The origin and development of the moral ideas

The opposition against ritualism which was started by the Prophets reached its height in Christ. Men are defiled not by external uncleanness, but by evil thoughts and evil deeds.196 “It is lawful to do well on the sabbath days.”197 Those whose righteousness does not exceed that of the scribes and Pharisees shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.198 The first and great commandment is that which enjoins love to God, but the second, according to which a man shall love his neighbour as himself, “is like unto it.”199 At the same time there are in the New Testament passages in which God’s judgment of men seems to be represented as determined by theological dogma.200 The only sin which can never be forgiven either in this world or in the world to come, is blasphemy against the Holy Ghost;201 and the belief in Jesus is laid down as indispensable for salvation.202 According to St. Paul, a man is justified by faith alone, without the deeds of the law.203 This doctrine, which makes man’s salvation dependent upon his acceptance of the Messiahship of Jesus, has had a lasting influence upon Christian theology, and has, together with certain other dogmas, led to that singular discrepancy between the notions of divine and human justice which has up to the present day characterised the chief branches of the Christian Church.

Some of the early Fathers maintained that the interference and suffering of Christ, in itself, unconditionally saved all souls and emptied hell for ever;204 but this theory never became popular. According to St. Augustine and, subsequently, Calvinian theology, the benefits of the atonement are limited to those whom God, of his sovereign pleasure, has from eternity arbitrarily elected, the effect of faith and conversion being not to save the soul, but simply to convince the soul that it is saved. A third theory—that of Pelagius, Armenius, and Luther—attributes to the sufferings of Christ a conditional efficacy, depending upon personal faith in his vicarious atonement, whereas those who for some reason or other do not possess such faith are excluded from salvation. A fourth doctrine, which early began to be constructed by the Fathers and was adopted by the Roman Catholic and the consistent portion of the Episcopalian Church, declares that by Christ’s vicarious suffering power is given to the Church, a priestly hierarchy, to save those who confess her authority and observe her rites, whilst all others are lost. Certain sectarians, like the Unitarians, or those “liberal Christians” who do not feel themselves tied by the dogmas of any special creed, are the only ones among whom we meet with the opinion that a free soul, who by the immutable laws which the Creator has established may choose between good and evil, is saved or lost just so far and so long as it partakes of either the former or the latter.205

According to the leading doctrines of Christianity, then, the fates of men beyond the grave are determined by quite other circumstances than what the moral consciousness by itself recognises as virtue or vice. They are all doomed to death and hell in consequence of Adam’s sin, and their salvation, if not absolutely predestined, can only be effected by sincere faith in the atonement of Christ or by valid reception of sacramental grace at the hands of a priest. Persons who on intellectual or moral grounds are unable to accept the dogma of atonement or to acknowledge the authority of an exacting hierarchy, are subject to the most awful penalties for a sin committed by their earliest ancestor, and so are the countless millions of heathen who never even had an opportunity to embrace the Christian religion.

Luther was considered to have shown an exceptional boldness when he expressed the hope that “our dear God would be merciful to Cicero, and to others like him.”206 In the Westminster Confession of Faith the Divines declared the opinion that men not professing Christianity may be saved to be “very pernicious, and to be detested”;207 and in their Larger Catechism they expressly said that “they who, having never heard the gospel, know not Jesus Christ, and believe not in him, cannot be saved, be they never so diligent to frame their lives according to the light of nature, or the laws of that religion which they profess.”208 This doctrine has had many adherents up to the present time,209 although a more liberal view in favour of virtuous heathen has obviously been gaining ground.210 Even in the case of Christians errors in belief on such subjects as church government, the Trinity, transubstantiation, original sin, and predestination, have been declared to expose the guilty to eternal damnation.211 In the seventeenth century it was a common theme of certain Roman Catholic writers that “Protestancy unrepented destroys salvation,”212 while the Protestants on their part taxed Du Moulin with culpable laxity for admitting that some Roman Catholics might escape the torments of hell.213 Nathanael Emmons, the sage of Franklin, tells us that “it is absolutely necessary to approve of the doctrine of reprobation in order to be saved.”214

Besides the heathen there is another large class of people whom Christian theology has condemned to hell for no fault of theirs, namely, infants who have died unbaptised. From a very early age the water of baptism was believed by the Christians to possess a magic power to wipe away sin,215 and since the days of St. Augustine it was deemed so indispensable for salvation that any child dying without “the bath of regeneration” was regarded as lost for ever.216 St. Augustine admitted that the punishment of such children was of the mildest sort,217 but other writers were more severe; St. Fulgentius condemned to “everlasting punishment in eternal fire” even infants who died in their mother’s womb.218 However, the notion that unbaptised children will be tormented, gradually gave way to a more humane opinion. In the middle of the twelfth century Peter Lombard determined that the proper punishment of original sin, when no actual sin is added to it, is “the punishment of loss,” that is, loss of heaven and the sight of God, but not “the punishment of sense,” that is, positive torment.

This doctrine was confirmed by Innocentius III. and shared by the large majority of the schoolmen, who assumed the existence of a place called limbus, or infernus puerorum, where unbaptised infants will dwell without being subject to torture.219 But the older view was again set up by the Protestants, who generally maintained that the due punishment of original sin is, in strictness, damnation in hell, although many of them were inclined to think that if a child dies by misfortune before it is baptised the parents’ sincere intention of baptising it, together with their prayers, will be accepted with God for the deed.220 In the Confession of Augsburg the Anabaptistic doctrine is emphatically condemned;221 and although Zwingli rejected the dogma that infants dying without baptism are lost, and Calvin, in harmony with his theory of election, refused to tie the salvation of infants to an outward rite, the necessity of baptism as the ordinary channel of receiving grace appears to have been a general belief in the Reformed churches throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.222 The damnation of infants was in fact an acknowledged doctrine of Calvinism,223 though an exception was made for the children of pious parents.224 But in the latter part of the eighteenth century Toplady, who was a vehement Calvinist, avowed his belief in the universal salvation of all departed infants, whether baptised or unbaptised.225 And a hundred years later Dr.

Hodge thought he was justified in stating that the common opinion of evangelical Protestants was that “all who die in infancy are saved.”226 The accuracy of this statement, however, seems somewhat doubtful. In 1883 Mr. Prentiss wrote of the doctrine of infant salvation independently of baptism:—“My own impression is that, had it been taught as unequivocally in the Presbyterian Church even a third of a century ago, by a theologian less eminent than Dr. Hodge for orthodoxy, piety, and weight of character, it would have called forth an immediate protest from some of the more conservative, old-fashioned Calvinists.”227