hands of hot Africans, of luxurious Byzantines, of fierce Gauls, its
creeds were tainted with their barbarism. In Holland, in England, in
Scotland, it felt the national narrowness. How unlike our habitual
turn of thought was that of the last century in this country! Our
ancestors spoke continually of angels and archangels with the same good
faith as they would have spoken of their own parents or their late
minister. Now the words pale, are rhetoric, and all credence is gone.
Our horizon is not far, say one generation, or thirty years: we all
see so much. The older see two generations, or sixty years. But what
has been running on through three horizons, or ninety years, looks
to all the world like a law of Nature, and ’tis an impiety to doubt.
Thus, ’tis incredible to us, if we look into the religious books of
our grandfathers, how they held themselves in such a pinfold. But why
not? As far as they could see, through two or three horizons, nothing
but ministers and ministers. Calvinism was one and the same thing in
Geneva, in Scotland, in Old and New England. If there was a wedding,
they had a sermon; if a funeral, then a sermon; if a war, or small-pox,
or a comet, or canker-worms, or a deacon died,--still a sermon: Nature
was a pulpit; the churchwarden or tithing-man was a petty persecutor;
the presbytery, a tyrant; and in many a house in country places the
poor children found seven sabbaths in a week. Fifty or a hundred years
ago, prayers were said, morning and evening, in all families; grace
was said at table; an exact observance of the Sunday was kept in the
houses of laymen as of clergymen. And one sees with some pain the
disuse of rites so charged with humanity and aspiration. But it by no
means follows, because those offices are much disused, that the men and
women are irreligious; certainly not that they have less integrity or
sentiment, but only, let us hope, that they see that they can omit the
form without loss of real ground; perhaps that they find some violence,
some cramping of their freedom of thought, in the constant recurrence
of the form.
So of the changed position and manners of the clergy. They have
dropped, with the sacerdotal garb and manners of the last century, many
doctrines and practices once esteemed indispensable to their order.
But the distinctions of the true clergyman are not less decisive. Men
ask now, “Is he serious? Is he a sincere man, who lives as he teaches?
Is he a benefactor?” So far the religion is now where it should be.
Persons are discriminated as honest, as veracious, as illuminated, as
helpful, as having public and universal regards, or otherwise;--are
discriminated according to their aims, and not by these ritualities.
The changes are inevitable; the new age cannot see with the eyes of
the last. But the change is in what is superficial; the principles are
immortal, and the rally on the principle must arrive as people become
intellectual. I consider theology to be the rhetoric of morals. The
mind of this age has fallen away from theology to morals. I conceive
it an advance. I suspect, that, when the theology was most florid and
dogmatic, it was the barbarism of the people, and that, in that very
time, the best men also fell away from theology, and rested in morals.
I think that all the dogmas rest on morals, and that it is only a
question of youth or maturity, of more or less fancy in the recipient;
that the stern determination to do justly, to speak the truth, to
be chaste and humble, was substantially the same, whether under a
self-respect, or under a vow made on the knees at the shrine of Madonna.
When once Selden had said that the priests seemed to him to be
baptizing their own fingers, the rite of baptism was getting late in
the world. Or when once it is perceived that the English missionaries
in India put obstacles in the way of schools, (as is alleged,)--do not
wish to enlighten but to Christianize the Hindoos,--it is seen at once
how wide of Christ is English Christianity.
Mankind at large always resemble frivolous children: they are impatient
of thought, and wish to be amused. Truth is too simple for us; we do
not like those who unmask our illusions. Fontenelle said: “If the
Deity should lay bare to the eyes of men the secret system of Nature,
the causes by which all the astronomic results are effected, and they
finding no magic, no mystic numbers, no fatalities, but the greatest
simplicity, I am persuaded they would not be able to suppress a feeling
of mortification, and would exclaim, with disappointment, ‘Is that
all?’” And so we paint over the bareness of ethics with the quaint
grotesques of theology.
We boast the triumph of Christianity over Paganism, meaning the victory
of the spirit over the senses; but Paganism hides itself in the uniform
of the Church. Paganism has only taken the oath of allegiance, taken
the cross, but is Paganism still, outvotes the true men by millions
of majority, carries the bag, spends the treasure, writes the tracts,
elects the minister, and persecutes the true believer.
There is a certain secular progress of opinion, which, in civil
countries, reaches everybody. One service which this age has rendered
is, to make the life and wisdom of every past man accessible and
available to all. Socrates and Marcus Aurelius are allowed to be
saints; Mahomet is no longer accursed; Voltaire is no longer a
scarecrow; Spinoza has come to be revered. “The time will come,”
says Varnhagen von Ense, “when we shall treat the jokes and sallies
against the myths and church-rituals of Christianity--say the sarcasms
of Voltaire, Frederic the Great, and D’Alembert--good-naturedly and
without offence: since, at bottom, those men mean honestly, their
polemics proceed out of a religious striving, and what Christ meant
and willed is in essence more with them than with their opponents, who
only wear and misrepresent the _name_ of Christ.... Voltaire was
an apostle of Christian ideas; only the names were hostile to him, and
he never knew it otherwise. He was like the son of the vine-dresser in
the Gospel, who said No, and went; the other said Yea, and went not.
These men preached the true God,--Him whom men serve by justice and
uprightness; but they called themselves atheists.”
When the highest conceptions, the lessons of religion, are imported,
the nation is not culminating, has not genius, but is servile. A true
nation loves its vernacular tongue. A completed nation will not import
its religion. Duty grows everywhere, like children, like grass; and we
need not go to Europe or to Asia to learn it. I am not sure that the
English religion is not all quoted. Even the Jeremy Taylors, Fullers,
George Herberts, steeped, all of them, in Church traditions, are only
using their fine fancy to emblazon their memory. ’Tis Judæa, not
England, which is the ground. So with the mordant Calvinism of Scotland
and America. But this quoting distances and disables them: since with
every repeater something of creative force is lost, as we feel when we
go back to each original moralist. Pythagoras, Socrates, the Stoics,
the Hindoo, Behmen, George Fox,--these speak originally; and how many
sentences and books we owe to unknown authors,--to writers who were not
careful to set down name or date or titles or cities or postmarks in
these illuminations!
We, in our turn, want power to drive the ponderous State. The
constitution and law in America must be written on ethical principles,
so that the entire power of the spiritual world can be enlisted to
hold the loyalty of the citizen, and to repel every enemy as by force
of Nature. The laws of old empires stood on the religious convictions.
Now that their religions are outgrown, the empires lack strength.
Romanism in Europe does not represent the real opinion of enlightened
men. The Lutheran Church does not represent in Germany the opinions of
the universities. In England, the gentlemen, the journals, and now, at
last, churchmen and bishops, have fallen away from the Anglican Church.
And in America, where are no legal ties to churches, the looseness
appears dangerous.
Our religion has got on as far as Unitarianism. But all the forms grow
pale. The walls of the temple are wasted and thin, and, at last, only
a film of whitewash, because the mind of our culture has already left
our liturgies behind. “Every age,” says Varnhagen, “has another sieve
for the religious tradition, and will sift it out again. Something is
continually lost by this treatment, which posterity cannot recover.”
But it is a capital truth that Nature, moral as well as material,
is always equal to herself. Ideas always generate enthusiasm. The
creed, the legend, forms of worship, swiftly decay. Morals is the
incorruptible essence, very heedless in its richness of any past
teacher or witness, heedless of their lives and fortunes. It does not
ask whether you are wrong or right in your anecdotes of them; but it is
all in all how you stand to your own tribunal.
The lines of the religious sects are very shifting; their platforms
unstable; the whole science of theology of great uncertainty, and
resting very much on the opinions of who may chance to be the leading
doctors of Oxford or Edinburgh, of Princeton or Cambridge, to-day. No
man can tell what religious revolutions await us in the next years;
and the education in the divinity colleges may well hesitate and vary.
But the science of ethics has no mutation; and whoever feels any love
or skill for ethical studies may safely lay out all his strength and
genius in working in that mine. The pulpit may shake, but this platform
will not. All the victories of religion belong to the moral sentiment.
Some poor soul beheld the Law blazing through such impediments as he
had, and yielded himself to humility and joy. What was gained by being
told that it was justification by faith?
The Church, in its ardor for beloved persons, clings to the miraculous,
in the vulgar sense, which has even an immoral tendency, as one sees
in Greek, Indian and Catholic legends, which are used to gloze every
crime. The soul, penetrated with the beatitude which pours into it
on all sides, asks no interpositions, no new laws,--the old are good
enough for it,--finds in every cart-path of labor ways to heaven, and
the humblest lot exalted. Men will learn to put back the emphasis
peremptorily on pure morals, always the same, not subject to doubtful
interpretation, with no sale of indulgences no massacre of heretics,
no female slaves, no disfranchisement of woman, no stigma on race; to
make morals the absolute test, and so uncover and drive out the false
religions. There is no vice that has not skulked behind them. It is
only yesterday that our American churches, so long silent on Slavery,
and notoriously hostile to the Abolitionist, wheeled into line for
Emancipation.
I am far from accepting the opinion that the revelations of the moral
sentiment are insufficient, as if it furnished a rule only, and not
the spirit by which the rule is animated. For I include in these, of
course, the history of Jesus, as well as those of every divine soul
which in any place or time delivered any grand lesson to humanity;
and I find in the eminent experiences in all times a substantial
agreement. The sentiment itself teaches unity of source, and disowns
every superiority other than of deeper truth. Jesus has immense claims
on the gratitude of mankind, and knew how to guard the integrity of his
brother’s soul from himself also; but, in his disciples, admiration of
him runs away with their reverence for the human soul, and they hamper
us with limitations of person and text. Every exaggeration of these is
a violation of the soul’s right, and inclines the manly reader to lay
down the New Testament, to take up the Pagan philosophers. It is not
that the Upanishads or the Maxims of Antoninus are better, but that
they do not invade his freedom; because they are only suggestions,
whilst the other adds the inadmissible claim of positive authority,--of
an external command, where command cannot be. This is the secret of the
mischievous result that, in every period of intellectual expansion,
the Church ceases to draw into its clergy those who best belong there,
the largest and freest minds, and that in its most liberal forms, when
such minds enter it, they are coldly received, and find themselves out
of place. This charm in the Pagan moralists, of suggestion, the charm
of poetry, of mere truth, (easily disengaged from their historical
accidents which nobody wishes to force on us,) the New Testament loses
by its connection with a church. Mankind cannot long suffer this loss,
and the office of this age is to put all these writings on the eternal
footing of equality of origin in the instincts of the human mind. It is
certain that each inspired master will gain instantly by the separation
from the idolatry of ages.
To their great honor, the simple and free minds among our clergy
have not resisted the voice of Nature and the advanced perceptions
of the mind; and every church divides itself into a liberal and
expectant class, on one side, and an unwilling and conservative class
on the other. As it stands with us now, a few clergymen, with a more
theological cast of mind, retain the traditions, but they carry
them quietly. In general discourse, they are never obtruded. If the
clergyman should travel in France, in England, in Italy, he might leave
them locked up in the same closet with his “occasional sermons” at
home, and, if he did not return, would never think to send for them.
The orthodox clergymen hold a little firmer to theirs, as Calvinism has
a more tenacious vitality; but that is doomed also, and will only die
last; for Calvinism rushes to be Unitarianism, as Unitarianism rushes
to be pure Theism.
But the inspirations are never withdrawn. In the worst times, men
of organic virtue are born,--men and women of native integrity, and
indifferently in high and low conditions. There will always be a class
of imaginative youths, whom poetry, whom the love of beauty, lead to
the adoration of the moral sentiment, and these will provide it with
new historic forms and songs. Religion is as inexpugnable as the use
of lamps, or of wells, or of chimneys. We must have days and temples
and teachers. The Sunday is the core of our civilization, dedicated
to thought and reverence. It invites to the noblest solitude and the
noblest society, to whatever means and aids of spiritual refreshment.
Men may well come together to kindle each other to virtuous living.
Confucius said, “If in the morning I hear of the right way, and in the
evening die, I can be happy.”
The churches already indicate the new spirit in adding to the perennial
office of teaching, beneficent activities,--as in creating hospitals,
ragged schools, offices of employment for the poor, appointing almoners
to the helpless, guardians of foundlings and orphans. The power that in
other times inspired crusades, or the colonization of New England, or
the modern revivals, flies to the help of the deaf-mute and the blind,
to the education of the sailor and the vagabond boy, to the reform
of convicts and harlots,--as the war created the Hilton Head and
Charleston missions, the Sanitary Commission, the nurses and teachers
at Washington.
In the present tendency of our society, in the new importance of the
individual, when thrones are crumbling and presidents and governors are
forced every moment to remember their constituencies; when counties
and towns are resisting centralization, and the individual voter his
party,--society is threatened with actual granulation, religious as
well as political. How many people are there in Boston? Some two
hundred thousand. Well, then so many sects. Of course each poor soul
loses all his old stays; no bishop watches him, no confessor reports
that he has neglected the confessional, no class-leader admonishes him
of absences, no fagot, no penance, no fine, no rebuke. Is not this
wrong? is not this dangerous? ’Tis not wrong, but the law of growth.
It is not dangerous, any more than the mother’s withdrawing her hands
from the tottering babe, at his first walk across the nursery-floor:
the child fears and cries, but achieves the feat, instantly tries it
again, and never wishes to be assisted more. And this infant soul must
learn to walk alone. At first he is forlorn, homeless; but this rude
stripping him of all support drives him inward, and he finds himself
unhurt; he finds himself face to face with the majestic Presence,
reads the original of the Ten Commandments, the original of Gospels and
Epistles; nay, his narrow chapel expands to the blue cathedral of the
sky, where he
“Looks in and sees each blissful deity,
Where he before the thunderous throne doth lie.”
To nations or to individuals the progress of opinion is not a loss of
moral restraint, but simply a change from coarser to finer checks. No
evil can come from reform which a deeper thought will not correct. If
there is any tendency in national expansion to form character, religion
will not be a loser. There is a fear that pure truth, pure morals, will
not make a religion for the affections. Whenever the sublimities of
character shall be incarnated in a man, we may rely that awe and love
and insatiable curiosity will follow his steps. Character is the habit
of action from the permanent vision of truth. It carries a superiority
to all the accidents of life. It compels right relation to every other
man,--domesticates itself with strangers and enemies. “But I, father,”
says the wise Prahlada, in the Vishnu Purana, “know neither friends nor
foes, for I behold Kesava in all beings as in my own soul.” It confers
perpetual insight. It sees that a man’s friends and his foes are of his
own household, of his own person. What would it avail me, if I could
destroy my enemies? There would be as many to-morrow. That which I hate
and fear is really in myself, and no knife is long enough to reach to
its heart. Confucius said one day to Ke Kang: “Sir, in carrying on your
government, why should you use killing at all? Let your evinced desires
be for what is good, and the people will be good. The grass must bend,
when the wind blows across it.” Ke Kang, distressed about the number of
thieves in the state, inquired of Confucius how to do away with them.
Confucius said, “If you, sir, were not covetous, although you should
reward them to do it, they would not steal.”
Its methods are subtle, it works without means. It indulges no enmity
against any, knowing, with Prahlada that “the suppression of malignant
feeling is itself a reward.” The more reason, the less government. In
a sensible family, nobody ever hears the words “shall” and “sha’n’t;”
nobody commands, and nobody obeys, but all conspire and joyfully
co-operate. Take off the roofs of hundreds of happy houses, and you
shall see this order without ruler, and the like in every intelligent
and moral society. Command is exceptional, and marks some break in
the link of reason; as the electricity goes round the world without
a spark or a sound, until there is a break in the wire or the water
chain. Swedenborg said, that, “in the spiritual world, when one wishes
to rule, or despises others, he is thrust out of doors.” Goethe, in
discussing the characters in “Wilhelm Meister,” maintained his belief
that “pure loveliness and right good-will are the highest manly
prerogatives, before which all energetic heroism, with its lustre and
renown, must recede.” In perfect accord with this, Henry James affirms,
that “to give the feminine element in life its hard-earned but eternal
supremacy over the masculine has been the secret inspiration of all
past history.”
There is no end to the sufficiency of character. It can afford to
wait; it can do without what is called success; it cannot but succeed.
To a well-principled man existence is victory. He defends himself
against failure in his main design by making every inch of the road
to it pleasant. There is no trifle, and no obscurity to him: he feels
the immensity of the chain whose last link he holds in his hand, and
is led by it. Having nothing, this spirit hath all. It asks, with
Marcus Aurelius, “What matter by whom the good is done?” It extols
humility,--by every self-abasement lifted higher in the scale of being.
It makes no stipulations for earthly felicity,--does not ask, in the
absoluteness of its trust, even for the assurance of continued life.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 6: Reprinted from the _North American Review_ of April,
1866.]
EDUCATION.
WITH the key of the secret he marches faster
From strength to strength, and for night brings day,
While classes or tribes too weak to master
The flowing conditions of life, give way.
EDUCATION.
A NEW degree of intellectual power seems cheap at any price. The use
of the world is that man may learn its laws. And the human race have
wisely signified their sense of this, by calling wealth, means,--Man
being the end. Language is always wise.
Therefore I praise New England because it is the country in the world
where is the freest expenditure for education. We have already taken,
at the planting of the Colonies, (for aught I know for the first time
in the world,) the initial step, which for its importance might have
been resisted as the most radical of revolutions, thus deciding at the
start the destiny of this country,--this, namely, that the poor man,
whom the law does not allow to take an ear of corn when starving, nor
a pair of shoes for his freezing feet, is allowed to put his hand into
the pocket of the rich, and say, You shall educate me, not as you will,
but as I will: not alone in the elements, but, by further provision,
in the languages, in sciences, in the useful and in elegant arts. The
child shall be taken up by the State, and taught, at the public cost,
the rudiments of knowledge, and, at last, the ripest results of art and
science.
Humanly speaking, the school, the college, society, make the difference
between men. All the fairy tales of Aladdin or the invisible Gyges
or the talisman that opens kings’ palaces or the enchanted halls
underground or in the sea, are only fictions to indicate the one
miracle of intellectual enlargement. When a man stupid becomes a man
inspired, when one and the same man passes out of the torpid into the
perceiving state, leaves the din of trifles, the stupor of the senses,
to enter into the quasi-omniscience of high thought,--up and down,
around, all limits disappear. No horizon shuts down. He sees things in
their causes, all facts in their connection.
One of the problems of history is the beginning of civilization. The
animals that accompany and serve man make no progress as races. Those
called domestic are capable of learning of man a few tricks of utility
or amusement, but they cannot communicate the skill to their race. Each
individual must be taught anew. The trained dog cannot train another
dog. And Man himself in many races retains almost the unteachableness
of the beast. For a thousand years the islands and forests of a great
part of the world have been filled with savages who made no steps of
advance in art or skill beyond the necessity of being fed and warmed.
Certain nations with a better brain and usually in more temperate
climates, have made such progress as to compare with these as these
compare with the bear and the wolf.
Victory over things is the office of man. Of course, until it is
accomplished, it is the war and insult of things over him. His
continual tendency, his great danger, is to overlook the fact that the
world is only his teacher, and the nature of sun and moon, plant and
animal only means of arousing his interior activity. Enamored of their
beauty, comforted by their convenience, he seeks them as ends, and fast
loses sight of the fact that they have worse than no values, that they
become noxious, when he becomes their slave.