acceptance of the familiar laws of goodness, having in the Bible their
express sanction, with a great promise and an awful warning for the
future, and the embodiment of holiness, love, and help, in Christ. This
has been the religion of a multitude of faithful souls, manly men and
womanly women, who did not concern themselves with any elaborate
theology, but went along their daily way, strong in obedience to duty,
trustful in a divine guidance, and with serene hope for what may come
after death. Their souls have been nurtured on whatever was most vital
and most tender in the words of Scripture and the services of the church,
and whatever was unintelligible or innutritions they have quietly passed
by. This is the essential religion of humanity, made definite and vivid
by accepted symbols and rules, and made warm by the sense of fellowship
with a great company.
Recurring to the successive phases of religious thought, the next
development of Protestantism, while in a sense world-wide, may be most
clearly seen in America. By Jonathan Edwards there was begun the
application of a rationalizing process to the theology of Calvin and to
experimental religion. In Edwards almost the only result was a more
lurid and tremendous affirmation of the old dogma and the old
requirement. But the New England mind, speculative, practical, and
intense, worked rapidly on. In Channing and his associates came the
renunciation of Depravity, Atonement, and the Trinity. In the next
generation, Unitarianism expressed itself through Theodore Parker as
simple theism. A little later than the Unitarian movement, the old
Orthodoxy itself became transformed into a new Orthodoxy. The foremost
interpreters of the transformation were Bushnell and Beecher; Bushnell
translating the Atonement into terms of purely natural goodness,--not as
a transaction, but an expression; and Beecher finding in Christ simply
the truth that Love is sovereign of the universe. To Bushnell and
Beecher the historical Christ remained in a unique sense an incarnation
of God. By later voices of the new Orthodoxy--for example, Phillips
Brooks--he is spoken of rather as the one actual instance of perfect
humanity, and in this sense a manifestation of God and the spiritual
leader of mankind.
But for three centuries men have been studying the facts of existence
from an entirely different side from that whence the church takes its
outlook. They have been finding out all kinds of curious facts, totally
unconnected with any supernatural sphere. First, they made such
discoveries as that the world is not flat, but round; not stationary, but
doubly revolving. And so they went on. The stars, the plants, the
animals, the human body, yielded all manner of curious knowledge. New
powers came into men's hands through this knowledge; new avenues to
happiness were opened. Facts wove themselves together in wider and wider
combinations. Orderly procedure was found where there had seemed such
confusion as only capricious spirits could occasion. It is learned, too,
that even as the individual man has grown up from babyhood, so the race
of man has grown up from the beast. The globe itself has grown from a
simple origin into infinite diversity and complexity. There has been a
universal, orderly growth,--what we name "Evolution." And it is learned
that all mental phenomena, so far as we can explore them, stand in some
close relation to a physical basis in the brain, and to a train of
physical antecedents.
And now the men who have come up by the path of this knowledge stand face
to face with the men who have been climbing in the path whose signboards
are such as "Duty," "Worship," "Aspiration;" and the question arises, Do
our paths lie henceforth together, or do they separate, and is the one
party losing its travel?
Perhaps the best example of the union of the two pursuits in one man is
given by Benjamin Franklin.
Franklin worked out, through a very genuine, homely, and personal
experience, the conviction that _moral perfection_ is the only true aim.
He reached this conviction while still a young man, and in the main tenor
of his life he was faithful to it. He made no vaunt of his religion,
founded no sect, gave his words and deeds chiefly to practical affairs;
and perhaps few guessed, until at the close of his life he told his own
story with consummate charm, that the secret motive and mainspring of his
life had been the same that animates the saints and saviors,--the thirst
for moral perfection. The motive and method had been hidden, but the
result had long been clear to the eyes of the whole world. Franklin's
character was reverenced alike in the court of France and the farmhouses
of Pennsylvania and New England. To the Old World he seemed the heroic
and coming man of the New World, side by side with Washington. The
Virginian embodied the highest traditional virtues of the race,
self-mastery, patience, magnanimity, devotion to the common good; the
Pennsylvanian, if less called on for the heroic forms of antique virtue,
added to its substance new traits of wisdom, progress, and
happiness,--signs of a better age to be.
Moral perfection was Franklin's secret and ruling principle. But his
life was conspicuously engaged in the fields of science and of
statesmanship. He was a leader in exploring the material world, skillful
to trace its secrets, fertile to apply them to human use. He was a
pioneer and founder of the new nation, projecting its union before others
had desired or dreamed of it; sharing in its first hazardous fortunes;
winning by his personal weight and wisdom the foreign alliance which
turned the scale of victory; laying with the other master shipwrights the
keel and ribs of the new Constitution. Moral perfection for himself,
and, as the outcome to the world, not a new church or a theology or a
missionary enterprise, but a winning of the forces of nature to the
service of man, and a shaping of the social organism for the benefit of
all. That is the originality of Franklin,--that he carries the old moral
purpose into the new fields of science and of social ordering. His
desire for moral perfection and his confidence that the universe is
ordered rightly are not dependent on any visionary scheme of heaven and
hell; they rest not on any doubtful argument; they bring sanction from no
transport mixed of soul and sense. He walks firm on the solid earth. He
has found for himself that goodness is the only thing that satisfies.
That this is an ordered universe comes home to him with every step of his
study of actuality. What need of a supernatural religion to a man who
finds religion in his own nature and in the nature of the world?
Such confidence and such purpose are as old as Socrates. But come, now,
let us go where Socrates did not go; let us put the ideas of Jesus and
Paul to some further application; let us use our freedom from pope and
tyrant for some solid good! And so he goes on, cheerfully and
delightedly, to question the thunder-cloud and make acquaintance with its
wild steeds,--presently some one will put them in harness. He is always
inventing. Now it is a stove, now it is a fire-brigade,--a public
library,--a post-office,--a Federal Union! And be his invention smaller
or greater, he takes out no patent, but tenders it freely into the common
stock.
The prophets introducing this age are Carlyle and Emerson. Carlyle sees
the disease--he convinces of sin. Emerson sees the solution. Carlyle
reflects in his own troubled nature the disorder he portrays. He is
physically unsound; his dyspepsia exaggerates to him the evils of the
world. Emerson's disciplined and noble character mirrors the present and
eternal order, and forecasts its triumph.
Carlyle and Emerson give two different phases of life as experienced.
Carlyle gives the experience of good and evil,--the tremendous sanctions
of right against wrong, wisdom against folly. He is not triumphant, but
he is not hopeless. "Work, and despair not" is to him "the marching
music of the Teutonic race." Emerson, from the height of personal
victory, sees all as harmonious. One shows the struggle up the mountain
path, the other the view from the summit.
Carlyle's gospel is summed up in "_Work_, and despair not." "Work" was
his own addition to Goethe's line. "Do the duty that lies nearest thee;"
action, as the escape from the puzzles of the intellect and the griefs of
the heart, is his special message.
Emerson is a precursor of the day when "No man shall say to his
neighbors, Know ye the Lord, for all shall know him, from the least unto
the greatest." He is the first of the prophets to rise above anxiety as
to the success of his mission. He lives his life, says his word, sheds
his light--concerned to be faithful, but wholly unanxious as to personal
success.
As the tribes of ancient Israel stood arrayed, the one half on Mount
Ebal, the other on Mount Gerizim,--the one to pronounce the blessing, the
other to utter the curse,--so Emerson is like an embodied promise and
Carlyle a perpetual warning. In Emerson we see the hero triumphant and
serene. Carlyle shows him at close grips with the devil. "Pain, danger,
difficulty, steady slaving toil, shall in no wise be shirked by any
brightest mortal that will approve himself loyal to his mission in this
world; nay, precisely the higher he is the deeper will be the
disagreeableness, and the detestability to flesh and blood, of the tasks
laid on him; and the heavier, too, and more tragic, his penalties if he
neglect them."
The background for Emerson is the life of early New England. The secret
of New England's greatness was the combination from the first of the
profoundest interest in man's spiritual destiny with the closest grip on
homely facts.
In Calvinism, and in Christianity, the universe was at eternal war within
itself; this was man's projection upon the world of his own moral
conflict. Emerson sees the universe as a harmony. Many influences have
contributed to this idea; it becomes distinct and vivid in a man whose
own life is a moral harmony. Himself truly a cosmos, he recognizes the
answering tokens of the greater cosmos.
The religious sentiment had become so inwoven with institutions, creeds,
usages, conventionalisms,--each man believing because his neighbors do,
or his father did,--that it was necessary to take a new observation.
What says the heart of man at its highest? For this Emerson is singled
out; for him an ancestry is trained through generations; he is drawn
apart from the church, set aside from government and all institutional
work; practical functions are denied him; he is made an eye,--an organ of
pure vision.
To him God is not afar off but in himself. The heart in its own purity,
tenderness, and strength recognizes the Divine Presence. "The soul gives
itself, alone, original, and pure, to the Lonely, Original, and Pure,
who, on that condition, gladly inhabits, leads, and speaks through it."
The order of physical nature is the symbol and the instrument of a moral
order. The beauty and sublimity of nature are the manifestation through
sense of the Divine Reality.
So high a revelation can come at first only to souls which in their
greatness are isolated, as the highest mountain peaks stand alone in the
earliest sunbeams. It is for a later time to fit such truth to all the
conditions of human life, to fully assimilate it with older lessons, to
weave it into the warp and woof of society.
It is Emerson, child of the Puritan and disciple of the new knowledge, in
whom joy is most abiding--its roots are in faithful living, brave and
high thinking, the spirit of love, oneness with nature and humanity.
Emerson dwells in an ideal yet real world. He cannot give the password
that will certainly admit; inheritance and temperament must contribute to
that. But he sees that one principle is the rightful sovereign in his
inner world and in the universe,--allegiance to highest known law. It is
a sublimation of the idea familiar to the religious mind, but he gives it
a new and larger interpretation; for, in place of the written Word,
beyond the social and civic obligation, greater than the accepted
moralities, superseding the ecclesiastical virtues, wider than the
overworked altruism of Christianity, is the complete ideal of Man, from
his roughest force to his finest perception.
Talk about duty had become wearisome. "Thou shalt not preach!" says
Emerson. So he discourses as the observer of man and nature, and bids
men to look at realities.
His imitators were beguiled into a theoretical exposition of the
universe. A sense of thinness and unreality accompanies much of their
talk, because it is not, like Emerson's, in constant touch with active
duty and fresh observation.
His ideal includes worship, but to this he brings above all the quality
of sincerity. He will not observe a sacrament which has lost its
significance to him. He will not use language of a personal God which is
not natural to him, nor affirm a certainty as to immortality when his
conviction is not always clear. But he has the profoundest sense and the
simplest expression of that reality which we call "the presence of God in
man." In him it is not involved with miracle or metaphysic; it is a
personal experience, the source of humility, energy, and peace. "I
recognize the distinction of the outer and inner self; the double
consciousness that within this erring, passionate, mortal self sits a
supreme, calm, immortal mind, whose powers I do not know, but it is
stronger than I; it is wiser than I; it never approved me in any wrong; I
seek counsel of it in my doubts; I repair to it in my dangers; I pray to
it in my undertakings. It seems to me the face which the Creator
uncovers to his child."
Emerson represents thought in its highest form--perception, vision. The
world interpreted by such vision supplies motive, support, and rapture.
He is essentially and above all a poet, and to whoever can follow him he
opens a celestial world in which the homeliest earthly fact is irradiated
by indwelling divinity.
Emerson's escape from evil is by rising to such a height of contemplation
that evil is seen as only an element of good. He sits like an
astronomer, viewing the procession of the worlds in their sublime
harmony. For most men, the jar and dust of daily life largely shut out
that glorious view. They catch hope and strength from the voice of the
seer upon his heights. But they need other help; they need some one by
their side; they need the love of a stronger brother, who takes their
hand. This men found in Jesus the friend of sinners, who went about
doing good; they idealized it as Christ--a divinity who took upon him the
form of a servant. The higher stooping to the lower is still the world's
salvation.
In teaching, Emerson generalized for all men from his own experience. He
said, "Be yourself! Follow the law of your own nature. Trust the
all-moving Spirit. Be above convention and rule, above vulgarities and
insipidities. Give way to the God within you!"
Literally obeyed, it was insufficient advice for most men, for it ignored
what Emerson's modesty forbade him to recognize,--the vast difference
between his own nature and bent and that of most men. When ordinary men
and women tried to imitate him the result was sometimes a lamentable
failure. But _he_ was genuine and lofty always. He failed in no homely
duty. The great trial and discipline to him was the alternation in
himself of the commonplace with the high. In individuals he was forever
disappointed, always looking for heroes, saints, and saviors, and seldom
finding them. His own work bore little visible fruit; his own teaching
fell for a long time on scornful ears. This perpetual disappointment he
took with perpetual constancy, always serene under disappointment,
gracious to the dull, indifferent to fame, careless of his own obscurity.
The typical man of letters has his own besetting sins,--neglect of homely
duties, self-consciousness, vanity,--from all of which Emerson was free.
The faults we allege against his philosophy--its scanty recognition of
sin and sorrow--were the natural incidents of his character and work.
They do not debase, though they sometimes limit, his influence for good;
his is always the speech of an angel; it strengthens, uplifts, gladdens
us. There are other angels to whom we must listen,--others, perhaps, who
speak more nearly the speech of our own experience,--but his music always
chords with theirs.
In Emerson, a soul inheriting centuries of Catholic and Puritan training,
until obedience was its instinct and purity its native atmosphere,--a
soul endowed with genius,--spread its wings and flew with the suddenness
and joy of a young bird's first flight. He saw good everywhere, beauty
everywhere, and was glad with the gladness of a seer and savior. He is
one of those of whom he speaks, as belonging to a better world which is
yet to come, and who touch us with a sense of a heaven on which we are
just beginning to enter.
Though he professes an idealist philosophy, and that way of thinking can
be traced in all his writings, he never makes of it a creed or dogma.
His children are welcome to worship in the church which has lost its
attraction for him. The skeptic may freely question immortality,--nay,
Emerson himself sometimes feels uncertainty. The personal God, and man's
personal immortality, which the idealist is wont to affirm as definite
certainties, Emerson will not explicitly avow or define. Universal good,
beauty, order,--these he sees, feels, is sure of. What form belongs to
them, let each imagine as best he can. So free, so generous, so simply
true is he that not only men of an idealist way of thinking, but all
strong and high souls own impulse from him,--the scientist, the
positivist, the churchman.
His distinctive note is not self-abnegation, but it is the note which
with that makes a perfect harmony. Joy in God and self-sacrificing love
are the two wings of the angelic life. Long have the preachers taught
self-sacrifice,--now let one child of God sing the joy of God!
The latest chapter in the story of the higher life is the conception of
man and the world which has grown up under the influence of modern
science. The most original and effective expression of this philosophy
is given by Herbert Spencer. What new light does the evolutionary
philosophy throw on man's chief problem, the right conduct of his own
life?
First, it defines with clearness two great forces which bear on the
individual life, as Heredity and Environment. Next, it defines the ideal
to be sought, by reaffirming in substance the familiar conception of
human morality, showing its sanctions on purely natural grounds, and
giving new applications and extensions of its principles. And finally,
compared with the traditional theology, it leads to a new conception of
the relation between man and the higher power, and necessitates, what
Spencer does not supply, a new expression of the religious life.
The discovery of Darwin, supplying the final link to the growing proofs
of the evolutionary development of man, opened an amazing panorama of the
past history of the planet's inhabitants. The predecessors and
successors of Darwin added to the panorama one after another scene of
wonder. The standpoint of thought seemed wholly changed, and a
readjustment necessary which threatened overthrow to all the old creeds
and standards. Spencer, who has been the most successful in generalizing
the new knowledge, comes back to the inquiry, By what law shall man guide
his own conduct? His answer is substantially a reaffirmation of the
principles which good men have acknowledged for many ages. Whatever else
is changed, it remains true that justice, fidelity, chastity, honor,
regard for others, are man's safest guides and his lawful rulers.
Altruism is only a new word for the golden rule. But the advance of
society has brought wider and finer applications: the claim of the whole
community comes closer home; the principles which have been recognized
within the church and the neighborhood must be carried on to reshape
institutions, industries, the whole social organism.
The moral idea is thus reaffirmed and extended, but how can man attain
that ideal? By using his free will, said the Stoic. By the grace of God
obtained through prayer, said the Christian. Is man then free, or is he
the passive creature of a greater power, and of what nature is that
power? Now, where theologians have sought to define the Deity, and to
conceive his government of his creatures in terms of a personal affection
and will, scientists, contenting themselves with observation of facts,
have shown that each man is what he is and does what he does partly
because of what his parents and remoter ancestors were and did before
him, and partly because of the forces of climate, institutions,
education, companionship, event, which surround him from his birth to his
grave. Heredity and Environment, these are
"the hands
That reach through Nature, moulding Man."
It looks at first as if the old dispute between free will and necessity
were settled at last, and man were indeed a creature of inscrutable fate.
Yet, in the very act of acknowledging certain ideals of character as
desirable, we become conscious of an impulse and initial effort--call it
automatic or call it voluntary--toward attaining those ideals. As a
matter of practice, we speedily recognize that both Heredity and
Environment are in a degree under human control. If they are deities,
they are accessible to prayers, the prayers which are watchfulness and
obedience. Man is always at work to better the environment of himself
and his fellows. As he sees more clearly that his true good is character
and the noble self, he shapes his environment more intelligently and
resolutely to that end. As to heredity, while the individual is
powerless over his own lot, he is in a degree potential over those who
are to succeed him. The conception of duty is enlarged by the
obligations of marriage and parenthood, in a wise selection and
thoughtful care for the future offspring.
Heredity and Environment, then, are partly the servants of man. Yet
largely they are his lords and masters. In a degree, but only in a
degree, do we make ourselves what we are. And while the degree of that
self-determining power can never be known, we learn to be charitable
toward others and exacting toward ourselves.
The new philosophy has its chief bearing on conduct, not in abstract
conceptions about fate, free will, and responsibility, but in the
stimulus it gives to find new tools and weapons of moral achievement.
How shall we make men good? No longer by the mere appeal to reason; no
longer mainly by promise of heaven and threat of hell. Still appealing
to reason, to hope and fear, to imagination, we must go on to put about
men all stimulating influences, all guiding appliances. We must begin in
the formative stage. The hope of the future is in the child; we must
educate the child by putting him in true touch with realities,--realities
of form, color, and number; of plant and animal life; of play and
pleasure; of imagination; of sympathetic companionship; of a miniature
society; of a firm yet gentle government. The education must go on
through youth, and must introduce him to industry not as drudgery but as
fine achievement. So of every phase of humanity. The criminal is to be
met not with mere penalty but with remedial treatment. In the sordid
quarter must be planted a settlement which shall radiate true
neighborhood. The state must be so ordered as best to promote the
material good and the essential manhood of its citizens. The church must
serve some distinct purpose--of ethical guidance, of emotional uplift, of
social service--in character-building. Such are the forces to which we
now are turning. Where ancient philosophy appealed through the lecturer
at his desk, where Christianity sent its missionary to proclaim a faith,
or set its priest to celebrate mass, or its minister to preach a
sermon,--in place of these partial resources we now realize that every
normal activity of humanity is to serve in building up man, and that "the
true church of God is organized human society."