Edwin Hatch

“ Nothing is good which is unjust; all that is just is good.... The good is where the just is. From the beginning of the world the Creator has been at once good and just. The two qualities came forth together. His goodness formed the world, His justice harmonized it. It is the work of justice that there is a separation between light and darkness, between day and night, between heaven and earth, between the greater and the lesser lights.... As goodness brought all things into being, so did justice distinguish them. The whole universe has been disposed and ordered by the decision of His justice. ”

“ No sooner is any special form of literature created by the genius of a great writer than there arises a class of men who cultivate the style of it for the style’s sake. No sooner is any new impulse given either to philosophy or to religion than there arises a class of men who copy the form without the substance, and try to make the echo of the past sound like the voice of the present. ”

“ We cannot believe that there is any virtue in an act of worship in which the conscience has no place. We can understand, however much we may deplore, such persecutions as those of the sixteenth century, because they ultimately rest upon the same conception: men were so profoundly convinced of the truth of their own personal beliefs as to deem it of supreme importance that other men should hold those beliefs also. But we find it difficult to understand why, in the second century of our era, a great emperor who was also a great philosopher should have deliberately persecuted Christianity. ”

“ It is the Eternal, the Uncreated, the Undying, to whom time brings no change. For time is always flowing and never stays: it is a vessel charged with birth and death: it has a before and after, a ‘will be’ and a ‘has been:’ it belongs to the ‘is not’ rather than to the ‘is.’ But God is: and that not in time but in eternity, motionless, timeless, changeless eternity, that has no before or after: and being One, He fills eternity with one Now, and so really ‘is,’ not ‘has been,’ or ‘will be’, without beginning and without ceasing. ”

“ The tendency to conceive of abstract ideas as substances, with form and real existence, received in them its extreme development. Wisdom and vice, silence and desire, were real beings: they were not, as they had been to earlier thinkers, mere thin vapours which had floated upwards from the world of sensible existences, and hung like clouds in an uncertain twilight. The real world was indeed not the world of sensible existences, of thoughts and utterances about sensible things, but a world in which sensible existences were the shadows and not the substance, the waves and not the sea. ”

“ I claim for the subject which we have been considering an exceptional importance, because it will enable us, if on the one hand we accept the theory that the primitive should be permanent, to disentangle the primitive from the later elements, and to trace the assumptions on which these later elements are based; and if on the other hand we adopt the theory of development, it will enable us, by tracing the lines of development, to weld the new thoughts of our time with the old by that historical continuity which in human societies is the condition of permanence. ”

“ The state of human nature is such, that to linger upon the threshold of philosophy is to induce a moral torpor. The student who aims at shaping his reason into harmony with nature has to begin, not with unformed and plastic material, which he can fashion to his will by systematic rules of art, but with his nature as it is shaped already, almost beyond possibility of unshaping, by pernicious habits, and beguiling associations of ideas, and false opinions about good and evil. ”

“ The world of the time was a world, I will not say like our own world, which has already burst its bonds, but like the world from which we are beginning to be emancipated—a world which had created an artificial type of life, and which was too artificial to be able to recognize its own artificiality—a world whose schools, instead of being the laboratories of the knowledge of the future, were forges in which the chains of the present were fashioned from the knowledge of the past. ”

“ The growth, both within the Church and on its outskirts, of opinions which were not the opinions of the majority—the tendency of all majorities to assert their power—the flocking into the Christian fold of the educated Greeks and Romans, who brought with them the intellectual habits of mind which dominated in the age—gave to the intellectual element an importance which it had not previously possessed. Knowledge, which had always been in some sort an element in Christianity, though not as a basis of association, came to assert its place side by side with love. ”

“ The one belief affects all literature, religious and secular alike. It is that the thoughts of the past are relative to the past, and must be interpreted by it. The glamour of writing has passed away. A written word is no more than a spoken word; and a spoken word is taken in the sense in which the speaker used it, at the time at which he used it. There have been writers of enigmas and painters of emblems, but they have formed an infinitesimal minority. There have been those who, as Cicero says of himself in writing to Atticus, have written allegorically lest open speech should betray them ”

“ While you are teaching him logic and physics, the very evils which it is his object to remedy will be gathering fresh strength. The old familiar names of “good” and “evil,” with all the false ideas which they suggest, will be giving birth at every moment to mistaken judgments and wrong actions, to all the false pleasures and false pains which it is the very purpose of philosophy to destroy. He must begin, as he must end, with practice. He must accept precepts and act upon them before he learns the theory of them. ”

“ Every object that is presented to the mind by either the senses or imagination tends to range itself in the ranks of either good or evil, and thereby to call forth desire or undesire: in most men this association of particular objects with the ideas of good or evil, and the consequent stirring of desire, is unconscious, being the result of education and habit: it is the task of the philosopher to learn to attach the idea of good to what is really good, so that desire shall never go forth to what is either undesirable or unattainable: this is the “right dealing with ideas.” ”

“ The study of the one is the complement of the other; but it is with the latter only that we have at present to do. We may enter upon the study with confidence, because it is a scientific inquiry. We may hear, if we will, the solemn tramp of the science of history marching slowly, but marching always to conquest. It is marching in our day, almost for the first time, into the domain of Christian history. ”

“ There were many things in the Old Testament which jarred upon the nascent Christian consciousness. “Far be it from us to believe,” says the writer of the Clementine Homilies, [114] “that the Master of the universe, the Maker of heaven and earth, ‘tempts’ men as though He did not know—for who then does foreknow? and if He ‘repents,’ who is perfect in thought and firm in judgment? and if He ‘hardens’ men’s hearts, who makes them wise? ”

“ From the earliest Christian teaching, indeed, the conception of the transcendence of God is absent. God is near to men and speaks to them: He is angry with them and punishes them: He is merciful to them and pardons them. He does all this through His angels and prophets, and last of all through His Son. But he needs such mediators rather because a heavenly Being is invisible, than because He is transcendent. The conception which underlies the earliest expression of the belief of a Christian community is the simple conception of children. ”

“ By a remarkable anticipation of a modern science, possibly by a survival of memories of an earlier religion, the Homeric stories were treated as a symbolical representation of physical phenomena. The gods were the powers of nature: their gatherings, their movements, their loves, and their battles, were the play and interaction and apparent strife of natural forces. The method had for many centuries an enormous hold upon the Greek mind; it lay beneath the whole theology of the Stoical schools; it was largely current among the scholars and critics of the early empire. ”

“ The questions of the mode of creation, and of the precise relation of God to the material world, which had grown with the growth of monotheism as a philosophical doctrine, were asked not less instinctively, and with an even keener-sighted enthusiasm, when monotheism became a religious conviction. They came not from curiosity, but as the necessary outgrowth among an educated people of that which, not less now than then, is the crucial question of all theistic philosophy: How, if a good and almighty God made the world, can we account for imperfection and failure and pain? ”

“ It is Stoical, not only in conception, but also in detail. It makes virtue the highest good. It makes the hope of the life to come a subsidiary and not a primary motive. Its ideal of life is happiness: it holds that a happy life is a life according to nature, that it is realized by virtue, and that it is capable of being realized here on earth. Its virtues are the ancient virtues of wisdom and justice, courage and temperance. It tinges each of them with a Christian, or at least with a Theistic colouring; but the conception of each of them remains what it had been to the Greek moralists. ”

“ The knowledge of the facts of the life of Jesus Christ necessarily precedes faith in him. But under the touch of Greek philosophy, knowledge had become speculation: whatever obligation attached to faith in its original sense was conceived to attach to it in its new sense: the new form of knowledge was held to be not less necessary than the old.
The Western communities not only took over the greater part of the inheritance, but also proceeded to assume in a still greater degree the correspondence of ideas with realities, and of inferences about ideas with truths about realities. ”

“ GREEK AND CHRISTIAN ETHICS.
It has been common to construct pictures of the state of morals in the first centuries of the Christian era from the statements of satirists who, like all satirists, had a large element of caricature, and from the denunciations of the Christian apologists, which, like all denunciations, have a large element of exaggeration. The pictures so constructed are mosaics of singular vices, and they have led to the not unnatural impression that those centuries constituted an era of exceptional wickedness. It is no doubt difficult to gauge the average morality of any age. ”

“ Think what it is to be able to say, ‘What others preach, I am doing: their praise of virtue is a praise of me: God has sent me into the world to be His soldier and witness, to tell men that their sorrows and fears are vain, that to a good man no evil can happen whether he live or die. ”

“ For Being, quâ Being, is out of relation: itself is full of itself and sufficient for itself, both before the birth of the world and equally so after it. [464] He transcends all quality, being better than virtue, better than knowledge, and better even than the good itself and the beautiful itself. [465] He is not in space, but beyond it; for He contains it. He is not in time, for He is the Father of the universe, which is itself the father of time, since from its movement time proceeds. ”

“ It marches, as the physical sciences have marched, with the firm tread of certainty. It meets, as the physical sciences have met, with opposition, and even with contumely. In front of it, as in front of the physical [24] sciences, is chaos; behind it is order. We may march in its progress, not only with the confidence of scientific certainty, but also with the confidence of Christian faith. It may show some things to be derived which we thought to be original ”

“ The main underlying conception of initiation was, that there were elements in human life from which the candidate must purify himself before he could be fit to approach God. There was a distinction between those who were not purified, and those who, in consequence of being purified, were admitted to a diviner life and to the hope of a resurrection. The creation of this distinction is itself remarkable. The race of mankind was lifted on to a higher plane when it came to be taught that only the pure in heart can see God. ”

“ But when the product of one generation spreads its branches far and wide into the generations that succeed, its roots must be deep and firm in the generation from which it springs. No lasting element of civilization grows upon the surface. Greek education has been almost as permanent as Christianity itself, and for similar reasons. It passed from Greece into Africa and the West. It had an especial hold first on the Roman and then upon the Celtic and Teutonic populations of Gaul; and from the Gallican schools it has come, probably by direct descent, to our own country and our own time. ”

“ Reason, whether unconscious in the form of natural law, or conscious in the form of human thought, is like a river that [184] flows forth from Him and fills the universe. [327] In man the two worlds meet. The body is fashioned by the Artificer from the dust of the earth: “The soul came from nothing that is created, but from the Father and Leader of all things. ”

“ Such men are not the disciples of the sacred word. Its disciples are real men, lovers of temperance and sobriety and modesty, who make self-restraint and contentment and endurance the corner-stones, as it were, of their lives: who rise superior to money and pleasure and fame: who are ready, for the sake of acquiring virtue, to endure hunger and thirst, heat and cold: whose costly couch is a soft turf, whose bedding is grass and leaves, whose pillow is a heap of stones or a hillock rising a little above the ground. ”

“ The conception of mind was not yet evolved. When it was evolved, two lines of thought began to diverge. The one, following the conception of human personality as absolutely single, conceived of both reason and force as inherent in matter: it is the theory which is known as Monism. The other, following the conception of human personality as a separable compound, body and soul, conceived of reason and force as external to matter: it is the theory which is known as Dualism. These two theories run through all subsequent Greek philosophy. ”

“ With the revived conception of philosophy as necessarily involving practice, it was necessary that those who professed philosophy should be marked out from the perverted and degenerate world around them, in their outer as well as in their inner life. “The life of one who practises philosophy,” says Dio Chrysostom, “is different from that of the mass of men: the very dress of such a one is different from that of ordinary men, and his bed and exercise and baths and all the rest of his living. ”

“ The Christian communities were based not only on the fellowship of a common ideal, but also on the fellowship of a common hope. In baptism they were born again, and born to immortality. There was the sublime conception [338] that the ideal society which they were endeavouring to realize would be actually realized on earth. The Son of Man would come again, and the regenerated would die no more. The kingdoms of this world would become the kingdom of the Messiah. The lust and hate, the strife and conflict, the iniquity and vice, which dominated in current society, would be cast out for ever ”

“ It is a conceivable view that once, and once only, did God speak to men, and that the revelation of Himself in the Gospels is a unique fact in the history of the universe. It is also a conceivable view that God is continually speaking to men, and that now, no less than in the early ages of Christianity, there is a divine Voice that whispers in men’s souls, and a divine interpretation of the meaning of the Gospel history. ”

“ It is the conception that the definitions and interpretations of primary beliefs which are made by the majority of church officers assembled under certain conditions, are in all cases and so certainly true, that the duty of the individual is, not to endeavour, by whatever light of nature or whatever illumination of the Holy Spirit may be given to him, to understand them, but to acquiesce in the verdict of the majority. ”