tyrannical, but it trained the mind in exact and intense thought.
Fox, after long searchings amid sects and parties, made the new
discovery again,--God's spirit given directly, freely to man! Hence a
sort of intoxication in the early Quaker, sobering to a sweet religion.
Always, in the various churches,--Roman, English, Genevan,
Lutheran,--was something of the divine fire, though often hidden and
choked.
In the Wesleys, the saving and seeking love of Christ was the form the
revival took; and with this went "free grace," as against fatalism
which crushed the will.
Edwards had something of the love-element, but it was fettered by his
Calvinism. His main service was to stimulate religious thought, which,
from a Calvinistic basis, worked out through Hopkins to Channing.
The revival in Liberal Orthodoxy is essentially a recognition of the
true character of Jesus, and an idealization and enthronement of this
as the sovereign ideal, with a clinging as yet to the supernatural
basis, which inevitably grows weaker.
Meanwhile, new "ways into the Infinite" have been opened,--through
nature, as by Wordsworth; through humanity by Emerson.
Science has swept away the whole supernatural machinery with which this
inner life of the soul has been connected in men's minds. It finds
everywhere order, growth, a present rooted in the past and flowering
into the future. Opening immense vistas for the race, it sometimes
seems to shrivel the individual to a transient atom.
But still there wells up in the heart of man the mysterious, profound,
irresistible gladness in its Divine source,--the love that casts out
fear. We may look at it soberly, assign it place, limit it in a way;
it can no longer give us a cosmogony, but unimpaired is its message,
"Obey and rejoice!" We correlate its impulse with the sense of moral
obligation and the code of ethics which has grown up in the world's
sober experience. We learn to cultivate the religious sense more
wisely than of old. We make bodily health its minister. We administer
and reorganize civil society, instead of confining ourselves to the
church. We open our hearts to the revelation of nature and humanity.
And we wait patiently the slow coming of the Kingdom; the slow growth
of religion in our own character; the slow upbuilding of human
societies.
Side by side with this slow process lies always the present heaven into
which at times the soul enters and finds perfect peace,--a peace which
embraces past, present, and future, time and eternity. We study and
practice obedience, diligence, patience; and at unforeseen moments,
under shocks or in highest tranquillity, comes the divine revelation.
The belief that the perfect life had actually been lived by Christ was
a help to men whose aspiration felt itself unsuccessful,--the very
height of the aspiration deepening the sense of failure. The mind
fastened on an actual and perfect goodness outside of itself. The
Stoic ideal kept a man self-watchful, giving him no higher personality
to look up to. There was in Christianity the feeling that the perfect
life has been lived, and this somehow may help to save me. This was
the core of the Atonement. All theories of it--ransom, substitution,
and the like--were intellectual explanations of the fact of experience.
Forgiveness is the soul's delighted sense that its sin is not mortal.
It comes only after sin has been felt as a burden. Conscious of
wrong-doing, man feels helpless and even accursed,--imagines or credits
stories of a fall, of measureless guilt, and an endless hell. What
gives poignancy to these ideas is the real sense of wrong-doing, which
projects a monstrous and exaggerated shadow.
The sense of duty, constantly worked, breeds in sensitive souls the
despair of an unattainable perfection. The outward ceremonial does not
help or enrich,--the moral and spiritual ideal tantalizes by its
impossibility. This happens even to the strenuously righteous. In the
gross wrong-doer, especially if he falls under the ban of society,
there is wrought a despair which probably expresses itself in a
hardened recklessness.
Among these "lost sheep" came Jesus as a friend. His love divined the
deeper soul within them,--its yearning for the good it had perhaps
ceased even to struggle for,--its untouched possibilities. He said,
"Be of good cheer! Thy sins be forgiven thee! Go in peace!" At his
word and touch, a new life sprang up in them,--a new force lifted
humanity in its lowest depths.
To this new sense of life out of death Jesus gave the name of _Your
Father's love_. He typified it in the parable of the Prodigal Son.
And as the appropriate attitude for this recovered sinner, he set, not
merely a glad and thankful acceptance of the gift, but the passing of
it on to others. He bound inseparably the receiving and the giving.
"Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors."
Just the experience of the pardoned miser or harlot came to Paul when
he saw that in his pride and willfulness he had been persecuting the
holy and innocent, yet felt himself reached and loved and restored by
that same innocent and holy soul.
The experience was constantly repeated in the early church. It was the
most striking of all those genuine "miracles"--the wonders of spiritual
creation and growth--which were the wealth of the Christian society.
At the most dark and depressing hour of that society; when in gaining
dominion it had lowered its purity, and before the barbarian invasion
the whole social fabric shook,--that same miracle of a divine love,
realized as a saving and transforming force, was wrought in the great
personality of Augustine, and inspired through him anew the life of the
church.
The intellectual vestment of this experience--the form under which the
crude thought of these men gave it body and substance--was the
Incarnation and the Atonement. Those doctrines have lasted through all
changes, even until this day, because of the pearl of truth cased in
their rough shells.
When now we try to express that truth in its simplicity--finding always
a great difficulty in putting in articulate words the deep things of
the spirit--we say that the man who sees and sorrows for and seeks to
escape from his wrong deed or habit may come into the consciousness
that he will escape,--may feel with a profound assurance that he is
upborne by some power of good which will save him and bless him. He is
recoverable; he is lovable; he is loved, and shall be saved. And the
way in which that consciousness is awakened is oftenest by the contact
of some soul which the sinner reverences as better than himself, which
knows his guilt and loves him in spite of it, and declares to him that
he shall live and recover. The minister of forgiveness may be a mother
or a wife; it may be the sincere priest speaking to the sincere
penitent; it may be Christ or Madonna; it may be the unnamed Power
whose token is the sunset, or the rainbow, or the voice within the
heart.
The especial limitation of Christianity at its birth was the
expectation of the speedy ending of the existing order. Hence an
indifference to such subjects, belonging to permanent human society, as
industry, government, knowledge, the control of the forces of nature.
As to all these, the limitations of Christianity hindered its progress;
as to each, the natural and secular world exercised an influence
unconfessed or striven against; as to each, the perception was reached
that it must be recognized by religion, until in our day the _Here_ and
_Now_ takes the foreground in place of the _Hereafter_. The personal
life in its present relations, the human society under earthly
conditions,--these give to us the main field and problem. The
hereafter of the individual gives background and atmosphere.
For "holy living and dying" we put simply holy living. To give
fullness and perfection to each day, each act, is all and is enough.
The thought of death should not swerve or alter a particle. When the
last hour of life comes, what retrospect shall we wish? Only to have
filled life with the best.
The religious emotion will often and freely personify, and must do so.
The highest feeling takes on a quality of love, and love goes to a
personal object. It is sometimes as toward one divine friend and God,
sometimes toward the one beloved human being, sometimes the Christ,
sometimes a universe of living and loving beings. These are
distinctions of form rather than of substance, the expression by
different minds of the same reality.
To the modern mind, the distinct personification of deity is less
natural than formerly. The very vastness of the Infinite, as we
conceive it, precludes this definite personalizing of it as a habitual
mode of thought or basis of conduct. Yet under lofty and high-wrought
emotion, the yearning of the soul toward the Supreme Power often breaks
spontaneously into the language of personality. In the exquisite sense
of deliverance from sharp trouble,--when the trouble itself seems more
than justified by the heightened gladness, as in Titian's Assumption
the face of the Virgin Mother shines in the welcome of that heaven to
which the way has led through all earthly and motherly sorrow,--in such
emergence, the heart utters again the very words of the Psalmist: "I
love the Lord, because he hath heard my voice and my supplications.
The sorrows of death compassed me, and the pains of hell gat hold upon
me; I found trouble and sorrow. Then called I upon the name of the
Lord, O Lord, I beseech thee, deliver my soul! Gracious is the Lord
and righteous; yea, our God is merciful. Return unto thy rest, O my
soul, for the Lord hath dealt bountifully with me. For thou hast
delivered my soul from death, mine eyes from tears, and my feet from
falling."
If we would weigh and measure the value of mankind, we have no scales
or measures. As much is to be said for the badness of men as for their
goodness. Still more impossible is it to trace their individual
responsibility for what they are. But the determination of the value
of mankind, even the lowest, is by a different process from that of the
speculative intellect. Are men worthy of love? Love them, and you
shall know! The attitude of love vindicates itself. No one who has
heartily given himself to the service of others turns back saying,
"They are not worth it."
Encompassing light creates in the developing creature an eye. So
encompassing love--human love--draws out response in its object, makes
it lovable.
One class of truths are certain for all and at all times. These are
such as: the excellence and authority of the highest moral ideal; the
obligations of purity, truth, and honesty; love as the true attitude;
receptivity toward knowledge, beauty, and humor.
There are other perceptions which vary greatly in their frequency and
vividness. They are impulses of reassurance, joy, hope, victory. They
surpass all other sources of strength and comfort.
They cannot, in their clearness and fullness, be transferred or
expressed; they cannot even, by the mind experiencing them, be resolved
into intellectual propositions.
They are not peculiar to what we usually call religion. The experience
of love between man and woman opens a new world. So does music; so do
all the finer forms of happiness.
All these, when they come, are felt as gifts,--as revelations. They
are not within our direct and immediate command.
What relation do they bear to the life which is within our command,--to
our deliberate, purposeful, self-ordered life? First, in that life we
cultivate the two traits which fit us for the vision, though they do
not command it,--sensitiveness and self-control.
So no man or woman can foresee whether the love of wedlock shall come
to them, but each can render himself worthy of love, and no high
experience of love is possible except to one trained long beforehand in
purity and unselfishness.
Next, these higher moods, when they come, should be accepted as giving
law to the unillumined hours. They do not change, but they intensify,
the aim at rightness of life, and they add to it the spirit of courage,
of trust, of joy.
The hope of immortality--the assurance of some good beyond, which we
express by "immortality"--is born from a sense of the value of life.
Life is felt to be precious as it is consecrated by the moral struggle
in ourselves, and as it is viewed in others with sympathy. We give our
moral effort and our sympathy, and these are encountered by the
tremendous play of human joys and sorrows, and the result is a sense of
life as intensely significant.
The feeling of communion with Christ, with angels and saints,--its
natural basis is the reverence and love for great souls. As such
reverence and love is deep, and as death removes the objects, the sense
of a continued communion arises spontaneously. No form of our
consciousness is more vivid and profound than this. It has a
background of mystery,--mystery scarcely deeper or other than that
which envelops the earthly love. _What_ do I love in the friend whom
here I see? Is it the individuality, or that higher power of which it
transmits a ray?
The sense of this blending of the human and divine does not weaken or
perplex our affection for the friend we see; it intensifies and
sublimates it. So, in the sense of communion with the unseen friend,
it disturbs us not that we cannot say how much is there of the
remembered personality, how much of the one eternal deity. The essence
of what we loved and love is sure and undying.
The creature succeeds as its functions and organs become fitted to its
environment. Man succeeds as he fits himself to a moral environment.
To the undeveloped man the world is full of forces which are hostile or
indifferent to his right action; a thousand things distract him from
doing right; he is like a creature in a watery world with
half-developed fins. But as a man becomes morally developed he finds
moral opportunity everywhere,--finds occasion for service, for
admiration, gratitude, reverence, hope. This moral development
includes the whole man: he needs a good body; he needs much that only
inheritance can supply. His own effort is one factor, not the sum of
factors. We must be patient with ourselves,--accept our inevitable
imperfections as part of the grand plan, and find a joy in what is
above and beyond ourselves.
Man first solves the problem of his own life,--finds the key in
devotion to the highest ideal of character,--finds the answer in moral
growth following his effort, forgiveness meeting his repentance, human
love answering his love, beauty meeting his desire, truth opening to
his search, a support and assurance found in emergency.
Then, and only then, he can rightly study the world. For he must first
have the standard of values in human life; he must have, too, the utter
devotion to truth.
Studying the universe, he learns that man has come into being through
the processes of material law,--that the aeons of astronomy and geology
have been working toward his production. He finds that man develops
into moral man, with the power of choice and of love; develops into a
being loyal and sensitive to duty and to his kind. This type of man
tends to become the universal type. Human goodness tends to spread
itself. There is a society, living from age to age, of those devoted
to the good of man: this sentiment grows purer, more enlightened, more
enthusiastic; it is the heart of all reforms, all social progress; no
equal power opposes it. It is combated by selfishness, greed,
ignorance, violence, but these forces have no spiritual cohesion among
themselves, no inner unity; they are destined to fall before the
advance of the higher spirit.
Hand in hand with this advancing goodness goes advancing knowledge,
growing sense of beauty, greater powers of happiness.
We see thus a power working for good through man, making him its
instrument, absorbing him into itself.
The movement is continuous, from the star-mist to the saint.
This is one element in the sum of things. It is the element that man
knows best. The lives of the gnat and the tiger he scarcely more than
guesses at. Other possible existences than his own there may be, even
within this mundane sphere, of which he knows nothing. Of humanity he
knows something, and he sees that it is moved toward the goal of
perfection.
The power which thus moves it he inevitably identifies with that which
he has found urging himself toward goodness, touching him in his best
estate with a sense of harmony, and sustaining him in all emergencies.
To this Power of Good he devotes himself and trusts himself. His
supreme prayer is, "Thy kingdom come, thy will be done." He seeks to
be used by this power for its own ends; better than any wish he can
frame must be the end to which it works.
The final product of the world-forces, the flower of the universe, the
child of God, is man, in his fidelity, tenderness, yearning. To him
belong the saint's aspiration, the poet's vision, the mother's love.
And this highest type, by all its finest faculties, reaches toward a
hereafter.
The ruling power turns often a harsh face upon its creatures. There is
unbounded suffering. There is the perpetual destruction of the
individual. Even the moral growth meets obstacles often
insurmountable; inheritance limits; circumstances betray; we see sudden
falls and slow deterioration; whole races wane.
But we see that evil is somehow a stepping-stone to all our good.
Heroism, piety, tenderness, have been born out of pain. The
expectation of a hereafter gives hope that no individual moral germ is
lost. And we see that the crowning victory of life is the persistence
of man's good against the evil; as in the mother whose love the
prodigal cannot exhaust; in the Siberian exile who will not despair; in
Jesus when before the cross he prays, "Thy will be done." This is
faith, this is the soul's supreme act,--the allegiance to good, the
trust in good, in face of the very worst. Man, in that depth feels
lifted by a power transcending himself. So, when the beloved is taken
by death, the heart, in face of that loss, loves on; feels its love
greater than that which has befallen; says, "O Death, where is thy
sting! O grave, where is thy victory!"
The best living unites us closely and mysteriously with some greater
whole of which we are a part. The three great faculties are knowledge,
conduct, love. Knowledge finds always new objects, new connections, a
more perfect and wonderful whole. Right conduct brings a sense of
being in true relations,--of fulfilling some high destiny. Love blends
the individual with the universal; its successive steps are the highest
form of human education.
Christianity was a feminine religion in its virtues, as purity and
tenderness; and also in its attitude of pure dependence, submission,
petition. The masculine elements have not been duly recognized as
religious, even when having a great place in the actual working of
things,--self-reliance, physical hardihood, civic virtue, the pursuit
of truth.
In her subject state, woman has learned piety. She brings that as she
emerges into her free state, her gift to man, as his to her is strength
and self-reliance.
The moral power of the dogmatic systems has been very limited. They
pretended to all knowledge and all power, but they have only gone a
little way to sweeten and purify human life. The "enthusiasm of
humanity" advances society farther in a decade than the old religion
did in a century.
We are taught by scientists the extreme slowness with which races have
improved. But do we know how fast races or families can improve if
brought in contact with the most helpful influences of other races or
families? Has that experiment ever been fairly tried? Do not results
with hardened convicts, with Indian and negro pupils, suggest that
there may be an immense acceleration of moral progress?
Different classes of minds require different religions. A multitude
require the pictorial faith and the absolute authority of the Catholic
church. A great many require the divine-human figure of Christ. A
certain class of minds will be pantheistic. To some the wonders of the
physical world will be the most impressive revelation. Natures strong
in spiritual insight will be transcendentalists. Those in whom
personal affection is profound will have the gospel of "In Memoriam"
and Lucy Smith. Active, serviceable, unimaginative men will often be
content with a cheerful agnosticism. Some, after pushing their inquiry
to the farthest, and keeping it united with right living, will rest in
"devout and contented uncertainty."
The advance of knowledge has been the great fact of the world's
intellectual life for the past century.
The increase by this means of material good; the upward push of the
people, strengthened by knowledge and by prosperity won through
knowledge; the widening and deepening of human sympathy,--these are the
great social facts.
The imminent situation is that knowledge has destroyed the old
religious basis, and is only just beginning to construct a new
religious cultus. Socially, the common people seem on the point of a
great advance, while the too eager push for material good brings
temporarily a moral injury.
Among the constructive forces are: a knowledge of man and the world
which enables us to build on broader foundations than Jesus or St.
Francis; a vivified sense of humanity which gives the emotional force
which is always the strongest dynamic factor; and a new sense of
natural beauty which feeds the religious life and imparts peace.
The immediate future is uncertain,--the barbarian invasion and the
religious wars may have a parallel in another period of disasters. But
the large onward movement is clear, and the personal ideal was never at
once so reasonable and so ardent as now. Though storms should rise
high, faith and hope may hold fast, remembering that
"all the past of Time reveals
A bridal dawn of thunder-peals
Wherever Thought hath wedded Fact."
Democracy is just a continuation of the upward push which out of the
mollusk has made man. Altruism is not the only nor the primary upward
force. Before it and along with it goes the individual's struggle for
his own betterment,--the outreach, first, of hunger and sex; then
toward finer forms of pleasure; then of moral aspiration. Democracy,
socialism are an effort for _common_ betterment; the egoistic merges
with the altruistic impulse.
The mind must be held open to the free winds of knowledge. If they can
shake the foundations, let them. And just as one's personal courage
must often tremble before personal risks, so there must sometimes be
intellectual tremors.
If in the ardent temper and sweet spirit of the New Testament we try to
discriminate as to what phases of human conduct receive the chief
stress, we find the strongest emphasis is on brotherly love and
chastity. The ethical service of the Christian church has been
greatest in the direction of these two qualities. What it has done for
purity is beyond our power to measure. And it is just at that point
that even yet the struggle of humanity to emerge from the bestial
condition seems most difficult and doubtful. Some writer has remarked
that Christianity apparently introduced no really new virtue into human
society, with the exception of male chastity. Shakspere in one sonnet
gives tremendous expression to the evil of lust, with this conclusion:--
"This all the world doth know; yet none know well
To shun the heaven, that leadeth to this hell."