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"^*^^' i * !, ) SIX LBCTUEES DELIVERED AT THE CHAUTAUQUA ASSEMBLY BY THE REV. JOSEPH COOK. AUGUST, 1877. TORONTO WILLARD TRACT DEPOSITORY. 1877. 1 i TORONTO: PRINTED BY HILL AND WEIR, I3 VICTORIA ST. t,W \ PR EFACE. JOSEPH COOK. Of Mr. Cook,' Prof. Edwards A. Park, D.D., of Andover The- ological Seminary, says: " I have various reasons for desiring that the lectures and addresses announced on the programme of Mr. Joseph Cook may be heard by our churches. " Mr. Cook is well qualified to defend the truth, and to refute the most recondite objections against it. He is fitted to make the religion of the Bible appear reasonable, and to make the practical errors of men appear unreasonable. He is a Licen- tiate of Andover Theological Seminary ; has studied at the German Universities ; has travelled extensively in Italy, Egypt, Palestine, Greece; and in these, as well as in various other methods, has become well furnished for fundamental discussions on religion as affected by philosophy, and on science as affect- ing religion. His practical lectures are instructive; and, while they lead the mind from fanaticism, they interest and affect the feelings." The 'New York Tribune of March 30th, 1877, says of him: "One of the great sensations of Boston this winter has been, and still is, Joseph Cook, whose Monday lectures in Tremont Temple have a popularity quite unprecedented, considering the rather abstract nature of his subjects. He has had a wide range of theme, from Evolution and Immortality to Emerson and Parker, and has made it a point to undertake the reconciliation of Religion (or rather of evangelical theology) with science. He has shown quite remarkable power of various illustration, and great skill in making his similies do the work of arguments, be- ing very fluent and scholarly." From the Rev. Joseph Leckie, D.D., "Ibrox, U.P.C., Glasgow. " I have read several lectures by the Rev. Joseph Cook, and think them admirable specimens of controversy, fair and can- did in tone, and yet incisive, earnest, and fervent. They are the result of much reading in many directions, and are full of subtle, strong, and fresh thinking. They are calculated to do great good, especially among the more thoughtful young men. " 13th June, 1877." "Joseph Leckie, D.D." " The lecturer is a brave man, and has spoken fit and noble words on themes of pressing import to inquiring young minds of to-day." — Samuel Colev, Wesleyan College, Headingley. 11. PREFACE. In a letter to the Cincinuatti Gazette, Rev. A. D. May® writes Qc follows '. — "The students at Yale College of some twenty years ago re- member a tremendous young fellow who came down their trail- h^g a big reputation from Andover Academy. A long residence in Europe cooled him off, crystalized his mental salts, and sent ,u:^ u^X f^ Am^rira. where he appeared a year or two ago as an" occasional- preacher, thundering out aiscour^es au aoui long, rammed to the muzzle with the hot shot of logic illumm- ated by the glare of a wondrous imagination. Wisely declm- ing the proffer of several reckless parish committees to a set- tlement,' the Rev. Joseph Cook emerged last winter in Tremont Temple, Boston, as a Monday-noon lecturer, under the auspices of the Young Men's Christian Association. The respectable Boston press, according to its wont, was preparing to take him up with a pair of silver tongs for calm and critical ' analysis, when the lively Springfield Republican broke in, and advertised him as the coming man in New England theology. Perhaps his crowning attraction in Boston is the magnificent assurance with which he encounters the chronic conceit of the large clasa of extreme theorists and sceptical literati of tnat locahty. :^ 4 CONSCIENCE." THE FIRST LECTURE BY JOSEPH COOK, OF BOSTON, DELIVERED WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON. \l Rev. Dr. Newman, in introducing Mr. Cook, spoke as follows: The God of the Bible is the God of Creation. The Scriptures are a commentary upon the order and constitution of nature. All the fundamental principles of Christianity have their paral- ells in nature. Infidelity has changed its mode of assault upon the Gospel of our Lord. To-day it calls in question the grand harmony between the unwritten word of God and His written truth as we have it in Moses ?nd the prophets, in Christ and the apostles. Hence, to-day, Bishop Butler's Analogy is the book for the time, and I rejoice to-day that we have with us a living, a thinking, breathing, feeling, talking Butler's Analogy. In God's good providence He raises up men eminently quali- fied to accomplish the exalted purpose of His will. We re- cognize in our friend who is to speak to us at this hour such an agent. He is not Doctor of Divinity, he is not Rever- end, but he is Brother Cook in the Lord, and I have great pleasure, therefore, ift presenting to you this afternoon one who is capable by natural endowment, by educational acquirements, by personal experience, to vindicate the great claims of Christi- anity upon the faith and the convictions of mankind. I, there- fore, take pleasure in presenting to you Brother Joseph Cook. Mr. Cook came forward and spoke as follows: William Shakespeare, who is supposed to have known some- thing of human nature, says that conscience is a thousand swords, and John Wesley, who spent the larger part of his life in gazing into the unseen, says that God is a thousand con- sciences. Now we are assembled to-day on the edge of a hardly quenched volcano. Our land has twice been washed in blood in the first century of its existence, and yet, within the last fort- night, we have suffered from three things: a wide-spread strike of low paid labor, a riot of the roughs and the sneaks, and a grand, motherly self-defence. Our fathers thought that our safety consisted in the diffusion of liberty ; very well, we have diffusion of liberty, and we have not found safety in that alone. Some of our fathers said it would be necessary for CONSCIENCE. US to diffuse intelligence, and we have diffused that, as no other nation ever has done, and yet we are not safe. And now it begins to be whispered that safe republicanism must consist not only in diffusion of liberty and a diffusion of intelligence, but in the diffusion of property. The self-respect of ownership will make men orderly it is thought. Now I am audacious enough to believe that when we have diffused property as far as natural law will allow it to be spreaa broadcasc ihiuu^h tliC ccrr»rr/v:n:ty, every man having what he can earn and can keep, and no more, there will be yet another diffusion, for I feel sure that safe re- publicanism consists in the diffusion of liberty, the diffusion of intelligence, the diffusion of property anc^the diffusion of con- scientiousness. These four things: liberty, intelligence, property, conscientiousness — unless we can saturate America with them, she never will be clay soft enough for the hands of the potter, that is, for the hands of the average multitude. But if we can diffuse conscientiousness, I think we shall have secured a diffu- sion of property, a diffusion of conscientiousness, so that in the last analysis the diffusion of conscientiousness is the first work of the Republic, and that work is the first work of the Church, the great American Church; and we can then have a glorious American Republic, otherwise not. With the diffusion of con- scientiousness we can have diffusion of property, of intelligence, and of liberty that shall be safe. Divide the property Monday morning between the individuals in the community and on Sat- urday night it will be unequally divided again. Rothschild was once visited by the Communists who told him they thought he ought to divide his property among the population of France. "How much do you think I ani worth?" "Thirty-five million francs." "How manj' people are there in France?" "Thirty- five millions." "Well, gentlemen, here'are your francs." Un- less we attend to the diffusion of conscientiousness in the population, we descend at once. Any population that does not come together every week, with clean clothes and with sacred song and elevated discussion, and feel religious sympathy, will ultimately be led by quacks. And the unchurched population is very large among the unemployed, very large among those who are the explosive material in our cities, very large south, east, and west among tramps. There is to me no hope for America unless we give up the pet theory of our fathers, that the diffusion of liberty and intelligence is enough for republican- ism. The diffusion of intelligence and property, fair wages, after fair rates have been paid to capital, and then diffusion of conscientiousness, and nothing short of that will save America from the evil we have seen burst forth all the way from Balti- more to San Francisco. In the Church is the safety of repub- licanism. What is conscience ? If God is a thousand consciences and conscience is a thousand swords, it is certain that neither from conscience nor from God can we escape. We never can I CONSCIENCE. escape from God, who is ten thousand ten thousand times ten thousand times more holy than the spark He has breathed in us. We are to go hence, but we are not to go from ourselves or from Him. When Samuel Taylor Coleridge was a poor boy and a charity scholar in London, he was wandering one day along the Strand throwing out his hands wildly to the right and left, and one of them came in contact with a gentleman's waistcoat pocket, and the man iiuiuv^diatcly ac^"":**'! the boy of thievish intentions. "No," said Mr. Coleridge, "I am not intendmg to pick your pocket, I am swimming the Hellespont. This morning in school I read the story of Hero and Leander, Hero was on the Euro- pean side, and Leander swam the Bosphorous to meet her, and such a hold has that story on my imagination that I am now imitating Leander." So thoroughly was the gentleman impres- sed with the vividness of the imagination of Coleridge, that he subscribed for the lad's admission to the public library, which commenced the poet's education. Now, my friends, the begin- ning of all clearness on this topic of conscience is to make a dis- tinction between the Hellespont and picking a pocket. For your external act may be precisely the same although the mo- tives that lead to it are as different as those of a thief and those of an enthusiastic boy imitating Leander. We all know that it is the motive that gives the moral character to the external act. It is one of the common-places of ethical instruction to assert that a merely external act taken wholly apart from the motive that leads to it, has no moral character. It has no expediency or inexpediency. It has mischievousness or usefulness, but we do not in strict speech call it right or wrong. Until a lawyer knows what a criminal meant to do he does not know what the crime was. Everybody understands that we must go beyond the external action and inquire what a man meant who commit- ted an act before the criminalty of that act is determined. Your boy, coasting down the hill yonder, in the winter, may be acci- dentally struck by the lash of some passing coachman, and the boy looks up at once and says, " Did you mean to do that ? " and according as the boy judges, he blames or excuses the coach- man. And so with your little urchin on the parlor floor, build- ing his palace on the carpet, if you tumble down his cards, he will look up into your face and say, by his action if not by language, "Did you mean to do that?" and the untutored infant thus makes a distinction between a good motive and a bad one. Now that infant has not been evolved very far in human experience. That infant is pretty nearly in the condition in which it came into the world, and its personal experiment of expediency and inexpediency probably can not have taught him to make this distinction between motives that are good and motives that are bad, and it is natural to the child, I hold, when it is born to make those distinctions between a man that means well and a WB « CONSCIENCE. I! man that means wrong, and the external act takes on the char- acter to that child from the motive; and it is not a thing of the schools, it is a thing put into us before birth. But now, just here, ^n order that I may pass first to the dryest part of the dis- cussion, but what to some will be the most essential part, let me ask those who have been annoyed or captured by Herbert Spen- cer, to remember that the experience of men in regard to self- evident truths can be explained by nothing in our individual experience of the external or internal world, and by nothing in the experience of our ancestors. That is to say, we have some convictions that can not be explained either by your own per- sonal experience or by the personal experience of the race. I am going to show before I sit down, I hope, that man is so made that he must make a distinction between the right hand and the left hand of motives, and that we all proceed on the supposition that there is ^ difference between right and wrong. Now, philosophers of the materialistic school are accustomed to say that those tendencies have been evolved in us. vVe were specks of protoplasm once, and have been variously boxed about, and some things have burned us, and some things have cooled us, and some things have done us hurt, and some good, and our an- cestors, having !.ad a long experience, have transmitted to us certain nerve tracks, and we now come, as if by instinct, to love the things that are useful, and to dislike the things that are mischievous. If we had been boxed about the other way, per- haps the left would have been right, and the right would have beeii left. Stuart Mill said that there might be worlds in which two and two did not make four. And so a consistent believer in the mofi sensationalist's philosophy will hold that there may be a world in which wrong may be right, and right wrong. Now, against all that style of philosophy it is time to appeal to common sense — to the average experience of man. You think I am about to talk metaphysics. Well, metaphysics don't mean Missouri water. I saw some of thac the other day, and could not see a new-coined dime in the bottom of it. But now if you will fasten attention on your own experience I think the convic- tion will fasten upon your mind that some parts of your experi- ence are not to be explained in this method of the evolutionist's philosophy. Do we not have some certainties that go beyond our experience? That is the question. I know that the whole is greater than a part, do I not? I hope so. Well, is the whole ^'•eatcT than a part in the sun ? I feel sure it is. Is it greater than a part in the moon and the stars? I feel perfectly sure that a vhcle is greater than a part in every star in the concave. Is it possible to imagine that there was any past time when a whole was less than a part? No. Any future time when a whole will be less than a part? No. Now, have I had any experience in the sun? No. Any in the siars? None at all. I never flew with Cygnus over the horizon, or marched in even pace with m ^ CONSCIENCE. Ursa Major in the north. And I feel sure that yonder where Cygnus appear^ to my view, and v/here Ursa Major paces in the eternal circle around the pole, the whole is greater than the part, and things equal to the same thing are equal to each other, and that a straight line is the shortest distance between two points. Now our evolutionist philosophers come forward and say we feel sure on all these points, but our assurance is the result of the experience of our ancestors. They always saw a whole was greater than the part, and they have come to think so, and we have inherited the tendency, and it has been ingrained in us. There is no revelation of God in that necessity of thought; but there is a revelation of our being boxed about in this way and in that in the necessity of existence. I do not deny that evolution has had some part in human conduct. But I deny the material- istic and atheistic doctrine of existence. If you will hold with Dana and Grey, I will not fight with you much. But if you hold with Heckel, who denies that God is anything more than a necessity, and that conscience is anything more than a bundle of hoops, then in the name of the scientific method we shall cross swords, and there shall be no pause called until we find out who is clear, and unto whom, therefore, regency ought to belong. Now I must ask the attention of everyone to a trite point, but it is an important one. If our experience, and that of all our an- cestors, accounts for all tl'^se convictions we have as a self-evi- dent truth, we ought to find our convictions perfectly immovable whenever we refer to anything about which experience has al- ways been the same. If experience is the source of ail these convictions which we call self-evident truths, and whenever ex- perience has always been the same, it ought to be impossible to imagine the opposite of that experience. Now have we always that experience of the sun rising in the east? Yes. Our an- cestors saw the sun rise in the east? Certainly. Adam saw it rise there ? Very probably. There is nothing to show that the sun ever rose in the west, nothing whatever. Now can you not barely imagine tnat the sun might rise in the west ? Is there any impossibility of thought in supposing that the course through which the globe revolves might be in the opposite direction. I could imagine that might be, but I cannot imagine that a whole might be less than a part. I cannot imagine that things that ari equal to the same things are not equal to each other. It is ab- solutely impossible for me to conceive that a straight line is n^* the shortest distance between two points. When I say two things equal to the same things are equal to each other, I am not putting before you merely an identical proposition, but I am as- sured that things equal to the same things here are equal to the same things in the moon, are equal to the same things in the sun that they have been in all past time and Will always continue to be. I cannot imagine the opposite of it. I have that only from my experience and the experience of my ancestors on the subject ; i lO CONSCIENCE. and I 'nave only the experience of myself and the experience of my ancestors on the subject of the sun rising in the east. But I ,can reverse in thought the possibility of the sun rising in the east but I cannot reverse in thought the other proposition. Thus whtn we find in our convictions that a whole is greater than a part that a strai,=;ht line is the shortest distance between two points, that things equal to the same things are equal to each other — when we find those certainties regulating all the universe in all times past, and all time to come, we say that our experi- ence can not account for the breadth of our conviction. If it can, the fountain rises a great deal higher than the source. Those convictions are the result of the make-up of human nature. They are a part of the original revelation of God in the structure of the soul. They do not come from our being boxed about in this way or that, and no conceivable change of our experience would ever have made us believe that a whole is less than a part, or that a straight line is not the shortest distance between two points, or that things equal to the same thing are not equal to each other. Contingent truths we can imagine the opposite of; necessary truth we can not even imagine to be reversed. Now what does this have to do with conscience? Just as they are axioms in mathematics there are axioms in morals. There is a difference between right and wrong. That is an axiom. We feel just as sure that some things are right and, some things are wrong, as we do that a whole is greater than a part. We know when we mean right, and we know when we mean wrong. Every time when we mean to be mean conscience makes us feel mean. Now the question is whether it ought to. It does, any- way. And the question is whether if we had been boxed about a little differently, we should not have been delivered from all these thousand swords of which Shakespeare speaks. The ques- tion is whether there are not in religious science axioms just as firm as any in mathematics; whether we can not build upon self- evident truth in the language of moral ideas, just as we build upon self-evident truth in the language of mathematical ideas. It is more and more, I assure you, my friends, the assertion of all advanced thought in Germany and England and Scotland and in this country that just as there are axioms in mathematics, so there are axioms in religious thoughts. And upon these axioms and self-evident truths, propositions of which we can not imagine the opposite, we must build our religious philosophy. Not in the last place, not in the first place, shall there be one corner- stone, and the Scripture another corner-stone; for the Scripture appeals everywhere to the nature of things. Tliey insist on it, that two cannot walk together unless they are agreed ; and that "c-n't" is an appeal io the ver>' nature of things. Things can not be, and not be, at the same time, and in the same sense; and so the Bible itself appeals to self-evident truths that will begin therefore in reasoning with our philosophers, with the scientific the deti say you at a ani Pas con: that any con CONSCIENCE. II ence of But I the east Thus than a een two to each Universe experi- 1. If it source, nature, ructure 3out in )erience n a part, reen two equal to )0site of; I. Now they are lere is a m. We lings are Ve know 1 wrong. ;s us feel 3es, any- ed about I from all ^he ques- is just as ipon self- we build :al ideas, tion of all land and latics, so e axioms t imagine Not in e corner- Scripture sist on it. and that lings can ;nse; and vill begin scientific method itself, and will proclaim that the advance of science will answer all the questions the advance of science raises, and that not to the detriment, but to the coronation of religious science § itself. Ws will build on axioms, and, looking sharply into these ^ axiomr, perhaps we may find at last the light that lighteth every I man that cometh into the world. Now that is the Biblical de- I scription of conscience. I Now, if there be in nature such a plan that he must make a I distinciion between meaning right and meaning wrong, then God speaks through that plan to the creature He has made, and in conscience may, perhaps, be the temple — of whom ? Where is Jesus of Nazareth now? In Gethsemane? Not at all. On the Mount of Olives He wanders no longer; on the Jordan His foot- steps strike no more the sands of the white shore. But we read that His name was "God with us." We read that He is the light that lighteth every man that cometh into the world, and if there is a sense in which man may be the temple of that light, and which in the beginning was with God and was God, I can show you that the temple of the Holy Spirit in man is the tem- ple of our ascended Lord. But I can show you in the name of natural science that conscience has in it a somewhat and a some- one which are in us, but not of us. If I can show you that the light which lighteth every man that cometh into the world was in the beginning with God, and was God, I may be able to send you away with such an awe in the presence of the somewhat that you shall feel yourselves, whenever the moral law touches you, touched by the pierced right hand. I solemnly believe that wherever the Holy Spirit touches human history the our ascend- . ed Lord is touching it, not that there is any distinction at all between the influences of the Spirit and His influences, but He is wherever the Spirit is, and the Spirit makes its temple in con- science. And so to-day my theme is not moral conscience in a view of exact science, but conscience as the temple of Him who had not once where to lay His head, but who to-day, in this Assembly, and in all assemblies of the globe, fills individual souls as the magnetic currents fills the throbbing needle — omnipresent — making every one that will obey balance toward the globe. But we have thus far attained only a pomt of view from which the outlines of this theme are visible. Let us now, passing to detail for a moment, ask what is conscience once more. Some say conscience is faUible. Others say it is infallible. Some say ' you can educate conscience. Others say you cannot educate it ; at all. Some say conscience is one thing north of the Pyrenees,. ; and another south. One thing in this age, and another in that. Pascal made those observations. Others say that an erring , conscience is a chimera, there is no such thing. Some claim that conscience is always infallible. Others say that there is not ^ anything so capricious, and fluctuating, and utterly absurd as conscience. Now, when learned men differ in this style, how 12 CONSCIENCE. M •shall we plain men form clear ideas? Here we are on the shore of a lake, one thousand two hundred and ninety one feet above the sea level, but the name of the lake means "Foggy Place." We stand here on the shore of the topic of conscience, the high- est above sea level of all earthly things, and yet such is the pop- ular misapprehension and such the scholarly misapprehension on many points connected with this theme that we, out in this Chautauqua, are in a fog^ place. Now whenever you are in a mist, attend to the duty of definition. * There are two ideas con- cerning conscience, the popular and the strictly scientific. By the popular idea is meant strictly the soul's sense of right and wrong. In the strict scientific acceptation of the word, con- science means the soul's sense of right and wrong in motive. Now, little as those two phrases differ from each other, they will enable us to dissipate this mist. The soul has many senses, but one of those senses is of the difference between right and wrong, and a popular definition is a soul's sense of right and wrong, and the scholarly definition is the soul's sense of right .and wrong in motives. Now what is the trouble with the popu- lar definition ? Why, it is definite enough. You do not know whether it refers to swimming the Hellespont, or picking the pocket, or to the motive that lies behind those afcts. The popu- lar definition makes no distinction between the outer acts and the inner motive. The strict and scholarly definition applies conscience to the inner motive only. It affirms that we always know infallibly what we want to do. Now, do you, or do you not? I put this whole matter to plain common sense, to the acute thought of scholars who are here in great numbers. I know how silent I ought to be in this Assembly, sir, and I know how swiftly I shall be corrected if I treat anything erratic here. But I hold that it is clear that if you define conscience as a fac- ulty which determines the moral quality of motives, we have a faculty that does determine infallibly whether we mean right or wrong, for it points out the moral quality of the motive, just as the tongue points out bitter or sweet anything that we taste. If you give no definition that makes a distinction between the ex- ternal acts and the inner motive, then, of course, you will be in a fog. Thus, a man takes the life of another. Is that wrong or right ? I don't know. But you are no lawyer, you say. But if a lawyer were here, and saw a man take the life of another, he would not know whether it was right or wrong. There is the ■external act. Perhaps it is homicide, and perhaps it is murder and the penalty is death. The lawyer must ascertain by going behind the act, and finding out whether there is malice afore- thought. We don't know until wt reach the heart of Coleridge, the boy, whether he means to pick the pocket, or swim the Hellespont. Now there will come another distinction between ■external and internal. The lawyers draw a line very sharply between the external actions and the operations that lead to hem, i Jyou wil Ifhen I 'adopt t ds fallib ^and an labsurd /science |no disti jBible sj •the wor |not fallj land we Ipopulai I Now, ■means 1 man pic Ht for th iits colo ionly th< pudging |conside 'but I a if you 1 ply inte are onl igranate the ton; jmoral intelle^ Now! timt y\ tDUght,' tiot," tiot, e^ against from tl hot felt all Gl now >| hav( t>r "I iivill nd Will n( that wl it way i| l>eing. the mj fe soni CONSCIENCE, 15 :he shore »et above Place." the high- the pop- rehension ut in this are in a deas con- tific. By right and rord, con- n motive. :her, they ny senses hem, and what the lawyers do I claim the right to do, and if you will let me do that and say that conscience refers to motives, then I will show, you that conscience is infallible; but if you ladopt the popular definition, I will let you say tiiat conscience iis fallible ; can be educated ; is one thing north of the Pyrenees^ land another thing south ; that it is one of the most capricious, labsurd thifigs in the world. Sometimes we speak of our con- f science as our general perception of right and wrong, and make Ino distinction between the external act and an inner motive ; the- iBible speaks of a light that lighteth everything that cometh into fthe world, and was with God, and was God, and probably was |not fallible. There are two ideas, therefore, both in the Bible, land we have the popular and scientific — one the looser and Ipopular, the other the strict and scholarly. I Now, from this point on, I shall assume that conscience^ imeans the soul's sense of right and wrong in motive. When a right and Iman picks up a pomegranate, as I used to in Syria, and tastes right and |jt fQj. the first time, he looks at it, weighs it in his hand, notices- se of right ij^g color, perhaps i :s odor, but he brings it to his lips, and it is- the popu- |only the tongue that tastes that fruit. If you say that often in I not know fudging motives, our intellects are concerned, that they weigh icking the fconsiderations on the right hand and on the left, so they do, The popu- / t5ut I affirm that you can find out, to your perfect satisfaction, ;r acts and ,jf ^^u will only notice how your mind acts, that when you ap- on applies p|y intellect to the decision and character of the motives, you we always ^^j-g only using your mind as you use your h d with a pome- or do you jgranate ; you bring the pomegranate up to your lips, and it is- the tongue that tastes whether it is bitter or sweet. There is a anoral sense, and, if we h«id not that moral sense, no amount of intellectual power would distmguish between right and wrong. Now, I put it to you whether th«re is not within you every )tim« you say " I will not " a still, small voice that says " I jpught," which gives you unrest. Have you not said " I will |iot," when the still, small voice says " I ought," and have you not, every time you have said that, felt that the stars fif ht against you, felt that the sun is growing dim, felt that the rains from the heavens were not as plentiful as formerly? Have you- not lelt a sense of remoteness ? From what ? From what you call God. Now that is a terrific fact, if it be the fact. You know you hear the still, small voice saying " You ought." Yes, §. have heard it again and again. You may say *•! will not," i)r " I will " to that voice. Yes, I know that I have said " I Ivill not " again and again. You know every time you say " I tin by gomg ^jn not" that there is a sense of remoteness from a somewhat, lalice afore- ihat which you think of as if it were a some one, you are driven if Coleridge, 4way into that feeling of remoteness from the Author of your tr swim the |)eing. Do you need to open^ the Bible to know anything about on between j^he matters up to this point f Why, if we open our Bible there- ^ery sharply {|g something about man being expelled from Paradise, being: hat lead to 4 ise, to the Limbers. I md I know ratic here, ce as a fac- we have a in right or ive, just as e taste. If een the ex- u will be in at wrong or ay. But if another, he rhere is the : is murder 14 CONSCIENCE. There 15 one unwilling to hear the voice in the cool of the day. meaning in that story. That is, that whosoever disobeys God will have a sense of remoteness from Him. I know I can not come back at all unless I want to. Is it not possible for me to go into a sense of remoteness until I shall cease to want to come back ? That is a terrible prophesy conscience makes €very time we turn our back on the sun. Remoteness,^eepen- ing remoteness, crystalizing remoteness, a kind of remoteness that by and by brings up the feeling of despair, We don't know whether we ever shall go back, for we seem to have gone over the brink. Now all that, I hold, is the natural operation of our faculties. If we are so made that this sense of remote- ness comes back when we say that " I will not," we are also so -made that a sense of nearness comes when we say " I will." Who has not felt the sun grow brighter as many times as he has said " I will " to the divine " I ought " ? Does any man want the sun to rise at mid- noon? Does any man want the leaves and flowers to become twice as beautiful as they are ? Then let that man or woman look into the inner heavens of the soul, yield gladly to all the light there, and the regions vithin shall stream into this perishable world without, and the Heav- ens, which shall be rolled away by and by as a scroll, will them- selves seem to be illummed from these inner Heavens that are never to be rolled away. Kant said that the two sublimest things to him were the starry Heavens and the moral law, and now I affirm that whoever yields to the voice that says : "thou oughtest," finds nearness to the somewhat, or some one in Him, but not of Him; finds all things fighting for Him; the stars in their courses are on His side, and this may go on until life is bliss, until there is in man a rapture quite equal to that pain which is produced by remoteness from God on the other hand. If God is a thousand consciences, let us rejoice and be glad, and let us also call on the rocks to cover us from the face of Him before Him, lest the universe shall flee away and there be found no place for it, and the very heavens be regarded as un- clean. We are so made that obedience to this voice brings us nearer to the universe, and to the somewhat and some one be- hind it and governing it, and disobedience gives us a sense of remoteness. These things we know. They are certainty. They are a part of our make up. Edmund Burke used to say a man's constitution must be the basis of religious science. But now you say this " ought," to which I refer, does not mean much. It is not a very great iorce in human nature. We can put it aside. Our wills can say " no," although God's will be upon us in some sense through conscience. Well, put the word "ought" in the scale, put in the other everything ex- cept the word " ought." Perhaps in this audience there are soldiers with an empty sleeve.* They left their limbs at Gettysburg ; but there was an earlier day when they left CONSCIENCE. 15 ic is one eys God can not e for me want to e makes [j'^deepen- oteness '"e don't ve gone peration remote- e also so ' I will." es as he any man want the hey are ? :ns of the at vilhin le Heav- vill them- i that are sublimest law, and 's : "thou e in Him, 5 stars in ntil life is that pain her hand. 1 be glad, he face of i there be ed as un- brings us e one be- sense of certainty. jed to say s science. not mean We can I's will be 1, put the thing ex- ice there eir limbs they left their homes, and, perhaps, experienced a sharper trial in that act than they did when, in the storm of war, the cannon-ball sheared away limb after limb. To a soldier enlist- ing, in one scale the word " ought," in the other scale is the word " father," the word " mother" — very heavy words ; per- haps there is no heavier one except '• wife," and that, too, is there in that scale. Children are in this scale. The soldier supports mother, father, wife, children, and all the weight of his love, and of his duty in regard to that family, is m one scale, and in the other only this word " ought," and he weighs a single syllable against all those others. You know the result. Up, up, as if a feather, go the heaviest words- as we call them, father, mother, wife, children, and a single " ought" carries him to the front, and to the death of a hero. And now what if that soldier could have weighed other heavier things in that scale. The word '* ought" is there, and now he puts on the other side everything but that word " ought." He puts in the temptation of wealth, and of ease, and of pain ; he puts in the kingdom of the world ; he puts in the whole planet ; he puts in the solar system ; _nd I will show you that the single syllable here will carry up all that we call the world ; for that single syllable " ought" ought to weigh more than anything else. Is it not a curious fact this, and yet a fact absolutely un- deniable ? Where is your Spencerian who will deny this to be the case ? Any man of honor, I care not what his philosophy, will sa}' " I have weighed these words aright." And now it is a scientific method, is it not, to weigh over things against each ('ther. I will put anything you please into that scale, against that word, except God, for I cannot imagine God put into a scale against " ought." And there is a mystery explained, for God is in that word " ought, " and, therefore, it weighs more than all but God. Hera is a man that believes there is a physical law of gravi- tation. How shall I convince him that there is a moral law ? He believes only what he can see, feel, touch and handle. Now 1 open William Shakespeare and here is the camp of the vil- lainous King Richard. Here is the camp of the virtuous King Richmond. You remember in that play of " Richard HI," the most majestic treatise on conscience in the English language, except Macbeth. I do not justify all that Shakespeare has written. He held the mirror up to nature and in the lower part of his mirror are many things that he, if he were alive, would blot out. Shakespeare's father was twice prosecuted for allowing a heap of refuse to be accumulated before his own door in Stratford-on-Avon, and I have olien thought the son took after the father in this particular. But while I would screen the lower part of Shakespeare's mirror, I, conversing here with men who believe that I am afraid to take human na- ture as a standard, will direct their eyes to the upper part of ^" w. i6 CONSCIENCE. that mirror, where heaven itself, with rewards and punishments, in the unseen holy are reflected. Here is Richmond ; here is Richard. Now, Richard has committed many murders, and on the eve of a battle with Richmond the ghosts arise and trouble Richard in his sleep. \ou open Shakespeare at a mag- nificent scene in " Richard III," and find Clarence rising and shaking his bloody hair at Richard and saying : " Remember how thou stabbest me at Tewkesbury. Let me sit heavy on thy soul to-morrow. Peace to thee, Richmond, light be thy sleep all thy days." And another murdered soul arises, and thirteen times Shakespeare makes the ghosts call out : " Let me sit heavy on thy soul to-morrow." Did Shakespeare delin- eate human nature there, or not ? Is that the way a man feels when he has committed murder ? Are there any chains that seem to draw down the forger and adulterer ? I know a sneak- thief found in the holy of holies of society of Boston, and he fled to a place where German was spoken, and Dutch, but he found that the still, small voice spoke there also. I know another sneak-thief found in the holy of holies at Washington, and when he was brought up for impeachment, do you believe that although there was no visible change in him, there were no invisible ones ? Go and commit forgery — go and commit crimes that are unreportable — and I have known a man to be driven secretly under the surface of society as a wharf rat into the water. Ask whether there are any chains on you. Do the moral laws weigh upon you ? Why, I say moral gravitation is just as tangible as physical. I say there is a difference between up and down, and right and left, and that the moral law which inheres in the nature of things is jugt as tangible to the soul as the physical law is to the body. We are made so that our spirits feel that a heaviness greater than that produced by chains is upon them, or a lightness which brinjs us into the bosom of the Maker of all things. Ihments, here is |ers, and rise and |t a m ag- ing and imember eavy on t be thy ses, and 'Let re delin- an feels ins that a sneak- and he 1, but he I know hington, u beheve ere were i commit lan to be f rat into Do the itation is ! between iw which e soul as that our iuced by i into the CERTAINTIES IN RELIGION. THE SECOND LECTURE BY REV. JOSEPH COOK, OF BOSTON, DE- LIVERED THURSDAY MORNING. A little while ago we were not in the world — a little while hence we shall be here no longer. This is arithmetic. This is the clock. Demosthenes used to say that every speech should begin with an incontrovertible proposition. Now, it is scien- tifically incontrovertible that a little while ago we were not here, and a little while hence we shall be here no more. De Tocqueville said that you will in vain try to make any man religious who has no thought of dying. Now, the first of re- ligious certainties is, that we are going hence soon. As to that proposition there is not a particle of doubt. In this audience we have assembled the eastern west and the western east. But among all the coteries of small philosophy which annoy our un- rolling democratic ages, in the Mit -issippi Valley, or the Ohio, or in that of the Hudson, the Connecticut, or the Merrimac, there is no one who can deny that we are going hence soon, and that we want to go hence in peace. Here then are two religious certainties, that we must go out of this world, — and that if law is universal in its reign, we shall not in going out of this world escape from the sovereignty of the moral law re- vealed in conscience here, and likely to be revealed in the next world quite as fully as it is in our present lowest state. I defy any man to deny that we are going hence. I defy any man to deny that we want to go hence in peace. I defy any man to show that we can go hence in peace unless we are harmonized with our environment. What is that ? Our environment is made up of God, of the plan of our own natures, and of our record in the past ; and therefore we must be harmonized with God in conscience and our record, or, in the very nature of things, there can not be peace for us. Aristotle built his whole philosophy on the proposition that a thing can not exist and not exist, at the same time and in the same sense ; that is to say, self-contradiction is the proof of error everywhere. And now, since we have an environment made up of God, conscience and our record, we must be either in harmony or in dissonance with it ; and if we are in dissonance, we are ^ot in harmony with it, and if we are in harmony, we are not in dissonance with it. And so it is incontrovertible that with whatever environ- ment we can not escape from we must come into harmony, and that environment consists of conscience, and of God, and of our record. But before I proceed to state analytically the propositions s i8 CERTAINTIES IN RELIGION. ! i I am to defend, as the basis of natural religion, let me call pause to your thoughts and endeavor to bring for a moment a solemn hush here, such as will exist in our souls when eternity breathes on our cheeks. You say it is a very common-place proposition that we are going hence ; but did you ever calcu- late how many mature working hours there are in an ordinary life-time ? Very few men begin labor for themselves earlier than at the period of twenty-five years of age. Very few continue such labor beyond the seventieth year. Now between the twenty-fifth year of life and the seventieth, there are forty-five years, and if you throw away in each year fifty-two days for Sundays, and thirteen for vacations and illness and other inter- ruptions, you have three hundred working days a year. That is to say, in forty-five years you have 13,500 working days. Now suppose that you labor ten hours a day, a very large average to be continued through forty-five years, you will there- fore have in the forty-five mature years of life 135,000 working hours. At the end of that very short stretch of time you will go hence. Some of you have about a hundred thousand work- ing hours left. Some of you have not sixty thousand, some of you not thirty thousand. Really there is no doubt about the proposition that at the end of 135,000 working hours any man's life which has already had twenty-five years in it, will be over, and Gettysburg will be fought and won in that time, and America ! it will not be half as interesting as the unseen holy into which all men haste. We say that we are to remain here. America is to remain ; but it is t' tree, we are the leaves. The leaves fall, although the tree endureth. Over the stringy bridges of the Atlantic mountain ranges and the Pacific, God will draw the cords of civilization many an age yet, and thrum them to his own glory and to the good of men. But you and I will listen to the music from the upper, and not from the under, side. " Onward storms my strong-limbed race, And pause, for Time is nigh. Long on earth will men have place, Not much longer, I. "Thousand summers kits the lea. Only one the sheaf ; Thousand springs may deck the tree, , Only one the leaf. One, but one, and that one brief." Mrs. Browning used to look toward the Ai^s and repeat the words of one of her famous poems : ' ' Above the star, Pricked by the last peak of snow, My Italy is there." So our America, my friends, is not on the shore of a great lake, the valley of the fathers of waters, or in that delicious nook ol the world we call New England. Our Mississippi is CERTAINTIES IN RELIGION. 19 yonder with the Father of spirits. Mrs. Browning would re- peat often the words of an old English poet : " Although the day it seems so bright, Long after the day cometh Ihe dark night." At last the bell nngeth to even-song, ringeth, she would say, with a melody that is prodigal of echoes. Now, in that hushed silence, in that attention of the whole spirit which is given to religious truth the moment we say we are going hence, and that we wish to go hence in peace, ring any bell of merely negative philosophy, ring any tocsin of audacious self- conceit in the field of mere speculation, and ask how satis- fying are the echoes. We want truth, and we want that on which we can depend as we take our leap into the unseen ; and we want, therefore, certainty guaranteed, both by natural and revealed truth. We want, when we go hence, " a house not made with hands eternal in the Heavens," and in which we may at this moment take up our residences, provided only we bring ourselves into peace with our environment. But that house not made with hands, perhaps it is about us now, perhaps we are not at peace with it at this moment, perhaps we do not like the company in the house not made with hands. There are in that palace things that we can see from this present low position of the human race, and some of the things in it I assure you this morning, some pictures you have turned with their faces towards the wall, I would turn with their faces towards the front, and in the house not made with hands where we stand already, I would raise the question whether it is possible for us to live happily in that house unless we love what its Lord loves and unless we build according to the pattern of His own palace. The first proposition that I am to put before you — anu I speak to-day from a set of numbered heads in order to avoid the possibility of being misrepresented ; our friends who are reporters are among the busiest men on the globe, as they always have to make three days out of one, and it is my policy to aid them as much as possible by putting the strategic points of an address in writing, and only those. Among the certainties in religion I rank first : three things from which we cannot escape, our own natures, God, and our record. When the battle was fought between the Monitor and the Merrimac, the ship Cumberland was sunk in water so shallow that her top- gallants remained above the wave. A friend of mine who was in the cabinet of Gov. Andrew, of Massachusetts, had a friend in the hold of that vessel, a surgeon attending to the wounded. When the ship went down he was nearly strangled by the rush- ing in of the brine, but keeping in view the light that was streaming down the hatchways, he aided himself out on the rigging, and at last, almost dead, was taken into a boat at the surface of the sea in safety. Now, the incidious and almost unseen persuasion of human nature is, that when we go down 20 CERTAINTIES IN RELIGION. II. il w in the sea of death and eternity we shall leave ourselves behind ourselves at the bottom of the sea, and escape through the en- gulfing torrents from ourselves, and be taken into a life-boat on the surface of the eternal ocean and sa""ed. Now the trouble with that precious theory, my friends, is in the nature oi things. We are the Cumberland, and the Cumberland cannot swim out of the Cumberland, can it ? While you continue to exist you will have to keep company with yourself, will you not ? Is there any doubt about that ? Anybody here so surprising in his doctrinal unrest as to deny that while his existence con- tinues it will be necessary for him to keep company with the plan of his own nature ? We are in existence, and while we continue to be in existence, we cannot flee from our own individualities. One wife I cannot be divorced from — that is, my conscience. Your Indiana divorce law may be lax, but the supreme powers do not pass divorce laws between man and conscience. We are to stay with ourselves, for the Cumberland cannot swim out of the Cumberland, that is one certainty. But it is sure the Cumberland cannot escape from the water in which it floats. It cannot float among the sands. We never shall escape from omnipresence. There is no fleeing from a being who is everywhere and who is omnipotent. The old Latin proverb says, " Si vis fugere deo,ftige ad deum " — " Il you wish to flee from God, flee to God." For the only way to flee from an omnipotent being, and an omnipresent one, is to flee to him. There is no cloud at this moment shot through by the sunlight so saturatingly as we all are, and always shall be shot through by the omnipresence. There is no sedge in the seeth- ing white and green below the terrible majesty of Niagara yonder, that is so boiled full of water as we all shall be, and are with God's presence, whether we feel it or not. Undoubtedly the dull serge yonder in the foam knows little of the sublimity of Niagara ; and so, we tossed to and fro, in natural law, know little. of the awsome depth and height below us and above us ; but the day will come when we shall know, and we are to be filled, as never was a floating sea-weed with the ocean, with God. And it is sure that he will be our environment. Facul- ties touch faculties and, as I may say, when I clasp my hands, one hand is the environment of another. So I may say when my faculties interact that one faculty is the environment of the faculty that stands next to it. So I call our own individualities a part of our own environment. But the past is unchangeable. Not only can the Cumberland not swim out of the Cumberland and out of the sea, it cannot escape from its own weight, can it ? You were born in the commonwealth of New York. Omni- potence can not make it true that you were not born there. You have done things in the past which you would gladly turn to the wall. Omnipotence can not make it true that those things never were done. Even God's power can not make a CERTAINTIES IN RELIGION. 21 thing that has once been not to have been. In the nature of things what once has occurred will always be an event that has occurred, and the nature of things is only another name for God's nature. Our record in the unchangeable past, our con- science, must face God, and must face it. And now I will hold that I am on firm scientific ground when I say that there are three things we can not escape trom, these interacting faculties in our souls, this power of the uni- verse which brought us into existence, and which reveals itself in physical and moral law ; this omnipresence, this omnipot- ence, this unswathing somewhat and some one, and lastly our record which we must tace, and which He must face. Conse- quently it is incontrovertibly certain that these three things constitute our unalterable environment while we continue to exist in the next world as well as in this. Just here, my friends,, the skeptics will say that I am passing into the region of con- jecture, but all I ask of them to-day, or on any other occasion, is to be true to the scientific method. You say th?it law is universal. Very well, then. If I can measure a little arc of a law here I will draw the whole circle from the arc. Any three points determine the direction of a curve. You say that if you can make here the truth about gravitation clear you know what gravitation is in the sun, and the moon, and all the stars. You say if you have a good text-book here on gravitation, that book is worth something in the north star. Go to Mr. Dana, of New Haven, and he affirms that a good text-book on the laws of light would be worth something in the constellation of Orion, and he is sure of that, because he is sure of the universality of law. This is one of the sublimest points of view of natural science, for, as Dana has said with fine epigrammatic phrase, "Our earth, although an atom in immensity, is immensity itself in its revelations of truth." It becomes such because any three points determine the curve of a circle. You ascertain here that light moves in straight lines, that it is the opposite of darkness, and you know that those things are true about it yonder in the stars. You bring down from the stars light to your spectroscope, and analyze it, and find that certain minerals are in the stars yon- der, and our light here we can analyze in the same way. If I know what natural laws are on this globe, I have a right to v/a Ik right out on their ascertained curve, and say that in worlds out- side of this those laws prevail, for laws are universal and a unit. Now, what you do with regard to the physical law you call gravitation, I have a right to do in regard to the equally tangible law which inheres in conscience. It is enough for me to assert that the moral law is a natural law just as much as the law of gravitation. You believe that all natural law is a unit and uni- versal ; so I say that if I can determine a curve of the moral law here I have a right to walk on it right up to Orion, right up to^ the North star and the Pleiades. In the name of the scientific I I !l II i! I 1 22 CERTAINTIES IN RELIGION. method I do this. Precisely this audacity or scientific caution was exhibited in the parables of our Lord, for, from the experi- ence of men at the fireside with the moral law, and from the sheepfolds, He drew illustrations of moral principles, the range of which He swept through the universe, and by which He ex- plained not only our present existence but the world that is to come. He assumed everywhere the unity of the moral law. I affirm that a good text-book on the moral law here is worth something in heaven. A good text-book here on physical gravi- tation is worth something in Orion. A good text-book on moral gravitation here is worth something in the heavens that shall never be rolled away. And I maintain that in these assertions I am not going by the breadth of a hair to the right or the left from the path of scientific straightforwardness. Moral law is just as much natural law as physical law, and moral law as natural law, is universal and a unit. The three points of the curve of moral gravitation may determine a circle as well as the three points in the curve of physical gravitation. Our globe, on account of the universality and the unity of law, is immensity itself in its revelations of moral as well as physical truth, although it be but an atom in the moral and physical immensity. Third. — It is incontrovertibly certain that, according to Her- bert Spencer, we need nothing so much as harmonization with our environment. That phrase is Spencerian and singularly strategic, when once we take the right point of view. Our en- vironment — why, it is not merely physical ; it is spiritual as well. And after all I am not so much concerned as to my physical environment as to my spiritual, even in this low estate. I can be tolerably happy in any physical surroundings if my spiritual environment is right. We know that in this life wise men are far more cautious about their spiritual environment, that is the interaction of their souls' faculties upon each other, and their feeling of harmony or dissonance with the nature of things, than they are concerning wealth or poverty, or even the flames that curl about the martyr's stake. In our present calloused condi- tion we are far more influenced by our spiritual than our physi- cal environments. We have now proved that our unalterable environment here and hereafter is our nature, God, and our record, and even, ac- cording to reactionary, half-studied thought, that style of philos- ophy which captures beginners only. We are told that we must have harmonization of our environment, or we cannot possibly be at peace with the universe. Herbert Spencer is the philosopher of beginners. The other day I went to Harvard University to give a lecture on con- science in the Saunders Theatre there, and it was my fortune to meet the Professor ot metaphysics before the lecture in the parlor of the preacher to the University. I put to Prof. Bowen, my former instructor, this question : " Has Herbert Spencer a oi CERTAINTIES IN RELIGION. 23 caution experi- from the le range He ex- lat is to law. is worth ;al gravi- on moral hat shall ssertions r the left ■al law is il law as its of the ell as the globe, on nmensity although • r to Her- ition with singularly Our en- al as well. J physical :e. I can r spiritual men are tiat is the and their mgs, than ames that sed condi- our physi- ment here even, ac- ! of philos- it we must t possibly The other e on con- fortune to ire in the )f. Bo wen, Spencer a future in Harvard University ?" " Oh, yes, sir, he has a future here, but it is all down hill." To the younger Professor of philosophy there, once my class-mate, I put the same question, and received for substance the same answer. I know that a brilliant Spencerian, Mr. Fiske, has sent out from Harvard University the best American book on the Spencerian philoso- phy, but it is never my policy to underrate the intellectual worth of any critic on views I consider vital. It is worth mentioning, however, that Mr. Fiske began as an anti-Spencerian, and no- body knows what he may be yet. He has reversed his whole philosophical system twice, at least, and to-day does not re- present the university, in which he is not an instructor, but simply an assistant librarian. It is important for me, at this distance from Harvard, to make these statements, for it is commonly supposed that Harvard has been captured by Her- bert Spencer. I not long ago met a distinguished scholar from England, who is now in this country and has become a critic of the free religionists, and I put him the question — " Has Herbert Spencer a future in Great Britain, and especially in the universities?" He replied with caution and with great in- genuousness : " If the truth must be whispered, it is that Her- bert Spencer is losing his hold on the acutest and boldest critics of Great Britain." Nevertheless, you find that men who are beginning to read philosophy are often captured by Spencer's style, are commonly very reverent toward him. The newspaper , men are most of them Spencerians. Spencer, you know, thinks that all truth concerning Grd is like the back side of the moon — we never see it, we can know j nothing about it. Well, what if that were so ? I should not admit that the back side of the moon has no influence on us. il never saw the back side of the moon. That is true, but I ;know that there is not a wave in the tar-gleaming sea from shere to Japan that is not influenced by that back side as much as by the front. And that there is no ripple along the edges jof any coast, public or private, in time past or in time to come, |that is not under the law of the tides, and is not as much in- lebted for its motion to the unknown side as to the known. While I employ, therefore, Herbert Spencer's famous phrase concerning the necessity of our harmonization with our environ- lent, I would give it a far wider sweep than he allows to it, md yet I need to insist only on self-evident truth, or direct inference from such truth, namely, that our environment with rhich we must be harmonized is made up here and hereafter )f our conscience, God and our record. Fourth — It is therefore scientifif' illy known that harmoniza- tion with conscience, God, and our record, is. the unalterable latural condition of peace of soul. What ? Natural conditions ["or salvation 1 Yes. Well, life is rather serious if the very lature of things has in it conditions of our salvation. You are 24 CERTAINTIES IN RELIGION. at war with the nature of things. Which shall change, you or it ? Let c be serious my friends, because God can not be an unswathing kiss without also being a consuming fire. There can not be an upper without there being an under. There can not be a here without there being a there. There can not be a before without there being an after. There can not be a right without there being a left. You say these propositions are all incontrovertible ; but if you please, they have applications to interests of ours deeper than the immensities and more endur- ing than the eternities. If the nature of things is against us, God is against us. The nature of things is only another name for the total out-come of the Divine perfections. He can not deny himself. He is the same yesterday, to-day, and forever. And the nature of things is the same yesterday, to-day, and forever. It has no variableness or shadow of turning. With Him is no variableness or shadow of turning. It is He. Are you in dissonance with it ? Then are you in dissonance with Him. If, in face of the nature of things you need a change, so you do in the presence of a personal God. What ! am I assuming the Divine personality ? Not at all. I am not endeavoring to prove it to-day, but I say there can not be a here without a there, there can not be a before with- out an after, there cannot be an upper without an under, and so I say there can .iOt be a thought without a thinker. There is thought in the universe, a thought not our own. That thought in the universe proves that there is a thinker in the universe not ourselves, and a thinker is a person. You can not have a thought without a thinker any more than a here with- out a there, or an upper without an under, and you know there is a thought in the universe that is not your thought. Agassiz, over and over, would close the majestic sections of his discussion of natural science by asserting that all facts of zoology, for in- stance, or geology, exhibit thought, prescience, forecast. Stand- ing on that assertion, I affirm that there can not be thought without a thinker, and that a thinker is a person. Now, with that person the law of existence is that he can not deny him- self. Out of that ' can not" burst forth all the self-evident truths of the universe. We can not have an upper without an under, we can not make a whole less than a part, we can not make a straight line other than the shortest distance be- tween two points. We can not erase the difference between right and wrong, and all those things we are unable to do, be- cause the nature of things will not reverse itself. God, in other words the Thinker who is the Ruler of all His creation, can not deny Himself. You feel that you must be in harmony with the nature of things. You dare not deny the perfection of the nature of things. Submit to it then. Positively, the government of this universe is not elective. There are natural conditions of salvation. What is salvation ? I mean by that ,5 1 CERTAIMTIES IN RELIGION. 25 ige, you or not be an re. There There can in not be a : be a right ons are all lications to lore endur- igainst us, Dther name ie can not nd forever, o-day, and ing. With 3 He. Are Qance with change, so Not at all. there can efore with- Linder, and per. There wn. That iker in the f ou can not here with- know there . Agassiz, 5 discussion ogy, for in- ast. Stand- be thought Now, with deny him- self-eviuent >er without irt, we can istance be- ce between I to do, be- f. God, in is creation, in harmony perfection itively, the are natural an by that word, permanent deliverance from both the love and the guilt of sin. Well, that definition clears un a point or two. If sal- vation means that, it is about time tor us to seek deliverance fron. the love of sin and guilt of sin. The love of sin ? Why^ I ought not to be at peace if I have that. The guilt of sin ? if I have that, I ought not to be in peace with the universe. But •' ought" has God in it. Until a man gets rid of both the love and the guilt of sin he can not be at peace with the nature of things. Without perfect freedom from the love of sin and perfect freedom from the guilt of it a man cannot be at peace in a universe, managed as it ought to be and this universe is managed as it ought to be, and it will be for sometime hence. W^hat I am afraid of is not the bann of any ecclesiastical party, I ^^elong to no party, but it is dissonance with the nature of things. It is want of harmony with that constitution of the universe which was and is and is to come. ** Gentlemen," said Edmund Burke once to the electors at Bristol, " neither your vain wishes or mine can change the nature of things." Now I want no theology that is not built on rendered reasons. I want no pulpit — no dying pillow. I will put under the head of no dying man, as a pillow, anything that is not built on the nature of things. It is unalterable, and it is He. Fifth — It is scientifically uncontrovertible that we know in- ductively that the soul, like everything else is made on a plan^ and sixth, that the plan of any mechanism is to be ascertained by finding out how it can be operated as nearly frictionless as possible. Eighth — That the frictionless in a full-orbed human nature is the natural in human nature. Ninth — that continuous joy in all the faculties is a sign of the frictionless or i tural action of the faculties. Tenth — That only when reason and conscience are supreme in the religious sense can a full-orbed soul obtain frictionless action within its environs or continuous joy in all its faculties. Eleventh — That the religions is therefore scientifically known by induction to be the only natural, that is, the only frictionless action of human nature within its unalterable environment of God, conscience, and our record. My hand is made to shut towards the front and not towards the back. I think I know that in spite of all the chatter of the know-nothing philosophy which asserts that we'cannot be surejthat there is any intention, although we do see the adaptation of means to ends, in nature. Now, that prince of American mathematicians, Prof. Pierce, of Hartford University, lately delivered a lecture in Boston in which he said : " If there is no force in the universe except what we call natural law, physical and moral, where is God ?" And his re- ply was : "God is in the intention exhibited in the universe everywhere." In this he uttered one of the deepest of the pro- positions of the most advanced thought in Germany and in Eng- ;a6 CERTAINTIES IN RELIGION. )' ■ ' land, though not of the thought that has made the most cla- mour in the newspapers and in the magazines. That hand I know was made to shut towards the front, and how do I know it ? Why, not to use technical terms, I know that it was in- tended to shut towards the front and not toward the back be- cause I can shut it thus with the least friction. If I try to shut my hand towards the back at once certain parts of its mechan- ism resists that action, and I crush the hand by trying to shut it in that way. I affirm that the hand cannot have been made in such a manner that its natural action is its own destruction. The hand cannot have been so bunglingly made that when it acts ,as it was meant to act it will break itself. Now, just that is the rule concerning the soul, if you please. How are you to find out what is natural action in the soul ? Why, just as you find out the natural action of the hand by as- certaining what the frictionless action is. That looks very simple you say, but after all the principle runs very widely through religious science. Here is a piece of mechanism. I do not know the plan of it, but I try to start the loom this way and that, and I find I am crushing a wheel here and a spring there. You have made that loom, it may be; and you have written a book concerning it, but I say you are a partisan. I •will not read the book. God made man, and knows the plan of man's nature, and has written a book called the Bible ex- plaining the plan and giving direction in regard to human life. But we say that book is partizan, and we will have none of it. I try to operate your loom, and you stand by and you see my -work, and are very willing I should have your experience as a guide. But I say, " I will have none of your wisdom, even though you are the servant of the mind which made the loom. You have set out under the direction of the maker, and you understand the way of operating it ; but you are a partisan and I will have none of your wisdom, for perhaps you are a minis- ter. In these days, although a man is a man, even if his fa- ther was rich or poor, I think a man is not quite a man if he is a minister and claims any authority. So I will have none of this partisan guidance, for I beheve in Spencer. This me- chanism is before me, and I go on trying it now this way and now that. This is just what those professional guides want me to do. They have been studying this human loom all their Jives. They have had experience in community after commun- ity, and probably have a better chance to understand human nature on all its sides than men not in their profession. But as they are partizans I will experiment for myself. They want me to do so. At last I find that the machine moves smoothly. I can weave a webb on it that will sell. I can make up a cargo of my weaving at Chicago and carry it to Liverpool without unpacking it, and there it will bring a price. The loom it weaves pattern after pattern, and those patterns all sell, at last I say I have found out how to operate this machine. J CERTAINTIES IN RELIGION. 27 ost cla- hand I I know was in- »ack be- to shut nechan- to shut made in >t. The it acts 1 please, le soul ? d by as- >ks very widely lism. I his way a spring ou have :isan. I the plan Bible ex- nar life. )ne of it. I see my nee as a )m, even le loom, and you isan and a minis- if his fa- n if he is none of ?his me- way and want me all their :ommun- d human Dn. But ley want moothly. p a cargo I without loom it 11, at last Just so I affirm concerning this far more complicated ma- chine we call the human soul, that it must work frictionless or we may be assured of the fact that it works wrong and that we have not ascertained the way in which it was meant to work. Everything is made on a plan, and therefore you know the soul is made on a plan. But now, everything made on a plan is a kind of mechanism and every piece of mechanism works l)est when it works with the least friction. My hand does not work absolutely without friction, but the movement of least friction is the natural action of it. And so with the soul, the action of least friction is the natural action. Will you please apply that very simple principle to human nature without the Bible in sight, and looking at this whole topic from the point of view of the scientific method. What is frictionless action in the soul of a full-orbed man ? Why do I say full-orbed ? Because this loom might urn against the very plan of it, if you were to take oif half a dozen wheels. The young man who has crushed out fifty or eighty of the noblest instincts of his nature by dissipation — he is not only a dissipated man but he is a dizzypated man. Is not a fair specimen of human nature. I will not take him to find out how this human machine may be made to operate har- moniously upon itself, for several of the wheels are gone. Per- haps I could turn him the wrong way and give no distress to his faculties. 5 Well, but you say this is a very unfair procedure. It is a apientific procedure, for if I go to Ann Arbor or the University C^ New York, and ask some great Professor what the lily of the valley is, or what the plant we call maize is, he will not l|iow me a stunted specimen. If I carry to him a lily of the D^lley or a stalk of maize, he will want a specimen that grew ii good soil, and that was well watered, and that showed all ^e powers of the plant. If I present to him the plant which istles over so many hundred square miles on the prairies yon- jr, he will ask, " did this maize come from France where it reduces forty to one, or from Illinois where it produces eighty one, or from Mexico where it produces a hundred and fifty one .'' " He will not take the maize to put into his cabinet iless it is a full-grown specimen, and he is perfectly scientific that procedure ; and so with the lily of the valley — he will )t have it from any stunted soil, but he tells me that I must [ake up a picture of it if I cannot get a perfect specimen. )me specimens are good, and I will picture the best in a num- ^r of specimens until I have from several specimens a perfect ;a of what that plant can do. When I have done this I ear- that picture to Prof. Agassiz or Prof. Dana and he will say, ""hat is a hly of the valley that I will show to the world as a |ecimen of what is natural in that plant." ,JUust so I claim that if I am to follow the scientific method in 28 CERTAINTIES IN RELIGION. I ■T I ascertaining what is natural to human nature, I must take full- grown specimens, and if I can not find in any one man or wo- man all the growth of all the faculties, I will take the best his- tory has shown here and the best it has shown there, and make up my ideal of man as Agassiz does his ideal of the lily of the valley. What is natural to man ? Let us answer that question by an unflinching application of the scientific method. Let us for a moment build up a man by that stern style of dissection which the student of merely physical science applies to the plant. We shall find ourselves confronted at once with a sense of our own fragmentary growth. I have a right, just as in the case of the lily of the valley, lo take the best of many specimens. Put together Phocian for Greece, and Hamden for England, and Washington and your Lincoln for America as representa- tives of lofty justice in men. Take your Aristotle and Bacon, your Kant and Hamilton, and Edwards, as specimens of analy- tical power. Take your Isaiahs, and Fenelons, and Bossuets, your Miltons and your Jeremy Taylors as illustrations of the height which men may attain in the spiritual imagination and insight. Take your Napoleons, your Hannibals, your Caesars, for executive strength. Put into those full-orbed men the con- sciences of the martyrs and the apostles and the prophets. And now, having built up the loftiest zones of human nature, accord- ing to the scientific method, I will not diverge from the stern de^ mands of science, I will put into the lower zones of man's nature the very best growth you have ever seen there. For after Isa- iah and Plato, after the prophets and apostles, after the Caesars and Napoleons, after the Kants and Hamiltons have been put into the upper ranges, I can bear to put into the lower, as added basilar strength, the Caligulas, and the Neros and the Domitians and the Vespasins. It will only give steeds to these riders to put the best growth of the basilar faculties beneath the best growth of the coronal. It is good for a man to have a tempest in the lower half of his face if he has a hurricane in the upper half. With the thought of a full-orbed man before you, ask whether nature made up thus can stoop to the gutter, can be at peace while uttering the words " I will not" defiantly to the still small voice that says *• I ought," can harmonize itself with the envir- onment which faculty gives to faculty when it will not do what it knows it ought to do or what the nature of things requires. Is it in such a full-orbed specimen of human nature to act crookedly or to drop down to vice ? There is a rule in the United States that no one State can de- clare war or make peace without the consent of all the other States. Massachusetts and South Carolina have no right under the Constitution to fall into war or to declare peace, unless the Union gives its consent. Now just that is the law of this repub- lic of faculties, and is the law of this full-orbed nature which I I have a mai that I not b( Unioi vice t there that i Now, all ph to all ought orbed every there know Yoi all th been Tw deper Yo] lakes, ing fr Great being acros lovec Nortl \Wha\ is in whic woul book it; Ame: only and gion that there actio the not inspi the day worl year CERTAINTIES IN RELIGION. 29 take full- nan or wo- le best his- and make 5 lily of the at question d. Let us dissection ies to the ith a sense st as in the specimens. England, representa- and Bacon. IS of analy- d Bossuets, ions of the ination and ur Caesars, en the con- Dhets. And Lire, accord- he stern de lan's nature or after Isa- the Caesars ve been put er, as added 3 Domitians ise riders to th the best e a tempest n the upper ask whether be at peace e still small h the envir- lot do what requires. Is * :t crookedly tate can de- dl the other - right under !, unless the - ' this repub- ure which I have sketched, and of which we have at best only a sketch, for a man must be a full-orbed nature in order to appreciate one of that nature. In man's nature there is a law that there must not be any secession. South Carolina must not go out of the Union. But all the vices are South Carolina's. There is not a vice that can get a vote of the Union on its own side. I claim there is not a single action in human nature known as a vice that is not a secessionist in the constitution of man's nature. Now, if you please, it is getting to be a stern last morning with all philosophy that has vice, if these things can be demonstrated to all men. We know we are made on a plan, and the soul ought to act frictionlessly, and of course when men take a full- orbed soul as a specimen of what is natural, and we know that every vice is a secessionist, why we know then scientifically there is a best way to live, and if there is a best way to live, we know scientifically that it is best to live the best way. You think nothing can be proved outside of the Bible 1 Why all these propositions I hold would be true, even if there had been given us no revelation. I hold it is incontrovertible. Twelfth — That these truths are known by strict induction in- dependent of revelation itself. Yonder thunders Niagara. In the distance gl^am the great lakes, not five of them only, but twelve, a chain of lakes extend- ing from the Arctic Sea to the mouth of the St. Lawrence, the Great Bear, the Great Slave, and Athabaska, and W^innebago being the upper end of the silver and golden ribbon stretching across the colossal breast twice washed in the blood of our be- loved America. Now suppose I should lose my guide-book to North America, would the map of North America change ? Wliat if the book we call the Bible were to be discredited, as it is in no danger of being? What if the theory of inspiration, which I hold in a high and severe form, were to be given up, would religion evaporate in human affairs ? I carry a guide- book to Niagara and the great lakes, and it may be I shall lose it ; but I have not the slightest fear that the plan of North America will change when my guide-book is lost. Revelation is only the sun rising upon the landscape of the nature of things, and the sun reveals, but does not create, the landscape. Reli- gion will stand on the nature of things as long as it is known that law is universal, that the soul is made on a plan, and that therefore we do know by strict induction, that the frictionless action of the human faculties is the only natural action, for it is the only action in harmony with our environment. We must not allow ourselves to be thrown into tremor by fear that the inspiration of the Bible is a truth that will be given up. To-day the Bible is read in two hundred languages of the globe. To- day more money is spent for it than in any previous age of the world. I do not know a single infidel book over a hundred years old that has not been put upon the upper shelf by scholars. V 30 CERTAINTIES IN RELIGION. I do not know a Boston infidel book worth reading. One or two of Theodore Parker's books went into a second edition, but in this country there never appeared a second edition of the col- lected works of Theodore Parker. That one fact is sufficient proof that they are not abreast of the times in Boston where every man is a philosopher. But, my friends, it is worth insisting upon that when our faculties act as they are meant to do they will not give us pain. It is, undoubtedly, painful at first to constrain ourselves to vir- tuous action, but the religious man is not an unhappy man, fundamentally. Your man of morality is the person who sails past the isle of the syrens and does not land, but he rather wants to do so. You remember that the ancients had a story about the golden fleece, and that once Ulysses went in search of the costly object, and on his voyage passed the isle of the syrens. They sang to him, and in order to keep his crew from being en- chanted, he filled their ears with wax, and bound himself to the mast with knotted thongs. In that way he went by safely. But he rather wanted to land, and so was not at peace. Of course, if a man wants to land and will not let himself land there is a conflict in his nature, and mere, cold prudence does not give him harmonization with his environment. The ancients said that when Orpheus went by that island, he being, as you re- member, a great musician, set up better music than that of the syrens, and so enchanted his crew that they went by, dis- daining the sorcerers' shore. They not only passed safely, but victoriously and at peace. Now, the man of morality is Ulysses bound to the mast with knotted thongs, and his ears filled with wax, cold prudence, taking him by, but he rather wants to land. Orpheus is the man of religion. He has heard a better music which has outsung the syrens and he goes by not only with safety but with disdain. That is the distinction between harmonization with our environment and forced action in some sort of prudential conformity to moral law. No morality can give us peace. When you define morality as Ulysses with his ears filled with wax and his arms bound to the masts and yet some desire existing in his heart to land, that desire must be taken away from his heart or he cannot be at peace. When he desires to do what he cannot do there is a collision among his faculties and he is not harmonized with the environment of faculty upon faculty. That is as evident as that a thing cannot be here and there at the same time and in the same sense. We therefore know scientifically that no mere morality in this sense of prudential self-control, mere cool selfishness, is enough to give peace, but that religion in the sense of love of what God loves and hate of what God hates is necessary to our harmonization with our environment. Why, I confess that when I think of these matters in the soli- tude of my chamber there is nothing in mathematics clearer to .1 CERTAINTIES IN RELIGION. 31 ;. One or lition, but of the col- ) sufficient ton where when our e us pain. /es to vir- ippy man. who sails :her wants tory about irch of the le syrens, being en- self to the ifely. But Of course, there is a ; not give nents said as you re- an that of t by, dis- safely, but morality is d his ears he rather has heard e goes by distinction reed action law. No loraiity as bound to ) land, that .nnot be at there is a lized with as evident the same ientifically elf-control, lat religion what God vironment. n the soli- clearer to me than that while I love what God hates and hate what God loves it is ill with me and will continue to be ill until that dis- sonance ceases. In the very nature of things I must love what He loves and hate what He hates, and not merely conform out- wardly to Him. Religion is the obedience of delight, and r-^t the obedience of slavishness. I must give my heart to the nature of things or it and I are ?t war ; and it is He. When a man has harmonized all his faculties with each other, when he has learned to love what God loves and hates what God hates, then he is like some of those majestic representa- tions of full-orbed human nature which Michael Angelo has given us, or which have come to us from the greatest of the ancients. I stood in the basement of the Louvre, the other day, and there was the Venus de Milo, apd there, too, was the sleeping Grecian Slave, in the Market Place, the marble crea- tion of Angelo. The man was majestic in quantity and quality of being. He had in him the possibility of power unfathom- able, and yet was tender as any drop of dew. A lion was in him ; a dove also. A woman, a man. Not only was his mas- siveness overpowering when you took a full view of it, but his tenderness was equally overpowering at any full prospect of its possibilities in action. For the massiveness standing there be- hind the tenderness might have been as the murky threat of the tempest thundering across league after league, and the tenderness concentrated was like the zigzag lightning to smite whatever is unjust or impure. On the other hand stood a woman, marvellous in quantity and quality, both. It is easy to find a man large enough, but not easy to find a man of fine quality and great size combined. It is easy to find a woman fine enough, but not so easy to find one remarkable at once for the greatest quantity and the highest quality of being. I am a married man if you please. I have no secrets to confess. There is in man a possibility of being full-orbed ; and our great sculptors and painters have sometimes given us in art an ex- ample of such a nature harmonized with itself. When I stood there before Venus de Mile, I asked a young man somewhat tempted by Paris life whether that woman and this man if they were turned out in modern wardrobe to go around the world would come back dissipated. " They would come back without the smell of fire on their garments." " How do you know ?" " Look at them," said he. " They are too great to be tempted." " But," said I, " they are to go around the world ; they are to be free from family police, and they are to be sub- jected to all the temptations of modern luxury and poverty." " They would come back without a thread of their wardrobe singed," said the young man. " How do you know ?" said I. " Why, look at them," said he, " they are too great to stoop." They had in tl m the full-orbed human nature, and that young man, no philosopher, simply a person of good practical instinct, 32 CERTAINTIES IN RELIGION. felt that you can not make a man who has all the wheels in him, act against conscience and reason. The whole make of him is against this. Such action is not natural. You, young men, want to be natural. Be full-orbed first, and then be as natural as you please. I affirm that any man who will not make a flat-headed Indian of himself, who will not bind upon his upper faculties some plank of evil habits and press down the better instincts of his nature year after year, and who will cultivate all the moral part of his nature as sedulously as he does his intellectual or executive faculties or his social or his animal, and who will let all parts of his nature grow north, south, east, and west, I affirm that such a man, when the breezes of the holy somewhat and some one who is in nature breathe through him, will utter a resonance, not like the hiss of the reptile, not like the beflowing of the hollow-voiced calf or the notes of the silly-throated goose. There will be in that man, when God moves through his full growth, a sacred and com- manding resonance like that of the forest of oaks on your prairie plains yonder, like that of your forest combining their tones with the roar of your Niagara yonder, like that of both those anthems conjoined with the eternal song of the sea, a hallelujah to the glory of organizing and redemptive moral law ; and it is He. It is therefore scientifically incontrovertible that harmoniza- tion without environment must include similarity of feeling with God, for we must love what the nature of things loves and hate what the nature of things hates. Similarity of feeling with God or a love of what He loves and a hate of what He hates, is an unalterable, natural condition of peace of soul in this life and the next. But you say that thus far I have been endeavor- ing to prove the necessity of a new birth merely. Well, I have heard that this is a scriptural doctrine, but I have not opened the Bible yet. Let no man say I underrate the Bible. There are four Testaments — the oldest, the old, the new and the newest. The Old Testament and the New are written. The oldest testament is the nature of things. The newest is the present action of God in human history. I interpret the oldest and the newest by the old and the new. Our surest guide beyond all doubt is the written word, but God wrote the Old Testament or the nature of things, and God writes the newest or current history, the last unrolling chapters in the acts of the apostles, whether in church, or in science, or in commerce, or in poHtics. He is here in the oldest Testament and here in the newest, although not as visible in them as he is in the written word, but the four Testaments are kis., and therefore one. I have taken all my texts to-day out of the na- ture of things, out of the oldest records of God, the constitution of man and of the universe, and we find in that Testameat as well as in the New it is written : " Verily, verily, I say unto ■3 i I i III CERTAINTIES IN RELIGION. 33 wheels in i make of ou, young len be as • will not ind upon ess down d who will isly as he cial or his ow north, he breezes re breathe iss of the :alf or the that man, and com- s on your ning their at of both the sea, a Qoral law ; larmoniza- eeling with is and hate :eling with He hates, in this life endeavor- 'ell, I have not opened le. le new and re written. : newest is terpret the Our surest wrote the writes the srs in the ice, or in Festament em as he his., and of the na- nstitution itament as say unto 4 you a man must be born from above. The natural mind is at enmity with God. It is not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can it be. How can two walk together unless they are agieed ?" You must walk with yourselves and with your record and with God, and how can anything exist here and exist there at the same time and in the same sense ? How can you love and hate God at once and in the same sense ? You must either agree or disagree. How can you walk with God and yourselves and your record without being agreed with them, and how can you be agreed with them without loving what God loves or without similarity of feeling with God ? And so in the oldest testament. I read from the nature of things what is in the old and the new and the newest. The four accord in thought and ought to solemnize civilization to its last fibre. If you and I do not learn similarity of feeling with God, it is ill with us, and we know that just as well as we know that the law of gravita- tion governs the world. We understand perfectly well by mere induction the necessity of the love of what God loves and tiie hate of what God hates as a natural condition of peace of soul. That condition being a natural one it is irreversible by our will. If you please the universe is not managed by count of heads or clack of tongues. There is no vacancy among the supreme powers that will be filled by an election in the Mississippi Valley or that of the Hudson. We must ascertain meekly these con- ditions. Exact science proclaims that continuous joy in all the faculties is the only decisive sign of their natural action, and that continuous joy in all the faculties can come only to him who has acquired, not morality merely, but religion in the sense of the supreme love of what God loves, and supreme hate of what God hates, or similarity with the nature of things, for it is He. It is scientifically incontrovertible. Fifteen — That even after we have acquired similarity of feel- ing with God, the record of our past sin is behind us in an un- changable past. Sixteen — That the conscience, in the absence of expiation, forebodes punishment. Seventeen — That for harmonization with our record in an unchangable past, therefore, we need more than our own re- formation and personal excellence. Eighteen — That, therefore, not only the necessity of similarity of feeling with God, or the new birth, but the necessity of the atonement also, is scientifically inferable from the necessity of our harmonization with our whole environment. You will allow me to assert in the name of Herbert Spencer^ that the unchangable past is a part of our environment. We must be harmonized with it. Am I harmonized with it when I have reformed ? There is an unchangeable record of my sin in the past. I have learned to hate that sin, but onorht the 34 CERTAINTIES IN RELIGION. record of it to be treated precisely as though it never had been ? Here is a deserter. Here is a soldier who never deserted. The deserter comes back. He is ready to re-enlist. Ought he to be treated just like the soldier that never enlisted ? Now I have deserted. I know that if what is done in the universe is what ought to be done, I shall be treated rather differently from Gabriel and Abdiel, and all those who have been faithful from the first. I ought to be treated differently, and God always does what he ought to do. Therefore I feel an unrest as to this record in the past, even after I have reformed. Say what you please, I hold it to be scientifically uncontrovertible that after a man has reformed the record of his past sin is behind him. When the deserter comes back and re-enlists, the record of the desertion is behind the soldier, is it not ? His re-enlisting and facing the enemy does not change the fact that he has been a deserter, does it ? I affirm that in the absence of expiation, man's conscience forebodes punishment. Why it does that it is not important for me to discuss. That it does that all history proclaims. We know that the ages have been thrown into un- rest on this point, and that when we take human nature through a large range, when we endeavor to ascertain how the ages have acted, face to face with the irreversible record of sin in the past, we find that they have foreboded punishment in the absence 'of expiation. " Plato, Plato," said Socrates, when Greek philosophy stood at its height, " it may be that God may forgive wilful sin, I do not see how he can, for I do not see that he ought to." That thought which I have put into shorter words than those of Socrates, has been the fundamental con- viction in the bottom of the soul of those heathen tribes that have sacrificed holocaust after holocaust to God to give them- selves peace of soul, face to face with this record. I know not, my friends, what can be made clear from human history, if it is not certain that in the absence of a deliverer, and of an expiation, man forebodes punishment. That is the way we are made, and even after we have reformed, human nature acts in this manner. I saythat the greatest saints, in the absence of expiation, or when they have known nothing of it, have had this foreboding, and in all ages have had it. This action of man's nature is not a mere sickly eddy of sentiment, coming up here and there in peculiarly educated circles, it is the great natural operation of conscience. The record of desertion be- hind a man makes his past permanently different from that of a man who never has deserted. That past which was an effect becomes a cause, and will perpetually produce appropriate effects of foreboding unless God's hand as a screen be let down between us and it, and between his face and that black, irrever- sible past. I know I need such a screen. But from mere reason I can not prove that such a screen has been provided for me. Revelation says an atonement has been made. That key turns C3RTAINTIES IN RELIGION. 35 in the lock of human nature. That fits the wards of this fore- boding. That washes Lady Macbeth's red right hand. You know Shakespeare makes Lady Macbeth say that she regret- ted her crime. She had killed Duncan, or connived at his murder, and she was so moved by her crime that she became insane in view of it. Shakespeare makes her rise in the night and try to wash her hands, and the gentle physician who looks upon her is accompanied by the watching servant maid, and the latter says to the forn r: "Look how she rubs her hands. Sometimes she does this for the qu '-ter of an hour together." Lady Macbeth, pacing up and dow iid put there, one might think, by Providence, to illustrate he forefront of literature, and to all time, one of the greatest oi . ^ligious truths, exclaims : " Out, accursed spot. All the perfumes of Arabia woujd not sweeten this little hand." Her husband, in similar circum- stances, says : " This red right hand the multitudinous seas it would carnadine, making the green one red." Now, undoubt- edly Macbeth and Lady Macbeth had learned to hate their crime, but how can they wash their hands. If you please, it is getting to be a deep question in philosophy, now that conscience has been scientifically investigated as it never was before, how Lady Macbeth's red right hand can be washed. I am talking about facts. There is nothing shadowy, nothing uncertain about the fact that Lady Macbeth's hand is red ; nothing shadowy, nothing uncertain about the fact that she would like to wash it ; nothing shadowy, nothing uncertain about the fact that she cannot. Who can ? Not Plato, not Socrates, not Goethe, not Strauss, not Parker, not Emerson, only Christianity can wash Lady Macbeth's red right hand. GOD IN NATURAL LAW. THIRD LECTURE BY REV. JOSEPH COOK, OF BOSTON, DELIVERED FRIDAY MORNING. h liii Suppose that to-morrow morning the sun should rise, inscribed across its face in letters brighter than its own light, and such as to be visible throughout the illuminated half of the world, with the words : " Holy ! Holy ! Holy ! Lord God of Hosts, who was, who is, and who is to come." Let this inscription be made in- telligible in all languages a ">d among all nations. One would think that under that awful light, as it passed over the con- tinents and seas, and from people to people, the dusky tribes of heathendom would quit their idols at once ; that, in the high marts of civilization, avarice, malice, and dishonesty, serpents writhing colossal in the hollow streets as in caves, would wither to ashes ; that literature, politics and art, on all their frozen hills, would feel the approach of a vernal season beneath this touch of supernatural fire ; and that before the slanting rays had passed thrice around the globe, they would have peeled from off the burdened world something of the ulcerous growths of sin, and in time would turn in another channel the course of the do- lorous and accursed ages. To those who see with the secret eyes of science the sun is thus inscribed ; and not the sun only but every natural object — the seas, the mountains, the forest arches, every lowliest violet^ the human fiame. Jonathan Edwards compared the relation of the material uni- verse to the Infinite Will with that of the image of an object in a mirror to the rays of light flowing from the object and pro- ducing the image. As the reflected picture is constantly sus- tained by a flow of rays precisely like the rays which first caused it to appear, so the material universe is constantly sustained by a flow of omnipresent acts of the Divine Will precisely like the acts by which it was created. As the rays flow through and build and are the image, so God's will flows through and builds and is natural law. Just this was the teaching of Aristotle and Kant and Leibnitz and Newton and Cuvier and Hamilton. Just this is the latest word of the Agassizs and Herschels and Farradays and Humboldts. Just this is now the doctrine not only of mental science, but of physical science. Just this is that open secret which throws the Goethe's and Richters and Car- lyles and Brownings and Tennysons, and ought to throw the whole world into a trance. As light fills and yet transcends the rainbow, so God fills and yet transcends all natural law. According to scientific Theism, GOD IN NATURAL LAW. 37 we are equally sure of the Divine Immanency in all Nature and of the Divine Transcendency beyond it. Pantheism, however, with immeasurably narrower horizons, asserts that natural law and God are one ; and thus, at best, it teaches but one-half the truth, namely, the Divine Immanency, and not the Divine Transcendency. Christian Theism, in the name of the Scien- tific Method, teaches both. While you are ready to admit that every pulsation of the colors seven, in the rainbow is light, you yet remember well that all the pulsations taken together, do not constitute the whole of light. Solar radiance billows away to all points of the compass. Your bow is bent above only one-quarter of the horizon. So scientific Theism supposes that the whole universe, of infinite existence in its widest range, is filled by the Infinite Omnipresent Will, as the bow is filled with light, and this in such a sense that we may say that natural law is God, who was, who is, and who is to come. In the in- controvertible scientific certainty of the Divine Immanency, we may feel ourselves transfigured, as truly as any poetic pan- " theist ever felt himself to be when lifted to his highest possible mount of vision. But, beyond all that. Christian Theism affirms that God, knowable, but unfathomable, incomprehensi- ble, but not inapprehensible, billows away beyond all that we call infinities and eternities, as light beyond the rainbow. While he is in all finite mind and matter as light as in the color seven he is as different as is the noon from a narrow band of color on the azure. Asserting the Divine Transcendency side by side with the Divine Immanency, religious science escapes on the one hand the self-contradictions and narrowness of pan- theism, and attains on the other, by the cold precision of exact research, a plane of thought as much higher than that of mater- ialism as the seventh heaven is loftier than the platform of the insect or the worm. I am to speak on the proofs from science of the Divine omni- prese.ice, or in support of the propositions : 1. That matter cannot originate force or motion. 2. That all force in natural law originates outside of matter — that iSj in mind. 3. That natural law is simply the fixed, regular, stated method of the Divine action. The reasoning by which science arrives at the conclusion that the Divine mind can be absent from literally no point of space, is simple. It is very clear. It is very short. Any one can comprehend it who will recollect what the commonest text- books mean when they teach that matter is inert, that is, that it cannot move itself. I suppose that there is not a schoolroom in the land in which the elements of either physics or meta- physics are taught, where I could not to-day find primary books asserting the proposition that inertia as one of the pro- perties of matter, as one of the first letters in the alphabet ol Ill ^11" 38 GOD IN NATURAL LAW. established science. I am neither affirming nor denying the doctrine known as that of second causes. I assert only what is called among men of science, the spiritual origin of force. This is held both by those who affirm and by those who deny the existence of second causes. It is a doctrine in the support of which all accredited scholarship is agreed. The first proposition, then, by which established science proves the Divine Omnipresence is that only two things exist in the universe — matter and mind. No one doubts that there is no third thing. We never saw, felt, heard, or tasted any- thing which was not either matter or mind. The human thought finds by the microscope, among things near and minute, no evidence of the existence of anything which is not matter or mind ; and by the telescope, among things distant and vast nothing which is not the one or the other. Even the materialist who holds that only matter exists, does not doubt that there is no third thing, for he holds that there is no second thing. So the idealist who holds that only mind exists does not doubt that there is no third thing, for he holds that there is no second thing. We, who, on the testimony of the necessary beliefs, hold that matter and mind both exist, do not doubt that there is no third thing. It is an immemorial proverb of phil- osophy that there is no tertmni quid. The second proposition is that the matter is inert, that is, it cannot originate force or motion. We know mind as some- thing which can move itself. We know matter as something which cannot. The boulders which we saw in the fields in our childhood, lie now where they did then, unless they have been moved by some power outside of themselves. We are as certain of this as we can be of any inference from universal experience. I do not assert that matter may not possess active chemical properties among its natural qualities. I assert simply that matter cannot originate force. What is force ? That which is expended in producing or resisting motion. The definition which I venture to give of inertia is the incapacity to originate force. Mind originates both force and motion. Matter ^originates neither. If matter possess force, it not only did not originate this force at the creation ; it does not originate it at the present instant. All force and motion in matter must have at every moment their ultimate source outside of matter, other- wise matter can move itself; and that it cannot do this is a part of our positive knowledge. Very noteworthy is the fact that the latest and subtlest and yet superficial materialism like Tyndal's, which attributes to matter the power to prigirate force, does so and can do so only after it has given to matter a wholly new definition and what it vaguely calls a spiritual side. Professor Bain, however, who leads the acutest and most recent materialism, admits that matter is inert, and cannot originate force. po thj th( 1 ■J enying the nly what is of force, who deny he support ed science hings exist that there asted any- he human near and lich is not gs distant Even the not doubt no second :s does not here is no necessary loubt that b of phil- t, that is, as some- Jomething Ids in our lave been ^e are as universal ess active 5rt simply bat which definition originate Matter y did not tiate it at ust have ?r, other- this is a i the fact lism like \te force, a wholly ial side. St recent •riginate ^ GOD IN NATURAL LAW. 39 I The third proposition is the conclusion from the two pro- positions that only matter and mind exist in the universe and that matter is inert, namely, that all force and motion in matter must have, not only a past and remote, but a present and immediate, origin in mind. At what, then, do we arrive ? The constellations are matter. : Matter cannot move itself. Eut they move. They do not move by our mind's agency. But since all force originates in will, they must be moved by a mind. We begin to see the tran- scendent importance of the conclusion. The earth in infinite space sleeps on its soft-spinning axle. It is matter. It does not move itself. But it moves now and here with a force immeasurable by human imagination. Our globe's motion must, at this moment, originate in a mind. " It is but reasonable," savs Sir John Herschel, "to regard gravity as the present effort it a will." We begin to see the unspeakable religious value of this doctrine of exact science. The spiritual origin of Force is a scientific phrase which transfigures itself before us and begins to flame from within. Two men are in a room ; one is handculfed and fettered ; or, to make the comparison more complete, let us say paralyzed. Now suppose some beautiful work of art is brought into existence in that room. It would be very certain that the work of art was made by the man who was not paralyzed. The universe is such a room. There are only two things in it, matter and mind. But matter is handcuffed. The works of art which the universe contains must be the present product of mind. Jeremy Taylor, in his Holy Living and Holy Dying, names three instruments of holy living, the discussion of which forms the three chief divisions of his book. They are the Care of our Time, Purity of Intention, and the Practice of the Presence of God. It may be said that the last of these divisions includes the former, since if it be secured they will follow of themselves. Not long since, on a December morning there passed under the giant hills of Northern New York, for a few seconds, the shock of an earthquake. At modern Ogdensburg a dancing party broke up and left their halls for their homes and for places to pray. A knot of gamblers dropped their cards, looked into each other's faces, and sought spots of refuge^ It is proverbial that in a shipwreck the profane pray ; that when a summer storm, at night, dropping low and tipped with electric fire, swirls thundering from league to league, the inhabitants of a whole region are overawed; that on a death- bed, even the flintiest heart is, to some extent, softened. But what is the common element in all these classes of instances that has such efficiency to overpower the sotil ? It is, of course, a sense of the Divine Omnipresence. God is almost visibly near on the other side of the curtain of the storm, the angry 1' I I'll 1 ! I I ! I ! ; ! 40 GOD IN NATURAL LAW. foam, the reeling landscape, the last instant of physical life. If, now, the same sense of the Divine Omnipre^ ice which at these times lifts us out of ourselves, and wrencnes our wills momentarily into submission to our consciences, we could bind constantly upon our foreheads, we should start up electric, empowered for religious activity as if the air were full of the glancing wings and rustling prostration of the innumerable company of the Unseen, and as if we saw that Infinite Supreme whom no man can see and live. But the power of the sense of the Divine Omnipresence as a motive, no more requires illustration than our need of the influence of that motive. It, and it only, can lay such a restraining hand upon our secret hours as shall throttle the enemies that assail us when alone. What the atmosphere is to the physical life, that a sense of the Divine Omnipresence is to secret prayer. Ambition, self-interest, the love of enterprise, as motives, in some of the greatest crises of life, ebb from under the soul and leave it stranded; a sense of the Divine Omni- presence is the only motive that wears, and that is capable of flooding the highest harbor bar of temptation and carry the soul fully out to sea. But the proof, the proof ! The proof from science. You have in your room, on the mantle, let us suppose, a clock and an ivy plant. The clock is a piece of skilful mechanism, in which every detail is designed with the purpose of efl"ecting a measurement of time. But it is made of inert matter. Its component parts are wood, and brass, and steel. Did the clock put itself together ? Certainly not. But the ivy plant is a piece of mechanism. The toothed wheels of the clock are not as wonderful exhibitions of mechan- ical skill as its toothed leaves. The most intricate work in the clock is not comparable for an instant in point of ingenuity of structure with the cells, the endless reticulated veins, the burst- ing buds of the plant. But the ivy is made up of matter. Did it put itself together ? Assuredly not. But you say that the ivy grows from a seed and the clock does not. Suppose that the clock were constructed with such wonderful interior mechanism that after running for a certain length of time it should put out through the apertures in the dial-plate little wheels, a minute chain and spring, a little dial-plate and little hands, and that these should be put into order by the machinery of the first clock, and form a complete miniature time-piece ; and suppose that this little clock should then gradually enlarge until it attained the size of its parent. Would the fact that the clock thus produced another clock make it any the less certain that it did not put itself together ? On the contrary, the more wonderful its mechanism, the greater would be the certainty that it did not originate in any of the powers of inert matter. But the ivy plant does produce a seed, BK GOD IN NATURAL LAW. 41 :)hysical life. ice which at nes our wills ve could bind up electric, re full of the innumerable tiite Supreme nipresence as need of the lay such a 1 throttle the losphere is to presence is to enterprise, as » from under >ivine Omni- is capable of nd carry the ice. ipose, a clock mechanism, of effecting a matter. Its 3id the clock The toothed s of mechan- 2 work in the ingenuity of IS, the burst- natter. Did ind the clock id with such for a certain 'tures in the ring, a little be put into Ti a complete clock should )f its parent. r clock make ^ether ? On the greater I any of the tduce a seed, and in that seed are folded the miniature root and stem and plumule of a new plant. Is this fact any reduction of the evi- dence that the ivy did not put itself together ? On the contrary, it emphasizes that evidence. But you say that the ivy grows by natural law and that the clock does not. I come here upon an objection turning upon the indistinctness of meaning attached in common speech to certain leading words. There is nothing, I believe which does mere to obscure the grandeur of the objects of science and to fill the mind with the views of an indefinite materialism, than the vagueness, as ordinarily used of the terms of " nature " and " law." What is a natural law ? Or, rather, taking one part of the phrase at a time, let us ask. What is a law ? The answer is that a law is the method of operation of some force. Now what force is capable of producing this result whicli we call an ivy-plant ? Evidently only a force possessing intelligence. But does matter possess intelligence ? Various properties and forces have been attributed to matter, but since the world began no philosopher of enduring reputation ever attributed intelli- gence and the power of choice to it. But, whatever else con- cerning it may be uncertain, one point is sure, that the force which is capable of producing the result we call nature, must possess intelligence and the power of choice. That force, then, cannot reside in matter. It must reside in mind. It must at this instant and at every instant be exerted by mind. That mind is omnipresent in natural law. What, then, is a natural law ? It is, to speak literally and without figure, the present thought of the Deity. It is the method of action of the Omni- present, Infinite Will. So that this ivy plant, growing on the wall, is as really at this instant God's present work as a paint- ing of the ivy, growing before your eyes, on the canvass of a painter, beneath the pencil of the artist, would be the artist's present work. I believe this. I am not presenting poetry, but one of the deductions of exact science. " The universe," says Dr. Carpenter, " is not governed by law, but according to law." Darwin adopts as the motto of his " Origin of Species," Archbishop Butler's famous assertions that " the only distinct meaning of the word natural is stated, fixed settled, "• and that it as much requires an intelligent agent to effect anything statedly, fixedly, regularly, that is naturally, as to effect it for once only, or supernaturally." I have supposed it to have been objected, in the first place, that the ivy grows from a seed, and that the clock does not ; and in the second place, that the ivy grows by natural law and that the clock does not. It may be objected, in the third place that as the clock was made, wound up and allowed to run as a machine, so the ivy plant may have been made, wound up and allowed to run as a machine. As the impulse of the hand of the maker of the clock is not needed to move it, when once it is ^ I ii I n I ; ! Ni 42 GOD IN NATURAL LAW. constructed and set in motion, so the impulse of the hand of the maker of the universe may not be needed, after it has once been created and set in motion. It then runs by its own laws, and as a machine. God is, indeed, according to this objection, needed to create the ivy plant and the universe ; but, once created, they act without his aid, by the laws imj r sed upon them at the outset. This objection, I need not say, is entirely irreconcilable with what we have just proved as to the nature of natural law. It is in conflict with the fundamental proposition that matter does not possess intelligence and the power of choice. But there is another reply to the objection which causes the comparison of the universe to a machine to fall apart at every link. The clock does, indeed, run after the hand of its maker is withdrawn from it. But it runs by the operation of a law of gravitation existing outside of itself. The weights descend and the pendulum vibrates in obedience to that law. Nature is outside of the human machine and is the force which moves it. No machine made by man has its motive power within it- self. The mill-wheel turns under the weight of the falling water which the heat of the sun has lifted by the law of evap- oration into the air and the law of gravitation draws down again. A necklace of pearls, let us suppose, is sent from India to a European Queen. It is conveyed upon rail roads over which the natural laws of steam drag loaded trains. It every- where moves in grooves prepared for it, and those grooves are natural laws. Now the difference between nature and every human machine is that every human machine runs by natural law which is outside of it, but there is no nature outside of nature itself for nature to run by. Outside of the clock is the law of gravitation moving it ; but, outside of the law of gravita- tion is no second law of gravitation moving it. Outside of the mill-wheel is the falling water, itself the motive wheel ; but outside of the wheel of the universe is no second wheel. Every human machine runs in grooves of natural law lying back of it. But nature, by its very definition, includes the totality of created things. There is nothing back of nature. Behind nature there is no second nature presenting grooves for nature to run by. You cannot send nature by express. This comparison of the universe to a watch wound up and allowed to run, is a very old one ; it expresses the theory under- lying many of the vague popular conceptions of nature ; in the last century it had a prominent place in some of the half atheistic speculations put forward in France and Germany. In the light of clear ideas it will not bear an instant's examination ; and it is now everywhere abandoned by scholars. It is what Carlyle calls the idea of " an absentee God, sitting, ever since the first Sabbath, on the outside of his creation, seeing it go." It may be objected, in the fourth place, that although the ijpa liill GOD IN NATURAL LAW. 43 he hand of it has once s own laws, s objection, ; but, once I r.sed upon Dilable with ral law. It natter does causes the rt at every if its maker of a law of ts descend w. Nature hich moves r within it- the falling iw of evap- raws down from India roads over It every- rooves are and every by natural outside of ock is the of gravita- ide of the /heel ; but il. Every back of it. of created nd nature ure to run id up and ory under- re ; in the f the half nany. In mination ; is what ever since g it go." lough the ivy plant is not a machine, and although the properties of the particles composing it cannot originate in matter, and must, therefore, be constantly upheld by the Omnipresent Infinite Will, yet these properties, when thus upheld, are enough to account for the structure and growth of the plant. In other words, although an Omnipresent mediate agency" of the Infinite Will be proved, it does not follow that there is in nature any example of the immediate agency of that Will. God acts, it is said, only through the forces and tendencies of matter ; His will touches the world omnipresently, indeed, in second causes, and these causes, without His will, cannot exist for an instant ; but His will always operates through them ; in nc case does it touch the world naked and bare. In this last objection we have the subtlest form of the evolu- tion hypothesis. As a short reply, let me say that evolution can not be greater than involution. Every change must have an adequate cause. If a certain effect comes out of your pro- cess of evolution an adequate cause went into your process of involution. Your loom picks out from raw material various parts, weaves them together and throws out a web. You know very well that there can nothing come out here that does not go in there. You say a peculiar pattern comes out. But it went in when the loom was made ; and although you do not see the pattern there in the same form in which we see it here, yet in substance it is there in the arrangement of the parts of the loom and of the unwoven threads. Everything that comes out here goes in there. If anything comes out on the one side of the loom that does not go in on the other, then something has come into existence without cause. But every event must have a cause. That is a first truth. That is an axiom. That is an unalterable, self-evident proposition. Therefore we say that even if everything has beer evolved, we know there is mind behind the process of evolution, because mind has been evolved in that process. You can not draw out of evolution what you did not put in. I am an involutionist first and an evolutionist afterward. Of necessity, evolution implies an Evolver ; a development a Developer. Just this is Darwin's proposition. It is Gray's. It is Dana's. Their teaching as to evolution does not at all annoy our confidence in the Divine omnipresence, for God, if theistic evolution be the true explana- tion of all things, is omnipresent in the process of development. We read that there are states of the nervous systein in which a man by an act of will can make a material object move with- out touching it. I have yonder a letter from a friend, and ac- j cording to the statements of some men of science there is a I possible condition of the will and of the nerves in which I can I cause that letter to move towards me by merely willing that I it should. I am no mesmerist, but there are curious facts con- cerning the power of human will over mere matter. Now^ 3 i'li I! i: II I : I 44 GOD IN NATURAL LAW. -what if God mesmerizes all things ? What if He fills the uni- verse by the magnetization of Orion and the Pleiades and of these trees and yonder great lakes and of all that moves and breathes and lives, as my little will fills that paper for an in- stant ? Can you say I am not in that paper ? Can you say God is not in the universe even if He is in it only in this way ? What if natural law be only the magnetization of all matter by < jod's will ? He yet was and is and is to come, omnipresent, first, midst, last. But I wish you to remember that the word " collocation" is the ghost which most frightens the evolutionary philosophers of the materialistic school. They say that the chemical and other properties of matter are sufficient to account for the way in which the hand and eye are put together, but this they never have proved. The latest form of evolution asserts that God makes the types, but that they print themselves without external aid. It admits that He marks on the different pieces of metal the letters of the alphabet ; but it says that when He has done that His work is over. Chance has tossed up the alphabet in immense numbers of types. Chance has boxed them this way and that, and at last they have come down and printed " Paradise Lost," Homer's " Illiad," the Constitution of the United States, and the Declaration of Independence. God made the types ; oh ! yes ; but the law of the survival of the fittest tossed them to and fro, and after an infinite number of hap-hazard falls they have printed you and me. Now that is what I call the topsy-turvey philosophy. You know Topsy said she " 'Spected she growed." The dicers's philosophy is a topsy-turvey style of accounting for the printing of the " Illiad," the Constitution, and yourself and myself. Let us test this scheme of thought by the scientific method, that is, by a merci- less application of the self-evident truth that every change must have an adequate cause, and that involution, therefore, must €qual evolution. In the prairies yonder near Adrian, Michigan, the figure of a night-hawk is traced on the ancient verdant acres by the mounds of that unforgotten and unknown race which once may have peopled the lost Atlantis between North and South America. Over against this night-hawk there is out-lined an Indian with a spear balanced at the bird. When George Bancroft wrote the first volume of his history of the United States, it was not known that the Mound-builders had left traces of themselves in the Mississippi valley, and Bancroft asserted that there were no ancient ruins of man's work left on the shores of the father of waters. It was sup- posed that the swirl of the ice-bergs in some geologic period and the drifting of curious currents had made these mounds. What now if a man should seriously adhere to that theory and try to explain the night-hawk and Indian by the fortuitous 'i GOD IN NATURAL LAW. 45 ; the uni- les and of oves and for an in- say God his way ? natter by nipresent, ;ation" is losophers lical and r the way this they serts that 3 without 2nt pieces when He d up the as boxed down and nstitution pendence. Lirvival of :e number Now that )w Topsy 5ophy is a " lUiad," test this y a merci- ange must ore, must : figure of es by the once may id South t-lined an is history d-builders illey, and of man's : was 3up- fic period mounds, lieory and fortuitous swirl of ice-bergs and waters ? What if he should come forward and remind us that Newton taught that we must not multiply causes without necessity. It is barely possible the night-hawk and Indian might have been made in that way, and if it is possible we have no right to bring in the supposition of an in- telligent agent. He quotes Haeckel, and somethmg ol Huxley. He can quote nothing of Charles Darwin, but he cites large name after large name to us, and if we are" humble, average men we may be startled and puzzled by his assertion, and yet we know that any man who should seriously believe that those figures were drawn by the fortuitous swirl of ice-bergs and the drifting of waters, ought to be sent to the lunatic ward, and this simply because he makes evolution insanely larger than, involution. Here are intelligent results brought out, and some- where mind must have gone in, lor there can not be a change without a cause, and a cause in which involution is equal to evolution. Here are intelligent traceries on the prairie, and, as intelligence comes out, somewhere intelligence assuredly went in. But, my friends, if we believe this concerning the poor earth- works, what shall we say of the living night-hawk here in the edge of the evening flying above the prairie, and of your Indian miraculously alive pointing his spear at the bird. You know those traceries were produced by intelligence ; but Huxley comes here, and Spencer and Haeckel, and although Darwin stands there and objects, these lesser men, the extremists in the school of evolution, undertake to tell us that the living night-hawk came from one just behind him not quite like him; and that one from one behind him not quite like him, and so back to the jelly speck. Where did the jelly speck come from ? Why, that came from the fortuitous concourse of atoms, or spontaneous generation. The first speck of really living matter arose by some turmoil of forces in a cooling planet. W^e must not multiply causes without necessity. Entia non sunt multiplicanda sine necessitate W^hat if I were to talk Latin here ? I could convince you all that I am right. There is an amazing capacity on the part of the average humble man to be mystified on this subject. We have a reverence for trained thought, and when with sufficiently numerous technical terms a specialist comes forward and tells you that the living night-hawk came at the last analysis from the swirl of ice-bergs and the drift of waters, you go away perhaps thinking that it did and that God must be left out of sight. Now for that yon ought to be sent to the lunatic ward ! and for the same reason for which you sent this other man there, namely, that you are adopting a theory which will not account for evolution by involfttion, and which asserts in the last analj^sis that there can be a change without ^.n adequate cause or that the fountain can rise higher than the source. Des Cartes said : " I think, therefore I am a person. And I *. m ' 46 GOD IN NATURAL LAW. must have been brought into existence by a being at least as perfect as I am, for the fountain cannot rise higher than the source." He was true to the axiom that every change must have an adequate cause. As he felt conscious of being a mind, a will and a heart, he knew that somewhere in the universe there must be a cause as a source at least as high as this fountain. If you have any lofty conception of what is possible in future history, if you finii your souls capable of imagining what you call perfection, then there must be in the universe somewhere perfection at least greater than you can imagine, otherwise your fountain rises higher than the source, and so there must be a being better than any being imaginable to man. Now that I hold to be the present posture of Charles Darwin. This is not the posture the materialistic and atheistic evolutionists, but it is the posture of Dana and of Gray, and of Owen, and of nearly every man who can be called an exponent of established as con- tradistinguished from disestablished science. I can account by merely chemical force for the fact that a certain number of atoms of oxygen and hydrogen when brought together -will unite and constitute water, but those chemical forces have no tendency to bring atoms together in just the pro- portions needed to cause them to unite. That is the difference between merely chemical forces and the force of co-ordination. Chemical forces, when the particles of matter are arranged, take hold of each other and produce important results. But the particles must be arranged first. Your quill will write when there is a hand behind it, but the fact that it can write when held and driven is not a proof that it holds and drives itself or that it sharpens itself. Sa}^ what we will of the forces and tendencies of matter it can not be made clear that these forces and tendencies, although upheld by Infinite Will, account for the adjustment and collo- cations of matter in those works of nature in which the struc- ture indicates an intelligent designer. A German professor once to illustrate this very proposition took a book and tore it into shreds and threw down the pieces at his left hand. He then took an uninjured copy of the same volume and put at his right hand, *' Now," said he, " young gentlemen, is not the same book here and there ? " " Yes," said they. " No," he thunder- ed. " Whit is the difference ?" " We do not see much differ- ence." " Collocation," was the impatient emphatic reply. You have here indeed the same type, you have the same pages, you have the same paper, but everything is in shreds here, every- thing is in chaos, and there you have everything intelligently arranged. Now the fact for which materialism and atheism, and for which the atheistic and materialistic school of evolu- tionists can never account, is collocation, or how the disarrang- ed chaos is put together into the intelligible book of God which we call nature. GOD IN NATURAL LAW. 47 Matter does not possess intelligence. It does not build cylinders and joints and cells and husks and barbs, all pointing to one design, the production of a plant bearing seed and per- petuating itself. While, therefore, we admit that God's will acts omnipresently in the forces and tendencies of matter, we must recognize the fact that there are phenomena in the collo- cations and adjustments of matter for which those forces and tendencies will not account. In the former case we recognize His mfediate agency ; in the latter. His immediate. I know how awful this conclusion is. I must not leave it with out at least naming a few of the great authorities in science and speculative thought by whom it is asserted. There are four forms of what is called the doctrine of second Causes which it is very important to distinguish from each other. 1. The mechanical theory, that the phenomena of the material universe are the result of powers impressed on matter at its creation, and which operate without any present agency of the Deity. 2. The theory that all the phenomena of the material uni- verse are produced by the forces and tendencies of matter as upheld by the Infinite Will. 3. The theory that all the phenomena of the material universe are produced b" the forces and tendencies of matter as constantly upheld by the Infinite Will, except the adjust- ments and collocations, which are produced immediately by that Will. 4. The theory that all the phenomena of the material universe are produced by the immediate agency of the Divine Will. The first and second of these theories are refuted, it is the third which I have asserted. It is but justice to the theme, however, to say that the fourth, which goes even farther than the third, though it does not, like the third, receive the unanimous support of scholars, is yet asserted by a large body of the most respectable authorities. This theory, which affirms that all the phenomena of the material universe are the result of the imme- diate Divine agency, denies the existence of second causes. The great name of Dugald Stewart is prominent in the list of the defenders of this doctrine. It was favored by Reid. It was asserted by Malebranche. It was defended by Berkeley, and Samuel Clarke. It was favored by Isaac Newton. In New England it was the doctrine of the theologian, Emmons. It is to-day elaborately taught in Harvard University in a standard text-book on metaphysics and ethics by Professor Bowen. Of course, all these authorities which assert the fourth propo- sition I have named, are authorities for the third. If the fourth, which asserts universal immediate Divine agency, be true, the third, which asserts a partial immediate Divine agency, and is thus included in the fourth, is true. If hi I >\[ 48 GOD IN NATURAL LAW. at I am not aware of a single authority of weight which does not affirm the third proposition. The work of Dr. McCosh on " The Method of Divine Government," is a recent careful defence of the doctrine. At Andover Theological Seminary it is elaborately taught by Professor Park that second causes exist, but that they are every- where upheld by the Infinite Will, and that first and second causes, though distinguishable in thought, are inseparable as things. Professor Farraday has called the law of the conservation and correlation of the physical forces "the highest law in physical science which our faculties permit us to perceive." This law is that light, heat, electricity, chemical affinity are only modes of TP m of the ultimate particles of matter, and that instead of t as they have long been thought to be, distinct, they are coi. .rtible forces. If either of these is brought into action one of the others follows as a result. One form of force may be con- verted into another form, but no portion of force can be lost. The forces of matter are the results of motion of its ultimate particles ; and, when men of science speak plainly of the cause of that motion itself, it is startling to observe how unqualifiedly they assert the third of the four propositions I have named, and how some of them affirm the fourth. " Light, heat, electricity, magnetism and chemical affinity," says Mr. Grove, in his cele- brated essay on the Correlation of Physical Forces, " are all con- vertible material affections." Assuming either as the cause, one of the others will be the effect ; thus heat may be said to produce electricity; electricity, magnetism; and so of the rest. Cause and effect, therefore, in their abstract relation to these forces are, words solely of convenience, and we must humbly refer their causation to one omnipresent influence. The common error, if I am right in supposing it to be such, consists in the abstraction of cause, and supposing in each case a general secondary cause — a something which is not the first cause, but which, if we examine it carefully, must have all the attributes of a first cause, and an existence independent of, and dominant over matter. Can we say abstractedly that heat is the cause of electricity, or that elec- tricity is the cause of heat ? Certainly not ; but if either be true, both must be so, and the effect then becomes the cause of the cause, or, in other, words, a thing causes itself. Any other pro- position on this subject will be found to involve similar difficulties, until at length the mind will become convinced that abstract secondary causation does not exist, and that a physical search after essential causes is vain." " Causation is the Will, Creation the act of God;' What is this but teaching entirely parallel with the magnificent sentences of Martineau ? "Matter is the negative condition of the Divine power ; Force, its positive exercise ; Life, its delega- tion under limits of necessity : Will, under concession of freedom. GOD IN NATURAL LAW. 49 As all forces are convertible, and that, too, not by culmination into volition, but by reduction from volition they are but God's mask, and can never be His competitors." Wherever we find heat, light, electricity, we infer motion as the cause ; wherever we find motion we infer force ; and wher- ever we find force we infer spirit. The law which in science is now called that of monogenesis of force is more completely ex- pressed by the phrase the spiritual origin of force. "It is our own immediate consciousness of effort," says Sir John F. W. Herscheil.speaking of the laws of gravitation, "when we exert force to put matter in motion, or to oppose and neu- tralize force,which gives us this internal conviction of power and causation so far as it refers to the material world, and compels us to believe that whenever we see material objects put in motion from a state of rest, or deflected from their rectilinear paths and changed in in their velocities if already in motion, it is in consequence of such an effort somehow exerted, though not accompanied with our consciousness. All bodies with which we are acquainted, when raised into the air and quietly abandoned, descend to the earth's surface in lines perpendicular to it. They are therefore urged thereto by a force or effort, which it is but reasonable to regard as the direct or indirect result of a con- sciousness and a Will existing somewhere, though beyond our power to trace, which force we term gravity." "The conception," writes a recent critic in the North Atnerican Review, "of a Being with a nature akin to our own, but perfect in all that we aspire to be ; infinite in power, with a perfect goodness and knowledge, whose will is just as immediately manifested in the order of nature as in any supposable miracle, such a conception is a most cheering and inspiring one, and is not inconsistent with anything which human science has yet discovered, or is ever likely to discover." I quote a single sentence from the manuscript of a lecture of President Hill, of Harvard University, which it was my fortune to hear: "Looking thus at the Divine Being as the Lord who has consciously expressed his thoughts in the material world, that world becomes glorified, and glows with heavenly splendor. Science becomes the study of the autograph works of the Infi- nite God ; and natural history, which is the highest of the series of the physical sciences, and links them to the sciences that deal with the human mind, becomes the means of communion with the highest geometrical, algebraical, and chemical thoughts of the Father of men, which He has yet revealed to us." Pro- fessor Agassiz, who was present at this lecture, was heard to say emphatically, as the audience were leaving the room : "That tnith is not more great than sure." '*Gocl of our fathers, Thou who wast, Art and shalt be, when the eye-wise who flout ^11 5P GOD IN NATURAL LAW. Thy secret presence shall be lost In the great light that dazzles them to doubt, We, who believe Life's bases rest, Beyond the probe of chemic test. Still, like our fathers, feel Thee near." — Lowell, There is no sound reasoning which may not be stated in exact syllogistic form. There is no reasoning which, when so stated, any human mind has the capacity to dispute, its premises once admitted. The reasoning now given in another form may be so stated. Its certainty will be completely evinced, if, in summing it up, I submit it, at the risk of some repetition, to the test of this form. 1. If matter is essentially inert, that is, if it cannot originate force or motion, every exhibition of force or motion in matter must originate in mind. 2. But matter is essentially inert ; that is, it cannot originate force or motion. 3. Therefore, every exhibition of force or motion in matter originates in mmd. The reasoning underlying the first premiss may be analytically stated as follows : 1. Only matter and mind exist in the universe. 2. Matter is inert, that is, it cannot originate torce or motion. 3. If, therefore, matter moves or exhibits force, that force must originate in mind. 4. That mind is G6d. 5. Matter does move and exhibit force now and here. 6. God, therefore, is now and here, since where He acts, there He is. Or, we may say, 1. All the forces ot matter are upheld by the Infinite Will, or not upheld. 2. If they are not upheld, they act as a machine. 3. But it has been shown that they cannot act as a machine. 4. Therefore they are upheld. 5. The Divine Mind, therefore, is Omnipresent, siiice where it acts there it is. Or, if we assert that second causes exist, we may reach the conclusion of the Divine Omnipresence thus : 1. Second causes are omnipresent in the created universe. 2. But the First Cause, that is, God's will, and second causes, though distinguishable in thought are inseparable as things. 3. God, therefore, is Omnipresent. It has pleased Him whose hand moulds the centuries, to make the progress of science very nearly the most characteristic feature of the present age. Science, as defended by its less thoroughly cultivated votaries, has many faults. It sometimes k.^ GOD IN NATURAL LAW. 51 makes arrogant claims. But it has one righteous thing in it. That is the love of clear ideas. The holy and intense creed of reverence for proof, clear ideas at any cost, and obedience the organ of spiritual knowledge, will live. It will go through the centuries of coming time, without a wreck. I believe that the love of clear ideas and impatience of their opposite, which characterize the educated mind of the present age, are as truly a Pentecost from the Divine Hand as if they were evidenced by tongues of flame. The gauntlet is at last thrown do>vn. "Doubts to the world's child heart unknown, Question as now from star and stone : The power is lost to self-deceive With hollow forms of make-believe." Faith and Reason challenge each other to the death. I see herein promise not of destruction for either, but of reinforced and mutually harmonious life for both. Science, against its choice, will show that every natural fact is in the strictest sense a religious fact. Startling us in some past years, it has been blindly bringing us to that great result. The eve of an unexpected time I believe to be at hand and its dawn now more than broken in the best educated minds, when faith will make science religious and science make faith scientific. The Word and the Works must flow together after 1900 ! I think I hear that storm of good already sing in the wind. Of the awfulness of the fact of God's presence in every point of space, I need not speak, for there are some topics on which the s^^rongest expressions are the most powerless and the loudest speech the most dumb. It is the certainty of the fact of the Divine Omnipresence on the one hand and its awfulness on the other which fit it to un- derlie the religion of action. When once this truth of science is fully grasped, we walk constantly within the flame of that mount which could not be touched. According as our life co- incides or does not coincide with conscience, we mce, while we retain a vivid sense of the Divine Omnipresence, in a pre- sent heaven or a present hell. But, once proved by science, it is idle to endeavour to shut oar eyes to the truth. It is truth, whether we remember its truth or not. Our shutting our eyes to the flame does not extinguish it. Dark passions, there- fore, hie them to their caves as beasts of night under the light of a thousand noons ; or, if they will remain r.broad, go mad, gnash upon the soul with a thousandfold more ferocious teeth of remorse. Life is conducted in the eye of its judge. To obey the truth is lo receive God's kiss ; to disobey it is to offer insult in the face of a present God. The keenest investigation the world contains declares that the commonest path of daily life demonstrably necessitates our walking through the midst of the- Great White Throne. No illustration is too awful to con- vey the literal truth of rigid science. : li IK N '11 52 GOD IN NATURAL LAW. Dr. Kane forced an expedition far toward the northern pole, expecting to meet at every advance increasing accumulations of icebergs. Instead of these, he came suddenly upon an open, polar sea. Science moves towards extremes apparently frigid to faith ; but, when it moves far enough toward the pole, it, too, comes upon the clear, open sea. There is a celebrated picture of Raphael in which the Virgin and her child are represented as surrounded by a halo, which, at a distance, appears to be luminous vapoj ; but which, when seen near at hand, is found to be made up of innumerable cherubs' faces. Come close to scientific truth, look fixedly upon nature anywhere, and, what at the distance appears to be vapor, resolves itself, beyond possibility of mistake, into the faces of angels. In Venice there was a princely merchant whom intemperance had conquered. During one of his wassails with his compan- ions in his own palace, his sons resolved to make a last effort to break their father's chains. Before the company gathered they wrote in large lettering across one of the walls of the room in which the revel was to take place, using for their pencil phosphorus, the mark of which can be seen only in the dark, the words : " Prepare to meet thy God." The revel went on : the merchant's companions late at night lay in the stupor of in- toxication beneath the massy mahogany of the table, and he himself was asleep, drunk in his chair. Waking toward morn- ing when the lights had burned out, his owil benumbed senses aiding the deception, the only thing visible in the room was the letters throbbing on the wall opposite him : •• Prepare to meet thy God." He was so moved that his chains from that hour fell off him. Years after, in describing his emotions at the time, he said : " That round O in the word God ! That round O. I think it is yet burned on the substance of my brain." I say to you in the name of science, that the whole rim of the uni- verse is such a round O. Let us see it and be saved. In Peru the commonest and simplest sign of adoration to the collective divinities was to kiss the air — " God is law say the wise ; O Soul, an"! let us rejoice ; For if he thunder by larv, the thunder is yet his voice ; Speak to Him, thou ; for He hears, and spirit with spirit may meet, Closer is He than breathing, and nearer than hands and feet." — Tennyson . 11 i II NEW ENGLAND SKEPTICISM. FOURTH LECTURE BY REV. JOSEPH COOK, OF BOSTON. The Connecticut and the Merrimac are little streams, but they are as dear to many who live in the Mississippi valley as is the Father of Waters. On this shore of Lake Chautauqua we are yet in the Mississippi valley, for these highest navigable waters of my native commonwealth, and of the continent, flow through the seething gorges of the Allagheny, and the placid curves of the Ohio, and the colossal stretches of the Missis- sippi, into the Gulf of Mexico. There are two New Englands, an Eastern and a Western ; and the Western is the larger, and ultimately will be the more powerful. Plymouth Rock is a piece of granite broken off the Alps at Geneva, and it crops out in the prairies, and in the Rocky Mountains ; and the western side of it, I sometimes think, is that stupendous height of El Capitan in the Yosemite — for on the Columbia river and on the Colorado there are men to whom Plymouth Rock, and Faneuil Hall, and Bunker Hill are as dear as to any who live on the Hudson or Massachusetts bay. I must treat New Eng- land tenderly here, for I am among the descendants of the Pilgrims. When an Englishman comes to America now, he must look for the successors of Hampden and Vane in the Mississippi valley chiefly, and in California. Sir Charles Diike says that Californians are all picked men, and you can hardly find in the front of affairs in this Mississippi valley any man who is not above the average in breadth of native endowment. But I recognize in the chief part of the vigor of the West the Granite of Plymouth Rock. I will not admit that Plymouth Rock is a hearthstone only for New England. The fires v;hich were built on that stope we all stretch out our hands toward from the Ohio, the Mississippi, the Missouri, the Colorado, and the Columbia ; and, indeed, from zones that sweep around the globe both ways men reach out their hands toward the fire of political liberty which first had assured existence in the world on that altar which we call Plymouth Rock. I affirm that our political liberty has Plymouth Rock for its foundation ; and when from my study on Beacon Hill, in Boston, I look out on Bunker Hill monument and ask on what it is based, I find that the corner-stone of Bunker Hill monument is Plymouth J^ock. And just here, my friends, in the fact that our fathers brought with them the spirit of self-rule, we find the first cause of New England skepticism. Men have been taught in America to think for themselves ; and the beginning of freedom in things intellectual always brings with it many mistakes. I suppose 11^ 54 NEW ENGLAND SKEPTICISM. ii' New England has made more mistakes in endeavouring to found new systems of religion and philosophy than the rest of the land has done, because she has tried oftener. Wait until the wave of popular enlightenment which is now at least knee-deep on the Atlantic shore — the wave which, although not deeper than that, has lifted some men of an easy standing off their feet — has swept over the whole land ; wait until every man in Philadelphia is as ready to deny authority as men in Boston are, and you will see in the Quaker City quite as grotesque out-growths of the free-thinking ol democratic ages as you have ever seen in Boston. We find in the city of the Puritans the most intense democracy in politics, and also in theology and in art. We are free-thinkers, and the tap-root of New England skepticism is New England freedom. Now, I believe in freedom, both political and intellectual, but there are early st^^-ges in which our democratic progress shows to a disad- vantage. Just as a young man, passing through a college course, finds a transition state of his culture in which he can ask more questions than he can answer, so the democratic ages, learning to think for themselves, pass through a sophomore year. New England is in a sophomore year. This age is the sophomore year in all democratic countries, and in most coun- tries which call themselves highly civilized, or which are, or are becoming, democratic ; and for five hundred years yet the sophomore year of the civilized ages of democracy will be unroll- ing its absurdities. We shall have loose thinking and free thinking — a great deal of it shrewd, a, great deal of it wild — and ministers and persons in authority will do well to teach men how to think, for all men are soon to think for themselves. If they have done so more thoroughly in Boston and in Eastern Massachusetts than in some other quarters of the globe, that circumstance is a partial explanation of the fact that we differ from each other there as sharply as anywhere, and that some very uncouth growths appear bof;h in our philosophy and our theology. But 1 stand on the shore of a great lake. I am at the edge of the valley made famous by the Father of Waters. It was my fortune to be born on soil over which the flags of three rations have waved. It was my early joy to have as a play- ground the renowned ruins of Fort Ticonderoga, built by the French on territory which as early as i6ii had been made historic by a battle between the Iroquois and Samuel Cham- plain, one of the Frenchmen who discovered the lands traversed by the Mississippi and the great lakes. You remember that France claimed all the regions traversed by the waters she had discovered. She owned, m law all the land through which the waters run into your great lakes and into the Mississippi, for she discovered these lakes and that river. It is a majestic memory, — the bare ghost of the French power which came near T NEW ENGLAND SKEPTICISM. 55 shutting the English up on the Eastern side of the Alleghenies. From the mouth of the St. Lawrence to the mouth of the Mississippi there were forts erected, and the French meant, bv a heavy chain of mihtary posts, to hold the English within the narrow confines of the Atlantic Coast. They came very near succeeding. They had forts dotting this whole territory from the mouth of the St. Lawrence to the mouth of the Mississippi, and in France, as De Tocqueville used to remark, the most familiar names in America are those which lie in the territory between the mouths of those two great rivers. The French gave the names. Your own commonwealth has an appellation of which the French hammered out a part, — the termination at least, — and this valley is full of French designations for Indian towns. We had a conflict after our Puritan fathers came here, and in the long French and Indian struggle we were de- moralized. We learned to like France after the Revolution came ; and when it came we were in a demoralized condition. After the French and Indian war we learned to love France. Lafayette bent our hearts toward France. We had conquered the French statesmen. We had asserted for ourselves the right of hope. When the battle of Quebec was fought this continent became Protestant. When the French flag went down at Quebec, the Bible was opened for the Mississppi valley and for the Pacific coast. But we had demoralizations following demoralizations in our wars, and it is not at all surprising that, at the date at which President Dwight began his career at Yale College, infi- delity filled our institutions of learning. We had had Whitefield, we had had Edwards. But so had war, so had French infidelity demoralized us that when, in 1795, President Dwight commenced his leadership of Yale College, only one student out of the whole undergraduate department remained to participate in the ser- vice of the Eucharist. There has never been in the history of American churches an hour of greater disaster. Jefl^erson, sus- pected of French principles in both religion and politics, had just become the chief magistrate of the nation. The enthusiasni for Lafayette and for Gallican liberty had inclined the heart of our whole people toward France. The atrociously shallow and unclean, but brilliant and auuacious Parisian infidelity of the period looked attractive, even to the most talented and scholarly undergraduates. *' That was the day," Lyman Beecher writes in his Autobiography (Vol. i, p. 43), " when boys that dressed flax in the barn read Tom Paine, and believed him." The college church was almost extinct. Most of the students were skeptical, or given to vices which skepticism does little to check. We find in that day in Yale College such a spirit of infidelity that wines and liquors were kept in many rooms, and intemper- ance, profanity, gambling, and licentiousness were common. Lyman Beecher was in Yale College as a student in his third 56 NEW ENGLAND SKEPTICISM. year, when Timothy Dwight came there as president ; and now these two men He not far from each other, in the unspeakably precious dust of the New Haven cemetery, at rest until the heavens are no more ? The senior class brought before the presi- dent a list of questions for discussion, one of them on the Inspira- tion of the Scriptures. He chose that theme for a written debate ; asked the young men to be as thorough as possible on the infidel side ; treated them courteously ; answered them fairly ; deliver- ed for six months from the college pulpit massive courses of thought against infidelity ; and from that day it ran into hiding- holes in Yale College. If Harvard University had had a President Dwight, I say not what might have been its subsequent history and that of portions of Cambridge and Boston, but it would have been different. At the outset of our national life Harvard was as full of French in- fidelity as Yale, but she had no President Dwight to correct her tendencies to French skepticism. As at Yale, so at Harvard • young men named themselves after French atheists. Among the eloquent memorials of the fathers, Mr. Emerson, in the Old South church lately, told us that Providence has granted to Boston thus far the guidance of the intellectual destiny of this continent. Boston is a sea-blown city of amusingly self-blown trumpets. It is safe to affirm that in the geography of American culture Boston is as yet, in the opinion of many, and especially in her own, the highest summit. But Harvard University is Boston's summit. Religious diseases, originated chiefly by con- tagion from France in her revolutionary peribd, and by many years of war on our own soil, filled the veins of Harvard, as well as those of Yale, at the opening of our national life. At the close of the last century Harvard, as well as Yale, was in a vicious state, induced chiefly by the very same causes which had pro- duced demoralization at Yale. I know that student life at Har- vard now occasionally, as at Yale, exhibits the dismal activity of youthful frivolity, and some secret and public societies appear to fan the flame of college dissipation. But neither at Harvard nor at Yale have the dissipated men power to put their heels on the neck of college sentiment. They had the power at the close of the last century in both those institutions. And it is not too much to say that Hogarth's pictures of " The Rake's Progress" might have been matched out of the fairly representative life of Yale and Harvard in the French period. In that Parisian day, ^ unreportable vices wtre as common at Harvard as at Yale. We have just had a pleasant book written describing student life in Harvard as it unrolls itself at present, and, as many of you and I remember it, but a vol i me describing life there ninety years ago, and as frankly written as this new description, we snould not care to have generally circulated. In several works of his- toric fiction, the average undergraduate of that time is represented as a low character. The average undergraduate of the last NEW ENGLAND SKEPTICISM. 57 years of the last century, at both Yale and Harvard, was far less of a gentleman and immensely less of a Christian, than he is to-day. Why, in my class at Yale ther3 were two-thirds Christians — not all members of churches, but most of them — and at Har- vard, at this moment, most of the students are members of chur- ches. You say that Harvard is a place of skepticism. But, if you please, the West, and the East also, exaggerate the amount of infidelity at Harvard University. I am speaking of my Al- ma Mater, but I have spoken frankly to her face, and I speak with bated breath here, for I would treat her more tenderly at a distance than near at hand. But it is true now that, out of a class of nearly two hundred, you find less than fifty claiming Unitarian proclivities in theology. It is commonly supposed that Harvard is Unitarian, when she has as good a right to be called Episcopalian. I hold in my hand here elaborate statistics as to recent classes in Harvard University. Take one of the very last and in it there were, of men about to graduate, of Uni- tarians, 39 ; Episcopalians, 35 ; Congregationalists, 23 ; Baptists, 1 1 ; Presbyterians, 6 ; Liberals, 4 ; Methodists, 2 ; Roman Cath- olics, 2. According to that table, there is really more reason for calling Harvard an orthodox college than a heterodox. I know that the majority of the governing body belong to the Unitarian denomination, but the recent elections into that body have been nearly all from Evangelical sources. The college is not denominational in any sense. It would not like to be call- ed Unitarian, or Congregational, or Episcopal. It has no de- nominational aim, but there is at Cambridge far more strength in sound evangelical thought than the West or the East com- monly gives Harvard credit for. Among the students there are well organized and vigorous religious societies, and the condi- tions of admission to them are more severe than to most chur- ches. I find reason, therefore, for contrasting the present vith the past of Harvard favorably. But this change has come about within the last fifty years. It was the religious demoralization produced by a great variety of causes inhering in the French and Indian wars and in the Revolution, and in the bending of our national heart toward France, which left Harvard unfit to lead Boston culture, and until within fifty or eighty years I must say she has continued to be unfit for that high office. She is my Alma Mater, but she has taught me to be ingenuous and give proof, and the proof that her career as a leader of erratic thought in theology is about to close is her own confession, for she is constantly electing into her board of governors men who are dis- tinguished, not for erratic, but for the soundest kind of sound thought in theology. She is taking for her leaders more and more men whose principles accord with those of the fathers of New England ; and it is that system of thought which has been tested by time on both sides of the Atlantic which to-day has the most power in Harvard University. 58 NEW ENGLAND SKEPTICISM. I* !t But how did our fathers drift away from the lofty ideals of Plymouth Rock, and drop into this demoralized condition ? Let me rapidly run over a series of causes whicn illustrate the source of the demoralizations of Harvard and Yale theologically. When our fathers received George Whitefield as an evangelist, it was necessary for him on Boston Common, in addresses before twen- ty or thirty thousand people, to teach the necessity of the New Birth. It was necessary for him to insist upon the proposition that a man should not be a minister unless he could give cred- ible evidence of having entered upon a profoundly pious life. Why was it necessary for Whitefield to proclaim the necessity of a converted ministry and the necessity of converted church membership? Our Puritan fathers believed as our Pilgrim fathers did in a converted ministry, and in a converted church membership. But our Puritan fathers, you will remember, were not Separatists. Our Pilgrim fathers were. Distinguish always the Pilgrims of Plymouth, who were separatists from the Church of England, from the Puritans who were not. Now the Puritans who landed in Boston, brought over the idea that every child, if baptized, became in some sense a member of the church, and therefore it was a part of their anxiety in founding a new civili- zation to have all children baptized. They had precisely the same idea concerning the baptism of children which prevails now in the state churches of Europe. Let me not here put any one upon thorns by awakening fear that I shall attack or defend merely denominational views* as to infant baptism, — a very in- fantile theme now, compared with this larger question how the secularization of orthodoxy in New England arose. It came from a good motive, — the desire to attend to the religious culture of the whole population. We had a law passed in Massachusetts in 1631 that united the church and the state. In that year the provision was made that nobody should vote unless he was a church member or had been baptized in youth. What is the effect of making a law as the general court did in 1631 in Massachusetts, that for all time to come nobody shall be admitted to the body politic except church members ? Of course the consequence of such legislation will be to make all men anxious to become members of the Church. There will be a secularization of religion if you make the rule that nobody can vote who is not a church member. And that was the law in Massachusetts, and that law was forced upon the churches partly out of their desire to carry religious influences into all secular things. They desired to found a theocracy, like the Jesuits who discovered the great lakes and the Mississippi. They proposed to unite the rehgious and the civil power, practically if not theoretically ; and this order was passed with the best of intentions, but it had the most mischievous effects. Of course, very soon after 1631 we begin to find a demand for a half-way covenant. The question arose whether those parents NEW ENGLAND SKEPTICISM. 59 whose children who had been baptized could not become voters. In 1657 there was a law passed called the "Half-way covenant," by its opponents, and now remembered in history by that name, and by that law those parents who were baptized in infancy, if moral and respectable, were allowed to have their children baptized and be eligible to civil offices. Notice how the political strain was on Massachusetts all the way through. Of course, secularization like this changed two or three thousand things. President Chauncey, of Harvard, opposed the half-way covenant, but the fashion had been set ever since 1631 of admitting to public office only church members. I know that in 1688, on the accession of William and Mary, the law that required church membership as a condition of citizenship was repealed. But you cannot raise a great wave like this and stop it by changing rulers in England; and we had that law from 1631 to 1688. It was the rule that only church members should be eligible to office, and as a result of that we had the half-way covenant. But long after that the half-way covenant kept on in spite of the changes of law under William and Mary. Therefore it is not surprising at all that in 1704 — coming down a little later in this wave of secularization — we find Stoddard, of Northampton, claiming that men should be admitted to the communion service as a converting ordinance. Whether converted or not, they should come to the communion service, and should be recognized as in some sense church members. And finally Stoddard went so far as to defend an unconverted ministry. Whitefield writes in his journal that " Stoddard is to be blamed for maintaining that a man may be an efficient minister although not converted." We see how this political strain year after year had caused Massachusetts to drift away from her anchorage,near Plymouth Rock, and how, little by little, she had come into those billows of unrest and secularization which belong in every democratic age to state churches. Massachusetts has had a state church, and her perils from it had become such in the time of Edwards that he underwent persecution for setting himself against this turbid wave of secu- larization that had been rising ever since 163 1. He opposed the half-way covenant, and was sent into the wilderness as an exile because he had resisted this injury of God's house. Why were Edwards and his family, why were his daughters and his wife, compelled to live on charity from Scotland for a while ? Because he had opposed the half-way covenant. I know where in Massachusetts to put my hand on little note-books of brown paper, covered all over with Edwards' writing, and the books were made from clippings of the paper used in the fans manu- factured by his wife and daughters and sold to obtain their daily bread. There are no fans that Massachusetts dislikes so much to be fanned with as those that Edwards' daughters and wife made and sold for food. Massachusetts starved him, 6o NEW ENGLAND SKEPTICISM. i m '1 ; and Scotland fed him, thank God ! But there were in this ex- perience of Edwards only the natural results of a long course of secularization. Edwards and Whitefield stopped the chief portion of the wave. So far as hat hc'f-way covenant was abandoned, the churches of Eastern Massachusetts became evangelical. So far as it was retained they became unevangelical. Look into Tracy's ^' History of the Great Awakening," and you will find a state- ment that no single church that continued to retain the half-way covenant up to the present time, whether converted or not, con- tinued to be evangelical. It is commonly supposed that the errors of Calvinism account for the rise of Unitarianism. But men must remember the errors of church government ; the secu- larization of the church by its union with the «5tate, and the general outcome of this half-way covenant which rCdwards and Whitefield suc( essfuUy resisted. Men must notice that the churches which dropped that system became evangelical, and the churches which kept it up continued to be unevangelical. And, therefore, I undertake to say that the political were far more important than the theological causes of Unitarianism. Undoubtedly gentlemen here who have opposed many of those errors which it is the delight of modern Calvinistic scholars to oppose — many of them statements for which Calvin was not responsible ; things tacked upon his system that did not belong to the core of it — undoubtedly, many gentlemen here will hardly give the emphasis I do, after long study of this theme, to the political pressure that lay on Massachusetts and secularized her churches. But, standing in Boston and reciting the history of New England, I do not feel any need of proof that the half- way covenant, and these political forces out of which it arose, were the principal causes of the demoralization of orthodoxy in Eastern New England, and that this demoralization was the chief cause of the division of God's house there between the evangelical and the unevangelical. To be brief, therefore, let me say that I hold in my hand a copy of a record made as late as 1728 on the official books of a church in Westfield, and it is a specimen of the records you may find all over Eastern Massachusetts. I go up and down from the Merrimac to the Connecticut as a flying scout, and every now and then I chance to meet a talkative document like this : "At a church meeting holden in Westfield, Feb. 28, 1728: Voted, that those who enter full communion may have liberty to give an account of a work of saving conversion, or not. It shall be regarded as a matter of indifference." W'll unevangel- ical opinions arise in a church managed in that style ? You may conclude whatever way you please according to theory. I conclude according to the fact of history that where that church practice exists, as it did all over Eastern Massachusetts, unevangelical opinions naturally arise. NEW ENGLAND SKEPTICISM. 6l Out of the political pressure which preceded the accession of William and Mary came the half-way covenant ; out of the half-way covenant came the secularization of the church membership of the Congregational body in Eastern New England ; out of our connection with the state came marshes of stagnant church life there, similar to the marshes of much of the state church life in Europe to-day. And there is hardly a breeze that sweeps over Boston that does not come from those marshes, not yet dry, and that never had any salt in them to keep them sweet. You know that I am speaking here more frankly than I could have spoken fifty years ago, for it has not been the fashion in my portion of New England denomination- ally to admit the evil of this half-way covenant as fully as I have now done until within twenty-five or thirty years; but these are the facts. A law by which only church members could vote was in operation in Massachusetts from 163 1 to 1688 in form, and much longer in spirit. The political and social pressure arising from that law led to the adoption of the half-way covenant, by which persons not professing to have entered on a new life at all were allowed to enter the church. Out of that pressure arose Stoddard's evil plea that uncon- verted persons should be brought to the communion service. Out of all *hese causes came an unconverted church mem- bership. Out of that came gradually an unconverted ministry. Out of that came a broad departure from many points of the lofty and scientifically severe ideals of Plymouth Rock. Out of that departure arose in experience a wide and deep secularization of the mere fashionable of the churches of Eastern Massachusetts. Out of this secularization of the churches of Eastern Massachusetts came their chief weakness in their resistance to the irreligious influences arising from the French War and the Revolution, and to the accession of French infidelity at the moment when Lafayette and French liberty had bent the national soul toward France. To-day I have trodden over ground that a little while ago no man could have passed across without burning his feet. We have had a state church ; we have had a secularized church membership in one of our denominations — the ruling one ; and little by little that secularization so lowered our standards that it is not amazing at all, and it is a, thing we ought to have expected, that out of the combination of causes included in the older Arminianism — (I beg every Methodist's pardon. I speak only of errors which your present scholars confess. Just as I criticise the older Calvinism I criticise the older Armmianism. The present Arminianism is pretty good Calvinism — most of it) 6t NEW ENGLAND SKEPTICISM. Hi; i ■ ■ 'A — that out of the combination of causes included in the older Ar- minianism.the half-way covenant, the disturbances of the French war and the Rev^olution, French infidelity, the popular miscon- ceptions of scholarly orthodox doctrine, and some crude and rash statements in orthodoxy itself, came Unitarianism. Out of Unitarianism and the brilliancy of its early literary and secular successes came Harvard University in its largely unevangelical attitude — an attitude now greatly changed. Out of Harvard University in its unevangelical attitude came the occasionally skeptical or doctrinally indifferent literary cir- cles of Eastern Massachusetts. Out of the skeptical Hterary circles of Eastern Massachusetts came one part of the influences that set a poition — though only a portion — of the Boston fashions ol thought. Here we are, then, face to face with the Civil war and with those mistakes which the Northern churches made in their dealings with slavery. Go to the tombstones which a few weeks ago you decorated and read the inscriptions on them, and you will find that the great proportion of all who gave up their lives in the Civil war were men between twenty-five and thirty- five years of age. My generation in this country is a remnant. And therefore you will allow me to speak frankly of those mis- takes which a large part — not all — of the churches of the North made in their delay to take God's side in the great questions which arose concerning slavery. I am to blame now the Amer- ican church. North and South ; for its dilatoriness left a gap on ' this continent between realized Christianity in our national life and God, who walked in advance, and that gap had to be filled up with the corpses of my generation. Daniel Webster was the archbishop of the Northern church, and it is hardly too much to say that deformers were so mixed -up with reformers that for a long while the church had some reason for being shy of the extreme positions of Abolitionism. Undoubtedly great mistakes were made by the Abolitionists. It was political Abolitionism which triumphed, and many of the radical Abolitionists, as you kn6w, were political Secessionists. I must criticise them somewhat. But the church could have done much which she did not do. One great denomination, the Quakers, have the good fortune to look back on a record such as the whole church might have had if we had acted in time and brought our public sentiment up abreast with God's own before Eli Whitney invented the cotton-gin. That changed the sentiment of man, but not much the sentiment of ■ heaveii. Eli Whitney in 1794 invented the cotton-gin. The British fleet in 1803 hovered off" the mouth of the Mississippi, and Napoleon Bonaparte sold to us Louisiana. With that purchase the cave of iEolus, who imprisons tempests within his bellowing mountains, was opened. When the winds had blown out of it l< ! ' NEW ENGLAND SKEPTICISM. 63 until it was substantially vacant, unexpectedly in the depths of the cave opened another ^Eolus cave — Texas. After the winds blowing out of that had tossed our whole ocean into yeasting yellow foam, suddenly in the rear of that ^Eolus cave opened another California and the Mexican war. Then came a yet more huge enlargement of the cave, in the repeal of the Missouri compromise, and the Kansas and Nebraska struggle. We saw the gleaming of the western sea through the last opening of the cavern. God be thanked that the bowels of the mountains were exhausted at last, and that we had no more unoccupied territory ! To this fully opened colossal prison-house of winds we found no door that could be bolted except one made of corpses. We had to block it up at last — the whole mouth of our unmeasured ^Eolus cavern— by the dead bodies of North and South. It is blocked to this day by that immovable and costly mound. Now who in Boston was foremost as an Abolitionist in the days when orthodoxy was a little too slow to keep pace with God? Why, Theodore Parker; and by following God he obtained a following not only for his anti-slavery ideas but for those principles of his which stood in conflict with accredited Christianity. What made Theodore Parker's pulpit high ? The lowness of other pulpits. Why were other pulpits low ? some of them faced the south. There were south-side views taken in Boston occasionally by orthodox pastors. What effect had all this upon the youth of this land ? If ever I had a struggle to retain my respect for embodied Christianity — I never had any struggle in retaining my respect for the real Christianity as it exists in the Scriptures, but if I had any struggle to retain my respect for embodied, accredited Christianity, it was during those years of my education in which I could look toward Boston, the seat of culture in America, and find heterodoxy at the front of God's side as to slavery and orthodoxy doubting as if halting between God and Mammon, her ears filled largely with cotton and gold- dust, and Webster, her archbishop. But the struggle I had with accredited, many had with real Christianity; and one of the profoundest causes of the current New England unrest in regard to orthodoxy is to be found in the fact that, in this time of trial, orthodoxy lacked leaders, and heterodoxy had men at the front on God's side. Now I know how frank all this speech is, and I am not to modify it very much. But it ought to be said that the rank and file of orthodoxy were very nearly right, although they lacked leaders. I suppose it can be proved by the most merciless statistics that in the year 1837 the majority of the ministers of evangelical denominations in Massachusetts were right on the subject of slavery. It was my fortune but a few days ago to hear the poet Whittier say, in that sea-blown city of Newbur5'port, where the roof yet stands under which William Lloyd Garrison was born, that Mr. Garrison himself, 64- NEW ENGLAND SKEPTICISM. in his earliest career A\as a friend cf ministers, and indeed, might have been called, perhaps, a Calvinist of the strict type. He believed too much in ministers ; he made them idols ; and when his sympathies were penetratingly enlisted in one of the greatest of modern reforms, and he found that many ministers were not on his side, the instant and surprised recoil was of that intense sort which comes when we fall into anger with those we love. Again and again a similar amazement was the source of the vigor and the breadth of the recoil from accredited Christianity in many of the anti-slavery men. Henry C. Wright was a Congregational minister; there were subsidiary men, and some of them, I think, were deformers as well as reformers — Parker, Pillsbury, aiid S. S. Foster and others. I have been lately honored with attention from Mr. Pillsbury. He said : ** Do not attack Mr. Cook. You cannot strike the ding out of a cow-bell." It is not on that account that I mention him as a deformer ; but he was once a Congregational minister, and the recoil from his old position to that talk about the cow-bell shows how greatly he once loved ministers ! Within the cir- cle of a hundred miles radius from Boston, you can find hundreds of influential citizens, and at least a score of divided or weaken- ed churches, whose difficulties with the ministers began as Garrison's did, by the operation of that principle which Coleridge describes in his " Christabel" : Alas ! they had been friends in youth. But whispering tongues can poison truth, And constancy lives in realms above, And life is thorny, and youth is vain, And to be wroth with one we love Doth work like madness in the brain. Evil exceedingly, my friends, is that day in any nation when poHtical and religious interests run in opposite channels. These opposing currents make the whirlpool that impales faith on the tusks of the sea. When Chevelier Bunsen lay dying he said : *' God be thanked that Italy is free ! Now thirty millions of people can believe that God governs the world." The average German peasant twenty years ago regarded his minister as merely an agent of the government, and spoke contemptuously of police Christianity, because the state church in the fatherland was, until within a few years, very frequently an ally of absolut- ism. In the United States, while the compromise measures were under debate, political ideas ran in one direction and re- ligious duties in another. The immense interests of commerce often held the pulpit, as well as the press in bondage. The payment of Southern debts ! Have you t er heard that theme discussed in whispers ? Webster had his eyes constantly on Wall street. Wendell Phillips would stand in Boston with his eyes on the conscience of the nation, a very different barometer, NEW ENGLAND SKEPTICISM. ^5 and he would say, " There is a storm singing already in all the winds. We shall escape from slavery only by civil war." Webster would reply, looking at the citations in Wall street, " There has not yet been any large fluctuations in prices. Gentlemen are not serious when they talk of secession. Let us repress agitation, and tide through the crisis without war." Both the moral and the financial barometer must be kept in view by any eyes that would read the signs of modern times. In the rising price of slave property we had a thermometer of threatening aspect, on which the North cast a too careless gaze, — one hundred dollars for a black infant, ten dollars a pound for a black boy, ten to fifteen hundred dollars for a good field hand, — and still this thermometer and the wailin'g breeze rose ; and the winds out of the ^olus cave resounded more and more loudly ; the murky threat of coming war hung above all business and bosoms; and yet, so were we filled with Anglo-Saxon pride, so little foresight did we have, that Wall Street was hardly troubled up to the very hour when we could no longer doubt that there was to be a deluge of blood. Webster hoped that we should pass through the crises without civil war, and could hardly have made more gigantic efforts to avert the contest had he foreseen what was to come, as probably he did, far better than some have thought. I know with what silence I should sit in this assembly were any one of five hundred scholars here the speaker, I should be quiet in this presence, but it is my good or ill fortune here to be responsible to nobody as nobody is to me ; and, therefore let me say that my personal feeling is that Webster, from first to last, was honest, and that he ventured much because he had great foresight. I believe that man anticipated, with a fulness we can but poorly under- stand from any of his public expressions, the terrors of our civil war. Judge Nesmyth, on the Merrimac, at Franklin, said to me the other day: "Once at Elms farm I was returning home in the sunset with Webster, and he turned upon me suddenly, and in his deepest supernatural voice said : ' You may regard me as extravagant, but J have had some experience with both Nortn- ern and Southern men. I probably shall not live to see the Potomac run red with blood, but I think you will.'" That was within six months of the time when, on the shore of the sea at Marshfield yonder, that man went hence. No doubt he was ambitious, but he was too great a man to be supremely ambitious. In secret as well as in public he prayed that when his eyes should be turned to behold for the last time the sun in heaven, they might not see him shining on the broken and dishonored fragments of a once glorious Union, on states dissevered, discordant, belligerent. He foresaw what this land would look like, drenched in Gettysbergs and Richmonds. But he was taken hence before he had time to right himself in the public estimation. No doubt he went to extremes. He was a states- man. But I believe that if the archbishop of the Nofth, Daniel 66 NEW ENGLAND SKEPTICISM. Webster, had lived as Edward Everett did, to hear the first gun fired against Sumpter, and its echoes rolling across belligerent commonwealths and reverberated from the Rocky Mountains to the Alleghenies, Webster in that case would have stamped his foot down on the side of the Constitution and for public order with an emphasis that would have shaken both those ridges and have called forth millions of armed men in support of the Union. There would have been needed no other drum-beat. There is a broader sky over the soul we call W^ebster than over the soul we call Douglas, but I believe that in the drifting mists in the narrower heaven of Douglas there was an opening which the hghtning would have widened had he lived longer, and Webster, without the lightning', would have beheld the azure. The opening was made Avide for us all only by the lightning. We were behind the times as much as any of our leaders, and, if you please, the sky became perfectly clear for you and for me only when the opening was made heaven-wide by the ascent through it of your sainted Lincoln. This, then, is the apology I have to make for the Church : that Webster was her archbishop ; that deformers were mingled with reformers. Beyond these propositions I say nothing in ex- cuse of Boston orthodoxy, for we were behind God, and bitterly have we reaped the fruits of our tardiness. Let us hereafter in the history of our nation remember that it is the business of the church to move ahead of reform and draw it on, and not to be dragged by it, — to be a moon before temperance, and social re- form, and in the rights of labor, as w'e were not in regard to the wave of anti-slavery. We were dragged by that wave. Had we drawn it we should have saved all that was wrecked in the bloody deluge. But now look eastward, and into the territory beyond the Hudson. Notice that the most typical sights are the College bell and the factory chimney. Our manufacturing pc lulations are growing much more rapidly than those of the cities. An operative class, disgusted with thci church, is becoming very large in New England, and the seed plats for small philosophy are always fat and wide whenever a population neglects habit- ual attendance on God's house. Give me a population which, for any cause whatever, fails to assemble at least once in seven days in clean clothes to listen to religious, philosophic, or ethical truth, and lift its soul aloft on anthems to God, and I will show you a population little by little falling under the power of char- latans as leaders. Any large manufacturing population that neglects church attendance habitually will ultimately be led by quacks. The difference between the rich and poor is growing wide in many manufacturing centres in New England, and our voluntary system, whenever an arsitocratic church insists on it that ]jeople shall have something to wear or not go to church at ail, repels the poor. Some churches are very much to blame. I beLeve ninety out of one hundred are glad to see all classes of NEW ENGI-AND SKEPTICISM. 67 first gun jlligerent ntains to mped his )lic order dges and le Union, here is a e soul we s in the vhich the Webster, e. The ng. We -s, and, if id for me le ascent • Church : ; mingled ing in ex- d bitterly reafter in ess of the not to be social re- ird to the ve. Had ed in the ^ond the College >ulations ties. An ling very lilosophy ts habit- >n which, in seven or ethical will show of char- tion that )e led by growing and our jists on it church at blame. classes ol eccentric, until and Connecti- and read now I went into the men in church, but we do have churches that are in debt and want only rich people to come to church. We do have chur- ches that, w^hen they erect a new house, dedicate to God, only a mortgage. I have no objection to tall steeples — if they are paid for. I have no objection to lofty church architecture if the rich and poor can gather together under it. But when a large manu- facturing population gets the idea, fallacious more or less — a. very false idea in nine cases out of ten — that it has few real friends in the churches, when it takes to heart some sour antici- pation for its children, thinks that it will be worse with the time to come than the present, and when it keeps out of the churches under a feeling that poverty is not wanted in these clubs of vel- vety pews, then, little by little, that population will be led by all kinds of religious and political quacks. You will have labor re- forms taught, not by reformers but by deformers. You will have theology taught by eccentrics more and more Tom Paine himself can be sold on the Merrimac cut as no other book on theology can be. Poor Tom Paine — outgrown fifty years ago, only by the half-educated even among infidels ! office where infidel publications are sold in Boston, the other day, and asked of what they sold the most ; and I w.is told that twenty thousand copies of Paine's " Age of Reason" were com- monly distributed from that office every two years, (in some years they wouldn't sell ten thousand copies, but on the average twenty thousand every two years,) chiefly to tjie operative class- es, more or less disaffected with the churches. Now in that class we have our wildest form of New England skepticism. Many of the leaders who are quacks now teaching that class were dis- affected with orthodoxy in the time of the anti-slavery ap^itation. Again and again you will find th^ deformers in New England persons who really had a right at times to criticise orthodoxy. Wendell Phillips says his is the old faith — and yet he will not sit down to the communion-table with the churches in Boston because he feels they have abused him. But during the Civil war, Wendell Phillips and Lydia Maria Childs, and several other abolitionists whom you perhaps have considered skeptical, or rationalistic, at best, were accustomed to meet together privately to observe the communion by themselves. At Theodore Parker's funeral Wendell Phillips said — and the words are printed in Dr. Manning's " Half Truths and the Truth" — '* Mine is not Parker's faith ; mine is the old faith of New England." But Phillips, reformer as he is ; Phillips, sweet bells not jangled, but simply in a strange church tower — dares for philanthropic purposes to keep close company with ration- alists very often, and if he will do this, how much sooner will men do it whose faith has really been undermined in accredited Christianity ? Mr. Garrison I suppose to be a man whose faith in Christianily is of the most fervent type, but he will have nothing to do with accredited Christianity, it so abused him 68 NEW ENGLAND SKEPTICISM. during the anti-slavery conflict. And if Mr. Garrison, with his fervent Christian feeHngs, takes that attitude, what shall we not expect of a man like Theodore Parker, who has broken with the chief part of accredited Christianity, or of men, like some of the followers of Theodore Parker, who are so free that they follow only their own individual limitations. We have in Boston all forms of deformers as well as all forms of reformers, and you must keep this curious past in mind if you are to take into view all the influences that fill Eastern Massachusetts, and from there govern New England theologically. Harvard has been Unitarian. The literary men of Eastern Massachusetts, Mr. Emerson among them — have taken their tone from Harvard. We have had, no doubt, vigorous, advanced Christianity from some of the ablest literary men of Eastern Massachusetts. The poet Whittier I sat with the other day at Newburyport, and I found he was very glad that once or twice I had said publicly that he had never broken with the church. His poems are resonant with that divine melody that fills the Psalms. There is in him a Hebrew tendency to rapt harmony of the soul, and to-day there is not a more fervent Christian in Massachusetts than John Greenleaf Whittier, whose spirit often helped us in the Civil War as the Pillar of Fire helped the chosen people of old. But it isn't every man that has Whittier's balance of spirit ; it isn't every man that can be held in check by his own good sense after he has been stunned by the delinquencies of Christians. I know that one in tv/elve of the original apostles was a villain. I don't know that more than one in twelve of the moderns is a villain. Even if you should prove that one in twelve is a villain, I shc-uld yet in modern times have hope, as I might have had hope in ancient times. But the trouble with the modern church is that whereas in olden times Judas went and hung himself, sometimes he holds the bag now and will not go and hang himself. Our voluntary system makes it important for the man who holds the bag to have power. A hypocrite in the church, if he is a Judas and holds the bag, and will not go and hang himself, is a Judas magnified — a Judas colossal ; and the chief millstone around the neck of a modern Christianity under the evangelical free system is the unhung colossal Judas who holds the bag. Don't say I'm too severe, for not long ago it was my fortune to deliver a lecture against bankrupts, and the next morning an oily-tongued man seated himself near me in the train, and commended my course of thought. I listened with what grace I could, remembering my temptations to pride in spite of the boxings which came so fre- quently as to make me far more humble than my friends think I am, — for I am an humble man by nature. But I survived this man's praise easily, for after he had left me a neighbour of his took his seat at my side and said, "That man. who has been commenting on your lecture has himself failed four times, and three times has assigned his property in a dishonorable way to NEW ENGLAND SKEPTICISM. 69 , with his ill we not ken with ke some that they in Boston , and you into view and from has been etts, Mr. Harvard, lity from etts. The rt, and I I publicly >oems are s. There soul, and sachusetts 3ed us in L people of alance of )y his own iencieG of il apostles twelve of that one ave hope, le trouble Ties Judas now and makes it wer. is the bag, -a Judas f a modern he unhung too severe, re against nan seated { course ot ibering my a me so fre- iids think I rvived this il^our of his 10 has been times, and iMe way to relatives. He, however, is a leader in our foremost church. And after his fourth failure, in which he paid but ten cents on the dollar, he was making a speech one evening in an education- al gathering in his church. The vestry windows were open in the sunr\mer night, and the boys of the common were seated be- neath them. This bankrupt was saying : " My church ought to maintain a missionary abroad. It ought to do so alone. If it will undertake to maintain a missionary, I, for that purpose, will pay one hundred dollars." "Ten cents on the dollar?" said a boy under the window. Now, suppose that that man and that boy had been seated face to face with each other for religious conversation in one of the inquiry meetings of your tabernacle yonder in Chicago. What if the boy had not been deeply impressed ? What if he had gone away to the gallows ? The fault would have been, no doubt, that of the boy chiefly, but in part, at least, that of the hypocrite who had done, as Tennyson says, "his holy, oily best." And yet, in greater degree, it would have been the fault of you who will not unite with the church. Although you blame the hypocrites, you will not unite with church and keep such hypo- crites out. What can we ministers do under a voluntary system ? A great deal. We can sacrifice our salaries, and often do. And when the trouble comes about a case of church discipline, usual- ly it is not the fault of the pastor that Judas is not hung. If you laugh, let the criticism fall on our American generosity — on this prairie-like breadth of sympathy with all forms of life, even with American sharpness when it is without principle. And if the church, filled with this loose government in our democratic age of men thinking for themselves, is not able to drive worldliness' out of itself much better here and now than under the old sys- tem of church and state, even if it had done no better than that, it would have done very much in the presence of these ter- rific difficulties. It is a difficult thing to hold one of your lake steamers in position when it is moving up the rapids of the St. Lawrence. If she does not make the progress of an inch, her engines must put forth colossal power to hold her in position in that current ; and the American church has not only been held in position here, but she has made an advance in her position as compared with what it was in the Old World, and she has mide it against a terrific current. Not only outside the ship, but in- side it, rushing through all her wheek, we have these very cur- rents — the outcoms of loose government, and they are the chief trouble, after all, of that machinery or engine that holds the ship in position. And you who applaud the sentiment are the quenched engines. I have left myself but little space in which to speak of free re- ligion and spirituaUsm, but I shall omit free religion in substance, as I hold in my hand a confession that the Paine Hall in Boston is about to be sold under a mortgage. You must remember 70 NEW ENGLAND SKEPTICISM. that it was built by contributions from all parts of the United States. I have an extract from a speech by Horace Seaver at the dedication of the Paine Hall in Boston in 1875, reported in the Iiivesti: itor for Feb. 3 of that year. Horace Seaver has abused me for reading this extract in public, and I suppose that he feels that, although I quote it from his own paper, to make it public is a violation of privacy — that paper has such a small circulation. " I will not," he says, "conceal the fact that we have had a long and difficult struggle. By the unexpected and most generous bounty of our principal benefactor, James Lick, Esq., of California, together with the donations of sympathizing friends from all parts of the country, we have been enabled to erect this edifice after about fifty years of incessant toil and struggle." Now, as to the free religionists of Boston, I went up four flights of stairs the other day to get the official statement of their finances, and in it I find this sentence: " The receipts of the 3'ear (ending Ma}' 27, 1875) by balance from last account, membership fees, and donations, subscriptions to lecture fund, and sale of publications were ^2,64954; expenditures, $2,182, and 28 cents " — not enough to equip an ordinary vestry in a city church — a sum that a wealthy man really interested in the great cause might toss out as a penny. What, then, is the source of the power which the free religionists of Boston have exerted upon public thought ? They have two or three really brilliant liter- ary men in their ranks. But, Mr. Emerson has very little sym- pathy with the deformers in that movement, and is not regularly found at the meetings of the Radical club. That club dosen't meet regularly. It dosen't meet at all now. Remember, that the Radical club was begun as a free religionist club. It altered its appellation because that title gave offence to many, and af- terward it changed its name from the Radical club to the Chest- nut Street club, which is a distinct and accurate description of what it was. Now, since the death of an honoured man, Mr. Sargent, whose wife's parlors were always open to that club, — and full of noble courtesy, indeed, — the club is disbanded. The lady who drew together by her hospitality some of the brightest wits of realistic Eastern New England has gone to Europe. It is announced that the club will be resumed. But at present it is in suspense, and the feeling in Boston concerning the club is the feeling of the Mississippi concerning the Merrimac or any other small stream. During this last winter, under the labours of a Chicago man called Moody, a graduate of one of your best colleges — the Chicago Young Men's Christian Association — un- der the power which an Unseen Holy put upon his lips, religious truth has filled the sky of Bostcn as the thunder fills the sum- mer azure, and the notes of that Radical club and of all who sympathize with it have been only as the clack of that crow in the pine under the summer shower. I do not exaggerate, for you know this to be the fact if you have kept an eye upon public United aver at )rted in ver has >Se that make it a small that we ted and !S Lick, Lthizing ibled to toil and up four ment of ;eipts of ccount, re fund, $2,182, n a city le great Durce of ed upon nt liter- ;le sym- igularly dosen't er, that altered and af- Chest- Dtion of an, Mr. club, — The Tightest »pe. It esent it club is or any labours )ur best )n — un- eligious le sum- all who crow in ate, for 1 public NEW ENGLAND SKEPTICISM. 71 events. There is no rationalism in Boston that pays much for the propagation of itself. Rationahsm in Boston is impecunious. There is no scholarly skepticism in Boston. It is not the policy of any one who reveres the scientific method to dodge difficulties, and therefore I shall conclude this address on New England skepticism with an outline of the position of current thought concerning Spiritualism. That the rise of American Spiritualism has increased more than it has diminished skepticism, is proved by the general character of the mass of matter which the Spiritualist publishers see fit to offer for sale. The growth of modern Spiritualism is commonly alleged by skeptics as a proof of the growth of skepticism. I think the estimates put forward that there are now some six or eight* million Spiritualists in the country are among the wildest conceivable ; and yet there is no doubt that the growth of Spiritualism is very considerable. But this fact has two sides. One-half of modern skepticism is anti-supernaturalistic to the core. But another half is supernaturalistic also to the core. It is proper for me to ask skeptics and Christians to notice that modern infidelity is so far antagonistic to itself that it is suffici- ently answered by its own antagonism. If the opinions of recent popular skepticism could start up to-day in this hall, as Minervas from Jupiter's' heads, from the brains in which they lie, and appear in the air armed from head to foot, I, as a de- fender of Christian faith, should not tremble at the sight. • Long before they could reach me they would in mid-air have fallen upon each other in exterminating war, and like the heroes of Valhalla, have cloven each other in halves, only to find each other rising again, while across the bloody rain would fall the serene bow of the evidences of the Christian faith. I think it important, there, to call the attention of any who point to the growth of Spiritualism as a growth of skepticism, to the fact that they handle a two-edged sword. The spiritualist body is divided between a part who call themselves Christian Spiritual- ists and a part who are plainly infidel Spiritualists. The former is small in number, but not the less intelligent portion of the mass. I think an infidel Spiritualist the most inconsistent of infidels. The modern Spiritualist is the last man who can con- sistently deny the fact of the supernatural. I am aware that whoever touches Spiritualism treads along on a line which, if he slips, there hangs over him the crack of doom. It is altogether too early yet to make any other than hypothetical assertions concerning Spiritualism, either as to its alleged facts or as to its future as a sect. Until the phenomena of Spiritual- ism have been more scientifically investigated than they have been thus far in its history, it is unsafe to speak of its leading propositions other than hypothetically. All I say about Spirit- ualism is '• if." I beg that it may be noticed that the assertions I am to make concerning it are simply and only fiypothetical asser- 72 NEW ENGLAND SKEPTICISM. it tions. The mind of this age is thrown into religious doubt, chiefly on the point of the relation of the natural to the super- natural. The questions whether the Scriptures are a record or an authority, or in part the one, and in part the other, and con- cerning the character and atoning work of the founder of Christ- ianity, he capsulate in this. I am not about to assert that Spiritualism may bring a day in which the cultivators of science will be reverent believers in the fact of the supernatura! and in the miracles of the Bible. Epes Sargent thinks it will — William Mountford thinks it must. Robert Dale Ower thinks it will. But Katie King put him in her pocket and almost put the Atlantic Monthly there also. It is said that a very different mind, namely, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, thought it would. It is vastly rash to assert this. But it appears to me important that those who fear and that those who desire the success of skepticism should notice, first, that the Spiritualistic body is divided between Christian and infidel Spiritualists; and, secondly, that the logical result, whatever the practical might be, of the proof by Spiritualism of the existence of modern evidence of the supernatural, should that proof ever be given, would be a perhaps logically needless, but in these days a practically use- ful confirmation of the ancient evidence of the supernatural. I hold five propositions to be true concerning Spiritualism, the last three of which are simply hypothetical. First — The chief propositions of modern spiritualism are: First, the possibilit}' of intercourse between human and disem- bodied, or supermundane, spirits ; second, the trustworthiness -of that intercourse as a source of religious knowledge. Second — Spiritualism has by no means proved the second of these propositions, and probably will be as far from proving it after five hundred years more of effort to establish it, as it is now afer five hundred years of effort to do so. Third — If the first of these propositions were established, and it should be impossible to establish the second, all that would be proved would be the existence and agency of evil spirits, — a position neither new nor unscriptural. Fourth — If the first proposition should be proved, great harm would result at least temporarily, for masses of the people would ignorantly or enthusiastically believe the second proved also. Fifth — If the first proposition should be proved, great good "would result ; for if Spiritualism should proved to be simply modern demonology, it would yet contain modern evidence of the supernatural, and the modern evidence would superabund- antly confirm the ancient. I do not forget the distinction between the supernatural and the miraculous ; nor that between the supernatural and the inexplicable. I do not forget that those who are not convinced by Moses and the Prophets might not be convinced by the best modern evidence of the supernatural. But the scientific proof NEW ENGLAND SKEPTICISM. 73 doubt, : super- cord or nd con- Christ- 2rt that itors of rnatura." 5 it will J Ower i almost a very thought rs to me sire the tualistic ts; and, light be, vidence uld be a illy use- ural. tualism, sm are: : disem- rthiness cond of oving it as it is and it ould be rits, — a it harm people proved t good simply ince of abund- 'al and nd the vinced le best ; proof that modern evidence of the supernatural exists is logically, the destruction of anti-supernaturalism. " The New Testa- ment narratives cannot be true, because they contain accounts of miracles," anti-supernaturalism says from Hume to Strauss. The impossibility of the supernatural, Ernst Renan affirms, is the first tenet in the science of modern historical criticism. " A theological miracle," Theodore Parker taught, " is as impossible as a round triangle." I do not predict the practical results ; but on the supposition that the manifestations at, for exam^>le, Stratford, Conn., which the Boston jfournal of Chemistry said not long since, it believed occurred, and that it could not ex- plain, did actually occur ; and on the supposition that they prove the action of disembodied spirits, or that they prove simply the action of supermundane intelligence — then logically Stratford answers Strauss. An immense distinction exists between proving the action of supermundane intelligence and proving the action of disem- bodied spirits. An immense distinction exists between proving the action of disembodied spirits and proving the identity of these spirits with spirits known in the flesh. An immense dis- tinction also exists between proving either, or any, or all of these things, and proving that either, or any, or all of them, make spiritualistic communications a trustworthy source of religious knowledge. To overlook either of these distinctions is to rush into very nearly blank insanity on this theme. But hundreds of enthusiastic people are constantly overlooking them, and into blank insanity have rushed. The Spiritualist newspapers and books are most of them there. The amount of evil directly and indirectly resulting from modern Spiritualism is enormous. If only to stay the delusion of the people and keep putridity itself out of certain circles of society. Spiritualism deserves the most deliberate investigation at the hands of scientific men. If a man wishes to have two wives he often becomes a Spiritualist. You say I venture too much by touch- ing this theme. I should venture more omitting it, for il there is any rule the young men love to see respected it is fair play and no dodging. This topic I will not skip, for I know that in New England and in the West there are men who are under- mining some of the loftiest ideals of social life, and doing this m the name of Spiritualism — undermining, some of the funda- mental truths of Christianity, and doing this in the name of a rat-hole revelation. It is time now that the pulpit should be frank enough to face this theme even if it be proved that modern Demonology is a fact, as some sound heads think there is evidence that it is. I do not think so. I am not only not a Spiritualist, I am not a modern Demonologist. But I am a student of the conflicts of infidelity within itself, and if I have a hopeful outlook it is be- cause I find on one side infidels who are supernaturalistic to the core, and on the other skeptics anti-supernaturalistic to the 74 NEW ENGLANiJ SKEPTICISM. 1^ i core. Popular materialism, which fills the West and the East, has no more subtle foe than this supernatural belief. Lift up the word " if," '• if," " if," and call no pause until science has determined whether indeed any have spoken behind the veil. They did in the past if they do in the present. Even if evil spirits speak, it proves there is something behind the veil. But, truth or illusion, Spiritualism quickens the distinctively Chris- tian iaith of many, even while it undermines that of more. It is, perhaps, the subtlest popular, though by no means the subt- lest scholar y, foe with which materialism and the opponents of the belief in the supernatural have to deal. It may be that there is in Spiritualism an undiscovered fact which will become a two-edged sword against rationalism itself. Say spirits blue and black the tables tip, A devil's knuckle rap may turn us pale ; It proves there is somewhat behind the veil ; A whispered lie proves yet a whispering lip, Rap louder, fiends ; fov if the age let slip Belief in miracle, ye will not fail To bring it back ; a barbed tail Or split hoof from the darkness doubt may trip. I pray our faith from science not aloof, May clip the tail and pare the devil's hoof, Slices of each beneath the microscope ; Then star-eyed faith with lynx-eyed doubt may cope. If. if, if split hoofs can be touched, the time has been When white wings and God's forehead could be seen. I ■;! ■m DOES DEATH END ALL ? FIFTH LECTURE BY JOSEPH COOK, OF BOSTON. Plato in his Phaedon represents Socrates as saying in the last hour of his life to his inconsolable followers : "You may bury me if you can catch me." The Greek philosopher then added with a smile and a look of unfathomable tenderness and thought, " Do not call this poor body Socrates, I would not have you weep at my hard lot, for when I have drunk the poison, I shall depart to the occupations of the blessed. Do not say at my interment, that you are burying Socrates. Say that you bury my body only." If modern materialism does not make unjustifiable pretences, you and I, my friends, can not die as well as Socrates did. On certain coasts of South America, men drive horses down to the shores of the great deep in order that they may receive shocks from electric eels and torpedo fishes. Sometimes the hoof of the tormented horse will smite the life out of a swimming creature and then it ceases once for all to be an electric battery, because the cells which have the power of secreting electric influences are wrecked once for all. Just so,, modern materialism pretends, the hoof of that courser which we call death will smite these poor, breathing, hoping, imploring creatures we call men, and in spite of our breath, and hope, and prayer, we shall cease once for all to be electric batteries, because the cells that secret soul will be wrecked once for all. You know Cabanis said in Paris, about ninety years ago, that the brain secrets soul just as the liver does bile. Thomas Carlyle, with grimmest humor shows that this proposition was the gospel on which was based the French Revolution. Assuredly a denial of the fact of immortality, and a belief that sensual pleasure is the highest end of life, were the broadest and blackest of the far-flapping Gehenna wings that fanned the furnaces of the French Revolution. Not to turn aside to the right or to the left by the breadth of a hair from the demands of a scientific method, let us begin by experiment our investigation of the question, ''Does death end all?" I have put before you the outline of the pretences of materialism, and now I wish to test them by the scientific method ; that is, by experiment which can be touched and seen. Suppose that I have here in my hand a frog. I open the back of its head and take out all that part of the brain which lies above the neck and back of the frontal portion. There are three parts of the brain, as you know. A very curious knot, lying just in the top of the neck, the middle regions, and the frontal lobes. I remove the two portions which are called the hemispheres. It will not do for me here, although I am in the 76 DOES DEATH END ALL? 1 9' lilMw i i t .'5 presence of scholars, to talk about corpora quadrigemini, corpora striata, medulla oblongata, and other names in Latin and Greek. Nevertheless, I keep all those technical terms in mind, and I wish you on the first access of leisure to look up this whole argument as it is stated in technical terms in a variety of volumes on biology. I am to avoid technical terms to-day ; but I am not to avoid scholarly argument. If I do not strew this discussion with Latin and Greek, do not think that it is altogether unauthorized by scholars, for it is getting to be the fashion to speak English even in science, now that the English tongue pervades a larger number of millions of the inhabitants of the world thaiT the Latin or the Greek ever did. My English tongue I hope will be sufficient to explain any physiological problem that may come before us here and now, but on account of the cheapness of the tongue do not underrate the propositions defended in it. After taking away the middle portion of the brain of the frog, I put him on my palm. He does not stir. He is as still as a mummy. I gradually turn my hand over and he keeps his bal- ance and gradually changes his position. Marvelous to relate, I may turn my hand little by little completely over, and that half-brainless frog will keep his place without assistance and stand on the back of my hand. I have removed what are pre- sumably the organs of will in the frog. Nevertheless, such is the power of what the books call the reflex action of the nervous system that he keeps his position and stands there ; when I turn my hand back again, he comes back again into the palm. Any number of times I may make him change his place, although he has only a fragment of brain, but unless I move my hand he does not move. I put that brainless amphibian at the edge of a pool and he sees his native haunts, but he does not leap into the Wi. ter. I touch the edges of his feet, I irritate them with a blade of grass, and he leaps at once into the pool, and when there be- gins to swim. He goes on in a straight course, however, not turning to the right or left. He does not pause until he reaches the opposite bank or meets some object. If a mate of his should be near his course he will not turn aside to play with that bro- ther or sister amphibian. There is in him no capacity apparently to turn to the right or left. He will not seek his food. If you put food in his mouth he will swallow it, but you may leave him standing at the side of his food and find him perishing of starva- tion, for he seems to have lost the power of self-direction. Take a fish and mutilate it in the same way, by the removgil^ of the two hemispheres of the brain, and you will find the fish wholly incapable of directing itsown movement. It will not seek food. It swims, indeed, when the water irritates its fins, but it does not play in spheral rhythm with its mates. It does n:)t flash up from its watery couch to catch the unwary insect in the morning or evening dusk. It will perish of starvation un- less artificially fed. It will become a mummy, unless artificially DOES DEATH END ALL? 77 stimulated from without. You say that this case of the fish is very different from that of the frog. But the two are governed by the same law. The frog leaps when you touch him, and when he is in the water that touches him, and this stimulation causes him to swim. So this fish, when he is in the water, will swim on account of the stimulation of the aqueous element. But if you remove it and put it on the sand, it has lost the power to put itself back into the water again. Unless stimulat- ed by yourself or the touch of the sand, it does not move. Just so if you take a pigeon and remove the upper portions of the brain, the animal will sit forever at the side of its food or mates and show no sign of self direction. It becomes a mummy in the presence of its own food ; and yet if you push it to the edge of your table the poor bird flies. The moment it needs its wings it spreads them, with perfect equilibration, and moves royally across the aerial tract of the world in that miracle which we call flying. It flies on and on in a straight course until some obstacle stops it or until fatigue necessitates a pause. It, too, does not play in spheral rhythm with its mates. I does not flash up from its aerial couch to catch the unwary in- sect. It seems to have lost entirely the power of self direction. So, too, a rabbit when you take away the upper part of its brain will sit forever in one position and become a mummy although its food may be at it« side. But if you fire a pistol near its silken ears, it will twitch and start, and perhaps run a few paces in a bungling manner. If you frighten it thoroughly, it will run several yards, but in a heedless, awkward way. It comes to a pause when wearied, or when obstacles intervene. It exhibits no power of self direction. These my friends, are stratagetic experiments. This frog, this fish, this pigeon, this rabbit, are tangible things. Their actions before and after mutilation are visible events about which there is no debate. Perform these experiments for your- selves. The out-come of them all proves 1. That when an animal has the whole of its nervous system it has the power oi self direction. 2. That when you take away a certain part of the nervous system the animal has no power to move unless stimulated from without. Very well ; right here we reach, by experiment, a most im- portant truth — that there is a difference in the offices of the two different parts of the nervous system, the upper and the lower. Here we have experiments showing that the lower part of the nervous system is just like the key-board of an organ. There is no music in it unless you play on it. You must touch the nerves of the fr-og and the pigeon, or the water must touch them, or some external stimulation must be brought to bear upon them, or no motion follows. We know perfectly well by experiment that the key-board is not good for anything unless there is an external agent playing upon it. Do you know that ? Are yoa . 78 DOES DEATH END ALL \ \ \ \ t i i f tolerably clear on that point ? An immense amount depends on your clearness just here. I hold that these four experiments are demonstration of the fact that the lower range of nerves, or what the books call the automatic nervous system with its ac- companying fibres, is'a piece of mechanism wholly inert unless stimulated from without, just as the key-b(^?.rd of that organ (re- ferring to an organ on the platform) is inert unless there is a musician to play on it from the outside Well, now, will you please adhere mercilessly to what we have proved by these experiments, that when the animal has all of its nervous system it can move of itself. You know very well that the fish and the frog, the pigeon and the rabbit, have innumerable playful ways when they are unmutilated. . You know they seek their own fooa and manifest in ten thousand dif- ferent methods the power of self-direction. It is not declama- tion, it is not forcing physiological argument at all for me to say that the common opinion of specialists is phj^siological science is that when these animals have the upper key-board of their brains they can move themselves. We see them exhibiting a great variety of activities which they never manifest when we take away that upper key-board. Now, if that lower key-board must have an external agent to play upon it, and without such an agent is perfectly inert, like the key-board in that organ without a musician, what about the upper key-board ? Must there be any musician there to play on that ? Something is there that stimulates the upper key- board. It is not you, it is not the water, it is not the air. What is it ? The upper key-board, or what we call the influential nervous system, the books say "initiates activity." That is Dr. W. B. Carpenter's phrase. It has powers altogether higher than the reflex or automatic nervous system possesses. , When an animal has the upper or influential i>ervous mechanism, it guides its own movements. But that upper key-board is made of matter, just as the lower key-board is. The ivory keys up there can no more move themselves than the. ivory keys below here. We know by experiment that this lower key-board can not be moved without fingers outside of it. And so we ought to infer that the upper key-board can not be moved without something outside of it. In itself it is perfectly inert like this lower mechanism. We ta e away from the frog the upper key-board and leave nothing but the lower nervous system, and then he can not stir at all unless we start him. Very well ; give hiin the upper key-board ; tha' is only matter. It cannot originate force. It can not stir u nless something starts it outside of itself, and that something we suppose to be a spiritual principle operating on the exterior of that upper key-board, as we in the exper.ments supposed, act on the exterior of this lower one. In man that external musician of the upper key-board, we call thp pjuI. The ancients had a story about Gyge's ring, which made the DOES DEATH END ALLr 79 spends on periments nerves, or ith its ac- ert unless organ (re- there is a ) what we lal has all now very 3bit, have :ed. . You )usand dif- declama- me to say ;al science d of their chibiting a ; when we il agent to inert, like ; about the re to play upper key- air. What influential ^hat is Dr. ler higher ;s. , When hanism, it rd is made vory keys ivory keys his lower )f it. And t be moved "ectly inert le frog the r nervous start him. ily matter. ;hing starts ? a spiritual aboard, as f this lower key-board, made th"; wearer of it invisible. Suppose that at this organ here there sits a musician with Gyge's ring on his finger. We should not see him, and yet we should see the motion of the ivory keys of the instrument. We should hear music pervading these leafy arches, and we should find a perfect correspondence jtween the pulsations of that anthem and the movement of those ivory keys. Now, what if some materialist should come here and say that the keys cause the music ? What is the proof that they do ? we should demand. " Wh5^"' the materialist would say, " there is perfect correspondence between the rise and fall 6f these keys and the rise and fall of these notes in the music. "Well, t :'t," we reply, "correspondence is not identity. Ivory is not music. Keys in motion are not melody." " '.ut there is a perfect parallelism," the materialist would say, " between the dropping and rising of these keys and the dropping and rising ot that music, and it is the ivory in the keys that > uses the music. I see no musician, I see the keys in motion, and I find that the music is in motion also, aud that the two keep time with each other, and I say that those keys are the cause of the music." " Well," we say in reply," there is parallf'ism between these motions and that music, but parallelism ;s not identity. No musician is seen here, but there must be a musician here somewhere unseen, because the involution must be equal to the evolution. There is more than motion in that music. There is a plan in it. There is something in it that takes hold of the heart, and that expresses soul. Mind comes out here, and some- where it must go in, although I do not see where." I am sup- posing the musician to be utterly invisible, for he wears Gyge'j ring. " I hold," you say, "that involution must b* equal to evolution, or that every change must have an adequate cause ; and, as mind comes out here in the ravishing melody, sonie- where mind must go in, although I do not see just where. I know that involution is equal to evolution, and therefore some- how mind goes into this process, for mind comes out." But the materialist says : " Ivory is a very curious tiling." If his name is Tyndall, he says: "Ivory has in it the potency and power of all music." He says we do not know all the qualities of these keys ; science is yet in her infancy. We see nothing here except the keys and we notice a perfect parallelism between their movement and tliat of the music. And so in the name of exact science why must we not assert that those keys produce that music ?" "But," you say, "ivory is matter, and matter is inert." "Well," Tyndall says, "let us have a new de- finition of matter." But Professor Bain stands he^e, and he belongs to Tyndall's school and really leads the latest and acutest form of materialistic speculation. Professor Bain says : "Professor Tynd.ill, I can prove that inertia as I can prove that extension is, or color, or weight. Inertia is absent in mind and present in matter " That is Professor Bain's own language in his volume on "Mind and Brain. ' It i£ only one of a dozen 8o DOES DEATH END ALL r i -n. -''■fii-i I qualities all present in matter," as he affirms, "and all absent in mind, inertia, extension, weight, color, hardness." Think of this astounding attempt of modern materialism to assert that matter is something that has two sides, physical and spiritual. Tyndall's attempt is just that. He wishes to show that ivory is such a curious thing that it produces this music, and in order to do that he puts into matter, mind. If matter is thus made into mind, that is no matter. Face to face of the scientific method itself, let us look at the pretense that the qualities of matter and mind can belong to one substance. What are the qualities of matter? Why, Prof. Bain says they are inertia, ano extension and colour and weight and a number of qualities expressed in terms of those. But is tnere any extension in mind, any weight, any colour ? When Brutus stabbed Caesar was the grief of the Roman dictator round or square ? When Columbus first saw the New World, was his joy triangular or hexagonal ? Is love white or green ? I know it is green sometimes. But if the imagination of the ordinary poet weighs a pound, does that of Shakespeare weigh a ton ? When Lincoln by a stroke of his pen manumitted four million of slaves, were his sense of gratitude to Almighty Providence and his gladness in being of service to his fellow-beings octagonal or triangular? You laugh, but your laugh is at the expense of Tyndall, and of all those who hold that the qualities of matter and mind can belong to one substance. We know that mind can not be spoken of in the terms that belong to matter. It is perfect nonsense to talk about the colour of thought and the shap«, of emotion. Thos* terms are utterly meaningless when applied to mind, and yet we know what they mean when applied to matter. Now, if you please, extension and the absence of extension, inertia and the absense of inertia, colour and the absence of colour, cannot belong to the same thing, unless a thing can be and not be at the same time and in the same sense. You cannot have a thing here and at the same time have it there, in the same sense in which you have it here. There is nothing sure, if the first principle of ail logic is not clear that a thing can not be and not be at the same time and in the same sense. Aris- totle built his whole philosophy on that proposition. I assert that it is impossible for us to suppose that these ivory keys, if they are matter, have a soul in them, however curious they may be. Tyndall knov/s that mind comes out in the music, so he wants to put mind into the ivory, for he knows he can not get out more than he puts in. The effort of modern material is to put into matter mind itself. But in that effort the assertion is made in the last analysis that one and the same substance can have extension and the absense of extension, and inertia and the absence of inertia, as its qualities. But inerti . is present in matter and abs^^-nt in mind, and extension is present in n^at- ter and absent in mind. The absence and presence of a thing DOES DEATH END ALL ? 8z absent in Think of ssert that spiritual, that ivory d in order hus made ook at the ong to one Vhy, Prof, md weight 3e. But is r ? When :ator round Id, was his ? I know le ordinary :igh a ton ? r million of idence and ctagonal or expense of !S of matter ' that mind itter. It is ^ht and the igless when len applied ; extension, absence of ling can be You cannot in the same sure, if the ng can not use. Aris- X. I assert >ry keys, if s they may isic, so he an not get iterial is to assertion is )s».ance can nertia and . is present 3nt in n^at- of a thing you can not have at the same time and in the same sense. Here is the fathomless self-contradiction on which all material- ism wrecks itself. In every age it has struck, in its voyages, on this reef, the roots of which take hold of the core of the world. Here is the rock on which whole Armadas of materialistic fleets have been shattered age after age. And on this reef Tyndall's barge of the gods, which, like Cleopatra's, burned on the water. Its sides were beaten gold, only yesterday beached on chaos. He himself has substantially abandoned materialism and returned to his old position. Tyndall himself once said that '* if we could prove that a right-hand spiral movement of the particles of the brain always occurs when we love, and a left-hand spiral movement when we hate, we should be just as far off from knowing by physical science what the cause of that movement is as befo-e." That is Tyndall's present position. He said in the appendix to his Belfast address that in his clearer moments he does not doubt that thtie are two substances in the universe, and that mind is a different thing from matter. Do not be puz- zled by that first Belfast address, for after it was cannonaded from all parts of the sky in the name of clearness of thought, Tyndall published a second edition, and a preface in which he substantially lakes his old position, that we, at the last analysis, as Prof. Bain himself says, are conscious, not of one substance, but of two, and that matter and mind do differ as everybody since Aristotle has said chey do, by the whole diameter of exis- tence. One is inert and the other is not. One can move itself, the other can not. Who can put pins into a cushion from op- posite sides, and point to point, and drive them into each other ? Extension and the absence of extension, colour and the absence of colour, materialism would make qualities of one substance. These opposites are spikes driven point to point, and that style of hammering has not succeeded in this age, and will not suc- ceed in any age that reveres the scientific method. There are two substances, and your ivory keys will not explain the music, even if you give a new definition to ivory. Is the wind that moves through the organ the source of the melody ? Why, we say, wind may move through an organ and produce certain tones, but not such ones as these. It is not to be denied that the air in the organ is an instrument in the production of the music. It is not to be denied at all that the ivory keys are essential to its production, but neither the air in the organ nor the keys will explain the qualities of '•oul that in- here in this melody. We must have as much go in as comes out, and so you ainrm in the name of the principle that every change must have an adequate cause ; that somewhere here there is a musician'. "With what microscope do you see him," the objector says. "With the microscope you ground the lenses of. That micro- scope that has not in it a single lens that the scientific method 6 wr^ 82 DOES DEATH END ALL 1 W' ! ^1 I '■I I' t does not shape, a microscope in which the central glass is the axiom that every change must have an adequate cause, and that involution must equal evolution. With that lens I see, behind these moving keys a power adequate to produce the melody. All that comes out there, in the name of this axiom, have a right to put in here. Now, my friends, we are the organ, and the upper key-board is made up of the white nervous substance and the gray matter in the brain. Undoubtedly molecular motions occur in the nervous system perfectly correspondent with the activity of our thoughts. I suppose that it must be granted that evefy time we think, or feel, or < hoose, certain shivers of the ultimate atoms of the nervous substance of the brain and elsewhere occur. If we had the power which future age may acquire of looking into these molecular movements, we might find, and probably it is already demonstrated that we should lind, a perfect correspond- ence between the movements of these white and gray keys, and the movement of the anthem which we call thought, and choice, and emotion. But when materialism comes and says " these ivory keys produce the music," we say to it, " parallelism is not identity." There is perfect correspondence between the motions of the nervous molecular atoms and the movements of choice, emotion and intellect. But ivory is not music. Nervous shivers are not mind. These nervous fibres are matter. They are the ivory in the keys, and ivory is inert. It can not move itself. ♦• Well," but materialism says, " let as have a new definition of matter." In urging that plea it falls into the same self-contra- diction Tyndall fell into in that other case. It cannot get out any more than it puts in, and knowing that it tries to put into the matter of this key-board what it wishes to get out. Our reply as to this key-board is precisely what it was as to the other. You cannot have extension and its absence, color, and its absence, inertia and its absence in the same substance any more than you can have a thing here, and there, at the same time and in the same sense. To suppose that you can, is against all self-evident truth. It ie in ihe face of axioms that constitute the very basis of the scientific method. Men who love clear thought never will adopt such a theory. If faithful to self- evident truth, we must believe there are two substances in the universe. When we take the theory that there are two, we can explain things, and when we take the theory that there is but one substance, and that this is matter, we are obliged to say that matter is not only matter but spirit, too, and thus Contradict ourselves fathomlessly. Such suicide does not result from a correct use of the scientific method, and we discard all that reasoning just as Tyndal' has discarded it in the other case. We come, therefore, to the conclusion that in this key-board as in the other there must as much go in as c<;mes out, and that, therefore there is a musician here as well as 'here, although he ,mL. DOES DEATH END ALL? 83 s is the ind that , behind melody, e a right jy-board y matter • in the ty of our time we atoms of . If we ;ing into bly it is respond- :eys, and d choice, s " these m is not ; motions if choice, IS shivers ^ are the ve itself, nition of if-conl;ra- t get out put into lut. Our ls to the olor, and ance any the same u can, is ioms that who love ul to self- es in the J, we can ;re is but :d to say contradict it from a all that her case, -board as and that, hough he may wear Gyges' ring and be invisible. We see him with the same lens — that axiom ground on the sternest grindstone of science that every change must have an adequate cause, or that involution must equal evolution. My friends, we can draw a Uttle nearer to the heart of this great mystery if we look analytically at the upper key-board for a moment. We have convinced ourselves of two things, first, that there is a difference between the automatic and the influ- ential arc in the nervous system. The automatic arc will not act unless it is stimulated. The influential arc acts of itself, but as it is matter we know it is stimulated from without. No- tice that there is direct proof that some parts of that upper arc will not act unless acted on from without. Here is the ear, and here is the eye. They are supplied with nerves from the brain. You know the brain is like a handkerchief — all folded, so that the interior of the roll cannot be studied by fingering the exter- ior. That is the chief difficulty in the science called phrenology, if it be a science at all. I believe something in the larger divis- ions of the phrenological map ; but I should not like to dofend all the smaller ones, for the interior of the brain can not be seen. It is folded up in the cranium just as a glove would be on my fingers when I shut my hand. What is in the inside, we do not see by looking on the exterior. There is the brain all folded up, and it is agreed among physiologists that the brain is the organ of the mind. The soul has its chief seat there in that most intricate part of the nervous system. Now what da we find in certain portions of the upper part of that higher in- tricate nervous mechanism." Here run down certain nerves which we find ending in the external apparatus we call the ear. Some run down here and end in what we call the tongue, and others end here in what we call the nostrils, and others end here in what we call the eye. Now, I ask anybody to follow me with the sternest application of the scientific method and ask whether the ear is good for anything unless there is an external agent to act upon it ? You have a very curious mechanism called the auditory apparatus. But put as many technical terms on the nervous structure at that point as you please, you know that unless there is an external agent to operate on that nervous mechanism, m?rvelous and intricate as it is, it is good for nothing. It is just like a key-board without a musician. So,, too, unless we have outside of the nerves that come into the nos- trils an external agent, they effect nothing. Just so, unless we have outside of the nerves thai come to the tongue an external agent, the nervous mechanism is not put into action. Here in the eye you have a marvelous retina, a complex, nervous ar- rangement absolutely incomparable in its intricacy, and yet it wili not move itself. Without light, it is inert. It is made of matter. It can not start its own activities. It initiates nothing. When it is beaten on from without by light then vision starta^ 84 DOES DEATH END ALL? f I up, and without that external agent it is precisely like the key- board without fingers on its exterior. Well, now, if that is the case as to two or three parts of the complex nervous mechanism of the brain, what shall we say of these other parts that we cannot handle. They are here and appear to belong to that same key-board which you can touch ^t two or three points. This concealed part of the key-board is just like any visible part. It cannot play of itself. Enter the interior of the brain and you will find convolutions ending in a peculiar mechanism on the exterior of the nervous structure. Is it not rather according to analogy to conclude that just as these key-boards will not play of themselves, so those key-boards will not. There is a power of self-direction in that brain some- where which governs my whole body. That power is exerted upon just such matter as comes down here to tihe eye, and here to the nostrils, and here to the tongue, and here to the ear. As this matter is a key-board which does not play itself, so I be- lieve that that matter is a key-board which does not play itself, beyond all controversy I know that there is something outside of this matter that plays upon it, although I do not see it. By the eye of reason I see it whenever I look through this lens ground by the scientific method and asserting that every change must have an adequate cause. Open Prof. Draper in his renowned book on " Physiology," and you will find him proclaiming that it is known to the eye of merely physiological science that the brain must be set in motion by an agent external to itself, invisible and immaterial. We know there must be an agent playing on it. And as that agent is not visible, we know it is invisible. It is effectual, and is known by its effects. We find the interior of the brain ending in curious convolutions of vascular material, as the books say. Draper affirms that we might infer from the structure of the brain that an external immaterial agent acts upon it. If you saw the eye for the first time you might infer from its very structure that an external agent was made to act upon it. You see the sail of a ship and you say from the way it is made that some external agent is to act upon it. There are two ways of determining problems in physiology. You may have the character of light and be required to determine the character of the organ that can perceive light or you may have the character of the eye given to you in the problem and you maybe required to determine the character of the agent that sets it in motion. Now the pro- blem as to the existence of the soul is just this : Given the structure of the brain, given the fact that the brain is inert of itself, a key-board that can not play unless a musician's fingers are on the outside of it, what is the character of '.he agent that sets it m motion ? Why, the agent must be a musician that has as much music in him as he brings out of the instrument, -and we know what he brings out. Magna Chartas, Illiads, DOES DRATH END ALL? 85 iEneids, Constitutions of the United States, Declarations of Independence, Paradise Lost, all the poetry and philosophy, and eloquence and legislation of the globe. Whatever there is of human emotion, choice or intellect has come from this key-board, and whatever comes out must have gone in. We know the character of the agent by what he has done. Under the Acropolis, when Socrates taught there, it was the prevailing theory that the relation of the soul to the body is not that of the music to the harp, but of the harper to the harp, or of the rower to the boat. If the relation of the soul to the body is that of the music to the harp, then when you break the harp the music stops forever. If the relation of the soul to the body is that of the harper to the harp, perhaps you can destroy the harp and not hurt the harper at all. If the relation of the soul to the body is that of the rower to the boat, you may have the boat sunk in the salt ooze or blow it around the hissing seas while the rower is safe. Your frail vessel may be splintered on the reefs, and your rower may be in his desired haven, for he was external to his vessel. Just so, if I can prove that the soul is external to the body, you may wreck this frail skiff on any tusk of the reef we call time, that you please, you may blow it about the seas, you may cause it to return to the dust of which it was made, and I, a rower, external to the boat, a musician wholly outside of that harp, may be in my desired haven, may have another harp given me when the fragile boat and the first harp are no more forever. Just as you may destroy the ear and not destroy the air that sets the nerves of the ear in motion, just as you may destroy the tongue and not destroy the flavors that put its nervous mechanism into action, just as you may destroy the nostrils and not destroy the odors, just as you may destroy the eye and not destroy the light, the external agent that initiates its activities, so, by a perfectly parallel argument, I am authorized to assert that you may destroy the brain and not destroy the soul, the agent which sets it in motion. That is Draper, that is Dr. Carpenter, that is Lionel Beale, that is Herman Lotze, that is the acutest German physiology. That is the position taken up now by the opponents of material- ism on both sides of the North Sea. We must infer the existence of an agent external to the mechanism of the brain to set in motion the upper key-board, just as we know an agent is needed in the lower key-board. The character of that upper agent must be ascertained scientifically by a study of its effects. When we study the effects and find in them soul, we must put into the keys what comes out. We must put into the source what appears in the fountain, mind. The destruction of the brain does not itnply the destruction of the musician that plays upon it any more than the destruction of the eye implies the destruc- tion of the light that plays upon it. 86 DOES DEATH END ALL? '•3! ' !1 If, then, death does not end all, what does or can ? If I prove by a purely physiological argument that the soul is exterior to the key-board which it plays, then it remains for you to prove that when the key-board is broken up the soul is destroyed, the, externality of the soul to the nervous mechanism is just as well known in the upper key-board as at the externality of your fingers to the lower nervous mechanism is known in relation to this lower key-board of the frog and the pigeon, the fish and the rabbit. You know how those motions in the lower key-board are produced. You know, therefore, how those iri the upper are started. Matter did not start them there. Matter does not start them here. Mind starts them here. Mind starts them there. We are conscious in ourselves of power of choice, and that inner witness must be combined with the testimony that comes from the scalpel and the microscope to show that the power of self direction does not originate in matter. We there- fore find in mind, not in matter, the source of intelligence and power of choice. No man of enduring reputation ever attrib- uted either of these capacities to matter, which cannot move itself. In this whole mechanism as in the universe, there are only two things, matter and mind. If we have self-direction, it we have choice exhibited, if we have all the qualities o*" mind shown to us in the activities of an organism, we know those qualities do not originate in matter. But if they do not inside, they originate outside of matter, and outside of matter there is only mind. In the microcosm as well as in the macrocosm, all force and motion originate in mind. But now, in the second half ot this discussion, it is necessary for me to use physiological illustrations and to call you into the presence of the Holy of Holies of the latest microscopical research. When we approach living tissues with powerful lenses, and look on them in activity, the first great truth we notice is, that nothing whxh lives is alive in every part. You walk on the murmurous shore of some tropical sea and pick up a shell, and you notice that the back of it appears to be dead, but the inter- ior of it, if the occupant is yet there, seems to be alive. Only a part of the whole mass of the encased animal is really living. The back of the shell has ceased to be a part of the quick flesh. Just so we pare away a part of our own shells every morning when we cut the nails. The tips of the fingers are alive. But the tips of the nails are not, in the same sense. Nevertheless, the back of the shaggiest oystershell is matter very different from the sand on which it lies. You never clip away matter from the tips of the rails that is Hke the sod of the meadow on "Vv hich you tread. There are, in short, three kinds of matter : inorganic, living, and formed material. You have your inorgan- ic matter in the sand on which the back of the oyster lies. You have the living matter in the quick flesh of the oyster ; you have vour formed matter in the shell. How ij to come i that tran the agen( ter, the c on the ou thrown o carmine s stained re illustratic what is re ic matter ial on the cell and ii for centur suddenly. Here youi or bioplas tissues, ai the ■•vail ( red biopla research. Keep in formed. But hov They thro fibre of mi the fibres the vein ai of the com Think wh living poii they conv( material, nerve and They thri here a ton co-ordinat as to make Is any ing ? The) for the effe eagle then ties that w marvelous take down its foot tal^ and if I ki' would be \ DOES DEATH END ALL? «7 How is organic matter changed into lormed matter ? Why, to come at once to the holy of hoHes of microscopic research, that transition has never yet been observed to occur except by the agency of Hving matter. In this cell or point of living mat- ter, the circle represents the living matter and the irregular Hne on the outside shows the mass of formed material that has been thrown off by the cell. Take living tissue and drench it in a carmine solution and what is called bioplasm in it will come out stained red. That discovery was made about 1856. In these illustrations living matter is represented by the red parts ; only what is red in those tissues is really alive. In this cell, inorgan- ic matter goes in at one side and is thrown off as formed mater- ial on the other. A current is drawn through the wall of the cell and in a mysterious manner, not to be explained by science for centuries to come perhaps, that inorganic matter is changed suddenly, and inexorably, and is thrown off as formed material. Here your oyster, say, takes in his food, and the living points, or bioplasts, transform it into whatever is needed to make up its tissues, and finally throw it off in the shape of a rhell. Just so the wall of every cell is formed by matter thrown off by these red bioplasts. That is the mystery of the latest microscopical research. Keep in mind those three kinds of materials-inorganic, livmg, formed. There are only those three kinds of matter. But how do these red points throw off the formed material ? They throw it off in such a marvelous way as to form here the fibre of muscle, and in such an astounding way as to form here the fibres of a vein, and in such a miraculous way as to twist the vein around the muscle or the muscle around the vein. Think of the complexity of the tissues and organs of the human frame. Think what these spinning bioplasts do. They are the only living points of matter in the organism. They take in nutriment, they convert that into livii;g matter and then throw off formed material. But they throw off that material so as to form here a nerve and there a m.uscle, or here a tendon and there a vein. They throw it off so as to form here an eye and there an ear, here a tongue and there a nostril. 1 ney throw it off so as to co-ordinate bone and muscle and nerve and tendon, so, in short, as to make up all that miracle which we call a living organism. Is any power behind the bioplasts to account for their weav- ing ? They weave. There must be a cause adequate to account for the effects produced. What is produced ? A man here, an eagle there, a lion here. In the eagle and in the lion the shut- tles that weave the growing tissues are these red points. More marvelous yet, when I, from the bough of some mighty pine, take down the egg of the eagle, and from the lair of a cave at its foot take the egg of a lion — every life comes from an egg, and if I kill the mother I may find the egg from which a lion would be produced — and when I open the egg of the lion and 88 DOES DEATH END ALL J ithe egg of the eagle and put them under a microscope, I see no difference between the bioplasm that has begun to weave the eagle and that which has begun to weave the lion. It is so in regard to the living points that wove the human form ; just so in regard to those that wove that acorn above the nest of the eagle ; and when they began fcheir work they were structureless; transparent, bioplasm, just such matter as you see in the morn- ing in the white of an egg befor/s it is cooked. When you kill the living tissue and drench it in carmine solution, that matter stains red, and the living points are represented by the stained matter. They are scattered all through the living tissue, but here in the egg there are only four of them, and at an earlier stage you can not see the separation of the four. There is a little speck in the middle of the egg that divides and sub-divides. What is the property of bioplasm ? Why, here is a specimen. Bioplasm is represented by this white mass, and it is the quality ' of bioplasm to change in shape and sub-divide. This irregular line shows th^ shapes this mass of bioplasm will take in a very few seconds. I have seen in the best microscopes in New Eng- land, bioplasm moving in this way, and these irregular shapes are taken on with a marvelous rapidity. Sometimes a smaller mass is thrown off from a larger. The former will immediately begin to move and take a variety of shapes and sub-divide itself as did its parent. Every divided part has the power of the original. Just in this way the points sub-divide in the egg. They are four; four becomes sixteen, sixteen becomes thirty-two, thirty-two becomes sixty-four. But so do they arrange them- selves that in one case they weave an acorn, and in the other an eagle ; in one the lion, and in the other the man. Now, do you think all that occurs without forecast ? Are we fools enough to believe that the dead matter on which the shag- gy bark of that oyster lies, or the formed matter of which the shell is made has woven him ? No. We think nothing of the sort. The mystery is in these red points. What are they ? Why, there they are. Colorless bioplasm is all we see. It is a key-board, marvelous music comes from it, and we say as to that key-board as we said as to the others, that it is made of matter and cannot move itself. There is nothing in it but mat- ter, and behind that key-board of the bioplasts there must be a musician with a Gyges' ring on his finger. He is invisible, but he is there, and we know who he is by what he does. If I have now proved the externality of the soul to the body, or that life is the cause of organization and not organization the cause of life, I have proved that the relation of the soul to the body is as that of the harper to the harp. The destruction of the harp is not the destruction of the harper. That is admitted by all materialists from the first age to the last. The harper is outside of the harp, and death is not the end of the harper even when it is the end of the harp. DOES DEATH ErTD ALL? 89 i If I prove that death does not end all, have I proved immor- tality ? I am not discussing immortality directly. My question is, does death end all ? Beyond death reason can not peer very far, but by the microscope I think we can see enough to show that deatn does not end all. If death does not, what does or can ? This is the state of the argument from mere reason as to immortality. Here is Island Number Ten ; here is New Orleans, If I can sail past that island and that city and get into the Gulf, then I can go where I please on the ocean, can I not ? If I sail past death and enter on an ocean beyond it, you do not know where I will go, do you ? It is getting to be a stern last morn- ing with our marvelously uneasy friends who believe Island Number Ten and New Orleans will wreck us. We begin to see that we can sail past them. We take the Malakoff, we take the Redan, and can we not get on in Russia ? It is for opponents to prove that anything beyond death can end all. I discuss only the question whether death ends all, and I have proved the ex- ternality of the soul to the body by a purely physiological argu- ment, and therefore the destruction of the harp does not imply the destruction of the harper, and so that death does not end all. Now, the question to be put to you, if you object to the doctrine of immortality, is the enquiry : If death does not end all, what does or can ? What of the immortality of instinct ? A great distinction ex- ists between those organisms that are mere automata, or have life, but nc» free-wills or consciences, and the higher animals, which have both the automatic and the influential nervous me- chanism. The plant and the automaton have life, but not souls in the full sense of the word. But do not facts require us to hold that the immaterial part in animals having higher than automatic endowments is external to the nervous mechanism in them as well as in man ? What are we to say if we find that straightforwardness may lead us to the conclusion that Agassiz was not unjustifiable when he affirmed, in the name of science, that indistinct may be immortal, and when he expressed in his own name, the ardent hope that it might be. Go to Agassiz's grave in Mount Auburn, and at the side of the Swiss boulder which marks the spot, stand alone and read these words of his, and meanwhile send your thoughts onward into the eternities and immensities, whither, no doubt, he sent his, when he wrote in the face of the world this majestic inquiry. These are the closing sentences of one of the most remarkable passages in perhaps the most remarkable of his works, — his •* Essay on Classification." " Most of the arguments of philosophy in favour of the immortality of man apply equally to the permanency of the immaterial principle in other living beings. May I not add that a future life. in which man should be deprived of that great source of enjoyment, and intellectual and moral improvement, which results from the contemplation IMAGE EVALUATION TEST TARGET (MT-3) %^ 1.0 I.I 1.25 U|^ |||U ■<'' IM IIIII2 2 1.4 20 1.6 Photogi"dphic Sciences Corporation 73 WEST MAIN STREET WEBSTER, N.Y. 1458C ', /16) 8724503 L.? C'l w. CiHM/ICMH Microfiche Series. CIHM/ICMH Collection de microfiches. m Canadian Institute for Historical Microreproductions Institut Canadian de microreproductions historiques 1980 90 DOES DEATH END ALL? of the harmonies of an organic world, would involve a lament- able loss ? and may we not look to a spiritual concert of the combined worlds and all their inhabitants in presence of their Creator, as the highest conception of paradise ?" (Agassiz, Louis, Contributions to the Nat. Hist, of the U. S., vol. i. p. 66 iissay on Ciaabiricalion, close of p«> t i-. chap, i, sect, xvii.) It was seventy years ago, In the plea.' ant month of May, In the beautiful Pays de Vaud, A child in his cradle lay ; And Nature, the old Nurse, took The child upon her knee. " Come, wander with me," she said, '* Into regions yet untrod, And read what is still unread In the manuscript of God." And whenever the way seemed long, Or his heart began to fail, She would sing a more wonderful song. Or tell a more marvellous tale." Longfellow. On the Fiftieth Birthday of Agassiz. What sings she now to this great soul which has passed into that paradise of which his worthiest conception was, that it should be a concert of the combined worlds ? One cannot but recollect in the sublimity of this passage that this man was born in sight of the Alps. Of French descent, of Swiss birth, of German education, of American activity, Agassiz is now of the house not made with hands ; and so large was he ^hat, even when in the flesh, he appeared by forecast to be a citizen, not of America, or of Europe, but of the supreme theocracy, in whose presence he hoped to see a concert of the combined worlds and all their inhabitants. Richter used to say that the interstellar spaces are the homes of souls. Tennyson sings most subtly his trust : "That nothing walks with aimless feet, That not one life shall be destroyed, Or cast as rubbish to the void. When God hath made the pile complete. *' That not a worm is cloven in vain ; That not a moth with vain desire Is shrivelled in a fruitless fire." Is it not worth while for us, standing here at Agassiz's tomb, with Richter on our right, and Tennyson on our left, to pause a moment, and on their wings, so much stronger than ours, to look abroad a little mto this highest conception of paradise ? A concert of combined worlds ! The Seven Stars have their planets ; Orion in this infinite azure is attended by his retinue of worlds ; the lightest feather of the Swan which fiiea through DOES DEATH END ALL? 91 66 the Milky Way represents uncounted galaxies ; in the north, Ursa Major guards realms of life so broad that thought faints in passing across but one of the eye lashes of the eternal con- stellation as it paces about the pole unwearied ; Aquarius, Bootes, Saggi*:tarius, Hercules, each holds in his far-spread palm of sidereal fire innumerable inhabitants. What if Agassiz and Richter and Cuvier and Milton and Shakespeare, and that host which no man can number, are studying at this moment a concert of all the life of Orion and the Seven Stars, Ursa Major and the rest, and of that forgotten speck which we, on this lonely shore of existence, call earth ? The loftiest exhibition of organic life of all kinds from all worlds, and in the presence of their Creator ! Would it not be an immeasurable loss to be without this concert of combined worlds ? Would it not be a diminution of supreme bliss not to have union with God throu^^h these, the most majestic of his works below ourselves ? Shall we, too, not hope that his highest conception of paradise may be the true one ? Richter would say, if he stood here, that he hopes it may be. Tennyson says, as he stands here, that he wishes it may be. Must not we, remembering the long line of acute souls who have believed in the possibility that instinct is immortal, say that, il it be so, it is best that it should be so ? Whether it is or not, I care not to assert ; what I do affirm is, that the argument for immortality, by striking against the possibility that instinct may be immortal, is not wretched, but glorified. But, my friends, I must ask you now for a moment to step off the adamant of physiological fact and to notice, not speculation, but what I will not call more than theory. Nevertheless it is g. view of physiological fact which is commanding wider and wider assent from the acutest minds in science. Germany asks whether behind the weaving of those bioplasts, there is not a spiritual, ethereal, invisible body. Ulrici, a great Professor at Halle, has written a book of which one portion defends the theory that there is in man an ethereal enswathment of the soul, and that this, although invisible, it is behind all this weaving. Just as the summer lightning blazes through the cloud, sotht soul blazes through the spiritual body which is finer than nervouS tissue, finer than electricity. When the egg begins to quicken the life is the chief thing in it, and that life belongs to a certain somewhat ; an ethereal form of matter that connects it with all this dead world around. The soul inhereting in that spiritual body, takes to itself clothing and builds the visible matter upon the invisible. According to the law of invisible matter, according to its power to take large or small space as its exigencies require, it grows for a season larger and larger until the soul in it haJ taken clothing to itself out of this visible world. We appear here as ghosts appear in the night. Carlyle savs we are all ghosts; we appear, we disappear; we come forth from the 92 DOES DEATH END ALL? I invisible, we go into the invisible. These are facts : but Germany begins to speculate as to the causes of our being woven as we are, and says that behind all the weaving of our tissues there must be this ethereal body. Why does she say that ? Germany commonly has a reason for her positions. There is Niagara. You see a rainbow drawn across the surface of the cataract. The rainbow does not move. The water moves. What is the cause of the rainbow ? The water, you say. Oh, no, Germany replies, the rainbow never moves. If the water were the chief cause of the rainbow, the rainbow would move, for you must have in the fountain what you have in the source. The occasion of the rainbow is in the water, the cause is in the sun. That is not in flux. Your rainbow is not in motion either. Now the plan of man's organism does not change from the first quickening egg until the man drops into the grave. It is one thing, just as that rainbow is one thing. Our sense of identity persists. Nevertheless all the particles in the body are changing as the drops in Niagara are. The cause of our sense of personal identity must be something that is not in perpetual change. Your fountain can not rise higher than your source. The plan of your mechanism does not change and so the source of that plan does change. We know that every coarser physical particle does change. There is nothing in my hand that was there seven years ago, I suppose, except the plan of the material. The particles have all been changed but the plan is just the same. That plan which does not change, implies the existence in man of a substance which does not change, and although that substance is invisible, science thinks it is there because it sees effects which can be explained only by that supposition. Will you please look at the scars on your fingers, I have some on my fingers, made when I was too young to be trusted with edged tools. They are all there yet. Scars will not wash out or grow out although the particles of body change. If I had time, here would be the place to* show the power of bad habits. You scar yourself on the brain and the scars will not wash out nor grow out there any more than they will on your finger. You scar yourselves with good habits and those scars will last just as well as the bad ones. This is the terrific force of habit, that it scars us either with good nerve tracks or bad ones, and that neither good nor bad scars wash out nor grow out. We know that the rainbow is not in flux, and so we know there is something behind it which causes it to persist in one form, as the plan of your eagle, your lion, your man, your oak, is steadily adhered to from first to last, we say that plan belongs to something that is not in flux, that came in when the plan threw its first shuttle and goes out unimpaired even after the shuttle ceases to move. That invisible somewhat some scholars in Germany call a spiritual body. DOES DEATH END ALL, 93 jrcrmany en as we jes there jermany TOSS the ve. The 16 water, r moves, rainbow ^ou have rater, the ow is not does not rops into ne thing, irticles in i'he cause lat is not than your ye and so lat every ing in my t the plan id but the B, implies ange, and t is there f by that ave some e trusted not wash ige. If I er of bad s will not I on your ose scars rific force cs or bad grow out. we know st in one your oak, ti belongs the plan after the ; scholars What if I should dissect the human body here, I might have a man made up of a skeleton. Then I could have a human form made up of muscle. If I should take out the arteries, I should have another human form, and just so with the veins and so with the nerves, were they all taken out and held up here in their natural condition they would have a human form, would they not ? Well, which form is the man ? Which the most important ? But behind the nerves are those bioplasts. If I could take those bioplasts, that wove the nerves, out itad hold them up here by the side of the nerves, all in their natural position, they would have a human form, wouldn't they ? and which is the man ? Your muscle is more important than your bone, your arteries than your muscle, your nerves than your arteries, and your bioplasts that wove your nerves are more important than your nerves. But you do not reach the bottom there, for if you unravel a man completely there is something behind those bioplasts. There are a good many things we cannot see that we know exist. I know there is in my body a nervous influence that plays up and down my nerves like electricity on wires. I never saw it. I have felt it. Suppose that I could take that out. Suppose that right there is my man made up of ner^'^es ; right here my man made up of red bioplasts, and I have right here what I call the nervous influence separated entirely from flesh. You would not see it, would you ? But wouldn't this be a man a good deal more than that, or that, or that ? Well, what if death thus dis- solves out the innermost fi'om the outermost ? We absolutely know that that nervous influence is there. We know, also, that there is something behind the action of these bioplasts. If I could take out this which is a still finer thing than what we call nervous influence, and could have it held up here, I do not know but that it would be ethereal enough to go into heaven, for the Bible itself speaks of a spiritual body. You know it is there, this nervous influence. You know it is there, this power behind the bioplasts. When the Bible speaks of a spiritual body, it does not imply that tht soul is material. It does not teach materialism at all. It simply implies that the soul has a glorified enswathment which will accompany it in the next world ? I believe that it is a distinct Biblical doctrine, that there is a spiritual body as there is a natural body, and that the former has extraordinary powers. It is a body which apparent- ly makes nothing of passing through what we call ordinary mat- ter. Our Lord had that body after his resurrection. He ap- peared suddenly in the midst of his disciples, although the door was shut. He had on him the scars that were not washed out, and that in Heaven had not grown out. I tread here upon the edge of immortal mysteries, but the great proposition I wish to put before you is that science hi the name of the microscope and the scalpel begins to whisper what revelation ages ago ut- tered in thunders that there is a spiritual body with glorious ca- pacities. 94 DOES DEATH END ALL? When DeWette lay dying, after a long career in which he had boen the leader of German rationalism, he said: "The fact of the resurrection, although a darkness which can not be dissipated rests on the way and manner, cannot be called into doubt any more than the assassination of Caesar." In 1849 DeWette printed that sentence in his last and most illustrious work. Neander, the church historian, shed tears over the passage when he read it. DeWette's concession was an admission of the very latest scholarship concerning the historical evidence of the fact of the resurrection and the incapacity ol science as it now exists to explain the laws involved in that event. But science to-day, thirty years later, begins to whisper that there may be a spiritual body. She knows there is an osseus body, a muscular body, an arterial body, a \ enous body, a nervous body, a bioplastic body. She knows there is a body made up of nervous influences. She infers that there is an individuality finer than that nervous influence, and the source of it, and which might be dissolved out of this complex web which we call man. That invisible, ethereal individuality, possibly inseparable from the soul, and never in flux, its particles not changed, she finds the source of this plan of our piiysical individuality which never changes. We clothe ourselves. "We are spirits clad in veils," the poet says, and so says science too. When you bend your ear upon the ground and listen to the very latest speculation in Germany and England, you will hear a whisper that the resurrection may not be utterly ine...plicabie. Perhaps it was a revelation of the glorious capacities of that innermost enswathment which we discover with the microscope and the scalpel. Perhaps it was but an exhibition of the power of that part of us over which death has no power. Perhaps we understand now, under the eaze of thp scientific method, how the innermost may be dissolved out of its coarser coverings, as the skeleton of your Autumn leaf may be dissolved out of the green portion. There is a feminine art by which we take a leaf, dissolve away the verdant part and have a beautiful skeleton left. It is the ghost of the forest. So science dissolves out form after form from this complex web we call ourselves, until at last it dissolves out the innermost thing we can touch by the scalpel of cause and effect. Standing on DeWette's admission that the fact of the resurrection can no more be brought into doubt than can the assassination of Caesar, you may build up from that foundation an adamantine stairway of belief in immortality. It was my fortune once to put the propositions I am about to recite before the man I consider the greatest theologian in America, and once I put the same propositions before Tholuck, of Halle: First — The historical evidence proves the resurrection. Second — The resurrection proves, not the Deity, but the Divine authority of our Lord. Third — His Divine authority proves the doctrines he attested. h he had le fact of issipated oubt any DeWette us work, ige when the very the fact jw exists e to-day, spiritual iar body, Dioplastic ifluences. t nervous olved out !, ethereal never in this plan ,Ve clothe ^s, and so le ground nany and 1 may not an of the which we ips it was ver which under the : may be >n of your 1. There away the the ghost from this es out the md effect, of the in can the oundation was my :ite before and once on. , but the attested. Dv^ZS DEATH END ALL? 95 Fourth — Among these were His Deity, the New Birth, Immortality, the necessity of the Atonement, the eternal Judgment. It is more and more admitted that the character of our Lord was a miracle absolutel undeniable. There is a record of it. Once the New Testament literature was not in the world. Now it is here. It came into existence, Its appearance required an adequate cause. The starting forth upon the historic canvas of such a picture as this under the unskilled pencils of such limners as the fishermen cf Galilee is suulcient proof of the reality of that character historically ;, and its reality is sufficient proof of its divinity. But that character, an absolutely undeni- able miracle, was connected with other wonders, and among them with power over what we call matter. There was nothing in the laws of matter which that character could not reverse. What if we were lifted to His altitude, perhaps we should find it easier to hold back the wheels of merely physical laws. We can do something in our present low estate towards counteract- ing laws beneath us. We have a little power over gravitation. We can stop the action of the organic forces. We know that the poet when elevated into rapt inspiration has powers he does not possess at any other time. What if he were lifted to the altitude of our Lord, who knows that the bars of merely physical law would check our flight towards God ? Who knows but that under, our magnetization great gifts might not come to man spiritually ? Who knows but that if there could be conferred on men at large, what was once conferred on a single member of the race, that in that case we, too, could burst the bands of death, because God is with us ? There is that capacity in man or there would not have been that capacity in him who was the Son of Man. The scientific method thus assures us that our spiritual body, when dissolved out from its fleshy tabernacle, may be left free before Almighty God for all the development with which he can inspire us. Is Spiritualism a proof that death does not end all ? Even if evil spirits speak, they prove there is something beyond the veil. Goethe, riding home to Wiemar on a summer evening, looked at the setting sun and said : " Setting, the sun is always the same sun ; dying, we are the same individualities." The great instincts of conscience force us to pace up and down behind the veil. There is no instinct without its corre- late. Your migrating swan from her tendency to fiy to the south has a right to infer that there is a south, and so I, from my constitutional or instinctive expectation or personal exist- ence after death, have a right to believe that God has not mock- ed me, but that he has made a south to match that migrating instinct. Goethe and Milton, it may be, look down now on the discov- . 96 DOES DEATH END ALLi '^ eries of the microscope, and on the human scientific conscious- ness struggling in the night. The swans fly through the dusk and morn, and in dusk and morn beheve God, that is, that the migrating instinct means a south. Goethe and Milton, looking down on our low estate, see us flying through the dusk and morn, and probably wish us nothing better than the swan seems to possess already, perfect trust in organic, ineradicable instinct. We are made right. We cannot avoid pacing up and down, to anci iro anu lO anu xio. behind the veil, ihere is sometnmg there or e should not be made so to pace up and down. These ethereal enswathments of the soul, dissolved out from their gros- ser integuments, may be in the ether what our Lord's body was there ; and as he ascended, so we may, if we are his own. Therefore let us part, my friends, by singing, in the name of science, and with miscrosqppe and scalpel clasped over each other, what Milton and Goethe, if they passed hence safely, no doubt are singing now in Milton's own words : Then joy shall overtake us as a flood, When everything that is supremely good And perfectly divine, With Faith and Hope and Love shall ever shine, About the Supreme Throne Of Him to whose happy-making face When once our heavenly-guided souls dhall climb, Then all this earthly grossness quit, Attired in stars we shall forever sit, Triumphing over Death, and Chance, and Thee, O Time, 1 1 DECLINE OF RATIONALISM IN THE GERMAN UNIVERSITIES. / no SIXTH LECTURE BY JOSEPH COOK, OF BOSTON. I. — GOD IN. GERMAN HISTORY. It is an exceedingly suggestive sign of the times that, in pro- portion to population, Great Britain has but one student in a course of higher university education where Germany has five. In this age it is from Germany that decisions in momentous in- tellectual questions proceed. Every day the world grows more international. There are now no foreign lands. It has been said that in England one is never quite outside of London, be- cause the city inflames the whole island. So, in science, one is never quite outside of the German universities, for they inflame the whole field of culture. Suppose that there were to be lifted from the waste of some ocean a new continent, peopled by a class of men equal to the Greeks in intellectual power, and their superiors in candor and learning. Let moral culture abound in the family life of the na- tion, but let church life be weak ; let political causes choke the church ; let wars storm over the territory ; let public discussion be free only in philosophy, theology, and art ; let system after system of metaphysical speculation arise, reign briefly, and be superseded ; let the universities of the nation lead the world in modern science ; let Christianity, probed to the innermost by restless spirits, with no outlet in politics for their activity, take its chances among this people ; let it go through many a strug- gle ; let it ask no assistance, and fight ever at a disadvantage ; let it be partially triumphed over in appearance ; let it rally ; let it prevail; let it come forth crowned: we should say, if God were to lift such a continent, with such a history, from the Atlantic, that he had spoken to rpen. But such a people, with such a history, he has lifted, in the last century, in Germany, from the deeps of time. Strauss is in his grave; Baur's doubts are solved in the unseen; Schleiermacher and Neander are asleep on the hill slope south of Berlin : Fichte and Hegel lie at rest beneath the lindens in a cemetery in the same city ; Kant has a peaceful tombinKonigsberg; Richter at Baireuth, among his native Fichtelgebirge ; DeWette at Basle, at the edge of the Alps ; Goethe, Schiller, and Herder, no disquiet wakes at Weimar; Tholuck has closed; and Julius Muller, laden with more than threescore years and ten, draws near the end of his victorious journey ; Austria has been humbled, Sedan fought, German unity accomplished. 7 98 DECLINE OF RATIONALISM IN H. — THE MISCHIEF OF FRAGMENTARINESS. What have been the causes of the power ol rationahsm in Germany in the last hundred years ? What are the proofs of the dechne of rationaUsm in the Ger- man universities ? Who are the dead, the wounded, and the living, after the bat- tle of a century ? Chief among the difficulties with which faith in Germany has contended has been one sidedness in the presentations of Chris- tianity. Science without earnestness, or earnestness without science — these were the two halves of German theological thought a century ago. Most mischievous, almost fatal, was the fragmentariness of a cold, speculative orthodoxism, on the one side, and of a warm, unspeculative pietism on the other. If Spener and Wolf could have been rolled into one man ; if Francke and Selmer could have lived in one head, perhaps English deism and Voltaire and his skeptical crew at Frederick's court had never stung, or, if they had stung, had never fly- blown, the fair, white, honest breast of Germany to fevers and eruptions. Average German natures are not as well balanced as the English, although broader and more subtle intellectually, and deeper in nearly every phase of the inner life, except only those royal English traits, self-esteem and the love of power. There are three types of German heads ; that of Goethe, or the regular ; that of Schiller, or the irregular; that of Bismarck, or the thick, high, and round. A head of the Schiller type in theology knows little of the pietistic side ; a head of the Goethe type, little of the philosophic ; only a head of the Bismarck type combines the two. The regular type is often, like Goethe, powerful in the intuitive and imaginative, and not so in the dis- tinctively philosophical faculties. The irregular type may have great imaginative and philosophical, but lacks intuitive power. A German philosopher with the irregular head of a Schiller is sure to be one-side i, and yet may be as endlessly acute and im- aginatively brillian as he is unbalanced. Heads of the Bismarck type naturally devote themselves to statesmanship or to positive science ; and it will i)e found that a line of such brains, like Von Moltke in war, Trendelenburg, Nitzsch, Dorner, Thoiuck, and Julius Muller in theology, Kiepert in geography, Lepsius in archaeology, and Curtis in history, have exhibited the balanced thought of the nation. No one has read German history, if he has not illustrated the narrative by the portraits of the leaders of thought. Eccentric systems, in Germany as elsewhere, have come from small or irregular brains, as in the cases of Strauss, Schenkell, and Schopenhauer. 1! n t THE GERMAN UNIVERSITIES. 9^ sm in ! Ger- ebat- ly lias Chris- ithout ogical lI, was on the ler. If an ; if erhaps crick's ■er fly- rs and as the ly, and y those 'the, or imarck, type in Goethe smarck 3oethe, he dis- ay have power, liller is and im- smarck positive ke Von ck, and 3sius in alanced [\ ted the ccentric mall or ;11, and III. DISUSE OF THE DISTINCTION BETWEEN CONVERTED AND UNCONVERTED. Fruitful, exceedingly, among the causes of the power of ra- tionalism in Germany has been the absence, not from its religi-^ ous doctrines but from its church forms, of that distinction be- tween the converted and the unconverted so familiar in Scot- land, England, and the United States. " I regret nothing so much," said Professor Tholuck to me once, with the emphasis of tears in his deep spiritual eyes, " as that the line of demarcation between the church and the world, which Jonathan Edwards and Whitefield drew ao deeply on the mind of New England, is almost unknown, not to the theo- logical doctrines, but to the ecclesiastical forms of Germany. With us confirmation is compulsory. Children of unbelieving, as well as of believing, families must at an early age be baptiz- ed, and profess faith in Fath .^ , Son and Holy Ghost. Without a certificate of confirmation, in some church, employment can- not be legally obtained. After confirmation, the religious stan- dard is assumed to be Christian ; after that, we are all church members. Thus it happens that in our state churches the con- verted and the unconverted are mixed pell-mell together." Is Bismarck a Christian ? I asked once of an accomplished German teacher. "Why not ? Is he a Tew ? Is he a Moham- medan ?" was the reply. To ask in Germany if a man is a Christian, in the English, Scotch, or American sense of that question, you must use expletives. Is the man a real, a shin- ing, an exemplary Christian ? for the unexplained word which in our colloquial use means that a man is converted, in Ger- many means only that he has been confirmed. Pastoral care of the mass of the population is, of course, very inefficient under this vastly maladroit organization of the Ger- man state church ; public and private devotional meetings lan- guish ; church discipline is often no more than a name. ♦'We have no Sabbath-schools in Heidelberg," said a distin- guished and Christian professor of the Heidelberg University to me once; "and, with exceptions not worth mentioning, there are none in Germany. We do not need them ; for the instruc- tion you give in America in Sabbath-schools, we give in secular schools. In our common week-day school-instruction an hour is specially set apart for teaching the children the biblical his- tories and the catechism. " But what you explain as a solemn public profession of faith on entrance into membership with a church, does not exist in Germany. The distinction which you say prevails in New England, and America generally, betv/een persons who have made such a profession of faith and of a renewed character, and those who have not, — the former being called church-members, and distinctively Christians, while the latter are not, — is a dis- lOO DECLINE OF RATIONALISM IN II "tinction not in use with us. We are all confirmed in youth, and after confirmation are all members of the church, and all known as Christians. " What you describe as a gathering among church-members for devotional purposes, or a prayer-meeting, does not exist with us, except among the very severely orthodox. Here in Heidelberg, among the higher orthodox, there are small meet- ings called conventicles, held from house to house, in private -rooms, but not in the church. Our theological students do not have prayer-meetings. " What you explain as pastoral visitation is not practised with us, unless in a few country churches. You will find something in books as to our theory of pastoral care ; but it is by no means the general custom of our preachers to visit their people for the purpose of conversation on personal religion. Were a pas- tor to open a conversation on the personal religion of a man, in the man's house, the reply would probably be : 'There is the door ; you can go out, or I must.' " At Halle, at Berlin, at Leipsiz, at Dresden, at Gottingen, and at Heidelberg, I looked in vain for Sabbath schools and prayer- meetings. Halle has led the religious life of Germany for a hundred and fifty years ; and yet, said Professor Tholuck to me : " There are no devotional meetings in our churches worth attending. It may be said that, according to the Scottish and New England idea, the state churches of Germany have no prayer-meetings. Once a week, in the churches of Halle, there is a biblical exercise. The pastor always leads, and the only remarks that are made, he makes. Sometimes, in this exercise, a Christian member of the audience offers a prayer, but this is all. Our theological students may know more Hebrew, Greek, and phil- osophy than yours ; but most unfortunately, as they have had no training to such gatherings in the state churches, they do not come together in devotional meetings as yours do. Bene orasse, est bene studuisse, you understand better than we. I have been subjected to no distiess in my lecture-room greater than that caused by the fact that our churches leave unsupplied, in the minds of the students, that devotional seriousness and elevation which are the only fit preparation for scientific study of religious truth. I beseech you not to judge of the condition of religion in Germany by the condition of our state churches." Most assuredly must an American maintain, however, that the health of religion in a nation depends on a mens sana in corpore ^ano ; the universities are the mind, but the church training of the people is the body ; And when the latter, as in Germany, is seamed through and through with weakness and disease, how can the former remain sound ? The eye for religion is not cul- tivated by the training which in Germany usually precedes theological study. The moral atmosphere of the German m THE GERMAN UNIVERSITIES. lor universities ex^hales from broad marshes of confessedly stagnant state church life ; and it is in the condition of the vapors which these neglected, steaming, batrachian flats cast up, that the wonders some German university telescope have seen in the sky find an important explanation. Face to face with the nearly- omnipresent lack of what New England and Scotland call spiritual cultivation, I, for one, did not, when in Germany, and meditating long on the banks of the Rhine, the Saale, the Neckar, the Ilm, the Spree, the Elbe, and the Danube, feel impressed with a tenth part of the intellectual respect for German scepticism which it is not uncommon to find in the minds of untravelled men in America. A noble but religiously neglected people, naturally honest and earnest, the German masses, as in the days of Tacitus, made a kind of religion of family life. Hegel was proud of the fact that Gemuthlichkeit, the name for what he considered the most char- acteristic trait of the Germans, is a word without any equiv- alent in French or English, kindness of nature, tender- ness, soulfulness are, perhaps the best Enghsh expressions for it; and this quality, conjoined with the renowned German sincerity, gives the nation a capacity for religious culture excelled by that of no other on the globe, and fit to rhake it the mission of Ger- many, as Hegel thought it was, to bear through the ages the Christian principle. But the capacity is as yet unoccupied. Studying often and searchingly the faces of the common peo- ple in the market places of Europe, I used to think that to pro-* duce a salutary effect by speaking to them on religion, I should need a day with the Germans, and succeed on the merits of the case ; an age with the English of the lower orders, and succeed only when my cause had become respectable among the upper classes ; a millennium with the French, and succeed then only to expect a revolution of opinion every three days. IV. CONTAGION FROM FRANCE. Moral, intellectual, and social contagion from France must be mentioned with painful emphasis among the causes of the power of rationalism in Germany. Voltaire and Frederick the Great at Sans Souci : you know the story made so brilliant by Carlyle. From the time of Louis XIV. to that of Napoleon, the numberless petty courts of Ger- many took their ideas of morality and taste from Paris and Versailles, almost as slavishly as Frederick the Great took his literary fashions from Voltaire. Think, too, of the humiliations of Germany under Napoleon, when his personal rule extended from the Tiber to the Elbe, and when Leipzig and Berlin had passed into kingdoms dependent on France. Until Lessing's day, there was no German literature. French taste ruled Ger- man literature. Even Goethe thought his country unwise in 102 DECLINE OF RATIONALISM IN resisting Napoleon : and the v/ar of liberation, by the colossal blows of Leipzig and Waterloo, only fractured a yoke which it is to be hoped that Sedan has broken completely in twain. In Halle, in 1872, I found in a large circulating library, in the best book-store of the city, patronized by respectable people, and within a bow-shot of the university, a complete set'of eigh- teen or twenty volumes of the works of an infamous French writer, whose production, if exposed for sale in London, Edin- burgh, or Boston, would be seized by the police, or would ruin the reputation of vendor and purchaser, — a great exception, no doubt, in Halle — but the books were worn black by use. I had not been in Paris a week before I was permanently cured of all intellectual respect for French skepticism. Tacitus says the ancient Germans whipped the adulteress through *he streets and buried the adulterer alive in the mud. But Julius Caes?r speaks of polygamous practices among the Gauls, and describes them as showy, cruel, and volatile. Thomas Carlyle call. Paris the city of all the devils. " Poor Paris," I heard him say once in his study at Chelsea, "they have done nothing there but lie for eight hundred years." Bismarck, speaking with facetious seriousness, says, that if you take from the average native Parisian — not the Frenchman, who is a different charac- ter — his tailor, the hair-dresser, and the cook, what is left is Red Indian. These men ought to know Prance; but, if their representations fit this century less well than the last, in the city which is the play-ground and sewer of Europe, it is yet certain that average Paris is politically and morally the city of little boys. For ethical and ethnological reasons, it is of no consequence what is thought of theology by Paris. There are several chambers lacking in the typical Parisian brain. In Germany can be found everything good but elegance ; in France nothing good but elegance. Eternity is not visible from Paris. V. SUFFERING OF GERMANY IN EUROPEAN WARS. Demoralization of the people by protracted and almost incessant European wars, deserves a high rank among the causes of the power of rationalism in Germany, even in the last century. "Scratch a Russian," said Napoleon, "and you will find beneath the surface a Tartar." Scratch peasant-life in Central Europe once, and you find the wars of the first Napoleon; twice, and you find the Thirty Years' War; thrice, and you find the Middle Ages. After the sack of Magdeburg, Tilly cast six thousand bodies of the citizens into the Elbe, and the river was choked by the mass. Soldiers in the Thirty Years' War were largely foreigners and mercenaries and paid, from necessity and on principle, in beauty and booty. Cossacks, Walloons, Croats, Italians, Irish- men, and Turks fougiit with Scots, Dutchmen, Danes, Swedes, , THE GERMAN UNIVERSITIES. 103 Laplanders and Finns. Germany for a generation was a howling hunting ground for the rabble for all nations. One hundred years, to a day, after the Augsburg Confession was promulgated, that is, on June 24, 1630, John Winthrop was sailing into Boston Harbor and Gustavus Aoolphus was landing fifteen thousand men in Pomerania. For a hundred years after that date, the plundering bands cf Wallenstein did not disappear. From fear of starvation, a Swedish general, in the second half of the war, refused to lead an army through the once fat plains of the Oder and the Elbe, from the Baltic to the Saxcn Switzerland. When Louis XIV. stole Strasburg, in 1681, the dead German empire was too feeble to resent the robbery. The Turks, at the instigation of the French king, swarmed far up the Danube, and laid down forty-eight thousand lives in a nearly successful siege of Vienna. The Thirty Years' War gave to death half the population of Germany. It left her divided into more than three hundred petty states, each with the right to declare war and make peace; and into fourteen hundred yet pettier political fragments, each with the same right, and each depending upon a peeled peasantry for a means of feeding the ostentation and leprosies of courts filled with nobles often unable to read or write, and combining with soundly orthodox belief incredible coarseness, dulness, and savagery. Shivering the once orderly and majestic German constellation into asteroids, it left in existence no central sun. It allowed merely asteroid princes to acquire such power that for two centuries national unity was impracticable. It subjected all Germany to the inroads of French armies. It brought into fashion French manners. Switzerland and the Netherlands, at one time a part of the empire, was given up to the Peace of Westphalia. In Switzerland Germany lost its best fortress, and in the Netherlands its best port ; in the former, its surest defence against attack by the Romance nations, in the latter, its surest means of influence on the sea and in remote regions of the world. Great before, for two centuries after the close of the Thirty Years' War, Germany founded no colony on any shore and showed no flag on any ocean. When the French, in 1689, blew up the towers of Heidelberg ; swung a fire-brand up and down both shores of the Rhine ; filled the Palatinate with the hungry, the naked, and the froz tn ; scattered to the winds, at Spires, the splintered coffins and violated dust of th«. German emperors ; and at Treves, Julich, and Cologne compelled the peasants to plow down their standing corn, Louis XlVth's plan was to protect himself from Germany by making the Palatinate, and the middle region of the Rhine, a desert. With Frederick the Great came war upon war; with Napoleon, war on war. Caesar's robe was not so full of dagger tents as is German soil of battle-fields. In German-speaking 104 DECLINE OF RATIONALISM IN lands lie Magdeburg, Lutzen, Nordlingen, Prague, Rossbach, Hohenlinden, Austerlitz, Eylau, Aspern, Elringen, Wagram, Jena, Leipzig, Waterloo, Langensalza, Sadowa, and Konig- gratz : •* Poor dumb mouths Mark how the blood of Caesar followed them." VI. — POLICE CHRISTIANITY AS THE ALLY OF ABSOLUTISM. Support given by state churches to absolutism in politics, and the consequent alienation of the masses of the population, and of the more progressive of the educated class, ought to be named early in any enunieration of the causes of rationalism in Germany. Too often in Europe the cause of infidelity is that the Bible has been forced down the throats of the people with a bayonet, or food taken from starving lips by aristocracies whose throttl- ing and thievish action a state church has blessed. " I daily thank God," said Chevalier Bunsen, on his dying bed, " that I have lived to see It^ly free. Now twenty-six millions will be able to believe that God governs the world." Red republican- ism as yet makes white republicanism impossible in Europe. Still in the trance of perpetuated horror of the French Revolu- tion, church and state in Germany in 1848 united in resisting the demands of the people for political reforms. Until very lately, any too marked agitation for German unity itself has been choked with a strong hand, and the churches applauded the act. Christlieb says, " tha for two centuries the law of German history has been that infidelity grows strong under oppressive, and weak under just, civil regulations." Evil exceedingly is that day in a nation when religious and political interests flow in opposite directions ; these opposing currents make the whirl- pool that impales faith on the tusks of the sea. The German population of the ruder sort look on the preacher as merely a governmental agent, and scoff at his teaching as " Police Chris- tianity." It must never be forgotten that the Romish is in Germany one of the state churches, and by compact organiza- tion and religious loyalty to the subtle creed that the church governs the world, the pope the church, and the Jesuits the pope, has almost power enough to disentegrate the new empire. As Bismarck and Gladstone are at this moment proclaiming, patriotism and Jesuit ultiamontanism, now as of old, mingle no better than water and fire. V!I. — LIMITATIONS AND STIMULATIONS OF THE UNIVERSITIES. Limitation of free discussion, in the universities and elsewhere, to philosophy, theology and topics not connected with the civil life of the nation, has a prominent place among the inciting cau- ses of German rationalism. THE GERMAN UNIVERSITIES. 105 Political discussion is not free inside or outside of the univer- sities in Prussia. Politics absorb an exceedingly small portion of the talent of educated men. Compared with the swirling, de- vouring whirlpool of political discussion in England or America, German civil life is an unruffled sea. Great waves, unknown here, roll there in science, philosophy and theology. Look into the bookstores at the Leipzig fairs, or into the university lecture lists, to get reports of this commotion among the educated class, and not into the newspapers. Under a vigorously paternal government, newspapers have little power, and so attract little talent. Accordingly there are no newspapers in Germany ; at least, none at all comparable for ability or influence with the leading sheets of the English or American press. The univer- sities in Germany absorb that huge amount of intellectual acti- vity which America and England diffuse through an awakened and multitudinously throbing public life. General erfthusiasm in politics does not exist in Prussia, still less in the smaller states of the empire. It is only upon scientific, philosophical, and literary topics that discussion in the universities is fully free. In the absence of great political and social themes, the stream of intellectual activity, which never runs shallow in Germany, shut of from one of its natural channels, turns its whole force upon philosophy, science, and theology. If the result has in many respects been excellent, in many also it has been unfortunate ; for the very current that has made the channel deep, has borne with it a drift-wood of utterly secular, turbulent and intriguing spirits, whose natural outlet would have been politics, and who had no calling, except from necessity, to discuss any other theme. The brilliancy of a German professor's success depends much on the size of his audience ; and he is under no inconsiderable temptation to secure hearers by novelty of doctrine. The professor is chosen for his merit as a specialist ; he at- tracts hearers by his fame as a specialist ; his rank is estimated according to the extent of the additions he has made to know- ledge as a specialist ; his ambition for scholarly renown leads him to seek perpetually to find or invent some new thing as a specialist. Competition for hearers is intensely keen at times under the operation of the peculiar system of the university lectures, sup- ported largely by the fees paid by students who voluntarily sub- scribe to hear certain courses. There is rivalry between the professors of the three different orders — regular, extraordinary, and candidate. The Private Docent of a German university is really a candidate professor, and one of his offices is to keep the regular professors strenu- ously wakeful by competition. This rivalry is intensified by the custom in Germany of assembling in circles of instructors at the universities always a io6 DECLINE OF RATIONALISM IN li majority of the brilliant men of learning of the whole country. In England one may count among those in the last fifty years distinguished for learning, at least a score who had no connec- tion with universities; but in Germany one can find in that period hardly any such. Macaulay, Carlyle, Mill, Grote, like our own Prescott and Irving, never were professors in college. But in Germany, if any learned person has anything to say, he is usually provided by the government with a chance to say it in lectures to the students at some university centre. Undoubtedly the German universities, on all topics within their range, have at present more power than the German nobility, to set the fashions of public thought. No one can enter the civil service or a learned profession in Germany, except through the gate of a state examination, at the close of a university course of study. The secret of the national power of the German universities is in this close connection with the state. "The university," says Bismarck, "exists for imperial purposes." The American and English universities do not rest on state preparatory schools, or end i;ithe state service. The German university rests on the state gymnasiums and ends in the civil service and learned professions. America governs by majorities, England by an aristocracy, Germany by universities. All life in Prussia has an organization so utterly different from that in New England, that although in Edinburgh, Glasgow, Oxford, or London, an American feels himself yet hardly out of America, he will not have that feeling in Germany, not even in the highest places of learning. Modern German society is a spiritual landscape, with stagnant flats and reedy marshes extensive as those of the Baltic provinces themselves ; but also with wide tracts thrown up, like South Germany, into Thuring- ian hills and Saxon Switzerlands, or even into Alpine peaks, on which day strikes first and lingers longest. Examine more closely, however, the novelties which surprise an American are seen to be arranged in a most definite order. Prussian society consists of these seven parts ; the king, the civil service, the army, the universities, the nobility, the tradesmen, the peasants. I assign the universities a rank as a class, and that rank next higher than the nobility ; for such is now, according to the best German critics, their relative position. Acting in the eye ot the nation, and oh this elevated stage of public respect, German professors are stimulated as no other university teachers in the world are, both to excellence and to rivalry. I find in these circumstances the explanation of the fact that the German universities are the best now in existence, and also of the circumstance that among the multitude of their produc- tions they have given to the public some most wild and perish- able systems of thought. THE GERMAN UNIVERSITIES. 107 VIII. RISE AND FALL OF PHILOSOPHICAL SYSTEMS. Complete or partial overthrow of many celebrated schools in philosophy on which theology had unwisely been made to de- pend, is a recent cause of the power of rationalism in Germany, especially of the latter materialistic phases of unbelief, which sneer at metaphysics as an impossible science. Never since Plato and Aristotle has so much metaphysical ability been dis- played as by Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel ; but in Ger- many Fichte and Schelling are obsolete ; Hegel, obsolescent ; Kant, only, has foundations upon v/hich this century dares to build. A Herbert, a Beneke, a Rothe, a Trendelenburg, a Schopen- hauer, have come and gone ; but, for twenty-five years no com- manding system of philosophy has arisen in a land which in philosophical gifts possesses the primacy of the world. A re- turn to Aristotle and Kant has distingui ied the later German metaphysics. To-day, in the hands of a Kuno Fischer, the history of philosophy is made to attract almost as much atten- tion as philosophy itself ; and in those of a Hermann Lotze, metaphysics and physics are joined together as the opposing ribs of a new vessel, which perhaps is destined to endure the shock of wind and wave where fleets, ribbed with metaphysics only, went down, even with Schellings, Fichtes and Hegels at the helm. But neither Lotze nor Fischer pretends to under- take what was the joy of older admirals, the circumnavigation of the yet uncircumnavigated globe of philosophy. These giants among costly wrecks, pace to and fro sadly on the ocean shore. They do not set sail ; and yet they perform for thought an incalculable service, by V.eeping the world in view of the limitless horizons. Meanwhile, out of sight of the sea, in the marshy interior, of a groveling materialism, a Moleschott and a Carl Vogt can assert that there is no ocean ; and even the pigmy Buchner, from lack of height of outlook, through twenty editions of a shallow book, can proclaim the impossibility of both metaohysics and religion. IX. — DOCTRINAL UNREST OF THE AGE, The doctrinal unrest of the age in most, from the acquisition of. new facts in many, departments of thought, is a chief force in all modern history, and has been exceedingly efficient among the causes of German rationalism. Nearly every other branch of human inquiry besides theology has been supplied with a new method and new materials within a century ; and it was neither to be expected nor desired that scholars would not seek a new method for the latter science ; and it was to be expected, though not desired, that when they could not find copious new materials for it, they would invent them. Really new materials, however, have been brought to theology in the last century from the 1 io8 DECLINE OF RATIONALISM IN department of exegetical research. An age of new truths and facts is necessarily a period of unrest as to old ones. Although ultimately it may be found that the old and the new agree, acquisition of fresh materials for belief and the crystalization of those materials around ancient beliefs are processes which do not succeed each other without an intervening space of investigation and uncertainty. It is upon precisely these intervening spaces in history that skepticism has seized as battle- fields, only to lose them one by one, in a long line of defeats reaching now through eighteen centuries. But there never was a more important intervening space of this sort than the last age in Germany, except the first age of Christianity in Asia and Europe. X. STATE AID TO RATIONALISTIC SECTS, State aid to rationalistic churches I class among the causes that have given rationalism power to make a noise in Germany. If a majority in a church at Heidelberg, for instance, vote fr r a rationalistic preacher, they can have him, and yet retain state aid. In Ameri i, under the voluntary system, ratic lalistic organizations soon disband, for they have not earnestness enough to pay their own expenses. But, in Germany, loaves and fishes keep them together under the endlessly vicious practical arrangements of the state churches. XI. CATHOLICISM IN SOUTH GERMANY. Catholicism, covering all South Germany, and stimulated to act the part of mere reactionary Romanism by influences from beyond the Alps and the Rhine, I rank as a powerful cause of German rationalism, for it has prevented half the German people from seeing what a church can accomplish ; made the lives of vast peasant populations a prolonged childhood ; disgusted scholars by its absurdities ot doctrine ; resisted the progress of the nation toward Protestant unity ; and seeks now to destroy an empire whose power is the best guarantee of both peace and progress in Europe. Pope Boniface wrote to Philip the Fair of France : " Boniface to Philip, greeting : Know thou, that thou art subject to us both in spiritual and temporal things." The king replied : " Philip to Boniface, little or no greeting: Know thou, O supreme fool, that in temporal things we are not subject to any one." Such would now be the answer of America or England or Scotland to similar pretensions ; such is to-day the answer of Germany. If necessary, this answer- would be given by Great Britain or the United States through the cannon's mouth ; if necessary, it will so be given by the German Empire. Ultramontanism against nationality is the simple issue between the pope and Bismarck. First a Catholic and then a citizen, or first a citizen and then a THE GERMAN UNIVERSITIES. 109 Catholic, is the ancient question Bedin debates with Rome. In the long struggle between the civil and ecclesiastical power, England stood three hundred years ago where Germany stands to-day. By the celebrated bill passed in 1581 " to restrain her Majesty's subjects in their due obedience," Parliament asserted in principle all that now causes outcry against the sternness of Prussia toward Romanists of the disloyal type. Summarizing with fairness the history of Ultramontanism for five hundred years, Bismarck said once to the Prussian Parliament that " the goal which, like the Frenchman's dream of an unbroken Rhine boundary, floats before the papal party — the programme which, in the time of the mediaeval emperors, was near its realization — is the subjection of the civil power to the ecclesiastical." William I. writes to Pius IX. that Catholic citizens of Germany, at the instigation of Ultramontanism, conspire against the unity and peace oi the Empire. Pius IX. replies : ** Every one who has been baptized belongs to the pope in some way or other." Henry IV., in smock and barefoot, stood three days in the snow before the palace of pope Hildebrand at Canossa, implor- ing absolution. In 1872 Bismarck said of the German Empire : " We are not going to Canossa, spiritually or physically. i' But it was by barely a majority of one that great, rich, Romish Bavaria was brought to the aid of the rest of Germany in the war of self-defence against Napoleon III. France echoed the scorn of Philip the Fair in his famous answer of contempt to the pope ; she is to-day governed by Ultramontanism. Canossa is not the goal of the centuries ; but the feet of one hundred and eighty millions of the human race yet tread its snows. XII. — SUMMARY OF CAUSES. These, then, in my judgment, are the ten chief causes of the power of skepticism in Germany in the last century : 1. Fragmentary presentations of Christianity in the spirit of earnestness without science, or of science without earnestness. 2. Maladroit organization of the German state church ; first, in the use of compulsory confessions of faith at the confirmation legally required of the whole population, whether believing or unbelieving ; and secondly, in the absence of the familiar American and English distinction between the converted and the unconverted, and in a consequently stagnant church life. 3. Moral, intellectual, and social contagion from France. 4.. The demoralization arising in Germany from its having been the principal theatre of European wars. 5. Support by the church of a popularly odious absolutism in politics. 6. German university life in its peculiar limitations and stim- ulations of free discussion. 7. The overthrow of several celebrated German systems of philosophy. no DECLINE OF RATIONALISM IN 8. The doctrinal unrest of the age in most, from the acquisi- tion of new facts in many, departments of thought. 9. State aid to rationalistic organizations. 10. Roman Catholicism in South Germany. I am aware how difficult it is to present in proper perspective a complicated array of causes and effects extending through an hundred years ; and that, for patriotic and political reasons, even candid German writers do not always arrive at a frank admission of the power of some of these causes. But whoever has read between the lines in European history, and listened to the whispered as well as to the spoken and printed thought of Germany, will recognize in this analysis her own unpublished judgment of herself. On such authority, it is well to be able to assure the superficial skeptic that in the most learned land on the globe, rationalism had several other sources of influence besides its own intellectual merits. In view of these enumerated causes, it is not surprising, nor to a scholar's faith is it intel- lectually annoying, that skepticism has had power in Germany, and that it yet retains power among the slightly educated. XIII.~»-EMPTY RATIONALISTIC AND CROWDED EVANGELICAL LECTURE ROOMS. In the German universities the incontrovertible fact is that the rationalistic lecture rooms are now empty, and the evangel- ical crowded ; while fifty or eighty years ago the rationalistic were crowded, and the evangelical empty. Lord Bacon says that the best materials for prophecy are the unforced tendencies of educated young men. Take up any German year-book, look at the statistics of the universities, ascertain which way the drift of educated youth is now setting in the most learned circles in the world, and you have before you no unimportant sign of the times. But, in looking for this, you come upon another sign no less important, namely, that the leading universities of Germany are now, and eighty years ago were not, under predominant evangelical influence. Berlin, beyond doubt the university of first importance, and hallowed by the great names of Schleiermacher, Neander, and Trendelenburg, is theologically led by Dorner, Semisch, Stein- meyer, and Twesten — staunch defenders of evangelical faith. Leipzig, with Kahnis and Luthardt and Delitzsch — and lately with Tischendorf — among her professors, contests with Berlin for the first place, and in the opinion of many deserves that rank, and is the renowned traditional seat of an orthodoxy which at some points New England and Scotland — agreeing in the main with the present attitude of Berlin — might consider excessive. Halle, whose theology permeates Germany, both from the THE GERMAN UNIVERSITIES. Ill tely erlin that ioxy gin ider the university and from Francke's famous Waisenhaus, has in it Tholuck, and Kostlin, and Kahler, and Guericke, and Jacobi, and Schlottmann, and JuUus Mailer, known throughout the world as antagonists, and as successful antagonists, of the subtlest forms of skepticism. It is not uncommon to hear Julius Muller spoken of as the ablest theologian of Germany. Tubingen itself, where Strauss put forth one of his earlier works, and Baur founded a theological party, has had in it for years no Tubingen school, but, through the professorships of Beck, Palmer and Landerer, is permeated by vigorous evangelical influences. Heidelberg, under the theological leadership of Schenkel, Hitzig, Gass, and Holtzmann, is to-day the only prominent university of Germany given to views that can be called rationalistic. Now, which of these institutions is most patronized by German theological students? Halle and Berlin may be compared, in a general way, as to their theology, with Andoverand New Haven ; Leipzig, with Princeton; and Heidelberg, with the Unitarian portion of Cambridge. I found Dorner's, Muller's, and Tholuck's lecture rooms crowded, and Schenkfl's empty. In 1872-3 there were but twenty- four German theological students at Heidelberg; and I have heard Schenkel often, and never saw more than nine, eight, or seven students in his lecture-room. Against twenty-four German theological students at Heidelberg, there are one hundred and thirty-two at Leipzig, two hundred and fifty-seven at Halle, two hundred and thirty-nine at Berlin. But, counting both the native and the foreign theological students in these institutions, the whole number at rationalistic Heidelberg is thirty four ; at evangelical Halle, two hundred and eighty-two; at evangelical Berlin, two hundred and eighty; at hyperevangelical Leipzig, four hundred and twelve. It must be remembered that German students often change universities, as occasionally American students change theologi- cal schools, passing one period in one, and another in another, according to the attractions of different professors. It is immaterial to the German student where he hears lectures, provided that he is prepared to pass with credit the severe final examinations. When a professor is called from one university to another, a large number of his hearers often follow him. Thus it is a fair test of the direction of the drift of educated youth in Germany, to point to the fact that they give their patronage to evangelical, rather than to rationalistic, professors, and this in the overwhelming proportion of ten to one. XIV. TESTIMONY OF THOLUCK, DORNER, CHRISTLIEB, SCHWARZ, AND KHANIS. "By far, by far," was Professor Tholuck's constant answer, " 112 DECLINE OF RATIONALISM IN when asked by foreign students if orthodoxy is not stronger in Prussia than fifty or eighty years ago. In 1826, at Halle, all the students except five, who were the only ones that believed in the Deity of our Lord, and all the professorsof the university united in a petition to the government against Tholuck's appointment to a professorship there, and the opposition rested solely on the ground of his evangelical belief. The students at Tubingen, not lar from the same date, ceremoniously burned the Bible. "When I came to Halle," said Professor Tholuck to me once, as he walked up and down that famous, long, vine-clad arbor in his garden where his personal interviews with German and foreign students have exerted an influence felt in two hemispheres, " I could go twenty miles across the country and not once find what, to use an English word, is called an experimental Christian. I was very unpopular. I was subject to annoyance, even in my lecture- room, on account of my evangelical belief." " His adversaries are bold and cunning. A baptism of fire awaits him at Halle," wrote Frederick Perthes of the young professor, in 1826. Contrast these murky threats of Tholuck's morning with the clear sky of his westering sun. In December, 1870, he had completed so much of a half century of work at the University of Halle that three days were given by iiis friends to the cele- bration of the event. There were social gatherings and suppers and speeches at the hotels. All the halls and staircases of Tholuck's residence were crowded with guests. The Emperor William sent to him the star of the red eagle. Court preacher Hoffmann brought to him the salutations of the ecclesiastical council as to a veritable church father of the nineteenth cen- tury. The various universities of Germany were represented by their ablest professors. Pastors of diffe.'ent cities sent dele- gations. A letter to Tholuck was received signed by theolo- gians at that hour in the army before Paris. An immense torch- light procession of students filled a night with Luther's Hymn " Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott." " No one can deny," Professor Tholuck would say to me re- peatedly, '* that since the death of Frederick the Great, or the French Revolution, or the opening of the century, or even since fifty or forty years ago, there has been a great reaction in Ger- many against infidelity and rationalism." " You ciie right in pointing to the impotence of the edict is- sued in favour of orthodoxy by Frederick William II. on the death of Frederick the Great, as proof that it has not been the favourable attitude of the state towards orthodoxy that has caused the reaction. Frederick the Great had no influence to promote s'^'ipticism in the lower and middle, but he did mischief among the upper classes. "Frederick William III. and Frederick William IV. were THE GERMAN UNIVERSITIES. "J re- the ince rer- |t is- the the has le to Ihief rere favorable to orthodoxy ; and William I., our emperor, i» thoroughly so. Much depends on the attitude of the court at Berlin in respect to the churches. In Weimar, however, a preacher without belief in the Deity of Christ, and with denial of miracles, may be connected with the state church. In respect to orthodoxy, Weimar is x>i\e or the most lax of all the provinces of Germany. It would probably not be true to say that in the small territory of Weimar, infidelity is less powerful than fifty years ago, although that is most certainly the case in Prussia, •• Hagenbach has written a History of the Rise, Progress, and Decline of German Rationalism, and his book I put first into the hands of foreign students coming to Germany and asking information from me. I am myself writing a work on the same svbject. ♦* As to men of science and professors in the philosophical faculties with us, they are often uninformed concerning theology; but materialism makes much less noise in Germany than in England. If a man is a materialist, we Germans think he is not educated." On account of their having little freedom to discuss political,, German professors are intensely jealous of their liberty to dis- cuss literary, scientific, philosophical, and theological topics. Whoever has breathed the quickening oxygen of the atmosphere of a German university will understand very well that it is by no means the changed attitude of the state toward orthodoxy that has brought about the reaction against rationalism. Skepticism had its greatest power under Frederick WilHam II. and Frederick William III., who opposed, as much as Frederick the Great had favored, rationalism. In Germany it is almost a proverb that the soul of a university is made up of Lehr Freheit and Lern Freheit. "No," said Professor Dorner in his study at Berlin, when I mentioned Professor Tholuck's opinion of Weimar rationalism, even in Weimar and Thuringia^ was quite as strong fifty years ago as it is now." ♦* That is nothing," (Das ist nichts), he remarked emphatical- ly, and added no more, speaking of the rationalism of Renan. " The writers who discuss materialism," he said, "are in Ger- many more anti-dogmatic than ethical. As to the rationalists themselves, we have more who agree with Channing than with Parker. '♦ The mass of our preachers are genuine believers, but among the populace one can sometimes find infidelity. The mass of our divines are convinced ; but they are too contentious. In Prussia, unbelief is much weaker than fifty years ago, or in the- time of Frederick \he Great. Then rationalism was the loyaf theology. Most certainly, most certainly, rationalism in Ger- many, taken as a whole, is plainly and by far weaker than fifty years ago." 114 DECLINE OF RATIONALISM IN •' The proposal," says Professor Christlieb, "to implore the divine blessing and assistance on the deliberations of the Frank- fort parliament in i8|8 was received with shouts jf derisive iaughter." "For the last thirty years," he writes^ "in spite of all hostilities, a truly Christian science has begun victoriously to lead the way, by new and deeper exegetical researches ; by historical investigation ; by pointing out the remarkable har- mony existing between many new archeological, ethnological, and scientific discoveries. In the pulpit of by far the greater number of the German churches and in the theological faculties ■of most of the universities, it has so completely driven unbelief out of the field, that the latter has been compelled to retire, in a great measure, into the divinity schools of adjacent countries — Switzerland, France, Holland, Hungar3\ When compared with these and other countries, Germany shows that unbelief has a greater tendency to insinuate itself into, and to make its permanent abode among, half-educated, rather than thoroughly educated communities." " So much is to be said," says Court preacher Schwartz, of Gotha, author of the acutest of the histories of recent theology : " Schleiermacher's work has been incomparably more enduring, and quietly and inwardly transforming, than Hegel's. Schleier- macher's influences yet advance, while those of Hegel are ex- hausted and dead." " It is spring," says Professor Kahnis, of Leipzig, in 1874. "The period since the wars of liberation represents the conflict of the newly quickened heat of the German mind with the mass- es of snow and ice in the Aufklarung. Until to-day the conflict endures ; but ever mightier grows the sun, ever weaker the winter." This testimony of German professors to the fact of the decline of skepticism in the German universities I might make volum- inous ; but it is enough to show the accord of confidential and colloquial with printed testimony, and the agreement of five such authorities as Tholuck, Dorner, Christlieb, Schwartz, and Kahnis. XV. SEPARATION OF CHURCH AND STATE. Church and state in Germany are slowly seperating ; the bisreaucratic tutelage and bondage of the church are becoming things of the past ; a determined purpose is exhibited, on the part of both government and scholars, to call out a regulated religious activity among the masses of the people. As the German peasantry and middle class have never been taught to give money freely for religious organizations managed by them- selves ; as the rationalism outgrown in the universities has only too much power with the populace, especially in the large towns ; as Sabbath-schools and prayer-meetings, and all the machinery of the voluntary system in church affairs, are in THE GERMAN UNIVERSITIES. riy line m- md ich ind the |iing the Lted the It to lem- mly Lfge the in Germany conspicuous by their absence, the separation of church and state in the empire will not occur without many most painful temporary disadvantages. The poorer clergy will starve for a time ; and there will be wioe tracts of baptized tor- por and unbaptized indifference and paganism in the religious life of the lower classes. Ultimately, however, when the dangers of allowing religious marshes to go undrained have become sufficiently evident and alarming, and the impo: ^nce of rationalism to drain malarious soil has received adequate illus- tration, German sagacity and honesty will cause the stagnant fens of German church life to wake with currents, which, it is to be hoped, will one day make of its green, sedgy, and pestil- ential pools a clear, flashing, and brimming river. XVI. GERMAN PRIMACY IN EUROPE. Immense c :)mmercial, political, and moral advantages accrue to Germany from her unity, sought in agony for two hundred years. Schiller did not hesitate to say t' at Europe was suffi- ciently compensated for the horrors of the Thirty Years' War by an increased sense of the interdependence and need of union among its nations. At Sadowa, in 1866, at the close of the- battle which gave to Central Europe Prussian and Protestan-t, instead of Austrian and Romish, leadership, and ended a struggle which Frederick the Great began, the sun came forth from under heavy clouds in the low west, and the united armies of North and South Germany, struck by the omen, gathered around their commander, and sang : " Now all thank God r In that late hour the Reformation first became politically ar> assured success in the land of its birth. Sadowa is Germany'^- best hope of internal, Sedan her best hope of external, freedom?, from war. But whenever Germany, beaten down almost constantly under the hoofs of military strife, has had time to catch breath,, she has shown a recuperative power that has astonished all Europe. In the thirty years after the battle of Waterloo, her soil was not once touched by war, or by the tread of foreign troops. Her historians assign to that period her ftrst real recovery from the effects of the Thirty Years' War. In 1818^ bold, wise, indefatigable Prussia abolished all duties upon goods in transit through its own territories. For commercial purposes Germany became a unit in 1828. Even under the imperfect league of the ZoU Verein her navy was the third in extent in the world. Agriculture grew prosperous. Capitals of princes were not the only cities distinguished for wealth and culture. At the mere dawn of that national unity and peace, of which the full sunrise was at Sedan, commerce in Germany awoke from the dead. The rapid growth Cologne, Breslau, Magde- burg, Nuremburg, and Berlin amazed Vienna and wounded Ii6 DECLINE OF RATIONALISM IN Paris. The overshadowing and E.wiftly increr.sing prosperity of Germany and her approaches to political unity drew upon her the attack of Napoleon III. Sedan opened to Victor Emmanuel, Rome ; to the angels Peace and Union, entrance on Gen.ian soil ; to Napoleon, his grave ; to contagion from France, an antidote. At last Germany has military and political, as well as intellectual, primacy in Europe. Versailles leads her fashions no more. Voltaire is not asked to be her tutor. On those very grounds of Sans-Sousi, where Frederick the Great and Voltaire had called out to the culture of Europe, •'Ecrasez I'infame !" King William and his queen lately enter- tained an Evangelical Alliance gathered from the Indus, the Nile, the Danube, the Rhine, the Thames, and the Mississippi. XVII. — BAUR, STRAUSS, AND RENAN. But who does not know the history of the defeat of skeptical school after skeptical school on the rationalistic side of the field of exegetical research ? The naturalistic theory was swallowed by the mythical theory, and the mythical by the tendency theory, and the tendency by the legendary theory, and each of the four by time. Strauss laughs at Paulus, Baur at Strauss, Renan at Baur, the hour-glass at all. " Under his guidance," says Strauss of Paulus, '• we tumble into the mire ; and assuredly dross, not gold, is the issue to which his method of interpretation generally leads." "Up to the present day," says Baur of Strauss, " the mythical theory has been rejected by every man of education." ♦'Insufficient," says Renan of Baur, "is what he leaves existing of the Gospels to account for the faith of the apostles." He makes the Pauline and Petrine factions account for the religior , and the religion account for the Pauline and Petrine factions. "Criticism has run all to leaves," said Strauss, in his bitter disappointment at the failure of his final volume. Appropriately was there carried on Richter's coffin to his grave a manuscript of his last work — a discussion in proof of the immortality of the soul ; appropriately might there have been carried on Strauss's coffin to his grave his last work, restating his mythical theory, if only that theory had not, as every scholar knows, died and been buried before its author. XVIII. SUMMARY OF PROOFS. Among the proofs, then, that skepticism in Germany is declining in power with those whose special study is theology, are the facts : 1. That in the German universities the rationalistic lecture- rooms are now empty, and the evangelical crowded ; while fifty or eighty years ago the rationalistic were crowded and the evangelical empty. 2. That histories of the rise, progress, and decline of German rationalism have been appearing for the last fifteen years in the most learned portions of the literature of Germany. THE GERMAN UNIVERSITIES. 117 IS the 3. That such teachers as Tholuck, JuUus Muller, Dorner, Twesten, Ullmann, Lange, Rothe, and Tischendorf, most of whom began their professorships with great unpopularity in their universities, on account of their opposition to rationahstic views, arc now particularly honored on that very account. 4. That ev«ery prominent German university, except Heidel- berg, is now under predominant evangelical influences, and that Heidelberg is nearly empty of theological students. 5. That the attitude of the general government at Berlin has destroyed the force of many of the political causes of disaffec- tion with the state church. 6. That Vm victory at Sedan and the achievement of German unity diminish the chances of demoralization from European wars, and by contagion from France. 7. That in the field of exegetical research, while rationalism has caused the discovery of many new facts, and the adoption of a new method, the naturalistic theory by Paulus, the mythical theory by Strauss, the tendency theory by Baur, and the legendary by Renan, have been so antagonistic to each other as to be successively outgrown both by Christian and by rational- istic scholarship. Turn your serious thoughts towards Germany, in the Missis- sippi Valley, New York and Cincinnati. Carl Schurz sits there, the Secretary of the Interior, at Washington. He is a repre- sentative German, and yet he does not well represent the new- est portion of religious Germany. I revere his views on Civil Service Reform. 1 regard his career thus far in our country as ft great national blessing, but he was educated in Germany at the time when French influences were vigorous on the Oder and on the Elbe, The universities, when he began his course of education, were in a very different atmosphere from that which they now possess, and I should not be surprised to learn, al- though I do not know what the facts are, that Carl Schurz is found to exhibit occasionally something of the atmosphere of the rationalistic side of the German universities as they stood twenty or thirty years ago. But he is a serious man. If you are to approaoh Germany you must approach her seriously. The Germans are not from Erin's Isle. They are not from Scotland, They are not from England. I believe the average educated German is a more serious man, and more given to the culture of all the blessedness and sacredness of home life than your average Irishman, and 1 had almost said than your average Englishman or even your average Scotchman. The German deserves to be treated as entirely equal to the Englishman in his origin. Re- member that England is the mother-land, but Germany is the father-land. In the Mississippi valley let us build up English- speaking German Churches. Let us teach our German popular tion to support their own religious institutions. Let us fasten attention on that part of their civil education which has been neglected in their own land namely, their greatly defective train- ii8 DECLINE OF RATTONALrSRf IN" ing in the voluntary system in the support of churches. Let American churches be friendly to the Lutheran, in spite of the feeling of a few critics that certain Lutherans are somewhat Ro- mish. Let us discourage the permanent usr of the German lan- guage in American German churches. I revere the German mother tongue, but it is not profitable to foster congregations of Separatists. Where English-speaking German churches, Lutheran or other, are started in the Mississippi Valley, feebly supported, staggering in their early walk, let us put our arms about them, and if any think they are Lutheran overmuch, let' us not wince too greatly over venerated Lutheran names and fashions. Let us stand by the essentials of Christianity, in all English-speaking German churches in America, and love them in their aggressive activity, assured that the work will make them all thoroughly lovable. No man has a ^,xOW in his fore- head until activity brings it there, and you and I, unless lifted out of our level, unless filled with the illumination of aggressive Christian activity, are not always lovable creatures. Divisions among evangelical sects usually rise in periods of inactivity. If we can only bring the German to work religiously and fill his great, serious nature with a sense of his responsibility in the re- ligious portions of the privileges of American citizens'iip, we shall find the German now what he has been ever since Luther's time, naturally one of the most religious of all the citizens of the planet. But you say the German Sunday beer-gardens are nuisances ; and so they are, smoke and beer together, and I wish you would not set them a bad examble in any respect. But we must slowly educate the German into a proper regard for our Sabbath laws, and we shall never educate him to ob- serve those laws until we observe them enough ourselves to. make railway kings observe them. Your German thir^ks that under the westering sun of a Sabbath, after he has oeen to- church, he may take his family and go into a beer-garden and pass the rest of the day in social conversation, not in riot, but, on the whole, in rather a superficial, irreligious way. Your keen railway king thinks he may drive his palatial freight trains from Plymouth Rock to the Golden Gate in the Lord's hours ; and you and I, who are so offended at the beer-gardens, are seated in our velvety pews and hear the thunder of the Sabbath- breaking railroading pass hy, checking our anthems, and filling the up-tunied eyes of American devotion with dust, and we have no complaint to mak^. It is a terrible thing that the beer gardens are open on Sunday; it is not a terrible thing at all that multitudes of working men on our railways have no Sunday at all because of the greed of the cut-throat competitors among railway kings of the second-class. Let us set an example there- fore, to our Germans by showing them that Sunday is a day for the diffusion of conscientiousness through the whole community, and that without that diffusion we can never safely diffuse pro- perty or liberty. Little by little the second or third generation THE GERMAN UNIVERSITIES. 119 g: r t »r n k of Germans will become Americans. We have an enormous power of assimilation in America When the elephant takes the boughs of the oak into his proboscis and swallows a great mass of its foliage the oak becomes elephant and not the ele- phant oak. So I think it will be with the influx of our vast German immigration. But we must be true to the laws of health ; this elephant will not succeed in his mastication or the subsequent processes unless he is both in good health and thoroughly put to the work. I want no sick elephant ; I want no indolent elephant ; but give me America, well and active, and we will assimilate Germans, Irishmen, Scotchmen, China- men and Negro, and our own roughs, and sneaks, and cut- throats, the worst element among us, at the bottom of the perishing and dangerous classes of our great cities. XIX. — RESULTS OF SCIENTIFIC CRITICISM, Beyond controversy are many great results of the theological discussions in Germany for the last hundred years ; nor have the attacks of rationalism been an unmixed evil. A doctrine of the intuitions, basis of all ethical and metaphysical research, has been established by Kant. A doctrine of con:Jcience, growing up from the Kantian theory of the intuitions, is acquiring a height of outlook, from which the farsighted already descry the scientific inference of the necessity of an atonement. A doctrine of sin, built on the doctrine of conscience, has been made by Julius Muller to unlock all theology. A doctrine of the personality of God has been founded upon the Kantian analysis of the intuitions, and has already supplied the chief deficiencies of Kant's own system, besides undermining the pantheism of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. A system of criticism has grown up in relation to everything histor ical in Christianity ; and exegtical research has been placed upon a thoroughly scientific basis. A vindication of the historical evidence of the supernattiral has followed from an application of the new system of criticism. A series of discoveries has been made, illuminating at impor- tant points the records of the origin of Christianity and carrying back the date of the chief documents a full half of a century, narrowing by so much the previously too narrow space used by the skeptical theory to account for the growth of myths and legends, and so shutting the colossal shears of chronology upon the latest deftly-woven web of historical doubt. A Life of Christ is.now the most natural form in which belief, resting upon a system of criticism common to sacred and secular history, expresses and defends its credence. XX. — CHRISTIAN TREND OF THE CENTURIES. Whoever ascertains the trend of the historic constellations through long periods, obtains a glimpse of the hem of the garment of Almighty God. What Providence does, it from the 120 DECLINE OF RATIONALISM IN THE GERMAN UNrVERSITIESV first intends. A sifting of Christianity has taken place in this; last age by a prolonged contest of unbelief with faith, each armed with the best Damascus blades the world furnishes either to-day ; and the result has been a defeat of doubt on all central points. It is, therefore, now certain that it was divinely intended that there should be a sifting of Christianity in thisi last age, and that a defeat of doubt should be the result. Prolonged historic tendencies are God allowing portions of His- plan for the government of the world to become humanely comprehensible. When the completion of a circle of events reveals what the plan of the cycle was from the first, it behoves men, co-ordinating latest with earliest cycles, to ascertain the trend of the movements in the sky ; and to gaze, more solemnly than upon the stars themselves, upon that Form loftier than the stars,, which passes by in the darkness behind them, its outlines not wholly visible, but the direction not unknown in which it is moving the constellations. I commend this German theological battle-field to the timid and to the hopeful who goes out to walk and meditate in the world's eventide. Goethe could say that the only real, and the deepest, theme of the world's and of man's history, to which all other subjects are suibordinate, is the conflict between faith and unbelief. "We are the ancients," as Bacon said. But the inscription written by history, which is God's finger and no accident, before the sad eyes of the bruised and staggering ages, on the trophy erected after the severest intellectual battle of this oldest and newest of the centuries, is : Via Crusts, Via Lucis ! I do not respect any proposition merely because it is ancient, or in the mouths of majorities. But I do respect propositions that have seen honest and protracted battle, but not defeat. The test of the soundness of scholarship is that it should contend with scholarship, not once or twice, but century after century, and come out crowned. But the intellectual supremacy of Christianity in the nineteenth century is not a novelty. There are other battle-fields worth visiting by those who walk and meditate, on which Christian trophies stand, more important, as marks of the world's agonies and advances, than any that ever Greek erected for victory at Salamis or Marathon, I lean on church history. I go to its battle-fields and lie down oYi them. They are places of spiritual rest. Gazing on their horizon, I see no narrow prospect, but a breadth of nineteen hundred victorious years. Looking into the sky, as I lie there, I hear sometimes the anthem : As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. I obtain glimpses of a heaven opened ; and behold a white horse, and he that sits on him' is called the Word of God, King of kings, and Lord of lords. He is clothed in a vesture dipped in blood ; but his eyes are as a flame of fire and on his head are many crowns. I ' I y It 'm ,*■ «;'.*i'..;}' ■<^ OUK 0%VIV PUULICATIOKS. (Ready about the end of Octdher, i8yy. Edited by S. R. BRIGGS & J. H. ELLIOTT, WITH INTRODUCTORY CHAPTERS By D. W. WHITTLE, BIBLE READINGS,-" HOW TO PHEPARE AND HOW TO GIVE." Rev, LYMAN ABBOTT, D.D. on "How to Study the Bible." Rev. JAMES Ji. BROOKES, D.D., on " How to Study the Bible." AND "The Bible with Christian Workers." Rev. 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