es not the whole creation literally groan? Too manifestly it
does, however natural philosophers may affect to speak of the book of
nature, as if it were the clear and uncorrupted text of the living book of
God. Not only man, but the whole environment of external nature, which
belongs to him, has been deranged by the Fall. In such a world as this,
wherein whoso will not believe a devil cannot believe a God, it was
impossible for Christianity to remain in that state of blissful vital
harmony with itself with which it set out. It became divided. Extravagant
developments of ambitious, monopolizing faculties became manifest on every
side. Self-sufficing Pelagianisn and Arianism, here; self-confounding
Gnosticism and Manichaeism there. Then came those two great strifes and
divisions of the middle ages--the one, that old dualism of the inner man,
the ever-repeated strife between reason and imagination, to which we have
so often alluded--the other, a no less serious strife of the outward
machinery of life, the strife between the spiritual and the temporal
powers, between the Pope and the Emperor. This was bad enough; that the
two vicars of God on earth should not know to keep the peace among
themselves, when the keeping of the peace among others was the very end
and aim of the appointment. But worse times were coming. For in the
middle ages, notwithstanding the rank evils of barren scholasticism,
secular-minded popes, and intrusive emperors, there was still a church, a
common Christian religion, a common faith of all Christians; but now,
since that anarchical and rebellious movement, commonly called the
Reformation, but more fitly termed the revolution, the overturning and
overthrowing of the religion of Christendom, we have no more a mere
internal strife and division to vex us, but there is an entire separation
and divorce of one part of the Christian church (so called) from the main
mother institution. The abode of peace has become the camp of war and the
arena of battles; that dogmatical theology of the Christian church,
which, if it be not the infallible pure mathematics of the moral world,
has been deceiving men for 1800 years, and is a liar--that theology is
now publicly discussed and denied, scorned and scouted by men who do not
blush to call themselves Christians; there is no universal peace any
longer to be found in that region where it is the instinct of humanity,
before all things, to seek repose; the only religious pea