of God is "one and the same, and perfect" in all "when the proper
conditions" are complied with, yet practically, if, in the majority of
these proper "conditions are not observed"; (Discourses, p. 19) "the
conception, which men universally form of God is always imperfect,
sometimes self-contradictory and impossible"; "the primitive
simplicity and beauty" of the "idea" are lost. And thus it is, he
tells us, that, owing to this awkward "conceptions" the vast majority
of the human race have been, and are, and for ages will be, sunk in
the grossest Fetichism,--Polytheism,--and every form of absurd and
misshapen Monotheism;--the horrors of all which he proceeds faithfully,
but not too faithfully, to describe, and sometimes, when he is in the
mood, to soften and extenuate; in order that he may find that the
"grim Calmuck," and even the savage, "whose hands are smeared over
with the blood of human sacrifices," are yet in possession of the
"absolute Idea" and the "absolute religion."
And what must we infer from Mr. Newman? The unanimity anticipated
would, doubtless, be obtained, only that, unfortunately, there are
various principles of man's nature which traverse the legitimate action
and impede the due development of the "spiritual faculty"; and so
man is apt to wander into a variety of those "degraded types" of
religious development, which the dark panorama of this world's
religions has ever presented to us, and presents still. "Awe,"
"wonder," "admiration," "sense of order," "sense of design," may
all mislead the unhappy "spiritual faculty" into quagmires; and, in
point of fact, have wheedled and corrupted it ten thousand times
more frequently than it has hallowed them. This all history, past and
present, shows.
It is certainly unfortunate, and as mysterious, that those unlucky
"conceptions" of God should have the best of it,--or rather, that the
"idea" of God should have the worst of it; nor less so that Awe,
Reverence, and so forth, should thus put the "spiritual faculty" so
hopelessly hors de combat.
Nevertheless, two questions naturally suggest themselves. Since the
destructive "conceptions" have almost everywhere impaired the "Idea,"
and the "degraded types" seduced the "spiritual faculty,"--1st. What
proof have we that man has an original and universal fountain of
spiritual illumination in himself? and 2dly. If he have, but under
such circumstances, is its utility so unquestionable that no space is
left for the offices of an external revelation?
First. What is the evidence of the uniform existence in man of any
such definite faculty?
When we say that any principle or faculty is common to the whole
species, do we not make the proof of this depend upon the uniformity
of the phenomena which exhibit it? When we say, for example, that
hunger and thirst are universal appetites, is it not because we find
them universal? or if we say that the senses of sight and hearing are
characteristic of the race, do we not contend that these are so,
because we find them uniform in such an immense variety of instances,
that the exceptions are not worth reckoning? If men sometimes saw
black where others saw white, some objects rectilinear which others
saw curved, objects small which others saw large,--nay, the very same
men at different times seeing the same objects differently colored,
and of varying forms and attitudes, and every second man almost
stone-blind into the bargain,--I rather think that, instead of saying
men were endowed with one and the same power of vision, we should say
that our nature exhibited only an imperfect and rudimentary tendency
towards so desirable a faculty; but that a clear, uniform, faculty of
vision there certainly was not. As I gaze upon the spectacle of the
infinite diversities of religion, which variegate, but, alas! do not
beautify the what is there to remind me of every uniformity of which
I do see the indelible traces in every faculty really characteristic
of our nature; as, for example, our senses and our appetites? Powerfully
does Hume urge this argument in his--"Natural History of Religions."
(Introduction)
I have my doubts--admire the modesty of a sceptic--whether the entire
phenomena of religion do not favor the conclusion, that man, in this
respect, only the traces of an imperfect, truncated creature; that,
he is in the predicament of the half-created lion so graphically
described by Milton:--
"Now half appeared
The tawny lion, pawings to get free
His hinder parts";
only, unfortunately, man's "hinder parts"--his lower nature--have
come up first, and appear, unhappily, prominent; while his nobler
"moral and spiritual faculties" still seem stuck in the dust!
There is, indeed, another hypothesis, which squares, perhaps, equally
well with the phenomena,--I mean that of the Bible:--that man is not
in his original state; that the religions constitution of his nature,
in some way or other, has received a shock. But either this, or the
supposition that man has been insufficiently equipped for the uniform
elimination of religious truth, is, I think, alone in harmony with
the facts; and to those facts, patent on the page of the whole world's
history, I appeal for proof that man has not on these highest subjects,
the certitude of any internal revelation, marked by the remotest
analogy to those other undoubted principles and faculties which exhibit
themselves with undeniable uniformity.
It will perhaps be said, that the spiritual phenomena are not so
uniform as those of sense,--as Mr. Parker and Mr. Newman both
abundantly admit,--but that there is an approximate uniformity. And
you must seek it, says Mr. Parker, in the "Absolute Religion"
which animates every form of religion, and is equally found in all.
I know the chatters about this incessantly; but when I attempt thus
to "hunt the one in the many," as Plato would call it.--to seek the
elusive unity in the infinite multiform,--to discover what it is
which equally embalms all forms, from the Christianity of Paul to the
religion of the "grim Calmuck," I acknowledge myself as much at
loss as Martinus in endeavoring to catch the abstraction of a
Lord Mayor; Mr. Parker, on the other hand, is like Crambe, "Who,
to show his acuteness, swore that he could form an abstraction
of a Lord Mayor, not only without his horse, gown, and gold chain,
but even without stature, feature, color, hands, head, feet, or any
body, which he supposed was the abstract of a Lord Mayor." Or if
it be vain to attempt to abstract this Absolute Religion from all
religions, as Mr. Parker indeed admits,--though it is truly in
them,--and I take his definition from his "direct consciousness,"
--which direct consciousness we can see has been directly affected
by his abjured Bible,--namely, "that it is voluntary obedience to
will of God, outward and inward,"--why, what on earth does this
vague generality do for us? What of God? Is he or it one or many?
of infinite attributes or finite? of goodness and mercy equal to
his power, or not? What is his will? How is he to be worshipped?
Have we offended him? Is he placable or not? Is he to be approached
only through a mediator of some kind, as nearly all mankind have
believe but which Mr. Parker denies,--a queer proof, by the way,
of the clearness of the internal oracle, if he be right,--or is he
to be approached, as Mr. Parker believes, and Mr. Newman with him,
without any mediator at all? Is it true that man is immortal, and
knows it by immediate "insight," as Mr. Parker contends, or does
the said "insight," as Mr. Newman believes, tell us nothing about
the matter? Surely the "Absolute Religion," after having removed
from it all in which different religions differ, is in danger of
vanishing that imperfect susceptibility of some religion, which I
have already conceded, and which is certainly not such a thing as
to render an external revelation very obviously superfluous. It
may be summed up in one imperfect article. All men and each may say,
"I believe there is some being, superior in some respects to man,
whom it is my duty or my interest to"--caelera desunt.
To affirm that every man has this "Absolute Religion" without
external revelation is much as if a man were to say that we have
an "Absolute Philosophy" on the same terms, in virtue of man's
having faculties which prompt him to philosophize in some way. All
religions contain the Absolute Religion, says Mr. Parker: Just, I
reply, as all philosophies contain the absolute philosophy. The
philosophy of Plato, of Aristotle of Bacon, of Locke, of Leibnitz,
of Reid, are all philosophies, no doubt; but that is all that is
to be said. Even contraries must resemble one another in one point,
or they could not be contrasted. In truth, there is, I think, a
striking analogy between man's spiritual and intellectual condition;
only his intellect is a little less variable than his "spiritual
faculty"; far more so, however, than his senses. His animal nature
is more defined than his intellectual, his intellectual than his
spiritual and moral. All the phenomena point either to an imperfect
organization of his nobler faculties, or to the doctrine of
the "Fall."
But further, surely if this internal oracle exists in man, every
sincere and earnest soul, on interrogating his consciousness, would
hear the indubitable response,--would enjoy the beatific vision of
"spiritual insight." If this be asserted, I for one have to say to
this representation, that, so far as my own consciousness informs
me, I have honestly, sincerely, and with utmost diligence,
interrogated my spirit; and I solemnly protest, that, apart from
those external influences and that external instruction which the
revelation from within is supposed to anticipate and supersede, I am
not conscious that I should have any of the sentiments which either
of these writers make the sum of religion. Even as to that fundamental
position,--the existence of a Being of unlimited power and wisdom, (as
to his unlimited goodness, I believe nothing but an external revelation
can absolutely certify us,) I feel that I am much more indebted to
those influences from design, which these writers made so light of,
than to any clearness in the imperfect intuition: for if I found--and
surely this is the true test--the traces of design less conspicuous
in the external world, confusion there, as in the moral and in both
greater than is now found in either; I extremely doubt whether the
faintest surmise of such a Being would have suggested itself to me.
But be that as it may; as to their other cardinal sentiments,--the
nature of my relations to this Being,--his placability; if offended,
--the terms of forgiveness, if any,--whether, as these gentlemen
affirm, he is accessible to all, without any atonement or
mediator;--as to all this, I solemnly declare, that, apart from
external instruction; I cannot by interrogating my racked spirit,
catch even a murmur. That it must be faint, indeed, in other men,
so faint as to render the pretensions of the certitude of the
internal revelation, and its independence of all external revelation,
perfectly preposterous, I infer from this,--that they have, for the
most part, arrived at diametrically opposite conclusions from those
of these interpreters of the spiritual revelation. As to the
articles, indeed; of man's immortality and a future state, it would
be truly difficult for my "spiritual insight" to verify theirs; for,
according to Mr. Parker, his "insight" affirms that man is immortal,
and Mr. Newman's "insight" declares nothing about the matter!
Nor is my consciousness, so far as I can trace it, mine only. This
painful uncertainty has been the confession of multitudes of far
greater minds; they have been so far from contending that we have
naturally a clear utterance on these great questions, that they
have acknowledged the necessity of an external revelation; and
mankind in general, so far from thinking or feeling such light
superfluous, have been constantly gasping after it, and adopted
almost any thing that but bore the name.
What, then, am I to think of this all-sufficient revelation from
within?
There is, indeed, an amusing answer of Mr. Newman's to the difficulty:
but then it formally surrenders the whole argument. He says to those
who say they are unconscious of those facts of spiritual pathology
which he describes in his work on the "Soul," that the consciousness
of the spiritual man is not the less true, that the unspiritual man is
not privy to it; and this most devout gentleman somewhere quotes, with
much unction, the words, "For the spiritual man judgeth all things,
but himself is judged of no man."
"I shall be curious to know," said I, interrupting him, "what you will
reply to that argument?"
Reply to it, said he, eagerly; does it require any reply?--However, I
will read what I have written. Is it not plain, that while Mr. Newman
is professedly anatomizing the spiritual nature of man, as man,--the
functions and revelations of that inward oracle which supersedes and
anticipates all external revelations--he is, in fact, anatomizing his
own? What title has he, when avowedly explaining the phenomena of the
religious faculty which he asserts to be inherent in humanity,--though
how they should need explaining, if his theory be true, I know not,--what
title has he, when men deny that they are conscious of the facts he
describes, to raise refuge in his own private revelations, and that of
the few whose privilege it is to be "born again" by a mysterious law
which he says it is impossible for us to investigate? "We cannot
pretend," he says, "to sound the mystery whence comes the new birth,
in certain souls. To reply, 'The Spirit bloweth where He listeth,'
confesses the mystery, and declines to explain it. But it is evident
that individuals in Greece, in the third century before the Christian
era, were already moving towards an intelligent heart-worship or
had even begun to practise it!" (Soul, p.64)
High time, I think, that after some thousands of years some few
individuals should begin to manifest the phenomena of the universal
revelation from within, if such a thing be!
This is not to delineate the religions nature of humanity, but to
reveal--yes, and to reveal externally--the religious nature of the
elect few,--and few they are indeed,--who, by a mysterious infidel
Calvinism, are permitted to attain, by direct intuition, and
independent of all external revelation, the true sentiments and
experiences of "spiritual insight." It this be Mr. Newman's solution
of our difficulties, it is utterly nugatory. It is not to dissect
the soul, "its sorrows and aspirations"; it is merely to give us
the pathology--perhaps the morbid pathology--of Mr. Newman's soul;
its sorrows and its aspirations. If the answer merely respected the
practical value of a theory of spiritual sentiments, which all
acknowledged, then Mr. Newman's answer might have some force; for
certainly, only he who reduced that theory to practice, or attempted
to do so, would have a right to conclude against the experience of
him who did. But it is obvious that the question affects the theory
itself, and especially the consciousness of those terms of possible
communion with God, those relations of the soul to him, on the
reception of which all the said spiritual experience must depend.
How, then, stands the argument? I ask how I shall know the intimation
of the spiritual faculty, which renders all "external revelation" an
impertinence? I am told, with delicious vagueness, that I must gaze on
the phenomena of spiritual consciousness; I say I exercise earnest and
sincere self-scrutiny, and that I can discern nothing but shadowy forms,
most of which do not answer to those which these new spiritualists
describe; and then Mr. Newman turns round and says, that the unspiritual
nature cannot discern them! What is this but to give up the only
question of any importance to humanity,--which is not what are Mr.
Newman's spiritual phenomena; if they are known to himself, it is
well; he has been very long in discovering them, in spite of the
clearness of the internal revelation;--but what are those of man? In
the former be all, Mr. Newman is safe indeed; he is intrenched in his
own peculiar consciousness, of which I am quite willing to admit
that all other men (as well as I) are inadequate judges. But the
monograph of a solitary enthusiast is of the least possible consequence
to humanity. For reasons similar to those which render us
incompetent to pronounce on his experience, he is incapable of judging
of ours. There is only one other answer that I know of, and that is
the answer which Fellowes made to me the other day, when you were not
by:--"O, but you have the same spiritual consciousness as I have,
only you are not aware of it?" I contented myself with saying, that
I was just as able to comprehend a perception which is not perceived,
as a consciousness which when sought was not to be found. The question
is one of consciousness; you say you have it, I do not deny it; I have
it not. Now, if we are not disputing as to whether it be a
characteristic of humanity, it little matters: if we are, I plainly
have the best of it, because want of uniformity in the phenomenon
is destructive of the hypothesis.
But I proceed to ask my second question. Is the "absolute religion"
of Mr. Parker, or the "spiritual faculty" of Mr. Newman, of such
singular use as to supersede all external revelation, since by the
unfortunate "conceptions" of the one, and the "degraded types" of the
other, it has for ages left man, and does, in fact, now leave him,
to wallow in the lowest depths of the most debasing idolatry and
superstition; since, by the confession of these very writers, the
great bulk of mankind have been and are hideously mal-formed, in
fact, spiritual cripples, and have been left to wander in infinitely
varied paths of error, but always paths of error?--for Judaism and
Christianity, though better forms, are, as well as other forms,
--according to these writers,--full of fables and fancies, of lying
legends and fantastical doctrines. Think for a moment of a "spiritual
faculty," so bright as to anticipate all essential spiritual verities,
--the universal possession of humanity,--which yet terminates in
leaving the said humanity to grovel in every form of error, between
the extremes of Fetichism, which consecrates a bit of stone, and
Pantheism, which consecrates all the bits of stone in the universe, in
fact, a sort of comprehensive Fetichism;--which leaves man to erect
every thing into a God, provided it is none,--sun, moon, stars, a cat,
a monkey, an onion, uncouth idols, sculptured marble; nay, a shapeless
trunk,--which the devout impatience of the idolater does not stay to
fashion into the likeness of a man, but gives it its apotheosis at
once! Think of the venerable, wide-spread empire of the infinite forms
of polytheism, the ancient Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Chinese, and Hindoo
mythologies; and then acknowledge, that, if man has this faculty, it
is either the most idle prerogative ever bestowed on a rational
creature, or that, somehow or other, as the Bible affirms, it has
been denaturalized and disabled. If, on the other hand, man has this
faculty, and yet has never fallen, it can only be because he never
stood; and then, no doubt, as John Bunyan hath it, "He that is down
need fear no fall!"
There is an answer, indeed, but it is one which, in my judgment,
covers those who resort to it with the deepest shame. It is that
which apologizes for all these abominations,--so humiliating and
odious, by representing them as less humiliating and odious than
they are. It is true that Mr. Parker, when it is his cue, is most
eloquent in his denunciations of the infinite miseries and degradation
which have followed the exorbitancies of the religious principle.
Thus he says of superstition (and there are other innumerable
passages to a similar effect), "To dismember the soul, the very
image of God,--to lop off the most sacred affections,--to call Reason
a liar, Conscience a devil's oracle, and cast Love clean out from
the heart,--this is the last triumph of superstition, but one often
witnessed in all the three forms of Religion, Fetichism, Polytheism,
Monotheism; in all ages before Christ, in all ages after Christ." Far
be it from me to deny it, or the similar horrors which he liberally
shows flow from fanaticism. But then, at other times, that quintessence
of all abstractions which all religions alike contain--the "absolute
religion"--imparts such perfume and appetizing relish to the whole
composition, that, like Dominie Sampson in Meg Merrilies's cuisine,
Mr. P. finds the Devil's cookery-book not despicable. The things he
so fearfully describes are but perversions of what is essentially
good. The "forms," the "accidentals," of different religions become
of little consequence; whether it be Jehovah or Jupiter, the infinite
Creator or a divine cat, a holy and gracious God that is loved, or
an impure demon that is feared,--all this is secondary, provided
the principles of faith, simplicity, and earnestness--that is,
blind credulity and idiotic stupidity--inspire the wretched votary;
as if the perversions he deplores and condemns were not the necessary
consequences of such religions themselves, or, rather, as if they
were aught but the religions! In virtue of the "absolute religion,"
"many a savage smeared with human sacrifice," and the Christian
martyr perishing with a prayer for his persecutors, are hastening
together to the celestial banquet. I hope the "savage" will not
go with "unwashen hands," I trust he may be Pharisee enough for
that; I also hope the two will not sit next one another; otherwise
the savage may be tempted to offer up a second sacrifice, and the
Christian martyr be a martyr a second time. Hear him:--"He that
worships truly, by whatever form,"--that is, who is sincere in his
Fetichism, his idolatry, his sacrifices, though they may be human,
--"worships the only God; he hears the prayer, whether called Brahma,
Pan, or Lord, or called by no name at all. Each people has its
prophets and its saints; and many a swarthy Indian who bowed down
to wood and stone,--many a grim-faced Calmuck, who worshipped the
great God of Storms,--many a Grecian peasant who did homage to
Phoebus Apollo when the sun rose or went down,--yes, many a savage,
his hands smeared all over with human sacrifice,--shall come from
the East and the West, and sit down in the kingdom of God, with Moses
and Zoroaster, with Socrates and Jesus." (Discourses, p. 83) The
charity which hopes that men may be forgiven the crime of "religions"
which, if there be a God at all, must be "abominations," one can
understand; but these maudlin apologies for the religions themselves,
--as if they were not themselves crimes, and involved crimes in
their very practice,--I do not understand. According to this, all
that man has to do is to be sincere in any thing, however diabolical,
and it is at once transmuted into a virtue which nothing less than
heaven can reward!
Mr. Newman sometimes follows closely in Mr. Parker's steps in the
exercise of this bastard toleration, this spurious charity; though,
in justice, I must say, he does not go his length. Yet who can read
without laughter that definition of idolatry, made apparently for
the same preposterous purpose,--to sanctify the hideous absurdities
of the "religious sentiment," and to save the credit of the "internal
oracle"? He says,--"To worship as perfect and infinite one whom we
know to be imperfect and finite, this is idolatry, and (in any bad
sense) this alone ...... A man can but adore his own highest ideal;
to forbid this is to forbid all religion to him. If, therefore,
idolatry is to mean any thing wrong and bad, the word must be reserved
for the cases in which a man degrades his ideal by worshipping
something that falls short of it." (Soul, pp. 55, 56)
So that the most degraded idolater, if he but come up to his own
ideal of the Divinity, is none at all, but a respectable worshipper!
It may be; but the idolater's ideal of God is, generally, the reality
of what others call the Devil!--Only think of the divine ideal of a
man who worships an image of his own making, with ten heads and twenty
hands! The definition reminds me of that passage in which Pascal's
Jesuit Father defines the moral sin of "idleness":--"It is," says
he, "a grief that spiritual things should be spiritual, as if
it should be regretted that the sacraments are the source of grace;
and it is a mortal sin." "O Father!" said I, "I cannot imagine that
any one can be idle in such a sense." "So Escobar says, 'I confess
it is very seldom that any person fails into the sin of idleness.'
Now, surely, you must see the necessity of a good definition!"