facts. He has somehow found it out in the long existence of the race;
he has seen it more and more clearly. This true way is expressed by
what we call right principles of conduct. It is such traits as we name
courage, truth, justice, purity, love, aspiration, reverence. It
includes the study of natural laws and conformity to them. It includes
the search for knowledge, both for its use and for its own joy. It
includes the delighted gaze upon beauty of every kind.
Whoever follows this ideal--and just as far as he follows it
intelligently and earnestly--finds certain results. Whenever he acts,
he finds set before him a right way to follow rather than a wrong. So
from every situation he may draw strength. So he may continually find
peace,--often peace won through struggle, but the deeper for the
struggle. The love of beauty finds beauty everywhere. The love of
living creatures finds objects everywhere, and love given brings love
in response. This higher life gives joy,--not constant, alternating
with sorrow; but the joy is incomparably sweeter and purer and higher
than any other course of life yields, and the sorrow has such nobility
that we dare not wish it absent from the mingled cup we drain. And
always through joy or sorrow may come moral growth--development of
character.
There is no exemption to be won from suffering, none from fear. Pain,
weakness, bereavement, death,--these things must come, and we must
sometimes tremble before them,--no divine hand will pluck them away.
But in our fear we learn a deeper strength.
These are the gifts with which Life answers our faithful service. The
brave, the gentle, the peace-makers, the pure in heart, the forgiving,
the patient, the heroic, are blessed,--incomparably enriched.
This is what we know of the relation of the One Power to
ourselves,--that it asks the very highest and best we can give, and
returns our service with the best and highest we can receive. This is
what that power we name God is to us.
This is the same reality which has been apprehended under the figure of
a personal God, a Heavenly Father, or a Christ. To many, those figures
still express it. But those to whom the Deity is not thus personified
may no less fully and vividly apprehend the divine Reality.
And further, this whole conception stands no less in stead the persons
and the hours when the conscious sense of Deity fails altogether. This
conception makes the essence of religion to be conformity to the homely
facts about us, in the relations of fidelity, sympathy, and service.
When one has no conscious thought of God, or cannot reach such thought
if he tries, he can always exercise love, sympathy, admiration,
self-control,--and that is enough.
The limitations of our knowledge imply everywhere a background of
mystery. But that mystery is at once a stimulus to our inquiry and a
prize set before our longing. In some respects it is only a challenge
to search, and the horizons of knowledge forever widen before the
explorer. At other points the veil never lifts, but all longing,
aspiration, unsatisfied hunger, inarticulate yearning, "groanings which
cannot be uttered," reach out to and lay hold on this realm of mystery.
It is not an adamantine wall that encircles us, it is the tender
mystery of the sunset or the starry heavens.
So of the mystery of death. The veil is not lifted, but it stirs
before the breath of our prayers and hopes. The deepest fear in man is
the fear of death, and that fear is conquered in him by something
greater than itself. Even on the natural plane man is seldom afraid of
death when it comes; it is rather the distant image that appalls him.
Before the reality some instinct seems to bid him not to fear. Every
noble sentiment lifts men above the dread of death. For their country
on the battlefield, for other men in sudden accidents and perils, men
give their lives instinctively or deliberately.
It is personal love to which death seems to menace irretrievable and
final disaster. But it is personal love to which comes the divinest
presage. Some voice says to our yearning heart, "Fear nothing, doubt
nothing, only _live_!"
From our birth to our death we are encompassed by mystery, but it is a
mystery which may, if we will have it so, grow warm, luminous, divine.
So, by simple fidelity, man may find within himself harmony, victory,
and peace. When now, from this standpoint, he looks out on the
universe,--and from no other standpoint can he hope for any clear
vision,--what does he most clearly discern? These three
aspects,--Order, Beauty, Life.
As he opens himself to these three aspects and actively conforms
himself to them,--as he studies, obeys, and reveres the Order, as he
perceives and rejoices in the Beauty, as in sympathy and service he
merges his personal life in the multiform Life,--so he grows in the
impression of a divine harmony and unity pervading all things. So he
becomes aware of a Cosmos,--a universal order of beauty and of love.
He becomes aware of it only as he becomes voluntarily and consciously a
part of it. Only through the fidelity of his moral life does he feel
beneath his feet a sure foundation. Only as his soul glows a spark of
love does it recognize the celestial ether in which it is an atom.
At every moment and on every side we are in touch with the realities of
being.
We live and move in a world of orderly procedure, to which we may adapt
ourselves with growing intelligence and purpose.
Both the animate and inanimate creation is clothed in forms which
minister to the sense of beauty; and the more that sense is cultivated
in us, the more universally do we recognize beauty, and the more
profound is its appeal to our consciousness.
In our social existence we come in touch with other souls, each with
its actual or potential wealth of being, and each inviting our
sympathetic response.
These--order, beauty, conscious existence--are the impact on us of the
universe. The right apprehension of these and the active response to
them constitute the true exercise of our own nature; and it is through
that exercise that we know Life,--the one Life,--and know it to be
divine.
These three aspects,--order, beauty, our fellow-lives,--let us dwell
for a moment on each in turn.
An amazing stimulus to man's powers has come in the discovery that he
may penetrate and follow to an indefinite extent the actual procedure
of the Universe. We are only on the threshold of our discoveries. We
are just beginning to see where they have their highest application.
We have been harnessing the steeds of power to the service of our
physical wants. We are just beginning to understand that they are to
be made the ministers of building up a complete manhood. The
theologian has sought to demonstrate that all natural processes work in
the service of a divine righteousness. In place of any such
demonstration, we are finding the true exercise of knowledge in
applying for ourselves the processes of nature to the fulfillment of
our noblest purposes.
We are just now at the transition point between the old and the new
conception of divine Power. The old conception was: "The Almighty is a
merciful father. If his children ask anything, he will give it: the
weapon of desire is prayer." The new perception is: "The Almighty
moves in lines which we can partly discern. By putting ourselves in
line with that Power, we make it helpful: the weapon of desire is
intelligent effort. Through our wills works the divine Will."
"With the great girdle of God, go and encompass the earth!"
It is moral fidelity which apprehends the true application and
significance for man of that regular procedure of nature which environs
and conditions him. And this Natural Order, in turn, requires the
moral sense to humbly and obediently go to school to it. "You want to
be good?" says Nature. "You dare to believe that even I in my
mightiness am set to help you to be good? Then study my processes, and
conform to them!" A new set of commandments is being written in the
sight of men,--commandments learned but slowly and often transgressed,
even by those whose wills are pure and whose hearts are loving. _Thou
shalt sufficiently rest_! How perpetually in these days is that
commandment broken, and with what woeful penalty! The practical basis
of all religion is the religion of the body. The body politic, too,
the social organism, has its code of natural laws, intelligible,
imperative. And every new discovery yields guidance and utters
command. "Seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened!"
Only through moral fidelity is the higher meaning of Beauty won. It is
the pure in heart who see God. The beauty of the human form is, on the
one side, uplifting to the soul, sacramental, as if it were the shrine
of a divinity. On the other side, it blends with the instincts which
when unchecked in their play degrade humanity. Plato pictures the two
mingled elements as two steeds yoked together, the one black, unruly,
down-plunging, the other white, celestial, up-mounting, while Reason,
the charioteer, strives to rule them. The nobler interpretation is
slowly acquired by mankind. There are great, sometimes catastrophic,
lapses; there are periods when art and literature become the servants
of the earthly instead of the heavenly Venus. We still look far
forward to
"The world's great bridals, chaste and calm."
Yet, little by little, the ennobling aspect of human beauty becomes a
familiar perception, is wrought into a habit, is transmitted as an
inheritance. Whoever achieves in himself the victory of personal
purity is helping to open the eyes of mankind.
The material world becomes instinct with majesty and with sweetness to
the eyes that can see. It is a revelation of which Wordsworth and
Emerson are the prophets in literature, but which is written no less in
many a heart quite untaught of books. The face of Mother Earth is the
book in which many a man and woman and child read lessons of delight,
spelled in letters of rock and fern, of brook and cowslip, of maple
leaf and goldenrod. Such lessons mean little save to the pure and
humble.
The distinctive voice of nature's gospel is a voice of joy. Mixing
freely with humanity, we encounter the almost perpetual presence of
trouble. But turning to forest and mountain and sea and sky, we are
confronted with gladness ineffable. Still "the morning stars sing
together and the sons of God shout for joy." Can our religion find no
other emblem than the cross,--the instrument of torture? Mankind has
pondered long the lesson of sorrow: dare it enter the whole inheritance
of sonship, and taste the fullness of joy? Reality which thought and
word cannot convey is bodied forth to us in music and in natural
beauty. Music is the deepest voice of humanity, and beauty is the
answering smile of God. When the poet-philosopher has crowded into
verse all that he can express of life's meaning,--of the subservience
of evil to good, the "deep love lying under these pictures of
time,"--he invokes at the last the very look of earth and sea and sky
as the best answer:--
"Uprose the merry Sphinx,
And crouched no more in stone;
She melted, into purple cloud,
She silvered in the moon;
She spired into a yellow flame;
She flowered in blossoms red;
She flowed into a foaming wave;
She stood Monadnoc's head.
"Thorough a thousand voices
Spoke the universal dame,
'Who telleth one of my meanings
Is master of all I am.'"
Yet is the chief exercise of our life through relation with our
fellow-lives. If the sublime joy of nature's companionship could be
made constant, at the price of isolation from our kind, the price were
a thousand-fold too great. And it is through true and sympathetic
relation with other lives that we chiefly come into conscious harmony
with the universe. It is in a right interplay with mankind that we get
closest to the heart of things.
"God is love." So I am told: how shall I interpret it in my
experience? Is it a proposition to be believed about some being
throned above my sight? If I exercise my mind in that direction, if I
weigh and balance and sift the intellectual evidence, I may toil to a
doubtful conclusion. But let me, issuing forth from my ponderings, put
myself into kindly relations with my fellow beings,--let me so much as
pat affectionately the head of the honest dog who meets me on the
street,--and a thrill like the warmth of spring touches my chilled
intellect. Let me, for a day only, make each human contact, though but
of a passing moment, a true recognition of some other soul, and I feel
myself somehow in right relation with the world. "He that loveth
knoweth God, and is born of God."
At the heart of all love is an instinct of reciprocity. It may or may
not get a return from its immediate object, but somehow it opens the
fountains of the universe. The heart that loves finds itself, it
scarce knows how, beloved.
Such, then, is the process, and such the revelation. The first step,
the constant requirement, the unsparing hourly need, is obedience to
the known right. The sequence is an ever-widening sense of a sweet and
celestial encompassment.
The man rightly practiced in all noble exercises of life--in moral
fidelity, in reverence and sympathy, in observation and conformity to
the actual conditions of the world about him--will find pouring in upon
him a beauty, a love, a divinity, which fill the soul with a heavenly
vision. And that soul, in whatever of extremity may come to it, has
under its feet the eternal rock.
Through the serious literature of to-day runs a bitter wail,--the cry
that life is sad and dark and cruel. Sad and dark and cruel it is,
until one meets it sword in hand. The great Mother will have her
children to be heroes. She tests them, frightens them, masks herself
sometimes in terror. Face the terror, drive straight at the danger,
and the mask dissolves to show the celestial smile, the "all-repaying
eyes."
The road is an arduous one. The aged philosopher, you remember, was
asked by a youthful monarch, "Tell me if you please in a few words what
is the final fruit and outcome of philosophy?" The philosopher
answered him, "Cultivate yourself diligently in all virtue and wisdom
for thirty years, and then you may be able to partly understand the
answer to your question."
It is an arduous road, but it leads to reality. All short and easy
answers to the supreme question dissatisfy after the first flush. The
confidence of the dogmatic answer, we soon discover, has no sufficient
authority to back it. The glib theoretical answer leads us, after all,
to a Balance of Probabilities. That is the best God that theoretic
philosophy can give us. It may be better than nothing. But who can
love a Balance of Probabilities? Who can feel the hand of such a deity
as that when his hand gropes for support in face of temptation,
disaster, heartbreak?
We are told, "It may suffice for the strong and saintly to bid them
'Prove for yourself that the universe is good;' but what kind of gospel
is this for the weak, for the child, for the average man and woman?"
The answer is: The vast majority of mankind always have lived and
always will live largely by reliance on some person or some body of
persons or some social atmosphere of opinion. That authority of the
church which has availed so much is just the confidence of a crowd in
the leadership of certain men to whom they are accustomed to look up.
In the order of nature, always the leaders will lead. What the strong
and saintly receive with vivid impression and profound assurance, the
mass who feel their influence will accept a good deal on their
authority. The child will catch the faith of its father and mother.
But, further, in its very nature, that method of approach to the
highest reality which requires only goodness and open-heartedness and
love is available to the little child and to the simplest mind. When
Jesus said, "Blessed are the meek, the merciful, the peace-makers, the
pure in heart, they that do hunger and thirst after righteousness,"
every one understood him.
But it may be asked, Does this attitude bring man face to face with a
personal God? Personal he will be to some: to many the only solid and
adequate expression of a real being is a personal being. Nay, to many
only a human personality means anything. A great preacher and poet of
our day once said that he never thought of God except under the figure
of Christ,--a human figure in some human occupation and attitude. Let
Divinity body itself as Christ to minds so constituted. Let others
invoke "the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ." But impose no
constraint and lay no ban on those to whom, as Carlyle says, "the
Highest cannot be spoken of in words. Personal! Impersonal! One!
Three! What meaning can any mortal, after all, attach to them in
reference to such an object?" It is not these forms of thought that
are essential. What is essential is a way of living access to the
Highest.
The adequate conception--the keynote--must be one that is sufficient
alike for the every-day mood, for the exalted hours, and for the
emergencies. That keynote is given in this truth: that there is no
moment so dull or so hard but one can ask himself, What is the best the
situation allows? and conform to that; can open his eyes to some beauty
close at hand; can enter sympathetically into some neighboring life.
We prescribe to ourselves certain attitudes, and strive toward certain
ideals. But the supreme hours are those in which there flow in upon
our consciousness the inshinings and the upholdings of some unfathomed
Power. We are led, we are carried. We feel, we know not whence nor
how, a peace that passeth understanding and a love that casteth out
fear.
This is the substance of that religious experience in which throughout
the ages the heart of man has found its deepest support and
encouragement. The experience has clothed itself to the imagination in
the garb of this or that creed or climate. It is liable to debasements
and counterfeits, but no more liable than all other noble emotions and
experiences. Sometimes there is the culmination of a moral struggle,
and the whole course of life receives a new direction. Sometimes there
is an illumination and joy and peace. It is an exaltation of the soul
in which gladness blends with moral energy. No chapter of human life
is written in deeper letters than those which tell of victory over
temptation, strength out of weakness, radiance beside the grave,
through this divine uplift.
There is another experience, more common, less dependent on individual
constitution, which bears an inward message of soberer tone but of like
import. It is the peace which attends the consciousness of
right-doing. Wordsworth personifies it as the approval of Duty, "stern
daughter of the voice of God:"--
"Stern Lawgiver! Yet thou dost wear
The Godhead's most benignant grace;
Nor know we anything more fair
Than is the smile upon thy face."
The faithful child of duty, whatever his creed, whatever his
temperament, is naturally the possessor of a steady, calm assurance.
Somehow, he feels, it is well.
Reasonings about immortality lead to little result. Convinced or
unconvinced, we profit little by a mere opinion. We speculate, doubt,
reject, or hope; and in either case the moral conduct of life is,
perhaps, not much affected. But there come hours when to love and
aspiration the heavenly vision opens, and the sense of its own eternity
thrills the soul.
The crying need of the heart is always a present need. No promise of a
far-away satisfaction is sufficient for it. And answering to just that
need is the experience, sometimes given, that the human love once ours
is ours still in its fullness,--some richer fullness even than that of
days gone by. There are hours in which the heart's voice is,
"Though mixed with God and Nature thou,
I seem to love thee more and more."
The highest state of consciousness to which we attain is expressed by
the old phrase that man feels himself a child of God. His energy feels
back of it an infinite energy. His desires rest peacefully in some
all-sufficing good. All that is highest and purest in him mingles with
its divine source. He sees new and higher interpretations of his own
life and other lives. All the human love he has ever experienced he
holds as an abiding possession. There comes to him not so much the
premonition of a future state as the consciousness of some state in
which past, present, and future blend. He is free from illusions, and
serene. It does not disturb him even to know that the vision will
pass, and he will return to earth's level. He sees the truth, he feels
the divine reality; and the certainty and the gladness are such that
not even the prevision of his own relapse into dimmer perception can
depress him. The hour speaks with command to the hours that are to
follow; it bids them to fidelity, to love, to highest courage.
When turning from contemplation we throw ourselves into the work and
the battle, a pulse of divine energy blends with our noblest effort,
touches our joy with an ineffable sweetness, and hushes our sorrow like
a child folded in its mother's arms.
The key of the world is given into our hands when we throw ourselves
unreservedly into the service of the highest truth we know, "with
fidelity to the right as God gives us to see the right." So it is that
we may find ourselves
"Wedded to this goodly universe
In love and holy passion."
III
A TRAVELER'S NOTE-BOOK
A tourist who roams for a brief while through some great country like
England or Russia may jot down a few of the impressions which come home
to him, making no pretense at completeness or symmetry of description.
So, one who has journeyed like a hasty traveler over some passages in
that vast tract of years which we describe as the classic and Christian
civilizations, notes down in the following pages a few of the salient
features that have impressed him. He has already prefaced this with a
sort of outline map, drawn largely from familiar authorities, under the
title "Our Spiritual Ancestry;" and has further ventured to interpret
some phases of our own time, as "The Ideal of To-Day." Now he goes on to
group a few observations on some special phases of the historical survey,
disclaiming any attempt at exact proportion and perspective, but
lingering where the prospect has pleased his fancy, or at points which
seemed to yield some necessary clew or fruitful suggestion.
When, in the poems bearing the name of Homer, the curtain rises on the
drama of man as it was acted in Greece, after the immeasurable
prehistoric space, we are amazed at the sudden brilliance. The men and
deeds brought before us are various in character and worth,--savage,
heroic, repulsive, beautiful, by turns. But the ever-present charm is
man seeing the world about him. It is the vividness with which every
object is seen in its distinctive form and spirit, and conveyed by the
fit word and phrase. So seen and spoken, the commonest object becomes a
thing of delight. The high-roofed house, the brazen threshold, the
polished chest, the silver-studded sword, the purple robes,--the tawny
oxen, the hollow ships, the tapering oars,--the wine-dark sea, the
rosy-fingered dawn, the gold-throned morning,--Hector of the nodding
plume, the white-armed Nausicaa,--so in long procession moves the
spectacle. A like distinctness invests all the actions and emotions of
the story with charm. To us, as to the poet, the world becomes enchanted
simply in being seen.