surely ’twere presumption for an average woman to attempt more. For my
part I am content to ‘feel.’ The brave Switzer who sees the awful
avalanche stealing down the mountain side threatening death and
destruction to all he holds dear, hardly needs any very correct
ratiocination on the mechanical and chemical properties of ice. He
_feels_ there is danger nigh and there is just time for him to sound the
tocsin of alarm and shout to his dear ones ‘fly!’
For me it is enough to know that by this system God and Love are shut
out; prayer becomes a mummery; the human will but fixed evolutions of
law; the precepts and sanctions of morality a lie; the sense of
responsibility a disease. The desire for reformation and for propagating
conviction is thus a fire consuming its tender. Agnosticism has nothing
to impart. Its sermons are the exhortations of one who convinces you he
stands on nothing and urges you to stand there too. If your creed is
that nothing is sure, there is certainly no spur to proselytize. As in
an icicle the agnostic abides alone. The vital principle is taken out of
all endeavor for improving himself or bettering his fellows. All hope in
the grand possibilities of life are blasted. The inspiration of
beginning now a growth which is to mature in endless development through
eternity is removed from our efforts at self-culture. The sublime
conception of life as the seed-time of character for the growing of a
congenial inner-self to be forever a constant conscious presence is
changed into the base alternative conclusion, _Let us eat and drink for
to-morrow we die_.
To my mind the essence of the poison is just here. As far as the
metaphysical grounds for skepticism are concerned, they are as harmless
to the masses as if they were entombed in Greek or Hebrew. Many of the
terms, it is true, are often committed to memory and paraded pretty much
in the spirit of the college sophomore who affects gold-bowed spectacles
and stooping shoulders—it is scholarly, you know. But the real reasons
for and against agnosticism rest on psychological and scientific facts
too abstruse for the laity to appreciate. There is much subtle sophistry
in the oracular utterances of a popular speaker like Mr. Ingersoll,
which catch the fancy and charm the imagination of the many. His
brilliant blasphemies like the winged seed of the thistle are borne on
the slightest breath of wind and find lodgment in the shallowest of
soils; while the refutation of them, undertaken in a serious and logical
vein is often too conclusive to convince: that is, it is too different
in kind to reach the same class of minds that have been inoculated with
the poison germs.
My own object, however, is neither to argue nor to refute argument here.
I want to utter just this one truth:—The great, the fundamental need of
any nation, any race, is for heroism, devotion, sacrifice; and there
cannot be heroism, devotion, or sacrifice in a primarily skeptical
spirit. A great man said of France, when she was being lacerated with
the frantic stripes of her hysterical children,—_France needs a
religion!_ And the need of France during her trying Revolution is the
need of every crisis and conflict in the evolution of nations and races.
At such times most of all, do men need to be anchored to what they
_feel_ to be eternal verities. And nothing else at any time can propel
men into those sublime efforts of altruism which constitute the moral
heroes of humanity. The demand for heroism, devotion and sacrifice
founded on such a faith is particularly urgent in a race at almost the
embryonic stage of character-building. The Hour is _now_;—where is the
man? He must _believe_ in the infinite possibilities of devoted
self-sacrifice and in the eternal grandeur of a human idea heroically
espoused. It is the enthusiasms, the faiths of the world that have
heated the crucibles in which were formed its reformations and its
impulses toward a higher growth. And I do not mean by faith the holding
of correct views and unimpeachable opinions on mooted questions, merely;
nor do I understand it to be the ability to forge cast-iron formulas and
dub them TRUTH. For while I do not deny that absolute and eternal truth
_is_,—still truth must be infinite, and as incapable as infinite space,
of being encompassed and confined by one age or nation, sect or
country—much less by one little creature’s finite brain.
To me, faith means _treating the truth as true_. Jesus _believed_ in the
infinite possibilities of an individual soul. His faith was a triumphant
realization of the eternal development of _the best_ in man—an
optimistic vision of the human aptitude for endless expansion and
perfectibility. This truth to him placed a sublime valuation on each
individual sentiency—a value magnified infinitely by reason of its
immortal destiny. He could not lay hold of this truth and let pass an
opportunity to lift men into nobler living and firmer building. He could
not lay hold of this truth and allow his own benevolence to be narrowed
and distorted by the trickeries of circumstance or the colorings of
prejudice.
Life must be something more than dilettante speculation. And religion
(ought to be if it isn’t) a great deal more than mere gratification of
the instinct for worship linked with the straight-teaching of
irreproachable credos. Religion must be _life made true_; and life is
action, growth, development—begun now and ending never. And a life made
true cannot confine itself—it must reach out and twine around every
pulsing interest within reach of its uplifting tendrils. If then you
_believe_ that intemperance is a growing vice among a people within
touch of your sympathies; if you see that, whereas the “Lord had shut
them in,” so that from inheritance there are but few cases of
alcoholized blood,—yet that there is danger of their becoming under
their changed circumstances a generation of inebriates—if you believe
this, then this is your truth. Take up your parable and in earnestness
and faith _give it out_ by precept and by example.
Do you _believe_ that the God of history often chooses the weak things
of earth to confound the mighty, and that the Negro race in America has
a veritable destiny in His eternal purposes,—then don’t spend your time
discussing the ‘Negro Problem’ amid the clouds of your fine havanna,
ensconced in your friend’s well-cushioned arm-chair and with your patent
leather boot-tips elevated to the opposite mantel. Do those poor
“cowards in the South” need a leader—then get up and lead them! Let go
your purse-strings and begin to _live_ your creed. Or is it your modicum
of truth that God hath made of one blood all nations of the earth; and
that all interests which specialize and contract the broad, liberal,
cosmopolitan idea of universal brotherhood and equality are narrow and
pernicious, then treat that truth as true. Don’t inveigh against lines
of longitude drawn by others when at the same time you are applying your
genius to devising lines of latitude which are neither race lines, nor
character lines, nor intelligence lines—but certain social-appearance
circlets assorting your “universal brotherhood” by shapes of noses and
texture of hair. If you object to imaginary lines—don’t draw them! Leave
only the real lines of nature and character. And so whatever the vision,
the revelation, the idea, vouchsafed _you_,
Think it truly and thy thoughts shall the soul’s famine feed.
_Speak_ it truly and each word of thine shall be a fruitful seed;
_Live_ it truly and thy life shall be a grand and holy creed!
Macaulay has left us in his masterly description of Ignatius Loyola a
vivid picture of the power of a belief and its independence of material
surroundings.
‘On the road from the Theatine convent in Venice might have been seen
once a poor crippled Spaniard, wearily but as fast as his injured limbs
can carry him making his way toward Rome. His face is pinched, his body
shrunken, from long fast and vigil. He enters the City of the Cæsars
without money, without patrons, without influence! but there burns a
light in his eye that recks not of despair. In a frequented portion of a
busy street he stops and mounts a stone, and from this rude rostrum
begins to address the passers by in barbarous Latin. Lo, there is
contagion in the man! He has actually imparted of his spirit to that
mottled audience! And now the same fire burns in a hundred eyes, that
shone erewhile from his. Men become his willing slaves to do his bidding
even unto the ends of the earth. With what courage, what zeal, what
utter self-abnegation, with what blind devotion to their ends regardless
of means do they preach, teach, write, act! Behind the thrones of kings,
at the bedside of paupers, under every disguise in every land, mid
pestilence and famine, in prisons oft, in perils by land and perils by
sea, the Jesuit, undaunted, pursues his way.’
Do you seek to know the secret charm of Ignatius Loyola, the hidden
spring of the Jesuit’s courage and unfaltering purpose? It is these
magic words, “_I believe_.” That is power. That is the stamping
attribute in every impressive personality, that is the fire to the
engine and the motor force in every battery. That is the live coal from
the altar which at once unseals the lips of the dumb—and that alone
which makes a man a positive and not a negative quantity in the world’s
arithmetic. With this potent talisman man no longer “abideth alone.” He
cannot stand apart, a cold spectator of earth’s pulsing struggles. The
flame must burst forth. The idea, the doctrine, the device for
betterment must be imparted. “_I believe_,”—this was strength and power
to Paul, to Mohammed, to the Saxon Monk and the Spanish Zealot,—and they
must be our strength if our lives are to be worth the living. They mean
as much to-day as they did in the breast of Luther or of Loyola. Who
cheats me of this robs me of both shield and spear. Without them I have
no inspiration to better myself, no inclination to help another.
It is small service to humanity, it seems to me, to open men’s eyes to
the fact that the world rests on nothing. Better the turtle of the
myths, than a _perhaps_. If “fooled they must be, though wisest of the
wise,” let us help to make them the fools of virtue. You may have
learned that the pole star is twelve degrees from the pole and forbear
to direct your course by it—preferring your needle taken from earth and
fashioned by man’s device. The slave brother, however, from the land of
oppression once saw the celestial beacon and dreamed not that it ever
deviated from due North. He _believed_ that _somewhere_ under its
beckoning light, lay a far away country where a man’s a man. He sets out
with his heavenly guide before his face—would you tell him he is
pursuing a wandering light? Is he the poorer for his ignorant hope? Are
you the richer for your enlightened suspicion?
Yes, I believe there is existence beyond our present experience; that
that existence is conscious and culturable; and that there is a noble
work here and now in helping men to live _into_ it.
“Not in Utopia,—subterraneous fields,—
Or some secreted island, Heaven knows where!
But in this very world, which is the world
Of all of us—the place where in the end
We find our happiness, or not at all!”
There are nations still in darkness to whom we owe a light. The world is
to be moved one generation forward—whether by us, by blind force, by
fate, or by God! If thou believest, all things are possible; and _as_
thou believest, so be it unto thee.
[Illustration: FINIS.]
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TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES
1. P. 88, changed “Black Wo-” to “Black Woman”.
2. P. 163, changed “1819” to “1619”.
3. Silently corrected typographical errors and variations in spelling.
4. Archaic, non-standard, and uncertain spellings retained as printed.
5. Footnotes have been re-indexed using numbers.
6. Enclosed italics font in _underscores_.
7. Subscripts are denoted by an underscore before a series of
subscripted characters enclosed in curly braces, e.g. H_{2}O.