losing their hold on human belief, day by day; a restlessness and
dissatisfaction in the religious world marks that we are in a moment
of transition; as when the Roman Church broke into Protestant and
Catholic, or, earlier, when Paganism broke into Christians and Pagans.
The old forms rattle, and the new delay to appear; material and
industrial activity have materialized the age, and the mind, haughty
with its sciences, disdains the religious forms as childish.
In consequence of this revolution in opinion, it appears, for the
time, as the misfortune of this period that the cultivated mind has
not the happiness and dignity of the religious sentiment. We are
born too late for the old and too early for the new faith. I see in
those classes and those persons in whom I am accustomed to look for
tendency and progress, for what is most positive and most rich in human
nature, and who contain the activity of to-day and the assurance of
to-morrow,--I see in them character, but skepticism; a clear enough
perception of the inadequacy of the popular religious statement to the
wants of their heart and intellect, and explicit declarations of this
fact. They have insight and truthfulness; they will not mask their
convictions; they hate cant; but more than this I do not readily find.
The gracious motions of the soul,--piety, adoration,--I do not find.
Scorn of hypocrisy, pride of personal character, elegance of taste
and of manners and pursuit, a boundless ambition of the intellect,
willingness to sacrifice personal interests for the integrity of the
character,--all these they have; but that religious submission and
abandonment which give man a new element and being, and make him
sublime,--it is not in churches, it is not in houses. I see movement, I
hear aspirations, but I see not how the great God prepares to satisfy
the heart in the new order of things. No Church, no State emerges; and
when we have extricated ourselves from all the embarrassments of the
social problem, the oracle does not yet emit any light on the mode of
individual life. A thousand negatives it utters, clear and strong, on
all sides; but the sacred affirmative it hides in the deepest abyss.
We do not see that heroic resolutions will save men from those tides
which a most fatal moon heaps and levels in the moral, emotive
and intellectual nature. It is certain that many dark hours, many
imbecilities, periods of inactivity,--solstices when we make no
progress, but stand still,--will occur. In those hours, we can find
comfort in reverence of the highest power, and only in that. We never
do quite nothing, or never need. It looks as if there were much doubt,
much waiting, to be endured by the best. Perhaps there must be austere
elections and determinations before any clear vision.
No age and no person is destitute of the sentiment, but in
actual history its illustrious exhibitions are interrupted and
periodical,--the ages of belief, of heroic action, of intellectual
activity, of men cast in a higher mould.
But the sentiment that pervades a nation, the nation must react upon.
It is resisted and corrupted by that obstinate tendency to personify
and bring under the eyesight what should be the contemplation of
Reason alone. The Understanding will write out the vision in a
Confession of Faith. Art will embody this vanishing Spirit in temples,
pictures, sculptures and hymns. The senses instantly transfer the
reverence from the vanishing Spirit to this steadfast form. Ignorance
and passion alloy and degrade. In proportion to a man’s want of
goodness, it seems to him another and not himself; that is to say, the
Deity becomes more objective, until finally flat idolatry prevails.
Of course the virtuous sentiment appears arrayed against the nominal
religion, and the true men are hunted as unbelievers, and burned. Then
the good sense of the people wakes up so far as to take tacit part with
them, to cast off reverence for the Church; and there follows an age of
unbelief.
This analysis was inevitable and useful. But the sober eye finds
something ghastly in this empiricism. At first, delighted with the
triumph of the intellect, the surprise of the results and the sense
of power, we are like hunters on the scent and soldiers who rush to
battle: but when the game is run down, when the enemy lies cold in his
blood at our feet, we are alarmed at our solitude; we would gladly
recall the life that so offended us; the face seems no longer that of
an enemy.
I say the effect is withering; for, this examination resulting in the
constant detection of errors, the flattered understanding assumes to
judge all things, and to anticipate the same victories. In the activity
of the understanding, the sentiments sleep. The understanding presumes
in things above its sphere, and, because it has exposed errors in a
church, concludes that a church is an error; because it has found
absurdities to which the sentiment of veneration is attached, sneers at
veneration; so that analysis has run to seed in unbelief. There is no
faith left. We laugh and hiss, pleased with our power in making heaven
and earth a howling wilderness.
Unlovely, nay, frightful, is the solitude of the soul which is without
God in the world. To wander all day in the sunlight among the tribes
of animals, unrelated to anything better; to behold the horse, cow and
bird, and to foresee an equal and speedy end to him and them;--no, the
bird, as it hurried by with its bold and perfect flight, would disclaim
his sympathy and declare him an outcast. To see men pursuing in faith
their varied action, warm-hearted, providing for their children, loving
their friends, performing their promises,--what are they to this
chill, houseless, fatherless, aimless Cain, the man who hears only the
sound of his own footsteps in God’s resplendent creation? To him, it
is no creation; to him, these fair creatures are hapless spectres:
he knows not what to make of it. To him, heaven and earth have lost
their beauty. How gloomy is the day, and upon yonder shining pond what
melancholy light! I cannot keep the sun in heaven, if you take away the
purpose that animates him. The ball, indeed, is there, but his power
to cheer, to illuminate the heart as well as the atmosphere, is gone
forever. It is a lamp-wick for meanest uses. The words, _great_,
_venerable_, have lost their meaning; every thought loses all its
depth and has become mere surface.
But religion has an object. It does not grow thin or robust with the
health of the votary. The object of adoration remains forever unhurt
and identical. We are in transition, from the worship of the fathers
which enshrined the law in a private and personal history, to a worship
which recognizes the true eternity of the law, its presence to you
and me, its equal energy in what is called brute nature as in what is
called sacred. The next age will behold God in the ethical laws--as
mankind begins to see them in this age, self-equal, self-executing,
instantaneous and self-affirmed; needing no voucher, no prophet and no
miracle besides their own irresistibility,--and will regard natural
history, private fortunes and politics, not for themselves, as we have
done, but as illustrations of those laws, of that beatitude and love.
Nature is too thin a screen; the glory of the One breaks in everywhere.
Every movement of religious opinion is of profound importance to
politics and social life; and this of to-day has the best omens as
being of the most expansive humanity, since it seeks to find in every
nation and creed the imperishable doctrines. I find myself always
struck and stimulated by a good anecdote, any trait of heroism, of
faithful service. I do not find that the age or country makes the least
difference; no, nor the language the actors spoke, nor the religion
which they professed, whether Arab in the desert, or Frenchman in the
Academy. I see that sensible men and conscientious men all over the
world were of one religion,--the religion of well-doing and daring, men
of sturdy truth, men of integrity and feeling for others. My inference
is that there is a statement of religion possible which makes all
skepticism absurd.
The health and welfare of man consist in ascent from surfaces to
solids; from occupation with details to knowledge of the design; from
self-activity of talents, which lose their way by the lust of display,
to the controlling and reinforcing of talents by the emanation of
character. All that we call religion, all that saints and churches and
Bibles from the beginning of the world have aimed at, is to suppress
this impertinent surface-action, and animate man to central and entire
action. The human race are afflicted with a St. Vitus’ dance; their
fingers and toes, their members, their senses, their talents, are
superfluously active, while the torpid heart gives no oracle. When
that wakes, it will revolutionize the world. Let that speak, and all
these rebels will fly to their loyalty. Now every man defeats his own
action,--professes this but practises the reverse; with one hand rows,
and with the other backs water. A man acts not from one motive, but
from many shifting fears and short motives; it is as if he were ten or
twenty less men than himself, acting at discord with one another, so
that the result of most lives is zero. But when he shall act from one
motive, and all his faculties play true, it is clear mathematically,
is it not, that this will tell in the result as if twenty men had
co-operated,--will give new senses, new wisdom of its own kind; that
is, not more facts, nor new combinations, but divination, or direct
intuition of the state of men and things?
The lessons of the moral sentiment are, once for all, an emancipation
from that anxiety which takes the joy out of all life. It teaches
a great peace. It comes itself from the highest place. It is that,
which being in all sound natures, and strongest in the best and most
gifted men, we know to be implanted by the Creator of Men. It is a
commandment at every moment and in every condition of life to do the
duty of that moment and to abstain from doing the wrong. And it is so
near and inward and constitutional to each, that no commandment can
compare with it in authority. All wise men regard it as the voice of
the Creator himself.
I know there are those to whom the question of what shall be believed
is the more interesting because they are to proclaim and teach what
they believe.
All positive rules, ceremonial, ecclesiastical, distinctions of race or
of person, are perishable; only those distinctions hold which are in
the nature of things, not matters of positive ordinance. As the earth
we stand upon is not imperishable, but is chemically resolvable into
gases and nebulæ, so is the universe an infinite series of planes, each
of which is a false bottom; and, when we think our feet are planted now
at last on adamant, the slide is drawn out from under us.
We must reconcile ourselves to the new order of things. But is it
a calamity? The poet Wordsworth greeted even the steam-engine and
railroads; and when they came into his poetic Westmoreland, bisecting
every delightful valley, deforming every consecrated grove, yet manned
himself to say:--
“In spite of all that Beauty may disown
In your harsh features, Nature doth embrace
Her lawful offspring in man’s art, and Time,
Pleased with your triumphs o’er his brother Space,
Accepts from your bold hands the proffered crown
Of hope, and smiles on you with cheer sublime.”
And we can keep our religion, despite of the violent railroads of
generalization, whether French or German, that block and intersect our
old parish highways.
In matters of religion, men eagerly fasten their eyes on the
differences between their creed and yours, whilst the charm of the
study is in finding the agreements and identities in all the religions
of men. What is essential to the theologian is, that whilst he is
select in his opinions, severe in his search for truth, he shall be
broad in his sympathies,--not to allow himself to be excluded from any
church. He is to claim for his own whatever eloquence of St. Chrysostom
or St. Jerome or St. Bernard he has felt. So not less of Bishop Taylor
or George Herbert or Henry Scougal. He sees that what is most effective
in the writer is what is dear to his, the reader’s, mind.
Be not betrayed into undervaluing the churches which annoy you by
their bigoted claims. They too were real churches. They answered to
their times the same need as your rejection of them does to ours.
The Catholic Church has been immensely rich in men and influences.
Augustine, à Kempis, Fénelon, breathe the very spirit which now fires
you. So with Cudworth, More, Bunyan. I agree with them more than I
disagree. I agree with their heart and motive; my discontent is with
their limitations and surface and language. Their statement is grown
as fabulous as Dante’s Inferno. Their purpose is as real as Dante’s
sentiment and hatred of vice. Always put the best interpretation on
a tenet. Why not on Christianity, wholesome, sweet and poetic? It is
the record of a pure and holy soul, humble, absolutely disinterested,
a truth-speaker and bent on serving, teaching and uplifting men.
Christianity taught the capacity, the element, to love the All-perfect
without a stingy bargain for personal happiness. It taught that to love
him was happiness,--to love him in other’s virtues.
An era in human history is the life of Jesus; and the immense influence
for good leaves all the perversion and superstition almost harmless.
Mankind have been subdued to the acceptance of his doctrine, and cannot
spare the benefit of so pure a servant of truth and love.
Of course a hero so attractive to the hearts of millions drew the
hypocrite and the ambitious into his train, and they used his name to
falsify his history and undo his work. I fear that what is called
religion, but is perhaps pew-holding, not obeys but conceals the moral
sentiment. I put it to this simple test: Is a rich rogue made to
feel his roguery among divines or literary men? No? Then ’tis rogue
again under the cassock. What sort of respect can these preachers or
newspapers inspire by their weekly praises of texts and saints, when we
know that they would say just the same things if Beelzebub had written
the chapter, provided it stood where it does in the public opinion?
Anything but unbelief, anything but losing hold of the moral
intuitions, as betrayed in the clinging to a form of devotion or a
theological dogma; as if it was the liturgy, or the chapel, that was
sacred, and not justice and humility and the loving heart and serving
hand.
But besides the passion and interest which pervert, is the shallowness
which impoverishes. The opinions of men lose all worth to him who
perceives that they are accurately predictable from the ground of their
sect. Nothing is more rare, in any man, than an act of his own. The
clergy are as like as peas. I cannot tell them apart. It was said: They
have bronchitis because they read from their papers sermons with a near
voice, and then, looking at the congregation, they try to speak with
their far voice, and the shock is noxious. I think they do this, or
the converse of this, with their thought. They look into Plato, or into
the mind, and then try to make parish mince-meat of the amplitudes and
eternities, and the shock is noxious. It is the old story again: once
we had wooden chalices and golden priests, now we have golden chalices
and wooden priests.
The clergy are always in danger of becoming wards and pensioners of
the so-called producing classes. Their first duty is self-possession
founded on knowledge. The man of practice or worldly force requires
of the preacher a talent, a force, like his own; the same as his own,
but wholly applied to the priest’s things. He does not forgive an
application in the preacher to the merchant’s things. He wishes him to
be such a one as he himself should have been, had he been priest. He is
sincere and ardent in his vocation, and plunged in it. Let priest or
poet be as good in theirs.
The simple fact that the pulpit exists, that all over this country the
people are waiting to hear a sermon on Sunday, assures that opportunity
which is inestimable to young men, students of theology, for those
large liberties. The existence of the Sunday, and the pulpit waiting
for a weekly sermon, give him the very conditions, the ποὺ στὼ he
wants. That must be filled, and he is armed to fill it. Let him value
his talent as a door into Nature. Let him see his performances only
as limitations. Then, over all, let him value the sensibility that
receives, that loves, that dares, that affirms.
There are always plenty of young, ignorant people,--though some of them
are seven, and some of them seventy years old,--wanting peremptorily
instruction; but, in the usual averages of parishes, only one person
that is qualified to give it. It is only that person who concerns
me,--him only that I see. The others are very amiable and promising,
but they are only neuters in the hive,--every one a possible royal bee,
but not now significant. It does not signify what they say or think
to-day; ’tis the cry and the babble of the nursery, and their only
virtue, docility. Buckminster, Channing, Dr. Lowell, Edward Taylor,
Parker, Bushnell, Chapin,--it is they who have been necessary, and the
opinions of the floating crowd of no importance whatever.
I do not love sensation preaching,--the personalities for spite, the
hurrah for our side, the review of our appearances and what others say
of us! That you may read in the gazette. We come to church properly
for self-examination, for approach to principles to see how it stands
with _us_, with the deep and dear facts of right and love. At the
same time it is impossible to pay no regard to the day’s events, to
the public opinion of the times, to the stirring shouts of parties,
to the calamities and prosperities of our town and country; to war and
peace, new events, great personages, to good harvests, new resources,
to bankruptcies, famines and desolations. We are not stocks or stones,
we are not thinking machines, but allied to men around us, as really
though not quite so visibly as the Siamese brothers. And it were
inhuman to affect ignorance or indifference on Sundays to what makes
our blood beat and our countenance dejected Saturday or Monday. No,
these are fair tests to try our doctrines by, and see if they are worth
anything in life. The value of a principle is the number of things it
will explain; and there is no good theory of disease which does not at
once suggest a cure.
Man proposes, but God disposes. We shall not very long have any part
or lot in this earth, in whose affairs we so hotly mix, and where
we feel and speak so energetically of our country and our cause. It
is a comfort to reflect that the gigantic evils which seem to us so
mischievous and so incurable will at last end themselves and rid the
world of their presence, as all crime sooner or later must. But be
that event for us soon or late, we are not excused from playing our
short part in the best manner we can, no matter how insignificant
our aid may be. Our children will be here, if we are not; and their
children’s history will be colored by our action. But if we have no
children, or if the events in which we have taken our part shall not
see their solution until a distant future, there is yet a deeper fact;
that as much justice as we can see and practise is useful to men, and
imperative, whether we can see it to be useful or not.
The essential ground of a new book or a new sermon is a new spirit.
The author has a new thought, sees the sweep of a more comprehensive
tendency than others are aware of; falters never, but takes the
victorious tone. For power is not so much shown in talent as in tone.
And if I had to counsel a young preacher, I should say: When there is
any difference felt between the foot-board of the pulpit and the floor
of the parlor, you have not yet said that which you should say.
Inspiration will have advance, affirmation, the forward foot, the
ascending state; it will be an opener of doors; it will invent its own
methods: the new wine will make the bottles new. Spirit is motive and
ascending. Only let there be a deep observer, and he will make light
of new shop and new circumstance that afflict you; new shop, or old
cathedral, it is all one to him. He will find the circumstance not
altered, as deep a cloud of mystery on the cause, as dazzling a glory
on the invincible law. Given the insight, and he will find as many
beauties and heroes and strokes of genius close by him as Dante or
Shakspeare beheld. A vivid thought brings the power to paint it; and in
proportion to the depth of its source is the force of its projection.
We are happy and enriched; we go away invigorated, assisted each in our
own work, however different, and shall not forget to come again for new
impulses.
The supposed embarrassments to young clergymen exist only to feeble
wills. They need not consider them. The differences of opinion, the
strength of old sects or timorous literalists, since it is not armed
with prisons or fagots as in ruder times or countries, is not worth
considering except as furnishing a needed stimulus. That gray deacon
or respectable matron with Calvinistic antecedents, you can readily
see, could not have presented any obstacle to the march of St. Bernard
or of George Fox, of Luther or of Theodore Parker. And though I
observe the deafness to counsel among men, yet the power of sympathy
is always great; and affirmative discourse, presuming assent, will
often obtain it when argument would fail. Such, too, is the active
power of good temperament. Great sweetness of temper neutralizes such
vast amounts of acid! As for position, the position is always the
same,--insulting the timid, and not taken by storm, but flanked, I may
say, by the resolute, simply by minding their own affair. Speak the
affirmative; emphasize your choice by utter ignoring of all that you
reject; seeing that opinions are temporary, but convictions uniform
and eternal,--seeing that a sentiment never loses its pathos or its
persuasion, but is youthful after a thousand years.
The inevitable course of remark for us, when we meet each other for
meditation on life and duty, is not so much the enjoining of this or
that cure or burning out of our errors of practice, as simply the
celebration of the power and beneficence amid which and by which we
live, not critical, but affirmative.
All civil mankind have agreed in leaving one day for contemplation
against six for practice. I hope that day will keep its honor and its
use. A wise man advises that we should see to it that we read and speak
two or three reasonable words, every day, amid the crowd of affairs and
the noise of trifles. I should say boldly that we should astonish every
day by a beam out of eternity; retire a moment to the grand secret we
carry in our bosom, of inspiration from heaven. But certainly on this
seventh let us be the children of liberty, of reason, of hope; refresh
the sentiment; think as spirits think, who belong to the universe,
whilst our feet walk in the streets of a little town and our hands work
in a small knot of affairs. We shall find one result, I am sure,--a
certain originality and a certain haughty liberty proceeding out of our
retirement and self-communion, which streets can never give, infinitely
removed from all vaporing and bravado, and which yet is more than a
match for any physical resistance. It is true that which they say of
our New England œstrum, which will never let us stand or sit, but
drives us like mad through the world. The calmest and most protected
life cannot save us. We want some intercalated days, to bethink us and
to derive order to our life from the heart. That should be the use of
the Sabbath,--to check this headlong racing and put us in possession of
ourselves once more, for love or for shame.
The Sabbath changes its forms from age to age, but the substantial
benefit endures. We no longer recite the old creeds of Athanasius or
Arius, of Calvin or Hopkins. The forms are flexible, but the uses not
less real. The old heart remains as ever with its old human duties. The
old intellect still lives, to pierce the shows to the core. Truth is
simple, and will not be antique; is ever present, and insists on being
of this age and of this moment. Here is thought and love and truth and
duty, new as on the first day of Adam and of angels.