BERNARD MOSES 
 
THE KEYS 
 
 OF 
 
 THE CEEEDS 
 
LONDON : PRINTED BY 
 
 SPOTTISWOODE AND CO., NEW-STREET SQUARE 
 AND PARLIAMENT STREET 
 
THE KEYS 
 
 OF 
 
 THE CEEEDS 
 
 ' ' 
 
 LONDON 
 TRUBNER & CO., LUDGATE HILL 
 
 1875 
 
 AH rights reserved 
 
BERNARD MOSES 
 
 * v i 
 
 . ; . < . 
 i i < ' i 
 
PBEFACE . 
 
 THE LETTEES contained in this volume were written 
 between the autumns of 1873 and 1874. The 
 reason for publishing them anonymously will be 
 obvious to all who read them. Happily, religious 
 and historical truth needs not for its confirmation 
 the authority of a name. The Editor has been 
 careful to omit all references of a personal nature, 
 saving only in so far as was necessary to make the 
 position of the writer intelligible. It is considered 
 sufficient to add that the quotations from Scrip- 
 ture have been made, as was natural under the 
 circumstances, from both the Douay and the En- 
 glish versions. 
 
 LONDON: Easter 1875. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 -CO- 
 
 PAGE 
 
 I. THE SHADOW OF DEATH ...... 1 
 
 II. THE SOUL 8 
 
 III. GOD . . . . . . . . . .15 
 
 IV. IN HIS OWN IMAGE, MALE AND FEMALE . . 20 
 
 V. IN HIS OWN IMAGE, INTELLECTUAL, MORAL, EMOTIONAL 25 
 
 VI. THE FALL AND THE INCARNATION . . . 34 
 
 VII. THE ATONEMENT . . . . . . .41 
 
 VIII. THE Two JEHOVAHS 46 
 
 IX. GOD-MAN AND MAN-GOD . . . . .52 
 
 X. THE BRIGHTNESS or HIS GLORY AND THE EXPRESS 
 
 IMAGE or HIS PERSON . . . . . 58 
 
 XI. THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD 62 
 
 XII. THE APOSTASY . . . . . . . 72 
 
 XIII. THE WORD MADS FLESH . . . . . .81 
 
 XIV. ' OUT OF EGYPT HAVE I CALLED MY SON ' 86 
 
 XV. THE KINGDOM OF HEAYEN 95 
 
Vlll CONTENTS. 
 
 LETTER PAGE 
 
 XVI. THE HOLT CATHOLIC CHURCH . . . . 103 
 
 XVII. THE CHURCH; ITS SECRET AND METHOD, IN THEOLOGY 110 
 
 XVIII. THE CHURCH; ITS SECRET AND METHOD, IN MORALS 115 
 
 XIX. THE SUPERNATURAL 123 
 
 XX. MIRACLE . . . 127 
 
 XXI. THE CHRISTIAN OLYMPUS . . . . . 137 
 
 XXII. THE Two TRINITIES 141 
 
 XXIII. THE PRINCE OF DARKNESS . . . 149 
 
 XXIV. HELL . . 153 
 
 XXV. FOR EVER . . 158 
 
 XXVI. NIRVANA . ... .... 163 
 
 XXVII. OUR COUNTRY 168 
 
 XXVIII. THE CHURCH ACTUAL 174 
 
 XXIX. MAN'S GOD AND NATURE'S GOD . 180 
 
 XXX. THE CHURCH POSSIBLE 190 
 
' ! -' 
 
 , -. > o i . > . -. . - 
 
 
 A . 
 
 THE 
 
 KEYS OF THE CEEEDS. 
 
 upon me, and with such fell and menacing grasp that 
 my doctors hold out but faint hope of escape by the 
 expatriation to which they doom me. 
 
 Do not, however, think that I am excusing my- 
 self from complying with your request. On the 
 contrary ; next to the delight I should have derived 
 from renewal of the converse which has been the 
 chief solace of my lonely life, will be the pleasure I 
 4 shall take in seeking to exorcise the demon that 
 
 B 
 
Vlll CONTENTS. 
 
 LETTER PAGE 
 
 XVI. THE HOLT CATHOLIC CHURCH . . . . 103 
 
 XVII. THE CHURCH; ITS SECRET AND METHOD, IN THEOLOGY 110 
 
 XVIII. THE CHURCH; ITS SECRET AND METHOD, IN MORALS 115 
 
 XIX. THE SUPERNATURAL 123 
 
 XX. MIRACLE 127 
 
 XXI. THE CHRISTIAN OLYMPUS . . . . . 137 
 
 XXII. THE Two TRINITIES . 141 
 
 The reader is requested in make the follow iny correctwn* :- 
 
 Page 69, line 4 from bottom, for successors read successor. 
 ., 167, last line but one, for whose read where. 
 194, line 6. after dividing add thpse. 
 
 Key? of th Creed?. 
 
. -1 
 
 
 I ' - , . - *'.''.* * 
 
 '--. " 
 . ;, - 
 
 THE 
 
 KEYS OF THE CEEEDS. 
 
 LETTER I. 
 
 THE SHADOW OF DEATH. 
 
 DEAREST AND BEST FRIEND, Even were my mind 
 disposed otherwise than it is, your touching appeal 
 would deprive me of the power to choose. I cannot, 
 alas ! come to you as you kindly suggest ; for in- 
 firmity, marching far in advance of age, has seized 
 upon me, and with such fell and menacing grasp that 
 my doctors hold out but faint hope of escape by the 
 expatriation to which they doom me. 
 
 Do not, however, think that I am excusing my- 
 self from complying with your request. On the 
 contrary ; next to the delight I should have derived 
 from renewal of the converse which has been the 
 chief solace of my lonely life, will be the pleasure I 
 ^ shall take in seeking to exorcise the demon that 
 
 B 
 
2 THE SHADOW OF DEATH. 
 
 
 
 oppresses you, ancl making you a partaker in the 
 peace I myself have g,t length found. 
 
 I should be disposed to reproach yen for deferring 
 your communication until now, and choosing to suffer 
 in silence rather than tell me what you know would 
 distress me, but that I am conscious of having been so 
 much absorbed in things affecting myself as to justify 
 in a measure your suspicion that human intercourse 
 had become indifferent to me. The charge would be 
 true only to a certain extent in respect of things in 
 general, but wholly untrue where you are in question. 
 For, as you must well know, you have ever been a 
 prime element in my life, whether as an object of 
 worship, hope, and longing, when in my young and 
 ardent days I offered you, as my dearest and best, a 
 sacrifice to the inexorable Divinity of Ecclesiasticisrn, 
 and heedless of your sufferings and my own, took 
 the vows which severed us, and kept them until too 
 late ! Small atonement will it be then if by aught 
 I can say now I succeed in restoring to you some of 
 the peace you so well deserve. And who has the 
 right to command me if you have not ? 
 
 But there are other reasons in presence of which 
 your hesitation cannot fail to vanish. The develop- 
 ment of my mind in regard to the very questions on 
 which you are so sorely exercised, has reached a stage 
 at which utterance of some sort is no longer optional 
 but compulsory. Long ere you broke the too long 
 
THE SHADOW OF DEATH. 3 
 
 silence my resolution was taken ; and you have but 
 modified and determined the form of its expression. 
 Ordered as a last chance for health, if not for life, to a 
 Southern clime, I had already selected and partially 
 packed the materials necessary to enable me to com- 
 pose the book which has been striving to take shape 
 in my mind. Not that I intended to publish it, at 
 least within any time given or contemplated. But I 
 wished to have it in my power to put into the hands 
 of any one sufficiently earnest to care to know, and 
 sufficiently intelligent to be able to comprehend, my 
 view of the real nature of the world-old contest be- 
 tween the Spiritual and the Secular, between the 
 Church and the World, between Religion and Science, 
 between the Soul and the Flesh, a contest that bids 
 fair soon to surpass all its previous dimensions ; and 
 to show also how it is possible, without committing 
 oneself to popular interpretations, not merely to 
 minister faithfully in the Church, but to be a con- 
 scientious and even enthusiastic upholder of it. 
 
 Well, I propose then to write my book to you in 
 a series of letters from my place of exile. And that 
 you may not be incredulous as to the perfect freedom 
 of my treatment, I will remind you that as a secular 
 priest I have never been subject to- the restraint and 
 supervision imposed upon those who are members of 
 any religious Order. Locomotion and converse are 
 thus for me alike untrammelled by superior authority. 
 
 u2 
 
4 THE SHADOW OF DEATH. 
 
 And even were they not, I have in me sufficient of 
 the rebel to assert my independence, although no 
 such overwhelming motive existed as that with which 
 you have supplied me. 
 
 Your case is in some respects a rare one. In 
 youth it is not unusual for certain temperaments 
 to feel suah intense longing to know the secrets of 
 the universe as to be impelled to hasten the termina- 
 tion of life in order to penetrate, unrestrained by the 
 limitations of sense, the world that lies beyond. I 
 well remember having the same feeling myself when, 
 an ardent neophyte, I watched beside the couch of a 
 dead friend who in life had been my fellow-explorer 
 in the realms of mental speculation. Forgetting 
 almost the claims of affection on my grief, and in- 
 terpreting the deep calm and content written on the 
 still face as a proof that now at length he read the 
 meaning of the problem of God and the Universe, 
 and had satisfaction therein, with envious curiosity I 
 cried, ' Oh, that I knew what thou knowest now ! 
 gladly would I take thy place ! ' But you have 
 passed that period of insubordination, and reached 
 one at which disappointment has generally become 
 a habit, and resignation a virtue not so hard of 
 exercise. 
 
 Believe me, then, that in acceding to your most 
 legitimate demand upon my friendship, I experience 
 nothing of the reluctance or wrench you anticipate. 
 
THE SHADOW OF DEATH. 5 
 
 but throw myself wholly and readily into the service, 
 grateful at once for the opportunity so timely ac- 
 corded me, and for the confidence reposed in me. 
 And that your tender heart may not be apprehensive 
 on the score of having unduly tasked my failing 
 powers, I assure you that the prospect of an occupa- 
 tion so congenial to me, both in its own nature and 
 
 O t 
 
 in its association with you, has already done much 
 to excite the action which my doctors declare to be 
 the main thing necessary for my recovery. 
 
 Reserving myself until I shall have reached my 
 destination, I will only say further in this letter, that 
 the manner in which you express your solicitude 
 helps to shape the form of my ansAver. Is the pro- 
 blem of the world's creeds, you ask, in truth soluble 
 only by death, as the poet implies when he speaks of 
 
 The Shadow cloaked from head to foot, 
 Who keeps the keys of all the Creeds : 
 
 and the feeling you describe as so intolerable as to 
 prompt you almost irresistibly to suicide, is that of 
 desire to find those keys. 
 
 In the mean time I would conjure you to bear in 
 mind this consideration. Even were it certain that 
 Death is the custodian sole of the mysteries in ques- 
 tion, it does not follow that under any circumstances 
 -there, in the world to which Death would intro- 
 duce you, more than in this one the secret would 
 be imparted to you. The poet speaks of the ' Shadow ' 
 
6 THE SHADOW OF DEATH. 
 
 only as keeping the keys, in no wise of parting with 
 them. Consider, moreover, that in drawing a con- 
 trast between the two sides of the grave so immea- 
 surably to the disadvantage of this one, you are fol- 
 lowing a philosophy more in accordance with the 
 theology you have been accustomed to deprecate, 
 than with the scepticism you are wont to avow. For 
 it is, as you know, the theological usage to exalt 
 the life hereafter as a condition of all perfection in 
 being and knowing, and to repudiate this one as a 
 mistake and a failure. While scepticism, preferring 
 science or knowledge to the faith inculcated by theo- 
 logy, and not ashamed when ignorant to confess 
 ignorance, holds that strong as may be our convic- 
 tion that we survive and retain our identity after 
 death, we have 110 certitude of the fact. So that if 
 death be indeed the end of all things for the indi- 
 vidual, to court death for the sake of obtaining in- 
 formation on that or any other point, would be to 
 perpetrate a bull of the most ghastly kind. 
 
 You will be surprised to find me speaking thus of 
 a tendency which my life has been spent in combat- 
 ing. But the truth is that, though as Anglican par- 
 son and Catholic priest it has been my function to 
 advocate the claims of faith, as a man I am not the 
 less alive to those of the intellect; and, indeed, as I 
 go on, you will find that it was on grounds rational 
 rather than religious that I adhered to the practice 
 
THE SHADOW OF DEATH. 7 
 
 and profession of my creed, so long after the dissipa- 
 tion of the early illusions under whose influence that 
 creed received my implicit adherence. 
 
 In plain language, I conscientiously remained an 
 officiating priest of the Catholic Church, even while 
 convinced that the authority and doctrines of the 
 Church are founded altogether in what would com- 
 monly be regarded as an illusion. And in the letters 
 which will follow this one, I propose to show you 
 the sense in which, and the reasons why, I and every 
 thinker who deserves the name, are compelled so to 
 regard them ; to put you in possession, in fact, of the 
 Keys of the Creeds, and so enable you to judge for your- 
 self how far you are likely to further your search by 
 taking the poet's hint ; and whether, if it were so, 
 the result would be worth the cost. 
 
 Tell me in your next if my plan has your approval. 
 
8 
 
 LETTEE II. 
 
 THE SOUL. 
 
 MY first concern on reaching this sunny shore, dear 
 friend, was for your letter. Having read it, I hardly 
 know in which respect the profuseness of your ex- 
 pressions strikes me as most excessive, whether in 
 that of your gratitude or that of your surprise. As for 
 the former, believe me that I am but too glad to have 
 my long budding resolve forced into flower and fruit, 
 and to find its ripening sun in one whose affection, in 
 spite of the blight and disappointment that fell upon 
 it when I felt compelled to take the step that placed 
 an impassable barrier between us, has been so deep 
 and constant as yours. 
 
 As for the latter, surely you were not ignorant 
 that the Church has ever claimed to be the sole de- 
 pository of the knowledge you seek ; and why 
 wonder, then, that I should deem myself competent 
 to impart it to you 9 
 
 Your surprise, however, has another source. You 
 had no notion that I had ceased to be the true be- 
 liever you once knew me. Ah, if you only knew 
 
THE SOUL. 9 
 
 how many fill the priestly office without having even 
 my justification, but simply as a mode of occupation 
 and means of livelihood, your wonder would be that 
 the incredulity of ecclesiastics does not force itself on 
 the notice of the laity to the imminent peril of the 
 Church's existence. 
 
 Yet to say that we do not believe, would be to 
 mislead you by saying but half the truth. To all 
 the fundamental doctrines of Christianity specified 
 by you, and the long list of others which grow 
 naturally out of them, I can truly say I believe. It 
 is the sense in which I believe them that will con- 
 stitute the essence of my letters to you. 
 
 It is true that belief of the kind to which I refer 
 would for the world in general be but another name 
 for unbelief. But the world in general has an ex- 
 ceedingly limited capacity of comprehension. And 
 it is its own misfortune if it places a gross ma- 
 terialising interpretation upon truths which are not 
 amenable to the faculties wherewith it is wont to 
 judge them. Anyhow, let it receive the faith in 
 whart sense it may, the world is the better for having 
 it, at lea.st until some substitute be found which has 
 never yet been discovered. 
 
 It is because you yourself, while possessing the 
 faculties necessary for a proper appreciation of the 
 meaning of Christian dogma, have never yet found 
 the effective angle at which to bring those faculties 
 
10 THE SOUL. 
 
 to bear upon it, that yon have been reduced to your 
 recent pass. This is due to the fact that you have 
 been reared a Protestant, and have never quitted the 
 Protestant groove. Catholicism prohibits inquiry, 
 but allows full play to the emotions. Protestantism 
 on the other hand, quenches the emotions, but 
 allows inquiry, though only to a very limited extent, 
 inasmuch as it dictates both the method and the 
 conclusions. That is, while Catholicism closes one 
 eye, that of the intellect, and allows full scope to the 
 other, representing the feelings, Protestantism 
 
 ^ 
 
 wholly closes the latter, and permits the former to 
 be but half open ; and is thus fatal to both the 
 religious and intellectual perceptions of its pro- 
 fessors. 
 
 To take as an instance the Anglican divine 
 whom you truly rank as surpassing in theological in- 
 sight all others of his communion in these days, the 
 late Frederick Denison Maurice. Well ; pure, in- 
 tense, spiritual-minded, and laborious as he was, he 
 failed, as you admit, to grasp a single abstruse truth 
 with such distinctness as to enable him to make it 
 clear to you or to anyone. The reason is that, 
 being Protestant, and severed from the Church, he 
 sought in vain for the keys which alone can unlock 
 the mysteries he sought to explore, and which the 
 Church alone possesses. One might as well seek to 
 traverse the ocean in a fog without a compass. 
 
THE SOUL. 11 
 
 And it is by following the Protestant usage of dis- 
 carding three-fourths of the mind's faculties, and 
 seeking to judge all things by the remaining fourth, 
 that he and you have been stranded in difficulty and 
 darkness. In religion, as in art, reason plays but a 
 subordinate part compared with that of the im- 
 agination. Hence a Protestant regime, however 
 favourable to physical analysis or science, is fatal 
 to religion and art, which appertain to the emotional 
 rather than to the intellectual side of our nature. 
 
 You must not, however, accept the term imagi- 
 nation in its usual restricted sense. Neither must 
 you suppose that because a thing exists only in the 
 imagination it has no actual existence. It is in 
 virtue of our being compounded of two elements, the 
 real and the ideal, that man is an intelligent being. 
 The former includes all that side of him which is 
 cognisable by sense ; the latter that which he knows 
 only through the spirit. The real, which is of the 
 earth, earthly, we share with the animals. The 
 ideal, which is of heaven, exalts us out of their 
 sphere into heaven. By the faculties appertaining 
 to the real we may know the organisation of our 
 bodies and the physical world. By those of the 
 ideal we know God, we overcome the world, we attain 
 immortality. 
 
 It is humanity only in its limitations, its striv- 
 ings, its failures, its sufferings, its dying, that we 
 
12 THE SOUL. 
 
 recognise in the real. In the ideal we see it no 
 longer c vile ' and a ( body of death/ but divested of 
 limitations, translated into the infinite, triumphant 
 over sin, misery, death, risen from the grave, 
 ascended into heaven, seated on the right hand of 
 God. 
 
 The process of idealisation consists in imagining 
 an object as transcending its limitations, existing in 
 a perfection not actually attainable by it, and filling 
 infinity with its expanded characteristics. All that 
 is necessary to truthfulness of idealisation is the pre- 
 servation of character and proportion. 
 
 The faculty by which we perform the act of 
 idealisation is known as the Soul. Call to mind the 
 colloquial method of describing a person who cares 
 for nothing but what is appreciable by sense : a 
 voluptuary who exists only for fleshly delights, an 
 artist to whom the real suggests nothing beyond the 
 real, a beautiful face expressive of nothing but its 
 own beauty of form and colouring, we speak of 
 these as being without soul. The higher imagination 
 is wanting, and we despise them accordingly ; thus 
 giving proof positive that for us the ideal is more 
 than the real. By the soul we are conscious of our 
 limitations. By it, therefore, we are conscious of 
 the infinite. To possess soul is to have a percep 
 tion of a greater and better than we are or can be. 
 Without it we should be as the animals who, having 
 
THE SOUL. 13 
 
 no conception of a better towards which they can 
 strive, remain for ever at the same stage of being, 
 unchanged save bj outward accidents of their con- 
 dition. Man alone is able to look and strive up- 
 wards through the power he possesses of looking 
 beyond his real, that is, through the soul. 
 
 To speak of man's faculty of idealisation, then, is 
 to speak of his soul. By means of this he transcends 
 the finite and approaches the infinite. Thus it is 
 with the soul that he conceives the personified in- 
 finite we call God. 
 
 This sense of the infinite, or soul, includes the 
 sense of perfection, or conscience. The soul enables 
 us to recognise, the conscience impels us to follow, 
 perfection. It is a mistake to restrict the domain of 
 conscience to religion or morals. There is no direc- 
 tion in which the impulse towards perfection does 
 not find ample room for its exercise. The posses- 
 sion of the power of discerning ideal perfection in 
 one or more directions, and of reproducing it in the 
 real, constitutes genius. The extent to which genius 
 is productive depends mainly upon its combination 
 with energy and faith, or confidence in one's ideal 
 and oneself. ' Whatever thy hand findeth to do, do 
 it with all thy might,' is the application of the rule 
 of conscience to every department of life, industrial, 
 artistic, literary, social, political, religious. For 
 in each there is a standard of perfection capable of 
 
14 THE SOUL. 
 
 being discerned and approached ; and he alone is a 
 conscientious worker who strives to the utmost to 
 discern and approach it. To renounce the struggle 
 after perfection, and at the bidding of the temporary 
 and expedient to be content with a low and degrad- 
 ing success, is to seek the real at the expense of the 
 ideal, to serve mammon instead of God, to gain the 
 world and lose the soul. 
 
 It is with the application of conscience to theology, 
 or the science of God, that our concern in these 
 letters will mainly lie. 
 
15 
 
 LETTER III. 
 
 GOD. 
 
 THE idea of God has a twofold origin ; the craving 
 of the intellect for a cause, and of the soul for per- 
 fection. Confident that nothing he sees is self- 
 existent, man necessarily postulates something that is 
 self-existent, and as necessarily proceeds to invest 
 that something with a nature and attributes. Neces- 
 sarily conceiving of it as superior to himself and all 
 he sees around him, he finds no point at which to 
 pause in the process of construction short of the in- 
 finite. Aware of no faculties but those which he 
 finds himself capable of exercising or appreciating., 
 he takes it for granted that whatever he deems best 
 exists also in his Deity; only, without limitations. 
 Embarking in metaphysical speculation, he argues 
 that as he himself constitutes the best thing existing 
 in the finite, and God the best in the infinite, he 
 must be the special though finite manifestation of 
 the infinite God. That is, he must be made in God's 
 image, and endowed with the various qualities, phy- 
 sical, mental, and spiritual, of his Maker, 
 
16 GOD. 
 
 Having come to the conclusion that man, though 
 derived from God and resembling him, is yet not 
 God, but has a separate existence and personality, 
 the earliest metaphysicians did not trouble them- 
 selves about the problem which has occupied their 
 successors through all following ages, whether abso- 
 lute Being, such as a self-existent Creator must be, 
 can be represented in the relative and finite, and 
 become an object of cognition at all, and brought 
 within the grasp of the subject man. Neither did 
 they entertain doubts as to the possibility of reason- 
 ing from the relative to the absolute, or from, the 
 snbject to the object, and identifying that which 
 depends on our consciousness with that on which we 
 depend. Nor did they stumble at the proposition 
 that a conception of air infinite and absolute being 
 by a finite and relative one, involves a contradiction 
 on the ground that such conception must itself be 
 limited and imperfect, and therefore altogether in- 
 adequate and fallacious. 
 
 No ; they set before them one distinct and intel- 
 ligible idea, and though scattered over all regions 
 and among all races, they never let it go ; but how- 
 ever meagre their opportunities and dim their lights, 
 however barbaric their surroundings and evil their 
 times, that idea was ever steadily embodied and 
 reflected in their theology. And however widely 
 they differed in detail, the principle that governed 
 
GOD. 17 
 
 them was always one and the same, for it was the 
 Catholic principle that God, translating himself into 
 the finite, had made man in his own image ; so that 
 man had no option bnt to make God in his image 
 by retranslating himself into the infinite, and ima- 
 gining himself as divested of limitations. 
 
 All theology, therefore, is based on the assump- 
 tion that, man being God in petto, God is man in 
 extenso. But such translation of God into man, you 
 will perceive, constitutes an incarnation. And thus, 
 having by the aid of the imagination leaped the 
 chasm in reason left by metaphysics, and as it were 
 taken the kingdom of heaven by violence, theology 
 found itself fairly launched on its momentous career. 
 
 You will observe that I refrain from using the 
 term Revelation in regard to any knowledge that 
 man has of God, thus far. And I shall abstain from 
 using it, at least in any sense resembling the popular 
 one. My reason is, that I wish to show you the 
 extent to which the human mind is capable of evolv- 
 ing by itself a theology in accordance with Catholic 
 dogma. I expect to avoid some embarrassment by 
 adopting this course. For if we were to start by re- 
 garding the fundamental principle of theology just 
 stated as a ' revealed ' one, we should have to allow 
 that every nation, tribe, or sect, which sets up a 
 god made more or less in the likeness of man, whether 
 physically or morally, may, however low its con- 
 
 c 
 
18 GOD. 
 
 ception and gross its idolatry, claim to be acting 
 under the divine authority of a ' revelation.' That 
 Catholicism should recognise a principle human in 
 origin and universal in application, proves at least 
 that there is thus far no fundamental antagonism 
 between it and the human consciousness. 
 
 Well, it is to your portion of that consciousness, 
 and not to revelation as commonly understood, that 
 I shall appeal in elucidation of the mysteries which 
 perplex and distress you. The kingdom of God is 
 within us, and it is within ourselves that the desired 
 keys are to be found. For it is there that the spirit 
 itself beareth witness with our spirit to the eternal 
 facts of which the creeds are the expression. And 
 what is true of the consciousness at one time, is true 
 of it always. 
 
 But though we have not to travel beyond our- 
 selves for our proofs and illustrations, the journey 
 we have commenced bids fair to be a somewhat long 
 and intricate one. Our path, however, is too ancient 
 and well beaten to be rugged or obscure. If you 
 observe the direction of the footsteps which have 
 worn it, you will see that they are exactly opposite 
 to ours. For what is requisite in our case is, not 
 that we travel by another path than they who have 
 claimed to be guided by revelation, but that we start 
 from the opposite end of the same path. This in 
 itself will save us much trouble. For the well- 
 
GOD. 19 
 
 defined track will keep us from wandering into 
 jungles of speculation, from plunging into sloughs of 
 despondency, or fainting on hills of difficulty. While,, 
 to make it impossible that we should ever be at a 
 loss for a turn, there is always a signpost at hand, 
 with an inscription easy to read, and not difficult to 
 understand, an inscription I have already indicated 
 to you, for it is no other than this : 
 
 1 God made man in His own image? 
 
 This, simple as it may appear, was the compass 
 wherewith in those divine old days the wayfarers of 
 humanity sought the goal of their aspirations. Our 
 search, as I have said, lies in precisely the opposite 
 direction. But the needle that indicates the Pole- 
 star, points also to the Southern Cross. Lately 
 leaving his Maker's hands, and coming into an ex- 
 istence where he himself was the least familiar 
 object, man might well think of himself as preserv- 
 ing the recollection of God ; so that it only remained 
 for him to learn man. We of these later days, ab- 
 sorbed in the observation of man, have well-nigh 
 forgotten God. You see now why I have brought you 
 into this old pathway, and why we start from this 
 end of it. If man be made in God's image, by 
 idealising and magnifying man we shall discover 
 what God is. Not to learn man from God, then, as 
 did our forefathers, but to learn God from man, is 
 the task before us. 
 
20 
 
 LETTER IV. 
 
 IN HIS OWN IMAGE, MALE AND FEMALE. 
 
 WE will take first the most palpable and universal 
 physical facts of humanity, as befits the intelligence 
 in its earliest essays towards the conception of a 
 Supreme Being. 
 
 For this, as for all subsequent stages of our pro- 
 gress, it is necessary that we clear our minds from 
 the prepossessions wherewith we are wont to regard 
 the infinite, and suppose space to be absolutely 
 vacant save only of ourselves and the world visible 
 around us. We are here, and yonder is the void. 
 How came we here, and of what nature must that 
 be which produced us ? 
 
 Such are the questions to which, following the uni- 
 versal course of human thought, we have to provide 
 an answer. Starting, then, from our own conscious- 
 ness, let us see what answer comes most naturally to 
 us, and what are the lineaments of the image of 
 God. 
 
 To man who makes that which he requires, with 
 ngenuity according to forethought and design, his 
 
IN HIS OWN IMAGE, MALE AND FEMALE. 21 
 
 Maker can only be one who proceeds in the self- same 
 fashion, thinking out the details and fashioning the 
 work with his hands. There must be power, or his 
 Creator could not have made him at all. There must 
 be will, and there must be intelligence. All these 
 are human qualities, inasmuch as man finds them in 
 himself; and qualities which constitute one of man's 
 most essential attributes, personality or individu- 
 ality. 
 
 The Creator, then, appears as a Person possessed 
 of characteristics physical and intellectual. But as 
 man grows and observes he finds that something 
 more than these are necessary to account for the 
 impulse to create. Great as was the advance made 
 when, searching into the marvels of nature, Aristotle 
 found everywhere proofs of the presence of intel- 
 lect, and ascribed creation to Intelligence rather 
 than to Will or Power, a motive for creation was 
 still wanting. 
 
 It is only as we approach adolescence that we 
 learn to ascribe aught resembling emotion to our 
 parents. As children we do not wonder at the fact 
 that the being to whom we belong consists of two 
 persons, a mother as well as a father. Only slowly 
 dawns upon us the mystery of Sex, and its correla- 
 tive Sentiment. It is long after man has learnt to 
 recognise in his progenitor power and intelligence, 
 that he learns to credit him with emotion or love. 
 
22 IN HIS OWN IMAGE, MALE AND FEMALE. 
 
 Thus, even while confining himself to the phy- 
 sical side of things, man is led more and more to see 
 in his Maker the original and counterpart of him- 
 self ; and, recognising one point of family likeness 
 after another, to ascribe to him every organ, faculty, 
 and quality he finds in himself; only, divested of 
 limitations. And the less special and restricted to 
 any particular tribe or race such attributes are, 
 that is, the more they belong universally to all man- 
 kind, the more Catholic appear the results attained. 
 Sectarianism in its earliest form consisted in depict- 
 ing the Deity after the likeness of some particular 
 people ; making him black and thick-lipped, as did 
 the Ethiops, or white, lithe, and straight-featured, as 
 did the Greeks. Later ones consisted in investing 
 him with local moral characteristics ; as did the 
 Jews when they invested their Jehovah with the 
 jealous exclusiveness characteristic of themselves, a 
 quality to which their isolated condition as a people 
 is mainly owing. 
 
 A favourite practice in all non-monotheistic re- 
 ligions was to cut up humanity, as it were, and dis- 
 tribute its various qualities, moral and other, among 
 several deities, making one the impersonation of 
 power, another of wisdom, another of love; and in 
 having also separate gods to represent not merely 
 separate nationalities, but separate human pursuits, 
 as war, peace, music, agriculture. All these mytho- 
 
IN HIS OWN IMAGE, MALE AND FEMALE. 23 
 
 logic systems, pagan though they were, and sectarian 
 in respect of their failing to ascribe perfection in all 
 respects whatsoever to one and the same supreme 
 Being, were yet essentially Catholic in so far as they 
 proceeded on the principle of making God in man's 
 image, the image of man's best, divested of limita- 
 tions. 
 
 For a being to experience the sentiment of love 
 and to be productive, it is evident that the element 
 of duality must not be wanting. For a solitary 
 existence there is neither object of love nor mode of 
 production. Unable to conceive it of himself, man 
 cannot conceive it of his Maker ; and whatever man 
 cannot conceive of himself, he cannot, consistently 
 with the rule of nature and Catholicism, conceive of 
 God. Where, moreover, man may well ask, can the 
 universal law of duality, the law in accordance with 
 which nature appears as one vast sexual apparatus, 
 have its origin and seat but in the nature of the Crea- 
 tor himself, the type and model in the infinite of the 
 finite manifestation of him self called the World ? 
 
 The primitive doctrine that God created man 
 in his own image, male and female, and conse- 
 quently that the divine nature comprised the two 
 sexes within itself, fulfils all the conditions requisite 
 to constitute a Catholic theological dogma, inas- 
 much as it may truly be affirmed of it that it has 
 been held semper, ubique, et ab omnibus, being uni- 
 
24 IN HIS OWN IMAGE, MALE AND FEMALE. 
 
 versal as the phenomenon to which it owes its exist- 
 ence. 
 
 How essential to the consistency of the Catholic 
 system is this doctrine of duality you may judge by 
 the shortcomings of the theologies which reject it. 
 Unitarianism blunders alike in regard to the Trinity 
 and the Duality. Affecting to see in God a 
 Father, it denies him the possibility of having either 
 spouse or offspring. More rational than such a 
 creed as this was the primitive worship of sex as 
 represented by the male and female principles in 
 nature. In no gross sense was the symbolism of 
 such a system, conceived, gross as its practice may 
 have become, and as it would appear to the notions 
 of modern conventionalism. For no religion is 
 founded upon intentional depravity. Searching back 
 for the origin of life, men stopped at the earliest 
 point to which they could trace it, and exalted the 
 reproductive organs into symbols of the Creator. 
 The practice was at least calculated to procure re- 
 spect for a side of nature liable under an exclusively 
 spiritual regime to be relegated to undue contempt. 
 
25 
 
 LETTER V. 
 
 IN HIS OWN IMAGE, INTELLECTUAL, MORAL, 
 
 EMOTIONAL. 
 
 I DO not wonder at your surprise. Yet were I to 
 give but a moderately full account of the worship 
 referred to in my last, I should have to write a volume. 
 For us as Christians the universality of the doctrine 
 of the divine Duality derives its main importance 
 from the fact that it indicates the recognition by 
 the human consciousness of the necessity of a multi- 
 plicity of persons in the divine essence. In these 
 days, when men accounted of the highest culture 
 are found to ridicule the doctrine of the Trinity as 
 intrinsically absurd, and to regard the Athanasian 
 creed as incoherent and unmeaning, it is well to re- 
 collect that the belief finds justification in the very 
 constitution of physical human nature, and as we shall 
 presently see, in the laws of human thought. Just a 
 few instances, then, in illustration of its antiquity 
 and universality. 
 
 It appears certain that the names of the Hebrew 
 deity bear the sense I have indicated ; El, the root 
 
26 IN HIS OWN IMAGE, 
 
 of Elohim, the name under which God was known 
 to the Israelites prior to their entry into Canaan, sig- 
 nifying the masculine sex only ; while Jahveh, or 
 Jehovah, denotes both sexes in combination. The 
 religious rites practised by Abraham and Jacob prove 
 incontestably their adherence to this even then an- 
 cient mode of symbolising deity ; and though after 
 the entry into Canaan the leaders and reformers of 
 the Israelites strove to keep the people from exchang- 
 ing the worship of their own divinity for that of the 
 exclusively feminine principle worshipped by the 
 Canaanites with unbridled licence under the name 
 of Ashera, yet the indigenous religion became closely 
 incorporated with the Jewish ; and even Moses him- 
 self feU back upon it when, yielding to a pressing 
 emergency, he gave his sanction to the prevailing 
 'Tree and Serpent' worship by his elevation of a 
 brazen serpent upon a pole or cross. For all portions 
 of this structure constitute the most universally ac- 
 cepted symbols of sex in the world. 
 
 It is to India that we must go for the earliest 
 traces of these things. The Jews originated nothing, 
 though they were skilful appropriators and adapters 
 of other men's effects. Brahma, the first person in 
 the Hindoo Triad, was the original self-existent being, 
 inappreciable by sense, who commenced the work of 
 creation by c creating the waters with a thought,' as 
 described in the Institutes of Manu. The waters. 
 
INTELLECTUAL, MOEAL, EMOTIONAL. 27 
 
 regarded as the source of all subsequent life> be- 
 came identified with the feminine principle in na- 
 ture whence the origin of the mystic rite of bap- 
 tism and the atmosphere was the divine breath or 
 spirit. The description in Genesis of the Spirit of 
 God moving upon the face of the waters indicates 
 the influence upon the Jews of the Hindoo theogony, 
 to which they had access through Persia. 
 
 The twofold name of Jehovah also finds a corre- 
 spondence in the Arddha-Nari, or incarnation of 
 Brahma, who is represented in sculptures as combin- 
 ing in himself the male and female organisms. And 
 the worship of the implements of fecundity continues 
 popular in India to this day. The same idea under- 
 lies much of the worship of the ancient Greeks, find- 
 ing expression in the symbols devoted to Apollo or 
 the sun, and in their androgynous sculptures. Aryan, 
 Scandinavian, and Semitic religions were alike per- 
 vaded by it, the male principle being represented 
 by the sun, and the female by the moon, which was 
 variously personified by the virgins, Ashtoreth or 
 Astarte, Diana, and others, each of whom, except 
 in the Scandinavian mythology, where the sexes are 
 reversed, had the moon for her special symbol. 
 Similarly, the allegory of Eden finds. one of its keys 
 in the phenomena of sex, as is demonstrated by the 
 ancient Syrian sculptures of Ashera, or The Grove ; 
 and 'the tree of life in the midst of the garden' 
 
28 IN HIS OWN IMAGE, 
 
 forms the point of departure for beliefs which have 
 lasted thousands of years, and which have either 
 spread from one source over, or been independently 
 originated in, every part of the habitable globe. 
 
 The point essential for us to observe at present in 
 this system of religious symbolism is the persistency 
 with which the idea of Duality is maintained. The 
 two principles together were regarded as constituting 
 but one complete being. 
 
 It was impossible, however, for mankind to re- 
 main satisfied with a Duality that did not complete 
 itself naturally, as in man's own case, by the addition 
 of a third element. And so it came that the idea 
 expanded until it appeared in the form of a Triad or 
 Trinity either of principles or of persons, in one 
 essence, principles for the spiritual and philosophic 
 thinker, and persons for the uninstructed materialis- 
 ing masses. 
 
 Proceeding on our way towards the creation of 
 God in the image of man, it becomes necessary, in 
 order to avoid having two or more deities or sets of 
 deities, to combine in one Being the facts and ideas 
 common to man. 
 
 Endeavour now to accompany me on a short ex- 
 cursion into a region lying altogether apart from 
 things concrete and appreciable by sense, a region 
 shunned by mankind at large, and rarely entered 
 save by thinkers, for it is called Metaphysics, and it 
 
INTELLECTUAL, MORAL, EMOTIONAL. 29 
 
 is occupied by the Abstract. Arrived there we close 
 all the faculties of sense as useless, for there is neither 
 light to impinge on the eye nor sound on the ear, 
 nor aught of any kind to appeal to the touch, but the 
 imagination is all in all, both as regards the things 
 to be dealt with and the instruments wherewith they 
 are to be treated. 
 
 Try now to imagine Being, simple and apart from 
 all conditions of being. Try to imagine it as abso- 
 lute and sole in space. You will not succeed ; for 
 the moment we seek to imagine Being existing by 
 itself, there rises before us an idea of something else 
 equally with it demanding recognition. For the idea 
 of Being involves the idea of its opposite, or Not- 
 Being. . So that we cannot have in our minds a 
 Positive without at the same time having also a 
 Negative, either actually or potentially. 
 
 Apply this fact to the theology we are seeking to 
 construct. We want to imagine deity as absolute 
 and infinite. But no sooner do we attempt to do so 
 than the idea of an absolute negation of deity forces 
 itself upon us. Having one absolute Being, then, we 
 must have two ; and so the idea of dualism appear^ 
 as a necessary idea. 
 
 But the laws of thought forbid us to stop there. 
 We cannot imagine two Beings to co-exist without 
 imagining also the effect of their action upon each 
 other. But such effect constitutes a third form of 
 
30 IN HIS OWN IMAGE, 
 
 existence ; so that, given the human consciousness of 
 being at all, we are absolutely unable to exclude from, 
 our thought the notion of a trinity of Beings ; a 
 trinity, moreover, in which none is afore or after 
 other, none is greater or less than another ; but the 
 whole three are co-eternal together and co-equal, 
 and constitute among them but one being. 
 
 If, proceeding a step further, we seek to identify 
 this necessary product of thought with the animat- 
 ing force of the universe, we are equally compelled 
 to regard it as personal, inasmuch as by the very fact 
 of creation it manifests Will, Intelligence, and the 
 creative impulse we call Love. 
 
 Thus without aid from aught external to ourselves, 
 without aid even from the visible phenomena of the 
 world, but building solely upon the basis of our own 
 consciousness, we have occupied the throne of space 
 with a Being who is at once personal and infinite, sin- 
 gle and threefold, incomprehensible and unimagina- 
 ble by us, and yet in whom we recognise our own 
 lineaments, the substance of which we are the mani- 
 festation. And this, inasmuch as He is Conscious- 
 ness, while we are conscious. He is Intelligence, 
 while we have understanding. He is Power, while 
 we can do somewhat. He is Energy, while we live 
 and move. He is Love, while we exist. 
 
 But no other than such a Being as this is the 
 God men have ever felt bound to adore. The human 
 
INTELLECTUAL, MORAL, EMOTIONAL. 31 
 
 consciousness being one, whether as Aryan or Semite, 
 Jew or Christian, the idea of Deity has in all as- 
 sumed a triune aspect, and men have all adored it on 
 one and the same principle. Whatever faculties for 
 good we find in ourselves, or whatever is productive 
 of that which we deem good, we necessarily offer to 
 him as our reasonable service ; and with these, di- 
 vested of limitations, we build up the fabric of ideal 
 perfection which we call God. To ascribe to him 
 aught that falls short of the best we can imagine 
 would be to stultify ourselves. Even the rudest 
 savage, whose worship appears to us to be rendered 
 to a demon, invariably ascribes to his deity in excess 
 the qualities most prized by himself; never those 
 which he deems evil, be he Cannibal or Calvinist. 
 
 Creating God morally as well as physically in our 
 own image, it is inevitable that his growth in our 
 minds should keep pace with our own. Advancing in 
 knowledge of our own character and capacity, we 
 find ourselves compelled to make such modifications in 
 the divine nature as are necessary to preserve its har- 
 mony and proportion. Thus, to prevent Will from 
 degenerating into caprice, Power into cruelty, Capa- 
 city for enjoyment into sensuality, we add to his 
 attributes others which we find indispensable to our 
 own perfection, as sympathy, patience, purity, 
 justice, and to temper this last, tenderness ; first 
 expanding each of them to infinity. Only where we 
 
32 IN HIS OWN IMAGE, 
 
 fail to possess these qualities in ourselves do we fail to 
 ascribe them to our God. To make him defective in 
 respect of any of them, is to make him after the 
 pattern of a pagan or sectarian deity. To attain 
 Catholic results we must regard him as resuming in 
 himself all the good that characterises universal man. 
 
 To be able to construct such a God as this, it is 
 necessary to know man in the utmost reaches of 
 our nature. One must have loved and hated, toiled, 
 suffered, and enjoyed, and all with intensity; must 
 have lost and found oneself in all directions, 011 the 
 side of evil as well as on that of good. To such 
 knowledge the spirit and the flesh must alike bring 
 their contributions. One must have lived the inner 
 life that finds no expression in the prosperous com- 
 placency of external worldly success; and in one's 
 own soul have grappled with the problems of sin, 
 condemnation, repentance, atonement, and salvation. 
 In a word, one must have felt, inasmuch as God is at 
 once the source, the sum and the product of all feeling. 
 
 As metal unrefined and unwrought is valueless, 
 so is there no perfection of character without trial. 
 Any idealisation of humanity in its youth, beauty, 
 and prosperity must be inferior in moral value to 
 one of humanity perfected by suffering. Suffering is 
 the parent of sympathy. A suffering and sympathetic 
 deity is above all those of Greece or Rome. Where- 
 fore, carry our idealisations far as we may, we shall 
 
INTELLECTUAL, MOEAL, EMOTIONAL. 33 
 
 not transcend the level assigned in the creeds of 
 Catholicism to him who 6 suffered for our salvation.' 
 Thus, if in the construction of our ideal of perfec- 
 tion we attain a height unreached by the 'heathen,' 
 it is because, though on the right track, they failed to 
 carry their analysis of man's capacity to its furthest 
 point. The prominence of selfishness among man- 
 kind led them to put self-seeking in the fore-front of 
 the nature of their deities. We, on the other hand, 
 recognising the sympathetic element as at least 
 better, if not wholly dominant in us, lift up as divine 
 the character of one suffering with and for others, 
 rather than of one who by dint of superior force or 
 strategy is triumphant over others. How far the 
 former surpasses the latter in its power to draw 
 men unto it, becomes apparent when, looking from 
 the depths of our own deepest feelings, we contrast 
 the emotions excited respectively by the contempla- 
 tion of the Belvidere Apollo and the Crucifix. The 
 pagan ideal vanishes, quenched in the higher ideal 
 presented in the creeds. For what are all the mira- 
 cles worked by force to those of which love is capable ? 
 
 Thus, not only in his own image, male and female, 
 and all other physical respects, does man create the 
 God to whom he ascribes his own existence, but in 
 his own image, moral, intellectual, and emotional. 
 By and by we shall have to add spiritual. 
 
 D 
 
34 
 
 LETTEE VI. 
 
 THE FALL AND THE INCARNATION. 
 
 ( BUT supposing himself to be made in God's image, 
 man must have supposed himself to be perfect. He 
 could not have credited a perfect Being with defec- 
 tive work.' 
 
 Your remarks are just, up to a certain point. 
 Man had both the convictions you describe. It was 
 on finding himself defective that he came to suppose 
 that, though assuredly made perfect originally, he 
 had fallen from that state. True, the logic that 
 was content with such a solution was itself defective, 
 inasmuch as one of the essential elements of an ori- 
 ginal perfection must be the ability to remain per- 
 fect. According to the popular notion, it was through 
 the abuse of the gift of freedom that man fell. But 
 as a state of perfection must, to be perfection, in- 
 clude such an amount of knowledge and wisdom as 
 will keep from falling, the popular notion is defective 
 in this respect also. 
 
 Nevertheless, man knew perfection and fell ; and 
 his fall was the most momentous event in his exist- 
 
THE FALL AND THE INCARNATION. 35 
 
 ence, inasmuch as by means of it he became man. 
 For the fall was the birth of the soul, the initial 
 stage of the supreme incarnation. 
 
 To comprehend the fall, you must first compre- 
 hend the incarnation. Here, as elsewhere, we shall 
 be guided solely by the light of human reason, bor- 
 rowing nothing from c revelation/ Like the idea of 
 a Trinity, the idea of an incarnation belongs to no 
 one religion. Product on one side of abstract 
 reason, and on the other of the phenomena of phy- 
 sical nature, it was postulated by the earliest meta- 
 physicians, ages before either Christianity or Juda- 
 ism, as the sole possible solution of the problem of 
 creation. 
 
 For incarnation is but a term to express the 
 manifestation of the infinite in the finite, of the ab- 
 solute in the conditioned, of the ideal in the real; 
 that is, of God in nature. Unable to conceive how 
 such a process can take place, yet perceiving that it 
 has taken place if God and the world exist at all, 
 reason is compelled to postulate a miracle. 
 
 The incarnation, though a single eternal process, 
 inasmuch as God in his function of creator is always 
 becoming the world, is yet various in kind and 
 degree. The infinite being the source of all things, 
 wherever we find a finite we find an incarnation. 
 Of course the word, as its derivation shows, signifies 
 primarily a manifestation in the form of flesh, but 
 
86 THE FALL AND THE INCAKNATION. 
 
 it may fitly be used to signify manifestation in any 
 form. In tliis way it becomes applicable to the 
 creation in its earliest stage. Prior to that all was 
 God, in his original condition of pure spirit. In that, 
 God took form in the world. The proof of this is 
 that we cannot think of God as existing prior to 
 creation in any other fashion. 
 
 The earliest manifestation of the infinite in the 
 finite comes before us as a world without form and 
 void. Though without life, sensation, consciousness, 
 or even motion, it was not the less divine, inasmuch 
 as it was the divine handiwork, formed of the divine 
 substance for there was nought else of which it could 
 be formed a part of God himself, made in the image 
 of God thus far, though to us, viewing it from the 
 advanced standpoint of our own after- growth, it 
 may appear but a poor and meagre embodiment of 
 the divine nature, or illustration of the divine per- 
 fections. 
 
 Product, however, of the omnipotent intelligence^ 
 will, and energy, this dark and shapeless mass is in- 
 stinct with the possibilities of our universe. Every 
 particle of it, minute beyond conception, contains in 
 itself the two poles, positive and negative, which 
 constitute the first elements of life. Eestless, and 
 moving among themselves, they develop in a con- 
 tinually ascending series life chemical, as in the 
 process of crystallisation, life vegetable, life animal. 
 
THE FALL AND THE INCAKNATION. 37 
 
 But this, vast as is the advance on previous exist- 
 ence, does not satisfy us as presenting a fair por- 
 trait of the characteristics of the Creator. We find 
 in it the commencement of our own lower nature, 
 but not that on which we pride ourselves, the higher 
 characteristics of humanity. Made thus far in the 
 image of God, creation as yet affords no image of 
 him who transcends our best actual, possible, or 
 imaginable. A higher stage of the incarnation is 
 yet to come. 
 
 At length a being in our own form appears upon 
 the scene. Surpassing all his predecessors in capa- 
 city mental and physical, and finding all things 
 subject to him, he knows not his own nature or the 
 limits of his powers. Everything is so fitted to his 
 wants, existence is so delicious, it does not occur to 
 him that aught can be better. Without experience 
 of contrasts it does not occur to him even that 
 aught is good ; nor, therefore, that aught is evil. 
 Having no standard or criterion whereby to form a 
 judgment, if questioned on the subject he could not 
 do otherwise than assume that he is perfect. 
 
 Still does the capacity resident in the original 
 atoms develop itself. With all his might, beauty, 
 intelligence, man is still but an animal, for he lives 
 in sense, and has no notion of a right and wrong, of 
 a good and evil. Unable to imagine anything better 
 than he has or is, he has no ideal wherewith to sur- 
 
38 THE FALL AND THE INCAENATION. 
 
 pass his real. And having no ideal, he is uncon- 
 scious both of himself and of God. Bounded by 
 sense, he is still in the real, and with no side of him 
 open to the ideal and absolute. Knowing nothing 
 of conditions or limitations, he cannot conceive the 
 unconditioned or unlimited. Knowing nothing of 
 perfection, he has no sense of imperfection. Know- 
 ing nothing of law, he has no consciousness of 
 transgression. And having no law whereby to judge 
 himself, no moral nature to render him amenable to 
 a moral law, no conscience or sense of perfection 
 to condemn him, he is ' sinless,' c innocent,' ' perfect.' 
 
 But this is precisely the sense in which my 
 horse and your dog are morally perfect. The re- 
 cognition of a law by you and me does not justify us 
 in condemning them as f sinners,' for they are with- 
 out that law. But though not sinners, are they, 
 then, our superiors, and would it be a fall or a rise 
 for them, were they to become partakers of our 
 ' sinful nature ? ' Surely a rise, inasmuch as it 
 would be an advance from the unconsciousness of the 
 animal to the consciousness of the human. 
 
 It was the fact of man's attaining the conscious- 
 ness of an ideal, or perfection unattainable by the 
 finite in respect of things moral, that constituted 
 the introduction of ' the law.' By the ' giving of the 
 law,' that is, by our becoming conscious of a better 
 than we could do, ( sin came to life and we (vir- 
 
THE FALL AND THE INCAKNATION. 39 
 
 tually), died.' That is, we recognised ourselves as 
 falling short of a perfection we were able to imagine, 
 and therefore as incapable of living under the regime 
 of the ideal or perfect law which has its existence in 
 the conscience. 
 
 Thus all have sinned, and come short of the ideal 
 perfection personified in God. 
 
 The fall, then, consists in man's becoming aware 
 that his real does not equal the ideal he is able to 
 imagine ; or, conversely, in his attaining a sense of 
 perfection beyond that which he is able to realise. It 
 is thus the birth of the soul, or faculty whereby we 
 are enabled to rise from the finite to the infinite, 
 from the real to the ideal, from the earth to God, 
 and to know that from which we have sprung, and to 
 which it is our highest function to aspire. No mere 
 external fact in history, then, is the fall, but an ex- 
 perience true of every individual of our race who is 
 gifted with a ' soul.' For us all alike, the first per- 
 ception of a standard of excellence transcending our 
 actual, is the moment of the giving of the law, even 
 that law by which is the knowledge of sin. 
 
 Let us return to the incarnation. Unconscious 
 of any defect in his real, prior to his discovery of 
 the distance between it and his ideal, man supposed 
 himself to have been made in the image of God, an 
 exact counterpart and resemblance of his Maker. 
 The discovery of his shortcoming was accounted by 
 
40 THE FALL AND THE INCARNATION. 
 
 him a fall. Having quitted his original state of un- 
 - consciousness of imperfection, he could 110 longer 
 regard himself as worthy to be considered a divine 
 incarnation. Before humanity can claim to be made 
 in the divine image and to be a true incarnation of 
 God, it must produce a new Adam, whose real shall 
 coincide with the ideal. 
 
LETTEE VII. 
 
 THE ATONEMENT. 
 
 c WHOSE real should coincide with the ideal.' That, 
 say yon in your charming and appreciative letter, 
 would be an union of the finite and the infinite, of 
 man and God. And you go on to suggest that surely 
 humanity cannot have fallen far if it is able to rise 
 to such contact. 
 
 Every word you write to this effect is good and 
 true, but you have not allowed your perceptions to 
 attain their furthest reach. Had you done so, you 
 would not have stopped short until you had arrived 
 at the doctrine of the Atonement, developing it out 
 of your own intuitions, and without any revelation 
 save that of reason applied to your own faculty of 
 idealisation. 
 
 And not without revelation only, but without 
 aught historical or concrete; but, given solely your 
 own consciousness of the abstract, and supposing only 
 the existence of the two elements the real and the 
 ideal you will find your thought, when allowed to 
 go forward, reaching successively the stages of 
 
42 THE ATONEMENT. 
 
 original incarnation (or creation), fall, new incarna- 
 tion (or second creation), and atonement. 
 
 It is not, however, in the meaning popularly as- 
 cribed to it, and for which you express such strong 
 aversion, that this doctrine is true. 
 
 For, in the first place, no doctrine respecting the 
 Divine Nature that is repulsive to the human intui- 
 tions, or sense of perfection, can be true. Startling 
 as this may appear, it is a simple truism. By the 
 divine we mean only the ideal perfection of which the 
 soul alone is cognisant. That perfection personified 
 is God. If repulsive to our sense of perfection, it is 
 not God. 
 
 In the second place it is not logical, and therefore 
 cannot conduct us to that higher esoteric doctrine 
 which the Church reserves for a chosen few. 
 
 The atonement signifies simply the mutual recon- 
 ciliation between the Maker and his work, first through 
 that work proving equal to its Maker's intention, and 
 so winning his approbation ; and, secondly, through 
 the work, no longer conscious of failure, and of cause 
 for alienation, becoming reconciled to its Maker. 
 
 This last may be otherwise elucidated. Taking 
 God for the ideal, and nature or humanity for the 
 real, the union of the two in one person constitutes 
 in itself a reconciliation or at-one-ment. It is the 
 longing of humanity thus to find itself in harmony 
 with the object of its highest conceptions, that has ever 
 
THE ATONEMENT. 43 
 
 and again prompted it to select from the race some 
 individual pre-eminent for his goodness, and to ascribe 
 to him a divine origin and character. Thus it has 
 come that wherever a man has appeared whom his 
 fellows deemed so far above themselves in any direc- 
 tion as to indicate the possession of an element of 
 infinity, they have straightway held him as inspired 
 by the divine spirit, and as being, in a greater or less 
 degree, God as well as man. 
 
 That the last member of the race thus deified by 
 any considerable section of mankind, should have 
 been the Jesus of the New Testament, is not surpris- 
 ing when we take into account the character and 
 history of him which have been presented to us. 
 We may seek in vain among other deified men for so 
 many and so lofty elements of infinity. In him the 
 religious genius seems to have culminated to such 
 an extent as in a great measure to obliterate his local 
 and national characteristics. His sense of ideal per- 
 fection raised him above the limitations of bis deified 
 predecessors. Especially as drawn by John and Paul, 
 was there in him an universality that entitled him to 
 the appellation of Son, not of Israel, nor of any 
 limited denomination, but Son of Man ; for nought 
 human was excluded from his sympathies or the 
 benefits of his moral teaching. To all whose hearts 
 were accessible to any sense of perfection in things 
 spiritual, were the gates of his kingdom opened. 
 
44 THE ATONEMENT. 
 
 And this brings me to a point of vast importance in 
 determining how it came that such a character 
 should have emanated from a race so intensely bigoted 
 and exclusive as the Jews. 
 
 The quality which made them emphatically a pe- 
 culiar people was that of spirituality, or appreciation 
 of the personal and divine in Deity. In them God 
 was above all things the Moral Governor of the uni- 
 verse, so far as they comprehended morality, and it 
 was through men's hearts and minds that he made 
 his presence specially felt. Of course there is much 
 in their earlier history and literature that conflicts 
 with this high conception of Deity. Many and many 
 a time is the portraiture coarse and revolting, and 
 such as only a people whose ideal scarcely transcended 
 their own lowest real, could have devised. In fact, 
 so various are their delineations of him, that it is 
 scarcely an exaggeration to say that they worshipped 
 two distinct divinities under the same name. I will 
 in my next dAvell a little on this, as it will explain 
 much that perplexes honest enquirers, and account for 
 many a theological contradiction. 
 
 In the present I will content myself with remark- 
 ing that even in their earliest compositions there are 
 gleams of a pure and lofty ideal, gleams which grow 
 and brighten as misfortunes thicken on their race, 
 showing them to be no exception to the rule that all 
 products of nature, whether human or material, re- 
 
THE ATONEMENT. 45 
 
 quire to be wrought with toil and trial in order to at- 
 tain their highest value. And so, when place and 
 power were lost, and servitude had become their 
 inheritance, Israel, made perfect through suffering 
 his real quenched in sorrow attained in Jesus to the 
 conception of an ideal of character which the world 
 has since accepted as the highest humanity can pro- 
 duce, and styled at once Son of Man and Son of God. 
 
46 
 
 LETTEE YIII. 
 
 THE TWO JEHOVAHS. 
 
 THE two Gods of the Bible, of whom I promised to 
 give you some account, must be referred to the 
 antagonistic influences of the real and the ideal 
 in man's nature. Though existing side by side 
 throughout the whole of the sacred literature, and 
 passing under the same name, there is no difficulty 
 in discerning between them. In one we have a 
 Being of amazing selfishness and ferocity, owning 
 responsibility to no moral law, and absolutely re- 
 velling in blood. 
 
 The other is a just judge and ruler over all, yet 
 pitiful and of tender mercy, a hearer of prayer, and 
 one that doth not willingly afflict the children of 
 men. It is to the co-existence in the Bible of these 
 two presentments of Deity, and the failure of the 
 worshippers of the letter to distinguish between them, 
 that the theological troubles of Christendom and the 
 comparative failure of Christianity are in great mea- 
 sure due. For, so far from referring the existence 
 of the inferior Jehovah to the propensity of unde- 
 
THE TWO JEHOVAHS. 47 
 
 veloped man to make his God after the image of his 
 own lower nature, the Church, rather than weaken 
 the authority of the letter of Scripture, has sought 
 to sanctify even the most revolting doctrines by 
 ascribing to them a spiritual signification. 
 
 The truth is that so long as the gross and brutal 
 predominate in the character of man, they will pre- 
 dominate in that of the God recognised by man. 
 Only as the things of sense give place to the things 
 of the spirit, and the ideal assumes its proper 
 supremacy over the real, does the Deity emerge from 
 his low estate, and shedding the grosser nature with 
 which he has hitherto been invested, shine forth as 
 the sun in his glory, the absolute realisation of man's 
 developed moral conceptions. 
 
 How low and rudimentary humanity still is, even 
 among peoples we regard as highly civilised, is de- 
 monstrated by the reception still widely accorded to 
 the grosser interpretations of the doctrine of atone- 
 ment by blood. The term carnivorous is in no way 
 too strong to express the character thus ascribed to 
 the Deity himself. As if expressly to illustrate the 
 inveterate co-ordination subsisting between man and 
 his gods, the Bible exhibits in strong relief the con- 
 tinuity of both natures. The carnal God of the Old 
 Testament survives in the carnal God of the New ; 
 and the spiritual God of the Old Testament survives 
 in the spiritual God of the New. 
 
48 THE TWO JEHOVAHS. 
 
 Let us glance shortly at their respective careers. 
 Throughout the Old Testament we find the lower 
 Jehovah depicted as abandoned to falsehood and 
 cruelty, and ever ready for a bribe of blood to aid 
 the foulest cause. For his consent to offer up his 
 only son as a burnt- offer ing, Abraham is repeatedly 
 lauded as the father of the faithful and friend of 
 God. For a promise which involves a like fate to 
 his daughter, Jepthah obtains the desired victory. 
 And even the Moabite King Mesha gains a victory 
 over the Jews in virtue of his offering up his son as a 
 sacrifice. David, on a mere surmise, hanged the seven 
 sons and grandsons of Saul ' in the hill before the 
 Lord,' 6 and after that God was entreated for the land.' 
 He puts a lying spirit into the mouth of his prophets, 
 and threatens to destroy those who are deceived by 
 them. He denounces the most tremendous penalties 
 for the lightest offences. Nothing can satiate his pro- 
 pensity for blood, and the idea of the sanctity of life 
 is utterly scouted. Blood of animals innumerable ; 
 blood of peoples hostile to his own people ; blood of 
 offenders among his own people ; blood of unoffending 
 men, women, and children even, also among his own 
 chosen people. Because some of them look into 
 the ark, he smites fifty thousand three score and ten 
 men. By the mouth of one of his prophets he de- 
 clares, f I also will deal in fury ; mine eye shall not 
 spare, neither will I have pity. And though they 
 
THE TWO JEHOVAHS. 49 
 
 cry in mine ears with a loud voice, yet will I not 
 hear them.' To another he says, ( Go through the 
 city and smite ; let not your eye spare, neither have 
 ye pity ; slay utterly old and young, both maids and 
 little children and women, and begin at my sanc- 
 tuary.' 
 
 Passing to the New Testament, its continuity 
 with the Old in respect of this deity is indisputable, 
 and the propensity is carried to a height previously 
 unimaginable. No Jew in Old Testament times 
 thought of God as a possible parent, except in a 
 general way of the human race. But the Dualism 
 veiled under the name that was too sacred to be 
 uttered, had in the interval borne its fruit ; and after 
 glutting himself with the blood of the first-born sons 
 of mere men, this deity found himself at length in a 
 position to require the blood of his own ' only- 
 begotten beloved Son.' The plea on which this 
 stupendous sacrifice was demanded was the pardon 
 of mankind. But so far from their condition being 
 ameliorated, no sooner was it consummated than the 
 bulk of the human race found themselves in a worse 
 plight than before. The Old Testament consigns no 
 one to eternal punishment, nor does it make penal 
 the honest conclusions of the understanding:. The 
 
 o 
 
 New Testament, on the contrary, abounds in dire 
 menaces not only against evil-doers but against in-, 
 dependent thinkers. Here the deity appears as 
 
 
 
50 THE TWO JEHOVAHS. 
 
 inflicting torture for torture's sake, without any 
 pretence of reforming the offender or promoting the 
 security of society. 'The unbelieving and the 
 abominable ' are placed in the same category, and 
 both ' have their portion in the lake that burneth 
 with fire and brimstone,' c where their worm dieth 
 not, and the fire is not quenched,' and where there 
 is 'weeping and gnashing of teeth.' 
 
 It is the love of blood evinced by this the lower 
 deity of the Jews that Christians recognise and sanc- 
 tion when they receive in the gross material sense 
 the body and blood of Christ in the Eucharist. 
 
 Far different is the character of the Jehovah 
 who has won for the Jews the credit of being en- 
 dowed with a transcendant genius for religion. In. 
 him all the noblest attributes of humanity reach their 
 highest expression. For he is c a God of truth, and 
 without iniquity,' whose * ways are equal,' and who 
 is 6 no respecter of persons : ' a ' God of peace ' and 
 hater of violence, who takes no delight in the blood 
 of animals, but c whose name is holy,' who * dwells 
 in the high and holy place, with him also that is of 
 a contrite and humble spirit, to revive the spirit of 
 the contrite, and to revive the heart of the humble.' 
 A God, moreover, who so loved the world that he 
 sent his Son to save it ; a God whom that Son called 
 Love, and of whom he declared, ( If a man love me 
 and keep my words, my Father will love him, and 
 
THE TWO JEHOVAHS. 51 
 
 we will come unto him, and make our abode with 
 him.' 
 
 There is a sense, however, in which the shedding 
 of blood is necessary to procure a full reconciliation 
 between the soul and its absolute ideal. For how can 
 humanity justify itself to the Supreme Perfection, 
 save by showing itself capable of attaining the loftiest 
 reaches of moral heroism ? And how can such hero- 
 ism be shown but by being ' faithful unto death ? ' 
 
52 
 
 LETTER IX. 
 
 GOD-MAN AND MAN-GOD. 
 
 THERE was a manifest consistency in the destiny 
 that assigned to the Jewish race the honour of pro- 
 ducing him who has filled for mankind the part of 
 ideal man. Its character, its history, its literature, 
 all combined to make it fitting that, as the Hebrew 
 mind had attained a conception of spirituality and 
 righteousness far beyond that of any other people, 
 so the Hebrew race should produce the individual in 
 whom spirituality and righteousness culminated to 
 such a degree as to make mankind see in him the 
 realisation of its highest ideal. 
 
 Let us proceed to trace the lineaments of the 
 ideal man, not according to any supposed historic 
 outline, but as evolved necessarily from our con- 
 sciousness when once the notion of such a being has 
 occurred to us. 
 
 The ideal, as you already understand, being in 
 the imagination the equivalent of the infinite, the 
 ideal man must have his origin and habitat in that 
 region ; and on all sides of his nature he must appear 
 
GOD-MAN AND MAN-GOD. 53 
 
 divested of the limitations of the real, and endowed 
 with the element of infinity. In every particular of 
 his history he must show himself superior to the race 
 of ordinary men. His very coming into existence 
 must be by no vulgar method ; for of him the super- 
 natural alone is worthy. Yet, proceeding immediately 
 from the supreme personified ideal whom we call 
 God, and therefore himself God, he must, to be man 
 also, derive one half of his being from a human 
 source. So palpable is the necessity for this, that the 
 legends of all religions recognise it, and many of 
 them agree in representing their divine men as born 
 of virgin mothers. For the ideal man postulates the 
 ideal woman; the woman who, like her ideal spouse 
 the Holy Spirit, and ideal son, surpasses the limita- 
 tions of the real, and without human assistance pro- 
 duces her ideal babe. 
 
 Son at once of humanity and deity, he must pos- 
 sess in perfection the characteristics of both natures, 
 and these so balanced that none can say which pre- 
 dominates in him. Animated with the divine enthu- 
 siasm of the perfection from which he is sprung, he 
 will go forth to do battle against all the powers of 
 evil, or man's lower nature, by stimulating the 
 growth of the ideal, and so reducing the real to its 
 proper level. Not, however, by dint of physical 
 force ; that in itself would constitute an appeal to and 
 alliance with the very power he desires to subdue ; 
 
54 GOD-MAN AND MAN-GOD. 
 
 but by setting forth the rule of perfection, and ex- 
 hibiting it in himself in so winning a guise as to 
 draw perforce unto himself all who are amenable to 
 such sweet and spiritual influences. 
 
 As his mission must be the highest imaginable 
 by man, he must for its accomplishment be invested 
 with powers transcending those attainable by man. 
 At his command must be all the elements of physical 
 nature. Earth, sea, air, and fire, heaven and hell, 
 must obey him. The very demons must acknowledge 
 his supremacy ; disease and death must flee his 
 approach. 
 
 God though he be, he is still man, and as man he 
 must suffer and die. But it is by his death that his 
 divinity is most triumphantly demonstrated. For it 
 is by his death that he crowns his life, and exhibits 
 in supreme degree the love of perfection as his ruling 
 passion. Mighty as has been his enthusiasm of 
 humanity in the real, his enthusiasm of ideal perfec- 
 tion far exceeds it. For the ideal perfection, caught 
 up and resumed in an infinite personality, is no other 
 than his Father, God. 
 
 Yes, it is for love of God even more than for love 
 of man, that the Man-God suffers and dies. So 
 vivid is his sense of the personality and presence of 
 the Divine Perfection, and of his own intimate rela- 
 tionship thereto, that he speaks ever of him in the 
 most endearing terms, aspiring ever to his presence, 
 
GOD-MAN AND MAN-GOD. 55 
 
 and so shapes his speech as to imply identity of 
 being with him ' My Father and I are one ; ' c No 
 man cometh to the Father but by me ; ' ' I am the 
 way, the truth, and the life ; ' ' He that has seen me 
 hath seen the Father also.' 
 
 As the ideal Son must have existed, either actu- 
 ally or potentially, in the bosom of the ideal Father, 
 he must be co-eternal with him and co-equal, and 
 the same divine disposition or spirit that animates 
 them must proceed alike from both. 
 
 But while eternal in his ideal nature, he must be 
 subject to death in his real. And inasmuch as by 
 his death he reconciles the real to its Creator, his 
 blood is for the healing of the nations, his suffering 
 for their salvation. 
 
 For his death is the crowning proof of his tho- 
 roughness. Infinite would be the loss to mankind 
 were he to shrink from such consummation. For 
 then would humanity exhibit itself as incapable of 
 attaining perfection even in its ideal. Unable to 
 imagine such unselfish devotion as possible, it would 
 have shown itself to belong to but a low degree in 
 the scale of moral existence. The capacity to ima- 
 gine and appreciate self-sacrifice involves the capa- 
 city for self-sacrifice. Our whole real is elevated by 
 the exaltation of our ideal ; and the supreme ideal is 
 reconciled and propitiated thereby. Humanity, in 
 virtue of the perfect ideal it has produced, takes its 
 
56 GOD-MAN AND MAN-GOD. 
 
 seat at the right hand of the Absolute Perfection, and 
 claims the enthusiastic greeting, ' My beloved Son ! 
 in whom I am well pleased ! ' For it has attained per- 
 fection, and the divine work of creation is ' finished.' 
 
 God though we may be disposed to deem him, it 
 is as man and man alone, though man perfect, that 
 the ideal Son achieves for us his victory. His triumph 
 is the triumph of humanity. For he represents man's 
 ideal side rising superior to his real, inasmuch as he 
 accomplishes the sacrifice of sense to spirit, -of body 
 to soul, the lower to the higher, the phenomenal to 
 the eternal, the limited to the infinite. 
 
 To comprehend the nature of the Son of Man, 
 you must comprehend the nature of man. Two 
 elements go to the making up of this, the real and 
 the ideal. Discard the notion that either of them 
 is in the popular sense supernatural. This done, 
 the divine man readily appears as he in whom both 
 these sides of humanity are perfect ; but in whom 
 also the real occupies its proper place of subordina- 
 tion to the ideal, or sense to spirit. 
 
 It is only in respect of its transcending sense, or 
 the c natural,' that the ideal can be regarded as 
 supernatural. We have no warrant for regarding 
 any part of existence, real or ideal, as lying outside of 
 nature. No possible redeemer can the ideal man be 
 for us unless he be identical with that which he 
 comes to redeem, one of ourselves, save without de- 
 
GOD-MAN AND MAN-GOD. 57 
 
 feet. For, otherwise, his very perfection would but 
 enhance the disfavour with which the Creator 
 regarded his work. The demonstration that other 
 
 o 
 
 elements than those contained in humanity are ne- 
 cessary to produce a perfect man, would involve a 
 confession of impotence in the original creation. 
 And so far from the divine work being finished in 
 him, and he being greeted as the beloved Son in 
 whom the Father is well pleased, and suffered to 
 ascend on high, and, crowned with, honour and glory, 
 to take his place at the right hand of God, he would 
 be to the Father a constant source of mortification, 
 as a reminder of his failure in the first creation. 
 
 No Saviour or Redeemer in such case would he 
 be for us ; no maker of peace by his blood ; no re- 
 conciler with God. 
 
 It is, then, not at the incarnation as an isolated 
 or historical event, or as restricted to any one period 
 of time, that we arrive in our process of constructing 
 God in onr own image, and in following the theology 
 that naturally evolves itself therefrom. But we 
 arrive at the incarnation as a perpetual demonstra- 
 tion of the capacity of nature for attaining perfection 
 on its ideal side. The existence of perfection any- 
 where in nature, whether in you or in me, demon- 
 strates the divinity of creation, and so ' saves ' the 
 world. And he who is most perfect does this in the 
 greatest degree. 
 
58 THE BKIGHTNESS OF HIS GKLOKY 
 
 LETTER X. 
 
 THE BRIGHTNESS OF HIS GLORY AND THE EXPRESS 
 IMAGE OP HIS PERSON. 
 
 HAVING got, either in idea or in reality, subjectively 
 in our consciousness or objectively in history, a man 
 whose character and career suggest to us the element 
 of infinity in power and goodness ; and having by 
 him discovered the capacity of our race for attaining 
 perfection, real or imagined, and having thereby 
 won exemption from eternal condemnation, how shall 
 we give vent to our heart's promptings to adore him 
 as a God, how institute divine worship in his honour ? 
 Having a theology and a religion, worship inevitably 
 follows. 
 
 Not enough that we make him in the image of 
 our own little best. As Son at once of God and 
 man, the universe contains no element too noble to 
 be pressed into his service, no symbol too exalted to 
 be converted to his worship. 
 
 Here, dull and unimaginative that we are, we should, 
 if left to our own resources, find ourselves at once 
 brought to a standstill through lack of a rule by 
 which to fashion the expression of our adoration. 
 
AND THE EXPRESS IMAGE OF HIS PERSON. 59 
 
 It was not so in the days of old when, not yet civil- 
 ised and artificial, men lived in immediate depend- 
 ence upon the physical order of the universe. Buried 
 in the streets of towns, unconscious of the operations 
 of nature on which our very existence depends, and 
 heeding the changes of the seasons chiefly for their 
 effects on our social life, we can little realise the vivid 
 interest taken by primitive peoples in the march of 
 the sun, and in his varied yet regular operations 
 throughout the year. Not for us in these days is his 
 rising the daily advent, or the winter solstice the 
 yearly birth, of a god. Inhabiting a temperate climate, 
 and sheltered in substantial dwellings, we dread not 
 his noonday rays as the darts of irresistible power ; 
 warmed by clothing and fire, and cheered by artificial 
 light, we hail not his victory over the cold and dark- 
 ness of winter as a rescue and redemption for our- 
 selves ; nor, nourished by the commerce that flows 
 from afar through a thousand artificial channels, do 
 we watch eagerly for the alternate beams and 
 showers which alike proceed from him, in fear or 
 hope of starvation or plenty. 
 
 Surely, if there be anywhere a visible manifesta- 
 tion of God which can be accepted as c the brightness 
 of his glory and the express image of his person/ it is 
 in the kingly orb on which we depend utterly for 
 light and life, and all things needful to existence. 
 What then but the sun can represent for us and 
 
60 THE BRIGHTNESS OF HIS GLORY 
 
 suggest all that we require in the way of symbolism 
 and worship, when we would fulfil the impulses which 
 bid us adore the Perfection whereby we ourselves are 
 made perfect? 
 
 It is the sun, then, that we must press into our 
 service, and not ours only, but his whom we delight 
 to honour, if his worship is to reach the supremest 
 heights accessible to humanity. 
 
 You have demanded of me the Keys of the 
 Creeds. I gave you before the key to their moral 
 side, in the worship of perfection. I give you now 
 the key to their physical side. It is the worship of 
 the sun. The sun and, as I have already indicated, 
 the organs of sex, are the fundamental symbols of 
 every religious worship known to us, each alike catho- 
 lic in their acceptance, their necessity, and their func- 
 tions. It was impossible for me to enter fully into 
 detail respecting the second. Neither is it essential 
 to my purpose to do so, seeing that, although incor- 
 porated with the basis of ecclesiastical Christianity, 
 and discoverable by those who choose to search for it, 
 it does not practically affect either its doctrine or 
 its ritual ; its function being purely antiquarian and 
 sesthetic. 
 
 Far otherwise is it with the sun, whose course to 
 this day not only controls both our secular and eccle- 
 siastical calendars, and the character and times of 
 the festivals held in honour of Christ, but coincides 
 
AND THE EXPEESS IMAGE OF HIS PEESON. 61 
 
 with the main circumstances narrated of his life, from 
 his conception and birth to his ascension and recep- 
 tion into heaven. 
 
 
 
 So little is there strange and recondite in these 
 facts, that it is a perpetual marvel among the initiated 
 how even the least incredulous of the laity contrive 
 to ignore them, a marvel not unmixed with appre- 
 hension as to the result that would follow from 
 their becoming enlightened. The blind impetuosity, 
 on the other hand, with which Protestant sects in- 
 dignantly denounce ( idolatry,' pagan or catholic, 
 while themselves offering palpable homage to the 
 sun under the name of Christ, is to us a never- 
 failing source of amusement. 
 
62 
 
 LETTER XI. 
 
 THE LIGHT OP THE WORLD. 
 
 INDIA, Persia, Egypt, Syria, Greece, and many more 
 countries of the ancient world, place themselves at 
 our disposal the moment we seek to explore the mys- 
 teries of the solar culte. I will commence with Persia, 
 under the influences of whose philosophy the Jews, in 
 their captivity, finally abandoned their passion for the 
 grosser idolatries of Syria; and after their release 
 collated their legends, and re- wrote what they are 
 pleased to call their history. 
 
 The rule was to personify the sun under the form 
 of a benefactor to mankind, and to narrate his annual 
 career as a moral and philosophic tale. The Persian 
 magians accounted to the populace for the intro- 
 duction of evil into the world by a fable of a serpent 
 tempting the first woman to pluck a forbidden apple. 
 This act, as the apple ripens late in autumn, was of 
 course followed by the prevalence of winter, with dark- 
 ness and cold the kingdom of the evil principle 
 and necessitated the adoption of clothing. The mis- 
 chief thus brought about could only be remedied by 
 
THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD. 63 
 
 the agency of the sun, whom they identified with 
 the principle of good. Hence they supposed the in- 
 carnation of the sun in the person of Mithra. This 
 Mithra was set forth as born of a virgin in a cave at 
 the winter solstice, and as accompanied by a retinue of 
 twelve persons, who represented the months. Having 
 vanquished the prince of darkness, who under guise of 
 a serpent had seduced the woman, and having lost his 
 life in the contest, Mithra descended into hell or 
 under side of the earth and at the spring equinox 
 rose again and ascended into heaven, opening to man 
 the gates of light and redeeming him from the op- 
 pression of the evil one. 
 
 Mithra was represented as born of a virgin because 
 the constellation Yirgo was on the horizon at the 
 time of the sun's birth. And because the sun was 
 then in the sign of Aries then known as the Lamb 
 
 at the vernal equinox, which governs the year, 
 
 i 
 
 Mithra was called the Lamb of God, and the Lamb 
 that takes away the evils of the world. The serpent 
 that causes all the mischief by bringing in the winter 
 is Scorpio, the constellation of the later autumn. 
 
 Zoroaster, the reputed author of the sacred 
 books called the Zend-Avesta, where this system of 
 theogony is found, is variously reckoned to have 
 lived from one to six thousand years before the 
 Christian era. He was a pure and ardent monotheist, 
 but compelled by way of solving the problem of evil 
 
64 THE LIGHT OF THE WOKLD. 
 
 to ascribe a dual nature to deity. Like all the great 
 men of antiquity, from being an historical he grew 
 into a dogmatical personage, an immediate emana- 
 tion from the supreme Being. Such was Alexander ; 
 such Plato, who was said to be the child of Apollo, 
 and born of a virgin named Perictione. Ariston, who 
 was betrothed to her, postponed his marriage because 
 Apollo appeared to him in a dream and told him that 
 she was with child. Genius was for the ancients ever 
 associated with a divine origin. 
 
 The religion founded in honour of Mithra was 
 provided with the sacraments of baptism, penance, 
 the eucharist, consecration, and others. Its novices 
 were subjected to a severely ascetic regime. Chastity 
 and virginity were accounted sacred ; and it con- 
 tained the doctrines of the Fall, the Incarnation, the 
 Atonement, and the Resurrection. 
 
 Passing to Egypt, we find the sun-god Osiris, a 
 member of a triune godhead product of Egyptian 
 metaphysics coming upon earth for the benefit of 
 mankind, and gifted with the titles Manifestor of 
 God and Kevealer of Truth. Born of a divine virgin, 
 he was persecuted and put to death through the 
 malevolence of the Evil one, namely winter or dark- 
 ness. He was buried and rose again, and returning 
 to heaven became the judge of all men. Such was 
 the Man- god of the Egyptians, whose worship per- 
 vaded the country that gave tone and colour, if not 
 
THE LIGHT OF THE WOELD. 65 
 
 actual birth to the G-ospels, and which gradually paled 
 and died out before the ascendancy of Christianity. 
 
 Already will you have perceived in the coinci- 
 dences between the histories of these Sun-gods and 
 that of the Christ of the calendar and creeds, evi- 
 dences that the same compulsion which dominated 
 the expression of the pagan faiths controlled also 
 the Christian. The surprise you confess at the no- 
 tion of there being any coincidence between the fes- 
 tivals of the Church and the solar phenomena would 
 have been astounding to me, but that a long experi- 
 ence of the determined blindness of ordinary Christ- 
 ian folk, where an account of their faith is concerned, 
 and of their utter indifference to its truth, has taught 
 me to be surprised at nothing in that relation. 
 
 To no less a person than Sir Isaac Newton the 
 world owes both the first suggestion that the Christian 
 festivals were determined upon an astronomical 
 basis, and a detailed list of instances of correspond- 
 ence. Even he, however, resolutely closed his eyes to 
 the inevitable inference ; and like his great brother 
 in science, Faraday, declined to submit the basis of 
 his faith to the test of his understanding. 
 
 The day assigned to the birth of the Sun-god of 
 all the other religions was the same as that assigned, 
 without a particle of historical evidence, by the 
 Church to Christ. The shortest day being December 
 21, his birthday is put on the twenty-fifth, the 
 
 p 
 
66 THE LIGHT OF THE WOELD. 
 
 first day that shows any elongation, and which is 
 therefore the actual commencement of the year; 
 while the twenty-first, on which the sun reaches its 
 lowest point, when his worshippers are supposed to be 
 filled with alarm lest their lord and master fail to rise 
 again, is assigned to the doubting apostle Thomas. 
 In the corresponding worship in Syria, it was the 
 custom to lament the Sun-god Adonis as actually 
 dead at this time, and needing to be re-born into life. 
 
 Well, Christmas has come, and the sun is born ; 
 but winter has still a long career to run, and conse- 
 quently, the sun, as yet a feeble infant, has to under- 
 go a series of struggles with the powers of darkness. 
 And so, just as we find the infant Christ exposed to 
 the perils celebrated on Innocents' Bay, we find the 
 various representatives of the sun with difficulty and 
 danger emerging into childhood. In the case of the 
 Hindoo deity, Crishna, who was cradled among shep- 
 herds, and greeted at his birth by an angelic chorus, a 
 massacre of children was ordered, by a jealous king, in 
 exact correspondence with the slaughter afterwards 
 ascribed to Herod, In every case, however, the Sun- 
 god escapes all dangers, and grows in stature and in 
 favour with God and man, the days gradually gaining 
 on the nights as he rises higher above the horizon, 
 until the spring equinox, when they are equal. 
 
 This period of equality constitutes in all the solar 
 religions a serious crisis in the god's history, and it 
 
THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD. 67 
 
 becomes an anxious question for his adorers whether 
 he on whom their very existence depends will still be 
 able to make good his way against the powers of 
 darkness ; or whether the world will be thrust back 
 into the region of winter, and never more see sweet 
 summer skies. 
 
 For a time things seem to go against him, and 
 mankind are in despair. The change to the south- 
 west rainy monsoon brings equinoctial storms which 
 hide the sun from their sight. He has succumbed to 
 his foe. They fast long and mourn him dead. But 
 being a god he cannot be holden of death. Nay, by 
 his dying he shall prove himself to be conqueror over 
 death, and his very death shall be a blessing and re- 
 demption for the nations ; for the rains by which the 
 sun has been obscured are essential to the life of the 
 eastern world. 
 
 Thus hope returns, and despair is changed to joy, 
 as from a point still higher in the heavens than that 
 at which he had disappeared, he shines out with new 
 and greater effulgence. His rising is followed by 
 his final triumph and continued ascent towards the 
 zenith, his kingdom of heaven, whence, in the heat 
 and fruitfulness of summer, he sends down susten- 
 ance and comfort for men. 
 
 But during the equinoctial period of the sun's 
 rising and ascension he is in the constellation of the 
 Lamb, as Aries used to be called. This also is his 
 
 F 2 
 
68 THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD. 
 
 time to pass over the equinoctial line from the tropical 
 zone to ours. Now does the orb of day begin to at- 
 tain his full powers. Thus, in the Apocalypse we 
 find the Lamb adored in the presence of the throne 
 by four living creatures, the cardinal constellations 
 of the heavens, and twenty- four elders or hours, who 
 fall down before him, crying, ' Worthy is the Lamb 
 that was slain, to receive power, and riches, and 
 wisdom, and strength, and honour, and glory, and 
 blessing.' For the symbolism of the Apocalypse, 
 that sublime hymn of invective against Rome and 
 idealisation of the future glories of Israel, shows it- 
 self to be mainly derived from the solar phenomena, 
 especially as exhibited in the worships of Mithra and 
 Osiris. What but the constellation that ushers in 
 the winter is the Serpent or Scorpion which afflicts 
 the earth five months, and whose tail draws a third 
 part of the stars of heaven ? 
 
 Not less susceptible of a solar interpretation are 
 the miracles ascribed to Christ. Thus the conver- 
 sion of water into wine represents the formation of 
 the juice of the grape out of the rains by the sun's 
 action. The production of food, as in the extra- 
 ordinary draught of fishes and the feeding of the 
 five thousand, illustrates the sun's fertilising in- 
 fluence oh land and water. In the stilling of the 
 tempest we have an example of the dependence of 
 the weather on the sun. It is the sun that, by af- 
 fording light, gives sight to the eye. He is the 
 
THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD. 69 
 
 universal healer of disease, able by darting his rays 
 afar to impart renewed vitality at a distance, as in 
 the cases of the nobleman's son and centurion's 
 servant. He it is that raises from the dead to new 
 life the body buried in the ground. While in the 
 blasting of the barren fig-tree we see the blighting 
 effect of the sun's heat on a feeble and rootless vege- 
 tation. 
 
 The rule in the calendar is to dedicate to some 
 apostle the day of the sun's entry into a new sign. 
 And as pointed out by St. Augustine in his sermon 
 on the nativity of St. John the saying of the Bap- 
 tist, herald of the sun that is to be, 'He must 
 increase, but I must decrease, 3 procured for him his 
 place in the calendar as lord of the waning year. 
 For his festival is held on June 24, the last dav of 
 
 V 
 
 the summer solstice, and that from which the days 
 begin to decrease ; while from that of Christ, at the 
 opposite pole of the year, the days grow in length. 
 Peter and Paul, the most zealous of the apostles, 
 are placed together on the 29th of the same month, 
 when the sun. enters the station of greatest heat ; while 
 the phrase, 6 who by transgression fell and so went to 
 his proper place,' applied to Judas, is exactly de- 
 scriptive of the month of February dedicated to the 
 successors of Judas which by transgressing or pass- 
 ing over a day, falls into its proper place in the } T ear. 
 The notable part played by the constellation Virgo 
 in the celestial scheme could not fail to procure its 
 
70 THE LIGHT OF THE WOBLD. 
 
 identification with the ideal woman of the new 
 dispensation. Osiris, Mithra, Bacchus, Christ, are 
 all represented as having been born at the moment 
 of midnight, between Christmas eve and Christmas 
 day, in a cave or stable. At this moment the 
 constellation Virgo is cut exactly in half by the 
 eastern horizon, the sun itself being beneath the earth 
 in the sign of Capricorn, or Stable of Augeas, the 
 cleansing of which constituted one of the labours of 
 Hercules who also represented the sun. Justin 
 Martyr boasts that Christ was 'born when the sun 
 takes its birth in the Stable of Augeas, coining as a 
 second Hercules to cleanse a foul world. The ap- 
 pearance of the celes j Virgin above the horizon at 
 this time is thus indicated in the third Rosary : f Let 
 us contemplate how the B. V. M., when the time of her 
 delivery was come, brought forth our Redeemer, Jesus 
 Christ, at midnight, and laid him in a manger. 9 And 
 Eusebius says he was born underground. 
 
 Even the names assigned by gospel or legend to 
 the grandparents of Christ, on the mother's side, 
 seem to bear a solar signification; Heli being a 
 contraction of the Greek Helios, the sun ; and Anna 
 the feminine of Annus, the year. And it so happens 
 that, July 26, the day devoted to the latter in the 
 calendar, was the new year's day of ancient Egypt. 
 
 Returning to the Virgin herself, we find that the 
 Church celebrates her Assumption e into the heavenly 
 
THE LIGHT OF THE WOELD. 71 
 
 chamber in which the King of kings sits on his 
 starry seat,' on August 15. This is exactly the time 
 of the disappearance of the zodiacal constellation 
 Virgo, called by the Greeks Astrcea. And the period 
 during which the constellation is so wholly absorbed 
 in the brightness of the sun's rays as to be invisible 
 in the heavenly field, is seven days, or the period 
 during which Miriam (or Mary), the virgin of the 
 Old Testament, was compelled to hide her leprous 
 face in the camp of Israel. Three weeks pass ere 
 
 
 
 the sun has moved sufficiently to allow the entire 
 constellation to be seen. The day on which Virgo's 
 head emerges from, his rays September 8 is the 
 day appointed for the nativ' of the B. Y. M. 
 
 The sun's place at the vernal equinox is not now 
 in Aries, as it was at the beginning of our era, but 
 has moved on to Pisces. It was previously in Taurus. 
 The shifting of the zodiac by a sign occupies 2151 
 years. It is thus that while Mithraism, Osirisism, 
 and, following them, Judaism, had the bull and the 
 lamb, the ' golden calf and l paschal lamb,' for their 
 symbols, Christianity adopted the lamb and the fish. 
 
 The division of the sun's path among the stars, 
 into the constellations which form the Zodiac, was 
 made and known throughout the East, and domi- 
 nated its religious myths, at a period so remote that 
 Ptolemy declared it hopeless even in his time to seek 
 for its origin. 
 
72 
 
 LETTER XII. 
 
 THE APOSTASY. 
 
 THUS, for both the worshippers of the solar deity and 
 for those of Christ the same 'cardinal doctrines ' of 
 the Incarnation, the Atonement, the Death, Resur- 
 rection, and Ascension, held equally good. And the 
 fact is indisputable that neither the claim raised for 
 Jesus as being the Messiah of the Jews, nor that of 
 being the incarnate Logos, the Word made flesh, of 
 the Alexandrian Neoplatonists, of whom I will tell 
 you by and by, nor even the fierce denunciations of 
 eternal tortures against all who did not believe in 
 him, and the assurance of salvation for all who did, 
 would have secured for him popular recognition and 
 acceptance in the absence of his identification with 
 the sun, and therefore as the legitimate successor of 
 Mithra, Osiris, Adonis, and all the numerous other 
 human forms under which the sun was worshipped. 
 
 Not among the populace only did the principle 
 of the old religion thus retain its vitality, but many 
 strenuous attempts were made by influential persons 
 to restore it to supremacy. Among these was a 
 
THE APOSTASY. 73 
 
 notable attempt made by the imperial family of 
 Severus, especially by the female members of it, in- 
 stigated no doubt by the priesthood of the decaying 
 faith. Jealous of the Jewish Christ, and perceiving 
 the necessity of a new incarnation to restore the 
 prestige of their religion, these princesses sought to 
 elevate Apollonius of Tyana, a remarkable character, 
 said to have lived during the whole of the first 
 century, to the desired place, and to that end claimed 
 for him the distinction of being the latest incarna- 
 tion of the solar deity. 
 
 The worship of Christ as a god, continued, how- 
 ever, to gain ground against all competitors ; until 
 at length the power, moral, political, and ecclesiasti- 
 cal of the system as a religion, made it expedient for 
 the State to recognise it and incorporate it with 
 itself. And thus it came that under Constantine 
 Christianity was erected into a complete system 
 combining all that was essential and vital in the 
 systems it was called on to supplant. 
 
 I have shown you the correspondences between 
 the course of the sun and the histories ascribed to the 
 various personages in whom he was held to have 
 been incarnate, and those of Christ. The authorita- 
 tive promulgation of the Nicene Creed by the Council 
 presided over by the politic Constantine, cannot but 
 have confirmed the world in its ancient beliefs. Light 
 and life, the objects of worship from the beginning, 
 
74 THE APOSTASY. 
 
 are set forth in this document as of the essence of 
 God, ' maker of heaven and earth and of all things 
 visible and invisible/ through the agency of his ' only 
 begotten Son,' the grand orb in which for us all light 
 and life-giving warmth are centred and expressed, 
 which may further be said to be begotten of the 
 supreme source of things, 'the Father, before all 
 worlds, begotten not made, being of one substance 
 with the Father : by whom all things were made ' as 
 agent for the Father, even all terrestrial life, by the 
 action of the solar rays on the earth's crust. Then 
 we have the sun's annual history. ' Who for us men 
 and for our salvation' from death by the cold and 
 darkness of winter, ' came down from heaven, and 
 was incarnate by the Holy Ghost,' the wind, or 
 atmosphere. For to the ancients the course of the 
 sun lay, not above and beyond, but through the 
 atmosphere, the breathing of which is essential to 
 life, while its movement, or wind, is directly due to 
 the influence of the sun's heat. 
 
 But the Holy Ghost must have 'a spouse, by whom 
 to produce the human expression of the Only-begotten. 
 To the warm winds of spring breathing on the sur- 
 face of earth, 'the frolic wind that breathes the 
 spring,' is due all life, vegetable and animal; and 
 from them the earth, ever virgin, receives her im- 
 pregnation, at the season accorded by the Church 
 to the annunciation of the Virgin Mary the spring 
 
THE APOSTASY. 75 
 
 equinox precisely nine months before Christmas 
 day. 
 
 So the sun is made man, and in man's form un- 
 dergoes on earth the vicissitudes to which he is sub- 
 ject in the heavens. He ' suffers death ' on a machine 
 whose shape is the most ancient and universal symbol 
 of the sexual order of nature. ' He is buried ' out of 
 sight, as is his prototype during the spring storms 
 and rains. But not for long. For presently ' he rises 
 again, and ascends into heaven,' mounting higher and 
 higher as midsummer approaches, and takes the post 
 of honour ' on the right hand of the Father ' of 
 Light, as supreme arbiter of life and death, or 
 ' judge of quick and dead ; ' -for the sun has but to 
 withdraw his rays and the world is wrapped in 
 death ; to restore them and it blossoms into life : 
 ' whose kingdom shall have no end.' 
 
 The Nicene creed was composed at two different 
 times, for two special objects. The first part belongs 
 to the Council of Nice, and was written to condemn 
 the doctrine of Arius, who affirmed Christ to be a 
 mere creature, though the first of creatures, and not 
 of the substance of the Father. The second portion, 
 with the exception of the phrase ( and the Son,' was 
 written half a century afterwards, to define the na- 
 ture and functions of the Holy Ghost in opposition 
 to the teaching of Macedonius. The attempt to de- 
 fine these things at all, and still more the im- 
 
76 THE APOSTASY. 
 
 position of them by authority, have been fraught 
 with mischief incalculable to mankind, and will never 
 cease to be so until mankind is brought to see the 
 real nature of the contention, and the unpractical 
 character of the subject. Even now eastern and 
 western Christendom are hopelessly divided on the 
 question of the procession of the Holy Ghost. The 
 Mcene creed, in virtue of a later addition, takes the 
 western side, and affirms his double procession from 
 the Father and the Son, a development in which the 
 eastern Church declines to follow it. Seeing that 
 the wind, personified by the third person of the 
 Trinity, is due alike to the universal principle of 
 light and life, that is, to the Father ; and to the sun, in 
 whom he takes visible form, the Niceiie creed as we 
 have it, is manifestly in the right. So that by the 
 solar analogy as well as by that of sex, the doctrine 
 of the single procession of the Holy Ghost shows 
 itself to be untenable. 
 
 Let me again remind you that these two provinces 
 of nature have suggested the matter or controlled 
 the expression of every system of theology the world 
 has seen. So that the Mcene creed will hold good 
 of all incarnations whatever until the world gives 
 practical recognition to the facts long since proclaimed 
 to it by astronomical science. For, so far from de- 
 scending and dying and rising again, and undergoing 
 the other changes on which the theologies are built. 
 
THE APOSTASY. 77 
 
 the sun remains fixed in the centre of the solar sys- 
 tem, and the whole of the phenomena of the seasons 
 are due to a change of position in the axis of the 
 earth itself. To this you must add the consideration 
 that, as ours is but one of an innumerable host of 
 suns and systems, whatever theological system we 
 assign to one, we must assign to all, allowing only 
 for local peculiarities. 
 
 Of the peculiar value attached to the atmosphere 
 by the Orientals, and therefore of the importance of 
 the personification of that element in their theological 
 systems, we can judge from the fact that the Sanscrit 
 root of the word for God in the Latin, Greek, and other 
 derived tongues, signifies equally breath. The Greek 
 Pneuma, and the Sanscrit Div, the root of deity and 
 divine, have an identical meaning in the air. The 
 world was supposed to live by a process of breathing, 
 and the thoughts of men's minds were regarded as 
 inspired together with their breath. 
 
 But on whatever ground Christianity obtained 
 acceptance as the new rule of faith, whether from 
 pagans as constituting a new form of sun-and-sex 
 worship ; from Jews as the fulfilment of the Law and 
 Prophets, and the reign of the Messiah ; or from 
 philosophers as a complement to metaphysics, in 
 that it seemed to demonstrate what metaphysics had 
 only postulated, and by a practical instance to bridge 
 the gulf between the finite and the infinite ; whether, 
 
78 THE APOSTASY. 
 
 again, it obtained acceptance from the masses in vir- 
 tue of the supernatural physical powers with which 
 Christ, in common with all the other Sun-gods, was 
 credited ; from moralists, through their recognising in 
 the teaching ascribed to Christ a standard of conduct 
 of absolute perfection ; or from theologians, on the 
 ground of his proclaiming the spiritual nature of 
 God and his own identity therewith, and living con- 
 sistently with such claim ; in no case does the rule 
 fail to hold good, that in exalting him into a god, 
 all these classes but exalted that which they deemed 
 best in humanity, and so made God in their own 
 image, only divested of limitations. 
 
 If proof were wanted of the affection still enter- 
 tained in the fourth century for the old religion, and of 
 the moral advance made by men through the contem- 
 plation of a life of earnestness, purity, and unselfish- 
 ness, such as was presented to them of Christ, we 
 have it in the attempt of Julian to undo the work of 
 Constantine and reinstate paganism. Constantine, 
 an ardent worshipper of the sun, whom he chose 
 to be his tutelar deity, adopted on the grandest 
 scale the principle of ' concurrent endowment,' and 
 established Christianity in connection with sun- 
 worship. Julian, similarly devoted, sought to re- 
 establish sun-worship in connection with Christi- 
 anity. That is, he wished to retain the old creed and 
 ritual under their true and original forms, but with 
 
THE APOSTASY. 79 
 
 the additional spirituality,, morality, simplicity, and 
 purity acquired by the recent generations from the 
 contemplation of a life that was beautiful all round ; 
 a life which the Jewish Christians had learnt, under 
 Neoplatonic influences, to regard as that of the 
 incarnate Logos, or the Word made flesh, of their 
 Jehovah ; but which the rest of the world insisted on 
 regarding as a new and more noble incarnation of 
 the sun. 
 
 Both sides could adduce what must have seemed 
 to them irresistible reasons for their views. The 
 Pagan could point triumphantly to the heavens for 
 the visible origin and sustainer of life, who already 
 in the persons of Crishna, Mithra, Osiris, Hercules, 
 Bacchus, Apollo, Adonis, and many others, had con- 
 descended to man's estate to redeem mankind from 
 evil. 
 
 And the Jew, whose temperament and history 
 disposed him to lay the principal stress on the moral 
 side of things, could point to his Law, with its stre- 
 nuous insistance on perfect physical purity : to his 
 prophets, with their ardent inculcation of spiritual 
 perfection : and now to his Christ, with his fulfilment 
 of the requirements of both as the translator of all 
 perfection from the abstract into the concrete, from 
 the infinite into the finite, the ideal into the real, 
 God into Man. 
 
 Yiewed in this relation the story of the Trans- 
 
80 THE APOSTASY. 
 
 figuration possesses a profound significance. In it 
 we have Christ, taking Peter, John, and James, 
 representing respectively zeal, love, and works, for 
 his witnesses, and meeting Moses and Elias, the 
 representatives of the Law and the Prophets, ' in 
 glory.' In the company of these two he is recognised 
 by a divine voice as the ' beloved Son of God,' the 
 fulfilment and completion of the dispensations repre- 
 sented by Moses and Elias, resuming in himself all 
 the perfections contemplated by them, and constitut- 
 ing therefore a satisfactory solution of the problem 
 their supersession had been to the Jewish mind. 
 
 It is true that the occurrence is alluded to only 
 in the three Gospels which are of exclusively Jewish 
 origin, and is not mentioned in the Epistle ascribed 
 to James, nor in the fourth Gospel, which bears the 
 name of John, nor in his Epistles. The omission 
 as regards John is important as an indication that 
 the fourth Gospel was the work not of any dweller in 
 Palestine, but of some foreign Neoplatonist, who was 
 more concerned to identify Christ with the Logos of 
 the Alexandrian school, than to save the credit of 
 the Law and Prophets of the Jews. 
 
81 
 
 LETTEE XIII. 
 
 THE WORD MADE FLESH. 
 
 I WILL now tell you of tlie Logos, or Word that was 
 made flesh. 
 
 As not from without but from within the human 
 consciousness, came the necessity for a Being who 
 should constitute the solution of the problem of ex- 
 istence, that is, for God ; so, not from without but 
 from within the human consciousness, only further 
 developed, came the necessity for a solution of the 
 problem how God could produce the world ; the 
 problem, that is, how the infinite could become 
 transmuted into the finite, the ideal into the real, 
 perfection into imperfection. 
 
 For ages had metaphysicians pondered it. Brah- 
 minism, rejecting the previously received doctrine of 
 the eternity of matter, introduced a Trinity personify- 
 ing Absolute Existence, Composition, and Decom- 
 position. Late in the history of this religion, namely 
 about B.C. 1000 to 600, came Buddhism, a system de- 
 rived from Sakya Muni, a sage and philanthropist, who 
 sought to spiritualise Brahminism in much the same 
 
 G 
 
82 THE WORD MADE FLESH. 
 
 way that Jesus sought to spiritualise Judaism. Under 
 the name of Buddha this reformer was widely wor- 
 shipped as the Word of Divine Wisdom made flesh. 
 
 Simplifying the teaching of the Indian theolo- 
 gians, and breaking down the partition wall of 
 Caste between the priests and people, Buddha called 
 on all alike to receive the Word and its spiritual 
 benefits. 
 
 Passing from India to Persia, and thence to 
 Greece, where in the hands of Plato it was made 
 much of, the doctrine of the Logos became the pro- 
 minent feature of the famous Neoplatonic school of 
 Alexandria. For some time the doctrine was here 
 restricted to the region of philosophy, and was devoid 
 of any personal element. But to mere intellect the 
 chasm between the finite and the infinite was im- 
 passable ; it was for religion to accomplish what 
 philosophy had only attempted. 
 
 Where intellect sees an idea, an abstraction, 
 religion sees a person. This involves a superior 
 development of the consciousness ; inasmuch as, 
 while intellect of itself, having neither motive nor 
 force, could not have created, personality includes 
 intellect and all else that is indispensable to action, 
 namely feeling and energy. Aristotle, as I have 
 already mentioned, was here surpassed by Plato, who 
 spoke of emotion and intellect as the two wings on 
 which we rise towards God. It was by their aid 
 
THE WORD MADE FLESH. 83 
 
 that man discovered that God is Love, Love and 
 therefore Creator ; Love and therefore Redeemer. 
 
 Yes, Redeemer. For the growth of consciousness 
 had brought with it yet another problem, and one 
 whose solution was as necessary to the repose of the 
 human soul as that of the others had been for the 
 satisfaction of the human mind. The infinite had 
 become transmuted into the finite, the ideal into the 
 real, and thus had brought about the world. But 
 with the growth of consciousness came the growth 
 of conscience ; and under its influence man perceived 
 that the real fell so far short of the ideal as necessarily 
 to be displeasing to its Creator, the absolute ideal. 
 How was a reconciliation to be effected, and the 
 real be re-united to the ideal, the world to GodV 
 Surely, only by the same method as was employed 
 in the original creation ; even by an incarnation of 
 the Divine Wisdom or ' Word ' in the nature of those 
 who were to be redeemed, even God manifest in the 
 flesh. Only by a new birth or creation through the 
 Divine Word, the High Priest, the Anointed, the 
 Christ incapable of sin, first begotten of God, born of 
 a wholly pure mother ; the Word who was before all 
 things and by whom all things were made, who 
 stands between the living and the dead, and by whom 
 God will raise up man perfect and place him near 
 himself. 
 
 Be not dismayed. I am not quoting Scripture 
 
 G 2 
 
84 THE WORD MADE FLESH. 
 
 to prove itself. The keys wherewith we are to open 
 the Creeds are not taken thence. These phrases are 
 all borrowed from a writer who lived and wrote not 
 only long before the time of the New Testament, but 
 before the commencement of the ministry of Jesus. 
 And he did not use them as if he had originated 
 them, and was eager to propagate his own fame by 
 their means. He used them as being already in 
 vogue ; for they were already in the air, soon to be 
 precipitated in a concrete form to the earth. The 
 sense in which he used them, however, was less 
 spiritual than philosophical. They constituted for 
 him the solution of a mental problem. 
 
 Once more, then, I say, Redeemer ; for the love 
 that creates must also save. But love is of the feel- 
 ings, not of the intellect. Wherefore a religion that 
 appeals to the intellect only, fails in the essential 
 element of religion. The founders of religions have 
 not been intellectual men ; at least it was in virtue of 
 their spiritual and emotional characteristics, rather 
 than of their intellectual ones, that they have been 
 qualified for their mission. Pure intellect would be 
 content with an impersonal unconditioned Unity, oc- 
 cupying space in such a way as to admit of nought 
 beside itself. And neither intellect nor feeling can 
 conceive of Unity as productive. 
 
 All this was obvious to thinkers thousands of 
 years ago. Hence the Trinities of the Vedas and 
 
THE WOKD MADE FLESH. 85 
 
 the later Hindoos ; of the Scandinavians and Egyp- 
 tians ; of Zoroaster, of Plato, and many others, all of 
 which had their basis in a philosophy that was purely 
 human. Hence also the various incarnations spring- 
 ing from those Trinities. For, thousands of years 
 ago it was obvious to all, except the Jews, that the 
 fact of the divine personality involved the necessity 
 of a Trinity, and that the doctrine of incarnation 
 alone solved the problems of creation and redemp- 
 tion. The Jews, to some extent, learnt it at last ; 
 but it took a long course of study in the philosophy 
 of Persia, Greece, and Egypt, to bring them up to 
 the level of this catholic doctrine. A long course of 
 study, and of suffering- also ; for only by suffering 
 was Israel at length to be made perfect. This 
 should not tell against them. It was only through 
 the extraordinary fibre of the race that it required so 
 much working up, and that it was capable of being 
 worked up to so high a pitch. True, Israel's cross- 
 grainedness often brought its own troubles upon it ; 
 but a less hardy stock would long since have perished 
 utterly. 
 
 So far, then, from ministering to the moral degra- 
 dation of the Jews, their hopelessness of a physical 
 deliverance bore fruit in the production of the idea 
 of a spiritual deliverer, through whom their race 
 should achieve a triumph surpassing any imaginable 
 by their enemies. 
 
86 
 
 LETTER XIY. 
 
 'OUT OF EGYPT HAVE I CALLED MY SON.' 
 
 WHILE Israel was thus developing its faith in the 
 advent of a Messiah who should redeem him from all 
 his sins, instead of one who should rescue him from 
 his political woes, there arose in Alexandria a school 
 of philosophy that seemed to be a revival of the 
 departed glories of Greece. The language of this 
 School was Greek, and its philosophy that of Plato, 
 
 . 
 
 only Plato still further spiritualised and speaking of 
 one God as creator and ruler of the world, without 
 deference to the popular predilection for a multipli- 
 city of deities. 
 
 The School of Alexandria added a new Trinity to 
 those already received in Egypt, which were de- 
 rived, as I have shown you, from the phenomena of 
 the solar system and of sex. This new Trinity was 
 based 011 an analysis of the functions of the indivi- 
 dual man. Every living being consists of a trinity ; 
 the individual self ; the mind ; and the life. 
 
 Well, following our rule, and projecting the indi- 
 vidual man into the ideal, and divesting him of limita- 
 
'OUT OF EGYPT HAVE I CALLED MY SON.' 87 
 
 tions, the Neoplatonists presented their Trinity as 
 consisting of three Persons, of whom the first was 
 Unity, infinite and perfect, but capable of generating 
 existence. How it could do so, this philosophy could 
 not say, because as yet it was only a philosophy, and 
 not a religion. The second person was subordinate 
 to the first, but was the most perfect of all generated 
 beings. It was called the Intelligence, Wisdom, or 
 Word, Logos, a Greek term, by a happy coincidence 
 signifying both reason and speech. The third person 
 was the universal Spirit, Soul, or Life. It was only 
 through the Word that God the Father could be 
 known, as a man's mind can only be known through 
 his speech. The Word was thus the interpreter or 
 mediator between God and man. 
 
 The leading apostle of this philosophy was a Jew, 
 named Philo, who was born about B.C. 30. From his 
 writings were quoted the passages that sounded so 
 much like Scripture. He was at once an enthusi- 
 astic disciple of Plato, and an ardent Jew after the 
 pattern of the later and more spiritual type. His 
 countrymen, growing in spiritual graces since the 
 captivity, had long been familiar with the idea of 
 the Logos, whom they personified under the name of 
 Wisdom. The Apocrypha, a collection of writings 
 retained in the Catholic Canon of Scripture, but ex- 
 cluded from the Protestant, affords us a clear insight 
 into the progress of Jewish thought between the 
 
88 'OUT OF EGYPT HAVE I CALLED MY SON.' 
 
 times of the Old and New Testaments. Constantly 
 in the book of Wisdom, is Wisdom spoken of as a 
 personified emanation of Deity, in every function 
 identical with the Logos of Philo. 
 
 In Jerusalem itself thought approximated more 
 or less to that in Alexandria. The early advent of 
 a deliverer was the object of belief and prayer with all 
 earnest Jews. Their differences were mainly respect- 
 ing his nature. Should the expected Messiah ap- 
 pear as a great Jewish warrior to redeem their 
 country from the Roman yoke, and lead them to the 
 enjoyment of all the glories and delights of the world 
 of sense ; or should he be a teacher of righteousness 
 to lead them to God and to the worship of an ideal 
 of spiritual perfection ? 
 
 These aspirations found an echo in the mind of 
 Philo. But living in a philosophical atmosphere and 
 being of a religious temperament, and withal a 
 liberal in politics, his aim was to win Jew and Gen- 
 tile alike to a religion derived equally from Moses 
 and Plato, and one which he believed himself able to 
 construct on a sufficiently catholic, or as he called it 
 encyclic, basis ; a religion at once so rational and 
 so spiritual as to be able to win acceptance from the 
 human heart and human mind without divine inter- 
 ference. Besides, for him the Logos was already an 
 actual person ; existing, not indeed in a gross mate- 
 rial form, but as the idea subsisting in the mind of 
 
4 OUT OF EGYPT HAVE I CALLED MY SON.' 89 
 
 the Creator, and taking form, in speech, even the 
 Word whereby all things were created, yet at the same 
 time a distinct personality. 
 
 We have, thus, at this time in the most influen- 
 tial centre of thought, and closely connected with 
 Palestine, geographically, commercially, and intel- 
 lectually, a religion which consisted in the worship 
 of a divine being, incarnated in human form in 
 order to redeem fallen man, born of a virgin, teach- 
 ing immortality, working wonders of benevolence, 
 dying through the hostile machinations of the Spirit 
 of Evil, rising from death, reascending into heaven, 
 and becoming judge of the dead. As representative 
 of the sun, the festivals appointed in his honour were 
 fixed in accordance with the seasons ; his birth being 
 at the end of the winter solstice ; his death at the 
 spring equinox ; his rising soon afterwards, and then 
 his ascension into heaven, whence he showers down 
 benefits on men. And, mingled with the worship of 
 this being, we have moral and theological teaching 
 of the utmost purity and nobility. 
 
 We have, also, at the same time and in the same 
 country a philosophy counting many adherents among 
 the learned and pious, and seeking to become gene- 
 ral, of which the main doctrines were a Trinity of 
 spiritual beings, consisting of Father, Son, and Soul 
 or Life, the second person being distinguished as the 
 Logos or divine Word, by whom all things were made, 
 
90 'OUT OF EGYPT HAVE I CALLED MY SON.' 
 
 and without whom nothing was or could be made ; 
 and who was also man's redeemer and mediator with 
 God. 
 
 And, shifting the scene but a short distance to a 
 country adjoining and in intimate intercourse with 
 Egypt, we have a people of the intensest religious 
 temperament, all of them ardently longing for de- 
 liverance from the yoke of a conqueror, and many of 
 them regarding the deliverance from spiritual and 
 ceremonial bondage as of still greater importance ; 
 familiar, too, with the preaching of a new era which 
 should constitute the kingdom of God 011 earth, 
 when under the chieftainship of a heaven-descended 
 Messiah, Israel should become the head of the 
 nations in moral if not in political power. 
 
 Still possessed as were the Jews by the tendency 
 to personify principles and ideas which had made 
 them so liable to idolatry, it was inevitable that the 
 desires which had accumulated until too oppres- 
 sive to be borne, should take visible form, and the 
 massive cloud of the general hopes and feelings 
 burst and discharge its pent up contents in solid 
 form on the earth. The passionateness of their 
 character finds ample demonstration in the history 
 of the sect of the Essenes. These were a people who 
 first appeared in the country of the Dead Sea about 
 200 B.C. Deriving their tenets from the East, they 
 believed in the Persian dualism, regarded the sun 
 
'OUT OF EGYPT HAVE I CALLED MY SON.' 91 
 
 as the impersonation of the Supreme Light, and 
 worshipped it in a modified way. Forsaking civi- 
 lisation for the wilderness, they renounced all the 
 pleasures of sense, and devoted themselves to the 
 culture of repentance and pious mysticism, in fur- 
 therance of the 'kingdom of God' on a broader 
 
 o 
 
 basis than that contemplated by the Law. They 
 had all property in common, and refused the ordi- 
 nary sacrifices, deeming themselves the only accept- 
 able sacrifice they could offer to God. 
 
 The Essenes also took vows of poverty and chas- 
 tity, attached vast importance to baptism, and, in 
 virtue of the solar basis of their faith, practised the 
 Mithraic rite of the Eucharist. Perhaps it has not 
 occurred to you that the sacrament of bread and 
 wine is traceable to such a source ? Yet how naturally 
 does the eternal work of the sun, daily renewed, 
 express itself in such lines as,- 
 
 Into bread his heat is turned, 
 Into generous wine his light. 
 
 And imagining the sun as a person, the change to 
 c flesh ' and ' blood ' becomes inevitable ; while the 
 fact that the solar forces are actually changed into 
 food without forfeiting their solar character, finds 
 expression in the doctrines of transubstantiatioii and 
 the real presence. To the sect of the Essenes the 
 originals of John the Baptist and Jesus himself must 
 have belonged ; and it is not difficult to imagine an 
 
92 'OUT OF EGYPT HAVE I CALLED MY SON.' 
 
 extraordinary development of the religious genius in 
 the youthful Jesus as calling forth the prophetic 
 utterances of John. 
 
 The passionateness of the Jewish character finds 
 illustration also in another and more influential 
 party, whereof the writer of the Pauline epistles was 
 an enthusiastic member. These could not conceive 
 of a law so holy, just and good, and inculcating a 
 standard of perfection so transcendent as that of 
 Moses, or of the sacrifices enjoined by it, as coming 
 to an end except by being so absolutely fulfilled as 
 to be no longer necessary : or of the high and 
 sanguine anticipations of their prophets passing 
 fruitless away. 
 
 The absolute hopelessness of restoring the old 
 regime would prompt this class of thinkers to accept 
 any solution that promised to save the credit of their 
 cherished system. It was true the prophets had not 
 held the Law in such high estimation as to consider 
 its perpetuity desirable. Nay, one of the most 
 highly inspired of them had drawn a touching pic- 
 ture of Israel personified as a man of sorrows, and 
 blameless life, and so far from requiring sacrifice for 
 himself, dying for the sins of others. What if the 
 obscure itinerant enthusiast, whose violent death 
 and the outcries of whose followers, had brought into 
 notice his simple life of benevolence and his moral, 
 though withal revolutionary teaching, could be 
 
'OUT OF EGYPT HAVE I CALLED MY SON.' 93 
 
 taken as foreshadowed in such a prophecy, and 
 exalted as the redeemer and moral Messiah of 
 Israel ? 
 
 The Law, the decay of whose authority they 
 were lamenting, had failed, it is true, to exalt Israel 
 to the first place among mankind. But that was 
 through no fault of the law. It postulated an ideal 
 perfection, now proved by experience to be unattain- 
 able in the real, so far as men, and even Israelites, 
 in general were concerned. 
 
 o 
 
 But what if it could be shown that a single indi- 
 vidual of their race had attained the perfection 
 prescribed by the Law, and in pursuit of that per- 
 fection had come to a violent death ? Why, in that 
 case the Law could be superseded as fulfilled in 
 every respect, and could without dishonour give 
 place to a new dispensation. 
 
 But who could thus accomplish all the divine 
 commands and supersede a law given by God? 
 None, surely, save God himself. Perfection such as 
 this appertained not to the finite. The new moral 
 Messiah must therefore be God himself, incarnate in 
 the seed of Abraham and David, even the familiar 
 Logos by whom all things were created and re- 
 deemed. But if God, there must be discernible in 
 him elements of infinity, moral spiritual and phy- 
 sical, altogether incompatible with the limitations of 
 humanity. 
 
94 'OUT OF EGYPT HAVE I CALLED MY SON.' 
 
 In accordance with this train of Jewish thought, 
 we are now brought to enquire what was the life 
 and rule, what the secret and method, whereby he 
 on whom the choice fell to fill this high office, de- 
 monstrated his superiority to ordinary flesh and 
 blood, and reconciled a doctrine essentially Catholic 
 with one exclusively Jewish. 
 
95 
 
 LETTER XV. 
 
 THE KINGDOM OP HEAVEN. 
 
 To be accounted divine by his fellows, a man must 
 exhibit the element of infinity in one or more direc- 
 tions. 
 
 The special distinguishing "characteristic of the 
 Jesus presented to us by the gospels, consisted in his 
 dealing with all moral and spiritual questions from 
 the standpoint of the ideal. His rules were rules 
 of absolute perfection, to be followed implicitly 
 without reference to consequences or to the possi- 
 bility of carrying them out in their entirety. Thus 
 far they were identical in spirit with the law of 
 Moses. But there was an essential difference be- 
 tween them and that law. The law did not concern 
 itself with the attitude of men's minds, or set forth 
 the Deity as an object of affection. It was essen- 
 tially outward and ceremonial, regulating conduct 
 and appearances, and its ruling motive was fear. 
 
 Jesus, on the contrary, cared nought for exter- 
 nals, but made the spirit all in all, and love for God 
 the sole motive. For him the essential element of 
 
96 THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN. 
 
 the perfect life was the cultivation of the soul ; the 
 means employed being the contemplation and prac- 
 tice of absolute perfection. This alone being of 
 consequence, he accounted nothing that befalls the 
 individual thus occupied as worthy of consideration. 
 The end and aim of his followers must not be the 
 happiness either of themselves or of othe?*s, but such 
 perfection of spirit as will of itself produce the most 
 perfect behaviour under all circumstances. To those 
 who seek first the ideal perfection in their minds 
 and hearts ( the kingdom of God' as he called it 
 whatever else is desirable will be added spontane- 
 ously. Being good will produce doing good. And a 
 life in the ideal will, by being indifferent to the life 
 of sense, seem to have all good things. 
 
 It was not the rich only whom he admonished to 
 hold their real as of no account, if they would culti- 
 vate their ideal, and to whom he promised ( treasure 
 in heaven ' on condition of their following him the 
 perfect ideal. The poor also would be gainers, in 
 that their poverty in respect of the things of sense 
 would be less felt by them when absorbed in the 
 pursuit of the things of the spirit. In declaring it 
 to be hard for the rich to enter into the kingdom of 
 heaven, he signified that wealth provides so many 
 delights for the senses, that those who possess it are 
 apt to neglect the culture and fruits of the spirit, 
 and to cherish the real rather than the ideal. 
 
THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN. 97 
 
 Similarly must we interpret the saying that who- 
 soever is born of God overconieth the world. Pro- 
 ducts of the ideal, the things of sense have no power 
 to affect them. And so absolute was his require- 
 ment in respect of spiritual perfection, that he 
 denounced even the possession of the natural appe- 
 tites necessary for the continuance of the race as 
 incompatible with perfect purity of soul. 
 
 To be able to devote oneself wholly to the ideal, 
 there must be complete trust and confidence in it. 
 The name given by Jesus to this sentiment is faith. 
 The ideal itself he personifies under the name of 
 God, and the state of ideal perfection he makes con- 
 crete under the term kingdom of God or of heaven. 
 Thus, to have entered into the kingdom of heaven, 
 or to ' be one with God,' means to be so penetrated 
 and suffused by a sense of ideal perfection, as to be 
 altogether lost to things of sense, and alive in the 
 spirit alone. Being thus, we have the faith that 
 moves mountains, for to such enthusiastic love of 
 the ideal, material obstacles count for nothing, or 
 operate but as means of attaining further grace. 
 
 In virtue of his supreme genius for religion the 
 soul of Jesus readily and spontaneously ascended into 
 these sublime regions of feeling. The e inspired ' 
 everywhere are those whom the possession of the 
 instinct of perfection provides with the wings neces- 
 sary for such flight into the ideal. As ideal and 
 
 H 
 
98 THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN. 
 
 representative man, it was fitting that Jesus should 
 have this sense of perfection in the highest degree, 
 especially in respect of things appertaining to reli- 
 gion, things affecting the welfare of the soul. Abso- 
 lute perfection as imagined by religious genius 
 necessarily becomes personified. That is, the soul 
 creates God, in man's image, but the image of man 
 spiritualised, purified, sanctified, and glorified. 
 
 Making allowances for the imperfection of the 
 reports of his teaching and conduct which have come 
 down to us, it would seem that Jesus was himself 
 so utterly penetrated by the enthusiasm not of 
 humanity, that was but secondary but of spiritual 
 perfection, as to identify himself personally with the 
 supreme ideal of perfection or God. Only thus, 
 supposing the fourth Gospel to represent him accu- 
 rately in this respect, can we account for his frequent 
 declarations that no man cometh to the Father but 
 by him, and that whoso hath seen him hath seen the 
 Father also. No other teacher has thus exalted him- 
 self. So that either he regarded the spirit which 
 animated him as identical with the supreme spirit 
 of the moral universe ; (and who can say it is not so 
 with all pure human spirits ?) or the sentiment was 
 afterwards ascribed to him to give colour and sup- 
 port to the doctrine which identified him with the 
 Logos or Divine Word made flesh, and therefore 
 with God the Father himself. For both the fourth 
 
THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN. 99 
 
 Gospel and the Epistle to the Hebrews show unmis- 
 takably a Neoplatonic inspiration. 
 
 The ascription to him of physical infinity followed 
 of necessity that of moral infinity. And when sub- 
 sequent ages had removed him altogether from the 
 category of the real into that of the ideal, and he 
 was regarded no longer as c the man Christ Jesus,' 
 but as a being wholly devoid of limitations, his dis- 
 ciples, following the universal custom in such cases, 
 eagerly vied with each other in ascribing to him 
 every attribute which struck them as befitting a 
 deitv. We have in this a further illustration of our 
 
 */ 
 
 doctrine that it is by regarding humanity, on its 
 best side, as divested of limitations, that men ever 
 seek to make God. Thus the life as well as the 
 teaching of Christ assumed in the eyes of his fol- 
 lowers the element of infinity, and appeared as free 
 from the limitations which restrain the action of 
 other men. Seen through such glasses his acts of 
 sympathy became miracles of healing, and he was 
 made lord over disease and the elements, and even 
 over death itself, and this in the persons of others as 
 well as in his own. 
 
 This universal tendency of religionists to represent 
 the objects of their veneration as superior to the limi- 
 tations of humanity, makes it necessary to distrust all 
 accounts professing to give details of their lives and 
 conversation. Their dispositions and characteristics, 
 
 H 2 
 
100 THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN. 
 
 though not incapable of distortion, can hardly be so 
 completely misrepresented as to seriously mislead. 
 So that we may possess a trustworthy account of the 
 spirit that was in Jesus, and yet be altogether in the 
 dark respecting his precise sayings and doings. 
 
 The condition of the world at this period being 
 such as I have described, it was inevitable that any 
 impressive personality, whose career enabled such 
 things, with however small a modicum of truth, to be 
 predicated of it as were predicated of Jesus, should 
 be seized upon and appropriated to the purposes of 
 a new religion. Religion and philosophy alike were 
 at a standstill for a solution of the new feelings and 
 ideas which had long been growing up. A fallow 
 time as to outward and visible products though the 
 ages immediately preceding Christ may have been, 
 they were not inactive. The soil of humanity, 
 whether pagan or Jewish, had undergone decompo- 
 sition, and in the process had set free the element 
 of spirituality in quantity and quality hitherto un- 
 equalled. 
 
 But though the soil had been thus preparing for 
 centuries, generations had yet to pass before the 
 acceptance of the Jewish teacher as an adequate 
 basis for a new religion, became in any great degree 
 general. In the meanwhile, such acceptance as was 
 accorded was due in great measure to the mental exi- 
 gencies of the times, and to the desire of the popular 
 
THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN. 101 
 
 imagination to fill up the vacuum caused by the fail- 
 ing prestige of the old religious systems. For the 
 masses, too, the spectacle of an lievoic crusade 3 gainst 
 the authority, respectability, and pharisaism of an 
 established ecclesiasticism, combined with complete 
 self-devotion, with teaching of the most absolute per- 
 fection in morals a perfection readily recognisable by 
 the intuitive perceptions of all and with a confident 
 mysticism that seemed to imply unbounded super- 
 natural knowledge all characteristics of the sect of 
 Essenes to which he and the Baptist manifestly 
 belonged these were amply sumcient to win belief 
 in Jesus as a divine personage. And especially so 
 when they found him persistently reported, not only 
 as having performed miracles in his life, but as 
 having shown that traditional superiority to all the 
 limitations of humanity which was ascribed to their 
 previous divinities, by rising from the dead and ascend- 
 ing into heaven. Familiar as they were with the notion 
 of incarnations in which the sun played the principal 
 part, and accustomed to associate such events with vir- 
 gin mothers impregnated by deities, births in stables 
 or caves, hazardous careers in the exercise of benevo- 
 lence, violent deaths, and descents into the kingdom 
 of darkness, resurrections and ascensions into heaven, 
 to be followed by the descent of blessings upon man- 
 kind, it required but the suggestion that Jesus of 
 Nazareth was a new and nobler incarnation of the 
 
102 THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN. 
 
 deity who had so often before been incarnate and 
 put to death for -man's salvation, to transfer to him 
 the^vKbfe'para.pheriialia of doctrine and rite deemed 
 appropriate to the office. 
 
 Add to these deeply-rooted beliefs the fact that 
 Christianity as then preached contained characteris- 
 tics universal to man, blended with the element of 
 infinity as to God, and it becomes impossible that 
 the Christian system could have been rejected from 
 any religion claiming to be catholic in character, or 
 seeking to become catholic in extent. Calculated, 
 moreover, as such a system was to satisfy the longing 
 of mankind for some palpable horizon to limit the 
 excursions of barren speculation ; and at the same 
 time to formulate their desire for perfection in things 
 moral and spiritual a desire fostered by their natural 
 recoil from the fast accumulating abominations of the 
 imperial regime of Eome it constituted the sole 
 scheme available whereon to construct a catholic 
 Church, a Church that should at once resume and 
 succeed to all that was of value in the systems which 
 were ceasing to be. 
 
103 
 
 LETTER XVI. 
 
 THE HOLT CATHOLIC CHURCH. 
 
 THE function of the Church is the culture of the 
 ideal. 
 
 You ask why there should be a Church, and why 
 its headquarters should be Rome. 
 
 Consisting, as does the Catholic Church, of all 
 persons who recognise the ideal as the supreme ob- 
 ject of human aspiration, especially in things spirit- 
 ual, it is inevitable that there should be an intimate 
 bond of union and fellowship between those who 
 make such culture the main end of existence. In- 
 evitable also, that, prevented as most are by the exi- 
 gencies of the struggle for physical existence from 
 devoting themselves to such culture with the assiduity 
 and intelligence necessary to secure the highest re- 
 sults, a class should be formed and set apart for this 
 express purpose. It is thus that we have the divi- 
 sion of the Church into clergy and laity. 
 
 Catholic or universal as is the Church in respect 
 of its principles both doctrinal and practical, it fol- 
 lows that all who refuse to acknowledge its jurisdic- 
 
104 THE HOLY CATHOLIC CHURCH. 
 
 tion condemn themselves to an abrogation of that 
 
 o 
 
 which is general in favour of that which is particular. 
 Thus the essence of sectarianism consists in its pre- 
 ference of a part to the whole. The part may indeed 
 be good and true so far as it goes ; but by being 
 severed from the whole and accepted as a whole in 
 itself, it becomes distorted from its true relations and 
 proportions, and converted into monstrosity and false- 
 hood. As well take a fraction of a ladder and expect 
 to mount as high as with the whole ladder, as hope 
 to obtain in a sect the same perfection of culture for 
 the soul as in the Church. 
 
 It is especially in virtue of its universality that 
 the Church is infallible. Derived from no isolated 
 place or period, its doctrines represent the collective 
 intuitions of the human consciousness and the collec- 
 tive facts of human life in their highest development. 
 It is only because the Christian aspect of these is the 
 highest that the Church styles itself Christian. The 
 Church's infallibility thus resides, not in any specific 
 corporation or individual, but in the universal human 
 soul. For every man, as has been said, carries with- 
 in him, consciously or unconsciously, the whole para- 
 phernalia of dogmatic theology. And of that 
 infallibility the chief officer of the Church for the 
 time being is the final depositary and expression. It 
 culminates in him. If, thus invested with the ex- 
 pression of the soul's ultimate conclusions, he be 
 
THE HOLY CATHOLIC CHUECH. 105 
 
 fallible and erring, it is then farewell to the intuitions 
 of humanity as a criterion of truth in matters of 
 faith in religion and of practice in morals ; for then 
 man is himself a failure, not in respect of his real 
 merely, but of his highest ideas and aspirations. 
 
 But, being man, and endowed with a soul, or 
 capacity for idealisation, he must have somewhere a 
 guide and exponent for his aspirations towards the 
 spiritual world; and if such exponent cannot be 
 found in the head of the Catholic Church, who and 
 where is he? Pontifex Maximus; Bridge-Maker 
 between the real and the ideal ; Yicar of Christ the 
 ideal realised and vanished into the skies and main 
 channel through which that ideal exercises its reflex 
 influence on man's real ; such are the titles and 
 such the functions of him who occupies the position 
 of spiritual father of the whole human race. For 
 there is 011 earth no other claimant ; and without 
 such an one to hold in the flesh the place assigned to 
 Christ in the spirit, the scheme of humanity would 
 be incomplete, the divinest part of the divine work a 
 failure. 
 
 ' But why Rome ? ' Why not ? True, there is 
 no inherent necessity for any one locality above 
 another ; but a locality there must be for things ap- 
 pertaining to the real, and what place can show a 
 prescriptive right to be accepted as such compared 
 with that of Koine ? The point was settled by Provi- 
 
106 THE HOLY CATHOLIC CHUKCH. 
 
 dence and history long anterior to Christianity. 
 Precisely as Christ, the ideal man, was, as we have 
 seen, the natural sequence and outcome of the char- 
 acter and history of the Jewish race, so was Catholic 
 Rome the natural sequence and outcome of pagan 
 Koine. For ages had Rome, dominating the world's 
 nationalities, given man law. Who, then, more fitted, 
 under the new dispensation, to give it gospel ; and 
 abolishing nationality and its severing influences, to 
 unite all men under one head in the bond of an iden- 
 tical spiritual sentiment? And here is another 
 analogy between Roman and Jewish history. The 
 law imposed by Rome pagan, like that of Moses, had 
 referred solely to man's real. The law imposed by 
 Rome catholic, like the gospel of Christ, had for its 
 subject man's ideal. And if, in its unapproachable 
 universality and loftiness of function, Christian Rome 
 surpasses pagan Rome, as the Gospel does the Law, 
 and attains a height and perfection unknown and un- 
 reached elsewhere, what better title can it have to 
 the supremacy it claims ? 
 
 Moreover, of all bodies claiming to be Churches, 
 the Roman alone has exhibited the spiritual know- 
 ledge and vitality which mark the true Church. She 
 alone is orthodox and catholic. She alone possesses 
 the Keys which enable her to unlock successively in 
 their due course of development the divine mysteries 
 of religion. There is 110 other system that does not 
 
THE HOLY CATHOLIC CHURCH. 107 
 
 fail in these essential respects. Protestantism, whose 
 theology is but an arbitrary selection from the 
 body of Catholic doctrine, represents a retrograde 
 step in that it is an appeal from the spirit to the 
 letter, from the ideal to the material. Putting the 
 imperfect records of a single period in the soul's 
 history, above the universal consciousness of the 
 soul in all places and ages, it seeks to interpret 
 Scripture by itself and apart from its context in 
 humanity, and thus makes catholic doctrine the re- 
 sult of Christ, instead of making Christ the result 
 of catholic doctrine ! 
 
 Such narrowness and exclusiveness constitute the 
 defect of all sectarianism whatever. Through the 
 
 CJ 
 
 omission from man of some essential element, is pro- 
 duced a representation of Deity scarcely less partial 
 and distorted than those of the rudest paganism. 
 Thus, the God of the Calvinists, the greatest of the 
 rivals of the God of Catholicism, so far from repre- 
 senting in unlimited degree all the characteristics of 
 man, according to the acknowledged principle of 
 making God in man's image, is restricted to an abso- 
 lute Will, ruling on rigid mechanical principles, 
 devoid of any emotion save that of anger; and 
 though accepting, in its grossest and most repulsive 
 sense the atonement made by Christ, as an expe- 
 dient, reduces it to a mere mechanical adjustment. 
 Catholicism, it is true, includes the same system; 
 
108 THE HOLY CATHOLIC CHUECH. 
 
 but by completing the human element, and idealising 
 it as a whole, exalts it to the divine. And this it 
 does with every element of universality which it finds 
 in any religious or philosophical system whatever. So 
 that while every other system represents some special 
 aspect of humanity, Catholicism alone, at once uni- 
 versal and eclectic, takes humanity in its totality, 
 and by projecting it into the infinite, sets forth a 
 God in whom every man can find the sympathetic 
 counterpart of himself. 
 
 Not that even within the Church all who are 
 Catholics in name are catholic in spirit. Just as 
 their mental or bodily development must be meagre 
 and unsatisfactory who cultivate but one portion of 
 their faculties, so is the spiritual condition of those 
 who, renouncing the manysidedness necessary to 
 build up the perfect man, confine themselves to some 
 one doctrine, worship the embodiment of some one 
 ideal, or attach supreme importance to some one 
 phase of life or faith, some solitary characteristic, 
 and ignore the whole remaining portion of the vast 
 body of divine truth. 
 
 But if this can occur within the Catholic Church, 
 how inexpressibly petty and poverty-stricken must 
 appear to a catholic mind the various sects into 
 which Christendom has divided itself; each taking 
 for its basis some point in theology, some practice in 
 ecclesiasticism, and rearing thereon a structure 
 
THE HOLY CATHOLIC CHURCH. 109 
 
 scarce recognisable as an attempt to build up a body 
 for Christ. The sole redeeming consideration, when 
 one beholds the crowds of worshippers flocking to 
 their temples, is, that these people, narrow and 
 stunted as are their spiritual perceptions, and grossly 
 inadequate to the comprehension of the divine signi- 
 ficance that may be in the phrases in which their 
 parrot-like utterances are couched, are still, yes, 
 whether Jew, pagan, or Christian, in so far as in 
 them lies, or rather in so far as their spiritual guides, 
 blind and leading the blind, have shown them the 
 way, cultivating the ideal side of their nature, still 
 worshipping God, though God dwarfed and starved 
 to dimensions in accordance with their own puny 
 imaginations. 
 
 Worship, whether it take form in prayer or in 
 praise, means nothing unless it consists in commu- 
 nion with the ideal. However low that ideal may 
 be for any man, still, being his ideal, it is his best. 
 Wherefore the poet's injunction, 
 
 Leave thou thy sister when she prays, 
 
 should ever be sacredly observed, no matter how 
 mean the would-be intruder may deem the object 
 of the suppliant's faith. Even the possession of in- 
 fallibility confers no right to enforce any other ideal. 
 
110 
 
 LETTER XVII. 
 
 THE CHURCH ; ITS SECRET AND METHOD, IN 
 
 THEOLOGY. 
 
 v 
 
 So I seem to you to show that no religion is true 
 except the Catholic, and that even that is false ; and 
 you marvel that I can thus exalt a system which 
 I admit to be mainly founded on and occupied with 
 illusions. 
 
 Remember that I qualified the term, and said 
 6 what would ordinarily be regarded as illusions.' 
 But it was not to deal with the ordinary that the 
 Church came into existence. It is ' ordinary' to take 
 for granted that things which are real are alone of 
 consequence. " et every one's experience contradicts 
 the assumption, inasmuch as the beliefs, feelings, or 
 sentiments excited in us by things, affect us infinitely 
 more than the things themselves, so that even ac- 
 cording to common experience the imaginary is more 
 important to us than the actual in fact, is the more 
 real of the two. 
 
 I ought not, probably, to wonder at some of your 
 observations in this connection. But, habituated as 
 
ITS SECRET AND METHOD, IN THEOLOGY. Ill 
 
 I ani to see in the ideal, at once the cause and result 
 of the real, the Alpha and Omega of all existence, 
 the Absolute Perfection, or Nirvana as the Buddhists 
 term it (pace your friends the professional Oriental- 
 ists,) Avheiice all things proceed and to which they 
 finally return, and therefore as the sole Eternal in 
 the universe, I am liable to overlook the very dif- 
 ferent view which the world takes of it. It is, there- 
 fore, just possible that the information I have to give 
 you on this head, will surprise you more than aught 
 that I have yet said. Yet so indispensable to a true 
 comprehension of our subject, is a distinct under- 
 standing of the respective functions of the real 
 and ideal in the Catholic, or as you naturally prefer 
 to call it, Christian scheme, that I am disposed to 
 think I should have done well had I gone fully into 
 the subject at an earlier period in our correspondence. 
 
 It is necessary to premise that the Church takes 
 little notice of God as Creator of the world, beyond 
 formally ascribing creation to him; but concerns 
 itself with him as the ideal of humanity ' Grod in 
 Christ ' -an ideal in which it is impossible to recognise 
 aught in common with the principles on which ani- 
 mated nature has for the most part been constructed. 
 
 In other words, the Church is what the world 
 would, if it were given to thinking, call atheistic. 
 But atheism is necessarily the secret of every anthro- 
 pomorphic religion. For it is through failing to find 
 
112 THE CHUKCH; 
 
 in the world external to man aught that it can re- 
 cognise as God, that the Church has sought to 
 meet man's want of such a Being by constructing 
 a substitute or equivalent out of the inherent charac- 
 teristics of the race. 
 
 To make such a process possible it was necessary 
 to call into existence not only the Being himself, 
 but a region in which he should have his abode, 
 and that both should transcend all limitations 
 as to space, time, and conditions. The faculty 
 whereby alone this could be done is the soul, which 
 I have already denned as the faculty of idealisation. 
 Through the soul and its handmaid the conscience, 
 we attain the infinite and behold perfection. And 
 these constitute what is called the supernatural. 
 
 Now, here is the point specially to be noted. The 
 supernatural of the theologian is no other than the 
 product of man's faculty of idealisation. In exer- 
 cising this faculty we transcend the limits of the 
 real, or that which is appreciable by sense. 
 
 But this faculty, and of course also its product, 
 are properties of the human mind. So that what 
 theology has done is to divide human nature into 
 two portions, and call that which appertains to and 
 is cognisable by sense, the natural : and that which 
 appertains to and is cognisable by spirit, the super- 
 natural. It is to these two departments that I have 
 so often referred as the real and the ideal. 
 
ITS SECRET AND METHOD, IN THEOLOGY. 113 
 
 The division of consciousness into God and self 
 is a wrong division. Consciousness is self, and self 
 is consciousness. For God and self, read, the ideal 
 and the real, both of which exist in, or rather con- 
 stitute, the same consciousness. 
 
 The supernatural, spiritual, or ideal, and the 
 natural, material or real, are thus equally parts of 
 nature. But the former, being so far as man is 
 concerned dependent on the latter, is only reached 
 by a process of translation, or transferring 'the real 
 into the ideal, through the imagination, and regard- 
 ing it as divested of limitations. 
 
 Not a single result has been attained by theo- 
 logy beyond those attainable on this principle. By 
 following it we arrive in turn at every tenet and 
 dogma of which the Church proclaims itself the 
 recipient, originator, expositor, or guardian. In it 
 we have, therefore, the master-key to the Creeds. 
 Projecting man and the system of which he is a 
 part, into the infinite existing in the imagination, 
 we arrive successively at the ideas of God and the 
 Trinity, the Incarnation, the Atonement, Immor- 
 tality, Satan, Heaven, and Hell : a theology super- 
 natural inasmuch as it has its source and habitat 
 in a region transcending the physical or real; yet 
 natural in that the ideal is as much a part or func- 
 tion of man as the real. 
 
 The divine for us is ever the highest and best 
 
 I 
 
114 THE CHURCH; ITS SECRET AND METHOD. 
 
 imaginable by us. How divine that highest and 
 best may be, depends on our own rank in the scale of 
 spiritual being, depends therefore on the develop- 
 ment and culture of our souls. 
 
115 
 
 LETTER XYIII. 
 
 THE CHURCH; ITS SECRET AND METHOD, IN 
 
 MORALS. 
 
 ALTHOUGH there is no apparent connection between 
 the Creeds and Morals, there is a real and essential 
 one which in this e utilitarian ' age is rarely con- 
 sidered. It is, moreover, impossible to treat fully of 
 religion without referring to the influences of the 
 religious principle in conduct. 
 
 As by religion we signify the sense of our rela- 
 tion to the whole, by morals we mean the sense of 
 our relation to the parts. The former involves our 
 relation to God : the latter to each other. Catho 
 licism, carrying into the real the same conscience, or 
 sense of perfection which actuates it in regard to the 
 ideal, necessarily refers morals and religion to an 
 identical basis, inasmuch as there can be but one 
 perfection in the universe, and that being God, the 
 recognition and pursuit of it in whatever direction 
 constitute a religious act. 
 
 The Utilitarian affects to ignore all reference to 
 religion, or any transcendental standard in con- 
 structing his system of morals ; but in so far as he 
 
 i 2 
 
116 THE CHURCH; 
 
 aims at what lie deems a perfect system, and deems, 
 therefore, perfection, of some sort or in some degree, 
 attainable, he is essentially religious. For him as 
 well as for the religionist perfection has its home in 
 the ideal : and the endeavour to translate the ideal 
 into the real is, however unconsciously, a homage 
 paid both to God absolute and to God made flesh. 
 Thus saint and iconoclast alike acknowledge and 
 reverence the Incarnation. 
 
 Where the Utilitarian, however, falls short of the 
 highest, is in his accepting a lower standard 
 than is consistent with the recognition of the 
 most perfect ideal. He limits his aspirations by 
 actual Humanity, instead of raising them to Hu- 
 manity idealised, that is, God. Eestrictiiig his 
 enthusiasm to the practical, material, or human, in- 
 stead of exalting it to the divine ; and placing the 
 individual before the general, sense before spirit, he 
 falls short of the Catholic standard. Utilitarianism, 
 as I showed you in Letter XV., was no part of the 
 secret and method of Jesus. Had it been so, he 
 would have shown himself to be lacking in that 
 element of infinity his possession of which makes 
 him the fitting corner-stone of the Catholic Church. 
 
 Do not, however, suppose that the doctrine of 
 perfection is not an utilitarian doctrine, even where 
 Humanity is concerned. But its utilitarianism 
 consists, not in limiting its aim to human conve- 
 
ITS SECRET AND METHOD, IN MORALS. 117 
 
 nience, but in uniting man to the perfection which is 
 God. Catholicism puts God first, but does not stop 
 with that. It includes man also. Utilitarianism 
 puts man first, or rather the convenience of indi- 
 vidual men, and does not take God, or perfection, 
 into the account. 
 
 At least, not consciously. The uncompromising 
 opponent of compromise, no matter how utilitarian 
 he may deem himself, does but tread in the steps of 
 Christ when he exhorts to leave all and follow him, 
 the ideal perfection. The most pronounced infidel 
 and radical, when seeking to overthrow altar and 
 throne, and to bury the time-honoured institutions of 
 his country in ruins, is acting out the principle of 
 religion if his object be, not self- advancement, but 
 the realisation of an ideal of human life that seems 
 to him nobler and better. 
 
 Admitting that the Church's method in dividing 
 the real from the ideal in human nature, and in rele- 
 gating the latter to the region of the divine or super- 
 natural, does afford apparent ground for the reproach 
 that it treats all that appertains to the senses as 
 fallen and base, and as requiring an exorcism at con- 
 secrated hands to redeem and sanctify it, we must 
 remember how potent is Sense, how unceasing its 
 endeavours to make itself all in all, and to extinguish 
 the divine spark of the ideal within us, and that un- 
 less dealt with as a foe whom there is no trusting, 
 
118 THE CHUECH ; 
 
 and with whom therefore any peace must be hollow, 
 it will ever be rising in arms against the soul. 
 
 Rightly considered, however, so far from being 
 liable to reproach on the score I have indicated, the 
 Church does but take advantage of a fact actually 
 existing. It is an universal truth that for all man- 
 kind the real is below the ideal, or in other words, 
 that we all are able to imagine something better than 
 we can be or do ; and this in every department of 
 life, be it art, morals, or theology. In art, for in- 
 stance, no subject is too mean to be treated idealisti- 
 cally, and thus to be sublimated into a thing of beauty. 
 And this is what the Church seeks to do with human 
 life. As in the meanest flower that blows may, for 
 the sentimentalist, lie thoughts too deep for tears, 
 so for the truly Catholic the grossest parts of our 
 nature, even those we share in common with the 
 brute creation, are capable of being idealised and 
 exalted into the pure and holy. The mistake and 
 evil consist in denying that the latter are as much 
 parts of nature as the former, and in requiring for 
 their purification and sanctification a grace of which 
 the source is external to nature. 
 
 Let us apply the Church's method to a specific 
 example, the relations between the sexes. If any 
 human sentiment be sufficiently important to be 
 deemed divine, it is surely that of love. The im- 
 pulse to yield oneself to its indulgence constitutes 
 
ITS SECKET AND METHOD, IN MORALS. 119 
 
 the chief crisis of man's existence. To love amiss is 
 to hazard all, to love aright to gain all, that life 
 offers worth having. At least, to me as a celibate, 
 and especially one who has dared to indulge dreams 
 which once seemed not incapable of realisation, such 
 is the light in which love appears. Dear friend, I 
 have much for which to ask your forgiveness. Is it 
 any atonement that the bitter reflection has ofttimes 
 thrust itself upon me to the destruction of my soul's 
 repose, that in obeying the call to leave all and 
 follow what I deemed the highest ideal, I was not 
 only yielding to an impulse wholly selfish, and sacri- 
 ficing one whom I would gladly have died to save, 
 but actually mistaking the lower for the higher? 
 Confident, however, am I of one thing. No man 
 ever abandoned a sweeter real to become a soldier 
 of the ideal. Yet not upon the Church must the 
 blame be cast ; but upon my own failure to perceive 
 that the kingdom of the ideal is to be realised on 
 earth, and that if we fail to take it by force here, we 
 fail to deserve it anywhere. 
 
 Sanctified by elevation to the ideal, nothing is 
 common or unclean. By insisting that the vow once 
 taken shall be irrefragable, the Church ordains that 
 none but the one supreme love possible to man or 
 woman, shall aspire to its recognition and sanction. 
 Knowing no repentance, such love admits no waver- 
 ing in fidelity. It thus constitutes a religion in 
 
120 THE CHUKCH; 
 
 itself, inasmuch, as, being conscious of no limita- 
 tions, it belongs to the category of the ideal. With 
 no love short of this, no bond that is soluble, can 
 the Church, the guardian and exponent of the ideal, 
 for a moment concern itself. If any choose to in 
 voke the sanction and rite of the Church for an union 
 impelled by any impulse short of the supreme one I 
 have described, and to degrade the sacrament by 
 using it to procure the gratification of a sentiment 
 that is merely animal and transient, they do so to 
 their own cost. They have chosen to fasten in a 
 sacred and lasting bond, hearts which are incapable 
 of a sacred and lasting love. The Church cannot 
 sink its ideal to the level of such as these. Ordinary 
 and commonplace, let them be content with such 
 ties as they may frame for themselves, or as the civil 
 power, whose function is restricted to the real, can 
 make and unmake at will. But the true marriage is 
 made in that ideal world, where flowers never fade or 
 fall, and souls are pure and unchanging as eternity 
 itself. Wherefore the Church in its dealing with 
 the relations of the sexes, remains true to its mis- 
 sion, and transmutes that which, if left to sense would 
 be carnal and gross, into pure spirit worthy to par- 
 take of the lot of the saints in light. 
 
 Such use of marriage, however, is regarded by 
 the Church as possible only, not as easy or probable ; 
 and it holds as more likely to attain the king- 
 
ITS SECEET AND METHOD, IN MOKALS. 121 
 
 dom of the ideal, those who renounce wholly all 
 delights into which sense enters. And not from the 
 pleasures only, but from the cares and anxieties of 
 the married state, are they free who, devoting them- 
 selves wholly to a religious life, reserve for the ser- 
 vice of God or culture of the ideal side of their 
 nature all the faculties and energies wherewith they 
 are endowed. 
 
 Zeal is the especial characteristic of the celibate. 
 Into the subject of his devotion he throws all the 
 force which has been detained from love ; and this in 
 imagination as well as in act. Arrested in the 
 direction of the sexual feelings, the idealisations of 
 the virgin far transcend in intensity those of the 
 wedded. Nought human approaches to their ideal. 
 They must have something to love and to worship, 
 or they will become mad. 
 
 There is, too, another, and a far larger class for 
 which the Church provides a refuge. Those whose 
 vocation is neither celibacy nor any form of the 
 ideal, but who through defect of circumstance fail to 
 find legitimate satisfaction for their natural affec- 
 tions, and are liable to brood morbidly over their 
 disappointment. For both of these classes the 
 Church supplies a fitting object of regard in One 
 whose perfections can never be exaggerated, never 
 pall by familiarity. The persons and characters of 
 its idealised man and woman, in the imagination of 
 
122 THE CHUECH; ITS SECRET AND METHOD, ETC. 
 
 the devotee and blighted take the place that would 
 naturally have been occupied by a real object. On the 
 Saviour and the Virgin respectively are lavished all 
 their capacity of loving. They too were virgin, and 
 the mystery of sex, that supreme mystery which for 
 Object and Subject alike is veiled, constitutes a bridge 
 of sympathy across the gulf that divides them. 
 
 Rising by means of such culture of the ideal 
 humanity far beyond any heights attainable by the 
 culture of the real, and unable to fall away from 
 grace inasmuch as the ideal suffers no reaction or 
 relapse, but ever retains its supremacy in the empy- 
 rean of the imagination, they come at last to regard 
 that side of nature which they have trodden under 
 foot as but a poor sacrifice in comparison with the 
 joys of the heaven they have won, or hope to win. 
 
123 
 
 LETTEE XIX. 
 
 THE SUPERNATURAL. 
 
 IN things religious mystery has ever been deemed 
 essential to authority. For its own sake therefore, 
 as well as for that of the world at large, authority has 
 always fostered what it considered a wholesome de- 
 gree of ignorance respecting sacred things. No doubt 
 such reserve has its disadvantages, especially in re- 
 spect of the controversies and schisms to which par- 
 tial knowledge gives rise. But even an infallible 
 Church can only choose between evils, and in its 
 view the advantages of a firm belief far outweigh the 
 evils arising from obscurity. 
 
 There have been few more fertile causes of scep- 
 ticism than the logical difficulty attaching to mira- 
 cles, and the moral difficulty of everlasting punish- 
 ment. True, I am about to remove both difficulties 
 for you ; but I leave you to judge of the effect of 
 similarly removing them for the world. 
 
 And first, as to Miracles. We have already 
 treated of the perpetual miracle of the Incarnation. 
 This being no other than that of Creation, or the 
 
124 THE SUPEENATURAL. 
 
 process ever going on of transmuting the eternal 
 ideal into the phenomenal real, and constituting a 
 problem insoluble by finite minds, we can but bow 
 and pass on. The world exists, and we cannot think 
 of it as making itself. That is all we know, or can 
 know, on this head. The God of the naturalist has 
 nothing in common with the God of the theologian. 
 
 Very different is it with the miracles which con- 
 stitute your difficulty and that of inquirers in general. 
 I say inquirers, because believers have no difficulty 
 whatever. The very impossibility of a thing is to 
 them but further proof of the existence and agency 
 of God. The sense iu which they receive them, how- 
 ever, will not satisfy you. Nor will it satisfy anyone 
 who subordinates belief to knowledge. Nevertheless, 
 notwithstanding your present aversion to miracles, I 
 promise you that if you keep your foot beside mine 
 on the track we are following, you will instead of 
 regarding them as thorns and briars, soon be pluck- 
 ing them in delight by the handful. 
 
 Only let me remark first that the very terms in 
 which you express your objection to miracles, involve 
 the idea of their possibility. By ' the laws of nature' 
 you imply limits to nature. By whafc right do you 
 assign such limits, or determine their place ? I 
 should not, however, raise an objection on this ^point, 
 but for your use in the same connection of the term 
 omnipotence, by way of contrast to nature's limita- 
 
THE SUPEKNATUKAL. 125 
 
 tions. For you thus expressly imply your convic- 
 tion of the existence of a power external to and sur- 
 passing that of nature, and so yourself make way 
 for the very interference you deprecate. 
 
 Endeavour now to dismiss from your mind the no- 
 tion of an inside and an outside to nature. Trample 
 down the limits you have been wont to assign to it, 
 and bring into it the whole region hitherto allotted 
 to the supernatural or divine. Doing this, you will 
 be able to dismiss altogether from your vocabulary 
 the term supernatural, and to regard nature as in- 
 cluding all that is ; only, compounded of two ele- 
 ments, commonly called the natural and the super- 
 natural, but properly the real and the ideal. Doing 
 this, you will find yourself ranging under the name 
 of the ideal all that portion of existence which does 
 not come within the range of the senses, and of 
 which we are cognisant in idea only : and under the 
 name of the real all that is appreciable by the 
 senses, and commonly called nature. This done, 
 God becomes for us the supreme personal element 
 in nature ; but existing only in the ideal, inasmuch 
 as it is only in idea, and not in the senses, that we 
 are cognisant of him. 
 
 We now find ourselves in harmony with those 
 who, like the Greeks and other Pantheists, regard 
 Deity as immanent in and inseparable from nature. 
 With those also who, like the Jews and Christians, 
 
126 THE SUPERNATURAL. 
 
 regard him as existing apart from and above nature. 
 And with those who have earned for themselves the 
 name of Atheist by regarding the real (under the 
 name of nature) as existing independently of any 
 ideal (or God) at all. 
 
 Under the influence of your inherited notions, 
 you have been wont to regard all that, being in 
 nature yet transcends nature, as miraculous and 
 therefore impossible. Taking now the ideal into 
 nature, do you find any difficulty in making the real 
 your basis, and constructing your ideal upon it? 
 If you do not, you admit that something which is 
 natural can transcend the real, and so be ( miracu- 
 lous ' without being contrary to nature. 
 
127 
 
 LETTER XX. 
 
 MIRACLE. 
 
 IT is as I expected. You regard the real and the 
 ideal as so intimately allied as to be inseparable for 
 us ; and you make this union the essential condition 
 of conscious intelligence. That is, you find it impos- 
 sible to be cognisant of any external object in fact, 
 without being at the same time cognisant of it in 
 idea ; without, therefore, being able to imagine it as 
 divested of the limitations which it has for your 
 senses. You own that, being natural, it transcends 
 nature : and you fail to see what this has to do with 
 miracles ? 
 
 Dear friend, what then is a miracle but the trans- 
 mutation of a ' natural ' or objective fact, that is a 
 reality, into an imaginary or subjective one, and its 
 enlargement to ideal or 6 supernatural ' dimensions ? 
 
 For me 6 supernaturalisrn,' in the popular sense, 
 has as little meaning as for you ; though the grounds 
 of our objections are different. As I have tried to 
 make clear to you, the ideal is as much a part of 
 nature, or the universal order, as the real. So that 
 
128 MIEACLE. 
 
 we have not to transcend nature to find an explana- 
 tion of ' miracles.' What we have to transcend is 
 the limitation of the fact in its reality. The moment 
 it is removed from the category of the real into 
 that of the ideal, and divested of limitations, it be- 
 comes what it is the custom to call supernatural or 
 miraculous. 
 
 Thus you see the significance of your admission 
 that so far from the miraculous, thus understood, 
 being contrary to nature, it constitutes a necessary 
 element of thought, inasmuch as the union of the 
 real and the ideal is an essential condition of con- 
 scious intelligence. 
 
 Writing of the soul I said, the process of ideal- 
 isation consists in imagining an object as transcend- 
 ing its limitations, existing in a perfection not actu- 
 ally attainable by it, and even filling infinity with its 
 expanded characteristics. And the faculty whereby 
 we perform this act is the soul. 
 
 The soul, therefore, is the true miracle-worker. 
 Taking, necessarily, the real for its basis, it con- 
 structs thereon the ideal with all the wonders of 
 religion. In admitting the union of the real and 
 ideal in man, you are opening the door to every doc- 
 trine of Catholicism. To fail to see this is to be a 
 sectarian, a Protestant ; that is, one who, able to 
 see but a short way along a road, denies the road's 
 continuance beyond the reach of his own vision. 
 
MIEACLE. 129 
 
 You now understand how that all the wonders 
 which make up the life of the God-man and Man-god, 
 are equally with himself the product and necessary 
 product of the soul's longing for a realised perfec- 
 tion, or God made flesh. The translation of the 
 person of Jesus of Nazareth, from being at most an 
 apostle of the sect of the Essenes, though remark- 
 ably endowed with spiritual graces, into the ideal, 
 would have been but a meagre and inadequate pro- 
 cess unless combined with the like translation of his 
 actions. It was through an extraordinary conjunc- 
 tion of circumstances that upon him, and not upon 
 any other individual of admirable and exquisite cha- 
 racter, fell the supreme destiny of being accepted as 
 the representative man of the race, latest and most 
 perfect realisation of the divine idea of humanity. 
 But as such destiny was bound to alight upon some 
 one, in accordance with the traditions and wont of 
 mankind when previous incarnations had lost their 
 prestige ; and as the peculiar -circumstances of the 
 Jewish race were most fitted to produce the character 
 best adapted for the part, there is no reason why it 
 should not have been filled by him as well as by 
 another. 
 
 So common has it been for mankind to credit the 
 objects of their veneration with miraculous powers, 
 that the improbability that Christ should be so in- 
 vested hardly becomes greater on the hypothesis 
 
 K 
 
130 MIRACLE. 
 
 that lie was no real person at all, but wholly a creation 
 of the imagination. To judge from what we know of 
 previous incarnations, it does not appear to be abso- 
 lutely necessary that the character selected as their 
 subject should have an actual existence in the flesh. 
 Indeed some early Christian sects denied such exist- 
 ence to Christ. Even the Pauline epistles often leave 
 us in doubt whether the writer regarded Christ as a 
 real person, so strong is his tendency to treat him as 
 but an idea. The declaration, ' Last of all he was 
 seen also by me, as by one born out of due time,' 
 bears out this conjecture, inasmuch as it was not in 
 the flesh, but only in the spirit, that Paul owns to 
 having beheld him ; while the refusal to know him 
 after the flesh, indicates his strong preference for 
 Christ as an idea and system of thought rather than 
 as an individual. 
 
 Idealist as Paul was, it was assuredly not Christ 
 as a person, but Christ as representing the ideal 
 perfection contemplated in the law of Moses, and 
 the triumph of that perfection over sin, death, and 
 all the limitations of sense, that roused the apostle's 
 enthusiasm to its highest pitch. His principal 
 solicitude was that the character represented by 
 the name of Christ should proceed from the Jews. 
 For in such a product he beheld a power capable of 
 subjugating the world, and demonstrating their supe- 
 riority over the Gentiles. 
 
MIEACLE. 131 
 
 For, had it not subjugated himself? So long as 
 he had deemed of Christ as a man, he had applied 
 the whole force of his enthusiasm to the persecution 
 of his followers. It was when the true idea of Christ 
 flashed suddenly upon him in all its possible signifi- 
 cance, that he fell stunned as it were to the ground, 
 at the revelation of the grandeur and beauty of that 
 which he had hitherto reprobated. Thenceforth his 
 enthusiasm, turned into the opposite direction, led 
 him into being himself accepted as the second 
 founder of Christianity. 
 
 Brought up in a school whose leading character- 
 istic was its intense appreciation of the spiritual 
 significance of the Law, Paul was carried by his 
 ardent spirit beyond all his compeers. For him 6 Sin ' 
 consisted in the falling short of the perfection of the 
 infinite by the finite. Everything appertaining to 
 the real was a ' body of death,' utterly vile and con- 
 temptible in comparison with the ideal recognised 
 by him. Yet lofty as was his doctrine, his omission 
 to take account of the truth that the constitution of 
 nature makes it utterly impossible that the finite 
 should emulate the infinite, the real the ideal, and 
 therefore that the individual is not responsible for 
 the interval between them, has greatly contributed 
 to the widespread belief that the whole domain of 
 the real, or 'nature,' is essentially and thoroughly 
 
 x 2 
 
132 MIRACLE. 
 
 bad, and worthy only of reprobation and perdition. 
 And the belief has caused anguish unspeakable to 
 millions of tender souls, and has inflicted on the world 
 that kind of detriment which comes to everything 
 that, being desirous of perfection, finds itself pro- 
 nounced incapable of amendment. The law of per- 
 fection is holy, just, and good, and indispensable as 
 a standard by which to regulate our lives. It is 
 necessary, also, for our moral progress that we should 
 recognise the interval between it and our per- 
 formances. But when we assume that we are our- 
 selves responsible for the existence of the interval, 
 and abandon the hope of doing aught to dimmish it, 
 through our consciousness of the impossibility of 
 wholly abolishing it, then the commandment which 
 was ordained to life is found to be death to us. 
 Raise our real as we may, we cannot with it attain 
 to the full height of our ideal. Compared with that 
 our best actions must always be defective. 
 
 It was necessary that one who surpassed the 
 limits of the finite in things moral and spiritual, in 
 such degree as to be accounted Grod manifest in tlie 
 flesh, should surpass them also in respect of things 
 physical. As all his teaching must be the teach- 
 ing of perfection, so all his doing must surpass the 
 possible. Should you, in your reading of the Gospels, 
 be disposed to ascribe error or imperfection to 
 the divine Master; should he appear to you cold 
 
MIRACLE. 133 
 
 and unfilial to his blessed Mother, or harsh to the 
 stranger seeking relief; should you be led to the 
 opinion that the miracle of Can a, or the raising of 
 Lazarus, was effected by chicanery and collusion, 
 and his conduct in regard to the fig-tree, the result 
 of an ebullition of bad temper ; should some of his 
 parables, such as that of the unjust steward, or the 
 importunate widow, strike you as defective in their 
 morality or theology, set it down to the dulness of 
 his reporters. If they did not represent him as per- 
 fect, they ought to have done so ; for no one less 
 than perfect could occupy the position assigned him 
 by the Church. Whether as Son at once of God and 
 man, the Divine Word made flesh, or as the heaven- 
 sent Messiah, nothing short of perfection was suited 
 to the part. There is for the Catholic no sound canon 
 of criticism except this. 
 
 This canon however, so far from ruling miracles 
 out of the record, makes them indispensable. True, 
 Paul makes mention of no 'miracle but that of 
 the resurrection, and that was for him a spiritual 
 rather than a physical fact. The apostle's contempt 
 for things of the ' flesh ' accounts for his indifference 
 on this head. But for us to whom the Jewish law 
 and its spiritualisation are considerations subordinate 
 to Humanity and its consciousness, the perfection of 
 Christ in all things is essential to our accepting him 
 as God incarnate; and the soul of the believer is 
 
134 MIRACLE. 
 
 wanting in the fervour of true faith if it fails to 
 translate all his acts from the region of sense and 
 limitation into that of spirit and perfection. The 
 soul as I have said is the oiilv miracle -worker ; and 
 
 V ' 
 
 where there is unbelief even the Son of Man him- 
 self the soul's personified perfection can do there 
 no mighty works. 
 
 But where faith is strong no miracle will be 
 beyond his power. Divested of limitations in virtue 
 of his ideality, he will be conqueror over all the ills 
 of human existence. Did he not herein transcend 
 the real, were he not all-powerful over the elements 
 of the world, over disease, sorrow, sin, and death, he 
 would be but common-place humanity, merely real, 
 and no true ideal rising sublime above all limi- 
 tations. 
 
 What we already as mere men have from the be- 
 ginning been striving to accomplish in reality, he 
 accomplishes for us in idea and hope. We have 
 always been struggling to improve our real by 
 banishing as far as may be the ills which afflict it. 
 The fact of our continued efforts is a virtual confes- 
 sion of our faith in the possibility of a greater or 
 less success. Tor, what becomes of those who make 
 no such efforts? They remain what they were 
 myriads of ages ago the lower races of men and 
 animals creatures, however human in form, devoid 
 of soul inasmuch as they lack the faculty necessary 
 
MIKACLE. 135 
 
 to improvement, the faculty of transcending their 
 real in the ideal. 
 
 It is thus, through his possession of an ideal, in 
 which he sees himself ultimately victorious over all 
 that he now counts as hindrances, that man is in- 
 duced to struggle at all. The divine discontent 
 which inspires him, the travailing and groaning in 
 pain, are themselves agents in his redemption and 
 adoption into the perfection of the ideal realised. 
 Faith in God, that is faith in his ideal, is no other 
 than faith in Humanity, in himself. 
 
 To render unnecessary further reference to Paul, 
 whose life and writings are accounted the strongest 
 portion of the evidence for the historical existence of 
 Jesus Christ, I will add here three remarks. 
 
 First, that as a Pharisee and one of the sect most 
 instrumental in bringing about the death of Christ, 
 the true Paul could not have ( gloried in the cross ' of 
 Christ, and in being a Pharisee also. Nor could he 
 have referred, as the Pauline epistles continually do, 
 to his sufferings without a word of compassion for 
 him, or reproach for the sect that caused them. 
 Nor, again, could he have known aught of Christ's 
 denunciations of the Pharisees, and still continued to 
 exalt both Christ and Pharisaism. 
 
 Secondly, that the ' secret and method ' (I employ 
 the phrase of the author you so much affect) of Jesus 
 and the Paulist writer are identical. They both aim 
 
136 MIRACLE. 
 
 at a rule of absolute perfection, a rule transcending 
 the limits of the ' flesh/ and attainable only in the 
 ( spirit.' 
 
 Thirdly, that as the Pauline episttes implicitly 
 if not explicitly set aside Jesus as a person for Jesus 
 as an idea, it is far from improbable that the apostle 
 himself may, Tinder the sublimating process of his- 
 torical criticism, be removed from the category of the 
 real, and transferred to that of the ideal. Certainly 
 is this true so far as concerns the identification of 
 their writer with the Paul of the Acts. Every such 
 exaltation, however, of the ideal in place of the in- 
 dividual, of the spirit in place of the letter, is a 
 gain to religion. For we thereby escape more and 
 more from the region of persons, fact, and contro- 
 versy, into that of doctrine, faith, and unity ; and 
 become more and more one with God and with each 
 other in the spirit of holiness. That is, more Catho- 
 lic and less Protestant as we cease to worship the 
 letter. 
 
 The mythical character of Paul's history finds 
 exemplification in the narrative of his conversion, 
 an event readily explicable on the solar hypothesis. 
 As secondary founder of Christianity it was fitting 
 that he should be represented as impelled to his 
 mission by the direct action of the solar divinity 
 with whom Christ had become identified. 
 
137 
 
 LETTEE XXI. 
 
 THE CHRISTIAN OLYMPUS. 
 
 LET us follow the new creation which owns the soul 
 of man for its maker. Given the soul and space, all 
 that is in man the real becomes necessarily trans- 
 ferred to the ideal, and there exists divested of limi- 
 tations, comprising all desirable or imaginable objects 
 of aspiration and worship. Already do we behold, 
 seated upon the throne of infinity, the Absolute 
 Supreme, ideal Father of our spirits, associated in 
 bonds of eternal amity with the ideal Mother and 
 ideal Son, and animated by the same ideal disposi- 
 tion or Spirit, the Spirit of ideal perfection. Nought 
 is there in their nature or conditions to disturb the 
 everlasting equilibrium of their satisfaction, could 
 they only be content to pass eternity in the contem- 
 plation of their own perfections. 
 
 But the ideal must have a reflex influence on its 
 real. Wherefore they are not like the classic gods 
 of old, so finely described by England's truly Catholic 
 poet : 
 
138 THE CHKISTIAN OLYMPUS. 
 
 The Grods who haunt 
 The lucid interspace of world and world, 
 Where never creeps a cloud or moves a wind, 
 Nor ever falls the least white star of snow, 
 Nor ever lowest roll of thunder moai^j, 
 Nor sound of human sorrow mounts to mar 
 Their sacred everlasting calm. 
 
 For, as mankind has mounted in the scale of moral 
 being, so have the gods, or, to adhere to our own 
 nomenclature, the ideals of mankind. And hence it 
 comes that, no longer selfishly absorbed in them- 
 selves, no sound of human joy or sorrow here is so 
 faint but that it mounts to their sacred abode, not to 
 mar their repose, but to win a sympathetic response. 
 More ' perfect ' these, as we understand perfection, 
 than their impassible predecessors. No sooner, then, 
 does man, finding it vain to attempt to redeem him- 
 self by his own limited efforts from the evils in- 
 herent in all conditions involving limitation, glance 
 upward in appeal for aid, than the ideal Son, obey- 
 ing the impulses which are at once human and 
 divine, 
 
 Down from his glorious throne descends 
 
 With joyful haste to save ; 
 Dies for our sins in mortal flesh, 
 
 Then leaves the vanquished grave. 
 
 For even death has no power over the children of 
 the ideal. Eather do they, when freed from the 
 limitations of mortality, rise and ascend into the 
 brightest heaven the imagination can depict, there 
 
THE CHRISTIAN OLYMPUS. 139 
 
 for evermore to bask amid the full glories of the 
 throne. 
 
 Thus is it with the company of the glorified dead, 
 who all are children of the ideal, even those whom 
 we style Saints inasmuch as they have lived on 
 earth the life of ideal excellence, the life in which 
 the realities of sense have had little part, or power 
 to withdraw them from their devotion to ideal per- 
 fection. 
 
 But for him, their elder brother and lord, Son at 
 once of Humanity and of the supreme personified 
 Ideal, not for evermore does he abide in repose to 
 enjoy his well-earned laurels. The sovereignty he 
 has acquired is not that of lotos-eaters, 
 
 Besting their weary limbs on beds of asphodel ; 
 
 and lying 
 
 Reclined 
 On the hills together, careless of mankind. 
 
 It imposes a responsibility. It constitutes him 
 judge of all men, who at the crisis of every soul is to 
 descend, and determine the fate due for its conduct 
 on earth. 
 
 Different indeed to his former coming is this one. 
 
 Not in entire forgetfuluess, 
 And not in utter nakedness, 
 But trailing clouds of glory, 
 
 does he now come ' to judge the quick and dead.' 
 
140 THE CHRISTIAN OLYMPUS. 
 
 No rare or isolated experience is this ; but a 
 fact, in the soul's history of all men possessing a 
 faculty of idealisation, that is of all who have a soul, 
 and this again is all who possess a moral conscious- 
 ness. 
 
 Recall, if you can, your earliest conception of 
 perfection in life and conduct. Was it not meagre 
 and unstable ; too weak to raise and guide you ; 
 strongest ofttimes when you felt most humble, and 
 weakest when you were best satisfied with your- 
 self? 
 
 So is it with the ideal of every man. At first, 
 6 coining in humility.' But, carefully cherished, it 
 grows ' in stature and in favour with God and man,' 
 ever lifting up our real towards itself ; and when our 
 decaying powers warn us that the end is near, and we 
 make a final estimate of ourselves and our work, and 
 see how often and how far we have failed to cherish 
 our ideal, and to strive to act up to it, it stands over 
 us an unerring criterion of our deserts, from, whose 
 judgment there is no appeal. * And so he cometh to 
 judge the world. 3 
 
141 
 
 LETTEE XXII. 
 
 THE TWO TEINITIES. 
 
 THE same Protestant training that enables you to go 
 with me thus far, hinders you from joining me in 
 offering the recognition due to the divine Mother 
 who represents the feminine element in deity. Ac- 
 companying us in constructing their God in the 
 image of man, so far as the masculine element is 
 concerned, by their omission in this respect the 
 sectarians have produced a deity of a hard cold pas- 
 sionless nature, possessing indeed intellect, will, 
 and power, but non-productive and incapable of 
 creation in that they have denied him the impulse 
 that alone prompts to creation. Their unintelligent 
 worship of the record, which comes down to a cer- 
 tain period only, has kept them from appreciating 
 the spirit of that record, and its equally necessary 
 revelation subsequently developed. Even while 
 holding that man is made in the image of God, and 
 consequently that God must be the idealised coun- 
 terpart of man, and that the Son of God is no other 
 than the ideal man himself, as the ultra- evangelical 
 professor of Moral Philosophy in the ultra-protestant 
 
142 THE TWO TRINITIES. 
 
 University of Cambridge recently declared, Pro- 
 testantism, refuses to allow woman her place in the 
 divine essence, and so mulcts the Godhead of one- 
 half of its fair proportions. Shrinking thus from 
 the journey's end, it ought not to have entered on 
 the journey at all. Accepting the principle, it has no 
 right to recoil from the full application of the prin- 
 ciple. To such timid and halting exploration of the 
 many mansions of the Father's house, the keys 
 which unlock the inmost and most sacred chambers 
 are rightly denied. The defect has been fatal to the 
 system. Lacking the vital elements of tenderness, 
 fervour and love, which woman alone can evoke, 
 Protestantism as a religion is torpid and dead. The 
 sole resource left to it is science, the domain of the 
 real and limited, the wilderness of mere fact. While 
 Catholicism cares not to enter there, it suffers no in- 
 trusion upon its own empire, the ideal and infinite. 
 There it is infallible ; and in nothing does it more 
 effectually demonstrate its divinity than by its com- 
 pletion of what may be called the domestic economy 
 of heaven. 
 
 I have placed before you the two Jehovahs of the 
 Bible. Behold now the two Trinities of the Church. 
 As in man the same individual comprises three entire 
 personalities, each absolutely separate and distinct, 
 yet inseparably combined in one, Father, Husband, 
 and Son ; so in woman we have Mother, Wife, and 
 
THE TWO TRINITIES. 143 
 
 Daughter, three distinct persons in one, each com- 
 plete and perfect in itself, and yet inseparably com- 
 bined to form one whole. 
 
 Well, as in man, so in deity made after man, the 
 masculine trinity postulates the feminine trinity. 
 Wherefore we find the Blessed Virgin comprising in 
 herself the functions and titles of Mother, Spouse, 
 and Daughter of God. For the divine sonship of 
 the ideal man has its complement and counterpart 
 in the divine daughterhood of the ideal woman ; an 
 impersonation which bids fair in a future develop- 
 ment of Catholic dogma, when, by the acquirement 
 of the 6 rights ' she is already demanding, woman shall 
 have demonstrated her superiority over man, to in- 
 vert the positions hitherto assigned to these two 
 constituents of the Godhead. 
 
 To comprehend fully the thoroughness with which 
 the Church projects the human into the divine in this 
 relation, you should be familiar with the modes of 
 address to the Virgin which have been formulated 
 through the profound insight of the Catholic fathers. 
 Fathoming the deepest recesses of humanity, they 
 have ascertained that the closer the relationship in 
 blood between two persons, the more intense their love 
 and complete their union where they love. Projected 
 into the infinite and ideal, such union is untram- 
 melled by the exigencies of family life in the limited 
 and real. And hence we are without reproach en- 
 
144 THE TWO TEINITIES. 
 
 abled to address the Holy Virgin in the words of the 
 Litany of the Immaculate Conception as ' Daughter 
 of the Father Immaculate. Mother of the Son Im- 
 maculate. Spouse of the Holy Ghost Immaculate ; ' 
 and yet to regard these three as one, and the act of 
 one as the act of all, and Mary as the ( handmaid of 
 the Divine Trinity,' and this though elsewhere she is 
 addressed as f Spouse of the Eternal Father.' 
 
 Not unmindful of the evils to which such ' con- 
 founding of the persons ' is liable, the Church is 
 careful to present such admonitions as the follow- 
 
 ing 
 
 f Consider with what privileges and honours the 
 Blessed Trinity glorifies her. The Father loves 
 her as his daughter ; the Son honours her as his 
 mother ; the Holy Ghost embraces her as his bride,' 
 and his ' loving spouse who was taken up to the 
 heavenly chamber (thalamum) where the King of 
 kings sitteth on his starry throne.' f Admirabile 
 Commercium ! marvellous intercourse ! 3 exclaims 
 with exquisite fervour one of the Primes in the 
 Golden Manual, ' the Creator of Mankind, taking a 
 body with a living soul, vouchsafed to be born of a 
 Virgin, and becoming man without man's concurrence, 
 bestowed upon us his Deity ! ' f O God,' exclaims 
 another, ( who didst vouchsafe to choose the chaste 
 chamber (virginalem aulam) of the Blessed Virgin 
 Mary to dwell therein ; ' and again, ' Thou art be- 
 
THE TWO TEINITIES. 145 
 
 come beautiful and sweet in thy delights, holy 
 Mother of God. 5 
 
 No prudish shrinking here from the deification of 
 the prime facts of love and loving intercourse, so 
 dear to humanity. Small thanks would God owe to 
 man if denied that which man prizes most for him- 
 self. But with such sacrifice offered him in the 
 ideal, he in turn sanctifies love in the real, and con- 
 stitutes it a legitimate indulgence for man possessed 
 of a soul as for animals devoid of it. JSTo particle of 
 right or title to reject such doctrine can Protestantism 
 exhibit. It is the logical and necessary outcome of 
 the doctrines already accepted by Protestants, and 
 is essential to the principle on which equally with 
 Catholicism their religion is based; the principle 
 that, God having made man in his own image, it is 
 by reversing the process and projecting himself into 
 the ideal that man in his turn arrives at his concep- 
 tion of God. 
 
 Not without reason are Catholics sanguine over 
 
 the spiritual condition of England, when they see 
 both logic and sentiment operating to bring it back 
 to the true fold. For, ministering in the Anglican 
 communion are to be found men who, recognising 
 
 J O O 
 
 the vital inseparability of the feminine from the 
 masculine element in Catholicism, have accordingly 
 restored to their parishioners the privilege of paying 
 to it the homage due. And this in no secret under- 
 
146 THE TWO TRINITIES. 
 
 hand way, but with the full knowledge and consent 
 of their bishops who, lamenting the mutilation of the 
 faith and estrangement from the Catholic Church 
 involved in Protestantism, are, under a higher law 
 of morality higher in that morality itself is subor- 
 dinate to theology doing all that is possible, con- 
 sistently with prudence, to annihilate the schism. 
 There are country parishes in which, as bright oases 
 of faith in a desert of unbelief, the parish church 
 witnesses not only the invocation of the saints, and 
 prayers for the dead, but the recognition of the 
 Blessed Virgin as the effectual mediator with the 
 Father and Son, and even as herself a hearer and 
 answerer of prayer ; and the peasant, the stolid un- 
 imaginative English peasant, reverts with delight to 
 the worship of ideal womanhood ! 
 
 And yet further, smitten by the beauty of the idea 
 of Mary, as was Paul by that of the idea of Christ, 
 there are Anglican clergy who in receiving the Holy 
 Eucharist, that perpetual symbol of the Incarnation 
 and Atonement ever in process of renewal, mentally 
 add the Virgin's name to that of her Son, and by 
 faith eat her flesh and drink her blood with his. 
 
 For one placed thus high no honours can be ex- 
 cessive. Heaven as well as earth must contribute 
 of its best. We have seen how Catholicism has 
 invested the ideal man with all the glories of the 
 
THE TWO TRINITIES. 147 
 
 solar orb. Equally must the skies be ransacked on be- 
 half of the ideal woman. Not enough is it to invoke 
 her as e Star of Heaven,' ( Star of the Sea/ ' Gate of 
 Light,' the Christian Daphne and Aurora the dawn 
 of whom is born the light of the world. She is 
 also ' Queen of heaven,' ' glorious Queen of all the 
 heavenly host,' ' gentle, chaste and spotless Maid,' 
 6 Queen with the stars as a diadem crowned,' who, 
 c wrapt in the blaze of her Son's divine light, doth 
 shine as the dawn on the confines of night ; As the 
 Moon on the lost through obscurity dawns, the 
 Dragon's destroyer, the rose amid thorns.' 
 
 Here then is the process completed. Christ, the 
 incarnation of the sun, enacts on earth a part in all 
 its details corresponding to the course of the sun in 
 the heavens. The Holy Spirit as Atmosphere, is 
 variously saluted as the Searcher, the Refresher, 
 the Invisible, the Winged, the bringer of showers, 
 the melter of frost, the harbinger of spring, the 
 herald of the advent of the sun. He broods over the 
 earth. He moves on the face of the waters. He 
 shakes the house with a mighty rushing noise. He 
 breathes into man the breath of life. Resigning 
 this, the dying gives up the 'ghost.' 
 
 The Virgin is the moon, Mother of the sun and 
 Queen of heaven. When, entering on his nadir, the 
 sun falls into darkness, undergoes a bloody passion, 
 and dies on the reddened bier of his setting, he turns 
 
 L 2 
 
148 THE TWO TRINITIES. 
 
 to the representative of his Beloved, and exhibiting 
 to him the moon, exclaims, ' Behold thy mother ! I 
 go hence and am no more seen ; but now she takes 
 my place. Henceforth she is thy mother.' Thus 
 the Church, celebrating in August the festival of the 
 harvest moon, celebrates at the same time the feast 
 of the Assumption and of the Sacred Heart of the 
 Yirgin. And Catholic painters, following the de- 
 scription in the Apocalypse, fondly depict her as 
 ( clothed with the sun, and having the moon under her 
 feet,' and both as overriding the dragon. Even the 
 triumph of Easter is not celebrated until, by attain- 
 ing its full, the moon accords its aid and sanction. 
 
 Is it not interesting thus to discover the true 
 note of Catholicism in the most ancient paganisms, 
 and to find that the moon, which for us is incarnate 
 in the Blessed Yirgin Mary, was for the Syrians and 
 Greeks respectively personified in the virgin Ash- 
 toreth, the queen of heaven, and Diana, or Phoebe, 
 the feminine of Phoebus ? 
 
 It was in furtherance of that ideal perfection 
 which ever strives to renounce the real and its plea- 
 sures, that the Church, following some of the 
 elder paganisms, enforced the principle of asceticism 
 which finds its extreme outcome in the adoration 
 of virginity and practice of celibacy. For in its 
 view sense is the chief antagonist of soul, and sex 
 is the chief agent of sense. 
 
149 
 
 LETTER XXIII. 
 
 THE PRINCE OF DARKNESS. 
 
 WE have now peopled one portion of our imaginary 
 space with a Holy Trinity, nay two, of Absolute Ex- 
 cellencies, made in our image, and so far identical 
 with, though surpassing, the best and greatest pos- 
 sible to ourselves. And we have followed man, re- 
 deemed by his faith in his ideal, on his passage from 
 life through death to life again, where he re- assembles 
 as a Communion of Saints, never again to fall away, 
 but henceforth to repose in bliss. He has shed the 
 limitations of the real, the corruptible has put on 
 incorruption, the mortal has put on immortality. 
 Death is swallowed up in victory, and the victory 
 has been given by the supreme personified Ideal 
 through the final embodiment of his perfection in 
 the ideal Son of God and Man. Henceforth man, 
 redeemed, is beyond the reach of trial and tempta- 
 tion, beyond the necessity or possibility of being 
 called on to make efforts that may fail or cause him 
 to fall. His lot is fixed in that new abode, at once 
 
150 THE PRINCE OF DARKNESS. 
 
 heaven and earth, where all tears are wiped away, 
 and there is no more death nor sorrow, nor crying, 
 nor any more pain. For the real has passed away 
 with all its limitations and antagonisms. Inherit- 
 ing the kingdom of the ideal, the individual is 
 merged in the universal Perfection and Unity from 
 which all have proceeded, and to which those 
 return who through tribulation and poverty and 
 persecution have kept fast their souls, and retaining 
 their love for the ideal, have proved faithful to it 
 unto death, and shall now obtain a crown of life 
 ' with God and the Lamb.' 
 
 We have thus far, however, peopled but one por- 
 tion of space, and that with idealisations derived 
 from one side of our nature. There remains, alas, 
 another and contrasting side, equally capable of 
 being idealised, and not less imperious in its demand 
 to be submitted to such a process. Opposites and 
 contrasts are essential to consciousness. The light 
 from the throne itself must cast a shadow some- 
 where. It is in the gloom thereof that we have now 
 to seek. Seeking there, we shall find the dark side 
 of ourselves. 
 
 Yes, as on the one hand we project our best into 
 the regions of the infinite, and make a Being wholly 
 and surpassingly good ; so on the other hand we 
 project our worst, and the result is the impersonated 
 Evil, Ruler of the world of sense, Prince of dark- 
 
THE PRINCE OF DARKNESS. 151 
 
 ness. Thus, as in man's image the Church makes 
 God, the Lord of the ideal, so equally in man's 
 image it makes the Devil, the Lord of the real, 
 and divides between them the empire of conscious 
 existence, in co-equal co-ordinate sovereignties, in- 
 herently and eternally antagonistic, and yet essential 
 to each other's existence as the idea of darkness is to 
 that of light, of evil to that of good. 
 
 In the Zoroastrian system,, the most spiritual 
 and catholic of all pagan religions, the necessary 
 existence of the Devil as a complement and corollary 
 to that of the Deity was first discerned and acknow- 
 ledged. Then was the Deity first rehabilitated ; for 
 in the absence of a special representative for the evil 
 side of their nature, men were compelled to ascribe 
 good and evil alike to God. 
 
 As other systems failed to gather up, idealise, 
 and personify, all the best characteristics of humanity 
 in a single deity, so had they failed to gather up, 
 idealise, and personify the worst. 
 
 That is, they had no Devil. The credit of the 
 revelation of this great personage was reserved for 
 Persia ; and it was thence that, after the captivity, 
 he was adopted into the system, of the Hebrews, to 
 assume such stupendous proportions in that of the 
 Christians. The Devil, as we have him, is the 
 crowning proof of the divinity of the genius of 
 Christianity, the final demonstration of the human 
 
152 THE PEINCE OF DARKNESS. 
 
 soul. Had there been no Devil, there would have 
 been no God. And without God, no soul. 
 
 As by idealising and personifying his best, man 
 creates God, in the image of his own best: so by 
 idealising and personifying his worst, man creates 
 the Devil, also in his own image, but the image of 
 his worst. The incapacity to idealise the one would 
 involve the incapacity to idealise the other ; would 
 involve therefore the incapacity to idealise at all. 
 Thus the sense of moral perfection, or conscience, is 
 wanting to those who exclude the Devil from their 
 theology. But this sense is of the very essence of 
 the soul. So that the abolition of the Devil would 
 involve the negation of conscience and the destruc- 
 tion of the soul of man. 
 
 So long, then, as man retains any portion of his 
 faculty of idealisation in respect to things moral, he 
 must be able to exert it in one direction as well as in 
 the other, and to personify the perfection of his bad 
 as well as of his good. Thus, projecting his worst 
 side into space, as we have already described him as 
 doing with his best, and contemplating it also as 
 divested of limitations, he is compelled to regard it 
 as contending on equal terms with the Deity for the 
 sovereignty of the universe, each vanquishing and 
 vanquished at the same moment and in turn, com- 
 mingled, inseparable, burning with deadly hate 
 towards each other, and still unable to exist apart. 
 
153 
 
 LETTER XXIY. 
 
 HELL. 
 
 OF course the Devil must have his special place of 
 abode. Such a personage cannot be expected to 
 subsist without dominion and regal state correspond- 
 ing to those of him who occupies the bright half of 
 infinity. He must have his hell and his throne, 
 even as God must have his heaven and his throne. 
 
 But these two, though they fill space, do not 
 monopolise it. Each is a lord of hosts. The angels 
 of the one are matched bv the demons of the other ; 
 
 * 
 
 and the lines of their hostile array are everywhere. 
 
 For, as we personify in two chief idealisations 
 respectively the entire good and entire bad sides of 
 our nature, under the name of God and the Devil, so 
 do we farther divide and subdivide our various qua- 
 lities, and personifying each portion, project them, 
 divested of limitations, into the spiritual world. 
 Thus, as the supreme ideal of Good is surrounded 
 by angels of whom each one reflects in transcendent 
 measure some one quality found excellent in man ; 
 so the supreme ideal of Evil is backed by a host of 
 
154 HELL. 
 
 lesser demons, each of whom represents in a degree 
 transcending the limits of the actual, some defect or 
 failing in ourselves. 
 
 And as their supreme leaders, so are the two 
 armies, to their most insignificant member, locked for 
 ever with deadly grip in each other's arms, instinct 
 with unceasing vitality; inasmuch as every quality 
 contains the idea of its opposite, and we cannot ima- 
 gine its positive without necessarily imagining its 
 negative. 
 
 It is a false theology, then, that would postulate 
 the existence of God and exclude that of the Devil ; 
 just as it is a false theology that makes of God a 
 unit, and denies his dual and treble nature. False, 
 because incapable of being unlocked by the key, 
 which, as we have seen, alone opens the gate of all 
 theological mysteries. It is a false theology also 
 that holds the Devil as capable of repentance and 
 salvation, until, at least, man shall have lost the 
 faculty of idealising and personifying evil, while 
 retaining it in respect of good. To lose the Devil 
 would be to lose our souls. 
 
 And inasmuch as both beings are compounded 
 of the same essence, even the ideal, divine and in- 
 divisible, we have in good and evil, or the ideal 
 and the real, the true duality which are, and ever 
 have been and will be, the parents of all conscious 
 existence, divine co-progenitors of the sentient 
 
HELL.* 155 
 
 universe, the eternal interaction between whom is the 
 condition of all life and thought. 
 
 If it seem to you that the hypothesis must be 
 defective which represents the principles of good 
 and evil as co-equal and co-eternal, and neither 
 proceeding from the other ; and nevertheless makes 
 the latter to some extent inferior and subordinate to 
 the former, remember that, although in one sense 
 they must be on an equality, inasmuch as both have 
 an identical source in the human faculty of idealisa- 
 tion, yet that it lies with man to determine to which 
 side the balance of power shall incline, and that it 
 pleases him, theoretically at least, to give the pre- 
 ference to his ideal of good, and making that the 
 Supreme, to commit all creative power into his hands, 
 even the power that produces the Devil ; a fact 
 recognised in the Hebrew saying, ( I the Lord create 
 evil.' 
 
 But though we thus attain our conception of the 
 existence of the personified Evil by a process iden- 
 tical with that which brings us to God, namely, by 
 imagining one side of our nature as divested of 
 limitations, it does not follow that the natures of 
 these two beings correspond in detail. In the Devil 
 is no distinction of persons or distribution of func- 
 tions ; no trinity of Father, Son and Spirit, of God, 
 Woman and offspring. These are the essential attri- 
 butes of creative intelligence only, and of loving 
 
156 HELL. 
 
 impulse. Hate creates nought, save a hell for itself 
 and its victims. The function of the ' sole Being sole ' 
 the personified selfishness is destruction. 
 
 ' But the Devil may improve, or at least be utterly 
 vanquished ? ' 
 
 Only in one way can the former happen, namely 
 as we ourselves improve. And by this I mean, not 
 the getting so far away from, evil as to lose all con- 
 ception of it. But rising in the scale of moral being 
 so that our good may be a higher good, our evil a 
 less low evil ; our love for the real decreasing as our 
 love for the ideal increases ; but still with the same 
 impassable barrier between them as before. To 
 become so utterly unconscious of evil, so incapable 
 of appreciating it as to be entirely lost in good ; that 
 
 is, to be absorbed in the ideal, or God, is attainable 
 
 / 
 
 only in the soul's final rest. This is Nirvana, the 
 ideal perfection, or Absolute of Buddhism, from, 
 which all things spring, and to which they return. 
 But so long as we remain in the real, the perception 
 of contrasts, and therefore of good and evil, is essen- 
 tial to consciousness. 
 
 What, then, is the meaning of vanquishing the 
 Devil ? Simply resisting the impulses of the real, or 
 sense, when they interfere with the call of the ideal, 
 or spirit ; and striving towards the perfection which 
 our souls enable us to discern and our consciences 
 prompt us to pursue. 
 
( 
 
 HELL. 157 
 
 There is a further reason against a multiplicity 
 of persons in the diabolic nature, and this completes 
 the astronomic parallel. As God represents light, 
 Christ the sun, the Spirit the atmosphere, and the 
 Virgin Mother the moon, so the Devil represents 
 darkness. Now darkness is not gathered up and 
 condensed into any specific orb or body. It is a 
 mysterious intangible existence, universal and all- 
 pervading, save only where light penetrates. It is 
 enough therefore to sum it up in a single being, 
 without ascribing to it any distinction of persons. 
 To do with it as the Church has done with light, 
 would be to violate the solar analogy. There are no 
 orbs of darkness. The very name of God in the 
 countries whence our religion is derived signifies 
 the shining one. What, but the prince of darkness, 
 then, can be his opposite ? 
 
158 
 
 LETTER XXV. 
 
 FOR EVER. 
 
 DEATH being the end of all things for the real, that 
 which survives can exist only in the ideal. The two 
 elements being severed which constituted the in- 
 dividual, neither can undergo further change, save in 
 respect of the limitations of the ideal. Whatever 
 the real was in character and proportions, that it 
 must for ever remain. Whatever, then, we are in 
 life, that in death we continue to be, only carried 
 forward into the realms of infinity and eternity. 
 Should we, therefore, have grieved and quenched the 
 ideal within us, and ensured that the judgment of 
 which I spoke be against us, we must reconcile our- 
 selves to a sentence of eternal condemnation. 
 
 The revolt against the doctrine of eternal con- 
 demnation is a consequence of that same neglect of 
 the ideal which characterises this materialistic age. 
 Let us test its significance and reasonableness by 
 analogy. 
 
 You love flowers. Your rose-bushes are the 
 marvel and envy of the neighbourhood. Do you 
 
FOE EVEE. 159 
 
 remember once pointing out to me a cluster of 
 withered buds on a, tree, all whose other buds had 
 blossomed into fullest perfection of beauty and fra- 
 grance, while these, through some defect in them- 
 selves or in their conditions of atmosphere or nourish- 
 ment, or through attack of hostile insect, failed to 
 reach their due development, and had to be plucked 
 from their stem, partly because their appearance was 
 a blemish, and partly lest they should be injurious to 
 the tree ? 
 
 Well, all your love and tenderness cannot make 
 you think of those withered buds other than as 
 failures. Carry their memory forward in your mind 
 as far as you will, and still it surpasses all the 
 miracle-working power of your imagination to change 
 the failure they were in their real, into success in 
 your idea of them. In spite of yourself their creator 
 as it were their condemnation is eternal. As they 
 fell, so they lie, and in their grave is no repentance. 
 
 Similarly with the flowers which attained perfec- 
 tion. Your sense of that perfection remains with 
 you after they have quitted the regions of the real, 
 and through that sense they continue to flourish for 
 evermore in the heaven of your ideal. 
 
 Thus, not for themselves do they, not for our- 
 selves do we, continue to exist, in any sense that 
 can be called real. But self is swallowed up in the 
 universal ideal, absorbed in God, who alone abides 
 
160 FOE EVER. 
 
 the all and in all. Such is the doctrine of all 
 spiritual catholics whether Christian or Buddhist. 
 
 But some come to an end while on the road 
 toward perfection, losing their chance of attaining it 
 only through some untimely accident. Are these, 
 you will ask, liable to like condemnation P If they 
 are, you rebel against the sentence. 
 
 In thus stating the case you would answer your 
 own question. You think of these not as failures 
 and fitted for destruction, but as containing elements 
 which, under more favourable circumstances, would 
 have enabled them sooner or later to attain perfec- 
 tion ; and so in idealising them you continue the 
 process and suppose them ultimately to attain that 
 perfection. No hopeless reprobates these, as shown 
 by the idea they leave with you. You do not, 
 however, place them on the same level with the 
 actual successes. Your feeling respecting them is 
 one of hope and expectation. They escape condem- 
 nation, truly ; but they fail to attain the highest 
 places. Promises rather than performances, you do 
 not reject them, but the place you assign them is 
 below the highest. In the house of your ideal are 
 many mansions. 
 
 But they may yet fail to prove themselves worthy 
 your regard, and ultimately fall away from, the 
 grace you have shown them, and have to be cast 
 out? 
 
FOE EVEE. 1G1 
 
 Nay ; such, relapse is impossible. Their place in 
 the ideal world is fixed by their place in the real. 
 Promises they were, and as promses they must ever 
 continue to be regarded. 
 
 True, a larger charity, founded on the discovery 
 that evil, like darkness, has no absolute existence, 
 leads us to be less ready to regard any as hope- 
 lessly reprobate, than was the custom in the days 
 when the Creeds were composed. But for the 
 severity of those times we must not hold the Creeds 
 responsible. They represented humanity, and hu- 
 manity had not got beyond the point of so thinking. 
 
 But let humanity advance as it will, it will never 
 reverse the sentence pronounced against the wholly 
 reprobate, and in favour of the good. He that is 
 unjust, will be unjust still; he that is filthy and 
 lives in sense only, will be filthy still ; he that is 
 righteous will be righteous still ; and he that is holy 
 and lives in the spirit, will be holy still, when he 
 has passed from the real into the ideal state. 
 
 I see in a paper just come the deaths of two 
 persons of whom we both had some knowledge. 
 One, a man of singular piety and benevolence,, with 
 a clear abounding intelligence, but so humble that 
 in all his intercourse with others, he seemed ever to 
 be the learner rather than the teacher. The other 
 was a cynic of the first water, hard, selfish, and 
 tyrannical. 
 
 M 
 
162 FOR EVER 
 
 Shall we ever think of these men as being other 
 than we knew them? That would be to destroy 
 their personal identity. It would be annihilation. 
 No, he who for us was selfish in the real, will be 
 selfish still, when translated to the regions of the 
 ideal. And he that was benevolent, will be bene- 
 volent still. Remember them long as we may, 
 we cannot think of them otherwise. Nay more, we 
 even exaggerate their dominant characteristics, and 
 think of them as possessing them without the limi- 
 tations of time and space, and so as being wholly 
 given up to the exercise of the qualities which in 
 life determined their place in our regards. 
 
163 
 
 LETTEE XXVI. 
 
 NIRVANA. 
 
 AH, my friend, so sense and the things of sense 
 dominate you after all, and you insist on regarding 
 as worthless the perfection which is of the spirit, 
 unless it contain the element of material perpetuity. 
 Taken each by itself, you find the ideal inferior to 
 the real in its power to confer happiness, and 
 you require the addition of immortality to strike 
 the balance in its favour. 
 
 The confidence with which you appeal to the Paul 
 of the Epistles would be amusing were it not a yet 
 further proof of the extent to which a Protestant re- 
 gime is able to paralyse the spiritual life. Paul preach 
 the worthlessness of the ' hope in Christ ' as a source 
 of delight in the present ! Paul rank duration above 
 perfection ! You have indeed misread him, and fallen 
 short of comprehending the enthusiasm that filled 
 him for his beloved ideal. No, we may be very sure 
 that it was to no sentiment such as you imagine 
 that he was giving utterance when he said, ' If in 
 this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all 
 
 M 2 
 
1C4 NIRVANA. 
 
 men most miserable.' Rather was lie with the 
 eagerness usual to him, overstraining the argument 
 for the resurrection ; or his appeal was addressed to 
 those who, like yourself, were more amenable to the 
 things of sense than to those of the spirit; or the 
 life of which he spol\e a,s miserable was the out- 
 ward material existence, and the life of hope in 
 Christ was life in the perfected ideal. 
 
 Your letter illustrates that habit of living and 
 judging to which the prevalent outcry against God's 
 justice in the world is due. ' There must be another 
 world,' meaning a future physical existence, ' to 
 redress the inequalities of this life, if we are to be- 
 lieve that God is just.' As if in the ideal world of 
 our own now-living spirits we had not that other 
 world we need. As if, too, another physical and 
 therefore finite existence could fail to repeat the 
 limitations of this one. 
 
 No, it is not true that if in this life only we have 
 110 joy beyond that of communion with our ideal, we 
 are to be accounted miserable. Onl} T they whose 
 life lies wholly in sense, and who are therefore in- 
 competent to judge between body and soul, would 
 impugn the divine justice 011 this score. Their very 
 inability to comprehend the feeling of those 6 whose 
 life,' to use Paul's phrase, ' is hid with Christ in 
 God,' and, to imitate the language of the fourth 
 Gospel, are one in spirit with the ideal Son and the 
 
NIRVANA. 1 ()5 
 
 Absolute Perfection his Father, even as they are 
 one, disables them from forming a sound judgment 
 in the matter. 
 
 As to the perpetuity of the joy and peace which 
 come from ' believing,' is it not manifest that what- 
 ever lasts as long as we last, is perpetual for us ? 
 What more can we require in the way of con- 
 tinuance ? 
 
 As a Protestant and one therefore familiar with 
 the text of the Bible, you readily recognise the 
 stress continually laid in the Bible on the inward 
 and spiritual nature of that only true religion which 
 consists in the cultivation of the ideal. Whether it 
 be the sense of abstract perfection called in the Old 
 Testament ' the law of God in the heart,' by Socrates 
 his 6 daemon,' by Paul the ' inward man,' and by us 
 the conscience ; or the perfect condition called in 
 the New Testament ' the kingdom of heaven,' and 
 described as being within us ; or whether it be the 
 appreciation of the incarnate personified perfection 
 set forth as ' Christ,' whose function it was to hold 
 up as a standard towards which we should perpetu- 
 ally strive, rules of perfection so absolute that nought 
 finite can attain to them ; and who is described as 
 being in us, our life and our hope, by whom we are 
 made perfect, and in whom, when we have ' crucified 
 the flesh with its affections and lusts ' -sacrificed 
 the real to the ideal and become ' dead to the rudi- 
 
166 NIRVANA. 
 
 ments ' of the world of sense, we ' rise towards tlie 
 things which are above ;' no suggestion is made that 
 all these things are of such small account in them- 
 selves that they depend for their value on their power 
 to procure for us some other state of physical exist- 
 ence. Those who think otherwise have never known 
 with Paul, or appreciated as he did, the ' unsearch- 
 able riches of Christ,' or comprehended the mean- 
 ing of spiritual religion ; have never known the 
 intensity and abidingness of the satisfaction that 
 comes from living up to one's higher nature, -a 
 satisfaction so complete and enduring in itself as to 
 need no stimulus from the future ; the sole satisfac- 
 tion that knows 110 ebb or satiety. 
 
 Such incapacity, however, is but the natural out- 
 come of that same materialising tendency which leads 
 all Protestants, and not a few Catholics, to require an 
 actual historical representation at some specified 
 place and time, and by some specified individual, of 
 the immutable doctrines of the Church, and to lay 
 all the stress, not on the indwelling consciousness of 
 humanity, but on the letter of the record which 
 claims to give some special instance of its manifesta- 
 tion. 
 
 Repress, then, for the future this longing for 
 assurance of immortality, and rather say to yourself, 
 6 If I am not perfect, I am. not worthy to endure. If 
 I am perfect, let me be content : I have fulfilled my 
 
NIRVANA. 1G7 
 
 nature, and God has fulfilled himself in me.' For 
 this at least I hold to be self-evident : Should im- 
 mortality be a fact, the least likely way to attain the 
 perfection which alone can fit us for it, is to con- 
 vert the expectation of it into a motive either of 
 conduct, feeling, or belief. 
 
 Such, again, is pure catholic doctrine, whether 
 Christian or Buddhist. For, as the Buddha-Word 
 says, 
 
 ' To Buddhas Nirvana is the name of that which 
 alone is good. 
 
 ' He who flees to Buddha, who clings to his doc- 
 trine and Church, 
 
 6 He will understand aright the fourfold lofty 
 truth. 
 
 ( He who, loose from all ties of sense, has risen 
 to the divine communion : 
 
 6 He who has thus laid aside every weight, him 
 alone do I call a Brahman a ' (or one who only re- 
 quires death to attain Nirvana, whose self is lost, 
 or rather found, in God, the absolute ideal.) 
 
168 
 
 LETTEE XXYIL 
 
 OUR COUNTRY. 
 
 THE questions which throng to your mind, and which 
 I will do my best to answer so far as my still-failing 
 health will permit, involve more than you are aware 
 of. For they not only range over the whole subject 
 which has occupied us for the last ten months ; 
 but they involve a declaration of my own individual 
 sentiments apart from Catholicism and the Church. 
 
 Well, the conclusion to which a life of close and 
 reverential inquiry, mingled with intervals of rapt 
 adoration, has brought me, is that nought super- 
 natural, as the word is ordinarily used, ever has 
 occurred or can occur. ISTot even ' the original act 
 of creation ' constitutes for me any exception to this 
 rule. Nature, which includes all that is, consists of 
 an element which assumes in the mind two dif- 
 ferent aspects, namely those which I have called 
 respectively the real and the ideal. When we have 
 conceived of nature as alive, and in the course of its 
 eternal growth producing the whole infinite variety 
 of forms which constitute the physical universe, we 
 
OUR COUNTRY. 169 
 
 have conceived all that the most advanced science 
 can ascertain concerning the world of the real. 
 When we have conceived of nature as alive, and in the 
 course of its eternal growth producing the whole infi- 
 nite variety of moral phenomena which constitute the 
 spiritual universe, we have conceived all that religion, 
 can ascertain concerning the ideal, or God. For the 
 rest, we must abandon the universal and absolute as 
 insoluble by us, and restrict ourselves to the stand- 
 point of ourselves. It is from this standpoint that 
 every religion the world has seen or can see, has its 
 rise. Man can recognise as good that only which he 
 finds to be good in himself. Wherefore, as he cannot 
 worship aught that does not appear to him to be 
 good, he must worship his own best. Catholicism, or 
 Christianity, differs from other religious systems in 
 that it carries out this principle more fully than they 
 do, and includes elements which they omit. 
 
 Thus, though wholly human in origin and cha- 
 racter, Catholicism represents the best human, the 
 side of humanity so high and exquisite as to merit 
 the epithet divine, inasmuch as it is the divinest thing 
 humanity can know or imagine; and it is by culti- 
 vating this that Catholicism seeks to draw us up from 
 the lower to the higher regions of our nature. 
 
 While there is thus room within the many man- 
 sions of Catholicism for all mankind, it fails to gather 
 all in, through the operation mainly of two causes. 
 
170 OUK COUNTRY. 
 
 The first of these is the ignorance and narrow- 
 ness of individuals ; ignorance of the meaning of 
 Catholicism, and narrowness that is incapable of ap- 
 preciating its breadth. 
 
 Do not suppose that I refuse the character of 
 Catholic to all who do not adopt the name. All 
 followers of a high and generous ideal, all seekers 
 after perfection, in whatever department of life, are 
 so far catholic. The narrowest sectary does but 
 follow catholic doctrine. The tenet he selects for 
 his special patronage is orthodox in itself; though 
 through imperfection of his mental vision he dis- 
 torts it from its true proportions in relation to the 
 whole body of doctrine. The controversy about the 
 respective value of Faith and Works, for instance, 
 as agents in human redemption, is as absurd as 
 would be a controversy about the respective values 
 of colouring and drawing. To perfect art form and 
 colour are alike essential; and in religion it is as 
 impossible to show one's faith without works, as it is 
 necessary to prove one's faith by works. 
 
 The essential characteristic of idolatry as dis- 
 tinguished from true religion, is the selection of 
 some one quality or faculty for exclusive adoration. 
 Seeking the realisation of his ideal in one 6 Son of 
 man ' after another, man has had gods many and 
 lords many, each representing for him, indeed, some 
 quality of excellence, but none in whom he could see 
 
OUR COUNTRY. 171 
 
 of the travail of his soul and be satisfied. Each, 
 however, betokened an advance on its predecessors, 
 until at length, in the fulness of the time, from the 
 
 O 7 ' 
 
 bosom of the infinite ideal of humanity there came 
 forth the f Son,' born like ourselves of a woman, 
 made under the law of perfection, and fulfilling it in 
 all imaginable high respects, and resuming in him- 
 self the totality at once of human nature and of the 
 cosmical system from which human nature is derived. 
 This is the Catholic ideal, which the sectary is un- 
 able to grasp. Remaining still pagan and idolater in 
 heart, he prefers to pay his homage to some limited 
 and exclusive tenet, rather than to the whole and 
 indivisible body of divine truth. And this with the 
 Catholic Church matured and organised, in his view ! 
 What is this but to ignore the sun, and worship some 
 petty star as the source of light and life ? 
 
 A purely human product, Catholicism represents 
 the divinest aspects of humanity. And to accept a 
 part of it, as does the Protestant world, and vehe- 
 mently reject the rest, is to rend in pieces the seam- 
 less garment of the ideal. 
 
 If such must be the verdict of the Catholic 
 respecting the great seceded divisions, such as the 
 Anglic an Church, think how infinitely small in his eyes 
 must be the bodies which have seceded from them. 
 Parts of a part, sections of a section, the religious 
 sects of Anglo- Saxondom are impersonations of indi- 
 
172 OUR COUNTEY. 
 
 vidual idiosyncracies rather than of universal truth. 
 Products indeed of burning zeal, though ofttimes of 
 zeal inflamed by anything but love, they are products 
 also of intense ignorance of the source and signifi- 
 cance of that which they accept and of that which 
 they reject. missionary-loving England ! Send- 
 ing your apostles to convert the heathen from their 
 idolatries, while yourself worshipping the sun under 
 the name of Christ, and making a fetish of a book of 
 palpably human origin. Protestant England ! 
 hating and reviling the whole body of doctrine and 
 worship from which your own is but a selection. 
 practical commonsense-loving England ! resting all 
 your hopes of perfection upon a particular record 
 and taking no account of that side of humanity 
 which alone makes such record intelligible. How 
 gladly would Catholicism once more gather you 
 under her wings, and make you partaker in her 
 divine secret and method ! As it is, for lack of that 
 sense of perfection whose culture is the Church's 
 special function, you are year by year sinking to a 
 lower level both of aims and of execution. Your 
 guides- heavens ! to think of the destinies of 
 England being entrusted to the purblind sectaries 
 who profane the sacred name of Liberal by arro- 
 gating it to themselves. Incapable of comprehend- 
 ing and appreciating the ideal, how shall you shape 
 the real ? Well, well, nature works in a mysterious 
 
OUR COUNTRY. 173 
 
 way ; and man can little forecast the issue from the 
 character of the means. But for the labour of the 
 scavenger the streets of London would "be impas- 
 sable, the metropolis of the world a desert. Ply then 
 your ruthless besoms, ' Liberals ' of Britain. If need 
 be, use the torch. What if the Communist of Paris 
 on being charged with setting fire to a library, justi- 
 fied the act by saying that he could not read ! 
 
 * * 
 
 The road to God is paved with idols. 
 
174 
 
 LETTER XXVIII. 
 
 THE CHURCH ACTUAL. 
 
 I FEAR that in my last letter I allowed myself to 
 become over-excited. The fact is, I lose all patience 
 when I reflect on the fate with which the Anglican 
 Establishment is threatened by people who affect to 
 be a branch of the Catholic Church, and on the 
 capacity for usefulness of the highest kind which, 
 properly administered, the Establishment possesses. 
 It is not necessary to be superstitious to revolt 
 from the idea of withdrawing that which has been 
 
 ^3 
 
 dedicated to our highest uses, and applying it to 
 lower ones. No one can deny that the material 
 dedications of religion have been at least intended 
 as an offering to what men deemed the highest in 
 their nature ; so that the application of the revenues, 
 organisation and fabrics of the National Church to 
 inferior purposes, that is, purposes which are felt to 
 be not the highest, would constitute a sacrilege. And 
 this, precisely as even the man least susceptible of re- 
 fined sentiment would feel it to be a sacrilege to trans- 
 fer to a wanton, gifts which have once been tokens of 
 
THE CHURCH ACTUAL. 175 
 
 a pure and ennobling love. Fancy one's wife's jewels 
 decorating the person of a scullion ! To give to 
 purposes of sense that which has served the soul,, and 
 so to rob the ideal for the real, this it is that con- 
 stitutes the sin of sacrilege. For what is given to 
 the ideal, is given to God, the soul's perfection per- 
 sonified. 
 
 I spoke of a second cause for the failure of 
 Catholicism to gather the world into its fold. This 
 is not the narrowness of the human mind, nor the 
 wickedness of the human heart, that favourite theme 
 of preachers who, knowing not that heart, find their 
 ill-contrived appeals to it vain. The cause is twofold, 
 and to the charge of the ecclesiastical authorities of 
 
 o 
 
 the Church must each count of it be laid. These 
 are the affectation of universal infallibility, and 
 the assumption of temporal power. 
 
 Through its affectation of infallibility has come 
 the substitution of the principle of authority for the 
 voice of the individual conscience. The highest 
 reach attainable by sentient existence is, so far as we 
 can imagine, the production in finite beings of that 
 sense of and impulse towards perfection which 
 constitute the soul and the conscience. For, as I have 
 insisted throughout, man's sense of perfection is his 
 recognition of God, and involves that union of the in- 
 finite with the finite which constitutes the supreme In- 
 carnation. The Holy Eucharist, whereby the Church 
 
176 THE CHUECH ACTUAL. 
 
 seeks to symbolise this incarnation, has under the 
 operation of authority become degraded, as I have 
 already said, from a simple and exquisitely touching 
 allegory, of purely spiritual significance, into the 
 grossest of fetiches, and a banquet for carnivora. 
 Thus converting faith into credulity, and exalting 
 itself at the expense of the understanding, authority 
 has itself to thank for the meagreness of its recep- 
 tion by mankind. The intellectual or analytic facul- 
 ties equally with the emotional or synthetic demand- 
 ing exercise and recognition recoil from the suicide 
 imposed by the principle of authority. Had the Church 
 appealed to both sets of faculties, and by avoiding 
 concealment and mystery set forth the whole truth, 
 it would have enlisted the support of reason on be- 
 half of faith, and have become as universal in fact 
 as it is in essence. 
 
 The Church therefore erred, not in regarding 
 itself as infallible in matters pertaining to the ideal ; 
 but in asserting its infallibility and resting thereon 
 its claim to supremacy. It is no impeachment of its 
 infallibility in the ideal, that it should be liable to 
 errors of judgment, and even of spirit, in the real. 
 
 It is in this latter respect also that the second 
 count lies, namely the assumption of temporal power, 
 of all its errors the most fatal to the growth and 
 
 o 
 
 stability of true religion. 
 
 It is probably true that in the first instance the 
 
THE CHUECH ACTUAL. 177 
 
 Church, gained by its investment with power. But 
 the gain was outward, superficial, and temporary, 
 and at the expense of its best interests ; like the ap- 
 parent gain of a trade or a plant through unnatural 
 forcing. Its fibre was enfeebled, and its quality dete- 
 riorated. The proper function of the Church lying 
 solely in the ideal, its kingdom being not of this 
 material world, it cannot be invested with physical 
 powers without belying the essential object of its 
 existence. Only when crucified as to the arm of 
 flesh, and ignoring all weapons save those of the 
 spirit, can it hope to succeed in lifting up the ideal 
 with whose culture it is charged, in such aspect of 
 loveliness that it shall draw all men unto it. 
 
 The essence of love is spontaneousiiess ; and to 
 be won to the love of perfection, whether in things 
 moral or things spiritual, the soul must be free. As 
 perfect love casts out fear, so is fear in its turn an 
 inevitable counteractive to love. Setting forth the 
 ideal the true eternal and substantial the Church 
 in seeking temporal power with the hope of obtain- 
 ing all power, grasped at the shadow and, as the 
 event proves,lost both substance and shadow togethe. 
 It still remains to be proved whether when wholly 
 dissevered, in wish as well as in fact, from that which 
 hindered, the Church will ever recover even its legi- 
 timate sway. So long as it hankers after the flesh- 
 pots of worldly power, such an event is hopeless. 
 
178 THE CHURCH ACTUAL. 
 
 Had it renounced the ' unclean thing' voluntarily, the 
 error might have been forgiven it. But mankind has 
 a good memory, and what it has suffered under the 
 material lash wielded by spiritual hands, can never 
 be forgotten. Never to trust ecclesiastics with power 
 has rightly become the maxim most deeply graven in 
 the human mind. Their very habit of judging things 
 from the standpoint of the ideal, unfits them for the 
 control of the real. Small mercy has finite man to 
 expect at the hands of the unconditioned and absolute, 
 as witness the horrors of the creed of Calvin. 
 
 Doubtless the dream was a grand one, and the 
 temptation to realise it overpowering. And even 
 from the Church's point of view it was not destitute 
 of a certain, though illusive, logical propriety. For, 
 had not Catholicism held forth to mankind the spec- 
 tacle of two perfect yet incompatible natures the 
 real and the ideal combined in one person ? Why, 
 then, should not the fleshly and the spiritual depart- 
 ments of humanity be equally blended ? 
 
 The consciousness of its infallibility, however, in 
 things spiritual proved too much for ecclesiastical 
 equilibrium. There was no State but would gladly 
 accept the Church as a friend and ally. But the 
 Church would only tolerate the State as a slave. Im- 
 porting the same pretensions into things secular, it 
 lost its head altogether; and by arrogating supremacy 
 in an element foreign to its nature, drove nation after 
 
THE CHURCH ACTUAL. 179 
 
 nation into lawful rebellion; a rebellion, alas, 
 which so far from stopping at the assertion of its 
 proper rights for the real, has gone on to make war 
 upon the ideal itself. 
 
 And so the true moral of the story of Peter's 
 sword has been lost upon the very Church that 
 claims Peter as its founder and patron. Nay, and 
 even the moral of the temptation of Christ himself, 
 who when offered by ' Satan ' the sovereignty of the 
 real, refused it on the ground that the ideal only was 
 worthy his aspirations. 
 
 N 2 
 
180 
 
 LETTER XXIX. 
 
 MAN'S GOD AND NATURE'S GOD. 
 
 YOUR resume of my argument is perfectly cor- 
 rect. I deny neither God, nor revelation, nor 
 immortality. But I assert that every doctrine of the 
 system called Christianity can be arrived at by the 
 natural mind and faculties of man. And I have to 
 the best of my ability shown you the process by 
 which the human mind has arrived at them. 
 
 I grant you that even if Christianity is demon - 
 strably a product of the human mind, it does not 
 follow that it is the less a revelation from some 
 source more divine than that mind. The animating 
 spirit of the universe may work through man from 
 within, as well as on man from without. But it is im- 
 possible for man to prove that results thus attained are 
 not the natural thoughts of his own mind. And 
 when the suggesting causes of his thoughts are 
 plainly ascertainable, as we have seen them to be, 
 all pretext for ascribing them to aught supernatural 
 vanishes ; and we are compelled to acknowledge that 
 
MAN'S GOD AND NATURE'S GOD. 181 
 
 the theology set before us by the Church is but a 
 sublimation of our own nature. 
 
 I will now reply to your question as to what I 
 meant by saying that the God of the naturalist has 
 nothing in common with the God of the theologian; 
 and I shall thereby strengthen the proof that the 
 latter is merely the reflection of ourselves, by show- 
 ing how very much the former is the reverse of 
 ourselves. Of course by ourselves I mean the best 
 side of our nature. The worst side we have be- 
 stowed upon the Devil. 
 
 I must observe here, however, that the recog- 
 nition of the principle 1 have stated is never suffered 
 to be more than a tacit one. Ecclesiastical Councils, 
 Synods, Congresses, and Convocations are far too 
 wary to proclaim to the outside world the nature of 
 the criterion or Canon whereby they determine the 
 truth or falsehood of any doctrine. If any of their 
 members show themselves so unsophisticated as to 
 appeal to the Bible, they are covertly laughed at as 
 simpletons, and overruled by the others who are in 
 the secret, and who proceed to their decision on prin- 
 ciples unsuspected by the worshippers of a text, 
 sometimes, perhaps, unsuspected by themselves ! 
 Whenever you wish to check one of these decisions, 
 all you have to do is to take the broadest possible 
 view of human nature, project it in your imagination 
 into the infinite, and regard it as divested of limita- 
 
182 MAN'S GOD AND NATURE'S GOD. 
 
 tions. If the doctrine in question prove proportion- 
 ate and harmonious with the whole of human nature 
 on its good side thus treated, it is an orthodox 
 dogma, and predicable of the God of the Church. 
 
 But how little a deity thus constructed in the 
 image of man's best has in common with the actual 
 creator of the world, becomes startlingly apparent 
 when we think of Christ, the divine son of divine 
 love, the Christ of the Sermon on the Mount, and of 
 the Passion at Gethsemane, whose ardent love of 
 perfection and sympathy with humanity led him to 
 devote himself to the death in relieving suffering, 
 denouncing cruelty and injustice, and preaching the 
 regime of ideal perfection : and then think of him as 
 creating a world in which the struggle for existence 
 and its indispensable selfishness are the conditions of 
 continuance, and the vast majority of living creatures 
 are formed expressly to prey upon each other. 
 Christ impose their habits on the Carnivora ! Little 
 attention could the learned and pious Alexandrian, 
 or the spiritual enthusiast his disciple who composed 
 the fourth Gospel the profoundest and most exqui- 
 site piece of anthropotheistic idealism ever penned- 
 have bestowed on the facts of animated nature, 
 when they contemplated as the Divine Word him by 
 whom all things were made and without whom was 
 made nothing that was made. 
 
 Assuredly whatever the God of theology may be, 
 
MAN'S GQD AND NATURE'S GOD. 183 
 
 the author of nature finds no counterpart in man's best, 
 and is no product of his idealisations. For, lovely 
 and delicious as nature is on one side, it has a side 
 that is exquisitely horrible and revolting. Scanning 
 nature's universal untiring eagerness to appear in 
 one form of life or another, the profoundest scrutiny 
 of science is compelled to regard it as a vast me- 
 chanical apparatus working on principles utterly ex- 
 clusive of moral considerations. Doubtless the sum 
 total of pleasure is greater than that of pain. 
 Hardly otherwise could the" world go on. It would 
 become a scene of universal suicide. But the 
 struggle to become alive and to continue alive is 
 
 ~ o 
 
 carried on irrespective of justice, benevolence, or any 
 kind of morality whatever ; and beings innumerable 
 are endowed with an irresistible instinct to perpe- 
 tuate their kind, whose express function seems to be 
 the infliction of misery upon others. 
 
 Such is especially the case with the enormous 
 class of parasitical animals, which in the shape of in- 
 sects, worms, and various other creatures, prey upon 
 the outside or inside of the larger organisms, them- 
 selves wholly guiltless of having done aught to merit 
 the torments thus inflicted on them. Naturalists 
 assure us that there is scarce an individual creature, 
 even among the animals used for food by man, but its 
 system is riddled by myriads of loathsome intestinal 
 worms whose function it is to inflict suffering; while 
 
184 MAN'S COD AND NATURE'S GOD. 
 
 man himself is the victim of diseases innumerable of 
 which living organisms are the agents, each sepa- 
 rate part of his body, to the very eyeball, having a 
 species peculiar to itself to prey upon it. 
 
 This, however, for man is the consequence of his 
 voluntary act in ranging himself in the ranks of the 
 Carnivora. But let us take such a case as that of 
 the horse and his tormentor, the oestrus equi, where 
 no responsibility can be attached to the noble 
 sufferer. This insect deposits its eggs on the skin 
 of the horse. The irritation thereby set up causes 
 the animal to lick the part. By means of the 
 tongue the larvse are introduced into the interior, 
 where, attaching themselves to the membrane of the 
 stomach at the cost of vast distress to the horse, 
 they attain a development above that reached under 
 any other conditions, and finally are ejected fully 
 matured to perpetuate their race and their depreda- 
 tions. The very name of gadflies, to which the 
 oestrus belongs, has become proverbial for the miseries 
 they inflict on the Mammalia. 
 
 One member of the dreadful class of Entozoa is 
 the Tcenia S errata. This animal makes its first ap- 
 pearance in the interior of dogs, where it lays its 
 eggs. These, when dropped about on grass where 
 sheep are pastured, are swallowed by the sheep, in 
 whose body they change into a worm that has a 
 special affinity for the brain. Tormented in this 
 
MAN'S GOD AND NATURE'S GOD. 185 
 
 region by these worms, the sheep vainly seeks relief 
 by butting its head against trees. The Tcenia is 
 capable of a yet further development, but to attain 
 that it must have a nobler abode and richer diet. 
 When sheep thus infested are eaten by human 
 beings, it enters the third and last stage in its 
 metamorphosis. Boarded and lodged in the brain of 
 man, it operates in like manner as in the sheep, in- 
 ducing cerebral disease and madness. 
 
 For no breach, conscious or other, of the laws 
 of their being, are such tortures inflicted on the 
 lower animals, but in the legitimate use of their 
 natural and necessary diet. And, what must strike 
 us as an anomaly even more remarkable is the fact 
 that, whereas the higher the development attained by 
 ourselves, not only the less noxious but the more 
 beneficial to others do we become, many of these 
 creatures actually improve, so far as they them- 
 selves are concerned, in proportion to the excel- 
 lence of that which they destroy. As I before said, 
 there is reason to believe that the general balance is 
 in favour of happiness, and even largely so. But 
 inasmuch as, 011 the hypothesis of an omnipotent, 
 intelligent, and benevolent Creator, we can con- 
 ceive of living beings as provided with instincts 
 which would preserve them from liability to suffer or 
 inflict misery, as easily as we can conceive of them 
 as having instincts at all, we are unable to recog- 
 
186 MAN'S GOD AND NATUEE'S GOD. 
 
 nise in the author of nature the perfection which 
 we are able to formulate in our own souls, and which 
 religion exhibits as the God and Creator of all 
 
 o 
 
 things. 
 
 I do not dwell on the evils incidental to man as 
 an argument against the benevolence of the Creator ; 
 because the sufferings inflicted on us by nature are 
 small compared with those we inflict on ourselves 
 through our neglect of the laws of our being. It is 
 impossible to conceive of our gaining any moral or 
 intellectual education save by the effort to work our- 
 selves up, through, and out of difficulties. So that al- 
 though in man's case there appear to be needless evils, 
 from which he can obtain neither immunity nor 
 advantage, it is impossible to assert positively that 
 there are any which may not be turned to some high 
 spiritual end. Were man alone upon earth, he might 
 ascribe nature's indifference to his sufferings to its 
 supreme regard for the moral over the physical. 
 
 Here, however, we are met by the condition of 
 animals. We cannot regard them as gainers morally or 
 otherwise by the evils which afflict them. And their 
 sufferings, being neither penal nor educational, are a 
 puzzle as insoluble to us as to themselves. It is true 
 that, on the whole, pleasure for them predominates 
 over pain. Nature, as I have said, is one vast appa- 
 ratus for the production of life. Wherever there is 
 life, there, is love in some sort, and the joys of love 
 
MAN'S GOD AND NATURE'S GOD. 187 
 
 are a compensation for many woes. But if pleasure 
 be the end, why should it be qualified by so many 
 drawbacks ? And if there be as it is scarcely possible 
 for a whole-hearted man to avoid thinking and 
 hoping some universal conscious Being to feel 
 through all his creatures, would not he, as well as 
 they, be the happier in their completer happiness ? 
 
 But our inability to perceive the moral and phy- 
 sical perfection we would fain ascribe to every part 
 and detail of the universe, does not justify us in 
 taking the pessimist view of its author's character 
 or intentions. Our own ideal, with all its sublimity, 
 is as much a product of nature as the real that so 
 much revolts us. And if in human creations, when 
 we find among the works of an artist who has 
 reached the highest excellence, some things which 
 we fail to appreciate, we reserve our judgment in 
 deference to his proved genius ; still more so, when 
 perplexed by some of the works of nature, ought 
 the consideration of the absolute perfection we are 
 compelled by our very definitions to ascribe to deity, 
 a.s well as of the perfection attained in the idealisations 
 of the human soul, to make us pause in reverential 
 humility, and trust with what confidence we can the 
 nobler hope. It may be that a certain physical edu- 
 cation of matter is necessary for its development into 
 higher forms, as in mind. 
 
 But love and worship are impossible while the 
 
188 MAN'S GOD AND NATURE'S GOD. 
 
 mind is clouded by distrust. Nature veils its origin 
 from us. So that if man must have a supreme object 
 of worship, there is none to whom we can better 
 render the unreserved homage of our hearts than 
 the God set before us by the Church, a being good 
 as we imagine goodness, in every respect in which we 
 can conceive it, even the personification of our own 
 best. The supreme ideal of all human aspiration, it is 
 he with whom our spirits must seek communion in 
 prayer and in deeds ; he whom, with the ideal man 
 of our race, we must call Father ; he whom we can 
 see and approach only through the ideal ; and who, 
 thus approached and sought, will manifest himself to 
 us, each in our own souls, though not to the world 
 that lieth in sense : and who, if we love him with all 
 our heart and with ail our mind and with all our 
 strength, and keep his commandments, will come to us 
 and love us and make his abode with us, and teach us 
 to be perfect even as he our heavenly Father is perfect. 
 Lofty as such an ideal of deity must appear to us, 
 we have no right to assume that it represents the 
 ultimate reach of creation. Man is but a single one 
 of the multitudinous products of nature. Some of 
 these are lower ; some certainly in the future, possi- 
 bly in the present, though unseen and unrecognised, 
 higher. If one kind of creature may credit its best 
 thought with being a representation of deity, others 
 may do the same, down to the very lowest. 
 
MAN'S GOD AND NATURE'S GOD. 189 
 
 Man, moreover, has existed but for a compara- 
 tively brief space, and has seen of the universe but a 
 comparatively limited portion. Whereas, in order to 
 judge of the Creator fairly, we must take the whole of 
 his work as it exists throughout infinity and eternity. 
 To attempt to do otherwise is to judge the whole 
 surface of the earth from, it may be, an acre of garden 
 plot, a league of ocean, or a patch of the Sahara. But 
 until we obtain a view that completely satisfies the 
 requirements of our highest ideal, we have no choice 
 but to withhold our adoration. 
 
 At present the utmost that can be predicated of 
 the Creator in reference to ourselves is, that the 
 highest perfection we can imagine does but represent 
 the ideal standard towards which we and our parti- 
 cular kind are intended to aspire, and in no way the 
 character of the Creator himself. 
 
 Every different species of beings, and nearly every 
 different member of each species, has, if we may 
 judge from the analogy of man, a different ideal of 
 perfection towards which to aspire ; each such ideal 
 being founded on its own real. 
 
 Yet one more reflection. If we cannot credit the 
 
 author of nature with being the God of our ideal, 
 
 let us at least respect nature for being the producer 
 
 of that Grod. It must have in it an element of 
 
 divinity to be that. 
 
190 
 
 LETTER XXX. 
 
 THE CHURCH POSSIBLE. 
 
 So you have been studying Comte, and have come to 
 the conclusion that, like him, I find nothing left to 
 worship save Humanity. I thank you for having 
 frankly stated your impression, as it involves a mis- 
 take on a point of much importance. 
 
 Although Catholicism sets before us a God made 
 after the image of man, save in respect of his per- 
 sonality, it is a religion of humanity in quite another 
 sense than that of Positivism. The latter indeed 
 affects to preserve the best elements of Catholicism, 
 and to reinforce it by adding the element of science- 
 But inasmuch as it takes little account of individuals 
 and individual amendment, and aims at regenerating 
 the world by a mechanical adjustment of the rela- 
 tions between man and man, it falls infinitely short 
 of the system it seeks to supplant. 
 
 Positivism claims to be the religion of humanity 
 in that it posits the sum of human possibilities as 
 the sole legitimate object of adoration. It thus 
 sets before us an object at once finite and indefinite. 
 
THE CHURCH POSSIBLE. 191 
 
 Catholicism, on the contrary, though constructing its 
 God after a human pattern, does so on a scale infinitely 
 transcending all human possibilities, and thus exalts 
 a rule of absolute perfection, not a rule of something 
 merely better than we now have. And this rule of 
 perfection is imposed, not on man in the mass only, 
 but on every individual man, requiring of him the 
 awakening of the conscience, the purifying of the 
 heart, an entire re-birth in short from the fleshly and 
 real to the spiritual and ideal. However much the 
 Church may seem to have erred by its depreciation 
 of one side of man's nature, namely the finite and 
 real, Corntism commits a far greater error in ignor- 
 ing the other side, namely the infinite and ideal. 
 All the social and other science in the world can do 
 little for us in the absence of that perfect ideal in 
 the heart whereby alone we ourselves can be made 
 perfect. 
 
 But Catholicism does more than supply us with a 
 perfect rule of life and feeling. It sets before us a 
 Person as the embodiment of its rule of perfection. 
 This ideal incarnate becomes for the true Catholic 
 who worships in spirit and in truth, God himself, 
 present at once in heaven and on earth, in the heart 
 and in the hands. The Human Possibilities of the 
 Comtist must ever fluctuate with the conditions of 
 humanity. Not so the infinite and eternal Ideal, 
 the God-Man of Catholicism, who is ever present to 
 
192 THE CHUKCH POSSIBLE. 
 
 the soul of the worshipper who receives the Holy 
 Eucharist in faith. Where there is no Person there 
 is no worship, and where there is no worship there 
 is no religion. And inasmuch as Positivism dis- 
 penses with a Person, it is a mockery to call it a 
 religion either of humanity or of anything else. 
 Religion, is emphatically a function of sympathy, and 
 sympathy can subsist only between individualities. 
 If we are to have religion at all, it must be an affair 
 between persons, even though on one side at least 
 they exist only in the imagination. 
 
 The vast bulk of mankind recoils from abstrac- 
 tions. Why has Protestantism failed to obtain a hold 
 on the masses to elevate and refine them, but that it 
 offers them a symbol only instead of a Person ? Men 
 and women, especially those in whom the emotions 
 are unmodified by education, cannot in their devo- 
 tional moods be content with aught less than One in 
 whom faith enables them to behold sacred feet at which 
 they can kneel, knees which they can embrace, hands 
 which they can kiss, eyes which can melt in tenderness 
 and pity, lips which can speak pardon and encourage- 
 ment. Take from the sacrament this divine Pre- 
 sence : tell them it is but a symbol ; and their feeling 
 will 110 more be evoked towards it than would the 
 feeling of loyalty by a wax effigy of the Sovereign. And 
 as Positivism is far more abstract than Protestantism, 
 it possesses even fewer attractions for the world. 
 
THE CHUKCH POSSIBLE. 193 
 
 Positivism, however, has done the world admi- 
 rable service in assigning a foremost place to science. 
 And it is for the Church of the future to repair the 
 error of the past by recognising the claim of science 
 to share the throne of its highest regards. In this 
 matter the theory of the Church condemns its prac- 
 tice. Recognising the union of two elements, the 
 real and the ideal, in its god-man, it has virtually 
 sacrificed one to the other by its exclusive exaltation 
 of the ideal. The Church has now to learn that it 
 must extend its recognition of this duality to man 
 himself; and applying itself alike to the culture of 
 the ideal and the improvement of the real, make reli- 
 gion and science the two wings whereon in the future 
 man may mount upwards. After what I have said 
 of the nature of the ideal, you can perceive how vain 
 is the notion that there is any inherent antagonism 
 between them, at least, any greater than that 
 which the Church teaches was overcome once and 
 for all in the Incarnation. Man consists of soul and 
 body ; and joined together as these have been by Na- 
 ture, the Church has no right to put them asunder. 
 Hitherto it has sought to raise the ideal by depressing 
 the real. The effect was, not to raise the ideal, but 
 merely, at best, to extend the interval between them. 
 Let it only recognise the truth that man's ideal is 
 but the projection of his real into the infinite, and 
 then, no longer fearful of entrusting men with the 
 
 o 
 
194 THE CHUECH POSSIBLE. 
 
 knowledge, it will proclaim as a new gospel the 
 truth that the higher we raise our real, the higher 
 the ideal which may be reared upon it. It is with 
 the spirit in which this should be done that the fu- 
 ture concern of the Church will lie. 
 
 For the present, in its attempt to obtain rule 
 by dividing two elements, the Roman Church has 
 sunk into imbecility. The recent enunciation of the 
 Pope -that Christians owe no duty to the lower ani- 
 mals exhibited gross ignorance even of the special 
 function of the Church. For, setting aside the ques- 
 tion as regards the animals themselves, it is manifest 
 that if the culture of ideal perfection in man is com- 
 patible with the practice of cruelty to an humble and 
 helpless servant, there is no vice whatever with which 
 it is incompatible. The representative of the Gospel 
 herein showed himself far behind the giver of the 
 Law, who prohibited the muzzling of oxen while 
 treading out the corn, the taking of the parent bird 
 with the nest and eggs, and by way of fostering 
 kindly sentiments in man, even where no cruelty 
 would be inflicted on the animal the seething of a 
 kid in its mother's milk. 
 
 While the Papacy, under the cover of transcen- 
 dental metaphysics, is aiming at universal dominion, 
 the world at large is manifesting indications of an 
 approach to a new era. The modern extension of the 
 sympathetic sentiment bej^ond self, beyond family, 
 
THE CHURCH POSSIBLE. 195 
 
 beyond caste, beyond party, beyond country, beyond 
 race, beyond humanity itself, even to everything that 
 has life, demonstrates perhaps more than any other 
 phenomenon of modern society, the continued develop 
 merit of the soul in man. Is it not evident that when, 
 under the substitution of the reign of sympathy for 
 that of the selfishness which has hitherto prevailed, 
 there shall be no more war of peoples, no more an- 
 tagonism of classes or parties, no more indifference to 
 suffering whether of man or beast, we shall in some 
 measure realise the promise of those new heavens 
 and new earth wherein dwelleth justice ? 
 
 But, to qualify itself to foster this new regenera- 
 tion and lead the world on to so desirable a consumma- 
 tion, the Church must be true to its own principles, 
 must return to its first love, and renounce as an 
 unclean thing the worldly elements to which it is in 
 bondage. Minister of the ideal, but one thing is 
 needful to it. And when on part of the Kornan 
 branch of the Church, the Pope announces himself 
 content with his spiritual functions and abdicates all 
 worldly dominion, rank, and distinction ; and on part 
 of the Anglican branch, the bishops voluntarily and 
 with a single eye to the spiritual, vacate their tem- 
 poral privileges, then perchance may we say, ' lo ! 
 here, and lo ! there,' and begin to hope that the grain 
 of mustard seed is at length beginning to shoot 
 
 o 2 
 
196 THE CHUECH POSSIBLE. 
 
 among whose branches, when grown into a tree, all 
 may find a home and a rest for their souls. 
 
 It is through misconception 011 both sides that 
 we see conflicts, such as that now raging in Ger- 
 many and which may yet reach England, between the 
 State and the Church, between the departments of 
 the real and of the ideal. Though distinct in their 
 functions, both rest on the same basis, the col- 
 lective conscience of the citizens. The State and 
 Church of every country represent, though under 
 different aspects, the aggregate of citizens, but the 
 duty of each citizen to his own conscience is superior 
 to the obligations imposed on him by his fellows 
 under the name of either. His own ideal of per- 
 fection is to him the God whom, rather than man, 
 he ought to obey. In all issues whatever his con- 
 science must be supreme ; and it is not as controller 
 but as developer of that conscience that the Church 
 should ever regard itself. The proper meaning of 
 Papal supremacy in this relation is that, regarding 
 the Roman pontiff as president of the council of con- 
 science, the catholic citizen is bound to accept the 
 coincidence between the dictates of his conscience 
 and the decrees of the Pope as indicating his duty 
 with a certainty otherwise unattainable, and to act 
 accordingly. No man will be a worse citizen for 
 thus regulating his. conduct. 
 
 But, except through the free conscience of the citi- 
 
THE CHUKCH POSSIBLE. 197 
 
 zen, the Cliurcli should exert no influence whatever. 
 Gathering up in itself all the threads of the threefold 
 cord of human culture, Truth, Goodness, and Beauty, 
 the Church should no more seek to be entrusted with 
 executive or legislative functions than should a guild 
 of literature, art, or industry. Its business is to teach, 
 and to illustrate by example, not to rule or to take 
 possession. And the State when encouraging art 
 and education, and whatever tends to the higher 
 development of its members, must logically extend 
 its control to the Church. And this, if for no other 
 reason than to secure to it the largest freedom and 
 possibilities of usefulness by bringing the practical 
 secular mind to temper and correct the extrava- 
 gancies to which a body under exclusively profes- 
 sional influence is liable. The ministers of the Church, 
 charged with the cure of souls, or culture of the 
 ideal, enter a province for which their special office 
 unfits them, when they attempt to exercise power, 
 even though it be only over their own material 
 fabrics and organisation. 
 
 The notion that the Church has outlived its time, 
 and that the world, having got science, can. now dis- 
 pense with religion, is wholly vain. All the science 
 in the world is of small account in the absence of that 
 perfect ideal in the heart through which alone we 
 can ourselves be made perfect. Science may make 
 our outward conditions perfect. But we are more 
 
198 THE CHURCH POSSIBLE. 
 
 than our conditions ; and who or what is to make us 
 perfect ? 
 
 The Church, it is true, may exchange its means 
 for others. It may discard much that in the shape 
 of doctrine or rite it has been accustomed to use ; 
 and especially should it discard and eradicate the 
 notion that in dealing with the supernatural it 
 deals with aught external to humanity. It must 
 thus suffer truth to spring out of the earth, before 
 it can hope to prove itself an efficient minister of the 
 righteousness that looketh down from heaven. 
 
 So long as children are born ignorant, and men 
 continue to be imperfect, will the necessity for a 
 Church exist. As the world changes, the means em- 
 ployed by the Church must change. It will not in 
 the developed future as in the rude past, require the aid 
 of anthropomorphic theologies, or solar myths, sym- 
 bolic ritual, or mysticism in any form whatever, to 
 keep alive the light of the ideal. But, inasmuch as 
 that light must be maintained so long as man is 
 possessed of a soul and sense of perfection, the insti- 
 tution charged with the function of maintaining it 
 will always possess the essential element of a Church, 
 under whatever name it may be known, or by what- 
 ever means it may work, and its culture will consti- 
 tute c religion.' 
 
 If, indeed, the existing Church ultimately fails 
 and falls away into dissolution, it will be because 
 
THE CHUECH POSSIBLE. 199 
 
 it has suffered the mystical and mythological ele- 
 ments in it to stifle and supplant the moral and spi- 
 ritual. It is for want of the proper exaltation of the 
 standard of personal perfection among us, that the idea 
 of Duty is so feeble and dim, while that of ' Eights ' 
 is rampant. Family tyranny, social ill-nature, and 
 cruelty to the human and the animal, are still rife, 
 while the mass of workers of every degree think more 
 of the amount of their wages than of the quality of 
 their work, as if conscience and perfection were vain 
 things. The individualism of the Protestant spirit is 
 
 
 
 accountable for much of this. And even if the Church 
 is slow to abandon the old nomenclature, and insists 
 on regarding the revelation of which it is the medium 
 and guardian as c supernatural ' and ' divine,' let us 
 strive to look tenderly on it, considering that what- 
 ever proceeds from that part of man's nature which 
 is above the ordinary and secular namely, from the 
 ideal and spiritual to the real and sensible, must 
 ever be for us the divinest, and possess the highest 
 sanction attainable. This and science constitute the 
 only true ' revelations.' 
 
 As with individuals, so with peoples. If nations 
 are to flourish and endure, they must keep ever 
 before them, burning clear on the altar of the 
 national heart, that ideal from whose bosom springs 
 the righteousness that alone exalteth a nation. Seek- 
 ing power, honour, wealth, luxury, kingdoms innu- 
 
200 THE CHUKCH POSSIBLE. 
 
 merable have risen up, endured for a space, and 
 then passed away, because they followed the real and 
 the transient ends merely utilitarian and temporary 
 instead of that ideal which constitutes the Ever- 
 lasting Perfection, even the God whose kingdom 
 ruleth over all and abide th for ever. 
 
 
 
 And now, sweet friend of my life, adieu. The 
 time appointed for my departure for the warmer seas 
 and gentler airs of the southern hemisphere has 
 come, and in a day or two I embark in further 
 search of the San Graal most prized by mortals 
 physical health. I will not attempt to deceive you 
 by feigning hopes which I do not entertain. What- 
 ever amendment I am capable of has, I suspect, 
 already been effected by this intercourse with you. 
 For, all through our correspondence you have been 
 a ' real presence ' to me, and one fraught with ten- 
 derest blessings. What I have written, I leave wholly 
 with you. The writing of it has been of infinite ser- 
 vice to my own mind ; and I prize beyond measure 
 your assurance that it has brought peace and comfort 
 to yours, that the stone has been rolled away for you 
 from the door of the sepulchre, and that, secure of 
 possessing within yourself a standard of perfection 
 towards which to aspire, you can henceforth contem- 
 plate undismayed all chances of finite and infinite. 
 Thus provided, you have indeed found a God who 
 
THE CHURCH POSSIBLE. 201 
 
 * 
 
 will be to you a refuge and strength and very present 
 help in trouble. 
 
 About your suggestion that others might derive 
 benefit from my confessions, and your request for 
 leave to publish my letters, I have hesitated greatly, 
 though I can scarcely formulate the grounds of my 
 hesitation. I now hesitate no longer. Not for worlds 
 would I expose you to the woe pronounced against 
 those who take away the key of knowledge; who 
 enter not in themselves ; and who hinder those who 
 would enter in. I do not, however, ask you to publish 
 them, but leave it to your discretion, suggesting only 
 that you allow yourself to be guided by the wants 
 of the times, so that, if spoken at all, they may be 
 spoken in season. All that reaches me respecting 
 the condition of thought and progress of events at 
 home, makes it seem probable that such a time is 
 near at hand. Thus do I make you a sharer in 
 my responsibility ! For myself I can now with all 
 thankfulness say, 
 
 Liberavi animam meam. 
 
 FAREWELL. 
 
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