ESCORTING TO GLORY—ERRORS OF THE WISE—THEIR ORIGENISM.

“He taketh the wise in their own craftiness.”

            We have inquired in a previous article, Whence it comes, that historians, professors, college students, and their patrons (a classification which comprehends nearly all Antichristendom) with the Old and New Testaments, or Books of the Covenant, in their hands, have sunk into such visible darkness, and fallen so far behind the apostles in a scriptural understanding of the genius, spirit, and character of the kingdom of Christ? That they have done so is proved from the writings of the Cambridge historian of Christ’s church, and of our luminous friend, the professor of Sacred History, in the sun-setting. Here are two great and shining lights in theology, one a wise man of the east, the other, as wise a man perhaps of the west, very fit and proper representatives of “the wisdom of the world”—1 Corinthians 3: 19, gravely and complacently imputing error, false ambition, and ignorance to the apostles, concerning that kingdom, the gospel of which they had been proclaiming throughout Judea! The reader will remember our quotations from the historian and the professor which need not be repeated; we shall, however, favour him with a passage from our millennial friend exegetical of the real sort of a thing he thinks the apostles ought to have looked for, and which he, more discerning than they, looks for, instead of the restoration of the kingdom again to Israel under the Messiah. He is commenting upon the words, “This same Jesus, who is taken from you into the heaven, shall so come in like manner as ye have seen him go into the heaven.” Referring to this returning, the Spirit saith by Zechariah, “His feet shall stand in that day upon the Mount of Olives, which is before Jerusalem on the east”—that day characterised in the preceding verses as the day when “all nations shall be gathered against Jerusalem to battle, and the Lord shall go forth and fight against them”—Zechariah 14: 1-4. But why is the Lord Jesus to return to Mount Olivet and fight with all nations? Hear the unvisionary averment of our imaginative friend—“Two angelic personages, of celestial mien and grandeur—probably a portion of Messiah’s celestial train—returned to Olivet, and gave a rich and exhilarating promise, on which the faith of the whole church reposes with unshaken confidence, and around which its brightest hopes cluster with joy unspeakable and full of triumph. It is that the identical Jesus, who thus visibly and gloriously entered the heavens, shall as visibly and sensibly descend to earth again, to escort all his friends from this sin-polluted earth to a new paradise of God, in which the tree of life, in all its deathless beauties, shall bloom and fructify for ever!!” But can the reader divine what necessity there can possibly be for this return to escort, and especially to Mount Olivet, seeing that upon the hypothesis of college theology men’s souls, at death, go direct to Jesus, where he now is, sitting upon David’s throne, reigning personally over Israel, having gained kingdoms as indicated by the many crowns upon his head, beyond the range of the solar system in the Milky Way?! If the souls of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, of Moses and the Prophets, of John the Baptist and the apostles, and of the disciples of all ages since, be now with him reigning on David’s throne in the Galaxy, and it was not necessary for Jesus personally to escort them thither, upon what principle is it necessary that he should return to escort the remainder who may happen to be alive at the epoch of return? Besides, to escort, is to attend and guard by land; would not to convoy them be a better word? But why escort or convoy at all? They both imply danger on the route; or if not, are appointed as guards of honour. It is not Jesus who is an escort or convoy, but the honourable personage who is himself to be escorted. Let our critical friend be a little more choice in his composition. It is better occasionally to forego a verbal flourish than to be magniloquently small, and grandiloquently less. In dismissing for the present the “celestial mien and grandeur,” “Messiah’s celestial train,” the “rich and exhilarating promise,” the “church’s brightest hopes clustering with joy unspeakable and full of triumph,” around this wholesale emigration from our “sin-polluted earth,” we would humbly inquire of our extraordinary friend, “Where, in Moses and the Prophets, and in all the New Testament construed in harmony with them, is it taught that Messiah is to empty the earth of all the righteous it contains? Is not this taking away the righteousness, instead of the sin, of the world? Is it not a practical abandonment of the controversy between God and Satan upon the earth? Does not the escort theory indicate that Satan has gained undisputed possession of the battle-field; and that God is obliged to send assistance to enable his friends to make good a retreat to some undiscovered country, where their conqueror cannot pursue them, and whence none shall e’er more return?”

            The wisdom of theological historians and professors, and the foolishness of the apostles! Which does the reader prefer? Jesus to return to Mount Olivet to become an escort in a flight; or the Lord Jesus to return to the earth, and at the head of the Saints, and of Israel as their king, to contend here in battle with Satan’s hosts, to subdue them on every side, and having thus removed all obstruction, set up the throne of David, restore the kingdom again to Israel, and then bestow it and the dominion of the subject nations, upon the apostles and the believers of the gospel of the kingdom for ever? Which is the only scriptural hope, besides which all other theories are only superstitious rhapsodies, the airy flights of imaginations perverted and bewitched? That we believe, is the only true hope which finds the consummation of the divine purpose upon the earth; and, with the apostles, looks for the realisation of its expectations in the restoration of the kingdom again to Israel as in the days of old.

            “I have again began to read modern theology,” writes our professor of Sacred History. We beseech him to let “theology” alone. He has read too much of it already, intoxicating and bewildering as it is. We would humbly advise our sublime friend to read the Acts of the Apostles with all accuracy and reflection before he proceeds further in his essays, if he would “enlarge the empire of truth by a more rapid consumption of the Man of Sin.” If our consuming friend would compass this, he must be accurate. To explain what we mean. Speaking of “the first Acts of the Apostles” after their return to Jerusalem, Mr. Campbell says, “During the ensuing forty days, Peter, the first of the Twelve, the Elder Brother of the apostolic family, arose, and after a short speech, moved the election of an apostle for the chair vacated by the fall of Judas.” We make no note of the expressions “apostolic school,” “first convention,” “chair vacated,” scattered over the page before us. It is natural for our academic friend, himself the proprietor of a college, and occupant of a chair, and patron of conventions, to see schools, conventions, and chairs, in things apostolic and prepentecostial, and to speak according to what he thinks he sees; but we cannot pass over the palpable error in the above extract without a word or two concerning it.

            We beg leave humbly to remark to our learned friend, that forty days did not ensue from the return of the apostles to Jerusalem on Ascension-day, to Pentecost. He is altogether out of his reckoning here. Let him answer this question: How could forty days remain between the ascension and Pentecost, when it is stated that Jesus was seen alive by the apostles forty days after his release from death, during which time he conversed with them concerning the things pertaining to the kingdom of God? This long period of discourse about the kingdom—discourses which prompted the question about the restoration of the kingdom at that time to Israel—would leave only seven days to Pentecost. Our discerning friend, we presume, is aware that there were only fifty days, not eighty-three, from the crucifixion to Pentecost! We will take it for granted that he is really aware of this. Now, if he will put on his Brazilian pebbles, he will perhaps discover the following division of the fifty days:

From the Crucifixion to the Resurrection, say—                                     3 days.

From the Resurrection discoursing about THE KINGDOM—        40 days

From the ascension to Pentecost—                                                       7 days

Total from Crucifixion to Pentecost—                                                 50 days.

            Our computative friend has been misled by not understanding the saying of Jesus to Mary, “Touch me not, for I am not yet ascended to my Father.” This was a private ascent, which doubtless occurred; as he afterwards permitted his apostles to handle him freely. Our discriminating friend has unfortunately confounded the two ascensions, which may have been the cause of his extraordinary calculation of forty days between the return from Olivet and the day of Pentecost!

            Our rhetoricating friend errs, we think, in styling Peter “the first of the Twelve, the Elder Brother of the Apostolic family.” This sounds very popish; and as there are a vast number of unenlightened and weak-minded people who look up to him as a living oracle; and, supposing that he knows every thing, receive his quotations and rhetorical flourishes, as if the words of scripture itself, it behoves that he should convey in what he writes that only which is in strict accordance with the ideas of God, and the spirit of his religion. Great errors in past times have originated from trifling departures from the literal in the beginning. “If any man speak let him speak as the oracles of God.” These oracles no where exhibit Peter or any other as “the first,” or as “the Elder Brother.” Christ’s teaching was, he that would be greatest, or first, let him be the servant of the least. He himself set the example, by washing the feet of Judas. Just as though our towering friend should wash the feet of the man with the “big head,” who is so utterly worthless, as he says! Christ and Judas; Mr. Campbell and the untaught and unteachable dogmatist, what a confounding antithesis! But not to lose sight of Peter. To style him “the Elder Brother of the Apostolic family,” is to place him just where the ignorant and superstitious papists put him, that is, in the place of Jesus Christ! They make Peter the elder brother, and hence the transition was easy to ascribe the same position to his pretended successors, who at length boldly averred the principle in the assumption of vicegerency for Christ. We would suggest to our unambitious friend, that the apostles were all brethren and elders, having no one first or last among them. “James, Peter, and John seemed to be pillars,” says Paul; but of these he places James first. As for Peter, he says of himself that he was “an elder,” not the elder. The preaching of the gospel of the kingdom in the name of Jesus was indeed committed to Peter, as the enunciator thereof to the circumcised, for the sake of order—to avoid confusion by many speaking at once—not for primacy; and even this prominence he was appointed to as the apostle having least ground of all to assume ascendancy over the rest. We offer these remarks to our child-like and teachable friend to guard him against indiscreet aspirations on his own part, and ascriptions of dignity to men not warranted by the scriptures of truth. Knowing how conscientious he is, and how singularly devoid of all desire of fame and worldly honour, we would strengthen him in these virtues, and fortify him against the allurements which environ theological professors, supervisors, and presidents, as with a thick cloud. We wish to keep primacy out of his head, and to establish ultimacy and minimacy in his heart, fearing lest, if he come under its influence, “this reformation” might be transformed into a basket of loaves and fishes, and himself into the chief baker and elder brother of the craft. Let our unostentatious friend remember then, that “One is your Master,” that is, the first and the elder brother, “even Christ, and all ye are brethren.”

            But to return, in conclusion, to the historians, professors, collegiates, and their patrons. These are a generation of unfortunates. They are the children of a system originated by erring men in a period of extreme darkness, which had been superinduced by the Origenizing of the sacred writings; that is, by imposing upon them endless allegorical interpretations, and torturing their doctrine into platonic notions concerning the soul of the world, the transmigration of spirits, and the pre-existence of souls. “Origen’s numberless comments on scripture,” says Milner, “constitute a system of fanciful allegory, which pervades the whole of the sacred oracles: the just and plain sense is much neglected; and the whole is covered with thick clouds of mysticism and chimerical philosophy.” “He threw all things into inextricable ambiguity.” He flourished in the third century, and is the great father of the age, to whom may be likened our philosophical friend of the nineteenth. If our ingenious friend’s theory of spirit-possession be entertained, we might suppose, that the soul of the learned and pious Origen had left the realms above at our friends nativity, and having entered into him then, or wrapped him up as in a spirit-halo, had mantled him until this present, and had kindly presided over him as his guardian angel, directing his lucubrations into all their eloquent and sublime rhapsodies, in which our friend, still soaring in his flights, disappears from mortal ken in the “grandeur” of “exhilarating” and “celestial” obscurity! “Origen’s quickness of parts, and his superior ingenuity,” says Milner, “served only to entangle him more effectually, and to enable him to move in the chaos of his own formation with an ease and rapidity that rendered him unconscious of the difficulties in which he had involved himself.”

            The sacred scriptures disappeared at length from the generation of unfortunates in the shadow of Origenism, in which they were totally eclipsed for over a thousand years. In the fifteenth century they reappeared under certain men called “Reformers,” who had been thoroughly indoctrinated into the Mystery of Iniquity which was their Alma Mater. The Bible made terrible havoc with the orthodoxy of their age, but failed to enlighten them in the good news of glory, honour, and immortality through Jesus in the kingdom of God restored again to Israel. They saw that justification of life was by faith, but they could not define the subject matter of the faith which justifies. And the generation which glories in them in this particular, without their courage and independence. They founded Protestantism; or schisms, in the Roman church, which protested against the Pope’s jurisdiction over them, instead of which they at length set up popes of their own, living or dead, the dead ones ruling them by the systems of divinity, or religious opinions which survived them. These systems preside over all modern schools and colleges, Bethany among the number; for our orthodox friend says, “it is being well known to all Protestant parties here, that we are just as sound, in all the so-called ‘essential doctrines of Christianity,’ which they call orthodoxy, as any who have, by concession, obtained that name and character.” Protestantism, or reformed Romanism, is Origenism restored and divested of the grosser superstition of a thousand years. It is philosophical religion, which in the hands of our ideal friend assumes a transcendental form, transporting him amid the remotest conceivable nebulae of the Galaxy, on the principle that the spirituality of a hope is in the ratio of the squares of the reality’s distance from the sin-polluted earth on which he dwells. The generation of unfortunates of the nineteenth century is trained and schooled in this double distilled, above-proof, spirituality, of which the apostles, and those who received their word and abode in it, were as ignorant as babes unborn. When it began to appear it was as the tares which the enemy had sown. They vapoured not at all about kingdoms beyond the solar system, a David’s throne there, and escorts from thence to abrept from the earth all the righteous it may then contain. These are the day-dreams of the Origenists—the clouds that obfuscate their intellects, the mirage that tantalises and bewilders their brains. Under its influence they call evil good, and good evil, themselves wise and the apostles foolish. Be it so. Give us the apostles’ foolishness, and be it ours with them earnestly to desire, and incessantly to look for, the restoration off the kingdom again to Israel, when Jesus shall “sit upon the throne of his father David, and rule over the house of Jacob for ever.”

EDITOR.