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NOTE TO SERMON XIII.

ON RELIGIOUS MYSTERY, REASON, AND FAITH.

WORDS of a sublime or recondite import are so often employed to produce impressions, instead of to convey meanings, and are so commonly received and passed without examination, that at length they are worn out, as well by dishonest practices as by indiscriminate currency. They lose their value, and are no better than blank counters. It then becomes necessary that they should be minted anew, and stamped, as it were, over again with the image and superscription which they originally bore. Thanks to our elder writers, and in the most important cases, to our incomparable liturgy, the dies are preserved, and can be re-applied with ease and certainty. To drop the metaphor, (if a mode of expression, so germane to the matter, and so long attached to it, can be called metaphorical,) the words in question frequently require to be re-defined.

It has so fared with the high religious term mystical. Used with a respectful feeling, it often means no more than vague, awful, and obscure: taken contemptuously, it passes for unreal, visionary, and phantastic'. Hence, it is apt to suggest these meanings, covertly and at unawares, to the prejudice of its proper signification, or else to go

'Mystic, taken as a substantive, always partakes of this borrowed sense. A mystic is an enquirer, who, passing the bounds assigned to human knowledge, vainly busies

himself with the heights above, or the depths below it: an explorer of undiscoverable secrets, whether in the world of sense, or in that of spirit.

for nothing: and when it is remembered where and how this term is used in the church service, and to what it refers in sacred scripture, it may perhaps not be deemed superfluous, or foreign to the subject under discussion, if I attempt to recal the precise notion to which it has been affixed, adding a few remarks on the allied terms, mystery and mysterious.

It cannot be necessary to premise, that there are, in matters of religion, many facts of highest concernment, and for which we have the fullest evidence, which are nevertheless insusceptible of sensible experience. These facts, with the notions to which they correspond, are properly called mystical: "truths above sense" revealed to "the pure of heart" by the Word; "deep things of God," which the natural man cannot know, because they are "spiritually discerned'." Hence the necessity of a certain preparation of heart and mind for the reception of divine light, an initiation, faintly imaged in those mystic rites of the heathen, (for even by these was this necessity acknowledged,) from which the class of phrases under consider. ation, has, with the highest possible authority", been

11 Cor. ii. 9, 10, 14.

Vere scribit Augustinus de Trin., 1. 3, c. 10. Diabolum animas deceptas illusasque præcipitasse, quum polliceretur purgationem animæ per eas, quas, Teλetàs appellant, transfigurando se in Angelum lucis, per multiformem machinationem, in signis et prodigiis mendacii. August. de Trin. 1. 3, c. 10. Vide Hoff. Lex. in voc. mysterium.

Mark iv. 11. Matt. xiii. 11. Luke viii. 10. 1 Tim. iii. 9, and the Epistles of St. Paul passim. Rev. i. 20, &c. The word μvoTŃ

pia does not occur in the Gospel by St. John, but the Oeoryeveo ía, or Taλiyyeveoía, were mystic terms, in use before the true doctrine had been stated by our Saviour. John ii. 1—10. Indeed, so striking was the apparent similarity, as to have drawn forth that indignant exclamation from Tertullian: "Omnia adversus veritatem ipsâ veritate constructa esse, operantibus emulationem Spiritibus erroris." But why "adversus veritatem?" Is it not rather a luculent testimony in its favour?

adopted by the Christian Church'. The word mystical therefore is nearly synonymous with the less usual terms supersensual or transcendental, and is frequently supplied by the expressions, "divine and heavenly," "inward and spiritual," "invisible," "ineffable,” “ supernatural," &c.

When these eternal verities, coming forth "from the bosom of the Father," take their place in a revelation, or religion, they are entitled mysteries; while the means through which they are made known, say, rather, the instruments by which they are communicated, as "lifepowers" in the spirit of man, whether from without or from within,—(the word preached, or the awakened energies of faith, or, both in one, the given symbols and sacraments under which they are enshrined,)—these means and instruments of grace, in their own high nature

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The terms in question had been in use among the Jews long before our Saviour's time, as is evident from the Book of Wisdom, throughout which there prevails a mystical turn both of thought and expression. Thus we meet the phrase παρέδωκε τοις ὑποχειρίοις μυσ Týρia KaÌ TEλETás, xiv. 15. Here the words are used in a bad sense, as applied to the practices of an incipient idolatry. But in the eighth chapter wisdom is beautifully described as μÚOTIS TÊS TÔU Oεоû èπιστýμns, instructress in the mysteries of divine knowledge, a mystic priestess. See also iv. 13, 16. vi. 22. vii. 14, &c., in the Greek, where the words τελειωθείς, τελεσθεῖσα, γενέσεως, συσταθέντες, &c., appear to be used in a mystic sense. (The ovoTaois became afterwards the fourth degree of Christian penances,

"quæ vox," says Hoffman expressly, "a mysteriis gentium accepta.' Bingham gives a different account of the term. Book xviii. chap. i. sec. 6.) But the whole work is a Oewpía àλnoeías, of the mystical description, and appears to be a graft of Greek philosophy, on the ancient stock of Hebrew wisdom. The Pythagorean Távта μéтρ καὶ ἀριθμῷ καὶ σταθμῷ διέTaças xi. 20, is most noticeable. See HOOKER Ecc. Pol. Pref. c. iii. 9. p. 183. Keeble's ed., and COLERIDGE'S Literary Remains, Vol. III. p. 21. By the later Fathers mystic terms were lavishly, not to say intemperately employed; till at length that which had originally supplied a happy allusion, adopted to elucidate a new and spiritual doctrine, was assumed as a formal model, and followed out technically in full detail.

mystical, with respect to the "mind contemplating" are properly said to be mysterious.

Altogether they organize, and constitute that "fellowship of the mystery, which from the beginning of the world hath been hid in God," and hence we may perhaps understand the sublime assertion of St. Paul, that "the manifold wisdom of God" was "made known, even unto the principalities and powers in heavenly places" by the Church, as the outwardness and body of the eternal Word. Thus only is it possible to "comprehend with all saints what is the breadth, and length, and depth, and height; and to know the love of Christ which passeth knowledge," and thus be "filled with all the fulness of God"."

We see then, that a mystery, by its definition, is inconceivable under the forms of the human, or any finite understanding. It exists, in the truth of things, as an eternal law, by which the several facts or operations in which it is outwardly revealed, are produced: but in the mind itself it is an idea. Now as no single fact is an adequate representative of the law by which it is produced, though it may be assumed as its symbol, but by the collation of many facts the law is said to be discovered; so no single notion or conception is sufficient to convey the idea, but by the comparison of many notions it appears

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1'Ev TOîs ÉπOvρavíois. The | est, the best or the worst. The doctrine is the same whether it be common interpretation is strengthto bad spirits in the air, the lowest ened by the parallel expression of heaven of the Jews, or to good St. Peter, "which things the angels spirits in the region of the blessed. desire to look into b," as into a In either case the text is conclu- new revelation, out of and beyond sive against ἀγγελοθρησκεία the themselves. worship of that which is not God, or the imputation of His incommunicable attributes to any of His creatures, the highest or the low

ii.

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* Eph. iii. 18, 19.

Compare Eph. ii, 2, 6. Col. i. 13, 16. 10, 15.

1 Pet. i. 12.

to be suggested'. Yet as the law must be prior to the facts which result from it, so the idea must have existed before the notions of which it is the parent.

Let me illustrate these remarks, and then draw the practical inference. The fall of a stone, the rising of an air-bubble, the motion of a projectile, the ebb and flow of the tides, are not merely unlike, but apparently opposite phenomena. Yet they are all found to arrange themselves under one general law, of which each might be taken as a symbol or representative instance; and in every such instance we say that the law is realized and by this law the seeming opposition of its several products is at once explained. Now all this is in nature comprehensible, because the truth which is here recognised is taken from the world of sense, and is composed of finite factors.

So, when we say that eternity is divided by the present moment into two equal portions, of which the former is perpetually lengthening by increments taken from the latter, without disturbing the equality,—or that every different point in space is its centre,-or that the half of a given extent is divisible into the same number of parts as the whole,-we have here a number of contradictory notions in which there is no real inconsistency. They are as completely reconciled by the idea of infinity, as the facts spoken of above, by the law of gravitation. But the truths here recognised are in their nature incom

'It is, of course, the latter ope- | the progeny of the second. To ration alone which really takes determine which of these is the place in the mind. The laws whether of nature or of spirit, can only be recognized as ideas and similarly, facts, the products of the first, are known only as notions,

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shadow and which the substance, is perhaps the profoundest problem that has ever exercised the mind of man.

R