Produced by Al Haines
THE CHIEF END OF MAN
BY
GEORGE S. MERRIAM
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY
The Riverside Press, Cambridge
1897
Copyright, 1897,
BY GEORGE S. MERRIAM.
_All rights reserved._
_The chief end of man,--to define it anew, and cite the witness of the
ages, may seem an audacious attempt, likely to issue in failure or in
commonplace. By the scholar this work must often be judged as crude,
to the churchman it will sometimes seem mischievous, and to the man of
science it may appear to lack solidity of demonstration. But its
essential purpose is to utter afresh, though it be with stammering
tongue, the message with which the universe has answered the soul of
man whenever he listened most closely and obeyed most faithfully._
_It is the assurance that Fidelity, Truth-seeking, Courage, and Love
are the rightful lords of human life, and its sufficient guides and
interpreters. It is the knowledge that as man is true to his best self
he finds the universe his friend._
_That message the seeing eye reads in the face of earth, and the
listening ear hears it in the song of the morning stars. The will
finds it as answer to its loyal endeavor. The heart wins it through
rapture and through anguish. It is our dearest inheritance, it is our
most arduous achievement. It is the sword with which each man must
conquer his destiny. It is the smile with which Beatrice welcomes her
lover to Paradise._
CONTENTS
PROLOGUE
I. OUR SPIRITUAL ANCESTRY
II. THE IDEAL OF TO-DAY
III. A TRAVELER'S NOTE-BOOK
IV. GLIMPSES
V. DAILY BREAD
THE CHIEF END OF MAN
PROLOGUE
It sometimes happens that a man is confronted by a perplexing crisis,
before which he is quite at a loss how to direct his course. His
familiar rules and habits seem to fail him, and his perplexity
approaches dismay. At such a time, if his previous life has been
guided by purpose and consideration, he may perhaps help himself by
looking attentively back at the steps by which he has hitherto
advanced. He recalls other crises, he sees how they were met, and
light, it may be, breaks on the path before him, or at least he takes
fresh heart and hope.
Some such crisis confronts the thoughtful mind of the world to-day, in
the disappearance of the old sanctions of religion. When the idea of
an authoritative revelation of divine truth has been finally dislodged,
there are moments when moral chaos seems to impend. We are still
upheld by old habits and associations, we are borne along by forces
mightier than our creeds or negations, and the loyal spirit catches at
moments the "deeper voice across the storm," even though the voice be
inarticulate. But it is felt that we need to somehow define anew the
rule of life. By what road shall man attain his supreme desire,--how
can he be good, and how can he be happy?
As the individual seeks help in looking back over his course, so it may
help us if we look back a little over some of the significant passages
in the movement of mankind. History is to the race what memory is to
the individual. One's best treasure is the memory of his happy and
heroic hours. The best treasure of humanity is the story of its happy
and heroic souls. Let us call before us some of these, and see how
they answered the questions we ask.
Following this clew, we run back along the line of what may be called
"our spiritual ancestry." Turning naturally to our own next of kin, a
child of New England, going back from the teaching of his youth to his
fathers and to their fathers, soon finds before him the Puritan. When
we study the Puritan it appears that he was a most composite product,
and that just behind him, and essential to the understanding of him, is
the great mediaeval church. Studying the church, there is nothing for
it but to go back to its foundation, and ponder well the one from whose
person and teaching it grew. And to know at all the mind of Jesus we
must know something of the mind of Judaism, of which he was the child.
Indeed, the popular religion of to-day bases itself directly on the Old
and New Testaments; so that our lineage must clearly be traced from
this as one of its origins. Another ancient line attracts us, by a
history which blends with Judaism at the birth of Christianity, and by
a literature which is rich in moral treasures. We must glance at some
of the landmarks of the Greek and Roman story.
And here our present study may define its bounds. We will not go back
to the progress from the animal up to man, nor survey the prehistoric
man; nor will we turn aside to the religions of Egypt, Arabia, and the
East; and we can but lightly glance at the early Teutonic people from
whom we are descended after the flesh. It will sufficiently serve our
purpose if we touch a few salient points among our more direct
progenitors in the life of the spirit. And, after all, our richest
search will be in the years nearest ourselves.
But no version of history simply as history gives an adequate basis for
the higher life. That life must be worked out by each for himself,
equipped as he finds himself by inheritance and circumstance, and
guided largely by the sure and simple laws of conduct which he drew in
with his mother's milk. Study and thought may help a little, and so
such essays as the present are offered for whatever they may afford.
Of all human studies, history, at its best,--the knowledge of whatever
of worthiest the past of mankind affords,--such history is of all
studies most delightful and inspiring, for it is the contact through
books with noble souls--and the touch of a great soul is a natural
sacrament. Such history has significance mainly as its events and
characters find parallels in the mind that reads. The soul of to-day,
catching from the past the voices of prophets and leaders, thrills with
a sense of kinship. The story of American independence means most when
the reader has fought his own Bunker Hill, and wintered at Valley
Forge, and triumphed at Yorktown. The death of Socrates has small
significance unless something in the reader's heart answers to his
affirmation that "nothing evil can happen to a good man, in living or
dying." The life of Jesus and the story of Christianity are most fully
understood when life's experience has brought the Mount of Vision and
the Garden of Gethsemane, the cross and passion, the resurrection, and
the coming of the Holy Spirit.
The interest of the present study is in the illustration of certain
great spiritual laws. These are laws of which every man may make proof
for himself. He may find instances of their working in any close
observation of his nearest neighbor, or in reading his newspaper. He
may find the clearest exemplification of them in studying the noblest
men and women he has known, or, if his life has been worth living, in
recalling the most critical and significant passages of his own
experience. The reading of these laws is the latest and finest result
of the experience of the race. In their substance, they are
acknowledged by all good men. No wholly new path to goodness and
happiness is likely to be suddenly discovered; certainly no essentially
new ideal of what kind of goodness and happiness we are to seek. The
saints and heroes are all of one fellowship, though they do not all
speak the same language. In a word, there are certain traits of
character which all men whose opinion we value now recognize as
supremely worthy of cultivation. To seek to know things as they really
are; to fit our actions to our best knowledge; to conform in word and
act to the truth as we see it; to seek the good of others as well as
our own; to be sympathetic and responsive; to be open-eyed to beauty,
open-hearted to our fellow creatures; to be reverent and aspiring; to
resolutely subject the lower elements of our nature to the higher; to
taste frankly and freely the innocent joys of life; to renounce those
joys and accept privation, suffering, death, when duty calls,--such
purposes and dispositions as these are unquestionably a true rule of
life. The main theme to be illustrated in these pages is that this
ideal and rule is in itself an all-sufficient principle. Fidelity to
the best we know, and search always for the best, is the natural road
to peace and joy, the sure road to victory. It is the key which opens
to man the treasury of the universe.
To enforce and vivify this conception,--this interpretation of the key
of life as consisting in fidelity to certain ideals of character,--we
go back to the memorable examples of the past. We use those examples,
partly to show how the spiritual laws always worked, the same
yesterday, to-day, and forever; and partly to show how as time advanced
the laws have been understood with growing clearness, and applied with
growing effectiveness. The same stars shone above the sages of Chaldea
as shine above us, but our astronomy is better than theirs. The sages
of Greece, the prophets of Palestine, the heroes of Rome, the saints of
the Middle Ages, the philanthropists and the scientists of to-day, each
made their special contribution to the spiritual astronomy. From age
to age men have read the heavens and the earth more clearly, and so
made of them a more friendly home. Just as, too, there come times of
momentous progress in the physical world; the establishment of the
Copernican theory, the discovery of a new continent, the mastering of
electricity,--so there are periods of swift advance and discovery in
the spiritual life, and such a birth-hour, of travail and of joy, comes
in our own day.
In this hasty panorama of the past, then, the effort has been to give
real history. But every student knows how transcendent and impossible
a thing it is to recall in its entirety and fullness any phase of the
past. Even the specialist can but partially open a limited province.
So with what confidence can one with no pretensions to original
scholarship, however he may use the work of deeper students, express
his opinion on any special point in a survey of thirty centuries? If,
accordingly, any competent critic shall trouble himself to convict the
present writer of error: "This view of Epictetus confuses the earlier
and the later Stoics;" or "This account of the Hebrew prophets lacks
the latest fruit of research,"--or, other like defect,--acknowledgment
of such error as quite possible may be freely made in advance. But, in
our bird's-eye view of many centuries, any fault of detail will not be
so serious as it would be if there were here attempted a chain of
proofs, a formal induction, to establish from sure premises a safe
conclusion. Only of a subordinate importance is the detail of this
history. We say only: in this way, or some way like this, has been the
ascent. The contribution of the Stoic was about so and so; the Hebrew
prophet helped somewhat thus and thus. But the ultimate, the essential
fact we reach in the Ideal of To-day. Here we are on firm ground. The
law we acknowledge, the light we follow,--these may be expressed with
entire clearness and confidence. The test they invite is present
experiment. Nothing vital shall be staked on far-away history or
debatable metaphysics.
In the fivefold division of the book, "Our Spiritual Ancestry" is a
bird's-eye view of the main line of advance, which culminates in "The
Ideal of To-Day." A more leisurely retrospect of certain historical
passages is given in "A Traveler's Note-Book;" thoughts on the present
aspect are grouped under "Glimpses;" and "Daily Bread" introduces a
homely and familiar treatment.
I
OUR SPIRITUAL ANCESTRY
The ideas and sentiments which underlie the higher life of our time may
be largely traced back to two roots, the one Greek-Roman, the other
Hebrew.
Each of these two races had originally a mythology made up partly of the
personification and worship of the powers of nature, and partly of the
deification of human traits or individual heroes.
The higher mind of the Greeks and Romans, in which the distinctive notes
were clear intelligence, love of beauty, and practical force, gradually
broke away altogether from the popular mythology, and sought to find in
reason an explanation of the universe and a sufficient rule of life.
The Greek-Roman mythology made only an indirect and slight contribution
to modern religion. But the ethical philosophy and the higher poetry of
the two peoples belong not only to our immediate lineage but to our
present possessions.
A humanity common with our own brings us into closest sympathy with
certain great personalities of this antique world. Differences of time,
race, civilization, are powerless to prevent our intimate friendship and
reverence for Homer, Sophocles, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Lucretius,
Epictetus.
Homer shows the opening of eyes and heart to this whole wonderful world
of nature and of man.
Sophocles sees human life in its depth of suffering and height of
achievement. He views mingled spectacle with profound reverence, sure
that through it all is working some divine power. Goodness is dear to
the gods, wickedness is abhorrent to them. But the good man is often
unhappy,--from strange inheritance of curse, or from complication of
events which no wisdom can baffle. Yet from the discipline of suffering
emerges the noblest character, and over the grave itself play gleams of
hope, faint but celestial.
In Socrates, we see the man who having in himself attained a solid and
noble goodness, addresses all his powers to finding a clear road by which
all men may be led into goodness. He first propounds in clearness the
most important question of humanity,--how shall man by reason and by will
become master of life?
Plato takes up the question after him, and follows it with an intellect
unequaled in its imaginative flight. Plato lighted the fire which has
burned high in the enthusiasts of the spirit,--the mystics, the dreamers,
the idealists.
Aristotle confined himself to the homelier province where demonstration
is possible, and laid the foundation of logic and of natural science.
Lucretius resolutely puts away from him the whole pageant of fictitious
religion. He scouts its terrors, and scorns to depend on unreal
consolation. He addresses himself to the intellectual problem of the
universe, and decides that all is ruled by material laws.
In Epictetus man reverts from the problem of the universe to the problem
of the soul. The beauty of the Greek world has faded, the stern Roman
world has trained its best spirits to live with resolute self-mastery.
The mythologic gods are no longer worth talking about for serious men.
But here is the great actual business of living,--it can be met in manly
temper, and be made a scene of lofty satisfaction and serene tranquillity.
Epictetus was the consummate expression of that Stoic philosophy in which
were blended the clearness of Greek thought and the austerity of the best
Roman life. Stoicism reverted from all universe-schemes, spiritual or
materialist, to the conduct of human life which Socrates had propounded
as the essential theme. The Stoic affirmed that all good and evil reside
for man in his own will, and that simply in always choosing the right
rather than the wrong he may find supreme satisfaction. Epictetus
expresses this in the constant tone of heroism and victory. In the more
feminine nature of Marcus Aurelius the same ideas yield a beautiful
fidelity along with a habitual sadness.
Stoicism was the noblest attainment of the Greek-Roman world. It was a
clear and fearless application of reason to human life, with little
attempt to solve the mystery of the universe. It gave an ideal and rule
to thoughtful, robust, and masculine natures. It made small provision
for the ignorant, the weak, or the feminine. Its watchwords were Reason,
Nature, Will.
The distinction of the Hebrew development was that the higher minds took
up the popular mythology, elevated and purified it. The Hebrew genius
was not intellectual but ethical and emotional. The typical Hebrew guide
was not a philosopher but a prophet. Through a development of many
centuries the popular religion from polytheistic became monotheistic, and
from worshiping the sun and fire came to worship an embodiment of
righteousness and of supreme power. An ideal of character grew up--in
close association with religious worship and ceremonial--in which the
central virtues were justice, benevolence, and chastity. The sentiments
of the family, the nation, and the church were fused in one. Its outward
expression was an elaborate ceremonial. Its heart was a passion which in
one direction dashed the little province against the whole power of Rome;
in another channel, preserved a people intact and separate through twenty
centuries of dispersal and subjection; while, in another aspect, it gave
birth to Jesus and to Christianity.
Jesus was one of the great spiritual geniuses of the race,--so far as we
know, the greatest. The highest ideas of Judaism he sublimated,
intensified, and expressed in universal forms. Indifferent to the
ceremonial of his people, he taught that the essence of religion lay in
spirit and in conduct.
The holy and awful Deity was to him a tender Father. The whole duty of
man to man was love. Chastity of the body was exalted to purity of the
heart. He lived close to the common people; taught, helped, healed them;
caressed their children, pitied their outcasts, laid hands on the lepers,
and calmed the insane. He brooded on the expectation of some great
future which earlier seers had impressed on the popular thought, and saw
as in prophetic vision the near approach of the perfect triumph of
holiness and love. Overshadowed by danger, his hope and faith menaced as
by denying Fate, he rallied from the shock, trusted the unseen Power, and
went serenely to a martyr's death.
Jesus had roused a passion of personal devotion among the poor, the
ignorant, the true-hearted whom he had taught and called. When he was
dead, that devotion flamed out in the assertion, He lives again! We have
seen him! He will speedily return! The Jewish belief in a bodily
resurrection and a Messianic kingdom gave form to this faith, and
unbounded love and imagination gave intensity and vividness. That Jesus
was risen from the dead became the cardinal article of the new society
which grew up around his grave. His moral precepts, his parables, his
acts, his personality,--the personality of one who was alike the child of
God and the friend of sinners,--these were enshrined in a new mythology.
A society, enthusiastic, aggressive; at first divided into factions; then
blending in a common creed and rule of life; a loyalty to an invisible
leader; a sanguine hope of speedy triumph, cooling into more remote
expectation, and in the finer spirits transforming into a present
spiritual communion; a growing elaboration of organization, priesthood,
ritual, mythology; a diffusion through vast masses of people of the new
religion, and a corresponding depreciation of its quality,--this was the
early stage of Christianity. It vanquished and destroyed the Greek-Roman
mythology, already half dead. Philosophy strove with it in vain,--there
was no real meeting-ground between the two systems. The final appeal of
the Stoic was to reason. The Christian theologians thought they
reasoned, but their argumentation was feeble save at one point. But that
was the vital point,--experience. Christianity, in its mixture of ardor,
credulity, and morality had somehow a power to give to common men and
women a nobility and gladness of living which Stoicism could not inspire
in them. So it was the worthier of the two antagonists that triumphed in
the strife.
Ideally, there ought to have been no strife. Christianity and ethical
philosophy ought to have worked side by side, until the religion of
Reason and the religion of Love understood each other and blended in one.
Destined they were to blend, but not for thousands of years. The new
religion brooked no rivalry and no rebellion. It swayed the world
despotically, but the beginning and secret of its power was that it had
captured the world's heart. Its best watchwords were Faith, Hope, Love.
In a word, civilized mankind, having outgrown the earlier nature-worship,
and having found the philosophic reason inadequate to provide a
satisfying way of life, accepted a new mythology, because it was inspired
by ideas which were powerful to guide, to inspire, and to console. For
many centuries we shall look in vain for any serious study of human life
except in conformity to the Christian mythology.
The Roman world was submerged by the invasion of the northern tribes.
There was a violent collision of peoples, manners, sentiments, usages; a
subversion of the luxurious, intelligent, refined, and effete
civilization; a rough infusion of barbaric vigor and barbaric ignorance.
The marvelous conflict, commingling, and emergence of a thousand years,
through which the classic society was replaced by the mediaeval society,
cannot even be summarized in these brief paragraphs. The point on which
our theme requires attention is that the religion of this period had its
form and substance in the Catholic church; and of this church the twin
aspects were an authoritative government administered by popes, councils,
bishops, and priests, and a conception of the supernatural world equally
definite and authoritative, which dominated the intellects and
imaginations of man with its Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven. The visible
church and the invisible world of which the church held the
interpretation and the key,--this concrete fact, and this faith the
counterpart of the fact, were the bases and pillars of the religion of
Europe for many centuries.
We are not required to balance the merits and faults of this mediaeval
religion. It was a mighty power, so long as it commanded the
unquestioning intellectual assent of the world, and so long as upon the
whole it exemplified and enforced, beyond any other human agency, the
highest moral and spiritual ideals men knew.
Its supremacy was favored by the complete subordination of all
intellectual life which was an incident of the barbaric conquest and the
feudal society which followed. Even before those events the human
intellect seemed to flag. The old classicism and the new Christianity
never so wedded as to produce either an adequate civic virtue or a great
intellectual movement. In the Dark Ages which followed, learning shrank
into the narrow channels of the cloister, and literature almost ceased as
a creative force. For almost a thousand years--from Augustine to
Dante--Europe scarcely produced a book which has high intrinsic value for
our time. When intellectual energy woke again in Italy and then in the
North, the ecclesiastical conception had inwrought itself in human
thought.
Along with authority and dogmas there developed an elaborate ceremonial,
appealing through the senses to the imagination and the spiritual sense.
For the multitude it involved a habitual confusion of the symbol with the
substance of religion. In an age when the highest minds lived in an
atmosphere of profound ignorance, and philosophy was childish, there was
wrought out the full doctrine of the Mass and its accompaniments,--a
literal transformation of the bread and wine of the sacrament into the
body and blood of Christ, powerful to impart a saving grace. The power
to work this miracle was the supreme weapon of the priesthood.
We may glance at the mediaeval religion in its culmination in the three
figures of Dante, Francis of Assisi, and Thomas à Kempis. À Kempis shows
religion fled from the active world with its strifes and temptations,
sedulously cultivating a pure, devout, unworldly virtue; feeding on the
contemplation of heavenly splendors and infernal horrors; self-centred
and inglorious. The opposite type is Frances, a joyful prophet of glad
tidings to the poor; ardent, sympathetic, heroic; touched with the beauty
of nature and the appeal of the animal creation; exalting simplicity and
poverty like an ancient philosopher; seeking the needy and sorrowful like
Jesus of Nazareth; but with no spiritual originality like Jesus, no power
to create a new religion; strong only to revive the best elements of the
traditional faith, and to organize a society which erelong sank back to
the general level of the church.
Dante is an embodiment of mediaeval belief in its most sublime and
intense phase. He has much of the temper of the Hebrew psalmist, in his
tremendous love and hate, his patriotism, his sorrow, his quest for the
highest. This vast spiritual passion finds its expression and
satisfaction in an invisible world, which promises in a future existence
the supreme triumph and reign of a divine justice, wrath, and pity, and
for which the visible world is but antechamber and probation. Dante
shows the culmination of supernatural Christianity, but he has something
further. The guide of his pilgrimage, the star of his hope, the
inspiration of his life, is a woman,--loved with sublimation and
tenderness, loved better after her death, and felt as the living link
between the seen and unseen worlds. Thus at the heart of the old
supernaturalism is the germ of a new conception, in which human love
sanctified by death becomes the revealer.
In Dante we feel that the projection of human interest to an unseen and
future world has reached its furthest limit. The mind of man must needs
revert to some nearer home and sphere. And closely following Dante we
see in England a group of figures who betoken the return. There is
Chaucer, displaying the various energy and joy and humor of earthly life.
There is Piers Plowman, showing the grim obverse of the medal, the
hardship and woe of the poor. Wyclif insists on a personal religion,
whose austere edge turns against ecclesiastical pretense and social
wrong; and he applies reason so daringly that it cuts at the very centre
of the church's dogma, in denying Transubstantiation. A little earlier
we see Roger Bacon making a fresh beginning in the experimental
philosophy which had been slighted for centuries. These four are the
precursors respectively of the purely human view, as in Shakspere, of the
elevation of the poor, of Protestantism, and of natural science.
As pagan mythology, Stoicism, and Judaism all were superseded by early
Christianity, as that in turn was succeeded by mediaeval Catholicism, so
another stage has brought us to the religion of to-day. The leading
features of this last transition may be summarily sketched, we may then
glance at certain groups of figures illustrating the advance in its
successive periods, and so we shall come to the ideal of the present.
The religious transition of the last four centuries is in one aspect
marked by the waning of authority and the growth of individual freedom;
and in another aspect it is the substitution for a supernatural of a
natural conception, or, we may say, in place of a divided and warring
universe, a harmonious universe.
In this double progress toward individual liberty and toward a new way of
thought, a conspicuous agency has been the advance of knowledge.
Connected with the advance of knowledge has been an improvement of the
actual conditions of human life. Meantime the ethical sense and the
spiritual aspiration of mankind have asserted themselves, sometimes as
slow-working, permanent forces, sometimes in revolutionary upheaval.
With change both of material condition and of ways of thought, new forms
of sentiment and aspiration have appeared,--a wider and tenderer
humanity; a reverence for the order of nature and dependence upon the
study of that order for human progress; a consciousness of the sublimity
and beauty of nature as a divine revelation; a reliance upon the powers
and intuitions of the human spirit as its only and sufficient guides; a
rediscovery under natural and universal forms of the faith and hope which
were once supposed inseparably bound up with ritual, dogma, and miracle,
but which now when given freer wing find firmer support and loftier scope.
Along with these forces has gone the steady push of human nature for
enjoyment, for ease, for power; the grasp of man for all he can get of
whatever seems to him the highest good. There have been mutual injuries,
degradations, retrogressions, such as darken all the pages of human
history; the manifest evil which often defies all interpretation, and
which only a profound faith can regard as "good in the making."
Together with these influences we must also reckon the special action of
strong personalities.
No sharp line can be drawn between these various powers,--their interplay
is constant. The main argument of the drama, from the mediaeval to the
present phase, may be briefly shown.
Into the world as Dante knew it came Knowledge on three great
lines,--opening the material universe, rediscovering a lost
interpretation of life, and diffusing the secrets of the few among the
many. The astronomers, voyagers, and geographers found out a new heaven
and a new earth. The revival of Greek literature gave to the cultivated
class a "renaissance," a rebirth, of speculative thought, of intellectual
beauty, of delight in human activities for their own sake. It was a new
birth in some of the old pagan sensuality, skeptical of heaven or hell;
worse than the old sensuality because it trampled down the finer purity
which Christianity had bred. In others it was a new birth to the pursuit
of moral and social good, inspired by the master spirits of Judaism and
early Christianity. Then came the invention of printing, and the
aristocracy of intelligence widened rapidly toward democracy.
The foremost men of the new knowledge supported the Catholic church,
either as a covert for indulgence or as a spiritual agency to be
maintained and purified. The successful rebel against the church was a
peasant-priest, who revolted because the moral unsoundness which long had
sapped the hierarchy ran at last into open countenance of vice. It was
originally a moral revolt, and it was led by a man who knew in his own
experience that not only the ethical but the emotional life of the spirit
was possible without dependence on the church of Rome. But neither
Luther nor any of the reformers were men of spiritual originality.
Driven to construct a new creed, they simply worked over the old dogmas,
divesting them of the keys of priestly power--the Mass, the confessional,
absolution, Purgatory, and the like; and giving infallible authority to
the Bible only. A war of creeds followed, mingled with a strife of
ambitions and a struggle between the powers of the secular state and of
the hierarchy. To men of piety and peace like Erasmus and Melanchthon it
seemed as if religion were only a loser by the long period of bloodshed
and bitterness that followed. The gain, as we see it, was that half of
Europe was wrested from the dominion of the Catholic church; that that
church was driven to purify its morals; and that in the Protestant states
the liberty which at first was only a change of masters spread gradually,
as one sect after another established its foothold, and as the secular
temper in the state rose above the ecclesiastical, until the religious
freedom of the individual is at last becoming generally and securely
established.
Only by this overthrow of ecclesiastical authority was rendered possible
that unchecked freedom of intellectual inquiry which has been the great
positive factor in modern advance. Step by step men have learned to know
the condition, the history, the natural laws of the material world in
which they live and the social world of which they are a part. The
bearing of this growing knowledge on the conception of the spiritual life
has been various,--seeming for a while to lie wholly apart from it; then
at times menacing its existence or contracting its scope; again arming it
with powerful weapons and enlarging its ideals. Of the latest chapters
in the story of science, one has retold the origin of Christianity,
divested it of miracle and revelation, and translated it into purely
natural and human terms. Another chapter has fixed the general trend of
the universe known to man as an ever advancing and broadening movement,
under the name of Evolution.
Amid all these changes the Christian church has continued to present its
ideals, precepts, incitements; partly affirming them in contradiction of
all denial, partly adapting them to the changes of time and thought. The
moral and spiritual interpretation of life has not been confined to the
church, but has been voiced in each generation by poets, moralists,
reformers, statesmen, each after his thought. Out of the conflict and
confusion a substantial agreement and harmonious ideal is at last
appearing. More clearly and confidently in our day than ever before the
universe may be seen and felt by man as a Cosmos,--a beautiful order.
This bird's-eye view will grow more distinct and vivid if we study
certain typical figures which group themselves as the representatives of
succeeding generations. Our conventional division of centuries will
serve as a convenient framework for four groups.
In the sixteenth century we have Sir Thomas More, uniting the highest
virtue of the church with the clearest intelligence of the new thought,
and setting forth in Utopia the ideal to be sought,--not mere individual
salvation, not an ecclesiastical fold, but a human commonwealth of free,
happy, and virtuous citizens.
Instead of the peaceful growth of such a society,--made impossible by
selfishness, ignorance, and passion,--comes social upheaval and religious
revolution, its central figure the burly, heroic, great-hearted Luther;
by turns a rebel and a conservative; leading the successful revolt of
Teutonic Europe against Rome, but leaving reconstruction to other hands.
Then we have Calvin, the builder of the creed of Protestantism; in its
substance little but a symmetrical statement of mediaeval ideas, but
resting its appeal not on authority, but logic; or, more exactly, on the
authority of a book, which, having no longer an infallible interpreter,
must be judged by human reason as to its contents and at last as to its
nature and origin. Thus, unconsciously, Calvin initiated a religious
democracy and ultimately a religion of reason; while for the time he
established a creed more austere and grim than the Catholic. Opposite
him stands Loyola, the reviver of Catholicism, infusing it with a new
heroism and self-sacrifice; reaffirming and intensifying its authority;
scornful of speculation, powerful in organization; zealot, missionary,
educator; giving to ecclesiastical obedience an added emphasis, to
organization a new force.
For a typical group in the next century, let us take Francis Bacon,
leading the human intellect away from abstractions and from other worlds
to the close, intelligent study of the material world in which men live.
Beside him stands Shakspere, reading the world of humanity with eyes
neither biased by creed nor sublimed by faith; portraying with marvelous
range the joys, sorrows, humors of mankind; showing on his impartial
canvas a true humanity, far different from the fictitious saint and
fictitious sinner of the theologian; showing, as with the truth of
nature, "virtue in her shape how lovely;" but with no consolation beside
the grave, no satisfying ideal for man's pursuit nor rule for man's
guidance. Near him we see "the Shakspere of divines," Jeremy Taylor; he,
too, is close to the realities of life, but he is planted firm on the
belief in a supernatural revelation of God, Christ, and a hereafter, and
for those who so believe offers a simple, noble way of "Holy Living and
Dying."
In Cromwell is embodied the attempt of extreme Protestantism to mould
society and the state by the authority of a supernatural religion. The
Puritan creed for which he stands is a mixture of Hebraic and Calvinistic
elements; the Puritan temper is at its best heroic and austere, made
despotic by its confidence of divine authority, and by its
supernaturalism made indifferent to the new science and to the various
elements of human nature on which statesmanship must build. Its
political sway is brief, its effects on English and American character
are lasting.
In the next century the master minds stand outside of Christianity.
Voltaire assails the whole ecclesiastical and supernatural fabric with
terrible weapons of hard sense and derision. For the target of his
arrows he has a church at once corrupt, tyrannical, and weak, and a creed
which the best intelligence has outgrown. He heartily scouts the church,
dogma, miracle; admits a vague Deity and a possible hereafter, but cares
little for them; is fearless, jovial, generous,--a rollicking,
comfortable, formidable apostle of negations.
Into the vacuum he creates comes Rousseau, and at his touch there well up
again deep fountains of feeling, belief, desire. Rousseau, too, has left
behind him the church and its dogmas; but he craves love, joy, action,
and finds scope for them. He delights in nature's beauty, and it is the
symbol to him of a God in whom there remains of the Christian Deity only
the element of beneficence. He exhorts men to return to nature, but it
is a somewhat unreal nature, a dream of primeval innocence and
simplicity. He idealizes the family relation, and brings wisdom and
gentleness to the training of the child. He lacks the Hebraic and
Puritan stress on conscience; the mild benevolence of his Deity is
somewhat remote from the ethical need of man and from the actual
procedure or the universe; Rousseau himself is tainted with
sensuality,--a diseased, suffering, pathetic nature, with "sweet strings
jangled," worthy of pity and of gratitude.
In France, the highest intelligence was at war with established
institutions,--the Encyclopaedists, Voltaire, Rousseau, against the
Catholic church and the reigning authorities: on the one side
persecution, but growing feeble; on the other side derision or evasion or
attack. In England, a large measure of civil and religious freedom gave
the intellectual combatants a fairer field and a milder temper. The
English genius showed itself as practical, matter-of-fact, and moderate.
Supernatural Christianity was attacked and defended; against the assault
on the miracles the defense was really a shifting of the ground, and an
insistence as by Butler on an ethical order in the observed workings of
the world, which gives a sort of analogue and support to the Christian
scheme of future retribution. In speculative thought the prevailing
school, as in Locke, approached reality from the side of sense-knowledge,
till Hume showed how this road led to a denial of miracle and in
philosophy to a fundamental skepticism. Berkeley reverted to the ideal
philosophy, and there seemed but a continuance of the eternal seesaw of
metaphysics.
In Germany, Kant sank his plummet deeper. He found indeed in the working
of the pure intellect an outcome of self-contradiction. But he
recognized, as the most certain guide to reality which man's inner world
affords, the commanding sense of duty,--the "moral imperative;" and
through this he found the presence and the authoritative voice of a moral
deity.
Goethe lived through a rich and various experience, of book-culture,
emotion, conversance with men and affairs, in the attitude of an explorer
and observer, unbound by creeds, but open to all teaching from past
records or present impressions. The projection of this experience was an
ideal of life which gave large scope to all human faculties,--to
knowledge, pleasure, passion, service,--under a wise self-control, and
with theoretical allegiance to a moral law and a future hope not unlike
the law and the hope of Christianity. It was an ideal which appealed
only to the man of intellectual habit, and which lacked the note of
heroism and self-sacrifice.
It was the opposite quality, the passion of self-forgetful service, which
won for Christianity its most notable triumph in this century, in the
movement led by John Wesley. In Wesley, Protestantism came back to the
rescue of the poor, as Catholicism came back in Francis of Assisi. Among
the peasants and colliers of England, among the backwoodsmen of America,
swept an uplifting wave of love, joy, and hope.
Jonathan Edwards did Christianity the service of carrying Calvinism to
its logical extreme, and showing what it really meant. He started in
the New England ministry a strenuous speculation, which was not to
rest till it destroyed the foundation from which he worked. The hell
as to which comfortable churchmen were getting silent, he painted in
such lurid colors that reaction and ultimate revolt were necessities
of human nature. The life of holiness and love--in himself a most
genuine reality--he defined in such terms of introspection and
self-consciousness, that there opened a wide gulf between the forms of
religion and the most sturdy and natural virtue of the time.
That sturdy and natural virtue was embodied in Benjamin Franklin,--in all
this eighteenth century the best type and herald of the coming
development of man. Franklin inherited the characteristic virtue of the
Englishman and the Puritan; he started in ground which Puritan and Quaker
had fertilized, and when the fire of the early zeal had cooled; he worked
out the problem of life for himself with great independence and entire
good sense. After a few vagaries and some wholesome buffeting, he
determined that "moral perfection" was the only satisfying aim. But
instead of proclaiming his discovery as a gospel, he quietly utilized it
for his personal guidance. He had a keen eye for all utility; he carved
out his own fortune; he early identified his own happiness with that of
the people around him, and served the community with disinterested
faithfulness through a long life. That unselfish beneficence, of which
Goethe thought a single instance was enough to save his hero from the
fiend to whom he had fairly forfeited his selfish soul, was the habit of
Franklin's lifetime. He found the ample sanctions and rewards of virtue
in the present world, though he held a cheerful hope of something beyond.
In the study of this world's laws, he saw, lay the best road to human
success. He recognized the homely virtues of industry and thrift, on
which the young American society had worked out its real strength, and
assigned to them the fundamental place, instead of that mystic and
introspective piety which the Calvinist made his corner-stone. He took
the lead in penetrating the secrets of nature, and not less in moulding
and guiding the infant nation. If his virtue was prudential rather than
heroic, his prudence was close to that large wisdom which is a right
apprehension of all the facts of life. Only the realm of the poet, the
mystic, the ardent lover, lay beyond his ken. He stands side by side
with the grand and magnanimous figure of Washington,--the twin founders
of the American republic.
The complexity and onrush of the nineteenth century may be in some degree
made clear if we fix our eyes on certain typical groups of men whom we
may classify under the aspects of Knowledge, Philosophy, Literature,
Protestantism, Catholicism, Social Ideals, Personal Ideals.
Regarding under Knowledge what may fairly be considered as solid and
irreversible acquisition,--the general movement of humanity has received
conspicuous interpretation by Darwin, who by most patient investigation
discovered at least approximately the path by which man has been
developed out of the lower animal forms. Spencer has shown, by a vast
generalization of facts, the working throughout all realms of existence
known to man of certain common tendencies--of variation and new and
specialized formation. Apart from all debatable theories of psychology
and metaphysics, he and a host of other students in the same direction
have discovered clews by which the growth of human societies and their
individual members can be in some degree traced under general laws.
In another department of knowledge the sacred histories of Christianity
have been given a new reading by scholars, among whom Strauss, Baur, and
Renan are conspicuous. The general result has been to show that these
scriptures are purely human documents, and the personages they describe
are purely human. Through the gospel histories Strauss ran his critical
theory like a plowshare through a field of daisies. He showed especially
the genesis of many of these stories by imagination working creations out
of Old Testament texts. Baur led the way in discovering by marvelous
analysis the composite influences which helped to shape the apostolic
histories in the interest of party or of piety. Renan reillumined the
scene which his predecessors seemed to convert into a dreary waste, by
reconceiving, with erudition illumined by genius and sympathy, the
personality of Jesus of Nazareth as a human character, nowise infallible,
but a sublime leader of the race. While Christianity has thus been
brought to the level of a natural religion, its old-time adversaries, the
other world-religions such as Buddhism, Brahmanism, Islamism, have been
shown by sympathetic students to be vast upward essays of mankind toward
truth and goodness. That no religion is handed down complete from
heaven, and that all religions are expressions of human aspiration and
effort, is coming to be accepted as axiomatic.
Turning from well-established knowledge to theoretical schemes of the
universe, the three typical names in this century are Hegel, Comte, and
Spencer. Hegel stood for the interpretation of all existence in terms of
man's inner world--thought and being are regarded as identical, and the
movement of thought, expressed by a new kind of logic, becomes
interpreter of the development of the universe. In absolute revulsion
from this tendency, Comte in his world-scheme rejected metaphysics and
theology alike as belonging to the infantile stage of man, and recognized
as legitimate only the "positive" knowledge which science affords. For
the emotional and ethical needs of man, he offered "the religion of
humanity," with the service of mankind as its worship and woman as its
priestess. Spencer, equally discarding the supernatural as matter of
knowledge, relegates the distinctively religious emotion to awe before a
supreme power wholly inscrutable to man. He sets himself to formulate so
far as possible the observed workings of the universe in which man is a
part; he makes Evolution the central principle; he finds in Heredity and
Environment the great formative influences upon the individual; and he
reaffirms as of supreme importance the familiar ethical principles which
mankind has discovered in its experiences.
In all these forms, the constructive philosophy of our century has
visibly fallen short of the immense volume of old and new truths which it
has striven to mould and formulate. The characteristic genius of the
time is shown more powerfully on the one hand in the accumulation of
specific knowledge, as science; and on the other hand in the imaginative
portrayal of human life. The favorite vehicle of imagination has been
the novel. If our successors hereafter desire to know how man in the
nineteenth century appeared to himself, their best guides will be such as
Scott, Hawthorne, Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot, Hugo, Balzac. It is
the children of Bacon and those of Shakspere who are most conspicuous in
the work of yesterday. To-day we seem to stand on the threshold of a
more inclusive, more profound, more inspiring philosophy.