They stand, those halls of Sion, And bright with many an angel, And all the martyr throng: The daylight is serene; The pastures of the Blessed Are decked in glorious sheen." And a little farther on we find him speaking of ** the many mansions, That divers merits claim. And so it is on high." How different this from the gloomy, vague eternity, the endless psalmsinging and monotonous enunciation (no cheerful embodiment in act and life-worship) of God's praise and glory, which became at a later date the almost exclusively prevailing conceptions (or no-conceptions) of heaven in the Christian world! Not that it was perhaps the intention of preachers and writers on the subject so to pourtray it, or that they always did actually so pourtray it; but they were so fearful of presenting false, and, as they deemed, too mundane ideas of it, that they too frequently omitted altogether to pourtray it under features which could assist the mind to realize any conceptions of it whatever; and the unknown and unimagined is of necessity gloomy and blank. We have ourselves known an objection made to a New Church child's hymn, on the ground that it spoke of heaven as radiant with flowers and sunshine. Who knew if there would be flowers and sunshine in heaven? Why not speak of joy and peace instead? And joy and peace there will doubtless be in heaven; only, to a child's mind these abstract impressions convey no idea, whereas flowers and sunshine do. And it was, among other causes, by thus abstracting from the idea of heaven, all conceivable earthly joy and beauty, that the idea itself was at length well-nigh abstracted altogether from the minds of men immersed in earthly passions and perceptions; till belief in any future life at all almost died out, in the wide-spread infidelity of the eighteenth century; the effects and influences may still be too surely traced among us up to the present day. Bernard de Morlaix, well versed, no doubt, in apocalyptic utterances concerning the splendours of the Jerusalem to be, perceived, with far truer insight, that nothing of God's making is in itself base or unheavenly, and that however perverted and defiled here, it will be rescued and restored to its true uses there, till "In the land of beauty All things of beauty meet." It is with still deeper interest that we observe in this mediæval gem the total absence of a far deeper error; that fatal doctrine of the Vicarious Atonement, which strikes at the very root of true Christianity; separating the Father from the Son, not only in person, but in character and attributes; ascribing to the former wrath and vengeance, which could only be propitiated by the blood of some sacrifice, whether innocent or guilty; and making the latter the victim, not of man's sins and hatred, but of God's justice, profanely so called; thus converting "the brightness of the Father's face" into a dense cloud, overshadowing and distorting His Divinest attributes; and yet further substituting for the love of God and man, and obedience to God's will, which Christ Himself enunciates as the conditions of pardon and salvation, a mere speculative faith in the mysteries of Redemption and Atonement; a faith of which the apostle justly says, that “ as the body without the spirit is dead, so faith without works is dead also!" Well might such a faith prepare the way for the fearful spectacle of a professing Christian Church denying its Master in life and act; nay, even boldly asserting that it neither need nor could keep the Commandments, Christ's obedience having sufficed for all! But what says Bernard? He is speaking of the perfect peace of the eternal home, and asks : "That peace-but who may claim it? The guileless in their way, Who keep the ranks of battle, He does not seem Who mean the thing they say." to so much as dream of the heresy that man's actions can contribute nothing to his salvation: "Oh! happy, holy portion, Refection for the blest; Toil, man, to gain that light; Till hope be lost in sight." Nor does he, on the other hand, put his trust in self-righteousness, or merit in works. The following beautiful passage is as free from the one error as from the other : "Jerusalem, exulting On that securest shore, I hope thee, wish thee, sing thee, I ask not for my merit; I seek not to deny And from defilement laved: I weep, or try to weep: And David's Royal Fountain Purge every sin away." Here, indeed, we have faith and grace duly honoured, yet undivorced from the free-will effort and obedience, without which man were no longer man, but a mere predestinate machine, constructed to utter certain phrases touching the all-sufficiency of Christ's blood and merits; in the utterance of which, even, it has no choice nor volition, being unable to utter them but in mechanical response to "a call" of the Holy Spirit, which indeed calls some, but neglects others, according to God's eternal decree (!) Oh! earnest Christian brethren! ye who labour so zealously at home and abroad to bring home a knowledge of Christ and His truth to the souls of fellow-creatures who sit in darkness,—but first, as a preliminary of your labours, sign a Westminster Confession, and the like,—bethink you yet a little if these Westminster Confession doctrines, of predestination to salvation or perdition by immutable decrees, of the valuelessness of obedience to contribute to salvation, and the rest, have in truth much to do with Christ or Christianity at allcan have anything to do with the teachings of Him who said—" If ye would enter into eternal life, keep the commandments ;" and "Whosoever cometh unto me I will in no wise cast out." In saying that we find no trace in this poem of the Vicarious Atonement doctrine, we may seem to have overstated our case, should the reader, at page 17, chance upon the expression, "“The happy, dearbought people." But it may be remembered that the translator himself calls his work a very free translation; and on reference to the Latin, conscientiously printed at the end of the translation, we are happy to find that the expression and idea is the translator's only. In the original it is "the pious," who "Through the sacred lilies, And flowers on every side," according to the beautiful description of the poet"Go wandering far and wide." It is the pious of whom he continues:— "Their breasts are filled with gladness, Their mouths are tuned to praise; On former sins they gaze. The fouler was the error, The sadder was the fall, The fulness of His love, Eternal joys above." He pardons all, then, according to Bernard's creed; not a predestined few alone. And we may observe, too, that his "one and only anthem" of the redeemed, celebrates—the Great Sacrifice?—the All-atoning blood? No : "The fulness of His love, ་ 1 Who gives, instead of torment, Whether Bernard may have possessed a clear conception of the perfect unity of Father and Son, as "God in Christ," we cannot say; but of their separation into two Persons he had positively none, as may be seen from several passages; as, for instance :— "There Jesus shall embrace us, There Jesus be embraced; That spirit's food and sunshine Amidst the happy chorus A place, however low, And Jesus to His true ones Brings trophies fair to see; Yes! God, my King and Portion, And worship face to face." What room does this leave for the idea of any God but one God, and that God, Jesus? And as, moreover, earlier in the poem, we find an allusion to that remarkable passage in 1st Corinthians (xv. 24—28.) concerning the end, when the Son shall have delivered up the kingdom to the Father, “that God may be all in all," is it not possible that clearer perceptions of the crowning truth, that Father and Son are one, even as soul and body in man are one, may have hovered in the Christian Church at that day, than most of us have been wont to imagine ?— possible?—nay, must it not have been so? It is mainly, indeed, as an indication of this fact that we desire to introduce this little book to our readers, though its own intrinsic beauty well deserves our notice. It has of late been strongly asserted that the doctrine of a Vicarious Atonement, so long supposed to be a vital, central, inseparable element of the Christian faith, is in fact neither more nor less than a heresy which took its rise in the dark ages, and was first authoritatively put forward in this very twelfth century in which Bernard wrote. A composition, therefore, belonging to that century,-probably to the earlier part, 1122 to 1156 A.D. being assigned as the probable limits within which it was written,—which presents no trace of the doctrine in question (though it issued from what must have been one of the strongholds of the orthodoxy of that day), affords strong corroborative testimony to such a theory of its origin. Whether Anselm or any other twelfth century theologian be responsible for originating it, it is clear that there were at that time pious Christians who had no knowledge whatever of such a doctrine, a fact which cannot but be gratifying to others, claiming to be pious Christians at the present day, who equally ignore that doctrine as any part of Christian truth, though they know and have heard so much of it. |