truth. No mediator is needed between the soul and the Soul of our
souls; no intercessor or redeemer. This perverse conception originated
in the supposition that man was, and is, a fallen and a falling being,
owing to the fatal legacy bequeathed by our presumptive parent, Adam;
but Genesis being wholly and avowedly mythical in its opening chapters,
the Pauline dialectic in the fifth chapter of the Romans falls to the
ground, and with it the laborious argumentations of the epistle to the
Hebrews, which essays to prove that the most sternly anti-sacerdotal
prophet who ever lived was a full-fledged priest; the man who never
conducted a ritualistic service in his life set forth as "a high priest
for ever according to the order of Melchisedech," the only and eternal
redeemer of humanity from the consequences of the misdeeds of an
aboriginal parent who had no existence. No; before Agamemnon men were
brave, before Aristides they were just, before Jesus they were in their
innermost selves divine, and this in essence is the doctrine of the
"Over-soul," associated, as far as this expression goes, with the name
of the latest of the prophets of ethics, Emerson.
We are all incarnations, flesh-takings, of the infinite. Not only so,
but the very unconscious universe, the silent, but ever-living nature
is but the garment which clothes the Invisible, and in clothing reveals
him; the beauty of nature is the veil, growing slenderer with every
fresh access of knowledge, which scarce conceals the Great Presence.
Vanini was thrust into the dungeons of the Inquisition at Naples on a
charge of atheism. "Atheism!" contemptuously retorted the wretched
captive, "I could prove God from that straw," picking up with his feet
a fragment of the bed on which he lay in fetters. For the universal
Life was in the straw. The life in that slender ear is one with the
mighty pulsations of the ocean, the growth of the forest, and of the
world of men, and the illimitable stars beyond. The being is one, the
life is one, and above all, the mind, the exclusive endowment of man,
is one too--one in us, one in the Supreme; we share it, for "we also
are his offspring". There is only one Soul--the Divine, and the souls
of the sons of men are, not so much images of that, made in its
likeness, as it itself, in essence one, yet, participately, in every
human being. "I have said, ye are gods, and sons of the Most High,
every one," quoted Jesus with approval. So says Emerson, and this is
his doctrine of the "Over-soul".
After thus indicating in general outline the essential features of this
culminating teaching of ethical religion, it may be well to trace its
historical development. It will be found to be, not an original
speculation of our own teacher, but a precious belief held by elect
souls in all ages to embody the truth of the relations between what is
_called_ the Divine and the human. I say "called" because this
doctrine annihilates the distinction. As the electricity in the
atmosphere may annihilate space by enabling us to flash a thought
instantaneously even to a world whose distance is measured in millions
of miles, so does this sublime conception of the great Oneness shatter
the foundations on which all _outside_ redemptions, priests,
sacrifices, formalisms, rituals, sacraments, devilry, hell fire, and
the rest repose, by showing every man that he is his own priest and
sacrificer. No anointing or ordering can make him more than he is in
himself (not through Christ or any man), the true-born son of God, one
in nature with whatsoever is Highest in existence. Boldly does Emerson
fling out his challenge--
Draw it thou canst the mystic line,
Rightly severing his from thine,
Which is human, which Divine.
We cannot. In our innermost selves we are Divine. We may say with
Emerson, on the heights of the holy mount, when we have by long thought
realised the truth, and by living the life which is alone worthy of
such a conception, "I the imperfect adore my own Perfect". We seek to
pray, we would fain worship. Then look no more into the skies; there
is nought but vapour there and the silent worlds that shine eternally.
Look not in the churches and the temples, for they are made by men's
hands, empty of the Divine Presence as a mausoleum is of life. Let us
look into ourselves for the true Shekinah, the true manifestation of
the Divine, nay, the truly Divine is there. The Good in man, that is
God; that alone is worthy of our adoration and our love.
I do not think it can be questioned that this is a noble conception of
man and God and their mutual relations, and as far as one can judge of
the trend of modern thought, it would appear that only on some such
grounds is the intelligence of the age prepared to recognise theism as
a possible belief. The conception of the Deity as a Being anterior to
creation in existence, eternally dissevered from it in being, an
external object, so to speak, of admiration, reverence and fear, seems
incomprehensible to the modern mind. It certainly did to the whole
idealist school of Germany, to such thinkers as Hegel, Schelling and
Fichte, to deeply religious spirits like Coleridge and Wordsworth, to
Emerson in America, and Carlyle in England. The "immeasurable
clergyman" [2] view of the Deity, seated somewhere in the skies, and
listening all day and night to the Hallelujah Chorus, is now wholly and
absolutely impossible outside little Bethel and Bibliolatry.
But the truth must be confessed that in refusing to acknowledge what
one may call an outside deity, an "absentee god," who pays periodical
visits to his creation and acts only at the instant request of prayer,
we are reverting to religious ideals that had their home in the land of
the Indus and the Ganges, a thousand years before Christianity was
heard of. It is the knowledge of this fact that fills one with
stupefaction when we think of Exeter Hall and the type of Christian
missioner who goes out to assail the venerable beliefs of Hindooism,
when our cultivated men, our Emersons, Coleridges, Carlyles and
Wordsworths, are positively reverting to the ideals of ancient India.
The doctrine of the Over-soul, essentially shared in by all men; the
belief that man is not in name, but in reality, not through the
vicarious intercessions of another, but by his own nature, a Divine
son, is in essence a form of Hindoo thought, and the recent
translations of their sacred books enable us to read that truth there.
The Jewish conception of the Deity was utterly opposed to this. In
that theology the Supreme Being was ever transcendent, and probably
Jesus, a son of Israel, was not greatly removed from this belief.
"Salvation is of the Jews," he proclaimed. Certainly there are no
indications in the three earlier gospels of any such teaching as that
of Emerson, though it is found, in suggestion at least, in the fourth
gospel. Christ is made to say in one of those lengthy speeches at the
close of the book, "If any man will keep my words, I will come to him
and my Father will come to him, and we will take up our abode with
him;" and again, "I and the Father are one". Here is a suggestion,
faint enough, of the teaching that the Divine is present in the hearts
of the just, of the ethically good, but there is a world of difference
between that and the essential Divinity of every human soul, because
part of the Over-soul, which is one in all men. No; Jesus was a son of
Israel, and his ideals were those of his race. The few words quoted
from the fourth gospel are in the spirit of the larger belief, but they
are Neo-Platonic in their origin, as is the whole Johannine gospel, and
cannot be taken as fairly representing the mind of the greatest of the
Jewish seers. If we would see the Eastern teaching in the West, we
must search, not the Old or New Testament, but the pages of the
Alexandrian School, of Philo, and above all, of Plotinus, who believed
that the supreme truths were learnt, not by study, nor by revelation
from without, but in an ecstasy of the soul, losing itself in the
contemplation of the Divine--in the "flight of the alone to the Alone".
Now, that which Plotinus considered an extraordinary occurrence, an
experience perhaps only possible to elect spirits, men at length began
to look upon as the truth of the normal relations between their Maker
and themselves. Of course, so stupendous a change took centuries in
evolution, and, naturally, the Christian Church and its clergymen gave
it no sort of encouragement. It would never do to preach abroad that
every man was his own priest, and so we wade through the whole of
mediaevalism without finding any recognition of the great teaching. It
is only when we are in the comparatively modern epoch of the fourteenth
century that we find it in Eckhart, the German mystic. "There is," he
writes, "something in the soul which is above the soul. . . . It is
absolute and free from all names and forms, as God is free and absolute
in himself. It is higher than knowledge, higher than love, for in
these there is distinction. . . . I have called it a power, sometimes
a light. . . . This light is satisfied only with the super-essential
essence." It is ever entering "into that unity where no man dwelleth,"
where there are no distinctions, "neither Father, Son, nor Holy Ghost".
It is the plain of the Great Silence, the centre of the immovable
peace, an Inner Sea whose still waters are nevertheless bounded by no
shores. It is the sense, rather it is the reality, of the Infinite in
man, that of which all seers have dreamed under many diverse forms. I
take it to be the Nirvana of Buddha, the eternal silence that follows
when the last of the avenues of sense has been passed, and the soul
enters at length into the possession of itself, that is, into the
recognition of its infinitude. It is what Jesus means when he speaks
of the faithful ones--they who have endured even to the end--entering
"into the joy of their Lord". It is the apostle's unspeakable peace,
"the peace of God, which passeth all understanding".
Another of the school of Eckhart, Tauler, gives his own experience, and
it is not dissimilar. He finds his soul "so grounded in God that it is
dissolved in the inmost of the Divine nature". No man, he says, can
distinguish between the sunshine and the air. How much less the light
of the created and the uncreated Spirit! We are lost in the abyss
which is our source. "From the place whence the rivers of waters go
forth, thither do they return." [3] Those words always haunt one with
a sense of the mysterious. They seem to say that the beginning and the
end of all are the same--the abyss of the Infinite. Emerson believes
that man came forth thence, is there now, and abides there for ever.
And surely Tennyson's lines must occur to the memory of every one:--
When that which drew from out the boundless deep,
Turns again home.
To begin to think at all, is to be brought, at length, to thoughts such
as these--the thought of the Inner Sea, on whose still and boundless
waters all is silence, peace, God.
After two centuries the teaching reappears, not in the pages of
professional divines, or the denizens of the cloister, but in the
philosophy of modern Germany. Schelling carries it still farther by
pronouncing that there is but one reason, one mind, the human and the
Divine being identical. The lines of Paracelsus are inevitably
suggested:--
O God, Thou art Mind!
Crush not my mind, O God!
Fichte, in his _Characteristics of the Present Age_, pronounces the
individual to be but "a single ray of the one universal and necessary
thought". "There is but One Life, one animating power, one Living
Reason . . . of which all that seems to us to exist and live is but a
modification, definition, variety and form." And, finally, he goes so
far as to say that it is only _by_, and _to_, mere earthly and finite
perception, that this one and homogeneous life of reason is broken up
and divided into separate individual persons. What a piercing thought!
Surely it is almost past believing that the eternal Life is itself in
us, nay, that it is we; that in very literal truth we may say, "I and
the Infinite are One". Only one who could speak in tongues of men and
angels is fit to hold discourse on thoughts so sublime, but it is
difficult to discern a flaw in the arguments of these prophetic souls
who have dared to believe and to preach to men, "Ye are gods, and sons
of the Most High, every one".
It is a doctrine we learn only from the new masters. Nothing half so
fair, so radiant, did we hear in days of old, so rich in promise, so
full of inspiration and helpfulness. "You are an adopted son of God,"
it was said. There is but one natural son, the Messiah and Logos,
Jesus Christ. Through him alone we have access to the Divine, apart
from him we are children of wrath; only in him are we "light in the
Lord". "He that believeth not the Son hath not life, but the wrath of
God abideth with him." To this hour do they say these things, but we
who have been privileged to hear wiser words, diviner voices, know that
nothing can come between our lonely spirits and the Great Alone--no
Church, no Book, no Messiah, or Saviour. We are greater than all that,
for the eternal soul of man is within us, heir-at-law divine of the
promises, and in its _own_ right a natural son of God.
But to continue. The scattered rays of this wonderful gospel are
focussed in the transcendental teaching of the last of the ethical
prophets, Waldo Emerson. In him the truth shines forth as the sun. We
have seen the germ of the doctrine in the fourteenth and fifteenth
century mystics, its resurrection in the noble school of German
idealism which grew out of the teaching of the great master himself,
Immanuel Kant. The man who introduced it to England, the link, so to
speak, between Fichte, Hegel, Schelling and Emerson, was Coleridge, for
whom there is but one reason, shared in by all intelligent beings,
which is in itself the universal soul. To this profoundly reverent
thinker reason is not a faculty, much less a property of the human
mind. Man cannot be said so much to possess reason as to partake of
it. He in whom reason dwells can as little appropriate it as his own
possession, as he can claim ownership in the breathing air or take in
the canopy of heaven.
Now, this is essentially what Emerson means by the Over-soul. It is
the universal mind, the light which lighteth every man that cometh into
the world. It is one and identical in all men, even as the sun in the
high heavens is one and the same for every dweller in the solar system.
Yea, more than this, we cannot shrink from the consequences of our
affirmation, the mind in man is not conceivably other than the Mind
which is self-subsistent and infinite. After what manner shall we
conceive of the intelligence which laid down the foundations of the
world, traced the pathway of the stars, fixed the laws which nature has
immutably obeyed from the eternal past even to this hour, if we
conceive it not after the manner of the mind in us which has at length
discovered these laws? How can we hold one intelligence to know and
another to originate them? As truth is one and identical for all
minds, so must be the intelligences which know and originate that
truth. Hence, you will see that for thinkers[4] such as these
agnosticism is the plainest of paradoxes--a bald contradiction in
terms. It affects to be unable to discern Mind in the cosmos when it
is exercising that very mind in formulating its doubts. It is as
though a man should go hunting his house for a light with a candle
burning in his hand. What on earth can we be searching for when the
"candle of the Lord," as Locke called it, is the very illuminant we
must employ in our search? "Tell me," Emerson would ask, "the truths
your sciences establish, the principle of your philosophies, are they
valid for all intelligences or only some?" Surely, for all
intelligences, you will reply. "Then, I will urge, these truths must
be one and identical if all intelligences admit them." Certainly.
"How, then, can there be any doubt but that intelligence itself, mind
itself, is one and identic in all men, since all think alike of the
cosmos, and one and identic also in that everlasting Cause of the
cosmos whence, you yourselves admit, all things derive their being?"
Are we asked for the supreme object of religion? Here it is, unveiled
so far as mind and speech of man may discover the great reality. It is
the God, not "who dwelleth in inaccessible light, who is enthroned on
the floors of the heavens," or "walks on the wings of the winds"; it is
the God who is "not very far from any one of us," for he is in us, in
very deed and truth; he is the mind, the intelligence; he is the soul
of man, and yet the "Over-soul," the soul of all souls, and we are not
so much made in his image, as it was taught of old, _but we are he_, we
are the Divine, there is no line of division 'twixt us and him; the
light in man, the good in man is God.
Pray no more, then, we urge, to the skies, nor in a holy city or
consecrated shrine, a temple, though it were of gold. Like the angels
that stood by the open, empty grave of the Christ and said, "he is not
here," your souls cry aloud that therein alone is the infinite Soul
whose truth and being alone can satisfy your own. This is the temple
not made with hands of man, in which alone the Supreme can be enshrined
and worshipped, "Foolish doctor, foolish doctor," says Carlyle of
Johnson, who went tapping for ghosts in Cock Lane, "thou thyself art a
ghost!" Foolish and superstitious beyond bounds, we may say, is the
man that thinketh to find the light of life in a church when it cannot
be found within himself.
He who has steeped his soul in this teaching will need no more to
commune with an imagination in the heavens, an anthropomorphic deity in
the skies--it is a merciful thing we see no more of these painful
profanities upon the canvases of our artists--nor will he need that his
soul should rise on wings of fasting and prayer "to pierce the clouds"
with his importunings and entreaties. No, his communings will be with
himself, his worship of the silent sort, for he knows now _that there
is no God anywhere who is not within him_. He will need no Chrishna,
Buddha or Christ to "make intercession with the Father" for him, no
god-babe in a manger or deity walking the earth in sorrow or expiring
in shame, for lo! the Divinity is also every son of God, and suffering
humanity is ever with us, the repression of the flesh is an unceasing
sacrifice which we offer up in the temple of our bodies out of
reverence for the Divinity within them.
NOTE.--The best account of Emerson's ethical and speculative teaching
is to be found in Cooke's _Life of Emerson_, obtainable through Green &
Co., Essex Hall, Strand. I am indebted to it for much of the
expository portion of this chapter.
[1] The fact that Petavius, a Jesuit theologian, felt it his duty to
condemn several ante-Nicene writers as heretical, though honest,
offenders against orthodoxy, is evidence enough that Athanasianism is a
spurious development unknown to the earlier ages.
[2] Tennyson's description of the "average Englishman's" theology.
[3] Ecclesiastes i. 7.
[4] And, we add, for ninety-nine out of every hundred philosophers of
repute.