'The life of God in the soul of man': a William Paley sermon on the spiritual character of Christianity

Today marks the beginning of another new series on Laudable Practice - readings from the sermons of William Paley. In recent months I have pointed to a convincing call to 'Revisit Paley' and his theology, rescuing it from the enormous condescension of Anglican posterity. I have also suggested that Paley represents something of the austere piety that New Georgians should cherish. In Sermon I from Volume V of Paley's Works - 'Meditating Upon Religion', on the text Ps. 63/7 - we see how Newman's view, that that the "animating principle" of Paley's Christianity was "false cheerfulness ... ill-founded hope ... blind charitableness" is, quite frankly, nonsense. 

Rather than Newman's charge, we see something very different indeed in this extract from Paley. His is indeed an austere piety, a weighty understanding of the Christian religion, with no "false cheerfulness". Indeed, elsewhere in this sermon, Paley will declare, "In a very few years to most of us, in a few years to all, it will be fixed and decided, whether we are to be in heaven or hell". It is the very austerity of this extract which demonstrates the seriousness of Paley's Christianity and thus of the Georgian Anglicanism which he, at least in some ways, embodied. 

What is more, Paley's statement regarding Christian religion, "the thing itself is purely spiritual", also punctures the lazy portrayals of Georgian Anglicanism as defined by "offices and ordinances", rather than that with which Paley opened his sermon - "The life of God in the soul of man". We open this series, therefore, with Paley calling his hearers and readers to the "spiritual character of religion":

the spiritual character of religion is an other great impediment to its entering our thoughts. All religion, which is effectual, is and must be spiritual. Offices and ordinances are the handmaids and instruments of the spiritual religion, calculated to generate, to promote, to maintain, to uphold it in the heart, but the thing itself is purely spiritual. Now the flesh weigheth down the spirit, as with a load and burden. It is difficult to rouse the human constitution to a sense and perception of what is purely spiritual. They who are addicted, not only to vice, but to gratifications and pleasures; they who know no other rule than to go with the crowd in their career of dissipation and amusement; they whose attentions are all fixed and engrossed by business, whose minds from morning to night are counting and computing; the weak, and foolish, and stupid; lastly, which comprehends a class of mankind deplorably numerous, the indolent and slothful; none of these can bring themselves to meditate upon religion. The last class slumber over its interests and concerns; perhaps they cannot be said to forget it absolutely, but they slumber over the subject, in which state nothing as to their salvation gets done, no decision, no practice. 

There are, therefore, we see, various obstacles and infirmities, in our constitutions, which obstruct the reception of religious ideas in our mind, still more such a voluntary entertainment of them as may bring forth fruit. It ought, therefore, to be our constant prayer to God, that he will open our hearts to the influence of his word, by which is meant that he will so quicken and actuate the sensibility and vigour of our minds, as to enable us to attend to the things which really and truly belong to our peace.