its efficacy? I unhesitatingly ascribe the results to increased
activity, more resolute determination, on the part of the natural will
of the votary. Let a man, for example, become convinced that the
crisis of his life has arrived, that a certain policy must be at once
adopted, a certain post secured, or an examination passed, and the
natural bending of the energies in a given direction redoubles his
ordinary powers. If a post has to be obtained and influence is
necessary, he prosecutes a more resolute canvass; if an examination
must be passed, a degree secured, he reads with increased application,
and, as a matter of course, he succeeds. If, in the meantime, he has
had recourse to prayer, his womankind, or possibly he himself, will
ascribe the entire results to that agency, while the results are
altogether due to his own persistent efforts. _He has answered his own
prayers_. Does the most pious individual believe, if all efforts were
remitted, or no exceptional energy put forth by the individual in
question, but the whole matter left entirely "in the hands of God," as
the phrase runs, that any successful results would have ensued? Not
one. And hence those axioms which the common-sense, even of the most
credulous, adopts as true, namely, that, "Heaven only helps those who
help themselves," or, as another pious recommendation goes, "Pray as
though everything depended on God, _act as though everything depended
on yourself_". What wonder, when this advice is followed out to the
letter, that we are overwhelmed with assurances that prayers have been
answered, when a man is appointed to a sinecure or has obtained a
life-pension? What one would like to ask is this: Do these credulous
people suppose that the event would have been otherwise, had the young
candidate not prayed? Do they suppose that the Deity would positively
have snatched away the prize at the last moment, and given it to
another, simply because he had not been consulted in the matter? If
they do, then we must confess our ideals of the Divine are very
different from theirs.
Powers are given to man for one purpose--that he may use them--and to
us it is wholly irrational to suggest that what is given with one hand
is to be taken away with the other, because the formality of
supplication is not employed when anything of moment is to be put into
execution. The notion that intelligence was put in man only to be
shattered, a will given him only to be forthwith distorted by passion
or blinded by ignorance, and that "there is no health in us" unless we
abase ourselves to the dust and proclaim our utter worthlessness, is to
men and women of this time wholly inconceivable. That nothing
ethically valuable can be accomplished except after instant prayer, or
after copious outpourings of Divine grace, that the curse of absolute
sterility is upon all our attempts to conform to the dictates of the
moral law, unless God be with us in prayer, is henceforth an impossible
theology.
Tell us that the man and the world are dependent at every instant of
time on the sustaining and prolonged creative act of the Infinite
Being, and we are one with you, nay, we probably go beyond you. "He is
not very far from any one of us" means more to the scientific
philosopher than to the mediaeval theologian. But spare us the
repetition of those stale legends that man was made and unmade in the
space of a few moments, and that ever since the manducation of the
forbidden fruit his powers have withered, and that there is no remedy
available for their recovery but incessant prayer and sacramental
ordinances. Our reading of history is exactly the reverse. With the
progress of time we discern the advance of man, and with the diminution
of sacerdotalism and a mechanical religion we think we note an
accelerated progress; that in those countries in which men are nobly
self-reliant, and look _within_ instead of _without_ for the source of
their inspiration and power, the course of moral life takes a higher
turn; that in proportion as men are true to themselves and the powers
of their own being, they ascend in the scale of moral perfection. We
think that to teach a man to look without him for assistance is to
cripple half his powers, to make him unlearn the grand gospel of
self-reliance, to loosen the fibres of his moral being, and thereby to
check his individual progress.[1]
It must have been some such conviction as this which led the late
Master of Balliol to say that the longer he lived the less he prayed,
but the more he thought. Precisely; it is not irreverence but a
deepening reverence for the Divine powers within us, which shames us
into trusting them when anything great is to be done. What god are you
praying to, we ask in dismay, when you lift up your hands and your
eyes, or turn to east or west, or kneel or lie? Is there any god in
the wastes of infinity, in a sunstar, a swarm of worlds, who is not in
that miraculous soul of yours? Is there aught anywhere greater than a
son of God? Is a stone, a star, a heaven studded with infinite
glories, a greater place than your eternal soul? Then look within you.
Speak with yourself, commune with your own heart, summon up the
irresistible energies of your nature and nothing shall be impossible to
you. This is "the prayer of faith" that never shall, that never can,
go unanswered, the concentration of the myriad energies of our souls to
meet an attack, to prosecute an enterprise, to overcome obstacles, aye,
to make our lives sublime with a heroism that men shall call divine.
"The less I pray, but the more I think!" Aye, it is not prayer in the
old sense, the cry of the soul that believes itself craven, weak and
wanton, because it has always been told so by blind guides; it is not
this aimless outpouring of energy directed towards a Divinity in the
skies, when the very Life and Mind Divine are the endowments of every
rational creature, that has made man great; but thought, concentration,
the serious, resolute application of the powers that man does possess,
the bending of the iron energies to the accomplishment of the
individual task--this it is which has "conquered kingdoms, wrought
righteousness, obtained the promises," riveted man's dominion over
nature and made him what he was intended to be--the crown and glory of
the universe.
And at this point we may make a further suggestion towards explaining
the genesis and the continued maintenance of vocal prayer as a part of
religious worship. The practice would seem to be due not merely to
ignorance or disregard of the obvious law of cause and effect, by which
material phenomena are necessarily controlled, but to less worthy
conceptions of the Divine Mind governing all things. The Deity of the
Christian and Mohammedan worlds is a Being eternally dissevered from a
world which he has by an omnipotent effort evoked from nothingness--a
conception now regarded as impossible. Consequently, while God is in
his high heaven, surrounded by his court, the world holds on its
courses, and is periodically corrected by special interferences,
generally said to be due to the intervention of prayer. Thus, the
grand historical evolution, which caused the Roman Empire to appear at
the close of the three great Eastern Empires, and that monument of
human genius itself to ultimately collapse and make way for the nations
which now constitute modern Europe, in no wise strikes Augustine, or
any orthodox teacher, even of to-day, as the outcome of purely natural
forces and influences--the action and reaction of powers wholly
human--but as part of a Divine scheme, which was foreordained for the
purpose of founding the Christian Church. This, in briefest outline,
is the famous argument of "The City of God," the first Christian
attempt at a philosophy of history. Everything mapped out by Divine
ordinance, and men moved like puppets to accomplish the scheme. Attila
the Hun appears at the gates of Rome, in the fifth century, and
threatens to sack it, and thereby delay the execution of the plan, and
prayer averts the disaster. In all moments of danger, threatened
catastrophe, public or private, the doctrine inculcated was recurrence
by prayer to the external Deity, who would so modify things by his
omnipotent power, as to reconcile the interests of all concerned. I do
not think it can be said that such a frame of mind is distinctive of
the Protestant of to-day, certainly not of the instructed Protestant,
who may acquiesce in the vicarious repetition of certain formulas by
his clergyman on Sunday morning, but would certainly not in practice
endorse the theory that Divine intervention might be called in at any
moment by prayer. But it is the attitude of the Roman and Greek
Churches, as it is of the Mohammedan religion, and doubtless of the
less educated in the sects of Nonconformity.
Now this conception of Divinity is Oriental, whence indeed our current
religion arose. It represents the Supreme Being as an aged man clothed
in flowing robes, his hair "white as wool," seated on a golden throne
and ceaselessly adored by myriads of voices who sing day and night,
Holy, Holy, Holy, or Hallelujah. It is the conception of a Divinity
who existed an eternity in the solitude of his own kingdom, amid
silences unbroken by any voice, who suddenly comes to the determination
to create worlds and man out of nothing, and orders men to pray and to
praise him. He is angry if they do not; he is "a jealous God," and
will punish those who offend him "to the fourth generation". He is
sorry he has made man and proceeds to destroy him, and then
subsequently regrets that decision. In a word, the God of the Hebrew
tradition, whom the Christian Church still popularly preaches, is in
reality a magnified copy of an Oriental Sultan, whose tastes and
proclivities are such as the _Arabian Nights_ has familiarised us
with--greedy of praise, adulation and homage, cruel and vindictive to
those who refuse their worship and adoration.
Now this Orientalism is no longer tolerable in the eyes of thoughtful
people. We cannot conceive that the Infinite Being should find
pleasure in hearing all day and night how wonderful he is, and how
miraculous his works. It is not easily intelligible how services and
litanies of "praise" can be acceptable to the Creator when they would
certainly be nauseous to the best men on earth. Jesus openly reproved
one who praised him as "the good master". "Call no man good," he said:
"God only, he is good." Wellington's reply to the famous individual
who claimed to have "saved the life of the saviour of Europe" is too
well known to repeat. The truth is, that these prayers and chants are
offered up not for God's sake, but for _ours_. They are a relief to
the heart surcharged with religious emotion, the outcome of the
vehement impulse of the soul towards communion with the Life of its
life. Speaking reverently, prayer and praise are like a lover's
protestations, which are not an act of adulation at the shrine of his
mistress, but an irresistible unburdening of the greatness of the
emotion that fills his heart. But no lover could speak from his soul
in a public place, in the sight or hearing of other men. Solitude,
silence, "the element in which everything truly great is made," is
needed above all else, that the soul may find adequate utterance for
thoughts so sublime.
And, therefore, Jesus warned man to pray in his own chamber, in secret,
the lonely soul bared in the presence of the Alone, "to the Father
which seeth in secret". Hence no sound of spoken prayer is heard at
our services. The deed is too solemn. Nevertheless, the whole object
of the series of acts which are done is to suggest, to create, first
thought, and then emotion, after the manner of the Hebrew psalmist, who
sang "In the midst of my thoughts shall a fire flame forth". The
_hymns_ are chosen with the idea, not of praising the Almighty, who
needs no such praises, but of filling our souls with a sense of the
unearthly beauty of the moral life, of the life perseveringly devoted
to high ideals of self-culture and human service, and thereby lifting
our souls to thoughts of that fair world of the Ideal in which such
conceptions are eternally realised. Likewise the _readings_ set before
us the burning words of first one and then another prophetical soul to
deepen in our own the conviction of the seriousness of life, its
far-reaching responsibilities, the realisation of the boundless
capacities for good or evil which man has within him, and the utter
worthlessness of all things on this earth compared with character,
integrity, the perfection of the will by conformity with the moral law.
In the midst of such influences by which we are surrounded during the
hour, all too brief, which we devote to the world of the Ideal on one
day out of seven,[2] it is hoped that thoughts will sometimes burn in
many hearts, that reverence, awe, fear, regrets for the past, fervent
resolutions for the future, hope, aspiration, and love; in a word, all
the sanctified emotions of the human heart, which together melt into
the supreme emotion of religion, will sometimes arise to sternly rebuke
the selfish life, shame us out of our moral lethargy, and comfort those
whose one solace is that their honour is intact, though misfortune has
stricken them in mind or body, or robbed them of the goods of earth, or
the cheer and comfort of friendship and of love. It is hoped that the
influence of what is said and done then will endure beyond the hour of
our meeting, and fill some other moments of our lives when we are, as
we should be, at seasons, alone--alone with ourselves, and _therefore_
alone with God, in solemn communion with the Soul who is the soul in
us, and who asks for no articulate voice of prayer, but only that our
life in every word and deed should be worthy of our exalted nature.
Life is prayer. Conduct is sacrifice. Morality is religion.
When I am stretched beneath the pines,
When the evening star so holy shines,
I laugh at the lore and the pride of man,
At the sophist schools and the learned clan;
For what are they all in their high conceit,
When man in the bush with God may meet?
--EMERSON.
[1] See the concluding words of Emerson's essay on "Self-Reliance".
[2] The Ethical Religion Society meets weekly on Sunday mornings.
IX.
THE ETHICAL ASPECT OF DEATH.
There is a common but none the less erroneous impression amongst those
who walk and worship in the old ways, that the newer forms in which the
religious sentiment expresses itself are insensible to the more solemn
aspects of life, its sins and sorrows, its disappointments and
disillusionment, and most of all to the final catastrophe which men
call death. Ours, they would impress upon us, is a fair weather creed,
good enough when all goes well, but painfully inadequate in the storm
and stress which the inevitable trials of existence inflict upon us.
Sorrow, they impressively warn us, is ever the rock upon which all such
systems must split.
Now, to say nothing of the obvious reflection that what we now call the
old, that is, the orthodox ways, are in reality exceedingly new, and
that even the "chosen people," or their immediate predecessors, were
left wholly destitute by the Deity of any such comforts as are held so
indispensably necessary to a well-ordered existence--to say nothing of
this, the argument, if worth anything, would go to show that the
religion which offered most consolation was the true one; and since no
traveller ever returns from that bourne, so near and yet so far, to
advise us of the truth or falsity of these ultra-mundane comforts, we
seem compelled to hesitate more than ever before we forsake that sturdy
and plain-spoken guide called reason, whom we as confidently follow in
the region of religion as in the business of everyday life. The
Society for Psychical Research has some remarkable evidence to offer,
apparently establishing to physical demonstration that _the_ man
[Transcriber's note: the _man_?] in us does not die but lives, and
communicates with his fellows after the final fact of this earth called
death. But, however this may be, and we are not called upon now to
offer any opinion on these matters, the so-called revelations are
wonderfully silent on those topics which sentimentarians apparently
erect into the supreme test of a religion's truth or falsity. As far
as one may judge, the departed appear to be occupied with nothing more
sublime than filled their thoughts during this present sphere; in fact,
as is well known, they often appear to exhibit a painful declension in
moral life and to have lost immeasurably in character by their passage
from this stage of being to the unknown land beyond the grave.
Reason, therefore, being in no position to settle the rival claims of
the physical delights of the Mohammedan paradise, the comparatively
insipid ideal of the Apocalypse, and "the nameless quiet" of the
Buddhist Nirvana, feels compelled to pass them all by and to hold that
of the invisible universe we are painfully ignorant, and that the only
deathless reality is the will of man conformed to the great obedience
of the moral law. It believes that the test of a system is not what it
promises but what it performs, and we may take it as an absolutely
certain thing that if any of the "systems" of our day secured palpably
higher ethical results amongst its adherents, the world would flock to
that Church forthwith. As Augustine says, "no one loves the devil,"
which, being ethically interpreted, means no one wants to be bad, and
if any ecclesiastical corporation, by an appeal to history or to
present and urgent visible facts, could justify its claims to
successfully strengthen man's oftentimes rebel will in the pursuit of
the great ideal, men would follow it to the world's end, such is the
power of truth and goodness over the human heart. But the truth is, no
such agency has ever been discovered. In the sixteenth century the
Council of Trent was summoned "to reform the Church in its head and
members," a plain confession of ethical failure. Do men suppose that
Luther, or a whole synod of monks, could have torn Europe in pieces in
about a score of years, when Anglicans have been debating auricular
confession and the eastward position for the last fifty, unless the
Continent had undergone a moral _débâcle_? Luther's paltry diatribes
about indulgences would have left men as cold as stone; it was the
fervour of the ethical enthusiast thundering against immoralities in
high places which rent the Christian Church in twain by the most
violent and widespread schism it had ever known.
No, the test of a thing is not what it promises but what it does.
_Exitus acta probat_. And if the enlightened men and women of our time
are disposed less and less to rely upon creeds as a basis of religious
communion, it is because they see that whatever the future life may
have in store for mankind, they cannot better prepare for it than by
living worthily in this.
But as evidence that they who follow the ethical obedience are in no
wise insensible to the sterner aspects of life, we shall now pass on to
say what in our judgment should be the religious attitude of man face
to face with the inevitable certainty of death.
If we pause one moment to reflect on the physical aspect of death, it
would only be to remark that it is as natural an occurrence as birth.
In fact, as is obvious to the most superficial mind, birth and death
are inextricably interwoven. The great life of the worlds is so one,
so powerful, so omnipresent, that nothing can so utterly pass away as
to give birth to nothing--no, not even the cremated remains which are
blown to the four winds. The theory that death is a non-natural
occurrence arbitrarily inflicted by the Deity in his anger at Adam's
disobedience is no longer taught even in the nursery, because aeons
upon aeons before man's advent hither death reigned supreme over
sentient existence, and the bones of the doomed are in our museums to
attest the fact. Nay, we have recovered the ice-embedded body of the
mammoth, its stomach filled with undigested food, food it ate as far
back as the glacial period, by which it was overtaken and frozen in its
ice grave 200,000 years ago. The Roman sentinel, overwhelmed where he
stood by the lava of Vesuvius, defiant of disaster in his inflexible
devotion to duty, is not a surer proof of the natural fact of death
than the mammoth that died in Alaska before man's appearance on the
earth. The law of growth is the law of death. Life begins, it
increases, it reaches its meridian, it begins to waver and then
steadily to decline, till at length the bodily frame dissolves, and
then--
That which drew from out the boundless deep
Turns again home.
It is so with all things, from a fungus to a giant of the forest, from
a stone to a cluster of stars whose light takes 4000 years to reach us.
It is only a question of time when our own sun shall set in impotence
and rise again no more. All things are passing away, everything is
unstable, change is at the heart of all. How solemn, how true the
words, whose melancholy haunts the more the memory dwells on them:
"this world passeth away and the desire thereof, but he that doeth the
Divine will endureth for ever"! As we said, the one changeless thing,
beyond the doom of sun-stars and swarms of worlds, is the will of man
nobly submissive to the Great Obedience of the Supreme Law--the Law of
Justice and of Truth. That alone can never die.
Let us turn now to the ethical and religious aspect of that which we
have seen to be in itself so natural, so inevitable.
In the first place, we conceive that it in no wise interrupts the
progress of the individual life. Certainly the conditions under which
existence maintains itself in that other state must be far other than
those which obtain here, for there man is destitute of his bodily
environment. The conditions of such a life are wholly unpicturable,
wholly unimaginable, but not _inconceivable_. These are high matters,
like the truths of sublimest philosophy, wherein it is impious to
intrude with so inferior a faculty as imagination, and demand that an
image or representation of a bodiless existence be presented to it.
What picture does man make for himself of the force of gravitation, nay
of the force which drives the crocuses out of the soil in spring? It
is enough to _know_ that the force is there; it is enough to know that
a man's body is not his _self_. Surely every one who reflects must be
conscious that his body is _his_, just like his clothes; and therefore
not _he_, any more than the raiment wherewith he is covered. Foolish,
then, is it to ask for pictures like children; let us be satisfied to
know with the reason, which we alone of all earth-born creatures
possess, that the body is not _we_ but _ours_, and that we are not mere
ephemerals, but are "going on and still to be".
Now these words of Tennyson exactly express our ethical teaching, that
man is "ever going on and still to be," and that death, so far from
putting a stop to the eternal progress, is but a stage, an incident in
the journey, possibly--for we know so little of these matters--a very
insignificant one. The theory commonly inculcated, certainly commonly
held, is that the fact of death ushers in a perfect transformation
scene, more wonderful than anything thought of or devised by man, nor
should we be accounted irreverent did we describe the language of the
book of Revelation as pantomimic in the exuberance of its splendour.
All sorrow is supposed to cease as if by magic, the sun shines
perpetually, it is eternal noon; the home of the blessed is a wondrous
city, built four-square, whose streets are of pure gold, whose rivers
are of crystal, and whose foundations are laid in precious stones.
Sweetest songs of earth resound in the heavenly courts; yea, even
musical instruments are there, and life would appear to be one
prolonged religious service. Into this celestial blessedness departed
souls enter new-born, and take their allotted places once and for ever;
they never apparently move from them; they grow no better; there is no
room for further development, nor possibility of deterioration, but a
fixed and immovable moral status is, to all appearances, arbitrarily
imposed upon them for evermore. The impression one gathers is,
therefore, of a large and glorified amphitheatre, tiers rising above
tiers into infinity, seats along them, each of which is tenanted by an
individual elect spirit whose merits are precisely proportioned to its
place.