"My Comrade!
For you to share with me two greatnesses--And a third one, rising
inclusive and more resplendent,
The greatness of Love and Democracy--and the greatness of Religion."
It is hardly necessary to say that the religion which Whitman celebrates
is not any form of ecclesiasticism. It was larger than any creed that has
yet been formulated. It was the conviction of the man of science touched
and vivified by the emotion of the prophet and poet. As exemplified in his
life its chief elements were faith, hope, charity. Its object was to
prepare you to live, not to die, and to "earn for the body and the mind
what adheres and goes forward, and is not dropped by death."
The old religion, the religion of our fathers, was founded upon a curse.
Sin, repentance, fear, Satan, hell, play important parts. Creation had
resulted in a tragedy in which the very elemental forces were implicated.
The grand scheme of an infinite Being failed through the machinations of
the Devil. Salvation was an escape from a wrath to come. The way was
through agony and tears. Heaven was only gained by denying earth. The
great mass of the human race was doomed to endless perdition. Now there is
no trace of this religion in Whitman, and it does not seem to have left
any shadow upon him. Ecclesiasticism is dead; he clears the ground for a
new growth. To the priests he says: "Your day is done."
He sings a new song; he tastes a new joy in life. The earth is as divine
as heaven, and there is no god more sacred than yourself. It is as if the
world had been anew created, and Adam had once more been placed in the
garden,--the world, with all consequences of the fall, purged from him.
Hence we have in Whitman the whole human attitude towards the universe,
towards God, towards life and death, towards good and evil, completely
changed. We have absolute faith and acceptance in place of the fear and
repentance of the old creeds; we have death welcomed as joyously as life,
we have political and social equality as motifs and impulses, and not
merely as sentiments. He would show us the muse of poetry, as impartial,
as sweeping in its vision, as modern, as real, as free from the morbid and
make-believe, as the muse of science. He sees good in all, beauty in all.
It is not the old piety, it is the new faith; it is not the old worship,
it is the new acceptance; not the old, corroding religious pessimism, but
the new scientific optimism.
He does not deny, he affirms; he does not criticise, he celebrates; his is
not a call to repentance, it is a call to triumph:--
"I say no man has ever yet been half devout enough,
None has ever yet adored or worship'd half enough,
None has begun to think how divine he himself is, or how certain the
future is."
He accepted science absolutely, yet science was not an end in itself: it
was not his dwelling; he but entered by it to an area of his dwelling.
The flower of science was religion. Without this religion, or something
akin to it,--without some spiritual, emotional life that centred about an
ideal,--Whitman urged that there could be no permanent national or
individual development. In the past this ideal was found in the
supernatural; for us and the future democratic ages, it must be found in
the natural, in the now and the here.
The aristocratic tradition not only largely shaped the literature of the
past, it shaped the religion: man was a culprit, his life a rebellion; his
proper attitude toward the unseen powers was that of a subject to his
offended sovereign,--one of prostration and supplication. Heaven was a
select circle reserved for the few,--the aristocracy of the pure and just.
The religion of a democratic and scientific era, as voiced by Whitman and
as exemplified in his life, is of quite another character,--not
veneration, but joy and triumph; not fear, but love; not self-abasement,
but self-exaltation; not sacrifice, but service: in fact, not religion at
all in the old sense of the spiritual at war with the natural, the divine
with the human, this world a vale of tears, and mundane things but filth
and ashes, heaven for the good and hell for the bad; but in the new sense
of the divinity of all things, of the equality of gods and men, of the
brotherhood of the race, of the identity of the material and the
spiritual, of the beneficence of death and the perfection of the universe.
The poet turns his face to earth and not to heaven; he finds the
miraculous, the spiritual, in the things about him, and gods and goddesses
in the men and women he meets. He effaces the old distinctions; he
establishes a sort of universal suffrage in spiritual matters; there are
no select circles, no privileged persons. Is this the democracy of
religion? liberty, fraternity, and equality carried out in the spiritual
sphere? Death is the right hand of God, and evil plays a necessary part
also. Nothing is discriminated against; there are no reprisals or
postponements, no dualism or devilism. Everything is in its place; man's
life and all the things of his life are well-considered.
Carried out in practice, this democratic religion will not beget priests,
or churches, or creeds, or rituals, but a life cheerful and full on all
sides, helpful, loving, unworldly, tolerant, open-souled, temperate,
fearless, free, and contemplating with pleasure, rather than alarm, "the
exquisite transition of death."