FRIENDS: I wish I could deserve anything of the kind expression of
my friend, the President, and the kind good will which the audience
signifies, but it is not in my power to-day to meet the natural demands
of the occasion, and, quite against my design and my will, I shall have
to request the attention of the audience to a few written remarks,
instead of the more extensive statement which I had hoped to offer them.
I think we have disputed long enough. I think we might now relinquish
our theological controversies to communities more idle and ignorant than
we. I am glad that a more realistic church is coming to be the tendency
of society, and that we are likely one day to forget our obstinate
polemics in the ambition to excel each other in good works. I have no
wish to proselyte any reluctant mind, nor, I think, have I any curiosity
or impulse to intrude on those whose ways of thinking differ from mine.
But as my friend, your presiding officer, has asked me to take at least
some small part in this day’s conversation, I am ready to give, as often
before, the first simple foundation of my belief, that the Author of
Nature has not left himself without a witness in any sane mind: that the
moral sentiment speaks to every man the law after which the Universe
was made; that we find parity, identity of design, through Nature, and
benefit to be the uniform aim: that there is a force always at work to
make the best better and the worst good.[218] We have had not long since
presented us by Max Müller a valuable paragraph from St. Augustine, not
at all extraordinary in itself, but only as coming from that eminent
Father in the Church, and at that age, in which St. Augustine writes:
“That which is now called the Christian religion existed among the
ancients, and never did not exist from the planting of the human race
until Christ came in the flesh, at which time the true religion which
already existed began to be called Christianity.” I believe that not
only Christianity is as old as the Creation,—not only every sentiment
and precept of Christianity can be paralleled in other religious
writings,—but more, that a man of religious susceptibility, and one at
the same time conversant with many men,—say a much-travelled man,—can
find the same idea in numberless conversations. The religious find
religion wherever they associate. When I find in people narrow religion,
I find also in them narrow reading. Nothing really is so self-publishing,
so divulgatory, as thought. It cannot be confined or hid. It is easily
carried; it takes no room; the knowledge of Europe looks out into Persia
and India, and to the very Kaffirs. Every proverb, every fine text, every
pregnant jest, travels across the line; and you will find it at Cape
Town, or among the Tartars. We are all believers in natural religion;
we all agree that the health and integrity of man is self-respect,
self-subsistency, a regard to natural conscience. All education is to
accustom him to trust himself, discriminate between his higher and lower
thoughts, exert the timid faculties until they are robust, and thus
train him to self-help, until he ceases to be an underling, a tool, and
becomes a benefactor. I think wise men wish their religion to be all of
this kind, teaching the agent to go alone, not to hang on the world as a
pensioner, a permitted person, but an adult, self-searching soul, brave
to assist or resist a world: only humble and docile before the source of
the wisdom he has discovered within him.
As it is, every believer holds a different creed; that is, all the
churches are churches of one member. All our sects have refined the point
of difference between them. The point of difference that still remains
between churches, or between classes, is in the addition to the moral
code, that is, to natural religion, of somewhat positive and historical.
I think that to be, as Mr. Abbot has stated it in his form, the one
difference remaining. I object, of course, to the claim of miraculous
dispensation,—certainly not to the _doctrine_ of Christianity.[219]
This claim impairs, to my mind, the soundness of him who makes it, and
indisposes us to his communion. This comes the wrong way; it comes from
without, not within. This positive, historical, authoritative scheme is
not consistent with our experience or our expectations. It is something
not in Nature: it is contrary to that law of Nature which all wise men
recognize; namely, never to require a larger cause than is necessary
to the effect. George Fox, the Quaker, said that, though he read of
Christ and God, he knew them only from the like spirit in his own soul.
We want all the aids to our moral training. We cannot spare the vision
nor the virtue of the saints; but let it be by pure sympathy, not with
any personal or official claim. If you are childish, and exhibit your
saint as a worker of wonders, a thaumaturgist, I am repelled. That claim
takes his teachings out of logic and out of nature, and permits official
and arbitrary senses to be grafted on the teachings. It is the praise
of our New Testament that its teachings go to the honor and benefit of
humanity,—that no better lesson has been taught or incarnated. Let it
stand, beautiful and wholesome, with whatever is most like it in the
teaching and practice of men; but do not attempt to elevate it out of
humanity, by saying, ‘This was not a man,’ for then you confound it with
the fables of every popular religion, and my distrust of the story makes
me distrust the doctrine as soon as it differs from my own belief.
Whoever thinks a story gains by the prodigious, by adding something
out of nature, robs it more than he adds. It is no longer an example,
a model; no longer a heart-stirring hero, but an exhibition, a wonder,
an anomaly, removed out of the range of influence with thoughtful men.
I submit that in sound frame of mind, we read or remember the religious
sayings and oracles of other men, whether Jew or Indian, or Greek or
Persian, only for friendship, only for joy in the social identity which
they open to us, and that these words would have no weight with us if
we had not the same conviction already. I find something stingy in the
unwilling and disparaging admission of these foreign opinions—opinions
from all parts of the world—by our churchmen, as if only to enhance by
their dimness the superior light of Christianity. Meantime, observe, you
cannot bring me too good a word, too dazzling a hope, too penetrating
an insight from the Jews. I hail every one with delight, as showing the
riches of my brother, my fellow soul, who could thus think and thus
greatly feel. Zealots eagerly fasten their eyes on the differences
between their creed and yours, but the charm of the study is in finding
the agreements, the identities, in all the religions of men.[220]
I am glad to hear each sect complain that they do not now hold the
opinions they are charged with. The earth moves, and the mind opens. I
am glad to believe society contains a class of humble souls who enjoy
the luxury of a religion that does not degrade; who think it the highest
worship to expect of Heaven the most and the best; who do not wonder
that there was a Christ, but that there were not a thousand; who have
conceived an infinite hope for mankind; who believe that the history of
Jesus is the history of every man, written large.[221]