318 LECTURES AND ESSAYS [1874- 



This extreme antithesis to the position that all real 

 Christian life rests on true Christian knowledge, is char 

 acteristic of pronounced unbelief, with which in this part 

 of our discussion we are no longer concerned. But even 

 within the Christian Church, the pantheistic notion of 

 God has always influenced a certain class of minds, and 

 shows itself in that tendency to conceive spiritual and 

 moral facts on the analogy of physical processes, which 

 is technically called mysticism. The mystical schools 

 incline to make Christianity an affair of feeling and 

 instinct rather than of knowledge and will ; though, 

 of course, where this tendency is limited by positive 

 Christian motives, it results not in absolute denial, but 

 only in certain modifications of the moral character of 

 our religion. The palmy days of mysticism fall in the 

 Middle Ages, and in these ages, it must be remembered, 

 even the Catholic Church exempted a most weighty part 

 of the spiritual energies of Christianity from the laws of 

 moral action. The doctrine of the opus operatum in the 

 sacraments unquestionably reduces certain features of 

 the spiritual life to the level of a physical process, and 

 this doctrine alone makes it possible for the Church of 

 Rome to regard with complacency a degree of ignorance 

 on the part of the laity, which is quite inconsistent with 

 truly moral growth. 



But in Protestantism, at least, it should be otherwise. 

 When the Reformers taught that the means of grace are 

 effective only in so far as they bring the Word of God into 

 contact with personal faith, they distinctly asserted that 

 all true religious life is morally nourished. For the 

 Word of God meant to the Reformers the direct personal 

 message of God s love in Christ ; so that saving faith is 

 neither a mere intellectual persuasion, nor a mere sub 

 jective habit of mind, but the intelligent and moral 

 outgoing of the personality and will towards a personal 

 revelation of God. Hence the intense zeal with which 

 early Protestantism threw itself on the study of the 



