gate was the power of a pure spiritual affection. Paul describes, in
language that strikes home to-day, the war of flesh and spirit. For
him, its conclusion is: "O wretched man that I am! Who shall deliver
me from the body of this death? I thank God through Jesus Christ our
Lord!" At the crisis there rises in his spirit the consciousness,
vivid as a personal presence, of that great, pure, loving soul; and
temptation falls dead. Augustine relates more fully a like experience.
The turning-point of his life comes when, still bound after long
struggles by a sinful tie, there comes to him the message, "Put ye on
the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provision for the flesh to fulfill
the lusts thereof." The church has not confined itself to a single
form of influence. It has invested the command to purity with the
sanction of a divine behest; has used threats and penalties; has
employed asceticism, often with most disastrous results; has appealed
variously to the spiritual imagination with legend and story. The
fresh blood of the Northern peoples has come in to reënforce the spent
and struggling morality of the South. A romantic conception of love
has blended nature's two great forces--sense and spirit--instead of
setting them in opposition, and has invested wedlock with its true
sanctity, in place of the false exaltation of celibacy. And, under
various influences, the relation of the sexes has upon the whole been
so far heightened that we see this at the end of two thousand
years,--that marriage, which Paul himself looked upon as a kind of
necessary evil, is recognized as the best guardian and teacher of
purity.
The connection between the two most strongly marked phases of Christian
morality--between love and purity--is not an arbitrary or accidental
one. It is an ideal affection that best masters the sensuous nature.
In the words of "Ecce Homo," "No heart is pure that is not passionate;
no virtue is safe that is not enthusiastic."
The modern attitude has two broad differences from early Christianity.
Man addresses all his energy to understanding and controlling the
forces of nature, instead of regarding them as alien or hostile and his
own salvation as a matter of supernatural relation.
And his relation with the Infinite and the Hereafter is far more
various, subtle, intimate.
Epictetus gives the heaven of the conscience, Jesus of the heart,
Emerson of the intellect.
Man's problems now are to find the physical and the social heaven,--to
rightly correlate the spirit with the body and the earth, and to more
perfectly organize society.
The modern man, instead of appealing to Jehovah or Christ, grasps the
powers of nature and of life as they are put into his own hands.
Walter Scott writes in his journal, in a sharp exigency: "God help--no,
God _bless_--man must _help_ himself."
"Love God and man; what higher rule can there be?" we are asked. But
the actual work of the modern man is widely different from what Jesus
or Paul perceived. To understand natural forces and ally himself with
them; to rightly order that vastly complex organism, the state; to
frankly enjoy the pleasures of the healthy body; to discern the beauty
of the surrounding world; to reproduce beauty in art; to relish the
humor of the world,--these are aims which would have sounded strange to
Paul, to Jesus, or to Epictetus.
To seek the best, not for ourselves alone but for others, even at cost
to ourselves; to control our lower natures by our higher natures; to
feel a relation with the Supreme,--these were the aims and inspirations
of the earlier Christianity; and they remain, but with enlarged and new
application.
Science has not penetrated to the inner secret of life, which is best
reached by other approaches. But it has enormously affected all
thinking by the discovery of Evolution. The recognition of growth--a
gradual, causal process--in mankind's whole advance, alters the entire
face of history and prophecy. Just as it eliminates supernaturalism
from the past, so it guides present progress and inspires while it
moderates anticipation of the future.
There grows the sense of some unfathomable unity. Creator and creature
are not sharply separated, as by the theologians: they are even more
closely united than the "father" and "son" of Jesus. So, too, the
unity of humanity--of all souls--until the idea of personal immortality
blends with some dimly conceived but greater reality.
It is impossible to portray under a single image the ideal of to-day,
because many ideals coexist. There is infinite difference of moral
development, as many characters as there are men; the variety of the
spiritual world is like that of the material world, and the diversity
gives richness and charm. And the forward movement of the ages is
immeasurably complex. Yet certain broad movements are traceable.
"Do right and fear nothing," was the word of Stoicism.
"God is holy; be ye holy," was the word of Hebraism, growing clearer,
stamping itself by institutions and inheritance.
"God is love; love ye," was the word of Christianity. The life of
Jesus was the symbol of that idea, and gave impulse and law to the new
society.
It was in keeping with the Stoic doctrine of Providence, but it came
through the imagination to the heart, more powerful than the calm
utterance of reason.
The Christian sense of sin was the intense force to rouse the ancient
world from its easy-going content. It was necessary that purity should
become a passion. The dogma of depravity was the intellectual
exaggeration of this. A God who died to save men from sin and hell was
its natural counterpart.
When the church had worked under the control of these ideas for fifteen
hundred years, there woke again in mankind the sense of joy, beauty,
knowledge, as good in themselves and God-given. Humanity was only half
ripe for this truth, and again the austere impulse reasserted itself in
Calvinism, in Puritanism, in the Jesuits. But knowledge, joy,
naturalness, went on growing; they have changed the conception of
religion itself, turning it to the sense of a present as well as a
future fruition.
The sense of human suffering comes in our day to full realization. The
best impulse of the time throws itself against that, as formerly
against sin. Just as the evil of sin was overstated and became an
exaggeration and terror, so the sense of human suffering is often
overstretched and becomes pessimism. But, essentially, a fresh and
powerful enthusiasm assails the evils of mankind. It aims to educate
and elevate the whole being,--to save men. It has in science a new
instrument.
The old hope of some speedy millennium is gone. We see that the
general advance must be slow. But we also see that the imperfect
condition is not so terrible as it was once supposed: it does not incur
hell; it does not imply total depravity; it may even serve as
stepping-stone to higher things.
All the higher phases of man's nature point together. The highest
thought says, "All is well;" the deepest feeling, "God is love;" the
human affection realizes its immortality; the seeing eye finds
universal beauty; the profoundest yearning enfolds the promise, "I
shall be satisfied."
We may follow the story by another thread.
A human society inspired and bound together by the highest traits,
consciously ensphered in a divine power and inspired by it,--this is
the ideal which has been reached toward and grown toward through all
the ages.
Its primitive germ was Israel's hope of a splendid national future.
In Jesus this expanded into the Kingdom of God among men,--that is, the
perfect reign of goodness, love, and the human-divine relation of son
and father. He looked for its realization by miracle, and when that
failed said, "Thy will be done," and died, trusting all to the Father.
His followers, at first under the dream of his second coming, settled
into a society bound together by common rules and ideals. The Catholic
church was born and grew. Mixed with all human elements of
imperfection, it advanced a long way toward the goal, then divided its
sway with new energies.
In the political and social life of Europe, and especially of England,
there slowly grew up a population fit for self-government in place of
government by the few.
Thomas More foresaw prophetically a community which should realize the
loftiest vision, and whose bond should be human and social, not
theologic.
The Puritan tried to enforce the will of God, as he understood it, by
authority,--to build a commonwealth on Hebrew lines. He failed, in
England and America, but stamped his character on both peoples.
Then came the essay of the Quaker toward a reign of peace.
Next, the Wesleyan movement, quickening the English heart and
conscience, and sending the wave which did in a degree for the West of
America what Puritanism and Quakerism did for the East.
Then the uprising in France,--the passionate aspiration for "liberty,
equality, fraternity,"--at war with Christianity, instead of at one
with it like English freedom, and working great and mixed results.
We see the American republic, founded by a blending of hard common
sense, experience, devotion, and widening purpose, and best typified in
Washington.
In Lincoln the problem of the American commonwealth--to maintain unity,
yet purify itself--and the problem of a human life are both solved by
the old virtues, honesty, self-rule, self-devotion.
The present movement of the world is toward a nobler social order. It
is to lift the common man upward, on material good as a stepping-stone,
toward the height of the saint and seer. This is the better soul of
democracy, the noble element in politics, the reformation in the
churches, the bond of sympathy with Christ.
Along with this goes a new personal ideal, exemplified in
Emerson,--accepting the present world as the symbol and instrument of a
celestial destiny. "Contenting himself with obedience, man becomes
divine."
In the Gospel history, the figures of the woman and the child take a
high place. In Jesus himself the feminine element blent with the
masculine. Medieval religion and art found their best symbol in the
figure of the mother clasping her babe. Our modern time is giving
freedom to woman and recognizing her equality with man, and we are
learning that the secret of the world's advance lies in the right
training of children under natural law. So the sentiment which grows
up in the natural relations of life is elevated by religion, then
developed and perfected by freedom and by science.
For us the practical problem is the cultivation of the religious nature
along with the other elements of a complete manhood. We are not
obliged by intellectual process to create a religious sentiment in
ourselves. We inherit that sentiment. It is like the sense of purity
or of beauty,--beyond demonstration, except the demonstration of
experience. We need only to supply the right conditions for its
education and application.
The belief that the spiritual life was dependent on certain
institutions and beliefs was the key to the ecclesiastical tyranny of
the past. We have virtually escaped that tyranny. Now, in the
atmosphere of freedom, we cultivate the spiritual life, and it proves
deeper and fairer than ever before.
V
DAILY BREAD
When Charles Lyell addressed himself to the problems of geology, he found
that his predecessors in the study had accounted for all the stupendous
phenomena whose story is written in the earth's crust, on the supposition
of vast catastrophic disturbances in the remote past, because they held
that these effects were too prodigious to have been wrought by the
ordinary slow processes of nature with which we are familiar. Lyell took
up the question by the near and homely end. He patiently watched the
workings of heat and cold, sunshine and rain and frost, summer and
winter, in the fields about his own house. He learned there what these
familiar forces are capable of, in what directions they operate, and in
them he found the clew to the story of the past aeons. Right about his
doorstep were the magicians that had done it all.
That illustrates the process of discovery in the spiritual universe. We
are not to soar up into infinity to find God. The only air that will
support our wings is that which encircles closely this familiar planet.
Let us look for a divine significance in homely things.
Here is Goodness. It is right about us, in people whom we know and meet
every day, plainly visible to eyes that know how to see it. Here are all
its forms. Innocence,--the very image of it looks upon you from many a
child's face. Courage, firmness, self-control,--you may read them in the
lines of many a manly countenance. Purity,--who has not felt its
hallowing regard fall upon him from the eyes of maid and matron? Pity,
tenderness, sympathy,--these angels move about us in human forms, and he
that hath eyes to see them sees.
Fineness of character must be recognized by sympathetic observation.
There must be the watchful attentiveness, like that of the sculptor
studying his subject, the hunter tracking his prey. And there must be in
the observer himself some quality akin to that he would detect. Only the
good see goodness, only the lover sees love. A mother would convey to
her little daughter some full sense of the motherly feeling that yearns
within her, but how can it be done? In just one way: let that daughter
grow up and have children of her own, _then_ she will know how her mother
felt.
Would we know something of the Divine Mother-heart? We must first get in
ourselves something of the mother-feeling. "Every one that loveth
knoweth God and is born of God."
Perhaps there has been given to us some human friend,--parent or comrade,
husband or wife,--in whom as nowhere else we see the beauty of the soul.
Best, divinest gift of life is such a friend as that,--a friend who fills
toward us a place like that to which our poet so nobly aspires:--
"You shall not love me for what daily spends,
You shall not know me on the noisy street,
Where I, as others, follow petty ends;
Nor when in fair saloons we chance to meet;
Nor when I 'm jaded, sick, anxious, or mean;
But love me then and only, when you know
Me for the channel of the rivers of God,
From deep, ideal, fontal heavens that flow."
Sometimes the friend whose goodness so touches us as with the very
presence of God is one whom we have never seen. To millions of hearts
that place has been filled by Christ.
These lines of Emerson--heroic idealist that he was--ask to be loved only
when he is at his highest, and so is felt as a revelation of something
higher than himself. But our best friends--comrade, mother, or
wife--love the ideal soul in us, and love us no less when we are "jaded,
sick, anxious, or mean," covering with exquisite pity our infirmities,
and by their nobility lifting us out of our baseness. And in that
affection which embraces our best and our worst, those human friends are
the symbols--yes, and are part of the reality--of the Divine love.
And what is all beauty, all grandeur, but the manifestation, through the
eye to the soul, of the one Supreme Being? The mountains, the sea, the
sunset, touch us with more than pleasure: they stir in us some awe, some
mystic delight, some profound recognition of sacred reality. How can we
better frame the wonder in speech than by saying, "Just as my friend's
face manifests to me my friend, so Nature is as the very face of the
living God"?
In the processes of human life,--the life we live and the life we
see,--there is discernible a significance which grows more impressive,
more solemn, more inspiring, just as we learn to read it intelligently.
What a wonderful drama is this play of human lives,--this perpetual
tragedy and comedy, of which some slight and faint transcript finds
expression in the pages of poet and novelist! We needs must continually
see and feel something of it, but we are apt to miss its best
significance. What fastens our attention most in our experience, or in
what we sympathetically watch in others, is the element of enjoyment or
suffering. Pain and pleasure are so very, very real! We ache, and we
are sorry for another's ache; we are joyous, and glad in another's joy.
And there it often stops with us. But all the while something is working
under the pain and pleasure. Character is being made or marred. Yonder
man bleeds, and you sigh for him,--ah! but a hero is being moulded there.
And here one thrives and prospers, expands and radiates,--but a spiritual
bankruptcy is approaching.
When we look closely and deeply at the world about us,--whether at this
ordered world of nature, moving steadily in its unbroken and majestic
course, or at the external aspect of grandeur and loveliness, or at the
drama in which all men are actors, as it is disclosed to insight and
sympathy, or at the inner world of each one's personal experience,--do we
not find ourselves in the perpetual presence of Goodness, Order, Beauty,
Love? Are not these the very presence of Deity?
"But," you say, "there is also confusion to be seen,--what does that
signify?" Just so fast as human intelligence advances, it finds that
what seemed disorder is really governed by strictest order. You say, "We
see ugliness as well as beauty,--what does that mean?" Ugliness serves
its purpose in aiding by repulsion to train the sense of beauty. Beauty,
and man's delight in it, is the end; ugliness, and our repulsion from it,
is but an incident and means. You say, "We see wickedness,--what of
that?" May we not hope that wickedness, in the broad survey of mankind's
upward progress, is the stumbling of a child over its alphabet?
The instinct that the shadow is the servant of the light, that seeming
disorder, ugliness, sin are but veiled instruments of good,--this seems
one of the truths which flash upon mankind in gleams, and which as the
race rises actually into nobler life tend to become clear and steadfast
conviction.
It is the vastness of the Divinity that overwhelms us. Suppose a man,
simple-hearted and imaginative, who, in a distant country, has read of
America, and has fashioned her in his thoughts as a heroic female
figure,--a kind of goddess. He has taken as literal reality such poetic
descriptions as those in Lowell's "Commemoration Ode" and Emerson's
"Boston Hymn,"--
"Lo! I uncover the land
Which I hid of old time in the West,
As a sculptor uncovers the statue
When he has wrought his best."
And he comes to you and says, "Show me America!" And you show him a
little of this country, its mountains and lakes and rivers, its shops and
farms and people. He is interested and gratified. Yet this is not what
he expected; and he says, "But show me America,--that radiant, heroic
form, that goddess to charm the eyes and the heart." And you tell him:
"But America is too great to be taken in so, at a glance. You have just
begun to see it. You have seen New England's hill-farms, but you have
not seen the prairies of the West. You have seen the Penobscot and
Kennebec, the Connecticut and Hudson; but you have yet to see the
Mississippi and Niagara. I have taken you to Katahdin and Monadnock and
Mount Washington, but you have yet to behold the Alleghanies and the
Rockies and Tacoma. Our people you have just begun to see: our armies of
free toilers, our happy households, our strong men and lovely
women,--these you are only beginning to know." And he says, perhaps: "But
all this is so diffuse, so various, so difficult to comprehend! I had
fancied _America_ as some one beautiful, some one to love. How can one
love such a scattered, immense, diversified thing as this you describe to
me?" Well, you tell him: "You may not understand it yet awhile; but this
country which you say is not a thing to love was in peril of its life a
few years ago, and it was so loved that men by hundreds of thousands left
home, and risked life and all for it, and their mothers and wives and
sisters sent them forth. That is how America can be loved!"
In some such fashion as this do we grope after a God whom we can
comprehend at a glance; and, lo! his presence fills the universe. "Say
not, Who shall ascend into heaven to bring him down, or who shall descend
into hell to bring him up? for he is nigh thee, before thy eyes and in
thy heart."
The chief revelation we need is the education of our own perceptive
powers. Sir John Lubbock has pointed out, in a very striking passage,
that the material world may convey itself through other senses than the
five which we possess, that there may be innumerable other senses, and
that some of these may perhaps be already developed in other creatures
than man. Such a suggestion stirs our curiosity and desire; but how few
of us have learned to rightly use the five senses we have! And of the
moral perceptions we have but a most rudimentary development. We are
unconscious of most of the world we live in, unconscious even of what
many of our fellow-men discern. Did you ever happen to be in the
presence of a sunset, flooding the heavens with glory, with a companion
who showed no sign of perceiving the splendor? Ah! perhaps he was
blinded to it by some secret grief or care, some trouble which you might
have discovered in him and comforted, had your sympathy been as acute as
your sense of beauty. But did his blindness, whatever its cause, suggest
to you that you perhaps were at that moment in the presence of sublime
realities, to which your consciousness was closed as his was to the
sunset?
To recognize consciously the spiritual elements in the universe belongs
partly to a right cultivation of character, and partly it is due to
natural endowment, to an intellectual faculty. It is not, after all, of
so much account that we _see_ the divine in life as that we have it in
ourselves. In this one sentence, "Blessed are the pure in heart, for
they shall see God," Jesus puts spiritual vision as the result of a moral
quality. But it is the moral quality itself on which, in one form and
another, his blessing is constantly pronounced. So, if you say, "I
cannot see,--God is in no sense visible to me," yet there remain still
most precious gifts, if you will take them. Blessed are the gentle, the
peacemakers, the merciful, they that do hunger and thirst after
righteousness; blessed are the sympathetic, the stout-hearted, the
open-eyed, the open-handed; plain and simple and sure are these
benedictions.
The presence of Divinity which it is most essential that we recognize is
the choice perpetually presented to us between a higher and a lower
course of action. Whether one has the joyful, uplifting vision is of
small consequence in comparison with whether he steadily chooses and
follows the right.
No one can be reasoned or persuaded into any living faith in God or
immortality, any more than reason and persuasion can draw from the cold
April furrow the field of waving wheat. The faith _grows_ in the
individual and in the race, under that culture to which the higher powers
subject us,--a culture in which the elements are experience and fidelity,
thought and action, love and loss, aspiration and achievement. Love and
Loss, the sweetest angel and the sternest one, join their hands to give
us that gift of the immortal hope.
If one asks, How shall I gain faith in God and hope of immortality? what
better answer can we give him than this: Be faithful, live, and love!
Work and love press their treasures on you with full hands. Open your
eyes to the glory of the universe. Watch the world's new life quickening
in bud and bird-song. Get into sympathetic current with the hearts
around you. Be sincere; be a man. Keep open-minded to all knowledge,
and keep humble in the sense of your ignorance. Seek the company that
ennobles, the scenes that ennoble, the books that ennoble. In your
darkest hour, set yourself to brighten another's life. Be patient. If
an oak-tree takes a century to get its growth, shall a man expect to win
his crown in a day? Find what word of prayer you can sincerely say, and
say it with your heart. Look at the moral meanings of things. Learn to
feel through your own littleness that higher power out of which comes all
the good in you. Join yourself to men wherever you can find them in that
noblest attitude, true worship of a living God. Know that to mankind are
set two teachers of immortality, and see to it that you so faithfully
learn of Love that Sorrow when she comes shall perfect the lesson.