What is meant by "Free Religion"? I understand by it, individualism in
religion. It is the religious belief which has made itself independent
of historic and traditional influences, so far as it is in the power
of any one to attain such independence. In Christian lands it means a
religion which has cut loose from the Bible and the Christian Church,
and which is as ready to question the teaching of Jesus as that of
Socrates or Buddha. It is, what Emerson called himself, an endless
seeker, with no past behind it. It is entire trust in the private
reason as the sole authority in matters of religion.
Free Religion may be regarded as Protestantism carried to its ultimate
results. A Protestant _Christian_ accepts the leadership of Jesus, and
keeps himself in the Christian communion; but he uses his own private
judgment to discover what Jesus taught, and what Christianity really
is. The Free Religionist goes a step farther, and decides by his own
private judgment what is true and what false, no matter whether taught
by Jesus or not.
Free Religion, as thus understood, seems to me opposed to the law of
evolution, and incompatible with it. Evolution educes the present from
the past by a continuous process. Free Religion cuts itself loose
from the past, and makes every man the founder of his own religion.
According to the law of evolution, confirmed by history, every advance
in religion is the development from something going before. Jewish
monotheism grew out of polytheism; Christianity and Mohammedanism out
of Judaism; Buddhism out of Brahmanism; Protestant Christianity out of
the Roman Catholic Church. Jesus himself said, "Think not that I am
come to destroy the Law or the Prophets: I am not come to destroy, but
to fulfil." The higher religions are not made; they grow. Of each it
may be said, as of the poet: "Nascitur, non fit." Therefore, if there
is to arrive something higher than our existing Christianity, it must
not be a system which forsakes the Christian belief, but something
developed from it.
According to the principle of evolution, every growing and productive
religion obeys the laws of heredity and of variation. It has an
inherited common life, and a tendency to modification by individual
activity. Omit or depress either factor, and the religion loses its
power of growth. Without a common life, the principle of development
is arrested. He who leaves the great current which comes from the
past loses headway. This current, in the Christian communion, is the
inherited spirit of Jesus. It is his life, continued in his Church;
his central convictions of love to God and to man; of fatherhood
and brotherhood; of the power of truth to conquer error, of good to
overcome evil; of a Kingdom of Heaven to come to us here. It is the
faith of Jesus in things unseen; his hope of the triumph of right
over wrong; his love going down to the lowliest child of God. These
vital convictions in the soul of Jesus are communicated by contact
from generation to generation. They are propagated, as he suggested,
like leaven hidden in the dough. By a different figure, Plato, in
his dialogue of Ion, shows that inspiration is transmitted like the
magnetic influence, which causes iron rings to adhere and hang together
in a chain. Thoughts and opinions are communicated by argument,
reasoning, speech, and writing; but faith and inspiration by the
influence of life on life. The life of Jesus is thus continued in his
Church, and those who stand outside of it lose much of this transmitted
and sympathetic influence. Common life in a religious body furnishes
the motive force which carries it forward, while individual freedom
gives the power of improvement. The two principles of heredity and
variation must be united in order to combine union and freedom, and
to secure progress. Where freedom of thought ceases, religion becomes
rigid. It is incapable of development. Such, for instance, is the
condition of Buddhism, which, at first full of intellectual activity,
has now hardened into a monkish ritual.
Free Religion sacrifices the motive power derived from association
and religious sympathy for the sake of a larger intellectual freedom.
The result is individualism. It founds no churches, but spends much
force in criticising the Christian community, its belief, and its
methods. These are, no doubt, open to criticism, which would do good
if administered sympathetically and from within, but produce little
result when delivered in the spirit of antagonism. Imperfect as the
Christian Church is, it ought to be remembered that in it are to be
found the chief strength and help of the charities, philanthropies, and
moral reforms of our time. Every one who has at heart a movement for
the benefit of humanity appeals instinctively for aid to the Christian
churches. It is in these that such movements usually originate, and are
carried on. Even when, as in the antislavery movement, a part of the
churches refuse to sympathize with a new moral or social movement, the
reproaches made against them show that in the mind of the community
an interest in all humane endeavor is considered to be a part of
their work. The common life and convictions of these bodies enable
them to accomplish what individualism does not venture to undertake.
Individualism is incapable of organized and sustained work of this
sort, though it can, and often does, coöperate earnestly with it.
The teaching of Jesus is founded on the synthesis of Truth and Love.
Jesus declares himself to have been born "to bear witness to the
truth," and he also makes love, divine and human, the substance of his
gospel. The love element produces union, the truth element, freedom.
Union without freedom stiffens into a rigid conservatism. Freedom
without union breaks up into an intellectual atomism. The Christian
churches have gone into both extremes, but never permanently; for
Christianity, as long as it adheres to its founder and his ideas, has
the power of self-recovery. Its diseases are self-limited.
It has had many such periods, but has recovered from them. It passed
through an age in which it ran to ascetic self-denial, and made saints
of self-torturing anchorites. It afterward became a speculative system,
and tended to metaphysical creeds and doctrinal distinctions. It became
a persecuting church, burning heretics and Jews, and torturing infidels
as an act of faith. It was tormented by dark superstitions, believing
in witchcraft and magic. But it has left all these evils behind. No
one is now put to death for heresy or witchcraft. The monastic orders
in the Church are preachers and teachers, or given to charity. No
one could be burned to-day as a heretic. No one to-day believes in
witchcraft. The old creeds which once held the Church in irons are
now slowly disintegrating. But reform, as I have said, must come from
within, by the gradual elimination of those inherited beliefs which
interfere with the unity of the Church and the leadership of Christ
himself. The Platonic and Egyptian Trinity remaining as dogma, repeated
but not understood,--the Manichæan division of the human race into
children of God and children of the Devil,--the scholastic doctrine of
the Atonement, by which the blood of Jesus expiates human guilt,--are
being gradually explained in accordance with reason and the teaching of
Jesus.
Some beliefs, once thought to be of vital importance, are now seen by
many to be unessential, or are looked at in a different light. Instead
of making Jesus an exceptional person, we are coming to regard him as
a representative man, the realized ideal of what man was meant to be,
and will one day become. Instead of considering his sinlessness as
setting him apart from his race, we look on it as showing that sin is
not the natural, but unnatural, condition of mankind. His miracles are
regarded not as violations of the laws of nature, but anticipations of
laws which one day will be universally known, and which are boundless
as the universe. Nor will they in future be regarded as evidence of
the mission of Jesus, since he himself was grieved when they were
so looked upon, and he made his truth and his character the true
evidence that he came from God. The old distinction between "natural"
and "supernatural" will disappear when it is seen that Jesus had a
supernatural work and character, the same in kind as ours, though
higher in degree. The supreme gifts which make him the providential
leader of the race do not set him apart from his brethren if we see
that it is a law of humanity that gifts differ, and that men endowed
with superior powers become leaders in science, art, literature,
politics; as Jesus has become the chief great spiritual leader of
mankind.
Men are now searching the Scriptures, not under the bondage of an
infallible letter, but seeking for the central ideas of Jesus and
the spirit of his gospel. They begin to accept the maxim of Goethe:
"No matter how much the gospels contradict each other, provided the
Gospel does not contradict itself." The profound convictions of
Christ, which pervade all his teaching, give the clue by which to
explain the divergences in the narrative. We interpret the letter by
the light of the spirit. We see how Jesus emphasized the law of human
happiness,--that it comes from within, not from without; that the pure
in heart see God, and that it is more blessed to give than to receive.
We comprehend the stress he lays on the laws of progress,--that he who
humbleth himself shall be exalted. We recognize his profound conviction
that all God's children are dear to him, that his sun shines on the
evil and the good, and that he will seek the one lost sheep till he
find it. We see his trust in the coming of the Kingdom of God in this
world, the triumph of good over evil, and the approaching time when the
knowledge of God shall fill the earth as the waters cover the sea. And
we find his profound faith in the immortal life which abides in us, so
that whoever shares that faith with him can never die.
The more firmly these central ideas of Jesus are understood and held,
the less importance belongs to any criticism of the letter. This or
that saying, attributed to Jesus in the record, maybe subjected to
attack; but it is the main current of his teaching which has made him
the leader of civilized man for eighteen centuries. That majestic
stream will sweep on undisturbed, though there may be eddies here or
stagnant pools there, which induce hasty observers to suppose that it
has ceased to flow.
"Rusticus expectat dum defluit amnis, at ille
Volvitur et volvetur, in omne volubilis ævium."
I sometimes read attacks on special sayings of the record, which
argue, to the critic's mind, that Jesus was in error here, or mistaken
there. But I would recommend to such writers to ponder the suggestive
rule of Coleridge: "Until I can understand the ignorance of Plato, I
shall consider myself ignorant of his understanding;" or the remark of
Emerson to the youth who brought him a paper in which he thought he
had refuted Plato: "If you attack the king, be sure that you kill him."
When the Christian world really takes Jesus _himself_ as its leader,
instead of building its faith on opinions _about_ him, we may
anticipate the arrival of that union which he foresaw and foretold--"As
thou, father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be one
in us, that the world may believe that thou hast sent me." Then
Christians, ceasing from party strife and sectarian dissension,
will unite in one mighty effort to cure the evils of humanity and
redress its wrongs. Before a united Christendom, what miseries could
remain unrelieved? War, that criminal absurdity, that monstrous
anachronism, must at last be abolished. Pauperism, vice, and crime,
though continuing in sporadic forms, would cease to exist as a part of
the permanent institutions of civilization. A truly Catholic Church,
united under the Master, would lead all humanity up to a higher plane.
The immense forces developed by modern science, and the magnificent
discoveries in the realm of nature, helpless now to cure the wrongs
of suffering man, would become instruments of potent use under the
guidance of moral forces.
According to the law of evolution, this is what we have a right to
expect. If we follow the lines of historic development, not being led
into extreme individualism; if we maintain the continuity of human
progress, this vast result must finally arrive. For such reasons I
prefer to remain in the communion of the Christian body, doing what I
may to assist its upward movement. For such reasons I am not a Free
Religionist.