Self-culture will never supersede worship, more than golden

CHRISTIANITY

AND

MODERN THOUGHT.

BOSTON:

AMERICAN UNITARIAN ASSOCIATION.

1873.

Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1872, by

THE AMERICAN UNITARIAN ASSOCIATION,

In the Office of the Librarian of Congress at Washington.

CAMBRIDGE:

PRESS OF JOHN WILSON AND SON.

INTRODUCTION.

The following discourses were delivered in Boston, at Hollis-Street

Church, on successive Sunday evenings, and repeated at King's Chapel on

Monday afternoons, during the winter of 1871-72, in response to an

invitation of the Executive Committee of the American Unitarian

Association, whose purpose was thus declared in the letter of

invitation:--

"It is not proposed that the course shall be a merely popular one,

to awaken the indifferent and interest them in familiar religious

truths; but rather to meet the need of thoughtful people perplexed

amid materialistic and sceptical tendencies of the time. Nor is it

desired simply to retrace in controversial method the beaten paths

of sectarian or theological debate; but rather, in the interest of

a free and enlightened Christianity, to present freshly the

positive affirmations of faith."

The several discourses were prepared independently, without conference

or concerted plan; and for their statements and opinions the

responsibility rests solely with their respective authors.

CONTENTS.

PAGE

Introduction v

Break between Modern Thought and Ancient Faith

and Worship 3

By Henry W. Bellows.

A True Theology the Basis of Human Progress 35

By James Freeman Clarke.

The Rise and Decline of the Romish Church 61

By Athanase Coquerel, Fils.

Selfhood and Sacrifice 101

By Orville Dewey.

The Relation of Jesus to the Present Age 129

By Charles Carroll Everett.

The Mythical Element in the New Testament 157

By Frederic Henry Hedge.

The Place of Mind in Nature and Intuition in Man 179

By James Martineau.

The Relations of Ethics and Theology 209

By Andrew P. Peabody.

Christianity: What it is not, and what it is 231

By G. Vance Smith.

The Aim and Hope of Jesus 273

By Oliver Stearns.

THE BREAK BETWEEN MODERN THOUGHT

AND

ANCIENT FAITH AND WORSHIP.

By HENRY W. BELLOWS.

There is evidently a growing disrelish, in an important portion of the

people of our time, for professional religion, technical piety, and

theological faith. These were always unpopular with youth, and people in

the flush of life and spirits; but this was because they called

attention to grave and serious things; and youth, as a rule, does not

like even the shadow of truth and duty to fall too early or too steadily

upon it. Restraint, care, thoughtfulness, it resists as long as it can;

and none who recall their own eager love of pleasure and gayety, in the

spring-time of life, can find much difficulty in understanding or

excusing it. Of course, too, careless, self-indulgent, sensual, and

frivolous people have always disliked the gravity, and the faith and

customs, of people professing religion, and exhibiting special

seriousness. They were a reproach and a painful reminder to them, and

must be partially stripped of their reproving sanctity, by ridicule,

charges of hypocrisy, and hints of contempt. But, all the while this was

going on, the youth and frivolity of previous generations expected the

time to come when they must surrender their carelessness, and be

converted; and even the worldly and scoffing shook in their secret

hearts at the very doctrines and the very piety they caricatured. The

old relations of master and pupil describe almost exactly the feeling

which youth and levity held toward instituted faith and piety, a

generation or two since. The schoolboy, indeed, still thinks himself at

liberty to call his master nick-names, to play tricks upon him, and to

treat with great levity, among his fellow-pupils, all the teaching and

all the rules of the school. But he nevertheless sincerely respects his

teacher; believes in him and in his teachings, and expects to derive an

indispensable benefit from them, in preparing himself for his coming

career. So it was with the religion and piety of our fathers. The people

profoundly respected the creed, the elders in piety, and the eminent

saints in profession and practice, although the young had their jibes

and jests, their resistance to church-going, their laugh at sanctimony;

and the majority of people then, as now, were not fond of the restraints

of piety, or the exercises of devotion.

But the alienation to which I wish to draw your attention now is

something quite different from the natural opposition of the young to

serious thoughts; or the gay, to grave matters; or those absorbed in the

present, to what belongs to the future; or of those charmed with the use

of their lower or more superficial faculties and feelings, to the

suggestions and demands of their deeper and nobler nature. That the body

should not readily and without a struggle submit to the mind; that

thoughtlessness should not easily be turned into thoughtfulness; that

youth should not readily consent to wear the moral costume of maturity,

or the feelings and habits of riper years; that the active, fresh,

curious creature, who has just got this world with its gay colors in

his eye, should not be much attracted by spiritual visions, and should

find his earthly loves and companions more fascinating than the

communion of saints or the sacred intercourse of prayer,--all this, to

say the least of it, is very explicable, and belongs to all generations,

and hardly discourages the experienced mind, more than the faults and

follies of the nursery the wise mother who has successfully carried many

older children through them all.

It is quite another kind of antipathy and disrelish which marks our

time. It is not confined to youth, nor traceable to levity and

thoughtlessness. The Church and its creed on one side, the world and its

practical faith on the other, seem now no longer to stand in the

relation of revered teachers and dull or reluctant pupils; of

seriousness, avoided by levity; of authoritative truth, questioned by

bold error; of established and instituted faith, provoking the

criticisms of impatience, caprice, ignorance, or folly. An antagonism

has arisen between them as of oil and water,--a separation which is

neither due to period of life, nor stage of intelligence, nor even to

worth of character; which does not separate youth from maturity, the

thoughtless from the thinking, the bad from the good, but divides the

creeds, observances, and professions of Christians, from a large body of

people who insist that after a certain fashion they are Christians too,

and yet will have little or nothing to do with professions of faith, or

pious pretensions, or religious ways of feeling, talking, or acting.

Clearly, it would not do any longer to say that the worth and virtue and

influence of society, in this country, could be estimated by the number

of communicants in the churches, by the degree of credit still given to

any of the long-believed theological dogmas, deemed in the last

generation the sheet-anchors of the State. We all know hundreds of

people, who could sign no creed, and give no theological account of

their faith, whom we do not count as necessarily less worthy in the

sight of God or man than many who have no difficulty in saying the whole

Athanasian Creed. Nay, there are some millions of people in this

country, not the least intelligent or useful citizens in all cases, who

never enter a church-door. A generation or two back, you would safely

have pronounced all these absentees to be worldly, careless people,

infidels, atheists, scoffers. Do you expect to find them so now? Some,

of course, but not the majority. Indeed, you would find a great many of

these people supporting churches, to which their families go, and not

themselves; or to which others go, for whom they are glad to provide the

opportunity. They would tell you, if they could discriminate their own

thoughts, something like this: "Public worship and church organizations,

and creeds and catechisms, and sermons and ceremonies, and public

prayers and praises, are doubtless very good things, and very useful up

to a certain stage of intelligence, and for a certain kind of character.

But we have discovered that the real truth and the real virtue of what

people have been misnaming religion is a much larger, freer, and more

interesting thing than churches, creeds, ministers, and saints seem to

think it. Here is this present life, full of occupations and earnest

struggles and great instructions. Here is this planet, not a thousandth

part known, and yet intensely provoking to intelligent curiosity; and

science is now every day taking a fresh and an ever bolder look into it;

and we want our Sundays to follow these things up. That is our idea of

worship. Then, again, the greatest philosophers are now writing out

their freest, finest thoughts about our nature; and, if we go to church,

we are likely to find some fanatical and narrow-minded minister warning

us against reading or heeding what these great men say; and it is a

thousand times fresher and grander and more credible than what he says

himself! Why, the very newspapers, the earnest and well-edited ones,

contain more instruction, more warning, more to interest the thoughtful

mind, than the best sermons; and why should a thinking man, who needs to

keep up with the times, and means to have his own thoughts free, go

where duty or custom makes it common to frown upon inquiry, doubt, and

speculation,--to shut out knowledge and testimony, and stamp a man with

a special type of thinking or professing?"

For there are, you observe,--in justice to these thoughts,--these two

instructors to choose between in our generation. Here is the Church,

with its ecclesiastical usages and its pious exhortations; its Sunday

school for the children; its devotional meeting in the week, and its

Sunday teaching and worship,--all acknowledged as good for those that

like them, and are willing to accept what people thought or believed was

true a hundred or five hundred years ago; and here is the modern press,

with the wonderful profusion of earnest and able books, cheap and

attractive, and treating boldly all subjects of immediate and of

permanent interest; and here are the reviews, quarterly and monthly,

that now compress into themselves and popularize all that these books

contain, and furnish critical notices of them; and then, again, here are

the newspapers, wonderful in variety and ability, that hint at, suggest,

and bring home all the new and fresh thoughts of the time. And the

marvel is, that most of these books, reviews, papers, are in the

interest of, and seem inspired by, something larger, freer, fresher,

truer, than what the churches and the creeds are urging. Thus church

religion and general culture do not play any longer into each other's

hands. If you believe what the men of science, the philosophers, the

poets and critics, believe, you cannot believe, except in a very general

way, in what the creeds and churches commonly profess. Accordingly, the

professors in college, the physicians, the teachers, the scientists, the

reformers, the politicians, the newspaper men, the reviewers, the

authors, are seldom professing Christians, or even church-goers; and if

they do go to church from motives of interest or example, they are free

enough to confess in private that they do not much believe what they

hear.

Assuming that this is a tolerably correct account--although doubtless

exaggerated for pictorial effect--of the existing state of things among

the reading and thinking class of this country, what is the real

significance of it? Is it as new as it seems? Is it as threatening to

the cause of religious faith as it seems? Reduced to its most general

terms, is it any thing more or other than this? The faith and worship of

this generation, and the experience and culture of a portion of this

generation, have temporarily fallen out; and, as in all similar

quarrels, there is, for the time, helpless misunderstanding, mutual

jealousy and misrepresentation. The faith and piety of the time

pronounce the culture, the science, the progressive philanthropy, the

politics, the higher education and advanced literature, to be godless

and Christless; and the culture of the age retaliates, perhaps, with

still greater sincerity, in pronouncing the faith and worship of the

time to be superstitious, antiquated, sentimental, and specially fitted

only to people willing to be led by priests and hireling ministers.

Now, if this were a quarrel between experience and inexperience, between

good and bad, between truth and falsehood, it would be easy to take

sides. But faith and knowledge have both equal rights in humanity.

People who are sincerely in love with knowledge and science and

philosophy are not thereby made enemies of God or man; certainly are not

to be discouraged and abused for their devotion to practical and

scientific truth, their search for facts, their interest in the works of

the Creator, even if they are not possessed of what the church properly

calls faith and piety. And, on the other hand, however shocked

established faith and piety may naturally be by the handling which

religion and its creeds and worship receive from modern inquisitors,

ought the deeper believers to be seriously alarmed for the safety of its

root or its healing leaves, on account of the shaking which the tree of

life is now receiving? However slow science and culture may often show

themselves to be in recognizing the fact, can any reasonable and

impartial mind, acquainted with history or human nature, believe that

faith itself is an inconstant or perishable factor in our nature? prayer

a childish impulse, which clear-seeing manhood must put away? the

conscience, not the representative of a holiness enthroned over the

moral universe, but an artificial organ, which social convenience has

developed, much like the overgrown liver in the Strasburg goose? In

short, who that considers the part that faith and worship have played in

the history of the race, can doubt their essential and permanent place

in human fortunes? The question of _some_ religion, of _some_ worship,

for the people, does not seem debatable. The only alternative among

nations has been a religion in which mystery, awe, and fear prevailed,

clothing themselves in dread and bloody sacrifices, or else a religion

in which more knowledge, more reason, more love, embodied themselves in

a simpler and gentler ritual. The nations have had only a choice--not

always a wholly voluntary one--between terrific superstitions and more

or less reasonable religions. Christianity has prevailed in civilized

nations, since Constantine, by accommodating its theological dogmas and

external ritual to the needs of successive eras; beginning with coarser

and more heathenish symbols, and running itself clearer and more clear,

as the mind and taste and experience of the race have developed

"sweetness and light." But does this make Christianity only a human

growth, and so predict a coming decay, which many seem to think has

already begun? On the contrary, the decisive fact about Christianity is,

that, while its intellectual history is changing, its early records are

in form fixed and permanent, and that its real progress has been

uniformly a return towards its original simplicity. Other faiths

develop. It is we who develop under Christianity, and are slowly changed

unto the original likeness of Christ. Christ's statements, Christ's

character, Christ's words, do not become antiquated. We are not called

upon to explain away, as superstitions of the time, any of the _certain_

words he said, or thoughts he had, or commandments he left. True, there

are critical embarrassments about the record, and room enough to

question how it was made up; and we cannot always trust the reporters of

that age, or our own. But when we get, as we certainly do get in

hundreds of cases, at Christ's own words; or when we really see--as by a

hundred vistas, through all the _débris_ and rubbish of the age, we may

see--the true person and bearing and spirit of Jesus, we behold, we

recognize, we know, a Being who, transferred to this age, and placed in

the centre of the choicest circle of saints and sages whom culture and

science and wisdom could collect, would bear just the same exalted

relation of superiority to them that he did to the fishermen and

publicans and kings and high-priests and noble women and learned rabbis

of his own day. We should not hesitate, any more than they did, to call

him Master and Lord; to say, "To whom else shall we go? Thou hast the

words of eternal life."

Those, then, who fear that true culture, that science or philosophy

boldly pushed, that learning and logic impartially applied,--whether in

studying God's method in creation, or his method in revelation,--can

injure permanently faith and piety, or endanger Christianity, as a

whole, must either think the religious wants of man very shallow or very

artificial, or the providence of God very easily baffled, and the

harmony of his word and works very badly matched. If there be in nature

or in man, in earth or in our dust, in chemistry, astronomy,

anthropology; in geology, the language of dead eras; or in language, the

geology of buried races, any thing that disproves the existence and

providence of a living God, the holiness and goodness and

trustworthiness of his character; the moral and religious nature of man,

his accountableness, his immortality; the divine beauty and sinless

superiority of Jesus Christ, and the essential truth of his

religion,--by all means let us know it! Why should we allow ourselves

to be beguiled by fables and false hopes and make-believes? But the

faith of religious experience, the confidence of those who know and love

and have become spiritually intimate with the gospel of Jesus Christ, is

usually such that they would sooner mistrust their senses than their

souls. They have found a moral and spiritual guidance, a food and

medicine in their Christian faith, which enables them calmly to say to

criticism, to science, to culture, "We do not hold our faith, or

practise our worship, by your leave, or at your mercy." Faith leans

first on the spiritual nature of man, and not on demonstrable science.

It would not be faith, if it were only a sharper sight. It is insight,

not sight. It springs from its own root, not primarily from the

intellect. As we love our wives and children with something besides the

judgment, or the logical faculty, so we love God with the heart, and not

with the understanding. We stand erect, with open eyes, when we are

seeking truth; we fall on our knees with closed eyelids, when we are

seeking God! Religion is not the rule of three, but the golden rule; it

is not the major and minor premises and copula of logic, but the sacred

instinct of the soul, which Jesus Christ has satisfied, and guided, and

owned, and directed, in an inestimable way.

But when faith and worship have taken this true and independent tone,

let them not join the foolish bigots, who think that because faith rests

on other foundations than science, therefore it owes nothing to science

and culture, and can wholly separate its fortunes and future from them.

True, _faith_ and _culture_, religion and science, in spite of their

general and permanent agreement and connection, when they cannot get on

honestly together, had better for the time separate; for they embarrass

each other, and it is in their insulation that they sometimes ripen and

prepare in separate crucible elements that are ultimately to blend in a

finer compound than either ever knew before. Thus faith, driving science

and culture out of her cell, and closing the doors on fact and

observation, wrapt in devotion, has sometimes caught visions of God

through her purely spiritual atmosphere, which sages in their

laboratories have never seen. The great religious inspirations have not

come from scholars, but from seers; from men of soul, not men of sense.

"How knoweth this man letters, having never learned?" said his

contemporaries of Christ. Well, he knew no letters, but he had what

letters never teach,--divine wisdom! He knew God, that end of knowledge;

he knew man, that last of philosophy. Faith therefore often recruits

itself in a temporary divorce from science, just as Romanism profitably

drives her priests into periodical retreats for prayer and exclusive

meditations on God and Christ. It is beautiful to study even those

humble and uninstructed Christian sects, whose simple and implicit faith

is protected, yes, and exalted, by their providential indifference to

science or unacquaintance with speculative difficulties. It is not their

ignorance that kindles their devotion, but it is faith's vitality, which

in certain exceptional natures and times beams and glows most purely,

fed only on its own sacred substance. When you have reached the inner

kernel of a true Moravian, or even a true Catholic heart, and found a

solid core of faith, unsupported by any other evidence than that which

the Scripture described in the words, "Faith is the substance of things

hoped for, the evidence of things not seen," you have gone far towards

fathoming the holiest secret in our nature, the well of living water.

And, on the other hand, how much better, both for faith and science,

that science should, at a time like this, go without religious ends into

physical or metaphysical pursuits, investigate, inquire, test, question,

in absolute independence of theological or spiritual results. It is only

when thus free and bold and uncommitted that her testimony is worth any

thing. Think of Newton, meditating and exploring the solar system, in

the simple love of truth, without let or hindrance from ecclesiastical

intermeddlers, and compare him with Galileo, lifting his telescope under

the malediction of the priesthood of Rome.

No: let science be as free as light, as brave as sunbeams, as honest as

photography! Encourage her to chronicle her conclusions with fearless

and unreproached fidelity. She will doubtless make many things which

have been long associated with religion look foolish and incredible. But

it is only so religion can shed some husks, and get rid of some

embarrassments. It is, in short, only just such assaults and criticisms

from science and experience that ever induces religion to strain out the

flies from her honey; to dissociate what is accidental in faith from

what is essential and permanent. And, when science and culture have

gathered in the full harvest of this wonderful season of discovery and

speculation, we may expect to find faith stripped of many garments, now

worshipped, which ignorance and fear put upon her for protection and

defence; but really strengthened in substance, by the free movements

allowed her lungs, and the dropping of the useless load upon her back.

Then, too, science and philosophy will again resume their places at the

feet of the master-principle in our nature, until again driven away, by

new disagreements, to return again by the discovery of a finer harmony.

Self-culture will never supersede worship, more than golden lamps

burning fragrant oils will ever supersede the sun; more than digging and

hoeing and planting will supersede sunshine and rain from heaven.

Self-culture? Yes: by all means, and in any amount, but not as an end.

When people look to ornamental gardening for the crops that are to feed

the famine-smitten world, and not to the pastures and prairies, as they

lie in the light of the common sun, they will look to self-culture for

the characters, the hearts, the souls that glorify God and lift and

bless the world. "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart,

and thy neighbor as thyself." That is the irrepealable law of growth.

"Seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all other

things shall be added unto you." Worship, faith, duty, devotion to God,

Christ, humanity, to justice, freedom, truth,--these, and not

self-culture, have lifted the race and the world. Learn, acquire,

cultivate, improve, develop yourselves, by art, music, reading,

languages, study, science, experience, but do it all in seeking to know

and love and serve God and man. Seek to know Christ, and you will learn

more, indirectly, than though you sought all knowledge without this

thirst. Seek to know God, and you shall find all science and culture

healthful, sacred, harmonious, satisfying, and devout.

The break between modern thought and ancient creeds and worship, thus

considered, though serious, and worth the utmost pains to heal, by all

arts that do not conceal or salve over, without curing the wound, is not

permanently discouraging to earnest and well-considered Christian

faith. Nor are all the signs of the times one way. For--after all that

has been said about the restless and dissatisfied condition of the

critical and conscious thought of the time, and the scepticism of the

learned, or the speculative class, or of the new thinkers born of the

physical progress of the age, and the decay of worship in the literary

and artistic, the editorial and poetical circles--it remains to be said,

that, leaving this important and valuable body of people aside,--not

badly employed, and not without personal warrant for their doubts and

withdrawal from positive institutions,--there remains a mighty majority,

on whom the Christian religion and historical faith and the external

church have a vigorous and unyielding hold; whose practical instincts

and grand common-sense and hereditary experience anchor them safely in

positive faith, while the scepticism raves without and blows itself

clear, and passes over. Christianity first addressed itself to common

people, not to avoid criticism, but to secure the attention of the moral

affections and the spiritual powers, instead of the meaner

understanding. It has lived on the heart and conscience and needs and

yearnings of the masses, from and to whom practical wisdom and fixed

institutions and simple faith always come and always return. Common

sense is not the sense that is common, but the sense that is _in_

common. And popular faith is not the faith of private ignorance massed,

but of that wisdom which alone enables ignorant people to find a basis

for feelings and actions that all feel to be beyond and above their

private ignorance or self-will. The common people were the first to hear

Christ gladly: they will be the last to hear any who deny him.

It is easy to exaggerate the decline of modern faith, and to misread the

tendencies of the time on which we have been dwelling. Thus, paradox

though it seem, it were just as true to say that more people are

deliberately interested in Christian faith and worship to-day than at

any previous era in the history of our religion, as to asseverate that

more people doubt and regret it than ever before. Both statements are

true; and they are reconciled only by the fact that it is only in this

century that the claims of faith and worship have been popularly

debated, or that the people were expected or allowed to have any

independent opinion about them. The general soil of our humanity is for

the first time surveyed and sown; and it is found that, with more

_wheat_ than ever, there are also more _tares_. With more intelligent

and convinced worshippers, there are more wilful or logical neglecters

of worship; with more genuine believers, more sceptics; with more

religious activity, more worldliness. Without an army in the field,

there will be no deserters; without a common currency of genuine coin,

no counterfeits; without a formidable body of affirmers, few deniers.

The positive institutions of Christianity decline in one form, to spring

into new life in other and better forms. Doubtless, fourfold more money

is expended to-day upon temples of worship than in what have been

falsely called the ages of faith,--rather the ages of acquiescence.

Religion does not decline as a costly interest of humanity with the

progress of doubt, freedom, intelligence, science, and economic

development. It is a permanent and eternal want of man, and is always

present, either as a vast, overshadowing superstition, or as a more or

less intelligent faith. Nowhere has it a stronger hold on society than

in free America, which false prophets, with their faces to the past,

muttered was about to become its grave. This busy, delving, utilitarian

country, without a past, denied the influence of ruins and the memory of

mythic founders, a land without mystery or poetry,--how could so tender

and venerable a sentiment as reverence live in its garish day? how so

sweet a nymph as Piety kneel in its muddy marts of trade, or chant her

prayers in its monotonous wilderness, ringing with the woodman's axe or

the screeching saw? But now delegates of all the great religious bodies

in the Old World are visiting America, for religious instruction and

inspiration. Nowhere, it is confessed, is there to be found a people so

generally interested in religion, ready to make so great sacrifices for

it, or so deeply convinced that its principles and inspirations are at

the root of all national prosperity. Nowhere do churches and chapels

spring up with such rapidity, and in such numbers; nowhere is the

ministry as well supported, or its ministers as influential members of

society; nowhere do plain men of business and intelligence, I do not say

of science and philosophy, participate so freely in religious worship.

And since all political compulsion has been taken off from the support

of religion, and it has been made purely voluntary, its interests have

received even more care. There is little doubt that the decline of

religious establishments, the decay of priestly authority, the complete

withdrawal of governmental patronage, the discrediting of the principle

of irrational fear, the dispersion of false dogmas, the clearing up of

superstition, the growth of toleration and charity, instead of weakening

true faith or lessening public worship, will greatly increase and

strengthen both. For it is not man's ignorance, weakness, and fears,

that lead him most certainly to Christian worship and faith. There is a

worship and a faith of blindness and dread; but they have no tendency to

develop a moral and spiritual sense of the character of God, or the

character becoming man, or to survive the spread of general intelligence

and mental courage. If thought, if courage of mind, if inquiry and

investigation, if experience and learning and comprehensive grasp, if

light and sound reason, and acquaintance with human nature, tended to

abolish a living God from the heart and faith of man, to disprove the

essential truths of Christianity, or to make life and the human soul

less sacred, aspiring, and religious, the world would be on its rapid

way to atheism. But I maintain that science itself, philosophy and free

inquiry, however divorced from religious institutions and dogmas, were

never so humble, reverential, and Christian as since they partly

emancipated themselves from theological or ecclesiastical censure and

suspicion. For ages science knelt to religion as she went to her

crucible or laboratory, like the sexton passing the altar in a Catholic

cathedral, and with as little thought or feeling as he, simply to avert

censure, while she pursued inquiries she knew would banish the

superstition she pretended to honor. Faith and knowledge were at

opposite poles; religious truth and scientific truth, finally and

permanently amenable to different standards. How dishonoring to religion

was this distrust of light and knowledge! how faithless in God, this

faith in him which could not bear investigation! how compromising to

Christianity, the sort of trust which refuses as blasphemous the

application of all the tests and proofs which are required in the

certification of every other important conviction! Religious faith rests

on the spiritual nature; but its basis is not less real for being

undemonstrable, like the axioms of mathematics. That is not real faith

which dares not investigate the grounds of its own being. It is

irreverent to God, to affirm that he does not allow us to try his ways;

to demand proofs of his existence and righteous government; to ask for

the credentials of his alleged messengers; to doubt until we are

rationally convinced. If the artificial feeling that faith is opposed to

reason; religious truth to universal truth; that belief in unseen things

is less rational or less capable of verification than the radical

beliefs of the senses,--if these prejudices were sound, or not the

reverse of true, the world would be on its inevitable way to universal

infidelity and godless materialism. But is that the tendency of things?

Is it that religion is growing _less_ mystic? or only science more so?

Have not real and affecting mysteries been very much transferred for the

time from theology to philosophy, from the priest to the professor? I

doubt very much whether men of science are not more truly on their knees

than men of superstition, in our days. Never did such candor, such

confessions of baffled insight, such a sense of inscrutable wisdom and

power, such a feeling of awe and dependence, seem to prevail in science

as now, when so many theologians are raising the eyebrow, and seeking to

alarm the world at what they call the atheism of the most truth-loving,

earnest, and noble men. I would sooner have the scepticism--reverent and

honest and fearless--of these solemn and awed inquisitors in the inner

shrines of nature, than the faith of self-bandaged priests, who are

thinking to light the way to heaven with candles on the mid-day altar,

or to keep faith in God alive only by processions in vestments of purple

and gold.

Nor has Christianity any thing permanently to fear from the disposition

which now so largely prevails, to separate it from its accidents, its

accretions, and its misrepresentations. The days have not long gone by

when men were counted as entitled to little respect, if they did not

wear side-swords and bag-wigs. You recollect how our Benjamin Franklin

surprised, shocked, and then delighted all Europe, by appearing at the

court of France in plain citizen's clothes? Religion, too, has had her

court-dress, and her sounding court-titles, and official robes, and

circuitous ceremonies. The world has felt horror-stricken whenever any

brave and more believing spirit has ventured to ask the meaning of one

of these theological tags and titles. But how much less wholesome is

living water, if drunk out of a leaf, or the palm of one's hand, than if

presented on a salver, in a curiously jewelled flagon, by a priest in

livery? How much has theological ingenuity of statement and systematic

divinity, which it takes the study of a life to understand, added to the

power of the simplicity of Christ as he unfolds himself in the Sermon on

the Mount? Yet, if any one has dared to be as simple as Christ himself

was in his own faith, he has been said to deny the Lord that bought him.

It has been called infidelity, to think Christ meant only just what he

said, and was understood to say, in his simple parables. You must

believe something not less incredible and abstruse than the church

Trinity; something not less contrary to natural justice and common sense

than the church vicarious atonement; something not less cruel and

vindictive than the eternal misery of all who through ignorance, birth,

or accident, or even perversity and pride, do not hear of, or do not

accept, the blood of Christ as their only hope of God's mercy and

forgiveness, or you are no Christian. Now I hold these dogmas themselves

to be unchristian in origin and influence, although held by many

excellent Christian men. I believe that they are the main obstacles with

many honest, brave, and enlightened men in our day, to their interest in

public worship; and that millions repudiate the Church, and

Christianity, which is a different thing, simply because they suppose

her to be responsible for these barnacles upon the sacred ship. It would

be just as reasonable to hold the Hudson River responsible for the filth

the sewers of the city empty into it; or to hold the sun answerable for

the changes in its beams, caused by the colored glass in church-windows.

Christianity, the Christianity of Christ, is simple, rational,

intelligible, independent of, yet in perfect harmony,--if it be often an

unknown harmony,--with philosophy, ethics, science; true, because from

God, the God of nature as well as grace; true, because the transcript of

self-evident and self-proving principles; true, because guaranteed by

our nature; true, because of universal application, unimpeached by time

or experience. It affirms the being and authority of a righteous, holy,

and all-loving God, whom man can serve and love and worship because he

is made in his image; can know, by studying himself; and to whom man is

directly related by reason, conscience, and affections. It affirms

divine science and worship to consist in obedience to God's laws,

written on man's heart, and for ever urged by God's Spirit. It affirms

the present and persistent penalty, the inevitable consequences, of all

moral and spiritual wrong-doing and disobedience; the present and future

blessedness of well-doing and holiness. It sets forth Jesus Christ as

the Son of God and Son of Man,--appellations that, deeply considered,

really mean the same thing,--the direct messenger, representative, and

plenipotentiary of God,--his perfect moral image. It insists upon men's

putting themselves to school to Christ, honoring, loving, and following

him; forming themselves into classes,--another name for churches,--and

by prayer, meditation, and study of his life, informing their minds and

hearts, and shaping their wills in his likeness, which is the ideal of

humanity. Its clear object is to dignify and ennoble man, by presenting

God as his father; to show him what his nature is capable of, by

exhibiting Christ in the loveliness, sanctity, and power of his awful

yet winning beauty; to make him ashamed of his own sins, and afraid of

sin, by arousing moral sensibility in his heart; safely to fence in his

path by beautiful and sacred customs,--the tender, simple rites of

baptism and communion; the duty of daily prayer, the use of the

Scriptures, and respect for the Lord's Day.

Here is a Christianity without dogmatic entanglement; plain, direct,

earnest, simple, defensible, intelligible to a child, yet deep enough to

exhaust a life's study. For it is the simplicities of religion that are

the permanent and glorious mysteries that never tire. They draw our

childhood's wonder, our manly reverence, and age's unquenched curiosity

and awe. Do we ever tire of the stars, or the horizon, or the blue sky,

or the dawn, or the sunset, or running water, or natural gems? Do we

ever tire of the thought of a holy, all-wise, all-good Spirit of

spirits, our God and our Father, or of hearing of the reverence and

trust, the obedience and the love, due to him? Do we ever tire of Jesus

Christ, considered as the sinless image, within human limitations, of

God's love and truth and mercy and purity? Do we ever tire of hearing

the wondrous story of his obedient, disinterested, and exalted life and

sacrifice? or of the call to follow his graces and copy his perfections

into our own hearts and lives? Are we ever weary of hearing of the

blessed hope of immortality, with the comfortable expectation of

throwing off the burden of our flesh, and winging our way in spiritual

freedom nearer to God and the light of our Master's face? Who can

exhaust, who can add to, the real force and attraction and fulness of

those truths and promises? Truly received, they grow with every day's

contemplation and use; they fill the soul with an increasing awe and

joy; they prove only less common-place as they are more nearly

approached, more copious as they are more drawn upon, and more sacred as

they are more familiar.