is the end: this is a world without a God: you are a body without a
soul: there is a Here, but no Hereafter for you; an Earth, but no
Heaven. Die, and return to your dust. Man is bones, blood, bowels, and
brain; mind is matter: there is no soul in the brain, nothing but
nerves. We can see all the way to a little star in the nebula of Orion's
belt; so distant that it will take light a thousand millions of years to
come from it to the earth, journeying at the rate of twelve millions of
miles a minute. There is no Heaven this side of that: you see all the
way through: there is not a speck of Heaven; and do you think there is
any beyond it; and if so, when would you reach it? There is no
Providence. Nature is a fortuitous concourse of atoms; thought is a
fortuitous function of matter, a fortuitous result of a fortuitous
result, a chance-shot from the great wind-gun of the Universe,
accidentally loaded, pointed at random, and fired off by chance. Things
_happen_; they are not _arranged_. There is luck, and there is ill-luck;
but there is no Providence. Die you into dust!" Does all this satisfy
the human instinct of immortality, that makes us ever long, with
unutterable longing, to join ourselves again to our dear ones who have
gone away before us, and to mankind, for eternal life? Does it satisfy
our mighty hungering and thirst for immortality, our anxious longing to
come nearer to, and to know more of, the Eternal Cause of all things?
Men never could be content to believe that there was no mind that
thought for man, no conscience to enact eternal laws, no heart to love
those whom nothing of earth loves or cares for, no will of the Universe
to marshal the nations in the way of wisdom, justice, and love. History
is not--thank God! we _know_ it is not,--the fortuitous concourse of
events, or Nature that of atoms. We cannot believe that there is no plan
nor purpose in Nature, to guide our going out and coming in: that there
is a mighty going, but it goes nowhere; that all beauty, wisdom,
affection, justice, morality in the world, is an accident, and may end
to-morrow.
All over the world there is heroism unrequited, or paid with misery;
vice on thrones, corruption in high places, nobleness in poverty or even
in chains, the gentle devotion of woman rewarded by brutal neglect or
more brutal abuse and violence; everywhere want, misery, over-work, and
under-wages. Add to these the Atheist's creed,--a body without a soul,
an earth without a Heaven, a world without a God; and what a
Pandemonium would we make of this world!
The intellect of the Atheist would find matter everywhere; but no
Causing and Providing Mind: his moral sense would find no Equitable
Will, no Beauty of Moral Excellence, no Conscience enacting justice into
the unchanging law of right, no spiritual Order or spiritual Providence,
but only material Fate and Chance. His affections would find only finite
things to love; and to them the dead who _were_ loved and who died
yesterday, are like the rainbow that yesterday evening lived a moment
and then passed away. His soul, flying through the vast Inane, and
feeling the darkness with its wings, seeking the Soul of all, which at
once is Reason, Conscience, and the Heart of all that is, would find no
God, but a Universe all disorder; no Infinite, no Reason, no Conscience,
no Heart, no Soul of things; nothing to reverence, to esteem, to love,
to worship, to trust in; but only an Ugly Force, alien and foreign to
us, that strikes down those we love, and makes us mere worms on the hot
sand of the world. No voice would speak from the Earth to comfort him.
It is a cruel mother, that great Earth, that devours her young,--a Force
and nothing more. Out of the sky would smile no kind Providence, in all
its thousand starry eyes; and in storms a malignant violence, with its
lightning-sword, would stab into the darkness, seeking for men to
murder.
No man ever was or ever can be content with that. The evidence of God
has been ploughed into Nature so deeply, and so deeply woven into the
texture of the human soul, that Atheism has never become a faith, though
it has sometimes assumed the shape of theory. Religion is natural to
man. Instinctively he turns to God and reverences and relies on Him. In
the Mathematics of the Heavens, written in gorgeous diagrams of fire, he
sees law, order, beauty, harmony without end: in the ethics of the
little nations that inhabit the ant-hills he sees the same; in all
Nature, animate and inanimate, he sees the evidences of a Design, a
Will, an Intelligence, and a God,--of a God beneficent and loving as
well as wise, and merciful and indulgent as well as powerful.
To man, surrounded by the material Universe, and conscious of the
influence that his material environments exercised upon his fortunes and
his present destiny;--to man, ever confronted with the splendors of the
starry heavens, the regular march of the seasons, the phenomena of
sunrise and moonrise, and all the evidences of intelligence and design
that everywhere pressed upon and overwhelmed him, all imaginable
questions as to the nature and cause of these phenomena constantly
recurred, demanding to be solved, and refusing to be sent away
unanswered. And still, after the lapse of ages, press upon the human
mind and demand solution, the same great questions--perhaps still
demanding it in vain.
Advancing to the period when man had ceased to look upon the separate
parts and individual forces of the Universe as gods,--when he had come
to look upon it as a whole, this question, among the earliest, occurred
to him, and insisted on being answered: "Is this material Universe
self-existent, or was it created? Is it eternal, or did it originate?"
And then in succession came crowding on the human mind these other
questions:
"Is this material Universe a mere aggregate of fortuitous combinations
of matter, or is it the result and work of intelligence, acting upon a
plan?
"If there _be_ such an Intelligence, what and where is it? Is the
material Universe _itself_ an Intelligent being? Is it like man, a body
and a soul? Does Nature act upon itself, or is there a Cause beyond it
that acts upon it?
"If there is a _personal_ God, _separate from_ the material Universe,
that created all things, Himself uncreated, is He corporeal or
incorporeal, material or spiritual, the soul of the Universe or wholly
apart from it? and if He be Spirit, what then is spirit?
"Was that Supreme Deity active or quiescent before the creation; and if
quiescent during a previous eternity, what necessity of His nature moved
Him at last to create a world; or was it a mere whim that had no motive?
"Was matter co-existent with Him, or absolutely created by him out of
nothing? Did He _create_ it, or only _mould_ and _shape_ and _fashion_ a
chaos already existing, co-existent with Himself?
"Did the Deity _directly_ create matter, or was creation the work of
inferior deities, emanations from Himself?
"If He be good and just, whence comes it that, foreknowing everything,
He has allowed sorrow and evil to exist; and how to reconcile with His
benevolence and wisdom the prosperity of vice and the misfortunes of
virtue in this world?" And then, as to man himself, recurred these
other questions, as they continue to recur to all of us:
"What is it in us that thinks? Is Thought the mere result of material
organization; or is there in us a _soul_ that thinks, separate from and
resident in the body? If the latter, is it eternal and uncreated; and if
not, how created? Is it distinct from God, or an emanation from Him? Is
it _inherently_ immortal, or only so by destination, because God has
willed it? Is it to return to and be merged in Him, or ever to exist,
separately from Him, with its present identity?
"If God has fore-seen and fore-arranged all that occurs, how has man any
real free-will, or the least control over circumstances? How can
anything be done _against_ the will of Infinite Omnipotence; and if all
is done _according_ to that will, how is there any wrong or evil, in
what Infinite Wisdom and Infinite Power does not choose to prevent?
"What is the foundation of the moral law? Did God enact it of His own
mere pleasure; and if so, can He not, when He pleases, repeal it? Who
shall assure us He will not repeal it, and make right wrong, and virtue
vice? Or is the moral law a necessity of His nature; and if so, who
enacted it; and does not that assert a power, like the old Necessity,
superior to Deity?"
And, close-following after these, came the great question of HEREAFTER,
of another Life, of the soul's Destiny; and the thousand other
collateral and subordinate questions, as to matter, spirit, futurity,
and God, that have produced all the systems of philosophy, all
metaphysics, and all theology, since the world began.
What the old philosophic mind thought upon these great questions, we
have already, to some extent, developed. With the Emanation-doctrine of
the Gnostics and the Orient, we have endeavored to make you familiar. We
have brought you face to face with the Kabalists, the Essenes, and Philo
the Jew. We have shown that, and how, much of the old mythology was
derived from the daily and yearly recurring phenomena of the heavens. We
have exhibited to you the ancient notions by which they endeavored to
explain to themselves the existence and prevalence of evil; and we have
in some degree made known to you their metaphysical ideas as to the
nature of the Deity. Much more remains to be done than it is within our
power to do. We stand upon the sounding shore of the great ocean of
Time. In front of us stretches out the heaving waste of the illimitable
Past; and its waves, as they roll up to our feet along the sparkling
slope of the yellow sands, bring to us, now and then, from the depths of
that boundless ocean, a shell, a few specimens of algæ torn rudely from
their stems, a rounded pebble; and that is all; of all the vast
treasures of ancient thought that lie buried there, with the mighty
anthem of the boundless ocean thundering over them forever and forever.
Let us once more, and for the last time, along the shore of that great
ocean, gather a few more relics of the Past, and listen to its mighty
voices, as they come, in fragmentary music, in broken and interrupted
rhythm, whispering to us from the great bosom of the Past.
Rites, creeds, and legends express, directly or symbolically, some
leading idea, according to which the Mysteries of Being are supposed to
be, explained in Deity. The intricacies of mythical genealogies are a
practical acknowledgment of the mysterious nature of the Omnipotent
Deity; displaying in their beautiful but ineffectual imagery the first
efforts of the mind to communicate with nature: the flowers which fancy
strewed before the youthful steps of Psyche, when she first set out in
pursuit of the immortal object of her love. Theories and notions, in all
their varieties of truth and falsehood, are a machinery more or less
efficacious, directed to the same end. Every religion was, in its
origin, an embryo philosophy, or an attempt to interpret the unknown by
mind; and it was only when philosophy, which is essentially progress,
outgrew its first acquisitions, that religion became a thing apart,
cherishing as unalterable dogmas the notions which philosophy had
abandoned. Separated from philosophy, it became arrogant and
fantastical, professing to have already attained what its more authentic
representative was ever pursuing in vain; and discovering, through its
initiations and Mysteries, all that to its contracted view seemed
wanting to restore the well-being of mankind, the means of purification
and expiation, remedies for disease, expedients to cure the disorders of
the soul, and to propitiate the gods.
Why should we attempt to confine the idea of the Supreme Mind within an
arbitrary barrier, or exclude from the limits of veracity any conception
of the Deity, which, if imperfect and inadequate, may be only a little
more so than our own? "The name of God," says Hobbes, "is used not to
make us _conceive_ Him, for He is inconceivable, but that we may _honor_
Him." "Believe in God, and adore Him," said the Greek Poet, "but
investigate Him not; the inquiry is fruitless, seek not to discover who
God is; for, by the desire to know, you offend Him who chooses to remain
unknown." "When we attempt," says Philo, "to investigate the essence of
the Absolute Being, we fall into an abyss of perplexity; and the only
benefit to be derived from such researches is the conviction of their
absurdity."
Yet man, though ignorant of the constitution of the dust on which he
treads, has ventured, and still ventures, to speculate on the nature of
God, and to define dogmatically in creeds the subject least within the
compass of his faculties; and even to hate and persecute those who will
not accept his views as true.
But though a knowledge of the Divine Essence is impossible, the
conceptions formed respecting it are interesting, as indications of
intellectual development. The history of religion is the history of the
human mind; and the conception formed by it of Deity is always in exact
relation to its moral and intellectual attainments. The one is the index
and the measure of the other.
The _negative_ notion of God, which consists in abstracting the inferior
and finite, is, according to Philo, the only way in which it is possible
for man worthily to apprehend the nature of God. After exhausting the
varieties of symbolism, we contrast the Divine Greatness with human
littleness, and employ expressions apparently affirmative, such as
"Infinite," "Almighty," "All-wise," "Omnipotent," "Eternal," and the
like; which in reality amount only to denying, in regard to God, those
limits which confine the faculties of man; and thus we remain content
with a name which is a mere conventional sign and confession of our
ignorance.
The Hebrew יהוה and the Greek _To ON_ expressed abstract existence,
without outward manifestation or development. Of the same nature are the
definitions, "God is a sphere whose centre is everywhere, and whose
circumference nowhere;" "God is He who sees all, Himself unseen:" and
finally, that of Proclus and Hegel--"the _To_ μη ον--that which has no
outward and positive existence." Most of the so-called ideas or
definitions of the "Absolute" are only a collection of negations; from
which, as they affirm nothing, nothing is learned.
God was first recognized in the heavenly bodies and in the elements.
When man's consciousness of his own intellectuality was matured, and he
became convinced that the internal faculty of thought was something more
subtle than even the most subtle elements, he transferred that new
conception to the object of his worship, and deified a mental principle
instead of a physical one. He in every case makes God after his own
image; for do what we will, the highest efforts of human thought can
conceive nothing higher than the supremacy of intellect; and so he ever
comes back to some familiar type of exalted humanity. He at first
deifies nature, and afterward himself.
The eternal aspiration of the religious sentiment in man is to become
united with God. In his earliest development, the wish and its
fulfillment were simultaneous, through unquestioning belief. In
proportion as the conception of Deity was exalted, the notion of His
terrestrial presence or proximity was abandoned; and the difficulty of
comprehending the Divine Government, together with the glaring
superstitious evils arising out of its misinterpretation, endangered the
belief in it altogether.
Even the lights of Heaven, which, as "bright potentates of the sky,"
were formerly the vigilant directors of the economy of earth, now shine
dim and distant, and Uriel no more descends upon a sunbeam. But the real
change has been in the progressive ascent of man's own faculties, and
not in the Divine Nature; as the Stars are no more distant now than when
they were supposed to rest on the shoulders of Atlas. And yet a little
sense of disappointment and humiliation attended the first awakening of
the soul, when reason, looking upward toward the Deity, was impressed
with a dizzy sense of having fallen.
But hope revives in despondency; and every nation that ever advanced
beyond the most elementary conceptions, felt the necessity of an attempt
to fill the chasm, real or imaginary, separating man from God. To do
this was the great task of poetry, philosophy, and religion. Hence the
personifications of God's attributes, developments, and manifestations,
as "Powers," "Intelligences," "Angels," "Emanations;" through which and
the oracular faculty in himself, man could place himself in communion
with God.
The various ranks and orders of mythical beings imagined by Persians,
Indians, Egyptians, or Etrurians, to preside over the various
departments of nature, had each his share in a scheme to bring man into
closer approximation to the Deity; they eventually gave way only before
an analogous though less picturesque symbolism; and the Deities and
Dæmons of Greece and Rome were perpetuated with only a change of names,
when their offices were transferred to Saints and Martyrs. The attempts
by which reason had sometimes endeavored to span the unknown by a bridge
of metaphysics, such as the idealistic systems of Zoroaster, Pythagoras,
or Plato, were only a more refined form of the poetical illusions which
satisfied the vulgar; and man still looked back with longing to the lost
golden age, when his ancestors communed face to face with the Gods; and
hoped that, by propitiating Heaven, he might accelerate the renewal of
it in the islands of the Far West, under the sceptre of Kronos, or in a
centralization of political power at Jerusalem. His eager hope overcame
even the terrors of the grave; for the Divine power was as infinite as
human expectation, and the Egyptian, duly ensepulchred in the Lybian
Catacombs, was supposed to be already on his way to the Fortunate Abodes
under the guidance of Hermes, there to obtain a perfect association and
reunion with his God.
Remembering what we have already said elsewhere in regard to the old
ideas concerning the Deity, and repeating it as little as possible, let
us once more put ourselves in communion with the Ancient poetic and
philosophic mind, and endeavor to learn of it what it thought, and how
it solved the great problems that have ever tortured the human
intellect.
The division of the First and Supreme Cause into two parts, one Active
and the other Passive, the Universe Agent and Patient, or the
hermaphroditic God-World, is one of the most ancient and widespread
dogmas of philosophy or natural theology. Almost every ancient people
gave it a place in their worship, their mysteries, and their ceremonies.
Ocellus Lucanus, who seems to have lived shortly after Pythagoras opened
his School in Italy, five or six hundred years before our era, and in
the time of Solon, Thales, and the other Sages who had studied in the
Schools of Egypt, not only recognizes the eternity of the Universe, and
its divine character as an unproduced and indestructible being, but also
the distinction of Active and Passive causes in what he terms the Grand
Whole, or the single hermaphroditic Being that comprehends all
existences, as well causes as effects; and which is a system regularly
ordered, perfect and complete, of all Natures. He well apprehended the
dividing-line that separates existence eternally the same, from that
which eternally changes; the nature of celestial from that of
terrestrial bodies, that of causes from that of effects, that which is
from that which only BECOMES,--a distinction that naturally struck every
thinking man.
We shall not quote his language at full length. The heavenly bodies, he
thought, are first and most noble; they move of themselves, and ever
revolve, without change of form or essence. Fire, water, earth, and air
change incessantly and continually, not place, but form. Then, as in the
Universe there are generation and cause of generation,--as generation is
where there are change and displacement of parts, and cause where there
is stability of nature, evidently it belongs to what is the cause of
generation, to move and to act, and to the recipient, to be made and
moved. In his view, everything above the Moon was the habitation of the
gods; all below, that of Nature and discord; _this_ operates dissolution
of things made; _that_, production of those that are being made. As the
world is unproduced and indestructible, as it had no beginning, and will
have no end, necessarily the principle that operates generation in
another than itself, and that which operates it _in_ itself, have
co-existed.
The former is all above the moon, and especially the sun: the latter is
the sublunary world. Of these two parts, one active, the other
passive--one divine and always the same, the other mortal and ever
changing, all that we call the "world" or "universe" is composed.
These accorded with the principles of the Egyptian philosophy, which
held that man and the animals had always existed together with the
world; that they were its effects, eternal like itself. The chief
divisions of nature into active and passive causes, its system of
generation and destruction, and the concurrence of the two great
principles, Heaven and earth, uniting to form all things, will,
according to Ocellus, always continue to exist. "Enough," he concludes,
"as to the Universe, the generations and destructions effected in it,
the mode in which it now exists, the mode in which it will ever exist,
by the eternal qualities of the two principles, one always moving, the
other always moved; one always _governing_, the other always
_governed_."
Such is a brief summary of the doctrine of this philosopher, whose work
is one of the most ancient that has survived to us. The subject on which
he treated occupied in his time all men's minds: the poets sang of
cosmogonies and theogonies, and the philosophers wrote treatises on the
birth of the world and the elements of its composition. The cosmogony of
the Hebrews, attributed to Moses; that of the Phœnicians, ascribed to
Sanchoniathon; that of the Greeks, composed by Hesiod; that of the
Egyptians, the Atlantes, and the Cretans, preserved by Diodorus Siculus;
the fragments of the theology of Orpheus, divided among different
writers; the books of the Persians, or their Boundehesh; those of the
Hindūs; the traditions of the Chinese and the people of Macassar; the
cosmogonic chants which Virgil puts in the mouth of Iopas at Carthage;
and those of the old Silenus, the first book of the Metamorphoses of
Ovid; all testify to the antiquity and universality of these fictions as
to the origin of the world and its causes.
At the head of the causes of nature, Heaven and earth were placed; and
the most apparent parts of each, the sun, the moon, the fixed stars and
planets, and, above all, the zodiac, among the _active_ causes of
generation; and among the _passive_, the several elements. These causes
were not only classed in the progressive order of their energy, Heaven
and earth heading the respective lists, but distinct sexes were in some
sort assigned to them, and characteristics analogous to the mode in
which they concur in universal generation.