[From the Herald of
Freedom of August 11,1838.]
We wander a moment from our technical anti-slavery “sphere,”
to say, with permission of our readers, a word or two on a beautiful article
under this head, in the Christian Examiner. It is from the pen of one of our
highly gifted fellow-citizens, to whom the unhappy subjects of insanity, in
this state, owe so much for the public charity now contemplated in their
behalf. It is written with great elegance, perspicuity and force of style — and
what is more, it seems scarcely to want that spirit of heart-broken
Christianity, so apt to be missing in the graceful speculations of reviewers,
and may we not say, in the speculations of the elegant corps among whom the
writer of the article is here found.
We will find, briefly, what fault we can with the article.
Its beauties need not be pointed out — they lie profusely scattered over its
face. It is an article on the presence of God, and treats of our relations to
Him. But does it set forth that relation, as involving our need of the Lord
Jesus Christ, in order that we may be able to stand in it? For ourselves, we
cannot contemplate God — and dare not look towards Him, unconnected with
Christ. Our writer seems boldly to look upon Him, as the strong-eyed eagle
gazes into the sun. God is of purer eyes than to behold iniquity. He cannot
look upon sin, but with abhorrence. We have sinned; therefore we fear to behold
Him. In Christ, alone, is he our Father in heaven, and we his reconciled
children. In Christ, we dare take hold of his hand and of the skirts of his
almighty garments. The Lord Jesus Christ and “him crucified,” is the medium,
through whom, alone, we dare look upon God, in his works, his providences or
his grace. Sinless man might, without this medium. Fallen man may not. Like the
Israelites at the mount of Sinai, he may “not break through unto the Lord to
gaze,” lest “he perish.”
The writer contemplates God in his works — but he seems,
though awed, elevated and delighted at their grandeur, beauty and wisdom, to
feel still baffled of the great end in their contemplation. Does he not, we
would ask him, feel the absence of some link in the chain of communication with
this ineffable being—which might, if interrupted, anchor his soul securely
within the veil, which, after all, continues to shroud him from communion and
sight? Can he, in sight of the works of God, speak out and sing in the strains
of the singer of Israel? Does he not experience, in view of them, an
admiring enthusiasm and certain swellings of genius, rather than those
spiritual heart-burnings felt by the two on the way to Emmaus, as they talked
with the “stranger in Jerusalem?”
Here is the grand mistake of gifted humanity. Tired of the
world — sick of its emptiness — shocked at its heartlessness — withdrawn from its unprincipled highway into
the lonely by-path of a supererogatory morality, — moved by those “longings
after immortality,” which haunt forever the unbesotted spirit — it tries to
find God in his works, and peradventure in the majesty of his word — not
looking for him, however, in “The Way”
— seeking him along the high and ridgy road of a sort of spirito-intellectual
philosophy, instead of down in the valley of humiliation.
The writer speaks of the communion of God with our minds.
This he seems to regard with chief interest. He mentions “the need of
having attention” — meaning
intellectual attention — “waked up to those old truths.” “Listlessness
of mind,” he continues, “an inveterate habit of inattention to the existence of
the Eternal Spirit, needs to be broken in upon. We need to help each other to
escape a fatuity of mind on this subject, that we may feel that God's ark still
rides o'er the world's waves, and that the burning bush has not gone out.”
There is an “inattention,”
it is true; but it is of the heart, and not merely of the mind
— of the nature, and not of “habit” merely — a spiritual inattention or rather alienation
from God, which must be broken in upon. It is not the creature of habit. Adam
felt it in all its force, the very day of his first transgression. He heard the
voice of God, which in his innocency he had hailed with joy, beyond all
he felt at the beauties of Paradise, — heard it, walking in the garden, in the
cool of the day, and he hid himself from the presence of the Lord God, among
the trees of the garden. His wife also hid herself, for she too had
transgressed — and we, their moral heirs, hide ourselves so to this day.
They could walk in the garden in sight of the beautiful works of God,
and perhaps admire the splendors of Eden; but when they heard his voice, they
hid themselves. Not from habit surely, that not being the creature of a
day. There was “inveteracy,” not of habit, but of fallen nature. It is that which
must be “broken in upon,” before we shall incline to come out from among the
trees, to welcome the presence of God. It may be there is a figurative meaning
also in this hiding among the trees from the presence of him who made those
trees — and may we not deceive ourselves in supposing we contemplate God in his
works, when in truth we are seeking to hide ourselves from his presence,
among the glorious trees of this earth's garden?
The elegant writer will bear with us in our coarse
commentary. We would not expend critical attention on the literary merits or
marks of genius, in a production treating of our relations to God. It is too
awful and interesting a subject. We want reconciliation with God. That is the
one thing needful. The crew of the ill-fated Pulaski wanted only one thing,
when they were cast afloat upon the waves. When they retired to rest that
night, each heart was tantalized with a thousand objects of desire. But when
that explosion awoke them, they had all but one, — life — the shore — something on which to float.
That, all needed, and all felt the need Such
is our need of reconciliation with God, to save us from greater depths than the
sea. We have revolted from God. We are born universally in a state of alienation
from him. The Scriptures and all experience teach this. We do not more
certainly inherit the transmitted form of our fallen first-parents, than
their descended nature. We are born with the need of being “born again.”
Of this we are sure. The truth of it and the effects of it press continually
upon us, with the universality of the air upon our bodily systems. We cannot
evade it. It is our fate, in the wisdom of God. We cannot escape it, any more
than the Old world could the deluge. They saw an ark of Gopher wood, building
by an enthusiastic old man. It eventually saved none of them, who refused to
enter its pitchy sides. The old man forewarned them. He was a preacher of righteousness.
But they were philosophers, and he a fanatic. He talked of rain and flood, — the
breaking up of the fountains of the deep, and the opening of the windows of
heaven. The sky looked blue — the sun rose and set gloriously, and broke out,
as wont, after the showers. And though there were tokens about that despised
old man, which at times made them turn up an apprehensive eye into the
cloudless firmament — philosophy chose
to risk it. The prediction was unnatural— irrational—it could not be so. They
perished.
We have an ark of safety, capacious enough, to be sure, to save
the entire race of man. It will save only those who will enter it, — and
the time of entering, as it was at the flood, is before the sky of probation is
overcast. The door is shut now, as then, before the falling of the first great
drops of the eternal thunder shower.
The ark of safety, we need not say, is Christ. He is the
Way, the Truth, and the Life. No man can come to the Father but by him. Whoever
hath seen him, hath seen the Father, and by him is the only manifestation of
God's presence. The presence of his power may be seen in all objects around us,
but his strange love to the children of men cannot be seen, but through Christ.
As the mortally bitten Israelite could be healed only by looking at the brazen
serpent, so the mortally sin-infected descendant of fallen man can live only by
looking at the Son of Man in the midst of his ignominious crucifixion—even
where he was “lifted up.”
God may be seen in his works, by him whose sins are forgiven.
He may be seen, then, in his word—and the Bible is then as self-evidently the
word of God, as the sun, the mountain and the ocean are his works. His
providential care and government are then palpably felt. The soul can then take
him by the paternal hand, and feel that infinite safety which puts all human
apprehension at rest.
But we are forgetting that our Herald is a small sheet. We
have not space to notice the exquisite beauties of our writer's production as a
composition merely, or the argument it draws of God's presence from his works,
and as it purports merely to notice this evidence of his presence, we will not
here express our regret that the name of Christ is not mentioned in the
article.
May the gifted writer, if he be out of the ark of safety,
not delay to enter in. Let him not tarry without, to gaze with the eye of
elegant curiosity, on the scenery of this Sodom world, — but bow his neck, and “enter
while there's room.” And as we bespeak his immediate heed to the “one
thing needful,” — so we demand his pen, voice, influence, prayers, and
active and open co-operation, in the deliverance of his fellow-countrymen from the
CHAINS OF SLAVERY
SOURCE: Nathaniel Peabody Rogers, A Collection from the Miscellaneous Writings of Nathaniel Peabody
Rogers, Second Edition (1849), p. 1-5
