Ex Libris
C. K. OGDEN
'/I
SERMONS.
PRINTED BY C. J. CLAY, M.A.
AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS.
INDIVIDUALISM:
ITS GROWTH AND TENDENCIES
WITH SOME SUGGESTIONS AS TO
THE REMEDY FOR ITS EVILS.
SERMONS PREACHED BEFORE THE UNIVERSITY
OF CAMBRIDGE IN NOVEMBER, 1880.
BY THE RIGHT REVEREND
A. N. LITTLEJOHN, D.D., LL.D.,
BISHOP OF LONG ISLAND.
(Eambrfoge :
DEIGHTON, BELL AND CO.
LONDON: GEORGE BELL AND SONS.
NEW YORK : T. WHITTAKER.
1881
TO
THE EEV. CHAELES ANTHONY SWAINSON, B.D.,
CANON OP CHICHESTER CATHEDRAL,
AND
LADY MARGARET PROFESSOR OF DITINITT
IN THE
UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE:
AS A SLIGHT TOKEN OP RESPECT FOR HIS LEARNING AND CHARACTER,
AND IN GRATEFUL REMEMBRANCE OF MANY COURTESIES AND
KINDNESSES THAT HAVE GIVEN TO CAMBRIDGE LIFE
AN ADDED CHARM,
Cfocse Sermons are ^ffectumatelg
BY THE AUTHOR.
1057538
CONTENTS.
SERMON I.
INDIVIDUALISM : ITS GEOWTH AND TENDENCIES.
GENERAL aim of these Sermons The status of the Individual in
anfient life His status in modern life The vast change Chris-
tianity preeminently influential in effecting it The three periods
in the history of Individualism Causes which, in our time, have
stimulated the growth of Individualism Diffusion of political
power Advance of knowledge Eapid growth of wealth Enlarged
control of the powers of nature The age one of transition
Consequent instability of popular convictions, and detachment of
the Individual from the settled traditions of the past The
Individual reason lifted more and more into the place of the
collective, continuous judgment of mankind Tendencies (1) as
seen in the character of individuals and in the general character of
the time (2) Their influence on Morality (3) Their influence as it
affects the Faith, Ordinances, Worship and Polity of the Church
(4) Their influence hostile to the Traditions of the race (5) Have
helped to establish the absolutism of Public Opinion (6) In
sympathy with the two leading phases of Modern Socialism (7)
The tendencies of Individualism illustrated by the present con-
dition and prospects of the Art-work, the Art-impulse of the time.
Pages 166.
SERMON II.
INDIVIDUALISM : COUNTER TRUTHS.
The duty devolved upon the teachers and representatives of
Christianity The difficulty and urgency of the Church's work in
dealing with the problems presented by the threatened excess of
viii Contents,
Individualism Branches of Christendom disqualified for the task
The teaching demanded must, by the use of Counter Truths, (1)
assail the core of Individualism, its pride and self-sufficiency (2)
Deliver a clearer and stronger message in regard to the value and
uses of purely intellectual power (3) Moderate the cherished hopes
of the time touching the results which are to spring from vast
colonizing movements, the founding of new states and the develop-
ment of industrial and commercial resources &c. (4) Show that
the various forms in which Political power has been and still
continues to be diffused are experiments, whose final issue yet
remains to be determined That the Democratic current has its
hidden rocks and shoals (5) The teaching required to develop and
apply the Counter Truths supplied within the domain (1) of
Theology (2) of Philosophy. Pages 67133.
SERMON III.
INDIVIDUALISM :
INSTITUTIONAL CHECKS AND LIMITATIONS.
The more advanced views now entertained respecting the
supremacy of the individual over all external organizations The
prevalence of these views Some of their consequences Organic
life, as existing in the Family, the State, and the Church,
defined The Family as related to the individual Its authority
Its sacredness How it rules and how it serves the individual The
State as related to the individual It has wider aims than those
immediately connected with the individual The development of the
individual not its exclusive object Though political in form and
spirit, the State is an integral part of the world's moral order
Its service for the race The great treasure-house of the results of
human labor in every department of effort The same line of
thought pursued with regard to the Church Its organization not
a mere construction, but an outgrowth from the Divine purpose
Not made by individuals Not a voluntary society Therefore not
subordinated to the will of the individual It has ends beyond the
salvation of the individual Conclusion. Pages 134178.
SERMON I.
**
PSALM vm. 1, 3, 4, 5, 6.
Lord our Governor, how excellent is thy name in
all the earth! When I consider thy heavens,
the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars,
which thou hast ordained ; What is man, that thou
art mindful of him? and the son of man, that
thou visitest him? For thou hast made him a
little lower than the angels, and hast crowned him
with glory and honor. Thou madest him to have
dominion over the works of thy hands ; thou hast
put all things under his feet.
THIS Psalm, in magnifying God's glory by His works
and by His love to man, describes the latter as he
was originally created, and as he will be again when
the Mediatorial work of Christ shall be accomplished.
Though every man's probation may be complete in
L. S. 1
Individualism.
itself, yet the result of it, as exhibited in the average
character of the individual, is still only the prophecy,
not the verification, of his promised oneness with God
and the consequent restoration of his lost perfection.
However far he may be from the final goal, it is
certain that he has grown to be a much larger figure
than he once was, as compared with the bulk of
human life, or with the life of institutions ordained
of God for his guidance and discipline. On all sides
the individual has been so much widened and
deepened as, now and then, to tempt him to ques-
tion the lawful authority of those institutions.
In other times the origin, the mutual relations,
the rightful functions of the Family, the State, and
the Church have been abundantly discussed. But
now there are many circumstances, of which none can
be ignorant, which prove that the time has come
when we must give, not less thought, indeed, to these
forms of organic life, but more to the individual.
His relations to the external powers working upon
him are gradually shifting, and in such ways as to
assure him of a constantly increasing prominence in
the future. It is of moment, therefore, that we
should seek to define, as clearly as possible, his due
Its Growth and Tendencies.
place and influence, to restore where it has been lost,
and to preserve where it still exists, the equilibrium
between his own life and a life larger than his own.
The development of the individual has been at
once a cause and an effect of the progress of the race.
The two facts have been correlative and inseparable.
In %he early stages of society and even in the most
advanced ones of the ancient life there was no true
idea of man, as man. " He belonged not to himself
and had no independent, substantive existence*." The
monarch owned the subject, the father the son, the
husband the wife, the master the slave; and so
absolute was the ownership that it excluded even the
vaguest notion of the jus naturale of the individual,
as we understand it. Everywhere and in all relations
"he was simply the function of another's will, the
appendage to outward authority." If his life or his
property was wanted for any purpose whether of war,
or of peace, or for the altars of religion, both were
taken without a thought of wrong. And when all
might be taken what was left was regarded in the
light of a concession or privilege. The patriarch's
only struggle when about to sacrifice Isaac was with
* See opening pages of Dr Mozley's "Buling Ideas," &c.
12
Individualism.
natural affection, not with any scruples as to his
right to do so. "That children should share their
parent's guilt and punishment was recognized by the
civil law of all ancient Eastern life as a sound judicial
principle." Sparta did not hesitate to destroy the
infirm infants born within its borders, but considered
itself as having an unchallenged right to do as it
pleased in this and in all kindred matters involving
the disposal of human life. Even Roman law, so
much lauded for its enlightened spirit in dealing with
personal property, never rose above the average pagan
idea in regard to the higher question of the ownership
of man by man. Such was the fact, and the other note-
worthy fact going with it was that no form of the an-
cient life had in itself any available power to make it
otherwise. Neither its religious, nor its social organiza-
tions, nor its political policies formally and consciously
attempted to do so. The last chapters of the old
Asiatic and of the old Greek and Roman civilizations
closed with substantially the same teaching and the
same practice on this subject as had been exhibited
by the earliest. Now if we were required to name
the one most salient and characteristic difference
between the ancient and the modern life, we should
Its Growth and Tendencies. 5
undoubtedly find it in their respective notions as to
the individuality of man. A vast change has been
accomplished, and, whatever other agencies may have
cooperated to bring it about, Christianity, beyond
all question, supplied the principles that originated
it and the most potent of the instrumentalities by
wjiich those principles were enabled, however slowly,
to assert their practical supremacy. To show how
Christianity achieved this greatest of revolutions
would be to describe Christianity itself its view of
man as made in the image of God, the seminal
principle of our substantive, human personality its
doctrine of God in Christ coming in the fulness of
time to recover the lost glory of that image by
making man a partaker of His own life, and so an
heir of immortality its offer of redemption to all
men without respect of persons or of the accidents of
human lot its message of universal brotherhood
resting upon the revealed purpose of God that all
men should be gathered into one fold and under one
Shepherd its declaration of a judgment to come
wherein every man will be judged according to his
work ; and, finally, its own life-power from what-
ever source drawn, incorporated into a visible, historic
Individualism.
kingdom, and through that moving upon the king-
doms of this world and leavening all social and
political institutions : not scattering the truths
entrusted to it at random as winds and waters
scatter the seed thrown out upon them ; but sending
them out from its own heart in well denned and
orderly currents of power, through the lips of duly
commissioned ministers, through offices of worship,
through Sacraments and a positive discipline over
human wills and consciences. It was not the Gospel
merely as truth, or spirit, or energy, or influence, but
the embodied Gospel, Christianity organized, the
very Church of the living God that, in respect of the
great principle of man's individuality, lifted the world
"into another orbit and rolled it along another
course." I emphasize the fact in this connection for
a reason that will be seen further on. The indi-
vidual is no larger to day in the estimation of
Christianity, than he was when it first began to
propagate the principles that, more than all else,
have made man what he is in modern society. For
well nigh eighteen centuries it preached and
laboured to accomplish this, among other and, in
view of eternity, more important results ; but it has
Its Growth and Tendencies.
been only within the present century that our
civilization has accepted it in its integrity, and then
only after revolutions and upheavals which shook
modern life to its centre. This gradual falling into
line with Christianity this slowly developed and
now almost complete accord with the Church re-
specting the intrinsic value and self-centred life of
the individual is now the vaunted characteristic of
the more advanced social and political ethics of our
time. The thought and practice, however, of the
leading races of the world to-day have yet scarcely
labored up to the original standpoint of the Church
of Christ. It is beginning to be seen and to be
generally admitted that the more aggressive, if not
the more highly developed forms of modern life, are
democratic in their tendency. What is yet only a
tendency in England and in most other countries of
the Continent is an accomplished fact among fifty
millions of people across the sea. The genius and
aims of Democracy may, in some quarters, excite
grave apprehension and very justly, because, like all
new forces, it will be inclined to extremes and
develop more or less licence and disorder. But at its
core one great idea is planted, one great impulse is
8 Individualism.
struggling for mastery; and that idea is the majesty
of the individual that impulse is to make the most
of the individual. What history proves to be true of
every principle that has acquired a more or less
durable sovreignty over mankind in any sphere of
life, will no doubt prove true of the Democratic
principle. Long checked, repressed, often crushed by
institutions and organizations which, however un-
wisely administered, always recognized as part of
their raison d'etre the education of man as man, the
individual has at last moved up to the front and is
rapidly advancing toward a position where he will be
strongly tempted to overrate himself, and corre-
spondingly to underrate what is external to himself,
whether it be the truth and grace of God, or the
established institutions of Society, the State and the
Church. One period in the history of Individualism
that of its outgrowth, is now well nigh finished. To
this will succeed that of its exaggeration the period
which, if not coincident with, at least overlaps the
present generation. After this will follow the period
of distortion and abuse running out, at last, into
eclipses of reason and conscience, and into disruptions
and anarchies of every name ; and finally into reac-
Its Groivth and Tendencies.
tions toward a recovery of the lost balance between
the personal and impersonal, the subjective and
objective, the individual and the organic body
whether social, political, or ecclesiastical. Now if it
be true that our time is to witness the exaggeration
of the relative importance of the individual, it is of
grave moment that we should watch closely this drift
of the age, and examine under the best light we have
not only the evident symptoms of its power, but also
some of the more unwholesome fruits which it has
already produced : and then if we can, indicate the
remedy.
Whatever these fruits are, we should not be
surprised at them. Their growth has been neither
sudden nor mysterious. Causes have been at work to
produce them which lie out on the surface of life.
What wonder that the individual should be tempted
into undue self-assertion, when we consider how many
things have helped to exalt him in his own esti-
mation. The wider and wider diffusion of political
power has taught him that the ballot is mightier
than the bayonet and that rulers and parliaments
can no longer permanently resist his will. Know-
ledge has rapidly advanced, and the misfortune is
io Individualism*
that he has just enough of it to engender pride and
not enough to teach humility. Wealth, too, has grown
so fast as to breed a greedy lust for the power which
it creates, as well as a passionate thirst for the
comfort and ease that follow in its wake. While
physical science has turned over to him without
reserve or qualification its own immensely enlarged
control of nature's powers. But stronger, perhaps,
than anything else working in this direction is the
now popular view of the age as one of flux and
transition. Apparently, nothing is sure of continuing
long in one stay. It is said that we are breaking
away from the old anchorages, and that the new
ones have not yet been found. A "thaw", we are
told, has begun in Theology which threatens to relax
its joints and to resolve its positive elements into
a shifting vapour of sentiment, replacing, as its final
result, all definite beliefs with certain vague aspi-
rations after a truth about God and duty that will
be so large and free as to spurn the trammels of
formula. Not a few, too, as we have been reminded,
of the old religious and ethical traditions, which we
had supposed to be so permanently imbedded in the
consciousness of mankind, as to be lifted above the
Its Growth and Tendencies. 1 1
eddies of change, have been summoned to the bar of
inquiry, and questioned in a way that implies a
distrust of their supremacy, and a disposition to
modify, if not overthrow their influence. Indeed,
there are certain leaders of the thought of our day
whose speculations have acquired a singular charm
over-- the popular mind, who, either out of charity to-
wards our weakness, or courtesy toward prejudices that
have not ceased to be respectable, tell us that, amid
the attempted reconstruction of the very foundations
of human knowledge now going on, these venerable
heirlooms of faith and duty are destined to take their
place among the exploded conceits of the race. And
then, as part and parcel of the same drift, we are told
that not only do the Family, the State, and the
Church exist for the benefit of the individual, and in
his advancing power and glory, find the only power
and glory which they can legitimately claim : but, what
is a far more radical and disturbing idea, that they
have no divine and unchangeable principles of organi-
zation; but, like all lower forms of corporate life, are
to be dealt with as the accidental and ever mutable
embodiments of the social instincts of man. And,
further, coupled with this drift, nay, as an inevitable
1 2 Individualism.
effect of it, there is the notion that the only court
of appeal, in determining the character and extent of
these revisions and amendments, is not the collective,
continuous judgment of mankind, nor any standard
above and outside the individual ; but each man's
reason working out the problems for and by itself.
It matters not how this new gospel reaches the
masses, whether as science or philosophy, as poetry
or fiction, as the culture that dilutes our God and
Father into "a power that makes for righteousness,"
or as the barren visions of agnostic dreamers, the
effect is all one way. The individual emerges more
and more as the central figure. At first, dazed some-
what, it may be, by so flattering an estimate of his
capabilities, he seems a -little chary of accepting the
proffered honor with its inseparable risks. But pride
has never yet failed to get the better of humility
in the average man. The temptation to play the
sovereign in the world of intellect, and in the yet
higher one of morals and religion is too alluring
to be resisted: and in a sense not dreamed by the
poet his self-confidence will soon learn to affirm with
easy complacency,
Nil mortalibns arduum est.
Its Growth and Tendencies. 13
But however imperfectly I may have accounted for
the Individualistic tendency of the day, the fact
of its increasing prominence will not be questioned.
Interesting as it may be to explain the fact, it is
of more importance to trace the evidences of its
power, to sift the good from the evil in the mixed
hq.Test to be reaped from its sowing, and to ascertain
what are the available safeguards against its excesses.
(I) And first let us note how this tendency works
itself out, in a twofold way, in the character of indi-
viduals and in the general character of the time.
Both exhibit traits which, though widely contrasted
on the surface, are the offspring of the same causes.
If I accept the current judgment of the most eminent
critics, I must speak of them, on the one side, as
unheroic, easily drawn into compromises and weak
assents, as full of moral and intellectual indecision,
as without stability or earnestness of convictions,
and, in the most serious and profound concerns of
life, as lethargic and indifferent. And they are so
because their thinking is of the same tone : and
what else could be their thinking when it is so
widely the feeling of men that there is nothing sure
but doubt, nothing certain but change, nothing real
14 Individualism.
but what the senses can discern, nothing of value
that does not tell upon the welfare of the individual ;
and, further still, what else could be the dominant
feeling when the individual mind finds in self-
guidance, self-sufficiency, self-laudation, self-pleasing
the chief articles of its faith. Moral greatness cannot
thrive in such an atmosphere. The first condition of
growing heroic souls is forgetfulness of self. The
self-conscious man is cursed with the feebleness of a
low, as well as a narrow motive. The energy that
moves him may be intense, but it is the energy that
exhausts itself on the aims of the ambitious schemer,
the money maker, the pleasure seeker, the worldling
of any and every name. This, however, is no more
the energy that lifts souls into the higher life
whose doing and suffering are recognized as the chief
treasures of the race, than water is blood. The cne
is quite equal to the task of making, but not to
the task of bearing the cross. This is the one side.
If now we look at the other side, we shall find the
average character of the individual and of the age
exhibiting qualities so opposite to these, that, at first
thought, we can scarcely credit their existence. We
have only to shift the point of view and the doubt
Its Growth and Tendencies.
vanishes. The same character, that, looked at from
one direction, seems to be lacking in heroic impulse,
to be vague of purpose, weak in will-power, careless,
unenthusiastic, at peace because there is nothing
important enough to quarrel about : regarded from
another, is found to be headstrong and belligerent in
pushing its rights, aggressive and even revolutionary
in its theories, protestant and inquisitive in its litera-
ture, disquieted and restive in temper as though a
very fever were raging in its blood, and abounding in
rapid transitions and continual surprises.
Now the mystery of the contrast, if not the
contrast itself, disappears, when we trace it to its
source. Here, again, Individualism comes to the
front. Its power tells on both aspects of character,
as well in what it does, as in what it leaves undone.
On the one hand, it chills and impoverishes character,
robs it of fervor, depth, decision, sympathy, trust;
and does it in, at least, these two ways by detaching
man more and more from the contact and sway of
organic institutions framed to give due scope and
poise to his faculties, and next by subjecting his
inherited ethical and religious beliefs to the unstable
and often capricious handling of the individual
1 6 Individualism.
reason. On the other hand, it inspires character
with the spirit of unrest and belligerency by teaching
man that himself individually considered, should
be the sole object of solicitude in Society, in the
State, and the Church; that he has more rights than
he has ever claimed ; that among these is the yet
only half asserted right to frame his own ideal of
what the world ought to be in its relations to himself
and to regard the non-fulfilment of that ideal as
a personal grievance to be redressed by incessant
agitation and attack upon the existing order of
things: that it is part of his duty to be on the
watch for something to strike rather than for
something to defend; that unless he would let the
true spirit of manhood die out of him he must be
somewhere and in some form an avenger and an
iconoclast ; that it is treason to his future as well as
a base veneration for the dead past to seem to be
satisfied with what is. Thus it is the tendency of
Individualism to unsettle the foundations and to mar
the symmetry of character. Under its sway character
so far from being what it ought to be the balanced
and orderly result of the means provided by Divine
Wisdom and by the long ages of human experience
Its Growth and Tendencies. i 7
for the training of man, dwindles gradually into
a lopsided embodiment of the reigning theories, the
master passions, and the ever-shifting aims of the
hour.
It is the supreme purpose of Christian discipline,
as the crown and perfection of all culture, to build
up character into completeness, not so much by
displacing the outward law of righteousness, as by
clothing character with the unity and steadiness, the
strength and continuity of the law itself. But it is
the inevitable effect of this high-wrought conception
of the individual to reverse this aim by constantly
adding to the caprices and instabilities of human life.
Parted from its normal centres of outward control,
loosed from the bands thrown around it by the
enduring organisms of society civil and ecclesiastical,
it fluctuates with every tide of impulse, nay with
every wave of speculation that strikes it.
I have spoken of the influence of Individualism on
two leading phases of character. There is still another
which it affects, if possible, still more disastrously.
In the Christ-like type of character, the virtues are
so grouped as to lift the passive above the active
ones submission, patience, fortitude, humility, self-
L. s. 2
1 8 Individualism.
sacrifice, above the qualities which develop push and
energy, resistance, enterprise, aggression, self-asser-
tion. This is simply a fact of the Gospel. I am not
concerned here with the Christian philosophy that
underlies it; nor do I care to defend it against
adverse criticism. We are quite familiar with what
certain thinkers say about it, and with the world's
general conception of it. I name it only to show
how the Christian ideal of character is disparaged
and disrupted by the tendency of thought and action
now under consideration.
The Christian ideal never treats the individual
apart from a life larger than his own. It may be the
life of the Family, the life of Society, the life of the
Race, the life of the Church, the life of God. It
teaches the individual that he can find his true life
only by losing it in a life greater than his own. It
puts him under a discipline of self-abnegation from
the start. It tells him that to be strong, effective,
brave, fruitful in noble deeds, he must serve rather
than command, endure rather than attack, suffer
rather than retaliate, believe rather than doubt.
Powers ordained of God and running through the
whole circle of legitimate authority, mould his will,
Its Growth and Tendencies. 19
direct his affections, demand his obedience at every
step. He is never free from their pressure, and
cannot without peril and loss ignore the obligations
which they impose. He conquers by refusing to
fight, and deals the heaviest blows by not striking at
all. And as for his own highest interests, he best
promotes them by promoting those that have the
least obvious connection with his own immediate
advancement. It is needless to linger on what this
ideal has done for mankind as a whole, or for the
glory and power of the individual. Its record is the
record of the Son of man, its service for humanity,
His service. It raises no question of "idle passivity
on the one hand, and abundant labor on the other;"
but simply how every soul can work most and work
best for the ends God has set before it.
Such, briefly, is the witness of Christianity as to
the best training and the best type of the individual
man. It would be hard to imagine any more
radical contradiction of them both than that offered
by this other conception. Its fundamental postulate
is that if man would be himself he must assert
himself, that his own life when thrown into the scale
is the sufficient counterpoise to all life beyond him,
22
2O Individualism.
and that institutions are accidental rather than
essential factors in his development. If he is to
grow, it must be by the exercise of his rights rather
than by the performance of his duties. To stand
fast in his lot is to smother his energies. No
assignment of vocation can be considered Providential
that checks his ambition or limits the possibility of
success. Thus the measure- of his desires becomes
the measure of his capacities; and thus, too, character,
from being a tranquil, duly proportioned resultant of
healthy powers working for healthy ends, degenerates
into a disorderly and feverish exponent of self-
seeking and ill-regulated aspirations after things
unattainable and perhaps utterly visionary. There is
in this training the assumption that every man,
whatever his station and surroundings, has in him the
elements of some sort of greatness; and then it is
assumed that, being thus endowed, every man who
fails of advancement, must be an idler, or a groveller
or a coward. With the estates and ranks of society
ever turning on the wheel of change, with Senator-
ships and Governorships, with Magistracies and Presi-
dencies, and the vulgar power of sudden wealth
equally open to all, that man is apt to be thought
Its Growth and Tendencies. 21
incurably weak who is satisfied with what he is and
aims not to be something else. The star of destiny
is believed to hang over the humblest, and it will be
their own fault if they do not follow its leading until
promotion is won, and with it the chances of assured
fortune and fame. Children learn this faith with
their alphabet, and too often begin life with an
ambition whose restless craving only repeated failure
and disappointment in after life can subdue.
It is quite likely that of English life this would
be an overdrawn picture. I speak of a phase of
character which Democratic Individualism is building
up the other side of the Atlantic. And what I say
has a meaning for you; for, unless I greatly mistake
the signs of the hour here, American life is only the
advanced guard of tendencies which are asserting
themselves more and more alongside the more stable
life, and in the midst of the venerable institutions of
this ancient Realm.
(II) Let us now note the influence of Indi-
vidualism on Morality. I shall grant at once, in
discussing this point, nearly all that is claimed by
those who are most sensitive to the dignity of the
individual; namely, that it is his right to decide in
22 Individualism.
the last resort in all matters of personal obligation ;
that he should never act against his conscience : and
that to the full extent, that he is responsible for his
conduct, must be his freedom and authority in
determining for himself the conflicting moral interests
which environ him. In this sense the language of
the Apostle may not be qualified, "Whatsoever is not
of faith is sin*." It will be granted, moreover, that
it is the aim of all moral discipline to build up habits
of conscience that will take the place of outward
statutes and ordinances, and to substitute an inward
character for an external law. These are all essen-
tial factors in the development of the individual :
and the only question is, as to how they are to be
brought into action how they are to guide and to
govern in all ultimate issues of personal duty. The
right to do so is conceded, but the conditions under
which the right is to be exercised require considera-
tion.
Now Individualism in its relation to Morality is
understood to mean an undue assertion of the right
without a needful regard for the proper conditions of
its use. Certainly, it will not do, it is neither wise
* Bomans xiv. 23.
Its Growth and Tendencies.
nor safe to trust the individual, as things now are, to
settle absolutely for himself, and so to some extent
for others all questions of duty, all claims of law, all
demands made upon him by the authority of Church
and State, or even of the Family and of general Society.
He is yet a long way off from the intelligent and
balanced mastery of self which would justify such a
trust. Outward guides civil and ecclesiastical must
still and for a long time to come stay his often feeble
steps and light up the dim gropings of his moral
reason. The end of the law is righteousness: but he
is yet so remote from the end that the law cannot
safely silence its thunders or veil its lightnings.
Calvary has interpreted in fact and fulfilled in idea
the meaning of Sinai: and yet Sinai still lifts its
gloomy top behind every conscience not washed in
the blood of the Lamb and "purged from dead works
to serve the living God*." Great reliance, I need
hardly say, is put upon education as the sufficient
guarantee against any abuse of the individual's
liberty of choice. The more advanced nations seem
to be staking their hopes on it. Unfortunately they
are not thinking of an education ethically as well as
* Heb. ix. 14.
24 Individualism.
intellectually complete an education that builds up
intelligence and morality on religion: but of an
education that exhausts its mission as a gift or re-
O
quirement of the State by qualifying the individual
for secular functions: i.e. to earn a living, to use
the ballot discreetly, to handle, it may be, political
dynamite without blowing up himself or others, to be
conservative as against sudden revolutions that would
endanger vested interests, to mind his own business
when society does not call upon him to mind its busi-
ness, and, generally, to be a considerate, safe, steady-
going, patriotic citizen of the commonwealth of this
world. It is a delusion and a snare to suppose that this
sort of training can be an equivalent for the wider and
deeper one that deals with the whole man, his will
and conscience as well as his faculty of knowing that
two and two make four, or of discerning what is safe,
prudent, expedient, useful. Experience has shown
us that the one is very far from implying or pledging
the other, and that the State is neither willing nor
able to make it do so. The policy of the State with
us (in America) is the inevitable result of its attitude
toward any recognized religion. It has determined,
on the one hand, that religion is none of its business,
Its Growth and Tendencies. 25
and, on the other, that education is its business. It
turns over, therefore, the one to voluntaryism to get
on as best it can, and holds the other in its grasp as
a creature of law. It does not encourage, far less
enforce an infidel training ; nor does it concern itself
to prevent it.
What the effect is to be in the next, if not in the
present generation is no mystery to those who have
come to see either by inquiry or observation the
rising, widening tide of a faithless, godless secularism.
There is one nation, at least, that is already, especially
among its more thoughtful classes, beginning to un-
derstand that mere knowledge is not an unmixed
good, that Christless schools do create some suspicion
that all will not be safe for other generations and
that possibly the withes and bands of a secular state-
craft will not hold, in their proper orbit of liberty and
obedience, huge masses who have been taught to
know their power, without being taught to know
their responsibility to God for the right use of it.
Except God shall change the constitution of the world
and of humanity, a highly developed brain will not
offset a shrivelled conscience; nor will knowledge
take precedence of duty ; nor will a secular education
26 Individualism.
prove a veritable sacrament to man even in the work
of his temporal salvation. The education, then, now
most widely accepted gives no promise that, for the
present, the individual can be trusted, more than he
has been, to act absolutely in and for himself as the
supreme arbiter in the court of duty and conscience.
The time has not come, as Individualism claims, for
turning over to his keeping the outward law of
morality, or subordinating to his will the institutions
ordained of God and man to enforce and perpetuate it.
Again, neither the Christian standard nor the
Christian type of morality is safe in the hands of Indi-
vidualism. The standard refers to the degree in which
in different times the recognized virtues are enjoined
and practised; the type refers to the relative im-
portance attached to particular virtues or particular
groups of them*. Now Individualism cares chiefly
for what magnifies the independence of the individual
and only subordinately for the things that overshadow
and control him. It may not be hostile to an exalted
moral standard ideally considered, but its inclination
will always be to dilute and lower it in practice.
* Lecky's "European Morals," Preface. Bampton Lectures
for 1873, pages 5, 6.
Its Growth and Tendencies. 27
The natural man when confronted by the severities
of the moral law is instinctively tempted to keep
within as narrow limits as possible his actual re-
sponsibility. He is never lacking for reasons why
somebody else should obey and himself be excused.
It is astonishing how under the clearest light the con-
science will lapse into vagueness and flabbiness as an
interpreter and enforcer of practical obligations. No
amount of instruction or discipline can keep it fully
nbreast of its proper office. We see this constantly
cropping out in its dealings with "sin which is the
transgression of the law*." It is never the guilty thing
to the eye of man that God declares it to be. It is
a mistake, a weakness; it is caused by unfortunate
limitations of faculty, or by an ignorant misappre-
hension of what the law demands: or it is an
inherited fault running in the blood and so not
deserving to be punished ; it is any thing and every
thing but that which excites Divine justice and calls
down upon the offender merited penalty. On these
and kindred grounds no moral standard, far less the
Christian, is safe in the exclusive custody of the
individual and apart from the sanctions which the
eternal Lawgiver has planted behind the law, or from
* 1 St John iii. 4.
28 Individualism.
the visible ordinances that announce and emphasize
them. And then with regard to the type of morality,
only loose and disorderly dealing can be looked for
from Individualism. Countless influences are at
work to produce disintegrating fluctuations in the
current estimate of the virtues and vices of human
life. The processes by which the moral taste is
unsettled and often radically modified are subtle and
intangible, but not the less sure in their operation.
History tells us how, for reasons difficult to assign,
first the individual, and then companies of individuals,
and then society itself have inclined now to the heroic
and now to the amiable virtues ; now to sins and
vices of the intellect and will, and now to those of
sensual appetite ; and History tells us, too, how hard
it has been at all times to secure a hearty recognition
of qualities that immeasurably transcend either the
heroic or the amiable ; and for the reason that they
are the gifts of the Holy Spirit, and as such can
abide in man only as he rises above himself and
becomes like God, and by this likeness a partaker of
the Divine life. Individualism, then, can be ac-
counted neither the friend, nor the safe custodian of
an exalted natural, far less Christian morality.
(Ill) But from Individualism as it affects cha-
Its Growth and Tendencies. 29
racter and morality, I turn to it as it affects the
Faith, Ordinances, Worship and Polity of the Church.
I may not do more than allude to the Ecclesiastical
System which has done so much to create the ex-
treme form of it with which I am required to deal.
That Modern Popery by its despotic rule and un-
relenting intolerance is largely responsible for some
of the worst evils of Individualism, none but its own
disciples will deny. How and why it is so are
questions that my limits will forbid me to handle.
Partly as a result of the religious dissents, protests
and antipathies of the last three centuries, and partly
as a result of the social, political and speculative
tendencies associated with and respectively repre-
senting them in their kindred spheres, the Indi-
vidualism of our time has already arrived at certain
conclusions within the province of Religion which
it announces not only with boldness, but with almost
impatient dogmatism. It speaks, indeed, on some
very vital issues as though, to the enlightened
thought of the day, the debate were already closed.
We are told, for example, by some Christian teach-
ers as well as by many anti-Christian thinkers
that the individual is the master, and that all
3O Individualism.
organizations external to him of whatever name or
source are his servants; and further that, if they
are not willing to serve him and to be modified
according to his mandates, they have outlived their
time and are fit only to perish. It is declared to
be the teaching of experience, not less than of the
philosophy of History, that institutions are often
in their origin the creatures of great personalities,
and that it is the habit of mankind to cling to
and transmit them long after the impulse or emer-
gency that gave them being has died out. At best,
it is claimed, that they are only the shifting "time
vestures" of the ideas, and aims, and forces of the
race. That they may have some connection with
a Divine plan in History, or that God's Providence,
as a power secretly directing and fashioning human
wills and judgments, may have something to do with
their origin and continuity is, with the advanced
doctrinaires of Individualism, an obsolete theory.
Thus resolved into issues of the unfolding conscious-
ness of the individual, they have no life tenure save
that chartered by his will no claim upon his obedi-
ence save that resting upon his voluntary consent.
Thus the only vox Dei that he is bound to respect
Its Growth and Tendencies.
is the vox populi or the utterance of any number of
individuals greater or less, moving on the same plane
and subject to the same conditions as himself.
For the present, I may not stop to inquire how this
doctrine affects the framework of society or the foun-
dations of civil government. Religiously and ecclesias-
tically considered, it is so radically false or so radically
true, as, in either case, to swallow up all minor con-
troversies. If it be true, then, as necessary corollaries
from it, we must admit that, "as the web comes out
of the spider, so creeds, ordinances and polities come
forth from the inner life of man, and with a character
in strict harmony with that inner life :" that the
visible Church is only a gradual outgrowth from the
spiritual needs and aspirations of the individual soul
and hence without any divine and immutable prin-
ciples in its structure ; that truth has its ultimate basis
in the moral instincts and its final criterion in the
reason of the individual. But if this be true, then
we are confronted with certain other deductions as
momentous as they are inevitable. There is neither
room nor ground for an objective, supernatural Re-
velation. Theology in substance, as well as in form,
is a product of the human mind. God Himself, so
Individualism.
far from being what Christianity declares, dwindles
away into a vague and impotent reflection of the
creatures whom He is supposed to govern. The
Kingdom of Christ is no longer like its Author
the same in its organic being yesterday, to-day,
and for ever; but lapses into the category of the
perishable elements of History. The Faith once
and for ever delivered shares the same fate ; for truth
grows with the growth of the human consciousness,
and therefore no belief can be said to be final in
the sense of being incapable of essential change both
by addition and subtraction. Worship emptied of
unchangeable verities, without a revealed and there-
fore a fixed object, without a revealed and therefore
a fixed mode of access to its object, ceases to include
the confession of a true faith and degenerates into a
sentimental utterance of human needs and desires.
It is no longer "We praise Thee, O God, we ac-
knowledge Thee to be the Lord. All the earth
doth worship Thee, the Father Everlasting;" but
we are lonely and weak, empty and out of joint,
perplexed and distressed with
the burthen of the mystery
Of all this unintelligible world;
Its Growth and Tendencies. 33
and we would be comforted by pouring our cries
into the ear of we know not what ; but whatever it
be, unless it have some help for us, it must be a
heartless, headless phantom all the worse for its
inconceivable power and immensity. The Sacra-
ments of Religion, so far from being anchored to
the Rock of Ages and assuring us of God's gracious
favor and goodness and of our oneness in Christ, are
no more than arbitrary signs whose only power to
affect us is derived from our superstitious veneration
for material forms. Christian discipline, which pre-
scribes and regulates the exercises of personal religion
and brings the animal into subjection to the spiritual
man, withers away into a conventional arrangement
of human wisdom and convenience. And, finally,
the Christian Priesthood instead of being constituted
and commissioned of God a veritably Divine am-
bassadorship from the Court of Heaven sinks into
a function that has no higher origin than the in-
stinct or necessity which leads all human societies
to provide for an orderly subdivision of labor.
Nor are these all the consequences of this ultra
individualistic tendency in Religion. For I have yet
to mention the confusion and distrust which it creates
L. S. 3
34 Individualism.
in the sphere of Christian evidence. If we accept its
premises, its conclusions in regard to the available
proofs of Christianity are inevitable. The subjective
method resting upon intuitions or the so-called neces-
sary truths of consciousness is all that is left us.
The whole mass of external evidence is surrendered
at a blow, as having no solid ground of defence
against the open assaults or the secret sapping and
mining of modern criticism. If the intuitive con-
victions of the individual mind be the only ultimate
criterion of truth; if every reader of the Holy
Scriptures must find in himself the only sure evi-
dence of their truth ; if our faith has no firm props
to lean upon outside the soul itself; no anchors to
hold by save its own feelings: then it follows irre-
sistibly that Christianity has no impregnable historic
proof to support it, and that, thus, it ceases to be
a historic religion and resolves itself into a mere
exhalation from the " inner life" of man.
But it is clear that, if Christianity be dislodged
from history and all testimony be barred out as
useless and incompetent, the mind has no refuge
against absolute unbelief except its own notions of
truth: and truth, when cited to appear before this
Its Growth and Tendencies. 35
inward court, is forced to prove itself by itself and
apart from its place and operation in history. Any
argument based on external evidence is sneered at as
empirical; any reference to historical data is rejected
as irrelevant. Revelation is true not because it is
authoritative, but authoritative only to the extent
that... it is seen to be true. Christ is accepted not
because of His miracles, but in spite of them. What
each man's consciousness does not verify is incapable
of verification by any other witness. To this one
witness we are tied up; and, this failing us, we drift
helplessly out into 'the dark unknown.
I venture just here only these two comments.
Individualism, while shutting us up to our instincts
or intuitions, is obliged to admit that, at most, they
are only half articulate even in the wisest and the
best; and that for the great majority of mankind
they are a mute presence in the soul monitors that
do not admonish guides that do not see witnesses
that cannot be trusted vague hints that one soul
cannot communicate to another secret visions that
each must possess for himself in order to understand
them and that vanish in the effort to describe or
embody them. And next it seems a pity, that our
32
36 Individualism.
Lord could not have foreseen the lofty stage to be
reached by our Nineteenth century consciousness.
Had He done so, He would have been saved the
trouble of doing what He did to manifest and certify
His Divinity, of sending the Holy Ghost to guide
His people into the way of all truth, of preparing
through inspired men the Record of His life as a
precious heritage for the ages, and, lastly, of estab-
lishing and endowing His Church as the Keeper and
Witness of that Record.
It is impossible to estimate the mischief wrought
by this tone of thought in the field of Christian
evidence. With a folly that would be ridiculous
were it not followed ' by such fatal consequences, and
alas ! with the countenance of not a few in the very
home of the faithful, it complacently hands over to
the enemy the outer defences of the faith, which, in
their place, are as solid and tenable as the interior
ones of consciousness. It sunders what Christ Him-
self so joined together as to be incapable of
divorce the light within and the light without
the soul, the moral reason and external testimony,
the intuitions of the spirit and the supernatural
facts of History which shape and voice them to
Its Growth and Tendencies. 37
the eye and ear of our every day life of belief and
duty.
(IV) But I pass on to other vicious fruits of an
exaggerated Individualism. There is scarcely any-
thing of more value in itself, or of more beneficent
influence, than what are known as the Traditions of
the., race, assorted, compacted, unified by the lapse
of time. There is no department of life exempt
from their sway, or independent of their life giving
currents. In them we see with the eyes, hear with
the ears, work with the hands of the many sided
past. Through them we live over again the thoughts
and deeds, the agonies and triumphs, the burials and
births of by-gone generations. They are, so to speak,
the sacramental signs and seals by which History
affirms and certifies the unity of the race amid all
diversities of lot, and the mighty sweep of a provi-
dential purpose that goes on increasing with the
ages, flashing out, here and there, like an unearthly
flame in new enthusiasms of religion, new phases
of knowledge and art, new advances of civilization.
These Traditions are all memorable for their origin
and growth, and often mysterious and almost sacred
in their power to affect us.
38 Individualism.
Now if these Traditions have one enemy more for-
midable than another, it is that type of Individualism
now under review. It has more interest in the future
whose character it may help to shape, than in the
past by which itself has already been largely shaped.
Jealous of the authority of living institutions, it is
still more jealous of Traditions deemed dead because
the wills and minds that gave them being are dead.
Setting itself up as the sufficient measure of what-
ever claims its assent, it regards with impatience all
that transcends it, proves too large for it, laughs at
its pride, exposes its weakness, prophesies the failure
of its hopes, and strips its plans of the conceit of
originality. Thus it finds a certain pleasure in
clipping and paring away these honest, unshrinking
reminders of its littleness in the eye of History.
Whatever the cause, Individualism has a poor
opinion of all transmitted, inherited wisdom, and so
a very onesided and superficial one of the more
silent, but really governing elements of progress.
It is its habit to narrow the area and discount the
strength of all forces not born of its own will, not
nursed by its own thought, not plastic to its own
wish. So far as it does so, it turns what is positive
Its Growth and Tendencies. 39
in the life of the individual into a negative as regards
the greater life of humanity at large. Thus it not
only breaks in upon the order of human growth, but
blights and impoverishes the mind itself. Negations
whether in the world of thought or the world of
action starve, not feed us. All inspiring fervour, all
living energy, all yearnings that open up to the soul
even glimpses of a true greatness dread them as
plants dread mildew, or human bodies the touch of
palsy.
But further, as might be expected, Individualism
has an affinity neither weak nor obscure with that
most formidable of negations in these times
Agnostic materialism; or, if affinity be too strong a
word then a connection that renders it easy to pass
from the one to the other. Somehow the laws of
thought will have their revenge on those who forget
or despise the inherent limitations of co-ordinate,
fundamental truths. Excess breeds defect, extra-
vagance poverty, too much liberty the destruction of
liberty, too great pretensions of will fatalism, too
much idealism in dealing with matter, the loss of
spirit in matter. And so under the same law of
reaction, as experience shows us every day, some
40 Individualism.
minds disgusted at the religious contradictions and
anarchies of the hour leap at a bound over the gulf
that yawns between Protestant licence and Papal
despotism; while others in the sphere of philosophical
thought and even of social life, distracted and worn
out by the evils consequent upon an extreme asser-
tion of free will and a lawless use of reason, jump,
with scarcely an intermediate pause, from the
strongest, wildest doctrine of self-sufficiency and self-
government to the doctrine which converts man into
a passive, transitory link in a fatalistic chain, and so
into the slave of outward circumstances, thereby
wiping out at a blow the consciousness of freedom,
the sense of sin, the dread of remorse, the horrors of
shame, and with these the conviction that the indi-
vidual soul could have been better or worse than
it is. And what is this but Agnostic materialism
pushed to its logical results on the ethical side of
human life. But further, if it be true, as our ultra-
Individualism affirms, that all knowable truth is
evolved from, and conditioned by our personal
consciousness, then it is certainly made less difficult
to adopt the more radical proposition that conscious-
ness itself is only an evolution from something lower
Its Growth and Tendencies. 41
than itself; and this readily paves the way for the
theory that the highest life we know is only "a
refined organization of dirt." I speak of a tendency,
and I speak of it thus to show how needful it is that
we should see it in all the gravity of its possible
consequences.
(-V) But turning from the more abstract phases
of the subject, let us look at it, briefly, as it bears
upon more obvious interests. And, under this head,
I remark, first, that Individualism tends to an undue
exaltation of the power of Public Opinion and to a
corresponding depression of the power of authoritative
and permanent Institutions. At least one effect of this
on the individual is to narrow his range of thought,
to relax his sense of duty, and to fetter his proper in-
dependence of will and action. It is curious to see
how the individual, in the effort to assert himself as
the foremost figure in modern life, has succeeded only
in changing his masters, without sensibly abating the
tyranny that exacts his obedience. While seeking to
lift himself into supremacy over external organ-
izations of every name, he has been building up
another external power that threatens to rule him
with a rod of iron. This new Autocrat Public
42 Individualism.
Opinion is intolerant of appeals from its established
verdicts, chastises the rebellious into submission,
admits no responsibility for the wrongs it inflicts,
drags down at a word the mighty from their seats,
and with a nod enthrones its favorites chosen from
the multitude, it may be, in moments of passion or
caprice. It would be a just and generous master,
.and so a wonderful advance upon any previous form
of power, if it could give any guarantee that only the
best elements of popular life would enter into its
composition. But alas ! with the best it absorbs
the worst. It must include all that lies at the base,
as well as what rises to the top of the social fabric.
It is at once the child and the slave of majorities ;
and the most charitable judgment on the tempers of
popular majorities will not affirm that the power
they wield is always that of the intelligence and
virtue of the community. The Public Opinion with
which I am most familiar, like the social and
political system of which measurably it is at once the
offspring and exponent, does not, as matter of fact,
grow purer and wiser, as it grows older and stronger.
It may be doubted whether it becomes more con-
siderate and trustworthy as its authority expands,
Its Growth and Tendencies. 43
and its subjects multiply. As the supreme tribunal,
it is so constituted as instinctively to level down, not
up. If it does not make flattery of the masses, it
certainly does make unquestioning obedience to the
will of the multitude, the price of promotion and
office. Too often a millstone is ready for the neck of
every,,sort of leadership, every form of greatness that
resolutely adheres to integrity and independence of
personal convictions. As with the loftiest peaks of
mountain ranges, so with the noblest spirits ; when
the thunder gust of popular passion sweeps the sky,
they are the first and surest to be struck by its
lightning. As in politics, so in religion. The pulpit,
if not subordinated to, is dependent on the pews.
Considerations of shelter and raiment and daily
bread, cannot be excluded from the preacher's esti-
mate of the freedom and independence which he
may venture to exercise. So that under the absolute
sovereignty of Opinion a sovereignty built up in the
main by modern Individualism, it has come true that
the very theory of life that pets most and is most
petted by the individual is the least tolerant of
thoroughly independent individualities. Nor is this
altogether confined to peoples most deeply imbued
44 Individualism.
with the genius of democracy. For, if the testimony
of one of your own profoundest thinkers can be
trusted, a like tendency is not unknown here. He
tells us that a sharply defined, resolutely out-speaking
individuality is becoming too rare in English life ;
and that even eccentricities of thought and conduct
may be worthily condoned, when regarded as protests
against a monotonous uniformity which, if not, now
and then, startled and interrupted will degenerate
into a tame mediocrity*.
(VI) Again, Individualism has played its part of
late in devising theories and originating movements
for the reconstruction of society. No age has been so
prolific of both as our own. Socialism, indeed, may
be regarded as one of the leading characteristics of
the century. Its first phase was Communistic. Of
this the fundamental thesis was that all property is
robbery. "Birth into the world entitles one to a
living in it. Society in absorbing the individual
becomes responsible for his support; while the
individual, in being absorbed, becomes entitled to
support." The second and now prevalent phase is
* The substance of a passage in John Stuart Mill's "Essay on
Liberty."
Its Grozvth and Tendencies. 45
just the opposite. So far from teaching that the in-
dividual is, or can be absorbed by society, it declares
the individual to be the sole object for which society
exists. It attempts to appropriate the social ethics
of Christianity, and, at the same time, to eliminate
all that is essentially distinctive of Christianity. It
adopts the Christian view of the inherent greatness of
the individual, while it rejects the Christian limita-
tions of the idea ; and so in behalf of the individual
it wages war against the Providential and inevitable,
as well as against the artificial, and therefore needless
inequalities of society. No man, it tells us, is bound
to acquiesce in a lot that deprives him of what
some one else possesses, or to be resigned to any set
of conditions that permanently interferes with what
he believes to be his rightful happiness. He is sure
of but one life ; and it is foolish to ask him to
sacrifice his comfort here for any possible compen-
sation in any only possible hereafter. The individual
is the foremost figure and the value of all things is to
be guaged by what they do for him here and now.
If social gradations and inequalities hinder his
development, they are an impertinence and must
perish. If capital refuses to share with him its
4 6 Individualism.
profits on terms of whose equity he is to be the sole
judge, it must be taught its dependence by dividing
up its accumulations and making it give bonds for
more liberal dealing in the future.
This type of Socialism, however lofty its exalta-
tion of the individual, professes to repudiate violence
and to care little for legislation. It appeals, with an
enthusiasm worthy of Christian Apostles and Martyrs,
to justice, philanthropy and brotherhood. But what-
ever its professions, its aim is that of an overdone
individualism and its morality that of an atheistic
travesty on the sentiment and purpose of the Gospel
of Christ.
(VII) Finally, it remains for me to notice the
influence of Individualism upon the Art impulse, the
Art work of our time. The Art of this age is
diversified and prolific beyond all precedent. There
is no limit to its ambition, energy and industry. The
earth spirit of the race never had so picturesque, so
sensitive and so obedient an organ. It is genial,
philanthropic, humanitarian. It is realistic, sensuous,
imaginative. It has its dramatic, epic and lyric sides.
It is tragic, serio-comic and comic. It is, moreover,
justly distinguished for its learning and technical
Its Growth and Tendencies. 47
skill, as well as for a style of handling alike vivid,
powerful and logically accordant with its own rules.
And yet when we are through with our praise ; nay,
when we have uttered our Amen to the loftiest note of
admiration struck by the most sympathetic criticism,
there is still in it the greatest masters themselves
being the judges, an unfulfilled promise, an unsatisfied
want, a sense of spiritual thinness and emptiness, a
tacit confession of hopeless mediocrity in the midst of
its wit and skill, its pomp and fascination, its abund-
ance and versatility. Somehow while hovering near
true greatness it just misses it and stumbles at the
threshold of an assured immortality. Now if such be
the fact, how has it come to be so ? This question
dominates all others in the realm of Art criticism
to-day. It presses upon every cultivated and really
thoughtful lover of beauty, and especially upon every
Christian believer who sees in beauty one of God's
revelations of Himself and in Art, as its chosen
interpreter, one of the accepted auxiliaries of holiness.
Some will say that the age itself is utilitarian and
coarse, unideal and unaspiring ; that Art expresses its
spirit, and, in doing so, becomes like it. Some,
again, will say that Art, like much of the culture of
4 8 Individualism.
the time, has fallen too much under the sway of a
view of life that takes the bloom and joy, as well as
the seriousness and depth out of it ; by dropping a
blind over the eye of faith and forcing it to grind like
some alien, captured Samson in the mill of "positive"
knowledge ; by smiting hope on the mouth because
of the audacity of its visions ; by robbing love of its
true soul in the act of resolving it into a mere
expansion of brute instinct or natural function ; by
treating every sign and expression of the marvellous
as an enraged iconoclast would treat the images of a
false worship ; by flinging discredit, if not contempt
on historic narratives which, if not penned with
absolute accuracy of detail, yet picture to us with a
loving admiration heroes and saints and martyrs of
whom the world was not worthy. Others, again, will
account for the fact by telling us that Art is without
a creed, without a religion; that, infected by the
spirit which has analysed and investigated and
formulated God out of His own world, it has come to
worship at a shrine turned into the grave of its own
deity, and thrown away the key to the inner courts
of the temple whose beauty it would explore; and
having done so, is fated to move on a lower plane
Its Growth and Tendencies. 49
than the Art-life of classic Paganism, and to forfeit
its hold on the purest ideals springing as they do,
not from nature's order, nor yet from the mixed and
clouded life of humanity full as that life is of
sweetness and light ; but from the moral beauty and
perfection of the Incarnate Godhead.
But however Art, ethically and religiously con-
sidered, may have turned its back on sources of
inspiration which should be to it what the cloud
by day and the pillar of fire by night were to the
Israelites in the desert, this does not entirely account
for its poverty along side of its admitted flexibility
and productiveness. It may be that it paints and
sculptures too much with an eye to good markets;
it may be that it has no more thought of anything
divine in what it portrays than have the craftsmen
of Birmingham in the idols they cast for itinerant
buyers on the banks of the Nile ; it may be that
much of it, like many living votaries of nature and
culture, hangs on to the shows of things, "having no
hope and without God in the world*." All this
may be so, and yet there is one mischief making
and, in an Art sense, demoralizing influence still
* Eph. ii. 12.
L.S. 4
50 Individualism.
to be mentioned; and that is the influence of
our exaggerated Nineteenth century Individualism.
This may, at certain points, blend with, or spring out
of the causes first named ; and yet, in the mode of
its operation and in the result it produces, it deserves
to be treated as a distinct factor.
Now if it be, as is often claimed, the mission of
Art to imitate nature it must take nature as it finds
it, bound up with the laws and processes that govern
the reproduction of its own forms. Nature is a per-
petual new birth, and Art must be true not only to
the things born, but to the laws which regulate their
birth. Or, again, if it be the object of Art not merely
to copy nature, but to create out of existing materials
new forms that harmonize with nature, though not
found in nature ; then, to do its work well, it must
adhere to the characteristic properties of the ideals
which it seeks to embody. Still further, if this world
had a maker and builder, then itself is the art- work
of that maker and builder the author and finisher of
all ideal as well as actual beauty ; and the best that
the human mind can conceive or shape is no more
than the dim and broken reflection of God's methods
of building and fashioning in the world of sense.
Its Growth and Tendencies. 51
Now if these premises be sound, it follows that Art
completes its task only so far as it conforms to the
divine patterns of things and to the divine laws after
which those patterns were made. Now wherever
God creates we trace a purpose and movement
toward organic unity, a passing down from the
general to the particular, from the type to the
individual, a grouping of details around dominant
centres. All things run out into a life larger than
their own. Every thing is dependent on and finds
its perfection in something else. Nowhere is the
individual self-contained or self-sufficing. The land-
scape is made up of countless details each of little
moment by itself and significant only in combination.
The clouds are only dull vapour apart from the ether,
the sun, and the underlying earth. The sea is blank,
melancholy space until the light pierces its depths
and gleams along its crests. The dawn is lovely
only as it holds on its one wing the fading shadows
of the night, and glows on the other with the
radiance of the coming day ; and the sunsets' glory
is due as well to the segment of the heavens from
which it recedes as to the curtained splendour into
which it melts. So with grace, beauty, sublimity
42
52 Individualism.
everywhere. Apparently there is no particle of
matter, no form of life, but abhors limitation to
self as being first deformity, then death. Nature
to the mind that reads it aright is always effecting
the "transcendental" passage from itself to the
thoughts mirrored in its visible forms, and so, too,
is always escaping from its own bounded indi-
viduality into the greater life whose hidden har-
monies it voices with a stammering tongue. We
wonder not that Pythagoras rested in his doctrine
of numbers or rhythmical order of the elements,
and Plato in his scheme of ideas as the key to
the mystery of creation. If both were no more
than guesses, they, at least, were wise and ennobling
guesses ; and nothing has yet occurred in the march
of the modern mind to prove that they did not bring
their authors as near to the heart of nature's secret
as the scientist of to-day is brought by his probes
and crucibles. Those old Greeks interpreted God's
works the one by the law of proportion and the
other according to the patterns of things in the
heavens; and the now current theory of Evolution,
so far as it is likely to have any abiding hold on
reason must accept something akin to these inter-
Its Growth and Tendencies. 53
pretations, only adding the laws of continuity and
uniformity of development, the end being potentially
present in the beginning. In fact no philosophy
of the universe has long attracted the human mind
that has not sought and found in every individual
part an idea, an energy, a life greater than itself
coujd contain or measure.
Now it is the tendency of Individualism, as in
religion, morals, social and political organization, so in
art to ignore or reverse this law. Whether consciously
or unconsciously it is inclined to contract, not expand
the area of life for all things external to the indivi-
dual, and so to sever, one by one, the bonds that
connect the mind with the world of objective reality.
Certainly this is its disposition toward all forms of
truth not evolved out of the mind itself; and it is
only natural, not to say inevitable, that it should feel
in the same way toward all truth revealing itself
in the forms of beauty, and, through them, appealing
to our human sense of beauty, or to the art-instinct,
the art-impulse. This disposition exhibits itself,
as in other ways, so especially in a certain incre-
dulous, morbidly analytical handling of all phases of
nature, life and history that fall within the domain
54 Individualism.
of Art. The Art of the time has been a willing pupil
in the school of Individualism. It has caught its
temper and largely adopted its methods. Its attitude
is one of challenge, doubt, negation. It runs after
its own arbitrary specialisms, instead of surrendering
itself with a loving faith to the divinely constituted
unities of nature and humanity unities which raise
individual persons and things above themselves and
bathe them in the effluence of a life deeper and
grander than their own. It paints human faces
as though they spoke for nothing but the single
personalities reflected in their lineaments. It paints
the great, the tragic, the passionate, the heroic, the
martyred life of history as though it had no hold
upon an ideal let down from the eternal world
and no purpose loftier than the circumstances that
immediately environed it. So with its sculpture
and too much of its poetry. It has been charged
with faintheartedness in dealing with the noblest
themes. Certainly, it seems to approach them
with a vague purpose and an unsteady hand. Its
firmest touches are confined to things which a hard
positivism has been willing to class among the facts
of which all can afford to feel sure. There is genius
Its Growth and Tendencies. 55
enough, there is skill enough, there are industry and
ambition enough to fill the century with an Art-
greatness that would revive the memory of the
household names of the race. It is not the lack
of power that renders new Durers, Angelos, and
Da Vincis improbable visitors among us; but the
misuse, the misdirection of power both as to its
processes and its aims. Our mediocrity is faith's
revenge on our unbelief. It has been well said that
"we are allowing science to browbeat us out of
religion," and it is quite possible that we shall allow
Individualism infected as it is, with the aggressive
incredulity, if with no other trait of Science, to
browbeat us out of Art. We know what happens
to eloquence when it no longer believes what it
says ; we know what becomes of truth when it passes
into the keeping of sophists; and we know, too,
the doom of poets who are careless of what they
sing, if only they sing sweetly. Briefly, our Art is
cursed with poverty of spirit in the midst of its
fine linen and sumptuous fare ; and it is so because
it believes, loves, adores as little as decency will
allow, and doubts and rejects as much as it dares
without utterly abandoning its mission. Acres of
56 Individualism.
canvas and interminable files of sculpture rich in
technical skill and intellectual vigor turned out,
within the last ten years, and scattered among all
Art loving peoples, might be cited to prove the charge.
But further, as the analytic, introspective, chal-
lenging, subjective training favored by Individualism
hinders the search for spiritual truth, religious
certitude ; so likewise it stops the path into the realm
of beauty. The anatomist's knife never yet brought
him face to face with the life secret of the human
body, nor can any mental analysis open up the life
secret of beauty. It escapes the moment it is
handled with a view to its dissection. "It is a
revelation, not a mechanism, it is seen, not reasoned
out." It is not built up part by part, but comes and
goes as light through the heavens. So to speak, God
argues for His own being at the bar of reason in
three parallel, correlated, and yet distinct lines the
first and highest, the argument of duty or the moral
law, the second the argument of design, the third
the argument of beauty. Each in all its parts is true
to its own line ; each is perfect in its every individual
manifestation ; each evinces the unity of its source by
the unity of its utterance and by the unity of impres-
Its Growth and Tendencies. 57
sion which that utterance produces. As with duty
and design in the constitution of persons and things,
so with beauty. It is in all its varieties a repetition
of the same thought, the same law, the same mind.
It pervades every part, but lives only in the whole.
Scientific analysis takes nature in detail, labels and
puts away its facts on the shelf one by one ; but its
labor is only wind and folly when turned upon the
pictures God paints on the eye. It may be, "that
beauty is as much a phenomenon as oxygen or
hydrogen ; as good a fact as torpedoes or vivisection,
typhoid or grenade shell or any other product of
modern civilization;" but it is also an epiphany of
mind to mind, and as such defies all inductive sifting
and probing, grinding and weighing, and lifts itself
out of the category of acids and gases.
Now so far as Art has contracted this analytic,
curiosity-mongering, mystery-hating tone of the day,
or has fallen into the hard, pounding method of
science ; so far as it disputes the presence of mind in
beauty because it can construct no argument, frame
no analysis to prove it; just so far it mars and
shadows, not God's faculty to create, nor nature's
power to manifest the beautiful; but itself and the
58 Individualism.
work that embodies what is best in itself. The
sovereign delight, the rapt ecstasy of an intuitive
beholding of that which is nobler than the vision
that reveals it withers and dies out with the collapse
of the unreasoned, spontaneous confidence of reason
and imagination in the truth of the vision itself; and
with these perish the conditions of the highest art-
power yet reached by human genius ; and so goes
down too the faith which sees the mercy of God in
the rainbow and the glory of His love in the glory
of the flower ; while in their place rises that lame
and wretched substitute born of our self exalting,
materialistic culture, planed and squared into barren
accuracy, seeing " in the eye no more than a crystal-
line lens and an exercise of nervous function : and in
the sweetest smile no more than animal complacency
lighted up by transitory sympathy."
Again, Individualism leavens Art with a spirit of
egoism. As in other things, so in this, its favorite
formula is the me equal to the not me, the individual
poised against the universe. The world has had many
sorts of latria, the latria of things, of idols, of mythical
personalities ; but it has been left to this generation
to invent a new worship and with it a new name
Its Growth and Tendencies. 59
Autolatry. We need not wonder at this addition to
the old shrines and divinities, when we remember
what one of our current philosophies has done for
this human self, by telling it that, if there be a God,
His consciousness is not "only the same as man's; but
finds its only authoritative expression in man's. Who
shall set limits to the human ego, if this notion is to
prevail? Now modern Art has not, we know, formally
domiciled this idea ; but it gives evidence of having
been much influenced by it. Drawn into the well
worn grooves of Individualism, it is doing much of its
work on the maxim that, " nothing can come out of
the sack but what is in the sack." In other words,
every man is to himself the centre and circumference
of rational life, and in listening to himself listens to
the highest available authority.
I have already spoken of this temper as it
affects character and the relations of the individual
to external organizations. I have now to note its
bearing on Art. It is almost an axiom of morals
that to be unduly self conscious and to be great
is impossible. As well say that the body can be
hot and cold, moving and stationary at the same
moment. What is true in morals is just as true
60 Individualism.
in Art. All creative acts in the realm of beauty, as
in that of letters, are unconscious acts. The mind
goes out of and above itself, and, if it really create
something, does so after an ideal too large to be shut
up within its own " sack ". The self conscious mind
may have the power, but it cannot rise to the higher
inspirations of genius ; and for the reason that these
inspirations break down the fences of personality,
springing as they do out of sensibilities, passions,
purposes which can become the property of the indi-
vidual man only because they are first the property
of all men, and so the gift of God to humanity. The
Art-work, therefore, that revolves around the self of
the worker loses its hold on the subtle energy and
mysterious impulse of a constructive originality. It
may copy well: it may combine with freshness and
skill the materials within its reach : but it will do so
after types and patterns thrown off, as sparks from
the anvil, by the creative faculty of other minds
swayed by a loftier spirit. Real originality is the
product only of minds that gladly accept baptism
into a life larger than their own a life which, if
it enter the soul at all, enters it, as light enters the
sky or magnetism the body, without noise or friction.
Its Growth and Tendencies. 61
It is therefore beyond the reach of the autolatrous
mind. It has been rare in every age and it is so in
our own. The world of Art to-day shows an astonish-
ing amount of shrewd imitation, and of vigorous
and ingenious use of existing material, and withal
unsurpassed fulness and finish of elaboration : but its
own masters confess with ill disguised disappointment
its poverty of invention and original achievement.
Modern life is rich in novelty. It has thrown not
only human interests, but human hopes and fears,
joys and sorrows, in fact human passions and
yearnings of every sort into new and commanding
attitudes. Even the gross materialism of this genera-
tion has opened up fresh points of contact between
matter and the power that moulds it, and has
developed as never before the astonishing capabilities
and latent energies of nature. Now all its achieve-
ments in this direction have their poetic side. To
the soul of true insight the world has never been so
full of the wonderful, the sublime, the graceful, as it
is to-day. For the present, the ambitious mechanism
of scientific progress may, to most minds, hold in
abeyance "the music of the spheres," and grind up in
the mill of law the finer tissues of sentiment. But
62 Individualism.
the elect men of genius are bound to look beneath or
above all this, and in their Art to catch the hidden
pulsations of the Divine, beating evermore behind
the passing pageants of our marvellous development
of nature's powers. Strangely enough they are doing
comparatively little in this way. The greatness of
their work, as interpreters and fashioners of the
sublime and beautiful, lags behind the greatness of
muscular and mechanical energy. What they have
done amounts to little more than tacking cheap
fringes of Art on the flowing, kingly purple of
physical progress. And were I to venture an ex-
planation of the fact, I should find it in the proud,
self-conscious, self-centred, self-sufficing Individualism
of living Art. The "sack" has emptied itself, turned
itself inside out, and found itself too small; and,
instead of leaving its mouth open to receive the
incoming riches, has practically sewed itself up at
both ends.
Still further, in accounting for the leanness of Art,
we cannot overlook, as one of the causes, the same
egoistic temper toward the organic, continuous life of
humanity. It has made not only the least of the
past, but also the least of what is common to all men,
Its Growth and Tendencies. 63
and the most of the present and of what is character-
istic of some men, or of some classes and conditions
of men. It has courted popularity and patronage,
a quick market and prpmpt returns by speaking for
classes rather than for mankind, for the wrongs and
griefs, the ambitions and triumphs of schools of
thought, for reform movements, and special agitations
against this or that evil, rather than for the sub-
missions and protests, the pains and agonies of human
nature smarting under the ingrained inequalities and
diseases of the world's order. Art, whether as
painting, sculpture, or poetry may do all this, but not
as its foremost aim. These are the side eddies, not
the main current. But it is the weakness of the
egoist to mistake the less for the greater, the
particular for the universal, the fugitive for the
everlasting; and it is just this weakness that is
vitiating much of the Art of our time.
How different the line taken by the only masters
in the past whose names and whose works cannot die.
Dante spoke not only for "the ten silent centuries"
behind him; but for the heaving, shadowed, painful
life stretching further back even to the Cross at
whose foot it cast the burden of its sin and sorrow.
64 Individualism.
So did the noblest ones who wrought in color
and marble, in Art's noblest ages, when masters
seemed to be sent of God, not called of men.
Shakespeare left, among his creations, marvels of
individual portraiture ; but back of them all and
higher than them all was human nature. Milton put
himself in communion with the learning of all time,
and, drinking in its spirit, reproduced what is essen-
tial in man, whether viewed in his relation to his
fellowman and to outward nature, or in his relations
to God's providence and government. Wordsworth,
in a frame of feeling utterly subversive of self-
exaltation and of specialism of every name, did the
same thing, only in another way, when he said :
"I have learned
To look on nature, not as in the hour
Of thoughtless youth : but hearing oftentimes
The still, sad music of humanity,
Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power
To chasten and subdue. And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts: a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air
Its Growth and Tendencies. 65
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man :
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought
And rolls through all things."
On the other hand, as an example of the self-
spirit that dwarfs Art, I have only to cite one well
known name in letters, though not a few others
might be given who have exhibited the same temper
only in a less degree. Criticism has done its task
for Byron and nothing remains to be added. It
would be difficult to find another instance of such
wastage of power, or of so brittle a hold upon lasting
influence by so commanding a nature. How he
stirred and muddled the hearts of men is one of
the traditions of the last generation. What he was
and did found a voice not only in the morbid gloom
and false fire of his verse, but in the supreme egotism
that characterized his handling of all themes that
fell within his range. His fame is what it is not
merely because he took a soured and hateful view
of life, or found in the deadly upas the favorite
symbol of the world's order; nor yet because he
accepted as a permanent experience what proved
to be only a transient phase of passion engendered
L.S. 5
66 Individualism.
by the revolutionary phrenzy of his time : but still
more because he put himself out of joint with nature
and mankind ; and instead of finding in them a power
to chasten and subdue, converted them into goads to
his passions and blinds to his conscience.
This then is the sum of the matter, and, however
imperfectly it may have been reasoned out, standeth
sure that, (as has been often shown,) as Art cannot be
truly great when the individual is shorn of the free
play of his faculties : so neither can it be truly great
when the individual pushes his liberty into license,
his individuality into Individualism. Both conditions
equally disturb the normal equilibrium between the
inner life of man and the outward order and move-
ment of the world in nature and in history. And if,
in earlier ages, the best races and peoples had too
much of the one tendency, it is quite certain that
the best races and peoples, to-day, are menaced with,
if they have not already accepted the dominion of
the other.
SERMON II.
PSALM xn. 3, 4.
The Lord shall root out all deceitful lips, and the
tongue that speaketh proud things: which have
said, with our tongue will we prevail : we are they
that ought to speak : who is Lord over us ?
IN the preceding Discourse it was my aim to trace
the growth of the individual: to show how he gra-
dually emerged into the foremost figure in modern
life ; to indicate the tendency in our time to develop
an eccentric, abnormal, extreme type of the indi-
vidual ; and to point out its exaggerations, abuses
and perils in the leading departments of thought and
action. Among the agencies that have contributed
to the healthy and lawful elevation of the individual,
it was claimed, that Christianity has been by far the
most prominent and influential ; so much so, indeed,
that but for the general and profound sway secured
52
68 Individualism.
for its fundamental principles, the individual would
be moving to-day on well nigh the same plane as
that provided for him by the old pagan civilizations.
He is where and what he is, aside from present faults
and excesses, not in virtue of industrial and com-
mercial advances, or of changes in society and civil
government, or of the progress and diffusion of
knowledge whether in the forms of literature or of
science. These have all proved necessary auxiliaries
in effecting his elevation ; but the chief force that
which has leavened, combined and directed them all
has been the Gospel and the Church of Christ.
These alone could cause him to be esteemed and
treated as made in the Divine image, and as a
member of the universal brotherhood founded by the
Incarnate Lord and afterward developed in history
by the Spirit whom He sent. It was the light
thrown upon man from the world invisible and
eternal that opened up to him and to society at large
his true position in the world that now is. Now if it
be true, as has been claimed, that the progress of the
race is dependent upon the progress of the indi-
vidual ; and, therefore, that the individual has still
before him an indefinitely extended career of de-
Counter Truths. 69
velopment; if it be true, too, that our age marks
the beginning of an exaggerated estimate of the
powers and capabilities of the individual ; and if it be
true, moreover, that as the Christian religion has
been his chief guide and educator in the past, so it
must continue to be in the future ; then it follows
that the teachers and representatives of Christianity
are specially and eminently bound to deal with this
deepest and knottiest problem of the time ; and to
discover and apply the remedy for existing or
threatened disruptions and excesses growing out of
the misuse or forgetfulness of the principles which,
more than all else, have clothed the individual with
his present dignities and prerogatives. In this regard
the difficulty and urgency of the Church's work to-
day are only less than those that confronted her,
when she sent forth her master builders to lay the
foundations on which her life was to repose through
all the centuries to come. What then is the teaching
required of us by this emergency ? What is the
attitude, the policy, the work now especially de-
manded of the Church ?
There are two great divisions of Western Chris-
tendom whose antecedents and whose present temper
Individualism.
partially, and, in some respects, totally disqualify them
for dealing sucessfully with the evils of Individualism.
Latin Christianity cannot touch them except as it
opposes one extreme to another. In its dealing with
the individual it repeats the error of the ancient pagan
civilization. It cannot cure his excesses in the use of
reason and liberty, because it denies what is lawful
and necessary in both. It knows no way to remove
cataract except by destroying the eye. It mutilates
the patient in its attempt to cure him. It stirs up
revolt in the act of demanding obedience. On the
other hand, the unhistoric, disintegrating Sects of the
day, so far from diminishing, aggravate the disease.
Themselves the offspring of successive insurrections
against and secessions from the Church's order, they
beget the very things by which themselves were
begotten. They are impotent to check a tendency,
but for which themselves had never been born. The
most impulsive and turbulent Individualism of the
hour is only their own life pushed to its remotest
consequences. They are moving so rapidly toward
these consequences that they have lost control of
their own drift ; and so are powerless to arrest that
of others somewhat in the advance. Now it is clear,
Counter Truths. 7 1
in view of the position of these portions of Chris-
tendom and of an experience of their methods, that
the needed teaching can come only from some other
portion of it that in its organization, worship, faith
and practical work evinces, on the one hand, its
fidelity to the history; and, on the other, its adhesion
to the organic structure of Christianity, and with
these its equal regard for the authority of the whole
Catholic Body, and for the rights and franchises of its
every member. It must be conservative of all that
God put into its keeping, the unchangeable verities,
the unchangeable Sacraments, the unchangeable
Commission, the unchangeable standard of personal
godliness ; and, on the other side, it must be a loving,
generous interpreter of the spirit of the age and a
sympathetic advocate of progress in all that makes
for the true welfare of humanity. Now so far as this
great Anglican Communion, whose branches com-
pass so many seas and continents, fills out these
requirements, so far it can cope with the evils which
have engaged our thought.
(I) To the question, then, what is the teaching
demanded by these evils ? I reply, first, and generally,
that our Christianity must not only claim, but prove
72 Individiialism.
itself to be the only authoritative and complete
exhibition of God's Revealed discipline for man;
secondly and specially, that, with a wise adaptation of
means to ends, it must urge with increased emphasis
those truths of the Gospel and those aspects of the
life and character of the individual and of Divinely
sanctioned Institutions, which the present tendency
is prone to disparage or to neglect. I shall ask
attention only to the second of these duties of the
hour.
To sober the temper, and moderate the claims of
Individualism, we must strike at its core its pride
and self-sufficiency. As powers of disturbance and
ruin these traits have never been absent from the
world. But now they are not only specially active,
but active in ways peculiar to this age. They
threaten us from new points, and with new and more
formidable weapons than ever before. It is not, then,
new qualities or new aspects of man, but old ones in
new shapes and in new fields of action that challenge
our thought. Now these characteristics of living
Individualism have sprung from divers sources from
amazing conquests in the material world from an
unparalleled quickening and development of the
Counter Truths. 73
intellect, and a corresponding extension of the area
of knowledge from the vast ramifications "of secular
empire as seen in the rapid growth of new states and
the peopling of new continents from civil changes
that have diffused political power in some countries,
almost without limit from alluring visions of pro-
gress in all forms and in all directions : and finally,
from the general conviction which rolls like an
atmosphere around and through these times, that
where so much has been done nothing is hopeless or
impossible. We seem to hear it in the very air we
breathe that it was well enough for less aggressive
and more ignorant generations to cultivate the self
distrust which properly attaches to infant races,
nationalities and civilizations; but now in the ripe-
ness of the world, what temper more becoming than
one of unquestioning confidence and bold self-
reliance. When man could do little, it was right that
he should think and act accordingly; but now that
the march of events has disclosed his power and
surrounded him with the grandest proofs of its
practically illimitable extent, it would be weakness
and folly if he did not bear himself as the worthy
peer his sublime opportunities. This is the temper
74 Individualism.
we have to meet the Nineteenth century pride we
have to humble, by holding up to its face the mirror
of forgotten truths and forgotten facts. These truths
and these facts are at hand. They are as manifest
and indisputable as ever, and only require to be
wielded with suitable courage to bring the haughty
adversary to terms. In marshalling them for this
purpose, experience and sound philosophy are alike
at our service ; while the wisdom, not of this world,
speaking through the Gospel and the Church of
Christ, is at hand to seal with a divine authority
what history and enlightened reason declare.
But that the proud spirit now addressed might
charge me with falling back on a dead tradition, I
might cite the Holy Scriptures, and show how with
one consent and with solemn earnestness they remind
man in all his works and at whatever elevation, that
his "sufficiency is of God," and that without Him he
can do nothing. But why spend time in citing an
authority before whose tribunal the adversary refuses
to appear ? Better, at once, to take him on his own
ground, and deal with the modes of justifying his
pride to which he habitually appeals.
(1) Now the first of these, as we have seen, is the
Counter Truths. 75
subjugation and control of nature. Man's dominion
over the world has been wonderfully advanced, and
yet, admitting all that can be claimed, how little has
he gone beyond the alphabet in reading the vast
outlying volume of the universe. He is still but the
merest child in what he claims to know, as well as in
what he has come to know. Natural Science, in its
off hours, when released from the task of counting
its triumphs, or of assailing received opinions is not
ashamed still to hold up the few grains of sand on
the sea-shore as the symbol of its knowledge. But
turning from this thought, so familiar as to need only
to be mentioned, I proceed to another not so familiar
and far more humbling. Paradox though it may
seem, it is nevertheless true, that the best measure of
man's dependence on nature is his control over
nature. The higher he enthrones himself in her
domain, the greater his subjection. She extorts
tribute from her conqueror at every step. She has
her revenges for his victories and her reprisals for his
intrusions into her mysteries. Haughty invader, she
seems to say, in taming me to your service, yourself
shall be tamed to the service of the paramount Lord
of both; and for every secret you unveil, for every
76 Individualism.
force you bind or loose, for every kingdom you
explore, you shall wear some new badge of de-
pendence, forge some fresh link in your chain ; and
all this until it shall become as true of your
sovereignty, as it is of all sovereignties attainable by
mortals, that this world has no thornless crown to
give. Nature allows us to make dynamite out of the
materials she supplies, but she tells us that its
mighty force can be used only at the risk of the user.
She has told us how water can be expanded to some
1600 times its normal volume ; but in unchaining
this tremendous power, she warns us that a very
demon of ruin lurks in every throb of its energy,
and is always on the alert for the careless hand, or
the weak joints in the walls that imprison it to claim
for its hidden altars whole hecatombs. The land is
threaded with electric wires which act as though
they were mere extensions of the nerve filaments of
the human brain; but they serve indifferently the
bad and the good, the devilish and the angelic in the
life of man. The iron cleft from her sides goes into
shot and shell, sabres and rifled cannon as well as
into plough shares and pruning hooks ; and so the
silver and the gold dug from her bowels carry with
Counter Triiths. 77
them a curse as well as a blessing. Our chemistry has
supplied us with marvellous stores of acids and gases,
and with them not only increased ability to detect,
but increased ability to conceal a thousand poisonous
adulterations of our meats and drinks. Physiology
reckons it among its noblest achievements to have
discovered certain scientific devices for patching up
and prolonging disordered constitutions, enabling
what otherwise would have perished by quick decay
to live on to a feeble maturity ; and yet it is obliged
to confess that, in doing so, it is debasing the stock
and so impairing the ultimate prospects of the race.
So, likewise, rapid locomotion, vast accumulations of
capital, inventions that economize labor or relieve
pain, while they are the accepted tests of material
progress, hang upon the neck, sooner or later, of
society and of the individual unlocked for burdens,
unsuspected evils. Cheaper fabrics, cheaper iron,
cheaper luxuries often mean cheaper lives, with a
huge increase of stifled hearts and darkened souls.
Our modern civilization, largely the fruit of this
stupendous utilization of matter, with all its con-
veniences and comforts, has been but poorly studied,
if it has not shown us the running sores it has opened,
78 Individualism.
the wide wasting gangrene it has created. It is with
no Manichaean antipathy to matter or any of its uses,
that I note this side of a subject which, ordinarily, is
the theme of unmixed eulogy.
There is no doubt that material progress has
rendered important service to the moral interests
of man; but the good it has done, though tenfold
greater, should not hide the evils it has wrought also.
And the moral of it is that this mixture of opposing
tendencies, these shadows trooping after the sunlight,
these pains dogging the pleasures, these penalties in-
flicting their revenges upon man for his growing
power over nature remind, nay, compel him to re-
member that it is not in him to say, but in one who
is the true Lord over him and outward nature what
shall be the outcome of these triumphs. The more
he governs the world, the more dependent he is upon
that Being, who, as the Creator of all things, can
alone rule the forces which he is permitted to evoke
and conduct to beneficent ends the physical masteries
which he is allowed to wield. That, then, which is
man's glory, on the one side, brings out his depen-
dence, on the other, and whatever call there may be
for praise and adoration, there is none for boasting.
Counter Truths. 79
(2) Again, there is required of our > Christian
teaching a stronger and clearer message in regard
to the value and uses of purely intellectual power
and advancement. There is no pride that takes
on loftier airs, or ventures more arrogant assump-
tions than the pride of intellect. Of its remarkable
development in recent times, of the magnificent
results of its exercise, of the part it has taken in
the progress of the race in every age, and especially
in our own there is no question ; and the criticism
now to be made will turn not upon the intellect, or
upon what it has achieved, in themselves considered :
but upon an almost idolatrous estimate of them when
sundered from things on which it is God's will, as
expressed in the constitution of man and society,
that they shall depend for their true health and
beneficence. Power of intellect, power of knowledge
like any other power is good, bad, or indifferent ac-
cording to the purpose it serves. It is the fault of
Individualism that it is prone to glorify it with little
regard to the aim that dominates it. This is no new
vice. It asserted itself in the old Gnostic spirit:
it appeared in the Scholasticism of later ages
vaunting its ability to solve all mysteries by a
8o Individualism.
priori logic; but it crops out to-day more boldly
than ever from a school of thinkers, who find in
the growth of knowledge the chief, if not the only,
impelling principle of human progress, and in the
exercise of the intellect a surer and shorter way
to the summit of truth even God Himself, than
by the uplifting energy of the moral affections.
Now this fault can be met, not by walking up to
it and smiting it in the face; but only by counter
truths which demonstrate its weakness, if not its folly.
Now here the first counter truth is that, though
this generation contains a larger number of in-
tellectual men and women than any previous one :
yet, as matter of fact, it has produced no men or
women of intellect that, individually considered, are
stronger than any in the past. It is idle to enter
upon a comparison of names. It is, perhaps, enough
to say that in looking back even among ages grouped
around the childhood of the race, or among those
commonly reckoned as eminently the ages of igno-
rance we find plenty of genius that our modern life
has not been able to duplicate. The strength and
glory of art, philosophy, letters, theology and even of
war and statemanship seem to be behind us. We
Counter Truths. 81
appeal, as by instinct, to the mental greatness of the
by-gone centuries as our standard of mental power
to-day. Besides this, there is the further considera-
tion that the high average of intelligence among
the mass has had its effect on the concentration
of mental force in eminent individuals. As velocity
absorbs power, so, it may be said, the wider the
diffusion of intellectual activity the less likely will
it be to retain commanding centres. The area of
culture can be extended until it shall include every
mind in the community; but it will be an area of
mediocrity. The limits within which the intellectual
property of each generation shall be confined would
seem to have been fixed by some yet undiscovered
law. The larger the number who are permitted to
share in the estate, the more there are to resist the
encroachments of great individual ownerships. Or
to change the figure, given portions of the soil have
each a certain aggregate of productive power. Each
will grow a certain amount of timber, and it is for
the owner to decide whether he will have a thousand
trees of medium size, or a hundred of extraordinary
dimensions. He can have number without bulk, or
he can have bulk without number; but he cannot
L. s. 6
82 Individualism.
have both. The giant cedars of California with trunks
twenty feet in diameter and lifting their tapering
shafts three hundred feet into the air are intolerant
of smaller growths about their roots. There seems to
be something very like this in the growths from the
intellectual soil. Certainly, the centuries that appear
to have done most in the leading branches of thought
and action are the ones that gathered up their energy
into the fewest leaders. Whenever the door of dis-
covery has opened out into new fields of conquest,
and toward new empires, new civilizations, it has
swung on very few hinges.
It would be well for this age that deems itself so
self-sufficing and
" Foremost in the files of time,"
to remember that it must accept the consequences of
its choice the reflection cast from its favorite ideal.
Ambitious of universal education, resolved on the
widest possible diffusion of knowledge, proud of its
efforts to make every man, woman and child a stock-
holder in the great intellectual corporation of the
century, it must be content with its mediocrity and
not repine because the first order of genius refuses to
appear at its bidding. Fifty years ago, it was pre-
Counter Truths. . 83
dieted that from the immense increase of printed
matter and the vast accessions to the writing class
there would be a corresponding augmentation of the
imperishable contributions to literature. Where so
many, it was said, are at work the greater will be
the number who will achieve immortality. But
somehow the law of averages has stept in to falsify
the prediction. General excellence has been at-
tained at the expense of extraordinary greatness.
The lofty, solitary mountain peaks have been cut
away to fill up the sunken places in the underlying
plain. Whether it be that so many are satisfied
with notoriety as a substitute for genuine fame, or
whether it be a sharp competition for immediate
gains, or whether it be the crudeness and super-
ficiality attaching to hurried work whatever the
cause, there is an amazingly small proportion of the
literary labor of the time that promises to be of
permanent value, and still less that is likely to be
ranked among the imperishable fruits of the highest
order of intellect.
(3) Again, the pride of Individualism plumes
itself on the rapid spread of empire, the founding
of new states, the colonizing and development of
62
84 Individualism.
new regions of the globe. It claims these and all
kindred movements as proofs of the intenser life
which it has infused into our time; but the moral
bearings of these movements are not free from doubt.
They show the elasticity and vigour of the leading
races their ambition and capacity for expansion;
they have relieved over crowded populations and
have brought into a productive condition vast spaces
of hitherto unoccupied territories thus increasing
enormously the commerce and industry of the world.
But it may be questioned whether any new or
higher moral elements have been evolved by all
this restless stir and aggressive enterprise. What-
ever the benefits arising from this order of things,
thoughtful minds cannot but endeavour to rate them
at their true worth and to caution the oversanguine
against the false hopes which they are likely to
excite. It does not follow that new states, because
they are new, will be better than old ones, or that
new continents with their cheap lands and vast
areas will lessen the temptations, or curb the
passions, or prevent the follies and vices that have
always and everywhere beset human nature. Great
colonizing movements only repeat with minor modifi-
Counter Truths. 85
cations the types of character whence they sprang.
They who cross the seas change their skies, but
not themselves. The stream of modern life may
divide into a thousand branches each cutting a
new channel for itself and each flowing toward a
terminus of its own ; but it is not certain that any
of them will rise higher than their original source.
New Babylons may be built as magnificent as
the dreams of man can portray. New Tyres, new
Corinths, new Alexandria^ may be planted and by
their growth swell the arteries of trade. But if
they are to furnish little more than fresh specimens
of accumulated wealth, concentrated power, com-
mercial success; they will only repeat a story
already too often told. Were such creations of
modern enterprise multiplied by the hundred, it
would be a vain hope that would look to them
to provide any sure barriers against the return,
in due time, of the corruption that sapped the
strength, or of the moral uncertainty and spiritual
despair that darkened as with Egyptian night the
soul of the ancient Pagan life. Old Rome subdued
worlds until she left herself almost without military
occupation, sent out into remote regions her colonies
86 Individualism.
by the thousand, created new centres of power among
barbarous races and constructed vast systems of
intercommunication between dependent provinces ;
and yet by them all she only delayed a little the
final collapse.
(4) But closely associated with these activities
and quite as stimulating to the self sufficiency of
Individualism, has been the steadily increasing
diffusion of political power, all the way from the
qualified forms adopted by constitutional Monarchies,
to the nearly absolute ones reached by Republics
and Democracies. This too is an experiment that
wise men watch with quite as much fear as hope.
It is practically settled who shall be the depositaries
of political power during, at least, the next genera-
tion ; and now the tide of inquiry sweeps anxiously
out toward the problem; given the power, what
shall be the restraints and safeguards to prevent
its abuse? given the power, will the multitude rise
to the level of intelligent convictions and unselfish
motives in its exercise? given the power, can the
people be so trained by the education to which
the State feels constrained to confine itself, as to
induce them, not merely in every day affairs, but
Counter Truths. 8 7
in great and solemn emergencies decisive of the
rise or fall, the honour or shame of empire, to
interpret their true interests by an enlightened sense
of duty to God and to man ? Or will the thing that
has been, come true again when cheap lands fail
and migratory movements cease, and huge popula-
tions are shut up within impassable barriers, and
passions kindle and seethe under adverse fortune
seedtime and harvest perhaps interrupting their
course and men, finding that ballots are not bread,
and universal suffrage not the equivalent for uni-
versal comfort, shall rise ; and, first trampling under
foot this coveted idol of our modern life, shall cast
themselves as pliant slaves at the feet of the strong
will that promises to win for them what all this
worship of the S^/AO? has failed to confer \
Whatever may be our love of country and of
humanity ; whatever our desire, nay our prayer, that
all these restless currents of political agitation,
steadily converging toward one point, may end in
nobler eras for the race, let it be said frankly, though
regretfully, that that man has studied history and
human nature to little purpose who can look into
the future without apprehension, or think himself
Individualism .
justified in speaking confidently of the certain peace,
prosperity and glory in store for our posterities.
(II) I turn to another topic. As we have seen,
Individualism has invaded the precincts, and, here
and there, assailed the very citadel of Religion, as well
in its Theology as in its Evidences. What, then is to
be our attitude toward it ? What are the counter-
truths to be wielded against it in defence of this, the
most sacred of all interests ? While avoiding dogma-
tism, I would speak plainly on so grave a question.
Surely there is little reserve or hesitation either in the
pens or the tongues of the dashing liberalism of the
day. Indeed, if the dogmatic, intolerant temper is to
be found anywhere, it is no longer solely among the ad-
vocates, but rather among the assailants of the Catholic
Faith that we are to look for it. This is no time for
the heralds of Christ to so strain the precept "speak-
ing the truth in love* " as to fall away into tameness
of speech, or into certain easy, unchallenged plati-
tudes of thought that have descended to us as part
of the worn out religious coinage of a past age.
We are living in the midst of attempted modi-
fications and readjustments of Christian Theology.
* Eph. iv. 15.
Counter Truths. 89
Much of our deepest and freshest thought is spending
itself on these tasks. It is claimed that a conflict is
upon us which renders these tasks imperative. I shall
not here question the fitness or the urgency of this
kind of work, though it is quite possible to overstate
the demand, and, in doing so, to concede too much to it.
Nor will I raise the kindred question whether,
instead of attempting to mend the ancient deposit of
God's truth, it would not be better to mend these
times, curb their pride of speculation, heal their
fractures, and bridge over the chasms which they
have opened up between themselves and the old
Creed of the Christian centuries. Be this as it may,
there is one characteristic of these attempted re-
adjustments of Theology that ought not to escape
us. With few exceptions they all look one way.
Some of them are intended to meet the special
difficulties developed by the progress of physical
science; some of them are carefully framed so as
to afford the utmost rational satisfaction to man on
grounds wide as the operation of his own reason;
while others, again, seek to commend Christianity to
general approval by enlarging upon the services that
it renders to society and especially upon its vast
90 Individualism.
contributions to the happiness of the individual.
However they differ in other respects, they all agree
openly or implicitly in this that both the intrinsic
and the relative importance of the verities of Revela-
tion is to be determined by their power to move and
to benefit human nature ; and that every individual
has the right to determine this for himself. The
effect of this is, little by little, to limit the Gospel of
Christ to humanitarian aims and philanthropic uses ;
and then to leave the individual to form his estimate
of it by such aims and uses. The question with him
quite naturally soon takes the shape that it really
has taken in the popular mind already : not what is
the worth of truth in itself and as an emanation from
the Infinite Mind as an image and witness of the
God who inhabiteth eternity ; but what can it do for
me? What is its immediate and practical use in
bettering my condition here and now ?
And so it turns out that God's word is precious
only to the degree that the soul can, at any given
time, taste its power and share its blessing. Only a
little farther on lies the thought that God is of use
in His own world only as man is helped. Not
the glory of God, therefore, but the welfare of
Counter Truths. 9 1
man becomes the chief end of Religion; and good
will to man, not piety to God the highest aspect
of the Church's life. This beyond doubt is the drift
of modern sentiment, the first and most striking fruit
of which is the "Ecce Homo" "enthusiasm of
humanity/' now filtering through the pores of our
most popular Christian and secular literature, and
fast proving itself to be little else than another
phase of the far sweeping tendency toward the
undue exaltation of the individual. This "en-
thusiasm " has made itself equally at home, according
to circumstances, under the Utilitarian and the
Intuitional standards of morals the one measuring
actions by their tendency to promote happiness the
other finding in man himself the supreme tests of
truth, and both agreeing that the voice of God from
Sinai and from Calvary is to be subordinated to an
authority within ourselves which, practically, is not
the same in any two persons. Nor have we had to
wait long for some of its results. The glory of God and
the majesty of His law in the shadow; the promo-
tion of happiness ; the making all things in thought
and life plain, easy, and agreeable; the present
and secular well being of man; utility the guage
92 Individualism.
of moral values and spiritual powers; truth judged
by each man's opinion of its use to himself; eternal
justice thrust down from its seat, and false notions of
mercy enthroned in its place ; the stern sanctions of
God's word regarded as fit only for infant or bar-
barous peoples, and altogether out of keeping with
the gentle, amiable tone of our Nineteenth Century
civilization ; Christian dogmas discredited as so many
impertinent restraints upon the free play of religious
sentiment ; and philanthropic benevolence, generally,
the accepted substitute for the duties of Christian
piety and the offices of Christian worship: these
without question, as they are among the evident
characteristics of the age, so they are logically and
sentimentally traceable to Individualism ; whose
extraordinary development in these times, be it
observed, has been stimulated by both the Utilitarian
and Intuitional subjectivism produced by the leading
philosophical theories of the last generation. To
return now to the statement made a moment since,
the attempted modifications and re-adjustments of
Theology which, of late, have attracted so much
attention, seem, as a rule, to have been planned
and executed in the interest of this phase of thought ;
Counter Truths. 93
and, if not in open sympathy with it, they have
certainly compromised themselves in the vain effort
to bring it into harmony with the true foundations of
Theology.
How then, is the danger from this quarter to be
met ? In the views now to be urged, the stand point
is a purely Theological one ; and if the late recon-
structions of Theology encounter the fatal objection
to which I have alluded, what is the safe and real
basis on which we are to build, or rather to defend
what has already been built by the great masters of
Sacred learning who, though dead, yet speak ?
Theology must begin with God His attributes,
purposes, dispensations ; or with man his sin, weak-
ness and wretchedness. Neither point of departure
excludes all that may be developed from the other,
and yet each imparts a characteristic tone to its own
line of inquiry. As matter of fact, whenever The-
ology has begun with man, it has kept him at the
front, has dealt less sternly with his guilt, taken
milder views of his moral disabilities, given wider
scope to his reasonings, greater authority to his
intuitions, and generally conceded more than the
facts would warrant to his powers and capabilities.
94 Individualism.
As a necessary result the subjective and human side
of truth has predominated ; and, in one way or
another, the individual has emerged as the ruling
factor. And so we have been furnished with various
Theologies all insisting upon the common title of
Christian ; and yet, in some cases, founded more on
what are called the necessary truths of the rational
consciousness than on the verities of Revelation ; and
in others, while accepting the authority of Revelation
as a whole, interpreting and combining its contents
in an unhistoric and uncatholic spirit each thinker
working for and by himself. Now of Theologies of
the former sort, whatever their local nativity or their
intellectual parentage, it is enough to say that they
have satisfied neither their authors nor their dis-
ciples ; but, one by one, have yielded to the remorse-
less hammer of criticism, kindling, while they lived,
no enthusiasm of conviction or of conduct; but
ravelling out thread by thread and gradually wasting
away into impotence, are likely to be remembered in
the future as little more than the ambitious utter-
ances of transient schools of thought within the
domain of religious philosophy. Of Theologies of the
latter sort built upon Revelation, but by individual
Counter Trziths. 95
judgments proceeding in ignorance or contempt of
the Universal Church as the witness and interpreter,
"the pillar and ground of the truth," it may suffice to
say that their history is the history of the Sect
movements which they helped to originate and are
now helping to perpetuate. Now in radical contrast
with both these kinds of Theology, stands the
Theology that begins with God and lays its founda-
tions on the rock of objective, revealed realities.
As its matter is essentially the property and gift of
Revelation, so its form will be determined by the
testimony of the living, universal, continuous body
the Church, which Revelation sets forth and au-
thenticates as its own highest and only sufficient
witness and expounder. Thus both in the matter
and the form authority will be the preponderating,
though, in the form, not the exclusive element.
It is the characteristic quality and aim of Reve-
lation not to reveal man to himself, but to reveal
God to man; and so, by the knowledge of God,
to enable man to know himself as he is. The surest
way for man to discern his own condition and wants
is by discerning what God in Christ has deemed it
necessary to do for him. The only key to human
96 Individualism.
nature is the Cross of the Son of God. Now the
method of Theology must be the method of Reve-
lation. It must interpret man by the scheme of
Redemption : not the scheme of Redemption by man.
It must erect itself upon and out of what has been
revealed; not upon or out of man's instincts, or in-
tuitions, or reasonings whether deductive or inductive.
And I pause here to say that, in the long run, the
only Theology that can permanently command the
assent, or preserve the faith of the English speaking
race, whether in this Realm, or in other parts of the
earth, is a Theology whose matter is made up of
facts which, however they may harmonize with, are
objective to and independent of the individual con-
sciousness a Theology resting on outward realities,
not on man's notions; on what the living God has
said of Himself and inclusively of man, not on what
man has thought or felt, reasoned or conjectured
about himself, and inferentially or inclusively of
God : a Theology, too, whose form, while recog-
nizing every rightful prerogative of reason, will
be cast in the mould and bear the superscription
of Primitive Catholic tradition. Some races are
habitually speculative, some habitually emotional,
Counter Truths. 97
some habitually imaginative ; but this race is habitu-
ally practical. Both by temperament and education
it insists upon having solid ground under its feet.
It has done so in Politics, in Morals, in Art, in
Philosophy, and eminently in Religion. It has often
been ridiculed, and even sneered at by neighbouring
peoples, because it preferred duty before glory as its
watchword, and common sense laws of belief on
the deepest problems of life before the misty and
often vapid abstractions of cloistered doctrinaires.
But, as well they might be, the laugh and the sneer
have been complacently forgotten amid the indis-
putable proofs of its enduring and symmetrical
greatness. And, in this connection, if I might
venture a special word to the younger now present, I
would remind them of this one thing that as, in the
last generation, certain of our aspiring youths were
like to perish of hunger amid the husks of ration-
alism; so, in this one, they are in greater peril of
having "the seeds of a wasting disease fostered by
the lukewarm damps and gilded vapors" of schools of
thought which, in the effort to develop all religion
from within, throw us back on spontaneous feelings
and beliefs; and teach us that Plato and St Paul,
L. S. 7
98 Individualism.
Seneca and St John were alike sharers in an
inspiration common to all great sayers and doers
in the history of the race. And I exhort you to
remember that so far as you allow any of these
schools to influence your faith or your practice, just
so far will you replace the rock of a true confession
with the quicksands of individualistic speculations.
But if Theology should begin with God and
accept as its primary ground the objective facts
of Revelation ; how are these facts to be dealt with ?
Having determined its matter ; how shall we give it
form ? If it be true that the task is laid upon us of
revising or readjusting Theology, so as to impart to it
the flavor of living thought and to enable it to
hold its own amid the conflicts and difficulties of the
time, this question presses for an answer.
God's truth, the truth "which is the power of
salvation to every one that believeth*" is in itself
eternally alive because it shares the eternal life of its
source. But to be alive and operative in human
thought and life, it must, to some extent, at least, be
so shaped as to have salient points of contact with
the intellectual spirit of each successive generation.
* Kom. i. 16.
Counter Truths. 99
This can be done, in part, by recasting and newly
adapting its general literature to the peculiar wants
of the day. It can be done, in part, too, by so
presenting it as to evince a just appreciation of all
real progress in the several branches of knowledge,
and notably in those claiming the most attention,
the sciences of consciousness and the sciences of
matter. Though in doing so, these two things must
never be forgotten : (1) that no science of mind or of
matter, of man or of nature can sit in judgment upon,
or radically disturb any supernatural and revealed
verity : (2) that the body of science so called and the
body of ascertained truth are not identical; and
consequently that Theology is not bound to drop out
any portion of its traditional contents as human
accretions at the demand of any or all lines of
naturalistic inquiry, until it can be shown that their
respective fields of investigation are exhausted and
that there is no possibility of setting aside their
present conclusions by a wider and deeper know-
ledge. But, further, it should be understood that
Theology in meeting the requirements or in tutoring
the temper of this age finds its chief task, not in re-
conciling with itself the admitted results of recent
72
ioo Individualism.
knowledge whether relating to man or to nature ;
but in holding the individual reason to its true office
in relation to things divine and eternal, and the
individual will within its proper limits as regards
the organic institutions ordained of God, or mediately
of Society for the education and discipline of man.
Now it is in this aspect and as bearing upon the
discharge of this task, that I desire to treat the form
which Theology is to assume in any proposed change
intended to adapt it to the " needs of the age." We
have seen what must be its matter ; and, if this be
granted, we shall have gone a long way already
toward determining its tone and attitude, if not its
form. Now, in the interpretation and arrangement
of the revealed facts of Religion with a view to
bringing them into order and system, let it be
assumed that the Holy Scriptures have been ren-
dered with grammatical accuracy, and that every
resource of contexual comparison and historical illus-
tration has been applied. Still, as experience tells us,
after all this has been done, there is wide room for
diversity of opinions and conclusions. To what rule
or standard, then, can we appeal in the effort to
bring unity out of this diversity ? By what authority
Counter Truths. 101
shall Theology be governed in the work of formu-
lating and adjusting the truths that make up its
matter ? I reply the Analogy or " Proportion of faith * "
as latent or implied in all Scripture, as specifically
referred to by an inspired Apostle, and as authorita-
tively developed by the Catholic Church.
Will it be said that this is a vaguely defined, loosely
jointed rule under which any and all religious thinkers
may build ? I answer that it has not proved so in the
past. The successive schools of divinity, during the
last fourteen hundred years, have aimed to harmonize
with it their respective peculiarities, or to correct
violations of it. It stands for the general symmetry
and unity of the whole body of Christian doctrine,
and for the right relation of every part of it to the
whole. It began with a body of truth possessed of
the attributes of unity, universality and perpetuity,
and rests upon the fact that the Church has never
been without such a body of truth. From the be-
ginning of Christianity, it has been a recognized
and influential factor in Theology. In the nature of
the case it could not have been otherwise. "The
origin and first establishment of Christianity were by
the preaching of living men who said they were com-
* Bom. xii. 6.
1O2 Individualism.
missioned to proclaim it. There is a vague and
unreasoning notion that Christianity was taken from
the New Testament. The notion is historically
untrue, Christianity was widely extended through
the civilized world before the New Testament was
written; and its several books were successively
addressed to various bodies of Christian believers to
bodies that is who already possessed the faith of
Christ in its integrity. When, indeed, God ceased to
inspire persons to write these books, and when they
were all collected together in what we call the New
Testament, the existing faith of the Church*, derived
from oral teaching was tested by comparison with
this Inspired Record. And it henceforth became the
standing law of the Church that nothing should be
received as necessary to salvation which could not
stand that test. But still though thus tested (every
article being proved by the New Testament), Chris-
tianity is not taken from it ; for it existed before it.
What then was the Christianity that was thus
established ? Have we any record of it as it existed
before the New Testament became the sole authori-
tative standard ? I answer, we have. The Creeds of
the Christian Church are the record of it. That is
* Romans xii. 6. 2 Timothy i. 13. 2 Timothy ii. 2.
Counter Truths. 103
precisely what they purport to be; not documents
taken from the New Testament, but documents
transmitting to us the Faith as it was held from the
beginning ; the Faith as it was preached by inspired
men, before the inspired men put forth any writings;
the Faith once for all delivered to the saints. Accor-
dingly you will find that our Church in her Vlllth
Article does not ground the affirmation that the
creeds ought to be "thoroughly received and be-
lieved " on the fact that they were taken out of the
New Testament (which they were not); but on the
fact that, they may be proved by most certain war-
rants of Holy Scripture*".
All essential truths, then, were as matter of
history, gathered up into "the form of sound words "
and were the things (as St Paul wrote to Timothy)
"that thou hast heard of me among many wit-
nesses : the same commit thou to faithful men who
shall be able to teach others also." In that "form
of sound words" the product of Inspired wis-
dom, nothing was in excess, nothing in defect,
nothing omitted essential to salvation or need-
ful to express the mind of Scripture when Scrip-
* From a Sermon by Kev. F. B. Woodward, 1861. (Kivingtons. )
IO4 Individualism.
ture should appear in its completed form. That a
body of truth thus framed and certified would be of
the greatest service in all ages cannot be doubted.
It was, certainly, so regarded by all the early Fathers
and was constantly appealed to by the Primitive
Church. The Anglican Communion throughout the
world is what it is, because its Reformation was
inspired and guided by an intelligent and steadfast
obedience to this standard*. There has of late been
much disputing as to the rival claims of the Deduc-
tive and Inductive methods in Religious inquiry.
I have only to remark in this connection that the
rule of interpretation and arrangement based on the
Analogia Fidei, combines both methods and in the
only way that it can be done with a due regard for
their mutual limitations. It proceeds deductively in
that it accepts the principles of saving truth as
already established and formulated ; and inductively
in that it proves the Divine authority for these
principles by collating the particular facts and teach-
ings of Scripture on which they rest. The absolute
validity of the deduction is assured because it was
* This subject is more widely treated in (Appendix C.) my
"Condones ad Clerum." (T. Whittaker, N. Y. 1880.)
Counter Truths. 105
the work, in great part, of Inspired men. The
absolute validity of the induction can. be assured
only by the perfect discharge of the function which
it Involves. Tho former is secure and cannot change;
the latter must always vary in force according to the
thoroughness with which it is done. The former
gives us. the sacred deposit the same yesterday, to-
day, and forever; the latter gives us the proof, one
sided or all sided, partial or exhaustive, just as
successive inquirers perform their task. Neither
method can stand alone in any Theology that means,
on the one hand, to be at unity with the testimony
of the Catholic Church, and, on the other, to approve
itself at the bar of living thought. And yet in
defiance of this fact, the modern spirit would turn
over the whole field to the exclusive keeping of
Induction. It tells us that there is but one road to
truth whether in Theology or elsewhere. It demands
that we shall first ascertain the particulars of God's
Word, and then evolve from the particulars the
general principles of Theology each inquirer work-
ing independently and accepting no helps, bowing to
no authority, yielding to no guidance that may
trammel the liberty of individual judgment. Now in
io6 Individualism.
resisting this demand we are in the best of company
and backed by a catena of authorities that includes
the most illustrious "names in the history of Sacred
learning. It is opposed to the consensus of the
Church universal, to the practice of Patristic anti-
quity, to the witness and work of the undisputed
(Ecumenical Councils, to the use of the Apostles,
and finally to the method of our Lord Himself as the
Supreme Prophet of the ages.
The Analogy of Faith, then, and the method based
upon and regulated by it, cannot lightly be put aside
by the new learning acting in the interest of Individ-
ualism. No possible increase of knowledge, however
drawn from the various fields of investigation, can dis-
place a principle which, from the beginning, has been
immoveably rooted in the mind and practice of the
Church of God. I have aimed to set forth the only
safe rule by which Theology can be governed in any
possible re-arrangement of its contents with a view
either to a better adaptation of itself to the altered
conditions of the times, or to erecting new safeguards
of the Faith against the weakening dilutions and
alien mixtures of individualistic speculations.
But as Theology is concerned not only with the
Counter Truths. 107
Faith as a system of truth, but with the Faith as a
historic fact, it must be prepared to defend and prove
the historic origin and development of the Faith, as
well as to determine the method by which it is to be
exhibited in the coherent unity of its parts. We
have seen that it is one of the characteristic ten-
dencies of Individualism in Religion to disparage the
historic evidences of Christianity. It regards Chris-
tianity as an affair of sentiment, as consisting of ideas
and forces capable of wearing any number of liveries,
as purest and most real when severed from all positive
historical relations, as finding its best and only needed
evidence in the answer it gives to the wants and
wishes of human nature, and generally in its moral
suitability to the present condition of mankind.
Show me, it says, that I need it, and you are done
with the proof. It is a weariness and an imper-
tinence to be pressing this or that outward credential,
when every man's own consciousness is the only
complete and satisfactory evidence*. So long as it
maintains a solid footing in history, it is felt to be
impossible to resolve it into a sentiment or an idea,
and so to constitute every individual mind the final
* See Note 2.
io8 Individualism.
arbiter of its value or its necessity. Therefore, to
push it out of history, to disrupt and cut away its
hold on history, to depreciate or deny the proof
which history adduces is the one issue on which
nearly all the forms of recent doubt have converged.
It is, then, a foremost duty of the Theology of the
time to insist upon a due respect for every kind of
historic testimony, and so to exhibit every kind of it
as to compel such respect. The great controversy has
run through all intervening cycles and brought us
back to the stand-point of the great writers on the
Evidences, who, a century ago, drove from the field in
utter rout and confusion the Atheistic and Deistic
assailants of the Faith. Doubtless it was because
they labored the subject so constantly and so pro-
foundly, that the present generation of Christian
scholars have so much overlooked it. But the time
has come, when we must imitate the diligence, and do
something more than reproduce the learning and
logic of our fathers. From the beginning, in all the
crises of doubt, the Church has urged, side by side,
and, with a deep sense of their reciprocal help, both
the philosophical and the evidential lines of convic-
tion the one dealing with the moral adaptations of
Counter Trtiths. 109
Christianity as the remedy for the sin and wretched-
ness of man the other with the argument based on
the specific and incontestable facts of history. Both
together make up the scheme of proof by which the
Author and Finisher of the Faith intended to vindi-
cate, through all time, the reality of His message,
the power of His Cross.
Religion lifted above or thrust out of history
may be a captivating vision for idealists and disciples
of the pure reason and votaries of overdone Indi-
vidualism; but it is not Christianity; and it is a
wretched abuse of words to call it so. The Apostles,
and first preachers of the Gospel showed man to
himself as he never saw himself before his diseases,
his sorrows, his guilt, his utter helplessness; and
then set before him the Cross as the only power
that could pardon, heal, and comfort him. They
argued out the adaptations to their final limit. And
yet with equal constancy and fervor, they affirmed,
"That which we have heard and seen with our eyes,
and our hands have handled of the Word of Life,
declare we unto you. Ye men of Israel, hear these
words; Jesus of Nazareth, a man approved of God
among you by miracles and wonders and signs which
1 1 o Individualism.
God did by Him in the midst of you, as ye your-
selves also know ; Him ye have taken and by wicked
hands have crucified and slain; whom God hath
raised up, having loosed the pains of death *,"
Indeed, as has been well said, "whatever may be
the case with other religions, the Gospel certainly
never made its way by first recommending itself
to the conscious wants and wishes of mankind. It
seemed, on the contrary, to contradict all man's
expectations, and to outrage all his cherished feelings,
and to cross all his strongest desires." It was "to
the Jews a stumblingblock and to the Greeks
foolishness -f-." What was true at the start is true
now. There are to-day, and there always will be
the same antipathy, the same distrust, the same
aversion, the same denial. Man will hate the light
which uncovers, rebukes, punishes him long before
he will love the light which illumines, warms, guides
and blesses him. No man can have any real
sympathy with the Gospel until he believes and
acts upon it, and so brings his heart under its
regenerating power. In fact, if he turn from its
evidences on the plea that they have nothing to
* Acts ii. 22, 23. f 1 Corin. i. 23.
Counter Truths. 1 1 1
do with his spiritual nature, or with spiritual truth
appealing to that nature, he will turn with stronger
aversion from the truth itself when it seeks to grasp
his sleeping, benighted soul. Let us understand at
once and put aside all deception in the matter,
that when the natural man says that he wants no
other proof of the claims of Christianity than its
felt adaptation to his wants its power to purify
and uplift his affections, he is, as a rule, simply
repeating the shibboleth of the sentimental ideal-
istic school; or he is leaving out of the estimate
of himself the one deepest, darkest fact of his
being the sin of his soul, the guilt of his life;
and with that leaving out of his estimate of God
the will and the power to punish interlocked with
the will and power to forgive; and in either case
he is conceiving of Christianity as something else,
something less and lower than it is. He may take
spontaneously to his own theory of Christianity ; but
not to the Christianity that finds its voice in the
Cross and the corner stone of its evidence in the
empty grave of the Son of God.
(Ill) But if we are to offer an effective opposi-
tion to the extravagant claims of Individualism we
ii2 Individualism.
must go deeper than any of these lines of inquiry
has carried us. Those claims have their ultimate
ground in the most profound and abstract specu-
lations which the human mind has dared attempt.
So far removed, indeed, are these speculations from
the ordinary processes of thought that we wonder
how they can influence practical life at all. And yet
history tells us how the speculative abstractions of
one age are often translated into the popular thinking
of another, and specifically how the literature, ethics
and politics of any given generation are influenced by
the modes in which its predecessor may have handled
those final problems of thought and being that the
human mind seems to be as powerless to let alone,
as it is powerless to solve. The subject now before
us furnishes a striking example of this.
The favourite thesis of Individualism man the
measure of all things the human mind the ultimate
criterion of all truth, is almost equally the product of
the two rival philosophies which, however they may
continue to be discussed in our day, were worked out
in the last generation. The principle in itself, as we
have seen, is a revolt, in greater or less degree, against
all authority, not only in religion and morals, but
Counter Truths. 113
inferentially in all external organizations whatsoever.
Some may think the principle sufficiently accounted
for by referring it to the innate pride and ambition
of the human intellect ; while others, duly allowing
for the influence of these qualities, will not fail
to discover how closely all that is now specially
characteristic of it is connected with the best known
philosophical systems of our time. The influence
of this connection may not be traced in detail. The
most general statement will suffice.
If it be true, as the one philosophy claims, that
we can know nothing beyond the things that appear,
that all attainable knowledge is limited to a gene-
ralized experience, that causes, substances, things as
they are in themselves cannot be grasped by us, that
the absolute and the infinite are unknowable because
unthinkable, that rational thought is possible only
within the limits of the finite and relative: if
this be true, then it is quite reasonable that reason
should infer that itself is the adequate measure
and final criterion of truth. If, as you are bound
to do by the fundamental principle of this philo-
sophy, you subtract from the domain of knowledge
God, spirit, immortality, and with these the Super-
L. s. 8
ii4 Individualism.
natural in every form; if you insist upon demon-
stration as the only authority, and accept science as
the only revelation, nature's laws as the only provi-
dence; if you destroy Christianity and the whole
world of thought and life which it implies by
destroying the possibility of its proof; if, in other
words, you so enlarge the compass of Materialism
as to make it commensurate in the sphere of know-
ledge with the all in all of the Universe; then
assuredly the human mind, as the organ of know-
ledge, puts forth no very great pretension in
assuming to be the measure of all. The sovreignty
obtained by thus dwarfing the empire over which
it extends may be a real one ; but it is not especially
flattering to the dignity of human nature. While
it helps to exalt Individualism, it narrows and de-
grades the individual.
If, on the other hand, it be true as the opposing
philosophy claims that the absolute and infinite
are knowable, that we can know things as they
are, that we can pierce down to the underlying
and essential reality, that the human consciousness
contains in itself premises larger than itself and from
which may be deduced rational conceptions of an
Counter Truths. 115
infinite and absolute existence and of the laws
and purposes by which such an existence is swayed ;
if it be true that man can furnish not only the
materials out of which, but also the method by
which, God can be rationally or metaphysically con-
structed, then it follows likewise that the individual
may claim to find in himself the ultimate ground
and measure of truth. If he is, in any form or
relation, able to grasp the whole, then he may
claim at once the power and the right to exercise
his critical judgment on the parts. If he can
compress Deity within the limits of his own con-
sciousness, then he may do the same with all the
operations of Deity. And if he may do the latter,
then he may affirm, for example, either that a
revelation is superfluous; or that, if given, its
contents can be authoritative only so far as they
approve themselves to his judgment.
To a mind that has thus learned to conceive
of itself as endowed with faculties of knowledge
practically unlimited in their scope, it will be no
answer to its demand to say, that, though in the
nature of the case all true revelation of the Divine
must be rational because emanating from the Divine
82
n6 Individualism.
reason; yet that only what is explicitly rational is
the proper object of human reason ; while what is
rational only in a latent and implicit sense is equally
the object of faith. Tutored in the school now under
consideration, such a mind will reply there is no
validity in the distinction thus drawn. For if the
difference between the reason of God and the reason
of man be one of degree only, not one of kind one
of quantity, not one of quality: (as is affirmed by
the absolute philosophy), then no limit can be fixed
beyond which human reason may not pass in approxi-
mating itself to the Divine reason. Expansion and
progress are the law of our rational life. What could
not be fathomed yesterday may be to-day, or some-
where in the near or distant future. What this or
that individual reason cannot comprehend, because
yet confined to a lower plane of thought ; some other
individual reason may comprehend, because it has
been widened out and lifted up by larger culture.
Both theories of knowledge, then, not only can be,
but have been so interpreted and applied as to
furnish the philosophical ground of the root-principle
of Individualism. The one establishes the supremacy
of the individual mind by eliminating God and tying
Counter Truths. 117
up man to the things that appear; the other does
the same, on the intellectual side, by humanizing
God; and, on the ethical and spiritual side, by
deifying man.
Now we cannot handle this ground-idea of In-
dividualism without being reminded that there is
nothing new under the sun, and that the thing that
hath been is the thing that shall be. Protagoras,
the Greek sophist, held the same notion. He advo-
cated it with an acuteness and cogency of reasoning
surpassed by none of its modern converts *. And he
made such free use of it, moreover, in morals as well
as metaphysics, as to compel both Plato and Aristotle
to honor him with elaborate refutations and so to
give him his only claim to immortality. This notion
re-appeared, as it could not fail to do, in many of the
arguments against Christianity by the early Pagan
rationalists. It cropt out again in the scholastic
scepticism of Abelard and his disciples: and the
part it is playing in the sphere of modern doubt
is only what might have been expected alike from
the history of thought and the innate tendencies
of the human mind. Such being the facts, the
* See Note 3.
1 1 8 Individualism.
question thrust upon us is, how are we to deal
with Individualism as developed from this root?
As Christian teachers and believers we may ex-
pose, and denounce the perilous consequences of this
or that theory of knowledge : but we shall lapse into
culpable folly, if we decry any and all efforts of
reason to convince itself of the reality of whatever
claims its assent or offers, itself to the larger vision of
faith. If it may be said of anything, it may be said
of the reasoned speculations of the mind, that the
evil that is in them is only "good in the making."
As the times now are, intellectually considered, we
must plead at the bar of reason, or surrender our
heritage to some possible future vindication. We who
are commissioned to speak for the Supreme Reason,
as operative in the scheme of Christian Redemption
and manifested in the Incarnate Word, cannot con-
sistently or safely scout reason at any lower stage of
its activity. The duty, then, presses upon us with a
gravity and urgency which no tongue can exaggerate,
to ponder deeply and wisely the plea we have to offer.
Now it seems to me that the first requirement
laid upon us is to move with careful discrimina-
tion in dealing with the -now dominant systems of
Counter Truths. 119
metaphysical inquiry which, as has been seen, are not
more hostile to one another, than tb,ey are, in some of
their final results, hostile to the sacred interests that
we are set to defend. Neither of them can we alto-
gether accept, or altogether reject. Full of light and
power as is the logic of Sir William Hamilton and
Dean Mansel, we cannot accept it as final or com-
plete. For, though, as presented by the latter, it was
intended to protect the foundations of the Faith by
an impassable wall, it was found, after critical ex-
amination, to justify inferences of which one of the
most subtle of living thinkers has made telling use
in building up the most compact and comprehensive
system of scepticism known to this century. On the
other hand, we cannot cast it aside as powerless or
worthless : indeed, we cannot lose our hold upon it as
a valuable auxiliary in certain stages of the Christian
argument, because of the luminous precision with
which it has traced the limits of all thinking that
admits its amenability to the accepted laws of thought
and with these the contradictions and difficulties
from which philosophy, considered as reasoned truth,
can never escape. So, again, we can neither accept
nor reject, as a whole, the opposing schemes of
1 20 Individualism.
speculation that aim to bridge the chasm between
the relative and the absolute. We cannot accept
any of them, because, if they prove any thing, they
prove too much : and still more, because of practical
consequences, against the peril and extravagance
of which, both recent history and present experience
alike warn us. How else than with a feeling of
distrust can we regard, as well the premises, as
the processes and conclusions, of a philosophy
whose masters undertake to "re-think the thought
of creation," or to engage in a priori reconstructions
on moral grounds of the Word of God, or to find in
their own intuitions translated into metaphysical for-
mulas the only complete and authoritative revelation,
or to merge the Deity in the order of the universe
and to cancel personal responsibility by a pantheistic
absorption of the individual will? On the other hand,
we cannot entirely reject this theory of knowledge
without, so far as reason is involved, forfeiting our
hold upon the Infinite and the hold of the Infinite-
upon us; and so cutting loose Religion itself from
its own anchorage. Thus it comes true here, as it
does within the circle of Christian inquiry, that
we must balance, as best we can, the teachings of
Counter Truths. 1 2 1
mutually repellant methods of thought and, in any
event, maintain principles whose contradictions we
can neither evade nor reconcile.
If the correctness of what has been said shall be
granted, we are prepared to advance a step further in
combating the philosophical basis of Individualism.
Speaking generally, we are, as against materialistic
positivism to assert a qualified moral and spiritual, if
not intellectual, knowableness of the Infinite, and, as
against the absolute philosophy, to maintain that man
cannot comprehend, in the sense of reasoning out or
rationally explaining, much that he is able to appre-
hend, in the sense of seeing and receiving, as the less
accepts from the greater, as the part derives upon
itself the life and virtue of the whole, as the member
profits by the light that belongs to the whole body.
Man's capacity to receive truth outruns his capacity
to formulate it. He is able to know more than he
is able to prove. His responsibility both moral and
mental, in opinion and belief, as well as in conduct,
is measured neither by his logic nor by his meta-
physics. It may be true that he has in him instincts,
aspirations, thoughts that impel him to the endeavour
to transcend his own individual consciousness to
122 Individualism.
find or to realize himself in that which lies beyond
and seems to limit him : it may be true that along-
side of these or included in them there is a latent
sense of the absolute unity of thought and being,
subject and object, or of that absolute consciousness
on which all finite knowledge and existence rest : yet
neither that impulse, nor that endeavour, nor the
consummation of both, nor that latent sense of the
universal and absolute, nor the feeling of dependence
on them as the ground of all human personality, nor
even the sense of moral obligation implying both an
outward, unchangeable law and an eternal lawgiver
none, nor all of these, however they may establish
the necessity of Religion and go to form the religious
faculty in man, entitle him to regard himself as the
final arbiter and judge of what God as the Infinite
and Absolute may have seen fit to reveal to him. For,
I repeat, his power to receive and act upon what is
offered him by external authority has a vastly wider
reach than his power to criticise what is so offered.
If then we concede to philosophy all it claims as the
result of its endeavor to lengthen out the sounding
line of the human mind, there will always remain
in the ocean to be fathomed depths which it cannot
Counter Truths. 123
measure. And, further, if this be so, then the human
mind must seek the ultimate criterion of truth, the
final basis of certitude, not only in itself, but as well
and equally outside itself, i. e., in a voice, in a word, a
testimony, a Revelation the authority of which rests
not more upon a reasoned assent to its contents, than
upon the collateral, external credentials which attest
to reason the divinity of its source.
It may be true that "whatever is absolutely in-
scrutable to reason cannot be made known to faith,"
and this because whatever is absolutely unintelligible
and in this sense beyond reason is simply the nega-
tion of reason : but it is also true that there may be,
nay that there is much within the province of reason,
taken in its largest sense, that the present disordered
moral state of human nature renders human reason
incompetent to do more than humbly accept, without
other challenge or criticism, than that given to the
evidences which certify the supernatural origin of
the message by which it is conveyed. Reason has
its rights sacred and inalienable rights. Let it exer-
cise them to the furthest lawful limits. Let it claim
all the light which a reverent and thoughtful inves-
tigation can throw upon the contents of Revelation.
124 Individualism.
Let it put forth its utmost endeavour to verify
them, to disengage them from what is accidental,
to develop their organic unity, to trace their con-
nection with other elements of knowledge, their
adaptation to the purpose for which they profess
to have been given, their course in history, their
influence over mankind ; but let it not with a
profane pride and vaulting ambition leap into the
seat of their Eternal Author, and dictate what should
and what should not have entered into a Revelation
the fulness and clearness of which can be known, only
as we know the human darkness and despair which
it came to remove.
I have run this general outline only to open the
way for considering a specific obligation especially
incumbent upon us in view of the issue with which I
am dealing. As it is not merely the tendency,
but the avowed aim of the now reigning schools of
thought to magnify the intellect*, some, as we have
seen, in one way and some in another: and thus
to encourage the fundamental vice of Individualism :
so it is manifestly our duty the duty of the Pulpit,
the duty of Christian scholars the duty of all who
* See Note 4.
Counter Truths. .125
bear office at the great centres of learning where
the young life of the day is being moulded, to
scrutinize more carefully than ever before the real
powers and attainments of the human mind : what it
can do and what it cannot; how far it can go and
where it must stop; and especially to show its
inability to solve the problems distinctively and
exhaustively handled by Revealed Religion. Doubt-
less this has been done to some extent in every age.
But it must be done again and by methods which
the intellectual spirit of the time will be compelled to
respect. We must move upon the same lines of
inquiry, use the same appliances for moderating the
claims of the individual reason that have been
employed for its undue exaltation. We have special
advantages for executing this task. The history of
thought furnishes abundant materials for it. It is
scarcely possible for philosophy to invent any new
method of investigation, or reason to discover any
new law of evidence or of demonstration. Every
leading type of thought has run its round, exhausted
its contents, and put itself on record beyond the
possibility of essential change. The most sanguine
advocate of the fresh and undeveloped possibilities of
126 Individualism.
knowledge will not claim that much more light is
likely to be thrown either upon the science that notes
and arranges the facts of consciousness, or upon
the science that deals with the essential reality of
being, or upon the science that mediates between
them and seeks to bring them into unity. Whether
we regard them separately, or in combination, their
results are before us. New thinkers may revise and
readjust them, adding here and there fresh guesses
and speculations : but they will be only as successive
artists painting the same faces or the same scenes
that the great masters have already glorified by
their genius.
The results, I have said, are with us results
which a scholarly and comprehensive induction can
mass together for examination whenever needed.
And what do these tell us about the actual attain-
ments of the human mind, not generally, but specifi-
cally, within the domain of Religion ? The mind has
been appealed to as the source and test of truth
in four ways under which all modes of appeal may
be grouped; viz. the sensational, the intuitive, the
emotional and the reflective. Each of these functions
or aspects of the mind has been not only analysed
Counter Truths. 1 2 7
and catechised; but almost broken upon the wheel
by the resolute and almost passionate spirit of
modern inquiry in order to extort from it every mute
sign or articulate word touching the buried secret of
its real or its possible knowledge. And what has
come of it ? What is the testimony already filed away
in the archives of thought ? Briefly, this, that the
consciousness of man however questioned or how-
ever developed, whether on one side or on all sides,
whether on the surface or in the depths, declares that
it can neither create nor dispense with Religion ;
that Religion is a necessity and that itself is a riddle
without it : and yet that it has no power to construct
a Religion that will satisfy its own want, or endure
its own criticism*; that it can neither determine the
particular elements that should enter into Religion,
nor the method by which they can be organized into
a living whole ; that it is at variance with itself in
regard to the number and validity of its own
intuitions ; that it can neither altogether follow nor
altogether desert the logic of reflective reason:
because, on the one hand, it must formulate itself
according to the necessary laws of thought, if it is to
speak at all: and, on the other hand, if it so
* See Note 5.
128 Individualism.
formulate itself, it trips and stumbles helplessly in the
meshes of inevitable logical contradictions. Surely
these are very serious if not fatal disabilities in a
faculty that assumes not only to construct the
subjective basis of Religion, but to exercise a
supreme and determinate judgment upon the con-
tents of a Religion avowedly revealed to it, because of
its proved incompetency either fully to explain or
fully to provide for its own want.
But the case becomes still stronger, if we take
into account the failures of the reflective reason both
on its speculative and on its practical side. These
failures are all the more significant, because the
religious consciousness, divorced from the reflective
reason, is ipso facto excluded from the sphere of
rational argument as applied either to the substance,
or to the form, or to the external credentials of
Religion. Now there is ample ground for affirming
that reason on its speculative side, and regarded as
the faculty for apprehending necessary truth or the
Real in its highest sense, has yet accomplished "no
absolute and unaltering solution of any problem
peculiar to its sphere*." Even its a priori demon-
strations of the existence of God are in a chronic
* See Note 6.
Counter Truths. 129
state of quarrel, resembling the members of a house-
hold divided against itself*. The old issue between
phenomenalist and realist is no sooner fought out on
one line, than it is renewed on another. The strife is
endless and incurable. It goes on to-day just as
though the host of great thinkers over whose graves
it has marched had settled nothing except the fact
that a settlement is hopeless. Systems rise and fall
with the great tidal waves of thought whose ebb and
flow are as inexplicable as they are inevitable. It is
pitiful to recall the giant struggles, the vast outlays
of mental force involved in the construction of these
systems, and yet to be obliged to feel that the toil of
Sisyphus and the thirst of Tantalus were not more
hopeless.
But reason on its moral side and viewed as
the faculty that determines the ought and the ought
not has, on its own ground and working by itself,
succeeded little better. Apart from the much that it
has borrowed knowingly and the still more that it has
borrowed unknowingly from Christianity, how little
has it done toward discovering or certifying the
essential facts the fundamental principles of theo-
* See Note 7.
L.S. 9
1 30 Individualism.
retical or practical Ethics, whose chief aim is not the
formation of moral rules or moral sentiments, but the
formation of character, the discipline of life ! I
honor more than I can express the profound study
and the vast erudition of the noble company who
have toiled on the foundations or on the superstruc-
ture of Ethical Science. But is it not true am I
mistaken in affirming that they have not as yet lifted
out of the realm of controversy, so far as reason is
concerned, the root question of the ultimate ground
of moral obligation : and consequently the kindred
question of a perfect standard of moral duty ? If they
have declared the right, they have discovered no
sufficient motive power, no moral or spiritual dy-
namics that would lead the average of mankind to do
it. It is certain that they have uttered no positive,
unanimous word in regard to the comparative
excellence and superiority of the several groups of
virtues, i. e. the heroic, the amiable, the holy ; and so
have been unable to construct the perfect man in
idea, far less in reality. Finally, while they have
established the psychological supremacy of the con-
science, they have not established its moral infalli-
bility. They have proved that it was ordained to
Counter Truths. 131
reign as chief and governor over all other faculties of
man: but they have not proved that its authority
extends over all moral truth offered to it from with-
out a fact, I may add, of primary moment in itself,
but of special force just now, in view of the grounds
on which the so-called liberal thought of the day has
assailed the Catholic doctrine of the Atonement.
Divines have been faulted because they have
spoken and written with so much freedom and
assurance on the existing, actual state of the human
heart without attempting to inquire into the original
structure of man's moral nature. But metaphysical
and ethical writers may be faulted quite as much,
because they have confined themselves to an in-
vestigation of the moral constitution of man and a
development of the moral faculty, without inquiring
into the present state of the heart, or into the present
working of the conscience as affected by the whole
moral nature, as it now is. They tell us what the
conscience was intended to be and to do : but tell us
almost nothing of the conscience as it is amid the
disorder and corruption both of the outward and
inward life of man. Now it would seem as though
the fact that the conscience has not the control that
92
132 Individualism.
it ought to have, that somehow it does not do its
appointed work, but bears itself not seldom like a
discrowned sovereign in the midst of its own empire,
is as worthy of investigation and explanation as its
original functions. The philosophers have carefully
avoided this side of the subject, as though afraid to
face the consequences, or as though conscious of their
inability to explain them, without being betrayed into
admissions or implications that would prove fatal to
the symmetry or the soundness of their theories.
After noting this fact, it only needs to be added
that nothing is more certain in the whole range
of ethical inquiry than that the very principles
arrived at by moral science, if fully adopted and
fairly applied in the very field which the philo-
sophers have declined to enter, will conduct to
conclusions in regard to the corruption of man's
nature identical with those derived from the study
of God's Word. And these identical conclusions,
while they establish the intended authority of
conscience as an internal ruler, disprove its in-
fallibility as a criterion of all moral truth that may
be presented to man by external authority. And
if this be true, then is the individual mind no
Counter Truths. 133
more the measure of all things demanding its assent
in virtue of its strictly moral, than of its strictly
intellectual faculties *.
In what has been said on this branch of my
subject, I have attempted only an outline (and
that a very general one,) of what I conceive to
be the proper and wholesome line of teaching in
our efforts to curb the ultra spirit of Individualism,
so far as it springs from certain admitted intellectual
tendencies of the dayf. No doubt this kind of
gospel within the domain of metaphysical and
ethical inquiry will prove unpalatable to many with
whom we have to deal. No doubt those who need it
most will be least likely to heed it. The only
question with us, however, is whether it be true.
If it be so, then the urgencies of the hour require
us to insist upon it with increased energy of con-
viction. We have a duty not only to the wayward
whom we would reclaim; but yet more toward the
teachable and reverent among us who have not
yet broken from the old paths of faith and culture.
* See Note 8. t See Note 9.
SERMON III.
1 CORINTHIANS VH. 10, 11. COLOSSIANS in. 20.
ROMANS xm. 1. EPHESIANS m. 9, 10.
Let not the wife depart from her husband And
let not the husband put away his wife.
Children obey your parents in all things ; for this
is well pleasing unto the Lord.
Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers : for
there is no power but of God; the powers that be
are ordained of God.
And to make all men see what is the fellowship of the
mystery, which from the beginning of the world
hath been hid in God, who created all things by
Jesus Christ: To the intent that now unto the
principalities and powers in heavenly places might
be known by the Church the manifold wisdom
of God.
Institutional Checks and Limitations. 135
HAVING treated of the attitude to be assumed in
Theology and Philosophy toward Individualism, I
proceed to consider some of the grounds of opposition
to it supplied by Institutions essential to the discipline
and well-being of man. It is not unlikely that what
I have urged as expedient and needful in our
teaching within the precincts of Theology and
Philosophy may have failed to command the assent
of some. But I trust all will admit the gravity
and force of the testimony to be drawn from this side
of the subject. The current teaching of late years
respecting the true nature and functions of the
Family, the State, and the Church has, I fear, not
been sufficiently bold and explicit. As the course of
events has, from time to time, admonished us of
the growth of schools of thought more or less hostile
to the Christian and rational conception of these
Institutions, we may have broken out into strong
words of dissent, or remonstrance. Our fears may
have been excited; perhaps, our indignation may
have been aroused. But certainly there have been
too few thoroughly earnest, thoroughly Christian,
thoroughly reasoned attempts to re-examine, under
the light of present facts, and to build up afresh
136 Individualism.
on its own indestructible foundations the great
argument touching the Divine and unchangeable
elements in these Ordinances, or their intended
mastery over the individual will. Somehow, while
the shadow of the enemy has been creeping stealthily
toward us, tongues that ought to have spoken at the
centres and along the highways of life have not
spoken as they might and should. The chief men in
Israel and in the seats of Sacred learning have either
underrated or mistaken the omens of the time ;
or, understanding them, have been deluded by a false
security. Time is not allowed me : and, if it were, I
should distrust my ability to handle the argument
with suitable vigor and clearness. I can now do no
more than briefly allude to some of the hinges on
which it turns, and so invite to its consideration a
wider learning and a deeper logic.
As was stated in my first Discourse, it is asserted
by the more outspoken, as well religious as purely
sceptical, type of Individualism that, whatever organi-
zations there may be external to the individual, he
possesses rights superior to them all that as "he
comes to a clearer sense of the powers within him," he
is to give less and less heed to them that the living
Institutional Checks and Limitations. 137
soul is the true Lord of all that " as its needs may
determine, Institutions of every sort are to increase,
dimmish, or totally disappear " " that its power over
them is that of the potter over the clay, either
moulding them to its purpose, or, if it suit the soul
better, breaking them under its foot." "As the
conditions of man's life change, Christianity gives
the individual authority to change the institutions
in which his faith is enshrined; creeds and ordi-
nances conformable to one age may not be so to
the next; and he is to judge how far and in what
direction they need modification. The right of add-
ing to, or taking from them, is given by God into
his hands *." These varied expressions of the same
idea, so far from being imaginary or hypothetical,
are the very language of a reputable school of
Divines. They are repeated and intensified by
hundreds of professedly Christian teachers in Great
Britain and in America.
To make sure that I am not overstating the drift
of the hour, let me put beside these statements the
emphatic and pointed utterance of the now best
known and most influential sceptical writer of England.
* Scotch Sermons. (Macmillan and Co. 1880.)
138 Individualism.
Speaking of the State and inclusively of every other
organization exercising authority over the individual,
he says, " Government being simply an agent, em-
ployed in common by a number of individuals to se-
cure to them certain advantages, the very nature of
the connection implies that it is for each to say
whether he will employ such an agent or not. If any
one determine to ignore this mutual safety confede-
ration, nothing can be said except that he loses all
claim to its good offices and exposes himself to the
danger of maltreatment *."
Now it is impossible that any mind could hold
such notions of the Church or of the State, unless
it had first come to regard the former as the mere
accidental embodiment of certain spiritual ideas,
and therefore in all its parts and functions as shorn
of every vestige of a Divine polity ; and the latter
as either a necessary evil, or an artificial and for-
tuitous resultant of historical contingencies, or as
a mere instrumentality for enforcing justice between
man and man, or as a simply economic society;
and therefore, in any case, a thing founded on force,
or in the individual's sense of expediency, or on the
* Herbert Spencer's "Social Statics," p. 229.
Institutional Checks and Limitations. 139
purely speculative basis of the social contract, or
in the shifting impulses and judgments of popular
sovereignty. These are not the doctrines, let us
understand, of merely abstract thinkers who speak
only to those shut up within cloistered walls. They
are not confined to books or speeches addressed only
to the few. They are floating about in the air.
They are in your workshops and factories, in the
resorts of your trades-unions, and in the tracts and
papers that go into the hands of the million. They
crop out in the resolutions and platforms of political
agitators and socialistic propagandists. They are
in the heads and hearts of tens of thousands who
are already, or soon will be, wielding the power of the
ballot. With such seed already in the ground, who
can wonder at the harvest fast ripening for the sickle ?
It is believed by many who look below the
surface that the higher ends of the State are in
danger of being sacrificed to gratify the sense of
power, the passion for political control in the mul-
titude. It is generally conceded that our time is
engrossed in the consideration of rights rather than
of duties, of powers rather than of responsibilities,
of individual advancement rather than of what will
1 40 Individualism.
make for the purity of Family life, for the true
greatness of Society, and for the divinely ordered
glory of the Church. Wise men sorrow as they
look out over our modern life and see how the old car-
dinal virtues of reverence, humility, obedience, thank-
fulness, adoring trust are at a discount; while self-
sufficiency, self-aggrandizement, "covetousness which
is idolatry," ambition to master the world and to
wring from it larger tribute to man's power and
pleasure are at a premium. There is no mystery
about it. These traits have not leaped to the front
in some spasm of popular caprice or passion ; rather
are they the slowly-ripened fruit of teachings as
false to the truth, as they have been persistent
and deliberate in their utterance : and I may add
that there is neither hope nor chance of giving them
a check, except by the power of principles which
they have only half stated, or openly perverted, or
ignorantly denied. What then are these principles ?
In stating them there is no room for invention
or discovery. What they always have been as matters
of fact, that they are to-day, and that they will
be to the end of time. False theories have only
obscured, not annulled them. It is the delusion
Institutional Checks and Limitations. 141
of man that he can make what God only can make,
and that things so made have not only their source,
but their end in himself; when, from their very
nature, they must begin and end in the purposes
of Him who created man and nature and all being
for Himself.
Organic life wherever it exists bears the sign
manual of Omnipotence and completes itself only as
it fulfils the divine idea out of which it sprang. It is
the essential property of organic being that the whole
exists before the parts ; not the parts before the whole;
that the parts can grow only as they are shaped, co-
ordinated, and combined by the life-principle work-
ing in and through the whole. Now the Family, the
State, and the Church are in this sense organic wholes.
Each of them antedates and outlasts its individual
parts. Each, as embodying and applying the necessary
laws of human development, precedes the individual
and provides the conditions apart from which the
individual could not realize a developed personality.
Man can come to manhood only as he is integrated
in consciousness and character by Institutions which
are God's workmanship as truly as himself is. This
is true of the Family and the State in the natural
142 Individualism.
order and of the Church in the supernatural. It is
well-nigh impossible, certainly it is at best a visionary
abstraction, to conceive of the individual outside
his necessary relations to these Divinely established
fellowships. He can realize himself only through
what is other than himself; and, speaking generally,
it is only by the negation or surrender of his own
individual self to a larger self, that he comes to
know the meaning of himself as a spiritual being.
To be true to the actual, as well as ideal order
of rational life, we must reach the idea of any one
of these organic Institutions, whether the Family, or
the State, or the Church, not by first supposing a
number of human beings each complete in himself,
and then by combining them to form the Institu-
tions ; but we must first think, conceive the Institu-
tions in order to know the individuals. "The
abstract, isolated individual is only the possibility
of an existence which has never become actual."
This, it may be said, is sound principle, good
philosophy, when we think out the fundamental
basis, the essential nature of the relations of the
individual to the Family and the State; but how
about its application to the Church ? The question
Institutional Checks and Limitations. 143
is timely and in these days every way most perti-
nent. It invites an answer that, if it be valid,
involves inferences of the gravest moment in them-
selves, and of the utmost value as correctives of
much of the faulty thinking now prevalent on the
polity and authority of the Church.
Now if it be necessary in order to understand
aright the nature of the individual, to take into
account other finite beings and his relations to them ;
and if the whole nature of the individual can be
developed only in virtue of the organic character of
these relations ; still more necessary is it, if we would
know the meaning of man's nature, that we take into
account that Infinite and Absolute Being who is at
once the presupposition and the end of all finite
thought and life, and the relations of the individual
soul to that Being. And still further, if man's relations
to his fellow-men the relations on which his life
and growth essentially depend are concentrated in
and vitalized by organic wholes i.e. the Family and
the State which are ordained and constituted of God ;
then, a fortiori, man's revealed and supernatural
relations to God, on which his yet higher life and
growth depend, must take shape and become operative
1 44 Individualism.
in and through a spiritual organism that was also
ordained and constituted of God and equally adapted
to its purpose. Now we believe and affirm the
Church to be that organism : and, if it be, then its
life must be an organic life; and, if organic, then
composed of something more than a message to man,
a divine idea, a moral force something more than
its individual human parts, or its individual super-
natural gifts even a body besides, the essentials of
whose order, worship, faith are as divinely pre-
arranged and established as the body itself. I deal
with a fact. Were I to attempt its explanation, I
should be led up at once to the central doctrine of
Christianity the Incarnation which shows how, in
the Divine counsel and in history, the fact was reached.
Here, then, in these Institutions, as elsewhere
in the universe, "the universal is the prius of the
particular" the organic whole of the individual.
And yet the universal must not be conceived as
having any reality apart from the particular, or the
organic body apart from its members. The wholes
integrate and are integrated by the parts. They at
once feed and are fed by the individuals of which
they are composed. Neither can subsist or attain
Institutional Checks and Limitations. 145
perfection without the other. The personality of the
individual and the collective personality of the whole
are inter-dependent at every point in the circle of
development which is common to both. Now these
are not two different truths in mere ideal or logical
correlation, but opposite sides of one and the same
truth. Unity completes itself in plurality and
plurality completes itself in unity, the one in the
many and the many in the one. If this principle be
grounded in truth, we can build on it and apply it
in the two directions along which our thoughts will
now move. It will prepare us to see in what respects
the Family, the State, and the Church are above the
individual his masters, not his servants; and how
they have a meaning and a purpose that transcend and,
at the same time, include the meaning and end of the
individual ; while, on the other hand, it will enable
us to see in what senses they are subservient to the
individual and exist for his benefit
In the old Hebrew conception the individual was
merged in the family and the tribe, though a certain
dignity was associated with him, because of the belief
that God had made him for His own glory, and had
chosen him as one among many through whom the
L.S. 10
1 46 Individiialism.
Divine promise was to be handed on through the
ages. In the Greek thought which best interpreted
that of the ancients outside of Judea, it was assumed
that the individual existed only for the State and
that the State alone existed as an end in itself.
Between them it assumed that there was a necessary
contradiction, and it solved the contradiction by the
suppression of the individual. " The Greek State ac-
knowledged no moral and tolerated no legal limitation
to its power. The conduct and ordering of life as
well in the inward thoughts and affections as in the
outward vocations and pursuits of the individual was
immediately and absolutely in its hands."
In much of the political speculation and very
largely in the political practice of modern life, the
exact opposite has been held the State being
regarded as existing only for the individual and
the individual alone existing as an end in himself.
It is by the disciples of this view that we are asked
to regard the State, and, by obvious inference, the
Church, as mere forms or agencies adopted by the in-
dividual for the promotion of his own ends, and there-
fore as artificial and temporary associations created
by the voluntary alliance of individuals and entirely
Institutional Checks and Limitations. 147
subservient to their interests. Now the old heathen
thought was ignorant of, and the modern conceit has
perverted or denied the one fact the one grand truth
of the Christian Revelation which alone could lift the
State, and, when the time came for it, the Church
and, with both, the individual into the unity of organic
life in which each can be an end to itself in virtue of
its own moral personality; and yet each in its own
sphere be subservient to the welfare of its members.
I mean the truth that God made man in His own
image, and with it the other inseparable truth that
this image was fully revealed only in the God-man,
Jesus Christ, by Whom, working through His own
Body the Church, redeemed humanity was to be put
in its true relations with all things on earth and in
heaven.
But to come back to my purpose, let us inquire
how the great Institutions of society at once rule and
serve the individual are their own end, and yet find
another end in him. And first in the natural order
of thought comes the Family.
(I) The Family is an ordinance of God and
invested with an authority commensurate with the
purpose for which it was ordained. Parents bear
102
148 Individualism.
rule as God's own deputies, not by virtue of human
law; and they so bear it that no external power
can lawfully restrain its legitimate exercise. Their
commission rests upon natural law re-enforced and
expanded, as well as sanctified by the law of Revela-
tion. They are authorized and required to discipline
and educate the life born of their mutual incorpora-
tion as one flesh. Children are to serve and obey
in all things, not because they are too weak to do
otherwise; nor yet because to do so is the implied
condition of food, shelter, and raiment ; nor because
of any animal or physical consideration whatever;
but simply for the reason that it is of the essence
of the Family that they should do so. It is the
fruit of an instinctive obligation and is the spon-
taneous admission of an authority, which is the
divinely-planted germ of all forms of authority to be
obeyed, when the child shall develop into the man.
Again, the Family dominates the individual,
whether man or woman, because the marriage-bond
is more than a simple contract or legal covenant that
may be set aside by mutual consent. It is a union
so intimate and so vital that the parties to it become
one by a continuous and reciprocal moral determi-
Institutional Checks and Limitations. 149
nation. Once formed, it is disseverable by passion,
or caprice, or antipathy. It is lifted above private
convenience or private preference. Fluctuations of
desire, changes of motive, disappointment as to re-
sults, or as to personal gifts have no power to revoke
it. It is ordained to bring new life into being and
its obligations to that life are as irrevocable as that
life itself. Now it is just at this the most vital
nerve-centre of social being that advanced Indi-
vidualism delivers some of its worst assaults. It
is insisting more and more upon a view of marriage
that resolves it into a contract, the conditions of
which are to be determined solely by the parties
to it. In effect it declares love to be the only
sacrament that can bind either husband or wife to
stand fast in a plighted faith, and when love wanes
or dies, the oath of life-long fidelity perishes with
it. It has multiplied the grounds of divorce to such
an extent that, now and then, even the civil courts
that pass upon them have rebuked public opinion
for not purging the statute-books of some of the
American States of the demoralizing license of their
laws. It holds that no man or woman should be forced
to continue in a relation that has become repugnant
1 50 Individualism.
or irksome; and that the tie is really binding only
so long as it produces the happiness which the
parties to it had a right to expect. And what is
more, it holds these views of marriage quite con-
sistently with its own fundamental principle the
satisfaction and welfare of the individual the one
primary interest that dominates all others.
But further, the Family rules the individual, rises
superior to his opinions, wishes, and volitions be-
cause of an inherent attribute of sacredness. Largely
as this quality may proceed from Divine institution
and enactment, it is quite as largely grounded upon
the instincts and traditions of mankind in every age
and in every land ; and upon the universal conviction
that the Family is the nursery of the Church and
the Nation ; and that on the whole, as is the Family,
so will be the Church and the Nation. The depth
and power of this conviction are attested by all
history. Christianity emphasizes and confirms it by
additional sanctions; but does not create it. It
is as old and as wide as the human race, and
prevails as a central fact in its art, literature and
laws, as well as in its various religions. The first
book of Holy Scripture records not only the founda-
Institutional Checks and Limitations. 151
tion, but the dignity and sacredness of the Family.
"The Iliad, in which there is the most vivid re-
flection of the spirit of archaic life, is the story of
a war in vindication of the purity of the marriage-
bond; and its heroes are those who go to battle
to avenge the violated sanctity of the Family; the
^Eneid is the story of filial duty and reverence.
In Greece, its earliest institutions the phratrice and
gentes are the evidences of the power and dignity
of the Family." In Home the sacredness of the
marriage-tie affirmed itself in many of the ob-
servances of its religion and in the characteristic
tone of its laws; while in that most populous and
enduring of empires, China, filial reverence and
obedience have beyond all else proved the cohesive
and conservative force of society and of the nation.
So true is this that it is an accepted law of history,
almost a recognized axiom of social ethics, that com-
munities and nations are doomed to corruption and
overthrow so soon as they begin to impair the
sacredness, or to loosen the obligations of domestic
life. And it is equally a law of history that com-
munities and nations, when they begin to do this,
uniformly begin by gradually ceasing to uphold the
152 Individualism.
sacredness of the Family as a moral order having
an end in itself as well as beyond itself; and as
uniformly conclude by treating it as a thing devised
by men, grounded on the law of expediency, and
maintained or dissolved as the will of the indi-
vidual may determine *.
But if, in all these senses, the Family must govern
the individual and assert its superiority over him,
there are others in which it must serve him and
be subordinated to his interests. He has a right to
hold it strictly to its own commission and to demand
from it all that it was intended to do for him. In
virtue of his personality he, too, has an end in himself.
He must be treated as more than an instrument or a
slave. He bears God's image and is marked for an
eternal as well as a temporal life. His franchises
match his hopes and keep pace with his capabilities.
He is to be educated into a consciousness of the
larger life of the State and the yet larger one of the
Church. He is to be so tutored and fashioned as
to develop into the twofold and yet homogeneous
character of the citizen-Christian and the Christian
citizen. He has not only a body to be reared, but
* See Note 10.
Institutional Checks and Limitations. 153
a soul, a mind, a heart to be instructed, so that to
him the highest freedom will be the service of truth
and righteousness. Such are the claims of the indi-
vidual upon the Family, and the Family serves the
individual in all offices necessary to the satisfaction
of these claims. The mastery of the individual over
the Family is the mastery of rights founded in the
nature of things and the constitution of humanity.
The reciprocal mastery of the Family over the
individual has the same foundation, and the two
masteries are the integration of an organic life
which precedes and excels every other organism in
its influence over man.
(II) Turning now to the State or the Nation, I
am to show that it does not exist for the individual
as its exclusive end ; that it is not only greater than
the individual because of its greater power and dura-
tion; but by reason of its own inherent constitution-
its own aims, labors and achievements. In speaking
of the State, I shall speak of it in its essential idea,
and not in its accidents as imperial, monarchical,
republican, or democratic. I shall assume, moreover,
(what some may think needs to be proved), that it is
ordained of God, that it has a conscious, continuous,
154 Individualism.
responsible personality * ; and therefore a moral as
well as a political life, that it may do right and be
rewarded, and that it may sin and be punished, that
it may live its own life, conform to its own law,
do its own work, act after its own methods, be self-
determining; and yet that it is God's instrument
for purposes that can be attained in no other way,
and that its noblest liberty consists in the voluntary
acceptance of God's way.
It is of the essence of personality that whatever
other ends it may have, it must have an end in and
for itself. But the Nation has personality and this
personality expresses itself "first in the consciousness,
then in the conscience of the people in whom it is
constituted," and finally through its own self-centred
will. But if the State or the Nation possess this
attribute, it must have ends of its own which, though
coincident with the interests of the individual as far
as those interests extend, sweep out indefinitely
beyond them. After it has done serving the indivi-
dual; after it has defined and protected his rights;
after it has indicated and enforced his duties; it
also serves the race. True it is that all such higher
* See Note 11.
Institutional Checks and Limitations. 155
service has its reflex benefits for the individual ; but
primarily the individual is not the aim of that higher
service and its benefits to him are only indirect and
consequential.
Again, that the State has not the individual for
its chief or exclusive end is shown by the fact
that, though political in the mode of its organiza-
tion and activity, its noblest function is to represent
and advance the moral order of the world, to give
practical force in the secular relations of man to
the laws that constitute that order, to witness in
each bounded sphere of its sovereignty for universal
justice and eternal truth ; and so to be in virtue of a
natural ordination and on its own side of human life
not only a king to bear rule, but a prophet to teach,
and a priest to offer sacrifice even the sacrifice of
unselfish service and devotion first to humanity
and through humanity to God. The State is not
in itself a righteous power; and yet in its normal
idea and after its own manner as a representative
and witness of the world's moral order, it cannot,
if true to its own noblest end, but work for righteous-
ness. History shows the process by which humanity
is developed according to the Divine purpose, and
156 Individualism.
the life of the Nation is, next to the life of the
Church, the highest manifestation of that process.
Indeed, as all organic instrumentalities working in or
upon man have their origin in the one eternal
purpose of God ; so, at some point in the wide circuit
through which they travel, they must meet and
coalesce both in aims and results as the final
consummation of that purpose. They have one
beginning ; they must have one end. And as their
beginning attested the unity of God, so must they by
their historic work first vindicate that unity amid the
world's fractures and anarchies ; and then, at last, as
their end, proclaim it as restored and established
forever, that all things may be gathered together in
one and God may be all in all. If this be so, then it
is the deepest idea of the State, as it is the foremost
end of the State, while not formally a righteous
power, to speak, after its own sort, for that same
moral order that the Church supernaturally and more
articulately voices by its faith, worship and sacra-
ments. If it were not so, then the only ground of its
authority as the source and administrator of posi-
tive law would be either force, or expediency, or an
implied compact, or the will of majorities. The State
Institutional Checks and Limitations. 157
is what it is because it is a moral before it is a
political power, or a political power only that it may
become a moral one; and in either case its end is
realized only as it passes up into unity with the
Divine purpose as manifested partially in history and
wholly in Revelation.
Still again, the State, considered as equivalent to
the Nation, rises above the individual, quite loses
sight of him in its connection with races. It is the
chief outlet and interpreter of race instincts, race
aspirations, race energies. Civilization at large looks
to the Nation to mediate between it and the race-cha-
racteristics of mankind. Some study history by the
light of great names that cannot be recalled without
recalling the peoples and eras to which they belonged.
Some read it by the key found, as they believe,
in the properties of races. Still others find in
nations, not in races, the integral powers in history ;
and this is the view now taken by the best thought
of our time. The Nation combines and fuses into
unity of temperament and purpose the peculiarities
not merely of this or that race, but of all races drawn
within its borders. Races as such have no status in
the political or moral order. They neither sow nor
158 Individualism.
reap, build nor destroy. If they may be said to
have missions, errands, destinies, these cease to be
ideas and become realities only as they are worked
out under the conditions of national life. It is in
and through the State that what is only half
conscious and indeterminate in the race is developed
into the force and dignity of definite motives and
definite objects. The only points of contact, there-
fore, between races and the general body of civiliza-
tion are and must be essentially national.
But there is still another and more impressive
illustration of the manner in which the life of the
State sweeps widely out beyond all individual interest
to be drawn from that, perhaps, most commanding
function in virtue of which the Nation gathers up, con-
serves, and transmits the cumulative results of human
effort. Individuals, like shadows, come and go. Even
the centuries looked at, one by one, are fugitive, and
in their onward march bear with them passively and
uncritically the forces that have wrought within
them. The Nation alone is, in the world's order,
the continuous and conscious factor; and because
continuous and conscious, capable of blending to-
gether in an unbroken unity the wisdom and repose
Institutional Checks and Limitations, 159
of the past with the hope and aspiration of the future.
Whatever the growth of language, science, law, litera-
ture, art, physical discovery, civil government, social
experience; whatever the fruits of the toil and
sacrifice of the great and good who have won a
lasting hold on the memory of mankind ; or of the
unremembered labor and suffering of the unhonoured
and unknown in all humbler walks of life ; whatever
may have been achieved in any age or in any land by
acts of piety, bravery, love, denial too obscurely done
to be sung by poets or recorded by historians all
find in the Nation's life not only an ample storehouse
for their safe-keeping, but a discriminating and
responsible trustee, an incorporated and majestic
intelligence to collect and preserve them. This deep,
broad life, impelled by instinct as well as by reason,
deems not its duty done in merely accepting as an
inheritance such priceless treasures. It knows that
it is not to keep them as talents wrapt in a napkin
and buried in the ground, but as living powers to be
sent forth on fresh errands and into fresh fields of
action. Thus it not only receives, but enriches what
it receives ; not only bears itself as the heir of all the
ages, but as a wise steward who makes the most of
1 60 Individualism.
the trust committed to him in the interest of the
posterities to come. But admirable and comprehen-
sive as is this function of the State ; high as it lifts
the State above the individual, it is not so general or
so remote as to belong of right to the abstract and
ideal rather than to the practical. For though it
demonstrates the fact that the Nation has other ends
than those bounded by individual interests; it also
proves how beneficently the State works for the indi-
vidual, while pursuing ends that manifest and uphold
the corporate continuity of the race. And it does so
in this wise.
"No man can think of his own separate individual
life without a certain sad, almost bitter feeling of
its shallowness and brevity. So much of it seems
abortive, that he is tempted to take refuge in petty
cares that will relieve him of all sense of incon-
gruity in the littleness of life. Noble designs, why
should he cherish them when time is not given
to fulfil them? Unselfish enthusiasm for the pro-
gress of mankind in truth and goodness, why
should he allow himself to be swept on by its fervor
and energy, when soon and forever he shall cease to
have any more part in all that is done beneath the
Institutional Checks and Limitations. 161
sun ? Visions of perfection and glory for himself to
be realized only after immeasurable toil, denial and
doubt, why should he not banish them from his
soul as tantalizing intruders, when a few more years
shall bury himself and them in a common grave" ?
The beginnings and materials of great things are
within him; but they are never realized; and the
higher his ideals soar the more they disclose the
poverty and meanness of actual life. Everywhere
boundless possibilities have their counterpart in
miserable performances. All this indeed does not
trouble much the bulk of mankind, bent, as they
are, upon little else than the satisfaction of animal
wants and selfish desires ; but to highly cultured and
aspiring minds to commanding, originative intel-
lects to heroic or saintly spirits to souls hungering
for truth and righteousness to wills that, in their
passionate yearning to do and dare for all that is best
and purest, strive to push back these cramping
limitations of time to all such this is a deep and
bitter experience. The remedy, as we all know, is
commonly found in the Christian view of the soul's
immortality ; and this ought to be effective with all
who accept it as an article of their faith. But there
L. S. 11
1 62 Individualism.
are many who do not accept it as a living, habitual
motive; and yet who are capable of doing very
precious and needful work for their fellowmen. And
it is these that the State may inspire with hope and
courage by holding up to them as a practical motive
an inferior and vague, but still, after its kind a noble
immortality nobler than that offered by the ma-
terialism of the day, the immortality of matter and
force nobler than that to which the pantheist would
lure us, the immortality of absorption in the Infinite
Unknown nobler, too, than that carved out for us
by the idolaters of reason, the immortality of ideas.
To the individual fretting himself into despair, or
wasting himself in indolence under the sense of his
own feebleness and littleness: here, says the State,
is a life the life of a great, growing, continuous
personality the Nation's own life built up out of all
that is left of the ages that have gone, and holding in
itself the prophecy of what is to be in the ages to
come a life into whose bone and fibre have been
transmuted and assimilated what poets have sung,
and wise men have taught, and statesmen, lawmakers,
warriors and patriots have achieved; and besides
whatever all the nameless millions have done for God
Institutional Checks and Limitations. 163
and humanity : accept the vocation, seize the oppor-
tunity it offers you. Come forth from your isolation
'and open your heart to its wide sympathies and
aspirations. Learn from it your place and your work
not only in the fellowship of your country ; but also
in the grander brotherhood of mankind. Wherever
you toil, whether in the retreats of learning or in the
crowded areas of trade and industry, or out on the
skirmish line of the battle against error and wrong ;
whether in high places or low ones; whether in
wealth or poverty; know certainly that, in that larger
life, nothing you say or do worthy to be remembered
shall be lost or forgotten. Eminently true of the
Church, it is also quite as true in its degree of the
State that, as God has provided some better thing
for us that our fathers without us should not be
made perfect ; so He has provided some like better
thing for our children that, we without them, should
not be made perfect. It is this law that ennobles
our imperfect life ; because it certifies, in every such
vanishing individual life, the promise of a future
without which it cannot be made perfect.
Thus the State, while working for ends above and
beyond the individual, becomes a heritage for the
112
1 64 Individualism.
individual. "The wealth of its historical associations
and the grandeur of its historical epochs are its gifts.
The majesty of its law and the authority of its
government and its conquering power are around
him; its acquisitions are his vantage ground, its
domain is his home ; its order is his working field ;
its rights are his armour ; its achievements are the
heights he treads; its freedom the ampler air he
breathes;" while more to be desired than all its
larger, profounder, mightier life lives in his life,
levelling it up step by step to the magnanimity of its
own spirit and the greatness of its own aims.
(Ill) Finally, I pass on to speak of the Church
as affected by the root principle of Individualism.
Were not the proofs at hand, we might well deem it
incredible that, in an age of so much intelligence and
with more than an average of knowledge of Gospel
teaching and ecclesiastical history, such sadly de-
fective views of the origin and constitution of the
Church should be held in any quarter, as those to
which I am about to allude. Anarchical and des-
tructive as may be the notions touching the Family
and the State now propagated by the advanced
schools of Individualism, the full extent of their wild
Institutional Checks and Limitations. 165
and pernicious tendency crops out only when we
consider their bearing on the Church, the foremost of
the Institutions commissioned of God for the educa-
tion and redemption of man. It is here that they
open up chasms in the immemorial tradition of
Catholic truth, that may well startle us and compel
us to ask, whereunto these things may grow ?
If what we are told be true, we must at once and
absolutely abandon our faith in the Divine origin and
supernaturally developed structure of the Church;
and drop to the level of accident, expediency, con-
venience. The one Body breaks up and dissolves, and
only the one Spirit remains. Christianity evaporates
into ideas, sentiments, tendencies. It ceases to be a
visible, historic kingdom, and is thinned away into a
spiritual force that organizes itself throughout the
entire domain of its action according to the hap-
hazard suggestions of individual leaders, or of par-
ticular schools of religious opinion, or according to
the supposed requirements of each succeeding genera-
tion. This, I say, is the notion that we must accept
with all its inferences, if what we are told be true.
And what, specifically, are we told? Why that
as "the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the
1 66 Individualism.
Sabbath" : and that, in regard to all ecclesiastical
Ordinances, as every man is justified in applying to
himself, by reason of his inherent dignity and moral
birth-right, the very words applied by the adorable
Saviour to Himself "In this place there is one
greater than the temple" : so the Church, with all its
institutions for teaching and discipline, with all its
sacramental channels of grace and bonds of fellowship
'was made solely/or man; and is, therefore, alterable by
man ; exists for man's benefit as its highest end ; and,
therefore, must take on whatever form, cast aside, as
a worn-out garment, whatever rite, prerogative,
creed, or ministration he may decree. Historically,
it must, in short, in all save its central idea, be the
ever changing outgrowth of man's own conception of
his wants. A liberty is his of which no authority can
despoil him to determine, at any moment, how much
or how little of the Church may be needful to
himself: and whether he will dwell within or without
its fellowship, according as he may judge it to be a
help or a hindrance to his spiritual life.
But if such liberty be his, (and it is now confi-
dently asserted that it is), then it follows of necessity
that the Church is not an organic body, but a mere
Institutional Checks and Limitations. 167
aggregation of individuals: not a kingdom framed,
established, equipped of God, changeless in its
structural essentials as the message it delivers : but a
voluntary society endowed with an indefeasible right
to determine its own organization, and with that its
own conditions of membership both as to faith and
discipline.
And to realize how closely this issue concerns us,
it is well to remember that it must be met within
our own Christian lines. It is thrust upon us not
more by open antagonists, than by nominal friends
who, strangely enough, seem not to be surprised or
restrained by the fact that this conception of the
Church has the hearty sympathy of minds to whom
the very names of Gospel, Church, Sacrament,
Ministry, Creed, are an intellectual nuisance, or a
moral impertinence. Brethren, it were a crime in us
to ignore, or to underrate the depth and breadth of
this controversy. Would we have the Gospel ? We
must defend its ordained witness and interpreter.
Would we have the New Testament and hand it on
as we received it ? We must resist, as with one will
and one heart, this attempt to sap and mine the
corporate unity and historic continuity of the Body
1 68 Individualism.
that originally framed and certified, and, during all
the Christian centuries, has preserved and transmitted
its Canon. Would we continue to worship the
Triune God, and to preach, and to baptize, and to
distribute to the faithful the bread of life after the
manner of our fathers ? Then, too, after their manner,
must we witness a good confession in this solemn
matter as against all gainsayers of Zion's glory : and
this, though like an anvil we be hammered by
organized dissent, or beaten with rods, like some
alien captive, by a liberalism that believes itself
stronger without than with organization.
As to the answer to this and all similar errors,
the occasion limits me to the utmost brevity of
statement. Would that the Word of God were as
full and explicit on all subjects touched by it, as
it is on this. If anything in it is declared to be
absolutely of God and not of man, it is the Church.
It was the fulfilment of His purpose, the creation
of His will, the revelation of His wisdom and love.
There has never been an hour since the Fall that
it did not exist. Through all the ages it has been
doing its appointed work, has had its Creed, its
Ordinances, its Worship, its Priesthood. There have
Institutional Checks and Limitations. 169
been no changes in its essential elements save such
as have grown out of and corresponded with God's
own successive dispensations, God's own advancing
revelations of "the mystery of godliness." Patriarchs,
prophets, lawgivers, kings have been its ministers,
and all of them were called and sent of God, not of
man. In the fulness of time, the Church of old
fulfilled, finished, merged itself in Christ, the one
Mediator between God and man, the promise of
Whom it had borne through the ages. Gathered up in
Him, its life principle its organic energy interfused
and blended with His incarnate Godhead and by
it intensified, enriched, enlarged according to the
eternal purpose of the Father, it issued from Him
again for its work in history, in a way faintly figured
to us by water flowing from its springhead or light
from the sun. When He declared, " Upon this rock
I will build my Church*," He declared that He
would build in time, and out of, and among men
that which was already in life, in power, and in
purpose, as well as in form, in Himself and one with
Himself. The actual building began with the
descent of the Spirit and was visibly manifested
* St Matt. xvi. 18.
1 70 Individualism.
by the preaching and baptizing of Peter on the
Day of Pentecost; when, and afterward, "the Lord
added to the Church daily such as should be saved*."
Even this "adding," be it observed, as exhibiting
the process of building, was so essentially God's
and not man's act, that the Inspired Record is
careful to say the Lord did it.
Such, briefly, was the origin of the Christian
Church, and that origin in every important character-
istic was radically different from the origin of any
earthly society. It came into being, as everything
bearing God's image and superscription in the organic
and rational world comes into being His own thought
taking on the vesture woven of His own hand His
own life clothing itself with a body born of His own
will and moulded after His own purpose. It came
into being, too, not only according to God's method
in the order of nature ; but also according to God's
method in the order above nature the spiritual,
supernatural order, in which He has contact with
His work in a manner of which the bounded realm
of mere antecedents and consequents affords us
neither sign, nor figure, nor vaguest glimpse.
* Acts ii. 47.
Institutional Checks and Limitations. 171
But this view of the Church's outgrowth from
Christ is greatly strengthened by what the Scriptures
tell us concerning its actual structure. First, and as
the simplest representation, we learn how it was
planted as the least of all seeds, and, how developing
after its own law, it was to grow until its branches
covered the whole earth. Next, we learn how it rose
under the hands of the master builders from its chief
corner stone, Jesus Christ, "in Whom all the building
fitly framed together groweth unto an holy temple
in the Lord*." Though both these conceptions of
growth involve the principle of organic development,
and therefore imply an organic structure, and, if
organic, then one whose end was present in its
beginning, and whose whole was potentially prior
to its parts; yet they also render it possible that
the thing planted, or the thing builded might stand
apart from the Being that planted or built it, having
no necessary share in His personal life, deriving
no quickening, continuous virtue from His wisdom
and love, breathing its own air, compacted by its
own joints, weaving its own tissues. But we are
not allowed to stop here. Inspiration throbs with
* Eph. ii. 21.
1 72 Individualism.
another and deeper pulsation of thought, and its
language rises to a loftier meaning. The Church
is no longer only a planted or a builded thing ; but is
intensified and exalted into a living body, the fulness
of Him that filleth all in all, whose Head is Christ
"from Whom the whole body fitly joined together
and compacted by that which every joint supplieth,
according to the effectual working in the measure
of every part, maketh increase of the body unto the
edifying of itself of love*." Thus the growth and
the Grower, the building and the Builder, the plant
and the Planter, the Body and the Life that pulsates
in the Body are one and inseparable. It is one and
the same personality repeating itself by a double
and yet identical manifestation. It is the one Christ
once on earth, now in heaven, always abiding with
us in vital continuity by the Spirit and in the
Church, which is His Body indefectible, universal,
immortal ; not a mere construction by even a Divine
Will-power, far less a society founded on an aggre-
gation or union of individual wills ; but a spiritual
generation and outbirth of the eternal Godhead in
Christ Jesus.
* Eph. iv. 16.
Institutional Checks and Limitations. 173
But if God's Word, in its account of the origin of
the Church and of the evolution of its structure, dis-
covers no trace of human suggestion ; so, in its account
of the ends for which the Church was instituted, it is
careful to place not only its relations to God before
its relations to man ; but its work for God before its
work for man. The individual soul so far from being
its chief is always its secondary object. In all its
functions it was needful that it should be the master,
if, in any, it was to be the servant of man. In none is
it amenable to man, in all it is responsible to God. It
is impossible to study the ends for which the Church
exists, as they are set forth in Revelation, without
seeing that it has ends which immensely transcend
the interests of mortals, and which, antedating the
foundation of the world, will outlast its dissolution.
Time in its widest reach hovers over and drops
away from them like a shadow. Out of eternity
they came forth and into eternity they return. At a
point in their boundless sweep determined of God,
man is taken up and redeemed; and at another
likewise determined, he is left through endless ages
with or without God, according as he has accepted
or rejected the overtures of mercy.
1 74 Individiialism.
The Scriptures do not leave us to infer from their
general teachings, or from any indirect statement, how
these ends of the Church are graduated in their hold
upon man and upon things above and beyond him.
The Apostle, in describing his errand as a preacher
and Christ's errand as the Saviour of man, describes by
necessary implication the chief ends of the Church; for
preaching is one of the means by which the Church
does its work, accomplishes its ends; and Christ's
mission to the world is the Church's mission, because,
as His Body and by His Spirit, it continues His
mediatorial work. It was the burden of the Apostles'
preaching, as it was the purpose of Christ's coming,
" to make all men see what is the fellowship of the
mystery, which from the beginning of the world
hath been hid in God who created all things by
Jesus Christ " ; but then, immediately following this,
is the yet higher end of both announced in words
most significant and remarkable in this connection;
namely, "to the intent, that now unto the princi-
palities and powers in heavenly places might be
known the manifold wisdom of God, according to the
eternal purpose which he purposed in Christ Jesus *."
* Eph. iii. 10, 11.
Institutional Checks and Limitations. 175
Again, the Apostle preached to bring men "to
the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the
face of Jesus Christ * : " that by this light they might
be brought to see, " that God was in Christ reconciling
the world unto himself f." But here, too, we have the
higher and further end in the same Apostle's words
an end common to the Church and to the Truth it
delivered, " that in the dispensation of the fulness of
times He might gather together in one all things in
Christ, both which are in heaven and which are on
earth |."
Indeed, so definite and luminous is the witness
of Holy Scripture on this point, that none who accept
its authority can doubt that the Church exists for
vastly wider and sublimer purposes than the salvation
of the individual. "What it does for him, great,
unspeakably great as it is, is rather the beginning
than the end of its work a single event, or at most
a single chapter in its record, rather than its sole
function, or its exclusive task.
In the foregoing thoughts it has been furthest
from my aim to dwarf the individual and to magnify
institutions whether heavenly or earthly. In common
* 2 Corin. iv. 6. t 2 Corin. v. 19. J Eph. i. 10.
1 76 Individualism.
with all that love Him who gave Himself for us, and
who, by that matchless gift, would enable every man
to take his place in the scale of being as only a little
lower than the Angels and to have dominion over all
things beneath him, I rejoice at every fresh proof of
his real greatness. So far from gainsaying what modern
life has done for him ; so far from narrowing or
withholding any of his rights or privileges ; so far from
questioning the vast capabilities of his nature, or
disparaging the range and power of his faculties, or
doubting the destiny of glory that awaits him ; I have
only attempted to trace for him, by inference rather
than by direct statement, the path of true progress,
the law of all healthy development graven by God's
hand at once and equally upon the individual and
humanity at large ; upon the Family, the State, and
the Church.
In a time that has already done so much and
promises to do still more for the elevation of the
individual, it is not strange that he should be tempted
to wander away, or, now and then, to shoot rashly from
the orbit in which, by the ordinance of God and the laws
of his own being, he must move, if he would not stifle
his own energies, shatter his own hope, mutilate his
Institutional Checks and Limitations. 177
own ideal. It has been my endeavour to lift from this
orbit the shadows, nay, in some cases, the dark eclipse
cast upon it by misleading speculations, exaggerated
theories, and even favorite watchwords and rallying
cries of the masses touching the rights and powers of
the individual as defined and limited by those of
the great organic Institutions whose authority is
the authority of Him by Whom all things were made
and in Whom all things consist.
That man must live in the by-ways, or in the
clouds who does not see the deep, strong drift of
the hour toward a yet larger liberty for the indi-
vidual and a yet smaller area for authority*. It
may or may not be the duty of the wise to resist
it ; but certainly it is their duty if there be poison
in it, to extract it ; if there be peril in it, to guard
against it ; if there be passion and violence in it, to
restrain them ; if there be ignorance and unbelief in it,
to enlighten them ; if there be spiritual death in it, to
preach to it the one only Name given under heaven
whereby we may be saved.
As in regard to the subject which has engaged
our thought, so for all things affecting the interests
* See Note 12.
L.S. 12
178 Individualism.
of sound learning and true religion, the purity
and sacredness of the Family, the order of Society,
the growth of the State, the administration of
Government, the welfare of mankind, the strength
and honor of the Catholic Church, the glory of
the Triune God for all let us pray and work as
the very children of God and members of Christ,
waiting in humility and patience for the day "when
we shall all come into the unity of the faith, and
knowledge of the Son of God, unto a perfect man,
unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of
Christ*." Then, "in thinking God's thoughts we
shall be thinking our own; and in doing His will
we shall be doing our own"; and so shall taste the
only true freedom of a spiritual being. Individual
opinion shall vanish in the vision of eternal truth,
and Individual duty, in becoming the witness and
expression of Infinite love, shall become the most
ardent desire of the soul.
*Eph. iv. 13.
NOTES.
NOTE 1.
"Entire quarters of the globe, Africa and the East
have never had, and have not yet the idea of free-will.
The Greeks and Romans, Plato and Aristotle and the
Stoics had it not. On the contrary they conceived only
that a man by his birth (as Athenian or Spartan citizen
<fcc.), or by strength of character, by education, by
philosophy, only so did they conceive a man to be free.
This idea came into the world through Christianity, in
which it is that the individual, as such, has an infinite
worth, as being aim and object of the love of God, and
destined, consequently, to have his absolute relation to
God as spirit, to have this spirit dwelling in him."
Hegel, Philosophic des Geistes, p. 374.
NOTE 2.
That I have not overstated this view, or the im-
portance of meeting it, the following thoughts will prove.
They are from a volume entitled "Scotch Sermons"
1880, (Macmillan and Co.), in whose Preface we read
"This volume has originated in the wish to gather
together a few specimens of a style of teaching, which
122
1 80 Notes.
increasingly prevails amongst the clergy of the Scottish
Church." "It may serve to indicate a growing tendency,
and to show the direction in which thought is moving."
Substantially the same teaching on this point, i. e. the
uselessness and obsoleteness of the External Evidences of
the Christian Religion might be quoted from many sources
(ecclesiastically) nearer home.
Says the preacher (p. 297) "Now we learn on
reflection that evidence divides itself into two great
classes, one of which naturally connects itself with the
sacerdotal principle of religion, the other with the
individualistic. That which is homogeneous with Sacer-
dotalism (?) refers as a rule to historical testimony,
calls in the aid of empirical logic, and generally adopts
the method of verification employed in science Leaving
out of view all philosophical objections to this mode,
there is a practical one of very great force, which it is
worth our while to consider. The objection is the want
of success which this sort of evidence for religious truth
has hitherto had in combating scientific scepticism. That
it has been unsuccessful will probably not be admitted by
the Christian controversialist. But the whole life both
of man and nature will soon be the recognized domain of
physical science, and then there will be seen more clearly
than now the inability of religion to defend itself by the
old empirical method. People will have to relinquish it
altogether or discover a new basis for it, and uphold it by
a more enlightened method. Let Christian apologists be
ever so clever or so laborious, they will have to change
Notes. 1 8 1
their principles, ere they can make much way among the
educated classes. I believe they will have to make trial
of that form of evidence which connects itself with
Individualism, whereof the principle is this : that
religious truth is its own evidence, the spiritual con-
sciousness the ultimate authority." Unfortunately even
the adoption of the method here so strongly urged
leads, according to the preacher, to a very sad and dis-
couraging result. "The popular apologist ought to
consider whether, fighting the battle of Christianity on
an objective basis, he is not rather harming his cause
than helping it." But if the battle be fought on the
subjective basis, the result is quite as hopeless. " For
the moment you bring the reasons for your belief from
the depths of inner consciousness, and state them logically
on paper, a thousand to one but they seem feeble to your-
self, ...and I am afraid if the spiritual ideas of the Bible
do not commend themselves as true to the consciousness
of those who read them, there is no method at present by
which they can be proved. At all events, in the present
state of popular culture, philosophical proof could not be
made widely intelligible." Again, "the spectacle of the
multitude looking to theology for evidence to support its
faith is pathetic and even tragical. The evidence that
theology is able to give is not in this age particularly
valuable, and people should be taught, though with
caution, to seek refuge from unbelief in their spiritual
instincts." What makes the case even more hopeless, as
the preacher admits, is the fact that these instincts are
1 82 Notes.
"so vague and inarticulate" that "we have no phraseology
for them," and, therefore, cannot put into shape the sort
of evidence they give. Each consciousness is shut up
within itself and can neither give, nor receive any
tangible help from the consciousness of any body else.
So that what is evidence to one may be no evidence to
another, and vice versa.
NOTE 3.
Protagoras was the best known and most influential
of the Athenian Sophists. He was a disciple of Herac-
litus the originator of the philosophical notion of sensa-
tion as the source of knowledge and of the theory of the
relativity of knowledge. He greatly expanded and,
with much logical power, applied the fundamental
doctrine of his master to the knowing subject the
individual mind. As a corollary from this doctrine, he
asserted that Man is the measure of all things, of things
that are that they are, of things that are not that
they are not, iravTwv ^p^/xetrwv //terpov av#pu>7ro?, TWV
/Atv ovTWV tos ecrri, TOJV Sc OVK OVTOJV tos OVK eoriv. Just as
each thing appears to each man, so it is to him. All
truth is relative. Plato discussed and refuted this thesis
in his Theaetetus, in his Dialogue Protag., and in his
SopMstes. Aristotle handled it also (Metaph. in. 2. 32,
p. 998).
Ueberweg (History of Philosophy, YoL i. p. 75)
says very aptly, "In illustration of the fundamental idea
Notes. 183
of Protagoras, a kindred utterance of Goethe may be
compared, which will illustrate as well the relative truth
of that idea, as the onesidedness of disallowing the
objective reason." I have observed that I hold that
thought to be true which is fruitful for me, which adjusts
itself to the general direction of my thought, and at the
same time furthers me in it. Now, it is not only
possible, but natural, that such a thought should not
chime in with the sense of another person nor further
him, perhaps even be a hindrance to him, and so he will
hold it to be false; when one is right thoroughly
convinced of this he will never indulge in controversy
(Goethe, Zelterscher Briefwechsel, v. 354).
Compare further the following in Goethe's Maximen
und Reflexionen: "When I know my relation to myself
and to the outer world, I say that I possess the truth.
And thus each may have his own truth, and yet truth is
ever the same."
NOTE. 4.
I cannot refrain from quoting in this connection a
passage from Canon Liddon which is as eloquent as it is
true. Uttered some seventeen years ago, the march of
events and the more extreme development of certain
schools of thought, during that time, have only served to
give additional force to it. "Faith is proscribed by that
undue exaltation of intellect which leaves no room for it.
The great conflict which rages between the pride of
1 84 Notes.
natural intellect and the claims of faith, is fought out on
no remote or imaginary battle-field. And upon the issue
to many a man who hears me may depend nothing less
momentous than the salvation of his soul and his place in
eternity.... Think of it well, brethren, and take your
parts. Believe it, there is a submission of thought which
is not slavery, and there is a haughty mental indepen-
dence which, alas ! knows itself to be anything but true
freedom. They do not really suffer defeat who make
their submission to God : they who, while opposing Him,
seem to conquer, can win but a perilous and short-lived
victory. On this side is Paul, first a persecutor, then an
Apostle ; and Justin, once a philosopher, then an Apolo-
gist and Martyr; and Augustine, who out of a sen-
sualized heretic and free-thinker, is raised by Divine
grace to be a Saint and Doctor of the Universal Church.
On that side is Julian, Emperor and Apostate, with
endowments of character and gifts of intellect so cal-
culated to win our highest interest and admiration ; yet
ending a reign in which rare accomplishments, and
consummate address, and vast political power had been
vainly employed against the Gospel with the despairing
confession, 'Thou hast conquered, O Galilsean.' In this
short life we see only a small portion of the full results
of thought and action. But another world casts its
shadow across our path ; and we often anticipate the
endless future with a keen presentiment which is not less
than tragical. Assuredly intellect has its rights, its
privileges, its duties, its triumphs. But faith has likewise
Notes. 185
her own province and her unshared capacities; and while
all around her is change and uncertainty, she gazes
unfalteringly upon the Unseen and Eternal. She knows
that for the Object on which her eye is fixed, all else, if
need be, may well be sacrificed, since all else will one day
pass away."
University Sermons, 2nd Edition, 1863 5, p. 181.
NOTE 5.
"All attempts hitherto made to construct a religion
independent of Scripture have turned out acknowledged
failures : the systems reared cannot stand a sifting
examination by reason, and have been utterly powerless
on human character. There was an expectation, long
cherished by many, that something better than the old
Christianity of the Bible literally interpreted might come
out of the great German philosophic systems ; but these
hopes have been doomed to disappointment. The idea
was fondly cherished by some that certain men of literary
genius, who had caught more or less of the spirit of the
German metaphysics, such as Coleridge, and Goethe, and
Carlyle, must have something new and profound to
satisfy the soul in its deeper cravings, could they only be
induced to utter it. Coleridge has played out his tune
sweet and irregular as the harp of ^Eolus, and all men
perceive that he never had anything to meet the deeper
wants of humanity, except what he got from the songs of
Zion. It has long been clear, in regard to Goethe, and is
1 86 Notes.
now being seen in regard to Carlyle, that neither of them
ever had anything positive to furnish in religion, and
that all they had to utter was blankly negative, and the
last hope of drawing anything soul-satisfying from these
quarters has vanished from the minds of those who have
been most impressed by their genius.
The school of intuitionalist divines, influenced by the
Teutonic speculations, have given profound expositions of
some of the deeper principles and feelings of the soul, and
have thus furnished a contribution to philosophy, and
incidentally benefited theology. It has erred, not in the
positive views which the members of it have unfolded,
but in what they have omitted and scornfully denied.
In particular they have lost sight of one of the deepest
and most ineradicable of all our intuitions : they have
taken no notice of that sense of God and of a judgment-
day which make men feel dissatisfied with every form of
natural religion and bring them in helplessness to the
crucified Saviour and the Written Word. Intuitionalism
has had its trial in the age now passing away, as
Rationalism had in the previous one, and both have been
found utterly insufficient."
"The Intuitions of the mind, Inductively Investi-
gated" By Rev. James Me Cosh LL.D.
NOTE 6.
As illustrative of the shifting character of the solutions,
offered from time to time, of the profoundest questions in
Notes. 187
metaphysics, take those worked out in immediate
succession by Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel names
foremost among the most brilliant in the long series of
speculative thinkers reaching from ancient times down to
the present.
Kant claimed as the result of his reasoning that the
real in its ultimate sense could not be an object of
consciousness, that it is impossible to bring the object
itself within the grasp of the subject. Fichte and the
others accepted the conclusion and undertook to meet the
requirement by constructing a philosophy of the real that
should be above consciousness, i. e. "to expand the subject
to the immensity of the object," an attempt which, as
Dean Mansel affirms, "necessarily ended in the identifi-
cation and consequent annihilation of both." Fichte
worked out the ego and non-ego as entities beyond
consciousness. Consciousness might authorize the in-
ference that they are, but could not possibly inform us
what they are, which amounted only to saying that the
subjects or causes of sensible or intellectual phenomena
are unknown. The effect of his scheme was to leave no
room for the distinct existence of Deity and to resolve
God into the moral order of things. After Kant and
Fichte, and partly as the result of their systems, it was
found that the Real could not become an object of
science unless in some way it could be "immediately
given or revealed to intelligence." There must be an
absolute Knowing to answer to the absolute Being. Not
only must the object of Knowledge be beyond con-
1 88 Notes.
sciousness, but it must be grasped by a faculty above
consciousness. This was the problem which Schelling and
Hegel proposed to themselves. It grew up out of the
antecedent thought. The necessity cornered them. They
attempted to meet it in two ways, Schelling by a direct
beholding or intuition lifted above the conditions of time
and space, Hegel by a logical reason equally lifted above
the laws of thought, and so independent of them as to
make consciousness not the substance, but the accident of
thought. The results of both schemes are thus stated by
Mansel, (Hansel's Metaphysics, pp. 312 14). With
Schelling "subject and object are the same, both being
merged in the absolute. The world of things and the
world of thought are but two opposite aspects of one and
the same being, manifesting itself without or with con-
sciousness. The human reason is identical with the
divine, and philosophy is not an imitation or repetition of
the divine thought, but the divine thought itself de-
veloped into consciousness. The act of knowledge is an
act of personal existence : this is the testimony of the
normal consciousness. The act of knowledge is also
an act in which personal existence disappears in the
absolute : this is the testimony of the abnormal in-
tuition. Cogito, ergo sum, says the one, Cogito, ergo non
sum, says the other."
The system of Hegel also rests on the postulate of
the identity of thought and being. "This assumed
identity necessitates a conception of thought not only
distinct from, but at variance with the evidence of
Notes. 1 89
consciousness. Thought according to the latter is mani-
fested (so far as we know it) in relative, determinate,
special states of my individual existence. Thought
according to Hegel is an impersonal, indeterminate,
absolute, universal, unconscious substance, becoming all
things, constituting the essence of all things, and
attaining to consciousness only in man. Creation does
not imply a creator, nor thought a thinker. The
Hegelian process may be described as a creation of the
Deity no less than of the world, for it recognises no
Deity apart from the world."
These characteristic speculations of Schilling and
Hegel are by no means mere speculations. They long
since emerged from their own abstract world into the
world of living, thinking, believing, doubting men.
They are influencing directly or indirectly thousands of
thoughtful minds on many of the leading questions of
the day. In most cases where any argument is attempted
in defence of the grand postulate of Individualism the
mind the measure of all things, it will be found, if
carefully analysed, that the argument is founded upon
inferences drawn from these systems.
NOTE 7.
The a priori demonstrations here referred to are those
built upon grounds outside of experience, i.e. independent
of all mental or moral cognitions furnished by experience.
They do not include therefore what are known as the
1 90 Notes.
a priori demonstrations constructed by Newton and
Clark or by Des Cartes. In all these the fundamental
postulate, though originating in the intuitional conscious-
ness, verified itself by experience and appealed in doing
so to the ordinary laws of belief and evidence. The
alleged failure of these not only did not prevent, but in
some degree encouraged the efforts of German thinkers
and of certain French and English writers who had
caught their spirit to elaborate arguments for the Divine
existence from ideas, which, when analysed, prove to be
little more than metaphysical abstractions in regard to
the nature of being that deserve to be classed among
the dreams rather than among the rational processes of
the mind.
NOTE 8.
The view here maintained finds not only a pertinent
illustration, but a strong confirmation nay, an incontro-
vertible proof in the grounds of opposition to doctrinal
and historical Christianity assumed respectively by the
old Deism in England and the earlier Rationalism in
Germany, on the one hand ; and by the later schools of
scepticism in both countries, on the other. The former
rejected Christianity both doctrinally and historically
considered, (1) because it contained doctrines repugnant
to the rational and moral instincts, and (2) because its
records contained miraculous attestations of such doctrines.
The doctrines could not be true because they violated
Notes. 191
reason, and the history could not be true because it
affirmed that miracles were wrought to prove them. The
latter cordially accepts the doctrines because as spiritual
ideas they are in harmony with reason, and adapted to
the wants and instincts of humanity; but rejects the
history because its miracles not only contradict the
uniformity and immutability of nature's laws, but also
because they were unnecessary and superfluous the
narrative of them having its origin in the wonder
working, passionate desire of man to clothe with the
marvellous whatever he has come to regard as divinely
pure and great. These two theories based on the judg-
ments of the moral reason or the moral and spiritual
instincts are not mere variations of testimony. They are
radically contradictory and mutually destructive. The an-
tagonism is absolute and the inference is undeniable. Both
schools agree in casting aside the history of Christianity
as worthless and incredible, but for diametrically opposite
reasons. Both schools perish in the conflict begotten of
their hopeless disagreement; the one denying Christian
principles because the moral reason declares them in-
credible : the other accepting them because the moral
reason sees in them the interpretation and fulfilment
of its own profoundest yearnings. It only remains to
be added that the later schools both in Germany and
England rest their reputation for usefulness on the
ground that they were chiefly instrumental in destroying
the earlier.
1 92 Notes.
NOTE 9.
Passing over many noteworthy signs of reaction in
the higher thinking of England and the Continent from
the bald, hard materialism that has of late years enlisted
multitudes of disciples ; I cannot forbear making brief
mention of what is going on in the same direction in the
best known circle of abstract thinkers in America. It
is commonly supposed in the Old World that the
American mind is either too busy with other things,
or too undisciplined and immature, to be much interested
in the great problems which have been the themes of the
profoundest philosophic thought in every intellectually
active age and among every people of ripe intelligence.
The supposition is not borne out by the facts. Along 1
side and mingled with the ambitious energy and practical
enterprise which have reclaimed a continent from savage
wildness, and built up within its borders a new and
powerful civilization, there has been, from small be-
ginnings, a steady, though diversified advance in the
cultivation of philosophy. The old arguments and in-
quiries touching the relations of subject and object, of
the real and the phenomenal, of the sources and laws
of knowledge, of the origin and government of the world,
of the nature and destiny of man, of an intelligent First
Cause and a Supreme Ruler, and all kindred themes have
been re-examined, re-stated, expanded, modified, pushed
to their logical inferences. How, and where, and by
whom this kind of work has been done among us could
Notes. 193
not be told without entering into details in no way
needful for the purpose of this note. In the summers
of 1879 and 1880, in a quiet New England town, what
has since taken upon itself, in a quite natural way, the
name and work of a school of philosophy, assembled
for conference among its leaders and for instruction
of all comers. The teachers were of widely different
antecedents and from parts of the country very remote
from one another. They were drawn together simply
as seekers after truth as candid inquirers who had
given much previous study to the subjects that were
to engage them, and yet who had not gone far enough
in their thinking to make definite theories or systems a
rational necessity, or even a mental gratification. Some
of them had graduated in the school of Utilitarianism,
some in the best known varieties of the Rationalistic
school ; while others had hovered on the verge, if they
had not gone down into the depths of Pantheistic idealism,
bifurcating, on the one hand into a worshipful estimate
of reason and, on the other, into a transcendental type
of mysticism. Generally speaking, the gathering was
composed of men who had tried every school and were,
on one ground or another, satisfied with none. They
neither intended nor attempted to found a new philo-
sophy. The only aim publicly avowed was to see what
could be done to rescue philosophy on the one side, from
the cold, careless, creedless, Godless grasp of the material-
ism which has been aptly called "the dirt," or, at best,
"tadpole" theory of humanity; and on the other, to
13
L. S.
194 Notes.
purge it of the scepticism built up on a spiritual or
mystical basis. United in this one purpose, each teacher
or discourser took his own line, and gave the results
of his own studies, without stepping aside to review or
to controvert those of his fellows. In this way nearly
all the great thinkers of the past found a voice and an
interpretation toned by what is characteristic of the
deeper thought of to-day. Now the one most signi-
ficant thing in this, for many reasons, very remarkable
movement was, with rare exceptions, a strong, earnest
tendency toward what, on the whole, may be best
described as a revived and modified Platonism : i.e. &
conception of the universe which makes matter the
least part of it, which finds the supernatural above,
beneath and around nature, which sees abundant room
for the exercise of will-power divine and human amid
all the uniformities and immutabilities of physical laws,
which maintains that this world is not the world that
rational beings believe it to be without a living, personal
God at its head, which declares that man is what he is
because the image of God is upon his soul and because
an immortal life awaits him.
The first meeting of this Concord School excited only a
transient curiosity. It was noticed by the public press and
in intellectual circles as the whim of a few restless minds.
The second, however, attracted wide and respectful atten-
tion, by its evident earnestness and sincerity of purpose,
by its comprehensive range of subjects, and, quite as
much, by the versatile and disciplined faculty for abstract
Notes. 195
thinking exhibited in most of its discussions. Though
it arrived at no positive results of any appreciable value,
and propounded no formulated philosophical creed, the
wisest observers of the signs of the times generally regard
it as a new and most hopeful departure in philosophy,
and as the best reasoned and most powerful protest of
the day against the grossly materialistic tendencies of
recent scientific and metaphysical inquiry. As such it
has been deemed worthy of this formal mention : as
such, too, we may see in it a sign and promise of a time
not far distant, when the deepest, most carefully reasoned
thought in physical science and in metaphysics will be
no longer, as now, the enemy, but the friend and helper
of Historical Christianity.
NOTE 10.
Certain phases of modern thought have reached their
present conclusions in regard to the nature and obligations
of marriage, and also in regard to the grounds for its
dissolution by easy and natural stages. Those conclusions
are not of recent or of sudden growth, though the practical
effect of them has only of late begun really to startle the
well wishers and defenders of the purity and order of
society. What wonder that an increasing number of men
and women should see no sacredness in the marriage tie,
and should contract it " unadvisedly and lightly," not
"soberly and in the fear of God :" or that they should claim
to be the final judges of the reasons and grounds of divorce,
when, for centuries, both the common law and statute law
132
196 Notes.
of the English speaking race have held marriage to be
merely and altogether a civil contract, and therefore a
purely human institution, having neither a divine origin
nor any formally divine sanction. What wonder that a rela-
tion which may be entered into without priest, minister,
or magistrate, and even without witnesses, ratified and
declared by no public or formal ceremony whatever the
consent of the contracting parties being alone essential
to the validity of the contract, and this consent given
according to the taste or jiidginent of the parties ;
what wonder, I say, that the million should find no
difficulty in concluding that a relation so formed may as
easily and as lightly be broken asunder? Modern law"
itself, as interpreted by the best judicial authorities, is
the parent of some of the worst theories and practices
that now trouble us ; and our Courts of divorce, by a
righteous Nemesis, are beginning to tremble at the retri-
bution which themselves have invited.
And yet the responsibility lies further back even in
what Society and the State themselves authorized to be
done some three hundred years ago. It is sad to think
that they could find no better way to redress the wrongs
inflicted by a corrupt and perverse ecclesiastical guardian-
ship of marriage anterior to the Reformation, than that
of stripping marriage of all Divine sanction and Sacra-
mental significance, and resolving it into what it is to-
day. It requires no prophet to foretell the trouble and
disaster, the moral impurity and moral decay that,
sooner or later, will avenge the violated sanctity of this
Notes. 197
primary institution of God. In tracing to the Reforma-
tion the change which has been generally accepted both
as to the conception of marriage and as to the proper
mode of solemnizing it, it should be remembered that it
was the political, not the religious element in the Refor-
mation that originated the change; and that in this,
as in many other things, even the Reformed Catholic
Church was no match for what were deemed the ne-
cessities or the expediencies of the State. The Roman
Catholic Chui-ch has been censured, justly too, for many
errors and corruptions; but in this matter of marriage,
she deserves honourable mention for the resolute, un-
flinching courage with which, in our own time, she has
resisted the downward tendency, and affirmed over and
over that she would discipline any of her members who
ignored the authority of her sanction in a matter so in-
separably connected with the law of God.
It is certain that the majority of persons in every one
of our Christian communities are quite ignorant of
what the Civil law teaches and rules as to what is
essential to the validity of marriage ; and while treating
the subject, though only in this passing way, I have
thought that it would not be amiss to append the
following statements, taken from an article published
recently in one of the ablest and best known of American
Journals They (enlightened people) look upon
marriage not as a sacrament, or in any sense a divine
institution, as did the generations of the past ; but con-
sider it a mere civil contract, that may be completed
1 98 Notes.
by the consent of the parties alone. On this point
Shelford says : " Marriage is considered in every country
as a contract, and may be defined to be a contract
according to the form prescribed by law, by which a
man and woman, capable of entering into such a con-
tract, mutually engage with each other to live their
whole lives together in the state of union which ought
to exist between a husband and his wife." Bishop
says : " Marriage is a contract having its origin in the
law of nature antecedent to all human institutions, but
adopted by political society, and charged thereby with
various civil obligations. It is founded on mutual
consent, which is the essence of all contracts, and is
entered into by two persons of different sexes, with a view
to their mutual comfort and support, and for the pro-
creation of children." And Lord Robertson, a Scotch
Judge, remarks : " Marriage is a contract sui generis,
and differing in some respects from all other contracts,
so that the rules of law applicable in expounding and
enforcing other contracts may not apply to this. The
contract of marriage is the most important of human
transactions. It is the basis of the whole fabric of
civilized society. The status of marriage is juris gentium
and the foundation of it, like all other contracts, rests on
the consent of the parties ; but it differs from all other
contracts in this, that the rights, obligations, and duties
arising therefrom are not left entirely to be regulated by
the agreements of parties, but are, to a cei-tain extent,
matters of municipal regulation." The learned Bouvier,
Notes. 199
speaking of the common law of England on this subject,
says : " Marriage is a personal relation existing between
a man and a woman, founded upon a civil contract, in
which the assent of the parties is alone essential to its
validity. All persons are able to contract marriage
unless they are under the legal age or otherwise in-
capacitated. The age of consent at common law is 14
in males and 12 in females. The parties must be each
willing to marry the other. No particular form of words
or ceremony is required. Mutual consent to the relation
of husband and wife is all that is necessary."
The law of the state of New York on this subject is
well expounded by Judge Harris, who, in a case reported
in the fourth of N. Y. Reports, page 230, says : " A
valid marriage may exist without any formal solemn-
ization. By the ancient common law of England,
marriage, being regarded as a sacrament, must, to be
valid, have been celebrated in facie ecclesice. But since
the Reformation it has been uniformly regarded as a
civil contract. In this State the common law rule exists,
and whatever may be thought of its wisdom, the
existence of the marriage contract is a fact which may be
proved like any fact. The sanctions with which religion
has invested this contract are not a matter of civil
cognizance." And Justice Gilbert, of the Supreme Court
in the case of Van Tuyl against Van Tuyl, in 57 N. Y. R.,
page 253, says : " A valid marriage, to all intents and
purposes, is established by proof of an actual contract, per
verba de presenti, between persons capable of contracting,
200 Notes.
to take each other for husband and wife. No solemn-
ization or other formality, apart from the agreement
itself, is necessary. Nor is it essential to the validity of
the contract that it should be made before a witness."
The most curious case that has ever risen under the laws
of this State was the case of Bissell against Bissell,
reported in fifty-fifth Barbour, page 355, which came
up for adjudication before Justice Barnard a few years
since. In that case a man and woman being engaged to
be married, the former stated to the latter that he did
not believe in marriage ceremonies, and wished her to
waive the ceremony, saying that a marriage without it
would be perfectly valid. She finally consented to waive
the ceremony, and fixed the day for the marriage. On
that day, while they were riding together in a carriage,
he placed a ring upon her finger, saying : "This is your
wedding ring ; we are married." She received the ring as
a wedding ring. He then said ; " We are married just as
much as Charles is to his wife, (referring to his brother
and his sister-in-law). I will live with you and take
care of you all the days of my life as my wife." She
assented to this, and they went to a house where he had
previously engaged board for "himself and wife," where
they lived together for some time. In this case Justice
Barnard held that it constituted a valid marriage. And
in delivering his opinion in the case, he laid down the law
as follows : " In this State marriage is a civil contract,
and no religious form or ceremony of any kind is
essential to its validity. All that is requisite is that the
Notes. 20 1
parties should be capable of contracting, and that they
should actually contract to be man and wife. An agree-
ment made in the present tense, whereby the parties
assume toward each other the marital relation, is an
actual marriage. This agreement may be either written
or verbal, with or without witnesses, and may be proved
like any other contract."
That eminent and learned jurist, Lord Mansfield,
says: "If a man and woman seriously and sincerely
enter into the marriage contract without the inter-
position of a clergyman or any religious ceremony what-
ever, it will be a good marriage by the law of God, of
nature, and of the land."
NOTE 11.
I have assumed that the State or the Nation which
is the concrete form of the State is not only a political
but a moral organism; and further that is not only a
moral organism, but that it has the essential attributes
and functions of moral personality. I have ventured
upon the assumption with a full knowledge of its liability
to be called in question. There is much of the thinking
of the time that assumes almost the exact opposite. On
so grave a subject it may not be well to rest in an as-
sumption followed by no proof of its reality. I find the
(attempted) proof ready at hand in a work which, for some
reason aside from its deep thoughtfulness, has failed to
attract the attention which it deserves, ("The Nation,"
2O2 Notes.
E. Mulford. 1872. Cambridge : Riverside Press pp. 16, 17,
18), "The nation is a moral organism. In the necessary
elements of its existence in history it transcends the
merely physical conditions of a physical organism ; and
in freedom, and law, and order, in the fulfilment of
a conscious purpose and vocation, and in the obligation to
law are the very elements of a moral being. Its
members are persons who subsist in it in relations which
presuppose the personality of the members. There is
in it the assertion of a justice which is the affirmation
of a person in the recognition of these relations between
the moral whole and the moral parts of the whole. Its
law is regulative of the whole and of the parts, in these
relations. It is as a moral organism that the nation
is the sphere of the individual person of the growth
and formation of his character. It presumes an existence
in a conscious relationship, and its fulfilment in the
relations of a moral order. It is thus that there is
formed in the nation the consciousness of the relationship
of humanity and the moral life of the individual is
apprehended in it as the life which is truly human.
The process of the nation is only as a moral organism.
It is constituted in the order of a moral world. Its
course is defined in law, and in law as prescribing
the actions and relations of men as moral agents.
The conditions of history presume the being of the
nation as a moral organism. History is not a succession
of separate events and actions, but a development in
a moral order, and in the unity and continuity of a
Notes. 203
life which moves on unceasingly. But it is only as
the nation is an organism that this unity and continuity
are manifest in it, and as a moral organism that this
moral order is confirmed in it. The nation, therefore,
cannot be comprehended in the definition, in its logical
limitations, of a physical organism. The distinction
of a physical and a moral organism is necessary as
serving to illustrate the being of the nation in its
necessary conception.
The physical organism is determined in itself by
a law of necessity, as the tree which cannot be other
than it is ; the ethical organism is determined in a
law of freedom which is the condition of moral action.
In the physical organism each member exists only in
its relation to the whole, as, for instance, the hand is
nothing without the body, and has no separate signi-
ficance ; in the ethical, each member has in itself a
necessary significance, and each member, furthermore,
has the destination in itself for which the whole exists,
and which the whole has in itself. The whole subsists in
the same relation and has the same destination as the
individual, arid neither the whole nor the individual
has a secondary existence, nor can be made only a means
to the end of another. In the physical, the elements
which are atomic, are taken up and separated again,
and as they pass back into unformed nature, it is only to
reappear in other and manifold forms; in the ethical
the members are individuals existing each in his own
identity, and each is so related to the whole that instead
204 Notes.
of a construction after the exclusive type of the whole,
it is indifferent to say that the individual has his type in
the whole, or the whole its type in the individual. But,
further, the nation is a moral personality. This is
determined in its consciousness and in this consciousness,
subsists its independence of other nations. It is not
to be necessarily what they are, nor as they are. Its
object is before it, which it knows as its own; its
freedom is in the working out of its vocation.
The condition of the realization of personality is the
same in the nation as in the individual. This condition
in each is the clearness and fulness in which it com-
prehends its purpose and in the faithfulness with which
it works after the type of its own individuality. Again
the nation is a moral person, since it is called as a power
iu the coming of that kingdom in which there is the
moral government of the world, and in whose completion
there is the goal of history. It is a power in the moral
conflict and conquest which is borne through history. It
is a power manifest in the judgment of history. But in
the formal and artificial conception of the nation this
becomes a fiction, and in the mechanical conception
it has no moral ground. The nation is a moral person,
since its development is in an integral moral life. Its
character is its own, it is not derivative from any powers
on earth ; it does not proceed from them, and its responsi-
bility cannot be transferred, nor its obligation rendered
to them. As it has its own vocation and is judged in it,
so it must have its own end.
Notes. 205
Again, the being of the nation as a moral person has
its witness in the consciousness of men. It has
awakened the higher moral emotion and its response
has been from the higher moral spirit. It has called
forth the willing sacrifice of those who were worthy.
The life of the individual has been given for the life
of the nation. If the nation had only a formal existence,
this moral spirit could have no justification, and if
its origin was in self-interest, to call for self-sacrifice
would be the negative of it ; and if its end was only
the protection of the life and property of the individual,
this siirrender of them would be the immediate defeat of
its end. Again, the nation is a moral person, since it is
the organized life of society, and society is formed in the
spirit and in the power of a personal life. It is to
be governed in the conscious determination of the
will and to act as one who looks before and after.
Its strength is in rectitude of thought and will ; wisdom
and courage, stedfastness and reverence, faith and hope
are attributes of it, the highest personal elements become
its elements and are moulded in its spirit.
Finally, the relation of the individual to the nation
presumes, as its necessary condition, the existence of the
nation as a moral person. The individual becomes
a person in the nation, and this involves the existence
of the nation as a person ; for personality, as it is formed
in relations, can subsist only in an organic and moral
relationship a life which has an universal end."
206 Notes.
NOTE 12.
John G. Whittier, who has written some of the
most tender and beautiful lyrics of the time and is
regarded as one of .the most gifted and thoughtful
minds in America, is generally accepted there as an
able and moderate representative of the more advanced
school of Individualism in religion and politics. Very
recently he expressed himself in these words*.
" Everything valuable to the soul has its corres-
ponding need in the soul. Authority as a ground
and element of Religion must wholly disappear. The
teachings of Christianity will be on the needs of man,
and the claims for Christ will be based on the perfect
character of his life and teachings, and not on His
authority"; (i.e. as claiming to be the Son of God
essentially divine). " In these periods of transition all
remedies must prove their adaptation to our needs
by satisfying the demands of our reason and our spiritual
wants"; i.e. it is of no moment that they are offered to
us on the warrant of Revelation. They will be true only
to the extent that reason affirms them to be so. The
necessary inference from this is that there is little
room and less necessity for the offices of faith.
* New York Daily Times, Oct. 4th, 1880.
CAMBBLDGE : PKINTKD BY C. J. CLAY, M.A. AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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