THE

CHRISTIAN EXAMINER

AND

RELIGIOUS MISCELLANY.

NOVEMBER, 1853.

ART. I. CHRIST'S AUTHORITY THE SOUL'S LIBERTY.

ONE of the most remarkable scenes in the opening chapter of Christianity is that wherein John asks, from the prison, of the authority of Jesus to be the Messiah. Jesus answers by alleging his miracles, enjoining his laws, and offering to teach his lessons; thus asserting an authority threefold, moral, intellectual, and supernatural. John's old question, in the first months of Christ's ministry, is, strangely enough, the question still, in the last year of the Christian era. Not a few in our day have a repugnance to all idea of authority, as implying the enthralment of the soul. But, as though Jesus anticipated at the outset this very objection, he declares that, contrariwise, his authority is the soul's liberty. We propose, if we can, following out this hint, to do away with the common notion of an essential contradiction between authority and liberty, especially between Christ's authority and the soul's liberty, considering the subject in the division already named. First, there is nothing to enslave, but power only to liberate, in Christ's laws. He does not attempt to conceal his claim of moral authority. He lays down the most unbending precepts in the plainest terms. He would not catch men by keeping his yoke out of sight, or saying he has no burden for them to carry, VOL. LV. 4TH S. VOL. XX. NO. III.

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but by explaining that this yoke and burden are from no tyranny, have no weight but what is put in them by a meek and lowly heart, and are thus so light and easy as to be not the oppression, but the emancipation, of weary and heavy-laden mortals. But does it not seem mockery to talk of liberating by a yoke and of giving rest by a burden? In regard to the yoke, we answer, No; for, though this figure is constantly misused, the purpose of a yoke is not to cramp, but to afford ease and the best advantage for drawing a burden. In regard to the burden, too, we answer, No; for the rest of a human being is not, is never, in bearing nothing. So he becomes the heaviest of all burdens to himself, and lugs about his own body and soul, a wretched load, depressing him more than aught beside he could lift, till he becomes like the sailor in Eastern fable, mounted by a spectral monster which no agony could throw off.

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Christ's idea here is but man's experience. Not the worker, but the idler, has a heavy tread; only the charge of a thousand responsibilities gives an alacrity of step scarce touching the ground, and the necessity of exertion fires the nerves and speeds the circulations. bition itself is less discomposing than a forced calm. Napoleon rested less in the little island of St. Helena, than when a score of empires made his bed. That line of the old versifier's fancy,

"Some place delight in action, some in ease,"

assumes a contradiction which hardly holds in fact. The little child, weary of its leisure and asking if you have not another errand for it to do; the bird, more at rest on its wings than on its feet; the horse obediently toiling for a faithful master, with more repose than the wild animal of the desert; the kingly eagle, fatigued in stooping for his prey, but by what he seizes and sustains impelled as with a motive up to his nest; the ship, without a cargo fretting at the wharf, with her freight swimming cheerfully before the breeze; - all these are emblems of spiritual truth; and the burden Jesus imposes by his moral authority in the laws of duty he enjoins, relieves and delivers the soul with just giving it that to do in which it finds its real blessedness and freedom, as every creature finds perfect rest only in the fit and harmonious exercise

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of its powers. His requirement is transport. There is in truth in all nature no rest in utter stoppage, but only in smooth motion; and nothing in the world is still, but all is astir; and all is at rest when stirring in its track,the earth in its orbit like a child in a swing, the sun in his sphere like a rider in his chariot, all the shining orbs in their magnificent mutual poise, and the soul, as Christ beyond all others has taught us, in its obligation and attraction to God and humanity.

We would have no jealous sectarian or even Christian partiality. Let every moral system have credit according as it has thus exercised the nature of man, while to Christianity falls the award simply of having given it the best exercise, which benefits the more it is prescribed upon those else ignorant of their own welfare, and the stronger the signals inducing them to adopt it, so that impertinent and inhuman is the nice scrupulosity that would withhold its application or soften its severity.

In short, Christ's deliverance of the soul is an exchange of burdens. He finds the race heavy laden and he proposes to unbind Pilgrim's pack as he goes on his way, and replace it with what he ought for his welfare to carry.

But in speaking of those that are burdened, Christ refers not to such alone as are crushed by manual toil or goaded by physical necessities. Many are in worse labor than that of the horny fingers or the sweating brow. There are tasks and struggles which men stand to more painfully, and are worn by more dreadfully, than those of spade and scythe, band and wheel, rope and rudder. Beyond the furrow of the ground, the smoke of the furnace and tempests on the sea, his piercing eye saw the stooping of the spirit under sin, the shoulders of transgression bent through ages beneath measureless piles of brute and human sacrifice, and round with heaps of cruel expiation. He saw it watch and droop, gazing into the dim light of its scanty discoveries, such as but made bright-eyed and honey-mouthed Plato long for some navigator from the eternal shore. O, there was a burden on the soul already! The poor, crazy murderess yonder in our asylum, hearing from the adjoining room a cry for light, and saying she, for her part, was resolved, if there were more light in the other world, her neighbor should reach it, furnishes no unapt emblem of an intellect

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bewildered under the burden of doubt. Wretched iniquities, too, like ghosts of judgment to the wicked king, lying heavy on the soul, with the common burden of mortality that lies on us all, sinking men into the grave, and, by a hold of the heart-strings, dragging survivors after them as the drowner draws those next him to perdition, or as down some inclined plane of way-side ruin slides one rank after another before plunged into the abyss, oh! before Christ came, were not the generations of men indeed laden with the huge three-plied burden of sin, uncertainty, and sorrow? But, untying from it this burden, he would not leave it loose and irresponsible, with the levity of a feather swept about in every wind or the vanity of a vessel empty of its contents, to show that last misery of an existence in vain. Therefore, for the burden, so miserable, of false ideas and superstitious tasks, he substitutes the happy one of a true faith and a righteous labor.

We offer no proof in words that so issues the practice of Christian principles. The logic of human history sufficiently evinces how joyless always it is to leave the highest standard of duty. As the punishment of the deserter is always severe, so doom cannot be escaped by the self-loving refugee from the divine kingdom; for the rest man wants. is not an outward state, but far more within; and by a secret jar, by a grumbling pain, by their internal clash or essential ache, while every thing in the outward lot may be fair and soft as summer, the vital powers will feel the judgment on a wrong or negligent life. As it is dangerous for the merchantman unballasted to cross the deep; so in the winds and waves of temptation will founder the soul that skims light and vacant with all its gay streamers on the eternal voyage. Christ's moral authority, though it prescribes our course, does not violate, but enlarges our freedom, just as the road upon the land or the channel through the waters, though defined and authoritatively laid down, is precisely and only the path in which the traveller or seaman is free to go, while deviation is entanglement, overthrow, destruction. The rest of Christ's yoke and burden is not indeed the dead slumber of an exhausted frame, but of a living nature, rest from guilt and struggle and remorse, rest in congenial activity and aspiring love; as the angels sang,

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peace on earth; as the saints tell, a Sabbath-day's journey towards heaven. It is a burden lightened by increase of strength, by supply of motive, by stimulus of example, not by exemption from duty, or diminished weight of responsibility, but by turning duty and responsibility, which will ever cling to us, into liberty and joy.

Verily it is a reality in the history of searching and wandering man. While, at our momentary look, unrest comes like an all-disturbing flood from the very eyes of the alienated being that has not found his home in God, what a river of peace serenely runs into us from the reconciled and communing heart! Not alone from the well and prosperous, but from the sick, from those that have suffered, from those surely declining, yet looking clear and open-eyed at the grave into which they decline, a sight as sublime, we think, as the sun shines upon, a lifegiving quiet, a resistless spiritual order, of which the elements of the universe moving with primeval dignity and depth are but a sign and picture, marking Christ's moral authority for the soul's liberty; the soul's liberty, because action is the essence of freedom, and right action of perfect freedom, and Christ alone, of all lawgivers, enjoins action purely right; because, moreover, to such peaceful action forgiveness of sin is requisite, and Christ, offering the atonement of his blood on the cross, teaching by his own example that the sacrifice of self is the true sacrifice and that the loving acceptance of God is boundless to the believing penitent, assures the pardon, opening a highway over the earth into the heavens.

But Christ's authority is not only moral in his laws : it is also intellectual in his lessons; for so he implies by his direction, Learn of me. This command assumes that there are certain matters on which we are beforehand inquiring. Truly so it is. To ask questions on all subjects, but especially, as the mind awakes, on our own origin and destiny, is indeed a chief characteristic of our nature. We see it in the endless inquisitiveness of a child, who would at once rove and drag us into every hard problem which has foiled the most ancient, inveterate ingenuity of the race; and who is in this but "the father of the man," showing to us our adult selves. But man cannot answer the questions as easily as he asks them; for it is a proverb, that the child or the fool can