Our veneration for the Deity, which is truer and more sincere than
yours, arises from a widely different conception. Looking back upon
the ages, and what they have brought to us, we perceive that each new
development in matter brings an increase of those qualities which give
us pleasure to behold. Beginning with the most unattractive shapes,
this process of change in organization and symmetry, by an unalterable
law of the Creator, bring to us out of the ugliness of the past the
beautiful of the present. Since, therefore, we see Him constantly
at work, transforming the ugly into the beautiful, we believe He is
pleased with the colors, shapes, and qualities of things which delight
our own cultivated senses. Acting then on this conviction, we surround
ourselves with the beautiful in nature and art.
The change, in the form of matter, is not more instructive than
the steady modification of intelligence, which, from its primitive
ignorance, superstition, and brutality, has gradually been raised
step by step to its present higher grade of thought and action. We
recognize here a fact most important and significant to us. While the
divine energy is steadily at work, converting lower forms of matter
into higher ones, we are given no part in the proceeding. It goes on
without our assistance, and we have no power to diminish or accelerate
its steady onward course. It is widely different with intelligence.
That is given into our hands, with all its grand possibilities.
In that, we have evidence of the divine confidence to promote its
advancement in view of the blessings it holds in store. Taking this
view, we have for centuries cultivated the mind in all directions of
knowledge and feeling, as the chief part of our religion. The motion of
the spheres is not more certainly the work of this great being, than
are these progressive changes in mind and matter.
We believe vice and ugliness to be convertible terms, the latter a
quality due to imperfectly developed matter, and the first a property
of intelligence in the same imperfect state; just as beauty and virtue
describe together, or separately, the same advanced evolution.
But while working in harmony with the Deity, and assisting in his
purposes, we have constantly in view, as an incentive to action, the
consummation or goal to which all these changes tend. We believe the
outcome to be a spiritual life with all things knowable, and a state
of perfection and happiness beyond our present conception. Happiness,
then, being a religious aspiration, we promote it in all ways to the
innocent and reasonable inclinations of our present state.
Our religion is consequently more jubilant than solemn. We have no
torments in store in it, nor long drawn agonies and mortifications of
the flesh. Its only business with death is to smooth its pillow, and to
reduce its attendant sorrows to the minimum. To the misfortunes of the
present our religion extends its hand of sympathy and material help.
To what purpose should it introduce and dwell upon the miseries and
sorrows of the past? We let the dead ages rest. We can find nothing
in their ashes to compare with the living. The present is better than
the past, as the future will be better in exact measure with the new
truths discovered, and the old fallacies cast aside. You rake among
the emanations of an early and imperfect development for monitors and
guides, and do honor to them for the mysteries they invoke. You place
the withered hand of the mummy into the warm palm of the living, and
your ceremony of introduction is a prayer that the living body may
never depart from the dead form.
The untenable and unsupportable premises upon which your religions are
based will lead to their decay. Nothing of them will remain to you but
their spirituality. Shorn of their superstitions, and guided by the
intellect, the spiritual part of them will be retained by you as a
jewel repolished and in a new setting.
The orthodox among you are suspicious of the inroads of science,
unaware of the fact that in due time it will fix upon your belief the
conviction of a future spiritual existence without the shadow of a
doubt. When you will have arrived at that point, your ways of morality
and progress will be so much increased, that you will regard your
previous advancement as trifling. To some, your science appears to
lend encouragement to materialistic beliefs. This is only your half
knowledge. For some time to come your discoveries will tend in that
direction of thought, but all this will be superseded with a firm
conviction of the existence of the Deity, and your steady approach to
Him. The period of danger to you will arrive when you will have made
the discovery, as we have centuries ago, of what may be described in
your language as the universal diffusion of intelligence amongst all
matter, inorganic as well as organic.
It may be a startling proposition to announce to you that the quality
which gives you the power of abstract thought is possessed in a lower
degree by, for instance, the stones which lie beneath your feet; yet
such is the case, for we have demonstrated beyond a doubt that the
chemical forces and affinities are nothing else but low, restricted,
and insensible forms of intelligent action. The fact is best shown by
the building up of organic bodies in their multiplication of cells.
Each cell arranges itself in place, and makes way to its successor,
under an inherited impulse of action from which it is unable to
depart. What are known among you as natural forces, are merely forms
of unconscious and restricted intelligences, which have only the power
to act in limited directions. They both build up matter and tear it
down for us. They shape the crystal with mathematical uniformity, and
mark out the form of the plant with unerring precision. The character
of the agency bears no proportion to the magnitude of its work. These
low, unconscious forms of intelligence, which inspire the plant cell to
build up its fanciful elevations, and the infinitesimal atom to seek
after and embrace its affinity, are precisely the same as that which
directs the sea of worlds upon their swift and unvarying paths. And yet
with all their exactitude and infinity of scope, they are as much below
that independent, self-conscious intelligence which guides our thoughts
and actions, as the protoplasm is beneath the most highly organized and
perfect form.
Your theology has degraded you with the belief that you are mendicants,
enjoying the favors of life as mere concessions from an all-powerful
and exacting master; and that your position in the cosmos bears a
close relation to the insignificance of your material bodies, and
your feeble power in the stupendous energies which surround you. Your
science will elevate you with the knowledge that you are peers in the
great universe, and that your stature has no comparative measure for
its proportions in the height and breadth of your material world. It
will teach you that by slow degrees, and through millions of ages, you
have become that elimination of the spiritual out of the vast number
of divided intelligences which have built up and governed your natural
world; that you are the harvest and the fruition of the innumerable
lower intelligences, which were sown broadcast in the beginning to do
their potent work.
In pursuing these matters, your scientists will arrive at a number
of important truths, entirely in opposition to some of your present
apparently established theories. In your speculations touching the
future state, there is a tendency which I cannot designate by any other
name in your language than narrowness. You have come so recently to
realize the immense sizes and distances of the heavenly bodies, that
their comparison with your former constricted views in that direction
has produced a sense of helplessness in the attempt to fathom these
infinite spaces. But ages of contemplation will serve to broaden your
views, as well as to expand your hopes. Encompassing or beside this
broad universe we have evidence of a spiritual region, like the firm
land bordering upon your own great ocean, which great body of water to
the lower animal life within it is just as limitless and profound as
the great cosmos is to yourselves.
You have but recently discovered a process of nature, by whose slow
changes, animal life has been altered, and its species modified and
improved. You know that the atmosphere, which encircled your Earth
at the beginning, was not of a composition to support its present
highly organized respiring life, and that consequently, behind the
ages the only living and moving things upon your planet were the scant
air-consuming creatures, who inhabited the water. Among the dark and
cavernous depths of your oceans, and the slimy ooze of your rivers
and lakes, were located the cradles, where nature began moulding the
present graceful living and moving forms which now roam over your
solid surface. The Creator’s delicate laboratory, for the beginning
of animal life, was placed among the equable temperatures, and soft
walls of water below the variable and desiccating atmosphere, which
everywhere surmounted it. Yourselves, as well as all other living and
breathing creatures, had your foundations of life laid in the waters
of the earth, a fact, of whose significant reminder is, that nature
has continuously provided for the protective presence of water in your
embryo womb growth.
In your germal life, the universe seemed to you nothing but a vast and
unlimited expanse of water. The submerged earth upon which you lay and
rested, with its murky surroundings, and the expanse of sunless liquid
clouds above you, was the only world and universe you knew. By what
authority of reason or science then do you conclude, that the stage of
evolution, which brought you out into the glorious sunshine and free
air, and adapted you with the form and comprehension you possess, is
the end? From the cold, sluggish, and unconscious, to the warm, alert,
and intellectual, is no greater a step of progress, than the coming
one, which will make clear to your understanding the mysteries of life
and nature, so unknowable and unthinkable in your present immaturity.
Out of your next stage of spiritual supremacy, you will look back upon
the present, with all its conditions, so condemned by the contrast
of better things attained, that it will be but little more to you
than is now the repulsive uncanny, and incommunicable habitat of your
beginning.