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AN EXAMINATION OF THE CRITICAL PHI- LOSOPHY OF IMMANUEL KANT. (In Preparation.) _-...> AGNOSTICISM AND RELIGION BY JACOB G'-^'JLD SCHURMAN President of Cornell University NEW YORK CHARLES SCRIBNER S SONS 1896 DR. JACOB GOULD SCHURMAN, President of Cornell University, AN EXAMINATION OF THE CRITICAL PHI- LOSOPHY OF IMMANUEL KANT. (In Preparation.) AGNOSTICISM AND RELIGION BY JACOB GOULD SCHURMAN President of Cornell University NEW YORK CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 1896 ■R wmmmma i COPYRIGHT, 1896, BY CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS llHilii J. S. Gushing & Co. — Berwick & Smitli Norwood Mass. n.S.A. " The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with diffiailty, and we must rise with the occasion, ^s our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disen- thrall ourselves, and then we shall save our [religiony* 4 IUJt-..lUl|ll n^mmimmn CONTENTS PART I / PAOK IIuxLEY \ND Scientific Aonosticism . . i PART II / Philosophical Agnosticism • • . 83 PART III ^ Spiritual Religion: Its Evolution and Es- sence . . 129 vii ■■ w PART I HUXLEY AND SCIENTIFIC AGNOSTICISM " Thou fool, thnt lohich thou sowest is not quickened, except it die" HUXLEY AND SCIENTIFIC AGNOSTICISM i I DO not think I can, at the beginning of this new academic year, better minister to your spiritual needs thpn by inviting you, in the solemn calm of this time and place, to reflect for an hour with me upon the vital doctrines of the distinguished investigator and thinker who during the summer has been snatched by death from the ranks of science, of which for more than a third of a century he has been a fruitful cultivator, a doughty defender, and an il- lustrious ornament. It was on Saturday, June 29th, that Professor Huxley passed away, encountering the great mystery which closes the continuous mystery of life a few weeks after filling out the psalm- ist's m.easure of threescore years and ten. His death is a severe, and but for his work 1 An address delivered before the students of Oor- nellUniversity, Sunday evening, November 3, 1896. 3 SCIE} TIFIC AGNOSTICISM lii it would be an irreparable, loss to the re- public of thought and -science. And, in voicing the sincere regret we all feel at the removal of this brilliant and devoted worker for the enlargement and defence of human knowledge, I desire, while dis- charging what you will perhaps permit me to regard as a corporate trust, to express, if it is not presumptuous, my personal ap- preciation of his abilities and attainments and my respect for the integrity of his character, the nobility of his aims, and the apostolic zeal and earnestness with which he devoted himself to the work of his life. I embrace this opportunity the more eagerly as I am constrained to dissent from some of Huxley's views. Thomas Henry Huxley was born on the 4th of May, 1825. His early education was somewhat irregular. While still a boy, he had a strong desire to be a mechan- ical engineer ; and, if his architectonic ge- nius, cleai; intellect, and enthusiastic and aggressive energy had been enlisted in the engineering profession, it is impossible to say what he might not have achieved ; but I much doubt if the modern world, whose civilization is nourished by heat, would SCIENTIFIC AGNOSTICISM o still be guilty of the stupid and wanton waste of nine tenths of the energy stored up in coal for the purpose of making the remaining tenth available. But it was not destined that Hr.xley should solve this still unsolved problem. At an early age he entered upon the study of medicine, and in the first M.B. examination at the University of London he took honors in anatomy and physiology. His taste for engineering did not leave him ; the arena for its exercise was merely shifted from the inorganic macrocosm to the organic micro- cosm, — from nature to the living body. He cared little about medicine as the art of healing ; the only subject in his pro- fessional course which really and deeply interested him was physiology, — and phys- iology conceived as "the mechanical engi- neering of living machines." With the genius of a Watt or Edison he set him- self to work out the unity of plan in the structures of the innumerable throngs of diverse living beings and the modifications made in the same fundamental mechanism to serve diverse ends. Fortune favored his tastes and ambition. The captain of Her Majesty's ship Rattlesnake^ which had 6 SCIENTIFIC AGNOrriCISM been ordered to make a surveying voyage in the southern seas, wanted for assistant surgeon a man who knew something of science ; and through the influence of Sir John Richardson, the distinguished natu- ralist and Arctic explorer, Huxley was given the appointment. For more than four y6ars — from 1846 to 1850 — he stud- ied in Nature's great biological laboratory, as Darwin and Hooker had done before him, spending most of his time on the coasts of Australia and New Guinea. The communications he sent home won him a reputation in the scientific world ; and in 1851 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. He now desired to obtain a professorship of either Physiology or Comparative Anatomy ; but he was unsuc- cessful in all his applications. With his friend Tyndall, he turned his eyes to the New World; but the University of To- ronto, in which at the same time they be- came candidates for the vacant chairs of Physics ^nd Natural History, " would not look at either" of them. In 1854, how- ever, Sir Henry De la Beche, the Director- General of the Geological Survey, offered Huxley the post of Palaeontologist and Lect- m SCIENTIFIC AGNOSTICISM urer on Natural History which Forbes had just resigned in the Royal School of Mines in order to accept the chair of Natural His- tory in Edinburgh University. Huxley was divided between his allegiance to physiology and his desire for the profes- sorship. He frankly told Sir Henry that he did not care for fossils and that he would give up Natural History as soon as he could get a chair of Physiology. But, as General Grant said, on publishing his Memoirs after having determined never to write anything for publication : "There are but few important events in the affairs of men brought about by their own choice." Not only did Huxley become Lecturer on Natural History, but he held the office for thirty-one years ; and of his scientific work a large part is paleeontological ! Indeed, he took the whole field of zoology for his province ; and it is the verdict of Haeckel that he was the foremost zoologist in Eng- land. This is not the place to describe his volumes or even to mention his celebrated memoirs. After the publication of the "Origin of Species," his investigations were largely guided by the Darwinian hypothesis, of which his results formed 8 SCIENTIFIC AGNOSTICISM a striking and substantial verification. While his research embraced both verte- brate and invertebrate life, he gave special attention to the structure and functions of vertebrate animals and he won renown by his brilliant elucidations of the intricacies of their mechanism. His growing fame procured him membership and office in many learned institutions and scientific associations ; and in 1883 he was crowned with the highest official distinction to which a British scientist can aspire, the presidency of the Royal Society, — of which for ten years he had been the sec- retary. In 1885 he resigned his profes- sorship (at sixty, he used to say, every scientific man " should commit the happy despatch ") and all his other official posts, and soon afterwards removed from Lon- don to Eastbourne. But, though he had well earned the ease and quiet of retire- ment, it is the last decade of his life which is notably marked by those divagations into politics, ethics, and especially theol- ogy, which made Huxley's name one of the best known in current literature. These incursions were often resisted, but such was the advantage of his controver- i SCIENTIFIC AGNOSTICISM 9 sial position and his skill in attack and defence that he was seldom worsted and never vanquished, though he had among his adversaries some of the subtlest dis- putants in the English-speaking world. For Huxley was not merely ajeeker of truth, he was her knight and sworn cham- pion, her defe.-der and her advocate. To carry the " platform " of science with the "intelligent electors " of the commonwealth was, I think, his dearest ambition. But he would have been as good a cht^mpion of any other "platform" which he had once accepted with that intense intel- lectual impulsiveness he inherited from his mother. Indeed, I suspect that the Genius which presides over the nativity of Englishmen may have intended him for leader of the opposition to Her Majesty's government in the House of Commons ; but the accident of a "medical brother- in-law " made him a biologist ; and so it happened that the combativeness, the genius for debate, the skill in attack and defence, the courage and audacity, and all the splendid fighting qualities with which Nature had endowed this ardent and icon- oclastic radical were destined to find a 10 SCIENTIFIC AGNOliTIClSM field of activity in the ad\ocacy of scien- tific knowledge and the defiance and de- nunciation of conventional Christianity. He says himself that he could not count even his scientific attainments and honors " as marks of success if I could not hope that I had somewhat helped that move- ment of opinion which has been called the New Reformation." He dearly loved a tilt with the ecclesiastical opponents of this progressive theology. And not even in the British Parliament was there a more formidable controversialist in England. Always courteous, he had at command the resources of ridicule and sarcasm ; warmly devoted to truth, he possessed an unerring sense for falsehood and error ; master of a lucid and trenchant style, a skilful dia- lectician, and a wonderful adept in the art of luminous explanation and popular ex- position, he was at home in science, he had travelled the highways, of modern philosophy and literature, and, as Burke said of Charles Townshend, he knew how to bring together, within a short time, all that was necessary to establish, to illus- trate, and to decorate that side of the question he supported. Nor was this all. SCIENTIFIC AGNOSTICISM 11 The strong atmosphere of debate and con- tention was to Huxley like the air of the sea or mountain. His zest in the pursuit of knowledge was never quite so keen as when the game led across the enemy's pre- serve. He had, indeed, the idealist's faith that truth would prevail, but he delighted to abound in militant works for the re- moval of obstacles that impeded her victo- rious march. Darwin passed his life in serene contemplation and studious investi- gation of nature, interrupted only by the thrill of fresh insight and the ecstasy of new discoveries. Huxley liked research too ; but he cared more for the general acceptance of the results achieved by scientists, and his chief delight was in compelling the public to assent to them, unless, as one might sometimes suspect, he derived still greater satisfaction from confuting pretentious critics and ruth- lessly exposing their ignorance. It is this missionary spirit which distinguished Huxley from all the scientists of his gen- eration. He was the great apostle of the modern gospel of science. And as he had the preacher's ear lestness in proclaiming this evangel and the controversialist's de- 18 SCIENTIFIC AGNOSTICISM hi termination to make it prevail, so he had the dogmatist's immovable confidence that his creed was tiio only orthodox doctrine, and that it was destined to overcome all rival dogmas as the rod of Moses sw.il- lowed up the rods of the lesser magicians. He was of the same breed as the theolo- gians he assailed. It matters not that theirs was the faith once delivered to the saints and his the creed gradually elabo- rated by the scientists. In his temper and mental habit, in his attitude towards what he believed the truth, Huxley was as veritable a dogmatist as any of his theo- logical antagonists, though they banned what he blessed and though he was neither of Paul or Peter, but heartily wished a plague on both their houses. A scientist by profession and achievement, but in- wardly a theological iconoclast, it is not strange that, with his gifts and under the stimulus of favoring circumstances, Hux- ley should have become the most distin- guished protagonist in the fierce scientific and theological controversies of his gener- ation. He was still a young man — only thirty-four years of age — when the bitter warfare began in which for the remaining SCIKNTIFW A GNOS TlVlsyf 13 lisilf of his life lie drank delight of battle with his peers, " Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy." The signal and the occasion of the im- pending storm was the appearance, in 1859, of Darwin's "Origin of Species.*' The tempest which this work aroused in the intellectual world was without a parallel since the time when Galileo, whom (sad irony of fate!) the youthful Milton found blind and a prisoner of the Inquisition, had revolutionized the thought of Chris- tendom by inaugurating the Copernican astronomy. The Prospero who, in his innocency, had conjured up this storm was a modest, retiring, diffident country gentleman, peaceful as a Quaker, dreading controversy, avoiding society, and devot- ing his entire energy (whenever a fragile constitution permitted him to labor) to harmless observation of the ways of plants and animals and innocent reflection upon the mode of their development. This interpreter of nature was distinguished for his caution, his patience, and, above all, his fair-mindedness. Now, as a result of his study and meditation, he had come 14 SCIENTIFIC AGNOSTICISM Vf ■ I to the conclusion that biological species, which had hitherto passed for immutable creations, were the slowly consolidated growths of changing varieties. The fer- ment which Darwin thus cast into the mass of current beliefs was in its logical essence identical with Galileo's e pur si muove. The astronomer asserted that the earth TT^oved; the biologist that species changed. But Darwin was more than a modern Heracleitus championing the her- esy of flux in opposition to the orthodox tradition of fixity as the law of the organic world. Others, too, had dreamt of the natural transmutation of species as an alternative to the miracle of creation. Darwin endeavored to turn the dream into a demonstration. His is the peculiar glory of actually showing, by analogy of the selective breeding practised by hor- ticulturists and agriculturists, how the variations in the species of plants and animals which are constantly turning up are, under the influence of what he called Natural Selection, preserved, and then transmitted with modifications to de- scendants, until by successive accumula- tions they are consolidated into species i :i SCIENTIFIC AGNOSTICISM 16 entirely distinct from the original forms. Man has made new varieties of the horse, of the pigeon, of the rose, — so distinct that a naturalipt from another planet would describe them as different species, — by the simple method of breeding exclusively from the individuals which happened to possess the characteristics desired. In the formation of true spe- cies, the struggle for life takes the place of man's selective action, with the result that, while in the comp >tition ill-favored varieties are exterminated, those organ- isms possessing modifications beneficial to themselves-, those which are "fittest" in the given environment, survive, and, as in the case of cultivated plants and domes- ticated animals, they pf^rpetuate their pe- culiarities until, in the course of many generations, tliare emerges the result of new and distinct species. Such is the essence of Darwinism, or the doctrine of tjie origin of species. Like all great and fruitful theories, it is simple enough when once pointed out. Every naturalist was already familiar with the facts of variability, of the struggle for existence, of adaptation to environment, 16 SCIENTIFIC AGNOSTICISM ic I and of the inheritance of parental charac- teristics. But no one before Darwin sus- pected that, by a new collocation of these well-known phenomena, a scientific solu- tion might be found for the mysterious problem cf the origination of species. In a short time the leaders, and before long the rank and file, of zoologists, botanists, and palaeontologists accepted the Darwinian doctrine, at least as a working hypothesis. The only alternative was the belief in the creation of species ; but as the Creator is the first causQ of all things, and science seeks second or intermediary or natural causes, it was really no scientific expla- nation to say that species were created. Darwinism assumed no causes but such as could be proved to pe actually at work. It had, therefore, the essential requisite of every scientific hypothesis. Whether it was adequate to explain the fact of the rise of species was another matter. And, for one, Huxley, while accepting the hy- pothesis, showed that its logical founda- tion was incomplete so long as the vari- eties produced by selective breeding were, while true species were not, more or less fertile with one another. SCIENTIFIC AGNOSTICISM 17 It is not for rae to express an opinion on the validity of the Darwinian theory. I suppose, however, that no naturalist would now deny that within certain limits new species are originated by the survival and consolidation of such variations, spontane- ously arising in organisms, as may be use- ful to their possessors 'n the struggle for life. Assuming, therefore, Darwinism to be true, I trust I may be permitted to ob- serve that the origin of species remains almost as much a mystery ay ever, though the mystery has been thrown a stage further back. Organisms differentiating themselves continuously along particular lines for indefinite periods of time must, under the law of the survival of the fittest, infallibly give rise to new species. But pray observe that the fiurvival of the fittest does not account for the arrival of the fittest. That self -evolving organism, on which the entire issue is dependent, is a miracle which no naturalist has as yet transmuted into science. Natural Selection — a struggle for life and survival of the fittest — simply sifts the material furnished by the variability of plants and animals. The question then arises by what agency those 18 SCIENTIFIC AGNOSTICISM 'h variations are originated, shaped, and con- tinued so that they are capable of produc- ing those specific forms which, under the sifting of natural selection, actually emerge. Darwin himself was not insensible to the heavy weight of this unexplained mystery. In a letter to Huxley, written November 25, 1859, he expressed his perplexity con- cisely and aptly, though somewhat pro- fanely, in the following query: •' What the devil determines each particular variation? "What makes a tuft of feathers come on a cock's head, or moss on a moss-rose?" If Darwin explained the appearance of new species, he did not explain the emergence of this differentiation of the organism — much less the origin of the organism itself — from which new species take their rise. The " Origin of Species " is, in fact, not the Genesis but the Exodus of living forms. It tells how a chosen seed, having been led out of the house of bondage, — the bondage to ancestral type, — waged a long struggle against the inhospitality of its environment and the attacks of its rivals, until at length it reached the promised goal, — the stature of an independent race, the transmutation into a new species. SCIENTIFIC AGNOSTICISM 19 One thing, however, is indisputable. The Darwinian hypothesis clearly belonged to the realm of science. If ever there was a passionless and abstract theory, Darwin's doctrine of the origination of species would seem to have deserved that characterization. And certainly no one bu^ a master in the biological sciences should have presumed to estimate the validity, or fix the limits, of a theory resting on such a mass gf ob- servations, and sustained by so many lines of converging evidence, as those which Darwin brought to the support of the theory of Natural Selection. But oftenest the unexpected happens, — and this time the unwarranted. The ignorance, bigotry, and blind passion of the mob who con- demned Socrates now took the judgment- seat for the hearing of Darwin. Dragged from the study and the laboratory into the garish light of public notoriety, his scientific hypothesis became the scandal of parlors and the ridicule of clubs, while press, platform, and pulpit thundered with a confused turmoil of refutation and in- vective, in which were mingled outrageous denunciations of the simple naturalist him- self as a dangerous, godless, and even de- 20 SCIENTIFIC AGNOSTICirM generate member of the human species. But if unthinking orthodoxy and prim pro- priety Avere horrified, free-thinking radi- calism went mad with delight. She wildly clasped Darwinism to her bosom as the hopeful parent of infidelity, materialism, and atheism. What with friends and foes, the plain craft of science had never before got between such a Scylla and T)harybdis ! But Avliy all this public interest in the new theory of organic species, you will ask? The mass of people, we all know, are not as a rule much concerned about abstract inquiries. Quite true ; and I will say at once that it was not Darwin's theory of the origin of species which convulsed society, but the inferences, deductions, and associ- ated ideas which that theory suggested concerning matters of vital and permanent interest to humanity. Human reason de- clares that God is the ground of the uni- verse, and the moral and religious sense gives assurance that He is the Father of our spirits. Now this primary belief, — " in the beginning, God," — this datum of con- sciousness as I may call it, has, in the lapse of many Christian centuries, become insep- arably entwined with a venerable tradition SCIENTIFIC AGNOSTICISM 21 of creation, according to which species were instantaneously originated, immutably fixed, and permanently distinguished. Read once more the beautiful legend witli which the Bible opens, — a legend so poetically vivid that Darwin's contem^.oraries still took it for history, as men devoid of culture and literary feeling do to this day, — read this story, I repeat, and you will see that the writer conceives of the species of plants and animals as sudden and unchangeable crea- tions, with metes and bounds for each, and an impassable chasm between man and every other species. This legendary account of the genesis of things had, unfortunately, embosomed itself, not only in theology, but in the religious thought and feeling of Christendom. And when the " Origin of Species " appeared,, the church had not yet recovered from the rude shock administered to the orthodox belief in impulsive crea- tions by the uniformitarian geology of Lyell's "Principles." In sheer self-defence, therefore, religious minds felt impelled to attack the evolutionary biology which Dar- win proclaimed and, still more, the revo- lutionary anthropology which loomed up behind it. If species were not immutable, 22 SCIENTIFIC AGNOSTICISM I if related species were co-descendants of the same ancestors, then man and tho apes — oh, unutterable horror! You smile at the mention, or even at the suggestion, of the pithecoid origin of mankind! But it was a stone of stumbling to able and de- vout men of the last generation. What, they asked, would become of the soul, of sin, of the atonement, — nay, of the Creator Himself thus discharged of so much of the activity hitherto imposed upon Him ? It was, indeed, an awful crisis of thought. And the travail and pathos of it will long be remembered. But you who look back on it, as to a remote period, with the fresh eyes of youth, will not miss the comic by-play that mingled with the tragedy. You will see society divided into two heraldic camps, one battling for an ancestor a little lower than the angels and the other for an ancestor a little higher than the apes You will see cool men lose their heads, and men of good breeding part with their manners, and men not hitherto conspicuous for piety suddenly grown jeal- ous about the honor of the Lord of Hosts. And all the while it is forgotten that man is what he is howsoever he came to be what SCIENTIFIC AGNOSTICISM 23 he is, and that in God all things live and j move and have their being, though His children are forever misreading the way in which He does His wondrous works. It was all over with science ! In this fierce and indiscriminate polemic, the Dar- winian hypothesis retreated from view be- fore the spectres which it had evoked in the imagination of the excited disputants and the terrified public. The theory of the origination of species by natural se- lection was a generalization addressed to naturalists ; but instead of receiving a dispassionate examination at the hands of experts, it became the occasion of a free fight over the entire area of that No Man's Land which lies between modern Science and traditional Theology. One party ap- pealed to the sure word of revelation, the other to the inerrant record of nature. The poiilts of issue were not clearly de- fined ; their number multiplied as the bit- terness of the disputants increased ; and in time Darwinism became identified with a mass of biological, psychological, ethical, metaphysical, and theological speculations, having little or nothing in common but a genetic or historical method of treatment. I s 24 SCIENTIFIC AGNOSTICISM 1^ and a content marked by opposition to current belief and orthodox Christianity. Huxley at an early stage descended into this arena with alacrity and keen delight. Darwin gave him the sobriquet of " My General Agent." He became the leader of the radical liosts. While retaining his .speculative doubt of Darwin's biological hypothesis, he was the head and front of the Darwinians. I have already described his splendid controversial powers ; I may say here that he was too good a debater, too intense a partisan, too strong a hater, to put himself sympathetically at the standpoint of his opponents, and lead them by kindly tact and timely sugges- tion of higher truth out of the bondage of error in which he believed them be- nighted captives. His militant spirit was too strong for his pedagogical instinct. His genius was not constructive, but icon- oclastic. He delighted to dare, to defy, to destroy; in dealing with persons not of his way of thinking, his aim was less instruction than refutation; and- I sup- pose nothing gave him greater pleasure than to cleave an antagonist with the sword of his logic, unless it was to be- SCIENTIFIC AGNOSTICISM 25 wilder him with tlie rapier of his irony. I do not, of course, mean to disparage the value of discussion. My point is merely that, if Huxley could have had more sym- pathy with the Philistines, his arguments, though losing something of their point and dash, would have gained in illumina- tion, efficacy, and fruitfulness. But one must take liim as he was ; and it was the nature of his analytic genius to revel in antinomies, and the method of his debate was to impale antagonists between the horns of an "either — or." Let us, how- ever, not forget that besides the thesis and antithesis of the controversialist, there is the synthesis of the comprehensive thinker, and that the *' either — or" of angry de- bate is often cancelled by the *'both — and," of calm reflection. Whether the issues between Huxley and his adversaries may be so resolved, we must now proceed to consider. I think that the many litigious suits in which Huxley was engaged as advocate for natural knowledge may all be em- braced in three categories, which, though related, we may nevertheless clearly dis- tinguish. First of all, there is the case \ i 'At> w W i[ I 26 SCIENTIFIC A GNOSTICISM ~\ !• of Science versus Kevelation ; secondly, the case of Evolution versus Creation ; and, thirdly, the case of Pithecus or the Ape versus Adam. The first of these cases engrossed the latter years of his life ; the other two claimed his attention at the outbreak of the war over Darwin- ism. The three, taken together, afforded abundant scope for the exhibition of that mental attitude which Huxley first desig- nated Ag?iosticism. And though his creed as an Agnostic was not exhausted either in idea or in fact by his views on these disputed points, these were the only as- pects of it which he ever fully developed, or in which he seemed sincerely and in- tensely interested. I shall have to allude to other elements of the Agnostic faith hereafter. Meantime let us see how the eponj^mous Agnostic filled his role in those vital contests between popular be- lief and evokitionary science to which I have just referred. It will be convenient to begin with the case of Evolution versus Creation. That God is the ultimate ground and source of all things, whether they be liv- ing or inert, thinking or unthinking, seems SfJIENTIFW A GNOSTICISM 27 to mo not merely a conclusion reached by reflection and inference, but an intuitive belief constitutive of intelligence itself. Man, ])ecause he is rational, must believe in God as Universal First Cause ; atheism is, in the strictest sense of the term, irra- tional. Science, however, is in quest, not of the ultimate ground and reason of exist- ence, but of the so-called secondary causes, — the proximate agencies and circum- stances, — by which things have been mod- ified in the natural order of events. It is, therefore, not an explanation of the scien- tific order to say that species of animals and plants were created by God. The proposition may be perfectly true and yet, in connection with science, totally irrelevant. What the biologist seeks to discover is the sequence of the natural phenomena by which it has been brought about that species have become what they are. And for the definite purpose, the limited inquiry, which science sets before itself as the goal of its endeavor, it mat- ters not — I say it with no feeling of irrev- erence — whether there be a Creator or not. If proximate causes, if natural agen- cies, cannot be found to account for the N^ «: l\ * "■xqMnamnMMiMMrM ■S aii 28 SCIENTIFIC AGNOSTICISM I i 1!' i H origination of species, the problem for the man of science is unsolved, and it may be insoluble ; but in any event, the case is not helped from the scientific point of view by the theory of supernatural crea- tion. If it be true that all kinds of life came into existence instantaneously, by the mere fiat of the Divine Will, then this fact, instead of affording an alternative explanation to the biologist, carries the problem which he had raised out of the field of science altogether. Science stops where the sequence- of natural events in time is broken bj'' a supernatural occur- rence. Science is simply the record of the behavior of things under the established order ; neither her method nor her appa- ratus enables her to go beyond these limits ; and when Omnipotence comes upon the scene, she is smitten with impotence , Only there are such good reasons for faith in the continuity of natural causation that no one can be expected to believe, without the strongest evidence, in a breach due to the miracle of supernatural agency. How, then, stands the case with the origi- nation of species ? Men of science may be prejudiced in favor of an explanation by SCIENTIFIC AGNOSTICISM 29 natural causation, for it is their business to seek secondary causes ; but if, as a matter of fact, species were miraculously and instantaneously created hy God, there would be nothing for biology to do but to accept the fact and confine its inquiries to the behavior of the organisms which had thus come supernaturally upon the field. But we do not know that living forms were thus originated. It was, no doubt, the universal belief before Darwin. But that belief had no other basis than the bib- lical account of creation ; and we have now learned that, whatever else the Bible may do for us, it was never intended to teach us science. Indeed the very conception of science — derived, as it is, from the Greeks — was foreign to the Hebrew mind. If you read the Old Testament with the slightest degree of attention, you will see that none of the writers has any notion of that order of nature and system of sec- ondary causes which it is the function of science to interpret. On the contrary, they conceive of God as the direct and immediate cause of all natural phenomena. "The God of glory thundereth ; " "the voice of the Lord breaketh the cedars ; " i mmm mm 1 1 i i ; tilll i i ! 30 SCIENTIFIC AGNOSTICISM " the voice of the Lord shaketh the wilder- ness ; " " the voice of the Lord maketh the hinds to calve ; " " the Lord sitteth upon the flood ; yea, the Lord sitteth King for- ever." These quotations are from a psal- mist, it is true; but neither in poet or prophet, chronI:ler or historian, will you discover any hint of nature as an inter- mediary system of relatively independent agencies ; and, the more fervid the inspira- tion of the writer, the more intensely does he picture all sublunary changes as doings of the Lord of Hosts. Ultimately consid- ered, this interpretation seems to me to be true, eternally true. But it is a verity with which science has no concern. On the other hand, as I have said already, the Hebrew race had no genius for that exact and systematic knowledge of natural phe- nomena which is the desideratum of the scientific inquirer. When, therefore, this profound, but unscientific, people began to brood over the mysterious problem of the origin of things, they grasped, with a clear- ness that has never been excelled, the great and precious truth that God is the creative source of the world ; but when they proceeded to describe the. procession ' / SCIENTIFIC AGNOSTICISM 31 of natural phenomena — the breaking of light on chaos, the formation of the globe, and the appearance of living creatures, "each after his kind" — they were so far from anticipating the discoveries oi modern science that their only aim was to adorn the truth of reason with the poetry of a naive but sublime phantasy, for which they sketched a succession of pictures which still have potency to subdue the imagina- tion and attune the emotions like the stately overture to an oratorio. It is perfectly obvious to-day — or it should be — that if you would know the history of organisms you must consult the testimony of the fossiliferous rocks. It was very different when Huxley began his investigations. Everybody then supposed it was enough to consult the Book of Gen- esis. It became Huxley's duty, as a man of science, to show that the two Tecords did not iigree. And he accomplished the task, which it must be owned he found far from uncongenial, with an array of evi- dence and a cogency of demonstration which convinced everybody except his discomfited antagonists and the invincible torturers of the Hebrew text. Huxley i 32 SCIENTIFIC AGNOSTICISM \ -J. i 111 l! i:il Hi I l;!iif I I .■!«'■ professed to have a perfectly open mind towards the two records, to have no preju- dice one way or the other ; and he declared that the view which he accepted was com- mended solely by the conclusiveness of the evidence in its favor. Perhaps he deceived himself; perhaps he was influenced, to some extent, at least, by his way of look- ing at things in general — what Mr. Bal- four has since called the "psychological climate." But Huxley was certainly not conscious of any such distracting cause of belief. In relation to the conflict between the creational and the evolutional doctrine of the origin of species, he conceived his mind as a freely acting balance, which, however moved, was moved solely by the weight of the evidence adduced. And this hospitality and loyalty of the mind to evidence, with the putting away of au- thority, tradition, and every other cir- cumstance, is what Huxley means by the Agnosticism of the man of science. I have hitherto spoken of the case of Evolution versus Creation solely from the point of view of biology. Huxley's con- tention is that, as concerns the time, order, and manner in which living kinds came SCIENTIFIC AGNOSTICISM 83 into existence, the stratified rocks tell one story and the Book of Genesis another. But Huxley (putting aside the colossal blunder of Bathybius, which he frankly acknowledged) has nothing to say of the first beginning of those primordial species from wliose varieties other species may subsequently have been formed. And, of course, as a biologist, he was under no temptation to account for the origin of the inorganic world or of the realm of con- scious minds. It is conceivable, indeed, that the universe is eternal ; but, if so, reflection shows that neither now nor at any other moment could it exist without the sustaining energy of the Divine Voli- tion ; and Goethe finely calls it " the liv- ing garment of God." But, however it be with the universe, it is a cer- ainty of science that at one time there was neither life nor consciousness on this globe. To the man of science their emergence must be a miracle, for it is a violation of the ^ law of natural causation. The religious mind calls it a creation. Evolutionary science would have accomplished its goal only if it could show that life had devel- oped from inorganic matter, and mind X D \ 34 SCIENTIFIC AGNOSTICISM i| Jl i .' if , -.1 III 1 1 'Mil;s''i from unconscious life. From the primi- tive nebula of the universe to man who knows it, the chain of evolution would then be complete. There would be no break in what Huxley described as "Nat- ure's great progression, from the formless to the formed — from the inorganic to the organic — from blind force to conscious intellect and will." But science has not realized this ideal; and it is probably unrealizable. This is doubtless a great comfort to the general public. Were the realization ever achieved, many pious minds, who can see God only when He breaks in on the order of natural causa- tion, would have to walk by faith ; and I fear, in the absence of sight, the light would seem dim indeed. Yet a primitive \/ chaos of star-dust, which held in its womb not only the cosmos that fills space, not only the living creatures that teem upon it, but also the intellect that interprets it, the will that confronts it, and the con- science that transfigures it, must as cer- tainly have God at the centre as a universe mechanically arranged and periodically ad- justed must have Him at the circumference. There is no real antagonism between Ore- SCIENTIFIC AGNOSTICISM 35 % ation and Evolution. The notion of Cre- ation implies the absolute beginning of existence; the notion of Evolution im- plies gradual and progressive change in that which already exists. Creation is not only in itself toto coelo different from Evolution; it is as much the prerequisite of Evolution as your bodily system is of digestion. Evolution is merely the mode in which, according to modern science, God manifests Himself alike in the world of nature and in the world of spirit. His procedure is not by spasms and cataclysms ; but here a little, there a little, and ever gradually onward. I wonder what posterity will make of the confusion which the law of evolution caused in the minds of the generation which in the nineteenth century first discovered conclusive evidence of its operation ? They will surely learn with amazement and incredulity that the dis- covery was in high quarters supposed to be fatal to a belief in God, and that, what in old times the fool had said in his heart, was in that age proclaimed upon the house- tops as the final inference of science and philosophy. As though man's faith that K I 'i I 1 ' Hi I 36 SCIENTIFIC AGNOSTICISM God 18 could be shaken by a new glimpse of how God acts! Surely it remains a necessary postulate of intelligence — a datum as reasonable and trustworthy as belief in the existence of anything wnat- soever — that God is the creative source and sustaining ground of the universe, — and that, whether He poured forth His energy at a definite then and there, or, as I believe, continues to diffuse it through every point of infinite space and to main- tain it at every moment of unending time. I must do Huxley the justice of explain- ing that his clear intellect was never obscured by the delusion that atheism was an inference from the theory of evolution. What he attacked was that venerable tradition of the process of creation, which had been so long ac- cepted as a part of religion itself ; and he attacked it for the good and sufficient reason that it was at variance with the facts revealed in the fossiliferous strata of the earth's crust. I have to some extent already touched upon Huxley's advocacy of the simian or pithecoid origin of man. I have des- ignated this issue the case of Pithecus .Va\ SCIENTIFIC AGNOSTICISM 37 n^. versus Adam. Huxley considered the issue one of capital importance. His own attitude brought upon him criticism and ridicule, and not only those, but also ani- madversion and reproof; and for a time, as he long afterwards good-naturedly said, he was little better than one of the wicked. But Huxley needed oppo- sition ; he liked fighting ; and this cru- sade was in the cause of truth. Indeed it is difficult to know how a fair-minded and honest biologist who saw so far could have forborne to say as much as Huxley set down in his famous pamphlet on "Man's Place in Nature." Science must needs be truthful, outright, and dovn- right. And Huxley was not the man to make his biographer blush, as Bacon had made Macaulay blush " for the disingen- uousness of the most devoted worshipper of speculative truth, for the servility of the boldest champion of intellectual free- dom." Herein Huxley is an admirable example to every student and thinker. The thing that is true may not be wel- come — for interests are entrenched be- hind what is current; but if you know it to be true — I am not speaking of f » i i i r mi 38 SCIENTIFIC AGNOSTICISM I 1 1 i' i ; guessing but of knowledge, and I say if you are sure you have ascertained the truth, in God's name speak it out and keep not silent! This is what Huxley did in regard to the question of man's relation to the animals next below him. Even before the appearance of " The Origin of Species " he had thought much of the structural affinities of men and apes ; and the views at which he had arrived were in full harmony with those which Darwin now proclaimed. " Man's Place in Nature" was finished in 1862. Taking account both of foetal develop- ment and adult structure, this work de- monstrated the most striking similarities between man and the man-like apes. In the processes of origination, in the early stages of formation, in the mode of nu- trition before and after birth, man's his- • tory is identical with that of the apes; and in his developed structure the re- semblances with theirs are as striking as they are fundamental. After compar- ing their several organs with great care and exactitude, Huxley reached the con- clusion that the structural differences which separate man from the gorilla and SLlENTIFlf AGXOSTIVISM 39 the chimpanzee are not 30 great as those which separate the goriUa from the lower apes. And this leads directly to the con- clusion which so horrified Huxley's gen- eration. If animals of similar structure and function are ever descended from common ancestors, then there is no ra- tional ground for doubting, either that the human species might have origi- nated by differentiation from the simian, or that both are modified ramifications of a common ancestral stock. Now Dar- win's investigations prove that species do, sometimes at any rate, originate through modifications in the co-descendants of common ancestors. Accordingly, Huxley regarded the simian origin of man as highly probable. And it afforded in- tense satisfaction to his craving for scien- tific explanation to be able to trace the condition of the entire organic world, as Lyell had traced that of the inorganic, to the efficiency of causes still operating about us. There is, as I have already intimated, a feeling — I think I may say a conviction — among scientists of the present day that the Darwinian theory of descent i 1 I 1 T] I 40 SriENTlFK! A GNOSTHJISM with modifications has been pushed too far, and that corollaries have been drawn from it which a longer and more accurate acquaintance with the facts shows to be altogether unwarranted. Something like a reaction from earlier Darwinism seems now in full force. In time the limits of the new truth will be defined. Meanwhile we are in doubt and uncertainty. In ' striking contrast is Darwin's own assur- -N/ ance of man's descent from the lower animals. In the postscript to a letter to Lyell, written as early as January, 1850, he tells his friend that he has a " pleasant genealogy for mankind" ; ' ^ describes our remotest ancestor as an " annual which breathed water, had a swim-bladder, a great swimming tail, an imperfect skull, and was undoubtedly an hermaphrodite I '* Beit^o! Yet " A man's a man for a' that." If at the beginning he starts with the brute, and if at the end his body may return to the basest uses, still 'twere to consider too curiously to consider so, unless we also observed that this quin- tessence of dust is not only the paragon SCIENTIFIC AiJNOSTK ISM 41 of animal.s, Imt the one si;lf-conscious denizen of our world, noble in reason, infinite in faculty, in action like an angel, in apprehension like a (lod. Assume, I say, that Darwin's "pleasant genealogy for mankind" should pass muster with the herald's college of contemporary biol- ogy. What matters it that you have come from brutishness, if you are come to humanity? What matters it that your ancestor vas an ape, if you are a man ? I ask not what you are derived from, but what you have arrived at? The vital matter is not whether a man started at this point or at that, but, in the expressive slang of our day, whether he "got there." If you are conscious of the dignity and responsibility of human living, you will survey with indifference speculations con- cerning the origin of your race, knowing that you are not one whit the better or the worse whether it started with a fallen archangel or an exalted ape. Of course Lady Clara Vere de Vere might see peril to her "hundred coats-of-arms." But that in a democratic community like ours, where worth and not birth is the test of manhood, there should be an aversion to \/ ¥^ Ip ■i A '^ i 1| 42 SCIENTIFIC AGNOSTICISM Darwin's doctrine of the descent of man as degrading to humanity, is a curious illustration of the tenacity with which sentiments survive the institutions and beliefs which made them appropriate, and live on even when they have become irra- tional and absurd. If men are to be judged, not by what they are, but by what they came from, not only biology, not only science, but common experience as well will force us to a complete revision of our estimate of mankind. If any one of us could trace his pedigree through a hundred generations, he would find at the other end a naked savage but little re- moved from the brutes. Nay, a short time ago and you yourself were merely a germ which no ordinary power of dis- crimination could distinguish from an incipient puppy. But these facts are neither degrading nor brutalizing to your humanity. They put on you no obliga- tion to scalp your neighbors, or to grovel on all fours. You are — not what you have come from^ but what you have become. And the knowledge of your lowly begin- nings should give you faith and hope in your capacity for still higher things. iJ I SCIENTIFIC AGNOSTICISM 43 There may be atavism, there may be re- version to primitive types ; but the general tendency of evolution being to fuller and better life, it is assuredly the destiny of man to " Move upward, working out the beast, And let the ape and tiger die." No one knew this better than Huxley. Asserting, on the one hand, that no abso- lute line of demarcation could be drawn between the structure of man and the» structure of the animals next below him, and holding that even the highest faculties of th«i human mind begin to germinate in lower forms of life, the evolutionary biol- ogist was also profoundly conscious of the vastness of the gulf between civilized man and the brutes, and he declared, in felici- tous and striking terms, that "whether from them or not, man is assuredly not of them." This Agnosticism does not touch the dignity or the spiritual vocation of man. True, Huxley did not, as he aptly put it, " base man's dignity upon his great toe, or insinuate that we are lost if an ape has a hippocampus minor." What he did was to raise a simple question of fact. i;- II 44 SCIENTIFIC AGNOSTICISM li Hi llil namely, whether the human species did not strongly resemble the simian, and to suggest an explanation, namely, whether they might not have had a common origin. This is the meaning of Huxley's .\gnosti- cism in relation to the question of the origin of man. At this distance of time nothing could seem more harmless or less disquieting. I have now examined the case of Evo- lution versus Creation and the case of Pithecus versus Adam. There remains, to complete our survey of the Agnosti- cism developed by Huxley, the case of 3' Science versus Revelation. This issue I have to some extent already anticipated. The conflict between the evolutional and the creational theories of the origin of liv- ing beings, and particularly of man, is a part — and a part of great strategic im- portance — of the general warfare between Science and Revelation. To this com- prehensive issue itself I now briefly in- vite your attention. As ordinarily understood, Revelation gives us inerrant truth on infallible author- ity. Science yields provisional theories with no better warrant than uncontra- SCIENTIFIC AGNOSTICISM 45 dieted experience. At fi s t sight Revela- tion might seem to be the more fruitful and trustworthy source of knowledge; and the ages of faith so regarded it. But ours is an epoch of criticism. We de- mand the grounds of belief ; we suffer no claims to pass on the plea of their sanc- tity or of their antiquity. In this work of criticism, the one sure standard is ex- perience. I use the word " experience " in the broadest possible sense ; and I say that the age of science which has super- vened upon the age of faith holds the experience of mankind to be the best and safest test of truth. We are not, how- ever, justified in rejecting everything that transcends the range of ordinary human experience. On the contrary, so far as we know, to-morrow may produce events which yesterday would have been mira- cles. It is not criticism, it is not science, but it is dogmatism of the most arrant type, to assert that miracles are impossible. What then should be the intellectual atti- tude of the candid inquirer in regard to assertions of miraculous occurrences which claim to be the sure word of Revelation — inerrant truth on infallible authority ? I vf pi ^'^'1 J 46 SCIENTIFIC AGNOSTICISM answer unhesitatingly that, before giving his assent to those statements, such an inquirer must satisfy himself, first, that (Z there is evidence sufficient to show that ^ the events in question actually happened, /and, secondly, that their occurrence is ^^ insusceptible of explanation on natural grounds. This would involve a close scrutiny of all the facts and circum- stances in connection with every reported miracle, for the purpose of ascertaining the evidential value of the whole. Nor would this be the end of the inquiry. Besides this specific examination in each case, it would be necessary to make a general canvass of the claims of Revela- tion as resting on infallible authority and furnishing inerrant truth. Appeals to antiquity, to authority, to tradition would have no more weight in the settlement of the question than a fair-minded judge might consider the equitable due of an- cient times, illustrious names, and sayings generally received. I say, then, that the miraculous occur- rences recorded in the Bible must be sub- jected to those tests before any critical in- quirer can be asked to accept or reject them. SCIENTIFIC AGNOSTICISM 47 Of course the natural events described by the sacred writers will be judged by the ordinary canons of historic credibility. In the light of these criteria, we may now afrk what attitude our Agnostic scientist assumed in relation to the claims of Reve- lation. I can, I think, describe his posi- tion in a very few words. In the first ^' place, Huxley finds that, while in some cases the sacred books of Revelation de- clare that certain events happened in a certain fashion, the secular books of Sci- ence prove that they did not. And, in the second place, Huxley finds that while, in other cases, the wonderful statements of the Bible are not contradicted by Sci- ence, they are not supported by inherent evidence sufiicient to make them probable or credible. The total result is, both as : regards historical events and supranatural occurrences, that the same liability to error and the same intrinsic improbabil- ity which we so readily recognize in the narratives of the sacred books of other peoples become the portion of our own Bible, which had hitherto, in almost uni- versal estimation, been set apart by the notes of canonicity, inerrancy, and author- ^f i :!' ■( « ■in $ ( * lif ■ ' ;ili • 'i ; 1 f 1 J! 1 ■i \ 1 ■ 1 1 iil lif 48 SCIENTIFIC A GNOS TIC ISM ity. Huxley bases his conclusion on an examination of typical specimens of the Old Testament ^nd the New ; and in mak- ing his selections he showed a marked and constant predilection for what he called the " Noachian Deluge " and " the Bedevil- ment of the Gadarene Swine." For in- sistence on fact, for force of reasoning, for lucidity of style, for the unconventional way in which he treats theological sub- jects, for disregard of everything but what he believed the evidence in the case, and for the radical character of his results, Huxley, in these writings, was un- paralleled in his generation and in recent times finds a parallel in Strauss alone. I may add, too, that the very general ap- proval which the intelligent public ac- corded to Huxley's excursions into the realm of theology shows that the Eng- lish-speaking world had already entered into a new era of thought and culture — a critical era in which the barriers between theology and reason have been broken down, and the most venerable dogmas left to stand or fall with the evidence adduced to support them. Of course, the Bible contains myth and SCIENTIFIV AGNOSTICISM 49 legend, allegory and fable, poetry and prose ; and it ought not to be surprising that critical science — historical and physi- cal — should discover errors in the sensu- ous setting of the supersensuous spiritual truth and life it was intended to reveal. , Grant that none of the miracles reported I in the Old Testament occurred, grant that ' many of the historical events were very different from what the records would naturally lead us to suppose ; still IsraePs vision of a reign of righteousness on earth and in heaven is to this day verified in the soul of every good man who studies their ' laws and maxims or who communes with their psalmists and their prophets. Or look at the New Testament. What if the "Bedevilment of the Gadarene Swine," .which proved such a stumbling-block to Huxley, never took place ; what if all the mirapulous occurrences in the natural world recorded in the Gospels were the fantastic tribute of a pious generation, unskilled in the art of writing history and ignorant of the constancy of nature's laws, to a transcendent personality who com- manded their loyalty, touched all the springs of their affection, and thrilled their £ 50 SCIENTIFIC AGNOSTICISM 6 I ! souls with a consuming sense of the inalien- able and indefeasible nearness of man to God ? Would not that miracle of miracles still remain, — Jesus of Nazareth, the won- der-worker of human history ? And would not the purpose of His coming — "I am come that ye might have life and that ye might have it more abundantly " — be fulfilled in the revelation He made, not only through His teachings but in His human life, both of the actual fatherliness of God and the potential divineness of man? These are spiritual truths which neither age can stale nor custom wither, which no science can disprove and no criticism discredit ; they are truths which transcend both the order of nature and the secular history of humanity ; yet truths which, once revealed and incarnated by the divine "Son of Man," approve them- selves eternal verities to our religious intuition and feeling — that divining in- telligence "Whose kingdom is where time and space are not." I do not think that Christian faith should be shaken or disturbed by new interpretations of the Bible. That the lii SCIENTIFIC AGNOSTICISM 01 essence of it is imperishable truth — truth of the spiritual order — the heart of man will perennially attest. Intrinsi(3 falsity — what Plato called the lie in the soul — not even the veriest sceptic has asserted of the sacred writings. But we have this treasure of soil itual truth in " earthen , vessels." The scenes in space and events y«\ in time which represent it to one age g^ ^ i The man who propounds it, whatever he may call himself, is the greatest dogmatist the world has ever seen. The philoso- phers who first set it forth deduced it from the premises — the false premises — which they inherited from one-sided sys- tems of thought. In Hume, it flows from an absurd sensationalism, in Kant, from an equally absurd rationalism, — both of them now happily obsolete. And Hume and Kant are the authorities whom Hux- ley invokes to support his theological nescience I The only remaining phase of Agnosti- ^ . cism is what I have called Logical Agnos- ^ ticism. This is not a creed of any kind, - either positive or negative ; it asserts no tenet, and denies none; it connotes an attitude of mind in dealing with evidence, " which is as much ethical as intellectual." It signifies candor, open-mindedness, and a resolute determination to believe what the facts warrant, neither more nor less. The doctrine that there are propositions which men ought to believe without logically satisfactory evidence, or (in Dr. New- man's words) that " religious error is, in itself, of an immoral nature," is abhorrent -V IM I };i ^ ! % m . JL ! 62 SCIENTIFIC AGNOSTICISM and shocking to the Agnostic. Agnosti- cism, in this sense, is synonymous with sci- entific method apj)lied to every realm of inquiry. You will find Agnostics in lit- erature, history, theology, philosophy, and science. They bring existing beliefs to the test of fact, with the result of sus- pending, altering, or confirming our judg- ment of their validity. The Agnostic is a judge weighing evidence, a critic balanc- ing conflicting probabilities. This phase of Agnosticism is that in which Huxley delighted as a champion of intellectual liberty. With an air of superi- ority, perhaps pardonable under the cir- cumstances, he would fling it in the teeth of his creed-bound opponent, as though thanking God (if only there were a God) that he was not as other men or even as this poor "ecclesiastic.'* But the fact is that Huxley missed the real point of dif- ference between himself and the " eccle- siastic." Both of them appeal alike to evidence ; both reason on the facts of the case in dispute. What distinguishes them is that the sort of evidence which convinces one, leaves the mind of the other unmoved. Their methods are the same ; SCIENTIFIC A GNOS TICIUM 63 they are both scientific, critical, or (if you will) agnostic ; and if they reach entirely different rosults, it is because the unex- pressed premises of their reasonings are different and perhaps contradictory. The fundamental assumptions that shape and color all thinking, the psychological cli- mate in which the intellect lives and works, the primal elements of character which remain below the threshold of con- sciousness, — these influence all our beliefs and reasonings, and in a Huxley and a Gladstone they present as wide diversities as any of the contrary theories these distinguished advocates ever espoused. Think, for example, of the impossibility of two intelligent, candid, and critical inquirers reaching similar conclusions on some religious dogma, when the bias, native or acquired, of the one mind is towards scientific naturalism, and that of the other towards ecclesiastical ♦ supra- naturalism. If, however, Huxley meant by Agnos- ticism the adoption of the scientific spirit and method, there is no investigator or thinker, whatever his creed, who would not to-day write himself down an Agnos- I I. H * ■h II P ii i 64 SCIENTIFIC! AGNOSTICISM tic. One gets the impression, however, that Huxley's Agnostic must also be hostile to conventional Christianity. On this latter point I have already spoken to you, and I have no time here to enlarge upon the theme. As to the main issue now before us, I will only repeat that if Agnosticism means merely the candid examination and criticism of evidence, there is no one in this scientific age of the world who would disavow, no one who would not glory in, the title of Agnostic. To Agnosticism, in its various forms, Huxley may be said to have consecrated his life. In one of his latest pieces of writing, — in the preface to the " Collected Essays," in nine volumes, which happily he lived long enough to see through the press, — he has put on record the main objects of his active career. They were, in brief, veracity of thought and action, the resolute facing of the world as it is, the unlocking of nature's secrets by means of science, and the application of scientific methods of investigation to all the problems of life. If he showed un- tiring opposition to clericalism, to the SCIENTIFIC AGNOSTICISM 66 spirit of ecclesiasticism, it was because everywhere and to whatever denomination it may belong, he regarded it as "the deadly enemy of science." — Few men, I imagine, have ever attained more fully the objects of their ambition. Huxley was the great enemy of cant, lying, and pretending to believe that for which there is no evidence. For this all honest men owe him a debt of gratitude. He earned the praise of every investigator, scholar, and thinker by his splendid vindi- cation of intellectual liberty. And even theologians (of the future, if not of the present) may bless him for exposing the absurdities of many dogmas which were yesterday a part of orthodox Christianity, which to-day -^ thanks in some measure to Huxley — have lost their baneful en- ergy, and which, dissolved in the light of criticism, will to-morrow flit to that limbo of superstitions, errors, and illusions which fill so many volumes in the history of our groping race. All honor and glory to this brilliant champion of light, and liberty, and truth I He saw clearly, studied thoroughly, and spoke boldly. • ^ ■) : 66 SVlENTIFirj AGNOSTICISM Yet Huxley liad his limitations. His horizon was restricted to his field of labor: he saw the natural world, but not the su- pranatural which envelops it. His hand was subdued to what it worked in : he grasped the judgments of the intellect, but missed the intimations of the sjjirit in man. He lived in the laboratory and lecture room : no man knew more of the tests and standards of physical science, few men knew less of the postulates and principles of human conduct and life. Huxley's defects are his excellences in excess. He sees nature so thoroughly, uses his intellect so logically, and rates science so highly, that he falls a victim to the vices of Naturalism, Intellectualism, and what (for want of a better word) I will venture to call Scientificism. I have already shown that evolutionary science furnishes no warrant for that natu- ralistic view of the universe which domi- nates all Huxley's speculations. Nay, one may be an Agnostic, as well as an Evolu- tionist, and yet recognize the divine and suprasensible Presence in and above the physical universe. I will explain what I mean by a comparison. Martineau would SCIENTIFIC AGNOSTICISM 67 I ! agree with Huxley in demanding evidence, instead of authority, for religious belief ; and, as Huxley uses the term, Martineau would therefore be an Agnostic. Never- theless I venture to assert that no man now living has done so much to strengthen faith in a free moral intelligence immanent in, yet transcending, the natural world and holding communion with the finite but kindred spirits who inhabit it. As bib- lical critics, Huxley and Martineau occupy pretty much the same position ; as spirit- ual influences, revealing the divine essence of things, the one radiates light and warmth for the English-speaking world, the other stands opaque and cold beside the extin- guished fires of an altar to the unknown God. But if Huxley's contentment with the mere physical interpretations of science was fatal to a theistic conception of the world, if his Naturalism left no place for the supersensuous and divine, his devo- tion to the ascertainment of truth by means of logical processes incapacitated him for taking a just view of the human spirit and foredoomed him to a narrow and one-sided Intellectualism. Knowl- i SCIENTIFIC A ONOSTICISM edge is only one of tlie functions of mind. Mere intellectual assent or denial marks but a small part of the essential life of consciousness. If any of you have read Disraeli's " Coningsby " you will recall tlie striking passage in which Sidonia shows how little reason has contributed to the great events of human history. It was not reason, he says, that besieged Troy ; it was not reason that sent forth the Sara- cen from the desert to conquer the world ; it was not reason that inspired the Cru- sader or instituted the monastic orders ; it was not reason that created the French Revolution. The true greatness of man is to be found in his capacity for forming and cherishing ideals. In this age of brilliant scientific achievements issuing in manifold conveniences and luxuries, I fear we have all been seduced into worship- ping the golden calf of Intellectualism. It would ill become me, in this place and before this audience, to disparage the value of scientific investigation or to dis- courage whole-hearted devotion to the ascertainment of truth. But I cannot forbear to observe that the spirit which each of us is consists not of intellect or SCIENTIFIC A UNOS TICISM 69 reason alone. And this discernment of the real constitution of human nature iu not without important consequences. For one thing, it follows that the maxims which are binding on the scientist in the investigation of nature may be irrele- vant or even injurious to the rest of man- kind who are engaged in other affairs. For the scientist, Huxley says, " scepti- cism is the highest of duties ; blind faith the one unpardonable sin." Now if this be the duty of the scientist, it is not the duty of the parent or child, of the statesman or teacher, of the merchant or manufacturer, of the clerk or financier. Nay, has not every true man faith — " blind faith " — in his mother and in his friends, in his country, and in the rule of Eternal Providence ? It is, unhappily, true that the scientist's devotion to " scep- ticism " may unfit him for living that larger life which breathes the atmosphere of faith. Darwin observed in his own case an atrophy of the poetic and lesthetic sensibilities ; and readers of his life will feel that his religious faith suffered decay from the same cause. Cramping and warping is the penalty of specialization 11 r it ill V m I' ill t i In ! 70 SCIENTIFIC AGNOSTICISM along whatever line it follow. But the fact remains that for living our human lives faith is as essential as scepticism, nay, far more essential. It was his fail- ure to comprehend the depths and riches of the human spirit, whose logical opera- tions alone concerned him as a scientist, that led Huxley to the shrine of Intellect- ualism, whose creed, however fruitful for science, becomes, if applied beyond the domain of science, a desecration and blight to the whole spiritual and active life of humanity. A few words on what I have called Huxley's Scientificism, and 1 will bid you good night. By this term I mean to designate the astonishing prejudice that the scientific investigator, the man who has great knowledge of the natural world, is, as such, an authority on the things of the spirit. This is a prejudice which indicates no self-conceit in Huxley; for he shared it with the generations that have grown up in the atmosphere of modern science. We all want to know what Darwin or Helmholtz or any other oracle of the natural world thought of the moral and spiritual problems which weigh B If! i ! 1 ■' i SCIENTIFIC A GNOS TICISM 71 upon us. We find, however, through mournful disappointments, that they have little or nothing to tell us. They have had no special experience that way, if in- deed their minds have not been closed to this order of reality. In consulting them our age has made the mistake of confer- ring with perhaps the worst-qualified ex- ponents of the spiritual world to whom it was possible to address such inquiries. Mr. Gladstone has recently recorded it, as a generalization of his long experience with Englishmen of every class and type, that the description of persons who are engaged in political employment or who are in any way habitually conversant with human nature, conduct, and concerns are very much less borne down by scepticism than srdcialists of various kinds and. those whose pursuits have associated them with the study, history, and framework of in- animate nature. How can this latter class be expected to tell us anything about that of which they have had no experience ? The oracle to consult in matters of religion is the man of faith and action, not the man of scepticism and science. His reports of the spiritual world, as verified in his own f M V \ 3 Ill ,■!*■' !■ r 72 SCIENTIFIC A GNOS TICISM life, are entitled to the same weight as the observations, verified by artificial experi- ment, which the scientist reports of the natural world. If the one is our authority for scientific belief, the other is entitled to be our authority for religious faith. I will not here name our highest authority for belief and trust in God. It is enough that you address your inquiries to any man of action who allied himself with moral causes and worked for spiritual ends. I take at random a product of our own native soil. Huxley says that Darwin was " the in- corporated ideal of a man of science." I should say that Lincoln was the incorpo- rated ideal of a man of action. Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln! These are the two greatest names of the century. The one wrought a revolution in natural science, the other in tho affairs and insti- tutions of his own country. There are strange coincidences in the lives of these two men. Both were born on the 12ch day of February, 1809. The Englishman had the advantage of a refined home, a school and college (?ducation, travel and study abroad, and the leisure of a lifetime SCIENTIFIC AGNOSTICISM 73 to meditate and write. Lincoln was born in a log -cabin in Kentucky, went to school for less than a year, worked as a common farm laborer till he became of age, and served afterwards as a boatman, a clerk, a storekeeper, a soldier, a postmaster, and a surveyor, until finally he became a lawyer and in 1834 wa ; elected to the legislature of Illingis. For the next two decades Lincoln lived a comparatively uneventful life, not distinguishing himself above his contemporaries, and had he died before 1857 the world would never have heard his name. Throughout this same period Darwin, in studious retirement, unknown to the public, was chewing the cud of natural selection. At the same time both men were suddenly pushed into prominence and publicity, and had fame thrust upon them, by the action of illus- trious rivals who threatened to pluck their foreordained honors. The inciting genius of the one was Wallace ; of the other, Douglas. Alike moved to action in 1858, Darwin published the first outline of a new theory of the origin of species, which was destined to put him at the head of modern science ; and Lincoln de- 1 3 3 ■! > it :i ; . i-^^WiFlVni^VRHII [■ i J 74 SCIENTIFIC AGNOSTICISM livered his " divided house " speech, which made him two years later President of the United States. Never before in the history of the world did a ruler come to so dubious and diffi- cult an estate. The Republic was already in the throes of dismemberment. Lincoln himself, who had been elected by a popu- lar vote a million smaller than that re- ceived by the three defeated candidates, was an object of distrust and prejudice to a majority of the people and of ridicule and contempt to a not inconsiderable mi- nority. His party was made up of dis- cordant elements ; and the opposite party was suspicious and hostile. There were no leaders who commanded the confidence of the public, either in statesmanship or in war. The army, small as it was, was scattered, and many of its officers had deserted. There was no money in the treasury, and the national credit was sinking. The seceding states, which had long been preparing for the contest, im- mediately organized under a strong cen- tral government ; and their organization, their unity of purpose and community of interest, their previous habits and experi- : n SCIENTIFIC AGNOSTICISM 75 ence, their matchless generals, and their immediately available military resources gave them at the outset an enormous advantage. The great powers of West- ern Europe manifested a cold neutrality, and cherished a secret hostility, towards the national government ; and their sym- pathy and moral support were given to the confederates. Yet from all these dire circumstances the inexperienced man of the prairies wrested immortal victory. He united his own party, enlisted the support of the opposition, and won the confidence of the people. At his call soldiers poured into the army and money into the treasury. Terrible disasters were followed by brilliant victories, by Vicks- burg, by Gettysburg, aad by the march from Atlanta to the Sea. Almost by accla- mation the great leader was re-elected to the Presidency. And before sealing the immortal work with his martyr's blood, he saw the confederacy overthrown, the union re-established, and the slave set free. His memory is the most precious heritage of the American people ; they recognize in their great war President — " kindly-earnest, brave, foreseeing man " (i liiii u • * 'J • ,,481 Sill >. il ! • r 76 SCIENTIFIC AGNOSTICISM Mi m : \'% f^lii (■'■■ I .'I :rii 'I — a fellow-worker with Divine Provi- dence. This is the man of action, engaged in noble struggles, whose testimony I would seek in regard to religious faith. If Darwin's spiritual powers were atrophied by his absorbing preoccupation with the phenomena of the natural world; if, like the domestic duck whose wings, he tells us, have become shrunken and useless from disuse, the pinions of his own soul, disabled for want of exercise, refused to soar above the solid ground of nature's familiar scenes and occurences; and if the glances he sometimes cast into the depths of the distant heavens only brought him a deeper sense of " the heavy and the weary weight of all this unintelligible world," which he nevertheless conjectured must have a Divine Artificer ; — if, I say, the most scientific of theoretic inquirers has no experience that brings authentic tidings of a reality beyond the veil of sense, let us turn to the doer of deeds of justice and righteousness and see whether the orbit of his best endeavor has ever seen the light of Infinite Goodness or felt the touch and thrill of Will Omnipotent. 1 I It ' SCIENTIFIC AGNOSTICISM 77 Now, it is a happy circumstance that our "first American," as Lowell calls him, leaves us in no doubt either as to the fact of his faith in God or as to the power which that faith gave him in doing what history, I think, will pronounce the supreme work of the nineteenth century. Indeed, Lincoln talked with such serene confidence, such perfect assurance of pious faith, that some persons believed him to be superstitious. Certainly the veil between the natural and the supranatural was for him neither thick nor opaque. God ruled the world in righteousness, and men were the servants and instruments of His rule : such was the faith that thrilled in every drop of Lincoln's blood. " I know," he said to his friend Bateman not long before the war, " I know that there is a God, and He hates injustice and slavery." And again : '^ Douglas don't care whether slavery is voted up or down, but God cares, and humanity cares, and I care ; and with God's help I shall not fail." A greater than Lincoln has said : " If any man will do His will, he shall know of the doc- trine, whether it be of God." Moral action is the road to spiritual intuition. %k i 1 1 • v.; fJl: I i 3- >}l i 1 78 SCIENTIFIC AGNOSTICISM This great truth, which the world is always ignoring, was splendidly verified in and by Lincoln. He took his stand on principle ; he did what was right ; and the right approved itself in his conscious- ness the law and will of a righteous God, with infinite power at its disposal. Thus right makes might. Thus Lincoln saved the Republic. And I wish to say deliber- ately, after reading many lives of Lincoln and trying to understand the history of the Civil War, that in my opinion the Union could not have been restored with- out the unseen, but none the less real, power which came to the nation through Lincoln's belief in God and confidence in His moral government of the world. Nor was Lincoln's faith a matter of tra- dition. It rested on no external authority whatever, not even the Bible, — a 'book which, with Shakespeare, always lay on his table and which he read every day. "No," he said in answer to Chittenden's question whether it must not all depend on our faith in the Bible, " no, there is the element of personal experience." And, let me add, that this basis of religion is pre- cisely the same as that which science SCIENTIFIC AGNOSTICISM 79 enjoys j for the principle of the uniform- ity of nature, on which all science rests, is simply a postulate or axiom which experience confirms but cannot demon- strate. Faith in God we cannot prove though it approves itself to us. It is true that Lincoln never joined any of the churches. He had mental reser- vations about their long and complicated statements of Christian doctrine. But he said to Congressman Deming that, when any church would inscribe over its altar, as the sole qualification for membership, " the Saviour's condensed statement " of the substance of both law and gospel: '* Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy hea,rt, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind ; and thy neighbor as thyself," that church would he join with all his heart and soul. But this confession of faith brings me back to Huxley, whom I have too long kept in the background. Once and, so far as I know, once only, Huxley gives us his own positive conception of religion. It is in the essay on "Genesis versus Nature." He first quotes the verse from Micah : i h Si > ' .J '. y » :1 '■■ \ I i^^mmBmm ■' '' ,iT.' i 80 SCIENTIFIC AGNOSTICISM ''"■ HI"'! m ■i« ii'f mil) '•. h 1:1 V "And what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God" ; and then he adds this statement : " If any so- called religion takes away from this great saying of Micah, I think it wantonly muti- lates, while, if it adds thereto, I think it obscures the perfect ideal of religion." If this was Huxley's own religion, — and that I take to be the meaning of the passage, — then, in spite of all his pro- fessional and controversial Agnosticism, Huxley's personal faith would seem to have been not so different from Lincoln's, although it was probably neither so sure nor so fervent. This blending of conser- vatism in essential faith, quietly and per- sonally held, with radicalism provoked by disputation over unessential dogmas, is no unique phenomenon in human nature. Even Hume, when he was told that he had subverted the principles of religion, replied that he threw out his speculations to entertain the learned and metaphysical world, yet he did " not think so differently from the rest of the world " as people im- agined. It may well be, therefore, that if we go deep enough we shall find that SCIENTIFIC AGNOSTICISM 81 the difference in faith between Huxley, the Agnostic scientist, and Lincoln, the Christian statesman, is not a funda- mental one. The one has voiced his creed in the golden text of the Old Testament, the other in the golden text of the New ; but the substance of the confession is the same in both. If this faith be not the Christian religion, it was certainly the religion of Christ. Yet Huxley, living, was the last man in the world to force himself into an unwilling communion. And, now that he is gone, piety forbids us to rank him with those who might disown him. Let us leave him, therefore, in the pomerium of Agnosticism. But if any wise ruler in Israel, if any intelligent citizen of the Civitas Dei, will hold converse with him there and learn something of his heart and life as well as of his intellect, he will, I think, return to us and report in the spirit of that pro- found epigram in which Carlyle recorded his first meeting with John Sterling, that they did " very well " together, " arguing copiously, but except in opinion not disa- greeing.'* Ml I il Wii IMAGE EVALUATION TEST TARGET (MT-3) 7 // /.. A^ u. 1.0 I.I I4£|28 |2.5 *- u 1.8 1.25 III 1.4 V <^ /a ^w °^i s % Photographic Sciences Corporation v <^\ SJ :\ \ N 23 WEST MAIN STREET WEBSTER, NY. 14580 (716)872-4503 ^. Lfi ^^' u- >. PART II PHILOSOPHICAL AGNOSTICISM " For now we see through a glasSf darkly ; . . now I know in part," I I I \ \ h / PHILOSOPHICAL AGNOSTICISM The Agnostic is one who holds that he / has no knowledge of God, or, indeed, that the human mind is incapable of reaching a knowledge of God. Though this creed is not new, it has reached its highest potency of expression in modern times, and the name by which it is designated is of very recent origin. The linguistic mint- age we owe to Professor Huxley. Bor- rowing the word "Agnostic" from the Greek designation of that "unknown "Kjrod whose altar Paul saw at Athens, he in- vested the imported term with a metaphys- ical meaning to which the original was neutral and' indifferent, and sent it forth to proclaim to the modern world a mental incompetency in regard to the knowing of God, which up to this time had been merely implied by the more general term of scepticism. The new name was coined ii 1869. That an appellation was needed 85 \. \ \ I! i t I III \ i' ! .1 f I i 86 PHILOSOPHICAL AGNOSTICISM -1 ' i'm \ /" proves that the Agiiostic sect was coming into prominence. The church it would supersede was an accomplished fact when at Antioch the disciples were first called Ch^i solans. The canonical writings of the Agnostic sect all antedate the year of its christen- ing. We have not space here to 3xamine them or even to enumerate their titles. But whether the authors be rationalistic or empirical philosophers, Christian di- vines or positivist scientists, the burden of their message is always the, incapacity of the human mind to know anything but the phenomena of the sensible world, or the contradictions in which it is involved when it essays to reach Infinite and Abso- lute Reality. This is the refrain, some- what monotonous it must be admitted, of Mr. Herbert Spencer's metaphysics, varied only by denunciation of those whose relig;- ion consists in humble faith in God, not in confident assurance of His incogniza- bleness. This is the universal incanta- tion by which Dean Mansel would exorcise doubt of revealed religion, as though by poisoning the chalice of natural knowledge he could commend to our lips the divine PHILOSOPHICAL AGNOSTICISM 87 wine of revelation ! Both Mansel and Mr. Spencer borrow the doctrine of nescience from Hamilton, in whose system it appears as the result of an inauspicious attempt to combine the speculations of Kant with the sober, home-staying philosophy of the Scottish school. ' With Kant and Hume (who provoked Kant into becoming a critical philosopher) we reach the foun- tain-heads of modern Agnosticism. Now Kant and Hume also mark an epoch in the history of p^^ilosophy, — for the rea- son, as generally stated, that they were the first to make knowledge itself their problem, instead of the objects of knowl- edge with which their predecessors had been exclusively engaged. But this is not a complete explanation of the special signiticance of Kant and Hume. Not only was knowledge itself their theme, not only did they propose to discover by analysis its nature, elements, and sources, but their primary interest lay in determin- ing its limits, — in settling for all time what could be known and marking off from it what must forever remain unknow- able. And each working in his own way, — Kant with the pretentious apparatus of ^ PHILOSOPHICAL AQN08TICI8M rationalism, Hume with. the simple instru- ments of empiricism, — reached the same solution of the problem : to wit, the know- ableness of whatever we apprehend by- means of our senses, the unknowableness of any other reality. Both agree that the human mind is incapacitated by its very constitution for the apprehension of God. Thus it was not merely by recalling specu- lation from the objects of knowledge to the knowing process itself, but by cpncen- trating attention upon the limits of knowl- edge, that Hume and Kant gave a new shape to philosophy and laid at the same time the foundations of modern Agnosti- cism. Hume's position, however, has so much resemblance to the scepticism that constantly attended, and ultimately super- vened upon, the constructive systems of ancient philosophy that one might, with- out straining the comparison, fairly recog- nize his earliest forerunners in Protagoras and Pyrrho and ^nesidemus. These are the prophets of the old dispensation of Agnosticism, as Hume and Kant are the evangelists of the new, or Mr. Spencer its great apostle to the Gentiles. This juxtaposition of names will serve I PHILOSOPIIKJAL AGNOSTICISM 89 II ' to bring out a truth which seems to be little understood, but which is of the ut- most significance, if we are to see Agnos- ticism in its true perspective. It shows ^ that belief in the jncognizableness of God \ is^no accidental or Ibelated phase of human \ thought. Whether Agnosticism be an i ilTasion or an insight of reason, it is not \ merely a casual or modern eclipse of faith. I However named, it has from the very dawn / of reflection haunted with its shadow the / struggling light of "divine philosophy." / Nt)w a factor so permanent must spring from constant conditions. If the doctrine of the unknowableness of God appears and reappears at every critical epoch in the evolution of philosophy, as it certainly does, it would seem to have some nec- essary connection with the progress of constructive thought itself. A careful scrutiny will show that Agnosticism is the logical consequence of certain habits of thought, of which the human mind can with difficulty divest itself. Like every creation of man, philosophy is character- ized by imperfection. The themes of phil- osophy are Reality and Knowledge. But even the best system has fallen short of a i| ! i n \ t >1' i^ 90 PllILOSOPUKJAL AQNOSTWISM 1 1 1 perfect conception of the Supreme Being and an infallible theory of the origin and nature of Knowledge. Nor is this surpris- ing, for philosophers are but men, and they bring to their speculative work the views and prejudices of the human race. Now, partly in consequence of his animal his- tory, partly as a result of his nature, and partly by the necessities of existence, man, tested by ideal standards, is prone to lay undue stress upon the things of sense, so that he is ready to treat perceptions alone as truth and material objects as the sole reality. From this immersion in sense and matter, it has been the divine mission of philosophy to redeem us. But here, as elsewhere, the real proves refractory to the ideal ; and philosophy has not infre- quently succumbed to the error she was sent to overcome. She has too often re- duced Knowledge to sensation, and pict- ured God after the analogy of material things or mechanical processes. Such a knowledge cannot reveal God, for neither eye nor ear nor any other sense can per- ceive Him ; and such a representation of God as an object among other objects easily discloses absurdities and contradictions. '> ^PHILOSOPHICAL AGNOSTICISM 91 Agnosticism, therefore, is the corollary of every sensational theory of Knowledge and every mechanical conception of God. But Agnosticism is also the refutation of the sensational and mechanical philoso- phy, or at any rate its reduetio ad ahsurdum. The human spirit cannot on reflection be- lieve either that there is no Divine Spirit or that the Divine Spirit does not reveal Himself in the consciousness of man. Agnosticism, therefore, is a challenge to philosophy to frame a rational theory of Knowledge and a spiritual notion of God. And as nothing interests man so deeply as the knowledge of God, we may claim that Agnosticism has been the most potent factor in the movement of the human spirit towards the true apprehension of its Divine original. The Agnostic himself may not always be conscious of the func- tion which he discharges in the economy of thought, and he may even take mali- cious pleasure in the reflection that he is a stumbling-block and a stone of offence to the theologians. But nothing is more certain than that the Agnostic's demon- strations of nescience fail to produce conviction, and their most general and I I i\ 'iii 92 PHILOSOPHICAL AQNOSTKJISM I permanent effect is to prompt thought to a consideration, criticism, and correc- tion of the premises from whicii such a paradoxical conclusion has been inieried. The effort to paralyze reason only provokes reason to brace herself for another flight. The theory of nescience is but the obverse of the fact of science. The Agnostic, in laying down the limits of Knowledge, is a champion of the might of mind. That he can make such a demonstration is the refutation of what he demonstrates. A false prophet testifying to the truth, he reminds one of the description which Mephistopheles gives of himself : << Ein Theil von jener Kraft, Die stats das Bose will, und stats das Gute schafft." Let us look at the matter a little more closely. Agnosticism affirms that we can- not know God. Its thesis is bound up in the two notions, God and Knowledge. The contention is that these terms can- not be brought together. Now, if this dogma be tenable, the reason must be either in the nature of Knowledge, as somehow inadequate to the apprehension of God, or in the nature of God, as «ome- PIIIL OSOPHWA L A GNOS TICISM %\ how transcending the reach of Knowl- edge. Both forms of proof have been used by the Agnostic. The argument, however, in either form is far from con- clusive. Let us examine each in turn, beginning with the supposed inability of Knowledge to reach to God. 'I. Why should Knowledge be disquali- fied from reporting the Supreme Reality ? In the long history of scepticism, one, and but one, plausible answer has been given to this question. It has been claimed that Knowledge consists of sensations, and that, as God cannot be felt or seen or heard or apprehended by any other sense, the human consciousness is inac- cessible to intimations, not merely of His nature, but even of His existence. The argument may be stated in different ways by sceptics of the ancient and of the modern schools, but in substance it has changed little since it was first put for- ward by the Greek Sophists, who derived it from the metaphysics of Heracleitus. Of course God, as a suprasensible being, must be declared unknowable, if you set out with defining knowledge as a con- geries of sensations imprinted upon the ^11 hi ' : ■\ ■ ■ ■ ! •■ - fticjt ^j aa jn ifNPiWy^^ 94 PHILOSOPHICAL AGNOSTICISM mind by the objects of the sensible world. But, as Plato already demonstrated, this conception of Knowledge is palpably false. It labors under three radical defects, which, although inseparably connected with one another, it will be well for us to contemplate severally. hi the first place, this theory treats knowing as a kind of mechanical process. It places the material world on one side and mind as an " empty chamber " on the other; and it pictures knowing as the filling of. the chamber, through the con- duits of sense, with outpourings from the external reservoir of being. Or, to use another favorite metaphor, mind, accord- ing to this mechanical philosophy, is a waxen tablet, and Knowledge consists of the impressions made upon it by the things of sense. The bald statement of this the- ory is perhaps its best refutation. Yet, as it is rooted in that materialism which is implicit in the constitution of language itself, we need not wonder that popular thought has always been in bondage to it. So long as we must use in describing mental processes terms which were origi- nally framed to signify physical processes, t PHILOSOPHICAL AGNOSTICISM 95 SO long shall we be exposed to the danger of conceiving mind after the analogy of matter. With all his sense, circumspec- tion, and insight, the father of English philosophy did not avoid this error, though the third book of the " Essay of Human Understanding " is an impressive warning against it. And what in Locke was occa- sional, and to a certain extent overbal- anced by a contrary view, appears in the latest scion of the English school as an habitual and radical illusion ; for though we may accept Mr. Spencer's personal dis- avowal of materialism, no reader can have failed to observe that his philosophy of mind is dominated by the theory of the "waxen tablet" and the "empty cham- ber." To all such mechanical hypotheses there is one effective answer. The simple fact is that mind is not material or like anything material. It is a spiritual ac- tivity, 8ui generis^, of which we are imme- diately conscious in all its movements, but which we can liken to nothing else what- ever, for to it, as subject, the world and all that therein is stand opposed as object. And it is an equally certain fact that the act of knowing, whatever else it may be, :\ f ! Ik 96 PHILOSOPHICAL AGNOSTICISM if I is no migration of things into conscious- ness through the avenues of sensation. Whta we see or hear objects, the retina or the tympanum is, indeed, atfected with vibrations of ether or of air ; and these disturbances are transmitted by appropri- ate nerves to the cerebral tracts which modern physiologj^ has learned to locate : but they do not drop over this utmost verge of the physical into the mental world, to which, indeed, they are not one whit nearer at the centre than they were at the periphery of the nervous organism ; and ap for a metamorphosis of them into conscious ideas, this is a miracle in com- parison with which the floating of iron or the turning of water into wine is easily credible, — a miracle, too, for which there is no justification, as the consciousness which it is thus intended to produce is given to us as a primal and ultimate fact, being that which is nearest; to us, that of which we are most assured, and that by means of which we know every thing, else, including the cerebral tremors from which it is sought to educe it. " The mind is its own place." In knowing it is not pos- sessed by, but itself possesses, the objects PHILOSOPHICAL AGNOSTICISM 97 ■ ; it apprehends. Knowledge is not the product of things ; it is the creation of the mind. Juster far than the ''v/axen tablet " account of Knowledge is Brown- ing's description — that passage of " Para- celsus" in which poetry and philosophy coalesce in a climax of beauty and sug- gestiveress : " Truth is within ourselves ; it takes no rise From outward things, whate'er you may believe. There is an inmost centre in us all, Where truth abides in fulness ; and around. Wall upon wall, the gross flesh hems it in. This perfect, clear perception — which is truth. A baffling and perverting carnal mesh Binds it, and makes all error : and to KNOW Rather consists in opening out a way Whence the imprisoned splendour may escape, Than in effecting entry for a light Supposed to be without." In the second place, the theory of Knowl- edge on which Agnosticism is based, misses in its analysis of the elements of cognition the most important constituent. It sees in Knowledge nothing but sensations. Of course this doctrine is of a piece with the mechanical conception of mind. If the understanding be an " empty chamber," if the cognition of things be the filling uf H 98 PHILOSOPHICAL AGNOSTICISM it with impressions from without, this inflowing material of sensation must make up the entire content of Knowl- edge. But we have already rejected as false the mechanical account of mind. And this sensational theory of Knowl- edge is obnoxious to equally cogent ob- jections. For when we look closely at the facts, we find that, even if the sen- sationalist's contention be admitted, only the smallest part of our Knowledge would be accounted for. It might perhaps ex- plain the qualities we attribute to sub- stances, — red, sweet, heavy, etc., — but what could it mean by substances, or by the relations between them which con- stitute the most important part, not only of ordinary experience, but also of sci- ence? These constituents of conscious- ness are a standing rebuke to the sensationalist. There are others of the same kind, among which the moral in- tuitions deserve a prominent place. Taken together, they prove that mind is rational as well as sentient. Nay, more, the sense-element of Knowledge is of less consequence than the thought- element. Sensations alone convey no PHILOSOPHICAL AGNOSTICISM 99 information to us ; they are dumb and blank. It is reason which, present at every point with sense, reads into the impressions of eye and ear and touch notions that give thom meaning and make them significant reports of an ob- jective world. A purely sensitive con- sciousness could know nothing; it could not even apprehend its sensations ; for apprehension is impossible without cate- gories of thought to discriminate and classify. If Knowledge were made up of sensations merely, it would cease to be Knowledge. Thus sensationalism, if logicallj'' carried out, not only leads to religious scepticism but to universal nes- cience. It is the lion's cave, from which there are no tracks outwards. It may seem strange that the Agnostic scientist should rest in a theory which is not more fatal to theology than to science ; but this only shows in what a lack of rigorous thinking his religious creed was engendered and what immunity from criticism any fashionable cult enjoys. Be that as it may, an exhaustive analy- sis of cognition will disclose reason as its vital principle. And to a rational Ai • ': 100 PHILOSOPHICAL AGNOSTICISM I i; : i 91 intelligence the existence of God is neither less nor more knowable than the existence of the Self or of the World. The truth that mind is rational as well as sentient, is fatal to the main sup- port of Agnosticism, — the easy argument drawn from the dogma that Knowledge is of sensations only. And with the dis- appearance of sensationalism, which is fast yielding to a juster conception of what Knowledge really is, the Agnostic wiseacres who have terrified the faint- hearted amongst us by pretentiously delimiting and circumscribing human knowledge, will find themselves without a vocation. No other generation, it is safe to predict, will see the farce of nes- cience playing at omniscience in setting the hounds of science. Scepticism may, indeed, survive and manifest itself at every forward step in the intellectual development of individuals and com- munities ; for deeper doubt is the first effect of larger knowledge ; but with the demise of sensationalism, this psycho- logical shadow, though it continue to be called Agnosticism, will never again take itself for the light of ultimate truth or PHILOSOPHICAL AGNOSTICISM 101 pretend that it can pierce even to the dividing of the knowable from the un- knowable universe. It has now been shown, first, that the Agnostic misrepresents the subject of Knowledge, and, secondly, that he mis- reports the elements of Knowledge. The third criticism to be made upon him is that he misunderstands the meaning of Knowledge. Even if the mind were an empty chamber, and in knowing it were filled with sensational material, the im- port of Knowledge — that which it sig- nifies — would be something other than this process of furnishing. Now the Ag- nostic fails to discern what it is whereof consciousness gives us information. He blunders in reading the communication, and he confounds the parties whom it concerns. Sensationalism has so per- verted his vision that he no longer sees realities, but images or even after-images. He will have it that in knowing we are cognizant merely of mental states, whereas what we know is always some Reality, and it is only by subsequent reflection and analysis we discover that sensational or ideational states were in any way in- I?;'i 102 PHILOSOPHICAL AGNOSTICISM ^ ' h I pi volved in the cognition of that reality. The Agnostic tells us we cannot know God because states of consciousness testify- to nothing beyond themselves. But the fact is that Knowledge is a report of Reality ; and if this fact be incompatible with the supposition of states of conscious- ness as constitutive of Knowledge, that supposition had better be dismissed to the arsenal of physical imagery from which it has been derived. That intelli- gence should make us aware of existence, and not merely of its own states, is no more surprising than that anything should fcc what it actually is. How it comes that we are cognizant of Reality, is a question neither more nor less difficult than this other, which iy really its equivalent, namely, How comes it that we are in- telligent beings? That we are intelli- gent beings, is at any rate a fact ; and it is just the nature of intelligence to have converse with existence. This is no the- ory about Knowledge, bat simply a state- ment 01 what it is. And the statement is so self-evident that it would never have been questioned — indeed, it would not have been necessary explicitly to make it / 1 VHILOSOPHIGAL AGNOSTICISM 103 — but for mechanical theories alike of the knower, of knowing, and of Knowledge. Now just as the knower is not a waxen tablet, but a self-conscious spirit ; and as knowing is not the receiving of impres- sions from without, but creative activity at home ; so Knowledge is not an aggre- gate of miscer ineous materials in a store- house called mind, but it is the unfolding of a living intelligence which, while open to all the influences of earth and sky, re- mains identical with itself, and so trans- forms or transubstantiate^ what it takes up L'om the environment as to make each addition the expression of its own life, — a life which at every stage of this process of differentiation and integration attains not only to a fuller revelation but .to a more perfect realization of its own in- most being. In the long course of this development, the essential principles of intelligence — the vital stuff of which Knowledge is compact — have clearly delineated themselves, al- though they are not obscure even in the crude thought of primitive mankind. At first, however, they are rather presupposed than explicitly conceived or expressly de- j I' I 1 1 104 PHILOSOPHICAL AGNOSTICISM scribed. But in the dawning, as in the full-orbed, intelligence there are present three ideas, which not only, fix its circuit but constitute also its real essence. They are the consciousness of the world, the con- sciousness of self, and the consciousness of God. These three realities are the soul of Knowledge, at once its essential sub- stance and its ultimate goal. Its sub- ^ stance, for Knowledge at every stage, ^ from that of the savage to that of the scientist, is an effort to realize more clearly what we mean by nature, by man, f and by God ; and its goal, for the pro- ' gressive movement of Knowledge always returns upon its starting-points, only with a more exhaustive consciousness of the subject and the obj jct, and of God as the focal source of their opposition and their union. Of course it is not meant that these three elements of intelligence are all equally conspicuous at every stage of its evolution, whether in individuals or in communities. On the contrary, there is first that which is natural and after- wards that which is spiritual ;. first the consciousness ^f objects, and afterwards self-consciousness and the consciousness M PHILOSOPHICAL AGNOSTICISM 105 of God. Not, however, that any intelli- gence is merely percipient of the external world; the meaning is simply that at first the objective consciousness predominates over the other forms of consciousness which, nevertheless, are vaguely present even from the beginning. The mental eye looks outward upon jiature before it looks inward upon itself or upward to the common source both of vision and the visible — of intelligence and the intel- ligible world. But though the idea of God is that element of intelligence which is latest to develop into clear conscious- ness, — and which must be latest, for it is the unity of the difference of the self and the not-self, which are, therefore, presup- posed, — it has not less validity in itself, it gives no less trustworthy assurance of actuality, than the consciousness of the self or the consciousness of the not-self. This is a point which philosophy has per- haps not sufficiently emphasized. At any rate, it is a point which the Agnostic fails to appreciate. For if it is conceded that there is an objective world of which something is known, and a subjective spirit of whom something is known, it 1^1 106 PHILOSOPHICAL AGNOSTICISM l:i (I cannot be that we are ignorant of God or in doubt of His existence. Like the self and the world, God is given to us as the presupposition of intelligence ; and so long as this evidence accredits them it cannot discredit Him. It might of course be said that we know no realities at all — neither finite nor infinite ; but this view is repugnant to common sense, it rests on a false ideal of Knowledge, and in prac- tice it is impossible to carry out. Knowl- edge cannot relax its hold on Reality, for Reality is the substance of its story. And the point here emphasized is that our knowledge of God is the same in kind as our knowledge of the external world or of ourselves. If it should be urged that, in the history of scepticism, the divine existence has often been put in doubt, one might retort that the self and the world have fared no bet- ter at the hands of materialists and subjec- tive idealists. These historical instances remind us of the danger of operating with one-sided abstractions and turning them against each other. In the face of such arbitrary partisanship for either the sub- ject or the object, or for either the finite ■i PHILOSOPHICAL AQNOSTWISM 107 or the infinite, the fact needs to be stated that as intelligence is conversant with nat- ure, and self, and God, so it knows them, not in isolation from one another, but only in their mutual relation and implication. We are not conscious of ourselves in sep- aration from the objective world : on the contrary, the latter nourishes our subjec- tive life of feeling and of cognition while, in volition, we react against it. Neither do we know the object divorced from the subject : it is we who perceive it ; ours are the sensations which give content to the perception, ours the thoughts which con- strue it into an object possessing definite qualities of its own and having definite relations to other objects in the expanse of an all-embracing space and the se- quence of an ever-during time. And as subject aid object mutually imply each ' other, so, if Knowledge is to be complete, they presuppose a principle of unity as ground of tn /«: connection and reconcilia- tion of their opposition. Only on rising to this unity, only when we "see all things I \ \ m I jod, can we see tnmgs as tney truly are. The consciousness of God is the log- ical priuB of the consciousness of self and j - ■ % - V 108 PHILOSOPHICAL AGNOSTICISM ill of the world. But not, as already ob- served, the chronological; for, according to the profound observation of Aristotle, what in the nature of things is first, is in the order of development last. Just be-, cause God is the first principle of being and knowing, is He the last to be mani- fested aiiu known. If this sound para- doxical, it may be asked whether all experience does not show that what is nearest to us is the last thing to be known; and whether, therefore, a princi- ple which is one with the very existence of intelligence should not be the latest to come into distinct consciousness and to gain verification and demonstration. Yet, from the beginning, human thought has been haunted by the presence of God. And beneath ail the crude pictures through which the fancy and imagination of all peoples have endeavored to represent Him, we may discern the never-failing concep- tion of God as the ultimate unity, who, in some way or other, takes up into Himself the differences of the objective and the subjective world. But, as the conscious- ness of the self and the not-self thus per- fects itself in the consciousness of God, II PHILOSOPHICAL AGNOSTICISM 109 SO our consciousness of God, which is no otiose and transcendent abstraction, real- izes itself in all our Knowledge of the world and of uurselves. It is not more certain that the finite implies the infinite than that the infinite moves and has Us being in the finite. In the strictest sense, therefore, nature and man are the revela- tion of God. These two volumes may be compared with the Old and the New Tes- tament. In both cases it is the later rev- elation which is the clearer. Man, as the highest point to which evolution has at- tained, best expresses the meaning and drift of the process and most clearly re- veals the nature of the spirit which under- lies it. Still the God who reveals Himself in man, especially in the moral and spirit- ual life of man, also reveals Himself in nature. All our Knowledge, therefore, of the finite is at the same time a knowl- edge of the infinite. It would be passing strange, if the light wherewith science is flooding the world and human life served simply to disclose our ignorance of God, of whom the world and human life are the express revelation. This illumination is surely not intended to smite reason to m M Jr h| . i if 1 J ll .. 1 ;( ' ' ' f tr ■ ^ ll I Nb II II ■I !: \l 110 PHILOSOPHICAL AGNOSTICISM the earth or to light her "the way to dusky death." And she will escape from the confusion into which Agnosticism would bring her by the recognition that the spirit that fills "all thinking things, all objects of all thought," is known to us through our observations of nature and the experience of human history, but most of all in the stirrings of our own spirit, which wise men of old declared to be in the image of God. From all that has been said, it would seem to follow beyond peradventure that there is nothing in the nature of Knowl- edge to warrant the dogma of religious nescience. On the contrary, since Knowl- edge is of Reality, and since the Infinite Reality is known in the same way and with the same evidence of assurance as the finite realities of the subjective and objective consciousness (which also pre- suppose the Infinite Being as the ground of their union and reconciliation), it is clear that, unless in a mood of finical but absurd scepticism, we are prepared to dis- charge all knowledge as illusory, we can- not impeach our knowledge of God or refuse to accept it as trustworthy. Ag- m I! PHILOSOPHICAL AGNOSTICISM 111 nosticism, so far as it rests on the sup- posed limits of our cognitive faculties, is in reality an utterly baseless dogma. II. But the Agnostic, as was remarked at the outset, has another argument. He finds in the very nature of God evidence of His incognizableness. This argument is not so different i om the pieceding as might at first appear. Both presuppose an impassable chasm between human in- telligence and Divine Reality. But the argument which has been already so fully traversed, imputes the estoppel of commu- nication to a fundamental incapacity of the human mind. The argument which is now to be considered, explains the breach by the essential inhospitableness, inaccessibility, or incommunicableness of God. The pith of the one argument is this, that Knowledge by its very nature must fall short of God. The pith of the other argument is this, that God by His very nature must transcend Knowledge. The eternal divorce of the Divine Being and human intelligence is the burden of both ; only, in one case the ground is dis- covered in a Divine excess, and in the other in a human defect. But the note- :, « u^ 11 ! \ li i) >\ / ,,„HBij w III I 111 ti ; ^1 u i, :!i 112 PHILOSOPHICAL AGNOSTICISM worthy thing is that the incompatibility of this pair arises not from a fault in each separately or in either alone, but from a fault which is due merely to their con- junction ; for that excess of being would not be an excess but for this defect of knowing, and this defect of knowing would not be a defect but for that excess of being. Consequently, in reasoning from the transcendency of God, -^he Ag- nostic is using the same argument as when he reasoned .from the limitation of Knowledge, only he is looking at the mat- ter from a different point of view — from the point of view of that which is known (or rather not known) instead of that which knows. This being so, it will be possible to dispose of the second defence of Agnosticism in much less space than it has been necessary to give to the first. There is one general observation, how- ever, suggested by this argument for Agnosticism, which it will be well to make in limine. As everybody knows, the Agnostic commends himself to men by an air of meekness and humility. His disclaimer of a much valued knowledge which others claim to possess, sounds like PHILOSOPHICAL AGNOSTICISM 113 ! li the voice of lowly honesty and intellectual modesty in a noisy world of self-assertive sham and pretence ; and even when he assumes the prerogative of rebuke and denounces those who will not enter into the kingdom of religious nescience, this reputation for humility ^s apt to palliate, if it does not altogether condone, the as- perity of his chiding, while it may even surround him with the halo of a great teacher of truth unpalatable to a generation of Scribes and Pharisees. Now when the Agnostic comes before us no longer either as a stern reproving prophet or as a good- natured, ironical fellow with a humor for negations, but in the guise simply of a metaphysician who is to give a reason for the faith that is in him, he cannot of course claim immunity from any legitimate criti- cism to which those expose themselves who enter into this dialectical arena. And surely no other dogmatist ever laid himself open to a juster charge of defying his own principles. Something has al- ready been said of the astounding specta- cle of Agnosticism simulating Gnosticism in order to fix the limits of human Knowl- edge. But what sliall we say when it I ' ! '•■I ■. I ■i i ?i fi ^sm^mBmm 114 PHILOSOPHICAL AGNOSTICISM goes on to set limits to the nature of God Himself? Yet this is precisely what is done whenever it is asserted that God is so constituted that He cannot reveal Him- self to the thought of man. How is this divine impotency known to the Agnostic who knows nothing Ijut the phenomena of our sensible experience ? If God is abso- lutely inscrutable, how can you say He must be of such a nature that He cannot make a disclosure of Himself or communi- cate with His creatures ? Surely, in this proclamation of the Divine dumbness, the Agnostic touches at once the climax of logical inconsistency and the height of intellectual presumption. But what giound is there in reality for supposing that the Divine Being tran- scends the reach and compass of human intelligence ? In the theory elaborated by Hamilton and Mansel and adopted by Mr. Herbert Spencer, this ontological argument for religious nescience, though buttressed by minor considerations, rests for its ultimate foundation upon two premises which it is not difficult to isolate from the superstructure and its adjacent supports. One of these premises asserts PHILOSOPHICAL AGNOSTICISM 115 that God is Infinite and Absolute ; the other asserts that man knows nothing but the finite and the relative. The lat- ter proposition we have already canvassed in another connection. It is derived from a false theory of Knowledge, and flies in the face of our actual experience. It has been shown already that the finite and the infinite are known together, and that it is as impossible to Know one without the other as it is to apprehend an angle apart from the sides which contain it. This is the truth in the much misunder- stood doctrine of the Relativity of Knowl- edge. But, not to repeat or expand what has already been said upon this subject, it must here be asserted once for all that intelligence is not, and by its very nature cannot be, restricted to the finite and the relative in any sense which excludes from its purview the Infinite and the Absolute. These provincial limitations are altogether artificial and arbitrary. And with their disappearance the sphere of Universal Being stands revealed as the proper coun- terpart for the boundless scope and em- brace of Knowledge. And when this point is reached — and it must be reached 1 i 'I 116 PHILOSOPHICAL AGNOSTICISM ri by all thinkers who accept ani/ knowlede^e of reality as trustworthy — no difficulty will be created by that other j)roposition which predicates *' Infinite" and "Abso- lute " of God. For the Infinite and Abso- lute is not that which excludes or negates the firiite and ttie relative, it is that which takes them up into itself and in whose embrace they find their truest being ; as, on the other hand, it realizes itself through them and would be unknown without them. This organic and evolutionary view at once of Being and of Thought is the true corrective of that ontological Agnosticism which derives itself from the conception of God as Infinite and Abso- lute. If it is the nature of the Infinite and Absolute Being to reveal and realize Himself in the finite and relative, and if it is the nature of intelligence to appre- hend theses rea'*':es, not separately but together, how, from such a perfect onto- logical and psychological arrangement for the meeting of the Divine Being and the human mind, can it be inferred that they must remain eternally apart ? Man- ifestly the thinkers who drew this conclu- sion did not so conceive either of God or of PHILOSOPHICAL AGNOSTICHM 117 human intelligence. Restricting the lat- ter to the finite phenomena of space and time, — unwarrantably, as we have already seen, — they set up over against these phenomena the image of a reality which was not only to transcend them, but which, as infinite, was to be merely the negative of the finite, and which as absolute was to stand out of all relation to it. Such a metaphysical idol we can never of course know, for it is cunningly devised after the pattern of what Knowledge is 7iot. Precisely because we are intelligent beings must we be ignorant of this nonentity. If it were real, and therefore in relation to other reality, we should have no trouble in knowing it, — were it not that the Agnostic objects, forsooth, to knowing by means of our intelligence because it is a relating intelligence, as though seeing should be forbidden to the eyes and en- joined upon the hands or ears. To know, to think, fo comprehend is to compare and discriminate — to set one thing against another and to note their differences and resemblances. It is in this way that intelligence has come into possession of the intelligible world — finite and infinite i i I 1 I la }^ li t I if I ■ I! i 1 ■ mwmm. 118 PHILOSOPHWAL AGNOSTICISM alike. Identity and difference are the poles about which all knowledge revolves. Comparing is the essence of the cognitive function. We know man in relation to nature and nature in relation to man, and we never know either truly till we know both in relation to God. But the Agnos- tic sets up the* invisible picture of a Grand Mrcy formless and colorless in itself, ab- solutely separated from man and from the world — blank within and void with- out, — its very existence indistinguishable from its non-existence, — and bowing down before this idolatrous creation, he pours out his soul in lamentations over the incognizableness of such a mysterious and awful nonentity ! The truth is that the Agnostic's abstraction of a deity is unknown only because it is unreal. And his argument has no bearing upon our knowledge of God. The Divine Being, whose vesture is nature and whose image man ; the Ever-active Creator, iii whom we and all things live and move and have our being ; the Holy Spirit, who nourishes the world and communes with the chil- dren of men : this Living God is known precisely because He does come into re- PHILOSOFIIIVAL .1 GNOSTICISM 119 lation with His creatures ; nor is He recognized by the intellect alone — the heart owns Him with pious and reverent affection, the will bows before His right- eous law, and our whole soul, yearning as it does for the Father of Spirits, is quickened and refreshed by His presence. This symphony of response from all sides of our nature confirms reason's assurance that God is not concealed from mortal ken ; that though the infinite depths of His being are beyond our present vision, we yet see *' through a glass darkly " and, while not omniscient, really " know in part." Partial as it is, it is this vision of the Divine which transfigures the life of man on earth. Agnosticism is only a transitional and temporary phase of thought. The human mind can no more surrender its belief in God than its belief in a world or in a self. Contemporary Agnosticism, strange as it may sound, is in part due to the great advance which Knowledge has made dur- ing the last half century ; it is blindness from excess of light. The astonishing results of scientific investigation have 120 PHILOSOPHICAL AGNOSTICISM i^ai" ••'l: ^r !i given us new insight into the physical universe and the life of mankind ; and though, in consequence of the immanency of the Infinite in the finite, every enlarge- ment and rectification of our view of man and nature must also involve growth in our knowledge of God, the first effect of this advance has been merely a revolt against the partial and inadequate repre- sentations of God which popular thought has inherited from the ages that antedate the birth of modern science. But the Agnostic fever seems already to be burn- ing out. And as reason cannot escape from its three fundamental ideas — nature, self, God — and the development of rea- son consists in enriching the content of each and adjusting them harmoniously to one another, it cannot be doubted — and the history of human thought confirms the expectation — that reason's next step will be to modify or reinterpret the idea of God so as to inform and liarmonize it with the revelation which science has de- ciphered in the operations of nature and the life of humanity. Nay, has not rea- son already to some extent accomplished her task? Does not the light already PHILOSOPHICAL AGNOSTICISM 121 shine for all who have eyes to see ? The conception of God as spiritual and not mechanical ; as immanent not external ; as working by law not by caprice, and with steady infinite patience not by ca- tastrophic outbursts ; as adumbrated in nature and revealed in the moral and spiritual qualities of man, who is the goal of evolution and the epitome and abridg- ment of existence : is not this conception, in combination with the idea of the Divine Fatherhood (which is the essence of Chris- tianity), taking possession of the best spirits in the modern world and dislodg- ing the Agnosticism by which it was pre- ceded and by which, in a sense, it was originated? Even the greatest of living Agnostics, — Mr. Herbert Spencer, — while still strenuously denying that we know anything about God, yet advances so far as to posit the existence of God as indis- pensable first principle both of knowing and of being. But apart from the peculiar perplexity into which our age has been brought by the attempt to assimilate duch an unpar- alleled mass of new knowledge, both of ourselves and of the world. Agnosticism i ■\ . 122 PHILOSOFHICAL AGNOSTICISM ,i.iA- Ji I now, as in the past, lias been provoked by, and is a reaction from, the excessive dog- matism of metaphysical theology. Indeed, many half-educated persons call them- selves Agnostics merely to indicate that they do not believe the thirty-nine arti- cles or some other churchly creed. The shepherds of the flock, judged by the arti- cles of faith, make such claims to omnis- cience that the silly sheep, in sheer recoil, delight to browse on nescience. The theologians have sown the wind of Gnosticism, and they are reaping the whirlwind of Agnosticism. The harvest will compel them — it is now compelling them — to reconsider what and how they sow. And the analysis already made by the late Dr. Hatch in his "Hibbert Lect- ures" awakens the hope that Christian theology, having at last become conscious of its origin and nature, will slough off what this learned writer designates its damnosa hereditas: its affectation oi in- fallible metaphysics ; its supposition that the Christian revelation, which is the set- ting ''orth of certain facts, authenticates and guarantees speculations which are built upon those facts. The speculative PHILOSOPHICAL AGNOSTICISM 123 m habit was foreign to primitive Christian- ity. It is the invincible residuum with which the Greek world, though van- quished, endowed the victorious Christian church. The tendency to uncontrolled speculation had been inwrought into the intellectual fibre of the time through the pervasive influence of Greek ideas ; and Christianity could, of course, be received only through this medium of apprehen- sion. The Sermon on the Mount pro- claimed a new law of life ; it assumed religious and ethical conceptions without attempting to justify or even to formu- late them; it contained no articles of faith ; it knew nothing of metaphysics or speculative theology. From this simple starting-point, as Dr. Hatch shows, the speculative habit which the Greeks had Ingrained in the mind of the world engen- dered the abstract and dogmatic meta- physics of the Nicene Creed. To a unity of belief in the fundamental facts of Chris- tianity, which was insisted upon from the. first, succeeded the demand for a unifor- mity of speculations in regard to those facts. "The holding of approved opin- ions was elevated to a position at first ■ ii.i i II I?: .124 PHILOSOPHICAL AGNOSTICISM M m M co-ordinate with, and at last superior to, trust in God and the effort to live a holy life." This is the bequest of Greece to Christian thought which Dr. Hatch char- acterizes as the damnosa hereditas. "It has," he says, "given to later Christian- ity that part of it which is doomed to perish, and which yet, while it lives, holds the key of the prison-house of many souls." 1 It is that part also, we must add, which has been most prolific of Agnosti- cism. The claim of the church to pos- session of an infallible knowledge has involved it in warfare with natural sci- ence and with historical scholarship. And so far as Agnosticism represents not reli- gious nescience, but freedom of thought and inquiry, it has deservedly triumphed at every point. The church is learning to leave to science and scholarship the things that are theirs. But it needs, if Agnosticism is to be completely disarmed^ 1 The Hibbert Lectures, 1888. The Influence of Greek Ideas upon the Christian Church. By the late Edwin Hatch, D.D., Reader in Ecclesiastical History in the University of Oxford. — The quotations are from Lecture V, on which other historical statements of this paragraph are also based. ti PHILOSOPHIOAL AGNOSTICISM 126 : ^ to learn one other lesson : namely, that as the religious life is vastly more impor- tant than the intellectual apprehension of its nature or conditions, so no interest of religion demands that we shall define pre- cisely or circumscribe with a fence of words the Infinite Personality that lies beneath our faith and worship. It Is forgotten that we know only "in part." Furthermore, for religion, as for art and life, the Vague has as much worth and significance as the Definite. It is other- wise with science, whose organ is the intellect. But it is a mere prejudice of the intellect — a prejudice against which the feelings and imagination must always protest — that we should deem what is vague to be less real than what is definite. On the contrary, the Vague is, in actual experience, not seldom far more real. And those who, in ignorance of this truth, endeavor to compress it into fixed categories of thought, are always in dan- ger of dissipating its essence. The theo- logical habit of defining what is known only " in part " and setting up the defini- tions as standards of orthodoxy, is a seri- ous danger to true religion. As such , Ml y t ■ 126 PHIL080PHI0AL AGNOSTICISM '■E!l: metaphysical dogmas multiply, Agnosti- cism must abound. But though theological omniscience has been a most fruitful cause of religious nescience, it remains, lastly, to mention another influence which, though less obvi- ous, has been no less potent. It may be described as the Zeitgeist, the spirit of the age, the whole form and pressure of the time. Ours is an era of material progress, of useful inventions, of great practical am- bitions and achievements. We have anni- hilated space a"lid time and made force and matter our doolie servants. But the hand is subdued to what it works in ; and these material operations and utilitarian ends have undoubtedly reacted upon our own spirits. They have imbued us with me- chanical modes of thought and material standards of worth. They make it conceiv- able that man himself is only a machine — a somewhat finer machine than the prod- ucts of his own skill I Now with this con- ception of personality and this estimate of human dignity, faith in man and faith in God cannot easily survive ; and Agnosti- cism is then merely the outward record of a spiritual paralysis already accomplished. PHILOSOPHICAL AGNOSTICISM 127 And to this blight of practical material- ism came, as ally, the Darwinian doctrine of the descent of man. Whether cor- rectly or not, Darwin's hypothesis was in- terpreted as degrading man from little less than angel to little more than ape. That such an animal should be the image and revelation of God, seemed incredible. As Pascal has well said, it is dangerous to let man see too clearly how he is on a level with the animals without showing him his greatness. The effect in the present case was the rise of an evolutionary Agnosti- cism which strengthened the Agnosticism of everyday life and interest. And both were reinforced by the Agnosticism of certain men of science who insisted on re- serving the appellation of "knowledge" for the mechanical processes of weighing, counting, timing, and measuring. Alto- gether the general spirit of the age, both on its practical and theoretical side, has been strikingly favorable to the rise of Agnosticism. But the historical and psychological causes which produce a dogma are not at the same time a guarantee of its truth. The premises of Agnosticism we have n r f ; i'H 128 PHILOSOPHICAL AGNOSTICISM already shown to be false. When the baselessness of this dogma, which is seem- ingly so modest yet really so presumptu- ous, comes to be generally recognized, we may expect to see it disappear. And un- less all signs are misleading, the night is already far spent and the dawn is at hand. But, as we strain our eyes to catch the first glimpses of the bleased morn, let us remember that, but for its humiliation and chastening in the valley of the shadow of Agnosticism, the human mind would not in our generation have initiated the most important reform since the Reformation, — the substitution of the spiritual religion of Christ for the speculative religion of Chris- tendom. PART III ;!■ SPIRITUAL RELIGION: ITS EVO- LUTION AND ESSENCE " But the hour cometh, and now is, when the true worshippers shall worship the Father in spirit and in truth." 129 11 1 iJ m \ 11; i * / ^ SPIRITUAL RELIGION! Every now and then we hear the requiem of religion chanted alike by the spirits who mock and by the pious souls who have " no language but a cry. " I sup- pose we shall always have professional mourners. But it is greatly to be desired that their services should not be prema- turely given. If there is anything in the I world that is alive and active, it If just ! this religious spirit for whose demise cer- i tain mourners go about the streets. The 'body of religion changes, the spirit and ■ the life abide forever. To the assertion that religion is defunct, I reply by pointing to the intense interest which men to-day everywhere feel in religion. It was re- cently stated by a Massachusetts judge — Burke observed truly that we Americans 1 This address was first given before the Liberal Club of Buffalo, and afterwards before a similar club in Boston. 131 ).% ■t k 132 SPIRITUAL RELIQION I ■in ■ ,1 ;,i l< ■it; !;: like to appeal to the law — that there is nothing in the world perennially interest- ing but religion. The ground of this dictum is to be found in the constitution of humanity; for the human soul which the things of sense fail to satisfy can attain its true home and its complete self- realization only in conscious communion with the Spirit behind the veil. What better evidence of the vitality of religion is needed than the fact that millions of our people go every Sunday to church, notwithstanding the crudeness of so many ecclesiastical dogmas and the sonorous inanities of so many pulpits? Men are too strongly convinced of the reality and ' significance of religion to be driven out of the temple by a caricature of its heart-up- lifting services and ordinances. Further- , more, I assert, as a matter of observation, that there is no topic — not even politics, and still less science — on which men are so anxious to be instructed. Man feels I himself akin to the All-Father, and he 'would fain know more of the conditions of his sonship. There are, no doubt, religious changes. But change is a sign of life. What is i| I' Sr I RITUAL RELIGION 133 dead is rigid and fixed. Wb«t lives grows, develops, and realizes its essence through differentiation. In this respect the development of religion is analogous ' to that of philosophy, science, art, or any other element of civilization. Compare the science of to-day with the science of the age of savagery. The investigation of nature's laws merely for the sake of knowing them would have seemed to primitive man an insane pursuit. The goal of his endeavor was to fill an empty stomach and so maintain a precarious ex- istence. If he used his mental faculties, if he observed and made inferences, it was to procure food, to escape perils, and to overcome rivals. For fallacious reason- ing, for imperfect observation, the penalty was death. In that universal struggle for existence, only those properly adapted to the environment could survive. This is the reason why there is so much truth and wisdom in what we call the vulgar, or common-sense, view of things. It is the deposit of the experience of the race tested by its adequacy for life. But this com- mon knowledge kept all the time expand- ing. In ministering to tlieir physical i i! ' I i{ 134 SPIJRITUAL RELIGION in \\\ ■ ■ J ! wants, men were unwittingly in the ser- vice of the ideal. They noticed their five fingers, and invented arithmetic. They measured land, and originated geometry. They used the lever, and discovered the first principles of physics. They watched their flocks under the kindly eyes of night, and, looking upward, they dreamed of the secrets of the heavens. Astronomy is our most perfect science. By it we regulate our watches, take our bearings at sea and on land, and predict solar and lunar eclipses. Think of the astronomer, if you would realize vividly the growth of human knowledge from its beginning, vith our rude progenitors, who could not count their fingers I The poor savage had no chronometer but his stomach. As a matter of fact, he measured the lapse of time by the recurrence of hunger. The word "meal" means originally "time." And the reduplication " meal-time," which is not merely a peculiarity of our lan- guage, shows that the sense of time in primitive man was pregnantly stomachic. Time! Time!! like the rising reverbera- tion of a dinner-bell! The measurement of time amongst ourselves is astronomical; SPIRI T( '. 1 L REL WION 135 :^ amongst our earliest ancestors it was gas- tronomical. Would you see at a glance the evolution of human science? Then note its rise in an empty stomach and its progress, often slow and always toilsome, to the mastery of the laws of the celestial universe. Man has evolved, the arts have evolved, science has evolved. Evolution means growth and progress ; there is nothing but has ovolved anywhere in this universe of God. It would be strange, indeed, were there no evolution of religion. I care not liow one defines religion, whether one fills it with superstition or empties it of everything but emotion ; whatever it is, it has come to be what it is, it has had a history, and it is now in process of development. Look first at the development of relig- ion in the individual mind. The mind of the child is wax, on which parents and nurses and teachers set their seal. Our earliest education consists in appropriating the ideas and beliefs of those about us. Children get many of them, more or less consciously, with language ; and their mimetic instinct, joined with their curi- i \' V 136 SPIRITUAL RELIGION ? osity, keeps them constantly adding to the first stock. How much there is for any one mind to learn from the mind of the race I A lifetime would be insufficient for any one of us to acquire and assimilate the mental products which the previous generations have transmitted. The utility of such general information is also obvious enough. Yet I wish to point out that j something else besides the absorption of i pre-existing material is required to make ' a man. Unquestioning recipiency, how- \ ever far you carry it, is only the infantile stage of education. Many persons, per- I haps the majority, never go very much ■ farther ; they believe what they are told, \ and consider themselves learned when they have been told a great deal. 1 know an encyclopaedic professor of theology who said to a doubting student: "Sir, I never had a doubt in my life." That man's mind was like the mind of a little \ child, not m its guilelessness, which is a Christian virtue, but in its absolute de- pendence upon others' thought. ^ The great Teacher bade men live each --^^is own individual life, heedless of the rules and traditions of Scribes and Phari- 11 SPIRITUAL RELIGION 137 sees. This is the second stage in the development of the soul. The first stage is that of acquiescence and absorption in custom, tradition, inherited beliefs, and sacrosanct formulae. These are our first schoolmasters ; and the discipline they give us is invaluable. The impression they make is so deep and lasting that many persons never pass to the higher stage of free and independent manhood. Yet there is probably in every mind a certain growth in this direction. In the best minds the tendency is so strong tAat it issues in what, considering its nature and its effects, we may designate a spiritual puberty. It is a coming of age of the master of the house, who has hitherto been kept in leading-strings. He is disposed to call everybody to account. He despises tradition, sneers at custom, doubts the certainties of the creeds, and finds that nothing is indubi- table on earth or in heaven. The assimi- lating soul has become reactive ; the unchained Titan flings himself against every restraining authority. This is the stage of doubt that follows in normal mental development — if this develop- r I- V vi m 'I'l m 138 SPIRITUAL RELIGION \ \ \ ment is carried along naturally — upon the stage of credulity and acquiescence. In some form, though not perhaps in this violent degree, every thoughtful j outh must be conscious of such an experience. It is, certainly, no uncommon thing to see the credulity and submission of youth give way to doubt, denial, and fire-eyed defiance. But this is an abnormal condi- tion of the soul ; from the nature of the case, it cannot endure. It is, in fact, the hurricane which precedes the settled calm ; it is the darkness of chaos ere the spirit says, "Let there be light." The third stage of mental development — happy is he who attains thereunto ! — consists in the readjustment of the old material to the new, in the discovery of a higher standpoint, in the attainment of an ultimate view of things broad enough to embrace all the facts we know of man and nature and God, in such harmonious relations as will satisfy the demands of the scientific intellect and the yearnings of that human heart whereby we live. Credulity, doubt, reasoned belief, or faith: these are the three phases of mental development, and, therefore, they are the ill SPIRITUAL RELIGION 139 three stages of the evolution of religion in the individual soul. The child lives by faith as by his mother's milk; the youth, conscious of strength, revolts against the powers that have held him in tutelage; the man regains peace by a larger knowl- edge and a riper experience, through which the youth's doubt iso^KC^^® ^^^ the child's faith esse]lti|dt)|^^d||Bkted. I Scepticism ^,^ may iajr^^^ I' place, riot ig^Jali'l^W'^ growing-pains of the spirit. Agnosticism is the apotheosis of scep- ticism. It is scepticism as a creed, as a system, as an ultimate resting-place. Those who proclaim it strangely misread the processes and the conditions of our spiritual life. They make the aimless gropings of the youthful intellect an ideal for the thinking of mature men. Only, instead of the awful earnestness of the in- quiring youth, they often affect an indiffer- ence to the great problems which oppress I him. As though we could be indifferent to the highest interests of the human ' spirit! So long as life lasts, so long must we strive to grasp the ultimate truth of things. To shut our eyes to problems is \S. 140 SPIRITUAL RELIGION I // an ostrich policy. Man is called by an inner voice to strive, and strive, and strive, and not to yield. Agnosticism would eradicate this noble endeavor. Its only justification, so far as I can see, is that men never attain the absolute truth, but only make successive approximations to it. But this very fact indicates with reason- able clearness that God meant our life to be one of constant and progressive en- deavor. Such was, in the last century, the faith of Lessing, and, in this, of Browning. Our religious thought is to be on the growth. The complaint that no system is final rests upon a misappre- hension of the nature of thought ; for thought realizes itself only in continuous progression. The evolution of religious belief is necessitated alike by the constitu- tion of the mind and by the inexhaustible character of the divine object of religion. Agnosticism is a passing fever of juvenile free-thinking. So much, then, of evolution from the point of view of the individual soul. But religion has also an objective side. It is a system of doctrine and worship em- bodied in the creeds and rituals of the SPiniTUAL RELIGION 141 churches. When we speak of the evolu- tion of religion, it is of this body of dogmas we think first. After the sketch I have given of the development of relig- ion in the individual mind, it will not be so difficult to trace the development of religion as an objective system and insti- tution, that is, as an established doctrine and mode of worship. Hitherto we have regarded religion as a process in the mind of the single person ; now we are to re- gard it as a product of the mind of hu- manity. The first thing to be noted in the early history of religions is that dogma occupies a quite inconspicuous position. With the history of Christianity before our eyes, this statement seems paradoxical. But the fact is that Christianity differs from all earlier religions in its insistence on articles of faith. Yet this dogmatic spirit, as modern criticism shows, was a late development in the Christian church, and a foreign graft upon primitive Christian- ity. Not belief, but ritual, is the key- note of primitive religions. Their essence is a cult, not a creed. They prescribe modes in which God's anger may be <: I iJ ii 1 i:'! •i if 142 SPIRITUAL RELIGION ' averted or His favor enjoyed. It is true that all religion presupposes the exist- ence of God. But I firmly believe that no rational being has ever permanently doubted, or will ever continuously doubt, the existence of God, though men have called Him by different names, which best seemed to them to express the infinitude of His nature. Certainly for the primitive races of men, God was an ever-present, a never-ques- tioned reality. They conceived of Him in the two ways which all later thinking has followed, either as a Great Human Spirit or as a Great Natural Power, though never exclusively one or the other. Under the latter aspect, God was terrible as the dev- astating storm or the rattling thunder; under the former. He was the mild and kindly Father of the tribe. According to their experience and environment, primitive men inclined to the one or to the other of these conceptions of the God- head. The tribes that personified the powers of nature dwelt in fear and trem- bling, with a haunting sense of alienation j from the terrible Ruler of the world, ' though with the conviction also that the I SPIRITUAL RELIGION 143 God might be rendered friendly. The tribes that practised ancestor-worship, making God their Father, enjoyed a sense of union and communion with the Divine Spirit, who deigned to join them at the common meal and sit with them round the common hearth. For either class of worshippers religion consisted in cult, and in cult only. There, religion meant the rites and ceremonies — many of them very absurd — by which the hostile nature- God was won over to friendship with man. Here, religion meant the pouring out of libations and the offering of food to the ancestor-God who guarded the homes of his children. In both cases religion consisted of practices, not of be- liefs. There was room for hetero-praxy^ or an error in ritual ; but there was no room for hetero-doxy^ or an error in belief. Hence among the Greeks, — who are the authors of art, science, literature, and philosophy, who, in fact, originated all occidental civilization with the single ex- ception of religion, — the notion of " her- esy" was absolutely unknown. There could be no heretic in the primitive world. Cult was the first stage in the evolution of religion. 144 SPIRITUAL RELIGION i p^ ' The second stage is that of creed or dogma. This is a step in advance of cult J or ritual ; for it presupposes considerable development of the intellect. I have already said that cults imply the elements ! of a creed, — God's existence and man's j power of influencing God ; but this be- \ lief is implicit, latent, unconscious, and overlaid by ritual. It becomes explicit I and predominant with the growth of hu- J man experience and reflection. The creed i may be the philosophy of a pre-existing I ritual. If so, belief in the creed becomes as necessary as the performance of the ritual. But the creed may transcend national traditions ; it may offer a new theory of God's will concerning man or of man's relation to God. Thus the Hebrew prophets of the eighth and following cen- turies endeavored to teach the nation, which had given itself up to forms, that God sought justice, mercy, and truth, and could not away with their sacrifices and burnt offerings. The burden of the Gos- pels, again, is just the fatherliness of God and the revelation of His love to man. But such simple, undeveloped creeds are not the most striking varieties of the spe- SPIRITUAL RELIGION 145 cies. For these we must have a body of doctrines, belief in which is necessary to salvation. The perfect dogmatist declares that we are saved by faith ; and by faith he means acceptance of a number of propositions formulated by some council or synod. The believer wins Heaven ; the doubter — let him be anathema ! Among Mohammedans, the standards re- quire acceptance of the Prophet as the messenger of God. It is not so easy to describe the creed of the Christian church. For, unlike the Mohammedan, the Chris- tian nations have been characterized by progress, and progress means more vitality. That which lives changes and varies. The creed of Christendom is not fixed, but plastic ; it is not one, but many. Only death gives the rigidity and uniformity which those good souls desire who are always seeking the living among the dead. A living religion is like an organic species; it never i% but is always becoming ; it is always passing into new varieties. What life there has been in Christianity to pro- duce all the creeds of Christendom, — the creed of the Catholic, the creed of the Protestant, the creed of the Episcopalian, ii i m I If ii 146 SPIRITUAL RELIGION the creed of the Presbyterian, the creed of the Independent, the creed of the Quaker, and the creeds of all the forgotten denomi- nations whom the church outlawed for heresj^ I But one thing is common to all these doctrinaires : they hold that dogma is the essence of religion, and each claims that his dogma is not merely truth but the I truth. Religion is right belief, or ortho- I doxy ; and orthodoxy is my " doxy," while a " doxy " other than mine is heterodoxy. The stage of creed is higher than the 1 stage of cult. We must also observe that i the lower is taken up in the higher, as an instrument for its expression. Thus in the historic church of Rome, while dogma is the soul, ritual is the body of religion, j The rites and ceremonies which constitute the religion of cult, as well as the beliefs they imply, are absorbed, and not only absorbed but transcended, by the relig- \ ion of creed. But not only does this 1 latter make dogma the primary and es- ^sential element of religion, it also multi- plies indefinitely the articles of faith. I cannot here analyze the creeds of the churches. It will suffice to observe that, howsoever they may differ in details of SPIRITUAL RELIGION 147 doctrine, they all agree in furnishing a theory of the Divine existence and govern- j ment, a theory of the origin and destina- ' tion of man, and a theory of the creation, course, and final purpose of the world. These are all vast, nay, they are infinite subjects ; and it is not surprising that the religious mind, in grappling with them, should have fallen short of the absolute truth. What else could have been ex- pected ? Certainly the natural under- standing is prone to error ; and, even if we suppose God to have made a supra- natural communication to chosen spirits, we can only apprehend as much of that message as our finite intellects can com- pass. In other words, given a revelation, or given no revelation, our knowledge of the ultimate mystery of things is but par- tial, provisional, and true in a relative sense. In the past the churches have all sinned through ignoring this consideration. They have claimed to be in possession of the final and absolute truth about nearly everything. The Christian churches knew that the earth stands still, with heaven above and hell beneath. They knew that the world was created in six days, and so ^ H II ill I,! ii. i, I 148 SPIRITUAL HEUGION much of it each day. They knew exactly how the first man and the first woman came into existence. They knew how languages originated. They knew why men must toil and sweat, and why it is . that boys kill snakes. Nor was it to these problems of nature alone that the religion of dogma furnished ready-made answers ; these indeed were only episodes in its main theme. Its peculiar boast was that it fur- nished a revelation of the will of God and of God's doings in nature and in human history. In the books of the Old and New Testament it possessed the truth, final, complete, and absolute, about all things of any importance in the life of man and God. These infallible oracles came from God Himself, who inspired the authors. The church was as sure of the actual I authors as we are of the writers of current 1 literature. Moses wrote the Pentateuch ; •; Solomon wrote Ecclesiastes ; David wrote the Psalms ; Job and Isaiah composed the works that bear their names. The arrogance of this dogmatism is I ! hastening the close of the second stage ] of religion. It is the pride of intellect that goes before confusion and discom- SPIRITUAL RELIGION 149 fiture. Dogma has conjured up the avenger, doubt. Men now begin, where they are thoughtful and serious, to ask whether religion has not had its day, whether the future generations will not be godless, whether the uni- verse, which seems to us divine, will not turn out to be an atheistic machine. France well reflects the Zeitgeist; the youthful philosopher of the new genera- tion, the late M. Guyau, has left us a brilliant work on "The Irreligion of the Future." Be the future what it may, there are few of the dogmas once held dear that now strike us as axiomatic. Astron- omy has set the earth spinning, dislocated heaven and hell, and whirled man from the centre of the spatial universe. Biology and geology have revolutionized our views of the origin of our race and of the cosmos. History and criticism have made the Bible a new book, or rather a new collection of books, written, for the most part, we know not by what authors or at what dates, and put together, as a Bible, we know not on what principle. All the old landmarks, Moses, Solomon, Job, are gone ; and a restless sea of criticism threatens to engulf Ji ■: T m " I' i i 160 SPIRITUAL RELIGION religion with the records it adored. This is the so-called " warfare " of science and religion. For him who has eyes to see, the religion of dogma lies exhausted on the field. Shall we then despair ? Lift up thine eyes towards the eastern sky and see what light is breaking just beneath the horizon. It is the star which the wise men of yore beheld and followed. That mildly glow- ing radiance is the immortal genius of re- ligion. Once eclipsed by nebulous ritual and dogma, it shines no\*r, and will shine upon future generations, in its own inef- fable beauty and purity. Itself the breath of God, its kindly light will cheer and gladden the hearts of all the children of God. Religion is life and spirit. It has long been buried beneath creeds and su- perstitions of men's device ; it now bursts its cerements, and comes forth a glorified reality. The decay of dogma is the resur- rection of spiritual religion. Religion is life with God ; dogma is a theory of that life. The mistake of the theologians- has been in supposing that there could be no religious life without a correct theory of life. As though there SPIRITUAL RELIGION 151 r It le could be no digestion without a knowledge of physiology, or no imagination without a knowledge of psychology ! Dogma was intended to nourish and support religion ; its kindness, alas, choked and suffocated her. The creeds were meant to be the defensive fortifications of religion ; alas, that they should have turned their artil- lery against the citadel itself ! But spirit cannot be captured by mechanism. Life outlives the theories that would tear out the heart of its secret. " Grau, theuer Freund, ist alle Theorie, Und griin des Lebens gold'ner Baum." The third and final stage of religion, which is now dawning upon us, cannot be so easily described as its predecessors. The religion of cult and the religion of dogma are thingf of the past : and it is a strikifig fact that we never know things thoroughly till we have gone beyond them in our experience. There is a sort of antinomy between living and knowing. "Has been," not "is," is the badge of all our knowledge, especially in the realm of human life. The religion of to-day, there- fore, will be better understood by future i;u I Hi! : 'I I 'Jl IW'I! i' 152 SPIRITUAL RELIGION inquirers than by us who experience it. I But it seems to me that it may be de- / scribed, not inaccurately and not too vaguely, as the religion of spirit. Dog- , matic religion is retreating ; spiritual re- i ligion is advancing. Henceforth we shall ' call that man religious who, be his belief and knowledge what they may, is pos- sessed of a sense of union and fellowship with God. In the coming ages of per- fected Christianity, religion will be defined as a man's permanent attitude and frame of mind towards the All-Father. But, while it is true that we cannot de- j scribe very adequately the religion of to- day because it is a part of our life, of one thing we may be assured, that it has not broken with the past and will not be alien ito the future development of religion. ! In the historical world there is no solution I of continuity. The religion of dogma j took up the religion of cult. The Roman I Catholic Church, which holds belief in certain doctrines essential to salvation, at the same time uses ritual for the expres- I sion of its creed and worship. So in the \ religion of to-day, though spirit rises su- perior to dogma and to cult, it does not SPIRITUAL RELIGION 163 repudiate its convictions or wage a puri- tanic war against symbols. Spiritual re- ; ligion will part with none of the elements 1 which have entered constitutively into the I development of the religious conscious- ness. We must be very careful to define 'accurately the mutual relations of the \ three stages of religion. They differ, not in elements, but in emphasis. In the re- a. ligion of cult, the emphasis fell on actions of a certain kind, that is, on ritual observ- ances. - The worshippers performed the rites under the influence of certain beliefs, indeed, and in a certain frame of mind; both of these, however, remained latent and unconscious. The religion of creed lays stress on belief in dogma as essential to salvation ; but it rejoices in the use of symbols, and it assumes, though not very consciously or explicitly, that a sound faith and a dorrect ritual will issue in a pious, God-fearing life. Now in the final devel- ^ opment of religion, it will be explicitly ^''^recognized that its primary and constitu- 1 tive element is neither cult nor creed, but what 1 may call the soul's entire attitude towards the Invisible, — an attitude which, in its highest attainment, embraces the / ML 164 SPIRITUAL RELIGION lb creature's sense of dependence upon the Creator, the child's loving and reverent trust in the Father, and the man's fellow- ship with the Divine Companion who alone can satisfy the boundless and im- mortal yearnings of the human spirit. To prevent misapprehension, it may be noted in passing that spiritual religion is I something very different from ethical or ' humanitarian culture. The enthusiasm of humanity is, indeed, the certain outcome of deep fellowship with the Father of Spirits, as we may see in Paul and Luther and many a less distinguished preacher of the gospel. It is a blessed characteristic of our own age that religion has come to express itself so nobly in practical well- doing. But beneficence is not piety. To ,1 make the love of man the essence of relig- '. ion, is to misread the latter and to divest 1 the former of its supreme spiritual dy- namic. If the religious man is a benedic- tion to earth, it is because his soul is bathed in the dews of heaven. We have now traced the growth of religion as a process in the individual consciousness and as a product of the ob- jectifying reason of mankind. We have SPIRITUAL RELIGION 155 found that, as a process, religious life passes from credulity to doubt and from doubt to faith ; and that, as a product, religion develops from cult to dogma and from dogma to spirit. These two lines of development are parallel. In the life of I the mind doubt is higher than credulity, while faith carries us beyond both to those indubitable intuitions which are the con- stitutive factors of intelligence. Simi- I larly, in the external sphere, doctrines are higher than ceremonies, though from the highest standpoint each gives us only the letter which kills, while it is spirit alone that makes alive. Finally, credulity and doubt correspond to the religion of cult ' and dogma, while open-eyed faith and reasonable hope are the struggling soul's response to the religion of spirit. Indeed, spiritual religion, which we have described as the late fruit of the tree of objective institutions and creeds, cannot be distin- guished from that highest phase of re- I ligious life which, in the mind of the individual, supervenes upon credulity and doubt. At this point objective and sub- jective religion are one and the same. To the religion of spirit, therefore, — a relig- ; T 156 SPIRITUAL RELIGION \ ion which is in the soul and for the soul, — we may conceive historical progress and psychological development alike to be tending. When, from the least to the greatest, all shall in this way " know the \ Lord," the millennium, in which all good men believe at least as an ideal, will actu- ally have come upon us. Towards this goal the race is slowly but steadily advancing. The religion of cult has vanished from the civilized world. Civilization is characterized by a subordi- nation of the physical to the mental ; it puts material things to spiritual uses. The civilized man has come to himself. He can no longer be satisfied with mere external rites and ceremonies. They must be informed by thoughts. The religion of dogma becomes a necessity. It will probably long remain a necessity even for a considerable portion of Christendom. It is the religion of elementary reflection, — the religion which asks and answers questions about the deep things of God with equal readiness and assurance. Its I questions appall the critical, but its an- \ swers satisfy the multitude. Indeed, dogmatic religion owes its security to the SPIRITUAL RELIGION 157 fact that mail yearns for definitive and ex- I act ir formation about his own origin and destiny. By a well-known psychological law, the yearning predisposes him to ac- cept any theory, but especially one claim- ing authority and finality. The religion of dogma has, therefore, always appealed to a supranatural revelation. Behind this intrenchment it is impregnable, even in I the gross form of Mormonism, so long as 'the masses of mankind are swayed more by personal hopes and fears than by in- sight and love of truth. But the spirit of inquiry cannot be permanently repressed ; and in recent times it has dared to investi- gate the nature and grounds of revelation. The answer of the Roman Catholic Church was the decree of Papal Infallibility. The effect of this decree was to reassert the i identity of religion with belief in divinely revealed doctrine, and to furnish an infal- lible expounder and interpreter of this doctrine. It committed the larger portion of Christendom irrevocably to the religion of dogma, for which, indeed, it had always consistently stood in the past. The Ro- man Catholic Church, rich in the reas- sured inheritance of nineteen centuries, 158 SPIRITUAL RELIGION !? K ;. 'ii' I confronts the rising spirit of liberal relig- \ ion with a serenity and confidence dis- turbed only by contempt. The summary procedure adopted by the j Roman Catholic Church was not available for Protestantism. The reformers had I appealed from ecclesiastical authority and I tradition to reason, and especially to the Bible. They failed to observe that these new authorities could not withdraw them- selves from investigation. The "all-de- stroying" Kant dissected the human mind, and asserted the incapacity of reason to know anything of itself, or to demonstrate, 1 even with the aid of other powers, the existence of God or the immortality of t^e soul. The image of the Bible, which Protestantism adored, fell to pieces in the hands of critics who wrenched from it the secret of its origin, structure, and diversi- fied meaning and purpose. We have, I am vqry sure, a nobler Bible than we lost and a diviner faculty than Kant denied. But, in view of the revolutionary work of critical science, scholarship and philosophy, — a work demanded by the spirit of Prot- estantism, — it is no longer possible for any Protestant sect to wave th^ banner of SPIRITUAL RELIGION 169 , final and infallible authority in matters of religion. Protestantism, in all its forms, " originated in the assertion of creeds or polities ; but the spirit of Protestantism has always carried it beyond its starting- I points. Its history is the record of ^ growing disinclination to that dogm.atic apprehension of religion which it o^yes to the Church of Rome. This tendency can be illustrated by a glance at the history of American Chris- tianity.^ At the beginning of the Revo- lution the whole number of religious organizations existing in the Colonies is estimated to have been about nineteen hundred and fifty, or one for every seven- teen hundred souls. The creed of three fourths of these churches. Congregational, Baptist, Presbyterian, and other, was Cal- vinism; while of the remainder some three hundred churches professed the faith of the Church of England. Methodism had scarcely gained a footing in the country; and the Catholics had not more than I twenty-six priests with twice as many 1 The historical data which follow are taken from Diraan's Orations and Essays, pp. 201-264. (The census is that of 1870.) 160 SPIRITUAL RKLIQION V: u !'.! ii' f^' k congregations. If anything seemed prob- able in the future, it was the ascendency of the Calvinistic creed. Now what American history shows is the decay of this creed, and, with it, of all merely creedal religion. The Metho- dists, who had no existence here at the time of the Revolution, are to-day the largest religious body in the land. The growth of Methodism may be attributed in part to its effective organization and in part to the missionary zeal of its preachers ; but there can be no doubt that its main source of success is to be found in its appeal to the feelings and in its disparagement of the intellect in which Calvinism lay intrenched. The Baptists, who are nominally Calvinists, are now, as they were at the beginning of the century, second in numerical rank; but their fundamental principle, — the Bible, the Bible only, — taken in con- nection with their polity, has enabled them silently to drop the old theology and unconsciously to adjust themselves to the new spiritual environment. The Congregationalists, who, at the begin- ning of the Revolution, were by far the SPIRITUAL RELIGION 161 strongest and most numerous of all re- ligious bodies, are now one of the minor denominations in point of numbers. With them the process of adaptation was more difficult, for the body had a deeply ingrained and inherited theo- logical habit. But, after producing Uni- tarianism and Transcendentalism, the sturdy mother also made her peace with the anti-dogmatic tendency of the age. There remain of the larger denomina- tions who made profession of the ancient creed only the Presbyterians. And they have more than held their own during the century. The steady growth of this religious body, which never, at least in form, abated one jot or tittle of its Confession, seems at first sight irreconcil- able with the view we are advancing. But this growth is to be attributed, not to the distinctive creed, but to the wise, orderly, and admirably effective system of church government by which the Presbyterian body secured to itself a full share of the fruits of American Christianity. Indeed, the creed, so long held with the resolute tenacity character- istic of the Scottish race that brought it 162 SPIRITUAL RELIQION I bt- to these shores, has at last come to be felt as a burden too heavy to be borne. It must soon undergo revision. The result bids fair to be, as it was in the like case with the Congregationalists, a ** com- promise document." But the right of a liberal party within the Presbyterian Church will be established, and the last residuum of l^rotestant dogmatism will be officially opened to the leavening in- fluences of the religion of spirit. It may be objected that, while these facts do indeed show the decadence of the old theology, they fail to prove the decay of dogmatic religion in general. The objector, however, overlooks the all- important point that the religious move- ment which we have been examining was not so much a reaction against Cal- vinism as a protest against the interpre- tation of Christianity as a system of dogmas. Only half its meaning can be read from the modifications which have been made in the creeds. For those creeds, which are survivals of dogmatism, resist, like the Matter of Plato's cos- mology, the transforming breath of the creative spirit. It is the penalty of the SPIRITUAL RKLKilON 163 new that it must always settle with the old ; and for this reason its true character is difficult to discern. But whoever will compare the best preaching of the present day with the sermons of the earlier part of the century will be aware of an entirely different atmosphere and attitude. Of doctrine there is now- adays scarce a word. Fuller, larger life is the ideal held before us. The poten- tial communion of man with God being assumed, as it always has been in religion, the whole strain of the preacher's discourse is directed towards quickening that po- tency into activity, making man's sonship vital and spiritual. He finds the quint- essence of the Gospel in the text : " I am come that ye might have life, and that ye might have it more abundantly." Few persons, who have not the oppor- tunity and the taste for verification, have any idea how sweeping has been the re- action against the religion of dogma. It has gone on, gradually and, for the most part, silently, but .with the force and efficacy of a process in nature. The revolution with which the modern world has been in travail is now accomplished. 164 SPIRITUAL RELIGION ^iA ^ Yet the sight of it is a surprise even to the actors themselves. The hand is sub- dued to what it works in, and many of the clergy find it hard to conceive that the creeds which formed so large a part of the material of their theological train- ing are actually either obsolete or of minor consequence. But the laity, who have ceased to read them, are rallying to the support of practical and spiritual religion. The goal of this religious movement is I not uncertain. It is, as we have seen, not the religion of humanity, though i humanitarianism is one of its manifes- tations. Neither is it simple ethical cult- ure, though it leads to the full exploration and development of the moral nature of man. There can be no religion without God.' And one great characteristic of the anti-dogmatic religion of the day is the conception of God, not as a capricious 'Power, not as an external Lawgiver and Judge, but as an Infinite Life and Spirit with whom the finite life and spirit that j is ours may have fellowship and find ever- I lasting joy. Pv^rsonality in man moves \ out towards personality in God, and is met by it. The fuller our conception of SPIRITUAL RELIGION 165 1 / y personality, the truer and deeper will our religion be. It was a mistake of the older theologians, with their love of formulie and finality, that they resolved the soul into a small number of definable faculties. It is one of the many boons we owe to recent psychology that it has taught us to recognize the Vague as well as the Definite in the life of the soul. Just in proportion as we see and reverence the mysterious depths of our own nature shall we rise in worship of the Eternal Spirit who is its source and ground. Spiritual religion is the conscious union of man and God. It defines itself only in tlie process of coming to be, and then only to the subjects of this process. If the result we have now reached, along different but converging lines, be correct, certain conclusions follow as corol- laries. These will serve to characterize a little more fully what we have ventured to call the religion of the future. First, spiritual religion will maintain a social organization. The church is rooted in the nature of things. It is the essence of spirit to express itself, to manifest itself to others, and to form associations with 'l; 166 SPIRITUAL RELIGION m them. Of all shallow speculations, few- are more absurd than the assumption that churches are the device of priests and parsons, the mere organs of dogmas whose decline thev cannot outlive. The fact is that every good yields its goodness only when shared with others. Even gross material things, like food and drink, lose half their flavor when taken in solitude. The common meal is the first product of civilization. Art and science embody themselves in corporate institutions which nourish and diffuse them. The church, too, is essential to spiritual life, in which no man can live unto himself. If this was recognized when religion meant belief in dogma, how much more emphatically should it be recognized of spiritual religion ! Creeds and rituals split mankind into sects ; in spiritual religion men are drawn together by com- munity of experience and aspiration. The religious man will feel (if he will but think of it) that he is an organ of a common life, wJiich is the spirit of the church universal. Few things seem to me to be of more practical consequence for the future of religion in America than SPIRITUAL RELIGION 167 tne duty of all good men to become iden- tiiied with the visible church. Liberal thinkers, have, as a rule, underestimated the value of the church. Their standpoint is individualistic, '-• as though a man were author of himself and knew no other kin." "The ola is for slaves," they declare. But it is also true that the old is for freed- men who know its true uses. It is the bane of the religion of dogma that it has driven many of the choicest religious souls out of the churches. In its purification of the temple, it has lost sight of the object of the temple. The church, as an institution, is an organism and embodi- ment such as the religion of spirit neces- ! sarily creates. Spiritual religion is not the enemy, it is the essence, of institu- tional religion. ^< Secondly, the religion of spirit does not ^^ need a unique or separate sect. Such a limitation would contradict the univer- sality which, potentially at least, can even now be seen to characterize it. It is a Pentecostal outpouring which every one receives "in his own tongue, wherein he was born." It is a leaven working in all the sects. It uses what it finds h\h /,^;. 168 SPIRITUAL RELIGION to hand, recognizing frankly that the churches have gone beyond their starting- points, and to-day move toward goals which would have been inconceivable to their various founders. It pays little heed to the questions of speculation and church government out of which the denominations have arisen. It intrenches itself in the . citadel, living on the best of terms with ritual and dogma which oc- cupy the outworks. The maintenance of this non-sectarian attitude, which is a present note of spiritual religion, may be predicted for the future., as it can certainly be asserted of the past. It is a well- . known fact, though the meaning of it has not been apprehended, that the decline of dogmatic religion in modern times has given a check to the multiplication of sects. The development of spiritual religion in America has had for its con- comitant ^he consolidation of the great existing types of ecclesiastical organiza- tion. Creedal religion makes sects; I spiritual religion uses them, and in using unites them. ^ * Thirdly, spiritual religion will make its -^home with any of the religious bodies SPIRITUAL RELIGION 169 s , which recognize it. It will more and more become the condition and the cri- terion of church membership. As at the present day, so presumably in the future, there will be in all the churches men who, according to their various char- acters and stages of development, stand pre-eminently for ritual, for dogma, or for spirit. But the latter class is likely to increase with considerable rapidity. And it will shape the church of the fut- ure. The first business of such men must be to understand and sympathize with their brethren who have not yet escaped the bondage of rites and formulae. One thing they must not do : they must not part company with them. How is the divinely ordained education of the human race to be achieved, if the children of light mass their torches and leave their less favored brethren in absolute dark- ness ? Humanity is a school of spiritual culture only (if I may appropriate a fine thought of Martineau's) when its mem- bers, who have a common nature but diversified attainments, group themselves into organizations of like and unlike, analogous to that of the family, which is 170 SPIRITUAL RELIGION the miniature type of every moral organ- ism. Consequently, if a true Christian discovers that the o-eed of his church is no longer tenable, his plain duty (other considerations apart) is not to leave the church, but to let his light so shine that others may come to a knowledge of the fact that the church is not the mere em- bodiment of a creed, but th3 plastic organization of a life which is spiritual. His insight into the real situation of affairs forbids desertion, even though he is aware that fidelity may be rewarded by banish- ment or persecution. Such a course is apt to be denounced both by the religious and by the secular press. It is held that the defence is sophistical and disingenuous, and that those who plead it are undermining moral- ity as well as religion. Now I will not deny, though I will not aver, that, in the case of those holding clerical positions of honor and emolument, the course here recommended may be unwise, for the simple reason that their motives may be misinterpreted by those who are always ready to catch the "appearance of evil." But, apart from this consideration of SPIRITUAL RELIGION 171 )t Le )f :e le )e rs expediency, I see no reason why an hon- |est man should withdraw from a com- munion in many of whose formularies he has ceased to believe. My reasons for this conclusion are, however, very dif- ferent from those usually adduced. To read into the articles of faith propositions which they never contemplated, or were even expressly framed to deny, seems to me intellectual jugglery and moral palter- ing, of the most shameless sort. But this sophistry is the product of the religion of dogma ; it is the deposit left by the cor- rosion of doubt. Protestant Christianity, speaking generally, has put away, as we have seen, the religion of dogma, and is even now rising to the heights of spiritual religion. To this religion no one can be true who makes the creed the condition or test of fellowship. Varieties of church government have perhaps originated more sects than varieties of doctrine ; and in the near future it will be thought as absurd to leave a church because one disagrees with its detailed formulation of doctrine as it would seem to-day to leave it because one thinks its system of gov- ernment not altogether perfect. 172 SPIRITUAL RELIGION y -( I > ,i\ Doctrine, worship, and polity will, doubt- less, in the future, be brought into closer harmony with spiritual religion than we see to-day. But the change will be wrought silently and from within out- wards. Agitations for the revision of doctrines and modes of worship are not desirable, if they concentrate attention upon these subordinate elements of relig- ion. If, as is frequently the case, they help many persons to see that there is something higher, they conduce to real progress. Plainly, the religious bodies best organized for development are those which have adopted the principle of local independency. Each church can differen- tiate itself according to the requirements of its inner life and its outer environment. While the movement from dogmatic to spiritual religion is in progress, these various Independent denominations are likely to be the favorite homes of liberal Christianity, When, on the other hand, the movement is completed (if it ever is), the American preference for stable ecclesi- astical order can scarcely fail to inure to the benefit of the Presbyterian and Epis- copal bodies. The latter has, indeed, some ^^. >'f / / SPIRITUAL RELIGION 173 / y C ''^.advantages. For it has not, to the same extent, enveloped religion in dogma, and thus it cannot suffer so much from des- quamation. The impressiveness of its liturgy and the grace and good sense of its forms — which in the seventeenth century filled Laud with a consuming sense of the "beauty of holiness," and in the nineteenth drew from Emerson the comment, ^'By taste are ye saved" — give scope and satisfaction to the aesthetic sentiments which in recent times have gained a very prominent place in the worship of all religious bodies. It is conceivable that some such organization as the Episcopal Church might ultimately become the catholic organ for that spirit- ual religion which seeks to express itself in symbols and in creeds. But the ex- perience of a century suggests that in the four or five favored and consolidated types of " strenuously competing sects," we have a diversity founded upon ineradicable dif- ferences in the religious life of our people. /^ . Fourthly, spiritual religion will lead to a ''modification, if not to an abandonment, of lithe conception of authority in religion. ' Authority is properly predicated of a sov- 174 SPIRITUAL RELIGION W ^ a ereign. He has the right, or at any rate the power, of enforcing his commands. But if the ruler's will is law to his sub- jects, it is only on condition that it limit itself to prescribing or prohibiting certain kinds of actions. Not even a despot can command the thoughts and the spirit of a man. It is for conduct alone that the sovereign is an authority. Accordingly, we conclude that in so far as religion is conceived as consisting of acts or observ- ances, — and these constitute the relig- ion of cult, — it is proper to speak of an authority in religion. In the second place, ^ the term " authority " is metaphorically ^ predicated of specialists who have mas- tered the facts and laws of any particular field of investigation. Edison is thus an authority in applied electricity, Huxley in physiology, and Zeller in Greek Philoso- phy. These masters tell me what I should believe in their specialties, and I accept their teachings. If, in the same way, I recognize a man or a council or a book as competent to lay down valid propositions in theology, the man or the council or the book is to me an authority. Those who identify religion with belief in dogma are SPIRITUAL RELIGION 176 within the line of possibilities when they speak of authority in religion ; that there u such an authority, however, is not a consequence of the inherent admissibility of the conception. But if it is not impossible to think of an external authority — even a final and infallible one — for the religion of cult and the religion of creed, it is a contradiction in terms to suppose that there can be, ulti- mately at least, any authority for spiritual \ religion outside the soul which experiences 1 it. Autonomy, not heteronomy, is the way of the spirit. But since we rise to spirit- ual life through successive stages of devel- opment (for the baby is only potentially a spirit), the agencies which stimulate and incite us to self-realization may, in a de- rivative sense, be designated the authori- ties for our religious culture. Without them we should not have reached the stature of perfect men, or acquired the freedom whereby the spirit becomes its own sole and absolute authority. This religious experience is paralleled by the moral. The source of moral obligation 1 for the child and for the undeveloped \ adult is the will of the family, of society, %, #. IMAGE EVALUATION TEST TARGET (MT-3) ^^ 1.0 I.I ■ 45 m 1^ lii£ £ i;£ 2.0 JiSi 11.25 i 1.4 Photographic Sciences Corporation 23 WEST MAIN STHET WEBSTER, N.Y. 14580 (716)872-4503 176 SPIRITUAL RELIGION of the state, and even of God. The virtu- \ ous man, on the other hand, knows that, while he is a fellow- worker with all the moral forces, human and divine, in the universe, duty would become mere legal or mechanical obligation could any one impose it upon the free spirit but itself. Yet if the good man is also a philosopher, he must recognize that that iTree spirit could never have come to itself, that the ' individual could never have developed into a personality, but for his training in and through society and under law, to both of which he has, nevertheless, in course of time, come to feel his own moral essence to be superior. Just as law and society are authorities I in morality, so the Bible and the church ! are authorities in religion. Through these disciplines we make our way — at least, some do — to the higher altitudes of free and self-supporting moral and religious life. But many fail to reach this stage ; and even those who succeed would surely fall, if deprived of the guides and helps that led and aided their steps. The function of the Bible and the church is, in this regard, educative. The noblest SPIRITUAL RELIGION 177 souls will feel most deeply their value, as they would be the last to belittle the func- tion of law and jociety in the moraliza- tion of mankind. By its worship, even if it be merely lormal, the church puts men in the mechanical attitude of piety ; and, owing to the wonderful connection between our mind and our motor mechan- ism, the muscular exercise reacts upon consciousness and quickens the germs of religious life. No doubt Pascal carried the matter to an extreme, when he coun- selled men to take holy water and observe ceremonies, as if the rest would come of itself. But the general principle is sound: it is the foundation of the histrionic art ; and one of our most eminent psycholo- gists has come to the conclusion that joy and sorrow are the effects, not the causes, of laughing and of crying. But besides its ritual, the church has its articles of faith. The memorizing of these stands in much the same relation to spiritual religion as the learning of the multipli- cation table to the reasonings of the origi- nal mathematician. Lastly, no description could well exaggerate the value , of the Bible as an agency for the development N 178 SPIRITUAL RELIGION of spiritual religion in the soul. This religion emerges, when the human and the Divine spirit meet and embrace. Now the Bible is a record, on a large scale, of man's reaching out after God and. of God's communication of Himself to man. It re- veals God as inflexible righteousness and as infinite love. What a glass it is through which to see the ever-living God ! But how useless, when you put your eyes out ! A scholar, who is the ornament o^ a great church, was recently on trial for a. lesy be- cause of his contention that the Bible, the church, and the soul (or what he calls "reason ") are the three sources of author- ity in religion. His accusers assert there is only one ultimate authority. If the foregoing analysis be correct, neither party has the whole truth and each has a por- tion There is only one ultimate author- ity in religion, — we mean spiritual and not dogmatic religion, — and this is the free spirit of man which finds itself in life with God. The Bible and the church, it is true, are, in a certain sense, authori- ties : they have the authority of peda- gogues who train us up to the religion of spirit. The terms " authority," " finality," ST'IRITUAL RELIGION 179 ^.^x? " infallibility," and the like, are, however, all borrowed from the religion of dogma. They are all inapplicable to the highest I stage of religion, which is not an objective fact, but a subjective attitude — an ever- tending, never-ending process of com- munion with God. ^T Fifthly, and lastly, the religion of spirit "^will be not only theistic, but Christian. Christianity affirms that God and man exist for one another ; that human beings are children of the Divine Father who loves them with an exhaustless love, and that they find their blessedness in a correspon- dent love of Him. This was the gospel . of Jesus of Nazareth, and it is the founda- tion of all spiritual religion. But there is > another sense in which, as I believe, the religion of the future will be Christian. Some liberal thinkers, indeed, have come to the conclusion that the personality of '. the author of Christianity is a matter of indifference to our religious life, if we are not deprived of his noble and exalted teachings. Others would be satisfied with a good example. But this position I hold to be erroneous. Like the religion of dogma, it springs from an inadequate conception 180 SPIRITUAL RELIGION of the soul as mere intellect feeding upon truth. But the soul is living spirit. It grows and realizes itself by contact with spirit. I am moved more by my vision of the personality of Jesus than I am by my thought of His doctrines. Spiritual growth is brought about by the impact of nobler souls on ours. Consequently, I cannot understand the Voltaire-like petulance with which, in his Divinity School Ad- dress, Emerson banished "the person of Jesus " from genuine religion. He thinks that you cannot be a man if you "must subordinate your nature to Christ's nat- It seems to me, howevcx', that you ure. w realize youv capacities only by coming into contact with their realization in others. The objectified self reveals the subjective aptitude ; and with the thrill of discovery begins the higher development. Spiritual growth is the atta,inment of those who con- stantly look up to higher personalities. Now if it is true of Jesus Christ (as Emer- son says in the address) that " alone in all history, he estimated the greatness of man : one man v^as true to what is in you and me," then I should say that you and I are to find our own highest life by open- SPIRITUAL RELIGION 181 ing our souls to the influence of this per- fect and absolute personality. Nay, as Jesus Christ was perfect man, so also, and I for that very reason, was He the revelation and realization of tiie Divine Father. In the new dispensation of spirit, as in the old of dogma, He must, therefore, in some sense, if not the orthodox sense, continue to be our Mediator and Saviour. *