Section 4.
SECTION 4.
There are various sorts of truths. Idolatry and formality consist in putting inferior in the room of superior truths. Evangelical and moral, i.e. religious truths alone change the heart.
WHEN I said that living faith has saving truth for its object, I did not use the word “saving” without reason: for as every stone is not precious, so every truth is not saving. There are then various sorts of truths. “There is a sun,” is a physical or natural truth. “Our ideas of the sun are mental pictures of the sun,” is a metaphysical truth. “All the points of a circle are equally distant from the centre,” is a mathematical truth. “No just conclusion can be drawn from false premises,” is a logical truth. “Alexander conquered Persia,” is a historical truth. “There is a God, and this God is to be worshipped according to the different manifestations of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost,” are two religious truths, the first of which belongs to natural, and the second to revealed religion. “Every man is to love his neighbour as himself,” is a moral truth. “A spiritual Jew is circumcised in heart, and a spiritual Christian is baptized with the Spirit,” is an evangelical truth, typified by the outward signs of circumcision and of baptism.
When natural and inferior truths raise our minds to the God of nature and of grace, they answer their spiritual ends: but if they are put in the place of their archetypes and antitypes, “the truth of God is changed into a lie.” Take some instances of it: “The invisible things of God,” says St. Paul, “are understood by the things that are made,” or visible; but who considers the profound truth couched under his words? Certainly not those heathens who worship the material, instead of the immaterial Sun: nor those Jews who are regardless of the circumcision of the heart, and rest satisfied with an external circumcision: nor those Papists who pay Divine honours to a bit of typical bread which their fancy has turned into the identical body of our Lord: nor yet those Protestants who, being unmindful of the baptism of the Spirit, exert themselves only in sprinkling infants with, or dipping adults in material water: for they all equally forget that the letter of natural and typical things alone profiteth little, or nothing comparatively; and that it killeth, when it is opposed to the Spirit, and made to supersede the invisible and heavenly archetypes, which visible and earthly things shadow out; or when it causes us to set aside the precious antitypes which typical things point unto.
Thus thousands of sinners, like the rich glutton in the Gospel, are spiritually, if not corporally, killed by meats and drinks, which should raise them to their invisible archetypes, the heavenly manna, and the wine of God’s kingdom. Thus conjugal love, which should raise married persons to a more lively contemplation of the mystical union between the heavenly bridegroom and his faithful spouse, has a quite contrary effect upon numbers. Absurdly resting in the fading type, they think that “I have married a wife,” is a sufficient reason to give Christ a bill of divorce, or to show him the greatest indifference. Thus also the Jews committed the deadly sins of idolatry and murder, through their regard for their brazen serpent and the temple; an extravagant regard this, which caused them to neglect, and at last to crucify Christ, the invaluable antitype of both the brazen serpent and of the temple.
Hence it appears that the sin of formalists is not unlike that of idolaters. As God has blessed his Church with various forms of worship, and literal manifestations of his truth, that they might lead us to the power of godliness, and to the truth in the Spirit; so he has filled the natural world with a variety of creatures which bear some signatures of his own unseen excellences. But alas! if we are only formal and letter-learned professors, we absurdly set up our forms and the letter against the power and spiritual operations which they shadow out: and if we are idolaters, we “love and serve the creature more than the Creator,” who has given us the outlines of his invisible glories in the visible creation, that in and through every thing we “might feel after him and find him.” Thus formality and idolatry equally defeat God’s gracious designs toward mankind, the one by opposing forms, and the other by opposing creatures to God.
To return: all sorts of truths, if they are kept in their proper places, may improve the understanding: but religious truths only have a direct tendency to improve the will, which is the spring of our tempers and actions. Therefore, “although I have all knowledge” but that which is productive of “charity, I am nothing:” the faith of God’s elect being only the cordial, practical acknowledging of “the truth, which is after godliness” — of the saving” truth, as it is in Jesus.”
A total inattention to every kind of truth makes a man brutish. An eager pursuit of natural, mathematical, logical, historical truths, &c, attended with a neglect of religious truths, tends to make a man an infidel: and this neglect, grown up into an obstinate, practical opposition to moral as well as to evangelical truths, turns him into “an enemy of all righteousness,” and a persecutor.
But when candour, a degree of which we may have through the light that enlightens every man; when free agency, assisted by the Spirit of power, that accompanies the word of truth; when candour, I say, and free agency thus assisted, attend and submit to the religious truths revealed under our dispensation; then the Divine “seed falls into good ground;” Christ begins to be formed in our hearts; and, according to our dispensation, “we receive power to become sons of God: for we [even as many as ‘receive with meekness the ingrafted word’] are all the children of God through faith in the light of the world, — through faith in Christ Jesus, who is the Saviour of all men, but especially of them that believe unto righteousness;” whether they do it with meridian light and intense fervour, as true Christians; with morning light and growing vigour, as pious Jews; or only with dawning light and timorous sincerity, as converted heathens.
Some sorts of truth, like some kinds of food, are richer than others. Infants in grace must be fed with the plainest truths, which the apostle calls milk; but stronger souls may feast upon what would give a surfeit to “babes in Christ:” “for every one that useth milk is unskilful in the word of righteousness. But strong meat belongeth to them that are of full age, even those who, by reason of use, have their spiritual senses exercised to discern both good and evil,” truth and error, as quickly and as surely as our bodily senses distinguish sweet from bitter, and light from darkness. Truth is spiritual light: too much of it might dazzle the weak eyes of our understanding. A parabolical blind is of great service in such a case. When the apostles were yet carnal, our Lord said to them, “I have many things to say to you, but ye cannot bear them now:” no, not in parables. “Howbeit, when the Spirit of truth is come, he will guide you into all [evangelical] truth.” A sure proof this that truth is the light, the food, the way of souls; and that the grand business of the Spirit is to “lead us into the truth,” as we can bear it, and as we choose to walk in it.