It may be asked, What was the fault of the Jews in their use of their Law, which led them to reject Christ when He came? That Law was from God; they honoured it as such; they were told to adhere to it, and they did adhere; they thanked God for it; they thanked God for the power of obeying it; they thanked God for the electing grace which had given them in it a pledge of His favour above the rest of mankind. All this surely, it may be said, was right and praiseworthy; it was proceeding in the way of God’s commandments, and seemed to promise, that when His perfect truth was revealed, it would be obeyed as dutifully as that portion of it which had already been given. This might have been expected; yet when Christ came, He was rejected.
We all know how to answer this question, viz. by explaining that the Jews considered their Law, not imperfect, as it was, but perfect; not as a means, but as the end. They rested in it, and though they nominally expected a Messiah, they did not in their thoughts place Him above the Law, or consider Him the Lord of the Law, but made their Law everything, and “the Desire of all nations” nothing. He was the true mode of approaching God, the sole Justifier of the soul; they considered their Law to be such. And so, in the words of the Apostle, “they, being ignorant of God’s righteousness, and going about to establish their own righteousness, did not submit themselves unto the righteousness of God.” They imagined that they could be both justified and sanctified by the Law, whereas Christ was the end of the Law both for holiness and acceptance. Now it is a very common charge against the Ancient and Catholic view of the Gospel, that it throws us back into a Jewish state, and subjects us to the dominion of the Law. On the other hand, from various remarks made in the course of these Lectures, it may be seen that that modern system, whose very life and breath (as I may say) consist in the maintenance of this charge, is itself not altogether free from the error which it denounces. Rather, as I would maintain, it is deeply imbued with it, having fallen, after the usual manner of self-appointed champions and reformers, into the evil which it professed to remedy. This, then, shall be our subject in this concluding Lecture, in which I shall suggest some remarks on the imputation of legalism, as it is called, wrongly urged against Catholic Truth, rightly urged against Protestant error;—not that I propose to enter upon a formal discussion of it, which would carry us far away from our main subject.
2.
1. It may be objected, then, that as Judaism interposed the Mosaic Law between the soul and Christ, turning a means into an end, a resting-place into an abode, so the Christian Church, Ancient and Catholic, also obscures the sight and true worship of Him, and that, by insisting on Creeds, on Rites, and on Works;—that by its Creeds it leads to Bigotry, by its Rites to Formality, and by its doctrine concerning Works to Self-righteousness. Such is the charge.
Now here I most fully grant that those who in their thoughts substitute a Creed, or a Ritual, or external obedience, for Christ, do resemble the Jews. Nay, I do not care to deny (what, however, I leave it for others to prove), that there are, and have been, Catholic Christians open to the charge of forgetting the “One Thing needful,” in their over-anxiety about correct faith, ceremonial observances, or acts of charity and piety. But I will say this:—that, on the face of the case, such an error is a great inconsistency; and no system can be made answerable for consequences which flow from a neglect of its own provisions. When, for instance, the Church bids us be accurate in what we hold concerning the Person of Christ, she is thereby declaring that Christ is the Object of our worship; when she bids us frequent His House, she implies that He is in it; when she says, good works are acceptable, she means acceptable to Him. The Church has never laid it down that we are justified by Orthodoxy only, or by Baptism only, or by Works only; much less by some certain spiritual feelings or experiences; and less still has she decided that to believe this was the one fundamental truth of religion. And if this be turned into a charge against her, that whereas there is One only Saviour Invisible, she has made the visible instruments and means of approaching Him many, and so by their very multiplicity has hidden Him, I reply, that if this were a fair argument, it ought to tell against the Mosaic Law also, as if its divinely appointed ceremonies themselves were to blame for the blindness of the Jews; but if the Jews themselves were in fault, and not their Law, so there is no antecedent objection against Catholic Christianity, (and such objections only have I here to consider), for its insisting on Baptism and Orthodoxy and Works, and many things more, even though in individual cases it has occasioned forgetfulness of Him, by whom these conditions and channels of grace have been appointed.