UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA 
 AT LOS ANGELES 
 
 GIFT OF 
 
 MRS.MATTIK H.MERRILL
 
 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP 
 
 IN 
 
 RELIGION. 
 
 A COLLECTION OF ESSAYS AND 
 ADDRESSES 
 
 EDITED BY A COMMITTEE 
 OF 
 
 CI;e JTree ffieUgtou* 
 
 BOSTON': ,., ; 
 ROBERTS BROTHERS. 
 
 1875.
 
 Copyright, 1875, 
 BY ROBERTS BROTHERS. 
 
 . 
 . . . . . 
 
 Cambridge ; 
 Press of John. Wilson and Son.
 
 33 
 
 CONTEXTS. 
 
 PAOE 
 
 INTRODUCTORY. THE RELIGIOUS OUTLOOK .... 1 
 
 A 
 
 THE NATURE OF RELIGION. By David A. Wasson . 17 
 
 THE UNITY AND UNIVERSALITY OF THE RELIGIOUS 
 
 - 
 
 IDEAS. By Samuel Longfellow 46 
 
 FREEDOM IN RELIGION. By Samuel Johnson ... 93 
 RELIGION AND SCIENCE. By John Weiss .... 135 
 CHRISTIANITY AND ITS DEFINITIONS. By William J. 
 
 Potter 178 
 
 THE GENIUS OF CHRISTIANITY AND FREE RELI- 
 
 GION. By Francis Ellingwood Abbot 222 
 
 THE SOUL OF PROTESTANTISM. By 0. B. Froth- 
 
 ingham 265 
 
 LIBERTY AND THE CHURCH IN AMERICA. By John 
 
 W. Chadwick 299 
 
 THE WORD PHILANTHROPY. By Thomas Wentworth 
 
 Higginson 323 
 
 RELIGION AS SOCIAL FORCE. By Ednah D. Cheney 338 
 
 VOICES FROM THE FREE PLATFORM 355 
 
 2065 P:
 
 INTRODUCTORY. 
 
 THE RELIGIOUS OUTLOOK. 
 
 THAT religion still occupies the thoughts of men 
 as a great human concern need not be argued. 
 
 O O 
 
 It may be said to occupy them as it never did in times 
 when it claimed an interest on grounds of its own, 
 wholly separate from other human affairs. The relig- 
 ious question now makes a part of every question. 
 There is scarcely a concern of any moment in which 
 religion does not hold a conspicuous rank. It is de- 
 bated in the highest places ; it is the business of empires ; 
 it occupies the thoughts of princes and administrators; 
 politicians make account of it; statesmen and dema- 
 gogues alike take bearings from it. It haunts the sci- 
 entific mind ; literature cannot leave it unrecognized ; 
 
 * O ' 
 
 philosophy finds it mingling in all its problems. The 
 social questions that vex our age address themselves to 
 it less directly indeed, but no less earnestly, than of old. 
 They who talk of the declining interest in religion can- 
 not be close observers of the times. The forms the 
 interest takes may have changed, but the interest was 
 never so vital before. 
 
 The religious aspect certainly has changed. The 
 theological epoch draws near its close. Fifteen years 
 
 1
 
 2 INTRODUCTOET. 
 
 ago, Mr. Buckle called attention to this, and supported 
 his position by quotations from eminent authorities of 
 the English Church. The impulse given in the reign 
 of Charles II., when the Royal Society received its 
 charter, an impulse clearly understood as committing 
 the English mind to natural studies as distinguished 
 from supernatural, has gone on with accelerating mo- 
 tion ever since, until now the books on natural science 
 outrank in power, if they do not in number, the works 
 on theology. The great writers in dogmatic and spec- 
 ulative theology are of the past. Warburton, Cudworth, 
 Barrow, Taylor, Hooker, are little read ; and such inter- 
 est in them as remains is due rather to their rhetoric 
 than to their reasoning. The human mind has aban- 
 doned that province. The press of England and 
 America still pours out pamphlets and booklets, ex- 
 pository and polemical, with a persistency born of 
 ancient habit; but the tractates are written for the 
 most part by divines who like to see themselves in 
 print, and, having nothing vital to talk about, talk about 
 the doctrines of the church. The quality of the lit- 
 erature if literature it can be called is thin, weak, 
 sentimental ; its readers are the personal friends of the 
 authors, or the pensive devotees of the church in whose 
 interest they write. The working mind of the age 
 turns from theological questions with a kind of disgust ; 
 and as no great thinker engages in obsolete or unreal 
 speculations, the literature of theology languishes. To 
 one who remembers the place it held but half a century 
 ago, this fact is of profound significance. 
 
 The disposition to discuss religion in its political re- 
 lations is another sign of a new era. This disposition 
 has been gaining force for two centuries and more, from
 
 INTRODUCTORY. 3 
 
 the reign of James I. Dr. Arnold called attention to 
 it in his lectures on modern history. In our day the 
 fact declares itself in a way not to be misunderstood. 
 It implies that religion must justify its existence to 
 society, must meet the human mind on its natural 
 plane, must accept the methods of science, and secure 
 its title to support by the .cordiality with which it 
 accepts the conditions of ordinary life. 
 
 The establishment of the scientific method is another 
 fact of vast moment to the religious world of our gen- 
 eration. Scientific men no longer apologize : they assert 
 with an emphasis the theologian cannot surpass. They 
 have their dogma ; they lay down their law ; they speak 
 with an authority that carries weight from the power 
 of their achievements, as well as from the splendor of 
 their talent. Their audience is immense, intelligent, 
 enthusiastic : it comprehends the strongest thinkers and 
 most earnest workers. Their literary performances are 
 marvellous for copiousness and brilliancy : they compel 
 attention and enforce the necessity, if not of accept- 
 ing special results, at least of adjusting beliefs to a new 
 method. 
 
 Christianity is now on trial at the bar behind which 
 it had sat as judge for a thousand years; and the judge 
 on the bench is the scientific spirit it had so often re- 
 manded to the dungeon or consigned to the flames. 
 Its dogma is discredited in the high places of thought. 
 Repeated modifications, definitions, restatements, made 
 for the purpose of readjusting it to the human mind, 
 have so far impaired its integrity, loosened its compact- 
 ness, and thinned its substance, that even in its private 
 haunts, among its most staunch friends, it is no longer 
 what it was. Of its great cardinal doctrines, some like
 
 4 INTRODUCTORY. 
 
 trinity, incarnation, atonement, depravity have been 
 explained till they have scarcely more than a name to 
 live; others like election, predestination, the damna- 
 tion of the nnbaptized, the endless torment of the 
 unbelieving have been, in their dogmatic sense, repu- 
 diated. Millions still profess them, but millions do not; 
 and the millions who do not are the most intelligent 
 portion of the human race. 
 
 In the old world the church of Rome is engaged in 
 a struggle for existence, and is losing. In Italy, the 
 government, though exceedingly moderate in its meas- 
 ures, under the lead of a king, himself a Catholic, and 
 a ministry scarcely aggressive enough to meet the 
 wishes of the people, gains steadily on the papacy, and 
 pushes reforms in the papal city that cause the ecclesi- 
 astical powers to shudder. In Rome, where the traces 
 of Protestantism were wiped out with a swift hand, the 
 Evangelical Alliance has proposed holding its next 
 meeting. In Germany, the battle with the empire, 
 under the lead of Bismarck, goes heavily against the 
 Pope. Catholic Austria modifies her school laws in 
 the interest of secular education. In England, Mr. 
 Gladstone has succeeded in unearthing and exposing 
 the pretensions of the church. The equivocations of 
 Archbishop Manning and of Monsignor Capel confess 
 the truth of the charge they try to evade. None appear 
 in open defence of the position which the ex-premier 
 assails. There is indignant protest, holy horror, honest 
 denial; but of manly championship there is none. The 
 discussion, which is carried on mostly by Catholic wri- 
 ters, reveals differences of opinion that may easily ripen 
 into dissension. The enormous sale of Mr. Gladstone's 
 pamphlet shows that the English people are interested,
 
 INTRODUCTORY. 5 
 
 but there is no evidence that they are afraid ; and the 
 tone of the press foreshadows with terrible decision the 
 attitude Englishmen would take if Rome should ever 
 interfere as a dominion with the organization of their 
 political or social life. On that issue Romanists them- 
 selves would fatally divide. If in the reign of Eliza- 
 beth such interference was resented and resisted, in the 
 nineteenth century the bare suggestion of it would ex- 
 cite only derision. 
 
 This question has not come up in America, and prob- 
 ably never will ; but it may. Mr. Gladstone reminds 
 us that "even in the United States, where the sever- 
 ance between church and state is supposed to be com- 
 plete, a long catalogue might be drawn of subjects 
 belonging to the domain of competency of the state, 
 but also undeniably affecting the government of the 
 church ; such as, by way of example, marriage, burial, 
 education, prison discipline, blasphemy, poor relief, in- 
 corporation, mortmain, religious endowments, vows of 
 celibacy, and obedience." More than once we have 
 been made uneasy by the possibilities of Catholic med- 
 dling with our public affairs. More than once we have 
 suspected officious dabbling and intrigue in elections. 
 It is notorious that the Roman Church has received 
 large endowments from the state, and that it has 
 obtained them through political influence. That this 
 church has heretofore kept up affiliations with existing 
 forms of despotic power is undeniable ; that these affil- 
 iations were not incidental is reasonably believed ; that, 
 from the nature of things, spiritual despotism must be 
 in league with political, is a rational persuasion ; and, 
 though in America the elements of political despotism, 
 instead of being organized as in Europe, are continually
 
 6 INTRODUCTORY. 
 
 shifting from party to party, and undergoing perpetual 
 transformations, still they exist, and maintain their 
 characteristic features ; which are ignorance, prejudice, 
 pride of race and class, intolerance, and contempt, in 
 a word, inhumanity, under one or another guise. 
 
 The decline of the temporal power of Rome may be 
 assumed as an event accomplished in modern history. 
 But it is not generally perceived that the decline of the 
 temporal power involves the decline of the spiritual. 
 The religion must follow the fate of the empire. Rome 
 sees too clearly that the fair vision of increased and 
 increasing sway over souls that is promised as the 
 reward for laying down her imperial sceptre is baseless. 
 By a strong logic she was impelled, as early as Con- 
 stantino's day, to apply her principle of spiritual au- 
 thority to all matters into which moral considerations 
 entered ; and perceiving, as every intelligent person 
 must, that such considerations enter into all concerns 
 whatever, public and private, social and domestic, judi- 
 cial and administrative, she asserted her paramount 
 right and duty to interpose in the regulation of the 
 social condition, on the whole and in all its parts. The 
 claim of spiritual authority is idle breath without this 
 solid burden of inference. The power that controls 
 conscience controls society. On that point Archbishop 
 Manning is in full accord with Mr. Gladstone. They 
 differ in this : that whereas Archbishop Manning be- 
 lieves in the existence of a visible power divinely au- 
 thorized to control conscience, Mr. Gladstone does not. 
 But if the power to control conscience implies the 
 power to control society, denial of the power to con- 
 trol society involves denial of the power to control 
 conscience. Take away the temporal power, and you
 
 INTRODUCTORY. 7 
 
 take away the very throne of power. You reduce the 
 church to an organ of teaching and of influence on 
 individual souls. The right to dictate opinion, to 
 direct principles, to impose rules on conduct, to ful- 
 minate edicts against misbehavior, to visit moral offences 
 with civil or social penalties, to use the confessional 
 for other than strictly sentimental purposes, is taken 
 away. The greater part of her machinery falls instantly 
 into disuse. She is shut up within the limits of reason, 
 imagination, and feeling, where other forms of religion 
 compete with her with more or less of success. She 
 would, thus limited, be less than the shadow of what 
 she was. 
 
 We are told that facts do not bear out this predic- 
 tion ; that, on the contrary, the increase of the Catholic 
 religion has kept pace with the shrinkage of political 
 power. It is said that in 1765, England and Scotland 
 contained but 60,000 Catholics; in 1821 there were 
 500,000 ; in 1842, 2,500,000 ; in 1845, 3,380,000. The 
 Catholics boast of 600 conversions a year; and claimed 
 in 1873, 1,893 priests, 1,453 churches and chapels, 86 
 convents of men, 268 convents of women, 21 Catholic 
 gymnasiums, 1,249 schools, 20 dioceses, 33 Catholic 
 lords, 77 baronets, 6 members of the Privy Council, 
 and 37 members of the House of Commons. But 
 neither figures nor facts explain themselves : there are 
 causes behind them that are not easily interpreted or 
 analyzed. It certainly would be rash to conclude that 
 these facts and figures report a genuine spread, to such 
 an extent, of the Catholic faith. The essential Roman- 
 ism of the English Church, which leads the most severely 
 consistent of its members directly back to the older 
 communion, accounts in considerable degree for the
 
 8 INTRODUCTORY. 
 
 success of the Tractarian movement. The passion of 
 the wealthy, idle, and aristocratic class for pomp and 
 the prestige of antiquity ; the proclivity of the same 
 class, among the women especially, to sentimentalism ; 
 the conservative love of order; the dread of infidelity, 
 and the social revolution associated with it ; the reac- 
 tion against scientific rationalism, are circumstances 
 that will explain a great deal. Add to all this, the 
 singular activity of the Romish priesthood, their devo- 
 tion to their work, the intense earnestness apparent in 
 their lives, the unwavering character of their beliefs, 
 and the tone of authority they use, and the increase 
 of Romanism in England is justified without supposing 
 any deep spiritual change in the popular heart. Mr. 
 Mill, in a recently published essay, dwells forcibly on 
 the power of mere authority to carry crowds away ; 
 but the crowds so transported are liable to be swept 
 back, or borne in a different direction, by the first strong 
 wind from an opposite quarter. 
 
 The ingenious Father Burke told the enthusiastic 
 Irish of Cork that there were 9,000,000 Catholics in 
 the United States, at a low estimate ; while at the time 
 of the Declaration of Independence they counted but 
 25,000 ; and then he went on, with true Irish fervor, to 
 state the details of this amazing spread. The number 
 he gives is probably something more than three times 
 the actual sum. But, supposing it were correct, it must 
 be admitted that they are almost wholly composed of 
 the different branches of the Celtic race, which is 
 Catholic wherever found ; and that from the numbers 
 of that race in America must be deducted the hundreds 
 of thousands who have simply been transferred thither 
 from the old world, chiefly from Ireland. It is not fair
 
 INTRODUCTORY. 9 
 
 to count even Catholics more than once. The estab- 
 lished habit of doing so at the polls must not be per- 
 mitted to disturb the axioms of arithmetic. The 
 Catholics of intellect and culture lawyers, judges, 
 men of letters, physicians are, with few if any excep- 
 tions, of Irish extraction, Catholics by tradition of 
 race. The Spaniards of New Mexico are Catholic, of 
 course ; so are the Italians ; so, in a less proportion, are 
 the French. The aristocratic class, or a portion of it; the 
 lovers of form and ceremony; the reverers of authority ; 
 the admirers of fixed beliefs ; the sentimentalists ; the 
 alarmists; the doubters, who refuse to be tormented ; the 
 believers, who refuse to be disturbed ; the worldly, who 
 regard religion as a police force to protect respectabil- 
 ity, and therefore advocate the strongest church, are 
 Catholic in America as they are in England. But such 
 converts ai'e to be counted, not weighed. Between the 
 indifference of the educated Catholics, whose faith is a 
 sentiment or a tradition, and the stupidity of the uned- 
 ucated, whose faith is a remarkably disreputable super- 
 stition, there is not much room for vital belief. The 
 evidence that the Catholic religion gains ground where 
 it is least implicated in the concerns of the state, is 
 very slight indeed. 
 
 No doubt, the Catholics are making prodigious efforts 
 in the old world and the new. The old Catholics of 
 Germany are trying to recover lost ground, by disen- 
 gaging themselves from the papacy. The new Catho- 
 lics of America are trying to revive the ancient system, 
 by disengaging themselves from the traditions of Eu- 
 rope. But it is probable that the unity of the church 
 suffers as much as its superficial area gains by these 
 diversions. Instead of one church, there are many :
 
 10 INTRODUCTORY. 
 
 its moral integrity destroyed, its power disappears. 
 Judged by its spiritual that is, by its intellectual or 
 rational influence alone, we are not warranted in con- 
 ceding to the Catholic religion as much sway as the 
 largest single sect of Protestantism exerts. 
 
 The weakness of Protestantism, so openly and plain- 
 tively confessed at the recent sessions of the Evangelical 
 Alliance in New York, is attested by numerous signs. 
 In England, there is lamentation over the falling oft' in 
 the number of missionaries, a lamentation rendered 
 more agonizing by the admission that in quality, as well 
 as in quantity, the new recruits are inferior to their 
 predecessors. The Episcopal Church there is disturbed 
 by controversies that increase in bitterness, and show 
 results in secession. The debates on the subject of 
 ritualism, at the late conference in New York, disclosed 
 an unsuspected gulf of separation. The departure of 
 Dr. Cummins with a large following is ominous of 
 dissolution in that communion. 
 
 He that would study the fate of Protestantism has 
 but to ponder the history of the Evangelical Alliance. 
 The very existence of an organization, avowedly formed 
 with the object of beating back menacing and danger- 
 ous foes, Romanism on the one hand, and Rational- 
 ism on the other, is an indication of acknowledged 
 
 ' O 
 
 infirmity. The difficulties experienced in forming the 
 league, the concessions that had to be made, the luke- 
 warmness that had to be surmounted, the appeals that 
 had to be issued, betrayed the extent to which secta- 
 rian divisions, dogmatic prejudices, party jealousies, 
 had demoralized the churches and disintegrated the 
 faith. The disproportion of the result to the plan 
 three or four sects only entering into the conspiracy,
 
 INTRODUCTORY. 11 
 
 and they held with great labor to their allegiance was 
 a confession of weakness it is surprising that far-sighted 
 men should have made. 
 
 The Christian unions which put on so brave a look, 
 and call attention so vauntingly to their breadth and 
 earnestness of spirit, their willingness to sacrifice inci- 
 dentals to essentials, and the deepening of their 
 Christian faith, are rendered necessary by the pressure 
 of rationalism. The sects draw together for mutual 
 support, surrendering outworks of belief they can no 
 longer hold, and consenting in the occupation of the 
 last trench. They admit as many as they can, that they 
 may present a good front to the besieging foe. The 
 liberalizing of creeds, the allowance of different inter- 
 pretations of book and article, the relaxing of defini- 
 tions, are suggestive of decaying bonds. Great boast 
 was made of the expanded temper of the orthodox 
 churches, because Dr. A. P. Peabody gave a course of 
 lectures in a Presbyterian Church on the Christian 
 Evidences. The enlargement was not remarkable ; for 
 the lectures might have been delivered fifty yea,rs ago 
 in any place less liberal than a Jewish temple, and, if 
 read by a Baptist or a Romanist, would have excited 
 no comment. But the willingness to listen to a so- 
 called Unitarian really proved no more than the readi- 
 ness of orthodoxy to reckon on all the forces it could 
 call in. On the other hand, the huddling of the Uni- 
 tarians of Saratoga behind the old defences showed 
 the fear lest longer exposure in the open field might be 
 fatal to existence. When vitality retreats from the 
 extremities, dissolution is commonly supposed to be 
 near. When the garrison retreats to the citadel, ulti- 
 mate surrender is predicted.
 
 12 INTRODUCTORY. 
 
 To say that the modifications in the statements of 
 Christian theology are merely adjustments of the faith 
 to the devout intelligence of modern times, is to con- 
 cede the whole case. The devout intelligence of mod- 
 ern times does demand precisely this, the indefinite 
 modification of the Christian theology; and it will 
 press the demand till every vestige of the theology is 
 swept away, and reason is alone and supreme in the 
 domain of truth. Enthusiastic believers inside of 
 Christendom rejoice to see their religion overpassing 
 its ancient close boundaries, and cordially meeting the 
 human mind on its own ground. But, to the cool 
 observer outside of Christendom, it looks rather as if 
 the human mind had overpassed the boundaries fixed 
 by church authority, and was driving the religion back. 
 Christianity is at bay within Christendom. The " Chris- 
 tian world" contains more non-Christians and anti- 
 Christians than Christians, more unbelievers than 
 believers, more unworshipful than worshipful, more 
 lukewarm than ardent, more irreverent people than 
 reverent. The naturalists outnumber the supernatural- 
 ists. The rationalists carry more weight than the fide- 
 ists. This is so, at all events, in the centres of thought; 
 and the centres of thought are the fountains of thought. 
 The live mind of the world meaning by live mind 
 inquiring mind is deserting Christianity for philos- 
 ophy, science, and literature. 
 
 But a more decisive indication of the decline of the 
 Christian system as interpreted by Protestants of all 
 degrees, from Lutheran to Universal 1st and Unita- 
 rian, is the all but complete divorce of the system 
 from popular life. Its influence on the practical con- 
 cerns of men is scarcely perceptible. The politician
 
 INTRODUCTORY. 13 
 
 sets up rules and standards of his own ; the lawyer 
 obeys the precedents of his profession ; the merchant 
 complies with the regulations of trade; the financier 
 consults' the principles of social economy ; ladies and 
 gentlemen conform to the precepts of fashionable eti- 
 quette ; men and women of the world follow, without 
 hesitation, the maxims of the community they live in. 
 Human existence, in all its departments, goes on un- 
 conscious of the presence of a law that rebukes its 
 whole spirit and practice. This point has been keenly 
 touched in a little book entitled "Modern Christianity 
 a Civilized Heathenism," by the piquant author of the 
 " Fight in Dame Europa's School." The argument, as 
 he puts it, is conclusive against the vitality of the 
 Christian system ; but he might have pressed it further 
 without exaggeration, and shown an equal incompati- 
 bility between modern life and the faith and ethics of 
 the New Testament. The teachings of the Sermon 
 on the Mount are as irreconcilable with the cardinal 
 principles on which modern society is based as are the 
 implications contained in the Thirty-nine Articles, or 
 any other Christian confession. Society drives neither 
 coach nor cart over that road. 
 
 If Christian professors and divines exhibited in their 
 own daily habits the power of the faith they contend 
 for, so that the Christian life confronted the world with 
 a majesty undaunted by insult, and a sweetness un- 
 ruffled by neglect, the assertions just made would be 
 deprived of their pertinency: for then a prospect of 
 ultimate victory might be entertained by the men of 
 faith. But this hope is not granted. Christian be- 
 lievers make strenuous efforts to defend and spread 
 abroad their faith j the spirit of consecration is active j
 
 14 . INTRODUCTORY. 
 
 the number of earnest, devoted men and women in 
 the various communions is very large; examples of 
 heroism and saintliness, of the pure Christian type, are 
 presented by refined people in the heart of worldly 
 cities : but they are not sufficient to create or keep 
 alive a body of opinion ; they are exceptions to the 
 rule, even among gospel people; indeed, they are, by 
 all admission, very rare. Their separate brilliancy 
 only serves to reveal the density of the surrounding 
 darkness. They confirm the condition of things which 
 they deplore : they convict the age of a stubborn, deep- 
 seated, ineradicable fidelity to the law of reason, so far 
 as revealed. 
 
 The chaotic state of opinion on religious questions is 
 simply the result of the general breaking up of the 
 Christian system. Intelligence, being thrown upon its 
 own resources to find a path over heaps of ruin, looks 
 in every direction for an issue out from the falling city. 
 Spiritualism, materialism, atheism, positivism, senti- 
 mentalism of every mode, fanaticism of every phase, 
 mark the efforts that are making to overleap, burrow 
 under, dig through, blast away the piles of ignorance, 
 dogma, tradition, that cumber the ground. They are 
 efforts of the human mind to come to an understanding 
 with things as they are. 
 
 The faith that such an understanding can be reached 
 gains in force every day. The destructive period has 
 about passed by ; the constructive period has begun. 
 In science, the greatest men are distinguishing them- 
 selves by positive generalizations. In philosophy, the 
 lines are converging towards certain central principles. 
 The outlook of Mr. Herbert Spencer's system is pre- 
 figured in John Fiske's " Outlines of Cosmic Philos-
 
 INTRODUCTORY. 15 
 
 ophy," a remarkable book, which, if it establishes 
 nothing, indicates some of the highways that the future 
 intelligence will tread". Lewes's "Problems of Life and 
 Mind," and Strauss's " Old Faith and New," are contri- 
 butions to the structure that is rising on the ruins of 
 the old creed. 
 
 To those interested particularly in religious spec- 
 ulation, cheer comes from Owen, Miiller, Lubbock, 
 Rawlinson, Legge, Muir, Elliot, Tyler, Ellis, New- 
 ton, Oppert, Dillman, Weber, and the noble fra- 
 ternity of scholars who are showing the identities 
 and sounding the unisons of faith in all ages of 
 mankind, and are laying the foundations of a religion 
 inclusive of all special faiths, and more intellectual, 
 more spiritual, more uplifting and commanding than 
 any one. The beautiful idea of the sympathy of reli- 
 gions has already become familiar, and not to " rational " 
 thinkers alone. No less eminent a person than Arthur 
 Penrhyn Stanley, within the solemn walls of West- 
 minster Abbey, has countenanced the noble conception, 
 not in so many words, but in sentences of grave ad- 
 monition to Christians, and honorable recognition of 
 the merits of those whom Christians go forth to con- 
 vert. Up to this time, outside of Christianity the 
 intellect has had the field of religious inquiry mainly 
 to itself; as was fitting, seeing that the need of criti- 
 cism was the most imperative. For a long time yet, 
 the relentless armor must be worn, and the pitiless 
 weapon kept sharp and bare ; but sentiment and imag- 
 ination, recovering from the shock occasioned by the 
 fall of their old idols, are rallying courage to do their 
 part in peopling the new heavens with worshipful ideals, 
 and clothing in robes of glory the august forms which
 
 16 INTRODUCTORY. 
 
 the seraphs at the gate of knowledge allow passage to 
 the upper skies. 
 
 This volume of essays, printed under the auspices of 
 the Free Religious Association, written by different 
 minds, in different moods, for different occasions, work- 
 ing without the least refei'ence to one another, and 
 associated here by no other bond than that of a com- 
 mon feeling of intellectual need, a common persuasion 
 of their personal responsibility to meet it as they can, 
 and a united conviction that sooner or later it will be 
 met adequately and triumphantly, is thrown out as 
 their contribution towards the religion of the future. 
 
 O. B. F.
 
 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP IN 
 RELIGION. 
 
 THE NATURE OF RELIGION. 
 BY DAVID A. WASSON. 
 
 TN the productive order of nature, nothing is 
 *- sudden, there is no break of continuity ; be- 
 tween lower and higher runs ever a thread of 
 relation. Hence the principles that flower in the 
 consciousness of humanity are not absolutely new ; 
 already, before the advent of man, Nature has had 
 them in use, and wrought them into the structure 
 of the world. Religion, accordingly, though as a 
 conscious principle it is peculiar to man, has already 
 a clear anticipation in the forms of life that lie below 
 him. To find it in that depth of relation will 
 assist toward an understanding of its nature ; this, 
 therefore, \vill be first attempted. 
 
 The growth of a plant may be regarded in three 
 several aspects. In the lowest and most limited 
 view, it consists in the formation of minute organic 
 cells. From one tiny cell another proceeds ; from 
 these, others ; and the result is, now a grass-blade, 
 and now a California cedar. Cell-formation, an ex- 
 
 2
 
 18 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 ceedingly small process, always and everywhere the 
 same, is that which clothes the fields, builds the 
 forests, makes the earth green. Such is the atomis- 
 tic view of vegetable growth, taking atomistic, of 
 course, in an approximate, not the strict, sense. 
 It is not, however, the less true, nor should be the 
 less interesting, for being such. Smallest and great- 
 est are wedded in nature ; and a well-balanced mind 
 will be as little disposed to overlook the one as to 
 undertook the other. 
 
 This view, nevertheless, is no complete one. Be- 
 sides this small process, and above it, there is a 
 structural idea, an immanent, artistic genius, one 
 might almost call it, which assures to every 
 plant an entire characteristic form. I remember 
 walking, many years since, over a hill in Maine, 
 and seeing the first buttercup of the season ; and 
 the question rushed upon my mind, What, then, 
 builds that ? I stood astonished to the heart before 
 an object so familiar, looking down through it in- 
 to the great deeps of natural mystery ; and the 
 accompanying thought, new then, but never after- 
 wards to be overcome, was: The miracle is natural 
 order, not its interruption. But what builds that ? 
 who can answer '? This alone we know : the idea 
 of the plant, as an individual whole, is there from 
 the first to make it a whole. A mass of clay is 
 formed by the mere putting together of parts ; a 
 pine is likewise formed by the addition of cell to 
 cell; but in this case there is something more: 
 the whole is there from the outset, only ideally,
 
 NATURE OF RELIGION. 19 
 
 if you will, but effectively one sees, to preside 
 over that process, conduct it ; and, were it not 
 there, no such process could take place. The tree 
 is in a low sense indeed, but a real one an 
 individual ; were it conscious of that individual 
 unity, it would be also a person ; and the notion of 
 individuality is this: an ideal unity of parts and 
 members ; an ideal whole, which presides over, and 
 remains identical with, its own realization. 
 
 Again, every plant stands in a system of uni- 
 versal relations, strictly necessary to its existence. 
 That one grass-blade may grow, there is needed 
 at least a whole sun and whole earth : a sun 
 capable of shining with a given power, and of 
 holding the planet in its orbit by a given force of 
 attraction, therefore having the constitution and 
 dimension of that one which actually rules in the 
 heavens ; an earth holding a spheric ocean of fire 
 in its bosom, with a solid crust formed from this 
 and floating upon it, with a certain chemic force 
 of its elements, with water and evaporation, and 
 seas to supply evaporation, and the flowing air and 
 vapors to temper it. in short, that one blade of 
 grass may grow, this sun and this earth are required, 
 with all their physical history, and all that system 
 of relations which their existence implies. The 
 plant, therefore, has not merely its physical roots, 
 ramifying through some few inches or feet of soil, 
 but also its unseen roots of vital relation ; and 
 these extend through what a space in the present, 
 through what a depth in the past !
 
 20 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 The husbandman that awaits the coming of the 
 vernal sun, then casts the seed into the earth, 
 making it over, in the hope of harvest, to the care 
 of its cosmic relations, might well find matter for 
 thought in his simple, customary act. The act 
 says that the universe is a party to all vital formation 
 within it ; and that activity, power, function, proceed 
 from the great whole to each particular existence. 
 Does not that already suggest a religion ? If the 
 tree were conscious, it would be a sun-worshipper 
 surely I With consciousness of vital relation on 
 that scale, must come some response of feeling to 
 it ; and that response, were it not a worship ? 
 
 Well, a conscious being is indeed here, and 
 with relations out of measure higher and finer. To 
 him, accordingly, we turn. 
 
 On the lowest scale, man is not conscious. 
 Interior physiological process which, though in 
 him it includes more than mere cell-formation, may 
 be taken here as represented by it goes on without 
 immediate report to the mind. One has no direct 
 knowledge of his own anatomy ; of the blood's 
 circulation ; of the formation and elimination of 
 tissue ; of the functions assumed by the stomach, 
 liver, brain, and so forth. Concerning all tin's one 
 must learn by observation as of external objects. 
 So far man is indeed to himself an external object. 
 
 It is at the second degree of the scale that 
 human consciousness appears. The tree is an 
 individual whole, and knows it not ; man is such, 
 and does know it. The ideal unity, which in the
 
 NATURE OF RELIGION. 21 
 
 lower organism remains dark, silent, becomes lu- 
 minous in the higher, becomes vocal, and says /. 
 This consciousness to the unthinking not won- 
 derful at all, to the thoughtful just infinitely 
 wonderful is the root of personality ; and there 
 are two questions about it to ask, two facts about 
 it to determine, if possible, here. 
 
 First, What is that which says I? The answer 
 to this question will be found through another : 
 What is there to say it? Something recognizes, 
 enunciates itself as pure and constant identity. If 
 we find somewhat which could so speak of itself, 
 and speak truly, it may be regarded as clear .that 
 this is indeed the speaker. Well, we have already 
 found it, even in the plant. The tree, it was said, 
 has individuality of a low order, but unmistakable. 
 Now, individual means " what cannot be divided," 
 indivisible unity ; and the characteristic unity even 
 of a tree is, indeed, indivisible. The body, the 
 matter of it, may be hewn in pieces : but hand a 
 bare chip from it to the woodman, he will at once 
 name the whole tree, oak, larch, pine, cedar, birch, 
 maple, as the case may be ; and in doing so will 
 name an assemblage of characters that are simply 
 inseparable, one there, all there. It is an ideal 
 unity always whole, whole in the seed as in the tree ; 
 and, though its physical realization is to tower a 
 hundred feet, amply accommodated, it may be, in 
 a seed no bigger than a pin's head. Now, if that 
 ideal unity should, in the tree or in a higher 
 creature, voice itself as such, it would clearly speak
 
 22 ' FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 truth. The fact is there, even in a plant ; and it 
 is here, a hundred-fold more emphatic, in man, and 
 it may justly call itself what it really is. I know 
 of nothing else in man which could say, "I am 
 oneness, and always the same oneness," and not 
 speak falsely. Self-consciousness is, therefore, ideal 
 unity recognizing and enunciating itself. The fact 
 affirmed is older than man, old as organic being on 
 this globe ; there is, there could be, no vital forma- 
 tion without it ; but in man alone does it become 
 to itself known, and find a voice. 
 
 Secondly, Can consciousness be, with any show 
 of propriety, described as a material manifestation, 
 or must we define it as a spiritual fact ? What is 
 matter, and what is spirit ? Matter is all that we 
 see, hear, touch, taste, or smell ; and all effects of 
 which we learn by the senses are physical effects. 
 That is the widest possible definition of matter and 
 material effects. No materialist Avill desire one 
 more liberal, since the materialist assigns the same 
 limit to all knowledge whatsoever. Now, con- 
 sciousness can neither be seen, heard, touched, 
 tasted, nor smelled. It escapes the senses utterly. 
 When, therefore, one describes it as a material 
 manifestation, he speaks neither from understanding 
 nor to it. It is as when one declares that he 
 believes in contradictories ; the statement is one to 
 which no mental conception does, or can, correspond. 
 We should say that one spoke absurdly, should he 
 call a horse a bald eagle. Yet the eagle, like the 
 horse, has body, weight, feet, eyes ; the blood
 
 NATURE OF RELIGION. 23 
 
 circulates, the formation and deformation of tissues 
 go on, in both ; they have really much in common. 
 But when that is called a material manifestation, 
 which to the ^senses does not exist, the words mean 
 simply and absolutely nothing intelligible. We 
 see light, hear sound, feel gravitation and electricity, 
 observe physical laws in their outward effects ; 
 but personal consciousness is that which, never to 
 be reached, never approached, on this road, reveals 
 itself to itself. That which does so, I define as 
 spiritual. If any one thinks the word a bad one, 
 let him find a better. But let him not fall into 
 sheer unintelligibility, by saying material where no 
 mental conception does or can accompany the 
 term. 
 
 But, further : it has been seen that the vegetable 
 organism has, besides its individual wholeness, 
 which in man becomes conscious of itself, also its 
 system of inter-relation with the great whole of 
 nature ; and in this fact a religious suggestion has 
 been recognized. Man has, of course, the like, 
 but incomparably higher and finer ; and he has it 
 with consciousness. . By that relation, and in it, he 
 lives, moves, and has his being : it gives him a 
 body, and affords to it nourishment ; it makes him 
 a thinking mind, and furnishes this with matter of 
 thought ; it endows him with a moral soul, and 
 supplies this with a field of action. His debt to it, 
 in short, equals the entire worth of his being, be 
 that more or less. One's life is not in himself 
 alone. In himself alone ! what paltrier conceit
 
 24 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 could a human head ever harbor? Humanity, 
 therefore, even in awakening to itself, awakens 
 also, and with awful emotion, to a sense of that 
 supreme relation ; and with some greatest word, 
 Jehovah, Brahma, God, or whatever else, with 
 hymns also and invocations, and with that manifold 
 gesture, faintly signifying the unspeakable, of 
 primitive worship, it responds to that illimitable 
 whole by which it feels itself creatively and sus- 
 tainingly embraced. " I am a son of the universe," 
 the primitive man would say, and speaks really but 
 a little toward the fact, in a symbolical, faintly 
 approximative way, that to another age may seem 
 quite too ineffectual, or even seem an idolatry. 
 Speak, think, the great fact completely, no man 
 ever did or will; but recognize it with feeling, 
 every one may. 
 
 Religion, then, in its broadest, simplest definition, 
 is the consciousness of universal relation. A sense 
 of subordination, " sense of dependence," goes with 
 it, in which Schleiermacher and others would see its 
 first principle and nature. Other accompaniments 
 vary from man to man, or from one stage to an- 
 other of human culture. Here it is attended by 
 abject fear, there by ennobling awe ; now by that 
 superstition of self-interest which Coleridge wittily 
 described as " other-worldliness," again by heroic 
 loyalty and an inspiration to act in the spirit of 
 that large reception. The principle generates ever 
 its worship of one sort or another ; but the sorts 
 vary extremely, from mere howling exuberance, as
 
 NATURE OF RELIGION. 25 
 
 of animalism fermented, to sentiments that sur- 
 pass every symbol, every word, and shrine them- 
 selves in a hidden place of truth and duty. As 
 lust is the villain-relative of love, so there is a lust 
 of religion, bred backward, so to speak, from its 
 principle. But for this the principle is not respon- 
 sible, as pure love is not for its graceless kinsman. 
 What were the response of a healthy soul to the 
 fact signified, one sees. 
 
 The definition here given will not, at first sight, 
 satisfy all, even of those whose mental conditions 
 are such as one would wish to satisfy. It is 
 religion, some will say, with God left out. But is 
 that indeed the case ? If God can be left out of a 
 system of universal relation, such relation, too, 
 as inducts and sustains the being of man, what 
 place for theism more ? The ground is surrendered. 
 It seems not advisable to make such an admission 
 hastily. Nevertheless it is clear that not enough 
 has been said, and we proceed to determinations 
 more definite. 
 
 And first, this : the universe is one, and there is 
 but one universe : it is a system, not a jumble, and 
 it is the all-embracing system. There is nothing 
 outside it, it has no outside : and there is no 
 absolute cleft, no final discordance, within it ; for, if 
 so, it were no unitive system. To sustain this 
 statement, in a mere rapid sketch like the present, 
 by any extended deduction, is, of course, impossible ; 
 nor is it, perhaps, at all necessary. A divided, 
 discordant universe were simply no universe, and
 
 26 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 were self-destructive ; it is inconceivable. Nor 
 is it to be supposed that the imagination of two or 
 several universes, standing quite out of relation 
 with each other, and liable, or, in the measureless 
 course of time, certain, to come into collision, with 
 mutual wreck, will be entertained by any sane 
 mind. This universe is therefore one ; the absolute 
 universal is absolute unity ; and in this unity it 
 comprehends all. There can be, then, in the most 
 extended view, no relation with a part of the 
 universe and not with the whole. As every 
 needle on the pine, every cell within it, is related 
 to the whole structure, so here relation is with 
 the universe as one and whole. 
 
 .Now, this matter of a comprehending unity is of 
 peculiar interest to man ; touching in him, I know 
 not what central, sympathetic chord. Perhaps the 
 secret of its suggestiveness and charm is that he is 
 such himself : the aspect of it represents to him 
 the identity of consciousness in the manifoldness 
 of experience. That unity of the manifold is 
 harmony in music ; it is indispensable to delight in 
 any work of art ; it begets admiration in the study 
 of vital organisms, with their numerous parts and 
 processes consenting to a common end ; and it is at 
 the root of that interest with which every man con- 
 templates a complex, perfect mechanism. Hence, 
 every fresh discovery of this in nature is like new 
 blood in the veins. What an impulse did Newton's 
 great discovery give to the modern world ! It 
 brought out the unity of near and far, of laws
 
 NATURE OF EELIGION. 27 
 
 familiar to us as our hats or hands, with the laws 
 by which worlds move in their orbits. So when 
 Goethe saw, as none had seen before, into the 
 unity of vegetable structure, and announced it in 
 his " Metamorphosis of Plants," the fact was as a 
 melody to the mind, fitly told in verse. This it 
 is that draws the scientist, as he traces the great 
 roadways of law through the world. Arid what 
 a magnet it is ! To what patience of pursuit, to 
 what silent, unseen fidelity of labor, does it inspire ! 
 Is there in our time any class of men who do more 
 from a pure, unworldly interest than the men of 
 science ? See, too, to what they condescend. No 
 mother or maid in the nursery accepts more of what 
 were drudgery and disgusting service, but for the 
 lofty interest that consecrates it, than the naturalist ; 
 and, like the mother, he has no sense of condescend- 
 ing. The great fact he seeks is great enough to 
 dignify all it inhabits. Let him but find that, 
 were it in a frog's foot, in the interiors of turtles 
 and clams, in snakes, spiders, or mud-worms, and 
 he feels himself looking upward. He is, indeed, 
 looking upward. Cosmic unity, law that expresses 
 it, you touch there a string that vibrates melo- 
 diously, sweet and awful, through all worlds. Phys- 
 ical science has indeed its customary limitations, 
 has, as I think, its blind e} 7 e, and looks for the 
 whole truth there where the ivhole truth is not ; but 
 it has the merit of believing with understanding, 
 which is no small one ; and, moreover, by the fact 
 it pursues, by the object of its devotion, it is in
 
 28 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 unison with the principle of religion. Unity in the 
 great whole ; religion says that, and science sees 
 it part way ! Half a loaf, however, is better 
 than no bread and may be better than an entire 
 loaf, if the former is white flour, while the latter 
 is much mixed with bran, bitter seeds, and earth, 
 as the whole loaf of traditional religion unhap- 
 pily is. 
 
 The universe is one : Of what grade is that 
 unity ? To point the question : Is the great whole, 
 as a whole, mechanical only ? Is it dead or living, 
 a machine or a self-active organism ? 
 
 The strong tendency of our time is toward a 
 material and mechanical conception of the cosmic 
 whole. On the contrary, however, it seems not 
 overbold to say that the universe is, must be, a 
 self-active organism. A machine requires external 
 propulsion. It can propagate force, not produce 
 it. That is the iron limit of all mechanics. Speak 
 that word, and spontaneous activity is excluded. 
 What, now, is external to the universe, which 
 should propel it? What assumes for it the part 
 of the boy at the crank of a grindstone, or of the 
 falling water which drives a mill-wheel ? The 
 notion is self-contradictory. If such be at all the 
 posture of arfairs, there is no universe ; unity is 
 destroyed, absolute dualism confessed, and the very 
 spinal cord, not only of religion but of reason as 
 well, is broken. When it is asked, indeed, What 
 is outside and at the crank ? the old theologians an- 
 swer readily, " God is the motor." But the Paley-
 
 NATURE OF RELIGION. 29 
 
 notion of a God appended to the universe-machine, 
 and only now and then breaking in, by way of 
 miracle, to do a little on his own special account, 
 is one that may here be regarded as obsolete. It 
 served in its day as an approximate expression of 
 religious feeling ; but it gradually ceases to serve 
 even that purpose, while, as a mode of dualism and 
 clearly recognized as such, it is to thought only an 
 affliction. Meantime, the mechanical philosophers, 
 religious in their way, cling or would cling to 
 the clew of unity, and admit no such deus ex 
 machina. What, then ? An outside propulsion 
 cannot be admitted ; no machine propels itself ; 
 whatever does so, is by the fact taken out of the 
 category of mechanical structures ; and yet the 
 world moves. It is therefore self-active. Can 
 the conclusion be avoided? But, with this at- 
 tained, much is left behind, if much yet lie before. 
 
 A living universe, therefore, not a dead one. 
 But, again, of what grade ? Happy he who is 
 permitted to answer that question in silence, as he 
 can, to his own heart ! But if the privilege of 
 silence may not be claimed, let speech go only so 
 far as indubitable fact goes with it. 
 
 Now, here is this fact, quite indubitable : the 
 universe brings forth man and comprehends him. 
 Does it bring forth its own superior ? Is the 
 product of a higher nature than the whole nature 
 which produced it ? But superior to it man surely 
 is, if his mind and heart are his alone. Tell us not 
 here of mere space, size, and power. What are
 
 30 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 these in comparison with thought, love, loyalty, 
 honor? The volcano, vomiting lava, buries a 
 thousand human homes ; but in one mother's heart 
 is that which is not only greater, but incomparably, 
 unspeakably greater, than all volcanoes. Were 
 some brute leviathan, big enough to fill the ocean's 
 bed, the equal of one baby Shakespeare ? The 
 universe is the mother of mind, of reverence and 
 pity, of the love of justice and truth ; is it, can it 
 be, the mother of that which is foreign to itself ? 
 It is an old question, and old enough to have been 
 answered as the believers in a dead or brute uni- 
 verse would have it, were it answerable that 
 way. 
 
 But, farther : man is comprehended in the unity 
 of the all. Now, the higher may thus comprehend 
 the lower, but not the lower the higher. Thus the 
 organism of man includes that of the ape ; it is 
 all that and more : but the converse is not true. 
 The larger circle is clearly not to be drawn within 
 the lesser. An ape-universe, or one rounded in 
 unity at that degree, could not comprehend in its 
 unity the mind of Newton, the heart of Jesus. 
 
 The point can perhaps be more clearly put 
 before the eye, if a somewhat grotesque illustration 
 be permitted. The anaconda is a unitive organism 
 of a certain grade. Imagine that to this organism, 
 just as it is, a human head were somehow added. 
 The total thus formed were no organic whole, no 
 unity for the mind ; but a mere monstrous con- 
 junction of incongruities. Well, if we assume an
 
 NATURE OF RELIGION. 31 
 
 infra-human, brute universe, whole indeed, but in 
 its principle of unity below man's degree, the 
 appearance of a human head there would be in like 
 manner incongruous. In, such a universe, indeed, 
 in its idea, in its unity, a human soul were not, 
 could not be. Man is to be conceived of, were 
 that assumed, as a capable, wonderful parasite, 
 wandering and building on the surfaces of a cosmos 
 to which he does not belong, which knows him 
 not, nor corresponds in its principle to the genius 
 that animates and illumines him. And, never- 
 theless, this same alien universe, this same wholly 
 foreign Nature, is his mother ! In short, the 
 assumption of a universe merely brute in its all- 
 comprehending unity is, to my mind, a plunge into 
 a bottomless abyss of unreason, where thought can 
 think only its own contradiction. 
 
 It is like coming from a pit into clear air and 
 out upon the sunlit world, when we turn from 
 these confounding imaginations to that which the 
 religious consciousness ever affirms, a luminous, 
 spiritual whole, open and akin to the mind of man. 
 Religion has represented the great whole under a 
 human form, recognizing this as its largest symbol. 
 That is the " anthropomorphism " nowadays so 
 much complained of. Of course, the complaint is 
 not ungrounded. When there is set before us, as 
 the object of worship and symbol of the great 
 whole, some celestial Squire Weston, a particular 
 individual, and with his full share of individual 
 limitation ; when, moreover, this county potentate
 
 32 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 is taken, not as merely symbolizing the universal 
 whole, but as the fact itself, then the cry of 
 anthropomorphism is quite in place. But when 
 the representation of the universe under a human 
 form is cried out upon because one believes it 
 infra-human, inhuman, brute, then the occasion 
 has come for discrimination both ways. The 
 ancient, world-old worship of human gods signifies 
 the immanent persuasion of man, that the universe 
 is not infra-human, that its principle of unity is 
 spiritual, lying rather above man than beneath. 
 Religion has said that : Can reason say less ? 1 see 
 not how, with what adherence to itself. The 
 universe is not a house divided against itself: it 
 comprehends man in its unity ; the lower does not, 
 cannot, thus comprehend the higher. Can the 
 mind think otherwise without unthinking itself? 
 
 And, indeed, the unthinking of reason by reason 
 itself is the latest method of escape from the great 
 conclusion here indicated. The intellectual, moral, 
 civilizing genius of man is serenely set aside as 
 merely " subjective ; " that is, in plain terms, as 
 a fiction that concocts itself in his breast, a con- 
 geries of unreal images that plays itself off in his 
 consciousness. Reason, therefore, is good for itself, 
 but has no validity as representative of universal 
 fact. As when a little girl imagines that her doll 
 sleeps, wakes, listens, takes food, and does so with 
 a half-sense of reality, these fancies are good for the 
 fancy which begets them, so the conscious intelli- 
 gence of man is to think of its thoughts. When
 
 NATURE OF RELIGION. 33 
 
 the light of thought has thus dishonored and denied 
 itself, then it may be assumed that the universe 
 really is, not what it seems to thinking mind, but 
 only what it is found to be by the unthinking 
 senses. Then religion also goes, of course, into 
 the same limbo of subjective illusion, of self-con- 
 cocted fiction. That is the newest fashion of 
 enlightenment, cherished, too, by good men, 
 sincere, patient inquirers, able, instructed teachers, 
 from whom I gladly learn. But what wise man 
 shall teach us the wisdom of unthinking thought, 
 and reasoning reason itself down ? 
 
 Who shall do so while the fact lies before the 
 eye, that it is the objective, true universe itself 
 which biings forth the supposed fiction, and as its 
 highest product ? It flowers in the consciousness 
 of man, so much is certain. Flowers in fiction, in 
 unreality, in falsehood, shall we say ? 
 
 The plant, observe, puts its principle at the top, 
 rounds itself there into the unity of the seed. 
 Man is the summit of natural process : is the 
 unitive principle, the little whole, not also there ? 
 
 Religion is the sense of universal relation ; and 
 not merely of dissolute relation with this, that, and 
 the other, but with the universe as whole. That 
 whole comprehends man : it is therefore not less, 
 but greater ; not lower, but higher. Therefore it 
 is living, spiritual unity. The question of grade is 
 answered so, if it is to be answered rationally. 
 
 This consciousness first makes man indeed a 
 citizen of the universe, and at home there. He 
 
 3
 
 34 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 may feel that he is really in such a universe, and 
 not merely on it. As a kindred whole, it rings to 
 his heart in tones that invigorate, vitalize, inspire; 
 and the heart rings response, for it is also whole ; 
 and its resonance is the bibles of the world, or say 
 rather the one great, ever-proceeding bible of man's 
 worthy thinking, doing, and being. And so it is 
 that nature is ever vocal to us with a language not 
 unintelligible nor unmoving. We touch tne earth, 
 and cannot feel that it is but a clod beneath the 
 feet ; we look up to the heavens, and see not merely 
 a gas mingled with vapors ; the sun is more ever 
 to man than a mere ball of fire ; daisy and grass- 
 blade, wood, hill, and river, breathe suggestion, 
 without voice but significant. For in all lives, in 
 all speaks, the spiritual whole, not unheard. To 
 every human soul this is indeed a speaking universe. 
 What if it were not such ? Then man himself were 
 dumb ; and dumb not of tongue alone, but to the 
 core. 
 
 It is perhaps bold, but I think not too bold, to 
 say that religion is, as in this view it should be, 
 the root of all civilization, all human culture. That 
 civilization began with it, is certain ; it is the 
 historical root, if no more. Auguste Comte, who 
 would limit all knowledge to the mere surface of 
 nature, and make man but surface even to himself, 
 a man, however, who thought largely and with 
 method, not only recognized this fact, but gave 
 it an especial prominence. As is generally known, 
 he found in the history of civilization three great
 
 NATURE OF RELIGION. 35 
 
 epochs, of which the first was characterized as the 
 " theological." The initial, genetic epoch is theo- 
 logical ? Civilization, thought, begin there ? It is 
 significant surely ! Comte himself, indeed, though 
 professing for observed fact a respect not only 
 profound but exclusive, had no use for this one. 
 He simply and serenely threw that epoch away. 
 It signified to him only so many centuries spent in 
 making an encumbrance for later ages to get rid 
 of. Is that the wisest way to contemplate and 
 treat history ? A parallel case will perhaps show. 
 There was a first epoch in human development, 
 which might be called the linguistic, the period 
 when language was forming. This passed, and men 
 ceased to be, in a considerable degree, makers of 
 language. What, then ? Had speech become su- 
 perfluous ? Were language and the period which 
 produced it to be simply thrown away ? The 
 making of language came first, because it was of 
 primal and perpetual necessity. The summary 
 throwing away of what has the first place in a 
 process of world-growth is of more than doubtful 
 propriety. 
 
 World-history is psychology, is the natural his- 
 tory of mind, written large. He that will hold 
 fast to that clew, may spare himself much wander- 
 ing and groping. Necessary bases in history are 
 bases in the mind for ever : it is the great law of 
 unity in yet another aspect. Find the order of 
 development in humanity, and this represents the 
 dependence of powers in the mind. Metaphvsic
 
 36 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 might learn more, did it pore less over its dis- 
 tressingly fine print, and read now and then the 
 large letter-press of that open book. The pre- 
 cedence, therefore, of religion in civilization may 
 be taken as a hint which it were well not to 
 neglect. 
 
 Meantime the propriety of Comte's terminology 
 may be doubted. The primitive ages were occu- 
 pied with the suggestions of religion, but clearly 
 not with theology. Moses and the singers of the 
 Vedic hymns were not theologians ; Jesus was no 
 theologian. Theology, properly so called, comes 
 later ; and of this there may be a superfluity. 
 Religion, then, is initial and genetic in civilization ; 
 but the theologic scholasticism, that accrues upon 
 it, is put grossly out of place when to it a like 
 antecedence is attributed. 
 
 And now let us see, by an instance or two, how 
 this principle, with its grand key-note of unity, 
 is implicated as radical in what chiefly ennobles 
 man. 
 
 I. It is the radical principle in morals. For 
 what do morals exact ? Justice, adjustment, right 
 unity between men. The underlying truth is the 
 one spoken of old : " We are all members one of 
 another." Love, justice, truth, loyalty, pity, are 
 terms of community, of a cordial, faithful holding 
 together ; hatred, env} r , injustice, egotism, treason, 
 falsehood, are terms of disintegration and dis- 
 union. 
 
 What, now, is the principle of morals? " Util-
 
 NATURE OF RELIGION. 37 
 
 ity," say some. Utility may be accepted as the 
 practical criterion of morals : what is in the high- 
 est sense useful is moral ; that is, it is moral to do 
 good, and immoral to do mischief. No moralist 
 disputes that, nor can it be regarded as a recent 1 
 discovery. But the producing principle of morals 
 in man is one thing, and the outward practical 
 test another. Why must one do good and not 
 evil ? What says that, and enforces it, in the 
 mind ? The ideal exaction comes from that law 
 of unity, which may well speak sovereignly in 
 man, since it is sovereign in the universe. Mean- 
 time a right holding together, a true faith, with 
 others, is equally a holding together with one's self. 
 He that acts with a vicious intention, acts against 
 his own better knowledge, knows one way and 
 wills another. He violates thus the unity of his 
 own being. Conscience is the vital ligament be- 
 tween conviction and volition, knowing and will- 
 ing ; and he who cuts that, falls asunder. 
 
 II. Rational thought has the same interior chord 
 of world-unity. It is curious and significant, in 
 reading the beginnings of Greek philosophy, to 
 find it occupied with the question, What is the 
 universal principle ? what contains and explains 
 all the rest ? But why assume such at all ? Why 
 suppose that it at all exists ? Simply because 
 reason, to be such, must assume, what religion 
 asserts, the interior oneness of all manifoldness. 
 How is one to think rationally and not think this ? 
 Will he reason of causes? Cause is the law of 
 
 2065V
 
 38 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 unity in the successions of things. Will he rea- 
 son from analogy ? It is obviously to follow the 
 same clew. Does he reason from various phe- 
 nomena to their law, after the manner of induc- 
 tive science ? The assumption that they necessarily 
 have a law is the very one we speak of. Why 
 should there not be phenomena without law, with- 
 out cause, without connection? The imagination 
 is lunatic, but indulge it a moment ; suppose such 
 a witch-welter of things, then put reason in the 
 midst of it, and where is it ? In an exhausted re- 
 ceiver. It can think nothing, for there is nothing 
 to think, nothing but contradicts all thought. The 
 wholeness that religion affirms is the faith of rea- 
 son, without which it ceases to be such. 
 
 III. Again, one sees what a part is played in the 
 productive genius of humanity by the conscious- 
 ness of freedom. There is, indeed, a false conceit 
 of liberty, and there has been, within a century, 
 so much of windy mouthing in the spirit of that 
 conceit, that a reaction has set in. Those who talk 
 of liberty most, scarcely believe their own words ; 
 while it has to many become a recommendation of 
 the mechanical philosophy, that it denies the fact 
 altogether. As when in a season of drought a 
 gusty Aviud blows up the dust in dense clouds, 
 men shut the eyes, and refuse for a moment to see, 
 that they may save sight, so in this case : the 
 mind closes itself to a fact about which such a 
 dust of demagoguery, sentimentalism, and mock 
 philosophy has been raised. But, on the other
 
 NATURE OF RELIGION. 39 
 
 hand, banish from man's breast all consciousness 
 of freedom ; let him really feel himself a machine 
 and no more, and what must follow ? Duty, re- 
 sponsibility, heroism, become empty syllables, sig- 
 nifying nothing ; honor and shame, self-blame and 
 self-respect, turn to smoke. George Washington 
 and Aaron Burr, Luther and Tetzel, St. Paul and 
 Dr. Titus Gates, become moral equivalents ; that 
 is, one and all equivalent to zero. Admiration dies 
 with the notion, the possibility, of human worth ; 
 and meantime a vital incitement, an inspiration of 
 personality and of history, without which they 
 were to the moving spectacle of life what dead 
 ashes are to flame, would be then no longer. Be 
 it that the consciousness of freedom is an illusion, 
 man would lose his human genius, his human soul, 
 with it. Those, therefore, who had proved it fic- 
 titious, would have next moment to turn around 
 and say, " Fiction is the better fact : by fiction man 
 lives and is man ! " Who could wish to see him- 
 self placed in that too equivocal attitude ? Just 
 what had been for ever disgraced as truth, must be 
 cherished as practical necessity, and preferred be- 
 fore truth. But how in a world of law is freedom 
 possible ? 
 
 The divine universe, it has been said, with brief 
 assignment of reasons, is a self-active whole. It 
 is therefore free, not as being lawless, but as gen- 
 erating its own law. It itself, in its wholeness, 
 makes and is the law which it, the same universe, 
 in its parts and particulars, observes. Were it a
 
 40 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 machine, externally moved, then indeed freedom 
 were possible neither for it nor for any thing within 
 it. But, as purely self-moved and self-ruled, it can- 
 not possibly be otherwise than free. Now, this 
 free whole is productive, as we see. Does it, can 
 it, never bring forth, as the flower of its expres- 
 sion, some image, some reflection, of itself? Won- 
 derful, if in a process of ascending production, 
 extending through incomputable periods of time, 
 it could arrive at nothing which should represent 
 its own nature ! Wonderful, if pure freedom must 
 for ever bring forth only its own contrary ! These 
 generalities, however, will not satisfy the doubt, or 
 rather overcome the necessarian dogmatism, now 
 current. How can one be free, say our philosophic 
 friends, seeing that he is operated by motives ? But 
 is one operated by motives ? Addressed, incited, 
 by them one is, indeed ; but operated, turned as 
 with a crank, by them? Does motive signify 
 mechanical motor f Look and see. A wise man 
 does not of necessity, nor habitually, follow the 
 first motive which addresses him : he detains it, 
 says " I will think about that," considers what 
 were best, and then acts. Now, this power of 
 detaining motives, of deliberating upon them, 
 weighing them, even of waiting for the possible 
 appearance of such as are not immediately before 
 the mind, is already freedom. Has the machine 
 any such power ? Can that, when a motor really 
 capable of moving it has been applied, suspend its 
 own motion, and wait to see if another, stronger
 
 NATURE OF RELIGION. 41 
 
 motor, will not appear to overrule the one already 
 present ? When that self-suspense of the will, 
 perfectly familiar to us all, has been accounted for 
 on mechanical principles, then, and not till then, 
 the necessarian hypothesis will be admissible. 
 
 Freedom, so far, is conditional only, I grant. 
 This is indeed a world of law ; and a final liberty 
 against law there cannot be. If the determination 
 arrived at run counter to the self- affirming and 
 self-enforcing law of the great whole, then it is 
 under correction, and certain not to escape cor- 
 rection. Otherwise, the sovereign freedom of the 
 universe were not such ; it might be contradicted, 
 and the contradiction be sustained ; then it were 
 already under constraint, already mutilated and 
 undone. That nation is not free as a whole to 
 govern itself, in which all laws are at the mercy 
 of every lawless will ; on the contrary, it has as a 
 nation, in its unity, no freedom. But, on the other 
 hand, good laws take away the liberty of no good 
 man. If he may not disobey them, neither would 
 he do so : he wills the law, is for it, not against it ; 
 and because he is not against it, neither is it against 
 him. He wills his obedience ; how can what is 
 with his will be against his liberty ? And thus it- 
 is that in a universe of law, man may be, to the 
 extent of morals, free, not only conditionally or 
 provisionally, but finally and wholly. Rational 
 duty that makes itself, is free in obeying itself. 
 Without, there- is nothing to correct it; and it is a 
 law to itself within. When the soul of man spon-
 
 42 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 taneously generates that same law, which springs 
 eternal in the universe itself, then is it also a free 
 whole, inwardly ruled, and not outwardly over- 
 ruled. Now, duty does make itself in the human 
 soul ; that is clear. How else did it get there ? 
 It was never foisted upon humanity from without. 
 
 We say, then, first, that the power of the will to 
 suspend its action while motives are weighed, or 
 even waited for, is to look no farther a free- 
 dom of the will, but not final : there is a subse- 
 quent adjudication ; secondly, that the power of 
 the human soul to produce spontaneously the law 
 which it ought to obey, opens to it a freedom which 
 is final. This is the great style of liberty, and I 
 trust it will one day be better understood. Duty 
 is the all-emancipating human word, and in the 
 sufficient making of that lies the superior freedom 
 the only one that should be named, moral or 
 political of individuals and nations alike. And 
 this freedom is that of the great whole, repeated, 
 springing in man from its native sources, and mak- 
 ing him lawgiver, that he may be free as the subject 
 of law. 
 
 Such, then, is religion ; and such are some of the 
 relations in which it stands. It is the sense of 
 relation, of unity, with the infinite whole ; and 
 morals, reason, freedom, are bound up with it. 
 If all this has been but hinted, how could it be 
 more under the conditions ? Time is limited, and 
 the ground so large ! 
 
 Religion, as actually represented, has indeed ugly
 
 NATURE OF RELIGION. 43 
 
 and odious manifestations. The best historical re- 
 ligion in the world is many times more stained with 
 crime than infidelity ever was. Unbelief has no 
 inquisition ; if it does not honor the cross, neither 
 has it consecrated the rack and the fagot. It was 
 a pope's legate, and not d'Holbach or La Mettrie, 
 who was one morning seen upon his knees tying 
 the shoes of the king's strumpet, the infamous Du 
 Barry. Voltaire lied at discretion ; but when 
 Archbishop Manning flatters, for a purpose, that 
 religious liberty of England which his pope damns 
 openly, and himself secretly, is he an honest man ? 
 Too often, moreover, has the Christian church 
 which nevertheless is the best church made itself 
 the champion of moral and intellectual barbarism. 
 In the last years of the seventeenth century, Bal- 
 thazar Bekker, of Amsterdam, himself a preacher, 
 pure beyond reproach in character, and perfect in 
 all decent orthodoxy, was thrust by Protestant 
 religion from the pulpit, and with cruel persecu- 
 tion harried out of the world, for not believing in 
 witchcraft and possession by devils. In 1612, the 
 Protestant consistory at Stuttgart issued its solemn 
 reproof to the great Kepler, bidding him bridle 
 his frivolous curiosity, and no more vex the church 
 of Christ with vain subtleties ; and he, under the 
 ban of religion, must pursue his grand labor in 
 circumstances of poverty, almost of misery. But 
 why enter farther upon the long, disgraceful 
 chapter ? It is unreservedly acknowledged, that 
 is enough. Well, under the laws of growth in
 
 44 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 the vegetable kingdom, noxious weeds, the deadly 
 nightshade, poisonous fungi, are brought forth: 
 who, therefore, accuses the laws of growth, and 
 the productive energy in nature ? Culture and 
 classification are needed in religion, as in all 
 that pertains to man. If there be much of mis- 
 chievous false reasoning, is that an argument 
 against reason ? It is an argument only for a wise, 
 capable culture of it. If there be false conscience, 
 shall we therefore decide to banish the sense of 
 obligation? Religion is not worse represented 
 than any other great principle of man's being. 
 It were well to be sane here as elsewhere. 
 
 Let religion have air. It has been kept too 
 close, kept in that " house of God " that derives 
 from the mason and carpenter, and thereby kept, 
 so much as may be, out of that limitless house, 
 eternal on earth and in the heavens, which was 
 not made with hands. It needs, as preliminary to 
 all else, the air of understanding. We have now, 
 not only to feel it, but to think it, think it out 
 of that supposititious connection with nasal tones, 
 cut of a coat, verbal formularies, recited gestures, 
 which has so almost fatally disguised its nature, 
 and think it into all the largeness of morals, poli- 
 tics, science, art, industry. I do not mean that we 
 should proceed to tag these severally with words, 
 phrases, formularies, called religious : if they need 
 the tag, then they are already not religious. Purity 
 in morals ; true faith of man to man in politics ; in 
 science, the devoted pursuit of law, the recognition.
 
 NATURE OF RELIGION. 45 
 
 of a speaking universe ; in art, truth; in industry, a 
 due giving for all taking ; and acquiescence in that 
 order which is for the health of the whole, these 
 are religion, as whatever is which expresses a liv- 
 ing, cordial, ordered, productive wholeness, a 
 unity which is first human that it may be divine. 
 
 There are many to cultivate religion in a sort ; 
 there are some whose clear calling it is also to 
 clarify, to interpret and apply it rationally. These 
 are far from having occasion to blush for their 
 work, if not for the manner of doing it. None is 
 greater, none answers more to the needs of this 
 age and of all ages. One is here at the root of 
 high effects ; and though, in the long seasons of 
 the world, he may not live to see the fruit of his 
 labor, yet every drop of water, fitly poured, finds 
 its way, and is sweet in the ripeness of the fruit at 
 last. And, whatever the special tendency of the 
 present, let such workers be sure that to this radi- 
 cal, nutritive mother-principle, the world will again 
 come cordially, and with new intelligence ; since, 
 for the healthful union of men in societies, for 
 that prosperity of thought without which man is 
 dehumanized, for the vitalization of morals, the 
 maintenance of progress, and the ennoblement of 
 character, in short, for the sustenance of every 
 high faculty, and the inspiration to every memora- 
 ble achievement in history, this principle of re- 
 ligion, taken in the fulness of its great import, 
 must ever remain, as it has ever been, the first 
 necessity and resource of humanity.
 
 16 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 THE UNITY AND UNIVERSALITY OF THE 
 RELIGIOUS IDEAS. 
 
 BY SAMUEL LONGFELLOW. 
 
 r I ^HE old definition of Catholic Truth was, 
 -*- " Quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus" 
 what has been believed in all times, in all places, 
 by all men. 
 
 It would be eas}' to catalogue the diversities of 
 the religious conceptions, the moral practices of 
 different times, places, nations, and to emphasize 
 the contradictions, until it might seem, as some, 
 indeed, believe, that there is no truth attainable by 
 man, nothing but notions and opinions, fancies, 
 errors, and superstitions, perpetually changing, and 
 alike futile. Till it might seem, as many believe, 
 that nothing but a miraculous intervention from 
 heaven could at last reveal the truth and the way, 
 and bring any order out of this chaos. I do not 
 believe either of these conclusions. And it is my 
 undertaking in this paper, to show a unity and 
 universality of truth existing in spite of all these 
 diversities, and under them all ; to show the ele- 
 ments of truth existing beneath all errors and su- 
 perstitions. I take the errors and superstitions 
 not to refute, but to bear testimony to, the reality 
 of the truth they have so poorly, yet so really,
 
 'UNITY AND UNIVERSALITY, ETC. 47 
 
 represented. These are the witnesses. Superstition 
 declares an impulse in man to religion. Idolatry 
 establishes the inborn impulse to worship. Poly- 
 theism reveals the native instinct in man to con- 
 ceive of mysterious power above man and nature. 
 Necromancy involves a belief in immortality. 
 These are the rude beginnings, the imperfect, 
 sometimes monstrous, growths. But where there 
 was all this smoke, there must have been some 
 fire ; where there was all this manifestation, there 
 was something seeking expression. That some- 
 thing was Religion : man's native sense of some- 
 what within him and beyond him other than the 
 visible ; the sense of the unseen and infinite and 
 perfect haunting him, now in rude and incoherent 
 dreams, now in clearer vision ; but from which he 
 could not free himself. He tried to name it, and 
 he stammered. He tried to reach it, and he stum- 
 bled. But still it stirred within him, and would 
 not let him alone. Still it shone before him and 
 beckoned him on. ) That, in spite of all unintel- 
 ligible and absurd beliefs, in spite of all burden- 
 some and monstrous and cruel practices, in spite 
 of all tyrannies of priestcraft and church authority, 
 nearly all nations of men have remained religious, 
 is to me a most striking proof of the reality and 
 indestructibility of the religious element in man's 
 nature. J 
 
 We must keep in mind the distinction between 
 essence and form, between a ground-idea and the 
 outward conception in which it shapes itself. The
 
 48 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 conception varies, as the idea works itself out in 
 more or less clearness and force. 
 
 The diversities, however great, need not disturb 
 our faith in unities of idea. But the diversities 
 have been much exaggerated. The unity is found 
 again and again, not merely in the underlying idea, 
 but in the very expression of the truth. 
 
 The great religious ideas are these : God, Duty, 
 Benevolence, Immortality. And these are univer- 
 sal ideas. They have been believed in all times, 
 in all places, by all peoples. You cannot travel so 
 wide but you will find temples, or the ruins of 
 temples, altars, worships. You cannot read so far 
 back into the history of men, but you will find 
 men thinking of God,' praying to him, trying to 
 do right, loving their kind, looking beyond death 
 to follow the souls of their friends into an unseen 
 world. The forms which these ideas have taken 
 have differed, and do differ : depending upon na- 
 tional character, upon race, climate, degree of 
 civilization ; sometimes buried under superstitions, 
 sometimes coming out in simple forms and clear 
 thought ; clothed in one form of words in the im- 
 aginative and dreamy East, in another in the prac- 
 tical West. In all ages, too, and peoples, the more 
 enlightened have held the popular faith under a 
 different aspect from the ignorant. In all ages 
 and peoples there have been individual men who 
 have been above the level of their time, superior 
 to the limitations of their race in a degree, though 
 never entirely free from them ; men of finer organ-
 
 UNITY AND UNIVERSALITY, ETC. 49 
 
 ization, wiser mind, more sensitive spiritual percep- 
 tion, keener moral instincts ; lofty and saintly 
 souls, who have striven to draw men away from 
 superstition to truth, from baseness to virtue, to 
 awaken them to a more living faith in God, duty, 
 immortality. These men have been reverenced as 
 prophets, have counted themselves sent of God. 
 They have been looked upon as his special messen- 
 gers. About them generally after their death, the 
 reverence of men, and the imagination and wonder 
 of men, have gathered legends of miracles ; have 
 attributed to them supernatural birth and super- 
 natural powers ; have believed them incarnations 
 of a descended God, or have raised them to demi- 
 gods, and worshipped them. 
 
 I. 
 
 The first great religious idea is the idea of God. 
 It is the idea of a mysterious Power superior to 
 man, creative, retributive, beneficent. With this 
 idea the mind of man has always been haunted 
 and possessed ; and growing intelligence has not 
 destroyed it, but only modified and elevated the 
 forms of it. The idea is germinal in, and native to, 
 the reason of man ; but his understanding, sen- 
 timent, and fancy have embodied it in many 
 varying conceptions. We trace its presence. and 
 unfolding through the forms of Fetichism or Idol- 
 atry, Sabeism or Nature-worship, Polytheism, 
 Monotheism, to pure Theism, the conception of 
 one universal infinite Spirit, whose immanent pres- 
 
 4
 
 50 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 ence is the perpetual life of all things, whose in- 
 finite Personality includes and inspires all persons, 
 while it transcends them : the " one God and Father 
 of all, who is above all, through all, and in us all." 
 
 Behind all idolatries and image-worships there 
 has always been a sense, more or less recognized, of 
 an Invisible which they represented ; and the more 
 intelligent have declared them to be only symbols, 
 a condescension to the senses and imagination. 
 Thus an English missionary relates that, standing 
 with a venerable Brahman to witness the sacred 
 images carried in pomp and cast into the Ganges, 
 he said : " Behold your gods ; made with hands ; 
 thrown into a river." " What are they, sir? " re- 
 plied the Brahman, " only dolls. That is well 
 enough for the ignorant, but not for the wise." 
 And he went on to quote from the ancient 
 V Hindu Scripture : " The world lay in darkness, 
 as asleep. Then he who exists for himself, the 
 most High, the Almighty, manifested himself and 
 dispelled the gloom. He whose nature is beyond 
 our reach, whose being escapes our senses, who 
 is invisible and eternal, he, the all-pervading 
 Spirit, whom the mind cannot grasp, even he shone 
 forth." l 
 
 In like manner, wherever Polytheism has pre- 
 vailed, there has been a vague sense of unity ac- 
 companying it and growing clearer with growing 
 intelligence. One of the gods comes to be re- 
 
 1 Laws of Manu, I. 5.7.
 
 UNITY AND UNIVERSALITY, ETC. 51 
 
 garded as supreme, and the others to be but his 
 ministers or angels. The Jehovah of the Jews 
 appears at first to have been conceived of as not 
 the only God, but the special god of their nation, 
 superior to the gods of the other nations. Thus 
 even in Homer we find a tendency to gather up 
 into Zeus, as centre and source, all the functions 
 of the other divinities : 1 a tendency which after- 
 wards developed into the faith expressed in the 
 magnificent Hymn of Kleanthes. The Egyptians 
 believed in a " first God ; Being before all and 
 alone ; Fountain of all." A very ancient inscrip- ' 
 tion upon the tomb of Mentuhotep speaks of " Turn, 
 the one Being, the great God, existing of himself, 
 Creator, Lord of all gods." 2 In the " Rig Veda," 
 the most ancient collection of Hindu Hymns, we 
 read: " They call Him Indra, Mithra, Varuna, Agni ; 
 that which is One the wise call in divers man- 
 ners." And again : " The poets make the beautiful- 
 winged, though He is One, manifold by their 
 words." 3 So the later " Bhagavad Gita " speaks of 
 " the Supreme, Universal Spirit, the Eternal Person, 
 divine, before all gods, omnipresent. Creator and 
 Lord of all that exists ; God of gods, Lord of the 
 Universe." 4 And the " Vishnu Purana " says, 
 " The one only God, the Adorable, takes the desig- 
 nation of Brahma, Vishnu, or Siva, accordingly as 
 
 1 See Denis : Ilistoire des Theories et des Id&s Morales, I. 7. 
 
 2 From the translation of Lepsius. 
 
 8 Riy Veda, I. 164, 46 ; and X. 114, 5. See Miiller, Chips, I. 29. 
 Bha<j. G. ch. X.
 
 52 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 he creates, preserves, or destroys. He is the Su- 
 preme, the giver of all good." 1 The Aztecs of 
 Mexico, with their more than two hundred deities, 
 recognized one supreme Creator and Lord, whom 
 they addressed in their prayers as " the God by 
 whom we live," " omnipresent, that knoweth all 
 thoughts and giveth all gifts," " without whom man 
 is as nothing," " invisible, incorporeal ; one God, of 
 perfect perfection and purity." 2 So the ancient Pe- 
 ruvians had their " Creator and Sustainer of Life ; " 
 the American Indians, their Great Spirit, " Master 
 of Life ; " the Scandinavians, their " All-father." 
 
 In the Masdean, or Zoroastrian, belief, Ormuzd 
 (Ahura-mazda) is spoken of as " omniscient, om- 
 nipotent, and omnipresent ; formless, self-existent, 
 and eternal ; pure and holy ; Lord over all creat- 
 ures in the universe ; the Refuge of those who 
 seek his aid." He is invoked as " the Creator, the 
 glorious, majestic, greatest, best, most fair, might- 
 iest, wisest, highest in holiness ; who created us, 
 who keeps us." 3 
 
 And where the forms of polytheistic mythology 
 occupied the popular mind, the intelligent and phi- 
 losophic have always regarded these as but shapes 
 of the fancy, and taught a pure doctrine of the 
 unity and spirituality of God. Xenophanes, as 
 Aristotle relates, casting his eyes upward to the 
 heavens, declared the One is God. He condemned 
 
 1 Wilson's Transl., I. 41, 43. 
 
 2 Prescott : Conquest of Mexico, I. 67. 
 
 8 Avesta : Fajna, I. 1, 2. Bleeck's Translation.
 
 UNITY AND UNIVERSALITY, ETC. 53 
 
 the prevalent mythologies and the notions of gods 
 in human figure, and severely blamed Hesiod and 
 Homer for their scandalous tales about the gods. 
 He taught that " there is one supreme God among 
 beings divine and human. . . . He governs all 
 things by power of reason." The Pythagoreans 
 taught the unity of God, and compared him to a 
 circle whose centre is everywhere, whose circum- 
 ference nowhere. " There are not different gods 
 for different nations," wrote Plutarch. " As there 
 is one and the same sun, moon, sky, earth, sea, for 
 all men, though they call them by different names ; 
 so the One Spirit which governs this universe, the 
 Universal Providence, receives among different 
 nations different names." l " There is but one 
 God, who pervades all," writes .Marcus Aurelius, 
 the Roman Emperor. 2 " In all this conflict of 
 opinions," says Maximus Tyrius, " know that 
 through all the world sounds one consenting law **_ 
 and idea, that there is one God, the King and 
 Father of all, and many gods, the children of God. 
 This both the Greek and the Barbarian teach." 
 And again he says, " I do not blame the variety of 
 representations : only let men understand that 
 there is but one Divine nature ; let them love one 
 and keep one in their thoughts." 3 
 
 Upon a temple at Delphi was the inscription 
 =. Thou art. And upon this Plutarch writes, 
 
 We say to God, Thou art : giving him thus his 
 
 1 Cit. by Denis : II. 224. 
 
 2 Thoughts, VII. 9. 3 Dissert., 38.
 
 54 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 true name, the name which .belongs alone to him. 
 For what truly is f That which is eternal, which 
 has never had beginning by birth, never will have 
 end by death, that to which time brings no change. 
 It would be wrong to say of him who is, that he 
 was or will be, for these words express changes 
 and vicissitudes. But God is : He is, not after the 
 fashion of things measured by time, but in an im- 
 movable and unchanging eternity. By a single 
 Now he fills the Forever. For Deity is not many, 
 but that which is, must be one." * 
 
 Again, after denying the fable of the birth and 
 education of Zeus, Plutarch says : " There is 
 nothing before him : he is the first and most an- 
 cient of beings, the author of all things : he was 
 from the beginning ; too great to owe his existence 
 to any other than himself. From his sight is 
 nothing hid. . . . Night and slumber never weigh 
 upon that infinite eye, which alone looks upon the 
 truth. By him we see, from him we have all 
 which we possess. Giver of all good, ordainer of 
 all which is, and which happens, it is he who gives 
 all and makes all. In him are the beginning, the 
 end, the measure, and destiny of every thing." 2 
 
 We are sometimes pointed to Buddhism as an 
 instance of a religion without a God. That its 
 primitive teaching was such, I suppose must be 
 admitted ; perhaps it was a reaction from the ex- 
 cessive devoteeism, or the corrupted worship, of the 
 
 i On the word 'El, 17, 19, 20. 2 Cited by Denis, II. 225.
 
 UNITY AND UNIVERSALITY, ETC. 55 
 
 Brahmans. But it was not long before the Buddha 
 himself became an object of worship. And there 
 is ample evidence that in our day the three hundred 
 millions of Buddhists are not without a belief in 
 God. In a Buddhist tract we read : " There appears 
 in the law of Buddha only one Omnipotent Being. v 
 . . . He is a Supreme Being above all others ; and, 
 although there are many gods, yet there is a 
 Supreme who is God of the gods." 1 Hue relates 
 a conversation with a Thibetan Lama, who said to 
 him, " We must not confound religious truth with 
 the superstitions which amuse the credulity of the 
 ignorant. There is but one sole sovereign Being 
 who has created all things. He is without begin- 
 ning, and without end : he is without body, he is 
 a spiritual substance." 2 And Schlagintweit says, 
 " In face of all these gods, the Lamas emphatically 
 maintain monotheism to be the real character of 
 Buddhism." And again he speaks of a chief 
 Buddha, Adi Buddha, called " Supreme Buddha," 
 " the Being without beginning or end," " the Su- 
 preme Intelligence, God above all." 3 So that 
 evidently the statement, " that a third of the 
 human race have lived and died without a belief 
 in God," is altogether too strong. 
 
 With the idea of God we find united the idea of 
 providence, beneficence, and friendly care toward \ 
 
 1 Upham's Sacred Books of Ceylon, III. 13. In some of the 
 tracts of this volume the existence of a Supreme Being is denied. 
 
 2 Journey through Tartary, Thibet, frc., I. 121, 122. 
 8 Buddhism in Thibet, p. 108.
 
 56 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 man. And from this, joined with a perception of 
 a moral likeness between him and man, sprang 
 naturally in the heart and mind of men the con- 
 ception of his fatherhood. This thought of God 
 as our Father is often represented as the peculiar 
 revelation of Jesus. But it was known and taught 
 long before and far beyond Christianity. We find 
 the name of Father familiarly given to the Supreme 
 in India, Greece, and Rome. 
 
 Thus we read in the " Rig Veda," " May our 
 Father, Heaven, be favorable to us. May that 
 Eternal One protect us evermore. We have no 
 other Friend, no other Father." " The Father of 
 heaven, who is the Father of men." 
 
 " Father of gods and of men," says Hesiod of 
 Zeus. And " Father of Gods and of men," echoes 
 Homer ; and again, " Zeus, most great and glorious 
 Father." " Father omnipotent," is Virgil's phrase, 
 and " the Father." In Horace we find " Father 
 and guardian of the human race ; " " the Parent 
 who governs the affairs of men and of gods ; " 
 " the Father." Plutarch declares that " Zeus is by 
 nature the Father of men ; and the best men he 
 calls his sons." 1 " He, the glorious Parent, tries the 
 good man and prepares him for himself," writes 
 Seneca. 2 " God, of all things which are Father 
 and Maker, more ancient than the sun ; whom no 
 voice can express, no eye behold," says Maximus 
 Tyrius. And Epictetus, " If what philosophers say 
 
 1 Apophthegmata. 2 De Providentia, I. 6.
 
 UNITY AND UNIVERSALITY, ETC. 57 
 
 of the kinship between God and men be true, . . . 
 why should not a man call himself a citizen of the 
 universe ? why not a son of, God ? . . . Shall not 
 having God for our Maker, Father, and Guardian 
 free us from griefs and alarms ? " And again, 
 speaking of Heracles, he says, " He knew that no 
 human being is an orphan, but that there is a 
 Father who incessantly cares for all. For he had 
 not merely heard it said that Zeus is the Father of 
 mankind, but he esteemed and called him his own 
 Father, and in the thought of him performed all 
 his deeds.'' 1 
 
 Philo, the Alexandrian Jew, says that "he who 
 regards the whole universe as his country, feels / 
 bound to seek the favor of its Father and Framer : " 2 
 and again, " God, whose most fit name is Father ; " 
 and " One Creator, one Father." 3 And in the 
 Talmud we read, " Every nation has its special 
 guardian angels : Israel shall look only to Him. 
 There is no mediator between those who are called 
 his children and their Father which is in heaven." 
 " As long as Israel is looking up to its Father which 
 is in heaven it will live." " If we are called ser- 
 vants of God, we are also called his children." 4 
 In every synagogue in Judea and Galilee were 
 recited at each service these sentences of prayer : 
 " Be thou merciful unto us, O our Father, for we 
 have sinned." " Most merciful Father, pardon 
 us." " Bring us back, O our Father, to the keep- 
 
 l Disc. I. 9 : III. 2i. 2 De Monarchic 
 
 8 Confus. of Lany. 83. * London Quarterly Review, Oct. 1867.
 
 58 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 ing of thy law." And daily in the temple was 
 spoken the prayer, " Bless us, O our Father, all 
 even as one, with the light of thy countenance." 1 
 
 II. 
 
 The second great religious idea which I named 
 is the Moral Idea; the idea of Right, of Duty; 
 and the sense of the obligation of the Virtues. I 
 call this religious ; I know it is often called " only 
 moral." But if by moral be meant any thing 
 deeper than mere custom or habit or external 
 good behavior; if it go down to principles and 
 laws felt to be of a creation and an obligation 
 superior to human will, then we are in the realm 
 of the invisible, the eternal, in the realm of relig- 
 ion. Therefore I call righteousness an essential 
 part of religion. To some men, who have little of 
 devout sentiment, or who have speculative difficul- 
 ties about* belief in God, or in a God, morals or 
 righteousness is the substance of their religion ; 
 and, if it gives a. sacred sanction and an immutable 
 ground of nobleness to their lives, it is truly a re- 
 ligion. To the devout mind, the sentiment and 
 idea of right become identified with the will of 
 God. Obedience to the law of our own being is 
 obedience to his law ; his service is therefore per- 
 fect freedom, and finds its sacred sanction in 
 likeness to him. 
 
 We ought not to be surprised to find that the 
 idea of right and wrong has been universal among 
 
 1 See Prideaux and Lightfoot.
 
 UNITY AND UNIVERSALITY, ETC. 59 
 
 men. That is but saying that men have always 
 been men ; have always had consciences, as they 
 have alwa}-s had senses, affections, language, so- 
 ciety. We ought not to be surprised that the vir- 
 tues of justice, honesty, veracity, purity, have been 
 inculcated and practised under all forms of relig- 
 ion. Yet there are those who, on account of su- 
 perficial diversities and differences of development, 
 deny any universality in the moral ideas. They 
 point, for instance, to the immoralities attributed 
 to the gods in some of the polytheistic mythologies. 
 But the wiser men in these nations disbelieved and 
 denounced these fables. Thus we find Plato in 
 his " Republic " at great length blaming Hesiod and 
 Homer for attributing low morals to the gods, and 
 declaring the falsity of such notions. 
 
 But even among those who currently believed 
 these things of the gods, the practice of them was 
 not justified or approved among men. There was 
 thought perhaps to be a different law for the Im- 
 mortals, or only their own will. Just as, in Chris- 
 tendom, God's mere will is thought to be for him 
 the only law of right. In Christian churches it is 
 currently taught that he may justly do what in 
 man would be monstrous cruelty. God is believed 
 to spend eternity in burning alive those of his 
 children who have disobeyed him, or who have 
 only not accepted his conditions of salvation ; or 
 in subjecting them to tortures of which burning 
 alive would be a faint symbol. But the same act 
 would not for a moment be justified, or be judged
 
 60 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 as other than monstrous cruelty, in a man. In the 
 decadence of Rome, it became a fashion for the 
 dissolute young men to take the names of the sev- 
 eral gods, and addict themselves to their special 
 vices ; but of course in that there was no serious 
 belief of any kind. And precisely in these periods 
 of corruption we find the wiser and better men 
 lamenting the prevalence of vices, inveighing 
 keenly against them ; in the name of religion urg- 
 ing a pure morality, endeavoring to awaken the 
 sense of personal virtue, and working reforms in 
 morals and manners. 
 
 But it is urged that practices condemned by the 
 conscience of one time and religion have been ap- 
 proved or commanded by that of some others. 
 Doubtless these diversities in the application of 
 moral judgments have existed, and do exist, ac- 
 cording as the moral sense has been more or less 
 enlightened and cultivated. I am not declaring 
 the absolute uniformity of the moral or the re- 
 ligious conceptions or practices of men; only 
 the virtual universality and essential unity of the 
 idea. Doubtless the diversities exist. But they 
 have been exaggerated. And the difference is 
 often on the surface, in the form of the act, and 
 not in its quality or motive. Thus human sacri- 
 fices, so prevalent in primitive worships, are held 
 up as instances of sanctioned cruelty. So they 
 would be for us ; and always they mark, of course, 
 a low state of religious and moral perception. But 
 they were never offered in a motive of cruelty. A
 
 UNITY AND UNIVERSALITY, ETC. 61 
 
 religious feeling overrode the natural sentiment of 
 humanity ; that sentiment was sacrificed in what 
 was erroneously deemed a higher feeling: as in 
 the tale of Abraham offering his son. Moreover, 
 under the practice of human sacrifices lay the true 
 idea of offering to God that which was most precious. 
 Doubtless the young men who, among the Aztecs, 
 were every year selected and prepared for the 
 bloody rites of the god, counted it a glory to be 
 so consecrated, and went to the teocalli with some- 
 thing of the exalted sentiment with which a youth 
 devotes himself to death in his country's defence. 
 But the same religions which enjoined these bloody 
 offerings to their gods, enjoined among men the ob- 
 ligations of kindness and humanity. The Christian 
 church proclaims daily the acceptableness to God 
 of the great Human Sacrifice, pictures the body 
 torn upon the cross, and dwells with earnest itera- 
 tion upon the efficacy of the blood shed on Calvary, 
 and its necessity to appease the wrath of God. 
 But it inculcates at the same time on men, pity, 
 compassion, and justice. A sincere but mistaken 
 religious sentiment blinds it to the essential cruelty 
 and injustice involved in God's acceptance of such 
 a sacrifice as it depicts. 
 
 With all the differences, then, in the culture of 
 the moral sentiments, and in the application of 
 moral judgments, we are justified in declaring the 
 universality of the moral idea. In no age or people 
 has any thing been approved because it was unjust, 
 or that was seen at the same time to be unjust.
 
 62 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 More than this : we find, in widely different nations 
 and times, the continual recurrence of the same 
 moral injunctions, the inculcation of the same 
 virtues. 
 
 In the " Vishnu Purana," a Brahmanic scripture, 
 we read : 1 
 
 " The earth is upheld by the veracity of those 
 who have subdued their passions, and, following 
 righteousness, are never contaminated with desire, 
 covetousness, or wrath." " The Eternal makes 
 not his abode in the heart of- the man who covets 
 another's goods, who injures any living creature, 
 who utters harshness or untruth, who is proud in 
 his iniquity, and whose thoughts are evil." 
 
 " Kesava [a name of God] is most pleased with 
 him who does good to others, who never utters 
 calumny or falsehood, who never covets another's 
 wife or another's goods, who does not smite or kill, 
 who desires alwaj-s the welfare of all creatures and 
 of his own soul, whose pure heart taketh no pleas- 
 ure in the imperfections of love and hatred. The 
 man who conforms to the duties enjoined in the 
 Scripture is he who best worships Vishnu [God] : 
 there is no other Avay." 
 
 " The duties incumbent alike on all classes are 
 the support of one's own household, marriage for 
 the sake of offspring, tenderness toward all crea- 
 tures, patience, humility, truth, purity, freedom 
 from envy, from repining, from avarice, from de- 
 traction." 
 
 l Transl. of II. H. Wilson, Vol. III.
 
 UNITY AND UNIVERSALITY, ETC. 63 
 
 " Know that man to be the true worshipper of 
 Vishnu, who, looking upon gold in secret, holds 
 another's wealth but as grass, and directs all his 
 thoughts to the Lord." " The Brahman must look 
 upon the jewels of another as if they were but 
 pebbles." 
 
 The five commandments of the Buddhist relig- 
 ion, which dates six centuries before the Christian 
 era, and counts among its adherents more millions 
 than any other church, are these : 1. Thou shalt 
 not kill. 2. Thou shalt not steal. 3. Thou shalt 
 not commit adultery, or any impurity. 4. Thou 
 shalt not lie. 5. Thou shalt not intoxicate thyself 
 with drink. 1 
 
 I need not occupy space with quotations of 
 moral precepts from the ethical writings of the 
 Greek and Roman philosophers. A single sentence 
 of Aristotle sums them up : " In all times men 
 have praised honesty, moral purity, beneficence. 
 In all times they have protested against murder, 
 adultery, perjury, and all kinds of vice. No one 
 will dare maintain that it is better to do injustice 
 than to bear it." 2 So we find in Cicero, " The true 
 law is everywhere spread abroad, it is constant, 
 eternal. It calls us to duty by its commandments ; 
 it turns us away from wrong-doing by its prohibi- 
 
 1 Upham's Sacred Books of Ceylon. Sometimes five other com- 
 mandments are added. 
 
 2 Topic. VIII. x., cit. by Boutteville, " La Morale," p. 642. Fo 
 Plato : " He who commits injustice is ever more wretched than he 
 who suffers it." Goryias, Bohu's Tr. I. 177.
 
 64 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 tions. We can take nothing from it, change 
 nothing, abrogate nothing. Neither the Senate 
 nor the people have the right to free us from it. 
 It is not one thing at Rome, another at Athens ; 
 one thing to-day, to-morrow another. But eternal 
 and immutable, the same Law embraces all times 
 and all nations. There is one Being alone who can 
 teach it and impose it upon all : that is God." l 
 
 This same religious sanction of right doing we 
 find in various writers, urged with the motive of 
 /likeness to God. " God is just," says Plato, " and 
 I there is nothing that resembles him more than the 
 ^just man." 2 "The temperate (virtuous) man is 
 dear to God, for he is like him." 3 Zeno taught that 
 " men ought to seek after perfection ; for God is 
 perfect." 4 Epictetus says that he who would 
 please and obey God must seek to be like him. 
 " He must be faithful as God is faithful ; free, be- 
 neficent, noble, as God is ; in all his words and 
 actions behaving as an imitator of God." 5 " Love 
 mankind : follow God," writes Marcus Aurelius. 6 
 
 There is a celebrated moral rule which is called 
 the Golden Rule of Christianity. Confucius, some 
 five centuries before the Christian era, was asked, 
 " Is there one word which may serve as a rule of 
 practice for all one's life ? " The Master replied, 
 
 1 Cited by Denis : Theories Morales, II. 16. 
 
 2 Tfacetetus : Bohn, I. 411. 
 
 3 The Laws : Bohn, V. 140. 
 
 * Cited by Boutteville, p. 531. 5 Disc. II. 14. 
 
 6 Thoughts, VII. 81.
 
 UNITY AND UNIVERSALITY, ETC. 65 
 
 " Is not reciprocity such a word ? What you do 
 not wish done to yourself, do not do to others." 1 
 Thales, first of the Greek philosophers, taught : 
 " That which thou blamest in another do not thy- 
 self to thy neighbor ; " and Isocrates : " Thou wilt 
 deserve to be honored if thou doest not thyself 
 what thou blamest in others." 2 " Let no one treat 
 his brother in a way he would Himself dislike " is a 
 Sabean maxim, preserved by El Wardi. In the 
 fourth chapter of the so-called " apocryphal" book 
 of Tobit, among many other excellent precepts, we 
 read, " Do to no man what thou thyself hatest." 
 In the Jewish Talmud, also, we find, " Do not to 
 another what thou wouldst not he should do to 
 thee : this is the sum of the law," given as one of 
 the teachings of the Rabbi Hillel, who died when 
 Jesus, according to the common reckoning, was ten 
 years old. 3 
 
 It is not merely external rules, nor outward good 
 conduct alone, that we find inculcated in these uni- 
 versal morals. The wise and good in all times 
 have looked within the heart for the motive and 
 quality of right action. Confucius continually 
 urges the " having the. heant right." " I keep 
 pure my thoughts," says a Parsee hymn. And 
 throughout the Zoroastrian scripture *^gooxL 
 thoughts " are always joined with "good words 
 and good works." u Seek to converse in purity 
 
 1 Legge : Confucian Analects, XV. 22 
 
 2 Cited by Boutteville, p. 533. 
 
 3 London Quarterly Review, Oct 1867. 
 
 5
 
 66 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 with your own pure mind and with God," says 
 Epictetus. " The first and highest purity is that 
 of the soul." And he warns his disciple that he 
 should not even look upon the wife of another 
 with an impure thought. 1 So Ovid : " It is not 
 by locks and bars that a woman ought to be 
 guarded, but by her own purity ; she who does not 
 sin only because she is unable, has really sinned ; 
 her heart is adulterous." 2 And Juvenal : " He 
 who in the silence of his own thought plans a 
 crime has upon him the guilt of the deed." 3 
 " The good man," says Cicero, " not only will not 
 dare to do, he will not even think, what he dares 
 not proclaim." 4 "Keep thy divine part pure," 
 writes Marcus Aurelius ; and again, " Look within ; 
 within is the fountain of good." " That which is 
 hidden within, that is the life, that is the 
 man." 5 
 
 So we shall not be surprised to find that not 
 only the conspicuous virtues are inculcated by the 
 so-called " heathen " teachers ; the lowly and the 
 passive have their place and commendation. 
 4i Whoever wishes to be happy," says Plato, 
 " must attach himself to justice, and walk humbly 
 and modestly in her steps. He who lets himself 
 be puffed up with pride, devoured by ambitious 
 desires, and thinks he has no need of master or 
 guide, God abandons him to himself. He ends by 
 
 1 Disc. II. 18; IV. 11. 2 Cited by Denis, II. 1?4. 
 
 * Satires, XIII. V. 209. * De Officiis, III. 19. 
 
 Tlunu/hts, III. 12< VII. 29; X. 33.
 
 UNITY AND UNIVERSALITY, ETC. 67 
 
 destroying himself." l " Do what you know to be 
 right without expecting any glory from it," is given 
 as a saying of Demophilus, the Pythagorean ; and 
 " Keep thy life hid " is said to have been one of 
 the great maxims of the Epicureans. " Dear to 
 all hearts is he whom lowliness exalts," is a Persian 
 saying ; 2 and another, " Make thyself dust to do 
 any thing well." " He who knows the light, and 
 yet keeps the shade, will be the whole world's 
 model," said Lao-tze ; and again, " He that hum- 
 bles himself shall be preserved entire, that is no 
 vain utterance." " To attain God, the heart must 
 be lowly," is a Hindu maxim. "Patience and 
 resignation is the one road : Buddha has declared 
 no better path exists," says a Chinese scripture. 
 It has indeed been objected that Buddhism unduly 
 exalts the " passive virtues." " Who is the great 
 man? He who is strongest in the exercise of 
 patience, he who patiently endures injury," is a 
 saying attributed to the Buddha himself. In the 
 Brahmanic "Vishnu Purana," " Tenderness toward 
 all, patience, humility," are named among the 
 " duties incumbent on all." Humility is said to 
 have had only an ignoble meaning with the 
 Romans ; but Epictetus, 3 who may have learned 
 the lesson as a slave, recommends to his disciple to 
 " train and perfect his will and render it noble, 
 
 1 Cited by Boutteville. 
 
 2 This and the following sentences are from Conway's Sacred 
 Antholocty. 
 
 a Disc. I. 4 ; II. 8.
 
 68 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 free, faithful, humble" And elsewhere he says, 
 " Such will I show myself to you, faithful, modest, 
 noble, tranquil, since Olympian Zeus himself does 
 not haughtily lift his brow." In his imperial 
 palace Marcus Aurelius could say to himself, 
 " Take care that thou be not made into a Caesar. 
 . . . Keep thyself simple, good, pure . . . kind, 
 affectionate." Again, " Make thyself all^smi- 
 plicitv." l He everywhere praises modesty ; and 
 commends the "sweetness" and "patience" of 
 Antonine. " The more exalted we are, the more 
 lowly we ought to walk," said Cicero. 2 In the 
 Talmud we read, " He who humbles himself will 
 be lifted up ; he who exalts himself will be hum- 
 bled." " He who offers humility before God and 
 man shall be rewarded as if he had offered all the 
 sacrifice in the world." And again, " He who 
 gives alms in secret is greater than Moses." 3 So 
 Seneca wrote, " That which is given to infirmity, 
 to indigence, to honest poverty, ought to be given, 
 in secret, and known only to those who are bene- 
 fited by it. ... Such is the law of benefits be- 
 tween men, the one ought to forget at once what 
 he has given, the other never to forget what he has 
 received." 4 And Plutarch, " The virtuous man 
 buries in silence his good deeds." " All thinking 
 beings," says Marcus Aurelius, " have been made 
 one for the other ; they owe patience one toward 
 another." " 'Tis against nature to cherish ill-will 
 
 i VI. 30 ; IV. 28. 2 De Off. I. 20. 
 
 3 London Quarterly, Oct. 1867. * De Benefidis.
 
 UNITY AND UNIVERSALITY, ETC. C9 
 
 to him who is your neighbor, your kindred, your 
 brother." 
 
 III. 
 
 And so we strike upon the sentiment of benev- 
 olence, the virtue of disinterestedness, the idea of 
 Brotherhood. We shall find the inculcations of 
 Love as widely spread as those of Justice. While 
 inhumanity has always existed in the world, and 
 selfishness and cruelty, certainly not yet outgrown, 
 in all times there have been protests against them 
 from the lips of the good, from the better heart of 
 man. Always there have been kindness, forgive- 
 ness, charity, and the inculcation of them. Those 
 sweet waters have flowed ever from the perennial 
 springs in the heart of man and of God, to refresh 
 even the most desert places. " He who injures any 
 living creature, does it to God," says the "Vishnu 
 Purana " : " He is most pleased with the man who 
 does good to others ; who bears ill-will to none." 
 " The Brahman must ever seek to promote the 
 good of others, for his best riches are benevolence 
 to all." " He who feeds himself and neglects the 
 poor and the friendless stranger needing hospitality, 
 goes to hell." " He who eats his food without 
 bestowing any upon his guest eats iniquity." The 
 Pythagoreans taught that the old ought to treat 
 the young with benevolence ; and men, to be kind 
 to children, remembering that childhood is espe- 
 cially dear to God. We must bear one another's 
 burdens, they said, but not lay burdens on any.
 
 70 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 Justice, they said, is the beginning of political 
 equality, but brotherly love is the completion of it. 
 If disputes or anger arose between any of his dis- 
 ciples, their master taught them to be reconciled 
 before the sun should go down. 1 lamblichus tells 
 us that, " Pythagoras taught the love of all 
 towards all." 2 In Confucius we find these notice- 
 able words : " My^doctrine is simple and eas 
 understand. It consists only in having the heart 
 right, and in loving one's neighbor as one's self." 3 
 And when one asked him about benevolence, he 
 answered " it is love to all men." 4 " We are by 
 nature inclined to love men," says Cicero. 5 " Take 
 away love and benevolence, and you take away all 
 the joy of life." 6 " Kindness, justice, liberality, 
 are more in accordance with our nature than the 
 love of pleasure, of riches, or even of life." And 
 he quotes with approval the maxim of the Stoics, 
 that " men are born for the sake of men, that 
 they may mutually benefit one another." 7 " What 
 good man, what religious man, will look upon the 
 sufferings of others as foreign to him ? " writes 
 Juvenal. 8 " Is there a better sentiment than com- 
 passion ? " says Quintilian, " or one whose source 
 
 i Denis, I. 15, 16. * Boutteville, p. 381, note. 
 
 3 Pauthier's Transl., p. 130. He declares his version to be 
 exact. Legge renders more verbosely and prosaically : " to be true 
 to the principles of our nature, and the benevolent exercise of them 
 to others." The two Chinese words, he says, mean literally 
 centre-heart and as-heart. Analects, IV. 15. 
 
 * Analects, XII. 22. 5 Oe Leg. I. 15. 6 De Amicitia. 
 
 1 De Off. 1U. 5; I. 7. Satires, XV. 131.
 
 UNITY AND UNIVERSALITY, ETC. 71 
 
 lies more in the most venerable and sacred prin- 
 ciples of nature ? God, the author of all things 
 here below, wills that we should help one another. 
 ... If I have given bread to a stranger in the 
 name of that universal brotherhood which binds 
 together all men under the common Father of 
 nature, would it not be a good deed to have saved 
 a soul ready to perish ? " 1 Menander, the Greek 
 dramatist, has these beautiful sentences : " To live 
 is not to live for one's self alone. Let us help one 
 another. Let us learn to have pity upon the sor- 
 rows of others, that they may with cause have 
 compassion upon ours. Help the stranger, for 
 thou mayest one day be a stranger. Let the rich 
 man remember the poor ; for the poor belong to 
 God." 
 
 u Will you not bear with your brother, " cries 
 Epictetus, " who has Gqd for his Father, his son 
 as thou art, of the same high descent ? " Notice 
 this religious motive urged for brotherly love. 
 And again, " Will you not remember over whom 
 you bear rule, that they are by nature your 
 kindred, your brothers, offspring of God ? " 2 speak- 
 ing of slaves. Epictetus had himself been a slave. 
 The poet Terence, who had known the same hard 
 experience, had plucked from it the same flower 
 of sympathy for his fellows. His sentence, " I am 
 a man, nothing human can I count foreign to me," 
 has become almost a proverb. Menander, before 
 
 i Cited by Denis, II. 156. 2 Disc. I. 13.
 
 72 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 him had said in almost the same words, " No man 
 is a stranger to me, provided he be a good man. 
 For we have all one and the same nature, and it 
 is virtue alone which makes the true kindred." 
 So Marcus Aurelius : " The good man remembers 
 that every rational being is his kinsman, and that 
 to care for all men is according to man's nature." 
 " We are made for co-operation : to act against 
 another, then, is contrary to nature." " We are 
 created especially for the sake of one another." 
 " It is the proper work of a man to be benevolent 
 to his kind." 1 
 
 The doctrine of the Brotherhood of Man has 
 been declared to be found in Christian teaching 
 alone. It is difficult to find it in the Gospels ; the 
 single sentence usually quoted having reference 
 only to the small company of Christian disciples. 
 Paul states it in one passage : " God has made of 
 one blood all the nations of men." But the idea 
 was already familiar to the heart and mind of 
 good men. Denis, in his learned and interesting 
 work on the " Moral Theories and Ideas of Antiq- 
 uity," from which many of my quotations have been 
 gathered, says that " Diodorus proposed to him- 
 self to write a universal history on the ground 
 that men everywhere belong to one family. " Plu- 
 tarch speaks of " that admirable republic imagined 
 by Zeno, the founder of the Stoic sect," which 
 shows us " that all men are our countrymen and 
 
 i HI. 4; II. 1; VIIL 66,26.
 
 UNITY AND UNIVERSALITY, ETC. 73 
 
 fellow-citizens ; " and he adds that " Zeno left 
 this description as the dream or imagination of 
 equity and of a philosophic republic ; but what he 
 taught, Alexander realized. Conceiving that he 
 was sent of God to unite all together, he formed 
 of a hundred diverse nations one single universal 
 body ; mingling, as it were, in one cup of friendship 
 the customs and laws of all." 1 
 
 " The love of mankind," caritas generis human* 
 is Cicero's beautiful phrase ; 2 and the expres- 
 sion " the fellowship of the human race " often 
 recurs in his writings. 3 " A man must believe 
 himself born not for himself, but for the whole 
 world," writes Lucan ; and he foretells the time 
 when " the human race will lay aside its weapons, 
 and all nations will love each other." 4 "We are 
 members of one great body : nature has made us 
 kindred . . . and implanted in us mutual love," 
 these are the words of Seneca. 5 
 
 But this is not all. We find among the writers 
 of " heathen " antiquity, not merely the inculcation 
 of kindness, compassion, benevolence : these find 
 their highest expression in the doctrine of forgive- 
 ness of enemies. No doubt we find the lex talionis : 
 the Greek Eschylus, with his " evil for evil," 
 matches the Hebrew " eye for eye." But it was 
 also a Hebrew proverb, " If thine enemy hunger, 
 give him bread to eat ; if he thirst, give him water 
 
 l De Fort. Alexand. 2 De Fin. 
 
 3 De Off. I. 44 ; III. 6. De Amiatia. 
 
 4 Pharsalia, II. 383; VI. Epist. 95.
 
 74 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 to drink." ] The Pythagoreans taught, that if in 
 the state the law recompensed evil with evil, 
 private men ought, on the contrary, to injure 
 none, but to support patiently wrongs and insults. 2 
 Pittacus, one of the seven wise men of Greece, 
 taught that clemency is preferable to vengeance, 
 which brings remorse ; that " it is better to pardon 
 than to punish ; " and said, " Do not speak ill of 
 your friends ; no, not even of your enemies." So 
 Cleobulus said that " we ought to be kind to our 
 friends, to make them more our friends ; and to our 
 enemies, to make them our friends." Confucius 
 thought that we " ought to repay injuries with 
 justice, and kindness with kindness ; " 3 but his 
 countryman Lao-tze had said, " The wise man 
 avenges his injuries by benefits." 4 Plato reports 
 Socrates as saying, " Neither ought one who is 
 injured to return the injury, as the multitude think, 
 since it is on no account right to do injustice. It 
 is not right, therefore, to return an injury, or to do 
 evil to any man, however we may have suffered 
 from him." 5 In later times Cicero teaches a simi- 
 lar less-on. " Let us not listen," he says, " to those 
 who think we ought to be angry with our enemies, 
 and believe this to be great and manly. Nothing 
 i.s more praiseworthy, nothing more marks a great 
 and noble soul, than clemency and the readiness 
 to forgive." 6 And Valerius Maximus, the Roman 
 
 l Prov. XXV. 21. 2 Denis I. 14. 3 Analects, XXV. 36. 
 
 < Tao-te-king (translation of Stan. Julien.) II. 73. 
 
 6 Crtio: Boim, I. 38. tie Off. I. 25.
 
 UNITY AND UNIVERSALITY, ETC. 75 
 
 historian, says still better : " It is more beautiful 
 to overcome injury by the power of kindness, than' 
 oppose to it obstinacy and hatred." 1 In Seneca 
 and Epictetus, the like sentiments are found. 
 Marcus Aurelius compares the wise and humane 
 soul to a spring of pure and sweet water, which, 
 though the passer-by may curse it, continues to 
 offer him a draught to assuage his thirst ; and, 
 even if he cast into it mire and filth, hastens to 
 reject it, and flows on pure and undisturbed. 2 
 This recalls the equally beautiful image in the 
 Oriental scripture of the sandal tree, which, in the 
 moment when it falls before the woodman's stroke, 
 gives its fragrance to the axe which smites it 
 with death. 
 
 I cannot better close this part of my subject 
 than by quoting that fine passage from Epictetus, 
 where he draws the picture of the true " Cynic," 
 he calls him, as men now say the true " Christian." 
 " The Cynic must fence himself with virtuous 
 shame. . . . He must purify his soul. . . . He must 
 know that he is a messenger sent from Zeus to 
 men to teach them of good and evil. . . . He must 
 tell them the truth, without fear .... He must 
 consult the Divinity, and attempt nothing without 
 God. . . . He will needs be smitten, yet he must 
 love those who smite him, as being the father, 
 the brother, of all. . . . When he rebukes he will 
 do it as a father, as a .brother, as the minister 
 
 i IV. 2. 2 vill. 51.
 
 76 FEEEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 of the Father of all. . . . He must have such 
 patience as to seem insensible and like a stone 
 to the vulgar. . . . Instead of arms and guards, 
 conscience will be his strength. For he knows 
 that he has watched and toiled for mankind, that 
 he has slept pure and waked purer, and that he 
 has regulated all his thoughts as the minister of 
 Heaven." 1 
 
 I am tempted to add as a companion picture that 
 which Marcus Aurelius draws of the good man. 
 " He is as a priest and minister of the gods ; de- 
 voted to that divinity which hath its dwelling 
 within him ; by virtue of which the man is uncon- 
 taminable by any pleasure, invulnerable to every 
 grief, inviolable to every injury, insensible to every 
 malice ; a fighter in the noblest fight, dyed deep 
 with justice, accepting with all his soul that which 
 the Providence of the Universe appoints him. . . . 
 He remembers also that every rational being is his 
 kinsman, and that to care for all men is in accord- 
 ance with the nature of man." 2 
 
 IV. 
 
 The last great Religious Idea which I named is 
 that of Immortality, or the continued life of the 
 soul after the body's death. 
 
 It may surprise those who have been brought 
 up in a different view, but I believe it to be the 
 simple fact, that no truth of Religion has been 
 
 i Disc. ffl. 22. 2 in. 4.
 
 UNITY AND UNIVERSALITY, ETC. 77 
 
 more universal than this. In all ages of which 
 any history has come to as, in nearly all nations of 
 which we have any trustworthy account, we find, 
 this faith : not a hope merely, not " one guess ' 
 among many," but a confidence, a practical assur- 
 ance, a faith to live by and to die by. Hardly 
 a people so savage but some traces of it are discover- 
 able ; none so civilized that they have outgrown 
 it ; an essential element in all religions. Supersti- 
 tions and foolish fancies about it, in plenty, no 
 doubt ; but revealed through them all the central 
 idea, the inner belief. From the wisest and best 
 in different ages and nations the clearest statements 
 of faith in it. No doubt, rude nations have had 
 rude conceptions of it ; no doubt, as nations grew 
 more advanced the old mythologies about it lost 
 their hold, and were discarded even with ridicule 
 as unworthy the belief of thinking men ; and some 
 men, with the going of the fables, lost their faith 
 also in the idea. But in these very times, some of 
 the wisest and best men sought to rescue the faith 
 and establish it on a deeper basis. The idea sur- 
 vived the form which it had cast off. 
 
 Caesar tells us of the ancient Gauls, that, " to 
 arouse their courage, by taking away the fear of 
 death, the Druids preach that souls do not die." l 
 And Pomponius Mela says that they believe " that 
 souls are eternal, and that there is another life." 2 
 And Valerius Maximus confirms the statement: 
 
 i De Bdlo Gall. VI. 14. 2 De Situ Orlis, III. 2.
 
 78 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 " They are persuaded that the souls of men are 
 immortal." 1 
 
 In later times Spanish conquerors go to Mexico 
 and Peru, and find the faith in immortality, as in 
 God, already there. 2 Roman Catholic missionaries 
 visit India, China, Thibet, and find it there ; go 
 among the North American Indians, and find it 
 there. Dr. Livingstone, the English missionary, 
 penetrates into the interior of Africa, and brings 
 home this report : " There is no necessity for 
 beginning to tell even the most degraded of these 
 people of the existence of God, or of a future state, 
 these facts being universally admitted. . . . On 
 questioning intelligent men among the Bakwains 
 as to their former knowledge of good and evil, of 
 God, and of a future state, they have scouted the 
 idea of their ever having been without a tolerably 
 clear conception on all these subjects." . . . "They 
 fully believe in the soul's continued existence apart 
 from the body, and visit the graves of relatives, 
 making offerings." 3 There are travellers, indeed, 
 who report of tribes that have belief neither in 
 immortality nor in God. If it be so, we must 
 regard these as exceptional instances, where the 
 native human faiths are yet undeveloped. 
 
 The Jewish Scriptures of the Old Testament 
 contain only faint intimations of a future life. 
 This is the more remarkable since the belief was 
 
 1 II. 6, 10. 
 
 2 Prescott : Cong, of Mexico, I. 62. Conq. of Peru, I. 89. 
 
 3 Missionary Travels in South Africa, pp. 176, 686.
 
 UNITY AND UNIVERSALITY, ETC. 79 
 
 so strongly held in Egypt at and before the time 
 of Moses. Perhaps the beliefs of their oppressors 
 were hateful to them. Be this as it may, we find 
 the immortality of the soul clearly taught in the 
 " apocryphal " books of Alexandrian-Jewish ori- 
 gin. It seems also to have been brought back 
 by the Jews from their contact with the Persians 
 in the Babylonian captivity. Certainly before the 
 advent of Christianity it was the common belief 
 of the nation, except among the sect of Sadducees. 
 At least the doctrine of the " resurrection from 
 the dead " was so. 
 
 Probably the oldest existing record of man's 
 faith in a future life is the ancient Egyptian " Book 
 of the Dead," or " Funeral Ritual." Its chapters 
 are found inscribed on mummy-cases, or written 
 upon rolls of papyrus within them. It is believed to 
 date as far back as two thousand years before the 
 Christian era. It might well be called the Book 
 of Life, for it is full of an intense vitality ; and this 
 vivid sense of life shines through all that is obscure, 
 strange, and extravagant in its details. It recounts 
 the experiences of the human soul after death : its 
 passage in the mystic boat through the land of 
 darkness to the blessed fields ; its trial in the " Hall 
 of the Two Truths " (or the " twofold judgment ") 
 before Thoth, the Lord of Truth, and the forty-two 
 judges, to each of whom it declares its innocence 
 of the offence he specially sits to condemn ; the 
 placing its heart in the balance against an image 
 of Righteousness ; the declaration of its innocence ;
 
 80 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 its passage through the initiatory trials to the 
 Blessed Land and the presence of the god Osiris, 
 its Father, in the eternal " dwelling-place of the 
 prepared spirit." I quote some passages from this 
 remarkable book. " The osiris [that is, the soul, 
 taking the name of its father-god] lives after he 
 dies. Every god rejoices with life ; the osiris 
 rejoices with life as they rejoice." " Let the osiris 
 go ; he passes from the gate, he sees his father, 
 Osiris ; he makes a way in the darkness to his 
 father ; he is his beloved ; he has come to see his 
 father ; he has pierced the heart of Set [the Evil 
 Spirit] to do the things of his father, Osiris ; he is 
 the son beloved of his father. He has come a pre- 
 pared spirit. . . . He moves as the never-resting 
 gods in the heavens. . . . The osiris says, ' Hail 
 Creator, self-created, do not turn me away, I am 
 one of thy types on earth. ... I join myself with 
 the noble spirits of the wise in Hades.' . . . * O 
 ye lords of truth, I have brought you truth ; I have 
 not privily done evil against any man ; I have not 
 been idle ; I have not made any to weep ; I have 
 not murdered ; I have not defrauded ; I have not 
 committed adultery: I am pure, I am pure.' . . . 
 Let the osiris go ; he is without sin, without crime ; 
 he lives upon truth ; he has made his delight in 
 doing what men say and the gods wish ; he has 
 given food to the hungry, drink to the thirsty, 
 clothes to the naked ; his mouth is pure, his hands 
 are pure. . . . His heart goes to its place in the 
 balance complete. . . . The Father of the spirit
 
 UNITY AND UNIVERSALITY, ETC. 81 
 
 has examined and proved him. He has found that 
 the departed fought on earth the battle of the 
 good gods, as his Father the Lord of the invisible 
 world had commanded him. . . . O God, the pro- 
 tector of him who has brought his cry to thee, he 
 is thine, let him have no harm ; let him be as one 
 of thy flying servants. Thou art he, he is thou ! 
 Make it well with him in the world of spirits ! " * 
 
 In the Hindu Vedas we find also the faith in 
 immortality. Yama, the god of the dead " waited 
 enthroned in immortal light to welcome the good 
 into his kingdom of joy.'* There were " the homes 
 he had gone to prepare for them," " where the One 
 Being dwells beyond the stars." 2 "Where there is 
 eternal light, in that immortal, imperishable world 
 place me," sings a Vedic burial hymn . " Where the 
 secret place of heaven is, ... where life is free, 
 . . . where joy and pleasure abide, where the desires 
 of our desire are attained,there make me immortal." 3 
 " Let him depart," says another, " to the heroes 
 who have laid down their lives for others, to those 
 who have bestowed their gifts on the poor." And 
 in the later Brahmanic scripture, the " Vishnu 
 Purana," we read, " He who speaks wisely, moder- 
 ately, kindly, goes [after death] to those worlds 
 which are the inexhaustible sources of happiness. 
 
 1 See Birch's Translation of the " Book of the Dead," in Bun- 
 sen's " Egypt's Place," &c., Vol. V. 
 
 2 Rig Veda, X. See S. Johnson's Oriental Religions; India, 
 p. 128. 
 
 3 R. V. IX. 113, 7, cited in M. Miiller's Chips, I. 46. 
 
 6
 
 82 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 He who is intelligent, modest, devout, who rever- 
 ences wisdom and respects his superiors and the 
 aged, goes to the highest heaven." " He who 
 feeds himself, and neglects the poor and friendless 
 stranger, goes to hell." i So in the Bhagavad 
 Gita : " There is another invisible eternal exist- 
 ence superior to this visible one, which does not 
 perish when all things perish. Those who attain 
 this never return. This is my supreme abode." 2 
 
 Buddhism teaches the same doctrine. " There 
 is undoubtedly a life after this," says a Buddhist 
 tract, " in which the virtuous may expect the 
 reward of their good deeds. . . . Wicked men, on 
 the contrary, are after death born into hell, as 
 animals. If they have done any good deed in 
 their lifetime, they are after a long time released 
 from punishment, and born into the world again 
 as men. If they abstain from evil, and do good, 
 they may reach the state of felicity, a place full 
 of joy and delight. Judgment takes place imme- 
 diately after death." 3 
 
 Beyond all the heavens, into which in turn the 
 good are born in their ascending course, Buddhism 
 (as well as Brahmanism) presents a state which is 
 the object of all devout aspiration, the final reward 
 of the highest devotion and virtue. It is called 
 Nirvana. Some writers have insisted that it means 
 annihilation. But others, equally learned, interpret 
 
 1 Wilson's Transl. III. 121, 144. 
 
 2 Thompson's Transl. p. 60. 
 
 8 Uphaui's Sacred Books of Ceylon, III. 158.
 
 UNITY AND UNIVERSALITY, ETC. 83 
 
 it, with far more probability as it appears to me, 
 to be merely the end of the soul's transmigrations, 
 the cessation of re-births into the pain and trouble 
 of this world ; not annihilation, but perfect rest, 
 absolute peace. 1 
 
 The religion of Zoroaster taught to the Persians 
 the same great truth. It promised to all who 
 should faithfully keep the law of God, in purity of 
 thought, speech, and act, " when body and soul 
 have separated, the attainment of paradise in the 
 next world ; " while the disobedient " after death 
 will have no part in paradise, but will occupy the 
 place of darkness destined for the wicked." 2 
 
 In Greece, where there were no sacred books, 
 no " holy scriptures " as such, but where the 
 poets and the philosophers were the religious 
 teachers of the people, we find no less the doctrine, 
 and the popular belief, of Immortality. This pop- 
 ular belief, founded on the pictures which the 
 poets' fancy had painted, is familiar to all. Hades, 
 the world of spirits ; the Judges, Minos, JEacus, 
 and Ilhadamanthus ; Tartarus, the abode of dark- 
 ness and punishment ; the Elysian fields, blooming 
 with asphodel, radiant with perpetual sunshine, 
 where parted friends meet again, " where life is 
 ever sweet, and sorrow is not, nor winter, nor any 
 rain or storm." Sophocles puts into the mouth of 
 
 1 See S. Johnson's Oriental Religions, p. 619; and M. Miiller's 
 Introduction to liis translation of the Dhammapada. 
 
 2 Aifsta : Spiegel, I. 171 ; cited by Alger, Doctrine of Future 
 Life, p. Io6.
 
 84 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 the dying Antigone the strongly cherished hope 
 that she should be welcomed by her father, her 
 mother, her brother, in that other world. 1 In Pindar 
 we read, " An honorable and virtuous man may 
 rest assured as to his future fate. The souls of 
 the lawless departing this life suffer punishment. 
 But the good lead a life without a tear, among 
 those honored by the gods for having always de- 
 lighted in virtue." 2 One of the golden verses of 
 Pythagoras is this : " When thou shalt have laid 
 , aside thy body, thou shalt rise freed from mortality, 
 and become a god of the kindly skies ; " as we 
 should say, " an angel." " Those who have lived 
 in justice and piety," says Plutarch, " fear nothing 
 after death. They look for a divine felicity. As 
 they who run a race are not crowned till they have 
 conquered, so good men believe that the reward 
 of virtue is not given them till after death. Eager 
 to flee away from the body and from the world to 
 a glorious and blessed abode, they free their 
 thoughts as much as in them lies from the things 
 that perish." And again: "Not by lamentations 
 and mournful chants ought we to celebrate the 
 funeral of the good man, but by hymns ; for, in 
 ceasing to be numbered with mortals, he enters 
 upon the heritage of a diviner life." 3 
 
 For the thoughts of Plato upon this question, 
 we turn of course to his famed book, " Phaedon." 
 Under the form of a report of the conversation of 
 
 1 Antiyone, 897. * Second Olympic, cited by Alger. 
 
 Cited by Denis, II. 225, 263.
 
 UNITY AND UNIVERSALITY, ETC. 85 
 
 Socrates with his disciples just before his death, 
 he gives his Master's ideas, or his own, upon the 
 immortality and future state of the soul, with the 
 arguments by which the conclusions are reached. 
 These arguments, long, curious, and elaborate, can 
 have little weight with us ; but the conclusions are 
 definite and plain. As a thoughtful and conserva- 
 tive writer has well said, " The reasoning of 
 Socrates in favor of immortality is far from clear, 
 but not so his faith in immortality itself." l We 
 find accordingly such sentences as these : 
 
 " Can the soul which is invisible, and which goes 
 to a place like itself excellent, pure, invisible, to 
 the presence of a good and wise God (whither, if 
 God will, my soul also must shortly go) can this 
 soul of ours, being of such a nature, when separated 
 from the body be immediately dispersed and de- 
 stroyed, as the many assert? Far from it." 
 " When, therefore, death approaches a man, the 
 mortal part of him, as it appears, dies ; but the 
 immortal departs safe and uncorruptible, having 
 withdrawn itself from death." " The soul, there- 
 fore, is most certainly immortal and imperishable, 
 and our souls really exist in the world of spirits." 
 " Those who shall have sufficiently purified them- 
 selves by philosophy [religion], shall live without 
 their bodies, received into more beautiful mansions." 
 After a long and minute description of the circum- 
 stances and scenery of the future state, he adds : 
 
 1 I. Nichols : Hours with Evangelists, p. 90.
 
 86 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 " To affirm positively that these things are exactly 
 as I have described them does not become a man 
 of sense ; that, however, either this or something 
 of the kind takes place with respect to our souls 
 and their habitations, this appears to me to be 
 most fitting to be believed, since the soul is evi- 
 dently immortal." " For the sake of these things 
 we should use every endeavor to acquire virtue 
 and wisdom in this life ; for the reward is noble 
 and the hope is great." " A man ought, then, to 
 have confidence about his soul, if during this life 
 he has made it beautiful with temperance, justice, 
 fortitude, freedom, and truth ; he waits for his 
 entrance into the world of spirits as one who is 
 ready to depart when destiny calls." " I shall 
 not remain, I shall depart. Do not say, then, that 
 Socrates is buried ; say that you bury my body." 
 
 Cicero tells us that the Stoics believed in a con- 
 tinued life after death, but not in an endless immor- 
 tality. His own faith has been thought to have 
 been variable, or at least his expression of it ; though 
 I think that with him, as with Plato, the " if" is 
 often of argumentation and not of doubt ; and, with 
 Lecky, I find in his writings " a firm and constant 
 reference to the immortalit}^ of the soul." " As an 
 eternal God," he says " moves the mortal world, 
 so an immortal soul moves our frail body." l 
 And, again, " the origin of souls cannot be found 
 Upon this earth, for there is nothing earthly in 
 
 1 Somnium Scip.
 
 UNITY AND UNIVERSALITY, ETC. 87 
 
 them. They have faculties which claim to be 
 called divine, and which can never be shown to 
 have come to man from any source but God. That 
 nature in us which thinks, which knows, which 
 lives, is celestial, and for that reason necessarily 
 eternal. God himself can be represented only as 
 a free Spirit, separate from matter, seeing all things, 
 and moving all things, himself ceaselessly working. 
 Of this kind, from this nature, is the human soul." 
 " Although you do not see the soul of man, as you 
 do not see God ; yet, as from his works you ac- 
 knowledge Him, so from memory, from invention, ,/ 
 from all the beauty of virtue, do tliou acknowledge 
 the divine nature of the soul. 'It cannot be de- 
 stroyed." 1 He represents the aged Cato as 
 exclaiming, " O glorious day when I shall remove 
 from this confused crowd to join the divine assem- 
 bly of souls ! For I shall go to meet not only those 
 great men of whom I have spoken, but my own 
 son Cato, for whom I have performed the funeral 
 rites, which he should rather have rendered to me. 
 His spirit has never deserted me ; but departed, 
 looking back upon me, to that place whither he 
 knew that I should soon come. If I have borne 
 his loss with courage, it is not that my heart was 
 unfeeling ; but I consoled myself with the thought 
 that our separation would not be for long." 2 With 
 these words of undying affection and faith, I bring 
 my quotations to a close. 
 
 1 Tusc. Quaest. 1. 2 Cato Major.
 
 88 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 How beautifully sound these consenting voices 
 from East to West, from century to century, utter- 
 ing the great Beliefs of the human race. Into 
 what a " large place " they summon us out of all 
 narrow limits of sect and church, even beyond 
 Christianity itself, into that great and universal 
 Church of the race, whose unity is the unity of the 
 spirit, whose fellowship is the brotherhood of great 
 faiths, sacred principles, and spiritual ideas. One 
 Truth, one Right, one Love, one immortal Faith : 
 the Reason, the Conscience, the Heart of man, in 
 all times and under all skies, essentially identical: 
 and over all one 'God and Father of all, giving to 
 all his inspiration and his revelations as they are 
 able to receive ! 
 
 The passages that I have gathered into this 
 paper are but a scanty gleaning from a broad and 
 rich field. Of course, a good deal of a less interest- 
 ing, less elevated, even opposite, character may be 
 gathered from the like sources. But its existence 
 does not invalidate what I have presented. I have 
 made no claim for entire uniformity, but only for 
 virtual universality, in the great ideas. I do not 
 say that every man has believed, but that among 
 all peoples, and in all times of which we have ac- 
 count, these beliefs have existed ; that they per- 
 petually recur, indicating a natural gravitation of 
 the human mind toward them ; that they are the 
 common property of the human race, and not the 
 exclusive possession of any special people or re-
 
 UNITY AND UNIVERSALITY, ETC. 89 
 
 ligion. The soul of man, human nature, bears 
 these ideas and sentiments of God, of Right, of 
 Love, and of Immortality as certainly, as naturally, 
 as generally, as the earth under all climes produces 
 plants and trees. Superficial variations, of place, 
 climate, race, culture, we find : essential unity of 
 idea. 
 
 We have been reading some verses from the 
 Scriptures of the Universal Church, man in his : 
 religious relations. This is the Broad Church, which 
 not only stretches be} T ond barriers of sects, Roman- 
 ist or Protestant, but reaches as wide as the world 
 of man. It is as ancient as it is broad. It has a 
 Past which far antedates that from which we are 
 so frequently warned or entreated not to sever 
 ourselves. Its antiquity does not stop with Judea 
 eighteen hundred years ago, but reaches centuries 
 beyond. This is the birthright Church of man. 
 It is founded on the rock of man's spiritual nature, 
 " normally and for ever God's Revealer." Its com- 
 mon thought is in that ground-idea of God which 
 lies back of all the various conceptions of God. 
 Its common life is in that mysterious disposition, 
 that native and irrepressible tendency toward the 
 invisible and the infinite, that universal sentiment 
 of reverence and of dependence upon a superior 
 Power, Goodness, and Right, which make man to 
 be, by force of his nature, in all time and place, a 
 religious being. Overarching all, like the universal 
 sky, encompassing and inspiring all, like the uni-
 
 90 FREEDOM. AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 versal air, vitalizing and informing all, like the 
 universal electric force, binding and drawing all 
 like the universal attraction and gravitation, this 
 idea of God, of his love and his law, this religious 
 consciousness, unites earth's millions in the humili- 
 ties and aspirations of prayer ; it moves them to 
 deeds of benevolence and justice ; it charms them 
 ever with the ideal of a better world, a perfected 
 societ} 7 -, a kingdom of God upon earth, a heaven of 
 immortality beyond. It creates always its prophets 
 and preachers, men of keener conscience, intenser 
 enthusiasm for truth and right; always its saints, 
 men of tenderer piety, deeper inward life, pro- 
 founder spirituality ; always its reformers seeking 
 to awaken men from dead forms to living faith and 
 righteousness ; always its martyrs bearing the re- 
 proach of truth and the cross of suffering humanity ; 
 always its heretics questioning all traditions, de- 
 manding light and liberty ; always its radicals 
 protesting against superstitions and mythologies, 
 and breaking down idols. " Before these vast facts 
 of God and Providence," says an English writer, 
 " the difference between man and man dwarfs into 
 nothing. These are no discoveries of our own 
 wi&i which we can meddle, but revelations of the 
 Infinite, which, like the sunlight, shed themselves 
 on all people alike, wise and unwise, good or evil ; 
 and they claim and permit no other acknowledg- 
 ment from us than the simple obedience of our 
 lives and the plainest confession of our lips."
 
 UNITY AND UNIVERSALITY, ETC. 91 
 
 Religious is a higher and broader word than 
 Christian; and so is human. Jewish, Brahman, Bud- 
 dhist, Parsee, Mohammedan, these, too, are churches 
 of the One Living God, the Father of all. With 
 advancing light, thoughtful men in all of them will 
 come out of what is peculiar and special in each, 
 and so local and temporary, into the broad ground 
 of universal, spiritual religion, which is Piety, 
 Righteousness, Humanity : that belief in God and 
 in man which is the creed of all creeds. 
 
 If ever in the isolation of our individualism we 
 are ready to envy the churchman his sense of 
 membership in a great body of brave and conse- 
 crated men and women, whose lips have uttered 
 for centuries the same sacramental words, then 
 may the better thought come to us, that we are 
 indeed, if we will, members of this and of a yet 
 grander company, from whom the churchman cuts 
 himself off. For he, after all, is the schismatic. 
 Look beneath names and words, and feel the life of 
 the invisible, spiritual host of all righteous, true, 
 heroic, saintly souls, made ours, if we are in sympa- 
 thy with them, not by any external organization, 
 but by a spiritual law. Its sacramental words are 
 God, Duty, Love, Immortality. These, written 
 in many tongues upon its banner, have given vigor 
 to more hearts and met more eyes lifted unfaltering 
 in death, than any one church or one religion can 
 count within its pale. This is the Eternal Gospel ; 
 this the true Church Catholic : the Church not of
 
 92 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 Rome, nor of England ; the Church not of Bud- 
 dha, nor of Moses, nor of Christ ; but of God and 
 Man. 
 
 NOTE. 
 
 I have not introduced any quotations from the Jewish or 
 Christian Scriptures, because they are familiar, and in all 
 hands. 
 
 For the reader's convenience I append a few dates, as they 
 are given in the books ; some of them approximative : 
 
 Before the Christian era: The Book of the Dead, 2000; 
 The Rig Veda, 1500; Homeric Poems, 900 ; Thales born, 640; 
 Lao-tze, 604; Zoroaster, 589; Pythagoras, 580; Confucius, 
 550. Gotama (Buddha) d. 548; Xenophanes b. 540; Pindar, 
 518; Sophocles, -495; Socrates, 470; Plato, 430; Menander, 
 342; Zeno, 300; Cicero, 106; Virgil, 70; Horace, 65; Ovid, 
 43; Philo, 27. Within the Christian era: Seneca. 3; Quin- 
 tilian, 40; Plutarch, 50; Epictetus, 70; Marcus Aurelius, 
 121 ; Maximus Tyrius, 180. The Talmud \vas composed in 
 its present form in the fifth century, but from ancient mate- 
 rials. The Vishnu Parana was compiled in the tenth century, 
 also out of ancient materials, as its name indicates.
 
 FREEDOM IN RELIGION. 93 
 
 FREEDOM IN RELIGION. 
 BY SAMUEL JOHNSON. 
 
 TF, as certain modern schools predict, Religion is 
 *- soon to be wholly supplanted by Science, that 
 fate will have become possible only through its 
 previous conviction upon the charge of suppressing 
 the just liberties of man. By no axe less penetrat- 
 ing than such condemnation can a root so deeply 
 set in human history be severed. The sharp edge 
 of one inquisition no height nor depth can now 
 escape. For all claims, one test and one title are 
 now indispensable : and these we indicate, when, 
 with a thrill, of which the mystery of the ocean 
 wires is but a symbol, we pronounce the word 
 Freedom. 
 
 Of the fact, which will not by my present hear- 
 ers be disputed, is not this the meaning? Man 
 has become mature enough to know that he at 
 least is real, and his experience valid ; that his 
 seeing is by his own eyes, and that he is concerned 
 only with what for Mm is true and just and good, 
 and for his powers the natural culture. All way- 
 marks of history point to this emancipation, as his 
 real goal. 
 
 Note, for instance, the ever-renewed escape from 
 spiritual swathes woven of Fate and Godhead, into
 
 94 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 freer play of the living Human Form. It is the 
 rhythm of history. Asiatic devotions issue in the 
 Buddha, or Man throned above the Gods ; Chris- 
 tianity in identifying God with a Man ; Homer and 
 Hesiod in the human art of Phidias, the human 
 dignity of Socrates. Confucius, summing up the 
 lessons of Chinese experience, learned " to speak 
 of man, not of God," and placed the foundations of 
 virtue in original human nature. Of modern phi- 
 losophy the doors are Kant and Hegel : analysis of 
 the human faculties as determinative of all knowl- 
 edge, duty, faith. And modern sentiment has added 
 to the practical maxim of Terence, " Nothing hu- 
 man but is of import to me," the largest ideal 
 reading of Feuerbach's impressive sentence, " God 
 is an unutterable sigh out of the depths of the 
 human heart." Steadily, on every historic line, 
 proceeds that imperial justification of the thinking 
 faculty, which is the condition of all respect for 
 the objects of thought ; the high recognition that 
 man is himself consubstantial with whatever he 
 knows, or- loves, or adores. 
 
 The profound significance of the word Freedom 
 for our age lies in the full consciousness, by mind, 
 of its own essential validity. For nothing can this 
 postulate of all future knowledge be bartered. To 
 no tradition in the name of God, to no science in 
 the name of Nature, will it be surrendered. Not 
 though the new heavens fall, as the old hells are 
 burning out, will man dispense with faith in his 
 personality and its freedom.
 
 FREEDOM IN RELIGION. 95 
 
 The new heavens of science are Evolution, and 
 not likely to fall by any such alternative. An inher- 
 ent law of development, reaching up through all 
 grades of existence, to receive its highest form in 
 man, so fully certifies growth and progress, that 
 Evolution may well be recognized as the scientific 
 equivalent to the principle of Spiritual Freedom. 
 But this recognition is not founded on the mere 
 fact that evolution is ascension of forms : it depends 
 on the way in which such ascension is interpreted. 
 Pure outgrowth of higher stages from lower ones 
 would imply that the origin of power is found in 
 the crudest forms ; which is essential fetichism, 
 and inverts the dignity of mind. That the inter- 
 ests of evolution can be identified with those of 
 freedom is due to the fact that this scientific prin- 
 ciple itself involves, as the condition of its ascend- 
 ing line of outgrowths, transcendent resources of 
 universal Mind, by whose constant implication 
 these finite growths are made possible, and whose 
 descent is their inspiration and emancipation. 
 
 Neither to the ascent, nor to the influx which 
 conditions it, does the mature demand of freedom 
 in our day admit any ultimate limit. This better 
 shaping of human circumstance, this secular march 
 over the falling redoubts of superstition, this end- 
 less invitation to every human need to stand forth 
 and be heard, this growing ideal of social order, 
 quickening the sense of actual depravity and defect, 
 and the absolute confidence of this assault on every 
 form of bondage, is manifestly an appeal to
 
 96 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 something of larger meaning than such terms as 
 *' evolution " or " emancipation " are wont to sug- 
 gest. It proves a constant sense of the Infinite. 
 The languages of the highest civilizations express 
 their future tense either by the infinitive, or by 
 some combination with it. The very limits within 
 which we find that progress must move, are but 
 the stimulus to an unlimited aspiration, which 
 delights in ascribing to natural law itself every 
 attribute of ideal mind. 
 
 Just here is my reason for believing that relig- 
 ion will not die at the hands of science. Freedom, 
 the principle not of science only, but of all culture, 
 rests on man's recognition of infinity as implicated 
 in his own finite conditions. In other words, 
 Freedom means religion, and Religion means free- 
 dom. If you tell me that religion must last for 
 ever, because it is " revelation," or because it is 
 " supernatural," or because it is " the endless need 
 of sinful man," your logic is a sieve ; my doubts 
 run through it. What is supernatural ? What is 
 not revelation ? What proof that sirifulness is 
 endless, or that religion is to stand or fall with 
 that ? But I can see that religion is imperishable, 
 if it is essential to development and progress. I 
 can see that this substance of spiritual endeavor 
 cannot be illusory or self-destructive, if it is the 
 basis and condition of Human Freedom. 
 
 Comprehensively to define what I hold to be the 
 meaning of this profound relation, is the task to 
 which I am now invited.
 
 FREEDOM IN RELIGION. 97 
 
 DEFINITIONS. 
 
 The question what is to become of religion 
 being now uppermost, restatements of what relig- 
 ion means are the order of the day. Is it not the 
 fine discipline of your platform to learn to con- 
 struct and apply them ? Of spiritual facts, indeed, 
 no definitions can do more than state relations with 
 clearness, since the related terms must, by their 
 very nature and their inherence in the infinite, 
 remain ill-defined. Were it not so, they would 
 not permit the very freedom they claim to express. 
 Hence the great number of such definitions now 
 in the field ; we are not discouraged to find that 
 no one is quite satisfied with his neighbor's 
 attempt. It is not easy, perhaps it is not possible, 
 so to define, that nothing which belongs to the 
 universality of the idea shall be shut out, nothing 
 ignored, nothing left to loose inference, or to a 
 merely charitable construction. Even if we define 
 religion broadly as " the effort of man for self- 
 perfection, or for endless growth," we may seem 
 to others to exclude, as non-essential to the process 
 defined, the real existence and inspiration of the 
 Perfect itself, without which such effort on man's 
 part, or even the idea of making it, is to most of 
 us inexplicable, and which therefore demands dis- 
 tinct recognition. One of the poles on which the 
 movement turns seems to be wanting to the com- 
 pleteness of the formula. 
 
 In the opposite statement, that " religion is the 
 7
 
 S8 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 supernatural action of divine grace in man," 
 there is, manifestly, wanting what should be 
 allowed as the natural pole of the spiritual pro- 
 cess, even by those who believe " the supernatural " 
 to be real and divine. 
 
 Again : two mutually exclusive conceptions 
 have arisen respectively in the East and the West : 
 the one defining religion as "man's sense of his 
 own nothingness before God," which excludes 
 man from the right to have any sense at all, and 
 even leaves him altogether out of the process ; the 
 other as the " worship of humanity," which ex- 
 cludes such a thing as worship by humanity, and 
 leaves no term in the process except man. Subject to 
 like mutual criticism are the old mystic absorption 
 in abstract impersonal essence, on the one hand, 
 and our modern idolatry of personal will and defi- 
 nite works, on the other. So, in general, a spon- 
 taneity without moral allegiance would seem to be 
 the Celtic onesidedness ; moralism without spon- 
 taneity, the Teutonic. Even the " Love of God 
 and Man," the " Golden Rule," the Christian 
 Beatitudes, fail of completeness, by not distinctly 
 recognizing the intellectual nature : whence in part 
 their degeneracy 'in to the petty sentimentalism of 
 the pulpit, and the unphilosophical narrowness of 
 the creeds. The full idea of Religion is not satis- 
 fied by these unipolar elements : they offer no ade- 
 quate basis for its definition. 
 
 Then we have religion represented organically, 
 as a supreme sphere, centring in Jesus Christ,
 
 FREEDOM IN RELIGION. 99 
 
 with circumference in Bible and Church, and in 
 various limits and monopolies of Christian origin ; 
 and again, personally, as a sense of absolute self- 
 condemnation, followed by a sense, through Christ's 
 merits alone, of supreme self-gratulation, and by 
 the fullest real security : of all which the exclu- 
 siveness would not be easy to overstate. 
 
 On the other hand, we must remember that the 
 purport of terms is open to such latitude, by rea- 
 son of the mutual involution of ideas in modern 
 thought, that the definer's intention must often be 
 read between the lines. Thus the word " Man " 
 may be meant to cover the infinite as well as the 
 finite relations of man ; and the word " God " to 
 embrace a divine humanity and a natural order, as 
 manifestations of God. And as by " man's effort 
 to perfect himself" may be intended " man's effort 
 at development, as moved by his relations with the 
 Perfect:" so by "the supernatural'' in divine 
 power, may sometimes be indicated, not exclusion 
 of deity from nature, physical or human, but 
 simply that of these, its two spheres, the human, 
 with which religion is concerned, is . the higher. 
 Our criticism goes to the form of statements, not 
 to what may be meant by them. 
 
 Such margin for interpretation often becomes 
 due, if we would read old or new definitions of 
 religion as they stand in the minds of their advo- 
 cates. And all the more manifestly is there need 
 of stating, or unmistakably implying, all elements 
 which are essential to the idea of Religion ; there
 
 100 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 being in strict usage of terms no authority for such 
 larger inferential construction as I have ventured 
 to give, for instance, to certain definitions, nor 
 assurance that it would not sometimes be declined 
 as injustice. 
 
 Surely this demand for completeness is enhanced 
 by the fact that we are seeking to define Religion 
 so as to express its identity with Freedom. 
 
 Shall we then, after these premises, venture to 
 attempt it ? Shall I offer the statement that 
 religion is the natural attraction of mind as finite 
 to mind as infinite f 
 
 Observe that I use this word mind in no narrow 
 sense, as of the intellect in distinction from the 
 emotions or the volitions ; but in the full sense of 
 intelligence, with whatever of conscious or uncon- 
 scious, scrutable or inscrutable, can be included 
 therein. 
 
 Observe, next, that the statement does not, as is 
 usual to do, speak of God in distinction from Man. 
 Nor does it enter on what seems to me the fatally 
 exclusive analytical process of determining how far 
 either of the terms may or may not involve the 
 other. At what point in the growth of any 
 thought, purpose, or desire, at what dividing line, 
 or suture, of the living personality of man, one may 
 say that God's work begins or man's work ends, 
 is to me past all conceiving, or even attempting to 
 conceive. I have no diagnosis on that matter, 
 initial as it is for the creeds. Mind shows me no 
 such suture. Mind is one essence : call it divine
 
 FREEDOM IN RELIGION. 101 
 
 or human, it cannot be cut off from itself; what it 
 knows is but that which itself is. I do not there- 
 fore find religion definable by any distinction of 
 Man from God, but call it the natural attraction 
 of mind in its finiteness to mind in its infinitude. 
 It is such attraction, whether as sentiment, con- 
 viction, or conduct, whether as aspiration or in- 
 spiration, whether as struggle, or solace, or heavenly 
 peace, or mastering faith, that we really mean, 
 when we speak of religion. It is a sense of inmost 
 identity with that absolute adequacy and boundless 
 resource to which our actual limits are drawn. 
 This is no arbitrary interpretation. We worship 
 Wisdom, Justice, Love, not as mere outward- 
 ness, but as our best and highest ; as our liberty, 
 our infinity : neither within us, nor without ; but as 
 somewhat eternally real, belonging to us, as we do 
 to it, more than to our actual or provisional selves. 
 The very dread of an outside God, and the agoniz- 
 ing sense of separation from him, which has made 
 up so much of what is popularly known as re- 
 ligion, intimates, however crudely, that a total 
 alienation of finite and infinite would be nothing 
 less than sundering our own spiritual substance. 
 The notion of eternal punishment itself shows with 
 what horror man regards so monstrous an irration- 
 ality ; his utmost fears having conceived it as the 
 very last consequence of sin, and the maximum of 
 penalty. On the other hand, our advancing ideals 
 of truth and virtue are announcements of the 
 Infinite ; and in our aspiration we simply follow
 
 102 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 its full assurance of freedom to the assumption of 
 our higher selves. 
 
 Prayer, indeed, clothes itself in the form of out- 
 ward appeal, of personal ascription ; but the 
 spiritual sense clearly perceives this dress to be 
 simply a form of mythology, required by the 
 inadequacy of human speech and by the natural 
 play of the imagination. As form of public worship, 
 it is sustained only by the sense of a common 
 understanding of those two justifying facts, as by 
 an atmosphere of consent, and ceases when the 
 critical faculty is felt to be analyzing and dissolving 
 this. At the same time, it is so far from implying 
 essential distinction of the soul from deity, that its 
 very confidence in that adequacy which the terms 
 do not express, can mean only the precise contrary. 
 
 That finiteness in man is thus invincibly attracted 
 to the clear open heavens of the ideal in all real 
 progress, is its confession that the Infinite is not its 
 mere negation, but the very motive force of its own 
 proper growth. The Infinite is not the less real, 
 because inconceivable : being known to us not at 
 all as a definite object, any more than space is so 
 to the open eye or to the free wing that traverses 
 it, but in and through the sense of an open path, 
 and an unprescribed scope ; of spiritual space, not 
 barred nor walled in, nor anywhere to fail us at 
 last : a sense, the condition whereof in us is the 
 pursuit of ideal good. This is the secret whispered 
 to us by principle, loyalty, pure devotion and faith, 
 in whatever sphere ; and the practicalism that
 
 FREEDOM IN RELIGION. 103 
 
 treats it as mere phrase is about as practical as the 
 insect's heady rush by twilight against the window 
 or into the flame. 
 
 The Infinite then is the motive power of our 
 personal growth. Not that there is always con- 
 sciousness of this oneness or this freedom. Your 
 service of your ideal is a battle, sore defeat and 
 hard recovery : bitter sense of impotence to do 
 what it would be more sad or cruel still to have 
 failed of doing. But fast beside all brave and true 
 hearts stands the mystic prompter, with secret 
 touches that mean all the prophecy one may not 
 for the moment hear. 
 
 As now defined, Religion is in three ways the 
 principle of Freedom. 
 
 First, It includes both elements in the process of 
 personal growth, as pursuit of ideal aims. It is 
 the relation of finite to infinite, as real poles of 
 spiritual movement, implied and involved in each 
 other. 
 
 Second, It is inclusive of every faculty of actual 
 mind : all of these alike being called " finite," not 
 in view of their limitations merely, but also of their 
 law of growth by an endless upward attraction ; in 
 other words, they inhere in the Infinite. 
 
 Third, It is the natural movement of these 
 faculties : the attraction implies identity of essence 
 in its terms, since we can aspire only to that of 
 which we have guarantee and foretype in our own 
 nature.
 
 104 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 Here, then, are three facts in the attraction we 
 have called Religion : unity in the elements of it ; 
 universality in the scope ; gravitation by inherent 
 affinity. 
 
 Now of these three, observe, that to make use 
 of religion as a means of shutting off the infinite 
 from the finite by a great gulf, is to deny the first ; 
 to confine religion to a special sphere or to certain 
 functions, is to reject the second ; to divorce religion 
 from nature and spontaneity, by fetching it into 
 man by importation, by graft, by compulsion 
 through miracle, proceeding from a nature alien to 
 its own essence, is to make void the third. And 
 are not these three perversions of religion the very 
 causes which have despoiled it of freedom ? Shall 
 we then believe religion to be at heart other than 
 radical freedom, or freedom other than radical 
 religion ? 
 
 PRACTICAL CONDITIONS OP FREE PERSONALITY. 
 
 Let us advance another step into the meaning of 
 our definition. Religion is Freedom, because, as 
 service of the ideal, it is attraction by infinity. It 
 is the pure principle of development ; as reconciling 
 the elements of spiritual being in their own proper 
 movement. It is thus our personality itself as a 
 freely active force. 
 
 What, then, are its practical conditions f 
 The poles of Freedom are positive Rights and 
 Duties ; neither valid without the other ; both 
 inherent in the personality, whose movement is 
 religion.
 
 FREEDOM IN RELIGION. 105 
 
 So that religious freedom will claim for every 
 power and sphere the right of complete culture, 
 and for all oil the same ground ; namely, as alike 
 forces of that personality through which alone the 
 infinite is recognized as real, and its attractions 
 followed in ideal aims. This is one side of OUT 
 freedom. 
 
 But the other is allegiance of all these powers 
 and spheres to that which is at once the inmost 
 fact of the personality and its practically unattained 
 object ; namely, Moral Order. It is the sentiment 
 of reverence for eternal morality ; the conviction 
 of duty to obey it ; the yearning to be absorbed in 
 it, and to lose what we now are in its grand at- 
 traction to what it is nobler for us to be ! Not 
 without this side shall come the other, in any way. 
 Religious freedom is spontaneity; but it is not 
 lawless will. If we drop the conscious sense of 
 our actual finite, we lose with it our attraction to 
 the infinite. With the impulse to yearn, to aspire, 
 to revere, passes out of us the power to grow. 
 Heaven save our age from idolatry of self and 
 deification of sense under the name of " free " 
 religion, or " free " any thing else ! 
 
 Whatever, then, excludes any gift or function 
 from that open attraction to perfection on which 
 growth depends ; or whatever lays on the con- 
 science burdens of allegiance beyond the claims of 
 the Moral Order and the upward aim, is at once 
 a denial of religion and an offence to rational 
 freedom.
 
 106 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 THE WAYS OF OFFENCE TO RELIGIOUS FREEDOM. 
 
 And now to apply these principles of criticism. 
 In what ways is religious freedom thus offended ? 
 
 I. By vain distinctions and exclusions, that 
 supplant its universality. These may be theo- 
 retical or practical. To the theoretic class belongs 
 the separation of Religion from Philosophy, as 
 " re-alms respectively of authority and freedom." 
 More than one modern school would subscribe to 
 the statement that " religious faith and philosophical 
 thought cannot coexist ; when one enters, the other 
 withdraws ! " But can any one tell us why religion 
 should be unphilosophical, or philosophy nonre- 
 ligious ? What " authority " that can be which 
 belongs to affirmations of religion, but not to those 
 of philosophy ; or what " philosophy " that can be 
 which does not rest on ultimates and postulates of 
 pure faith, it is not for me easy to imagine. 
 But I am sure that a " religion " that puts faith in 
 place of reason, and a " philosophy " that pretends 
 to be reason, after it has excluded all claims of the 
 ideal as attractions of the infinite, because the 
 infinite is a "mere phrase," are both of them 
 mutilations of mind, and incompatible with its 
 freedom. What is " faith," but that assurance of 
 a better solution of circumstances than we can 
 find specific grounds for predicting, one which our 
 ideal, a constructive infinite, guarantees to our 
 aspirations ? Is not that the same thing in philos- 
 ophy and in theology ; in the study of the soul and
 
 FREEDOM IN RELIGION. 107 
 
 in the conduct of life ? How can you tether, as to 
 a stake, this constant element of your spiritual 
 motion ? Its sphere is universal as mind ; wher- 
 ever aspiration is, there is faith, and the freedom 
 that goes with it. What, again, is " authority for 
 belief," but some adequate cause for believing ? 
 Oppose it to reason and right, you abolish it. 
 Everywhere its credentials are the same : a stamp 
 of truthfulness, an appeal to your sense of fitness, 
 of probability, of the claims of the ideal on the 
 actual. Does this belong to the sphere of theolog}*" 
 any more than to the sphere of philosophy, to the 
 conduct of life any more than to the study of the 
 soul ? " Religious authority," in any other sense 
 than this, is simply spiritual despotism, which 
 religion, as essential freedom, outgrows and leaves 
 behind. 
 
 Again, we hear it said that Religion is " the 
 realm of sentiment or emotion as opposed to that of 
 science." In the outset, I do not admit that 
 religion is exclusively emotional. Are there no 
 such things as religious convictions, principles, 
 disciplines, persistent cultures ? But how, further- 
 more, can sentiment and science be considered as 
 distinct and opposite ? Science is recognition of 
 invariable law ; sentiment is feeling for the true, 
 the beautiful, the good, of which law is the symbol. 
 Is there no recognition in such feeling ? Is there 
 no feeling in such recognition ? Is there to be no 
 sentiment in scientific study, making it unselfish, 
 faithful, ardent, intuitive ? Can science dispense
 
 108 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 with the enthusiasm that makes discoverers, the 
 devotion that cannot despair ; with such love of 
 the fair Cosmos for its own sake, as means serenity, 
 gladness, praise ? The one form of sentiment inad- 
 missible by the scientific mind is that which clings 
 to a belief as true because we desire or enjoy it, or 
 feel traditionally bound to believe it; and this 
 sentimental-zsm is no element of religious freedom, 
 any more than of scientific mind. And, on the 
 other part, will you call any worship " free," 
 which does not recognize law as supreme, universal, 
 divine ? If religion can properly introduce miracle, 
 then there can be no science : the very possibility 
 of science lies in the postulate that law is univer- 
 sal, a harmony that cannot anywhere admit the 
 slightest break. Freedom, then, can no more 
 permit Religion to be separated from science as 
 sentiment, than from philosophy as faith. 
 
 Human practice is always the result of theoretic 
 principles. And so, out of this limitation of religion, 
 as a special sphere, with faculties of its own, comes 
 manifold actual suppression of other spheres and 
 faculties, in the name of religion. It is the constant 
 demoralization of all culture that there should be a 
 prescriptive body of words, phrases, experiences, 
 books, traditions, personages, rites, times and 
 seasons, called " religious," for which special 
 reverence is exacted ; a perpetual assumption that 
 they have a higher function, a more positive moral 
 and spiritual claim, than the powers and pursuits 
 defined as secular and human. Robbed of the
 
 FREEDOM IN RELIGION. 109' 
 
 saving conviction that wherever he is, there he 
 should be at his best, spoiled of that respect for his 
 real task which is his saviour and his educator, 
 civilized man may well stand in his practical 
 functions, crude, unconsecrated, a palterer with 
 right, a profaner of uses, blinded to their ideal 
 relations and claims. And this while his religion 
 pretends to absolute perfection in creative and 
 redeeming powers ! That his " divine religion " 
 may fly on its vicarious wings, his human behavior 
 shall grovel and snarl and snatch and rend ! What 
 is this "salvation" that with such absolute com- 
 placency generates oceans of phraseology in tracts, 
 commands hosts of functionaries, and spreads 
 itself in endless evangelism of alliances and missions, 
 conferences, camp-meetings, revivals, while the 
 surrounding world of politics, traffic, and manners 
 is mocking at the possibility of a free personality 
 or an ideal aim ? It is surely but little to say of 
 such a master that he is not adequate to the age he 
 claims authority to rule and power to save. Is 
 not this the plain question for us after all ? Shall 
 we have a religion competent to turn the license 
 by which all practical powers are imperilled, into 
 the liberty of upward attractions, and the self- 
 assurance of democracy into the self-respect of 
 becoming disciplines, or shall we have no re- 
 ligion ? Can an age of infinite ambition dispense 
 with loyalty to infinite justice, truth, good ? Which 
 then shall represent this infinite, a court of special 
 jurisdiction, with its Christ, Bible, and Church, its
 
 110 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 elect partnership of piety, its peculiar phraseology 
 excluded by general consent from conversation on 
 practical concerns ; or an ideal of duty and 
 desire coextensive with life, invoking freedom 
 and culture for every power and sphere, and moving 
 them all with the sense of endless attraction to 
 boundless resource ? This, or a superstition of 
 times and themes and ruts of thought ; of " special 
 providences " to discredit the laws of nature, and 
 " Lord's daj^s " to disparage week-days ; playing 
 the policeman to constrain free, popular education, 
 and forbid labor or relaxation, upon an old-time 
 warrant our civil laws cannot in honor respect ? 
 
 I do not underrate the devotion, culture, human- 
 ity contained within that special institution which 
 is called the Christian Church ; but I should be 
 glad if it were possible to learn how much the idea 
 that religion, in its free substance, can be insti- 
 tuted or organized, and set apart with a machinery 
 of its own, has done to make other human spheres 
 irreligious, by the false standard and prestige it 
 sets up. Organization assumes to be the last and 
 highest form a principle can take, its endowment 
 with authoritative powers ; and always claims su- 
 premacy, and exacts conformity, on these grounds, 
 in exact proportion to its numbers, its directness 
 and definiteness of aim, and the energy of its 
 working machinery. Of religious organization, 
 Catholic or Protestant, this is eminently true. 
 Now it is simply certain that what is best in any 
 one cannot be outwardly organized, nor mechaii-
 
 FREEDOM IN RELIGION. Ill 
 
 ized in any way, nor even manipulated to that end 
 by himself, without loss : his self-communion, his 
 aspiration, his openness to ideal suggestion ; his 
 personal self-discipline ; his mental freedom ; his 
 power of suspending judgment ; his hospitality to 
 new thoughts and persons ; his conscience, not 
 subject to vote or director, nor committed to poli- 
 cies and conformities ; his sense of the value of 
 his function, and his aim to fulfil it in the best 
 way ; in a word, what goes with one wherever he 
 is and whatever he does, and makes the constant 
 level of his highest qualities. All these vitalities 
 are unorganizable ; they keep their essential free- 
 dom and claims above all specific combinations to 
 which men may commit what they can of them ; 
 and it is these which the pretension of ecclesiasti- 
 cal organism to represent religion deprives of their 
 true educational prestige, as the claim of the ideal 
 and infinite. I think these vitalities are what you 
 specially mean, and would rescue, by your call to 
 " Free Religion." You may well beware of even 
 unintentionally lending its name and example to 
 the side of forces more naturally organizable, but 
 which depress its culture, and which would like 
 nothing better than infecting this free spirit with 
 their own dependence on the strategy of mana- 
 gers, turning it over to political partisanship, and 
 making its adherents eager for roll-call and drill. 
 How real and refreshing to all of us are such re- 
 ports of the laws of character and the forms of 
 noble conduct as are free of phraseology associated
 
 112 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 with religious or political machinery ! Give us, for 
 once, a brave summer of full reliance on such 
 forces. Do not forget their power, nor the natu- 
 ralness of their growth in America to-day. 
 
 II. A second great class of offences to Freedom 
 in Religion I should refer to the theory that ob- 
 jective validity, essential to all rational concep- 
 tions, is to be denied to religious ones : in other 
 words, that God is but a process of human thought. 
 " The sensible object," says Feuerbach, " is out of 
 man, the religious is in him. Religion is the in- 
 direct, or imperfect consciousness man has of him- 
 self, and the goodness, justice, wisdom he worships 
 exist only as his own attributes." 
 
 Now this is, of course, rank heresy. Yet what 
 if I should point it out as plainly visible in certain 
 commonplaces of Christian belief ? The Christian 
 actual^ believes this lack of objective validity to 
 be true of all religious conceptions but his own. 
 His God is a real person ; but Jehovah, Brahma, 
 Zeus, he holds purely unreal, existing only in the 
 blindness of the heathen mind, or in the just criti- 
 cism thereof in his own. He forgets that if, in its 
 attempts at affirming the infinite, religion has been 
 dealing only with phantasm, or mere mental pro- 
 cess, for four-fifths of human history, it can only 
 be by a new self-delusion that the continued pro- 
 cess of the same faculties is regarded as pointing 
 to a real object at last. Remember, it is not a 
 question of hunting for new planets with a cal-
 
 FREEDOM IN RELIGION. 113 
 
 culus, but of the essential force and constant action 
 of spiritual laws. The Christian cannot apply 
 Feuerbach to judge the heathen, without convict- 
 ing his own judging faculty of the Feuerbachian 
 defect, to find no hold on positive truth in its 
 dealing with spiritual beliefs. 
 
 The theory that man's ideal attractions imply 
 no correspondent reality enslaves religion, by treat- 
 ing it as a mere reflex movement within the individ- 
 ual mind. It is but putting this theory in practice, 
 when one refuses all validity to the beliefs of 
 others but what they have for himself, as con- 
 ceived within his own limits. This is the pith of 
 theological contempt. From this come assump- 
 tions of absolutism turning on the poles of a shal- 
 low experience ; interpretations of the movement 
 of history as a mere preface to some special re- 
 ligion or sect, narrowing great systems of the elder 
 world to petty meanings ; imprisonment in preju- 
 dice so total as to forbid the perception of any 
 thing but prejudice in other men's endeavors for 
 impartiality and candor. 
 
 If you will allow a personal allusion, simply in 
 illustration of this point, I would mark it as worth 
 recording, that a recent literary and historical effort 
 to put religious faiths on their own merits, should 
 have been charged by all the denominational organs 
 with " prejudice and prepossession," for the reason 
 that it did not assume for Christianity those ex- 
 ceptional claims which have had the field of tradi- 
 tion and teaching, with all of us, to themselves !
 
 114 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 To escape prejudices, it would seem, one must hold 
 fast to his Christian education ! What shall we 
 say of the eyesight that can see nothing but fore- 
 gone conclusions in the very effort to escape them ? 
 But I offer an instance of higher moment. A 
 grand metaphysical and spiritual philosophy was 
 gradually developed by the Orientals and the 
 Greeks. Christendom found and absorbed it. 
 Observe how it has fared ; how it has been stunted 
 within the special phase it assumed for a tran- 
 sitional age of reconstruction, in a historical 
 person, a book, a church of exclusive claims. Its 
 Trinity, for example, Infinite Mind conceived at 
 once as essence, as creative power, as energizing 
 life, how universal and all-productive a concep- 
 tion it was ! Is such a truth of ideal being and 
 progress to be crystallized in the prejudices of a 
 Church, and have no validity outside certain end- 
 lessly revolving routines of belief ? 
 
 We are not apt to note what mamifold practical 
 tyranny comes of the habit of regarding one's own 
 mental processes about others as comprehending 
 the whole reality, not of one's self only as think- 
 ing subject, but of them also, the objects thought. 
 Is not this the rationale of intolerance ? And yet 
 it is but the practical side of a kind of orthodox- 
 Feuerbachian assumption, that the Infinite itself 
 exists only as a process of the thinker's own mind. 
 
 The noblest movement of modern speculative 
 philosophy is a reaction against this denial of in- 
 dependent validity to centres of thought beyond
 
 FREEDOM IN RELIGION. 115 
 
 self. It appears in Hegel's affirmation of the 
 absolute as real, and in his principle, by him 
 very imperfectly, I think, carried out, that the 
 aim of religion is to represent under historical, 
 that is, actual forms, the positive purport of human 
 consciousness. It is still more observable in the 
 fact that Kant and Fichte save themselves from 
 egoism by bathing in the great waters of Spinoza's 
 religious realism : his One Divine Substance, neither 
 within nor without us, but infinite and real. 
 
 III. The third great class of offences to Relig- 
 ious Freedom is referable to the theory that re- 
 ligion is the pure " sense of dependence." As 
 one offence consisted in treating the Infinite as 
 merely incident to the mind of the worshipper, so 
 another consists in worship of a God altogether 
 outside him. Now communion between men being 
 possible only through a common nature, and free 
 communion only between souls capable of mutual 
 access and interfusion, the relation of finite with 
 infinite, considered as a mere relation of depend- 
 ence, can surely be neither productive nor free. 
 This external God creates his world-machine, and 
 man to operate it : plans, stipulates, or works on 
 the pliant or stubborn stuff as a moulder on his 
 clay. The tenderness, gratitude, and trust allowed 
 by the relation as commonly conceived, is coun- 
 terbalanced by the obligation and subservience 
 implied in it. Not in prayers only, but in sermons, 
 hymns, and private meditation on trial and suffer-
 
 116 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 ing it has generated a weak and sentimental tone 
 of appeal from realities, which greatly needs in- 
 fusion of the Stoic faith in nature and fate. Tem- 
 pered by childlike instincts in its early stages, 
 the theory discloses a deeper evil as it unfolds. 
 Hebrew Jehovah, creating the world from naught, 
 sending his angels to make men prophets, and his 
 wrath to trample them as worms ; covenanting with 
 them on good terms to-day, and hardening them 
 for their ruin to-morrow, embodied many crude 
 forms of this separation of finite and infinite. It 
 has widened, in the Christian theory of " sin," 
 into the " great gulf " which supplies Calvinism 
 with its bottomless pit, crossed by its ineffectual 
 air-bridges of authority, and its arrow-flights of 
 miracle and grace through the void. Its array of 
 infinities includes the remoteness of God and the 
 impotence of man. The idea of the infinite thus 
 becomes the slavey of the finite : the spiritual 
 world is rent to its centre by self-contradiction. 
 Such entire outwardness of relation cannot indeed 
 be effected : God without man and man without 
 God are both impossible. But though so far an 
 illusion, the theory of separateness is none the less 
 capable of imposing base terms of acquiescence on 
 the soul. None the less does it breed offspring 
 after its kind : such as theological " miracle," which 
 means that natural law is external to God ; " effi- 
 cacy of prayer," as appeal to a foreign Will that 
 needs changing and allows it; anthropomorphic 
 creeds, whose eye is to some actual throned Person-
 
 FREEDOM. IN RELIGION. HT 
 
 age, issuing decrees of judgment, and prescribing 
 formal conditions of salvation ; enforced rejection 
 of natural doubt and free inquiry ; the notion of 
 revelation as a specific infusion instead of a natural 
 development ; and, finally, the notion of allegiance 
 due from man to a Power external to his own 
 moral sentiment and rational faculty. Were it 
 possible to carry out this last notion in practice, 
 personality itself would perish. But the theory 
 of pure dependence on a purely distinct and sep- 
 arate Ruler is refuted by the necessities of belief 
 and conduct. 
 
 How, for instance, could you reconcile the om- 
 nipotence of such a ruler with the amount of 
 suffering in this world, as far beyond desert as 
 beyond relief, on any principle that is not at war 
 with the love and justice which humanity pre- 
 scribes ? The descent of a reconciling Christ into 
 human life does not help the difficulty ; since the 
 miseries of Christian civilization are doubtless, like 
 its joys, much greater than those of barbarism. It 
 is only by the insight of spiritual imagination, 
 which makes no pretence of satisfying such outside 
 Deity, but sees infinity as mysteriously involved 
 in the human ideal itself, in upward attractions 
 self-justified, in a sense of the best and fittest, 
 undismayed by experience, that life becomes 
 tolerable amidst woes we cannot help to cure, nor 
 yet endure to see. To make paths for such spiritual 
 imagination and faith, such full trust in the very 
 service of ideal good, is, I conceive, the highest 
 function of our liberal thought.
 
 118 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 RESUME. 
 
 When we use this term, " Freedom in Religion," 
 do we not mean to imply that the Infinite is in- 
 volved in our ideal attractions, as at once within 
 and without us, but as neither of these exclusive 
 of the other ? Religion is the souFs absorption in 
 an infinite essence, since intelligence is that ; but 
 only through interfusion thereof with finite pro- 
 cesses of culture, a divinely human growth. The 
 light by which we see principles, the love by which 
 we are moved to humanities, is true spiritual sub- 
 stance. What we know, that we are : what we 
 worship, that we become. A truth that is older 
 than Orphic Mysteries, than Plato or the Veda ; 
 later also than the last credo of the scientists or 
 the come-outers. Yet I hear it scoffed at as behind 
 the age, because it is so ancient, by smart sectaries 
 who do not know what it means ; or, if they did, 
 would not dare to teach it, so revolutionary is it to 
 their childish traditions. 
 
 This then is the sum : Our ideal of the right and 
 true is no sense of outwardness, therefore no con- 
 striction of freedom ; nor is there any place for 
 conceit of special ownership, or of messianic com- 
 mission, in the grand relations of law and love that 
 reach through all the worlds. 
 
 NEGATION AND AFFIRMATION. 
 
 Now the substitution of such a Religion of Free- 
 dom for Christian beliefs and institutions that are
 
 FREEDOM IN RELIGION. 119 
 
 inconsistent with it, will seem to their advocates 
 pure destructiveness. This implication of the 
 Infinite with the upward attractions of the natural 
 and finite mind, will be pronounced "barren nega- 
 tion." Let us see. Plainly the human ideal has a 
 very searching " No " to pronounce in our age. 
 Its dreams of art, science, philosophy, social justice, 
 have to grow, like the infant Hercules, by strang- 
 ling hydras and eating the sinew of bears. Every 
 reform is at best a plowshare that must cut its way 
 through drifts of prejudice to the world's quick, 
 thus brightening its own edge for the better ser- 
 vice of coming husbandry. Do you fear negation? 
 Progress is negation : every step denies a past, dis- 
 claims a future. Life and Birth are negation of 
 previous life. God is negation, the Not Finite, or 
 Infinite. 'Tis but the emphasis on negation, the 
 destructive spirit, that harms. 
 
 But he who talks of pure destructiveness, of 
 absolute negation, imagines the impossible. No 
 people ever worshipped pure destruction. In the 
 old beliefs, world-lapse into fire or flood was but 
 part of a cycle in which the waste elements were 
 always full of seed, and immortality was the lesson 
 of death. Science, at its slower gait, comes in at 
 last to echo that eternal resurrection-song of the 
 infinite in the finite, with its burden of universal 
 laws, indestructible forces, interchangeableness of 
 motion, heat, light. In vain does theological 
 dogma itself pretend to put pure negation towards 
 the Human into Infinite Mind. " Whosoever shall
 
 120 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 speak a word against the Holy Ghost it shall not 
 be forgiven him, either in this life or that which is 
 to come." That would seem almost a satanic threat 
 of utter rejection, against the offender. But even 
 Calvinism cannot unfold it into any thing more 
 negative than this ; that, with all God's hate of sin, 
 He takes care to make it last ; his will to destroy 
 it getting no nearer to doing so than to a love of 
 punishing it which lasts for ever. Sin, instead of 
 being never in his all-perfect mind, is never out 
 of it, a confession that even "total depravity" 
 is not absolute evil, nor utterly rejected of good, 
 but maintains endless, however perverted, relations 
 with it. So indispensable is it for man to see the 
 infinite as involved in the finite : the sign of this 
 being manifest in his own ideal, redeeming its 
 harsher and gloomier features. 
 
 However imperfect human conduct may be, hu- 
 man nature involves the perfection of law. So 
 long as he respects himself man believes the shap- 
 ing force of his own nature to be Moral Order : so 
 interpreting its laws of reward and penalty, com- 
 pensation, discipline, growth. Here is its inner 
 mould, for ever unbroken, unmarred. No sin 
 touches it, no weakness invalidates. The worst 
 conceivable character or conduct is in some way 
 the inconceivable mingling of this perfect law with 
 finite circumstance and will. 
 
 If history is providential, then, to speak in mythic 
 types, God for ever idealizes man. What eternal 
 truths, sown broadcast in time from the first, cleave
 
 FREEDOM IN RELIGION. 121 
 
 fast, and grow in spite of failure and abuse ! Did 
 He recognize in us no more than the mere wit or 
 virtue we actually put into trade, politics, or even 
 religion, judging our value by our attainment, 
 what growth were possible ? Just as the bud is 
 not treated in horticulture as a mere bud, but as 
 promise of a flower, so the spirit-culture we call 
 history is speaking in symbols, as we must 
 God's recognition of man as germ of deity : in 
 other words, man's constant upward attractions 
 are implications of the Infinite in his movement 
 and growth. 
 
 This is what offsets our " negations ; " which we 
 are quite ready to compare with the fierce swoop 
 of dogmatic systems, not only upon the fair hu- 
 manities and spiritual intuitions of other faiths, 
 but upon human nature itself. Out of these sys- 
 tems the time hastens, as we turn from ages of ple- 
 siosaurs and buried footprints to the living world. 
 The mediaeval maps put Jerusalem in the centre 
 of the earth, ranged lands and tribes in a circle 
 round it, walled them in with a forbidden sea, with 
 heathen Gog and Magog on its desert rim, and a 
 u Gate of Iron " to keep them off. What a nega- 
 tion of all this when Columbus opened America, 
 when De Gama doubled the Cape, when Marco 
 Polo came back from far Cathay ! But what 
 affirmations swept then into the hope and faith 
 of man ! Such is the religious revolution of our 
 day. 
 
 This freedom destroys religion only in so far as
 
 122 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 religion is made a threefold bondage : an exclusive 
 sphere and special prerogative ; a worship of self; 
 a pure dependence on an outside God. Com- 
 pared with this faith in humanity, the intensest 
 confidence in Christian dogma is sheer unbelief. 
 It is fed not by prescriptive name, person, or 
 church, but by the constancy of law and life. It 
 sees in common people not the possible pictures 
 and statues seen by Raphael and Michael Angelo 
 in rough marble and on white walls, but minds 
 made for loving right because it is -right, for recog- 
 nizing the Infinite in all ages and creeds. Are 
 they unbelievers who trust in the natural powers 
 by which we come at all we know, and to whose 
 honor all we can be redounds, and of which all 
 founders of faiths are but children and pupils ? 
 He is the " unbeliever " whose religion requires 
 him to denounce these ; who holds it unsafe to use 
 them honestly, and abide their issues. The " de- 
 structive " is he who would suppress or disfranchise 
 them in man or woman. The " infidel " is he who 
 deliberately declines to speak what he thinks, or to 
 trust humanity with what helpful truth has been 
 intrusted to himself. I could not but smile to hear 
 it gravely said the other day, " One assumes an 
 awful responsibility to teach a doctrine not sanc- 
 tioned by the church." What is that, I thought, to 
 the audacity of refusing your own honest doubt? 
 Judged by these definitions, it is the church of 
 functionaries that denies ; it is free personal force, 
 in or out of it, that affirms, believes, worships,
 
 FREEDOM IN RELIGION. 123 
 
 creates. They who speak in this name speak in 
 the highest name. This is he who created Bibles : 
 shall he not rend his own books, when he would 
 supplant them by his own higher light ? Shall not 
 the maker re-make ? How shall he grow but by 
 0%-growing, or live but by cm-living, his own 
 work? Dearer the thirst for truth than any waters 
 of opinion or belief it ever yet struck from rocks 
 along its way. Where are the pure destructives 
 our defenders of the faith warn you to avoid ? I 
 do not find them. Pure negation is chimera, mo- 
 tiveless purpose : nature never made it. That 
 many should confidently assert it of the old East- 
 ern Nirvana, that refuge of the far-off times and 
 millions, is not strange, since there are so many 
 more who can imagine that honest men, close be- 
 side them, criticising a Greek and Hebrew book, 
 can be seeing nothing beyond what they reject. 
 
 Believe me, the mere image breaker, who could 
 only break images, would never take hold of men's 
 hearts. He would be heard of after his day only 
 to be despised. Not one crumb of the bread by 
 which a reformer's working-force is positively 
 nourished, comes of mere confutation of other 
 men's beliefs as such. There are thirsty winds 
 that descend the western slope of the Andes, sucked 
 dry by intervening heights of barren cold ; but 
 even these are not mere wasteful devourers of herb 
 and tree : they pass out beyond into the Pacific, 
 and draw their cisterns full again, then bear them 
 over the opposing trades, and pour supplies into
 
 124 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 the fountains of Oregon, Missouri, and the Great 
 Lakes. Far more shall our Free Reformer be a 
 child of that grand law of nature, which, while 
 allowing destruction, bids us live by creating, 
 affirming, building. I must suspect the breadth 
 of that freedom which scorns history. Our proph- 
 ecy is no break with the past ; but the resumption 
 of all true historic powers : it recognizes history as 
 continuous. Every step is locked with the last 
 and the next: every epoch saves, transmutes, 
 transmits, as well as destroys. Every step presses 
 the whole past, and has that long, grand push for 
 its fulcrum. Men and ages that seem to abolish 
 most, work from grounds, and to ends, beyond 
 themselves. Buddha, Pythagoras, Jesus, Luther, 
 and the rest, are children of their times : out of 
 Greece and Judea came Christianity ; out of 
 Christianity and Brahminism and Parseeism and 
 Judaism and Islam, and all the grand currents of 
 this century's civilization, flows the vaster tidal 
 wave of Universal Religion. 
 
 All destruction is but a little dust on the wind. 
 Does not humanity itself abide ? What truth it 
 ever had is lost ? Who are these that stand with 
 arms flung round the old creed or name, or cherished 
 " Body of Christ," trembling lest the universe crack, 
 if that go down ? 'Twere a strange universe to be 
 alarmed because things must go down when their 
 time has come ! 
 
 History is a seamless woof, wherein no thread is 
 broken, nor track lost. What wih 1 death do, the
 
 FREEDOM IN RELIGION. 125 
 
 rankest of destructives ? Shall I keep the special 
 details of my present life beyond that change ? I 
 know not. I ask not. If it be best, I shall know 
 them only in their issues. But what is of value in 
 them is in the hands of shaping laws that know 
 not waste, nor fraud, nor enmity to man. Our 
 freedom affirms all when it claims that whatever is 
 found to be the law of human nature will be found 
 good for human nature. Do you ask, what if 
 Immortality, Duty, God, shall be proved baseless ? 
 I repty that the special meanings we give these 
 terms are of course subject to the same test of 
 value as all other beliefs, namely, are they true 
 or false ? But I must add that it does not express 
 any fact of actual experience to say, as is often done, 
 of what is so full of opportunity as immortality, or 
 of what is so essential to the sense of source and 
 resource as the Infinite, or of what is so vital to 
 virtue as duty, that we really feel we can do 
 just as well without them, should they be proved 
 illusory. The best of us feels nothing of the kind, 
 since he probably knows well what he would lose 
 in losing them ; and even while one speaks thus of 
 their disproval, one is in some sense holding fast 
 the substance of them. The ungracious tone of 
 the language is quite uncalled for. Can we hold 
 so lightly what the ages have been teaching, of the 
 conditions of character, the freedom of ideal aims, 
 or of that relation to the permanence of truth 
 through whatever changes of consciousness, which 
 is what we properly mean by " immortality " ?
 
 126 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 Might I not as well say, that if freedom itself 
 prove false, or truth no better than falsehood, I 
 shall be just as well off? That were true in a 
 verbal sense ; but in every practical or vital sense, 
 a mere empty boast or fling. I know that the 
 right to follow truth is more indispensable than 
 any opinion. But if all questions are still open, 
 even the reality of duty and the possibility of 
 growth, then, practically, all the centuries have 
 taught us is the hypothesis, nothing else, that there 
 can be no basis for truth in man. Our Religious 
 Freedom does not believe this : it trusts itself. 
 Duty trusts itself: and the sense of the Infinite 
 in our ideal is a promise that invites to confident 
 work. 
 
 FREEDOM AND RELIGION APPLIED AS SCIENCE. 
 
 It affirms for the. sciences, authority to unfold 
 nature, and claims to interpret their results. It 
 demands the guarantee of invariable law for every 
 fact of matter and mind : since this alone admits the 
 absolute confidence which is essential to its upward 
 attractions. To Science it will say, The Infinite 
 is not outside your laws, but implicated in their 
 mystery, in their strength, in their scope. Not 
 without this interpreter may you read their outflow 
 of stars and layers, past count of numbers or term 
 of time : their chain of forms, their foretypes in 
 plant and creature, pointing on to man. Even the 
 mythic cataclysms, the six days' miracle of creation, 
 the gods that dispense with time and growth, the
 
 FREEDOM IN RELIGION. 127 
 
 nativities and transfigurations, do not lie ; for they 
 come of the poetic faculty which creates its own 
 world, having laws of its own : and the sympathetic 
 heavens and earth of mythology, once rescued from 
 literal historic dogmatists, speak to a finer sense, 
 which the children share with the seers. 
 
 Again, it is now the day of physical observation 
 and experience : and these are liable to forget that 
 it is forever Mind by which they see ; that mind is 
 the medium and solvent of all knowledge, and so 
 the framer and the postulate of all their facts and 
 laws. I believe our religious freedom will look to 
 this danger also. Nor have we escaped a Biblical 
 sky-firmament to be shut down under a scientific 
 rule that nothing is real which is not definable in 
 terms clear to the understanding. Neither God 
 nor Man, law nor life, freedom nor faith, duty nor 
 immortality, could abide that test : they are no 
 subjects for such handling. Even the practical 
 hope of science to make nature subserve human 
 uses, the harmony of true social relations, and the 
 education of the race, depends on such purely 
 undefiuable, illimitable conceptions as unity, liberty, 
 love. 
 
 AS ART AND LABOR. 
 
 It is but fair to credit our new spiritual freedom 
 with the renewed resort of Art to the study and 
 representation of Nature : for this is the healthy 
 reaction from creeds that have contemned the 
 visible world, or confined art to ecclesiastical and
 
 128 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 mythical cycles : and it indicates the demand for 
 a more ideal truth and purity than social themes 
 as yet afford ; for what is simple, direct, un- 
 mortgaged to traditions, impartial, universal. So 
 of practical arts. The appeal to constructive 
 natural disciplines in new schools of all grades, 
 from Kindergarten to Technological Institute ; the 
 effort to make each craft a faculty of finer craft ; 
 and the perfected machinery to which labor is 
 being adapted, are all signs of higher estimates 
 accorded to aesthetic values, as elements of economy 
 and use. But against all materialistic and selfish 
 elements in this tendency, religion will enter 
 protest. Art is not saved from degeneracy, from 
 sordidness, sham, or waste, so long as it obeys no 
 higher principle than force of machinery or pursuit 
 of gain. Its law is not material, but ideal, 
 freedom to follow beauty for its own sake, to love 
 right and fair doing for the Tightness and fairness 
 of it. The labor that turns out faithful, handsome 
 work obeys precisely the same attractions that 
 make the fine art of behavior, the beauty of personal 
 conduct. We shall not escape the fact by calling 
 the demand transcendental and visionary, nor by 
 neglecting this condition because others are un- 
 fulfilled. The present selfish strifes of labor and 
 capital are barbarizing, and lack the first elements 
 of constructive power. Nothing can make labor 
 remunerative, harmonious, and free, but positive 
 reverence for the best and fittest way of doing 
 what we personally have to do. For work of head
 
 FREEDOM IN RELIGION. 123 
 
 or hand, imagination or skill, the one indispensable 
 redemption is this simple loyalty to the infinite in 
 our ideal. We shall begin solving the great 
 " labor question " only when we take this path for 
 our religion, and have a public sense of its practical 
 necessity. To this end intelligent labor reformers 
 will direct all their outward practical methods, co- 
 operative or personal. Best of educators to it are 
 great works of noble art : they are as yet in the 
 future, because this moral ideal has not yet pro- 
 vided the social atmosphere for their creation. 
 They await a justice that leaves to all faculty the 
 freedom of its best conception and performance. 
 There lies our " Italy," doubtless 
 
 " Beyond the Alpine summits of great pain." 
 
 Let religion hasten to teach what the growth of 
 man at last allows and demands ; the identity of 
 the Fine Arts with spiritual experience ; of Poetry 
 and Music with the rhythm of noble desires ; of 
 the Novel and the Drama with expansion out of the 
 stiff veils we call our " selves " into the manifold 
 forms of human experience, towards that universal 
 sympathy which is man's largest sense of the 
 Infinite. 
 
 AS THE STATE. 
 
 It will treat the State as an ideal. Not as a mere 
 right of majorities or parties to make laws for their 
 opponents, or to substitute pushing legislation and 
 worked-up force for the earnestness of a public 
 sentiment; not as everybody's chance to put his
 
 130 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 \ 
 
 will in act, which is the French madness ; or to 
 work springs of patronage, which is the American ; 
 or, worse than all, to decide his dues as an office- 
 holder with his own fingers in the public chest. 
 The religious ideal of the State is the fulfilment 
 of functions by the fittest, as the one condition of 
 just culture for all. One absolute allegiance at 
 least is due from every citizen : it is to the personal 
 disciplines and self-restraints that shall secure this 
 end. Worse than kingcraft or oligarchy is the 
 republican politician's pretence of a full right to 
 hold any ofifice he is able to secure. This false 
 show of freedom makes the reality of slavery. A 
 nation rests on loyalty, not on greed ; and it is 
 only the idealism of the citizen that can hold it to 
 this law. 
 
 When the freedom of religion claimed for hu- 
 manity a sphere given over to Fugitive Slave Laws 
 and the suppression of personal liberty, it was bid- 
 den with sneers to keep its gospel out of politics. 
 Now, rm-forbidden, it will apply a more penetra- 
 tive criticism still. An exacting morality, by no 
 organized powers to be over-ridden or escaped, 
 begins to ransack all functions for signs of corrup- 
 tion, and musters its indictments to prove the 
 startling increase of crime. This is, I believe, an 
 evidence of growing standards, moved by freer 
 sense of the infinite, more than a sign of actual 
 degeneracy in public or private virtue. The subtle 
 soul of personal aspiration to freedom, which will 
 not be shut into a special sphere, as " religious,"
 
 FREEDOM IN RELIGION. 131 
 
 cannot be shut out of any as wn-religious. It goes 
 where men do not carry prescriptive church or 
 creed, leavening the practical secular life of a free 
 community. It is this that has abolished union 
 of Church and State ; not only that religion may 
 be free, but that the State may be free to essential 
 religion. Depend upon it, no propagandist Christ- 
 ism will be suffered to make the Constitution its 
 tool, and qualify voters by a creed ; nor are politi- 
 cal rights, at last, to be made into an Esau-pottage, 
 fed out by Christian Associations to such as are 
 willing to sell their freedom of thought ; nor yet 
 into spiritual constabularies under the old seals of 
 King and Priest and Lord. Our spiritual liberties 
 are protected from bigoted legislation by a grow- 
 ing ideality in the unconscious, as well as the con- 
 scious, faith (if not yet in the conduct) of our 
 age and country, too broad to be -labelled or 
 classified, too personal to be specifically organized, 
 too much in the line of social tendency to fail of 
 furtherance from the very effort to suppress it. 
 The real dangers to personality, to the life of 
 citizenship, are a selfish individualism and a tyran- 
 nous consolidation working together, a hydra of 
 materialism, in the name of practical rights and 
 interests ; and from this we must be preserved by 
 the advancing Religion of Freedom. 
 
 AS CULTURE. 
 
 So in Culture. The defect of our popular edu- 
 cation is in its mechanical tendencies. Drill of
 
 132 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 children in large schools to uniformity and even 
 concert, in all mental processes ; immense details 
 of prescribed knowledge infused by short rules 
 and methods, with severe competition and one 
 field of reward and penalty for all forms of mind, 
 make even our cherished common-school system a 
 kind of social absolutism. It hardly recognizes 
 differences of taste and faculty ; leaves no margin 
 for the free self-determination of the ideal; in- 
 spires no earnest desire to learn one's own real 
 limits or powers. It does not discipline the dan- 
 gerous democratic notion of a natural, uncondi- 
 tional right to manage all spheres, public and 
 private ; but indoctrinates it with subservience 
 to masses, organization, and mutual supervision. 
 Mechanism and manufacture, applied to mind and 
 morals, is naturally the first essay of republican 
 equality at the great task of self-culture. There 
 is need of certain uniform methods to secure equal 
 opportunity ; but uniformity become absolutism is 
 as much the peril of a free State as it is the power 
 of a despotic one. It may make smart human 
 apes and effective parrots ; but we must educate 
 our youth to free thought and noble aims. This 
 needed stand for the personal ideal, and its claims 
 in every child, must be made by our religion. It 
 must bring to bear upon our school system the 
 culture of moral loyalty ; an appreciation, in polit- 
 ical and social life, of real gifts and patient dis- 
 ciplines ; an infinite interest, ready to spend and 
 be spent, in adapting its methods to discover special
 
 FREEDOM IN RELIGION. 133 
 
 faculty and need, to stimulate self-respect, and to 
 thwart the public rage for uniformity with a noble 
 universality. The mutual influence of the sexes 
 in common cultures and disciplines is conspicuously 
 needed for all these purposes. More vital still is 
 the protection of the school system from theologi- 
 cal pretensions. I do not say from religion. You 
 cannot exclude that without producing worse cari- 
 catures of culture than Mr. Gladstone's proposal 
 for a university which shall teach neither philos- 
 ophy nor history, because of possible bearings on 
 sectarian questions ! Pure " secularism " is no such 
 easy matter as its advocates suppose. The reason 
 why the Bible should not be read in the schools is 
 not that religion and morality are out of place 
 there, but simply because the Bible represents the 
 principle of authority over mental and spiritual 
 freedom; because it would not be read as other 
 books are, for purely educational purposes, but 
 would introduce the denial of that freedom to 
 judge and reject, which is the basis of education. 
 This is not disrespect to its merits. Its immortal 
 best sentences ought to be read in the schools, just 
 as soon as they shall be put on the same level, in 
 every respect, with other great sayings of similar 
 purport, in Plutarch and Plato, in Avesta and 
 Veda : such universality being the only possible 
 evidence that no Bibliocracy is intended. Put an 
 ideal desire of free personal conviction and broad- 
 est growth into the school system, and the vexing 
 question of religious teaching is solved. One and
 
 134 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 the same spirit shall secularize and spiritualize our 
 whole public culture ; shall quicken free, origi- 
 nal mind, and bend it to patient, loyal disci- 
 plines, and lift it into the courage to follow simple 
 aims, and homely virtues, and hospitable hopes. 
 No better definition of Culture was ever given 
 than Matthew Arnold's " sweetness and light." 
 Not the less does it define the geniality and insight 
 of Natural Religion. With the new honor to 
 Nature enter all brave faiths and sympathies ; with 
 boundless tasks of joy, whose rewards are in this 
 life, in the believing and the doing : the world 
 opens its infinite resource like a Father's Heart ; 
 and love and duty shall be everywhere at home.
 
 RELIGION AND SCIENCE. 135 
 
 RELIGION AND SCIENCE. 
 BY JOHN WEISS. 
 
 A THOROUGH treatment of this interesting 
 ? subject, which is beginning to attract the 
 attention of all minds that are more or less compe- 
 tent to deal with it. involves more time and more 
 respect for details, more personal and experimental 
 observation, than any morning platform can fur- 
 nish. I lately heard of a saying of Professor 
 Agassiz to this effect, that the amateur reader of 
 scientific discoveries never actually possessed the 
 facts that are described : they belong only to the 
 observer, who feels them developing and dawning 
 into his knowledge with a rapture of possession 
 that seems to share the process of creation. To 
 that just remark I add my conviction that the 
 practised observer does not always thoroughly 
 apprehend and calculate the drift of the facts 
 which he procures. Still, a mere reader of science, 
 however receptive his intellect may be, or inclined 
 to scientific methods, is not in a position to speak 
 with authority upon various points which emerge 
 from the controversy that now prevails between the 
 two parties of Natural Evolution of Forces and 
 Natural Development of Divine Ideas ; for thus I 
 propose to state the matter in hand.
 
 136 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 One party may be said to derive all the physical 
 and mental phenomena of the world from germs 
 of matter which collect forces, combine to build 
 structures and increase their complexity, establish 
 each different order of creatures by their own in- 
 stinctive impulse, and climb at length through the 
 animal kingdom into the human brain, where they 
 deposit thought, expression, and emotion. At no 
 point of this process of immense duration need 
 there be a divine co-operation, because the process 
 is supposed to have been originally delegated to a 
 great ocean of germs: they went into action fur- 
 nished for every possible contingency, gifted in 
 advance with the whole sequence from the amoeba, 
 or the merest speck of germinal matter, to a Shak- 
 spearian moment of Hamlet, or a Christian moment 
 of the Golden Rule. Consequently, ideas are only 
 the impacts of accumulating sensations upon de- 
 veloping brains ; an intellectual method is only 
 the coherence of natural phenomena ; and the 
 moral sense is nothing but a carefully hoarded 
 human experience of actions that are best to be 
 repeated for the comfort of the whole. The im- 
 agination itself is but the success of the most sen- 
 sitive brains in bringing the totality of their ideas 
 into a balanced harmony that corresponds to the 
 Nature that furnished them. The poet's eye, 
 glancing from earth to heaven, is only the earth 
 and sky condensing themselves into the analogies 
 of all their facts, in native interplay and combina- 
 tion, wearing the terrestrial hues of midnight,
 
 RELIGION AND SCIENCE. 137 
 
 morn, and eve. The epithet divine, applied to a 
 possible Creator, can bear no other meaning than 
 unknown; and the word spiritual is equivalent to 
 cerebral. Spirit is the germinal matter arranged 
 at length, after a deal of trouble, into chains of 
 nerve-cells, which conspire to deposit all they 
 have picked up on their long journey from chaos 
 to man. So that when their living matter becomes 
 dead matter, their deposit drops through into non- 
 entity ; and the word Immortality remains only 
 to denote facts of terrestrial duration, such as the 
 life of nations, and the fame of men with the heav- 
 iest and finest brains. If the brain-cells discon- 
 tinue their function, existence cannot continue. 
 
 The other party, which inclines to a theory that 
 creation is a development of divine ideas, is very 
 distinctly divided into those who believe that this 
 development took a gradual method, and used 
 natural forces that are everywhere upon the spot, 
 and those who prefer to claim a supernatural in- 
 coming of fresh ideas at the beginnings of genera 
 and epochs. The former believe that the Divine 
 Mind accompanies the whole development, and 
 secures its gradualism ; or, that the universe is a 
 single, unbroken expression of an ever-present 
 Unity. The latter believe that the expression can 
 be enhanced, broken in upon by special acts that do 
 not flow from previous acts, but are only involved 
 in the ideas which the previous acts contained ; so 
 that there is a sequence of idea, but not of actual 
 creative evolution out of one form into another.
 
 138 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 The former think that they find in the marks of 
 slow gradation from simple to complex forms, both 
 of physical and mental life, the proof that a Creator 
 elaborates all forms out of their predecessors, by 
 using immense duration of time, but never for a 
 moment deserting any one of them, as if it were 
 competent to do it alone ; so that the difference of 
 species, men, and historical epochs, is only one of 
 accumulation of ideas, and not of their interpola- 
 tion. The latter think that the missing links of the 
 geological record, the marked peculiarities of races 
 and periods, the transcendent traits of leading men, 
 are proofs that the Creator does not work by natu- 
 ral evolution, but by deliberate insertion of fresh 
 ideas to start fresh creatures. One party recog- 
 nizes the supernatural in the whole of Nature, 
 because the whole embodies a divine ideal. The 
 other party is not reluctant to affirm the same, but 
 thinks it essential to the existence of Nature to 
 import special efforts of the ideal, which are equiv- 
 alent to special creations: so that the naturalist 
 gets on with nothing but unity and gradation ; the 
 supernaturalist cannot take a step without plurality 
 and interference. 
 
 What are the opinions entertained by Naturalism 
 upon the origin of ideas, the moral sense, the spirit- 
 ual nature ? 
 
 Naturalism itself here splits. One side boiTOws 
 the method of natural evolution of forces so far as 
 to derive all the contents of the mind from the 
 experiences of mankind as they accumulated to sys-
 
 RELIGION AND SCIENCE. 139 
 
 tematize themselves in brains; and when further 
 questions are put as to whether there be an inde- 
 pendent origin for a soul, and a permanent con- 
 tinuance for it ; whether there be an original moral 
 sense that appropriates social experiences, and gives 
 a stamp of its own latent method to them, the an- 
 swers are deferred, because it is alleged that Science 
 has not yet put enough facts into the case to sup- 
 port a judicial decision. 
 
 But another camp is forming upon the field of 
 Naturalism. Its followers incline to believe that 
 all human and social experience started from a 
 latent finite mind which is distinct from the struct- 
 ure that may surround it ; and that the movement 
 of evolution was twofold, one side of it being 
 structural and the other mental, both strictly par- 
 allel, moving simultaneously in consequence of a 
 divine impulse that resides at the same moment in 
 the physical and mental nature, an impulse that 
 accumulated into a latent finite mind as soon as a 
 structure appropriate to express it accumulated ; 
 that the history of mankind has been a mutual 
 interplay of improving circumstances and develop- 
 ing intelligence, but that the first step was taken by 
 the latent mind, just as the first step in creating 
 any thing must have been taken by a divine mind ; 
 and that the last steps of perfected intelligence 
 reproduce the original method and purposes of a 
 Creator who imparted to man this tendency to 
 reproduce them. In this latent tendency all men- 
 tal phenomena lay packed, or nebulous if you
 
 140 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 please ; or it was germinal mentality, if you prefer 
 the term ; or inchoate soul-substance. The term 
 is of little consequence, provided we notice the 
 possibility of something to begin human life with 
 beside the physical structure that was elaborated 
 out of previous creatures. 
 
 We know that the human brain repeats, during 
 the period of its foetal existence, some of the forms 
 of the vertebrata that preceded it. We also know 
 that when any organ of man's body is diseased, a 
 degeneration takes place that repeats the state of 
 the same organ in the lower animals. The secre- 
 tion is no longer normal, but recurs to a less perfect 
 kind. So we notice that in degeneration of the 
 brain some idiotic conditions occur that repeat 
 with great exactness the habits and temper of 
 monkeys and other animals. The descending scale 
 of degeneration, no less than the ascending effort 
 of development, touches at animal stages, and 
 incorporates them in the human structure. It 
 would require a uniformity of degenerating con- 
 ditions, sustained through an immense duration of 
 time, to degrade a human structure into any actual 
 animal form, if, indeed, such a retrogradation be 
 not forbidden by the mental and moral superiority 
 to which any human structure must have attained. 
 Still, the physical and mental diseases of mankind 
 are significant allusions : they mimic, as it were, 
 some stages of structural development. 
 
 When Dr. Howe visited the isolated cottages for 
 the insane at Gheel, in Belgium, he noticed that the
 
 RELIGION AND SCIENCE. 141 
 
 noisy ones (les crieurs, the howlers) could be 
 heard in the dusk crying like animals, but clearly 
 human animals ; and he says, " Is it only fancy, or 
 were men once mere animals, shouting and crying 
 aloud to each other ; and is this habit of shattered 
 maniacs another proof that all organized beings 
 tend to revert to the original type, like that rever- 
 sion of neglected fruit towards the wild crab ? " 
 
 The popular language notices this tendency to 
 deterioration in the tricks of over-sensual men : 
 we say a man is a hog, a goat, a monkey. Some 
 cunning facial traits remind us irresistibly of the 
 fox, others of the rat. These resemblances were 
 the unconscious elements in the Egyptian theory 
 of metempsychosis, or the retrogression of evil 
 men into the animals whose special tricks were 
 like their own. 
 
 We cannot help seeing that Nature slowly felt 
 her way towards us, built her clay models, reframed 
 her secret thought, committed it to brains of in- 
 creasing complexity, till man closed the composing 
 period, and began to blab of his origin. 
 
 But how did he begin to do that? Was his 
 social life a physical result of the sympathies of 
 gregarious animals, who defend and feed each other, 
 protect and rear their young, dig burrows, spread 
 lairs, and weave a nest ? That, it is replied, was 
 only the structural and physical side of something 
 that had been preparing to step farther. It could 
 not have furnished the germinal conditions of 
 speech, thought, and conscience. Was it because
 
 142 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 the fox was cunning, that man learned to circum- 
 vent his enemies ; because the elephant was saga- 
 cious, that he undertook to ponder ; because the 
 monkey was curious, that he began to pry into 
 cause and effect ; because the bee built her com- 
 pact cell, that he grew geometrical ? The answer 
 made is, that these structural felicities lay on the 
 road between a Creator who geometrized, and a 
 creature who learned to see that it was so, and 
 called it Geometry. At the end of that road is a 
 mind that undertakes to interpret whence the road 
 started, and how it was laid out. If you prefer to 
 derive that latent mind from these previous states 
 of animal intelligence, it does not damage the pre- 
 sumption in favor of independent mind. Estimate 
 the animals to be as sagacious as you please, until 
 they barely escape stepping over into the domain 
 which our reflective words have appropriated, 
 such as memory, perception, adaptation, causality, 
 also a rudiment of conscience. Even be surprised 
 by traces of self-devotion, like that in the " heroic 
 little monkey, who braved his dreaded enemy in 
 order to save the life of his keeper ; or in the old 
 baboon, who, descending from the mountains, car- 
 ried away in triumph his young comrade from a 
 crowd of astonished dogs." Say, if you will, as 
 Rama said in the Ramayana, when a vulture died 
 in defending his mistress : " Of a certainty there 
 are amongst the animals many good and generous 
 beings, and even many heroes. For my part, I do 
 not doubt that this compassionate bird, who gave
 
 RELIGION AND SCIENCE. 143 
 
 his life for my sake, will be admitted into Para- 
 dise." Believe, if you are a dog-fancier, that in 
 " that equal sky " your faithful dog will bear you 
 company. It would infringe upon my sense of 
 personality no more than to have him trotting by 
 my side in this world. Here he is altogether un- 
 conscious how my moral sense sets store by and 
 idealizes his instinctive service, and how I natter 
 him with imputations of my own self. He licks 
 the hand that extends to him a mood of a Creator's 
 appreciation of fidelity. 
 
 But grant that a Creator derived the latent hu- 
 man mind by gradualism out of all kinds of animal 
 anticipations. The mind thus derived reaches to a 
 distinction from physical structure, and to a sub- 
 ordination of it to ideal purposes, at that point of 
 development where the man can say, / am ; that 
 phrase is an echo against the walls of creation of 
 the first creative fiat of Him who is I AM. When 
 man finds language to express his sense of personal 
 consciousness, God overhears the secret of his own 
 condition told into all the ears he has created by all 
 the tongues of his own spiritual essence. The 
 mouse cannot squeak it, nor the elephant trumpet 
 it ; the sparrow cannot cheep and twitter it, nor 
 can the ape chatter his anticipation that he is about 
 to be liberated into speech and personal identity. 
 All the herds of the animals furnish the physical 
 structure of man with the devices of their strength 
 and instinct, but they have no personal freedom to 
 contribute. A school of whales will yield so many
 
 144 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 barrels of oil to feed the midnight lamps of think- 
 ers who chase the absent sun with surmises con- 
 cerning a light that never sets. 
 
 Certainly it must be true that the physical and 
 chemical forces which are involved in acts of 
 creation cannot suggest to any parts of creation 
 the previous laws of a Creator. We say these 
 forces reach the felicity of making a man : if this 
 be so, they have made something that is different 
 from their own nature. Man himself betrays this 
 difference as soon as he begins to establish science 
 upon universal laws: it is a proof that he is not 
 only a part of creation, in the natural order, but 
 also the member of a spiritual order, by virtue of 
 which he attains slowly to conceptions of the laws 
 that made him, including the chemical functions 
 of his various organs. Which of all our secre- 
 tions could explain themselves ? After they have 
 discharged all their duty of nutriment and defeca- 
 ti6n they have reached the end of their tether. 
 Could the pancreatic juice, by going into partner- 
 ship with the liver, kidneys, and stomach, succeed 
 in explaining the manner of its secretion, and how 
 it pours into the duodenum? Can the blood, 
 which is the expression to which these lower func- 
 tions reach, lift to the brain a report of the way it 
 grew to be red, and of the use of the white cor- 
 puscles ? Do the countless nerve-cells that weave 
 their telegraphic circuits through the brain to 
 which every organ sends its message, and receives 
 thence its reply convert these sensations into
 
 RELIGION AND SCIENCE. 145 
 
 something that is not nerve-cell, that is not gray 
 or fibrous matter ; do they lose their identity and 
 become deduction, wit, imagination, and synthetic 
 thought ? When you can prove that germinal 
 matter made itself, you will be in a condition to 
 show that matter interprets itself. For that is what 
 man does : he interprets not only the matter of his 
 own private structure, but of all organic and in- 
 organic forms. Does matter arm the eyes it makes 
 with the telescope and microscope to overcome its 
 own extension and density ? What is it that cal- 
 culates the weights of the planets, and records 
 the relative ratios of their movements, and an- 
 nounces new planets before they have been seen ? 
 Something kindred with the intellect that precon- 
 ceived the existence of that universe of germs 
 which becomes function, substance, form, and 
 force. When we see daily how all created things 
 hasten to fall in with the logic of the best think- 
 ers, and to crystallize along the lines which they 
 draw, we suspect that such lines are drawn parallel 
 with divine ideas, and that science is made in the 
 image of a Creator. 
 
 This position of theistic Naturalism entitles it 
 not to be afraid of all the scientific facts that can 
 be produced. If Mr. Darwin could prove to-mor- 
 row that we have descended from an anthropoid 
 ape that tenanted the boundless waste of forest 
 branches, we should as cheerfully accept our struc- 
 ture created out of dust in that form as in any 
 other. There is dignity in dust that reaches any 
 
 10
 
 146 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 form, because it eventually betrays a forming 
 power, and ceases to be dust by sharing it. I am 
 willing to have it shown that I travel with a whole 
 menagerie in my cerebellum : your act of showing 
 it to me shows that neither you nor I are members 
 of that menagerie. We are its feeders, trainers, 
 and interpreters. We act God's part towards it, 
 as he does upon the scale of zones and continents. 
 In us, in fact, he improves upon his natural action 
 by bringing all his dumb creatures under one roof, 
 where he enjoys the benefit of knowing that his 
 motive in creating them is understood and de- 
 lighted in ; so that though saurians are out of 
 date, and he no longer has the joy of making the 
 mammoth and aurochs, we rehearse the ancient 
 raptures for him, and preserve them in our struc- 
 t tures. 
 
 " Thus He dwells in all, 
 From life's minute beginnings, up at last 
 To man, the consummation of this scheme 
 Of being, the completion of this sphere 
 Of life ; whose attributes had here and there 
 Been scattered o'er the visible world before, 
 Asking to be combined, dim fragments meant 
 To be united in some wondrous whole, 
 Imperfect qualities throughout creation, 
 Suggesting some one creature yet to make, 
 Some point where all those scattered rays should meet 
 Convergent in the faculties of man." 
 
 " Man, once descried, imprints for ever 
 His presence on all lifeless things : the winds 
 Are henceforth voices, in a wail or shout, 
 A querulous mutter, or a quick, gay laugh, 
 Never a senseless gust now man is born."
 
 RELIGION AND SCIENCE. 147 
 
 " So in man's self arise 
 August anticipations, symbols, types 
 Of a dim splendor ever on before, 
 In that eternal circle run by life." 
 
 I submit to you the doubt whether germinal 
 matter, long cradled in the earth's evolving periods, 
 and then baptized as the individual, Robert Brown- 
 ing, could have composed those lines which con- 
 tain prevision of the whole drift of modern science. 
 Could nerve-cells, nourished by roast meat, revel 
 in those " august anticipations " of a state and 
 attainment that depend upon a continuance of our 
 life? 
 
 We need be afraid of nothing in heaven or 
 earth, whether dreamt of or not in our philoso- 
 phy. It is a wonder to me that scholars and 
 clergymen are so skittish about scientific facts. 
 I delight, for instance, in the modern argument 
 which reproduces and systematizes the ancient 
 fire-worship of the Persian, by showing that the 
 sun's atmosphere contains all the stuffs of the solar 
 system, and is its God whose vibrating emanations 
 wake all things to a morning of living. The more 
 possibilities you attribute to the sun, the more ex- 
 haustive you allege its creative power to be, to the 
 extent, if you please, of sending the fine ether 
 which courses through the brain-cells ; the more 
 correspondent to the solar nature you show that 
 all life-action may be, the more you help me to 
 my belief in a latent mind as the first term of hu- 
 man existence. You have made that fluent and
 
 148 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 wallowing sun a solid stepping-stone in the great 
 river of phenomena, and it takes me across dry- 
 shod, with not the smell of its fire upon my gar- 
 ments, takes me directly to a Cause for something 
 so glorious, for such a mobile and flaming minister 
 to all things. On the way toward that Cause, if I 
 choose, I can step to suns more distant, each of 
 which is the life-centre of its system and the dis- 
 tributor of germs ; but though this pathway may 
 stretch to the crack of doom expected by the theo- 
 logian, I shall find at the end of it something that 
 sands the floor of heaven thick with suns. Some- 
 thing ; not another sun, but sun's Father. I 
 started with an idea of Cause, and now I find the 
 reason why I did, because nothing is uncaused. 
 I get justification for using the term ; for it appears 
 to be the language used at length by One who can 
 no longer be content that his heavens should have 
 no sound, and that their voice should not be heard. 
 Latent mind first betrayed its presence on the earth 
 by beginning to grope from effects to causes, to 
 account for things. Thus the mind, like a weak 
 party of soldiers, separated from its base by formi- 
 dable streams, has slowly pontooned its way back 
 to the main Cause, by successive discoveries of 
 causes. It is recognized afar off, it is welcomed, 
 and rushes with the hunger of long absence into 
 the arms of comradeship. 
 
 It does not disturb me to be told that the mind 
 has no innate ideas ; that, in fact, the entity called 
 mind is a result of the impressions which the senses
 
 RELIGION AND SCIENCE. 149 
 
 ' gather from Nature, a body of sifted perceptions ; 
 that all our emotions started in the vague sympathy 
 /that the first men had for each other when they 
 found themselves in company ; that a sense of 
 justice is not native to the mind, but only a conse- 
 quence of the efforts of men to get along comforta- 
 bly in crowds, with the least amount of jostling ; 
 that the feeling of chastity has no spiritual deriva- 
 , tion, but was slowly formed in remote ages by 
 observation of the pernicious effects of promiscuous 
 living ; that, in short, all the mental states which 
 'we call intuitions, should be called digestions from 
 experience. For, supposing this theory to be the 
 
 / lone that will eventually account for all mental 
 phenomena, why need one care how he grew into 
 a being who throbs with the instantaneous purpose 
 of salutary ideas, with the devotion of his thought 
 and conscience to the service of mankind, with a 
 ravishing sense of harmony and proportion that 
 breaks into his symphony and song? When a 
 / man reaches the point of being all alive, thrilling 
 to his finger-tips with all the nerves a world can 
 
 c, contribute, shall he distress himself because, upon 
 examining his genealogy, he discovers no aristo- 
 crat, but a plebeian, for his ancestor ? If, in fact, 
 he should discover something that had fallen to the 
 conventionality of being an aristocrat, it would, as 
 the world goes, breed a suspicion that something 
 previous had maintained the dignity of being a 
 plebeian. Manhood ennobles all ancestors, and 
 they enjoy princely revenues in its vitality. Must
 
 150 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 I make myself miserable because I am told that 
 for nine months of iny existence I was successively 
 a fish, a frog, a bird, a rabbit, a monkey, and that 
 my infancy presented strong Mongolian character- 
 istics? This, then, was the path to the human 
 mind, that outswims all fishes in a sea where no 
 fish can live, that leaps with wit and analogy more 
 agile than frogs or kangaroos, that travels by aerial 
 routes to spaces where no bird's wing could winnow. 
 So be it, if it be so. I do not care for the path 
 when I come in sight of the mansion of love and 
 beauty that has been prepared for me. Its win- 
 dows are all aglow with " an awful rose of dawn." 
 What delicacy of sentiment or imagination can be 
 desecrated because barbarian ancestors felt like 
 brutes or fancied like lunatics? Can the mind's 
 majestic conception of a divine plan of orderly and 
 intelligent development be unsphered and brutal- 
 ized because the first men felt the cravings of 
 causality more faintly than the pangs of hunger ? 
 Causality has reached its coronation-day : its gar- 
 ment of a universe is powdered with galaxies and 
 nebuke, suns glitter on its brow, the earth is its 
 footstool, its sceptre is controlling Law. You can- 
 not mortify or attaint this king by reminding it of 
 days spent in hovels and squalor, when it hid from 
 the treason of circumstances, and was sheltered and 
 fed precariously by savages. Would you unseat 
 it ? Then annihilate a universe. 
 
 Tin's latent tendency to discover cause rescues 
 the first beginnings of the human soul from any
 
 RELIGION AND SCIENCE. 151 
 
 materialism that would deny its independent ex- 
 istence. It provides the human structure with a 
 tenant, who improves it as his circumstances 
 become more flattering, until both together frame 
 one complete convenience. We do not require a 
 theory of innate ideas to establish this soul upon 
 earth and set it going. All we require is the 
 theory of innate tendency, of latent directions, of 
 inchoate ideas, that pervade this germinal soul- 
 substance just as the divine ideas pervaded primi- 
 tive matter. I conceive that our mental method 
 and our moral sense were possibilities of soul- 
 germs, but that experience stimulated them into 
 improving action and expression, till at length our 
 idea of sequence and origin, and our sense of right 
 and wrong, have become normal conditions of in- 
 telligence. Why not say, then, that they are at 
 last intuitive? But it is chiefly important to 
 accept them as essential elements of a human per- 
 son, without regard to the method of their deriva- 
 tion. For derivation is not in itself fatal to the 
 independence of the thing derived. It is not 
 among genera and species : why should it be 
 among personal ideas ? 
 
 People do not like to have their conscience 
 derived from gradual discoveries of acts that 
 turned out to be the most useful or the most sym- 
 pathetic, nor to feel that they have no inner guide 
 but this inherited succession of selfish experiences. 
 And, indeed, the theory does not account for all 
 the facts. It is unable to give any satisfactory
 
 152 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 explanation of the moral condition of such men as 
 Woolman and John Brown ; of any brakeman or 
 engineer who coolly puts himself to death to save 
 a train ; of Arnold of Winkelried who " gathered 
 in his breast a sheaf of Austrian spears," and felt 
 Swiss liberty trample over him and through the 
 
 This theory, that the moral sense was slowly 
 deposited by innumerable successions of selfish ex- 
 periences, could make nothing of the story lately 
 told of the way a little girl was rescued, who had 
 " wandered on to the track of the Delaware Rail- 
 road as a freight train of nineteen cars was ap- 
 proaching. As it turned the sharp top of the grade, 
 opposite St. Georges, the engineer saw the child 
 for the first time, blew ' Down brakes,' and re- 
 versed the engine. But it was too late to slacken 
 its speed in time ; and the poor baby got up, and, 
 laughing, ran to meet it. 4 1 told the conductor,' 
 says the engineer, ' if he could jump off the engine, 
 and, running ahead, pick the child up before the 
 engine reached her, he might save her life, though 
 it would risk his own ; which he did. The engine 
 was within one foot of the child when he secured 
 it, and they were both saved. I would not run the 
 same risk of saving a child again by way of experi- 
 ment for all Newcastle County, for nine out of ten 
 might not escape. He took the child to the lane, 
 and she walked to the house, and a little girl was 
 coming after it when we left.' The honest engi- 
 neer, having finished his day's run, sits down the
 
 RELIGION AND SCIENCE. 153 
 
 next morning and writes this homely letter to the 
 father of the child, ' in order that it may be more 
 carefully watched in future,' and thanking God 
 ' that himself and the baby's mother slept tran- 
 quilly last night, and were spared the life-long 
 pangs of remorse.' It does not occur to him to even 
 mention the conductor's name, who, he seems to 
 think, did no uncommon thing in risking his own 
 life, unseen and unnoticed on the solitary road, for 
 a child whom he would never probably see again." 
 The feeling of utility would confine men strictly 
 within the limits of the average utility of any age. 
 Each generation would come to a mutual under- 
 standing of the things that would be safe to per- 
 form. The instinct of self-preservation would be 
 a continual check to the heroism that dies framing 
 its indictment against tyrannies and wrongs. The 
 great men who fling themselves against the scorn 
 and menace of their age could never be born out 
 of general considerations of utility or sympathy ; 
 for each man would say that a wrong, though not 
 salutary to its victim, would not be salutary to one 
 who should try to redress it. Sympathy that was 
 spawned by the physical circumstances of remote 
 ages could never reach the temper of consideration 
 for the few against the custom of the many. You 
 could no more extract heroism from such a begin- 
 ning of the moral sense than sunbeams from cu- 
 cumbers. We owe a debt to the scientific man 
 who can show how many moral customs result 
 from local and ethnic experiences, and how the
 
 154 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 conscience is everywhere capable of inheritance 
 and education. Pie cannot bring us too many facts 
 of this description, because we have one fact too 
 much for him ; namely, a latent tendency of con- 
 science to repudiate inheritance and every expe- 
 rience of utility, to fly in its face with a forecast 
 of a transcendental utility that supplies the world 
 with its redeemers, and continually drags it out of 
 the snug and accurate adjustment of selfishness to 
 which it arrives. The first act of such devoted 
 self-surrender might have been imitated, no doubt ; 
 and a few men in ever}" age, having learned by this 
 means that a higher utility resulted from doing an 
 apparently useless thing, might be developed by a 
 mixture of reason and sympathy into resisting their 
 fellows. But how are you going to account for 
 the first act ? How for a sentiment of violated 
 justice, if justice be only the precipitate of average 
 utility? How for a tender love for remote and 
 invisible suffering, for wrongs that are a nuisance 
 at too great a distance to be felt or observed, if 
 sympathy is nothing but an understanding among 
 people who are forced to live together ? I should 
 as soon pretend that my nostrils were afflicted by a 
 bad smell that was transpiring in Siam. 
 
 This reminds me to ask how any particular odor 
 was first discovered to be nauseous. If the reply 
 be offered, that olfactory discrimination must have 
 resulted from experiences of the effect of odors, 
 gradually acquired, and slowly modifying the or- 
 gan, I say that the process must have begun in a
 
 BELIOION AND SCIENCE. 155 
 
 capacity to perceive, no matter how imperfectly, 
 that a scent is disagreeable. What is that previous 
 capacity ? It must have been something that was 
 not created by the scent. It is no objection to this 
 that people differ in sensibility for odors, so that a 
 flower may be disagreeable to one and pleasant to 
 another. If odors create the organ that corre- 
 sponds to and discriminates them, they ought to 
 appear the same to everybody. But there is a 
 latent perception that varies among individuals, 
 and decides their favorite perfumes ; and it is 
 curious to notice how they correspond to mental 
 characters, and seem to have a faint analogy with 
 the condition of the moral sense. Discrimination 
 in smelling could not have been originated by the 
 things that were smelt, any more than a man's 
 trail or blood-drip must have preceded and created 
 the blood-hound's tracking. 
 
 The moral sense to which we have attained by 
 stages must have started from an original tendency 
 to become sensitive to moral acts. We cannot say 
 that the results have established the tendency, any 
 more than we can say that marks of design have 
 originated a designer ; that an eye, for instance, 
 developed light, or that light created a light-maker. 
 
 The phrases, I ought, I ought not, are not merely 
 functional, as when a blood-hound tracks, a pointer 
 points, a watch-dog listens through the house. We 
 detect even in the animals a sense of duty in car- 
 rying out their instincts, and a deferring to man, 
 as if to a source of the instincts, or at least to a
 
 156 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 power that holds them responsible for good behav- 
 ior. So we instinctively refer our moral attitude 
 to a source of moral law. 
 
 It is possible we have reached a moral sense 
 from the anticipatory types of conscience in some 
 animals, by drifting along with them through Mr. 
 Spencer's experiences of utility and Mr. Darwin's 
 social instincts. But a latent mental tendency 
 must have fallen in with that structural drift at 
 some point, else man would never agonize to say, 
 I ought, I ought not. Is it any the less divine be- 
 cause it has consorted with animals and savages, 
 and found their company no hinderance to this elab- 
 orating of a sense of right and wrong ? It is all 
 the more divine, because it betrays conformity with 
 the great order of development, at the same time 
 that it has been forereaching through it to perfect 
 moral actions. 
 
 What was the nature of John Woolman's secret 
 satisfaction when he insisted upon non-compliance 
 with the habits and allowances of his time ? If 
 conscience be the result of discovering what turns 
 out badly for a person who is living on the scale 
 of other persons, why should he, a tailor, have dis- 
 couraged the making and wearing of fine clothes ; 
 have refused to touch, to his own serious privation, 
 one of the products of slave labor ; have protested, 
 to the loss of sympathy and gain of contempt, 
 against ownership in men ? Was he an abnormal 
 variety, a deteriorated specimen, a man whom ad- 
 vantage hurt ? Where do Mr. Darwin's social in-
 
 RELIGION AND SCIENCE. 157 
 
 stincts come in ? Woolman withstood all these for 
 distant and abstract incentives, and originated, with- 
 out social and intellectual material, a fresh epoch 
 of moral feeling. The latent tendency attained to 
 liberation from all its previous experiences. 
 
 One of the bases of conscience is said to be the 
 intellectual capacity to recall past impressions, to 
 compare them with present temptations, and to 
 decide upon the most advantageous action. Pos- 
 sibly ; but it cannot be a sine qua non, as we see in 
 the cases of those uncultivated souls who have a 
 new scruple or a sudden heroism. And some of 
 the best intelligences are dull and uncertain in the 
 moral sense. Is it because they are at the same 
 time weak in the social instincts? Some very 
 acute and long-headed pirates of society are fond 
 family-men, love to gather children around their 
 knees, have sympathetic impulses ; and, when they 
 are not on a plundering excursion among widows 
 and orphans, as directors of mills, railroads, and 
 trust companies, would be selected to found a 
 society of correct men in consequence of immacu- 
 late dicky and domesticity. 
 
 The lower senses, by repeated experiment and 
 observation, acquire an unconscious, automatic 
 movement. When the higher senses have passed 
 out of their experimental stages, they acquire a 
 spontaneous movement. In the region of intel- 
 lectual and moral ideas this becomes intuitive; 
 that is, they attain to a power of looking into 
 themselves, of comparing and deducing, and also of
 
 158 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 anticipating other ideas, or at least evolutions from 
 existing ideas, which sometimes lead to the fore- 
 feeling of a law of nature in advance of its con- 
 firmation by experiment, as when Lucretius 
 anticipated moderns with a theory of evolution, 
 of the magnet, and of the constitution of the sun ; 
 and Swedenborg divined fresh planets before Le- 
 verrier was furnished with the calculus which 
 might have led him experimentally to the fact ; 
 or when Kepler saw dimly in his mental firmament 
 the law to which at length the sky responded. 
 This was latent correspondence with the law : it 
 was stimulated by all his scientific knowledge ; 
 but when it stepped upon planetary ratios into a 
 new secret of creation, it announced its indepen- 
 dence of experience, and betrayed a similarity in 
 essence with the Creator. 
 
 Let us now consider if this latent mentality, 
 which reaches thus to independent action, has any 
 chance of surviving the dissolution of the cerebral 
 structure, by means of some force, called Vitality, 
 distinct in kind from all the physical and chemical 
 forces that build our frame. Naturalism denies a 
 special vitality, because it is so engrossed with 
 showing how functions develop by the instrumen- 
 tality of human forces : it affirms that the whole 
 drift of experimental analogy sets against the 
 conception of another force, unless it be one that 
 shall differ only in degree, and not in kind, not in 
 essential independence, not in permanent continu- 
 ance, from the rest. Observation has lifted these
 
 RELIGION AND SCIENCE. 159 
 
 forces to the level of so many functions, till at 
 length it has detected them conspiring in the ac- 
 tion of the brain, that scientific men are cautious 
 about predicating the existence of a finer force 
 that comes to use the deposits of the brain-cells, 
 or that is exhaled from them into an independent 
 essence. This modesty is not mistimed, for its 
 singleness of purpose supplies marvellous facts and 
 hints about the human organization which no relig- 
 ion can afford to do without. It is childish to be 
 afraid of their tendency, and weak to declare that 
 they yet decide the question. 
 
 What is Vitality ? I notice, in the first place, 
 that our common contrast of animate and inanimate 
 which means, when we make it, that we believe 
 that the former could not have been developed 
 from the latter is really only a contrast derived 
 from a general optical impression. We think we 
 see that one object is alive and that another is not, 
 and our sight applies the tests which experience 
 has preconceived as being correspondent to life 
 and to death. But it does not follow that the 
 origins of life, which are removed from us by im- 
 mense duration, and thus far, if they are still going 
 on, by inadequate means of observation, must be 
 distinct acts of germs that exist in a plane apart 
 from the inanimate. They may have been, and 
 may still be, evolutions through forces out of inan- 
 imate matter. Inanimate may be only latent ani- 
 mate. 
 
 But I think we ought to discard this old-fash-
 
 160 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 ioned contrast, and substitute the terms organic 
 and inorganic ; for a bit of wood or stone will show, 
 beneath the most powerful microscope, a gathering 
 and shifting of granules, a confused intermingling, 
 that is enough to betray motion at least, and to 
 put us on the track of the suggestion that a prim- 
 itive ocean of germs was set on its creative way by 
 motion. Nothing, then, can be called inanimate 
 that contains the first quality or essential towards 
 vitality. But it may be called inorganic if its struct- 
 ure admits of passing to no other function. An 
 organism is something that announces vital force 
 or function ; that gathers the universal cells, gran- 
 ules, cytods or whatever you may please to call 
 protoplastic stuff into some definite gesture, 
 however faint, and begins to use the inorganic to 
 nourish and sustain its organs. 
 
 Mr. Beale, an eminent advocate for a special 
 and indestructible vitality in man, says : ' If a par- 
 ticle of living matter, not more than yfroVoT f au 
 inch in diameter, were made in the laboratory out 
 of non-living matter, if it lived and moved, and 
 grew and multiplied, I confess my belief in the 
 spiritual nature of my faculties would be severely 
 shaken." 
 
 Why should it be shaken any more than if it 
 should turn out to be true that living matter orig- 
 inated the spiritual nature ? It is certain that liv- 
 ing matter is instrumental in expressing our 
 faculties, whatever their origin may have been. 
 Then of what consequence is it whence the living
 
 RELIGION AND SCIENCE. 1G1 
 
 matter is derived? We are not appalled at the 
 possibility that organic matter may be made out of 
 non-living or, more properly, inorganic mat- 
 ter. We are nerved for such a result, whether it 
 occur in the laboratory or in nature, by the con- 
 viction that the spiritual functions are no more 
 imperilled by using matter originated in any way, 
 than the Creator hazarded his existence by orig- 
 inating matter in some way to be used by himself 
 and by us. His vitality resides in the whole of 
 matter ; so that, even if the inorganic be convertible 
 into the organic, or the organic into the inorganic, 
 he has to no extent fallen dead. Then there can 
 be no danger to our mind that may result from 
 either process, to the mind that may receive its 
 material instrument from either. 
 
 There is nothing really inanimate in all creation ; 
 ior the Infinite Life has gone into representation 
 by each of its epochs, from the primordial germinal 
 matter through all its evolutions : no form or result 
 of it can be dead. There is no such thing as death, 
 but an incessant shifting into and out of all forms. 
 The stone arrests for the present the shifting, but 
 it must have a certain kind of life in itself in order 
 to do that, something that tends to be not long 
 or constantly arrested, that is all the time vaguely 
 tumultuous with its imprisoned particles. If any 
 thing could be really dead, God would, to that 
 thing's extent, cease to be alive. 
 
 I have sometimes indulged the speculation that 
 the molecular activity observable in inorganic sub- 
 
 11
 
 162 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 stances is a degeneration of the germinal activity 
 which is observable in the amoeba and other vital 
 stuff. That is, I suppose that the germinal has 
 preceded the molecular activity ; and that all 
 stones, minerals, and gems were held positively 
 vital in the original nebulosity, in that ocean of 
 creative germs, which was not inorganic, though it 
 was undetermined. What we call dead matter is 
 the excrement of a germinal universe ; but it may 
 still go into fertilizing, and is doing it, perhaps, all 
 the time. It once shared the life of all germs, 
 though it now seems to have become inert and 
 solid merely to build continents for the support of 
 vital forms. The word inert cannot represent an 
 absolute fact of death, but only a relative condition 
 of vitality. 
 
 But what is vitality in a human structure ? It 
 may be only a part of the universal vitality, raised 
 to very high conditions, or it may be a special mode 
 of it ; but in either case I do not see why it does 
 not share the universal advantage of being inde- 
 structible. " Yes," says the scientific man ; " but 
 it also must share the universal tendency of forces 
 to shift into force again when the structure that 
 contains them is destroj-ed. The man's vitality 
 may still exist, but only in some mode of imper- 
 sonal force, as motion shifts into heat. When all 
 the known forces are discovered constantly at this 
 interplay, we cannot assume that another force, yet 
 undiscovered, will be differently endowed." What 
 have we got to say to that ?
 
 RELIGION AND SCIENCE. 163 
 
 The only attempt which I have noticed, of 
 purely scientific pretension, at an answer, is con- 
 tained in a paper on Vitality, read by the Rev. H. 
 H. Higgins, M.A., before the Literary and Philo- 
 sophical Society of Liverpool. He says : " The 
 most delicate tests for indicating minute changes 
 in electrical, thermal, and other conditions, have 
 been applied at the moment of death, and have 
 shown no sign. Now it is certain of the forces of 
 heat, light, motion, &c., that they are absolutely 
 indestructible : they may be converted one into the 
 other, but they cannot cease to exist. If the vital 
 principle was analogous to these agencies, it might 
 escape in any one of them ; but of this no well- 
 ascertained trace has been observed in any investi- 
 gation of the phenomena of death." 
 
 But this statement proves too much. If the 
 tests applied at the moment of death discover no 
 force at all in the act of escaping, it only shows 
 that no force at all is discoverable under the con- 
 ditions of a dying moment. But we know that 
 thermal and electrical conditions exist in the func- 
 tions of a living body : they ought, then, to be 
 intercepted as they pass away. Where, for in- 
 stance, does the thermal condition go, and why 
 should it not be seen in going ? For it certainly 
 existed just before the moment of dying, and for 
 some time after. This, then, is not a decisive test 
 of the undetectable presence of a special vitality. 
 
 This is the question. If there be specific vitality, 
 does it escape from death with the mental contents
 
 164 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 of the person whose body died, to prolong his iden- 
 tity, or is it only another physical force, though a 
 specific one, with character distinct from heat, 
 light, &c., but still a force that joins after death 
 the unconscious equilibrium out of which it first 
 allied itself to a human organization ? 
 
 To call vitality specific, and to claim that it is 
 prior to organization, does not answer the above 
 question. 
 
 All the steps of modern investigation seem to 
 disprove the theory of personal continuance. Func- 
 tions of the body which were long supposed to 
 depend upon a specific vitality are now referred to 
 known chemical forces, and are repeated in the 
 laboratory. The theory is pushed from post to 
 post, till it seems to have only a base of moral 
 probability to fall back upon. 
 
 Far from undervaluing that, finding, on the 
 contrary, in the manifestations of personal charac- 
 ter a hint of immortality that is superior to, at 
 least, the resurrection of any dead body, I still 
 claim that science is not so neutral on this question 
 as it thinks to be. I am quite content to wait for 
 some special investigation of the point, while the 
 co-ordination of all phenomena by mental laws that 
 explain creative acts, and refer us back to a pre- 
 existing mind, shows me, with the emphasis of a 
 universe, that the minds which can interpret and 
 spiritually reconstruct the plan of creation must 
 share the nature of a Creator. It is his nature to 
 have pre-existed distinct from his germinal mate-
 
 EELIQION AND SCIENCE. 165 
 
 rial. It must be the nature of corresponding mind 
 to be distinct from its germinal material, to have 
 been allied to human structures in a state of latent 
 mentality. 
 
 I own I find it difficult to conceive how this 
 latent mind was gradually developed out of the 
 structures that passed through animal into human 
 conditions. It seems at first as if the mental qual- 
 ity must have been homogeneous through all its 
 gradations. In what manner could it have begun 
 to be different in kind from itself as it was in its 
 previous animal expressions ? At first, in trying 
 to meet that question, we appear to be driven to 
 put up with one of two alternatives : either that 
 the animals have shared independent vitality, if we 
 have ; or that we started from germinal soul- 
 monads that were outside of, and previous to, 
 physical structure, but were in some way attracted 
 to all the points of human development. 
 
 But I suggest whether there can be any germinal 
 soul-substance except the mysterious force which 
 we call vitality wherever we see it in the human 
 state. It went into creation allied with all the 
 germs which have subsequently taken form. It 
 carried everywhere a latent sensibility for the crea- 
 tive law out of which it came. It swept along 
 with a dim drift of the Personality that first con- 
 ceived it and then put it on the way to self- 
 expression. It mounted thus by the ascending 
 scale of animals, and its improvements in structure 
 were preparations to reach and repeat Personality,
 
 166 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 to report the original sense of the Creator that he 
 was independent of structure. At length it be- 
 came detached from the walls of the womb of 
 creation, held only for nourishment by the cord of 
 structure, till it could have a birth into individual- 
 ism. Then the interplay of mind and organism 
 began, with an inherited advantage in favor of 
 vitality. Now vitality, thus developed and crys- 
 tallized into personality, tends constantly back 
 towards its origin. The centrifugal movement 
 through all the animals is rectified by the centrip- 
 etal movement in man. The whole series of effects 
 recurs to an effecting cause. 
 
 At any rate, it is quite as difficult to conceive 
 that there were pre-existent soul-germs which 
 could be attracted from without to human em- 
 bryos, to become their vital and characteristic 
 forces, as it is to frame a clear statement of the 
 way in which independent minds became devel- 
 oped out of all the previous animal and semi-hu- 
 man conditions. How or when could a soul-monad 
 become buried in a foetal form? If such an act 
 could take place, it would break up the inherited 
 transmission of characters ; for it is not credible 
 that every door of descent is waylaid and watched 
 by just the style of soul-germs that can straightway 
 be at home and carry on the business at the old 
 stand. It is plain that the whole process of evo- 
 lution of vitality into personal consciousness must 
 take place within the limits of human structure, 
 and that the child is father of the man.
 
 RELIGION AND SCIENCE. 167 
 
 Could the unconscious form of the embryo select 
 its appropriate soul-germ, and detach it from the 
 world-cluster to absorb and incorporate it through 
 the mother ? By what nicety of instinct or affinity, 
 could the moment of fertilization, or a subsequent 
 moment of the foetal throb, pick out of some great 
 ether of vital monads just the proper soul-germ, so 
 that each human family might propagate its traits 
 and accumulate its ancestors ? It is impossible to 
 conceive of any descent or amplification of vitality 
 except in the direct line of fructification, concep- 
 tion, and birth. 
 
 It is not absurd, then, to suppose that each 
 human being started from a finite beginning. He 
 pre-existed only in the impulse of vitality. It 
 is objected that, if he was not an actual essence or 
 monad that pre-existed before his finite structure 
 was brought up to the felicity of receiving it, he 
 could not continue after the physical structure 
 had disappeared. Why not ? Personal continu- 
 ance need not be supposed to depend upon any 
 special moment of eternal creative ness from which 
 the person may have started. It might be early or 
 late : in Judaea, Greece, or California. When a 
 person starts, he need not be imagined to stop 
 until the infinite Personality out of which he 
 started declines to project the vitality that propa- 
 gates persons. If there be such a fact as personal 
 continuance, it must depend only upon the impulse 
 of vitality. 
 
 It does not trouble me that I cannot put my fin-
 
 1G8 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 ger on the period of human development when 
 man began to have independent personality. Who 
 can tell when a child begins to have a conscious- 
 ness of self, and to say /, with a distinct feeling 
 of what his speech involves ? Yet at length he is 
 found to be saying it, and to be converting the 
 identity of consciousness into personal character. 
 Ages of semi-human conditions may have pre- 
 ceded, as years of characterless infancy precede, 
 the assertion of personal identity. The men of 
 those developing ages may have perished like ants 
 that swarm in the pathway of feet. What of that, 
 if a day comes that speaks an imperishable word ? 
 
 That word is, I know Unity, I share Unity, I 
 pass into consciousness of Creative Laws, I touch 
 the Mind from whom my mental method started, 
 and I thus become that circle's infrangibility. My 
 law of perceiving is so complete an expression of 
 the law of creating, that I perceive, as the Creator 
 once perceived, that matter alone could not start 
 with it nor end in it. I know the laws which 
 matter did not make. Then matter does not make 
 iny knowledge. 
 
 Science grants me this inestimable benefit of pro- 
 viding a universe to support my personal identity, my 
 moral sense, and my feeling that these two functions 
 of mind cannot be killed. Its denials, no less than 
 its affirmations, set free all the facts I need to make 
 my body an expression of mental independence. 
 Hand in hand with Science I go, by the steps of 
 development, back to the dawn of creation ; and,
 
 RELIGION AND SCIENCE. 169 
 
 when there, we review all the forces and their 
 combinations which have helped us to arrive, and 
 both of us together break into a confession of a 
 Force of forces. 
 
 Science has performed a mighty work against the- 
 ology, in freeing us from its superstitions. We have 
 picked ourselves up from Adam's fall, and are busy 
 shaking that dust from our garments ; geological 
 cemeteries, full of dead creatures, speak to exon- 
 erate us from the unhandsome trick of having 
 brought death and sin into the world ; we shake 
 the tree of knowledge, and woman helps us to 
 shake it and devour the invigorating fruit ; there's 
 nothing edible which we do not perceive to be a 
 divine invitation to eat, with a conviction that the 
 great Landlord is not plotting murder to pillage 
 our persons. We feel perfectly safe in every part 
 of the house, and are learning how to promote the 
 interests of the Builder, by clearing out corners 
 that grow infectious, and correcting our own care- 
 lessness ; so that there is not a slur left to cast 
 upon God. Death is discovered to be a process 
 of correlation and recombination of force ; and we 
 detect Heaven's wonderful footprint, that can never 
 be mistaken, in the paths of evil. Only let us 
 know enough, re-enforce every gift with the bene- 
 ficial facts, irrigate the whole surface of the mind 
 with law, that our structures may more happily 
 repeat the health that mantles on the face of a 
 universe. 
 
 Scientific men find themselves in opposition to
 
 170 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 almost every form of theology, because the world 
 is : they have no personal motive, and indulge in 
 pique no more than the great system whose move- 
 ments and causes they express. But theology has 
 so systematically libelled the Creator and misled 
 the creature ; so deliberately substituted trains of 
 arbitrary thinking for the law of Evolution ; so 
 depraved God by pretending the depravity of man, 
 to make a jailer of one and a felon of the other ; so 
 placarded the spotless plan with whimsical schemes 
 of redemption ; and so represented the universal 
 love, as if it were confectionery to stop the whim- 
 per of returning sinners, that Science might well 
 transfix it with the contempt of a gaze that is level 
 with the horizon, and as brimful hot with the noon- 
 day sun. 
 
 When the great observers are accused of disre- 
 spect towards religion, it would be well to remem- 
 ber how long, and to a period how late, men have 
 understood religion to be something that is brought 
 down by modified systems of theology, and to be 
 dependent upon an act of faith in them. Science 
 takes men at their word ; they point to a number 
 of articles that embody mental propositions ; they 
 extol emotional and mystic states, and exclaim, 
 Behold, here is something better than good behav- 
 ior, better than health, superior to scientific inter- 
 pretation, behold Religion! Science, armed with 
 all its glasses, curiously investigates this portent 
 that assumes to be divinely accredited, and cannot 
 discover a single germinal dot, not a bit of plasma,
 
 RELIGION AND SCIENCE. 171 
 
 that might make . one honest animalcule of a spir- 
 itual man. 
 
 In the mean time, real religion is busy with moral 
 sense, right mental method, true social feeling, 
 ecstatic vision of the divine order, to appropriate 
 every genuine fact and put it to service in its 
 scheme of humanity. However violently science 
 may pretend to be hostile to religion, there is noth- 
 ing in the world so religious as its method and 
 tndustiy. For religion, instead of being, according 
 to the old definitions, a restoration of rebellious 
 human nature to divine favor, attained by theolog- 
 ical beliefs and emotional practices, by prayer and 
 praise, by pietistic exaltations and homiletic ab- 
 sorption, is simply the recurrence of human nature 
 to the facts of the universe. 
 
 At first, this definition seems to be a dry, prag- 
 matic one, fit only to express that old function of 
 theology which was imperfectly exercised by it in 
 metaphysical notions about the divine plan and 
 nature. Theology always presumed that its state- 
 ments represented facts. But religion, recovering 
 of late from mediatorial emotions, enlists intelli- 
 gence, arms itself with a mental method that is the 
 counterpart of the divine plan, and casts loose for 
 ever from the speculations of theology. Then it 
 assumes the function of indicating realities ; and 
 every fact it gathers is a proclamation of God's law, 
 or will, or wisdom, and an invitation to man to be 
 on healthy terms with these attributes. In recur- 
 ring to the facts of a universe, man recurs most
 
 172 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 sensibly to God. But this gesture can be made 
 only with the help of intelligence. Facts must be 
 taught and known, not metaphysical contrivances 
 or scriptural formulas. The brain must learn to 
 act upon its own facts, in order to present the 
 world with a body in normal condition to perform 
 a normal work. The relation between the finite 
 and infinite must be found upon lines of forces and 
 stepping-stones of laws, not upon phrases and cer- 
 emonies. These weave no features of the infinite 
 into our life. As well might a woman expect by 
 knitting to embroider the zodiacal light upon her 
 stocking. If she croons a favorite hymn of Watts 
 or Toplady over her work, the sky is still too cun- 
 ning to descend, being content to overlook her 
 patient labor and to light the daily steps of the 
 little feet she covers. Her automatic action is su- 
 perior, for religion, to all her darling sentiment. 
 
 I close by noticing that science benefits religion 
 with hints at a more practical treatment for the 
 objects of moral and spiritual culture. The tech- 
 nical results of scientific observation now begin to 
 enrich every department of life, as they flow into 
 the kitchen and workshop, and down all the streets ; 
 so that a man may draw at his door health and men- 
 tal nourishment, and find an alarm-box in every 
 ward that will report whatever threatens sanity and 
 comfort. All the kingdoms of nature contribute 
 their economical facts, which slowly find their way 
 into social science, into the methods of domestic 
 life, into education and amusement. Man was
 
 RELIGION AND SCIENCE. 173 
 
 never so sumptuously served before with things 
 to depend upon. He learns what to eat, drink, and 
 wear, how to ventilate his dwellings and to build 
 his fire. The most inventive minds teach him 
 labor-saving processes, which aspire even to regu- 
 late and economize religion. This prompt and 
 convenient way of life begets a desire for facts: 
 we want nothing encumbering the house that we 
 cannot use ; theories go into the waste-basket, with 
 a good many superfine emotions that were once 
 thought to be essential to a spiritual life. Some- 
 times, by picking over the basket, we discover that 
 gifts very dear to the household, legacies of eter- 
 nity, have been hastily thrown there, in the greed 
 for clearing out all the corners and ambushes for 
 rubbish, to have nothing around that is not port- 
 able and ready for immediate use. 
 
 This tendency to bring the art of living down to 
 its practical minimum has gone so far that some 
 sources of spiritual culture have fallen into dis- 
 credit. The newspaper, the lecture-room, the 
 scientific cabinet, the technological school, the spe- 
 cial platform, is commended : men crave exactness 
 and the current intelligence. They long to live 
 creditably in the present, because they have dis- 
 covered it is the master of the future. And Amer- 
 ican pulpits have certainly earned the distrust, if 
 not contempt, of the more robust portion of the 
 people, by approaching all the critical moments of 
 the private or public life with their pill, their plas- 
 ter, or buchu, as they sound the trumpet of the
 
 174 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 quack before them in the market-place, to call their 
 livelihood together. 
 
 There is something which may be called the 
 vestry-sentiment, that acts like choke-damp upon 
 all natural ideas ; it will breathe an artificial com- 
 pound, or prefer to be asphyxiated. A badly ven- 
 tilated Scripture is responsible for these moods, 
 which cower over their little pile of smouldering 
 texts, and shudder and protest at leaving all the 
 doors ajar. It is nourished upon phrases in books 
 of mediatorial piety, and drops theatre-tears over 
 its futile feeling of dependence, its consciousness 
 of sin, or faded appreciation of good behavior. Its 
 disciples are the victims of fatty degeneration 
 when it is their boast that they are nothing but 
 heart. To some of the churches of this want of 
 faith, intelligence has penetrated far enough to 
 excite suspicions that the old phraseology has been 
 outgrown ; they are almost ready to espouse the 
 new Bibles of human information and enthusiasm, 
 not quite ready to cast off the damaged phraseology 
 of the clerical believers in miracles and grace : so 
 that they remind one of the garret of the eminent 
 but rather penurious lawyer, which was found, 
 after his decease, filled with suits of clothes, each 
 labelled, " Too old to wear, but too good to give 
 away." 
 
 Verbal statements of imaginary relations between 
 man and God, set off with appeals to a kind of 
 average religiosity, compose the sanitary method 
 of such churches. It lets more blood than it makes :
 
 RELIGION AND SCIENCE. 175 
 
 precious life-drops of the common people, squan- 
 dered in artificial excitements, in political com- 
 promises, and in the awful campaigns that restore 
 natural religion to mankind. 
 
 A better method will set in whenever the pulpit 
 prefers confirmed realities, and looks for them in 
 every province that the wit of man visits, when 
 the only question it asks relative to any subject is, 
 What are the facts ? Let us know the conclusion 
 of the best minds and the most devoted hearts, let 
 us preach the salvation that intelligence reveals. 
 Open wide the door of the meeting-house, so that 
 the six days can wheel up to it, and deposit what 
 the earth and sky manufacture, all the certainties 
 of all the arts, and every emotion that bears the 
 stamp of sincerity. 
 
 Nothing can come amiss, if it comes from a quar- 
 ter where honest handwork or head-work has been 
 engaged. ' The whole universe is let down to the 
 level of the preacher's desk, creeping things as 
 well as winged. The voice says : " Slay and eat 
 them, for there is nothing common or unclean that 
 God has made." Nature has sometimes furnished 
 the pulpit with illustrations : she is ready now to 
 provide the texts and substance also, and to occupy 
 the whole discourse. 
 
 But the treatment must be ideal. All the facts, 
 after passing through the technical treatment of 
 the platform, the lecture-room, and scientific ses- 
 sion, to receive their diplomas of utility, must 
 come into the pulpit bringing mankind with them,
 
 176 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 as into a place where separate localities can be seen 
 to melt into one broad horizon, stretching so far 
 that eternity is overtaken and included, and the 
 souls of the spectators are greatly ennobled to 
 perceive that all their little functions build the 
 endless view. 
 
 What is ideal treatment ? A kind that is nei- 
 ther metaphysical nor traditional. It is not the 
 investiture of subjects with a poetical form, nor 
 the speculative infirmity that broods upon an 
 empty nest. There must be a real egg beneath, 
 for warmth and devoted patience to quicken. The 
 ideal treatment is that deference to the natural law 
 which puts the breath of life into every thing and 
 person ; for laws are congenial to the imagination, 
 having indeed been often suckled in her open air, 
 and thence adopted by the family of man. They 
 can never quarrel with her genuine emotions. It 
 would be strange, indeed, if one function of our 
 intelligence should contradict or disable another. 
 In fact, the test of the sacredness of any feeling 
 will be that Law can comfortably dwell with it ; 
 and the test of the genuineness of Law will be 
 that it discriminates the truly sacred feelings from 
 moods which counterfeit, and proffers to the former 
 the alliance of a universe. Religion's work is so 
 sweet and awe-inspiring that it resents the waste 
 of time in manipulating the sentimental preference 
 of people who want their whims to be protected 
 against laws. It perceives that the sacramental 
 attitude is less adorable than its own worship of
 
 RELIGION AND SCIENCE. 177 
 
 Truth and Beauty, whose elements it distributes 
 to all communicants, pronouncing them to be the 
 body and the blood of every soul. 
 
 Science and religion may together undertake the 
 task of showing that the earth, the air, the water, 
 swarm with vital germs ; that no substance is too 
 solid to resist their penetration, none too thin to 
 support them ; that man himself is a compendium 
 of them, and in his soul they find a tongue to ex- 
 press how religious they are, how implicated with 
 the life and love of the Creator. Ideal treatment 
 sets forth the ideas that correspond to every fact 
 and circumstance. It is bent upon proving that 
 they arise in the soul, and are not transitory views, 
 or impressions depending upon the position of the 
 spectator, or digested from his food ; that they 
 have a continuity in the laws of nature and in 
 the persons of men and women, and are thus con- 
 nected with the moral order, are self-sustaining, 
 and derive no authority from any source save 
 Nature herself ; and that the only religious certi- 
 tude we can enjoy is provided by the harmony 
 between things, necessities, organizations, and the 
 laws of things. 
 
 12
 
 178 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 CHRISTIANITY AND ITS DEFINITIONS. 
 BY WILLIAM J. POTTEK. 
 
 TT is a most significant gauge of the distance 
 * which Christendom has travelled away from 
 the primitive conditions of the Christian faith, that 
 the question is now everywhere earnestly discussed 
 within the limits of Christendom itself, what Chris- 
 tianity is. In the early days, unbelievers from the 
 outside are reported to have pressed around the 
 apostles to ask what the new doctrine was whereof 
 they spoke. But we can hardly imagine that 
 there was any inquiry of this kind among those 
 who had caught the holy contagion of the new 
 religion, and with whom it was an enthusiasm of 
 the heart rather than a conviction of the under- 
 standing. There was a warm dispute, indeed, 
 between Paul and some of the leading apostles of 
 the original twelve ; a dispute which, we can now 
 see, indirectly involved very vital issues bearing 
 on the development of Christianity. And we may 
 easily find, too, in the New Testament, the germs, 
 perhaps, of all the different interpretations of 
 Christianity that have been made ; for it is ap- 
 parent that the new faith presented, even in the 
 earliest days, somewhat different aspects to dif- 
 ferent classes of believers, according to the angle
 
 CHRISTIANITY AND ITS DEFINITIONS. 179 
 
 of mental or moral condition from which it was 
 met and accepted.| Still, those primitive believers 
 all gathered at the same rallying-cry, and saw at 
 the centre of Christianity essentially the same 
 thing ; and in the dispute between Paul and the 
 other apostles the only question actually raised 
 was with reference to the amount of ceremony to 
 be required of Gentile converts : there seems to 
 have been no division as to the substance of Chris- 
 tianity. 
 
 But now the question debated is, What is Chris- 
 tianity itself? What is that which has given it its 
 peculiar character and power? What the vital 
 elements that define it as a specific religion? And 
 to this question, What is Christianity ? nearly as 
 many answers will be given as there are Christian 
 sects ; for each of the sects has originated in some- 
 thing which its members have regarded as essential 
 to Christianity, and which they have not found in 
 the other sects. Leaving aside, however, minor 
 differences of belief, and all differences in regard to 
 ecclesiastical administration merely, we may group 
 the various definitions of Christianity in some 
 three or four divisions around a few prominent, 
 distinguishing points ; though the separate groups 
 will shade into each other by imperceptible grada- 
 tions of denominational and individual belief. 
 
 First, we have what may be called the Orthodox- 
 evangelical definition, the definition which has 
 prevailed most largely in Christendom, and which 
 is still maintained by the vast majority of the
 
 180 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 adherents of the Christian church. This definition 
 is that Christianity is a system of religion which 
 rests on the recognition of .Jesus of Nazareth as 
 the supernaturally commissioned and therefore 
 authoritative and infallible revealer of spiritual 
 truth, as the Messiah of the world and the Saviour 
 of mankind. There is room for wide latitude of 
 difference in respect both to dogma and ecclesias- 
 tical forms among those who set out with this 
 definition. One may accept the trinity or reject 
 it ; may believe in vicarious atonement and salva- 
 tion through Jesus' death on the cross, or only in 
 simple mediatorship through his character and life ; 
 may be a Catholic or a Protestant, receiving the 
 Bible only or the Bible and tradition, as the depos- 
 itory of spiritual truth, and yet make this defi- 
 nition of Christianit}-. The essential point of the 
 definition is covered by what is well enough under- 
 stood under the common theological phrase, " the 
 confession of Christ." 
 
 And this definition is based on what was really 
 the beginning of Christianity as an historical relig- 
 ion, the confession of Jesus of Nazareth as the 
 Christ; that is, as the expected Messiah of Jewish 
 vision and prophecy. The New Testament makes 
 tins sufficiently plain. The demand made on the 
 first disciples, the covenant of the primitive Chris- 
 tian church, was this, and only this: " Believe on 
 the Lord Jesus Christ, and be saved ; believe in 
 him as the Messiah, though crucified ; for he is 
 risen from the grave, and will yet appear as the
 
 CHRISTIANITY AND ITS DEFINITIONS. 181 
 
 redeemer of Ins people." That belief saying 
 nothing now of what was meant by the Messiah- 
 ship, nor of the early transformation of the idea ; 
 nothing of the strength or Aveakness of the alleged 
 evidences for the resurrection ; nothing of the 
 dogma of sacrificial atonement which was con- 
 nected very early with the fact of crucifixion and 
 made the ground of salvation that simple con- 
 fession of Jesus as the Messiah was what, and all 
 that, defined a Christian when Christianity first 
 began its development as an organized religion. 
 This was the burden of the apostolic preaching ; 
 and this too, if we may trust the record of the 
 Gospels, was considered by Jesus himself as a good 
 definition of a disciple. Certainly, if he said what 
 the record puts into his mouth, " Whosoever shall 
 confess me before men, him will I confess also 
 before my Father who is in heaven ; but whoso- 
 ever shall deny me before men, him will I also 
 deny before my Father who is in heaven," if he 
 said that, then-he drew the lines of his communion 
 pretty strictly between those who accepted him 
 as Messiah and those who did not. The record, 
 however, on this point is to be taken with some 
 precaution. But whether Jesus uttered this and 
 other kindred sayings in just the form reported, or 
 whether the reporter and biographer warped what 
 he did say into a narrower and more polemic pur- 
 pose than he ever intended, it is certain that he 
 did lay claim to the Messiahship in some sense, 
 and that it was on the recognition of this claim
 
 182 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 and of the spiritual authority with which the Mes- 
 sianic office was believed to invest him, that the 
 discipleship which he attracted eventually devel- 
 oped into the Christian church. Those, therefore, 
 who define Christianity as the confession of Jesus 
 as the Messiah, and as consequently an authorita- 
 tive Lord and Saviour for mankind, have a strong 
 ground of argument in the earliest records and 
 usage of Christendom. The word " Christianity " 
 itself is standing evidence in favor of their defini- 
 tion. And there can be no reasonable doubt that 
 Christianity historically, as an organized religion, 
 did begin with this confession as defining itself. 
 
 But in the course of eighteen centuries it has 
 come to pass that this confession, though continued 
 accurately in terms, means practically something 
 very different from what it did to those primitive 
 followers of Jesus. The confession of Christ has 
 drifted away from its primitive moral and spiritual 
 significance, to be little more than an act of the 
 understanding, or even an act of mere ecclesiastical 
 or social conformity. The moral life has gone out 
 of it, and left it little more than an empty shell. 
 What a vast difference between the actual signifi- 
 cance of the confession of Christ to the great 
 majority of Christendom in modern times, the 
 majority even of those who take an active interest 
 in religious institutions and are church-members, 
 and what it meant to Peter and Matthew and Paul 
 and Stephen ! To those primitive disciples, and 
 for several centuries, to confess Christ to-day
 
 CHRISTIANITY AND ITS DEFINITIONS. 183 
 
 meant to go to prison or to the cross to-morrow. 
 To declare one's self a Christian was to declare 
 one's self an outcast from reputable society ; it 
 was to take up the most unpopular cause of the 
 time ; it was to be ready for any contumely, for 
 any suffering, for any death. To confess Christ 
 then meant mockings and scourgings and bonds ; 
 it meant perils by land and sea ; it meant cold and 
 hunger and loneliness ; it meant living in caves of 
 the earth and in tombs with the dead ; it meant 
 being stoned to death by furious mobs, and being 
 thrown for the sport of a jeering populace to con- 
 tend for life with wild beasts ; it meant all that 
 man can do and bear, for the sake of a conviction 
 of truth, against the united opposition of the 
 established government and religion and society, 
 and against the crudest forms of persecution which 
 the depraved ingenuity of man can devise. All 
 this did it mean practically in those early days to 
 confess Christ, and to call one's self a Christian. 
 And more or less of this was meant by the Chris- 
 tian confession, until Christianity conquered the 
 Roman Empire, or unfortunately was adopted by 
 it, and became itself the established religion. 
 This confession, therefore, in the origin of Chris- 
 tianity was not merely a test of intellectual belief ; 
 it was hardly that at all ; it was a criterion of 
 character. It was something that tested the in- 
 herent manliness in man. It was a touchstone of 
 moral rather than of mental soundness. It was an 
 appeal to what was deepest in the faith of the
 
 184 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 human heart, and summoned all the forces of 
 human bravery and moral pertinacity and fidelity 
 into the arena of public conflict, to fight for spirit- 
 ual liberty and for truth oppressed and scourged. 
 
 But what does it mean practically to confess 
 Jesus to be the Christ now ? Is there any test of 
 character in the act ? That is, does the bare con- 
 fession of belief in Christ compel character to any 
 such test as it did then ? Does it necessarily bring 
 any popular reproach ? Does it cost the "sacrifice 
 of one's good name ? One can but smile, indeed, 
 at the contrast between the Christian of to-day and 
 the Christian of that early time. In all the lead- 
 ing nations of the world, the Christian to-day is in 
 the majority ; he is on the popular side ; the sword 
 is in his hands ; wealth and worldly opportunity 
 are with him ; respectability and fashion give him 
 their indorsement. It is not the man who con- 
 fesses himself a Christian, but the man who con- 
 fesses that he is an infidel to Christian belief, who 
 to-day is likely to lose position and honor and to 
 fall under the social ban, and has to bear the cross 
 of popular odium for his confession. Even the 
 mobs are Christian to-day, and in their frenzied 
 profanity swear by the name of the holy Nazarene ; 
 which no man in a mob of Paul's time could have 
 done without challenging the violence of his fellow- 
 mobocrats as being himself traitorously a Christian. 
 Of course it is not asserted that all these people 
 who are counted as Christians the mobs, the 
 foolish players with fashion, the worldly and the
 
 CHBISTIANITY AND ITS DEFINITIONS. 185 
 
 powerful are regarded as really Christian in their 
 hearts and lives: that touches a sense of the word 
 which we have not yet considered. But so far as 
 to confess Jesus of Nazareth to be the Christ, and 
 to accept him as an infallible religious authority, 
 makes and defines a Christian, which was the orig- 
 inal definition, they are so ; for they give an intel- 
 lectual or a traditional assent to that confession, 
 and are accordingly counted in the world's census 
 as Christians. 
 
 Let me not be misunderstood. The point now 
 made is simply this, that, owing to the changed 
 outward conditions of Christianity, to acknowledge 
 Jesus as an authoritative messenger from God does 
 not in modern times, as it did in the early centuries, 
 necessarily require moral heroism. The confession 
 has become a part of the common stock of hered- 
 itary opinion in Christendom. And even to the 
 majority of those who take pains to assume the 
 name Christian, and who connect themselves with 
 religious institutions, and become the active parti- 
 sans of Christianity, the confession costs little more 
 than a walk or drive to a comfortable, perhaps 
 luxuriously appointed church, on Sunday, and an 
 annual ecclesiastical tax. And even this much 
 of cost is often expected to be paid back in im- 
 proved social and business position, the sacrifice 
 being very shrewdly invested where it will realize 
 most rapidly in these expectations of social or busi- 
 ness success. It is an open fact that men going 
 to new places to set up in business young law-
 
 186 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 yers, physicians, merchants, teachers often seek 
 an eligible church relationship in order to secure a 
 good business constituency, just as shop-keepers 
 seek a good stand for their trade. A young law- 
 yer goes to New York to begin his professional 
 career. Ambitious, determined to win position, 
 not very scrupulous concerning the means, after 
 he has hung out his sign in Wall Street, he hires a 
 seat in one of the fashionable up-town churches, 
 and takes a class in its Sunday school. He does it, 
 as he does not hesitate to say, not because he has 
 any faith in the religion there taught, or in any 
 religion ; but to advertise himself, and get the 
 entree of New- York society. And so long as he 
 has need of the advertisement he keeps his inter- 
 est in the church and the Sunday school ; though 
 his life through the week may give the He to 
 all that he says and does in church on Sunday. 
 And this is no imaginary case. Who does not 
 know that much of the church-going in modern 
 days, and much of the support that is given to 
 religious institutions, is of this character? It is 
 largely an act of religious conformity for the sake 
 of social or business success, without the slightest 
 basis in religious sentiment or principle. It must 
 have been one of this class of modern confessors 
 of Christ whose principles seem to follow their 
 interests, who, having been driven out of his Uni- 
 tarian pew into an Episcopal church by the disagree- 
 able politics of his old minister, and being rallied 
 one Sunday morning by one of his Unitarian neigh-
 
 CHRISTIANITY AND ITS DEFINITIONS. 187 
 
 bors on the Service Book under his arm, replied 
 with dignified piety, " This is my Lethargy" 
 What an exquisite satire all the more for being 
 an unconscious Mrs. Partingtonism on the ob- 
 jects and methods of very much that calls itself 
 Christian worship in modern times ? An eesthetic 
 device for lulling reason and conscience to sleep ! 
 I suppose if may be quite safely asserted that half 
 of the stock-manipulators and gold-gamblers in 
 New York are regular attendants of churches, and 
 would make a perfectly orthodox confession of 
 faith. Some of them are noted for their zealous 
 piety, for their efficiency in prayer-meetings, and 
 for their generosity, too, in handing over to Jesus 
 what they have cheated out of their own confed- 
 erates in financial wickedness. What wonder, see- 
 ing that such men can be accounted Christians, 
 that speculation and the gambling spirit have got 
 into the church itself, and that many ecclesiastical 
 corporations are conducted upon the same principles 
 upon which the great stock companies are man- 
 aged ! The same skill that successfully " waters " 
 railroad stocks is invited and welcomed to try its 
 hand at " watering " the gospel. 
 
 We hear much said in recent days about the 
 irreligious tendencies of people as manifested in 
 the -multitudes who do not go to any church ; and 
 the prospect is in some respects bad. Yet, to my 
 mind, there is a thousand-fold more ground for 
 solicitude concerning the moral and spiritual wel- 
 fare of society, in the fact that there are so many
 
 188 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 habitual church-goers who are no more religious in 
 their characters and lives than if they had no con- 
 tact whatever with religious institutions, and to 
 whom religious habits have only become a con- 
 venient cloak, not only to cover the want of real 
 moral and spiritual earnestness, but to conceal 
 decently from the public eye positive moral de- 
 formity and rottenness. To such an extent does 
 the insincerity prevail, that it is a wonder the 
 maskers, as they meet in their Sunday pilgrimages 
 to their respective churches, do not peep out from 
 under their masks to laugh at each other's attempt 
 at pious deceit. The deceit, however, has a sort 
 of conventional success. At least the mask an- 
 swers its purpose of advertising where the wearer 
 is, and in what social circle he may be found. As 
 to character, it cannot be said to vouch for, nor 
 perhaps to impeach that. For, to the shame of 
 Christendom, it must be confessed that no saga- 
 cious man trusts another any sooner for being an 
 attendant or member of a church, or for calling 
 himself a Christian. If one wants testimonials of 
 character that are of mercantile value, he knows 
 he must have something more than a certificate of 
 church-membership. So little does a mere con- 
 fession of belief in Christ remain in any way as a 
 test of character ! 
 
 And so patent has this fact become, that many 
 people in Christendom some of them attached 
 to the church, but more, probably, outside of the 
 church have refused to define Christianity any
 
 CHRISTIANITY AND ITS DEFINITIONS. 189 
 
 longer by this old phrase, " the confession of 
 Christ." Even those Orthodox sects that assert 
 intellectual belief in Christ to be essential Avill say 
 that there must be something more than a mere 
 lip-confession : the confession, they add, must be 
 experimental and of the heart. The most en- 
 lightened teachers of Orthodoxy, while they assert 
 that the moral life of society can have no security 
 without a belief in Christianity, will reject the idea 
 that there can be any real Christianity in those 
 people who do not connect their confession of 
 belief in it with purity of morals. And full jus- 
 tice must be done to this distinction. It is an 
 attempt to restore to the act of confessing Christ 
 something of its old moral significance ; and there 
 are, as all must most gladly acknowledge, very 
 many noble men and women who sincerely believe 
 that the confession of Christ requires of them to- 
 day something of the same practical, self-denying 
 life of simplicity and charity which was assumed by 
 Jesus himself, and something of the same struggle 
 against the power of fashion and popular applause 
 which was forced upon the primitive disciples. 
 But that it is exceedingly difficult, if not impossi- 
 ble, to maintain this distinction in an entire Chris- 
 tian community, the confessedly worldly condition 
 of the Christian church itself bears conclusive evi- 
 dence. The idea of confessing Christ by some 
 technical mental experience has become ingrained 
 in the very organization of Orthodoxy. Ministers 
 of Calviiiistic belief have admitted that the most
 
 190 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 discouraging fact in their professional experience 
 has been, that the people under their charge have 
 been accustomed to make so little connection be- 
 tween a confession of Christian faith and the prac- 
 tice of Christian morality ; that it had so frequently 
 happened that those who were foremost in their 
 professions of religion, and zealous talkers for 
 Christ in conference-meetings, and who were re- 
 puted to be Christian men and women, were not 
 only not distinguished above others in respect to 
 moral practice, but were positively wanting in 
 the common virtues of truthfulness, integrity, and 
 charity : so that it could hardly be claimed that 
 church-members were, as a rule, better men and 
 women than those attendants of churches who had 
 never made any confession of Christian belief. 
 
 But many other people have gone still further 
 in the attempt to rectify the old definition of 
 Christianity. Seeing what delusion and hypocrisy 
 are possible so long as a confession of belief 
 in Christ is made the essential thing in Chris- 
 tianity, they deny that such confession is in any 
 form the essential thing. They look into the New 
 Testament, and they say, that, though Jesus 
 claimed to be the Messiah, and seems also to have 
 taught the importance of being accepted as such, 
 yet this was not the main thing in his teaching or 
 his work. What he did teach as essential to vital 
 religion, they claim, was love to God and love to 
 man ; the fatherhood of God, the brotherhood of 
 man. It is said, for instance, that the essence of
 
 CHRISTIANITY AND ITS DEFINITIONS. 191 
 
 Christianity is contained in the sentence, " Bear 
 ye one another's burdens ; " and that that man is 
 a Christian, no matter what he believes or does 
 not believe, whose life and ethics grow out of this 
 central root of Christianity. Others say, meaning 
 substantially the same thing, that Christianity is 
 synonymous with goodness ; that the man who is 
 just, generous, loving, reverent, humane, whatever 
 his belief, is the Christian man. What are the 
 dispositions and affections of the heart, what the 
 grand aim of the character, what fruit is borne in 
 the life, these, they allege, are the test questions 
 in the gospels. And hence another definition of 
 Christianity has arisen, which may be called the 
 Liberal-evangelical definition ; not, however, that 
 it is coincident entirely with the so-called liberal 
 Christian sects, and not found in any others. It 
 may be found to some extent in all the sects. 
 There are ministers in Evangelical sects who 
 preach it more than some of the prominent clergy- 
 men of the Unitarian and Universalist denomina- 
 tions. According to this definition, Christianity is 
 the substance of what Jesus himself taught, 
 that is, God's love to man and man's love to -God 
 and to his fellow-men, and does not consist in 
 any doctrine about Jesus ; and the Christian is 
 one who lives habitually in the same attitude to- 
 wards God and man as did Jesus. The definition 
 is to be called evangelical as well as liberal, since it 
 professes to find its authority in the Gospels. 
 
 Now abundant argument can be found for this
 
 192 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 definition of Christianity in the New Testament, 
 and especially in the reputed words of Jesus him- 
 self. For even if he said, " Whosoever shall con- 
 fess me before men, him will I confess also before 
 my Father who is in heaven ; but whosoever shall 
 deny me before men, him will I also deny before 
 my Father who is in heaven," he may have been 
 thinking of such people as Nicodemus, who had 
 not the moral courage to come to him by daylight, 
 and. so did not really belong to his communion : 
 for he said, too, " Not every one that saith unto 
 me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of 
 heaven, but he that doeth the will of my Father," 
 where he clearly puts the doing of the divine will 
 before any personal homage to himself. If we are 
 to take the Sermon on the Mount, and the larger 
 and more important of the parables, as embodying 
 the substance of Jesus' teachings, it does seem as 
 if we might very accurately sum them up in the 
 formula, " Love of God and man." The Sermon 
 on the Mount, though probably never uttered by 
 Jesus as it stands, yet, in its relation to the biogra- 
 phy of him in the first Gospel, appears in the char- 
 acter of an inaugural discourse, setting forth the 
 main principles of his public teaching. And they 
 are certainly such as would not be regarded as a 
 sufficient qualification for admitting him to mem- 
 bership in any of the so-called evangelical churches 
 which make him their head. In the parable of 
 the Good Samaritan, under the characters of the 
 priest and the levite, he clearly rebukes the ortho-
 
 CHRISTIANITY AND ITS DEFINITIONS. 193 
 
 dox and ceremonial religion of the time, and selects 
 the heretical, despised, and outcast Samaritan as 
 the example of the kind of piety in which he 
 believed. 
 
 But a stronger argument for that definition of 
 Christianity which we are now considering than 
 any reputed discourses or words of Jesus, is his 
 general attitude towards his nation and its beliefs 
 and institutions; and concerning his general at- 
 titude there can be no doubt. However frag- 
 mentary and uncertain may be the biographical 
 accounts of his career, we instinctively feel that 
 Jesus was the great Radical of his age. He 
 was the moral and religious reformer ; the dan- 
 gerous innovator ; the pestilent agitator ; the be- 
 liever in an ideal ; the champion of humanity 
 against the tyranny of institutions ; the ecclesias- 
 tical and social revolutionist ; the determined, 
 merciless foe of cant and hypocrisy and a mere 
 traditional piety ; the Hebrew Protestant, who 
 fought, almost single-handed, against the whole 
 organized power of the Mosaic religion, though it 
 was' backed by the Roman Empire, and who, so 
 fighting, was hunted down at last by a conspiracy 
 between the synagogue and the state, and died a 
 martyr to his faith and his fidelity. The heroic 
 heart of the world does not easily give over such 
 a character to a few sonorous phrases bandied be- 
 tween pulpit and pew, in the exclusive service of 
 the very kind of conservative and traditional piety 
 against which it was once a living protest. The 
 
 13
 
 194 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 character of Jesus, and the movement in which 
 Christianity began, are instinctively felt to be in 
 the interest of human progress and freedom, in 
 the interests of the rights of man as against the 
 power of superstition and the authority of eccle- 
 siasticism ; and hence the} 7 have always furnished 
 argument and stimulus to social and religious 
 reformers, to the Savonarolas and Luthers and 
 Garrisons and Theodore Parkers, to the outcast, 
 persecuted, and martyred minorities, in all the 
 centuries since the Christian era. Against Chris- 
 tianity as it is, both in the church and in society, 
 some of the mightiest weapons that have been 
 hurled have been easily found in its own original 
 armory. 
 
 This definition, therefore, that identifies Chris- 
 tianity with the main substance of Jesus' teach- 
 ings, with the general drift and emphasis of his 
 work, is doubtless correct so far as it attempts 
 to define the essential principles which lay under- 
 neath his specific teaching and mission. And it 
 establishes a very broad basis of fellowship, 
 broader than has ever been realized in any Chris- 
 tian church or sect. By it those may really be 
 Christians who are not called so, and who do not 
 even call themselves so, or who have never even 
 heard of Jesus. By this definition, as has been 
 well said, " There are men called infidels who 
 really are Christians, as also there are men calling 
 themselves Christians who really are infidels." 
 Those Jews in Baltimore who, though no circular
 
 CHRISTIANITY AND ITS DEFINITIONS. 195 
 
 was sent to them when the Northern appeal for 
 educating the freedmen was forwarded to the 
 churches of that city, were yet among the first to 
 respond to it, were by this definition more Chris- 
 tian than the Christian churches that let the ap- 
 peal go unread and unanswered. 
 
 But, though this definition of Christianity which 
 keeps in sight only the spiritual and ethical sub- 
 stance of Jesus' teachings, is a very natural one, and 
 will do, and has already done, excellent service as a 
 reaction against the moral inadequacy of the more 
 Orthodox definition previously spoken of, yet it 
 may be questioned whether historically it is strictly 
 true, and whether it really meets and explains all 
 the facts in the case. It is not meant to explain 
 and cover all the events and facts in Christian 
 history. It throws many of them aside as corrup- 
 tions. But the deeper question comes, does it 
 adequately explain the origin of Christianity? 
 does it account for the phenomena attending that 
 wonderful renewal of religious life and thought 
 which made the Christian epoch? "Would the 
 simple preaching of the doctrine of the Love of 
 God and Man, even by the greatest of Jewish 
 prophets, have brought at that time a new religion ? 
 The doctrine in itself is not new, not distinctively 
 Christian : it belongs to Judaism ; and Jesus him- 
 self, in his most explicit statement of it, simply 
 quoted from the law of Moses, " Thou shalt love 
 the Lord thy God with all thy heart and soul and 
 strength, and thy neighbor as thyself." This was
 
 196 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 the essence of the Hebrew religion. It may be 
 said to be the essence, the seed-germ, the important 
 and permanent thing, in all religions. But the 
 question is, Is it an adequate statement of what 
 Christianity actually is as a specific religious sys- 
 tem ? It may be more important than that state- 
 ment ; but is it that statement ? It certainly does 
 not distinguish Christianity from other forms of 
 religion. The liberal Jew will make precisely the 
 same claim for his religion ; the reformed Hindu 
 and the Parsee, the same for theirs. If Christian- 
 ity means simply natural reverence and goodness, 
 if its whole significance is covered by the phrase, 
 " love to God and man," why a new word to rep- 
 resent that old thing? How did the new word 
 arise? Let it be that Christianity is only a new 
 phase of an old sentiment. Have we then truly 
 defined Christianity when we have defined the 
 old sentiment, and left aside just that which marks 
 a new phase ? To define Christianity as love to 
 God and man, is to make it independent of any 
 specific form or phase or teacher ; independent of 
 Jesus himself. Is it therefore a correct definition 
 of Christianity? 
 
 The inadequacy of the definition, certainly, from 
 an historical point of view, has long been felt even 
 by the liberal portion of Christendom ; and hence 
 there has come up in these later years a supple- 
 ment to it in what we may call the Sentimental- 
 historical definition ; using the word sentimental, 
 not with any intention of casting slight on the
 
 CHRISTIANITY AND ITS DEFINITIONS, 197 
 
 view of Christianity thus characterized, but be- 
 cause this representation is an attempt to explain 
 Christianity" by allowing more than does the pre- 
 ceding definition to the action of the emotional 
 side of religion, and because it lays special em- 
 phasis on the reverence and love excited by the 
 personal character of Jesus, and brings into cen- 
 tral prominence the influence of his personality 
 itself. And it is to be called historical, because 
 it emphasizes the actual facts of Jesus' career. 
 According to this view, Christianity arose iu an 
 unbounded enthusiasm for the person of Jesus, 
 and, through the personal magnetism of his char- 
 acter, for the ideas which he preached ; an enthu- 
 siasm for the kingdom of God as coming through 
 him, its earthly head and representative. He, 
 from this point of view, is the hero of this great 
 religious revolution ; the central figure of the 
 whole world's history, summing up in himself all 
 that was past, and prophetic and typical of all that 
 was future : and so he still remains, the ideal, re- 
 presentative man, holding, by virtue of his con- 
 summate spiritual intelligence, and the historic 
 results of his character and life, the place of 
 headship to the human race. And Christianity 
 from this point of view may be denned as the fel- 
 lowship of those who recognize Jesus in this his- 
 toric position, and acknowledge in any way their 
 personal allegiance to him. This view is repre- 
 sented by such books as the English "Ecce Homo," 
 by Schenkel iu Germany, by Renan in France, and
 
 198 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 by our own beloved Dr. Furness in America. All 
 these authors, and the school to which they belong, 
 though differing widely on many points among 
 themselves, yet agree in this, that to write truly 
 the biography of Jesus is to define Christianity 
 both in its origin and its continued inspiration, 
 and that the new spirit coming into the world 
 through the personal power of his life is the bond 
 of the Christian fellowship and the source and 
 strength of Christian faith. 
 
 Now this class of writers deserve high honor for 
 the real service they have done in rescuing Chris- 
 tian history from narrow dogmatists, who have 
 heretofore done most of the historical writing in 
 its interest, and in restoring to the character of 
 Jesus and his times the vividness of human reality 
 and personal life, features greatly wanting in 
 the representation of those who would make Chris- 
 tianity nothing more than a new proclamation of 
 old spiritual and ethical truths. They have at- 
 tempted to write Christian history, and to describe 
 the character of Jesus, as if both were human ; 
 and so have succeeded in giving a picture of both 
 that has touched the hearts of all readers, and 
 drawn them back into living sympathy with the 
 experiences of those early times. And to this 
 extent they have made a real contribution to the 
 true, history of Christianity. 
 
 Yet their statement of Christianity is defective, 
 for the reason that to dissolve history into biog- 
 raphy must always give unsound history. It is to
 
 CHRISTIANITY AND ITS DEFINITIONS. 199 
 
 commit the same error that Carlyle makes, when 
 he selects a few heroes and writes their lives for 
 the life of mankind during their times. The 
 method gives us no true philosophy of events, nor 
 of character. It misses the great forces that lie 
 back of events, the great providential forces of 
 race, of country, of climate, of ideas, of institu- 
 tions and temperaments, that help to mould 
 events and to make character. And hence this / 
 method of defining Christianity does not suf- 
 ficiently take into account the antecedent ele- 
 ments in other religions which came by natural 
 descent into Christianity at its origin, nor the 
 popular ideas which went into it while it was in 
 process of organization, nor the contributions that 
 came to it from contact with other modes of 
 thought and from emigration to other lands and 
 peoples after the time of Jesus. It gives us a pictu- 
 resque drama of Christianity, but not its philosophy, 
 and therefore not its true history nor definition. 
 
 The attempt, too, to resuscitate at this day the 
 old feeling of attachment and fealty to the person 
 of Jesus, which animated the hearts of the first 
 disciples, and to make that the fountain and inspi- 
 ration of religion to this age, must be futile. We 
 cannot, indeed, study his life without constant ad- 
 miration of his wisdom, and without learning to 
 lore and reverence the rare beauty of his char- 
 acter ; we may even adopt him as our spiritual ex- 
 ample and authoritative religious teacher ; or, as 
 many do, come to worship him as Deity : but it is
 
 200 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 impossible to revive in our hearts the active per- 
 sonal enthusiasm for him as a living, human being, 
 which was felt towards him by those who heard 
 the words from his own lips, who touched the 
 warm brotherly blood in his hand, and to whom 
 his face and character were familiar by daily inter- 
 course. The communion that gathers about him 
 now must be held by the force of ideas, and not 
 by the ties of personal magnetism. 
 
 And it is remarkable how soon the influence of 
 Jesus as a person seems to have passed away after 
 his death, and how quickly his official character as 
 Messiah, and the dogmas which were woven about 
 him as filling that position, came in to take the 
 place of personal recollections. One of the most 
 striking features of Paul's epistles is the absence 
 from them of allusions to the personal career of 
 Jesus. There is in them all hardly a reference to 
 any thing that Jesus said or did ; and yet some of 
 them are the earliest extant records of Christianity. 
 Though Paul had had no personal acquaintance 
 with Jesus, it is yet strange that he should not 
 have been the medium of preserving some of the 
 multitudinous personal traditions about him which, 
 one would suppose, must have come to his knowl- 
 edge. And this fact can only be explained by the 
 hypothesis that it was not so much the personal 
 character of Jesus which made its impress upon 
 Paul's mind as his official character, a supposi- 
 tion which is abundantly supported by evidence 
 which fills his epistles. He seems even to have
 
 CHRISTIANITY AND ITS DEFINITIONS. 201 
 
 taken pride in not knowing Jesus after the flesh ; 
 and shows throughout his writings that it was his 
 own ideal conception of Jesus' position in a provi- 
 dential plan of salvation that was the animating 
 impulse of his enthusiastic faith and labors. And 
 this was clearly the case, too, with others among 
 the earliest Christian believers and laborers. And 
 to-day, when it is claimed that Jesus is felt as a 
 personal friend, especially by the poor and wronged 
 and suffering, we may find the ground of the claim 
 in the fragrant memory of his human life of devo- 
 tion to all forms of disease and distress, which ten- 
 derly mingles with the dogmatic idea of him as 
 the continued administrator of the divine mercy by 
 virtue of his place in the Godhead or in a special 
 providential scheme of human redemption. 
 i \ And so we must seek another statement of Chris- 
 tianity still, something more comprehensive and 
 more scientific than either of the definitions we 
 have considered. Each of these marks an impor- 
 tant part of Christianity, but not the whole ; and 
 none of them is consistent with any philosophy of 
 Christian history. What we want is a statement 
 Avhieh we may call the Scientific-historical defi- 
 nition of Christianity. The great modern civil 
 historians attempt not only to gather up and set 
 forth in order the events of communities and 
 nations and the doings and influence of leading 
 persons, they attempt not simply to tell what 
 happened, but to trace back events to ideas and 
 principles, and to show the relations that exist
 
 202 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 between persons and the impersonal laws and 
 forces with which persons deal. And we shall ^ 
 not have Christianity set in its true position in 
 the world's history until we have its history writ- 
 ten from this point of view, until we come to 
 see it, not as a piece by itself, interjected into the 
 general course of history through the power of 
 any person, however eminent in wisdom or char- 
 acter, but as a fluent, social force, the momentum 
 and resultant of many confluent religious and moral 
 ideas, and of many generations of thought and sen- 
 timent and action, not beginning with Jesus, nor 
 confined to Hebrew history alone, yet coming to 
 specific organization and activity through the in- 
 strumentality of the Hebrew Messianic idea, and 
 through the spiritual genius and power of the 
 Hebrew prophet, Jesus of Nazareth, as the ac- 
 cepted representative of the Messianic office ; not 
 leaping, however, as a completely organized system 
 even from his brain and heart, but enlarging and 
 essentially transforming the Messianic conception, 
 its own instrument, in order to meet the religious 
 demands of the age ; and, as it proceeded in its 
 work of organization, assimilating to itself various 
 other ideas and modes of thought foreign to the 
 Hebrew faith and to the views of Jesus ; receiving 
 in its course contributions from different climes 
 and nations and persons and philosophies, and 
 modifying its nature as well as its volume by these 
 fresh increments to its constituent elements, until 
 it has grown from a small, despised, persecuted,
 
 CHRISTIANITY AND ITS DEFINITIONS. 203 
 
 and, to our modern ideas, a somewhat ascetical and 
 fanatical Jewish sect, into the gigantic religious and 
 social power, interpenetrating almost all modern life 
 with its influence and modern civilization with its 
 machinery, which we see Christianity to be to-day. / 
 
 And when we have the history of Christianity 
 written from this stand -point of scientific philoso- 
 phy, we shall see that it is indeed true that its 
 most vital and durable elements are not specifically 
 and exclusively its own, but are universal, such 
 as the doctrines of the divine fatherhood and 
 human brotherhood, and that in a very impor- 
 tant sense, therefore, Christianity did not begin , 
 with the Christian era. We shall find its roots far / 
 back of that epoch, far older and deeper than the' 
 popular estimate would reckon them. It was the 
 appearing above the soil of society, in new and 
 more powerful combinations, of elements that had 
 long been active beneath. It was the natural 
 ripening of religious ideas and aspirations, which 
 had long been living and growing in the human 
 mind, into a definite form of organization and 
 activity. Its coming was inevitable. It would 
 have come in some form, or some new religion 
 would have appeared corresponding to it, though <^ 
 Jesus had never lived ; yet in the unfolding of the 
 infinite plan of human history he was the leader 
 whose large and strong personality helped to con- 
 centrate the stirring religious elements of the time, 
 and to shape them to a definite purpose and end. 
 But he did not make the religious crisis ; that was
 
 204 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 prepared for him. He did not introduce the ideas 
 which made the constituent elements of Chris- 
 tianity ; they were before him, and helped to make 
 him what he was ; and he sought and could have 
 no higher office than to be their faithful inter- 
 preter, their devoted instrument. The old relig- 7 
 ions fell away, because pushed off by the growing 
 life of the religious aspirations and ideas that were 
 astir in the popular heart, and Christianity came 
 as the natural result and expression of those aspi- 
 rations and ideas, just as in political progress 
 the growing conviction of national freedom and 
 justice and power in the heart of a people is finally 
 able to push off a despotic and outgrown monar- 
 chy, and put a freer and higher form of government 
 in its place. 
 
 But such political revolutions sometimes fail for 
 the want of a fit leader, for the lack of some one 
 representative man of strong personal character- 
 istics who harmoniously combines in his o\vn 
 nature the progressive but still somewhat uncer- 
 tain aspirations, convictions, and will of the peo- 
 ple. America had such a man in Washington. 
 The great political reformation in France in the 
 eighth and ninth centuries was specially embodied 
 in Charlemagne. And the religious revolution 
 that brought Christianity had its leader in Jesus. 
 A philosophic statement of Christianity, therefore, 
 will not trace every thing to universal principles 
 and impersonal ideas working in the minds of men 
 in mass. It will take due account of the increased
 
 CHRISTIANITY AND ITS DEFINITIONS, 205 
 
 power of ideas when embodied in such a life-giving 
 and commanding personality as was possessed by 
 Jesus. It will show that it was the force of his 
 religious genius which persuaded people into ac- 
 cepting him as the Messiah, although he came with 
 none of the expected royal insignia of the Mes- 
 sianic office ; that it was the inherent authority of 
 the truth he saw and proclaimed, and the tender 
 humanity animating his heart, which drew the 
 multitudes to follow after his steps, and to hang 
 upon the gracious words that proceeded out of his 
 mouth. A true philosophy of the origin of Chris- 
 tianity will detect the inner spiritual fact, that the 
 people who accepted him were convinced that he 
 must be the Messiah, not so much because he so 
 announced himself and gave outward proof of the 
 office, as because their own yearning, aching hearts 
 instinctively felt in his virtue the secret of their 
 own healing and blessedness. A peasant by birth 
 and training, inheriting neither noble blood nor cult- 
 ure nor social rank and opportunity, with aid from 
 neither synagogue nor state, it was the power of 
 his personal genius as a religious teacher and re- 
 former that elevated him to the Messianic office. 
 
 But after all, great and pure as he was, it was 
 not Jesus the man, but Jesus the Messiah, who 
 was the recognized founder of the new religion. 
 And hence a scientific statement of Christianity 
 must take account not only of its universal ele- 
 ments, and of the personal power of Jesus, but also 
 of his Messianic office. For the medium through
 
 206 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 which these universal elements were concentrated 
 into such specific concrete shape as to make a new 
 religious era, and the instrument with which Jesus 
 worked as the prophet of the era, was the Hebrew 
 Messianic idea. The service of this idea in the 
 first organization of the primitive elements of 
 Christianity can hardly be overestimated. In that 
 childlike age, among a childlike people, something 
 more was needed than a bare proclamation of 
 moral and spiritual truth, with whatever power of 
 personal genius. And this need was supplied by 
 the old Hebrew conception of the speedy coming 
 of the Messianic kingdom, a conception that 
 appealed with all the vividness of a drama to the 
 spiritual imagination and hopes and fears of men. 
 This idea is the one thread of unity that runs 
 through all the varieties of writings in the New 
 Testament from Matthew to Revelation. It was 
 this that gradually lifted Jesus himself out of all 
 human and historic proportions into the colossal 
 magnitude in which he has been seen by Christen- 
 dom for eighteen centuries. It was the belief, 
 after his crucifixion, in his second Messianic ad- 
 vent an event which his followers looked for in 
 their lifetime that gave the immediate animat- 
 ing impulse to their cause, and attracted such 
 numbers of people to confess him as the expected 
 Christ; for this advent was to solve all life's trials 
 and perplexities ; it was to bring redemption to 
 the sinful, rest to the weary, wealth to the desti- 
 tute, and comfort to the sorrowing. And around
 
 CHRISTIANITY AND ITS DEFINITIONS. 207 
 
 this simple, childish hope, which was yet full to 
 bursting with the deep life of spiritual aspirations 
 and yearnings, the first Christian church was gath- 
 ered, a sect of Judaism accepting Jesus as the 
 Messiah, and looking for his second coming to 
 complete and establish his sovereignty. 
 
 But Christianity was early moulded by external 
 influences, as well as by its internal idea ; and of 
 these its scientific history must also take note. 
 This process began even in the apostolic days. 
 Paul and Apollos and others, bred in the Grecian 
 school of culture, soon appeared on the stage by the 
 side of the original apostles ; and from them the 
 Christian movement received a new tone of thought, 
 and took a new direction and a broader way. 
 
 Paul, the most important of this new class of 
 apostles, and the greatest intellect of the primitive 
 Christian period, emphasized, as has already been 
 intimated, still more than did the original apostles, 
 the official character of Jesus ; and, what is of more 
 moment, he attached new ideas to the Messianic 
 office. With him began that interpretation of the 
 crucifixion which made it a sacrificial atonement, 
 breaking the power of the Mosaic law, and intro- 
 ducing a new dispensation of faith and love, a 
 dogma which has played a very influential part in 
 Christian history. He opened Christianity too 
 another most momentous change to the Gentile 
 world, and sought to bring Gentile and Jew into 
 one fellowship through the uniting bond of faith in 
 the Christ. And we may find perhaps in him,
 
 208 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 certainly in the author of the Epistle to the He- 
 brews which proceeded from his apostolic circle, 
 the germ of the idea that the Christ was pre- 
 existent, the first-born Son of God and the Creator 
 of the world ; and that in his earthly Messianic 
 character he was a miraculous incarnation of Di- 
 vinity, and redeemed the world by sharing its 
 infirmities and bearing its sins in his own divine 
 person. This dogma, which we find developed to 
 some extent at least in the Epistle to the Hebrews 
 and in the fourth Gospel, and which is a great 
 transformation of the Hebrew Messianic idea, was 
 largely instrumental in making Christianity accept- 
 able after it had passed westward beyond the 
 limits of Palestine, and into countries where the 
 Hebrew conception in its original form could have 
 little power. 
 
 Christianity, indeed, under Paul effected, as has 
 been well said, " a change of base." Jesus came 
 to be represented, not only as the Messiah of the 
 Jew, but as the Messiah and Saviour of the world ; 
 and Christianity was enlarged by new ideas and 
 aspirations, and its power increased by the adop- 
 tion of a more logical method of thought. From 
 being a small Jewish sect, it advanced to the hope 
 of becoming a universal religion. 
 
 That was the first great change ; the precursor of 
 all changes, some of them for good and some for 
 evil, that have followed in Christian history. Chris- y 
 tianity then began the process, we might almost 
 say the policy, of adapting itself to the varied con-
 
 CHRISTIANITY AND ITS DEFINITIONS. 
 
 clitions, as to intelligence and temperament, of the 
 people it was to serve. As it was open to Gentile 
 believers, it became conformed quite as much to 
 the traditions of their ancient faith as to the 
 Hebrew. It was through the power of pagan 
 philosophical and religious ideas that Jesus was 
 gradually idealized from the Jewish Messiah into 
 a demigod, and then to a place in the Godhead 
 itself. It was through the power of pagan tradi- 
 tions that the doctrine of the Trinity was devel- 
 oped, that the saints were elevated into the niches 
 of the ancient gods and goddesses to be worshipped, 
 and that the magnificent ceremonies of symbolic 
 sacrifice, such as we see now in the Roman Catho- 
 lic Church, were established. Nor would any 
 philosophical statement of Christianity be com- 
 plete which should not especially show how much 
 it owed its progress, at a very early period, to the 
 practical organizing and aggressive power which it 
 learned from the Roman Empire, even before the 
 Empire came under its nominal sway; and how 
 the Papal ecclesiastical system which finally re- 
 sulted with its supreme monarch at Rome, Avith 
 its combination of spiritual and temporal sover- 
 eignty, with its royal pomp and wide-spread 
 dominion and marvellous vigor of organization 
 even to the minutest details was the legitimate 
 issue of the marriage of the religion of the Christ 
 to the empire of the Caesars. 
 
 In the old half-ruined castle at Heidelberg, on 
 the beautiful facade of Otto Heinrich's building, 
 
 14
 
 
 210 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 are to be seen images of Old-Testament heroes, 
 mingled promiscuously with figures from Greek 
 mythology, and busts of Roman emperors of pagan 
 days, and allegorical representations of Christian 
 graces ; while above the whole stand colossal 
 statues of Jupiter and Pluto, which no shocks of 
 war nor ravages of weather have been able to 
 shake from their solid pedestals. So do pagan 
 ideas still reign over large portions of Christen- 
 dom ; and this well-preserved wall, commemorat- 
 ing so many ideas and times, finally illustrates 
 how the united contributions of Hebrew, Greek, 
 and Roman nationalities have gone into the con- 
 struction of the religion which holds the memory 
 of the gracious virtues of Jesus. 
 
 Christianity, however, has been open not only 
 to the reception of old tradition, but to the forces 
 of advancing civilization, of progressive thought 
 and reason. It has taken shape according to the 
 taste and temperament and mental and moral 
 vigor of the people accepting it, among the 
 passional, warm-blooded nations of the South, or 
 among an excitable and aesthetic people in any 
 climate, developing into gorgeousness of form, into 
 ritual and architecture and symbolism. Among a / 
 people more thoughtful, critical, individual, and * 
 cold-blooded, it has been more fruitful in logical 
 systems of theology and practical righteousness. 
 In Germany and England, it yielded after a stormy 
 conflict to the Saxon spirit of free inquiry and 
 the demands of individual reason, and gave shel-
 
 CHRISTIANITY AND ITS DEFINITIONS. 211 
 
 ter to the Reformation and Protestantism. The 
 claim often made by Christian writers that all the 
 distinguishing and beneficent characteristics of 
 modern civilization in Christendom its science, 
 literature, diffusion of knowledge, free thought, 
 mental and material enterprise, progress in gov- 
 ernment and in useful discoveries and arts are 
 to be referred back for their source to primitive 
 Christianity, is most futile in the light of actual 
 history. The same forces that may be said to have 
 brought the Protestant Revolution in Christen- 
 dom, were the productive causes of these special 
 features of modern civilization ; and Christianity 
 did not carry these germinal forces in its bosom 
 from the time of its own birth, but found them 
 in the mental temperament of the nations of North- 
 ern Europe and in the atmosphere of a new men- 
 tal era which had set in without much of its 
 aid. The most that can be justly claimed for 
 Christianity is that a large section of the Christian 
 church yielded to the influence of these forces, and 
 honestly attempted to assimilate the new ideas and 
 spirit of the age to its old faith. And so in the 
 history of Protestantism, the Christian faith has 
 again and again given way before the rights of 
 private judgment, and recognized the formation of 
 sect after sect to embody some new theological 
 thought, or some new interpretation of an old 
 thought, till it covers almost every phase of relig- 
 ious opinion that is found in the world, and almost 
 every form of worship, from the practice of Feti-
 
 212 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 chism to the silent communion of the soul with 
 the Infinite. In fine, Christianity in its historical 
 development, since it became the recognized re- 
 ligion of the modern civilized world, while it has 
 been tethered fast on one side by the immovable 
 organization of the Roman Catholic Church, has 
 been free on the other to follow the advance of 
 public opinion, though always halting behind the 
 most progressive pioneers of opinion. Never lead- 
 ing public opinion, never taking the initiative in 
 any forward step, it yet has yielded and given voice 
 to beliefs that have been accepted by any consider- 
 able number of minds, and conformed in progress 
 to the average intelligence and moral convictions 
 of the people adopting it. 
 
 Whether Christianity shall make still further 
 advance in order to receive the new thought and 
 science of this age, and stand ready to respond to 
 all the demands of reason and reform, and be able 
 to become the permanent religion of the world, is 
 the question which now confronts us. The ques- 
 tion is twofold, First, what are the probabilities 
 in respect to the future progress of Christianity? 
 And, second, is Christianity likely to become the 
 permanent and universal religion of mankind ? 
 Through our answer to the first question we shall 
 reach the answer to the second. 
 
 There is surely no ground for asserting that 
 there is to be no further progress in Christian his- 
 tory. On the contrary, Christendom is most cer- 
 tainly tending by direct steps to the adoption of
 
 CHRISTIANITY AND ITS DEFINITIONS. 213 
 
 this rational view of its own history which I have 
 here attempted to indicate, far from it as the major- 
 ity of the Christian church may now appear to be. 
 The signs of the times point thither; the move- 
 ment is in this direction. The later books about 
 Jesus and his times that have excited the most 
 interest are all attempts to set the career of Jesus 
 in natural relations with, the world. Rationalism 
 appears in the very citadels of Orthodoxy. Half 
 of the Church of England is converted to rational- 
 istic views. Germany, Switzerland, Italy, are fast 
 ripening for a new Protestantism freer than the 
 old. The old dogmas of Calvinism are passing 
 away in churches nominally Calvinistic, or are ap- 
 pearing under rationalistic forms of interpretation. 
 Even the popular missionaries of the Roman Cath- 
 olic Church make their appeals for converts on the 
 ground that Catholicism harmonizes with the freest 
 reason ; and a large section of the Church of Rome 
 seems ready to revolt in the interest of reason 
 against further reactionary attempts to centralize 
 power in the Pope. Meantime, science and litera- 
 ture outside of the church, though in the territorial 
 limits of Christendom, are working everywhere 
 in the interest of spiritual liberty and a rational- 
 istic interpretation of Christianity. Science makes 
 constant war on the very idea of miracle, of 
 miracle in the procedure of history, no less than in 
 the mechanics of the universe. Rarely now by 
 any scholarly writer of any sect do we find the old 
 idea of miracle advocated. Instead of being re-
 
 214 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 garded as a direct abrogation of natural law by 
 supernatural will, miracle is now pretty generally 
 interpreted as the temporary action of some higher 
 law, just as natural, though rarer in its operations ; 
 and some theological writers even go so far as to 
 affirm that reason may yet explain miracles, a 
 concession that substantially abandons the miracle- 
 idea ; as does also the use by many modern theolo- 
 gians of the word supernatural in the sense of 
 spiritual. Such reasoning only indicates the path 
 by which Christendom is to pass from the common 
 view of its religiyn, which makes it a supernatural 
 and mysterious interpolation into the general course 
 of events, to the rational and scientific view, which 
 puts it into natural relations with all history. That 
 this passage is to be made, and that this latter is 
 to be the ultimate and generally accepted view of 
 Christianity, we may feel just as sure as we are 
 that reason will finally dispel superstition, and that 
 the light of to-morrow's sun will scatter the dark- 
 ness of this coming night. 
 
 Not very soon will this step be made by the 
 great majority of the Chiistian church ; but at 
 some day in the future it must be made, unless we 
 are to have the singular spectacle of a cessation of 
 progress in religious ideas, while people shall be 
 advancing in all other directions of thought. But 
 
 O c* 
 
 this will not be. Christianity will be forced to< 
 conform to the fresh thought of the age ; it must 
 be moulded by advancing science and reason ; it 
 must follow in the current of modern civilization.
 
 CHRISTIANITY AND ITS DEFINITIONS. 215 
 
 And all of it that does not so follow must be left 
 behind to perish as an effete institution. Already 
 there are signs that Christianity in its dogmatic 
 and instituted 'forms is disintegrating. The ten- 
 dency to identify it with its universal elements of 
 truth and love is strong in all the sects. Already 
 its freest thinkers and most rationalistic sects are 
 at the very limit of the way down which it is pos- 
 sible to carry the banner of a supernatural religion. 
 They have developed Christianity to the utmost 
 verge it will bear as a supernatural system. One 
 step further, and the thin wall of supernaturalism 
 which has hitherto served to protect Christianity 
 as a specific religious system is broken through, 
 and they stand over the line on the ground of 
 natural religion. Some of them are already over, 
 and are calling back to those lingering on the line 
 that the ground is solid, that the imagined pitfalls 
 are not there, and that the way is clear and bright, 
 and stretches before them into the illimitable truth. 
 And now we reach the answer to the second 
 question, Is Christianity to be the permanent 
 religion for man, destined to convert and absorb 
 all other faiths ? And we may answer this ques- 
 tion by putting another in this form : As soon as 
 Christianity comes thus to be recognized, in Chris- 
 tendom generally, as a natural phase in the prog- 
 ress of natural religious ideas and forces, and Jesus 
 is put in the line of our natural humanity, will it 
 not follow that Christianity will then lose just 
 those things which have made it a specific religion,
 
 216 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 and hence, as such, cease to exist ? The belief in 
 the Messianic character of Jesus, or in his having 
 been more than a naturally endowed man, will then 
 have passed away. He will stand -by the side of 
 other great religious teachers and prophets, with 
 no authority different from theirs ; and the New 
 Testament will take its place among other relig- 
 ious books of the past, of precious value, but to be 
 submitted in all its parts to the rational judgment of 
 mankind. The Christian-born man will then stand, 
 not as having found a finality in religious truth in 
 some past authoritative revelation, but as a truth- \ 
 seeker, gratefully recognizing and using all that 
 the past has to give him, but keeping his face 
 towards the future, and looking for revelations to 
 come out of the infinite word of truth that shall 
 eclipse in glory all revelations that have preceded. 
 He will stand with no infallibly authorized religion 
 behind him ; with no exceptionally inspired teacher, 
 no exceptionally written books, as his standards ; 
 with no Lord less than the Infinite for his spiritual 
 Sovereign. His own mind, thro ugh which pulses the 
 vital energy of the universal life, must supply his 
 authority, and cultured reason furnish him the stand- 
 ard by which all books and teachers and revelations 
 are to be judged. He will see that Christianity, ^ 
 like Judaism before it, is provisional, preparatory, 
 educational ; containing, alongside of the most val- 
 uable truth, much that is only human error and 
 bigotry and superstitious imagination ; and that it 
 will only have truly accomplished its providential
 
 CHRISTIANITY AND ITS DEFINITIONS. 217 
 
 mission when it shall have opened into a form of 
 faith that shall adhere to natural law, and not to 
 miraculous interjections of power, as the manifes- 
 tation of the Divine Mind both in things material 
 and things spiritual. 
 
 But though the Christian-born man, taking this 
 view of his religion, will have no specific revelation 
 behind him, no past which he is to take on implicit 
 trust as religious authority, yet the whole of the 
 past not only Christianity, but the religions be- 
 fore it will have contributed to the formation 
 of the solid ground on which he will feel his feet 
 to be planted. He will not have narrowed his 
 religious sympathies, but widened them ; nor lost 
 religious and moral teachers, but added to them. 
 The number of his saints and heroes will have in- 
 creased rather than diminished. And beneath 
 him, feeding the very life which he shall live, will 
 be the religious thoughts and experiences, the 
 struggles and triumphs, the wisdom and prophecy 
 and aspiration, the integrity and virtue and beati- 
 tude, of all the races and ages and religions that 
 have ever existed. By the growing light of human 
 intelligence, kept burning by continued connection 
 with the eternally vitalizing power of truth, he will 
 select the good and true from all, while the evil 
 and false he will leave aside. 
 
 In fact, the " Christian," in the historic and 
 ecclesiastical sense, will then be no more. If the 
 name shall linger, the old meaning will have gone 
 out of it, never to return. But even the name
 
 218 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 cannot remain, if it shall stand in the way of that 
 large and generous fellowship which the spirit of 
 this epoch is striving to effect. When men shall 
 come even to that point that they say that every 
 man is a Christian who shares his brother's burden, 
 no matter whether as to faith he is Mohammedan 
 or Confucian or Infidel, they will not tleem the 
 name Christian a very important one to keep, but, 
 forgetting names, will join hands in the fellowship 
 of fraternal love and good works. 
 
 And it is not alone in Christendom that there 
 are indications of this coming broader fellowship. 
 The old Hebrew faith has not been stagnant dur- 
 ing these eighteen hundred years since Christianity 
 parted company with it. It, too, especially in these 
 latter years, has been progressing; so that now 
 between the most advanced Jews and the most 
 progressive portion of Christendom there is scarcely 
 a shade of difference in theological belief. Fol- 
 lowing their present tendencies, these pioneer 
 divisions must inevitably come together. But 
 why should the Jew take the name of the Chris- 
 tian, more than the Christian the name of the 
 Jew? Or, in India, why should that growing and 
 already vigorous sect of native Hindus, who have 
 abandoned the idolatrous faith and practices of 
 the popular religion, and profess a pure theism, 
 adopt the Christian name more than the Christians 
 theirs ? They have really passed beyond all that 
 the word Christian means as defining a system of 
 faith; and, if they should assume it, would be
 
 CHRISTIANITY AND ITS DEFINITIONS. 219 
 
 going back upon their path. They gratefully ac- 
 knowledge their obligations to Christianity, which 
 has come to them through British literature and 
 civilization rather than by direct Christian teach- 
 ing, as they also confess their indebtedness to the 
 spiritual philosophy and inspiration of their own 
 ancient scriptures. But they claim that the human 
 soul has as direct access to truth to-day as it ever 
 had, and that no authoritative final revelation has 
 been given in the past ; and hence they stand 
 essentially on the same platform with the rational- 
 istic divisions of the Christians and the Jews. 
 But why should they call themselves by either of 
 these names, or by one of them more than the 
 other ? 
 
 In China, too, and in Japan, now that they have 
 been opened to the fresh enterprise and thought 
 of the nineteenth century, progress in religious 
 ideas will inevitably come as the accompaniment 
 of advance in other directions. But is this relig- 
 ious progress likely to take the Christian name ? 
 The Jesuits, who are already on the ground, may 
 make some converts from the masses of the people ; 
 for the reason that the mediseval form of Chris- 
 tianity which the Romish Church represents, and 
 which was to a great extent the product of the 
 pagan contributions which came into the stream 
 of Christian history, is nearly on a level with the 
 old Buddhistic faith of the Oriental masses. But 
 the intelligent and thinking class in those coun- 
 tries will not be so likely even as the Hindus to
 
 220 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 change their religion for Chris tianitj r , for the rea- 
 sons that they have a more rational religion than 
 the Hindus and are more averse to change. But 
 they will readily accept a religion that shall be 
 developed out of their ancient faith, yet still have 
 that faith beneath it, a religion that shall keep 
 all that is true in their own scriptures, and wel- 
 come all that is truth in all other scriptures, and 
 never close the canon of the continually uttered 
 Word of revelation. They will hardly adopt a 
 religion that degrades Confucius and Buddha into 
 the position of blind heathen guides, unworthy 
 of confidence, and deifies a prophet of another 
 \ race ; but they will receive a religion which shall 
 count Moses and Jesus and Confucius and Buddha, 
 and all the greatly wise and good, in the line of 
 its prophets, giving to each the honor due for the 
 truth he saw and told, and for the good his life 
 achieved. 
 
 Am I visionary, a mere dreamer, if I seem 
 to see that from all these manifest tendencies will 
 come forth eventually another form of faith and 
 worship, which shall not be Hinduism nor Buddh- 
 ism nor Judaism nor Christianity nor any system 
 of faith now existing, but a broader religious 
 development of humanity, in which all techni- 
 cal distinctions between these specific forms of 
 religion shall be obliterated, and nations and races 
 shall meet in a spiritual fellowship whose limits 
 shall be commensurate with humanity itself? 
 Nay, not a dreamer. I believe I am but reading
 
 CHRISTIANITY AND ITS DEFINITIONS. 221 
 
 the future by the light of past history and of pres- 
 ent social and mental forces. This epoch of the 
 nineteenth century repeats to some extent, though 
 with vastly larger and more favoring opportunity, 
 the religious conditions and combinations that ex- 
 isted just prior to the origin of Christianity. As 
 that epoch witnessed a decadence of old religious 
 systems, and brought together in Western Asia 
 the elements of religions and of civilizations that 
 had previously flourished apart, and from their 
 union there was begotten a higher form of faith 
 and life, so now it seems as if the various religions 
 of the world, having served their providential pur- 
 pose apart, are being brought into contact, in order 
 that they may serve to show each other's defects, 
 and confirm each other's truths, and stimulate to 
 higher thought and a larger charity and a more 
 beneficent activity ; and thus ultimately may be 
 created, not by any mechanical eclecticism but by 
 the organic laws of social growth, a purer form of 
 religious belief and practice, under which all na- 
 tions and races shall be joined as different members 
 in one household, to serve one Parental law of 
 truth and right, and to stand by each other as 
 brothers whose hearts beat with one blood and 
 respond to the pulsations of one love.
 
 222 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 THE GENIUS OF CHRISTIANITY AND FREE 
 RELIGION. 1 
 
 BY FRANCIS ELLINGWOOD ABBOT. 
 
 say that the age we live in is pre-eminently 
 an era of revolution, is to utter a stale and 
 profitless truism. The fact mirrors itself on every 
 open eye, and voices itself to every unstopped ear. 
 Not merely in the forms of government, the adjust- 
 ments of society, and other external matters, con- 
 stant changes occur which are perceptible by all ; 
 but the more observing also detect indications of 
 some profound and hidden movement in the depths 
 of the human spirit. The world's heart is ill at 
 ease. Miseries and oppressions and crimes are, it 
 is true, like the poor, ever with us ; but cancel 
 these, and the world's unrest will still remain. Its 
 secret inquietude betrays itself even in the tone of 
 the popular poems and novels of the day; and 
 although the Church, abundantly assiduous with 
 prescription and pill, promises to cure the distem- 
 per, she encounters a most alarming symptom in 
 the patient's distrust of the physician. In fact, the 
 patient refuses to be a patient ; and what the 
 Church accounts disease turns out to be a new- 
 born hunger for truth and life, a most excellent 
 
 1 A lecture delivered in the First Course of " Sunday Afternoon 
 Lectures " in Horticultural Hall, Boston, February 14, 1869.
 
 GENIUS OF CHRISTIANITY, ETC. 223 
 
 sign of spiritual health. The world needs, not to 
 be doctored, but to be fed ; and whoso brings sub- 
 stantial food fairly cooked finds a hearty welcome. 
 The old faiths, like cotyledons well stored with 
 starch, are perishing as the spring advances, yet 
 only to yield their contents as nourishment for a 
 better faith. Although there are no " new truths " 
 except as the discovery, or riper development in 
 human thought and life, of truths old as God, yet 
 in this sense new truths are creating to-day a new 
 faith in the world before which the elder faiths lose 
 their power. The grounds of human hope, the 
 motives of human action, the objects of human as- 
 piration, are slowly changing ; and because change 
 in these respects involves corresponding change in 
 all the relations of public and private life, the great 
 visible movements of the age are but indices of the 
 greater invisible movements in the spiritual con- 
 sciousness of mankind. Because all questions of 
 immediate interest in the amelioration of society 
 depend ultimately on deeper questions in the soul, 
 there can be no theme of profounder practical im- 
 portance than that to which I now invite your at- 
 tention, the "Genius of Christianity and Free 
 Religion." In the conflict between these two 
 faiths, and in the law of spiritual development by 
 which the one must increase and the other decrease, 
 lies, as I believe, the secret of the religious rest- 
 lessness of the times. With the seriousness be- 
 fitting so great a subject, and yet with no shrinking 
 from the plainness of speech which equally befits it,
 
 224 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 I wish to express convictions neither hastily formed 
 nor weakly held, for which I ask from you only a 
 calm and candid hearing. Whether right or wrong, 
 they must affect profoundly the well-being of every 
 one who makes them the basis of intelligent and 
 fearless action. Let them, then, be intelligently 
 and fearlessly judged. 
 
 A savage coming to the sea-shore at several dis- 
 tant points might perhaps imagine that he had 
 come to several disconnected seas, not knowing 
 that the sea is one. So he who beholds without 
 reflection the great religions of the world might 
 conceive these to be separate and distinct, not 
 knowing that religion is one. It must have been 
 from some such conception as this that men used to 
 class Christianity by itself as wholly true, and all 
 other religions in a group by themselves as wholly 
 false. But this distinction cannot stand. The 
 question of the truth or falsity of different relig- 
 ions is purely a question of degree. They are all 
 expressions of the universal aspiration of humanity, 
 and are so far all based on eternal truth. But each 
 of them has its own special historic form, deter- 
 mined by the personality of its founder, by the spirit 
 of the age in which it arose, and by the character 
 of the historic forces by which it was developed ; 
 and so far it must share the error which clings to 
 all things human. The worst religion has its truth, 
 the best has its error. Thus all religions are one, 
 in virtue of their common origin in the aspiring and 
 worshipping spirit of man ; while they are many,
 
 GENIUS OF CHRISTIANITY, ETC. 225 
 
 in virtue of the historic form peculiar to each. The 
 universal element in each belongs, not to it, but to 
 universal human nature ; while its special element, 
 its historic form, is its own. 
 
 Whoever, therefore, would find the oneness of 
 all religions must seek it in the universal spirit- 
 ual consciousness of the race ; while he who would 
 learn the characteristics of any particular relig- 
 ion must seek this in its history and origin. The 
 object of the first seeker is generic unity, the 
 object of the second is specific difference. Their 
 methods, consequently, must correspond with their 
 objects, and be the converse of each other. The 
 one must neglect peculiarities, and attend to re- 
 semblances ; the other must neglect resemblances, 
 and attend to peculiarities. To claim as peculiar 
 to one religion what is common to all religions, 
 a claim often made in behalf of Christianity, is 
 unreasonable ; but it is equally unreasonable to 
 ignore its actual peculiarities. No estimate of a 
 great historical religion can be just, unless formed 
 by the impartial, scientific application of the his- 
 torical method. 
 
 In attempting, therefore, to determine what 
 Christianity actually is, as a great fact in human 
 history, I shall not endeavor to frame a transcen- 
 dental or mystical formula, and thus, spider-like, 
 evolve a definition of it out of my own conscious- 
 ness. On the contrary, believing Christianity to 
 be the loftiest of all historical religions, I believe 
 that, like all other historical religions, it can only 
 
 15
 
 226 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 be understood by the study of its sacred books, its 
 traditions, its institutions, its origin, its history. 
 What were the ideas, purposes, and character of 
 Jesus, and what was the nature of the faith which 
 took fts name from him and became Christianity as 
 we see it in the world to-day, must be learned his- 
 torically or not at all. Abstract speculation can 
 throw no light on these questions of fact. History 
 is the key to the problem of Christianity. 
 
 CHRISTIANITY HISTORICALLY DEFINED. 
 
 Viewed, then, as one of the world's great histor- 
 ical faiths, Christianity is religion as taught in the 
 New Testament, developed in the history of the 
 Christian Church, and based on faith in Jesus of 
 Nazareth as the Christ of God. 
 
 If we attempt to make Christianity independent 
 of its founder and of the only records we possess 
 of his life and teachings (an attempt sometimes 
 made by modern radical thinkers), we simply 
 abandon the historical ground altogether, identify 
 Christianity with Religion, and annihilate the spe- 
 cific difference between Christianity and all other 
 historical faiths. It thereby becomes impossible to 
 distinguish it from them on the same level ; we re- 
 solve it into " natural religion," and must treat all 
 other religions as merely various modifications of it. 
 I need not say how arbitrary and irrational this 
 seems to me. If Christianity is itself " natural 
 religion," only love to God and love to man, 
 how can we escape calling Brahmanism and Buddh-
 
 GENIUS OF CHRISTIANITY, ETC. 227 
 
 ism and Confucianism and the rest different forms 
 of Christianity ? Would there be nothing absurd 
 in that ? If, on the other hand, we say that religion 
 is always natural, and that Christianity, Brahman- 
 ism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Zoroastrianism, Ma- 
 hometanism, and so forth, are all diverse historical 
 forms of this one natural religion, I think we take 
 the only sensible ground. We then put all histor- 
 ical faiths on the same level, and can distinguish 
 them one from another by their different historical 
 characters. But to do this is at once to sweep 
 away all the fine-spun metaphysical, transcenden- 
 tal, and purely ethical definitions of Christianity, in 
 order to make room for its only historical defini- 
 tion, namely, religion as taught in the New Testa- 
 ment, developed in the history of the Christian 
 Church, and based on faith in Jesus of Nazareth as 
 the Christ of God. 
 
 The ethical and spiritual teachings of the New 
 Testament are not peculiar to it ; as is well known, 
 they can all be paralleled in other ancient writings. 
 These, therefore, will not help us to comprehend 
 that which is peculiar to Christianity and makes it 
 a distinct historical religion ; they belong to the 
 universal religion of man; appear in the sacred 
 books of all religious, and are the private property 
 of none. In accordance with the true historical 
 method, therefore, I shall pass by these universal 
 truths, which find perhaps their best expression in 
 the New Testament, in order to concentrate our 
 attention on the fundamental characteristic of
 
 228 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 Christianity, namely, its faith in the Christ. It is 
 this which separates it from all other religions, 
 constitutes its prime peculiarity, and serves as foun- 
 dation to the other leading doctrines of Christian 
 theology. Purity, benevolence, mercy, forgiveness, 
 humility, self-sacrifice, love, and so forth, are no- 
 where more beautifully taught than in the dis- 
 courses, conversations, and parables of Jesus; but 
 these make the universal, not the special, element 
 in the New Testament, these make its religion, 
 not its Christianity, and it is now its Christianity 
 that we seek to comprehend. 
 
 So far as our present object is concerned, we 
 need not be embarrassed by the doubts resting over 
 the authorship, the dates, and the historic credi- 
 bility of the various books of the New Testament. 
 No critical scholar of the present day regards the 
 gospels as wholly mythical. Yet, unless they are 
 wholly mythical, it is impossible to doubt that 
 Jesus did actually claim to be the Christ or Messiah, 
 that is, the founder and sovereign of the " kingdom 
 of heaven." So all-pervading is this claim, that to 
 eliminate it from the gospels is to reduce them at 
 once to unadulterated myth. If misunderstood on 
 this point, there is no reason tc suppose that Jesus 
 has been understood on any point ; if his reported 
 sayings on this subject are ungenuine, there is no 
 reason to suppose any of his sayings to be genuine. 
 In the words of James Martineau [" National Re- 
 view," April, 1863] : " Whoever can read the 
 New Testament with a fresh eye must be struck
 
 GENIUS OF CHRISTIANITY, ETC. 229 
 
 with the prominence everywhere of the Messianic 
 idea. It- seems to be the ideal framework of the 
 whole, of history, parable, dialogue ; of Pauline 
 reasoning ; of Apocalyptic visions. ' Art thou he 
 that should come ? ' This question gives the ideal 
 .standard by which, on all hands, on the part 
 of disciples, relations, enemies, of Saul the perse- 
 cutor and Paul the apostle, the person and pre- 
 tensions of Christ are tried. His birth, his acts, 
 his sufferings, are so disposed as to ' fulfil what was 
 spoken ' by the prophets : so that the whole pro- 
 gramme of his life would seem to have pre-existed 
 in the national imagination." 
 
 That these Avords of Martineau are true, I am 
 profoundly convinced. The Messianic faith is the 
 soul of the entire New Testament, giving unity to 
 the gospels, epistles, and apocalypse, and making 
 Christianity a vital organism. In vain shah 1 we seek 
 to comprehend the spiritual power of Christianity, 
 and determine its agency in the evolution of modern 
 civilization, until we have first comprehended the 
 Messianic idea, and discovered the sources, the 
 channels, and the limitations of its power. In vain 
 shall we seek to solve the mystery of that spiritual 
 Nile which has fertilized the centuries, until we 
 discover its Lake Nyanza in the Messianic hope of 
 Judaism and its widening Delta in the advent of 
 Free Religion. History, not theology, must reveal 
 the true origin of Christianity ; and when we are 
 prepared to accept her calm instructions, we shall 
 learn that the greatest of the world's historical
 
 230 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 religions is no bastard with the bar-sinister of 
 miracle athwart its scutcheon, but the lawful off- 
 spring of Jewish faith and Greek thought. In the 
 New Testament, if we will but read aright, is am- 
 ple proof of its pedigree. In the first three gospels 
 we find the Jewish Messiahship assumed by Jesus ; 
 in the fourth gospel, we find it interpreted by the 
 Logos doctrine, and thus rationalized by Greek 
 philosophy ; in the book of Acts and in the Epistles 
 we find it stripped by Peter and Paul of its local 
 and national limitations, and thus fitted to become 
 the basis of a world-wide church. The organizing 
 genius of Rome supplied the element necessary to 
 convert the idea into an institution ; and the tri- 
 umph of Christianity was assured. 
 
 THE MESSIANIC IDEA THE GREAT TAP-ROOT OP 
 CHRISTIANITY. 
 
 Here, then, in the New Testament itself, the 
 Messianic idea appears as the great tap-root of 
 Christianity ; and we see, already fulfilled, all the 
 intrinsic spiritual conditions of its subsequent 
 growth. Given the corresponding extrinsic his- 
 torical conditions, what need of a miracle to ac- 
 count for its wonderful development? It would 
 have been a miracle indeed, if, in the actual stale 
 of the Roman Empire at that time, Christianity had 
 failed to become the State Religion. Into what a 
 melancholy and senile decrepitude had fallen its 
 pagan competitors ! The decaying mythologies of 
 Persia, E^rypt, Greece, Rome, were the spiritual
 
 GENIUS OF CHRISTIANITY, ETC. 231 
 
 compost whence the vigorous young plant derived 
 its sap. Universal putrefaction is a powerful fer- 
 tilizer. To the spread of every religion, however 
 rapid (and Christianity is in this respect 110 more 
 remarkable than Buddhism or Mahometanism), the 
 ' same explanation applies, adaptation to the spirit 
 and circumstances of the times. It is customary 
 among Unitarians to extol the purity of " primitive 
 Christianity," and to bewail what they call its the- 
 ological and ecclesiastical " corruption " during the 
 first three centuries. This is to praise the blossom 
 at the expense of the fruit, to indulge in that 
 idealization of childhood which is practical depre- 
 ciation of manhood. The triumph of Athanasius 
 over Arius, and of Augustine over Pelagius, was 
 not accidental. On the contrary, the gradual for- 
 mation of the Athanasian and Augustiriian theology 
 was the strictly logical and natural development 
 of the claim made by Jesus of being the Saviour of 
 the world ; while the gradual erection of the Ro- 
 mish hierarchy was the equally logical and natural 
 result of the attempt to found a universal church 
 upon this claim. How could a man be the Saviour 
 of the world? Only by being also Crod. The 
 Romish Church, with its theology of salvation 
 through the God-Man, so far from being a " cor- 
 ruption of primitive Christianity," was its neces- 
 sary historical evolution ; the Messianic idea, freed 
 from its merely Hebrew application, enfolded 
 mediaeval Catholicism as the acorn enfolds the oak. 
 As the Jewish theocracy was at last obliged to en-
 
 232 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 throne an earthly king as the representative of 
 Jehovah, so the Christian Church was obliged at 
 last to enthrone the Pope as the representative of 
 the Christ. It betrays, therefore, a lack of the 
 philosophical, the scientific, the historical spirit, to 
 call that a corruption which was in truth a devel- 
 opment. 
 
 KOMAKISM THE TBUE CHKISTIANITY. 
 
 As the history of philosophical systems is the 
 truest exponent of their logical tendencies, so the 
 history of religions is the truest interpreter of their 
 genius and innermost spirit. The Romish Church, 
 whether in its hierarchy, its institutions, its archi- 
 tecture, its painting, its music, its literature, its 
 theology, its spiritual power, its types of spiritual 
 character, or its missionary zeal, is the ripened fruit 
 of the Messianic germ, the supreme culmination of 
 Christianity. Christian poetry and art, no less than 
 Christian character and faith, have reached their 
 zenith in the Catholic Church. The cathedrals, 
 the Madonnas, the anthems, Dante's Divine Com- 
 edy (the great poem of Christianity, setting it to 
 eternal music), were born in the souls of Catholics. 
 The Protestant Reformation was simply the first 
 stage in the decay of Christianity. In Wickliffe 
 and Huss, in Luther and Calvin and their com- 
 peers, the modern spirit came to self-conscious- 
 ness. These men were, although unwittingly, the 
 first apostles of Free Religion. Socinus, Priestley, 
 Channing, Parker, and the other reformers of the
 
 GENIUS OF CHRISTIANITY, ETC. 233 
 
 Reformation, carried the work of disintegration 
 still farther, and gave voice to the deepening de- 
 mand of humanity for spiritual freedom. " Lib- 
 eral Christianity," which means Christianity as 
 liberal as it can be, has reduced the Messianic idea 
 to its minimum dimensions and its minimum power ; 
 the next step is outside of Christianity altogether. 
 Gradual in its growth and gradual in its decay, 
 coming to its prime in the Romish, and lying at 
 Death's door in the Unitarian Church, Christi- 
 anity has realized the highest possibilities of the 
 Messianic faith, has accomplished the utmost which 
 that faith can accomplish for man, and is now des- 
 tined to wane before a faith higher and purer still. 
 Its history, from beginning to end, is the history 
 of men's faith in the Christ ; its first and last word 
 is, by the law of its being, " Come to Jesus! " 
 In proportion as the name of Jesus grows infre- 
 quent on its lips, in proportion as his person fails 
 to attract its supreme homage and worship, in 
 that proportion it ceases to be Christianity, and 
 becomes merged in that universal religion whose 
 only history is the history of soul. Let me repeat, 
 with emphasis, that, while Christianity is the per- 
 ishing form, religion is the eternal substance, 
 that the universal truths, the inspiring hopes, the 
 tender consolations, the quickening impulses, the 
 divinely beautiful spirit, which have made and still 
 make the name of Christianity so dear to the un- 
 distinguishing many, belong to the eternal sub- 
 stance and not to the perishing form. Religion
 
 234 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 must endure ; but as Christianity came into his- 
 tory, so it must go out from history. Its inspira- 
 tion and life have come in and through its faith in 
 the Christ, the one Lord and Master and Saviour 
 of the world ; and its church, or visible embodiment 
 in a social and spiritual fellowship, has planted itself 
 from the beginning on this faith as its own eternal 
 rock and corner-stone. 
 
 There is no clearer recognition of the funda- 
 mental character of the Christian Confession than 
 in the following words of Dr. Hedge, a Unitarian 
 clergyman who perceives how much is involved in 
 the apparent truism that Christianity has a his- 
 tory : 
 
 " I am far from maintaining that Christianity 
 must stand or fall with the belief in miracles ; but 
 I do maintain that Christian churches, as organized 
 bodies of believers, must stand or fall with the 
 Christian Confession, that is, the Confession of 
 Christ as divinely human Master and Head. . . . 
 Things exist in this world by distinction one from 
 another. Enlarge as you will the idea and scope 
 of a church, there must be somewhere, whether 
 stated or not in any formal symbol, a line which 
 defines it, and separates those who are in it from 
 those who are without. The scope of the Liberal 
 Church is large ; but every thing and everybody 
 cannot be embraced in it. The Christian Confes- 
 sion is its boundary line, within which alone it can 
 do the work which Providence has given it to do. 
 
 . . The distinction involved in the Christian Con-
 
 GENIUS OF CHRISTIANITY, ETCl 235 
 
 fession is organic and vital ; its abolition would be 
 the dissolution of the ecclesiastical world and the 
 end of Christendom." ["Reason in Religion," 
 pp. 218, 219.] 
 
 This statement of Dr. Hedge is the verdict of his- 
 tory itself. On the Christian Confession, Jesus him- 
 self founded his church ; on the Christian Confession, 
 Peter, John, Paul, and the rest, built up its walls ; 
 on the Christian Confession, Augustine, Athanasius, 
 and their fellow-workers, roofed and completed the 
 great historic edifice. From the vast ecclesiastical 
 hierarchy of Rome to the puny " National Confer- 
 ence of Unitarian and other Christian Churches,'' 
 all the sects and sub-sects of Christendom, with 
 one consenting voice, confess that Jesus is the 
 Christ, the Saviour of the world, the spiritual 
 King of mankind by the grace of God. In all 
 the endless controversies respecting doctrines, 
 forms, or politics, all parties have accepted the 
 Christian Confession as the universal creed of 
 Christians. Whatever differences of opinion ex- 
 ist or have existed concerning the nature, the 
 official function, or the spiritual mission of the 
 Christ, the Christian Confession has remained 
 the corner-stone of the Christian Church ; and 
 a Christian will no more challenge the Christian 
 Confession that " Jesus is the Christ," than a 
 Mahometan will challenge the Mahometan Con- 
 fession that " there is but one God, and Mahomet 
 is his prophet." 
 
 It is in the first gospel, not the fourth, that Jesus
 
 236 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 says to Peter, on his confessing him to be " the 
 Christ, the Son of the living God," "Blessed 
 art thou, Simon Bar-jona ; for flesh and blood have 
 not revealed it unto thee, but my Father who is in 
 heaven. And I say also unto thee, That thou art 
 Peter, and upon this rock [i. e., your faith in me as 
 the Christ] I will build my church ; and the gates 
 of hell shall not prevail against it." It is in the 
 first gospel, not the fourth, that Jesus replies to 
 the high priest, adjuring him to declare whether 
 he is the Christ, "I am. Moreover I say to 
 you, Henceforth ye will see the Son of Man sit- 
 ting on the right hand of Power, and coining on 
 the clouds of heaven" [Noyes' translation]. It is 
 in the first gospel, not in the fourth, that Jesus ex- 
 plicitly makes the Christian Confession the neces- 
 sary condition of salvation : " Whosoever, there- 
 fore, shall confess me before men, him will I also 
 confess before my Father who is in heaven ; but 
 whosoever shall deny me before men, him will I 
 also deny before my Father who is in heaven." It 
 would be easy to cite scores of passages to the 
 same effect ; but these are amply sufficient. 
 
 In the same spirit, Peter declares, in the book of 
 Acts, that " there is no other name given under 
 heaven whereby men can be saved." In the same 
 spirit, Paul declares to the Galatians, " There be 
 some that trouble you and would pervert the gos- 
 pel of Christ. But though we, or an angel from 
 heaven, preach any other gospel unto you than 
 that which we have preached unto you, let him be
 
 GENIUS OF CHRISTIANITY, ETC. 237 
 
 accursed ; " and to the Romans, " If thou shalt 
 confess with the mouth that Jesus is Lord, and 
 shalt believe in thy heart that God has raised him 
 from the dead, thou shalt be saved ; for with the 
 heart man believeth so as to obtain righteousness, 
 and with the mouth confesseth so as to obtain sal- 
 vation." In the same spirit, John exclaims in his 
 first epistle, " Who is a liar, but he that clenieth 
 that Jesus is the Christ ? Whosoever denieth the 
 Son, the same has, not the Father." And so on. 
 Sayings such as these meet the eye on almost every 
 page of the New Testament ; and so far from be- 
 ing accidental or non-essential, they utter the 
 heart-faith, the inmost spirit of Christianity, as a 
 distinct religion. 
 
 CHRISTIANITY IS DEVELOPED JUDAISM. 
 
 The one grand aim of Jesus was to establish the 
 " kingdom of heaven ; " and this, however univer- 
 salized and spiritualized, was in essence the ancient 
 ideal theocracy, in which the Christ was to be the 
 God-appointed king. From the day when, on the 
 very eve of death, Jesus boldly affirmed before 
 Pilate^ and the high priest his title to the Messi- 
 anic throne, the highest and deepest prayer of his 
 disciples has been that his throne may be estab- 
 lished for ever in the hearts of all mankind. Was 
 it an accident that the new faith took its name, not 
 from the individual Jesus, but from his royal office ? 
 Christianity was the faith of the Christians, and 
 the Christians were those who believed in the
 
 238 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 Christ. Hence the condition of Christian fellow- 
 ship has always been fealty to Jesus as common 
 Lord and Master ; and in this, the organic bond of 
 union in all branches of the Christian Church, the 
 innermost life of Christianity has, by the very law 
 of its being, only expressed itself outwardly in 
 social form. In short, the history of Christianity is 
 simply the history of the Messianic faith, deepened 
 and widened, developed and spiritualized, in the 
 highest possible degree, the history of the vary- 
 ing fortunes which have befallen the attempt of 
 Jesus to found a universal spiritual empire in the 
 hearts of men ; and he will seek in vain to fathom 
 the depths of Christianity who looks elsewhere 
 than to this Messianic faith for the secret of its 
 peculiar religious power. 
 
 Furthermore, unless liberal thinkers cease to 
 philosophize loosely about Christianity and learn 
 to do complete justice to its Messianic or special 
 element, a problem of great importance will remain 
 permanently insoluble. It is only by tracing the 
 course of the Messianic idea back to its fountain- 
 head in the living faith of Judaism, that it becomes 
 possible to discover the natural origin of Christi- 
 anity. If the sources of Christianity reach no 
 further back than to the individual soul of Jesus ; 
 if so mighty a power in the world's history was 
 born of one man's single life, and owed nothing to 
 earlier ancestors ; if no deep unity can be discov- 
 ered between Jesus and the spirit of his age, in 
 virtue of which he became the natural represent-
 
 GENIUS OF CHRISTIANITY, ETC. 239 
 
 ative of humanity in his day and generation, and 
 brought to a living focus the religious forces of his 
 times, then is Christianity indeed a miracle, and 
 Jesus may well have been God. The naturalistic 
 interpretation of Christianity fails utterly, unless 
 it can reveal an adequate cause for its tremendous 
 influence on the course of history. Once admit 
 that a Jewish peasant lifted the whole world up to 
 a higher spiritual level, not by embodying in him- 
 self the best religious life of his era, but by the 
 sheer strength of his own individuality, and I, 
 for one, must perforce admit him to have been 
 Omnipotence in disguise. The incarnation of God 
 would be a less miracle than the upheaval of the 
 planet by a human arm. But if Jesus was a man, 
 and acted under natural human conditions, then 
 his power must have been the power of human- 
 ity ; behind him, beneath him, within him, must 
 have been the spirit of his age, concentrating in 
 his word the vitality of his race. SomeAvhere must 
 he have found a foothold in the profoundest faith 
 of his own nation, or he could not have moved 
 the universal consciousness of man. The secret of 
 success, with every great soul, lies in sympathy 
 with his times, without which his most magnificent 
 utterance perishes on the air. Given, therefore, the 
 humanity of Jesus, it is imperatively necessary to 
 discover the faith which he and his countrymen 
 must have held in common. Where shall we 
 search for this except in that Messianic idea 
 which is the core and heart of his religion?
 
 240 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 Here we find established a vital relation between 
 Jesus and the Hebrew people. The moment we 
 accept the clew here offered, the labyrinth ceases 
 to bewilder, our path is clear. It would be at 
 the same time tedious and pedantic, were I to re- 
 hearse in detail the evidence which has convinced 
 my own mind that Christianity is only a developed 
 Judaism. From the time of the Babylonish Cap- 
 tivity, the narrow theocracy of earlier ages began 
 to develop in Hebrew thought into the dazzling 
 dream of a universal " kingdom of heaven," de- 
 signed to succeed the great empires of antiquity 
 and to embrace in its dominions all the nations 
 of the globe. The so-called Jewish Apocalyptic 
 literature, which sprang up as a transformation of 
 the primitive prophetism, and of which the most 
 important writings are the book of Daniel, the 
 Sibylline oracles, the book of Enoch, and the fourth 
 book of Esdras, enables us to distinguish successive 
 stages in the formation of the Messianic faith. At 
 first an aristocracy of the saints rather than the 
 monarchy of the Messiah, the conception of the 
 " kingdom of heaven " incorporated into itself 
 more and more of the personal element, until this 
 at last came to predominate. Long before the 
 birth of Jesus, the chief features of the Messianic 
 idea as contained in the New Testament were 
 strongly marked, both with regard to the " end of 
 the world " and the " coming of the Son of Man." 
 The same place, Jerusalem ; the same time, the 
 immediate future ; the same symptomatic signs,
 
 GENIUS OF CHRISTIANITY, ETC. 241 
 
 wars and rumors of wars, and the gathering of 
 Gentile armies against Jerusalem ; the same com- 
 ing of the Messiah with his angels on the clouds of 
 heaven ; the same solemn Judgment, with the Son 
 of Man on the throne of his glory and all nations 
 before his tribunal ; the same sentences to the 
 wicked and the righteous; the same resurrection 
 of the dead from Hades ; the same passing away 
 of the old earth and appearance of the new ; all 
 these, and more, were definite Messianic beliefs in 
 the century before Jesus. Nor this alone. The 
 " kingdom of heaven," as conceived in the later 
 of these Apocalyptic writings, was highly spiritual 
 in its character, bringing at once happiness and 
 holiness to all mankind. The " kingdom of 
 heaven " was to ultimate in a universal brother- 
 hood of man, an era of universal peace and right- 
 eousness, introduced through universal submission 
 to the Hebrew Messiah or Christ. Every generous 
 aspiration for spiritual perfection and the welfare 
 of humanity thus found its satisfaction in the vision 
 of Messianic redemption to the chosen people of 
 God. 
 
 THE EDUCATION AND CAREER OF JESUS. 
 
 Into this circle of ideas and national aspirations 
 Jesus was born ; and were they not also his own ? 
 They were the very atmosphere he breathed; they 
 filled his soul from the earliest days of childhood. 
 The gospels represent him as not wholly illiterate, 
 being able at least to read. He undoubtedly was 
 
 16
 
 242 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 ignorant of Greek, which even at Jerusalem was 
 but little known and regarded as dangerous in its 
 tendencies ; and there is no trace in the gospel 
 narratives of the influence of the Hellenic culture 
 upon his mind. The study of the Mosaic Law 
 was alone considered reputable and safe by de- 
 vout Jews. The Rabbi Hillel, however, who fifty 
 years before Jesus anticipated his Golden Rule and 
 others of his finest sayings, in all probability ex- 
 erted a deep influence upon his development. It 
 is evident from the evangelists that Jesus had ear- 
 nestly pondered the Old Testament, especially 
 Isaiah and the book of Daniel, perhaps the book 
 of Enoch also, and other Apocalyptic writings. 
 " The advent of the Messiah," says Renan, " with 
 his glories and his terrors, the nations dashing one 
 against another, the cataclysm of heaven and earth, 
 were the familiar food of his imagination ; and as 
 these revolutions were thought to be at hand, so 
 that a multitude of people were seeking to com- 
 pute their times, the supernatural order of things 
 into which such visions transport us appeared to 
 him from the first perfectly natural." The con- 
 ception of universal and invariable laws of nature 
 which had been developed to a considerable degree 
 in the Greek mind by the philosophy of Epicurus, 
 and which, nearly a century before the birth of 
 Jesus, had been admirably stated by Lucretius in 
 his great poem on " The Nature of Things," was 
 utterly foreign to the thought of Jesus and his 
 countrymen, who believed in the habitual agency
 
 GENIUS OF CHRISTIANITY, ETC. 243 
 
 of demons and evil spirits, and had unwavering 
 faith in miracles. The great idea of Jesus, the 
 immediate advent of the " kingdom of heaven," 
 was also the dominant idea of his times ; but, 
 various attempts to realize it by political means 
 having ended in utter failure, especially that of 
 Judas the Gaulonite or Galilean, he early perceived 
 the folly of military Messianism, and relied implic- 
 itly on the establishment of his Messianic throne 
 by the miraculous display of the divine power. 
 Thus was Jesus educated by his age. 
 
 Repelled though he was by the vulgar concep- 
 tion of the Christ as a mere warlike prince, the 
 idea of spiritual supremacy through the religious 
 reformation of his people struck a responsive chord 
 in his soul. His deep nature was thrilled and 
 kindled by his country's hope, and with intense 
 earnestness must he have asked himself, " Can I 
 fulfil it ? Am I the Called, the Anointed of God? " 
 The consciousness of his wonderful religious gen- 
 ius, fertilized and developed by the spirit of his 
 age, fanned the wish into a prayer, and the prayer 
 iirto a conviction, and the conviction into an en- 
 thusiasm, and the enthusiasm into a calm and 
 omnipotent faith, that he was indeed the Mes- 
 siah, singled out from all eternity by the will of 
 God, foretold by prophets and kings, and awaited 
 for weary centuries by humanity in tears. Impos- 
 sible as it is for the cool intellect of the West to 
 comprehend the mystic fervor, the religious inten- 
 sity of the Semitic race, it is yet evident that
 
 244 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 Jesus acquired faith in his Messianic destiny by 
 an inward experience analogous to that which 
 convinced the prophets of their divine missions. 
 Fathom it or analyze it we cannot ; but we can 
 yet perceive that the phenomenon of Hebrew 
 prophetism, with its sublime identification of im- 
 passioned thought with the direct mandate of 
 God, repeats itself in the history of the young 
 Galilean carpenter. It is a fact to be studied, 
 not to be denied. 
 
 Let no one meet me here with the bigot's worn- 
 out dilemma " If Jesus was not in reality the 
 Messiah lie claimed to be, he was either a madman 
 or an impostor ! " Was John Brown a madman or 
 an impostor, when he aspired to be the redeemer 
 of an enslaved race? The moral sublimity of such 
 an aim is not to be measured by the six-inch rule 
 of vulgar souls, but by the astronomic spaces of 
 the heavens above. There is a madness that is 
 more than sanity, a veritable inspiration to dare 
 the impossible, and by bloody failure to achieve a 
 somewhat greater than " success." The hero is 
 always a fool in the eyes of him who counts the 
 cost. If it be madness to obey the enthusiasm 
 of ideas without stopping to count the cost, God 
 grant us all the wisdom to go mad ! Such mad- 
 ness is the glory of humanity. The insane man is 
 he whose thought fatally contradicts his surround- 
 ings; but he who comprehends the profoundest, 
 though it may be the unconscious, movement of 
 his age, and carries its underlying ideas into fuller
 
 GENIUS OF CHRISTIANITY, ETC. 245 
 
 and higher development, this man, I say, is the 
 sanest of the sane. To his contemporaries, the 
 idealist is always crazy ; to posterity, he appears 
 as the only practical man of his times, the guide 
 of his generation in the pathway of progress. In 
 the soul of Jesus, the great aspiration of the He- 
 brew race became purified from its alloys, and 
 stamped for ever with the impress of his superior 
 spirit. But, being essentially Hebrew still, it is 
 incapable of expansion into the aspiration of uni- 
 versal humanity ; and Jesus, though endowed with 
 that sanity of genius which is madness in the eyes 
 of mediocrity, is no longer in the van. 
 
 To him, however, who, hi face of sincerity like 
 that of Jesus, ventures to whisper the word impost- 
 ure, I will not do insult to my own reverence for 
 human greatness by addressing any defence of 
 Jesus from such a charge. It should blister the 
 mouth that makes it. Enough for me that in the 
 privacy of his own self-communings Jesus believed 
 he heard the summons to a work of unparal- 
 leled sublimity, that he valued not his blood in 
 comparison with obedience, that he claimed the 
 Messianic diadem with death for its Koh-i-noor. 
 Surely, the suspicion of duplicity as the root of 
 such vast historic influence betrays in the suspecter 
 a disgraceful faith in the power of knavery. 
 
 The transcendent greatness of Jesus appeared in 
 this, that the popular hope of a Priest-King ruling 
 by the sword transformed itself in his musing soul 
 into the sublime idea of a spiritual Christ ruling by
 
 246 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 love, that he sought to establish the " kingdom 
 of heaven," not over the bodies, but deep in the 
 hearts, of men. So pure and piercing was his 
 spiritual insight, that, once possessed with the 
 Messianic idea, he entered into the best that was 
 in it, and forgot the rest ; seized on the elder and 
 diviner meaning of the prophets, and cast away as 
 rubbish the popular selfishness with which this was 
 overlaid. Believing himself to be the Anointed 
 of God, he aspired to become, not merely king of 
 the Jewish theocracy after its miraculous restora- 
 tion by God at the great " day of judgment," but 
 also king of the very heart of regenerated human- 
 ity. I would fain put upon this ambition the 
 noblest possible construction ; for, so far from 
 wishing to make out a case against him, I am only 
 anxious to do him exact justice, and penetrate the 
 spirit of the faith which he bequeathed to man- 
 kind. To become the object of human imitation 
 and the quickening ideal of human aspiration, to 
 be the One Way to purity and love and peace, 
 to reign in men's souls, as the sun reigns in the 
 solar system, by developing the seeds of all good- 
 ness and beauty ; this, and no selfish empire, was 
 the ambition of Jesus. He aimed to be Lord and 
 King by drawing all men to God, and thus to 
 make himself the grea^; centre of the world's divin- 
 est life. To reconcile his supreme self-emphasis 
 with his supreme self-sacrifice, is the great per- 
 plexing problem, of the gospels. The doct rine of 
 his Deity, which is the orthodox solution, is not a
 
 GENIUS OF CHRISTIANITY, ETC. 247 
 
 possible one to humanitarian thinkers. Where 
 shall we find another ? 
 
 THE ORIGINALITY OF JESUS. 
 
 On the one hand, the claim of Jesus to the Mes- 
 sianic crown did not grow out of a vulgar lust of 
 power, but out of a profound faith that it was 
 God's will that he should wear it. Belief in the 
 " divine right of kings " was universal in the Jew- 
 ish world, and Jesus fully shared it. How it 
 happened that he first ^became convinced of his 
 own divine election to the throne of the " kingdom 
 of heaven," will never, I think, be explained ; that 
 is a secret, buried with him. But that he did 
 become convinced of it, and that this profound 
 conviction, rather than any desire of personal ag- 
 grandizement, was the root of his Messianic claim, 
 seems to me the simple verdict of justice. His 
 self-emphasis, therefore, was the necessary product 
 of his education, his spiritual experience, and his 
 faith in God ; and in the necessity of this connec- 
 tion between cause and effect lies his defence 
 against the charge of overweening and selfish 
 egotism. But there was nothing original in this 
 conviction of a special Divine mission ; every 
 founder of a religion shares it. The true origi- 
 nality of Jesus lies, I conceive, in the means he 
 adopted to accomplish his end and realize his am- 
 bition. Here he stands alone. Strange as it may 
 seem, he aimed to win absolute power by abso- 
 lutely renouncing it. This is the identification of
 
 248 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 contradictories, the very Hegelianism of con- 
 science. With a new conception of what consti- 
 tutes true royalty of soul, he sought to earn his 
 kingship by the more than regal majesty of his 
 service. The "great Masters" have been rare in- 
 deed ; yet how much rarer have been the great 
 Servants ! It is the grandest and most original 
 trait in Jesus' character, that he sought to realize 
 his supreme Mastership through a supreme Ser- 
 vantship. Here lies the reconciliation of his self- 
 emphasis and self-renunci,ation. Here also I find 
 the secret of his wonderful success in subduing 
 souls to his sway. He would govern, yet through 
 love ; he would secure absolute allegiance, yet 
 bind men to it by the spontaneous outgush of their 
 own gratitude ; he would wear a crown, yet bow 
 his head to receive it from the hands of subjects 
 burning with eagerness to place it there. Thus, 
 and thus alone, he aspired to reign, the welcome 
 Sovereign of every human soul. 
 
 What astounding, yet sublime, audacity ! How 
 mean, compared with this, the ambitions of Alex- 
 anders and Caesars and Napoleons I How brutal 
 is the ambition that relies on force, compared with 
 the ambition that relies on love I Yet, because it 
 involved his own elevation to a throne, albeit a 
 spiritual throne, his ambition was ambition still, 
 the "last infirmity" of a most noble mind. It 
 precluded the possibility of self-forgetfulness in 
 service, of that supreme modesty which teaches 
 that the value of the grandest soul is not personal,
 
 GENIUS OF CHRISTIANITY, ETC. 249 
 
 but inheres in the universal humanity it contains 
 and the universal ideas it represents. There is but 
 one ambition sublimer than to REIGN BY SERV- 
 ING, and that is, to SERVE WITHOUT REIGNING. 
 I cannot shut my eyes to the nobler purpose ; I 
 cannot forget that Socrates both lived and died to 
 make it real. 
 
 THE RADICAL DEFECT OF CHRISTIANITY. 
 
 In vain is all the modern noise and bustle about 
 a " Liberal " Christianity. Christianity is based 
 on forge tfulness of liberty ; the love of perfect 
 freedom is not in it. Spiritual servitude is its 
 corner-stone, none the less hurtful, if voluntary. 
 Many a slave has loved his chains. Interpret as 
 loosely as you may the Lordship which Jesus 
 claimed, it is no Lordship at all, if it leaves the 
 soul supreme Lord over itself. Run down the 
 scale from slavish imitation to simple deference, 
 it avails nought ; there is no spiritual freedom but 
 in reverence for the still, small voice within the 
 soul as supreme above all other voices. This made 
 the greatness of Jesus himself; would that he had 
 fostered it in his disciples ! Yet no ! Even the 
 mistakes of lofty spirits help on the great cause of 
 human development; and, mistaken as was the 
 Messianic ambition of Jesus, the world's debt is 
 immense to this magnificent mistake. Mankind 
 were not yet ripe for self-government in spiritual 
 freedom, are not wholly ripe for it to-day, will 
 not be wholly ripe for it this many a long year. The
 
 250 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 overpowering influence of a spiritual King whose 
 law was love met the worlds wants as the freedom 
 of self-government could not then have done ; and 
 thus the gospel of authority accomplished a work 
 not yet possible to the modern gospel of spiritual 
 liberty. The grave responsibilities of independence 
 befit only the ripe maturity of the soul. 
 
 Whether we consider Christianity with regard 
 to its essence, its origin, or its history, we are thus 
 led to one and the same conclusion, that its fun- 
 damental characteristic as a distinct religion is its 
 faith in Jesus as the Christ. Faith in a Christ or 
 Messiah as " the coming man " had become, long 
 prior to the birth of Jesus, an integral part of 
 Hebrew monotheism ; and Christianity, historically 
 considered, is only the complete development of 
 Judaism into its highest possibilities. " In its 
 earliest aspect," s&ys Martineau, "Christianity 
 was no new or universal religion ; Judaism had 
 found the person of its Messiah, but else remained 
 the same." All of high truth jand spiritual power 
 that are compatible with the Messianic idea, Jesus, 
 I believe, put into it, when he made it the corner- 
 stone of his religion. The Christian Church has 
 expressed outwardly the genuine character of 
 Messianism, and realized, both in their best and in 
 their worst directions, its necessary historical ten- 
 dencies. Gradually developing until the Papacy 
 reached the zenith of its prosperity, and gradually 
 decaying from that day to this, Christianity be- 
 comes daily more and more discordant with modern
 
 GENIUS OF CHRISTIANITY, ETC. 251 
 
 civilization and modern religion; and those sects 
 that dream of adapting it to modern life are un- 
 consciously officiating at its funeral. Construe it 
 as largely or as loosely as you please, Christianity, 
 as a great historical and spiritual power, will 
 nevertheless remain religion within the limits of the 
 Messianic idea. Idealize or transcendentalize the 
 Christ as highly as you may, his practical power is 
 gone the moment you make him aught less than a 
 person. It is the vitality of Jesus that has made, 
 and still makes, the vitality of his religion. Pass 
 beyond the circle of its supreme influence, arid, 
 whether you know it or not, you have passed out- 
 side of Christianity. Detach Christianity wholly 
 from the person of Jesus, and you destroy all 
 meaning in the Christian name by destroying the 
 historic root from which it sprang. The Christian 
 Confession remains the boundary line which no 
 Christian can overstep. 
 
 However some may yearn, having lost all faith 
 in the Messianic idea, to retain nevertheless the 
 Christian name, whether from love for its vener- 
 able associations or from reluctance to bear the 
 odium of its distinct rejection. I believe that the 
 proprieties of language and increasing perception 
 of what consistency requires will slowly wean 
 them from this desire. The world at large can 
 never be made to understand what is meant by a 
 Christian who in no sense has faith in the Christ. 
 If Jesus really claimed to be the Christ, if he 
 made this claim the basis of the Christian religion,
 
 252 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 and if through this claim he still infuses into his 
 Church all its Christian life, then the world is 
 right, and may well marvel at a Christianity that 
 denies the Lord, yet wears his livery. For myself, 
 I cannot evade the practical consequences of my 
 thought. The central doctrine of Christianity is 
 for me no longer true ; its essential spirit and 
 faith are no longer the highest or 'the best ; and 
 with the reality, I resign the name. Far be it 
 from me to do this in levity or mockery or de- 
 fiance ! Far be it from me to turn my back in 
 scorn on my own most hallowed experiences in the 
 past ! Once I felt the full power of the Christian 
 faith ; now I cleave to a faith diviner still. If I 
 am in fatal error, and rush madly into the woes 
 denounced against the Anti-Christ, even so must 
 it be ; but come what may, let me never plunge 
 into the deeper damnation of moral faithlessness, 
 or make my heart the coffin of a murdered truth ! 
 
 THE HIGHER FAITH. 
 
 If, then, there is a higher faith than Christianity, 
 he who shall cherish it is bound to make known 
 what it is, and how it is higher than Christianity. 
 Bear with me while I endeavor to discharge this 
 duty. It is no easy thing to do. Free Religion, 
 the higher faith I hold, has no history, save the 
 history of the human spirit, striving to work out 
 its destiny in freedom. It is spiritual, not histori- 
 cal, universal, not special, inward, not out- 
 ward. It has no list of doctrines to teach, no
 
 GENIUS OF CHRISTIANITY, ETC. 253 
 
 Church to extend, no rites to perform, no Bible to 
 expound, no Christ to obey. With none of these 
 things, it is the soul's deep resolve to love the 
 truth, to learn the truth, and to live the truth, un- 
 coerc^d and free. It is Intellect daring to think, 
 unawed by public opinion. It is Conscience dar- 
 ing to assert a higher law, in face of a corrupted 
 society and a conforming church. It is Will set- 
 ting at naught the world's tyrannies, and putting 
 into action the private whispers of the still, small 
 voice. It is Heart resting in the universal and 
 changeless Law as eternal and transcendent Love. 
 It is the soul of man asserting its own superiority 
 to all its own creations, burning with deep devo- 
 tion to the true and just and pure, and identifying 
 its every wish with the perfect order of the uni- 
 verse. It is neither affirmation nor negation of 
 the established, but rather a deep consciousness 
 that all the established is inferior to that which 
 has established it. It is the spirit of self-conscious 
 freedom, aiming evermore at the best, and trusting 
 itself as the architect of character. In fine, it is 
 that sense of spiritual unity with boundless Being 
 which fills the soul with reverence for human nat- 
 ure, and disables it from worshipping aught but 
 the formless, indwelling, and omnipresent One. 
 
 But the difference between Christianity and 
 Free Religion will best be made evident by a direct 
 comparison between the two, with respect to their 
 leading characteristics. This will show that by 
 the intrinsic truth or falsity of the Christian Con-
 
 254 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 fession, that " Jesus of Nazareth is the Christ of 
 God," Christianity must stand or fall. Let the 
 issue be met fairly and squarely. The heart of 
 the great controversy which is now shaking the 
 world to its profoundest depths can be found 
 nowhere, in the last analysis, but in this question 
 of the truth or falsity of the Christian Confession. 
 Here lies the battle-ground between freedom and 
 authority, the vast Christian Church and the spirit 
 of the nineteenth century, the great historical faith 
 of the Old World and the genius of American 
 liberty, in one word, between Christianity and 
 Free Religion. The time has come to see and to 
 say that the Christian Confession is not a truth. 
 Jesus was not the "Christ of God" The " Christ" 
 prophesied and longed for has never come, and will 
 
 never come. The office and function is a mvthical, 
 
 j t ' 
 
 an impossible one. No individual man has ever 
 stood, or can ever stand, in the relation of Lord, 
 King, and Saviour to the whole world. It would 
 be an infinite usurpation for any man to occupy 
 that office, either in a temporal or spiritual sense. 
 A comparison between the Christian idea as it has 
 always been and must ever remain, on the one 
 hand, and the ideas which are now asserting em- 
 inent domain over the development of humanity, 
 on the other hand, will show that this issue be- 
 tween Christianity and Free Religion is an abso- 
 lute and irreconcilable one, and that the former is 
 doomed by the very nature of things to fade away 
 and make room for the latter.
 
 GENIUS OF CHRISTIANITY, ETC. 255 
 
 THE TWO COKNER-STONES. 
 
 The corner-stone of Christianity is the Christ 
 himself, believed to have actually come in the flesh 
 as the Divinely appointed Saviour of the world, 
 the one " Life, Truth, and Way." His mission 
 is unique, not to be accounted for by historical 
 causes, but only by a special miraculous influx of 
 Divine Power into the course of history. How- 
 ever this conception is refined and subtilized by 
 the more thoughtful minds in the Christian Church, 
 Jesus remains still, in the religion it teaches, the 
 one Vine of which all his followers are merely 
 branches. 
 
 But the corner-stone of Free Religion is the 
 universal soul of man, the common nature of 
 humanity, as the source and origin of the world's 
 religious life. Out of this have sprung, in accord- 
 ance with unchanging spiritual laws, all churches, 
 faiths, and religions. Nothing less than the entire 
 history of humanity can reveal all its possibilities ; 
 and through its own inherent possibilities alone 
 can the world ever be " saved'' from its own mis- 
 eries and imperfections. The spontaneous energies 
 of human nature, which is the great fountain-head 
 of all history, all civilization, all religion, are the 
 power of God gushing up and revealing in each 
 soul afresh the Infinite Life that fills all space and 
 time. It is faith in these human yet divine spon- 
 taneities, wherever and whenever and however 
 manifested, that inspires the free soul to its high-
 
 256 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 est life, and bids it realize its own inborn ideal as 
 the consummation of its noblest possibilities. Faith 
 in the individual Jesus, faith in universal human 
 nature : these are the two corner-stones. 
 
 THE TWO FELLOWSHIPS. 
 
 As is the basis of faith, so is the fellowship built 
 upon it. The Christian fellowship is as wide as 
 all Christians, but no wider. Those are Chris- 
 tian brethren who acknowledge the same common 
 Lord, and thus drink at the same general foun- 
 tain of Christian life. It was their love for each 
 other that made the ancients marvel at the early 
 Christians ; and they who forget this limitation of 
 their love fail to understand the spirit of the prim- 
 itive Church as impressed on the New Testament. 
 From that day to this, the same limitation of fel- 
 lowship has existed ; and so long as the Christian 
 Church continues to survive, its organic bond of 
 union must still be the original Christian Con- 
 fession. 
 
 But the fellowship of Free Religion is as wide 
 as humanity itself. All who are born of woman 
 are brothers and peers in virtue of their common 
 nature. There is no right of spiritual primogen- 
 iture, no monopoly of inspiration, no precedence 
 of creed ; all men are but seekers after truth, and 
 despite all pretensions and delusions they reach it 
 only by using the natural faculties of the mind. 
 The impartial God sends his sunshine and his rain
 
 GENIUS OF CHRISTIANITY, ETC. 257 
 
 to all. There is no privileged or commissioned 
 interpreter of Divine oracles. 
 
 " Now there bubbled beside them, where they stood, 
 A fountain of waters sweet and good ; 
 The youth to the streamlet's brink drew near, 
 Saying, ' Ambrose, thou maker of creeds, look here 1 ' 
 Six vases of crystal then he took, 
 And set them along the edge of the brook. 
 
 " ' As into these vases the water I pour, 
 There shall one hold less, another more, 
 And the water unchanged in every case 
 Shall put on the figure of the vase : 
 O thou who wouldst unity make through strife, 
 Canst thou fit this sign to the Water of Life ? ' " 
 
 These beautiful lines of our own American poet 
 breathe the true spirit of Free Religion, a deep 
 humility in the presence of infinite truth which 
 forbids any one to despise another's earnest faith. 
 How all dogmatic arrogance fades away, when 
 reverence for our own souls begets an equal rev- 
 erence for the souls of others ! It is out of this 
 profound sentiment of human equality in respect 
 to all spiritual privileges that a profound regard 
 for all other human equalities is born, nor do I see 
 how it can have any other origin. Yet in the con- 
 scious equality of all human rights, whether before 
 God or man, must be found the seed of all univer- 
 sal brotherhood that deserves the name. These, 
 then, are the two contrasted fellowships, the 
 brotherhood of the Christian Church limited by 
 the Christian Confession, the great brotherhood of 
 man without limit or bound. 
 
 17
 
 258 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 THE TWO SOCIAL IDEALS. 
 
 A similar contrast meets us in the social ideals 
 held up as the great end of collective human ac- 
 tivity. The supreme object of the Christian 
 Church is to christianize the world, and thus secure 
 the salvation of ali in the world to come. That is, 
 its efforts are all directed to the one aim of bringing 
 all men within its fold, of making its brotherhood 
 universal on the basis of the Christian Confession, 
 of absorbing the world into itself, and thus includ- 
 ing all men under the sceptre of its Lord. In the 
 prime of its glory the mediaeval Papacy went far 
 towards accomplishing this object ; and, although 
 now the Christian Church is shattered into frag- 
 ments, each separate piece or "sect" endeavors to 
 accomplish it anew. "Church Extension" is the 
 primary aim of all denominations as such, the 
 evidence and measure of all denominational life. 
 To evangelize or christianize the world is the ideal 
 end of all Christian activity of a social kind ; and 
 this means to make conterminous with the globe 
 that "kingdom of heaven" in which the Christ is 
 the Divinely appointed king. 
 
 But the supreme object of Free Religion is to 
 humanize the world. That is, it aims to liberate, 
 to educate, to spiritualize, in one word, to develop 
 the race. To bring out of man the best that is in 
 him, the best in thought, in feeling and senti- 
 ment, in moral action, in social, political, and 
 religious life, this is the work it proposes.
 
 GENIUS OF CHRISTIANITY, ETC. 259 
 
 Whatever inward or outward conditions favor 
 this symmetrical development of human nature, 
 it strives unceasingly to secure ; and thus all high 
 philanthropies and all generous reforms and all 
 noble endeavors to ameliorate society grow out of 
 the essential purpose and dominant idea of Free 
 Religion. Man does not need t % o be christianized : 
 he does need to be humanized. While thus the 
 social ideal of the Christian Church is that of a 
 " kingdom of heaven " on earth with the Christ for 
 its king, the social ideal of Free Religion is that of 
 a Commonwealth of Man, in which there is neither 
 king nor lord, but all are free and equal citizens. 
 
 THE TWO SPIRITUAL IDEALS. 
 
 A profounder contrast still exists between the 
 two spiritual ideals held up to the private soul. 
 The highest possible exhortation of Christianity 
 is "Be like Christ;" its highest eulogy is to 
 say "He is Christlike." By rigid self-examina- 
 tion and laborious imitation to model the character 
 after the pattern set by the " Great Exemplar," is 
 the crowning achievement of the Christian saint. 
 The little work of Thomas a Kempis, called the 
 " Imitation of Christ," which is said to have passed 
 through more editions than any other book except 
 the Bible alone, is chiefly a devoutly passionate 
 outpouring of the Christian aspiration to attain 
 the character of Jesus. Suppression of the stub- 
 born individuality and complete reproduction of 
 the Master's likeness is the spiritual ideal of the
 
 260 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 Christian mystic ; and the heroes of Christian his- 
 tory are precisely those who, like Fenelon or St. 
 Francis of Assisi, are supposed to have most suc- 
 cessfully imitated it. 
 
 But the highest exhortation of Free Religion is 
 "Be thyself;" its highest praise "He was 
 true to himself, and therefore true to humanity 
 and to God." It recognizes no absolute ideal in 
 Jesus ; it perceives that, even were it possible 
 (which it is not), the successful imitation of Jesus 
 by all mankind would extinguish individuality, 
 make original and independent character impos- 
 sible, and destroy the very roots of all civilization. 
 It proclaims the servility, nay, the utter irreligion, 
 of spiritual imitation. Tho character of Jesus ex- 
 hibits but one out of an infinite number of spir- 
 itual types, and could be an ideal to no one but 
 himself, even supposing that he had made his own 
 ideal identical with his own real. The law of 
 endless variety in natural temperaments and or- 
 ganizations, and in the relative strength of ele- 
 mentary faculties, involves another law of endless 
 variety in individual ideals. A single absolute 
 ideal for all mankind would be an appalling curse, 
 if it were possible to hold all to it. Each soul 
 must have its own ideal according to the balance 
 of its natural capacities and powers, the nature of 
 its surroundings and conditions in the world, and 
 the quantity and quality of its being ; and as the 
 soul grows in attainment, so must its ideal ever- 
 more enlarge. It is supremely mischievous to be
 
 GENIUS OF CHRISTIANITY, ETC. 261 
 
 a copyist in character. Facsimiles of Jesus are 
 impossible ; good imitations of him are excessively 
 ^rare ; caricatures of him are plentiful. The ideal 
 of another, like a die stolen from the mint, can at 
 the best make me only a counterfeit. Hence the 
 highest maxim in this matter is simply this : " Be 
 true to yourself." Thus, while the spiritual ideal 
 of Christianity is to sacrifice all individuality in the 
 reproduction of the character of Jesus, the spir- 
 itual ideal of Free Religion is to develop the in- 
 dividuality of each soul in the highest, fullest, and 
 most independent manner possible. 
 
 THE TWO ESSENTIAL SPIRITS. 
 
 But the profoundest contrast of all lies in the 
 fundamental unlikeness of spirit and tone. The 
 spirit of Christianity, as manifested in the chief 
 saints of Christian history, has always been on the 
 one hand that of self-abnegation, self-distrust, self- 
 contempt, and on the other hand that of utter 
 spiritual prostration before Jesus and utter sub- 
 mission to his authoritative will. To be absolutely 
 obedient to the Christ, and to find this obedience 
 made easy by a divine passion of love for his per- 
 son and his character, has always been and must 
 always be the governing, secret aspiration of every 
 Christian heart. Whether believed to be the incar- 
 nate God or simply the one Divinely ordained Way 
 to God, the supreme motive to holy living has 
 always been, in the deeply devout Christian, ab- 
 sorbing love for his Saviour ; and this love always
 
 262 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 tends to produce the suppression of the free self, 
 the paralysis and humiliation of the individual will, 
 in order that the will of the Master may be accom- 
 plished in heart and life. Meekness, patience, 
 submission, resignation, passivity, absence of self- 
 will, complete surrender of the whole soul to a will 
 outside of itself, these are the especial graces 
 and virtues of the Christian character, and deter- 
 mine the type of the " Christian spirit." 
 
 But the spirit of Free Religion is fundamentally 
 different. The same self-consecration to God which 
 in the Christian soul produces self-surrender and 
 self-humiliation, produces in the free soul self- 
 reliance and self-respect. God in Christ is God 
 outside of self, and devotion to him must be self- 
 suppression. But God in Humanity is God in every 
 soul ; and devotion to him becomes the putting 
 forth of every energy to attain freely the individ- 
 ual ideal. The spirit of Free Religion, as the name 
 imports, is the spirit of freedom, of manly and 
 womanly self-respect, of deep religious trust in 
 human nature ; and because its faith in self is at 
 bottom faith in the divineness of universal Nature, 
 it is the perfect blending of sturdy self-reliance 
 with noble humanity and devout repose in God. 
 
 THE SUMMARY. 
 
 Thus from a thoughtful and independent com- 
 parison of the great faith of the past and the 
 greater faith of the present, it becomes clear, I 
 think, that there is a deep spiritual antagonism
 
 GENIUS OF CHRISTIANITY, ETC. 263 
 
 between them. The one must wane as the other 
 waxes. The one must die that the other may 
 live. God in Christ is the spiritual centre of 
 Christianity ; hence in Christ himself must Chris- 
 tianity ever have its basis and corner-stone, -7- in 
 the Christian Confession it must ever have its bond 
 and limit of fellowship, in the universal exten- 
 sion of the Christian Church it must ever have its 
 social ideal, in the imitation of Jesus it must ever 
 have its spiritual ideal, in the suppression of self 
 and utter submission to the will of Jesus it must 
 ever manifest its essential spirit. But G-od in Human- 
 ity is the spiritual and central faith of Free Religion ; 
 which has thus its corner-stone in universal human 
 nature, its fellowship in the great brotherhood of 
 man, its social ideal in a free republican common- 
 wealth, its spiritual ideal in the highest develop- 
 ment of each individual soul, its essential spirit in 
 a self-respect which is at once profound reverence 
 for human nature and profound repose in univer- 
 sal Nature. 
 
 Am I riot right in calling this the higher and 
 diviner faith, the faith of manhood as contrasted 
 with that of childhood ? I recognize the great 
 services rendered to man by the Christian Church ; 
 I appreciate the peculiar beauty of the Christian 
 character ; I know the mighty power of the Chris- 
 tian spirit. But I cannot conceal from myself that 
 Christianity is not adapted to the present as it has 
 been to the past, and that a deeper, broader, and 
 higher faith is to-day silently entering the heart of
 
 264 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 humanity. If, out of all the sayings attributed to 
 Jesus in the New Testament, I were asked to 
 select that one which most profoundly utters the 
 spirit of his religion, I should select these beau- 
 tiful, gracious, and tender words : 
 
 " Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy- 
 laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke 
 upon you, and learn of me ; for I am meek and 
 lowly of heart; and ye shall find rest unto your 
 souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is 
 light." 
 
 How many aching hearts and wounded spirits 
 have taken upon them the easy yoke of Jesus, 
 and found the promised rest! And how many 
 more will find repose and peace in the same gentle 
 bondage ! If the free spirit could indeed wear a 
 yoke, if it could indeed purchase rest on such 
 terms without abjuring that spiritual independence 
 which is its very life and breath, then might it 
 wear the yoke of Jesus. Once I rejoiced to wear 
 it ; but I can wear it no longer. The rest I 
 need comes no longer from spiritual servitude, but 
 must be sought and found in the manly exercise of 
 spiritual freedom. It is to those Avho feel this 
 Anglo-Saxon instinct of liberty stirring in their 
 hearts that my words are addressed, not to those 
 who feel no galling pressure from the easy yoke. 
 My duty is discharged ; my task is done ; and, as 
 I have freely spoken, so do you freely judge my 
 words.
 
 THE SOUL OF PROTESTANTISM. 265 
 
 THE SOUL OF PROTESTANTISM. 
 BY O. B. FROTHISTGHAM. 
 
 subject of this lecture is " The Soul of 
 -* Protestantism ; " by which is meant the es- 
 sence of Protestantism, its cardinal idea and prin- 
 ciple. This is not so simple a thing to get at as 
 people commonly imagine. They who think they 
 have it fast locked up in the phrases, " an open 
 Bible," "freedom of conscience," "liberty of pri- 
 vate judgment," " spiritual emancipation," or other 
 popular motto, are gravely mistaken. Such will 
 probably be surprised to learn that some of the 
 deepest scholars and hardest thinkers of Germany, 
 where the Protestant Reformation began, where its 
 genius was native, and its spirit should be most 
 easily caught, have written bulky books to show 
 what the soul of Protestantism was, and so little 
 agree in their descriptions of it that their chief 
 strength is expended in correcting, criticising, and 
 refuting one another. A glance at three or four 
 learned articles by first-rate men, in the " Theolo- 
 gische Jahrbiicher," will satisfy the incredulous 
 of the extreme difficulty of saying precisely what 
 Protestantism was or is. 
 
 Men protested long before Martin Luther ; but 
 Protestantism, as a solid movement in Christendom,
 
 266 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 began with him. It was no new thing for the 
 Church of Rome to be assailed. Malcontents had 
 had their fling at her for two hundred years and 
 more. Wycliffe in England, Huss and Jerome in 
 Bohemia, Savonarola in Italy, had said their say, 
 paid dearly for the luxury, to be sure, but spoken, 
 nevertheless, and been heard. Eminent men in 
 Catholic universities had dealt hard blows at the 
 papacy. The Church was used to complaint, fault- 
 finding, and opposition from her children. She felt 
 secure and good-natured, and let the malcontents 
 wrangle on and devour one another. The great 
 popes sat securely on their throne, suspecting no 
 new danger. The patient old world was wonted 
 to their ways. The cavillers had said their worst, 
 and, as for doing any thing, the power was not in 
 their hands. The elegant Leo X. accepted from 
 the mighty Julius II. the duty of rebuilding St. 
 Peters church. Michael Angelo laid before him 
 his plan of hanging the dome of the Pantheon 
 three hundred feet hi the air, and filling in the 
 space between the dome and the earth with an 
 architecture that should do justice to the concep- 
 tions of his colossal brain. The imagination of 
 Leo was enchanted, but his exchequer was low. 
 Angelo. was not a cheap builder. Good architect- 
 ure was never cheap. He planned for no earthly 
 monarch, but for the Vicar of Christ, who was sup- 
 posed to have at command the treasures of invisi- 
 ble kingdoms. For such building even the Pope 
 was poor ; the Roman State was poor. The rights
 
 THE SOUL OF PROTESTANTISM. 267 
 
 to the Church in France had been sold to Francis 
 I., but the price paid by a king for a national 
 church left but a scanty allowance for the celestial 
 design. Thirty new cardinals were created, each 
 at a handsome sum. Still the treasury of holiness 
 was empty. The terrestrial sources of revenue 
 being exhausted, the celestial remained. Tetzel, a 
 Dominican monk, was commissioned to offer seats 
 in paradise to the highest bidder. With boundless 
 impudence, partly constitutional, partly official, 
 and partly the result of confidence in the bottom- 
 less credulity of the German people, he offered his 
 goods openly in churches, public squares and tav- 
 erns, with huge parade. The market was fair, 
 and for a time a smart traffic went on to the great 
 content of the Dominican order, which pocketed a 
 handsome commission, and to the rapid accumu- 
 lation of Peter's pence. But as the goods became 
 shop-worn, the tradesman had to fall back on his 
 eloquence, which was of the auctioneer's quality, 
 not refined; he insinuated, he ranted, he cried up 
 his wares in the most approved style of the auction 
 block, peppered and sugared his lies, drew on his 
 fancy for inducements, threw sulphur and turpen- 
 tine at discretion into the furnaces, burnished up 
 his tarnished images of felicity, increased the num- 
 ber of penalties to be compounded for, swelled the 
 list of sins to a ruinous dimension, multiplied the 
 candidates for perdition, caught people figuratively 
 by the hair of the head, held them over the pit, 
 and, when they writhed and screamed in terror,
 
 268 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 quietly remarked, " Well, the door of escape is 
 open ; pay the price, cash down, and you are free." 
 
 A prospectus of these public sales, signed and 
 guaranteed by the Archbishop of Mentz, whom 
 the Pope had made superintendent of the saintly 
 lottery, fell under the eye of the monk Luther. 
 He was struck with amazement, but not dumb. 
 A remonstrance to his own Bishop of Brandenburg 
 had no effect. The bishop merely advised him 
 to hold his tongue, or he might get himself into 
 trouble. A respectable remonstrance addressed to 
 the Archbishop of Mentz, accompanied by a list of 
 propositions which he offered to maintain against 
 Tetzel and his practices, brought no reply ; and on 
 the 31st of October, 1517, the indignant monk 
 nailed a copy of the propositions to the church 
 door of Wittemberg Castle. The propositions are 
 too many to quote here in full. Here are a few 
 of them : 
 
 " Christians should be taught that, if the Pope 
 were made acquainted with the extortions of the 
 indulgence preachers, he would prefer seeing the 
 basilica of St. Peter's reduced to ashes to building 
 it with the flesh,, fleece, and bones of his sheep." 
 
 " The Pope's wish must be, if indulgences, a 
 small matter, are proclaimed with the ringing of 
 bell, with ceremonial and solemnity, that the Gos- 
 pel, so great a matter, should be preached with a 
 hundred bells, a hundred ceremonials, a hundred 
 solemnities." 
 
 " The true treasure of the Church is the sacro- 
 sanct Gospel of the glory and grace of God."
 
 THE SOUL OF PROTESTANTISM. 269 
 
 " People are given cause to hate this treasure of 
 the Gospel, by which the first became last." 
 
 " People are given cause to love the treasure of 
 indulgences, by which the last became first." 
 
 " The treasures of the Gospel are the nets by 
 which the rich were once fished for." 
 
 " The treasures of indulgences are the nets with 
 which men's riches are now fished for." 
 
 " To say that the cross placed in the Pope's arms 
 is equal to the cross of Christ is blasphemy." 
 
 " Why does not the Pope, out of his most holy 
 charity, empty Purgatory, in which are so many 
 souls in punishment ? This would be a worthier 
 exercise of his power than freeing souls for money, 
 and to what end ? To build a church ! " 
 
 " What means this strange compassion on the 
 part of God and the Pope, who, for money's sake, 
 change the soul of the impious, of God's enemy, 
 into a soul pious and acceptable to the Lord ? " 
 
 " Cannot the Pope, whose treasures, at the pres- 
 ent moment, exceed the most enormous treasures, 
 build a single church with his own money, without 
 taking that of the faithful poor ? " 
 
 " Christians should be exhorted to follow Christ, 
 their head, through pains, punishments, and hell 
 itself ; so that they ma} 7 have assurance that heaven 
 is entered through tribulations, not through secu- 
 rity and peace." 
 
 In all this we see moral indignation blasting hot, 
 the lava stream of a volcanic heart, nothing more. 
 But more soon followed. Straight on the heels
 
 270 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 of the propositions came the dogmatic theses and 
 the bold sermon in the vulgar tongue supporting 
 them : 
 
 " Man by his nature cannot will that God be 
 God. He would rather himself be God, and that 
 God were not." 
 
 " It is false that appetite is free to choose both 
 ways ; it is not free, but captive." 
 
 " There exists in Nature, before God, nothing 
 save unclean desire." 
 
 " It is false that this desire can be regulated by 
 the virtue of hope. For hope is opposed to charity, 
 which seeks and desires only what is of God. Hope 
 conies not of our merits, but of our passions, which 
 efface our merits." 
 
 " The best, the only infallible preparation and 
 disposition for the reception of grace are the choice 
 and predestination of God from all eternity." 
 
 " It is false that invincible ignorance is any ex- 
 tenuation. Ignorance of God, of one's self, of good 
 works, is the invincible nature of man." 
 
 This was the doctrinal basis on which the pro- 
 test of conscience rested. The people leaped upon 
 it, as if it had been the Rock of Ages. A thrill 
 of conviction ran through them. The German 
 mind seemed about to slide off in a mass from Italy. 
 The propositions were printed by myriads ; like 
 falling leaves scattered by the wind, they lodged 
 everywhere, in back-yard, on door-step and win- 
 dow-sill. Luther trembled at his own success. 
 He wrote to the Pope : " Most Holy Father, I
 
 THE SOUL OF PROTESTANTISM. 271 
 
 cast myself at your feet, with the offer of myself 
 and all that is in me. Pronounce the sentence of 
 life or death ; call, recall, approve, disapprove ; I 
 acknowledge your voice to be the voice of Christ, 
 who reigns and speaks in you." He protested that 
 he advanced no heretical doctrine. 
 
 The story of Luther's battle with himself and 
 the Pope does not belong here. We are concerned 
 with Protestantism, and but incidentally with its 
 founder. On the 10th of December, 1520, at the 
 ninth hour of the day, at the east gate of Wittern- 
 berg, near the holy cross, the Pope's bull of ex- 
 communication, along with other of the Pope's 
 books, was publicly burned. By that act the 
 reformer destroyed his ships, and strode forward 
 resolutely to his life-battle, while Europe entered 
 on the career of controversy which soon resulted 
 in blood. 
 
 The enthusiasm of all classes for the new religion 
 was boundless. " Nobles and people, castles and 
 free towns, rivalled each other in zeal and enthu- 
 siasm for Luther." His popular tracts were de- . 
 voured ; the sheets wet from the press were hurried 
 to the shops and carried off at almost the same 
 instant. The printers seemed to be disciples of the 
 reformer to a man. They printed with the great- 
 est care, and sometimes at their own expense, 
 writings that favored his cause, while the Roman- 
 ists found difficulty in getting any thing done, had 
 to pay dearly for it, and obtained the poorest work 
 even then. Not a few monks caught the fury and
 
 272 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 became colporteurs for Luther. The enemy tried 
 desperately to stem the tide, by sowing dissensions 
 among the German principalities, and so dividing- 
 the Protestant strength ; and they succeeded so 
 far that, in 1529, the German Diet took measures 
 to check the movement. Then it was that a mi- 
 nority of the delegates remonstrated, and, remon- 
 strance being of no avail, PROTESTED. Hence the 
 name PROTESTANTS. So much of external history 
 must suffice. 
 
 Now, the careful thinker asks two questions : 
 
 I. Against what was the protest made ? 
 
 II. In the name of what was the protest made ? 
 Against what? Against the right of a majority 
 
 to dictate to a minority in matters of faith ; against 
 outward compulsion in concerns of religion, whether 
 from State or Church ; against spiritual dominion 
 of all kinds. The protesting members declared 
 their willingness to obey the emperor in all fitting 
 duty till death; "but these are matters that con- 
 cern God's honor and the salvation of souls, and we 
 are bound to regard Him as King and God, King 
 of kings, and Lord of lords ; and, being so bound, 
 by baptism and by his holy word, we must consult 
 that honor and that salvation, each one standing 
 alone, and giving account of himself. Once for all 
 they declare that they cannot with good conscience 
 obey in all things the emperor, since they should 
 falsify themselves in sight of God, were they to in- 
 fluence any of high or low degree to depart from 
 the commandment of God's holy word, and bow to
 
 TEE SOUL OF PROTESTANTISM. 273 
 
 a lower authority. And as for the authority of the 
 Church to interpret God's word, it would be time 
 enough to speak of that when they were all agreed 
 on which was the true, holy Church of Christ. 
 But inasmuch as on one point there is not the 
 least controversy, as no precept is plainer than 
 the command to stand fast by God's word, as 
 the holy Scripture is clear on all essential points to 
 Christian men, we are minded, God helping and 
 instructing, to abide by it, to heed what is con- 
 tained in the holy gospel of the Old and New 
 Testaments, and to heed nothing else ; for, in thus 
 observing the one rule of truth, and conforming to 
 the only just standard of doctrine and life, no one 
 can err or go astray ; whoever builds thereon will 
 prevail against the gates of hell ; but they that 
 build upon human edicts must come to naught." 
 
 The protest, therefore, was against every kind of 
 outward interference in matters of faith. 
 
 In what name was the protest made ? In the 
 name of CONSCIENCE. In the early reform litera- 
 ture there is no more frequent word than the word 
 " conscience." Luther used it repeatedly. His 
 followers used it; it occurs many times in the ap- 
 peal which the minority made, and the pith of 
 which I have just condensed. But what did these 
 men mean by conscience ? In raising this question, 
 we touch the heart of our subject. The soul of 
 Protestantism iv as respect for conscience as the kernel 
 of moral personality. That was the seat of author- 
 ity within, as the Church for the Romanists was 
 
 18
 
 274 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 the seat of authority without. That was the organ 
 of faith as the Church had been the organ of faith ; 
 the only organ there was to oppose to the Church. 
 The external power must be supplanted by an 
 internal power. As Rome was objective, Protes- 
 tantism must be subjective. In the name of con- 
 science, Savonarola pronounced Pope Alexander an 
 atheist, and called on Catholic Christendom to 
 depose him ; in the name of conscience, Luther 
 declared Leo a blasphemer, and called on Christen- 
 dom at large to throw off his yoke. Both reform- 
 ers arrayed conscience against the hierarch} 7 " which, 
 combining with state-craft, crushed religion ; but 
 neither arrayed conscience against the religion thus 
 abused. Savonarola called himself a Catholic of 
 Catholics, and Luther called himself a Christian of 
 Christians. Both appealed to a new attestation 
 of faith ; neither detracted from the substance of 
 faith. It was to save the substance that they changed 
 the representation. It is, at least, a rhetorical exag- 
 geration to say, as George Bancroft does : " Luther 
 based his reform upon the simple but sublime truth 
 which lies at the- basis of morals, the paramount 
 value of character and purity of conscience ; the 
 superiority of right dispositions over ceremonial 
 exactness." Neither Luther nor his friends took 
 so natural a view of justification as this. 
 
 By conscience they meant what we mean by the 
 44 Christian consciousness," the " mind of Christ " 
 that had been imparted by grace and by inherit- 
 ance. Not the natural conscience ; not the human
 
 THE SOUL OF PROTESTANTISM. 275 
 
 moral sense ; not the impulse, or the persuasion, or 
 the conviction of right ; of the natural conscience, 
 as of other things natural, Luther had the most 
 despicable opinion. The function of the natural 
 conscience was simply to convict people of sin. It 
 was no oracle, unless it were of condemnation. It 
 revealed nothing but iniquity ; it proclaimed noth- 
 ing but doom. In appealing to conscience, Prot- 
 estantism appealed to no human power, but to an 
 authority above humanity, on which humanity was 
 absolutely dependent, before which humanity must 
 devoutly kneel. The conscience of the believer, 
 the conscience enlightened and renewed by grace, 
 furnished the new point of immediate spiritual 
 contact with God. But the conscience of the un- 
 believer rendered no such divine service. What 
 respect had Luther for the consciences of the poor 
 peasants who, getting an inkling of natural human 
 rights from the Bible, and interpreting justice by 
 the awakened feeling of their hearts, rose in insur- 
 rection against their brutal lords ? "I am of opin- 
 ion that all the peasants ought to perish, rather 
 than the princes and magistrates, since they take 
 up the sword without divine authority. The peas- 
 ants deserve no mercy, no tolerance, but the in- 
 dignation of God and man." " The peasants are 
 under the ban both of God and the emperor, and 
 may be treated as mad dogs." What consideration 
 had Luther for the conscience of the earnest and 
 indefatigable Carlstadt, who felt himself impelled 
 to enter the church at Wittemberg and destroy the
 
 276 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 crucifixes, images, and altars, who, pressing the 
 Protestant principle, as he received it, to its results, 
 questioned the doctrine of the real presence of 
 Christ in the Eucharist? Carlstadt was an uncom- 
 fortable fellow, but he was a true and uncompro- 
 mising reformer. Does Luther deal with him as an 
 over-zealous brother? He deals with him as a 
 miscreant. " Pray for me, and help me to trample 
 under foot this Satan that has arisen at Wittem- 
 berg against the Gospel, in the name of the Gospel. 
 It will be difficult to persuade Carlstadt to give 
 way ; but Christ will constrain him, if he does not 
 yield of himself. For we are masters of life and 
 death, we who believe in the Master of life and 
 death." " The spirit of the new prophets aspires 
 to be the highest spirit, a spirit which has eaten 
 the Holy Ghost, feathers and all. ' Bible,' they 
 cry out ; yes, Bible, Bubel, Babel.^ What regard 
 did Luther show for the conscience of the Anabap- 
 tists of Munster, fanatical people who, doubtless 
 with intentions as serious as his own, proposed to 
 reconstruct society on what they held to be Gospel 
 principles ? " Is it not clear," he cries, " that the 
 devil reigns at Miiuster in person, or rather that 
 there is a whole troop of devils ? " " When God 
 in his wrath deprives us of his word, no deceit of 
 the devil's is too gross. The best weapon against 
 the devil is the sword of the Spirit, the word of 
 God. The devil is a spirit, and laughs at cuirass, 
 horse, and horseman. The devil keeps the hot soup 
 in his mouth, and only mutters wmm, mum. Well,
 
 THE SOUL OF PROTESTANTISM. 277 
 
 devil ! Mutter and spit as you list ; one little word 
 overthrows all you say." 
 
 In all this it cannot fairly be said that Luther 
 was untrue to his principle. His principle never 
 admitted the validity of the unregenerated con- 
 science. In common with all the reformers who have 
 been associated with the Protestant movement, he 
 held as a cardinal truth the doctrine of human 
 depravity, the vital need of supernatural grace, and 
 the indispensable importance of faith grounded on 
 belief, to make the grace available. There was 
 not the faintest suspicion of Transcendentalism 
 about them. They deemed it a holy duty to put 
 the natural reason down. Luther, indeed, con- 
 demned resort to physical violence. He had no 
 mind to baptize unbelievers in their own blood. 
 " I will not," he said, " use carnal weapons to 
 spread the Gospel." " Preach I will, talk, write ; but 
 compel I will not. For belief must be voluntary, 
 unforced, spontaneous." Luther put his vehe- 
 mence into speech ; his words smote like two- 
 edged swords ; his language was a consuming fire. 
 But the less passionate, unsympathetic, unenthu- 
 siastic Calvin burned Servetus as logically and im- 
 perturbably as Alexander burnt Savonarola, or as 
 John burnt Huss. Toleration did not make part 
 of the plan. It is not enough to say that they 
 could not rise superior to the spirit of their age. 
 They could not rise superior to their religion, and 
 they had no wish to. Their religion was the 
 Christianity of the Middle Ages fortified by a new 
 guarantee.
 
 278 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 The protest was not against doctrines, but against 
 the external dispensation of doctrines. Could they 
 who made it have imagined that their work would 
 have been misunderstood as it has been, they would 
 have remained in the Roman communion for ever. 
 
 That Luther and his disciples, near and remote, 
 should have held fast the dogmas of the orthodox 
 faith, trinity, incarnation, atonement, fall and re- 
 demption, is not to be wondered at. How could 
 they have done otherwise ? The time for theologi- 
 cal doubt on these questions had not come. The 
 point to be emphasized is this: They did all they 
 could to prevent the possibility of any such doubt. 
 They wanted to make every thing as fast as the 
 Roman Church had made it, and faster, for they 
 would gladly have made all things secure against a 
 second Reformation. ' They had renounced one 
 authority, but only in the hope of establishing 
 another, equally or more stringent. They had no 
 idea of being Godless, Christless, or churchless. 
 Three points they insisted on : 
 
 I. The first and cardinal point was the absolute 
 dependence of the individual on the Almighty 
 Power, the Eternal Will, which appoints his 
 destiny, and determines absolutely his whole life 
 and being. The most characteristic form of Prot- 
 estantism is Calvinism ; but Calvin did not surpass 
 Luther in the force with which he laid down the 
 doctrine of predestination by the divine decrees. 
 The iron thread of predetermining law runs through 
 the whole system, binding reason and will in fatal
 
 THE SOUL OF PROTESTANTISM. 279 
 
 bonds. Protestantism, in its essence, is the effort 
 of the aivakened soul to secure its salvation by unit- 
 ing itself with the absolute cause of all blessedness, 
 the infinite and eternal G-od. Luther made this 
 central doctrine the basis of his reform, laying 
 ^stress particularly on the subjection of the human 
 will ; Zwingli was attracted by the other aspect of 
 the conception, the absolute Godhead, the divine 
 prevision ; Calvin completed the dogma by devel- 
 oping in full proportions the principle of the eter- 
 nal decrees. No one tolerably acquainted with the 
 literature of the early Reformation has failed to 
 observe the overshadowing importance given to this 
 speculation, or has missed the fact that it was in- 
 sisted on as a safeguard against the irruption of 
 unregenerated nature. So long as the determining 
 causality of God could be maintained, there was no 
 danger from rebellion. F. C. Baur, a profound 
 student of this whole subject, says : " That, in 
 the entire relation between man and God, as well 
 moral as religious, nothing proceeds from human 
 activity, but every thing, from the apprehension of 
 the saving truth to the blessed results thereof, 
 every thing depends on the unconditioned will of 
 the absolute cause, is an essential assumption of 
 Protestantism." Equally essential, no doubt, was 
 the assumption of freedom. Luther laid stress 
 enough on that, when on the ground of freedom 
 he defied Church and Papacy, and all spiritual 
 wickedness in high places. But that freedom was 
 simply freedom to respond to the inviting Saviour,
 
 280 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 freedom to embrace the Christ as freedom with 
 the Catholic was freedom to join the Church. 
 Neither Catholic nor Protestant called the choice 
 of a false religion freedom ; that was slavery. 
 
 II. The next point was the immediate concourse 
 of God, in Christ, with the human soul ; immediate, 
 without the intervention of priests ; a direct, con- 
 scious, vital communion, conditioned on faith in the 
 Redeemer. In this union, the disciple was made 
 partaker of the renewing life as completely as was 
 ever claimed by subject of the Papal Church. 
 Faith was the soul's reaction on the Saviour. 
 
 III. The third point, an indispensable one, was 
 the sufficiency of the Holy Scriptures of the Old 
 and New Testament, Law and Gospel. To quote 
 Dr. Scheukel, a famous living theologian of the 
 liberal Protestant school: " The contents of religion 
 are in God himself ; and since man is conscious of 
 God only as God reveals himself, for man the 
 contents of religion are in the written revelation. 
 Most gloriously and completely has God manifested 
 himself in the person of Christ ; and the Holy 
 Scriptures give the history of that manifestation. 
 The Holy Scripture, as the word or revelation of 
 God, contains the divine substance. Conscience 
 is free ; but true freedom consists in obedience to 
 the truth. Caprice is no freedom. That only is 
 genuinely free which is bound to God. Hence the 
 Protestant position, while appealing to conscience, 
 at the same time insists that conscience is bound to 
 God's word, and can attain outside of that to noth-
 
 TEE SOUL OF PROTESTANTISM. 281 
 
 ing. It is therefore the special characteristic of 
 Protestantism to be the religion of the Bible" 
 
 Here Schenkel, writing at Heidelberg, only twelve 
 years ago, repeats what Chillingworth said two 
 hundred and thirty-seven years ago. Chillingworth 
 had changed from Protestant to Catholic and back 
 again. He was now writing against the Catholics 
 in a strain so liberal as to offend his Protestant 
 allies : " The BIBLE, I say, the BIBLE only, is the 
 religion of Protestants. Whatsoever else they be- 
 lieve beside it and the plain, irrefragable, indubi- 
 table consequences of it, well may they hold it as 
 matter of opinion. I, for my part, after a long and, 
 as I readily believe and hope, impartial search of the 
 true way to eternal happiness, do profess plainly 
 that I cannot find any true rest for the sole of my 
 foot but upon this rock only. Propose me any 
 thing out of this book, and require whether I 
 believe it or no, and, seem it never so incompre- 
 hensible to human reason, I will subscribe to it with 
 hand and heart, as knowing no demonstration can 
 be stronger than this : God hath said so, and there- 
 fore it must be true. In other things I will take 
 no man's liberty of judgment from him, neither 
 shall any man take mine from me. I will think no 
 man the worse man, nor the worse Christian. I 
 will love no man the less for differing in opinion 
 from me. I am fully assured that God does not, 
 and that, therefore, men ought not to require any 
 more of any man than this : to believe the Script- 
 ure to be God's word, to endeavor to find the true 
 sense of it, and to live according to it/'
 
 282 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 To the objection that Protestants do not agree 
 in their interpretations of Scripture, and therefore 
 some of them must miss the truth and fall into 
 error, Chillingworth replies : " The most disa- 
 greeing Protestants that are, yet thus far agree : 
 1. That those books of Scripture which were never 
 doubted of in the Church are the undoubted word 
 of God and a perfect rule of faith ; 2. That the 
 sense of them which God intended, whatsoever it 
 is, is certainly true ; so that they believe implicitly 
 even these very truths against which they err, and 
 why an implicit faith in Christ and his word should 
 not suffice as well as an implicit faith in your 
 church, I have desired to be resolved by many of 
 your side, but never could ; 3. That they are to use 
 their best endeavors to believe the Scripture in the 
 true sense, and to live according to it. This, if they 
 perform truly and sincerely, it is impossible but that 
 they should believe aright in all things necessary to 
 salvation." But the Scripture stands in need of 
 some watchful and unerring eye to guard it. " Very 
 true ; but this is no other than the watchful eye of 
 Divine Providence. God, requiring men to believe 
 Scripture in its purity, engages himself to see it 
 preserved in sufficient purity ; and you need not 
 fear but he will satisfy his engagement." And 
 again (for I am anxious to make this position as clear 
 as light, and no language is so frank as Chilling- 
 worth's) : " The promise of Divine assistance is 
 twofold, absolute or conditional. That there shall 
 be by Divine Providence preserved in the world,
 
 TEE SOUL OF PROTESTANTISM. 283 
 
 to the world's end, such a company of Christians, 
 who hold all things precisely and indispensably 
 necessary to salvation, and nothing inevitably de- 
 structive of it ; this, and no more, God hath 
 promised absolutely. But a further assistance is 
 conditionally promised, even such an assistance as 
 shall lead us, if we be not wanting to it and 
 ourselves, into all, not only necessary, but very 
 profitable truth, and guard us from all, not only 
 destructive, but also hurtful errors." 
 
 In 1863, the archbishops and bishops of the 
 Church of England, in their protest to Bishop 
 Colenso, affirmed : " All our hopes for eternity, 
 the very foundation of our faith, our nearest and 
 dearest consolations are taken from us, if one line 
 of the Sacred Book be declared unfaithful or un- 
 trustworthy." And Colenso had merely called in 
 question the Old Testament^ arithmetic ! 
 
 From all this it appears that Protestantism was a 
 system ; not a movement, but a system, as fixed 
 and determinate as that of Rome. It erected 
 against unbelief what it considered to be impregna- 
 ble barriers, and it guarded them with a mastiff's 
 watchfulness. An inflexible creed could not be 
 imposed, nor was it thought desirable, at least it 
 was never entertained as feasible. There was little 
 consistency of opinion among the reformers on 
 speculative dogmas. They soon engaged in con- 
 troversies, and fell asunder in divisions. The dis- 
 putes about the sacraments were bitter, about 
 the fall of Adam, imputed sin and righteousness,
 
 284 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 predestination to bliss or bane. The confessions 
 were at issue on cardinal points of doctrine. Some 
 were compromised, others were dropped. In course 
 of time great modifications were made in the body 
 of the Protestant theology. Lutherans departed 
 widely from Luther. The Lutheran Church in 
 America deals gently with doctrinal differences ; 
 they drop the doctrine of the real presence, reject 
 the authority of the Fathers, and insist only on the 
 fundamentals, the necessity of personal union with* 
 Christ and faith in the sufficiency of the Scriptures. 
 But they do insist on these. Calvinists modify ma- 
 terially, in some respects essentially, the beliefs 
 held of prime moment by John Calvin, but belief 
 in the necessity of regeneration through and by 
 Christ, and in the sufficiency of the Scriptures, is 
 never relaxed. The members of the Evangelical 
 Alliance are very tolerant beyond certain limits ; 
 they talk as if they had caught the vision of the 
 Free Religion men. But touch with your little 
 finger the faith in the Saviour, the necessity of a 
 vital spiritual communion with him, the miraculous 
 character and divine authority of the Word of God, 
 and they are as sensitive as Luther was on the 
 point of the sacrament, or the dogma of predestina- 
 tion. The evangelical unions through the country 
 seem to be very generous in surrendering unessen- 
 tial points ; but the essential points are never 
 qualified, or put, even by implication, in debate. 
 A recent correspondent of the " London Spectator," 
 a Congregationalist, old and zealous, indignantly
 
 THE SOUL OF PROTESTANTISM. 285 
 
 protests against the insinuation that there is any 
 doctrinal despotism in the churches of his connec- 
 tion. But he does not deny that the discipleship 
 in Christ, and the revelation in the Bible, are as 
 cardinal now as ever. No man says such hard 
 things of the Protestant theology as Henry W. 
 Beecher. If we may credit the gossips, he serves 
 Luther as Luther served the Pope, and deals out 
 figuratively to Calvin the measure Calvin dealt to 
 Servetus, fastening up the fundamentals for deri- 
 sion, and scorching the articles with invective ; but 
 on a late occasion, when he cut himself adrift from 
 the churches, he avowed with whimsical solemnity 
 his faith in the necessity of personal regeneration 
 through Christ. As the tide flows in and out of 
 a bay, people may drift into and out of his church, 
 yet the church consists only of those who are made 
 one with God in Christ ! 
 
 A popular Congregational preacher bestows a 
 generous ministry on the horse. Does he despair 
 of the Gospel, or only of the man ? As St. Paul 
 turned from the unbelieving Jews to the Gentiles, 
 does he turn from his church-members to the quad- 
 ruped ? The same apostle contrasts favorably the 
 moral condition of Turk and Hindu with that of 
 Christians. Does he think the Hindus and Turks 
 need no regeneration, or only that the Christians 
 need it more ? Is he eulogizing the lost, or casti- 
 gating the chosen? Mr. Alanson Picton, in a note in 
 his remarkable volume, " The Mystery of Matter," 
 says that in England many non-conformist places
 
 286 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 of worship contain the Westminster Confession on 
 their title-deeds. " But I know," he says, " by 
 experience, that the assumption of office by the 
 minister may be preceded, "not by a signature of the 
 creed, but by an express repudiation of it." He 
 tells the story of a young student who was sent 
 out from his college to preach at a village chapel. 
 The man who met him at the railway station was 
 curious to know what precise altitude of doctrine 
 the congregation might expect on Sunday. On his 
 part the divinity student was curious to learn how 
 the congregation stood in regard to doctrine. " Well, 
 yo' seen, sir, some on 'em likes it igh and some on 
 'em likes it low. I likes it middlin igh myse'n." 
 This indicates a vast change of mental attitude 
 since the century came in ; but it is a change in 
 regard to matters which have always been subject 
 to change, because always in debate. Protestants 
 have fought hard for dogmatic uniformity ; but 
 Protestantism never pledged itself to such uniform- 
 ity. Protestantism pledged itself to nothing but 
 spiritual union with Christ through faith, and the 
 divine sufficiency of the Word of Grod. This implied 
 many things, the depravity of nature, the need of 
 supernatural regeneration, the eternal distinction 
 between the elect and the rejected. But on all 
 these matters shades of difference were allowed 
 that did not go-the length of flittering the essen- 
 tial faith away. 
 
 Sonic will ask why the essential faith should not 
 be frittered away at last ; why the process of dis-
 
 THE SOUL OF PROTESTANTISM. 287 
 
 integration should stop where it is ; how any thing 
 can resist the course of demoralization that, setting 
 in at the moment of Protestantism's birth, has gone 
 on with such prodigious force ever since, and has 
 so completely pulverized every other ecclesiastical 
 and speculative fragment of Christian institution ? 
 I answer, Nothing will arrest it. The decomposi- 
 tion will continue till the whole mass is decomposed. 
 In fact, the end is already reached over large tracts 
 of Christendom. What I contend for is, that, when 
 it is reached, Protestantism will be dead. Instead 
 of gaining its last victory as some imagine, it will 
 suffer' its final defeat, involving the final defeat 
 of the " Christian " system. For Protestantism, 
 is intellectual, as distinguished from ecclesiastical 
 Christianity. Its faith in Christianity was and is 
 as absolute as that of Rome ; its zeal for the Christ 
 was and is as intense ; its intellectual and moral 
 grasp was and is more convulsively tenacious. It 
 was an effort to come to close quarters with the 
 Gospel, to penetrate the holy of holies, to meet the 
 Redeemer face to face, to get within the direct 
 pressure of his arm. If it failed, the failure does 
 not lie at its door. If it failed, it failed because it 
 undertook the impossible. If it failed, the final 
 effort to recover the religion which Rome was 
 forced to let go which the sudden cry of -a sin- 
 gle monk precipitated from its broad sides, as the 
 avalanche slides from a mountain, and leaves it 
 bare is exhausted, and the system of Luther 
 shares the fate of the system of Hildebrand.
 
 288 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 Six years ago, Rev. Ferdinand Ewer, of Christ 
 Church, New York, delivered a series of remark- 
 able discourses on the " Failure of Protestantism." 
 They were delivered in the interest of ecclesiastical 
 Christianity, Dr. Ewer being an eloquent preacher 
 of the " High Church" theory. His points were, 
 and he put them with great force, that Protestant- 
 ism had failed to get at the masses, and even to 
 retain the masses it found prepared to receive it ; 
 that its logical issue is Rationalism, which is a 
 repudiation of Christianity ; that in its own prov- 
 inces, where it has held exclusive sway for two and 
 a half centuries, in Germany and Switzerland con- 
 spicuously, scepticism and disbelief, infidelity and 
 atheism, are regularly sown and planted (he might 
 have added by so-called Protestant preachers). 
 The conclusion is, that Protestantism must be 
 abandoned, and the Church Catholic, of which 
 the Roman Church is but a branch, must be re- 
 stored to dignity and authority. 
 
 Dr. Ewer's description of the condition of Prot- 
 estantism is not exaggerated in line or color. Had 
 he written in the autumn of 1873, after the meet- 
 ings of the Evangelical Alliance, he might have 
 put in effects of light and shadow that would have 
 made it more sombre still. The reports of the 
 fereign delegates were cloudy with disappointment 
 and misgiving. If their statements are credible 
 (and certainly they would not have made such, 
 had they been able to make others), Protestantism 
 is rapidly declining in Germany ; it makes no per-
 
 TEE SOUL OF PROTESTANTISM. 289 
 
 ceptible progress in France ; in Spain and Italy it 
 has no future. It achieves no fresh conquests, and 
 at every point is giving way to the pressure of 
 secular thought. The wail of Protestantism is 
 as general as it is pathetic. 
 
 But Dr. Ewer is clearly wrong in ascribing all 
 this ruin to Protestantism itself, to a fatal prin- 
 ciple which it carried in its own bosom, to the 
 inevitable logic of its own cardinal idea. He is 
 wrong in holding Protestantism responsible for 
 what Protestantism could not help. If Protes- 
 tantism could not preserve Christianity, neither 
 could Catholicism. If Protestantism cannot pre- 
 vent infidelity, neither could Catholicism prevent 
 Protestantism, and to charge Parker upon Luther 
 is as unfair as it would be to charge Luther upon 
 Leo. Back of them both was a power which was 
 before either, and which they Avere unable to re- 
 sist ; and that power was the HUMAN MIND, which 
 is more than all churches and Bibles. 
 
 But has not all this ruin come about through the 
 application of private judgment to religion? Most 
 certainly. And is not the right of private judg- 
 ment one of the cardinal principles, if not the 
 cardinal principle, of Protestantism ? No. Dr. 
 Ewer assumes that it is, on the authority of tra- 
 dition. This is one of the solemn commonplaces 
 of Protestant talk and writing. Even so careful a 
 thinker as John Stuart Mill speaks of the Reforma- 
 tion as " the great and decisive contest against' 
 priestly tyranny for liberty of thought." A great, 
 
 19
 
 290 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 though hardly a decisive, contest against priestly 
 tyranny it certainly was ; but I do not find evidence 
 that it was for liberty of thought. It was for a 
 spiritual, as opposed to an ecclesiastical faith. 
 
 . But surely Luther translated the Bible into the 
 popular German speech, in order that the humblest 
 people might read it ; he was glad to have it multi- 
 plied by the printing-press ; in fact, the invention 
 of the printing-press has been regarded as a provi- 
 dential aid to the Protestant religion, because it 
 multiplied copies of the Bible. Protestantism is 
 for ever urging people to read the Bible for them- 
 selves, is thrusting it upon people, if they will not 
 buy it, giving it to them, without note or comment, 
 trusting it unreservedly to their private interpre- 
 tation. What does this imply, if not the fullest 
 confidence in the private judgment, the fullest 
 acceptance of the principle of free thought ? It 
 implies the fullest confidence in the Bible. 
 
 Luther did translate the Bible ; but with a firm 
 belief in its inspired and inspiring virtue, with the 
 devoutest of devout persuasion that it was more 
 than able to protect itself against the assaults of 
 unhalloAved reason, that the glory which gilded 
 the sacred page would communicate itself to all 
 who read the book. Luther supposed that the 
 Bible would fall into the hands of believers to 
 whom an answering faith would explain it ; of 
 scientific unbelievers he had no thought. The 
 *same sublime confidence that animated Luther to 
 translate the Bible animates his followers to dis-
 
 THE SOUL OF PROTESTANTISM. 291 
 
 seminate it. They have no misgivings. Their 
 faith that the book not merely contains the divine 
 word, but imparts it, that it has power to teach, 
 convince, subdue, that no honest seeker will 
 miss the revelation that the immanent Christ 
 will work wonders of conversion by means of the 
 word, that, being eternal, it cannot perish, 
 that, being the receptacle and organ of the Spirit, 
 it will evidence and communicate the Spirit : this 
 faith, as absolute as the Romanist's faith in his 
 church, holds the eyes of Protestants so that they 
 cannot see the dangers before them. They regard 
 the prevalence of infidelity as an inscrutable dis- 
 pensation, a strange phenomenon, intended per- 
 haps as a trial of their faith ; but it never occurs 
 to them to doubt that their faith will be justified 
 in the end. So far from connecting infidelity with 
 the free reading of the Bible, they are convinced 
 that the free reading of the Bible will check infi- 
 delity. To conceive any other result is to them 
 impossible. They could as easily conceive of God 
 as a liar. 
 
 Private judgment with Protestants is opposed 
 to priestly judgment ; it means that the sense of 
 Scripture comes immediately to the individual, not 
 mediately, just as Christ himself does; that it 
 is each believer's own concern. It does not mean 
 liberty to read the Bible like any other book, to 
 try it by literary laws, to judge its contents by 
 rational standards ; but merely liberty to find the 
 oracles of God there, not liberty to detect error,
 
 292 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 but liberty to be personally assured of the truth. 
 This point cannot be made sharp enough. With 
 Protestants, the liberty of private judgment ex- 
 cludes doubt, implies faith to start with. To start 
 without faith is next door to sacrilege. Protestants 
 are fond of quoting Pastor Robinson's farewell ad- 
 dress to the pilgrims at Delft Haven : 
 
 *' Brethren, we are now quickly to part from one 
 another, and whether I may ever live to see your 
 faces on earth any more the God of heaven only 
 knows ; but whether the Lord has appointed that 
 or no, I charge you before God and his blessed 
 angels that you follow me no further than you 
 have seen me follow the Lord Jesus Christ. 
 
 " If God reveal any thing to you by any other 
 instrument of his, be as ready to receive it as ever 
 you were to receive any truth by my ministry ; for 
 I am verily persuaded the Lord has more truth yet 
 to break forth out of His Holy Word. For my 
 part, I cannot sufficiently bewail the condition of 
 the reformed churches, who are come to a pe- 
 riod in religion, and will go at present no further 
 than the instruments of their reformation. The 
 Lutherans cannot be drawn to go beyond what 
 Luther said ; whatever part of his will our God 
 has revealed to Calvin, they will rather die than 
 embrace it ; and the Calvinists you see stick fast 
 where they were left by that great man of God, 
 who yet saw not all things. 
 
 " This is a misery much to be lamented. I be- 
 seech you, remember, it is an Article of your
 
 THE SOUL OF PROTESTANTISM. 293 
 
 Church Covenant, ' That you shall be ready to 
 receive whatever truth shall be made known to 
 you from the written word of God.' ' 
 
 Noble words, spoken in Protestantism's noblest 
 spirit ! But note the limitations. The truth must 
 be " made known from the written word of God." 
 The good man's vision of new truth as " breaking 
 forth out of God's Holy Word " did not include 
 any new truth which might break forth outside of 
 it. He has no thought of any new WOKD. Such 
 thought would have been blasphemy. It was be- 
 cause the Bible was the divine word that more and 
 more truth might be anticipated from its bottomless 
 resources. The prophecy was inspired by his con- 
 fidence in the Bible, not by his confidence in the 
 human mind. Strauss says well : " The men of 
 the Reformation conquered for us the right of free 
 inquiry in Scripture ; but modern science has con- 
 quered for itself the right of free inquiry about 
 Scripture." 
 
 To identify Protestantism with liberty of thought 
 is a mistake. It has opposed liberty of thought as 
 vigorously as Romanism ever did, and in the same in- 
 terest. Rome did not discourage liberty of thought, 
 so long as it did not trespass on her ground. The 
 moment free thought trespassed on her ground, 
 Protestantism objected. In what directions has 
 Protestantism encouraged liberty of thought ? 
 Not in the direction of Scripture interpretation. 
 Small encouragement has she given to scholars 
 like DeWette, Schenkel, Schwegler, Colenso. Not
 
 294 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 in the direction of theological speculation. How 
 has she treated heresy ? What was her attitude 
 towards Dr. Channiug and the Unitarians ? How did 
 "she receive Theodore Parker ? " Oh, Lord if this 
 man is a subject of grace, convert him and bring 
 him into the kingdom of thy dear Son. But 
 if he is beyond the reach of the saving influences 
 of the Gospel, remove him out of the way, and let 
 his influence die with him." What course does 
 Protestantism pursue towards rationalists? Who 
 fixed the stigma to the word " infidel " ? Who 
 gave to free thinking its bad name ? In what tone 
 do the organs of Protestantism speak of the liberal 
 movement generally in religion ? The comments 
 of the entire Protestant press on a late conven- 
 tion of the Free Religious Association sufficiently 
 prove its hostility to thought, when it passes be- 
 yond its own border line. Does Protestantism 
 encourage liberty of thought in the direction of 
 positive knowledge of the material universe ? Ask 
 Tyndall, ask Huxley, ask Darwin, ask Herbert 
 Spencer. The Young Men's Christian Association 
 of New York refused to admit to their reading-room 
 the " Popular Science Monthly." 
 
 " But this is backsliding," you will say ; " this is 
 recreancy ; this is infidelity to its first principle." 
 Pardon me, no. It is fidelity to its first principle ; 
 it is steadfastness ; it is conscientious loyalty to 
 traditions. It is not quite true to say that Protes- 
 tantism was, from the start, inconsistent with it- 
 self; that, as a complex fact, it was' struck with a
 
 THE SOUL OF PROTESTANTISM. 295 
 
 radical contradiction. It would have been so had 
 it appealed to reason and encouraged free inves- 
 tigation ; for then it would have said almost in plain 
 language, " Be free, and remain enslaved." The 
 magic word " liberty," which stirred the motions 
 of nascent thought in the modern world, and at 
 last shook the fabric of belief in pieces, was not 
 spoken by Martin Luther. He admitted nothing 
 contradictory or inconsistent. 
 
 Foolish persons, seeing Protestantism come in 
 accompanied by literature, invention, discovery, the 
 useful arts, civil liberty, popular movements of re- 
 form, the industrial advance of the common people, 
 talk as if it called them all into being ! You might 
 as well say that the sail of a ship causes the 
 wind, that the mowing-machine calls into existence 
 the prairie, or that the telegraph wires cause elec- 
 tricity. After hearing the pastor of a Unitarian 
 church ascribe the post-office to Christianity, noth- 
 ing surprises me ; that pious people should give 
 Protestantism credit for the printing-press and the 
 submarine cable seems rational. The same folk 
 believe that Tenterden steeple was the cause of 
 Goodwin Sands, and that thunder is the cause of 
 lightning. Athanase Coquerel gives Protestantism 
 credit for three things : 1. Spiritual liberty, includ- 
 ing a full sense of private responsibility; 2. The 
 family spirit, as opposed to the monkish ; 3. The 
 independence of the laity. But spiritual liberty, in 
 our sense of the term, she never gave. The family 
 spirit was native to the Germans, who first gave
 
 296 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 Protestantism a home. The independence of the 
 laity became inevitable when the priesthood was 
 abolished ; but it was postponed and prevented 
 and thwarted by the prophetic spirit, which stepped 
 into its place and has not even yet resigned it. 
 The secular elements of the world have not much 
 to thank Protestantism for. 
 
 There is a superstition that Protestantism waked 
 the human mind from a sleep of ages. Does the 
 opening eyelid of the child create the morning ? 
 Accepting the illusion, it is singular that Protes- 
 tantism should so soon have discovered that it had 
 roused the wrong passenger, and done its best to 
 put him to sleep again, as the nurse tries to abolish 
 the morning by soothing syrup. 
 
 Protestantism was an indication that the human 
 mind was beginning to stir ; it was a convulsive 
 twitching of the giant's eyelids. The huge creat- 
 ure had turned and stretched before. Arnold of 
 Brescia, Giordano Bruno, Huss, Savonarola, Wyc- 
 lifTe, were heavings of the monstrous frame. It 
 was the human mind that shook Rome as Encel- 
 adus shook Etna. It burst out with a great cry 
 in Martin Luther. It set Protestantism against it- 
 self; it fell upon the dogmas one by one and pulled 
 them about till not one of them can be recognized 
 in its tattered garb. It took the printed Bible, 
 read it, studied it, sifted it, proved it uninspired, 
 adopted it among the products of literature, and 
 passed on to find other words of truth. It showed 
 the eternal Christ to have been a man, the pri-
 
 THE SOUL OF PROTESTANTISM. -97 
 
 meval Adam to have been a myth, the tempter to 
 have been a teacher, and the fall to have been a 
 rise. It dashed idol after idol, and at every stroke 
 said, " Nehushtan," mere brass. It took personality 
 from the Holy Ghost, reducing it to an influence. 
 The stage properties of the drama of Redemption 
 it remanded to the lumber-room ; and now it smiles 
 when the mile-stones it has passed boast of having 
 impelled its progress along a road of their building. 
 
 Dr. Ewer calls Protestantism a pestilent heresy, 
 and warns us to go back to the Church. But 
 the Church could not hold the human mind three, 
 hundred years ago, when it was an infant as com- 
 pared with its present growth. Protestantism 
 proved that the hierarchy was a pestilent heresy. 
 They are now both heresies to human thought, 
 which throws them off as the serpent sheds his 
 skin. 
 
 The word Protestantism will outlive the thing ; 
 the name always survives the faith. Already it is 
 borne by many who have discarded the religion it 
 stood for. Unitarians, Universalists, Transcenden- 
 talists, Rationalists, call themselves Protestants, 
 even Protestants eminently and characteristically, 
 Protestants of the Protestants ; though they have no 
 sympathy whatever with the Protestant idea. The 
 Protestant camp swarms with these traitors dis- 
 guised as friends. Men hate to drop respectable 
 uniforms. The whole Protestant army will go over 
 at last to the enemy, of course, without knowing 
 it, simply because they wear the old badges and
 
 298 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 carry the old flag. Judge the power of Protes- 
 tantism by the spread of its name ; it looks immense. 
 Judge of it by the vitality of its spirit, and it 
 shrinks within a small compass. For its breath is 
 well-nigh spent. Liberty of thought has proved 
 too much for it. What seemed a terminus proves 
 to be a way-station. The swift mind has struck 
 another track, and presently not even the station- 
 signal will be visible.
 
 LIBERTY AND THE CHURCH IN AMERICA. 299 
 
 LIBERTY AND THE CHURCH IN AMERICA. 
 BY JOHN W. CHADWICK. 
 
 TN" this essay I am to speak on the subject of 
 *- those relations which subsist, or should sub- 
 sist, between American citizens, as such, and Re- 
 ligion in its organized capacity, the Church, as 
 we say, but not quite correctly. We have churches 
 in America, but no Church. By some among us 
 this is regarded as a bad arrangement, and pro- 
 posals have been offered for a change which will 
 make the government itself a sort of Church, and 
 secure to us a State religion. I do not apprehend 
 that any such change will be brought about at an 
 early or even at a distant day, and have counted 
 the proposals that have been made to this effect as 
 rather a piece of good fortune than otherwise, 
 furnishing as they do, in connection with other 
 proposals and events, a capital excuse for the re- 
 opening of questions somewhat prematurely closed, 
 and a discussion of them which must inure to the 
 advantage of right principles, and a more rational 
 and vital appropriation of ideas which heretofore 
 have been the objects of a somewhat lazy acquies- 
 cence. It is the duty and the privilege of each 
 new generation rationally to consider, and accept 
 or reject, the institutions and the customs that
 
 300 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 have come down to it from the past. We should 
 be ashamed either to fail or flourish upon the 
 wisdom of the fathers or the gracious orderings of 
 tradition. We should prove all things, and hold 
 fast to that which is good. So doing, I am per- 
 suaded that the people of America will not only 
 earnestly endorse the framers of the national Con- 
 stitution in their absolute separation of the State 
 and organized religion, but proceed to harmonize 
 all special legislation with the organic law of the 
 nation. It will be seen that our safety for the 
 future depends, not on the repeal of that law, but 
 on its more absolute enforcement, the removal from 
 all national and local legislation of every statute, 
 and from all educational arrangements of every 
 particular method, which is not in accordance with 
 that pattern, of entire religious freedom which the 
 framers of the Constitution saw in their mount of 
 vision. 
 
 Between the State and organized religion three 
 different relations are possible, and have been 
 amply illustrated in the history of Christianity 
 alone. The State can be subjected to religion, or 
 religion can be subjected to the State, or the two 
 can " sit apart like Gods." We can have a State 
 religion, or an ecclesiastical government, or the 
 State and Church existing apart, and exerting 
 only a moral influence upon each other. Tt is a 
 significant fact that the last of these relations has 
 been characteristic of the most vital hours of Chris- 
 tianity. Certainly nothing in its history is so
 
 LIBERTY AND THE CHURCH IN AMERICA. 301 
 
 remarkable as the progress which it made in the 
 first three centuries of its existence, when it was 
 entirely independent of the State, save as an 
 occasional object of its persecution. Well may 
 Dr. Newman, referring to the Christianity of that 
 early period, speak of " the joyous swing of her 
 advance," and quote in her behalf the words, 
 Incessu patuit Dea, " the goddess was known by 
 her step." We speak of Constantino as the first 
 Christian emperor, but every student of history 
 knows that in that fatal alliance Christianity lost 
 more than it won: it was far more paganized by 
 Constantino than Constantino was Christianized 
 by it. 
 
 The next great period of the Church's growth 
 and distinction was when the force of circum- 
 stances had broken up this wicked alliance, when 
 Church and State again stood separate, and often 
 pitted against each other. Such progress as there 
 was during the whole middle age was the result 
 of that separation and antagonism. Meantime 
 Mohammedanism, that had started with so many 
 appearances of victory, found too late that they 
 were omens of defeat. There the union of Church 
 and State was complete, and neither was subor- 
 dinate ; and the result is that both Church and 
 State have been involved in a great common ruin. 
 All the worst evils of Mohammedan rule can be 
 traced to the admixture of ecclesiasticism, and all 
 the worst evils and defeats of the religion to its 
 connection with the State. Pius IX., in his famous
 
 302 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 Encyclical, did not overstate the evils of a purely 
 national administration of religion. Luther gave 
 the Reformation its worst blow when, in an evil 
 hour, he committed it to the care of the German 
 princes. By that arrangement Protestantism was 
 hopelessly fettered, and German unity infinitely 
 delayed. In Russia, national religion shows its 
 usual fruits of mediocrity and subserviency. In 
 all her history not one really great name has been 
 produced, so vast the premium upon fools and 
 sycophants. The National Church of Sweden 
 can rehearse a similar tale of nerveless languor 
 and respectability, which only rouses itself for an 
 occasional act of base intolerance. If any further 
 proof is wanted of the quality of national religion, 
 let England furnish it, England, whose Estab- 
 lished Church has been the grave of all enthu- 
 siasm, of all progress, of all earnestness. It has 
 steadily allied itself with tyranny and oppression: 
 it has endorsed every outrage which the govern- 
 ment has committed ; it has been saved from utter 
 death and absolute corruption only by the whip 
 and spur of great outlying organizations, such as 
 Puritanism and Quakerism and the Methodist 
 revival of the eighteenth century, which put her 
 somewhat on her metal and her good behavior, as 
 Luther's courage knocked at the heart of Loyola. 
 If to-day she feels the stirrings of a mystic energy, 
 it is -because the tie between her and the State is 
 chafed almost to breaking, and she foretastes the 
 joy of perfect liberation.
 
 LIBERTY AND THE CHURCH IN AMERICA. 303 
 
 The subordination of religion to the State is 
 mainly hurtful to religion. The opposite relation 
 is mainly hurtful to the State, but hardly less so to 
 religion. The later papacy is its most striking 
 illustration, and perhaps it would not be extrava- 
 gant to say that the government of God's vicege- 
 rent was the worst government upon the face of 
 the earth. " God save us from infallible rulers," 
 any people might well say, " if this is a sample of 
 their government." The less the government that 
 is haggled for, the worse for the religion. " Foxes 
 are so cunning because they are not strong." The 
 weakness of the temporal power has nursed the 
 craft of Jesuitism till it can no farther go. 
 
 It would seem that this record by itself would 
 be sufficient to deter any intelligent citizen of 
 America from embarking, ever so cautiously, on a 
 voyage having for its object to obtain the golden 
 fleece of an ecclesiastical government, or a State 
 religion. We are assured that these expressions 
 do not fairly represent the nature of the thing 
 attempted ; but this disavowal pales before the calls 
 for various conventions and the utterances of the 
 most intelligent exponents of " the new departure." 
 These earnest people do not seem to appreciate, 
 even if they consider, the signs of the times. 
 Everywhere in Europe the old relations between 
 Church and State are being weakened or com- 
 pletely broken up. But is there properly no re- 
 lation between them ? Indeed there is, the most 
 vital relation. If the State is the appointed guar-
 
 304 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 dian of man's dearest interests, it must be somehow 
 the guardian of religion, his dearest interest of all. 
 And, above all, it must guard it from the faintest 
 semblance of government interference or control. 
 It must do this once and for ever in its organic law. 
 It is the merit of our national government as it is 
 at present organized that it does this. It does it 
 not, as has been charged, by some dreadful over- 
 sight, but because of a superior insight. The men 
 who framed our Constitution saw that the life of 
 religion consists in its absolute freedom. They saw 
 that only harm had come to it from government 
 interference and control. They saw that the union 
 of Church and State was prejudicial to both par- 
 ties. They had two great examples to instruct 
 them, Rome and England. In Rome the eccle- 
 siastical power was uppermost, in England the 
 political. The papal government was beneath 
 contempt ; the State religion of England was a 
 dull and passionless conformity. In our day both 
 of these alliances are breaking up. The temporal 
 power of the Pope, so long misused, has finally 
 been taken from him. The Roman populace can 
 do honor to their dead Mazzini, and no one shall 
 say them nay. For political purposes the Pope is 
 twice as dead as Mazzini, who, being dead, yet 
 speaketh, and all Europe hears his voice. In 
 England the disestablishment of the Established 
 Church is only a question of time. And shall 
 America, in the very hour when Europe is waking 
 from her nightmare sleep of centuries, drug her-
 
 LIBERTY AND THE CHURCH IN AMERICA. 305 
 
 self with the same poison that has worked in 
 Europe's veins such brooding terrors, such slug- 
 gishness, such fierce, wild hate and cruelty ? I 
 have no fears that she will do so. But so she has 
 been earnestly advised. 
 
 The proposed Religious Amendment to the Con- 
 ' stitution invites us to introduce into the pream- 
 ble of that Magna Charta the following words : 
 " Humbly acknowledging Almighty God as the 
 source of all authority and power in civil govern- 
 ment, the Lord Jesus Christ as the ruler among 
 the nations, his revealed will as the law of the 
 land, in order to constitute a Christian govern- 
 ment." Possibly the leaders of this movement 
 might consent to change the wording a little ; but 
 as it stands at present it would commit the nation, 
 first, to a belief in God, then to the lordship, 
 messianic office and deity of Christ (" his revealed 
 will " most certainly implying this), then to the 
 establishment of a Christocracy. Reasons of vari- 
 ous force and character are offered in behalf of this 
 stupendous change in the organic law of the nation. 
 Some of them are too trivial to receive a moment's 
 serious attention. 
 
 The class of arguments mainly relied upon is 
 that which goes to show that the government has 
 always been implicitly theistic and Christian, 
 wherefore it should be so explicitly. There is a 
 good deal of truth in the premises, but the con- 
 clusion does not follow. Certainly the government 
 ought to be explicitly what it is implicitly, but this 
 
 20
 
 306 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 harmony can be brought about by changing the 
 implicit part as \vell as by changing the explicit. 
 If the appointment of congressional and army 
 chaplains, and the appointment of Thanksgiving 
 and Fast days, implies that we have a Christian 
 government, might it not be better to surrender 
 these things than to harmonize the Constitution 
 with them and accept the necessary consequences 
 of such action ? Fast days on which nobody fasts 
 are dishonest excuses for an extra holiday. Thanks- 
 giving Day is indispensable, but we could have it 
 just the same or all the better without the govern- 
 ment's appointing it. Should the government 
 withhold its hand, navy and army chaplains might 
 still be provided, and religion not be insulted by 
 any one's being obliged to attend upon their ser- 
 vices. Congressional chaplains might be elected 
 and enjoyed by those who feel the need of them 
 in their individual capacity, and no one would be 
 outraged or committed, though it may well be 
 doubted whether one less dishonest law was ever 
 passed by any legislative body on account of the 
 preliminary intercession. When even the excellent 
 chaplain of the Massachusetts House of Represent- 
 atives, meaning to pray, makes stump speeches to 
 the Almighty on railroad bills and woman's suf- 
 frage, it becomes a question whether religion is not 
 really a loser by this conventional arrangement. 
 Still I am unable to see why any public officer has 
 not a right to express his personal religious sense 
 in a public document, and can but feel that only
 
 LIBERTY AND THE CHURCH IN AMERICA. 307 
 
 bigotry and narrow-mindedness can take umbrage 
 at any such expression. If it is a duty never to 
 offend by the expression of our religious opinions, 
 it is a higher duty never to be offended by the 
 expression of another man's, if the expression is 
 sincere and natural. The assumption that our 
 government is implicitly theistic or Christian or 
 Biblical, in view of the administration of oaths 
 and the manner of their administration, has some 
 force in it ; but here, again, the custom had better 
 conform to the Constitution than the Constitution 
 to the custom. Our Quaker friends do not, I 
 imagine, perjure themselves oftener than other 
 people, but they never take an oath. The discon- 
 tinuance of this custom is not something to be 
 deprecated, but a consummation devoutly to be 
 wished. The custom is a premium upon every- 
 day lying. It cheapens ordinary veracity. A man's 
 word ought to be as good as his oath. Indeed, we 
 have Jesus himself with us in this matter. " Swear 
 not at all," he said. And in nine hundred and 
 ninty-nine cases out of a thousand the way in 
 which oaths are administered is not very solemn 
 or impressive. Religion and piety are degraded 
 every time an assessor or attorney rattles off or 
 mumbles over that little formula, and every earnest 
 person, when subjected to it, must wish the land 
 well rid of such an idle superstition. 
 
 That our government is in some things implicitly 
 Christian and Biblical is therefore no reason why 
 it should be so explicitly in all things, because the
 
 308 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 implicit things are either not indispensable, or can 
 be procured in other ways. The question still re- 
 mains : Not being formally and explicitly a theistic 
 or Christian government, ought it to be made either 
 or both by the insertion of a clause to that effect 
 in the preamble to the Constitution? 
 
 This question naturally divides itself into two 
 others : What right have we to do this ? What 
 good would come of it ? First, what right have 
 we to do it ? As much right, perhaps, as we have 
 to tell any other falsehood, for falsehood it would 
 be, unless at the start we resign the idea that the 
 government represents the nation. The nation 
 does not acknowledge the substance of the pro- 
 posed amendment. There are thousands of men 
 who are vital members of the nation who could 
 not, without perjury, express allegiance to the 
 Constitution so amended. Of the six men who 
 have done most to make America the wonder and 
 the joy she is to all of us, not one could be the 
 citizen of a government so constituted ; for Wash- 
 ington and Franklin and Jefferson, certainly the 
 three mightiest leaders in our early history, were 
 heretics in their day, Deists, as men called them, 
 and Garrison and Lincoln and Sunmer, certainly 
 the three mightiest in these later times, would all 
 be disfranchised by the proposed amendment. In 
 vain do those who have this thing at heart protest 
 that it would disfranchise nobody. It may do very 
 well for a religious denomination to put a creed- 
 let into its constitution, and then put in another
 
 LIBERTY AND TIIE CHURCH IN AMERICA. 309 
 
 article declaring that it is binding only upon those 
 who believe in it. But governments do not. act 
 in that way, nor do I hear that any supplemental 
 article is intended, declaring that the proposed 
 amendment expresses the opinion of the majority. 
 No self-respecting man who does not believe, not 
 merely in God, but in the lordship and deity of 
 Christ, could ever pledge his fealty to this govern- 
 ment so amended. Lincoln could not have taken 
 his oath of office had such a clause been in the 
 Constitution. If as a nation we stand for any 
 thing, it is for " equal rights for all ; " not for " all 
 white men," not for all Christians, not for all the- 
 ists even, but for all. To make the Constitution 
 theistic even would be to expatriate some of the 
 best men in the country ; not men who are athe- 
 ists, but men who think they are, because they 
 cannot accept any of the popular definitions of 
 God, or cannot even define Him to their own sat- 
 isfaction. There are men thus minded who are 
 among the best in the community, second to none 
 in their enthusiasm for every thing that looks to 
 the improvement of society. They have as good 
 a right to their position as the bluest Calvinist 
 that can be found. There is more genuine religion 
 in their silence and reserve than in the latter's furi- 
 ous boast. I do not suppose that such men would 
 be driven out of the country bodily, though I think 
 I know of some of them who would rather rehearse 
 the part of Robinson Crusoe than remain with us 
 physically when spiritually cut off, with us, but
 
 310 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 not of us. Equal rights for all, that is the Amer- 
 ican idea, and there is no other right so sacred as 
 the right to one's own thought upon the highest 
 themes. 
 
 But the wrong that would be done by the pro- 
 posed amendment only appears when we remember 
 that it proposes, not only to make the nation for- 
 mally theistic, but also formally Christian, and not 
 merely formally Christian, but formally evangelical. 
 There are few men who think themselves atheists, 
 less who are so in reality (at least among those 
 who are so professedly). But there are many who 
 think themselves non-Christian, although these too, 
 in many cases, seem to me Christian in the highest 
 sense of all. There are thousands of Jews among 
 us, and not a few persons representative of other 
 great religions. There are men who have been 
 Christians, driven by the tenderness of their con- 
 sciences and the force of private reasons to give 
 up the Christian name. There are thousands more 
 who call themselves Christians, and yet do not 
 believe that the Bible is " the revealed will " of 
 Jesus, nor, as this implies, that he is God. Taking 
 all these together they form a numerous class, who 
 heretofore have been American citizens by right, 
 but would be only by sufferance if this amendment 
 should prevail. Nay, they would not be citizens at 
 all, but only inhabitants. But wiry stop at evan- 
 gelical Christianity? Why not make the gov- 
 ernment Calvmistic, or Methodist, or Baptist, or 
 Roman Catholic ? The logic of the enterprise de-
 
 LIBERTY AND THE CHURCH IN AMERICA. 31 1* 
 
 mands that every sect shall try to outwit all the 
 others, and if possible get its peculiar creed foisted 
 upon the Constitution. And if " equal rights for 
 all " is a principle to be discarded, the Roman 
 Catholics have as good right to make the nation 
 Roman Catholic, if they can, as the Christians have 
 to make it Christian. If might makes right, then 
 any sect has a right to do any thing with the gov- 
 ernment it can do. If non-Christians have no 
 rights that Christians are bound to respect, simply 
 because Christians are in the majority, then, the 
 majority being the other way, what might Chris- 
 tians reasonably expect ? "But there is no danger," 
 you say. Truly there is very little. But when Je- 
 sus said, "Do unto others as you would that they 
 should do unto you," he did not add, if I remember 
 rightly, " unless you know that you will always 
 have the upper hand." 
 
 There are reasons peculiar to America why there 
 should be no constitutional preference for any 
 particular opinions. De Tocqueville remarks that 
 there is always a tendency in forms of government 
 and forms of religion occupying the same territory 
 to find the same level. The free institutions of 
 America have fostered freedom of thought and 
 ensured a much greater diversity of opinion than 
 exists anywhere else. And what right have we 
 to foster this diversity by the main tenor of our in- 
 stitutions, and then by special enactment make it 
 a crime against the State ? And if, here in Amer- 
 ica, the tyranny of the majority is getting to be
 
 312 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 quite unbearable, that only shows that in some 
 way minorities must be represented ; and when 
 minorities have their rights in politics there will 
 be less color for the maxim that religious minori- 
 ties have no rights which religious majorities are 
 bound to respect. The only justification of the 
 proposed amendment resides in a belief in the 
 sacredness of majorities, which is getting largely 
 undermined and will soon be thoroughly exploded. 
 " Government of the people, by the people, and for 
 the people " does not mean " government of all the 
 people by the majority and for the majority." 
 
 We have no right then, because the nation is 
 not actually so, to make the government formally 
 theistic or Christian or evangelical. If we had, 
 what good would come of it ? No good whatever. 
 Because " In God we trust " is stamped upon some 
 of our coins, has that phrase any alchemy to con- 
 vert their copper into gold ? Does any grocer give 
 better sugar for them, any milkman better milk ? 
 By no means. And by stamping God or Christ 
 upon the Constitution we shall not make the na- 
 tion more godly or more Christian. Nominal 
 theism, nominal Christianity, does not amount to 
 much. The worst crimes that have ever been 
 committed have been committed in the name of 
 God and Christianity. King Olaf put a pan 
 of live coals upon Eyvind's naked flesh until it 
 broiled beneath them, and then asked, without a 
 thought of incongruity, "Dost thou now, O Ey- 
 vind, believe in Christ ? " When Rome was one
 
 LIBERTY AND THE CHURCH IN AMERICA. 313 
 
 great sink of horrible debauchery, there was no 
 lack of nominal religion. Incestuous popes denied 
 not God or Christ. There was never more formal 
 recognition of God than in the time of George II. 
 of England ; never less vital recognition of his 
 justice and his truth. Public documents were 
 sprinkled thick with compliments to him : public 
 life and private were sprinkled thicker with all 
 possible forms of vice. History will bear record 
 that in our civil war the South was seemingly much 
 more pious than the North. It was always calling 
 upon God. It could quote Scripture by the }^ard to 
 justify its slavery and its secession. General Lee, 
 for all his treachery and cruelty, considered him- 
 self a Christian, and nominal Christians in the 
 North allowed his claim. 
 
 But why multiply examples? We might for- 
 mally acknowledge God and Christ in the Consti- 
 tution, and not a man, woman, or child would 
 believe or trust in either any more afterward than 
 before. Nay, some would believe less and trust 
 less, for real sanctities are always jeoparded by in- 
 sisting upon things as real and important which 
 are not so. From the top of a new Sinai I seem to 
 hear the old commandment thundered with a new 
 meaning and a higher than it had of old, " Thou 
 shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in 
 vain." It would be taking it in vain to put it into 
 the Constitution, there to be exhibited, like a fly 
 in amber, a striking curiosity, but very useless, 
 very dead.
 
 314 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 But it is only fair to ask what good the persons 
 in charge of this matter expect to be derived from 
 it. We are told then, in the first place, that " it 
 will be a becoming act of homage to God." It ma} r 
 well be doubted whether " acts of homage " are so 
 highly valued by the Almighty as some would have 
 us to believe. The phrase is somewhat redolent 
 of anthropomorphism in its grosser forms. Then, 
 too, the desired amendment could not represent the 
 nation, but only those in favor of it. To offer it to 
 God or man as representative of the nation would 
 be a lie. It would never represent any more than 
 those accepting it at any given time, and those 
 would need no such representation. Meantime our 
 sister nations will judge us, not by our professions, 
 but by our actions. They will not go to our Con- 
 stitution to find out what manner of men we are, but 
 to our particular laws and customs, to our treaties 
 and our trade : were the Constitution already Chris- 
 tian, they would think just the same of our claim 
 for consequential damages, thrust into the Wash- 
 ington treaty like the cup into Benjamin's sack. 
 
 But though it is asserted, when convenient, that 
 the new amendment is to be only a King Log, and 
 therefore quite harmless, as soon as its movers 
 begin to show what good will come of it, King Log 
 becomes King Stork right speedily. Not as an act 
 of homage, but as " a legal basis for all Christian 
 laws," it is particularly desired. It is something to 
 have it acknowledged that these so-called Christian 
 laws have at present no legal basis in our national
 
 LIBERTY AND THE CHURCH IN AMERICA. 315 
 
 government. What is now really desirable is to 
 take from them whatever legal basis they have in 
 the various States of the Union. For what are 
 these Christian laws and institutions for which a 
 legal basis is demanded in the Constitution? An 
 advocate of the amendment answers, " Prayers in 
 our legislatures, occasional days of fasting and 
 thanksgiving, the maintenance of chaplains in our 
 army and navy, in prisons and asylums, the use of 
 the Bible in our public schools, the religious ordi- 
 nance of the oath, laws guarding the sacredness of 
 the Sabbath, enforcing the Christian law of mar- 
 riage, and suppressing blasphemy and licentious- 
 ness." Some of these points we have already 
 considered, and found that the Constitution is 
 nearer right than the customs for which legal sup- 
 port is demanded. A similar conclusion will be 
 forced upon us if we turn to any of the others. 
 What, for example, is the Christian law of marriage 
 that it should have a legal basis in the Constitution ? 
 We are referred to the New Testament. But to 
 what part of the New Testament ? To Paul's 
 writings ? Then marriage is permissible only as a 
 safety-valve for passion. To the words of Jesus ? 
 But, if he is reported correctly, marriage is for the 
 weak and passionate only, not for the strong and 
 pure. Do we want a legal basis for such Christian 
 laws as these ? But by the law of marriage the 
 law of divorce is possibly meant, which, in the 
 New Testament, is that, save for adultery, no man 
 shall be divorced. Do we want a legal basis for
 
 316 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 such a provision as that ? Does profane swearing 
 call for a constitutional amendment? How much 
 of it could be reached by legal enactment ? Is it 
 not rather a sin against taste and culture than 
 against religion, a vulgarism rather than a crime ? 
 To punish it legally would be to provoke it to new 
 and grosser exhibitions. 
 
 Sabbath laws and laws concerning the Bible in 
 the public schools remain to be considered. So far 
 as the first are concerned, the demand which is 
 made for them is but an eddy in a current whose 
 general flow is all the other way. On every side 
 Sabbath laws are becoming less stringent or are 
 less and less regarded. Public libraries are being 
 opened, travel is being less curtailed, there is more 
 out-of-door exercise and enjoyment. Is this as it 
 should be, or is it all wrong, and must it be 
 opposed by legislative enactment that has its roots 
 in constitutional law? If the appeal to the past 
 were final or specially significant, it might be shown 
 that the Puritan Sabbath is itself an innovation ; 
 that the Christian Sunday and the Jewish Sabbath 
 are two entirely distinct institutions ; that for hun- 
 dreds of years after the birth of Christianity work 
 was continued on the seventh day, and that, for 
 long after the discontinuance of work, amusement 
 shared with worship the privileges of the day. But 
 our appeal is not to the customs of the past, but 
 to the needs of the present. Those needs point to 
 a Sunday free from all government restraints. The 
 day cannot be desecrated by work so much as work
 
 LIBERTY AND THE CHURCH IN AMERICA. 317 
 
 is desecrated by Sabbatarian distinctions. Long 
 may the day survive and be held sacred to rest 
 from ordinary cares, to earnest thought arid tender 
 recollection, to pure and simple joys. .But let us 
 carry its foundations down below the sandy soil of 
 superstition and tradition, and base them upon 
 common needs and aspirations and mutual respect 
 and kindliness. Let its consecration no longer be 
 the desecration of the week, nor Sunday idleness be 
 esteemed a holier thing than Monday labor. 
 
 By far the most vital problem in connection 
 with our general theme is that relating to the 
 presence .of the Bible in our public schools. The 
 amendment movement was a very feeble spark 
 until the Bible-in-school question fanned it into 
 a flame. During the war there was a convention 
 somewhere, and it was agreed that God was sore 
 displeased with America. But why ? Because of 
 human slavery (they did see that that had some- 
 thing to do with it), but more especially because 
 there was no mention of him in the Constitution. 
 There and then this movement originated, but not 
 much came of it till the Bible question poured its 
 volume into it as the Missouri pours the volume of 
 its muddy waters into the Mississippi. The pro- 
 posed amendment will give the Bible a foothold in 
 the organic law of the nation. The next thing 
 would be to make education national, and then 
 require reading of the Bible in every school-house 
 in the land. This sounds remote, certainly, but it 
 were better not to wait for it to get any nearer be- 
 fore going out to meet it.
 
 318 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 The principal argument against the exclusion 
 of the Bible from the public schools is that the 
 Roman Catholics demand it. " Shall we be dic- 
 tated to by Roman Catholics ? " But if they are 
 right in their demand, then it is not they that dic- 
 tate, but God who dictates through them. They 
 are his mouthpiece. " But the Catholics will not 
 be satisfied with the exclusion of the Bible. What 
 they want is a proportionate part of the school-tax 
 to educate their children in their own sectarian 
 schools." Granted. And the only ground on which 
 we can refuse them that is the exclusion of the 
 Bible. Keep it, and their demand is absolutely 
 just. Exclude it, and they will have no excuse for 
 their demand. If they still have sectarian schools, 
 it must be at their own expense. 
 
 The presence of the Bible in the public schools 
 must be regarded as sectarian. It not only makes 
 a concession in favor of Christianity, but it makes 
 a distinction in favor of Protestant Christianity ; 
 and Protestantism is no less a sect because it is 
 very common to talk about this matter as if the 
 whole difference between Catholics and Protes- 
 tants was the difference between the King James 
 and the Douay versions of the Bible. But in fact 
 it is the smallest part of it. The great bulk and 
 weight of it is that the Catholic believes that un- 
 less interpreted by the Church the Bible is a per- 
 nicious book. He believes this honestly. In view 
 of this belief, is it then fair to force upon him the 
 Bible in a translation which he does not accept,
 
 LIBERTY AND THE CHURCH IN AMERICA. 319 
 
 without that interpretation which he believes to 
 be essential to its usefulness ? 
 
 But the amendment people do not stick at sec- 
 tarianism. Why should they ? If they can distin- 
 guish in favor of Christianity, why not in favor of 
 Protestantism, or any other ism ? The very thing 
 they propose to do is to make the government 
 Protestant, Evangelical, Puritan. If they are right, 
 then the Bible should not be excluded. But then, 
 certainly, all Catholics, all Jews, and all persons 
 averse to the indiscriminate use of the Bible in the 
 schools ought to be absolved from school-taxes. 
 Thus would our common-school system be rent 
 asunder. The amendment people cry, " It is in 
 danger." It is, from their temerity. 
 
 " In order to form a more perfect union," reads 
 the first line of the Constitution. If ever the re- 
 ligious amendment is adopted, by all means let this 
 first line be expunged. It would be a mockery to 
 have it there any longer. Not to form a more per- 
 fect union would from that time forward be the 
 object of the government, but to breed dissension 
 and rivalry and hate. An ever-increasing multi- 
 tude of persons, inhabitants of the country, but not 
 citizens of the nation, expatriated by the new de- 
 parture, would hang upon the outskirts of the 
 body politic, nursing their sense of wrong, making 
 it necessary for the government in self-defence to 
 drive them from its borders. 
 
 " To establish justice " was the second object 
 proposed by the framers of the Constitution. Let
 
 320 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 this also be expunged if ever the religious amend- 
 ment is added, for after that this, too, would be a 
 mockery. For what justice would there be in de- 
 nationalizing thousands of persons on account of 
 beliefs which they conscientiously hold ? Persecu- 
 tion is a Proteus that can take many shapes, but its 
 essence is the same, whether it punishes with wheel 
 and fagot, or with civil disabilities. The advocates 
 of this new amendment are the spiritual antitypes 
 of Calvin and Innocent III. 
 
 " To insure domestic tranquillity," proceeds the 
 present preamble of the Constitution. Let that, 
 too, be expunged if ever the religious amendment 
 is added. That, too, would be a mockery. " Whom 
 the gods love, tranquillity," would dwell with us 
 no longer. In short, there can be no compromise 
 between the Constitution and the government as it 
 is, and the Constitution and the government as it 
 is proposed to make them. If the latter is all right, 
 the former is all wrong. The change proposed 
 would be nothing less than a fundamental reorgani- 
 zation of the government on a sectarian principle 
 entirely foreign to that which presided over its 
 original construction. 
 
 A government is one thing, and a nation is quite 
 another ; but the two are being constantly con- 
 founded by the exponents of the religious amend- 
 ment. A government is not even an accurate 
 standard of any sort of national growth and 
 power. Just at present the American Constitution 
 and the American nation are both a good deal
 
 LIBERTY AND THE CHURCH IN AMERICA. 321 
 
 better than the American government, the sum- 
 total of its official dignities. The nation is the 
 entire mass of the people. No constitutional 
 amendment can adequately express the amount 
 or character of its religious life. For these are 
 known only to the great Searcher of hearts. 
 
 To put God into the Constitution would be 
 one thing, and to put him into the nation would 
 be quite another. The name God is, perhaps, 
 sufficiently common. The thing God might well 
 be a great deal commoner. How shall we put God 
 into the nation ? How but by putting more of 
 his truth and justice into our laws, more of his 
 righteousness into their administration, more of 
 his holiness into the individual life of men and 
 women ? Blessed is that nation which fulfils the 
 threefold condition on which God incarnates him- 
 self in it, and makes it his all-glorious dwelling- 
 place. The experience of nearly ninety years has 
 justified the wisdom of the fathers in the general 
 outlines of our government. Important changes 
 have been made, and others are still necessary in 
 their work ; but in the main our admiration is 
 continually increased for the calm judgment of 
 those mighty men. Surely there were giants in 
 those days. Would that the administration of the 
 government were more nearly equal to its organic 
 law. Here is a field for earnestness and enthu- 
 siasm and systematic reform. Not in the Bible, 
 but in the Koran, do I find a sentence that best 
 
 enunciates the great need of the hour. It reads : 
 
 21
 
 322 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 " A ruler who appoints a man to office, when 
 there is in his dominions another man better quali- 
 fied for the position, sins against God and against 
 the State." 
 
 But, after all, the great thing to be done is to 
 sweeten the fountains of men's, individual and 
 domestic and social life. Here is the real nation. 
 Here is the real place for the reformer's work. 
 The laws of a nation may for a long time remain 
 superior to the nation's average life, but the admin- 
 istration of those laws must pretty nearly symbolize 
 the general moral health of the community. What 
 we want is not a religious amendment of the Con- 
 stitution, but a religious amendment of men's 
 lives ; not to acknowledge God upon parchment, 
 but on the fleshly tablets of our hearts. Let these 
 things be done, and he will crave no other recog- 
 nition. The kingdom of heaven cometh not with 
 observation. 
 
 " When the Church is social worth, 
 When the State House is the hearth, 
 Then the perfect state is come, 
 The Republican at home."
 
 THE WORD PHILANTHROPY. 323 
 
 THE WORD PHILANTHROPY. 
 BY THOMAJS WENTWOBTH HIGGINSON. 
 
 OOME writer on philology has said that there is 
 **-r more to be learned from language itself than 
 from all that has been written by its aid. It is 
 often possible to reconstruct some part of the 
 moral attitude of a race, through a single word of 
 its language ; and this paper will have no other 
 value than as an illustration of that process. 
 
 In the natural sciences, the method is familiar. 
 For instance, it was long supposed that the mam- 
 moth and the cave-bear had perished from the 
 earth before man appeared. No argument from 
 the occasional intermixture of their bones with 
 man's was quite conclusive. But when there was 
 dug up a drawing of the cave-bear on slate, and 
 a rude carving of the living mammoth, mane and 
 all, on a tusk of the animal itself, then doubt 
 vanished, and the question was settled. Thoreau 
 has remarked that " some circumstantial evidence 
 may be very strong, as where you find a live trout 
 in the milk-pan." These discoveries in palaeon- 
 tology were quite as conclusive. 
 
 Now what is true in palaeontology is true in 
 philology as well. When a word comes into exist- 
 ence, its meaning is carved on the language that
 
 324 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 holds it ; if you find the name of a certain virtue 
 written in a certain tongue, then the race which 
 framed that language knew that virtue. This 
 may be briefly illustrated by the history of the 
 word " Philanthropy." 
 
 This word, it is known, came rather late into 
 the English tongue. When the Pilgrim Fathers 
 stepped on Plymouth Rock, in 1620, though they 
 may have been practising what the word meant, 
 there were few among them to whom its sound 
 was familiar, and perhaps none who habitually 
 used it. It is not in Chaucer, Spenser, or Shaks- 
 peare. It is not even in the English Bible, first 
 published in 1611 ; and the corresponding Greek 
 word, occurring three times in the original, is 
 rendered in each case by a circumlocution. It 
 does not appear in that pioneer English Diction- 
 ary, Minsheu's " Guide to the Tongues," first 
 published in 1617. It does not appear in the 
 Spanish Dictionary of the same Minsheu, in 1623. 
 But two years later than this, in the second 
 edition of his" Guide to the Tongues" (16*2.")), 
 it appears as follows, among the new words dis- 
 tinguished by a dagger : 
 
 " Philanthropic ; Humanitie, a loving of men." 
 Then follow the Greek and Latin words, as sources 
 of derivation. 
 
 This is the first appearance in print, so far as 
 my knowledge goes, of the word " Philanthropic." 
 But Lord Bacon, publishing in the same year 
 (1625) his essay on " Goodness, and Goodness of
 
 THE WORD PHILANTHROPY. 325 
 
 Heart," the thirteenth of the series of his essays, 
 as now constituted, and occupying the place of an 
 essay on " Friendship," which stood thirteenth in 
 the previous editions, uses the word in its Greek 
 form only, and in a way that would seem to indi- 
 cate, but for the evidence of Minsheu, that it had 
 not yet been Anglicized. His essay opens thus: 
 " I take goodness in this sense, the affecting of the 
 weal of men, which is what the Greeks call Philan- 
 thropia ; and the word Humanity, as it is used, is 
 a little too light to express it." 
 
 The next author who uses the word is Jeremy 
 Taylor. It is true, that in his " Holy Dying " 
 (1651), when translating the dying words of Cyrus 
 from Xenophon's " Cyropsedia," he renders the 
 word <f}i\dvdpa)Tro<i " a lover of mankind," citing 
 the original Greek in the margin. 1 But in Taylor's 
 sermons, published two years later (1G53), there 
 occur the first instances known to me, after 
 Minsheu, of the use of the Anglicized word. 
 Jeremy Taylor speaks of " that god-like excel- 
 lency, a philanthropy and love to all mankind ; " 
 and again, of " the philanthropy of God." 2 The 
 inference would seem to be that while this word 
 had now become familiar, at least among men of 
 learning, the corresponding words " philanthropic " 
 and "philanthropist " were not equally well known! 
 
 1 Xen. Cyrop. viii. 7. 25. Taylor's Holy Dying, c. ii. 3, par. 2. 
 
 2 Taylor's Sermons, Vol. III. Sermons 1 and 11. (Cited in 
 Richardson's Dictionary.) In his sermon entitled Via Intelligentice, 
 he quotes the Greek adjective, translating it " gentle."
 
 326 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 If they had been, Jeremy Taylor would probably 
 have used either the one or the other, in trans- 
 lating the words attributed to Cyrus. 
 
 So slowly did the word take root, indeed, that 
 when so learned a writer as Dryden used it, nearly 
 seventy years after Minsheu, he still did it with an 
 apology, and with especial reference to the Greek 
 author on whom he was commenting. For when, 
 in 1693, Sir Henry Steere published a poor trans- 
 lation of Polybius, and Dryden was employed to 
 write the preface, he said: 
 
 " This philanthropy (which we have not a proper 
 word in English to express) is everywhere mani- 
 fest in our author, and from hence proceeded that 
 divine rule which he gave to Scipio, that whenso- 
 ever he went abroad he should take care not to 
 return to his house before he had acquired a 
 friend by some new obligement." 
 
 We have, then, three leading English writers of 
 the seventeenth century Bacon, Taylor, Dryden 
 as milestones to show how gradually this word 
 " philanthropy " became established in our lan- 
 guage. To recapitulate briefly : Bacon uses the 
 original Greek word, spelt in Roman characters, 
 and attributes it to " the Grecians," saying that 
 there is no English equivalent ; Taylor, twenty- 
 eight years later, uses it in Anglicized form, with- 
 out apology or explanation, although when quoting 
 and translating the Greek word fytiuivOpwiros, he 
 does not use the equivalent word in his transla- 
 tion. Dryden, forty years later, commenting on a
 
 THE WORD PHILANTHROPY. 327 
 
 
 
 Greek author, makes a sort of apology for the 
 use of the word, as representing something " which 
 we have not a proper word in English to express," 
 although he uses the English form. It is therefore 
 clear that the word " philanthropy " was taken 
 directly and consciously from the Greek, for want 
 of a satisfactory English word. Men do not take 
 the trouble to borrow a word, any more than an 
 umbrella, if they already possess one that will an- 
 swer the purpose. 
 
 Let us now consider the original word <f)i\av- 
 Opwn-ia. It has an illustrious position in Greek 
 literature and history. It affords the key-note 
 to the greatest dramatic poem preserved to us; 
 and also to the sublimest life of Greece, that 
 of Socrates. It was first used, however, in neither 
 of these connections, but by an obscurer writer, 
 Epicharmus, whose fragments have a peculiar 
 historical value, as he was born about 540 B.C., 
 and his authority thus carries back the word nearly 
 to the First Olympiad, 776 B.C., which is com- 
 monly recognized as the beginning of authentic 
 history. Setting these fragments aside, however, 
 the first conspicuous appearance of the word in 
 literature is in that astonishing poem, the "Pro- 
 metheus Bound" of JEschylus, which was prob- 
 ably represented about 460 B.C. as the central 
 play of a " trilogy," the theme being an ideal 
 hero, on whom the vengeance of Zeus has fallen 
 for his love of man. The word we seek occurs 
 in the first two speeches of the drama, where
 
 328 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 
 
 Strength and Hephaistos (Vulcan) in turn in- 
 form Prometheus that he is to be bound to the 
 desert rock in punishment for his philanthropy, 
 (f>i\avdpo)7rov rpoTrov', and it is repeated later, in 
 the most magnificent soliloquy in ancient litera- 
 ture, where Prometheus accepts the charge, and 
 glories in his offence, of too much love for man, 
 rrjv \iav <f>i\oTr)Ta fiporwv. He admits that when 
 Zeus had resolved to destroy the human race, and 
 had withdrawn from men the use of fire, he himself 
 had reconveyed fire to them, and thus saved them 
 from destruction ; that he had afterwards taught 
 them to tame animals, to build ships, to observe the 
 stars, to mine for metals, to heal diseases. For 
 this he was punished by Zeus ; for this he defies 
 Zeus, and predicts that his tyranny must end, and 
 justice be done. On this the three tragedies turn ; 
 the first showing Prometheus as carrying the 
 sacred gift of fire to men ; the second as chained 
 to Caucasus ; the third as delivered from his 
 chains. If we had the first play, we should have 
 the virtue of philanthropy exhibited in its details ; 
 if we had the last, we should see its triumph ; but 
 in the remaining tragedy we see what is, perhaps, 
 nobler than either, the philanthropic man under 
 torment for his self-devotion, but refusing to regret 
 what he has done. There is not a play in modern 
 literature, I should say, which turns so directly 
 and completely, from beginning to end, upon the 
 word and the thing " philanthropy." 
 Seeking, now, another instance of the early use of
 
 THE WORD PHILANTHROPY. 329 
 
 the Greek word, and turning from the ideal to the 
 actual, we have Socrates, in the "Euthyphron" of 
 Plato, composed probably about 400 B.C. ques- 
 tioned as to how it is that he has called upon him- 
 self the vengeance of those in power by telling 
 unwelcome truths. And when his opponent hints 
 that he himself has never got into any serious trou- 
 ble, Socrates answers, in that half-jesting way which 
 he never wholly lays aside I quote Jowett's trans- 
 lation : 
 
 " I dare say that you don't make yourself com- 
 mon, and are not apt to impart your wisdom. But 
 I have a benevolent habit of pouring myself out to 
 everybody, and would even pay for a listener, and 
 I am afraid that the Athenians know this." The 
 phrase rendered " benevolent habit " is airo (j>i\av- 
 Opwrrlas ; 1 that is, " through philanthropy ; " and 
 I know nowhere a franker glimpse of the real 
 man Socrates. 
 
 Coming down to later authors, we find the use 
 of the word in Greek to be always such as to 
 bring out distinctly that meaning for which it has 
 been imported into English. How apt we are to 
 say that the Greeks thought only of the state, not of 
 individuals, nor of the world outside ! Yet the great 
 orator Isocrates (borii 436 B. c.) heaps praises upon 
 a certain person as being one who loved man and 
 Athens and wisdom, <j)i\dvdpa>7ros KOI <j)i\adrjvato<i 
 KOI <i\6cro(o<?, a noble epitaph. 
 
 So the orator Demosthenes (born 385 B. c.) uses 
 1 Plato : Euthijph. 3. Jowett's Plato, I. 286.
 
 330 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 the word fyikavOpwrria in contrast to <>$oi>o<?, hate, 
 and to 00/10x779, cruelty ; and speaks of employing 
 philanthropy toward any one fyikavOpwrriav TLV\ 
 Xpfjadai. So Xenophon, as we have seen, makes 
 Cyrus describe himself on his death-bed as " phil- 
 anthropic." 
 
 So Epictetus, at a later period, said, " Nothing is 
 meaner than the love of pleasure, the love of gain, 
 and insolence ; nothing nobler than magnanimity, 
 meekness, and philanthropy." So Plutarch, ad- 
 dressing his " Consolations to Apollonius" on 
 the death of his son, sums up the praises of the 
 youth by calling him " philanthropic," $i\dv6pa>- 
 7T09. In his life of Solon, also, he uses the word 
 <f>t,\avOp(i)'Trevfia, a philanthropic act. So Diodorus 
 speaks of a desert country as ^(jreprj^ev^ Trdcrrjs 
 tf>i\av0pG>Tria<;, destitute of all philanthropy, or, 
 as we should say, " pitiless," as if wherever 
 man might be there would also be the love of 
 man. 1 
 
 We have, then, a virtue called philanthropy, which 
 dates back nearly six hundred years before our era, 
 and within about two centuries of the beginning 
 of authentic history, a virtue which inspired the 
 self-devotion of Prometheus in the great tragedy 
 of antiquity ; which prompted the manner of life 
 of Socrates ; to which Demosthenes appealed, in 
 opposition to hate and cruelty ; to which Isoc- 
 
 1 Isoc. Epist. v. 2 ; Dem. adv. Leptines, 165 ; Xen. Cyrop. 
 viii. 7.25; Epict. Frag. 46; Plut. Cons. 34, Solon, 15; Diod. 
 xvii. 50-
 
 THE WORD PHILANTHROPY. 331 
 
 rates gave precedence before the love of country 
 and the love of knowledge ; which Potybius 
 admired, when shown toward captives ; which 
 Epictetus classed as the noblest of all things ; and 
 which Plutarch inscribed as the highest praise upon 
 the epitaph of a noble youth. Thus thoroughly 
 was the word " philanthropy " rooted in the Greek 
 language, and recognized by the Greek heart ; and 
 it is clear that we, speaking a language in which 
 this word was unknown for centuries, being in- 
 troduced at last, according to Dryden, because 
 there was no English word to express the same 
 idea, cannot claim the virtue it expresses as an 
 exclusively modern possession. 
 
 It is worth noticing, that there is another use of 
 the word "philanthropy," which prevailed among 
 the Greeks, and was employed for a time in Eng- 
 lish. The word was used to express an attribute 
 of Deity, as, for instance, when Aristophanes ap- 
 plies it to Hermes, fl ^C^avdpwjrore " O ! most 
 philanthropic" that is, loving towards man. 
 Paul uses the Greek word but once, and then 
 in this same sense ; and the Greek Father Ath- 
 anasius uses it as a term of courtesy, ' H arf 
 (f)i\av0pa)7ria " Your philanthrop} 7 ," as we say to 
 Republican governors, " Your Excellency." Young, 
 in his " Night Thoughts," addresses the Deity, 
 " Thou great Philanthropist ; " Jeremy Taylor 
 speaks of " the philanthropy of God ; " and Barrow, 
 speaking of the goodness of God, says, " Commonly 
 also it is by the most obliging and endearing name
 
 332 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 called love and philanthropy." 1 But I do not re- 
 call any recent instances of this use of the word. 
 
 And the use of this word, in this sense, by the 
 Greeks, reminds us that the Greek religion, even 
 if deficient in the loveliest spiritual results, had 
 on the other hand little that was gloomy or 
 terrifying. Thus the Greek funeral inscriptions, 
 though never so triumphant as the Christian, 
 were yet almost always marked, as Milman has 
 pointed out, by a " quiet beauty." And this 
 word " philanthropy " thus did a double duty, 
 including in its range two thoughts, familiar to 
 modern times in separate phrases, the Father- 
 hood of God and the Brotherhood of Man. 
 
 It is to this consideration, I fancy, that we owe 
 those glimpses not merely of general philanthropy, 
 but of a recognized unity in the human race, that 
 we find from time to time in ancient literature. 
 It is hardly strange that in Greece, with its 
 isolated position, its exceptional cultivation and 
 refinement, and its scanty communications, this 
 feeling should have been less prominent than in 
 a world girdled with railways and encircled by 
 telegraphic wires. In those days the great ma- 
 jority of men, and women almost without excep- 
 tion, spent their lives within the limit of some 
 narrow state ; and it was hard for the most en- 
 lightened to think of those beyond their borders 
 
 1 Aristoph. Peace, 394. Paul, Titus iii. 4. Athanasius, cited 
 in Sophocles's Lexicon. Young, Night Fourth. Taylor, Vol. III., 
 Sermon 11 (Richardson). Barrow, Vol. II., p. 356 (ed. 1700).
 
 TEE WORD PHILANTHROPY. 333 
 
 except as we think even now of the vast popula- 
 tions of South America or Africa, whom ^we 
 regard as human beings, no doubt, but as having 
 few habits or interests in common with our own. 
 But every great conquest by Greece or Rome 
 tended to familiarize men with the thought of a 
 community of nations, even before a special stim- 
 ulus was at last added by Christianity. It does 
 not seem to me just, therefore, in Max Miiller to 
 say that " humanity is a word for which you look 
 in vain in Plato or Aristotle,'' without pointing 
 out that later Greek writers, utterly uninfluenced 
 by Christianity, made the same objection to these 
 authors. Thus, in an essay attributed to Plutarch 
 on the Fortune of Alexander, he makes this re- 
 markable statement: 
 
 " Alexander did not hearken to his preceptor 
 Aristotle, who advised him to bear himself as a 
 prince among the Greeks, his own people, but as a 
 master among the Barbarians ; to treat the one as 
 friends and kinsmen, the others as animals or chat- 
 tels. . . But, conceiving that he was sent by God to 
 be an umpire between all and to unite all together, 
 he reduced by arms those whom he could not con- 
 quer by persuasion, and formed of a hundred 
 diverse nations one single universal body, mingling, 
 as it were, in one cup of friendship the customs, 
 the marriages, and the laws of all. He desired that 
 all should regard the whole world as their common 
 country, the good as fellow-citizens and brethren, 
 the bad as aliens and enemies; that the Greeks
 
 334 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 should no longer be distinguished from the for- 
 eigner by arms or costume, but that every good 
 man should be esteemed an Hellene, every evil 
 man a barbarian." * 
 
 Here we have not a piece of vague sentimen- 
 talism, but the plan attributed by tradition to one 
 of the great generals of the world's history ; and 
 whether this was Alexander's real thought, or some- 
 thing invented for him by biographers, it is equally 
 a recognition of the brotherhood of man. And the 
 same Plutarch tells us that " the so much admired 
 commonwealth of Zeno, first author of the Stoic 
 sect, aims singly at this, that neither in cities nor in 
 towns we should live under laws distinct from one 
 another, but that we should look on all men in 
 general to be our fellow-countrymen and citizens, 
 observing one manner of living and one kind of 
 order, like a flock feeding together with equal 
 right in one common pasture." 2 So Jamblichus 
 reports that Pythagoras, five centuries before our 
 era, taught " the love of all to all ; " 3 and Menander 
 the dramatist said, " to live is not to live for one's 
 self alone ; let us help one another ; " 4 and later, 
 Epictetus maintained that " the universe is but 
 one great city, full of beloved ones, divine and 
 
 1 Merivale's translation: Conversion of the Roman Empire, 
 p. 64. He also gives the original, p. 203. Compare Goodwin's 
 Plutarch, I. 481. 
 
 2 Plutarch's Morals. Goodwin's translation, I. 481. 
 
 8 Jamblichi de Pythag. vita, cc. 16. 33. <t>tAt'av de 8ia$avaraTa 
 
 npbf unavTaf Uv&apopae irapeduKe. 
 * Meineke : Fragmenta Com. Graec.
 
 THE WORD PHILANTHROPY. 335 
 
 human, by nature endeared to each other ; " 1 and 
 Marcus Antoninus taught that we must " love 
 mankind." 2 In none of these passages do we find 
 the Greek word fyiXavOpayjria ; but in all we find 
 the noble feeling indicated by that word ; while 
 Aulus Gellius quotes the word itself, and attaches 
 to it the self-same meaning borne by the English 
 word. 3 
 
 And it is well known that the same chain of tra- 
 dition runs through the Latin writers, as when 
 Terence brought down the applause of the theatre 
 by saying, " Homo sum ; humani nihil a me alienum 
 puto ; " 4 and Cicero says, " we are framed by nature 
 to love mankind (naturd propensi sumus ad dili- 
 gendos homines') ; this is the foundation of law ; " 
 and Lucan predicts a time when all laws shall 
 cease and nations disarm and all men love one 
 another (inque vicem gens omnis amet*) ; and Quiii- 
 tilian teaches that we should "give heed to a 
 stranger in the name of the universal brotherhood 
 which binds together all men under the common 
 father of Nature ; " and Seneca says that " we are 
 members of one great body," and " born for the 
 
 1 Epictetus, III. 24. 
 
 2 Marcus Antoninus, VII. 31. fy'ikitaav rbv avOpumvov -yevof. 
 
 3 Aulus Gellius, XIII. xvi. 1. " Quodque a Graecis <[>i?Mv6punia 
 dicitur, et significat dexteritatem quandam benevolentiamque erga 
 omnes homines promiscuam." 
 
 * Terence : Heaut. I. 1. 25. Cicero de Legibus, I. 15, and de 
 Eepub. III. 7. 7 (fragm). Lucan : Pharsalia, I. 60-1. Quintilian : 
 Declamations, quoted by Denis. Seneca, Ep. 95. Juvenal : Sat. 
 XV. 140-2.
 
 336 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 good of the whole ; " and Juvenal, that " mutual 
 sympathy is what distinguishes us from brutes." 
 
 Shall we think the better or the worse of the 
 Greeks for having no noun substantive just cor- 
 responding to our word "philanthropist," whether 
 as a term of praise or reproach ? With us, while 
 it should be the noblest of all epithets, it is felt 
 in some quarters to carry with it a certain slight 
 tinge of suspicion, as is alleged of the word " Dea- 
 con" or " Christian Statesman." There is a peril in 
 the habit of doing good ; I do not mean merely in 
 case of hypocrisy ; but I have noticed that when a 
 man feels that he is serving his fellow-men, he 
 sometimes takes great liberties in the process. It 
 was of this style of philanthropists that old Count 
 Gurowski spoke, when he cautioned a young lady 
 of my acquaintance, above all things, against 
 marrying one of that class. " Marry thief ! " he 
 said, " Marry murderer ! But marry philantrope 
 never-r-r ! " 
 
 It is a singular fact that while the generous 
 word " philanthropy " was thus widely used in 
 Greek and widely spread in English, there should 
 have been no such wide-spread word for the 
 answering sin, self-love. The word (j>i\avrla was 
 known to the Greeks, and a word, " philauty," 
 was made from it, in English; and <j>i\avros is 
 used once in the New Testament by Paul ; l but in 
 neither language did it become classic or familiar. 
 Minsheu has " philautie " in his second edition, 
 1 2 Timothy, iii. 2.
 
 THE WORD PHILANTHROPY. 337 
 
 and Beaumont, in his poem of " Psyche ; " and 
 Holinshed, in his " Chronicle " (1577), speaks of 
 philautie " or " self-love, which rageth in men so 
 preposterouslie." But the word is omitted from most 
 English dictionaries, and we will hope that the sin 
 rages less " preposterouslie " now. I once heard 
 a mother say that if she could teach her little boy 
 good words one-half as easily as he could learn the 
 bad ones for himself, she should be quite satisfied. 
 Here is the human race, on the other hand, seizing 
 eagerly on the good word, transplanting it and 
 keeping it alive in the new soil, while the bad 
 word dies out, unregretted. In view of this, we 
 may well claim that our debt to the Greek race 
 is not merely scientific or aesthetic, but, in some 
 degree, moral and spiritual also. However va"st 
 may be the spread of human kindliness in Chris- 
 tendom, we should yet give to the Greeks some 
 credit for the spirit of philanthropy, as we are 
 compelled, at any rate, to give them full credit for 
 the word. 
 
 22
 
 338 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 RELIGION AS SOCIAL FORCE. 
 BY EDNAH D. CHENEY. 
 
 T AM to speak in this address of Religion as a 
 * Social Force, especially in relation to Philan- 
 thropy and Reform. The very utterance of my 
 subject seems a sufficient argument ; for the rela- 
 tion of religion to philanthropy is as natural as 
 that of the mother to the child. How can I sep- 
 arate religion from life ? It is everywhere, as 
 diffusive, as necessary as the air that we breathe. 
 Religion is our word for the relation of the mortal 
 to the immortal, of the finite to the infinite, of the 
 human to the divine. It is the essence and main- 
 spring of life, and must be the moving, vital power 
 in all love of men, which is philanthropy, and all 
 desire of progress, which is reform. As well 
 might we expect all this fair work of nature 
 every tree and shrub putting forth into new life 
 and beauty to be accomplished without looking 
 upwards to the sun, and drinking in his warmth 
 and light, as imagine that humanity will bud 
 and blossom without constant influx from its 
 Divine Centre. 
 
 Religion is the very spirit of our daily life, 
 animating all that we are and do. The ancients 
 rightly used the term " pious " alike to express the
 
 RELIGION AS SOCIAL FORCE. 339 
 
 reverence given to human beings and that due to 
 the gods. Every hero of humanity believes him- 
 self to be inspired by Divine light and protected 
 by Divine power, and there is no great movement 
 in history which does not find in religion its source 
 and guide. Pious JEneas went forth from Troy 
 into Latium, trusting in the protection of the gods, 
 even as Abraham went from the land of Ur into 
 Canaan at the command of the Lord. This is the 
 grand idea of Hebrew legislation, which gives to 
 every rule of life the sanction of Divine authority. 
 The sanitary measures rendered necessary by their 
 climate and mode of life had to the Jews the force 
 
 of Divine command. 
 
 * 
 
 The day of rest for man and beast was so guarded 
 by this sanction that three thousand years have 
 hardly lessened its authority, and reason has a hard 
 struggle even now against the tyranny of its super- 
 stitious observance. The same religious sanction, 
 modified according to the genius of the people, 
 made the authority of Greek, Roman, and Moham- 
 medan power. The Turk believes that the prayer 
 of the faithful must be perpetual ; that if a moment 
 passes in which the word " Allah " is not breathed 
 out into the air with pious fervor, the reign of chaos 
 will come again, and " all this goodly frame, the 
 earth, this most excellent canopy, the air, this 
 brave, overhanging firmament, this majestical roof 
 fretted with golden fire, will become a foul and 
 pestilent congregation of vapors." 
 
 The Turk is right : there is no safety for the
 
 340 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 outward world, none for the State, none for society, 
 or our daily household life, but in religion. that 
 is, in the constant relation of every thing human 
 to the Divine, the perpetual refreshment and 
 recreation from the source of all life. Like the 
 air, religion must be alwa} r s a new and living force, 
 never cut off from its primal source, but always 
 renewed by free access to the whole unlimited 
 range of Divine life. ""Get religion,'" and bottle 
 it up : it is stale as tho air which is confined with- 
 out renewal. 
 
 And yet religion, the great oonserver of life and 
 humanity, is also the great iconoclast and destroyer. 
 It is a flaming fire which burns up whatever has 
 not living force within itself to withstand it. 
 Again, it is like the air, the breath and life of 
 whatever is living and growing, the great de- 
 stroyer of all that is dead. It will suffer nothing 
 useless or stationary under its influence : it will 
 make either better or worse all that is submitted 
 to its action. Religion, which is the very breath 
 of life to true humanity, to real progress, is the 
 radical foe of all old idols and dead traditions. 
 Like life, it is constantly expressing itself in forms, 
 but yet ever freeing itself from them. 
 
 Hence it is, that while every one accepts the 
 religious origin and basis of reforms in the past, 
 the reformer finds no enemy so bitter, no inertia 
 so sluggish, no resistance so obstinate as that from 
 organized ecclesiasticism. It is the history of all 
 reform from the prophets stoned in Judea and the
 
 RELIGION AS SOCIAL FORCE. 341 
 
 martyr crucified on Calvary, from Socrates drink- 
 ing the hemlock in prison to Lovejoy murdered in 
 Alton, that it must contend to the death with the 
 old and traditional church. 
 
 It is here, then, that we claim the superiority 
 for the free religious movement in its relation to 
 reform. It is religion restored to its native freedom, 
 answerable to its own consciousness of God alone, 
 unfettered by tradition, unrestrained by formulas 
 and creeds, able to expand itself to its utmost 
 limits, free to flow into every channel that is open 
 to it, gathering help and counsel from all, binding 
 chains upon none. It is religion, like Pegasus 
 unharnessed from the yoke, that must inspire us 
 with new life and strength to battle against the 
 forces of evil, the great army of negation, em- 
 bodied in corrupt and oppressive institutions. 
 
 Free religion can accept this work, because she 
 has no hindrances in the way. She has no old 
 institutions venerable in their decay, which will 
 crumble into dust at the movement of reform. 
 The ecclesiastical historian, Eusebius, allows that 
 he only mentions what will reflect credit on the 
 martyrs, and Millner makes the same confession 
 in regard to the Church ; but free religion is no 
 hired advocate with a cause to defend. She can 
 rejoice in a brave deed done anywhere, and accept 
 the truth by whomsoever spoken. So her armory 
 against evil is rich in weapons, forged by all true 
 souls of whatever name, and she is never afraid 
 that they will be turned against herself ; for she is
 
 342 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 baptized all over in the waters of immortality, and 
 has not even a vulnerable point in her heel where 
 the arrows of truth can wound her. 
 
 I shall speak now of only two points in which 
 free religion has a special advantage and superior 
 power over the old organized forms of religion in 
 promoting reform and doing the work of philan- 
 thropy. It must be the task, not of a brief half- 
 hour, but of many years of thought and study, to 
 apply it wisely to all the varied demands of life 
 and society. 
 
 First, free religion has an infinite faith in hu- 
 manity. It sets no bounds to the possibilities of 
 the human race here and now on this very planet. 
 It knows man only as the child of God, partaker of 
 his spirit, and heir to his infinite resources. Glory- 
 ing in all the past achievements of the mighty 
 leaders of the race, it accepts none as the Ultima 
 Thule of progress beyond which humanity cannot go. 
 It is enough for it to know that a thing is good, to 
 be sure that it must be possible. It knows no 
 
 " fallen Adam there, 
 . A red clay and a breath," 
 
 but a new-born babe full of the spirit of its maker, 
 and capable of infinite progress in intelligence and 
 goodness. It recognizes evil, not as a vital force, 
 coequal with God, but as delay and hindrance, 
 negation and darkness, to be overcome only with 
 superabounding light and love and life. It accepts, 
 therefore, the means of reform which are all ready 
 for its use. It asks only man with God, the Di-
 
 EELIOION AS SOCIAL FORGE. 343 
 
 vine man, one with the Father, and one also with 
 all humanity, to do God's work on this planet. It 
 demands no miraculous power : it finds power and 
 love enough incarnated in humanity to redeem and 
 advance the world. It sees in man the very agSnt 
 God has created for this very purpose, to organize 
 and develop the life of humanity on this earth ; 
 and it believes that only faithful use of the powers 
 implanted within us is needed to accomplish all 
 that we ask for in our wildest dreams or our highest 
 prayers. Swedenborg says, " The very heavens are 
 in the form of a man," and all that we need ask for 
 earth is, that man should rise up to his true stature, 
 and live out in its utmost fulness the life that is 
 possible for him here upon earth. 
 
 How perfectly does this apply to the reform 
 which we have seen begun and nearly accom- 
 plished, the abolition of negro oppression, and to 
 those which so imperatively demand our attention 
 now in America, the Indian and Chinese ques- 
 tions. The moment the full recognition of the 
 negro's manhood was accomplished, the work was 
 done ; and the same will be the case with the Ind- 
 ian and the Chinese. 
 
 And here is the meeting-point of free religion 
 with true science, which brings me to my second 
 statement. 
 
 Baron Quetelet, of Belgium, one of the ripest 
 scholars and profoundest students of statistical 
 science (I quote from the Journal of the Ameri- 
 can Social Science Association for 1870), says :
 
 344 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 " The more intelligence increases, the nearer we 
 approach the beautiful and the good. The per- 
 fectibility of the human species results as a neces- 
 sary consequence of all our researches." 
 
 Free religion is therefore specially adapted to 
 the work of philanthropy and reform by its cord- 
 ial alliance with science. Reading by the light of 
 ecclesiastical history, what a strange proposition is 
 this, religion and science one! Was not Ana*x- 
 agoras exiled in the name of religion, and Galileo 
 put under the tortures of the Inquisition ? Did 
 not the gentle Cowper scoff at the researches of 
 geology ? and does not every scientific treatise feel 
 bound to justify itself against the charge of con- 
 flicting with the dogmas of the popular religion ? 
 Are we not again and again warned against the 
 pride of intellect, and taught that it is only by 
 unquestioning faith that we can receive the spirit 
 of God? 
 
 But looked at from the centre of things, in the 
 light of reason and common-sense, what is more 
 obvious than the unity of religion and science ? 
 Religion is the relation to God in the inward 
 heart, through love and faith. Science is the in- 
 quiry into God's methods of action in the outward 
 world, the world which we believe he has created, 
 and of which he is the vital essence and sustaining 
 force. What do we fear to find there ? That our Fa- 
 ther has blundered and failed, or has wilfully done 
 evil instead of good ? What faith would that be 
 in a human friend which led us to shun investi-
 
 RELIGION AS SOCIAL FORCE. 345 
 
 gation into his words and deeds lest perchance our 
 love and faith should be destroyed ? 
 
 Free religion is not afraid of the truth. It has 
 no pet dogmas to defend, nor old traditions which 
 must not be shaken. It is not disturbed, though 
 the earth has rolled on in space for ten millions of 
 years instead of six thousand: it knows it has 
 always rolled under the guiding hand of its infi- 
 nite and perfect Creator. It does not shudder if 
 science teaches that it is gradually approaching 
 the sun, and will finally be absorbed into that great 
 luminary. It knows that it will only be in accord- 
 ance with the same Divine Law, and that the welfare 
 of all will be secured amid the great conflagration, 
 if such is to take place. 
 
 And much as science needs the inspiring power 
 of religion to keep it broad and sweet and sane, 
 always loyal and true to its Divine Centre, just as 
 much does religion need science to guide its hand, 
 and show it how to accomplish the good which 
 love prompts it to desire. Free religion will return 
 to science the service she receives from her. As 
 Pythagoras said, " Divine Wisdom is true science," 
 so the conscious intuitions of religion will give 
 that guiding light to science which she needs. 
 Faith will assure us of the grand harmony which 
 must exist in creation, and will not suffer the in- 
 tellect to rest until it proves the law, and justifies 
 clearly to all men that which religion had discerned 
 spontaneously for itself. Thus we find that many 
 of the grandest discoveries of science have been
 
 346 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 foreshadowed and predicted by religious men who 
 welcomed the truth of God in their souls before 
 they read its confirmation in his works. When the 
 marriage between religion and science is acknowl- 
 edged, and the couple are admitted into good soci- 
 ety, we may hope for yet richer fruits from their 
 union. 
 
 Never was the need of this union more clear 
 than now. We have arrived at the point where 
 we cannot rest in the unconsciousness of ignorance. 
 The childhood of the world is past. We must 
 study the laws of nature and of social life, to 
 maintain society in a sound and healthy condition. 
 Life has become rich and complicated, full of diffi- 
 cult problems. The simple wish to help and bless 
 others is not enough to save us from doing incalcu- 
 lable mischief, unless we have profound wisdom to 
 guide our action. 
 
 The philanthropist leaves large sums of money 
 to feed the poor, and builds up a pauper settlement 
 which is the curse of the country for miles around. 
 Science should have ploughed his money into the 
 ground, and enabled the people to feed themselves. 
 
 The great questions which agitate us to-day are 
 not merely questions of good and evil dispositions. 
 The temperance question, the labor movement, the 
 woman question, the sanitary reforms, the treat- 
 ment of crime, pauperism, all demand the most 
 thorough and scientific knowledge to save us from 
 the gravest errors. The saint accepts the saying 
 of Jesus, " The poor ye shall always have with
 
 RELIGION AS SOCIAL FORCE. 347 
 
 you," and believes it a Divine provision for ena- 
 bling him to exercise the virtue of giving alms, 
 and so securing a higher seat in heaven. But the 
 reformer asks, Why must ye always have the poor 
 with you ? Why should not society be so organ- 
 ized that every human being shall have a fair 
 chance for his share of this world's goods ? and 
 he turns to science to help him to solve this ques- 
 tion. Social science says, The alms-giving of the 
 church has been the fruitful source of pauperism, 
 and hence of intemperance, vice, and crime. You 
 have no right to gratify your own benevolent im- 
 pulses by this indiscriminate giving ; you are bound 
 to seek out causes. You have no right to keep pet 
 beneficiaries for the luxury of bestowing charity, 
 as the English lords preserve their woodcocks for 
 the pleasure of hunting them : you are bound to 
 teach them to help themselves, and to raise them 
 to your own level of independent freedom. 
 
 A pious Spanish poet says, that sickness is the 
 sign of God's love. I give a part of the quaint 
 translation : 
 
 " This frame so weak, 
 
 Sharp sickness' hue, 
 And this pale cheek 
 
 God loves in you. 
 
 " More faltering speech 
 
 And weary days 
 Than beauty's blaze 
 His heart will reach." 
 
 Mr. Emerson says, " Sickness is felony." Is he 
 not right ? Have you any right to let your arms
 
 348 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 rust when God wants you to fight the battle of 
 life ? any right to come with broken tools to work 
 in his vineyard ? any right to waste in a year what 
 should serve for a life ? Which spirit will be most 
 likely to establish the board of health and clear 
 out the foul alleys in our cities ? Let Spain and 
 New England test the question. 
 
 Again, how does the old ecclesiasticism speak of 
 death ? 
 
 "As for man, his days are as the grass; 
 As a flower of the field, so he flourisheth : 
 The wind passe th over it and it is gone." 
 
 And a familiar Wesleyan hymn thanks God, 
 
 " whose wise, paternal love 
 Hath brought my active vigor down." 
 
 This spirit is not confined to Christianity. We 
 find the same wail and contempt of life in much 
 of the heathen poetry and philosophy, in all relig- 
 ion which is introspective and partial, instead of 
 round and whole. Superstition and piety alike 
 regard premature death either as a cruel fate or as 
 an arbitrary exercise of God's inscrutable will. But 
 social science says, " The first great object of san- 
 itary organization should be to watch the death 
 rate," and it conclusively proves that nothing is 
 more entirely under the control of law than human 
 mortality ; and every instance of increased care, in 
 obedience to the Divine laws of health, clearly re- 
 ports itself at once in the percentage of mortality. 
 
 Nothing can be more holy and tender than Jesus'
 
 RELIGION AS SOCIAL FORCE. 349 
 
 attitude towards the fallen woman ; but the Chris- 
 tian religion has struggled in vain for eighteen cent- 
 X uries against the great social evil. How to prevent 
 it is still the great unsolved problem, which religion 
 and science must work out together. Neither can 
 do it alone. 
 
 Again, the labor question cannot be solved by 
 j religion without the aid of science. The capitalist 
 may shorten the hours of labor, and increase the 
 rate of wages ; but he will not put any more bread 
 into the mouths of the hungry million, unless sci- 
 ence steps in and shows him how to apply the 
 forces of nature so that eight hours may do the 
 work of twelve, and an acre of ground well tilled 
 and well harvested may produce the food of three. 
 
 The Quaker says these desires after beautiful 
 things cannot be satisfied without injuring your 
 fellow-beings. Your white paint is poisonous : 
 your dyed garments are unhealthful. He cuts 
 them off, preserving his own sense of right, but 
 impoverishing the world of grace and beauty. 
 Science combined with religion says, " The re- 
 sources of God are infinite. He has given us 
 these longings for beauty and comfort ; there must 
 be innocent means for gratifying them : let me go 
 to work and seek them out." It substitutes zinc 
 for lead, and the paint becomes harmless; and it 
 will some day find that it may dye green gauze 
 as innocently as spring decks the meadows and 
 fields without the aid of arsenic. 
 
 Religion will not let us rest, while our enjoy-
 
 350 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 merits and comforts are purchased with the debase- 
 ment and degradation of a human being : science 
 must furnish new means by which the abundance 
 of good things shall be multiplied, so that all may 
 partake of them. Will it be the millennium when 
 the nobleman takes his turn at delving with the 
 spade, and the peasant sits upon the throne ? No ; 
 but when labor is made so noble and its rewards 
 so rich, that the misery of idle luxury will become 
 too heavy to be borne. But to accomplish this 
 work science must be free, the friend and part- 
 ner of religion, not her slave. 
 
 If religion says to science, " Seek and find, but 
 find nothing but what I bid you," her freedom and 
 power are gone. And this has been the attitude 
 of ecclesiasticism toward science. " You may teach 
 that the earth moves round the sun, but you must 
 not refuse to teach that Joshua commanded the 
 sun and moon to stay their apparent motion and 
 remain to give light for his victory over the ene- 
 mies of Israel." " You may teach the law of grav- 
 itation, and demonstrate to your pupils that its 
 operation is universal, and that by its unerring 
 force and constant action the whole machinery of 
 the heavens is kept in harmony and order ; but 
 you must not suffer them to doubt that this benefi- 
 cent law was suspended that Peter might walk 
 upon the waves to meet his Master." Science thus 
 held in fetters cannot do its legitimate work. It 
 must speak the bidding of its master, not follow 
 out the guidance of truth.
 
 RELIGION AS SOCIAL FORCE. 351 
 
 But free religion is not fettered to any such 
 formulas. It does not even feel itself bound to 
 protect and patronize God. If the sincere student 
 comes to it and says, " I have searched through 
 nature, I have penetrated into the heavens with 
 my telescope, and have traced out the law which 
 binds star to star, even to the remotest verge of 
 the Milky Way ; I have turned my microscope 
 upon the minutest insects that crowd a drop of 
 water, and traced out their nervous organizations 
 in their little bodies, but nowhere can I find your 
 God," free religion does not answer him with 
 contempt or anathema. But she replies, " Search 
 on, my friend : tell us what you do find. Your 
 gaze will not drive God out from the world which 
 he has created. You will not deprive me of the 
 joy of his presence if I find him and you cannot. 
 But you will find many and precious truths ; you 
 will find power, harmony, and beauty ; you will 
 find deep meanings and wonderful illustrations. 
 You may call the power law or chance or what 
 you will, only seek honestly, and tell me plainly 
 what you do find ; and it shall be my own fault if I 
 cannot relate it to any higher truth than I think 
 has been given me to hold." She says with Plato, 
 " While truth leads the way, we can never say that 
 any band of evils follows in her train." The pres- 
 ent revelations of science as of religion may be 
 partial and erroneous, but as long as they are sin- 
 cere and progressive, they will lead to good ; for in 
 the universe of God every path leads to the cen- 
 tre, if only steadily followed.
 
 352 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 This attitude of free religion to science makes 
 our work the most eminently practical one. We 
 are not seeking merely speculative freedom, or intel- 
 lectual culture. We are trying to clear the ground 
 of the old rubbish of tradition and formula ; we 
 are striving to let in the free air and warm sun- 
 light upon the germs of life with which it is filled, 
 so that these shall quicken and fructify and bear 
 fruit, and " the leaves shall be for the healing of 
 the nations." 
 
 Religion means to us warmth and life and love 
 and growth, what the sun is to the plant, what 
 the dew is to the grass, what the air is to our lungs, 
 its native atmosphere into which we are born, 
 from which we need no protection, into which 
 we can open out our whole natures, and receive it 
 in that we may expand and grow into the full stat- 
 ure and bloom of humanity. We strive to prime 
 away the dead wood, not because it has not served 
 the growth of the past 3"ear, but because it is in, 
 the way of the living shoots of this year. We 
 know that even the decay of the past may become 
 living nourishment for the present, if only the free 
 forces of nature be allowed to play upon it, so that 
 seeming to be destroyed it shall really be taken up 
 anew into the current of life. 
 
 Free religion does not at this moment tend to 
 express itself in finer cathedrals or sweeter litanies 
 or more glorious anthems. All these are good. 
 We must have religion expressed in art ; or, rather, 
 it cannot help so expressing itself when it is full
 
 RELIGION AS SOCIAL FORCE. 353 
 
 of rich, bounding, joyous life, as it should be. But 
 it may be long ages before we surpass the forms of 
 art which the past has bequeathed to us. 
 
 For us to-day the work is eminently a practical 
 one. ' Our art must be the art of life. Religion 
 wedded to science must give us bread for all, 
 shelter for all, health, freedom, education for all. 
 Religion must inspire us with the love to pour it- 
 self out in good to others, and to ask for them all 
 that we would ask for ourselves. Science must be 
 the hand to execute her will, to search out causes 
 and to devise remedies, and to found the good that 
 we ask for on the eternal rock of Divine and Im- 
 mutable Law. 
 
 Do not fear that life thus developed will become 
 hard and unlovely : when the heart and the head 
 work together, when wisdom does the bidding of 
 love, when religion and science, the love and know- 
 ledge of God, have worked out their appointed 
 results, what can the product be but immortal 
 good and beauty?
 
 VOICES FROM THE FREE PLATFORM.
 
 [EXPLANATORY NOTE. One purpose of this volume is to give 
 an answer to the question, now not infrequently asked, What is 
 the meaning of the Free Religious Association ? It is one of the 
 objects of that Association to encourage and to bring before the 
 public just such discussions of religious problems as this book con- 
 tains. It aims to discover and to establish truth in religious 
 matters by the method of intelligent free inquiry. Lectures, 
 Conventions, and Publications are its instrumentalities : and this 
 volume is made up chiefly of Essays and Addresses that have 
 appeared upon its platform. In addition to the foregoing more 
 elaborate essays, it has been thought advisable to append some 
 selections from the less formal discussions which have occurred in 
 the annual meetings of the Association, and have been preserved 
 in its Reports. The following extracts, made entirely from these 
 annual pamphlets, will show what a variety of representative 
 voices have been heard in the Conventions of the Association, and 
 indicate somewhat the range of topics which have been touched. 
 It will be perceived that the organization represents certain prin- 
 ciples and tendencies, and not any new creed or jointly subscribed 
 system of faith. These principles and tendencies are perhaps best 
 suggested by the title of the book, " Freedom and Fellowship in 
 Religion," Freedom of inquiry and opinion, and yet Fellowship 
 in spirit and aim. And they are expressed in the two chief articles 
 of the Constitution as follows : 
 
 "L This Organization shall be called the Free Religious Association, 
 its objects being to promote the practical interests of pure religion, to in- 
 crease fellowship in the spirit, and to encourage the scientific study of man's 
 religious nature and history ; and to this end all persons interested in these 
 objects are cordially invited to its membership. 
 
 " II. Membership in this Association, shall leave each individual respon- 
 sible for his own opinions alone, and affect in no degree his relations to other 
 associations ; and nothing in the name or Constitution of the Association 
 shall ever be construed as limiting membership by any test of speculative 
 opinion or belief, or as defining the position of the Association, collectively 
 considered, with reference to any such opinion or belief, or as interfering 
 in any other way with that absolute freedom of thought and expression 
 which is the natural right of every rational being." 
 
 Should any readers wish to know more of such an Association, 
 the first of these selections may meet their desire. W. J. P.]
 
 VOICES FROM THE FREE PLATFORM. 
 
 AIMS OF THE FREE RELIGIOUS ASSOCIATION. 
 
 As one who from the outset was especially interested 
 in the formation of this new Association, the Secretary 
 may here be allowed to put on record the statement, 
 that, so far as he is aware, there was on the part of no 
 one of those having the like interest any desire or 
 thought of forcing into a compact organization, and 
 into a strict community of purpose and action, the 
 various representative religious elements to which they 
 made their appeal for a public meeting ; much less did 
 they presume to control, through any formal, mechan- 
 ical contrivance, the progressive religious spirit of the 
 age, and think to turn it into some special channel. 
 On the contrary, the first premise of all their thinking 
 and acting was, that this spirit must be left perfectly 
 free and untrammelled in order to work out its proper 
 results ; and their sole aim was to form some simple 
 plan of association which should represent and give 
 expression to this perfect religious freedom; not pre- 
 maturely to hasten, nor artificially to shape, any natural 
 religious movements that are in progress, but to pro- 
 vide an organism itself a natural result of these 
 movements for religious elements that are spontane- 
 ously attracted more or less strongly to each other, and 
 that are already prepared for some kind of combination
 
 358 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 and fellowship, an organism that should enable these 
 elements the better to define and express themselves in 
 public sentiment in their united force, and at the same 
 time leave the largest liberty to individual opinion and 
 utterance. 
 
 . 
 
 The objects of the Association are succinctly stated 
 in the first Article of the Constitution. We are organ- 
 ized, according to that Article, " to promote the practi- 
 cal interests of pure religion, to encourage the scientific 
 study of theology, 1 and to increase fellowship in the 
 spirit." But we fail to perceive the full bearing of this 
 language, unless we note that this statement of purpose 
 is introduced by the title of the Association, which is 
 " Free Religious," and is followed by an invitation to "all 
 persons interested in these objects " to become members. 
 The basis of the Association, therefore, is broader than 
 any thing before attempted in the way of organization 
 in religious history. It goes below any one specific 
 form of religion, and seeks to find the common ground 
 on which all religions rest, or more properly religion 
 itself rests, and plants itself there. It contemplates 
 the ultimate union, not simply of all sects in Christen- 
 dom, but of all religions, Christian and non-Christian. 
 It looks beyond "Christian" limits for its fellowship. 
 Nor is this aim, even thus early, only ideal. As the 
 meetings last year and this both testify, it is in a meas- 
 ure already realized. And this fact, with what it in- 
 volves, is the most distinguishing feature of the Asso- 
 ciation. " With what it involves;" for the important 
 
 1 This phrase has been since amended so as to express the idea 
 more clearly thus : " Scientific study of man's religious nature and 
 history."
 
 VOICES FROM THE FREE PLATFORM. 359 
 
 thing is not so much the fact that the Association 
 brings different sects and religions together on one 
 platform, as the principle underlying that fact. This 
 principle is, that in this Association these various re- 
 ligious opinions and faiths meet and mingle on perfectly 
 equal terms, no one claiming for itself what it does not 
 cordially accord, by courtesy and by right, to every 
 other. For the first time in religious history, not only 
 representatives of differing Christian sects, but people 
 of all religious names and of no religious name, are in- 
 vited to come together as equal bi'others, and confer 
 with one another on the highest interests of mankind. 
 Most of us here are probably, by reason of birth and 
 education, counted in the census of the world's popu- 
 lation as " Christian," whether we make any other claim 
 to the name or not. But on the platform of this Asso- 
 ciation we do not obtrude that title. We agree here 
 to listen to what our Hebrew friend may have to utter, 
 or to what our India brother may write to us of their 
 respective religious faiths, with the same candor and 
 the same integrity and openness of judgment that we 
 accord to a " Christian " speaker. A believer in the 
 Christian system of religion may, if his conscience so 
 dictate, use his right to speak on the platform of this 
 Association with the purpose of proving the claims of 
 his particular faith paramount to all others, and of con- 
 verting non-believers to his views; but if he does so, 
 that very act commits him to hear impartially the same 
 claims made for any other faith. One who should come 
 here simply to speak with dogmatic and sectarian arro- 
 gance for his own belief, and not cordially to listen to 
 what might be said in behalf of another belief, would 
 not come certainly in the spirit of the constitution of 
 this Association.
 
 360 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 Yet this is not to say that the Free Religions Asso- 
 ciation takes the ground that one form of religion or 
 of faith is as true ami good as another. It simply does 
 not determine the claims of any specific form of faith, 
 or assume the claims of any to be determined. It de- 
 clines to consider it a closed question that the claims of 
 any religion are to be regarded as finally established, 
 and gives a fair, open field for the establishing of any 
 religion, or of so much of any religion as can prove 
 itself to be true. Christianity, thus far, has attempted 
 to convert all other religions to itself. The Christian 
 missionary goes to India and says to the natives there, 
 " You must be converted to my faith, or there is no 
 hope of your progress to any thing better in this world, 
 or of your happiness in the world to come." This 
 Association says to these native religious devotees, 
 " Let us see what is true in your religion, and what is 
 true in this and that other form of faith, and be ready 
 to accept the true from any quarter: and, meantime, 
 let us put our heads together and see if we cannot 
 contrive some better and worthier ways of living." 
 The Free Religious Association simply does not accept 
 any instituted form of religion as necessarily a finality. 
 It admits the possibility of advance in religious truth 
 beyond any present religious system. It plants itself 
 on Truth-seeking, and does not claim to have found a 
 finality in religious faith and practice. 
 
 On this broad basis, with this declaration of equal 
 religious liberty and rights, the Free Religious Asso- 
 ciation is organized ; and it is evident that the specific 
 objects of the Association, as stated in its constitution, 
 must take direction and shape from these fundamental 
 principles. The Association aims " to promote the
 
 VOICES FROM TEE FREE PLATFORM. 361 
 
 interests of pure religion," without stamping those 
 interests with any special name, or seeking to build 
 up any sectarian form of faith and worship. It aims 
 " to encourage the scientific study of theology," not 
 fearing to trust reason and free inquiry on all fields of 
 thought, not recalling them when they reach the limits 
 of the " Christian " or any other special confession of 
 faith, but striving to apply a more truly rational and 
 scientific method of investigation to all problems of 
 religious experience and history. It aims "to increase 
 fellowship in the spirit," defining that fellowship as 
 nothing narrower than the brotherhood of man, and 
 making it rest on the aspirations and strivings of our 
 common humanity after higher truth and life. Exec- 
 utive Committee's ^Report, 1868, by the Secretary. 
 
 KELIGIOUS NEEDS OF THE AGE. 
 
 I THINK the necessity very great, and it has prompted 
 an equal magnanimity, that thus invites all classes, all 
 religious men, whatever their connections, whatever 
 their specialities, in whatever relation they stand to the 
 Christian church, to unite in a movement of benefit to 
 men, under the sanction of religion. We are all very 
 sensible, it is forced on us every day, of the feeling that 
 the churches are outgrown ; that the creeds are out- 
 grown; that a technical theology no longer suits us. 
 It is not the ill-will of people, no indeed, but the 
 incapacity for confirming themselves there. 
 
 The church is not large enough for the man ; it cannot 
 inspire the enthusiasm which is the parent of every 
 thing good in history, which makes the romance of
 
 362 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 history. For that enthusiasm you must have some- 
 thing greater than yourselves, and not less. 
 
 The child, the young student, finds scope in his 
 mathematics and chemistry, or natural history, because 
 he finds a truth larger than he is ; finds himself con- 
 tinually instructed. But, in churches, the healthy and 
 thoughtful mind is likely to find itself in something 
 less ; it is checked, cribbed, confined. And the statis- 
 tics of the American, the English, and the German 
 cities, showing that the mass of the population is leav- 
 ing off going to church, indicate the necessity, which 
 should have been foreseen, that the church should 
 always be new and extemporized, because it is eternal, 
 and springs from the sentiment of men, or it does not 
 exist. One wonders sometimes that the churches still 
 retain so many votaries, when he reads the histories of 
 the church. There is an element of childish infatuation 
 in them which does not exalt our respect for man. 
 Read in Michelet, that in Europe, for twelve or four- 
 teen centuries, God the Father had no temple and no 
 altar. The Holy Ghost and the son of Mary were 
 Avorshipped ; and in the thirteenth century the First 
 Person began to appear at the side of his son in pict- 
 ures, and in sculpture, for worship, but only through 
 favor of his son. These mortifying puerilities abound 
 in religious history. But as soon as every man is 
 apprised of the Divine presence within his own mind, 
 is apprised that the perfect law of duty corresponds 
 with the laws of chemistry, of vegetation, of astronomy, 
 as face to face in a glass ; that the basis of duty, the 
 order of society, the power of character, the wealth of 
 culture, the perfection of taste, all draw their essence 
 from this moral sentiment, then we have a religion that
 
 VOICES FROM THE FREE PLATFORM. 363 
 
 exalts ; that commands all the social and all the private 
 action. 
 
 What strikes me in the sudden movement which 
 brings together to-day so many separated friends, 
 separated but sympathetic, and what I expected to 
 find here was, some practical suggestions by which we 
 were to reanimate and reorganize for ourselves the true 
 church, the pure worship. Pure doctrine always bears 
 fruit in pure benefits. It is only by good works, it is 
 only on the basis of active duty, that worship finds 
 expression. What is best in the ancient religions was 
 the sacred friendships between heroes, the sacred bands, 
 like the relations of the Pythagorean disciples. Our 
 masonic institutions probably grew from the like ori- 
 gin. 
 
 The close association which bound the first disciples 
 of Jesus is another example ; and it were easy to find 
 more. The soul of our late war, which will always be 
 remembered as dignifying it, was first, the desire to 
 abolish slavery in this country, and secondly, to abolish 
 the mischief of the war itself, by healing and saving the 
 sick and wounded soldiers, and this by the sacred 
 bands of the Sanitary Commission. I wish that the vari- 
 ous beneficent institutions, which are springing up, like 
 joyful plants of wholesomeness, all over this country, 
 should all be remembered as within the sphere of this 
 Association, almost all of them are represented here, 
 and that within this little band that has gathered 
 to-day should grow friendship. The interests that 
 grow out of a meeting like this should bind us with 
 new strength to the old eternal duties. Ralph 
 Waldo JZmerson.
 
 364 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 LIBERTY AS CONDITION. 
 
 IT is said that liberty is only a condition. True, 
 but it is a vital condition. A man with his feet tied is 
 in the condition of being bound ; untie his feet, and he 
 is only in the condition of being unbound ; but that 
 condition is the essential condition of all his progress. 
 In the one case, he cannot move a step ; in the other 
 case, he walks whithersoever he will. We admit that 
 freedom is a condition, but we say it is a necessary 
 condition of progress. When we mention the word 
 " liberty," we account for all that has been done in 
 modern science, modern art, modern literature, and 
 modern life. Our American civilization turns upon 
 this one pivot of liberty. Our people are free. All 
 the power there is, -is represented by man. All the 
 power there is, is in human nature. There is no power 
 outside of man. Power becomes strong when it be- 
 comes incarnate in man. There are infinite resources 
 and possibilities of power ; but there is no force, even 
 of divinity, until it is made human force ; and the only 
 condition on which that human force can be developed, 
 can expand, and find application, is the condition of 
 absolute freedom. Not simply freedom of discussion, 
 not freedom of debate, freedom of quarrel ; we do not 
 open a gladiatorial aren'a ; we would put an end to all 
 that. There is fighting enough now ; there has been 
 fighting enough before. Freedom of discussion im- 
 plies partial freedom. When people are only free 
 enough to be able to come with their swords and clear 
 a little place about them, where they can stand face to 
 face with their adversary, and fight on equal terms
 
 VOICES FROM THE FREE PLATFORM. 365 
 
 each fighting for life, that is but partial freedom. But 
 when there is no opprobrium, no reproval cast upon 
 any, no ill word spoken of any ; when one is as free to 
 avow himself an Atheist as a Theist, a Materialist as a 
 Spiritualist, a Christian as a non-Christian or an anti- 
 Christian ; when one is perfectly free to sit down with 
 any company, with publicans and sinners if he will, 
 without having any ugly name of " Atheist" or " In- 
 fidel " flung in his face, then we have freedom, free- 
 dom of contribution ; polemics are no more ; debate is 
 disarmed ; controversy is at an end ; we are not ene- 
 mies ; we have nothing to do with swords and pistols ; 
 we are friends ; we take each other by the hand ; we 
 open our arms for all to come in ; we say, " You shall 
 have as much right as we have. We are brothers. 
 Let us each add his mite to the general fund of knowl- 
 edge and cheer and inspiration, and then we shall get 
 all the power there is, losing no atom of it." 0. B. 
 Froihingham. 
 
 SPIRITUAL LIBERTY. 
 
 FOE myself, I belong to a sect. I love it and I 
 honor it. I believe its history to be one of transcend- 
 ent glory. I believe that the brave men and women 
 who have belonged to it in different ages and in different 
 lands have stood in the front rank of those who have 
 demanded "soul-liberty;" and at the stake, at the 
 whipping-post, in the prison, everywhere by their blood 
 they have sealed this precious testimony. But I am 
 sometimes afraid that my sect, having passed out from 
 under the harrow of persecution, being no longer a 
 scorned and outcast people, and having grown to mag-
 
 366 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 nificent proportions of strength, of culture, of educa- 
 tion, of wealth, and of power, are beginning to forget 
 the glorious lessons of the past, and are tempted to 
 build up simply an ecclesiastical structure, and to put 
 their hand of power upon those who to-day wish only 
 to repeat the announcements which our ancestors so 
 gloriously and so bravely made. All church history is 
 but a repetition of this experience, and, therefore, it 
 comes to pass that in every age this battle must be 
 fought over again. Through eighteen long centuries, 
 now in this land and now in that, now by this people, 
 now by that people, now by a resistance to civil tyr- 
 anny, now by a protest against ecclesiastical despotism, 
 this assertion of the liberty of every man to believe 
 for himself, answering only to God, and not to human 
 tribunals, has been made again and again. I believe 
 that it is made here to-day, not in any spirit of wild 
 enthusiasm or distorted fanaticism, but in a calm, ear- 
 nest, studious, and honest way. 
 
 Now, in this land, which we call free, in this age, 
 which we call glorious, we need, not so much, perhaps, 
 for our own sakes as for the sake of those who shall 
 come after us, to assert the principle which more than 
 two long centuries ago was the very axiom of Protes- 
 tantism, the absolute right of every human soul to 
 interpret for itself the whole word of Scripture. True, the 
 age of outward persecution is past. No longer do 
 the thunderbolts forged at the Vatican, and hurled by 
 the angry hand of the Pope, excite alarm, but merri- 
 ment only, on the part of those against whom they are 
 directed. The horrid chambers of the Inquisition are 
 deserted, the dreadful mechanism of torture lies idle 
 and rusted, the whipping-post and the scaffold to-day
 
 VOICES FROM THE FREE PLATFORM. 367 
 
 claim no victims to religious bigotry ; but there is a 
 more subtle, and, if possible, a more accursed persecu- 
 tion, which to-day, even, is employed by too many who 
 vainly dream they are doing God service. It is the 
 persecution which seeks to brand with odium and write 
 " outcast " upon brave and honest souls, who simply 
 differ from their fellows on questions of intellectual 
 interpretation or doctrinal statement, while their be- 
 havior and lives are on the side of justice, of brother- 
 hood, and of love. I think, therefore, that we need to 
 take to ourselves the lessons which are so beauteously 
 illustrated in the life and behavior of Jesus ; that it is 
 not what a man says he believes that makes him either 
 to be accepted or to be rejected, but it is what a man 
 does. A life of justice, a life of purity, a life of chaste- 
 ness, a life of temperance, a life of benevolence, a life 
 that puts out its hand of defence over the weak and 
 the oppressed, a life that dares to defy wealth and 
 power, even, if they are upon the side of wrong, is 
 not such a life a life of unquestioned righteousness ? 
 For myself, I hold it to be a cardinal and vital dogma, 
 that Jesus of Nazareth is the Saviour of the world. I 
 believe him to be God incarnated, manifested in flesh. 
 When I look upon him stretched upon the Cross of 
 Calvary, when I behold that crown of thorns, those 
 wounded hands and feet, that side pierced by the cruel 
 foeman's spears, my soul sees there my vicarious atone- 
 ment and sacrifice, and by the shedding of that blood 
 I believe my sin to be pardoned. That to my soul is 
 a profound, deep, earnest, and absorbing belief. But 
 if any other man judge differently, I am not consti- 
 tuted an ecclesiastical tribunal to try him, or to pro- 
 nounce a verdict of condemnation against him. I
 
 368 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 think of what Paul said, " Who art thou that judgest 
 another man's servant? To his own master he stand- 
 eth or falleth." I recollect that the severest and bit- 
 terest rebukes which passed the lips of the gentle 
 Nazarene were those which were hurled at the scribes 
 and pharisees who sat in Moses' seat, who wore broad 
 phylacteries, who loved the uppermost seats in the 
 synagogue, who paid tithes of mint, anise, and cummin, 
 and yet who devoured widows' houses, and forgot the 
 wider law of justice and of love. I transfer that lesson 
 to to-day, and think that it is not the outward eccle- 
 siastical relationships which men hold that will save 
 them, or cause them to perish, but that vital commu- 
 nion between God and their own souls is the one thing 
 necessary to salvation. Charles H. Jifalcom. 
 
 LIBERTY SAFE AND CONSERVATIVE. 
 
 A DEFINITION of liberty will not supply the place of 
 liberty. We must have the thing itself, nor fear to 
 confront the spirit which our fathers evoked. It is not 
 from the free-born that come the excesses that have 
 darkened the pages of history, but from bondmen who 
 have broken loose. Impose restraints, and you shall 
 have rebellions. Withhold rights, and the State shall 
 be convulsed with the earthquake throes of revolu- 
 tion. 
 
 The yearning for liberty is ineradicable, but it may 
 be repressed till it becomes a blind instinct, bursting 
 all barriers, scorning all restraints ; a Samson, reck- 
 less of consequences, so it can bring to their overthrow 
 the ponderous walls of old abuse. Liberty is conser-
 
 VOICES FROM THE FREE PLATFORM. 309 
 
 vative ; it builds up ; it is like the sap of the oak that 
 courses to every twig and root, creating as it goes new 
 germs, developing ever more perfect forms, ever greater 
 strength. License is liberty made insane, the house- 
 hold fire become a conflagration. The Church points 
 to the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror as 
 an illustration of too much liberty. She does not hint 
 that the force of the recoil of that outraged humanity 
 was precisely the measure of the outrage it had suf- 
 fered. Revolution is the asphyxiated heart in the 
 spasm of recovery. In the crypts of the Church the 
 atmosphere had grown poison by centuries of con- 
 finement, and when Voltaire and his fellow-mockers 
 let in a little fresh air from the outer world, the re- 
 storative breath excited convulsion terrible to behold, 
 but an evidence of returning health. 
 
 The breath of life in the human soul is love of lib- 
 erty. All progress is from less to more freedom ; from 
 ignorance and subordination to intelligent self-direc- 
 tion. The natural enemy of liberty is authority. This 
 stays progress and hinders growth ; and of all forms 
 of authority that which entrenches itself behind holy 
 names is the subtlest and most oppressive. No tyranny 
 is so relentless as that which is exercised in the name 
 of God. The despotism of mere force is comparatively 
 harmless ; but when despotism takes the form of relig- 
 ion, and enforces its exactions with a " thus saith the 
 Lord," not only human rights are endangered, but 
 humanity itself is paralyzed. To the individual soul, 
 born to a destiny that it cannot grasp, it is of vital 
 importance that it be left in freedom to deal as it best 
 can with the great problem of its relations and destiny. 
 What hope for it when authority in the name of re- 
 
 24
 
 370 FREEDOM. AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 ligion seizes on every vague hope and fear, and out of 
 these forges a chain that never clanks, but clings so 
 closely that the victim scarcely knows where the op- 
 pression begins, nor whether his limitations are of his 
 nature and inevitable, or the result of a usurping will ? 
 Mystery is transformed into mastery, and religion is 
 made to rebind the soul. Celia JZurleigh. 
 
 HUMANITY'S DREAM. 
 
 CONCEIVE the situation of the animal man in the 
 midst of the physical universe. What an insect, what 
 an atomy, what an embodied insignificance he appears! 
 Without natural clothing, without natural weapons, 
 wanting the wing and eye of the falcon, wanting the 
 scent, speed, and native cunning of the fox, a mere 
 mouthful to some of his animal neighbors, feeble in 
 instinct, delicate in digestion, more sensitive and sus- 
 ceptible of pain, and less provided by nature with 
 ready-made supply, than any other creature, he 
 exhibits the maximum of want and the minimum of 
 resource. What can he do but tug and sweat under 
 the whip of his own necessities ? Lorded over by the 
 immense system of the world, what sentiment can he 
 have but that of his own littleness, subjection, and 
 insignificance? When the thunder breaks, when the 
 storm roars, when the sea rages, when the earth shakes, 
 when the elements are at their huge horse-play, what 
 is he? The grass beneath his foot grows fearlessly 
 when his knees are knocking together. The pines lift 
 their proud heads to wrestle with the tempest when he 
 dives for an uncertain security into a hole in the earth.
 
 VOICES FROM THE FREE PLATFORM. 371 
 
 Nature overlies him with all its weight; what shall 
 lift it off, lift him above it, and enthrone him in a sense 
 of the sovereign significance of his own being ? 
 
 It is to be done by a peculiar resource within him- 
 self; by somewhat, which, in allusion to its ethereal 
 nature, I shall at present call the immanent dream of 
 the human soul, a dream that stands in perpetual, de- 
 fiant contrast with his outward experience. The forces 
 of the world enslave him ; he dreams pure freedom, 
 absolute and immortal. All things around him change, 
 and helplessly he changes with them ; he dreams a 
 conscious poise and comprehension, that mutation can- 
 not invade. Time sweeps past with its succession of 
 days, and on the wings of the days his life flies, to 
 disappear as they do ; he dreams the conscious eternal. 
 The world affronts him with hard, material, impenetra- 
 ble fact ; insolently independent of him ; owing noth- 
 ing, as appears, to any principle in his breast : he dreams 
 the primacy and universality of thought, holding the 
 solid universe in solution for ever. In the physical 
 world, force is the be-all and end-all ; he dreams the 
 conscious right, commissioned with authority to judge 
 reality by ideal standards, and renew it in an ideal 
 image. All that he beholds partakes of imperfection ; 
 he dreams the perfect, beauty and good without flaw 
 and without instability. 
 
 This dream, moreover, is humanity itself , the essence 
 of its nature. All the distinctive genius of man is in 
 it ; all his high performance comes out of it. It enters 
 into his contemplation of the forms of nature and life, 
 and makes poetry and art ; into his regard of nature 
 assumed to be the embodiment of thought, and makes 
 science ; into the eye, with which he reads the signifi-
 
 372 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 cance of his own being, considered as universal truth, 
 and makes philosophy ; into his sense of relation to his 
 fellow, and makes morality, civil and social order; into 
 his self-recognition, and makes the aspiration to liberty ; 
 it hovers .before him as an ideal, and makes the impulse, 
 the guidance, and the goal of progress. JD. A. Was- 
 son. 
 
 INNER MEANING OF RELIGION. 
 
 WHAT a word that is, " Religion "! How deep it 
 lies in the whole history of man ! How, in all the 
 efforts that men make to escape from the bondage 
 which has been connected with it, they cannot get 
 away from the thing itself! A friend of mine, recently 
 returned from England, said that, among intelligent 
 and cultivated men whom he met there, he found that 
 .religion was utterly given up ; " but," he said, " they 
 are men who hold fast, with true loyalty, to moral 
 principle." "Then," I said, "that is their religion." 
 And that is the religion of multitudes, who, either 
 from want of an original constitution of sentiment, or 
 disgusted by the false exhibitions of devout sentiment, 
 turn away from the whole emotional side of religion, 
 but place their feet firm on the rock of righteousness, 
 right doing, obeying the divine law, a sacred princi- 
 ple itself, consecration itself, therefore itself a religion : 
 though I should not say the whole of religion, for re- 
 ligion, covering the whole of man, is the idea of truth 
 with reason ; it is a righteousness of law in his con- 
 science ; it is an inspiration and an affection in the heart. 
 We want to plead for all these things : we find room 
 for them all in our freedom. Our freedom does not
 
 VOICES FROM THE FREE PLATFORM. 373 
 
 release us from the attractions of any one of them ; 
 we do not in our liberty go off into space : but we find 
 within ourselves those sacred divine laws a reality of 
 experience which bind us, in every direction, to the 
 true, to the right, to the beautiful, to the loving. A senti- 
 ment so deep in man's soul is not going to pass away : it 
 is only the transient forms which pass away, when some- 
 times men are wrenched from their old beliefs, and seem 
 to be set afloat ; when they are ready to believe that, 
 because they have been deceived under the guise of 
 sentiments called religious and emotions called devout, 
 there is no such thing as true, devout feeling. What 
 we want to get at, on every side, is reality, facts: 
 facts of physical nature, and of the spiritual world ; 
 facts of the emotions ; facts of the soul. . . . We want 
 to be uplifted at times from things visible into things 
 invisible, and to know that in our life, which is passing 
 away and in its nature perishable, there is a reality 
 which constantly passes on, through ways of change, 
 itself unchanged, and to lay hold of this reality through 
 the ideal faculty of our souls. That is Religion. 
 
 What is aspiration after perfection but the action of 
 the ideal element in us, seeking a better than we have 
 ever seen, not contented with the facts that are, but 
 knowing that there are greater facts beyond ? A reality 
 we want our religion to be in its freedom : freedom 
 from superstition ; freedom from external authority. 
 Not that we may stand still, but that we may grow in 
 every direction ; that we may fill out towards every 
 point; that we may receive, from all quarters, light and 
 truth and peace and strength and inspiration, a feel- 
 ing that there is something above ourselves, name it 
 as you may, state it as you may, a feeling of something
 
 374 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 above ourselves and yet akin to ourselves, for ever draw- 
 ing us on by an attraction which we could not resist if 
 we would, and would not if we could in our best moods, 
 and hemming us in, not letting us go from it, because it 
 is the law of our own life, that life within us which 
 is akin to God ; which enables us to say, with all the 
 liberty of thought as well as the emotion of feeling, 
 " Our Father," since it is this kindred with the Infinite 
 that we mean when we say, "Father." Samuel Long- 
 fellow. 
 
 THE PERMANENT AND THE TRANSIENT IN 
 RELIGION. 
 
 FORMS, the determinate mould in which ideas of God 
 and worship are cast, may change or perish, and yet 
 religion in its essence remain unharmed, untouched. 
 Flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God. 
 The task set to man, and especially to man of this gen- 
 eration, is to purify his worship, to purge it of the sen- 
 suous element. As there is a destructive force, a power 
 disintegrating, tending to break down, to corrupt, to 
 kill, so also there is a vital force, a power industrious 
 to build up, to enlarge, exalt, and free. There is this 
 vitality in the soul. It seeks to resist and surmount 
 the degradations of sense, to raise the spirit to pure 
 thought and liberty. The battle is as old as history, 
 and there are shown to have been substantial conquests 
 won. From the low fetich-worship there has been an 
 advance to a partially finer and better in nature-worship, 
 prostration before gods grotesque enough, dwelling in 
 dark abodes, but less material, invisible. The outer 
 image gave way before an inner image; the idol of
 
 VOICES FROM THE FREE PLATFORM. 375 
 
 wood or of stone was broken to be succeeded by a con- 
 ception in thought, a conception gross and very anthro- 
 pomorphic indeed, but still finer, less unworthy than 
 that represented in wood. Polytheism was exchanged 
 for monotheism, the divine was unified, the many melted 
 into one. The grosser personal conceptions were laid 
 aside ; corporeity, physical organs, as eyes, ears, hands, 
 dwelling in special place, or locality, the anthropomor- 
 phic ways of seeing, knowing, doing, &c., these, in 
 the course of ages, in good degree have passed away. 
 
 Other work remains to be done, till there be in our 
 conception of the divine a complete separating away 
 of every thing that even in thought involves outer or 
 personal limitation. 
 
 In this thorough elimination is the idea of person to 
 be laid aside ? Perhaps so, since it is so hard to hold 
 by person and escape the anthropomorphic conceptions. 
 "In the idea of person," says Fichte, in his sublime 
 invocation, " there are limitations ; how can I clothe 
 thee with it, without these?" In attempting to dis- 
 engage and lay hold of the content of pure thought, 
 the intuition within us, it is difficult to say where we 
 may or must stop. Our idea is conditioned by form, 
 and yet form limits the idea. All unconsciously men 
 borrow from the sensuous fancy what they suppose to 
 belong to the spiritual intuition. Professor Martineau, 
 as indeed do generally the theologians who appeal to 
 intuition for support of their views, deems that in that 
 content are given, not only the divine existence, but 
 personality, and will, works, ways, very much after the 
 human cast. Very hard it unquestionably is, as we 
 speak of the Highest, to escape the necessity of im- 
 personation. And yet, doubtless, the thought is to
 
 376 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 clear itself more of the personal determination as we 
 attempt to reach pure view of God. 
 
 But, not to dwell upon this subtle question, which 
 might involve us in debate as protracted and unsatis- 
 factory as that which afflicted the schoolmen upon the 
 subject of Universals, we" may say that religion will 
 come more and more to centre in those ideas which, 
 present ever in consciousness and intelligible to the 
 simplest understanding, are yet so ethereal that they 
 pass beyond the range of the loftiest thought, and 
 represent to us well the conditions of the infinite; 
 ideal Truths, ideas so substantial and enduring they 
 are the reality of Truth itself, truths so transcendent, 
 superlative, everlasting, they are pre-reminently ideal. 
 Justice, Truth, Beauty, Excellence, these are some 
 of the names we call them by ; and, under whatever 
 name, they hint the illimitable. Do we seek terms 
 comprehensive, most deeply significant ? There are 
 no words so broad and inclusive as they. Do we seek 
 that which conveys omnipresence, eternity, the majesty 
 of wisdom and power? There is nothing which so 
 finely fulfils the conditions of spirit as the reality 
 which they symbolize. They veil and they reveal, 
 temper the light to our mortal eyes, and express in 
 sublimest, fittest speech we know, the One inexpressi- 
 ble. Here is shrine for worship, altar for sacrifice, 
 temple for aspiration and prayer. Here is fane where 
 idolatry cannot enter, an object we may adore without 
 possibility of un worthiness or any excess, a beauty, a 
 Madonna, we may love without degradation or effemi- 
 nacy. Much as we sip and quaff, we can never exhaust 
 the sweet ; freely as we may partake, we can never 
 cloy of the possession.
 
 VOICES FROM THE FREE PLATFORM. 377 
 
 Religion thus becomes the pure worship of Truth 
 and Reality, the largest, noblest fact possible to our 
 being. It is sobriety, holding every thing at its worth, 
 reading all aright, suffering never any intoxication, 
 exaggerating never the present, pursuing nowhere 
 unduly whatever may be grateful or desired. It is 
 activity, wakeful energy, deep interest, constant doing, 
 finding stakes to be contended for in this world of 
 time, and willing to sacrifice all for their winning. It 
 is repose, keeping ever the poise, no heat even in the 
 thick of the battle, remembering the to-morrow after 
 to-day, and resting in perfect trust. It is dedication to 
 the highest, wedding Virtue, embracing Truth and Ex- 
 cellence. It is invocation to the finest and the best ; 
 it says to great Propriety, 
 
 " Be thou my pattern, thou my guide, 
 O'er every thought and step preside." 
 
 " I invoke and I worship benevolence, purity, and a 
 worthy life," says a Persian prayer, coming down may- 
 hap from the days of Zoroaster. So the soul shall say, 
 " I invoke and I worship the ideal perfect. Oh ! mould 
 thou me, and assimilate to thy complete image ; make 
 me to be like thyself." C. D. B. Mills. 
 
 KELIGION AS EFFORT TOWARD SELF-PERFECTION. 
 
 IF I find that religion reduced to its lowest terms, to 
 its simplest expression, is simply the effort of man to 
 perfect himself, does that seem to be an inadequate, 
 poor, and empty conception? Does it seem to exclude 
 the Infinite? No; far from that. You cannot travel
 
 378 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 the road towards perfection without very soon discov- 
 ering that you cannot attain it step by step. The path 
 to infinity is not a ladder. You cannot complete your 
 search, and gain its object. You feel that you have 
 entered upon a quest which is infinite, endless, not 
 possible to be ended, even in an eternity of time. The 
 very thought of progress presupposes a goal: the very 
 thought of progress, again, implies the impossibility of 
 a goal. You go from less to more and from more to 
 most, but you still have an infinite stretch of space be- 
 yond; and the very fact that you are thus travelling 
 onward into space gives you an idea of the infinite 
 space in which you live, and move, and have your be- 
 ing. Many a man starts out on this road towards per- 
 fection, fired by a deep hunger and thirst for the ideal, 
 but not knowing whither it shall lead him, or what 
 thoughts it shall give birth to in his own soul. But I 
 believe that, if he travel that road persistently, he will 
 find himself accompanied by a growing consciousness 
 of the infinity of the universe in which he dwells, the 
 infinity of the Power which has made him and makes 
 all the infinity of this Nature which he inhabits. Nat- 
 ure herself is the effort of the Infinite to express its 
 own perfection. The very thought of infinite perfec- 
 tion is implied in the effort to perfect one's self. The 
 thought of our own perfection implies the thought 
 of that infinite perfection of which ours is but the lee- 
 blest imitation and copy. So, although I admit that 
 many a man may be a religious man in having thu. 
 deep thirst for the ideal, and in putting forth the effort 
 to create and perfect it in his own life, and yet be tech- 
 nically and in his own thought an atheist, I do believe 
 that this effort to reproduce voluntarily within himself
 
 VOICES FROM THE FREE PLATFORM. 379 
 
 the unity of the universe find to help carry forward its 
 laws and powers to their highest evolution in his own 
 soul, has a direct tendency towards what I should name 
 Theism, were I called upon to describe it by the fittest 
 term. The Atheism which starts out with devotion to 
 any idea must logically end, I think, in the simplest, 
 the fairest, the noblest, the highest form of Theism. 
 That is the reason why I feel so much sympathy for 
 men like George Jacob Holyoake, of London, a man 
 who is conscientiously atheistic, who has written the 
 most touching, tender, and heart-probing book, per- 
 haps, that was ever penned, "The Trial of Theism." 
 I never in my life felt a more earnest religious spirit in 
 any book than in that. And yet he denies a personal 
 God, denies God in every sense in which he can be 
 defined in words, and declares himself to be a simple 
 atheist, a " Secularist." There is nothing in all 
 literature more deep, tender, and earnest than the spirit 
 that pervades that book. I feel myself infinitely more 
 in sympathy with that atheist than I do with thousands 
 and thousands of men who call themselves religious, 
 and lift their hands in horror up to God, as if I turned 
 my back upon Him. 
 
 This is the religion that I believe in, a religion 
 which is consistent with perfect freedom, and presup- 
 poses it ; nay, a religion that aims directly at freedom 
 as part of the ideal itself. This religion, once planted 
 in the human heart, must grow. It is a vital seed, 
 which cannot be suppressed or killed out. No drought 
 will kill it ; no flood will kill it. Nothing will kill it 
 but the extinction of the soul itself. So long as that 
 hunger after the ideal survives, you have the very spirit, 
 the very essence and epitome, of all religions. That is
 
 380 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 enough. Leave it to grow as Nature wills ; leave it to 
 develop as human nature shall direct ; and when it 
 comes to its natural growth, depend upon it, it will be 
 something most fair, beautiful, and lovely to behold. 
 We need not fear that any monster or any baneful 
 Upas-tree will come from it. No, it is the divine seed ; 
 the seed of truth, the seed of beauty, the seed of happi- 
 ness, the seed of love, the seed of every thing that can 
 sweeten, and enlarge, and beautify life. Francis E> 
 Abbot. 
 
 REASON AS GUIDE. 
 
 WHO shall guide man in this path to perfection? 
 How are we to distinguish the universal from the tem- 
 poral or local stand-point, God from the gods, justice 
 from compacts of selfishness ? History itself as little as 
 the Bible can guide us in this matter, for they contain 
 both the ideal and the history of development towards 
 it, the universal and all particular stand-points, truth 
 and the various shades of aberrations. If the Bible is 
 to guide, what are we to do with its immoral incidents, 
 the unreasonable tales and myths, the local or temporal 
 presentations of Deity ? The religious sentiment called 
 faith cannot guide, for it is evidently uncertain. Whence 
 the various and contradictory views of the Christian 
 sects, all claiming the guidance of faith, if it is reliable? 
 By faith, crusades were organized, inquisitions instituted, 
 autos-da-fe celebrated, tens of thousands were massa- 
 cred. How could faith be a good guide ? Imagina- 
 tion cannot invent a doctrine revolting to reason and 
 conscience, which, at one time or other, has not been 
 adopted by faith as a divine precept. By faith, all sorts
 
 VOICES FROM THE FREE PLATFORM. 381 
 
 of superstitions and barbarities have been preached, 
 believed, and practised. Faith is not our proper guide. 
 The ethical sentiment, conscience, must guide, it may 
 be maintained ; but this is also an unsafe guide. Con- 
 science, too, has misguided, and does misguide individ- 
 uals and nations. The conscience of those parents who 
 drown their new-born daughters because they cannot 
 afford to give them the proper education and outfit; 
 and of those barbarous sons who kill their feeble and 
 aged parents, because they are burdensome to them- 
 selves and others ; the conscience of fanatics and en- 
 raged mobs, of despots and their obedient coadjutors, 
 is human conscience. Conscience, clearly, is an unsafe 
 guide. 
 
 Reason, the understanding, is THE guide which God 
 has given us ; the highest and last arbiter in all matters, 
 human and divine. Reason is the supreme authority ; 
 and there is no appeal from its decisions. By reason 
 we distinguish correctly the true from the false, right 
 from wrong, the universal from the particular. Faith, 
 conscience, history, and Bible must submit to reason. 
 This is the touchstone to distinguish gold from brass, 
 the precious metal from the dross. Whatever cannot 
 stand the test of reason is worthless, arid to be cast 
 away. This was the case in all ages of history, and will 
 be so for ever. With the progress of reason, faith and 
 conscience are purified, humanity is elevated, and the 
 ethical feeling sanctified. Truth is the only Messiah. 
 Reason, says a Jewish authority, is the angel (the medi- 
 ator) which stands between God and man. Reason has 
 redeemed the human family from barbarism, and will 
 complete the work of redemption. If I speak of reason 
 as the highest authority, I do not mean my reason or
 
 382 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 your reason ; I mean reason itself, universal and eternal, 
 in which and through which the human family is a unit, 
 and God is revealed to man. Reason must distinguish 
 the universal stand-point from the particular ones in 
 the Bible and elsewhere. Truth is the seal of God. 
 Reason is the connecting link of God and man, like 
 the rays of light that connect the earth with the sun. 
 Therefore science, the favorite mistress of reason, is the 
 ally of religion and truth. Research, criticism, inquiry, 
 and all other exertions of reason, are divinely appointed 
 means for the progress of humanity to its lofty ideals of 
 God, truth, and happiness. Rabbi Isaac M. Wise. 
 
 UNITY IN RELIGIOUS SENTIMENT. 
 
 RELIGIOUS controversy seeks agreement and mutual 
 understanding. It invites the development of indi- 
 vidual views, in the interest of a final reconciliation 
 whose harmony is preluded and prepared by musical 
 dissonance. Only masters possess the idea of this sym- 
 phony of many minds in which all severalties conduce 
 to the common and final consent. Not once in a hun- 
 dred years is a true symphonist born. So rare is his 
 power, that his works increase in recognized value and 
 authority long after the term of his mortal life. Remote 
 generations seek to interpret his high meanings, and flat- 
 ter themselves that they understand him when their hom- 
 age flatters him no longer. Rare as is a symphonist in 
 music, a symphonist in morals is far more rare. Few 
 of us have that fine sense of the one in the many, and 
 the many in the one, which enables a man, by one 
 golden thread of doctrine and example, to draw all
 
 VOICES FROM THE FEEE PLATFORM. 383 
 
 men unto him. The religious spirit in man is the spirit 
 which in the master awakes, and in the multitude 
 responds to this sublime invitation. The consideration 
 of supreme subjects may promote diversity of opinion, 
 but will lead to unification of sentiment. To attain 
 this desirable end, each and all should be mindful of 
 individual limitations, and of the oneness of truth. 
 Every pair of antagonist minds should see between 
 them the infinite, which the finite of neither can pos- 
 sess. Then will arise a noble emulation, not of self- 
 illustration, but of mutual help. Then, however one 
 may pray and the other respond, Amen will be a clause 
 of peace. 
 
 The religious progress which I desire and expect lies 
 in this direction. The absolute religion, as I under- 
 stand it, is not a featureless abstraction. It is not a be- 
 lief without a church, a soul without senses. It is the 
 reality of faith which underlies and includes all sects 
 and all creeds. Not as if all were alike in value 
 and merit. For, while we grant one origin to all re- 
 ligions, we cannot insist that all shall have the same 
 issue. The primal source of Philip II.' s bigotry and 
 of Channing's liberalism was the same, the religious 
 element in man. The difference of result makes one 
 a poison, not yet worked out of Europe, the other a 
 medicine not yet worked into America. Our absolute 
 religion must first formulate what shall be called re- 
 ligion in spirit and in action. When it recognizes this, 
 it says, " This is religion. This man is or was relig- 
 ious." Where it recognizes the most of this, it says, 
 "Here is the most." 
 
 Religion does strangely include and govern the whole 
 man. It is imagination, it is energy. It is zeal, it
 
 384 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 is charity, it is love and aversion. It is intellection 
 and enthusiasm. It is all of these, and none of them 
 singly. And as it is composite of these various ele- 
 ments, those who specially represent one of them must 
 show appreciation, not disrespect, to those who repre- 
 sent the others. The world-church is a divine body 
 from which no member can be spared. The happiest 
 lesson of iny later life has been this, that all true 
 souls can agree in supreme things, that what is relig- 
 ious in the intolerant sects is civilizing, energizing, and 
 reformatory, as well as in the tolerant ones. "Where 
 the religious persuasion accompanies the larger intel- 
 lection, it removes the barriers of prejudice and super- 
 stition. The truly liberal build no citadel for themselves. 
 They only patrol and keep the streets of the free city. 
 Julia Ward Howe. 
 
 NATURAL RELIGION UNIVERSAL AND SYMPA- 
 THETIC. 
 
 I THINK we have disputed long enough. I think we 
 might now relinquish our theologic controversies to 
 communities more idle and ignorant than we. I am 
 glad that a more realistic church is coming to be the 
 tendency of society, and that we are likely one day to 
 forget our obstinate polemics in the ambition to excel 
 each other in good works. I have no wish to proselyte 
 any reluctant mind, nor, I think, have I any curiosity 
 or impulse to intrude on those whose ways of think- 
 ing differ from mine. But as my friend, your presiding 
 officer, has asked me to take at least some small part in 
 this day's conversation, I am ready to give, as often
 
 VOICES FROM THE FREE PLATFORM. 385 
 
 before, the first simple foundations of my belief, that 
 the Author of Nature has not left himself without a 
 witness in any sane mind ; that the moral sentiment 
 speaks to every man the law after which the universe 
 was made; that we find parity, identity of design, 
 through nature, and benefit, to be the uniform aim ; 
 that there is a force always at work to make the best 
 better, and the worst good. We have had, not long 
 since, presented to us by Max Miiller, a valuable para- 
 graph from St. Augustine, not at all extraordinary in 
 itself, but only as coming from that eminent Father in 
 the Church, and at that age in which St. Augustine 
 writes : " That which is now called the Christian relig- 
 ion existed among the ancients, and never did not exist 
 from the planting of the human race until Christ came 
 in the flesh, at which time the true religion, which 
 already subsisted, began to be called Christianity." I 
 believe that not only Christianity is as old as the crea- 
 tion, not only every sentiment and precept of Chris- 
 tianity can be paralleled in other religious writings, 
 but more, that a man of religious susceptibility, and one 
 at the same time conversant with many men, say 
 a much-travelled man, can find the same idea in 
 numberless conversations. The religious find religion 
 wherever they associate. When I find in people narrow 
 religion, I find also in them narrow reading. Nothing 
 really is so self-publishing, so divulgatory, as thought. 
 It cannot be confined or hid. It is easily carried ; it 
 takes no room; the knowledge of Europe looks out 
 into Persia and India, and to the very Caifirs. Every 
 proverb, every fine text, every pregnant jest, travels 
 across the line ; and you will find it at Cape Town w 
 amonsr the Tartars. We are all believers in natural
 
 386 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 religion ; we all agree that the health and integrity of 
 man is self-respect, self-subsistency, a regard to natural 
 conscience. All education is to accustom him to trust him- 
 self, discriminate between his hisrher and lower thoughts, 
 
 * O O ' 
 
 exert the timid faculties until they are robust, and thus 
 train him to self-help, until he ceases to be an under- 
 ling, a tool, and becomes a benefactor. I think wise men 
 wish their religion to be all of this kind, teaching the 
 agent to go alone, not to hang on the world as a pen- 
 sioner, a permitted person, but an adult, self-searching 
 soul, brave to assist or resist a world ; only humble 
 and docile before the source of the wisdom he has dis- 
 covered within him. 
 
 As it is, every believer holds a different creed ; that 
 is, all the churches are churches of one member. All 
 our sects have refined the point of difference between 
 them. The point of difference that still remains be- 
 tween churches, or between classes, is in the addition 
 to the moral code, that is, to natural religion, of some- 
 what positive and historical. I think that to be the 
 one difference remaining. I object, of course, to the 
 claim of miraculous dispensation, certainly not to 
 the doctrine of Christianity. This claim impairs, to 
 my mind, the soundness of him who makes it, and in- 
 disposes us to his communion. This comes the wrong 
 way ; it comes from without, not within. This posi- 
 tive, historical, authoritative scheme is not consistent 
 with our experience or our expectations. It is some- 
 thing not in nature : it is contrary to that law of nature 
 which all wise men recognize; namely, never to require 
 a larger cause than is necessary to the effect. George 
 Fox, the Quaker, said that, though he read of Christ 
 and God, he knew them only from the like spirit in his
 
 VOICES FROM THE FREE PLATFORM. 387 
 
 own soul. We want all the aids to our moral training. 
 We cannot spare the vision nor the virtue of the 
 saints ; but let it be by pure sympathy, not with any 
 personal or official claim. If you are childish and ex- 
 hibit your saint as a worker of wonders, a thaumatur- 
 gist, I am repelled. That claim takes his teachings out 
 of logic and out of nature, and permits official and 
 arbitrary senses to be grafted on the teachings. It is 
 the praise of our New Testament that its teachings go 
 to the honor and benefit of humanity, that no better 
 lesson has been taught or incarnated. Let it stand, 
 beautiful and wholesome, with whatever is most like it 
 in the teaching and practice of men ; but do not at- 
 tempt to elevate it out of humanity by saying, " This 
 was not a man," for then you confound it with the 
 fables of every popular religion ; and my distrust of 
 the story makes me distrust the doctrine as soon as' it 
 differs from my own belief. Whoever thinks a story 
 gains by the prodigious, by adding something out of 
 nature, robs it more than he adds. It is no longer an 
 example, a model ; no longer a heart-stirring hero, but 
 an exhibition, a wonder, an anomaly, removed out of 
 the range of influence with thoughtful men. I submit 
 that, in sound frame of mind, we read or remember 
 the religious sayings and oracles of other men, whether 
 Jew or Indian, or Greek or Persian, only for friendship, 
 only for joy in the social identity which they open to 
 us, and that these words would have no weight with 
 us if we had not the same conviction already. I find 
 something stingy in the unwilling and disparaging ad- 
 mission of these foreign opinions, opinions from all 
 parts of the world, by our churchmen, as if only to 
 enhance by their dimness the superior light of Chris-
 
 388 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 tianity. Meantime, observe, you cannot bring me too 
 good a word, too dazzling a hope, too penetrating an 
 insight from the Jews. I hail every one with delight, as 
 showing the riches of my brother, my fellow-soul, who 
 would thus think and thus greatly feel. Zealots eagerly 
 fasten their eyes on the differences between their creed 
 and yours, but the charm of the study is in finding the 
 agreements, the identities, in all the religions of men. 
 
 I am glad to hear each sect complain that they do 
 not now hold the opinions they are charged with. The 
 earth moves, and the mind opens. I am glad to be- 
 lieve society contains a class of humble souls who enjoy 
 the luxury of a religion that does not degrade ; who 
 think it the highest worship to expect of Heaven the 
 most and the best ; who do not wonder that there was 
 a Christ, but that there were not a thousand; who 
 have conceived an infinite hope for mankind ; who be- 
 lieve that the history of Jesus is the history of every 
 man, written large. Ralph Waldo JZmerson. 
 
 MISSION OF JESUS. 
 
 IT seems to me, that the nearer we come to the 
 spirit of Christ, the nearer we shall come to those who 
 appear not to wish to assert that name of Christ re- 
 specting themselves ; that those who are the most 
 Christian in spirit will say the least about it. For I 
 suppose that Jesus Christ did not come to preach 
 Christianity. Christianity, the Church, no doubt, was 
 the result of Christ's preaching ; but he did not come 
 to preach it. He came to preach the truth ; and we 
 shall be nearest to him, not when we preach Christian-
 
 VOICES FROM THE FREE PLATFORM. 389 
 
 ity, not when we preach the Church, not even when 
 we preach Christ, but when we preach Christ's preach- 
 ing, which he made as broad as the truth. The Church 
 was the result ; but it was a result, as many things are 
 results, of causes which it did not resemble. You may 
 have been in some great cavern, and seen the sparkling, 
 beautiful-shaped, finger-like stalactites that hang on 
 the roof of the cavern ; but from the droppings from 
 these beautiful, sparkling, crystalline stalactites, there is 
 formed a dark, amorphous, yet somewhat interesting 
 mass, called the stalagmite. The original truth is the 
 stalactite ; and the Church is the dark, amorphous sta- 
 lagmite. We are not to preach that stalagmite of the 
 Church, but to preach the truth as Christ preached it, 
 or in the spirit in which he spoke. 
 
 Christ is regarded as a mediator between God and 
 man. A mediator undoubtedly he became between God 
 and man. He has been such to millions. But the oflice 
 of a mediator is to introduce ; that is, Christ introduces 
 you to God. Certainly, then, like any other introducer, 
 doing his office generously, he leaves you to private 
 conversation with the Being to whom he introduces 
 you. You may have been present on some great occa- 
 sion, when hundreds or thousands of persons were in- 
 troduced by one man the mayor of a city, perhaps 
 to some great author, general, or president ; but the 
 moment a man was introduced, the mediator stood 
 aside, and let the man speak for himself to the person 
 to whom he was introduced. So, I think, the office of 
 mediator, so far as Christ exercised it, was simply to 
 bring us into immediate relation with God. That is 
 the true mediation. 
 
 Once more. I think Jesus came simply to be the
 
 390 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 voice of the moral sentiment. He refers you back to 
 the moral sentiment ; and is the voice of that ; and 
 only in the strength of your own moral sentiment can 
 you understand one word that he says. 
 
 I think if the two sides would look at these three 
 principles, that Jesus came, not to preach Christianity, 
 but truth ; that he came, not to be a mediator, but to 
 bring us into immediate relation with God ; and that 
 he came, not to be, and never pretended to be, the 
 author of the moral sentiment, but only its voice, I 
 say, if the two sides would look at these three prin- 
 ciples, they would find themselves more agreed than 
 perhaps they imagine. C. A. .Bartol, D.D. 
 
 DEATH A NATURAL LAW OF LIFE. 
 
 WHEN Death calls, he neither deprives us of the virt- 
 ues, nor suddenly relieves us of the vices, of which he 
 finds us possessed. Both go with us. The moral, so- 
 cial, and intellectual qualities which may have distin- 
 guished us in this world, will be ours in another, there 
 constituting our identity and deciding our position. 
 So also of the evil. That dark vestment of sin with 
 which, in a man's journey through life, he may have 
 become endued, clings to him through the death change 
 close as the tunic of Nessus. He, too, retains his iden- 
 tity ; his earthly shortcomings determine' his spiritual 
 state. 
 
 I believe, then, that the spirit of man passes the 
 ordeal without other metamorphosis than that which 
 its release from the fleshy envelope and its acquisition 
 of clearer perceptions effect : undimuied now, unob-
 
 VOICES FROM TEE FREE PLATFORM. 391 
 
 scured by the heavy veil of the material, gradually re- 
 lieved from the weight of bodily grossness and physical 
 infirmity ; a great gainer, too, by this, that, through 
 the agency of the spiritual senses, there is opened up 
 a wider and more luminous horoscope; and thus drawn 
 closer to the great Source of Wisdom ; yet essentially 
 the same spirit still. It changes there, indeed, but not 
 by miracle. It changes, even as now it does, by the 
 intervention of motive presented, by the agency of will, 
 by the influence of surroundings ; but of surroundings 
 better and nobler than those of earth. It changes, as 
 it changed here, by its own aspirations. It inhabits a 
 world of progress still ; a world of active effort, not of 
 passive beatitudes, nor yet of irrevocable doom. While 
 there is life there is hope, and there is life beyond the 
 veil. 
 
 The Christian world has been, and still is, blighted 
 with false conceptions of Death. Death is not, as 
 Plato taught, the opposite of life. He is life's best 
 friend ; a friend through whose agency life is embel- 
 lished, ennobled, perpetuated. To Death, at the close 
 of a life well spent, man owes Paradise. Yet Ortho- 
 doxy has taught us to think of this greatest of bene- 
 factors and reformers as the requiter of sin, the 
 Avenging Angel, the fell destroyer. Men robe them- 
 selves in black when he appears ; mourners go about 
 the streets. The great punishment, the evil of evils, 
 the primeval curse, declared to have been entailed on 
 man by Adam's fall, is held to be that summons which 
 calls him hence. Yet, under Omniscient Goodness, 
 nothing so universal, so inevitable as death, ever was, 
 or ever can be, essentially evil. Robert Dale Owen.
 
 392 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 TRUTH IN OBSOLETE DOGMAS. 
 
 HAVE you ever heard a noble musician take some 
 very simple theme which to you a few notes or words 
 would represent, and, sitting down before his instru- 
 ment, begin to dream away upon that theme, until, as 
 the moments passed, it turned into great orchestras of 
 sound, and tides of fresh meaning that you had known 
 nothing of come rolling in towards you, and you felt a 
 freshening from your little theme that you never be- 
 lieved was in the words or the thought? Somewhat 
 so, I think, these old dogmas of the recent Christian 
 past come freshening with full tides of meaning to the 
 thinker of to-day. Let me instance one, and yet I 
 hardly dare to, not a doctrine but a practice, but 
 you know practice is underlaid by doctrine : the vital 
 and the inevitable act, as I think it is, of prayer. Peo- 
 ple say to us, " With your idea of God, with your idea 
 of the relation between yourself and God, what is prayer 
 to you?" As if in the act one stopped to analyze the 
 experience. But when one does stop to analyze the 
 experience, and recognize it in all its new relations to 
 the thought of God and of ourselves, then he sees, of 
 course, that the old meaning of prayer is dissolved out 
 ot his mind. But is there nothing abiding and growing 
 in its place? The old thought of petition, and that 
 to most minds, to most Orthodox minds, at least, seems 
 to be the essence of " prayer," that thought has ab- 
 solutely gone ; and has nothing remained ? Has nothing 
 come up to larger meaning? Why, every thing! The 
 man who trusts absolutely does not beg. The man who 
 knows he is forgiven does not entreat forgiveness. The
 
 VOICES FROM THE FREE PLATFORM. 393 
 
 shame itself is pledge of that. The very feeling that 
 when you are praying you are not praying to a person, 
 but with a person ; the very thought that the prayer 
 comes from the One who answers it ; the very thought 
 that the "Thou" and the "I" are one in that act, 
 is not that a nobler, a sweeter, a deeper, a higher inspi- 
 ration, than the old thought, even to those who value 
 the old thought most? That is only one illustration, 
 and I have phrased it very poorly. It is hard to say 
 what one thinks, he hardly knows all he thinks, about 
 such an act as that. 
 
 Take that word "Incarnation." Do you know a 
 holier thought than comes into your mind when you 
 say that word ? The divine opening in the human ; the 
 divine implanted in the human, from the foundation of 
 the first things, pressing upwards into visibility all the 
 time ; pressing up in the individual, pressing up through 
 the race until a higher individual is formed ; pressing 
 up from the poor savage, pressing up from the lowest 
 sinner, into the greatest being. What tides of religious 
 meaning come swelling into that old word "Atone- 
 ment " ! It is almost the butt of some schools of relig- 
 ious thought. Do you know a more true law of the 
 universe than that law of atonement? Not concen- 
 trated into one man's history, or found only in that 
 man's life and death, but a law going through and 
 through the life of every creature on the earth ; the law 
 of a force which lifts us by the sufferings of others ; 
 the law of a force which lifts others by our sufferings. 
 And so about all the other doctrines. The meaning 
 glows within them, until the old words seem the veriest 
 last year's husks to the great resurrection that we begin 
 to recognize. William C. Gannett.
 
 394 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 EADICAL FAITH AFFIRMATIVE. 
 
 IT is a mistake for any of us believers in natural re- 
 ligion to allow ourselves to be betrayed, for a moment, 
 into a negative position ; to allow, for an instant, that 
 the burden of proof is on our side. The burden of 
 proof is on the other side. It is we who have the posi- 
 tive, and the sects the negative ; it is we who have the 
 affirmation, and the sects the denial. Each little sect 
 builds its little wall, and encloses its special atom of 
 God's truth. It denies all outside of the wall, and then 
 when we sweep that wall away, charges us with denial. 
 Our answer to them all must be that the church of free- 
 dom and philanthropy is older, larger, and grander than 
 they. As Luther said, we say, but in a wider spirit, 
 " We are the Church," because we represent no platform 
 narrower than humanity itself. Religion is the natural 
 instinct of the human soul ; this and this only lies be- 
 hind all these petty organizations, and gives them their 
 being; and when we push them away, and come down 
 to God's solid foundation, it is no denial, but affirmation. 
 That is the only assertion ; it is that which gives the 
 believer in natural religion strength, not alone for him- 
 self, but to labor for others ; because he represents, not 
 this or that conventicle, but the central spirit which 
 they all embody, the love of God and man, by which 
 alone they live. Take away from them what is super- 
 ficial, and they are all alike. Take away a few ceremo- 
 nies from the Catholic and the Protestant, a few 
 technical phrases from the Trinitarian and the Unita- 
 rian, and they are one and the same. Take away from 
 the Jew and the Mohammedan these separating forms
 
 VOICES FROM THE FREE PLATFORM. 395 
 
 and dogmas, bring back each one to what makes his 
 manhood, and they are all the same. Behind the high- 
 est utterances of the world, of the Vedas, of Epictetus, 
 of Marcus Antoninus, and of Jesus, behind them 
 all, and greater than all, is the eternal aspiration of 
 humanity to the absolute truth of God. It is that truth 
 to which the radical is pledged, because it is natural 
 religion which he recognizes. He it is who affirms, and 
 leaves each little sect of each little religion to do its 
 own denying. 
 
 Look into your books of piety, and see the unity of 
 the great expressions among all peoples! Look into 
 your hymn-books, and you see that the hymns which 
 come nearest to every religious soul are the hymns 
 which are not sectarian, which were not written by 
 sectarians, which were written, in many cases, by persons 
 cast out by the churches. Those hymns which are 
 most immortal in the hymn-books are often those which 
 the churches borrowed from poets whom they left out- 
 side. Who wrote, " While thee I seek, protecting 
 Power," that perfect utterance of the last triumph of 
 religious trust ? Helen Maria Williams, the friend and 
 imitator of Mary Wollstonecraft. You may still find 
 her branded as a heretic in the biographical dictiona- 
 ries. Who wrote. " Nearer, my God, to thee " ? It was 
 Sarah Flower Adams, the friend and disciple of William 
 J. Fox. In her lifetime, she would have been disowned 
 by the very churches which now cannot draw near to 
 their God without borrowing her wings to fly with. 
 And so, through piety as through morality, you find 
 that all forms are superficial, and all souls are saved by 
 that simple religious sentiment which lies behind all 
 creeds.
 
 396 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 It is the affirmation of the free religious movement 
 that makes it strong. An affirmation that takes in not 
 only one man's belief, but all men's belief, is not that 
 a positive faith ? Here, let us suppose, is an organiza- 
 tion that has met this week somewhere, and every man 
 who comes upon its platform comes with his religion 
 stereotyped into some creed ; and every thing else is 
 shut off that platform. That is affirmation, is it ? Yes: 
 it is the affirmation of one thing, and the negation of 
 every thing else. And when the old religious teacher 
 and his opponent come together on this platform, and 
 each in turn speaks his mind freely, you call that denial. 
 We call the other the denial, and this the affirmation. 
 The affirmation that recognizes not only one creed, but 
 the dignity, value, and worth of all ; that is what is 
 recognized here as religion. I do not understand it 
 when I am told that my attitude is that of denial only, 
 while I find that that which shuts me out of the churches 
 is not so much that I deny some little things which they 
 believe, as that I believe whole centuries of history, 
 and whole races of humanity, that they all deny ; while 
 they shut themselves into their little tabernacle, and 
 say only one creed has any foundation in it. I am not 
 separated from evangelical religion because it attributes 
 the divine inspiration to Jesus, but because it denies it 
 to all others. It is their denial, not their affirmation, 
 which separates me from them. When they tell rne 
 Jesus taught a gospel of love, I say I believe it. Plato 
 taught a gospel of love before him, and you deny it. 
 If they say, "Jesus taught it is better to bear an injury 
 than to retaliate," I say, "Yes: but so did Aristotle, 
 before Jesus was born. I will accept it as the state- 
 ment of Jesus, if you will admit that Aristotle said it
 
 VOICES FROM THE FREE PLATFORM. 397 
 
 too." I am willing that any man should come before 
 us and say, "Jesus taught that you must loA r e your 
 enemies: it is written in the Bible ;" but if he will open 
 the old manuscript of Diogenes Laertius, he may there 
 read, in texts that have never been disputed, that the 
 Greek philosophers, half a dozen of them, in words as 
 well authenticated as any literature can be, said the 
 same before Jesus was born. The brotherhood of man 
 is a sacred thing to think of, a sublime thing to 
 teach. When the Greek tragedians taught the brother- 
 hood of man before the Christian dispensation, was it 
 less sacred than it became after Jesus came on earth 
 and repeated it? There is this difference between the 
 attitude of natural religion and the attitude of any sec- 
 tarianism, even the widest Christian sectarianism, that, 
 while natural religion recognizes every voice of God 
 that ever spoke through the soul of man, Christian 
 sectarianism only admits the utterance of one pure 
 soul to be divine. 
 
 Affirmation ! There is no affirmation except the 
 belief in universal natural religion ; all else is narrow- 
 ness and sectarianism, though it call itself by the 
 grandest name, compared with that. It impoverishes 
 a man ; it keeps his sympathy in one line of religious 
 communication ; it takes all the spiritual life of the 
 race, and says, " All of this that was not an effluence 
 from Jesus, you must set aside ; " and so it makes you 
 a member in full standing of some little sect, all of 
 whose ideas, all of whose thoughts, revolved in the 
 mind of some one narrow-minded theologian who 
 founded it. It shuts you up there, and you die, suffo- 
 cated for want of God's free air outside. 
 
 Therefore, I say, it is an affirmative position that is
 
 398 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 to rule the world ; it is this large affirmation of univer- 
 sal religion, bringing a person into contact with the 
 natural instincts of the human heart, that enables him 
 to deal with that heart in all its wanderings, to reach 
 the conscience, however degraded, and to raise and 
 strengthen and encourage man as no gospel of narrow- 
 ness or despair ever can do. I do not believe, any 
 more than you do, that the mere theology of a few dry 
 metaphysicians or pedants is sufficient to move the 
 world. Whether they are radical or conservative, they 
 will equally fail. The theology that is to move the 
 world has got to have heart and impulse and faith in 
 it, as well as mere intellect. The religion that is to 
 move the world must be such a religion as the mother 
 can feel by her baby's cradle, and the child at his 
 mother's funeral. I have heard theologians quarrel 
 about texts; I have heard scholars debate amonsj 
 
 * O 
 
 themselves these petty questions, "Who was it first 
 taught these doctrines ? Can we fix the year and the 
 day when somebody came into the world and wrote in 
 some books the golden rule, or the principle of love to 
 God and man?" and I have thought to myself; " Stop 
 your discussion, and go home and take counsel of your 
 own little child." Of what importance is it who first 
 wrote into a book the golden rule, when you may go 
 into your own nursery and find your little girl, two 
 years old, acting the golden rule by her own lovely, 
 childish impulse, before she has ever seen the inside of 
 a Sunday-school? Talk of putting the thing into 
 words! There was never a generous-hearted child, 
 there was never a tender sister, who did not enact the 
 principle of love to enemies long before anybody thought 
 of making *a book, before this world was burdened
 
 VOICES FROM THE FREE PLATFORM. 399 
 
 with any such thing as learning. The child teaches 
 the lesson to its mother, to its father; God sends the 
 child into the world with the lesson already in it ; and 
 the bigot goes home from his parchment of doctrine, 
 and finds a holier gospel which his little girl teaches 
 him as she springs into his arms ; she, in her unconscious 
 innocence, has a universal religion, and he is nothing 
 but a bigoted sectarian by her side. ... I have lived 
 for months among an ignorant and degraded people, 
 whose religion was of the lowest type of Christianity, 
 still bearing those fruits which all sincere religion will 
 bear. I lived for two years among those who had 
 spent their lives in the darkness of slavery, and had 
 only so much of Christianity, in any form, as their 
 masters had chosen to give them. I saw the results of 
 this religion among them, but I never saw a man among 
 them whom the simplest truth of natural religion could 
 not reach. I never had occasion to wish for any of the 
 tools the churches give. I never saw reason to oppose 
 or alter the opinions that the Southern negroes under 
 my charge held, but did I ever for an instant believe 
 that their Christianity, ignorant and lowly as they 
 were, was a better thing even for them? that it had 
 more affirmation in it than the natural religion which I 
 held ? Never ! Of all the religions to live by and to 
 die by ; of all forms of religious opinion to carry to the 
 sinful and the suffering, and bring them back restored ; 
 of all the forms of religion to give renewed hope, to 
 relieve despair, and to enlighten ignorance, I believe 
 that natural religion stands at the head. I ask no more 
 than that with which to reach the sinner or the suffering; 
 and, if I cannot reach him with that, it is my fault, and 
 not the fault of the instrument ; and, thank God ! there
 
 400 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 are plenty of others who can. And we, who owe so 
 much, all our life long, to the gradual swelling, in this 
 community, of a religious impulse which is greater than 
 any in the past, because it is affirmative, are grateful to 
 bear testimony to its power. We can never own it as 
 negative. It has nothing to regret, nothing to apolo- 
 gize for. It is to us as much the hope of the world, as 
 the religion of the Roman Catholic, the Protestant, or 
 the Mohammedan is so to him ; and it is greater than 
 any of them, because it includes them all ; and a day 
 is coming, when even what we call the great religions 
 of the world shall show themselves but sects, and when 
 all these little sects shall be united in one vast I'eligious 
 assemblage, which shall march into St. Peter's, and all 
 the great old-time cathedrals of the world, shall take 
 possession of them all, and shall celebrate in them a 
 religious ceremonial as much grander than any that 
 Rome can now witness, as the dome of the sky is 
 grander than this petty building which contains us 
 here. T. W. Higginson. 
 
 SOLIDITY AND POSITIVENESS OF RADICAL 
 FAITH. 
 
 I WAS severely pitied by an old friend this morn- 
 ing, because I was coming here to take my stand upon 
 " that rickety platform of radicalism." Now that I am 
 here, it seems to me that I ana as safe as I am in any 
 place in God's universe. Underneath the platform of 
 radicalism on which I stand this morning, I find the 
 whole of past time, I find all the great natures of all the 
 great men who have ever lived, who have ever spoken
 
 VOICES FROM THE FREE PLATFORM. 401 
 
 or sung a word for God or for humanity. There is such 
 a phrase as the " Rock of Ages," as applied to the in- 
 finite wisdom and strength. Underneath the platform 
 of these religious ideas, I feel the Rock of Ages ; because 
 I find that every age has contributed its stratum and 
 deposit to build it, and that, standing here to-day, I 
 stand upon the most positive place I can find upon the 
 earth, since I stand in the last moment of time, upon 
 the last deposit that God has made in it, mixed, as it is, 
 with the human nature of the present, and with all its 
 needs and contingencies, and growing, as it does, out of 
 the human nature of the past, with all its circumstances 
 and its prophecies, as the tree grows from a root, for the 
 express purpose that it may free itself from the ground 
 beneath, where it is dark, and spread its full mass of 
 foliage into the light and air and rain of the ever-present 
 God. And if I undertake to scrape off from that tree 
 its bark and tetter of supernaturalism, if I venture to 
 say that the grain of the tree is supremely good and 
 sound and sweet, without taking with it every accre- 
 tion and parasite of the past which has made its home 
 upon the outside of it, I do so, that in my way, with 
 these my brethren who believe in Radicalism, I may be 
 able to show you what a grain, capable of what a polish, 
 what an exquisite beauty and durability, has been con- 
 cealed underneath that bark and the thin crust of my- 
 thologizing that has gathered around it. 
 
 I never felt in such a positive place in all my life as 
 I do now. I never felt a plank beneath my feet that 
 was so thick, so deep. Thousands of years deep is the 
 wood of which this plank is made ; hundreds of thou- 
 sands of years, with their rings of daily pleasure and of 
 daily sweetness, and the presence of the Divine Mind, 
 
 26
 
 402 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 and the smiles and tears of all the men and women who 
 have ever lived, have gone into the depth of the plank 
 of this platform ; and you are called here this morning, 
 that we may come to meet you, and to look you in the 
 face and say to you, that nowhere else can you find a 
 work so positive, upon material so durable, with thoughts 
 and feelings so far-sighted and so prophesying. For we 
 Lave beneath us the idea of the Infinite God, Father of 
 all men and women, the infinite, ever-present, ever- 
 creating Providence, who works for our behoof, and for 
 the cause of his laws and of his truths-, by laws. I feel 
 beneath me that vital and irresistible tendency which 
 no denomination, no creed, no man, no sect can stifle or 
 can put aside, the mighty desire that lives in all 
 hearts to know how it is that God, the infinite Father, 
 brings his truths to pass, and makes every day, and day 
 after day, a perpetual revelation and expression of his 
 presence. Beneath me, I feel your desire, and the de- 
 sire of all mankind, to understand God's presence upon 
 the earth, in every righteous cause, in every central 
 truth, in every tendency that sweetens and harmonizes, 
 in all social and philanthropic science, in that which 
 drains and irrigates and defecates infected districts, in 
 that which saves men and women from miasma and 
 cholera, that brings pure air, clean quarters, and a great 
 margin of space for comfort to all mankind, however 
 miserable they may seem to us to be to-day. I feel be- 
 neath me the irresistible desire of all men's hearts for 
 permanence and continuance of living, either within or 
 without a body, the old, primeval rock of personal im- 
 mortality. Is there any thing more positive than that? 
 What will you bring me? What will you bring into 
 this hall to-day that will compare with the positiveness
 
 VOICES FROM THE FREE PLATFORM. 403 
 
 of the presence of the infinite God and of his truths in 
 the heart of mankind, and the desire of men and wo- 
 men for personal continuance of existence for the sake 
 of the infinite truths of God ? 
 
 Somebody said to me, also, as I came here, "Your 
 ideas are very fine, and we can detect them scattered 
 all over the world, like gold which, the most widely 
 distributed of minerals, crops out upon the surface 
 everywhere. Your ideas are beautiful; they may be 
 what you call central and organizing ideas, but you 
 have left all the heart out of the concern. You have 
 got a few very superfine speculations about the Divine 
 Mind and human nature, but you have omitted all the 
 tenderness and pathos, all the sweet smiles and delights 
 of human existence, all the yearning, all the longing, 
 all the filial clutching for the Divine Hand, all the trust 
 in Providence, and all the sweet content which makes 
 one day succeed another, keeps all men and women 
 alive and prevents them from committing suicide. It 
 has all gone overboard. You have emptied the baby 
 out with the bath." 
 
 I should like to know what is meant by the word 
 " heart." It seems to me when people use the word 
 " heart " in this connection, that they want to have a 
 monopoly of Providence; that they would like to have 
 a channel of Divine Providence within their house, on 
 tap, where they can turn it on like gas or water. They 
 are not content with trusting to the infinite laws which 
 are inevitable and irrepressible, whatsoever we may 
 say or think about it ; and every one of them is con- 
 structed for our supremest good, and with reference to 
 our best advantage ; so that, as the Scripture says, not 
 even a sparrow falls to the ground without his care.
 
 404 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 But it falls, and it cannot help falling. It is hard for 
 the sparrow to drop ; perhaps it twitters a continual 
 dread of falling, or desire that it may be saved from 
 falling. But shall a man twitter too, and try to bribe 
 the Infinite Law with prayers, and to besiege the In- 
 finite Presence with supplications that this thing or 
 that thing may come to pass, that this or that may not 
 occur, or that he may be saved from any thing, whether 
 more or less piteous and grievous, while all the time one 
 thing is pleasure and another thing is pain, that is joy 
 and this is grief, all the time there is law, Providence, 
 the Infinite Presence ? The manliest heartfulness that 
 I can conceive of is that of the person who throws 
 himself directly into the bosom of the Infinite Pres- 
 ence, and says to it, " Come what may, let what will 
 happen to my house, to my family, to my children, to 
 my office, to my future, I will not be so mean as to ex- 
 pect from thee comfort merely, to derive from thee im- 
 munity, to claim a share in providence. I want to be 
 built by thy providence ; to be organized by that which 
 thou shalt send me. Here I am. Take me ; take the 
 "whole of me, my heart, my soul, my emotions, my 
 intelligence, take my soul and body into thyself, and 
 let me be, in deed and in truth, the gentle and filial 
 and trusting subject of thy law." That is what I mean 
 by having a heart towards God. 
 
 And we have a heart towards man. Do you tell me 
 that when Radicalism takes its stand upon the plat- 
 forms of America, by the side of the negro, and insists 
 upon his rights, upon his suffrage, upon his immunities, 
 and upon the opportunities that we ourselves so love 
 and enjoy, and so confide and place our future in, 
 that we have no heart? Do you tell me that when we
 
 VOICES FROM THE FREE PLATFORM. 405 
 
 take up the cause of woman, and desire to see her edu- 
 cated like ourselves, and standing, if she can, where 
 we stand, and doing, if she can, what we do, at any 
 rate, doing what she can, when we seek to give her 
 that greatest of all boons that can be given to God's 
 children, opportunity, that we have no heart? I tell 
 you, my radical friends and listeners, that in America, 
 heart is belief in the moral law. Yes, it is belief in 
 justice, it is belief in equality. Heart? It is the 
 brotherhood of man ! John Weiss. 
 
 THE TRUE TEACHER IN RELIGION. 
 
 Do you remember that story in the life of Theodore 
 Parker? When he was a little boy, coming home from 
 the field, one day, he saw a little animal by the way- 
 side, and raised his stick to smite and kill it; but some- 
 thing, he said, distinctly bade him stay his hand, and 
 he let the little creature live. When he got home, he 
 asked his mother what it was that told him, when he 
 wanted to strike the animal, he must not do it ; and 
 his mother took him reverently on her knee, and said 
 to him, " Some people call it conscience ; I call it the 
 voice of God ; and if you always listen to it, you will 
 always know what is right, and you will never need 
 to go wrong." From that reverent teaching came such 
 a man as Theodore Parker. It is the same thing that 
 Socrates meant by his " demon ; " it is the same thing 
 which, in every true soul, impels to noble deeds, or re- 
 strains from those which are wrong. 
 
 We come into the world, I believe, every one of us,
 
 406 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 with all that is needful in ourselves, if we will only 
 trust it, all that is needful to help us on and up to 
 the very highest heights to which a human being can 
 ever climb; but we have covered it over by dogma 
 and creed and sectarian theory, and by our own mis- 
 deeds, until these angel voices that are in us cease to 
 be heard, not totally cease, I do not believe they 
 ever totally cease, but they become less and less audible 
 to us. But if we learn to heed their faintest whisper, 
 reverently and obediently, I believe that there is no 
 path where the soul asks you to go that you may not 
 safely tread. It may carry you to the burning, fiery 
 furnace, but you will come out, and the smell of fire 
 even will not be on your garments. It may compel 
 you into the lion's den, but the wild beast's mouth will 
 be shut. You may walk where scorpions are in the 
 way of duty, and you will not be hurt. It is this 
 " inner light ; " it is not a text, it is not a creed, but it 
 is this in ourselves which, if trusted, will lead us into 
 all truth. 
 
 I said I did not believe this voice was ever lost in 
 the human soul. I do not forget that men grow very 
 wicked, and women, too, for that matter ; I do not 
 forget that men and women sometimes appear to us so 
 lost and fallen that it seems as if no power in them- 
 selves, or any human power, could help them up ; and 
 yet, to these worst men and women, in some hallowed 
 moment, is the word given, " This is the way : walk ye 
 in it." And if, at the side of this man or woman, at 
 that very moment, is some helping hand, some voice 
 wise enough to counsel, he or she may be started to 
 walk in that way. . . . 
 
 I do not believe that our present way of teaching
 
 VOICES FROM THE FREE PLATFORM. 407 
 
 religion is the true way. I know this platform will 
 help it; I know the lives of all good men and women 
 help it; and yet, after all, I believe that the world's 
 true teacher, in all that pertains to the soul and its 
 duties, has not been found. I believe she sits in every 
 household, and by the side of every cradle, and that the 
 true priest and the true religious teacher is the mother. 
 I know how, from the earliest time, woman has been in 
 bondage ; that the things which go to help all other 
 human beings in growth and symmetry and beauty 
 have always been withheld from her : but, after all, 
 I believe that all the healing, the helping, and the 
 building-up, comes through woman. " The seed of the 
 woman shall bruise the serpent's head." I believe that 
 she who should, by divine right, be the religious teacher 
 above all others, is to take her place as such. There 
 comes up, to-day, a voice asking that Harvard College 
 shall be opened to women ; that schools of science, and 
 whatever else will give breadth of being, shall be open 
 to her ; that no field of activity shall be denied to her, 
 if she can occupy it. I believe that all the signs of the 
 times point to woman's freedom ; and, when she is free, 
 as every thing else in nature finds its place, so will she ; 
 and the woman who, by God's appointment, inevitably 
 takes her place beside the world's cradle, will sit by the 
 world's altar; and when the Theodore Parkers that are 
 to be, ask counsel from her lips, the answer will not be 
 unwise or ignorant or irreverent ; but the mother, her- 
 self developed and taught, will be able to be herself a 
 priestess to the little one at her side, and teach him 
 that, as he grows, up, he shall be his own priest, his 
 own lawgiver, and that the holiest oracle is in his own 
 soul. We shall not see this ourselves, because it is so
 
 408 FREEDOM. AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 far in the future. As are the ages behind us which 
 have dragged woman down, so many years will it take 
 to build her up to the place where she shall occupy her 
 real throne ; and then, with her sons and daughters, as 
 she herself, " but little lower than the angels," extend- 
 ing helping hands to whoever needs, aspiring toward 
 all that is noblest and best in character, reaching after 
 those infinite fields of knowledge which the heavenly 
 Father spreads everywhere, the world itself will be 
 so changed that it will be "Paradise regained." 
 Lucy Stone. 
 
 THOUGHT AND DEED. 
 
 I HAVE seen many chai-med days, and shared a sub- 
 lime hope ; but this, of all days which I have yet seen, 
 is the most sublime ; because it not only speculates in 
 the most transcendent way, and absorbs all thought, 
 and all peoples, and all races, and all bibles, but it looks 
 to practice ; and you will all be disappointed if it end 
 merely in convention after convention, annual meeting 
 after annual meeting. You say : " Work, work, work ! 
 Work lovingly, work deliberately, not wilfully." You 
 say that. Therefore I shall look for the next step to 
 be declared hereafter for action. Let not the accusa- 
 tion be made any longer, my friends, that we are mys- 
 tics, that we speculate, that we have delicious and 
 delightful thoughts, but we do nothing. A friend said 
 to me to-day : " Mr. Emerson ! Oh, yes, a lovely man, 
 but what has he done ? " Who brought us here f Who 
 is the father, or, if not the father, the cousin, at least, 
 of the thought that brought us here ? You know who,
 
 VOICES FROM THE FREE PLATFORM. 409 
 
 so far as any one person is concerned. This meeting is 
 transcendentalism. This is the fruit of forty years of 
 earnest, private, self-respecting modest thought. There- 
 fore, I say, the more modest we are, and the less we 
 say about our religion, the more we shall possess. It 
 is too fine a thing to talk about ; it is a precious thing 
 to live by, and to show in action. That is the jewel, is 
 it not ? Therefore, I say, not until this thing is incar- 
 nated, not only in one man, but in all of us, and we 
 can say : " I and my Father are one ; " " he that hath 
 seen me, hath seen the Father also;" not until we 
 say that, not in egotism, but in the sublime and de- 
 lightful and beautiful personality which makes us one 
 with Him, is the word really spoken. So, in my judg- 
 ment, my friends, we have had almost enough of talk, 
 we want action ; and as I have now but a little while 
 to stay on any platform in this world, perhaps it will 
 delight me as much as any one to take part in the ac- 
 tion which must follow. So fine, so sublime a religion 
 as ours, older than Christ, old as the Godhead, old as 
 the soul, eternal as the heavens, solid as the rock, is 
 and only is / nothing else is but that ; and it is in us, 
 and is us ; and nothing is our real selves but that in 
 the breast. That is the religion, and nothing else ; not 
 in the flesh, but speaking and acting through the flesh ; 
 that is it. A. Bronson Alcott. 
 
 RELIGION AND SOCIAL SCIENCE. 
 
 J 
 
 RELIGION, while faithful to its function of affording a 
 
 substantial ground and an encouraging countenance to 
 the high spiritualities of the human race, is, and must
 
 410 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 be, concerned about labor and wages, commerce and 
 capital, health and houses, civil rights and laws, and 
 the like. It will be asked to give or withhold its sanc- 
 tion in such matters, and it will owe an answer. Now, 
 in order to give an answer, which shall at once be good 
 in spirit and sane in judgment, it must know, not only 
 the sovereign claim of the soul, but the law of outward 
 things^} Here science is its proper eye^ The spiritual 
 consciousness knows by its own light what are rectitude 
 and honor, holiness and heroism, adoration, charity, 
 noble awe, the spirit of faithfulness, the spirit of truth : 
 it does not know by its own light whether or not wine 
 is wholesome, usury beneficial, eight hours of labor 
 better than ten ; and, in the attempt to pronounce out 
 of hand upon these matters and the like, it has made 
 sad mistakes. Whenever and wherever it has to de- 
 cide upon outward conditions, and, therefore, to take 
 the law of things into account, it is dependent for the 
 Banity of its judgment upon other resources than those 
 which are native to it. Here it must supplement its own 
 methods by those of scientific investigation. Science, 
 and science alone, as I think, can teach it to be practi- 
 cal with entire sanity. This, too, is the proper cor- 
 rective of passionate reform, which surely needs a 
 corrective : surely it is time that for the methods of 
 agitation were substituted the methods of growth; and 
 for the harangue, study, and the sober conference of 
 prepared minds. Sober, modest, temperate, capable of 
 a wise silence, ableto wait and seek, able to distinguish 
 between partial and perfect knowledge, speaking when 
 it does speak in the modulated tones of calm knowledge 
 and clear intellectual conviction, science is not one of 
 those dangerous allies which are liable at any moment
 
 VOICES FROM THE FREE PLATFORM. 411 
 
 to annul their services by excesses. Like religion, it 
 subdues passion, and -respects truth. HA. substitute for 
 religion it can no more be than vegetable physiology 
 can be a substitute for sunshine : the natural ally of re- 
 ligion, its eye for truth of the outward world, science 
 should be. I Well, therefore, may modern religion stand 
 in the door to reach forth a cordial hand, and say to 
 social science, " Welcome, younger brother, to an 
 honored place in the household of faith." JD. A. 
 Was son. 
 
 PRACTICAL PROBLEMS OF RELIGION. 
 
 WHATEVEB may now be our speculative opinions 
 concerning the Trinity, the atonement, the divinity of 
 Jesus, the authority of the Bible, or the future condi- 
 tion of the soul ; whatever change these opinions may 
 hereafter undergo, it is certain that the teachings of 
 Jesus concerning love to God and love to man will 
 never be falsified or antiquated, since they are the ex- 
 pression of a sentiment inborn and natural to the human 
 heart. The sympathetic feeling of mankind responded 
 to them when first uttered, and will always do so. They 
 do not require the support of logic, nor of infallible 
 authority, for they furnish their own evidence, and no 
 miracle could make them more impressive. There have 
 been disputes about doctrines ; but these are not doc- 
 trines : they are practical statements, perceived by the 
 intellect, but accepted by the heart. I never heard the 
 Good Samaritan's claim to goodness denied, even by 
 the most orthodox Hebrews. 
 
 And yet there is something peculiarly religious in 
 this portion of the teachings of Jesus. It is not only
 
 412 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 the most undoubted, but the most affecting part of the 
 Christian religion. It is hard to persuade ourselves, 
 perhaps, that there is not something particularly relig- 
 ious in the maintenance of an opinion, though nothing 
 can be more absurd ; and so we are in the habit of 
 speaking of a man's " religious opinions." But it is in 
 the heart and life alone that religion manifests itself; 
 the intellectual convictions are as nothing in compari- 
 son. 
 
 Reasoning in some such way as this, and resolutely 
 overlooking the fact that it is opinions rather than 
 modes of life that have been the source of religious 
 dissensions, I have fancied that the time might come 
 when persons of all shades of religious belief would 
 cordially unite in works of charity and reform. And I 
 have interpreted the word " Free," in the name of our 
 Association as implying this liberation from the tyran- 
 nies of sectarian jealousy and dislike, rather than as 
 indicating a particular form of belief on the part of our 
 associates. Let us welcome to our work, as we invite 
 to our platform, the champions of every opinion pro- 
 vided they are willing to labor with us for the elevation 
 of mankind. Let the Catholic who loves God more 
 than his creed be as welcome in our assemblies as the 
 Jew who does the same. Let us extend to Calvinists 
 and Churchmen, to the disciples of Wesley, of Murray, 
 and of Channing, the same invitation ; and, whether 
 they join us or not, let us proceed to the labors before 
 us. 
 
 It is one of the most encouraging signs of the times, 
 that the tendency of all our religious organizations is 
 now very strongly towards works of charity and social 
 reform. The oldest and the newest churches feel the
 
 VOICES FROM THE FREE PLATFORM. 413 
 
 same impulse and obey it. This is partly because the 
 moral evils of the time are seen to be great and grow- 
 ing, while the remedies which the Church has been 
 wont to apply have ceased to be efficacious. The 
 Labor Question, the Woman Question, the Question 
 of Education for the poorest, of reclaiming the thief and 
 the prostitute, of suppressing intemperance, of dealing 
 with insanity, of diminishing pauperism, these and a 
 hundred other questions, derived from these or related 
 thereto, press upon us for decision and we cannot 
 escape them. If we have a true religious feeling, we 
 shall not try to escape them ; we shall entertain them 
 all, and devote ourselves to those with which we can 
 best deal. One person will teach the freedmen, others 
 will secure them the right to vote, will visit prisons, 
 found hospitals, open new avocations for women, pro- 
 claim a truce between labor and capital, diminish pov- 
 erty, and banish drunkenness ; and at every step of 
 every reform, Religion will be present to give her sanc- 
 tion. She will not always wear the vestments of the 
 Church, nor speak the voice of tradition, but sometimes 
 she will do both ; and she will never fail to attest the 
 truth of Pliny's saying, " To benefit mankind is worthy 
 of a God." F. B. Sanborn. 
 
 PHILANTHROPY AND THE CHURCH. 
 
 I BEGAN life with a most profound faith in the honesty 
 and in the efficiency of church organization. I had the 
 most entire belief (which I did not inherit) that the 
 Church contained all the sincere religious feeling and 
 purpose that existed. I was bayoneted out of that
 
 414 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 conviction by experience. My eyes were opened by 
 the facts about me ; and when I began to look bne-k, 
 with eyes anointed by the facts of my own life, into 
 the history of church organization, my experience 
 seemed natural enough. For instance, the Church, as 
 such, gave us no help in the anti-slavery effort or in any 
 other radical movement. I do not believe that the 
 philosophy of organization allows the possibility of a 
 church ever helping in such an onward movement. We 
 are not to be exacting. We are to allow, exactly, to 
 every phase of opinion, lever of purpose, organized rep- 
 resentative of conviction, its actual value. It seems to 
 me that organization is a milestone which represents 
 how far opinion had travelled when it crystallized into 
 an organization. You cannot expect of that organiza- 
 tion, necessarily in its shape as an organization, an 
 acceptance of any new idea. It will discharge, unex- 
 pectedly, its full duty if it even maintains life enough 
 bravely to represent the opinion which created it ; which 
 in seven cases out of ten it never does. It seems to me 
 that every organization is the representation of an idea, 
 but never can go beyond it. It never has been, or 
 rarely has been, faithful to the application of an idea. 
 It has fallen back into the worship of the fathers. It 
 lias limited itself by the application made by its own 
 saints. For instance, Luther claimed the right for 
 f bodies of men to go out and represent Catholicism; 
 but Luther did not reach the point of allowing the in- 
 dividual to do that ; and when some of his own followei s 
 went to that extent, the public sentiment of the era 
 being unable to bear them up, they were surged and 
 swamped in the age, and forgotten. The age was not 
 ready for such individuals. It could not hold them up.
 
 VOICES FROM THE FREE PLATFORM. 415 
 
 Succeeding them came Congregationalism, having the 
 idea that a church, a small collection, could assert the 
 right of individual judgment as against a large body. 
 That was another gain. Then came the Brownists, 
 the Independents, and the Baptists, asserting the right 
 of individual judgment within the line of what was 
 considered the inspired rule of the Scriptures. That 
 was another gain. But when the Quaker went out 
 beyond that, and claimed the right of individual judg- 
 ment, not subject to the inspiration of a book, they 
 cried out "heretic ;" they repudiated him, inevitably. 
 Were they not all good ? Yes, undoubtedly. Did not 
 Luther do a great deal of good ? Certainly. Did not 
 the Congregation alists ? Indubitably. Does not the 
 Church of to-day do a great deal of good ? Certainly 
 it does. It takes up the admitted truths, the respect- 
 able truths ; it gathers them into shape, applies them 
 to admitted evils ; cheap soup and the primer, giving 
 away money, perhaps the tenth of your income ; the 
 duty of not allowing your neighbors in the next street 
 to starve ; the duty of sending the truth you have got 
 to somebody else, all good, excellent ! The only 
 weakness you find in organization is when you demand 
 of it to walk. The fluid is a force ; the solid is a weight. 
 While the river is a fluid it moves. You must not expect 
 motion of that which is crystallized ; but it has its use. 
 When I was on the Mississippi's banks lately, we walked 
 across the river. The ice was useful. It was church or- 
 ganization. The fluid of the last summer crystallizes into 
 a useful bridge ; but if the river subsides, and leaves ten 
 feet of vacancy below, the bridge will fall. If, with the 
 advancing spring, the water rises, it will carry the whole 
 Church into the ocean of absolute truth ; it will carry
 
 416 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 the ice away. But you must not expect motion of the 
 crystallized sentiment which has become a church. 
 There was great truth in what the old Italian said in 
 the fifteenth century : "There 'has not been a Christian 
 to die in his bed for two hundred years," that is, 
 there had not been a real Christian man who looked 
 about him, saw the needs and met the lessons of the 
 actual day, with nothing in his own soul between him 
 and God, who led a comfortable life. He must al \vays 
 go out with the Baptist into the wilderness. He need 
 not, perhaps, always reproach the Church that staid at 
 home and did its own business, acted up to its light. 
 It has its uses. His duty is, as it seems to me, to con- 
 fess the light God gives him. As was beautifully said 
 as I stood by the coffin of a deceased friend this week, 
 "Her right never rebuked another's wrong." Perhaps 
 I should vary the statement a little ; but what I mean 
 is, there is no need, necessarily, of rebuking short-com- 
 ing until it passes into dishonest antagonism ; until 
 it seeks to throw a net^under your feet, and trip you 
 up ; until it thunders after you misrepresentation and 
 scandal, and cries out, " schismatic ! " " fanatic ! " " in- 
 fidel ! " As long as it can recognize its own place, and 
 let you take yours, it is to be fellowshipped, not as a 
 force in the movement of society, but as a breakwater 
 and anchor to keep what we have gained. That is my 
 idea. In the mean time, we are all to set to work and 
 preach whatever God or man has taught us of the finest 
 laws of the religious sentiment, and each age will see 
 more and more of it. Luther was honest ; but Carl- 
 stadt was necessary in a certain sense, because he saw 
 more. 
 
 The records of Christianity hold, it seems to me, a
 
 VOICES FROM THE FREE PLATFORM. 417 
 
 very large measure of the lessons that social science 
 needs. In the first place, the Christian records are 
 principles. The Church is an alleviative. It ap- 
 proaches evils to alleviate them, not to cure them. 
 That is not the New Testament method. There are 
 two ways of touching evils. If the gas was escaping 
 in this room, we should open the ventilators and relieve 
 ourselves. That is relief. To-morrow the superinten- 
 dent would send for a gasfitter, and he would stop the 
 leak. That is cure. Now, as I look at it, all action of 
 the Church approaches poverty to make it comfortable ; 
 it approaches crime to endeavor to soften it ; it ap- 
 proaches prostitution to shield it from temptation. 
 That is relief. That is opening the windows to get 
 rid of the leaking gas. But social science and the 
 religious philosophy of the New Testament, while they 
 attempt all that, pi-escribe that the really religious intel- 
 lect shall seek, not relieve, but cure. . . . 
 
 If there is any strength, God gave it in order that 
 it might hold up weakness, supplement weakness. If 
 there is any knowledge, God gave it that it might sit 
 down side by side with ignorance, and put its arm 
 around its neck, and divide. If there is any wealth, 
 it is only a trust, and the poorest man you can find in 
 the neighborhood is your co-trustee. That is Christi- 
 anity, as I read it. That is Christianity ; and, singu- 
 larly enough, we generally leap right off, and say, that 
 is the Church. But take the amelioration of punish- 
 ment, for instance, as an illustration of my meaning, 
 the old vindictive theory of the Jews, and the European 
 idea, that hangs a man to satisfy the passions of society. 
 That lived a great while. Then came the exemplary 
 idea, that I must be hung to make you better ; which
 
 418 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 sacrificed me to your welfare. That held its own a 
 great while. Those two were the pet ideas of the 
 Christian Church. We have got a new idea now, and 
 it is this : that the moment society has seized a man, 
 society owes him education, moral development, pro- 
 tection, emolument. Having put him within stone 
 walls for its own defence, it shall thereupon begin the 
 duty it owed to him in his cradle, and neglected ; that 
 is, begin to educate him. Prisons are moral hospitals. 
 God let that man commit a murder in order that society 
 might get the right to take hold of him, and do what 
 God holds it guilty for- not doing before, educate 
 him. Where did you get that idea? Got it from 
 Beccaria, got it from Voltaire, got it from Romilly, 
 got it from Dumont, got it from Bentham, men, who, 
 if they ever were inside of a church door, would be 
 held as heretics, got it from Brougham, whom the 
 Church denounced as an infidel. Never has there 
 been a man in advance of the age, on this question or 
 in any other way, who had not been driven into the 
 wilderness by the Church of the day. But whence 
 really came this idea of the treatment of persons, for 
 instance ? It came from the great normal root of 
 Christianity, the sacredness of the individual. Relig- 
 ion, having taken hold of a man, no longer deems him 
 a chip of a block, a part of the government, a unit that 
 goes to make up the State ; it no longer looks at him 
 in the mass, a hierarchy, an aristocracy. That single 
 unit of a soul and God, these are the only two things 
 in the universe, in the contemplation of religious prin- 
 ciple. The sacredness of the individual ! What right 
 Lave you to hang me ? Stuart Mill is the only infidel 
 who ever failed to see this, but he is followed by nine
 
 VOICES FROM THE FREE PLATFORM. 419 
 
 hundred and ninety-nine out of a thousand Christians, 
 so called. But those men called infidels studied social 
 science ; they studied philanthropy ; they studied prin- 
 ciple ; they studied it in human instincts. Called infi- 
 dels, for there are men called infidels who really are 
 Christians, as there are men calling themselves Chris- 
 tians who really are Infidels, without suspecting it. 
 I have met in my day many specimens of both these 
 classes. That man is a Christian whose life and ethics 
 grow out of the central root of Christianity ; no matter, 
 if in his ignorance or his prejudice he disowns the 
 name. That man is 'an Infidel who is not, with his 
 whole heart, willing to bear his brother's burden; no 
 matter how broad his phylactery, how regular his 
 church-membership papers, or how loud his profession 
 of Liberalism or Radicalism. . . . 
 
 God's method of education is to lay responsibility on 
 the human soul. The doctors say there is electricity 
 enough in the brain to cure any disease, if you can only 
 rouse it. So there is moral power enough in every 
 man to make him a man, if you could only rouse it ; 
 and responsibility rouses it. Take a girl, a mere pop- 
 injay, a toy; she gets married, and people say: " What 
 a mere child that is to have children ! " She has one 
 or two children, and then her husband is taken from 
 her side. How wisely she plans ; how patiently she 
 watches ; how she opens careers for them ; how she 
 guards her children's interests; how she begs from 
 one and from another, and earns from a third, the 
 means to give that boy an education, sheltering the 
 girl meanwhile ! What a wonderful being ! We never 
 knew her. Where were all those powers hidden ? 
 How did she get them ? Necessity brought them out j
 
 420 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 God created them. If you had given her a career 
 before, you would have seen them all. You were 
 beginning to move in the line of God's law when you 
 found her a widow, with those two children on her 
 brain and heart. You had got into the line of the 
 great necessity which God meant should unfold, educate, 
 and lift up every human being. You did not need 
 the magnet that a mechanic filled up with electricity 
 that is, a benevolent society for her ; the great 
 natural magnetism of the earth, that is, God's law, 
 made her gravitate towards a career and a success. 
 
 The value of social science to men of radical faith 
 and purpose is, that it digs down to the root of princi- 
 ple. It does not seek alleviation merely ; it does not 
 seek what the Church can give ; it faces the great prob- 
 lems of the hour. Negro slavery was a very great 
 question, but still, to a certain extent, it was a limited 
 one ; it applied to a race. Its value was that it forced 
 us, in the conflict with the Church, in the conflict with 
 the State, to dig down to the principles which, when 
 they grew up, covered all kindred interests. 
 
 Seek out, publish, and, as fast as possible, bring society 
 into harmony witli the laws of justice. This is social 
 science. All Labor asks is justice, not charity ; all wo- 
 man asks is justice, not pity ; all the negro asks is 
 justice, not humanity. Indeed, where is the treasury 
 full enough to pay that debt ? All crime asks is jus- 
 tice, not sympathy. Who shall teach us the full mean- 
 ing of this great word, JUSTICE ? " Owe no man 
 any thing." When that command is obeyed, Social 
 Science will be dazzled out of sight by the millen- 
 nium. Wendell JPhillips.
 
 VOICES FROM TEE FREE PLATFORM. 421 
 
 IMPROVEMENT OF MAN ON EARTH. 
 
 I THINK there is hope when a religion is presented 
 to the people which is not only in favor of free thought 
 and free speech, but which endeavors also to benefit 
 the physical condition of humanity. There never was, 
 there never can be, such a thing as true pleasure in 
 vice or crime ; and yet the land is full of them, because, 
 as I think, the social condition of the people is not cared 
 for as it ought to be at the present moment. I agree 
 with the sentiment of that great social reformer, Robert 
 Owen, that the characters of men are formed for them, 
 instead of by them ; and consequently I think the in- 
 fluence of circumstances in this country, rather than 
 any natural or inherent depravity in mankind, accounts 
 for the degradation and vice and crime that prevail in 
 every section of the country. Let us not, then, suppose 
 that it is owing to any natural or inherent depravity 
 that this state of things exists, but only in the fact that 
 the true remedy for social evils has not yet been put 
 into practice ; but when the remedy is applied, the 
 reform will be complete. And it is a great sign of 
 the times, that radicals and liberals and free-thinking 
 men are doing what lies in their power for the promo- 
 tion of this great reform. 
 
 Let men, if they can do no better, dream of a here- 
 after, to which I have no kind of objection ; but the 
 hereafter must be according to the present, and if 
 people live well in the present, they have the best 
 preparation for the future. But to go into the future 
 unprepared by the present may, perhaps, for any thing 
 I know to the contrary, be the same routine over again.
 
 422 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 But be that as it may, I am getting beyond my depth ; 
 I do not know any thing about these matters ; I do 
 not pretend to know. Being finite, frail, and imper- 
 fect, I do not presume to understand the infinite, and 
 therefore I confine my thoughts here ; for I think there 
 is enough to do in this world, and more than enough, 
 .to occupy all our time in improving the condition of 
 the people here. And those who believe in the here- 
 after should not object to the doctrine, because he who 
 is right to-day will probably be right to-morrow. That 
 there are those in the community who entertain these 
 aspirations, and are endeavoring by the aid of social 
 science to improve society and even religion itself, is 
 one of the hopeful signs of the times. Horace Seaver. 
 
 ESSENTIALS OF FAITH. 
 
 As regards the subject upon which so much has been 
 written of late, the importance of faith in a personal 
 God, we shall be content to let our limited knowledge 
 remain where it is, while we have all that science can 
 reveal, both that which is self-evident, which is natural, 
 which is spiritual, and that which belongs to outward 
 nature, which it needs not that I enlarge upon, ig- 
 norant as I am, after all that has been said. But I 
 think that this shall be found to suffice, and, as has just 
 been expressed, that it shall pervade the universe of 
 God, and bring us into the kingdom, which is nigh 
 even at the doors; and that we need not enter into any 
 speculations as regards the future, as regards immortal- 
 ity, but that we all shall learn to rest content with the 
 limited knowledge we have, and be confident, by ful-
 
 VOICES FROM THE FREE PLATFORM. 423 
 
 ness of faith, that that which is best for us shall and 
 will be ours, while we do not endeavor by our specula- 
 tions to make out or build up a heaven. I remember, 
 when Dr. Channing, years ago, at our house, attempted 
 to advocate his views, and to show what everlasting 
 progress there would be in the hereafter, I told him it 
 was as interesting to me as any speculation to which I 
 had ever listened on the subject, but he must allow me 
 to say that it was speculation still. I want we should 
 tread under foot our speculations, and every thing that 
 will mingle aught that is uncertain with the religion 
 which we have heard presented to us to-day, which 
 is certain, which is sure ; for that which is self-evident 
 needs no argument. And so we come near to the 
 beautiful truths and testimonies that rise out of this 
 pure religion and undefiled, that need no scholastic 
 learning, that need no pulpit explanations. They are 
 clear truth, justice, love, highest, noblest, finest in- 
 stincts of the human heart and mind, which we are to 
 apply to all that we can imagine of the unseen and 
 unknown. That divine power will be ours, if we seek 
 it ; and when these principles are stated they are self- 
 evident ; they need no learned oratory, and it is not 
 employed in regard to them. You do not heaiyin any 
 of the pulpits, a definition of what love, and justice, 
 and mercy, and right are. You know, and all know, 
 that they are innate, self-defined. Therefore, I say, 
 preach your truth ; le,t it go forth, and you will find, 
 without any notable miracle, as of old, that every man 
 will speak in his own tongue in which he was born. 
 And I will say, that if these pure principles have their 
 place in us, and are brought forth by faithfulness, by 
 obedience, into practice, the difficulties and doubts
 
 42-4 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 that we may have to surmount will be easily conquered. 
 There will be a power higher than these. Let it be 
 called the Great Spirit of the Indian, the Quaker " in- 
 ward light " of George Fox, the " Blessed Mary, mother 
 of Jesus," of the Catholics, or Brahma, the Hindoo's 
 God, they will all be one, and there will come to be 
 such faith and such liberty as shall redeem the world. 
 Lucretia Mott. 
 
 Cambridge: Press of John Wilson and Son.
 
 MESSRS. ROBERTS BROTHERS' 
 
 NEW BOOKS 
 
 IN PREPARATION FOR THE AUTUMN OF 1875. 
 
 I. 
 
 JEAN INGELOW. 
 
 FATED TO BE FREE. A Novel. By JEAN INGELOW. 
 With numerous Illustrations by G. J. PINWOOD. One volume, i6mo. 
 Uniform with "Off the Skelligs." 
 
 II. 
 
 LOUISA M. ALCOTT. 
 
 EIGHT COUSINS ; or, The Aunthill. By LOUISA M. AL- 
 COTT. With numerous Illustrations by ADDIE LEDYARD and SOL 
 EYTINGE. One volume, i6mo. Uniform with "Little Women," 
 "Little Men," " An Old-Fashioned Girl." 
 
 III. 
 
 SUSAN COOLIDGE. 
 
 NINE LITTLE GOSLINGS. By SUSAN COOLIDGE. With 
 Illustrations by J. A. MITCHELL. One volume, square i6mo. Uniform 
 with "The New Year's Bargain," "What Katy Did," "What Katy 
 Did at School," " Mischief's Thanksgiving." 
 
 IV. 
 
 PHILIP GILBERT HAMERTON. 
 
 ROUND MY HOUSE : About the Neighborhood where I 
 live in Peace and War Time. By PHILIP GILBERT HAMERTON. 
 With Illustrations by C. O. MURRAY. One volume, square I2mo. 
 Uniform with "The Intellectual Life," &c. 
 
 V. 
 
 NEIL FOREST. 
 
 MICE AT PLAY : " When the Cat's away, the Mice will 
 play." A Story for the whole Family. By NEIL FOREST. With 
 Illustrations by SOL EYTINGE. Square i2mo. 
 
 VI. 
 
 P. THORNE. 
 
 JOLLY GOOD TIMES ; or, Child Life on a Farm. By 
 P. THORNE. With Illustrations by ADDIE LEDYARD. 
 
 VII. 
 
 JULIANA HORATIA EWING. 
 
 SIX TO SIXTEEN. A Girl's Book. By JULIANA HORATIA 
 EWING, author of " The BROWNIES." One volume, i6mo.
 
 MESSRS. ROBERTS BROTHERS 
 
 HAVE JUST PUBLISHED : 
 
 By the Author of " Christian Art and Symbolism.' 1 '' 
 OUR SKETCHING CLUB : Letters and Studies on 
 
 Landscape Art. With an authorized Reproduction of the Lessons and Wood- 
 cuts in Professor Ruskin's " Elements 01 Drawing." By R. ST. JOHN TYR- 
 WHITT. 8yo. $2.50. 
 
 This book is in the form of a narrative, and is the doings of a supposed Sketch- 
 ing Club, their letters, talks, and essays on various art subjects, nearly all practical 
 ones, such as would be likely to be exchanged between fairly good critics and 
 well-educated men and women. It is a handsome Svo volume, with numerous 
 illustrations. 
 
 By the Author of " The Intellectual Life," 
 
 HARRY BLOUNT : Passages in a Boy's Life on Land and 
 
 Sea. By PHILIP GILBERT HAMERTON. With Frontispiece Illustration. i6mo. 
 . $1.50. 
 
 Mr. Hamerton has successfully accomplished a difficult task, and "his book 
 for boys reaches the standard of a first-rate one," says the London A cademy ; and 
 the Spectator says, " Harry Blouut is a fine fellow, and we are glad to see him 
 safely through his perils." 
 
 By the Author of" The Old Masters " and "Modern Painters.' 1 '' 
 MUSICAL COMPOSERS AND THEIR WORKS. 
 
 By SARAH TYTLER. i6mo. $2.00. 
 
 " Distinctively gossipy and very entertaining. Lovers of music, who read 
 for entertainment, wi 1 heartily enjoy these bright and minute sketches of the great 
 composers ; in point of readableness they are not surpassed by any similar sketches 
 in recent literature," says The (Boston) Literary World. 
 
 PARAGRAPH HISTORY OF THE UNITED 
 
 STATES, from the Discovery of the Continent to the Present Time. \vi:h 
 Brief Notes on Contemporaneous Events. By EDWARD ABBOTT. Square 
 iSmo, flexible cloth covers. 50 cents. 
 
 A pocket vade mecum of great value at this interesting period. It will be 
 published on the Centennial Anniversary of the Battle of Lexington and Concord. 
 
 THROUGH THE YEAR. By Rev. H. N. POWERS, 
 
 D D., Rector of St. John's Church, Chicago. i6mo. $1.50. 
 A collection of serious and religious papers suited to the seasons of Nature and 
 of the Church. 
 
 A SHEAF OF PAPERS. By THOMAS G. APPLETOX. 
 
 i6mo. $1.50. 
 
 Bostonians in particular, and lovers of good things in literature in general, will 
 be glad that the author of these Papers, the rich and ripened fruits of his intel- 
 lectual labors, has been induced to gather them into a Sheaf for publication. A 
 few of them only have been previously printed. 
 
 MADAME RECAMIER AND HER FRIENDS. 
 
 From the French of Madame LENORMANT, by the translator of " Memoirs 
 
 and Correspondence of Madame Recamier." i6mo. $1.50. 
 
 Madame Lenormant's previous volume contained the memoirs of Madame 
 
 Re'camier, and the correspondence of her friends. The present volume is the 
 
 complement of the first, and contains her Friendships and her Private Correspond- 
 
 THE DEFENCE OF GUENEVERE AND OTHER 
 
 POEMS. By WILLIAM MORRIS. Crown Svo. $2.00. 
 
 The author of "The Earthly 1 aradise" has been induced to reprint his earlier 
 poems, now for a long time out of print. T. e volume was never published here, 
 and is therefore entirely unknown to the numerous admirers of Mr. Morris's 
 poetry in America. 
 
 FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP IN RELIGION. 
 
 A Collection of Essays and Addresses. Edited by a Committee of The Free 
 Religious Association. i6mo. $2.00.
 
 MESSES. EOBEETS BEOTHEES' PUBLICATIONS, 
 
 MEET FOR HEAVEN. 
 
 A STATE OF GRACE UPON EARTH THE ONLY PREP- 
 ARATION FOR A STATE OF GLORY 
 
 IN HEAVEN. 
 BY THE AUTHOR OF "HEAVEN OUR HOME." 
 
 Crown 8vo. Cloth, extra. Price $1.25. 
 OPINIONS OF THE ENGLISH PRESS. 
 
 "This forms a fitting companion to ' Heaven our Home,' a volun.e which 
 has been circulated by thousand, and which has found its way into almost r very 
 Christian family." Scottish Press. 
 
 " What we shall be hereafter, whether our glorified souls will be like unto 
 our souls here, or whether an entire change in their spiritual and moral condition 
 will be effected after death, these are questions which occupy our thoughts, and 
 to these the author has principally addressed himself." Cambridge University 
 Chronicle. 
 
 " The author, in his or her former work, ' Heaven our Home,' portrayed a 
 social heaven, where scattered families meet at last in loving intercourse and in 
 possession of perfect recognition, to spend a never-ending eternity of peace and 
 Jove. In the present work the individual state of the children of God is attempted 
 to be unfolded, and, more especially, the state of probation which is set apart for 
 them on earth to fit and prepare erring mortals for the society of the saints. . . . 
 The work, as a whole, displays an originality of conception, a flow of language, 
 and a closeness of reasoning, rarely found in religious publications . . . The 
 author combats the pleasing and generally accepted belief that death will effect 
 an entire change of the spiritual condition of our souls, and that all who enter into 
 bliss will be placed on a common level." Glasgow Herald. 
 
 " A careful perusal of this book will make it a less easy thingj for a man to cheat 
 himself into the notion that death will effect, not a mere transition and improve- 
 ment, but an entire change in his moral and spiritual state. The dangerous nature 
 of this delusion is exhibited with great power by the author of ' Meet for Heaven.'" 
 Stirling Observer. 
 
 "This, like the former volume, ' Heaven our Home,' by the same anonymous 
 author, is a very remarkable book. Often as the subject has been handled, both 
 by ancient and modern divines, it has never been touched with a bolder or a more 
 masterly hand." John 'Groat Journal. 
 
 LIFE IN HEAVEN. 
 
 THERE, FAITH IS CHANGED INTO SIGHT, AND HOPE 
 IS PASSED INTO BLISSFUL FRUITION. 
 
 A New Work by the Author of " Heaven our Home " and 
 
 "Meet for Heaven." 
 Crown 8vo. Cloth, extra. Price $1.25. 
 
 This new work is a companion volume to " Heaven our Home," and ' Meet 
 for Heaven," and embraces a subject of very great interest, which has not been 
 included in these volumes. 
 
 The two works above mentioned have already attained in England the large 
 ale of 100,000 copies.
 
 MESSRS. ROBERTS BROTHERS' PUBLICATIONS. 
 
 REV. C. A. BARTOL'S NEW BOOK. 
 
 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 
 
 BY REV. C. A. BARTOL, D.D. 
 
 CONTENTS. Open Questions; Individualism; Transcen* 
 dentalism; Radicalism; Theism; Naturalism; Materialism) 
 Spiritualism; Faith; Law; Origin; Correlation; Character; 
 Genius: Father Taylor ; Experience; Hope; Ideality. 
 
 One volume, i6tno. Cloth. Price $2.00. 
 PROFESSOR PARSONS' S NEW BOOK. 
 
 THE INFINITE AND THE FINITE. 
 
 BY THEOPHILUS PARSONS. 
 
 AUTHOR OF "DBUS HOMO," BTC. 
 One neat l6mo volume. Clot A. Price $1.00. 
 
 " No one can know," says the author, " better than I do, how poor and dim a 
 presentation of a great truth my words must give. But I write them in the hop* 
 that they may suggest to some minds what may expand in their minds into a truth, 
 and, germinating there, grow and scatter seed-truth widely abroad. I am sure 
 only of this : The latest revelation offers truths and principles which promise to 
 give to man a knowledge of the laws of his being and of his relation to God, of 
 the relation of the Infinite to the Finite. ... And therefore I believe that it will 
 gradually, it may be very slowly, so utterly does it oppose man's regenerate 
 nature, but it will surely advance in its power and in its influence, until, in ita 
 own time, it becomes what the sun is in unclouded noon." 
 
 Sold everywhere. Mailed, post-paid, by the Publishers, 
 
 ROBERTS BROTHERS, BOSTON.
 
 This book is DUE on the last date stamped below 
 
 SEP 18 
 
 NOV 
 
 REC'OLD-UR 
 
 APR Oi 1998 
 
 Form L-9-15m-7,'32
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CAUFORNIA-LOS ANGELES 
 
 L 007 694 386 9