through the alembic of the intellect, and must stand out in the
clear definition of science. They verify and build up their
religion with callipers and dissecting-knife. It is a system of
digestion and pneumatology. They find an organ for veneration, and
another for conscientiousness, and therefore conclude that religion
has a legitimate place in the harmony of human character. But all
must be calm and balanced. They dare not trust the feelings and give
but little scope to enthusiasm. Sometimes, indeed, they rise to
eloquence in expatiating upon the truths of natural theology, and of
"the elder Scripture"; tho they believe in Christ also, because He
seems well authenticated as an historical fact. In short, such men
are religious like Cicero, or Seneca, with some modification from
modern science and from the Sermon on the Mount.
Now there is a close alliance between true philosophy and true
religion. That the New Testament is eminently free from fanaticism,
and makes no appeal to mere credulity, any one will see who
examines. That it is rational and sober, constitutes one of its
great internal evidences. A Christian philosopher is no anomaly,
but a beautiful expression of the essential harmony of all truth.
Knowledge and piety burn and brighten with an undivided flame.
Revelation and science are continually interpreting one another,
while every day the material universe is unfolding a more spiritual
significance, and indicating its subservience to a spiritual end.
But, after all, in order to be religious, it is not necessary that
a man should be a philosopher, and it is certain that often he is
a philosopher without being religious. Religion and philosophy
may coalesce, but they are two different spheres. Philosophy is
out-looking and speculative; religion is inner and vital. In the
scheme of philosophy, religion is reasoned out as a consequence,
and adopted as an appendage to character. In the true scheme, it
is the central germ of our being, the controlling force of life.
The religion of philosophy consists of right views of things, and a
prudential schooling of the passions. True religion consists in a
right state of the affections, and a renunciation of self. In the
one case, religion may "play round the head, but come not near the
heart"; in the other, it breaks up the great deep of conscience,
and pours an intense light upon the springs of motive. Philosophy
contains the idea of intellectual rectitude; religion, of moral
obedience. Philosophy speaks of virtue; religion, of holiness.
Philosophy rests upon development; religion requires regeneration.
In short, we make an every-day distinction between the two which is
far more significant than any verbal contrast. It is the one, rather
than the other, that we apply, in the profounder experiences of our
moral nature, in the consciousness of sin and in the overwhelming
calamities of life. The one pours a purifying, healing, uplifting
power into the homes of human suffering, and into the hearts of the
ignorant and the poor, that the other has not to bestow. Philosophy
is well under all circumstances; but it is not the most inner
element of our humanity. Religion, in its humility, penitence, and
faith--at the foot of the cross, and by the open sepulcher--rejoices
in a direct and practical vision, to which philosophy, with its
encyclopedia and telescope, cannot attain.
Under this head, too, may be ranked a class of men who, tho they
may not be exactly philosophers, fall into the same conception
of religion, as a matter of the intellect--as the possession of
correct views--rather than a profound moral life. They estimate men
according to what they believe, and attribute the same sanctity to
the creed that others attribute to the ritual. And as religion, in
their conception of it, consists in a series of correct opinions,
the great work should be an endeavor to make men think right. So the
pulpit should be an arsenal of controversial forces, incessantly
playing upon the ramparts of dogmatic error, with the artillery of
dogmatic truth, and forever hammering the same doctrinal monotony
upon the anvils of logic and of textual interpretation. They are
satisfied if some favorite tenet is proved to a demonstration, and
go forth rejoicing in the superiority of their "views," without
asking if saving love has melted and transfigured their own hearts,
or whether personal sin may not canker in their souls, if hereditary
guilt is not there. Now, it is true that great principles lie at the
foundation of all practical life, and the more elevated and clear
our views, the more effectual are the motives to holiness and love.
But it matters little to what pole of doctrine the intellect swings,
if the heart hangs unpenetrated and untouched. It matters little to
what opinions in theology the pulpit has made converts, if all its
mighty truths have not heaved the moral nature of the hearer--if
it has not shot into the individual soul, like an arrow, the keen
conviction: "I must be born again!"
Once again: there are those who seek religion in a routine of
outward and commendable deeds--in mere morality. With such, the
great sum of life is to be sober, chaste, humane; laying particular
stress upon the business virtues, honesty, industry, and prudence.
In their idea, that man is a religious man who is an upright dealer,
an orderly citizen, a good neighbor, and a charitable giver. To be
religious, means to do good, to keep your promises, and mind your
own business. They tell us that benevolence is the richest offering,
and that the truest worship is in the workshop and the field--that
a man prays when he drives a nail or plows a furrow, and that he
expresses the best thanksgiving when he enjoys what he has got, and
is content if he gets no more.
Now, the world is not so bad that there is not a good deal of this
kind of religion in it. It would be unjust to deny that many golden
threads of integrity wind through the fabric of labor; that there
is a strong nerve of rectitude holding together the transactions
of daily life, and a wealth of spontaneous kindness enriching its
darker and more terrible scenes.
But, after all, these easy sympathies, and these prudential virtues,
lack the radicalness of true religion. Religion cannot exist without
morality; but there is a formal morality which exists without
religion. I say, a formal morality; for essential morality and
essential religion are as inseparable as the sap and the fruit.
Nor is morality a mere segment of religion. It is one-half of it.
Nay, when we get at absolute definitions, the two terms may be
used interchangeably; for then we consider religion presenting its
earthly and social phase, and we consider morality with its axis
turned heavenward. But, in the case of these outside virtues, which
are so common, we behold only one-half of religion, and that is its
earthly and social form; and even this lacks the root and sanction
of true morality. For the difference between the morality of a
religious man and that of another, consists in this: with the one,
morality bears the sanction of an absolute law, and God is at its
center. It is wrought out by discipline, and maintained at all cost.
With the other, it is an affair of temperament, and education, and
social position. He has received it as a custom, and adopted it as
a policy; or he acts upon it as an impulse. With the one, it is
a matter of profit and loss, or a fitful whim of sentiment. With
the other, it is the voice of a divine oracle within, that must be
obeyed; it is the consecrated method of duty, and the inspiration of
prayer. Now, to say that it makes no difference about the motive of
an act, so long as the act itself is good, indicates that very lack
of right feeling and right perception, which confounds the formal
morality of the world with religion. For, in the distinctions of the
Christian system, the motive makes the deed good or bad; makes the
two mites richer than all the rest of the money in the treasury;
makes the man who hates his brother a murderer. The good action may
bless others, but if I do not perform it from a right motive, it
does not bless me; and the essential peculiarity of religion is,
that it regards inward development, individual purity, personal
holiness--so that one essential excellence of the good deed consists
in its effect upon the agent--consists in the sinews which it lends
to his moral power, and the quantity it adds to his spiritual life.
When, from a right motive, with effort and sacrifice, I help a
weak and poor man, I enrich my individual and spiritual being. If I
bestow from a mere gush of feeling, I receive no permanent spiritual
benefit; if from a bad motive, I impoverish my own heart. Acts,
then, which appear the same thing in form, differ widely, considered
in the religious bearings. There is the morality of impulse, the
morality of selfishness, and the morality of principle, or religious
morality. The motive of the first-named, we obey instantaneously,
and it may do good, just as we draw our hands from the flame, and
thereby obey a law of our physical nature, tho we act without any
consideration of that law. A great deal of the morality in the world
is of this kind.
It may do good, but has no reference to the law of rectitude. It is
impulsive, and, therefore, does not indicate a steadfast virtue,
or a deep religious life. For the very impulsiveness that leads to
the gratification of the sympathies, leads to the gratification
of the appetites, and thus we often find generous and benevolent
characteristics mixed with vicious conduct. Then, as I have said,
there is the morality of selfishness. In this instance, I may
perform many good actions from sheer calculation of material profit.
I may be benevolent, because it will increase my reputation for
philanthropy. I may be honest, because "honesty is the best policy."
But is this the highest, the religious sanction of morality? No;
the morality of the religious man is the morality of principle.
The motive in his case is not "I will," or "I had better," but "I
ought." He recognizes morality as a law, impersonal, overmastering
the dictates of mere self, and holding all impulses in subservience
to the highest good. The morality of impulse is uncertain. The
morality of policy is mean and selfish. The morality of religion is
loyal, disinterested, self-sacrificing. It acts from faith in God,
and with reference to God.
But another trait separates the religious from the merely formal
moralist. It consists in the fact that with him, "morality," as
we commonly employ the term, is not all. Piety has its place. His
affections not only flow earthward, but turn heavenward. He not
only loves his neighbor as himself, but he loves the Lord, his
God. He not only visits the widows and the fatherless in their
affliction, but he keeps himself unspotted from the world. With
him, toil is prayer, and contentment is thanksgiving, because he
infuses into them a spirit of devotion, which he has cultivated by
more solitary and special acts. With him it is a good thing to live
honestly, industriously, soberly; but all life is not outward, is
not in traffic and labor, and meat and drink. There is an inward
world, to which his eyes are often introverted--a world of spiritual
experience, of great realities, and everlasting sanctions--a
world behind the veil--a holy of holies in his soul, where rests
the Shekinah of God's more immediate presence; yea, where he meets
God face to face. And it is this that directs his public conduct.
The orderly and beautiful method of his life is not the huddled
chance-work of good impulses, is not the arithmetic of selfishness;
but it is a serene and steady plan of being projected from the
communion of the oratory, and the meditation of the closet.
Again, I say, let us not depreciate morality. Let us condemn that
ostentatious piety which lifts up holy hands to God, but never
stretches them out to help man; which anoints its head with the oil
of sanctity, but will not defile its robes with the blood of the
abused, or the contact of the guilty; which is loud in profession
and poor in performance; which makes long prayers, but devours
widow's houses. Let us condemn this, but remember that this is
not real religion, only its form; as often, the kind deed, the
honest method, is not true morality, only its form. Of both these
departments of action let it be said: that these we have done, and
not left the other undone. Let us recognize the perfect harmony,
nay, the identity of religion and morality, in that One who came
from the solitary conflict of the desert, to go about doing good,
and who descended, from the night prayer on the mountain, to walk
and calm the troubled waves of the sea.
But those who rest in a mere routine of kind and prudential deeds
need the deeper life and the inner perception which detects the
meaning and gives the sanction to those deeds. Such need the vital
germ of morality--the changed heart, the new birth.
And as I have spoken of a subordinate yet somewhat distinct class
who may be ranked under the general head of seekers after religion
in philosophy, let me here briefly allude to some with whom religion
is a matter of mere sentiment and good feeling. Such are easily
moved by the great doctrines of the New Testament. They are affected
by the sermon; they have gushes of devout emotion during the prayer.
But with them, religion is not a deep and steady pulse of divine
life. Prayer is not a protracted aspiration--is not a habit. They
feel well towards God, because they consider Him a good-natured,
complacent being; but they do not meditate upon the majesty of His
nature, upon His justice, and His holiness.
From the doctrine of immortality they draw consolation, but not
sanctity. They regard it as a good time coming, but it furnishes
them with no personal and stringent applications for the present.
They need a more solemn and penetrating vision; a profounder
experience in the soul. They need to be born again.
Then, again, there are those who may be called amateurs in religion.
That is they are curious about religious things. They like to
speculate about it, to argue upon its doctrines and to broach or
examine new theories. They go about from sect to sect, and from
church to church, tasting what is novel in the reasoning, or
pleasing in the manner of the preacher; in one place to-day to
hear an orator; in another to-morrow to hear a latter-day saint;
it is all the same thing to them. All they want with religion is
entertainment and excitement. They are Athenians, ever seeking some
new thing. They smack at a fresh heresy as if they were opening a
box of figs, and are as delighted with a controversy, as a boy with
a sham-fight. They have no fixt place in the Church universal. They
are liberalists, without any serious convictions, and cosmopolites
without any home affections. In fact, to them religion is a
sham-fight--a matter of spectacle and zest--not a personal interest,
or an inward life. They would seek Jesus by night, because they hope
to learn something wonderful or new, and would be started to hear
His solemn words tingling in their hearts: "Ye must be born again!"
Nay, my friends, would not these solemn words startle many of us?
It may be, we have never made any inquiry concerning religion--have
never even come to Jesus, as it were, by night. Such, with their
barks of being drifting down the stream of time, have never guessed
the meaning of their voyage, or reckoned their course; nay, perhaps
they live as tho religion were a fable, as tho earth were our
permanent abiding-place, and heaven a dream. If such there are, they
have not even listened to the Savior's words. But there are others
among us perhaps, who are interested in the subject of religion,
who are in some way or another engaged in it; but who are restless
seekers after it, rather than actual possessors of it; who are
resting upon insufficient substitutes for it. And I ask, would not
these words breaking forth from the lips of Jesus, startle us in our
ritualism, our philosophy, our outside morality, our sentimentalism,
or our mere curiosity? And do they not speak to us? Are they not as
true now as when they struck upon the shivering ear of Nicodemus? Do
they not make us feel as intensely our obligation and our religious
wants, as he might have felt there, with the wind flitting by him as
tho the Holy Spirit were touching him with its appeal, and with the
calm gaze of the Savior looking into his heart? Do they not demand
of us, resting here awhile from the cares and labors of the world,
something more than mere conformity, or intellectual belief, or
formal deeds? Do they not demand a new and better spirit, a personal
apprehension of the religious life, a breaking up and regeneration
of our moral nature, a change of heart?
STANLEY
IN MEMORIAM--THOMAS CARLYLE
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
ARTHUR PENRHYN STANLEY, the English scholar and divine, was born
1815 at Alderley, of which his father was rector. He was educated
under Dr. Arnold at Rugby and in 1834 began a brilliant career at
Oxford. Having been ordained priest in 1843 he was made Canon of
Canterbury in 1851 and Dean of Westminster in 1864. At this date
began his career as an ethical preacher. His pulpit became the means
of reconciling many to the English Church because of its broad and
sympathetic feeling of Christian brotherhood. All of his discourses
are marked by a refined literary culture and a catholicity of
spirit. Stanley's most famous sermons are those in which he
celebrates the life and work of many illustrious men who had passed
away during his lifetime. He died in 1881.
STANLEY
1815-1881
IN MEMORIAM--THOMAS CARLYLE
_The kingdom of heaven is likened unto a man which sowed good seed
in his field._--Matt. xiii., 24.
The gospel of this day starts with a comparison of the kingdom
of heaven to a sower. It is the same as that with which the more
celebrated parable begins, "A sower went forth to sow." They both
fix our minds on the manner in which God's kingdom--the kingdom of
truth, beauty and goodness--is carried on in the world. The kingdom
of all that is good is fostered, not so much by direct and immediate
plantation or grafting or building or formations of any kind, but
rather by the sowing of good seed, which, in time, shall grow up and
furnish a rich harvest.
It is so with regard to the truths of the Bible. They are sown
in the world; the good which grows up after them is never, in
outward form, like the truth which came from the actual source.
Institutions spring up. They may derive their vitality from the corn
and wheat which sink into the ground; but they cannot be the very
thing itself. There is not a single form, or a single doctrine of
Christendom, of which the outward shape is not different, in some
way, from the principle of life which gave it birth.
There is only one instance of a ready-made scholastic doctrine in
the whole Bible, and that has been long known to be spurious. It is
not the verse of the three witnesses, but the parable of the Good
Shepherd, the poetry of the Prodigal Son, the pathetic story of the
Crucifixion, that have been the true seeds of the Christian life. In
this way it is that the divine origin of these truths proves itself.
The bright and tender words can never grow old, because they are not
flowers cut and dried, but seeds and roots, which are capable of
bearing a thousand applications.
Again, this is the ground of our looking forward with a hope, which
nothing can extinguish, toward the transformation, the renewal of
the human life, for a moment perishing, to reappear, we trust, in
some future world, instinct with the capacities for good or evil
with which it was endowed, or which it has acquired in the life
that now is. The seminal form within the deeps of that little chaos
sleeps, which will, we trust, in the almighty providence of God,
restore that chaos of decayed and broken powers into conditions more
elevated than now we can dream of.
Again, characters appear in the world which have a vivifying and
regenerating effect, not so much for the sake of what they teach
us, as for the sake of showing us how to think and how to act.
What Socrates taught, concerning man and the universe, has long
since passed away; but what he taught of the method and process of
pursuing truth--the inquiry, the cross-examination, the sifting of
what we do know from what we do not know--this is the foundation
of the good seed of European philosophy for all time. What St.
Paul taught concerning circumcision and election or grace is among
the things hard to be understood, which the unlearned and the
unstable may wrest to their own destruction, or, having served their
generation, may be laid asleep; but what he taught of the mode and
manner of arriving at divine truth, when he showed how "the letter
killeth and the spirit maketh alive"; when he set forth how charity
is the bond of all perfectness; when he showed how all men are
acceptable to God by fulfilling, each in his vocation, whether Jew
or Gentile, whether slave or free, the commandments of God--he laid
the true foundation of Christian faith; he planted in the heart of
man the seed, the good seed, of Christian liberty and Christian
duty, to bear fruit again and again amidst the many relapses and
eclipses of Christendom. When Luther dinned into the ears of his
generation the formula of transubstantiation and of justification
by faith only, this was doomed to perish and "wax old as doth a
garment"; but his acts, his utterances of indignant conscience
and of far-sighted genius, became the seed of the Reformation,
the hope of the world. When John Wesley rang the changes of the
well-known formula of assurance, it was the word of the ordinary
preacher; but, in his whole career of fifty years of testifying
for holiness and preaching against vice, this was the seed of
more than Methodism--it was the seed of the revival of English
religious zeal. Such seeds, such principles, such infusions, not of
a mechanical system, but of a new light in the world, are not of
every-day occurrence--they are the work of a few, of a gifted few,
and, therefore, are so much the more to be observed when anyone,
who has had it in his power to scatter such seeds right and left,
passes away and leaves us to ask what we have gained, what we can
assimilate, of the peculiar nourishment which his life and teachings
may have left for our advantage. Few will doubt that such an one
was he who yesterday was taken from us. It may be that he will not
be laid, as might have been expected, among the poets and scholars
and sages, whose dust rests within this Abbey; it may be that he
was drawn by an irresistible longing toward the native hills of his
own Dumfriesshire, and that there, beside the bones of his kindred,
beside his father and his mother, and with the silent ministrations
of the Church of Scotland, to which he still clung amidst all the
vicissitudes of his long existence, will repose all that is earthly
of Thomas Carlyle. But he belonged to a wider sphere than Scotland;
for, tho by nationality a Scotchman, he yet was loved and honored
wherever the British language is spoken. Suffer me, then, to say a
few words on the good seed which he has sown in our hearts.