Unitarianism Defended: A Series of Lectures by Three Protestant Dissenting Ministers of LiverpoolMartineau, James
Religion
Unitarianism Defended: A Series of Lectures by Three Protestant Dissenting Ministers of Liverpool
Martineau, James
Unitarianism
I have shown that there is no doctrinal certainty in Christianity
considered as a _written_ Revelation: but neither is there _any moral
certainty_ as to the Will of God and his practical requirements conveyed
by mere words. When God tells me in words to love Him and to love my
neighbour, I do not know what practical forms these feelings are to
assume, neither do I know how all the influences of my present life are
to control me in the exercise of these affections. But I understand what
God means when I see Jesus interpreting for me this will of God by his
own character, and combining in his own life, through all circumstances,
the perfect love of God and Man. Now I maintain, that no system of
Doctrine could be a Revelation to me of the purposes and ends of life.
It is a practical question, and practically must it be solved. He who
will work out for me on this scene of things the great designs of my
being, and show to me, in action and in suffering, in sympathy and in
struggle, in the throbbings of life and in the hushed sublimities of
death, the right attitudes of my nature, the fitting dignities of
enlightened and heaven-bound man,—he who is not the Prophet merely of
divine Truth but the Impersonator of his own views, who stands
successively in each practical position and robes himself in the living
glories of duty,—he alone can pretend to be a Revelation of character,
as God wills it, having stamped upon his views illustrations of Reality.
And he alone can pretend to have unravelled the mystery of our
Discipline, who himself passes through our trials, and transmutes them
into the nurseries of Power, the pregnant schools of Character—who shows
us the outward circumstance, as a torch to the Spirit, lighting up the
energies of Duty’s inviolable will,—who moves amid the evil that is in
the world, and is not overcome by it, but overcomes it with good,—who
encounters sin and sinners, and treats them with the pity of a brother,
yet with the holiness of one whose Father is the spiritual God,—who
stands amid baffled purposes of good, the broken projects of benevolence
in the unquelled trusts of Faith, seeing, though afar off, the Harvest
of this unpromising Spring,—in whom the worst aspects of Humanity only
draw out the unselfishness of Charity; and the clouded countenance of
God, veiled to sight though not to Faith, the perfect peace of a filial
Spirit. He who passes for us through all this variety of mortal
circumstance, and exhibits each, even the most dark and unpromising, as
full of the materials of our Education, contributing to the formation of
that perfect mind which is the end and heaven of our being, is indeed a
perfect Revelation, “unimproved and unimprovable,” though improving _us_
to the end of Time, an embodied Scripture, the word made flesh and
dwelling amongst us.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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