On August 20, 1890, died Wathen Mark Wilks Call, M. A.,—a spirit finely
touched to fine issues. The posthumous work before me revives the sense
of personal bereavement, but soothes it with the satisfaction of holding
another interview with the beloved scholar on themes that through many
years engaged our conversation. Here is a casket of golden thoughts cast
up from the deep where went down the white-winged ship freighted with
such treasures. The general world is unconscious that it is poorer;
its ports and marts had little welcome for the dainty wares of this
unfamiliar bark. Many an American thinker will through this specimen of
the sunken treasures realise the world’s loss when it is irreparable;
and some who used to hover around the silver sail now vanished, and come
ashore laden with its gifts, have wondered that this writer, valued by
Mill, George Eliot, and the scholarly English circle, should have courted
obscurity rather than fame. He was not indolent, though his published
volumes were few: “Lyra Hellenica” (1842), “Reverberations” (1849,
second edition 1876), “Golden Histories” (1871). Besides his poems, his
contributions in the reviews,—some, like “The Nero Saga” (_Theological
Review_, July, 1871), equal to volumes,—would make a substantial and
important collection. There is enough thought and learning in his poems
and anonymous articles, to have earned fame for an ambitious and pushing
author. Why then did the world get so much less than it ought to have
got from this fine and active brain, and why is he so little known?
Many years ago I heard from his own lips the story of his life, which
is partly told in the fifty pages that introduce this book, under the
title “A Chapter from my Autobiography.” It will there be seen that
even so late as thirty-six years ago the finest minds and hearts that
could not accept creed-dogmas might be almost mortally wounded. From
that time he lived and wrote as from a retreat. The actual case, as he
told it me, was that his sister, a widow, left him executor of her last
will and testament, and the guardian of her children. He was tenderly
attached to this sister and to her children. She knew his opinions and
his doubts. When he went into the court for confirmation of his trust he
was confronted by the postscript of a letter he had written to a supposed
friend intimating his “dissent from the creeds of the churches.” For this
mild and vague heresy he was prevented from acting as the guardian of his
sister’s children, and fulfilling a sacred trust.
At this time he was a clergyman in the Church of England, which to-day
contains many ministers more unorthodox than Mr. Call was when he
received this crushing legal blow. This public disgrace of a sensitive
scholar, the loss of position, the alienation of friends, added to the
grief of seeing his sister’s children carried to strangers, parted him
from the world. He seemed to have no place in it. Stunned, lacerated, he
had no heart to enter on any new profession. But from his retreat came
the poems, pathetic but hopeful, entitled “Reverberations,” some of which
are sung in the liberal chapels of England. Deified egotism and vengeance
had brought home to him all their heartlessness: all nature was overcast
with this chilling cloud.
Silently bearing his grief, he gave himself to the search for truth
in those matters which had been predetermined for him by a thousand
subtle influences and associations. Born in 1817, he had graduated
at Cambridge,—the chief poet of its Magazine,—had passed through his
Shelleyan phase of scepticism, and entered the church (1845) through one
of the many casuistical blind-ways provided in that old minster for those
who hesitate at the main portal. Eleven years were occupied in passing
from one to another theoretical cloister or tower of the venerated church
before he finally discovered that it had no place for him. Nor was there
any church which he could honestly enter. He must be the hermit of his
truth. But in that retreat, where the lonely scholar must eat his own
heart, the healing hand of a true divinity found him.
Love found him. He married (1857) a lady whose beauty was the expression
of her genius. Her father was Dr. Brabant, the friend of Strauss, and
founder of the _Westminster Review_. In early life she married C. C.
Hennell, author of “An Inquiry into the Origin of Christianity,”—a
work which made a deep impression on Theodore Parker, who made it the
subject of an article in the old _Dial_. Miss Brabant, versed in ancient
and modern languages, did excellent work on the _Westminster Review_,
assisted by her friend Marian Evans, afterwards known as “George Eliot.”
These two ladies, as I have heard, undertook together the translation
of Strauss’s “Leben Jesu,” and were more than half through it when Miss
Brabant married. By a contrivance of Mrs. Hennell the name of Marian
Evans alone, and to her regret, appeared on the title-page. “George
Eliot” thereby gained a reputation helpful to her, though somewhat
embarrassing, implying as it did a knowledge of Hebrew and Greek which
she did not possess.
Mr. Call’s marriage was most happy. The Calls were regarded by their
circle of kindred spirits as representing the true ideal union. They had
together shared the friendship of the finest intellects, and had moved
abreast in intellectual progress, for more than the life of a generation
when parted by death.
About seven years ago trouble for the first time entered this almost
sacred household. A formidable consumption of one lung set in,
threatening Mr. Call’s life. I have always believed that this was the
long latent bequest of pious cruelties suffered in earlier life. Six
years ago the case became hopeless, in its normal course, and the
physicians said that the only possibility of recovery lay in a rare
and difficult operation, imperilling the few months of life that might
remain. The patient and his devoted wife resolved to incur this risk.
A tube was inserted through the back; through it the pus was drained
from the ulcerated lung; and little by little the tube was withdrawn, by
infinitesimal degrees, as the healing process went on behind it. It was
a painful anxious process of many weeks. At this time, when he was kept
motionless, I marvelled at his cheerful spirit; though the slightest
miscarriage in the wearisome operation might prove fatal, the patient was
always serene. One of his physicians, by no means sure of the result,
approached him on the subject of religion, and the condition of his soul.
Soon after Mr. Call gave me an account of the conversation. In religious
matters the doctor had dabbled where Call had dived; it ended in the
physician’s being compelled to consider the condition of his own soul,
and why he should be holding the religion of primitive man along with a
science almost able to raise the dead.
The wonderful operation was perfectly successful. Love had healed the
young man’s broken heart; science had healed the mature man’s dying
frame. The real miracles that supplant fictitious ones, and fulfil
their fables, had been brought home to him. Five happy years were added
to his life, during which he wrote the important work to be hereafter
considered. On a summer evening last year he passed a pleasant evening
at home, ended with a game of cribbage with his wife. During the night
he died painlessly of heart disease; a _post mortem_ examination proved
the lungs quite sound. My friend’s body and mind and affections were so
combined in organic unity that his very ailments had for me symbolical
significance. The unsuspected failure of the heart, for instance, seems a
last sequel of the spiritual lesion given him by Dogma as a parting blow:
its counterpart is to me visible in the fact that after writing this work
he hardly had heart to publish it. The substance of it was completed in
1887; it was entirely finished in 1889; it lay in his library one year.
His wife wished him to publish it—so she told me—but he thought the world
would not be interested in his views. So deep had bigotry been able to
send this man into the vale of Humiliation; and what an intellect was
thus discouraged may be partly estimated by those who shall read this
book on “Final Causes” published by his widow.
In the last generation many young men, awakened by the song of Byron
and Shelley, started out on a new spiritual pilgrimage. Their path was
at first fringed with poetic flowers, and in the distance shone the city
called Beautiful. But the path at length became flinty, the city became
more dim with progress towards it, and many a pilgrim turned back. Those
who pressed on were unique men, so that they came to parting ways, and
each had to advance on his individual and lonely path, albeit they were
travelling in the same direction. The records of these pilgrimages,
wherever found, are chapters in the scriptures of their generation. There
is one thing common to them all,—the tenacity with which they have clung
to their old faith, and after it to their old church, until beaten off by
bigotry or by conscience. “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” It
was no mere cry, but a question reaching far into the ages, and stirring
innumerable crucified hearts that have found no voice. Men do not forsake
their God; their God forsakes them. They have invested some ancient name
with all the pearls of their heart; they have idealised him as wisdom,
justice, love, compassion; but no sooner do they think an honest thought,
or maintain justice and love against unjust and heartless dogmas, than
their Good Shepherd beats such tender lambs with his crook and sets the
wolves on them. Yet even then, so long as they can, they keep in the
fold, and lift their lacerated hands in prayer. They will even practice
some self-deception that they may continue the old formulas after the
truth has forsaken these.
Mr. Call’s youthful scepticism,—a spell wrought by Byron and
Shelley,—being chiefly the expression of others’ experiences, and with
but little root in his own, carried him no further than the study of
philosophy and theology. It was not deep enough to prevent his entering
on residence in the University of Cambridge with a view of becoming
a clergyman. The struggle being not yet in the arena of his own life
and heart, but a combat for his soul between the Humes and the Jeremy
Taylors, poetic sentiment easily carried the day. His nature clamored
for a realised ideal, and the Church captivated him. “The church, as the
embodiment of celestial truth, as the aggregate of noble and beautiful
spirits, dead or living, appeared a sublime conception.” When a youth
falls in love does he consider whether his beautiful lady’s bloom may
not be hectic, or hereditary cancer be hovering near the fair breast?
Our young scholar weds our Lady of the Litany amid the light of stained
windows, and the white-robed choristers. He presently finds that the
lovely creature insists on his preaching the doctrine that all who
do not yield to her charms are to be burnt at the stake eternally.
“Human philosophy had failed to explain to me the mystery of existence;
Christian philosophy explained it to be the perpetuation of sin and
misery, intensified by omnipotent intervention.” Recoiling from this the
young clergyman went through years of critical investigation; he mastered
the exegesis of the Germans and the French; and at length found himself
a simple believer in the religion of Humanity. He, a clergyman of the
Church of England!
In the fifty preliminary pages of this posthumous book, comprising “A
Chapter from my Autobiography,” we have a succinct and useful summary of
the crucial criticisms under which biblical authority and supernaturalism
have been relegated to professional casuistry. This we will not study
here—profoundly interesting as it is—but dwell for a little on the
situation in which the scholar found himself.
“While I had thus been working my way through darkness into light—the
sober light of sad reality—life had been bringing to all who belonged
to me, as well as to myself, varied experiences of pain and sorrow. For
their sake I had already done violence to my better nature. Was I now
to render the previous sacrifice nugatory? Was the black shadow of my
unbelief to enfold those who had already more than their share of the
burden of life to sustain? Sympathising friends had early encouraged me
to retain my position in the church. A beneficed clergyman, advanced
in years, whose studies had ended, like my own, in the abandonment of
dogmatic Christianity, had drawn up a statement of the motives which,
as he argued, justified him in the retention of his preferment. This
statement was forwarded to me. A celebrated and venerable German
professor had sent me a message deprecating the abandonment of a post
which, he thought, I might continue to occupy without dishonor to myself
and with profit to others. I had hitherto deferred to the judgment of
persons whom I regarded as superior to myself in knowledge of life and
in ability to determine questions of moral obligation; but the progress
of unbelief and enlarged experience decided me, at last, on the adoption
of an independent course of thought and action. Taking counsel of my own
heart, I resolved to terminate a conflict which had become intolerable.
Painful and singular complications preceded, accompanied, and followed my
retirement from the English Church.”
Here is the “Robert Elsmere” of real life. Since Mr. Call left the Church
of England, thirty-five years ago, it has become a largely rationalistic
institution. Legal prosecutions of clergymen for heresy have resulted
in proving that the evangelical and orthodox have no more right to the
Church, in Law, than the liberals. They were usurpers of authority not
guaranteed by the constitution, in which there is nothing requiring
a clergyman to believe in hell, or the devil, or miracles, or the
infallibility of the Bible. Many clergymen are now honestly preaching a
simple theistic and humanitarian religion, and when told they ought to
leave the Church need only reply, “If you think so you have a right to
prosecute me.”
The English charlatan who calls himself “Father Ignatius,” who could only
make himself ridiculous as a heresy-hunter abroad, seems to have found
the Episcopal Church in New York provincial enough to take him seriously.
He would never venture to suggest the prosecution of a Broad Churchman
at home. His ignorant tribe have too keen a recollection of their severe
falls in grappling with Bishop Colenso, and the authors of “Essays and
Reviews.” We have, however, to deal with America, where the sects, by
departure of some of their best brains, seem falling more and more under
control of their illiberal constituents, though the consecration of
Bishop Phillips Brooks show that reactionists will not have it all their
own way. The passage I have quoted above bears upon a moral problem
which has already become urgent among us, and in the progress of inquiry
must inevitably become of very serious importance to large numbers
of ministers and their families. I therefore introduce here a little
digression on this subject.
What is the moral duty of a young minister who finds himself occupying
the pulpit of a denomination in whose generally accepted doctrines he has
ceased to believe? The New York _Evening Post_ recently declared this
to be a plain moral question. If—thus it argues—a man has voluntarily
entered the ministry of a church, and afterwards forms opinions which,
if known, would have prevented his admission, he is morally bound to
resign. But the question is much more complex than that. In a majority
of cases the minister has not entered “voluntarily,”—within the genuine
moral scope of that term. His orthodox parents, abetted by their
preacher, have kept light from him, repressed his reason, imprisoned
him in Sunday schools and prayer-meetings; he has been accorded no free
choice; he has been led as a captive, before his intellect was capable
of judgment, artificially terrified about his soul, and the world’s
danger of damnation, and at length found himself in the pulpit. When
the victim finds himself disabused of these fictions, what is his duty?
In my belief it would be immoral for him to resign without having first
secured a public decision of his church on the issue. His paramount
obligations are to the community in which he lives. He is morally bound
to preach the truth as he sees it, openly, honestly, plainly. He cannot
utter the discredited creeds, prayers, or dogmas. But he has a right,—nay
he is bound,—to throw upon the church which has entrapped him the
responsibility of repudiating his principles and doctrines. He should say
to his church: “You are responsible for the unhappy situation in which I
find myself. By your zealous propaganda you frightened or persuaded my
parents, my friends, myself, into acceptance of dogmas I now find false.
The logical result of taking you seriously was to turn from all worldly
occupations, and devote my life to the work of saving mankind from a
terrible doom. Now, awakened from the nightmare superinduced by you, I
find myself past the opportunities of youth, the time for preparations
in other professions irrecoverably lost, and a family dependent on me.
The situation concerns not only you and me, but others we have involved.
For years I have been laboring with you to try and persuade other youths
into the same situation as my own. Something is due to them. I have
deceived them and must undeceive them. You say I must be true, but you
must be true also. I have innocently reached a position which enables
me to compel you to publish to the world exactly where you stand. I will
clearly define my convictions: if you cannot tolerate them in your pulpit
the youth will know the precise limits to their freedom they agree to
in entering your ministry. If you can tolerate them they will know your
liberalism. Therefore I remain here proclaiming my truth, and will not
help you to cover the truth up by a resignation relieving you of the duty
of proclaiming your position with equal clearness. You have got me here,
and if I go now you must turn me out. So shall the cause of truth be
advanced.”
While this may be affirmed, I think, as a general ethical principle,
it is equally true that each case must be judged by itself. The above
principle depends on the condition that the ministry has been honestly
entered from religious motives, there being no mental reservations
at that time. It will be observed that in the case of Mr. Call the
consideration entered that he had passed through a phase of Shelleyan
scepticism in early youth. This had to be weighed, and perhaps may
have had much to do with his determination to retire voluntarily from
the ministry. He never concealed his views, however, and it is well
known that great efforts are made by older preachers to beat down the
scepticism that often arises in the minds of young candidates for the
ministry. In such case these unwise advisers assume a large share of
responsibility for the event, whether enough to justify the subsequent
heretic in compelling a conflict must depend on the minister’s
conscience. Although, therefore, Mr. Call decided rightly, in accordance
with his moral consciousness, it were by no means fair to maintain, with
the author of “Robert Elsmere,” that ministers who find themselves more
liberal than the majority of preachers in their church should surrender
to such mere superiority of physical force without testing its legality
and laying on it responsibility for its exercise of power. Robert Elsmere
should, on moral principles, have remained in the church. By so remaining
Colenso, Dean Stanley, Charles Kingsley, Max Müller, Professor Jowett,
Matthew Arnold, and others, have revealed the fact that, in their church,
thought is not delivered up by law to the despotism of a majority.
The case, however, is somewhat different again where the new opinions
adopted by a minister amount to an abandonment of the fundamental
doctrines of his church. That may not exonerate him from demanding a
formal and public declaration of the church, but this being secured, it
must affect his relation to the general world. Should it be proved that
he may be legally tolerated, he must then consider whether it is his
legitimate means of influence, or whether he would be substituting for
his own expression the mask of an extinct faith. The ethical principle
above affirmed relates to the first practical step of the minister whose
beliefs have changed. The progressive and inquiring mind that continues
in a church where it is barely tolerated does so at great peril. Where
the swift foot agrees to march with the halt the pace must be that of the
halt. Sceptical minds occupying pulpits even of liberal denominations
are likely to discover, should such engagements end, that they have been
unconsciously arresting their own development in finding a conciliatory
_modus vivendi_ with the reactionary brethren. There is, indeed, a class
of fine intellects, like the great English Broad Churchmen already
named, whose comparatively advanced views are the result of larger
learning; they have discovered that two and two are four, and gathered
courage to deny that the amount is five. These constitute the right
leaven by which great organisations are raised to higher standards of
knowledge and veracity. But there are original and philosophic inquirers
whose particular power were only buried in such organisations, without
elevating them. These are due to the corps of pioneers in the direction
whither the organisations are advancing. Their task is original research.
These cannot wisely wear the uniform of any religious or political party.
Mr. Call was such an original mind, and after he had left the English
church his course was to the maturity represented in this ripe book on
“Final Causes.” But had he not passed eleven of his best years in the
church, out of his true habitat, we should have more fruit of this fine
flavor. It is therefore a voice from his experience that here reaches us,
as from his grave:
“Scepticism has been vigorously advancing in the nation—I
might say, in Europe. And not only has it extended its sphere,
but it includes within that sphere some of the loftiest and
profoundest intellects of the age—men renowned for vast and
exact erudition, for scientific research or critical acumen.
Philosophers, poets, historians, novelists, openly or silently
disavow Christianity. In palaces, in lordly mansions, in
college halls, in secluded homesteads, and here and there in
rectory or vicarage, scepticism, if it has not a bold and
fearless utterance, at least expresses itself in a guarded
whisper. It becomes doubly a duty, then, when notwithstanding
the general diffusion of avowed or latent unbelief, we trace
everywhere the presence of a conservatism that conceals and
hesitates and trembles at the doubts which it cannot suppress,
that individual dissentients should candidly disclose their
theological divergences. Christianity, indeed, which has had
its triumphs in the past, will long conserve a portion of
its power, and continue to furnish guidance not only for the
unreasoning multitude, but for thousands of excellent men and
women who cannot abandon the old religious ideal. But there is
no final arrest for the intellectual progress of mankind.”
We now turn to Mr. Call’s work on “Final Causes.” In an introductory
chapter of eight pages he compresses the history of the doctrine of
Design in nature from Anaxagoras, B. C. 500, to our own time, stating
its modifications, criticisms, denials. In the second chapter a brief
account is given of “Natural Theology,” whose modern form is found to
rest fundamentally on Newton’s generalisation, that a body at rest
continues at rest unless acted upon by some external force; and on the
geometrical order of planetary revolutions. Starting anew from this point
the human mind has discovered in the varied realms of nature apparent
evidences of a supersensuous Intelligence. Kant, however, is brought
to criticise Newton. “Kant notes with delight that the ‘harmonical
relations which excite the feelings in a more sublime manner than even
the contingent beauties of nature originate in the properties of space’;
and this inevitable congruity he refers ultimately, indeed, to Divine
Wisdom, but directly to a common dependence on a single sovereign
ground, to a unity of possibilities which it is no more difficult to
conceive as self-existent than it is to conceive an Intelligent Cause as
self-existent.” Matter is not, then, naturally inert, but an aggregate
of forms and forces, and nature a self-adjusting, self-evolving power.
In a chapter on “Order and General Adaptation” it is shown that nature
contains vast realms of Disorder; and alleged “special adaptations”
are shown too as often as otherwise for cruelty and agony. “With what
feelings,” asks G. H. Lewes, “can we contemplate the destruction of
such an organism as that of man for the sake of some microscopic animal
made to live upon it? With what feelings can we think of a human being
sacrificed to the growth of cancer-cells? What is the contrivance
and benevolence here?” Particular illustrations of design on which
teleologists have depended,—the eye, the bee’s cell, the bird’s wing—are
examined with critical and scientific care, and imperfections, gratuitous
and cruel if ascribed to omnipotent wisdom, found everywhere. “To assert
that the Creator of the world is infinitely powerful and infinitely wise
were to deny that he is infinitely good.”
To escape the dilemma just stated, some theists postulate a “limited
or constitutional deity.” Dr. Martineau’s idea of a “material datum
objective to God” is an effort to relieve the deity of responsibility
for the evils of nature, but Mr. Call declares the selection of “power”
as the limited attribute is arbitrary. We have, he thinks, no more
logical right to limit the deity’s power than his intelligence, or his
benevolence. (This is doubtful, however, and requires more consideration
than is here given it.) “The Evolutionary God” is next considered, and
disproved by the uselessness and unfitness of some structures in various
organisations, the often injurious character of others, (e.g. the
intestinal canal called the vermiform process,) while the moral sense is
still offended by the general predatory method of natural selection.
The validity of the Design argument disposed of, Mr. Call leaves to the
theist whatever evidences of a deity he may find in his ideals, emotions,
aspirations, intuitions. He points out that the Designer thus disproved
has never been able to satisfy the intellect or heart, the like being
true of the “Unknowable.” The sole sacred ideal left us is that of
humanity; not of the whole race but of the purer, nobler constituents of
it.
“As Humanity will be the sole Ideal Object to which dutiful
obligation and exalted sentiment will be referred, so the
world of Humanity will be the world revealed, not by divine
inspiration or metaphysical intuition, but by Positive Science
The shadowy abstractions of the speculative rationalist, the
fanciful conceptions of the theologian, will gradually pass
away. To the Semitic explanation of the world and of man will
succeed that of Laplace and Darwin. The great and majestic
truths of the stellar universe, the mysteries of life, of
light, of heat, of sound; the wonders of natural history,
the magic of geologic lore, the epic of man’s progression in
time; the exaltation, the solace, the delight which flow from
poetry, music, painting, sculpture; the interest in the arts,
industrial no less than æsthetic; in the fellowship of work
which ameliorates the common lot; in friendships of man and
woman, short of passionate love, and in the happier profounder
affection of wife and husband; in all home charities and
patriotic activities, and in the identification of personal
‘feelings with the entire life of the human race’;—all these
incidents of thought and varieties of emotion and action will
possess the intellect and fill the heart of future generations,
in a mode and degree which we can now only imperfectly realise,
and which, in the end, will leave men but little reason to
regret that the raptures of saint or prophet, or the splendours
of ancient theocracy, or the power and glory of the Mediæval
Church, or the imposing premise of Hellenic or of Teutonic
speculation, are as the dreams of a night that has passed
forever away.”
Have we, in this prophetic conclusion, the afterglow of a faith sunk
beneath the horizon? Why should we suppose that such beautiful things
will come to pass in the future? Such prophecies have hitherto been
inspired by belief in an overruling and omnipotent Love. But we are now
brought by science and philosophy to the misgiving of Solomon, “We are
born at all adventure.” Things, the sceptic may say, will grow better if
man compels them so, otherwise they can as easily grow worse.
It appears to me that in the old dogma of Jehovah’s curse on the world
and its redemption by Jesus there is buried, as in a sarcophagus, a
skeleton of human nature, and of moral history, resembling the man of
to-day, and the history we are making. There was an appeal of the human
heart from Jehovah to Jesus,—from the cursing to the saving deity. The
terrible arraignments of nature written by some of the greatest men since
Darwin’s discovery have not found any one to answer them. The severest
indictment of the world, perhaps, is that by the late Cardinal Newman,
who declares, “Either there is no Creator, or this living society of
men is in a true sense discarded from his presence.... _Since_ there
is a God, the human race is implicated in some terrible aboriginal
calamity.” From a deity who having created his own materials, built up
a creation liable to such calamity, mankind are once more appealing.
The ancient case was Jesus _vs._ Jehovah; the present case is Humanity
_vs._ the Creator of Nature. This rebellion of the moral sentiment and
of compassionateness is not intellectually conscious; it goes on, and
for a long time must go on, with ceremonial respect to the Final Cause
of all the evils humanity tries to heal; but it appears to me certain
that the heart and enthusiasm which once went out to a personal God
are again turning to a crucified humanity. The humanitarian movements
of our time have arisen simultaneously with the overwhelming evidences
of nature’s cruelty and imperfections revealed by Science. The earlier
deists appealed from biblical superstitions and ecclesiastical cruelties
to the God visible in the order and beauty of the universe. With the
existence of evil in external nature they never grappled. Bishop Butler’s
“Analogy” first stated the problem. He answered deistic objections to the
inhumanities of the Bible by pointing out the like in nature. Instead of
answering the deists he set them on a new departure which has ended in
results summed up in Mr. Call’s book. The omnipotent creator of nature
is following the biblical Jehovah into extinction. But the instincts and
aspirations of the human heart and mind remain the same; the religious
sentiment remains. The stream that is dammed up in one direction or
another does not lose any force thereby; it streams into other channels
if it can find such, or floods field and village if it finds none. It
will beat earthward as strongly as it once beat heavenward; it will, if
channels be not provided, carry away institutions as it has carried away
gods and goddesses.
It has become therefore of great importance to recognise if possible
the lines of least resistance along the mighty stream of religious
enthusiasm, and provide that its energies shall not be destructive but
conservative of human welfare. At present the most conservative force
in the earth is ignorance: were the suffering masses of the world to
discover, suddenly and universally, that the old creeds are fictions,
their evils not providential, their heavenly hopes vain, every nation
would be filled with convulsions. Fortunately the sun is not shot up into
the heavens. But enlightenment progresses rapidly, and we have begun
none too soon turning the rising flood of light and fire into the human
channels long obstructed by sanctified inhumanities.
Mr. Call’s little book, which I hope will find publication and wide
circulation in America, sums up succinctly and cogently the present
religious situation, and the steps by which it has been reached. It
remains for us all to sweep the new horizon with eye and telescope,
to compare our observations and to catch the first ray of the star
that shall point wise men to the new incarnation. To my own mind this
book is one of the many signs and promises that the divine will be
steadily merged into and identified with the human. Not with humanity
as an objective and historical entity, as Comte believed, but with the
distinctive characteristics of humanity, the supreme qualities of reason
and love: this will become the ideal of the reasoners and the lovers; it
will then become the creating Word, instructing all; it will finally be
made flesh and dwell among us, and all shall behold in it the glory of
the kingdom of Man.