This is the great constitutional defect of the theology we are sitting in judgment upon; a defect which any jury of plain Christian men can understand; and it is easy to see, to what consequences, in the end, it must necessarily lead. Where the Gospel is not apprehended as the historical, enduring, objective Manifestation of God in the flesh, there can be no steady apprehension of that which constitutes the proper mystery of it in this view, namely, the union there is in it of the supernatural with the natural in an abiding, historical (not magical) form.

This precisely is the true object of all evangelical faith, in the New Testament sense ; the objective power of salvation, through the apprehension of which only, faith becomes justifying and saving faith. Instead of this, we shall have the supernatural resolved into a spiritualistic presence, seated in the Holy Ghost, and made to reach into the minds of men directly from heaven, in no organic conjunction whatever with the Incarnation; this being considered as, at best, the outward occasion only, and in no sense the inward medium, of the communication. In which case again, what is called justifying faith is no longer tied to the objective Gospel (without which, however, it cannot be faith at all), but hugs simply the Gospel of this subjective assurance a man may have of God’s mercy in his own mind, becoming thus, in fact, justification by fancy or feeling.

But with the real supernatural of the Gospel metamorphosed in this way into the general notion of the supernatural in a metaphysical view, the whole conception of Christianity, in fact, sinks into the order of nature. The sense of what it is as a continuous constitution of grace, the historical presence of new heavenly powers, through the Spirit in the world, is gone. As with the Gnostics of old, the spiritual has lost all concrete, objective union with the natural. The bond between them has thinned itself into airy speculation. The system has become, in one word, essentially rationalistic. The virus of unbelief is in its veins; and it has no longer power to understand or appreciate fully, at a single point, the Mystery of Godliness, as it was seen of angels, preached to the nations, and believed on in the world, at the beginning.