Swing's Sermons [pp. 512-532]

SWING'S SERMONS.
silk banners and intoned by all its priests, tle most profoundly
orthodox church sends forth from its bosom, especially from its
Emerald Isle, a swarm of human beings almost wholly ruined by
poverty, ignorance and vice." We think it will be news to most
that the Romrnish Church is "most profoundly orthodlox," or
that "the divinity of Christ and expiatory atonement, the pains
of hell and the joys of heaven " are set forth and applied by
that church in their true scriptural import, or so as to exert their
normal influence, as understood by Protestants. They are neutralized by a false doctrine of justification anrd the opus operattum
sacramentarian theory. We cannot understand any object of
such representations except to slur orthodoxy and the special
orthodox doctrines, there mentioned.
Indeed, he tells us, Sermons (p. 102), "Faith in Christ would
be a phrase still indefinite, for rot only has faith many forms,
but many forms also attach to the person of Christ. He was a
sacrifice, but sacrifices have many significati(,ns. He was an
example. He was a mediator. He was an unfolding of the
divine image. Faith in Christ is a phrase which is at once seen
to be made of words that are like bits of colored glass in the
kaleidoscope, forming mnany pictures, and all very beautiful."
This leaves us quite in the dark as to what faith is, and what is
its object even when called the sacrifice of Christ.
In his sermon on Faith, where we of course look for well considered statements, he says: "It will be necessary for a saving
doctrine, in order to merit such a name, that it shall possess some
power to lead the heart back to virtue, and it should do this by
some natural law, because a perpetual miracle may not be ex-I)ected unless a constant force acting naturally is impossible...
Religion impresses belief into its service, because belief is a perma nent law of intellectual life. Faith is this perpetual natural force."
This implies that there is no medium between a natural force
and a perpetual miracle, thus ignoring or repudiating super natural grace altogether, and making saving faith the mere acting
of a "natural force." He further says, "Faith is not imposed
upon the human family, as a condition of heaven, simply by the
decree of God, provided for Christianity alone, a despotic shib boletll separating souls differing only in the ability or non ability to pronounce consonants, but it enters the Gospel through
*the gate of reason or universal law written by the Creator; the
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