralising set of influences for a given time may fix the character so irrevocably in a wrong groove that, in Scriptural language, it is impossible to renew it again unto repentance.' And, on the other hand, perseverance in the right way will, in due time, impress upon the human will such a character of ttrict conformity to God's will, that it can no longer be tempted to evil ; sin will no more have dominion over it,' and a fall will be impossible. But the analogy of the vegetable kingdom does not carry us very far. There is a vital difference between the development of a tree and that of human character. For the tree is at the mercy of surrounding circumstances ; it oannot move out of its place or protect itself against the influences of the eastern breeze. Bat man can rise superior to circumstances. He can 'work out his own salvation,' and can turn even his temptations into blessings. No combination of circumstances, however hostile, can injure his true self without the concurrence of his own free and presiding will. He is thus the author of his own final destiny, whatever that destiny may be. God damns none of His creatures to everlasting perdition. He shuts the door of heaven against no one who has not previously closed it -on himself. In making man capable of everlasting bliss He has necessarily made him capable of everlasting perdition. God Almighty Himself, with reverence be it said, could not create a being who should be capable of virtue without leaving him, at the same time, capable of sin. For virtue implies a free-will, and a free-will implies the power of choice, and liberty of choice implies the possibility of making a wrong choice, and a wrong choice, confirmed into a habit, may result in such a moral paralysis as shall make recovery impossible. The man who has thus reduced himself t, a state of 'incorrigibility,' to use Aristotle's phrase, finds no place of repentance,' not because God refuses to be gracious, but because the perverted will no longer possesses the power of making a right choice."
We do not deny at all that what we see actually happening for years before our eyes,—the hardening of the human will against God,—might happen for ages. It is quite conceivable that man may be a creature with a power to mould himself so long as his nature is, so to say, in its plastic stage, either in one direction or the other, and yet after a certain period of such moulding, may be incapable of rendering himself, or being rendered ever again plastic to spiritual influence. We say this may be so, that there are phenomena which look as if it were so, though we should be very sorry to say absolutely, on such exceedingly inade- quate experience as ours, that it is so. But even grant it were so, and would it account for the everlasting life of a creature self- fixed in an evil mould, and incapable thenceforth of anything but misery? Mr. Maccoll appears to think it would. We should say that if it were so, it would account for the annihilation of such souls fixed in absolutely inelastic forms of spiritual evil, but certainly not for the doom of infinite, and hopeless, and as far as they are concerned, useless, misery.
Altogether, we cannot but think that Mr. Ma.ccoll, with all his learning, earnestness, subtlety, and eloquence, has failed in justifying "rationally," as he promises to do on his title-page, the interpretation ordinarily attached to "perishing everlastingly," And that, therefore, the Damnatory Clauses of the Athanasian Creed, even apart from the difficulty of applying such denun- ciations primarily to mistaken beliefs, would be much better kept out of creeds intended for public worship. We hold, then, that Mr. Maccoll has failed to justify the treatment of a probable, but at the best doubtful and indirect intellectual consequence of former guilt, as being on the same, or, as he seems to think, even a lower moral level, as regards the divine displeasure, than that guilt itself ; that he has failed to show that it is possible or
right to treat doubt nowadays as if there were a fair presumption that it implies a deep moral guilt, though unquestionably the Apostles (bat never, we believe, our Lord, unless the doubtful and probably unauthentic ending of St. Mark's Gospel be accepted as evidence), did more or lees so regard it in their days; and lastly, that he has failed to show that there is no deep moral difficulty about the hypothesis of the everlasting suffering, in the strict sense of the term, of " incorrigible " beings, even if we admit to him, as perhaps we might, that man may possess the unenviable power of making himself "incorrigible." With so many and such serious difficulties inherent in this Creed, we submit that men as broad and thoughtful as Mr. Maccoll, are unreasonable and in- tolerant, when they threaten to abandon the National Church for so trivial a cause as that an option had been left to clergymen whether they should use this difficult and to many of us bigoted and intolerant formula some six times a year or not.
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