One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic, Tome 2. John Williamson Nevin

gospel can be regarded as complete. Humanity includes in its general organization certain orders and spheres of moral existence that can never be sundered from its idea without overthrowing it altogether; they enter with essential necessity into its constitution, and are full as much part and parcel of it all the world over as the bones and sinews that go to make up the body of the outward man. The family, for instance, and the state with the various domestic and civil relations that grow out of them, are not to be considered factitious or accidental institutions in any way, continued for the use of man’s life from abroad and brought near to it only in an outward manner. They belong inherently to it; it can have no right or normal character without them; and any want of perfection in them, must even be to the same extent a want of perfection in the life itself as human, in which they are comprehended. So again, the moral nature of man includes in its very conception the idea of art, the idea of science, the idea of business and trade. It carries in itself certain powers and demands that lead to these forms of existence, as the necessary evolution of its own inward sense. Humanity stands in the activity of reason and will, under their proper general character. Take away from it any interest or sphere which legitimately belongs to such activity, and in the same measure it must cease to be a true and sound humanity altogether. No interest or sphere of this sort then can be allowed to remain on the outside of a system of redemption, which has for its object man as such in his fallen state. If christianity be indeed such a system, it must be commensurate in full with the constitution of humanity naturally considered; it must have power to take up into itself not a part of this only but the whole of it, and by no possibility can it ever be satisfied with any less universal result.

All this we say falls to the inner mission of christianity, its destination to raise humanity inwardly considered to a higher power, a new quality and tone, as well as to take possession of it by territorial conquest from sea to sea and from pole to pole. And it needs to be well understood and kept in mind, that the first object here is full as needful as the second, and belongs quite as really to the cause of the world’s evangelization. “The field is the world,”40 we may say with quite as much solemnity and emphasis in this view, as when we speak of it under the other. As the kingdom of God is not restricted in its conception to any geographical limits or national distinctions, but has regard to mankind universally; so neither is it to be thought of as penetrating the organization of man’s nature only to a certain extent, taking up one part of it into its constitution and leaving another hopelessly on the outside; on the contrary it must show itself sufficient to engross the whole. Nothing really human can be counted legitimately beyond its scope; for the grand test of its truth is its absolute adequacy to cover the field of human existence at all points, its catholicity in the sense of measuring the entire length and breadth of man’s nature. Either it is no redemption for humanity at all, or no constituent interest of humanity may be taken as extrinsical ever to its rightful domain. It will not do to talk of any such interest as profane, in the sense of an inward and abiding contrariety between it and the sacredness of religion; as though religion might be regarded as one simply among other coordinate forms of life, with a certain territory assigned to it and all beyond foreign from its control. What is really human, a constitutive part of the original nature of man, may be indeed profaned, by being turned aside from its right use and end, but can never be in itself profane. On the contrary, if religion be the perfection of this nature, all that belongs to it must not only admit but require an inward union with religion, in order to its own completion; and as christianity is the end and consummation of all religion besides, it follows that such completion in the case of every human interest can be fully gained at last only in the bosom of its all comprehensive life. The mission of christianity is not to denounce and reject any order of life belonging to primitive humanity as intrinsically hostile to God (that would be a species of Manichean41 fanaticism); nor yet to acknowledge it simply as a different and foreign jurisdiction; but plainly to appropriate every order to itself, by so mastering its inmost sense as to set it in full harmony with the deeper and broader law of its own presence. Art, science, commerce, politics, for instance, as they enter essentially into the idea of man, must all come within the range of this mission; and so far as it falls short of their full occupation at any given time with the power of its own divine principle, it must be regarded as a work still in process only towards its proper end; just as really as the work of outward missions is thus in process also, and short of its end, so long as any part of the world remains shrouded in pagan darkness. It is full as needful for the complete and final triumph of the gospel among men, that it should subdue the arts, music, painting, sculpture, poetry, &c., to its sceptre, and fill them with its spirit as that it should conquer in similar style the tribes of Africa or the islands of the South Sea. Every region of science, as it belongs to man’s nature, belongs also to the empire of Christ; and this can never be complete, as long as any such region may remain unoccupied by its power. Philosophy too, whose province and need it is to bring all the sciences to unity and thus to fathom their deepest and last sense, falls of right under the same view. Some indeed pretend, that christianity and philosophy have properly nothing to do with each other; that the first puts contempt on the second; that the second in truth is a mere ignis fatuus42 at most, which all good christians are bound to abhor and avoid. But if so, it must be considered against humanity to speculate at all in this way; whereas the whole history of the world proves the contrary; and it lies also in the very idea of science, that knowledge in this form should be sought as the necessary completion of it under other forms. To pronounce philosophy against humanity, is virtually to place science universally under the like condemnation. And so to treat it as profane or impertinent for the kingdom of God, is in truth to set all science in similar relation; the very result to which fanaticism has often shown itself prone to run. But what can be well more monstrous than that or more certainly fatal in the end to the cause of christianity? Philosophy, like science and art in other forms; is of one birth with man’s nature itself; and if christianity be the last true and full sense of this nature, it is not possible that it should be either willing or able to shut it out from its realm. We might as soon dream of a like exclusion towards the empire of China; for it is hard to see surely how the idea of humanity would suffer a more serious truncation by this, than by being doomed to fall short of its own proper actualization the other way. The world without China would be quite as near perfection, we think, as the world without philosophy. Its full redemption and salvation, the grand object of the gospel and so the necessary work and mission of christianity among men, includes it is plain both interests, and we have no right to magnify the one ever at the cost of the other.43

Such being the general nature of this missionary work intensively taken, we may see at once how far it is still from its own proper end even in the case of the nominally christian world itself. It is melancholy to think, that after nearly two thousand years which have passed since Christ came, so large a part of the human race should still be found beyond the line of christianity outwardly considered. But it is not always properly laid to heart, that the shortcoming in the other view, the distance between idea and fact within this line is, to say the least, no less serious and great. If when we think of the millions of Africa, India, and China, we must feel that the gospel thus far has been only in progress towards its full triumphant manifestation in the world; this feeling must prevail no less, when we direct our attention to the moral, scientific, and political fields, which all around us appear in like barbarous estrangement from its inward law. In this view, even more emphatically than in the other, may we not adopt the language (Heb. ii: 8): “We see not yet all things put in subjection under him”—though nothing less than such universal subjection be needed to carry out the first sense of man’s life (Gen i: 26; Ps viii: 6–8), and so nothing less can satisfy the enterprise of his redemption? Alas, how quite the reverse of this are we made to behold in every direction. Not alone do the wild powers of nature refuse to obey at once the will of the saints, but it is only a most partial dominion at best also that the christian principle has yet won for itself even in the moral world. Whole territories and spheres of human life here, have never yet been brought to any true inward reconciliation and union with the life of the Church. Romanism has pretended indeed to bring them into subjection; but so far as the pretension has