Swing's Sermons [pp. 512-532]

SWING'S SERMONS.
if the truth in these matters could from age to age be variable
either in itself, or in the necessity of its being felt and obeyed
by all that embrace Christ. "There was something in the times
of Calvin and Luther, and on to Jonathan Edwards, that enabled the motive of punishment to be very influential for good.
It is certain that the'terror of the Lord' wielded a
mighty influence on the past centuries; and the same impulse
to virtue will always be extant and active; but to the millions
of a subsequent age a new impulse is liable to arise, and expressing itself in the words,' the love of Christ constraineth us,'
may, for a time, be a complete universe to the existing heart.
The horizon is daily swept by new clouds."
If the time is at hand when men do not need to feel that sin
will be punished and that eternally, unless cleansed away by
Christ's blood, then the breach between us and the Universalists will soon be closed. And if there has ever been a professed
Christianity in which the love of Christ was not the supreme
constraining motive, it'had a name to live and was dead.
The passage to which we now call the attention of our readers is a sample of his dealing with another subject-God's
agency in the Kingdom of Providence and Grace-by a somewhat similar "permutation of combinations." The fallacy of
most of it will appear, if we ask whether the brain of man is the
only place where miracles ever existed? and whether any superstitions of the past overlaid upon some extravagant view of divine, diabolic, or other invisible agency, will compare with those
now embraced by millions, most of them quite as broad in their
theology as Prof. Swing, in connection with spirit-rappings and
other forms of "seeking to the dead?"
A more important criticism will follow the quotation:
"In the age preceding our own, reason operated chiefly in the domain of
the marvellous. Not having found the modern great premise that the universe is pervaded by general law, but having adopted another major premise, that God and Satan came forward each day with new and independent events of good or evil, the reason of that period busied itself in finding
in what cdream or in what occurrence these mysterious wonder-workers had
last appeared, and what lessons were to be drawn from the miracles of yesterday or last night. The great universe of law had not yet arisen upon
their intellects or hearts. Such became their habit of expecting the miraculolls that all ordinary events disgustd them by their monotony, and left them
longing for a daily invasion from lawless powers of the air.' * * To
.526
[July,