LiBftARY UK^^veRS^TY OP SAN m^Go IN FR£^SS, AND WILL BE PUBLISHED IN DECEMBER. Boston Monda y Lectures: oi^Ts:or)02C"Y". By Joseph Cook. One volume i2mo, uniform with this volume. $1.50. %* Now ready the Twelfth Thousand of "Biology," by the same author, i vol. izmo. $\.%o. JAMES R. OSGOOD & CO. Publishers. / 7W^ Boston Monday Lectures. TRANSCENDENTALISM, WITH PRELUDES ON CURRENT EVENTS. By JOSEPH COOK. " They who reject the testimony of the self-evident truths will find nothing surer on which to build." — Aristotle. BOSTON: JAMES R. OSGOOD AND COMPANY. (Latb Ticknor & Fields, and Fields, Osgood, & Co.) 1878, Copyright, 1877, By JOSEPH COOK. All Rights Reserved. (cl^ FRANKLIN PRESS: RAND, AVSRY, AND COMPANY, BOSTON. INTEODUCTIOF. The object of the Boston Monday Lectures is to present the results of the freshest Grerman, English, and American scholar- ship on the more important and difficult topics concerning the relation of Eeligion and Science. They were begun in the Meionaon in 1ST5 ; and the audiences, gathered at noon on Mondays, were of such size as to need to be transferred to Park-street Church in October, 1876, and thence to Tremont Temple, which was often more than full during the winter of 1STG-T7. The audiences contained large numbers of ministers, teachers, and other educated men. The thirty-five lectures of the last season were stenogi-aphically reported in the Boston Daily Advertiser, and most of them were republished in full in New York and London. The lectures on Biology oppose the materialistic, and not the theistic, theoiy of Evolution. The lectures on Transcendentalism contain a discussion of the views of Theodore Parker. The Committee having charge of the Boston Monday Lectures for the coming year consists of the following gentlemen : — His Excellency A. H. Rice, Governor of Massachusetts. Hon. Alpheus Hakdt. Hon. "WrLLIAM CLAFLrN^, Ex- Govemor of ]\Iassachusetts. Prof. E. P. Gould, Newton The- ological Institute. Rev. .J. L. WiTHKOW, D.D. Reuben Crooke. Rev. "WrLLiAii ]M. Baker, D.D. Russell Stukgis, Jr. E. M. McPhersox. Boston, September, 1877. Prof. Edwards A. Park, LL.D., Andover Thelogical Seminary. Right Rev. Bishop Foster. Prof. L. T. Townsekd, Boston University. Robert Gilchrist. SiVJviUEL Johnson. Rev. Z. Gray, D.D., Episcopal Theological School, Cambridge. ■William B. Merrill. M. H. Sargent. M. R. Deming, Secretary. Henry F. Durant, Chairman. ^ PUBLISHEES' NOTE. In the careful reports of Mr. Cook's Lectures printed in the Boston Daily Advertiser, were included by the stenographer sundiy expressions (applause, &c.) indicat- ing the immediate and varying impressions wdth which the Lectures were received. Though these reports have been thoroughly revised by the author, the pubhshers have thought it advisable to retain these expressions. Mr. Cook's audiences included, in large numbers, representa- tives of the broadest scholarship, the profoundest philoso- phy, the acutest scientific research, and generally of the finest intellectual culture, of Boston and New England ; and it has seemed admissible to aUow the larger assembly to which these Lectures are now addressed to know how they were received by such audiences as those to which they were originally delivered. go:ntents. LECTURES. PAGE I. Intuition, Instinct, Expekeuent, Syllogism, as Tests of Tkuth 1 n. Transcendentalism in New England .... 27 TTT. Theodoke Parker's Absolute Religion ... 53 IV. Caricatured Definitions in Religious Science 83 Y. Theodore Parker on the Guilt of Sin . . . 109 VI. Final Perjianence op Moral Character . . 135 VII. Can a Perfect Being permit Evil ? .... 105 VIII. The Religion required by the Nature of Thlngs, 191 IX. Theodore Parker on Communion with God as Personal 219 X. The Trinity and Tritheism 247 XI. Fkagmentariness of Outlook upon the Divine Nature 277 PRELUDES. FAOB I. The Children of the Perishing Po6r. ... 3 II. The Failure of Strauss' s Mythical Theory . 29 III. Chalmers's Remedy for the Evils of Cities . 55 rV. Mexicanized Politics 85 V. Yale, Harvard, and Boston Ill VI. The Right Direction of the Religiously Ir- resolute 137 VII. Religious Conversation 167 VIII. George Whitefield in Boston 193 IX. Circe's Cup in Cities 221 X. Civil Service Reform 249 XL Plymouth Rock as the Corner-Stone op a Factory 279 ^ T. LNTUITION, INSTINCT, EXPERIMENT, SYLLOGISM, AS TESTS OF TRUTH. THE FIFTY-NINTU LECTUKE IN THE BOSTON MONDAY LEC- TURESHIP, DELIVERED IN TREMONT TEMPLE, JAN. 1. " He would be thonglit void of common sense who asked on the one side, or, on the other, went to give, a reason why it is impossible for the same thing to be and not to be." — Locke: j;ssa?/. Book i. chap. iii. " There is here a confession, the importance of which has been observed neither by Locke nor his antagonists. In thus appealing to common sense or intellect, he was in fact surrendering his thesis, that all our knowledge is an educt from experience. For in ad- mitting, as he here virtually does, that experience must ultimately ground its procedure on the laws of intellect, he admits that intellect contains principles of jixdgment, on which experience being depend- ent, cannot possibly be their precursor or their cause. What Locke here calls common sense he elsewhere denominates intuition." — Sir William Hamilton: Reid's Collected Writings, vol. ii. p. 784. TEANSCENDENTALISM. I. INTUITION, INSTINCT, EXPERIMENT, SYL- LOGISM, AS TESTS OF TRUTH. PRELUDE ON CURRENT EVENTS. Unless the children of the dangerous and perish- ing classes are to blame for being born, they, at least, whatever we say of their parents, cannot be shut out from a victorious place in our pity. This is a festal day ; and, if the Author of Christianity were on the groaning earth to make calls, probably the most of them, in the cities of the world, would be in unfash- ionable places. Why should we be so shy of the visitation in person of death-traps and rookeries ? There is ineffable authority and example for going from house to house doing good. Visits thus en- joined cannot be made by proxy. No doubt organ- ized and unorganized charity is usually, in its modern form, a result of the Christian spirit. Celsus said Christianity could not be divine, because it cared insanely for the poor. Old Rome's mood toward the miserable the world of culture now loathes. Philan- thropy swells the tide of commiseration for the un- 4 TKANSCENDENTALISM. fortunate; and sometimes the most erratic opinions have been conjoined with the soundest behavior toward those who have hardly where to lay their heads. Orthodoxy itself is often shy of personal con- tact with the very wretched, and goes from house to house by proxy. Organized charity, we think, is the whole of our duty. But Thomas Guthrie, and Dr. Chalmers, and all who have had much to do with the perishing classes in great cities, have taught the Church, that, when men are sick and in prison, they are to be visited. I know a great orator in this city, whose name is a power from sea to sea, and whose sil- vering honored head often bends over couch and cradle in the most miserable houses. It is safe to go to the North End now : it is not safe in the fiercest heats of summer. Our North winds in winter strike us all the way from Boothia Felix, and their iciness seals some fever-dens, whose doors swing wide open every sum- mer under the guardianship, as one must suppose, of the negligence of the Board of Health. [Applause.] I am not speaking at random ; for, according to the city reports, there were in 1876 sixty-eight houses condemned as not conforming to the sanitary regula- tions of this city ; and of these only seventeen were really vacated; the rest were white-washed. [Ap- plause.] The truth is, that if there were ten Boards of Health, and if they all did their duty, we could not avoid having a large population born into the world miserable. This nation now has one-fifth of its population in TESTS OF TRUTH. 6 cities. Wliat are vre to do with the social barriers which allow a great city to be not only a great world, but ten great worlds, in which one world does not care at all for what the other worlds are doing ? In every great town there are six or ten strata in society ; and it is, one would think, a hundred miles from the fashionable to the unfashionable side of a single brick in a wall. Superfluity and squalor know absolutely nothing of each other — such is the utter negligence of the duty of visiting the poor, in any other way than by agents. I do not undervalue these, nor any part of the great charities of our times ; but there is no complete theory for the per- manent relief of the poor without personal visitation. Go from street to street with the city missionary or the best of the police ; but sometimes go all alone, and with your own eyes see the poor in the attics, and study the absolutely unspeakable conditions of their daily lives. Not long ago, I Avas in a suffocated tenement-house where five or six points on which I could put my hand were in boldest violation of the laws which it is the business of the Board of Health in this city to see executed. [Applause.] The death-rate of Boston in summer, in the North End, is often above thirty-five in the thousand. The regis- trar-general of England says that any deaths above seventeen in a thousand are unnecessary. Live one day where the children of the perishing poor live, and ask what it is to live there always. I know a scholar of heroic temper and of exquisite culture, who recently resolved to live with the poor in a 6. TRANSCENDEiSrTALISM. stifling part of this city, and who, after repeated and desperate iUness, was obliged to move his home off the ground in order to avoid the necessity of putting his body underground. You cannot understand the poor by newspapers, nor even by novels. Our distant lavender touches of the miserable show the barbaric blood yet in our veins. Going about from house to house doing good is a great Christian measure permanently instituted by a typi- cal example, which in a better age may be remem- bered, and be the foundation of a nobility not yet visible on the planet. There was One who washed his disciples' feet, and in that act founded an order of nobility; but this second symbolic act seems not to be apprehended even yet by some good Samari- tans — in gloves. The way from Jerusalem to Jeri- cho lies now through the city slums ; and, for many an age to come, there will be the spot where men oftenest will be left stripped and sore and half dead. We want all good influences of the parlor and press, from literature and the interior church of the church, to work upon the problem of saving the perishing and dangerous classes in great cities. [Applause.] Poor naked wretches, wliereso'er you are, That bide the i:)eltmg of this pitiless storm, How shall yoiu- houseless heads and unfed sides, Your looped and windowed raggedness, defend you From seasons such as this? Take physic, pomp; Expose thyself to feel what wi'etches feel, That thou mayst shake the superflux to them, And show the heavens more just. Lear, act iii. so. iv. [Applause] . TESTS OF TRUTH. THE LECTURE. Napoleon I., one day riding in advance of his army, came to a bridgeless river, which it was necessary that his hosts should immediately cross on a forced march. " Tell me," said the great emperor to his engineer, " the breadth of this stream." — " Sire, I can- not," was the reply. " My scientific instruments are with the army ; and we are ten miles ahead of it." — " Measure the breadth of this stream instantly." — " Sire, be reasonable." — " Ascertain at once the width of this river, or you shall be deposed from your office." The engineer drew down the cap-piece on his helmet till the edge of it just touched the opposite bank ; and then, holding himself erect, turned upon his heel, and noticed where the cap-piece touched the bank on which he stood. lie then paced the dis- tance from his position to the latter point, and turned to the emperor saying, " This is the breadth of the stream approximately ; " and he was promoted. Now, in all the marches of thought, metaphysical science measures the breadth of streams with scien- tific instruments, indeed ; but it uses no principles which men of common sense, at their firesides, or in politics, or before juries, or in business, do not recog- nize as authoritative. Your Napoleon's enginceer, after his instruments came up, no doubt made a more accurate measurement than he had done by his skil- ful expedient of common sense ; but the ncAV and exact determination of the distance must have pro- ceeded upon precisely the same principle by which 8 TRA^SrSCENDENTALISM. he liad made liis approximate calculation. Both the estimates would turn on the scientific certainty that the radii of a circle are equal. The distance to the opposite bank is one radius in a circle, of which the position of the observer is the centre ; and, if now he wheels round the radius, of course the radius here is just as long as the radius yonder; for things wliich are equal to the same thing are equal to each other. The most exact instruments ever invented would have behind them only that incontrovertible, axio- matic, self-evident truth. You can measure a river in the way Napoleon's engineer did ; but you think that research of the metaphysical sort has something in it incomprehensible, mystical, and suspicious. Let us not stand in too much awe of the theodolite. As the engineer's final measurement of the river with scientific instruments was simply his pacing made exact, so metaphysics is simply common sense made exact. After three months on Evolution, Materialism, and Immortality, the current of discussion in this Lec- tureship enters on a. new vista ; but the river is the same, for it flows out of that tropical land of Biology we have been traversing together, and the chief theme is always the relations of religion and science. It will yet be our duty to meditate on the applica- tion of the principle of evolution to philosophy, and espec-ally to ethics; fori am now bidding adieu to IVIaterialism as a topic, and am approaching Tran- scendentalism, and so Conscience, and so the natural conditions of the peace of the soul with itself and TESTS OP TEUTH. 9 •witli the plan wliicli inheres in the nature of tilings ; that is, with God. Here, as everywhere, religious science, like every other science, asks you to grant nothing but axio- matic truth. In considering Transcendentalism, or axiomatic tests of certainty, I must seem, therefore, to be almost transcendentalistic at first ; for such is and must be all sound thought, up to a certain point. I am no pantheist ; I am no individualist ; I am no mere theist, I hope : but so far forth as Transcen- dentalism founds itself upon what Aristotle and Kant and Hamilton have called intuition, self-evident truths, axioms, first principles, I am willing to call myself a transcendentalist, not of the rationalistic, but of the Kantian, Hamiltonian, and Coleridgian school. Both wings of the army front of Transcendental- ism must be studied, and it will be found that it is only the left or rationalistic wing that has been of late thrown into panic. That serried and scattered and very brave host made bold marches in Boston thirty years ago. Its leaders now confess that it has been substantially defeated. It is time for the right wing and centre to move. This portion of Transcen- dentalism never broke with Christianity: the other portion did ; and to-day, according to its own admis- sion, is not only not victorious, but dispirited (Froth- ingliam. Transcendentalism in New England, ^j'assi??;)- Its historians speak of it as a thing of the past. Self- evident truths, axioms, necessary beliefs, however, can never go out of fashion; they can be opposed 10 TRANSCENDENTALISM. only by being assumed ; they are a dateless and etei*- nal noon. JNIr. Emerson's theoretical tests of truth are the intuitions or axioms of the soul, and undoubtedly these are the tests which the acutest philosophical science of the world now justifies, and has always justified. Whether the tests themselves justify pan- theism, whether they give countenance to individ- ualism like Mr. Emerson's, whether they establish mere theism, are grave and great questions that can- not be discussed here and now, but which we shall reach at the proper time. The whole of metaphys- ics, the whole philosophy of evolution, the whole of materialism, the whole of every thing that calls itself scientific, must submit itself to certain first truths ; and therefore, on these first truths we must fasten the microscope with all the eagerness of those who wish to feel beneath them, somewhere in the yeasting foam of modern speculation, a deck that is tremorless. What is an intuition? Theodore Parker held that we have an " instinc- tive intuition " of the Divine Existence, and of immortality, and of the authority of the moral law. He constantly assumed that these facts are intuitive or self-evident, and as incontrovertible as the propo- sition that every change must have an adequate cause. He used the word " intuition " carelessly, and did not carefully distinguish intuition and instinct from each other. Very often, in otherwise brilliant literature, this vacillating and obscure use of the word " intuition " leads to most mischievous coiifu- TESTS OF TRUTH. 11 sion of thought. We are told that woman's intui- tions are better in many respects than man's ; we are assured that the intuitions of childhood are purer, clearer, or more nearly unadulterated, than those of middle life : in short, our popular, and many of our scientific discussions, so far as these proceed from persons who have had no distinctively metaphysical traininsT, use the word "intuition" with the moL.t bewilderinET looseness. Individualism is justified by intuition ; pantheism, mere theism, orthodoxy, or whatever a man feels, or seems to feel, to be true, he says his intuitions affirm. There are those who con- fuse intuition, not only with instinct, but with mere insight; that is, with an imaginative or reflective swiftness or emotional force, which, by glancing at truth, catches its outlines better than by laborious plodding. The loftiest arrogance of individualism justifies itself often simply by calling its idiosyncra- sies intuitions. In all ages mysticism of the devout- est school has frequently made the same wild mis- take. Gleams of radiance across the inner heavens of the great poetic souls of the race we must rever- ence ; but shooting-stars are not to be confounded with the eternally fixed constellations. Undoubted- ly a single flash of lightning from the swart, thunder- ous summer midnight, often ingrains the memory of a landscape more durably on the memory than the beating of many summer noons ; but even lightning glances are not intuitions. Our first business then, my friends, will be to ob- tain a distinct definition of the strategic word " intui- 12 TRANSCENDENTALISM. tion." This is a scientific teclmical term ; and, when correctly used as such, has outlines as clearly cut as those of a crystal. We must approach the definition in a way that will carry all minds with us, step by step. 1. It is possible to imagine all the articles in this room to be annihilated, or not in existence. You feel very sure, do you not, as you cast a glance on the capacities of your mind, that you can believe that these articles might never have existed ; and so of all other objects that fill space ? Orion flames in our skies now ; but you can at least imagine that this constellation might never have been. The Seven Stars we can suppose to be annihilated. I do not mean that we can prove matter to be destructi- ble, but that we can imagine its non-existence. You are entirely certain of your mental capacity to im- agine the non-existence of any material object in any part of space. 2. It is impossible to imagine the si^ace in this room to be annihilated, or not in existence. Notice the strange fact that you cannot so much as imagine the annihilation of a corner of the space in this room. You bring down in thought the space from one corner, as you would roll up a thick cur- tain ; but you have left space behind, up yonder in the corner. You lift up this floor and bring down the ceiling : but you have left space beneath and above. You draw in all four sides of this temple at once, and cause its dimensions to diminish equally in every direction ; but in every direction you have left TESTS OF TRUTH. 13 space. If you go out into infinite space with the best exorcism of your magic, if you whip it as Xerxes whipped the ocean, you will find your heaviest lashes as unavailing as his. No part of space can even be imaecined not to be in existence. We cannot so much as imagine that the space through which Orion and the Seven Stars wander should not be ; by no possi- bility can you in thought get rid of it, although you easily get rid of them. That is a very curious fact in the mind. 3. It is possible to suppose all the events since sun- rise not to have taken place. I know not but that at this moment the English fleet lately in the Bosphorus is floating across the purple ripples of the Piraeus harbor at Athens, in sight of the Acropolis. It may be that the Russians are commencing a march upon Turkey. But what- ever has happened since sunrise I can imagine not to have happened at all. It is perfectly easy for me, in thought, to vacate all time of all events. Any thing that has taken place in time may be imagined not to have taken place. We can imagine the non- existence of whatever we call an event. 4. It is impossible to suppose any portion of the duration from sunrise to the present moment not to have existed. If you will try the experiment with yourselves, and analyze your minds, you will find that it is really impossible to think of any portion of duration as annihilated. You annihilate an hour, as you say ; but there is a gap left, and it is an hour long. You anni- 14 TRANSCENDENTALISM. hilate an age in the flow of the eternities, and there is a gap of an age there. If you will simply notice your own thoughts, you will find that in this case, as in the case of space, we strike upon a most marvellous circumstance. The mind is so made, that it is not capable even of imagining the non-existence of time or of space. There are hundreds of proofs of this ; and those who hold the materialistic philosophy do not deny the existence of this necessity in the human mind. They explain its origin and meaning in a way that I do not think clear at all ; but they, with all men who understand their own mental operations, admit that all events and all objects we may annihi- late in thought, but not space, not time. Moreover, we are convinced that always there was space, and always there will be ; that always there was time, and always there will be. 5. It is possible to believe that any effect or change that has taken place might not have taken place. 6. It is hnpossihle to believe that any change can have taken place witlwut a cause. This latter is an amazing but wholly incontroverti- ble fact in the mind. Our idea of the connection of cause and effect is equally clear with our ideas concerning space and time ; and the axiom which asserts that every change must have a sufficient cause is not a merely identical proposition either. I know that materialistic schools in philosophy are often saying that most axioms are simply equations between different expressions for TESTS OF TRUTH. 15 the same thought. Whatever is, is. That, undoubt- edly, is an identical proposition. It means simpl}^ as Jolin Stuart Mill said, that, when any proposition is true in one form of words, we have a right to affirm the same thing in any other form of words. But take an axiom which is not an identical proposition, and that is admitted even by materialists not to be one : the proposition that the equals of equals are equal to each other. (See Baix, Professor A., Mental and Moral Science, English edition, p. 187.) You feel perfectly sure about that ; you cannot be made to believe that that is not true. Take the prop- osition, that every change not only 7ias, but must have, an adequate cause, and that is by no means an iden- tical proposition. What is beyond the verb there does not mean only what that does which is on the first side of the verb. An identical proposition is simply an equation : what is on the left side of tlie verb means just what that does which is on the right of the verb. But in the proposition, that every change has and must have an adequate cause, these words on the right of the verb do not express just the meaning of the words on the left ; and yet you are perfectly sure of the connection between these two phrases. Not only has, but must, you and all men put in there ; and you are sure about that vast double assertion. For all time past, and all time to come, that is an axiom, you say, not only for this globe, but for the sun, and the Seven Stars, and Orion. You are sure about that truth ; and, if you try ever so skilfully, you cannot make yourself 16 TRANSCENDENTALISM. believe but that every change must have an adequate cause ; and yet, if you try to prove that proposition, you cannot do it by any thing that does not assume it. It is not only evident : it is self-evident. It is not evident through any other truth. It is a primi- tive and not a derivative truth. It is a first truth. Nevertheless, although there is no demonstration of that proposition, except by looking directly on it, or the supremest kind of demonstration, — absolute men- tal touch, — you are sure that it is true not only here, but everywhere; not only now, but forever. [Ap- plause.] 7. The ideas of space and time are called in phi- losophy necessary ideas. 8. The belief in the connection of cause and effect is called in philosophy a necessary belief. 9. All real axioms are necessary truths. 10. All necessary truths are not only evident, but self-evident. You may say that the proposition that it is two thousand feet from here to the gilded dome yonder is evident, but not that it is self-evidetit. You ascer- tain the distance by measurement and reasoning. But it is self-evident that the shortest distance be- tween this point and that is a straight line. On that proposition you do not reason at all ; and yet you are unalterably sure of it. 11. Self-evident and necessary truths are univer- sally true ; that is, everywhere and in all time. We feel sure that it is, always was, and always will be true that a whole is greater than a part, and that TESTS OF TRUTH. 1? the Slims of equals are equals ; that a thing cannot be and not be at the same time and in the same sense. We are confident that these laws hold good here, and in Orion, and everywhere. We arrive thus at an incisive definition : — 12. An {ntuition is a truth self-evident, necessary/, and universal. It is a proposition having these three traits, — self- evidence, necessity, and universality. 13. Since Aristotle, these three have been the established tests of intuitive truths. (See Sm Wel- LiA^r Ha3IILT0n's celebrated Note A, Appendix to Reid's Works.') 14. An intuition is to be distinguished from an instinct. The latter is an impulse or propensity existing independent of instruction, and prior to experience. 15. An intuition is to be distinguished from in- sight, emotional, reflective, or poetic. 16. An intuition is to be distinguished from inspi- ration or illumination, sacred or secular. 17. In scientific discussion any use of the word " intuition " to denote other than a proposition marked by self-evidence, necessity, and universality, is a violation of established usac^e. 18. The supreme question of philosophy is wheth- er the self-evident, necessary, and universal truths of the mind are derived from experience, or are a part of the constitution of man brought into activity by experience, but not derived from it, nor explicable by it. Do these self-evident truths arise a priori, or d 18 TEAJSrSCENDENTALISM. posteriori ; that is, do they exist before or only after experience ? Up to this point we are all agreed, and we have attained distinctness, I hope, as to our fundamental term. From this point onward we may not all agree ; but I must venture these further proposi- tions : — 19. This fundamental question has a new interest on account of the recent advances in philosophy, and especially in biology. 20. These advances, if the German as well as the English field is kept in view, favor the a priori or the intuitional school. On one point there is no debate any longer ; namely, that there are certain truths which are not only evi- dent, but self-evident ; wliich are absolutely necessary beliefs to the mind ; and which are, therefore, univer- sal, both in the sense of being explicitly or implicitly held by all sane men, and in that of being true in all time and in all places. (See Mill's admissions pas- sim^ in his Examination of Hajviilton's Philosophy.^ Immanuel Kant instituted a great inquiry,you remem- ber, as to the origin of this particular class of truths, especially of those which are not identical proposi- tions; and now I beg leave to ask this audience whether it is not worth while for us — now that Ger- many has gone back to Immanuel Kant, and dares to-day build no metaphysical superstructure except on his foundations or their equivalents — to ask over again, in the light of all the recent advances of bio- logical science, the supreme question : Are the self TESTS OF TRUTH. 19 evident^ necessary^ and universal ideas of the mind derived solely from experience^ or are they a part of the original furniture of the soul, not derived at all from sensuous impressions ? [Applause.] I am quite aware that Mr. Frothingliam of New- York City, who in philosophy seems to have very little outlook beyond the North Sea, says that the Transcendentalism of which he is the historian has for the present had its day. Here is his graceful book ; and, although it is only a sketch, there is large meaning between its lines in its plaintive under- tone of failure. This coast of New England the Puritans made mellow soil for all seeds promising re- ligious fruitfulness. Transcendentalism rooted itself swiftly here for that reason ; but the effort was made to bring up that seed to the dignity of a tree without any sunlight from Christianity. Mr. Frothingham says the attempt has failed. I believe the seed, if it had had that light, might have lived longer. [Applause.] Let it never be forgotten that there are two classes of those who revere axiomatic truth, — the Kantian, Hamiltonian, and Coleridgian on the one side, and the purely rationalistic on the other. Mr. Frothingham says New-England Transcendentalism deliberately broke with Christianity; but in that remark he overlooks many revered names. His own school in Transcendentalism was indeed proud to shut away from the growth of the seeds of intuitive truth the simlight of Christianity. No oak has appeared in the twilight ; but does this fact prove that the tree may not attain stately proportions if 20 TRANSCENDENTALISM. nourished by the noon ? Already axiomatic truth is an oak that dreads no storms ; and forests of it to-day stand in Germany, watered by the Rhine, the Elbe, and the Oder; and one day similar growths will rustle stalwart in New England, watered by the Mystic and the Charles ; and the stately trees will stand on the Thames at last, in spite of its grimy mists. [Applause.] There will be for Intuitionalism in philosophy a great day, so soon as men see that the very latest philosophy knows that there is a soul external to the nervous mechanism, and that materi- alism must be laid aside as the result simply of lack of education. [Applause.] 21. The positions of Kant, Sir William Hamilton, and Coleridge, and not those of the rationalistic wing of Transcendentalism, are favored by the researches of the most recent German philosophy. 22. As materialism and sensationalism assert, there is in the spiritual part of man nothing which was not first in the physical sensations of the man. 23. Leibnitz long ago replied to this pretence by his famous and yet unanswered remark: There is nothing in the intellect that was not first in the sen- sations, except the intellect itself. (Nihil est in intel- lectu, quod non fuerit in sensu, nisi ipse intellectus. — Leibnitz, Nouveau Ussais.^ 24. It is now proved that the soul is a force exter- nal to the nervous mechanism, and that the molecular motions of the particles of the latter are a closed circuit not transmutable into the activities of the former. TESTS OF TRUTH. 21 25. We know now, therefore, that, besides what furni- ture sensation and association give to the soul, there are in us, wholly independent of experience, the soul and the plan of the soul. [Applause.] 26. Of this plan, which must be the basis of all philosophy relating to man, the self-evident, necessary, and universal truths, or the intuitions on the one hand, and the organic or constitutional instincts on the other, are a revelation. 27. Every organic instinct must he assumed to have its correlate to match it. 28. Every really intuitive helicf must he held to he correct. [Applause.] Proof that there is a soul is proof that there is a plan of the soul. It is now a commonplace of science that the uni- versality of law is incontrovertible. If the soul has an existence, it has a plan, for the universality of law requires that every thing that exists should have a plan ; and, if the soul exists, there is no doubt a plan according to which it was made, and according to which it should act. When, therefore, we prove that the soul is some- thing different from matter, or that it is as external to the nervous system as light to the eye, and the pulsations of the air to the ear ; when physiological science, led by the Lotzes and Ulricis and Beales, asserts that the soul is possibly the occupant of a spiritual body ; or when, not going as far as that, we simply say there is a soul, — we affirm by implication that it is made upon a plan. In the light of the best 22 TRANSCENDENTALISM. biological science of our day, it is incontrovertible that we have in man two things at least that did not originate in his senses ; namely, the soul and the plan of the soul. [Applause.] That is not a proposition of small importance. It means that these necessary beliefs, these self-evident truths, these first principles, inhere in the very plan of our soul ; and that they are, therefore, a supreme revelation to us from the Author of that plan. Self-evident truths thus take hold of the roots of the world. If, now, I raise the question whether instinctive beliefs, whether the first truths, which Aristotle said no man could desert and find surer, whether self-evi.dent propositions, are not made self- evident of necessity by the very structure of our souls, you will not think I am running into mysti- cism, will you? You believe there is a soul, and you hold that every thing is made on a plan ; or that from the eyelash that looks on Orion, up to Orion itself, there is no escape from the universality of law: therefore, you must hold, that, since every thing is made on a plan, the soul itself is. Just as you know that your hand was not made to shut toAvard the back, but toward the front, you know that the soul is made according to a certain plan. If we can find out that plan, we can ascertain what is the best way in which to live. It is said we can know nothing ; but do we not already know that there is a best way to live, and that it is best to live the best way, as assuredly as we know that our hand was not made to shut toward the back, but toward TESTS OF TRUTH. 23 the front ? I think I know that [applause] in spite of all the wooden songs of materialism. German}'- yet listens to Immanuel Kant, and to those who, succeeding him with the microscope and scalpel, have carried biological knowledge far beyond its state in his time, and are now asserting not only the existence of the soul, and its independence of the body, but that, because law is universal, the soul must be made on a plan ; and that, therefore, the supreme question of moral science and intellectual philosophy, and of all research that founds itself on mere organism, must be to ascertain what the plan of the soul is, in order that, through a knowledge of the plan, we may learn to conform to it. [Ap- plause.] What, then, must philosophy to-day call the su- preme tests of truth ? In the ceiling of this temple will you imagine a great circle to be dra^vn, and will you call one quar- ter of it Intuition, another quarter Instinct, another Experiment, another Syllogism? Let our attempts at arriving at certitude all consist of endeavors to rise to the centre from which all these arcs are drawn. If you will show me what the intuitions are, and do that clearly, I can almost admit that you may strike the whole circle from simply a knowledge of that quadrant. I know, that, if you can inductively deter- mine any curve of the circle, you can then determine deductively the whole. But, my friends, we have seen too many failures in this high attempt to de- scribe the circle of the universe by determining three 24 TEANSCENDENTALISM. points only. No doubt tkrough any three points a circle may be drawn ; but so vast is the circle of infmitie.5 and eternities, that our poor human com- passes cannot be trusted, if we use one of these quadrants only. Let us be intuit ionalists, hut much else. Let us test quadrant by quadrant around the whole circle of research. Let us conjoin the testi- mony of Intuition, Instinct, Experiment, and Syllo- gism. Show me accord between your quadrant of Intuition and your quadrant of Instinct, and be- tween these two and the quadrant of Experiment, — this latter is the English quarter of the heavens, and that of Intuition is the German, — and between these three and the quadrant of Syllogism ; and, with these four supreme tests of truth agreeing, I know enough for the cancelling of the orphanage of Doubt. I know not every thing ; but I assuredly can find a way through all multiplex labyrinths between God and man, and will with confidence ascend through the focus of the four quadrants into God's bosom. [Ap- plause.] Archbishop Whately said, that, the wider the circle of illumination, the greater the circle of surrounding darkness. Acknowledging that this is true, we shall be devoutly humble face to face with inexplicable portions of the universe. Nevertheless, let us, witli the faith of Emerson,' with the insight of Theodore Parker, with the acuteness of John Stuart Mill, ai well as with the deadly precision of Kant, and of all clear and devout souls since the world began, hold unalterably, in this age of unrest and orphanage, TESTS OF TKUTH. 25 that, if these four quadrants agree, we may implicitly trust them as tests of truth. [Applause.] The su- preme rules of certitude were never more visible than in our distracted day; and they are Intuition, Instinct, Experiment, Syllogism. Each is a subtle verification of every other. Let us image these vast quadrants of research as so many gigantic reflectors of a light not their own. At the focal point of the four. Religious Science, strictly so called, lights its immortal torch. [Applause.] 1 n. TEANSCENDENTALISM IN NEW ENGLAND. THE SIXTIETH LECTURE IN THE BOSTON MONDAY LECTURE- SHIP, DELIVERED IN TREMONT TEMPLE JAN. 8. *' ^TJ/iT} S'ovTTOTe nafznav am^vTat fjv nva itoVmI Aaoi (jnjfu^ovaf Oeoc vv ng earl kuc avTrj." Hesiod: Works and Days. "Let us do what we can to rekindle the smouldering, nigh quenched fire on the altar. The remedy is first soul, and second soul, and evermore soul." — Emebsok: Address at Cambridge, July 15, 1838. i i n. TRANSCENDENTALISM IN NEW ENG- LAND. PKELITDE OIT CUEEENT .EVENTS. A SEEious man must rejoice to have Christianity tested philosophically, historically, and in every great way, but not in a certain small, light, and inwardly coarse way, of which the world has had enough, and is tired. Yesterday the most scholarly representative of what calls itself Free Religion told Boston that the Author of Christianity is historically only an idolized memor}'- inwreathed with mythical fictions. Will you allow me to say that the leading universi- ties of Germany, through their greatest specialists in exegetical and historical research, have decisively given up that opinion ? Thirty or forty years ago it was proclaimed there in rationalistic lecture-rooms very emphatically : to-day such lecture-rooms are empty, and those of the opposing schools are crowded. On the stately grounds of Sans Souci, where Frederick the Great and Voltaire had called out to the culture of Europe, " Ecrasez Vinfame I " King William and his queen lately entertained an 29 30 TRANSCENDENTALISM. Evangelical Alliance gathered from the Indus, the Nile, the Danube, the Rhine, the Thames, and the Mississippi. Histories of the rise and progress and decline of German Rationalism, and especially of the power of the Mythical Theory, have been appear- ing abundantly for the last jfifteen years in the most learned portions of the literature of Germany. The incontrovertible fact is, that every prominent German university, except Heidelberg, is now under predomi- nant evangelical influences. Heidelberg is nearly empty of theological students. Lord Bacon said that the best materials for prophecy are the unforced opinions of young men. Against twenty-four theo- logical students at rationalistic Heidelberg there were lately at evangelical Halle two hundred and eightj^-two ; at evangelical Berlin two hundred and eighty ; and at hyper-evangelical Leipzig four hun- dred and twelve. Before certain recent discussions and discoveries on the field of research into the history of the origin of Christianity, the rationalistic lecture-rooms were crowded, and the evangelical empty. It is notorious that such teachers as Tholuck, Julius Miiller, Dorner, Twesten^ Ullmann, Lange, Rothe, and Tischendorf, most of whom began their professorships at their universities with great unpopularity, on account of their opposition to rationalistic views, are now par- ticularly honored on that very account. (See ar- ticle on the " Decline of Rationalism in the German Universities," Bihliotheca Sacra^ October, 1875.) We often have offered to us in Boston the crumbs TRANSCENDENTALISM IN NEW ENGLAND. 31 from German pliilosopliical tables; and, although I must not speak harshly, the truth must be told, namely, that the faithful in the uneducated ranks of scepticism — I do not deny that there are vast masses of Orthodoxy uneducated also — are not infrequently fed on cold remnants swept away with derision from the scholarly repasts of the world. If you will open the biography of David Friedrich Strauss, by Zeller, his admiring friend, and a profess- or at Heidelberg, you will read these unqualified words : " Average theological liberalism pressed forward eagerly to renounce all compromising asso- ciation with Strauss after he published the last state- ment of his mythical theory." (See Zeller, Pro- EESSOR Eduard, " Strauss in his Life and Writings,'' English translation, London, 1874, pp. 135, 141, 143.) It did so under irresistible logical pressure, and especially because recent discoveries have car- ried back the dates of the New-Testament literature fifty years. Thirty years ago it used to be thought that the earliest date at which the New-Testament literature can be shown to have been received as of equal authority with the Old was about A.D. 130 ; but, as all scholars will tell you, even Baur admitted that Paul's chief Epistles were genuine, and were written before the year 60. This admission is fatal to the mythical theory put forth by Strauss when he was a young man, and now for twenty years marked as juvenile by the best scholarship of Germany. These letters of Paul, written at that date, are incontro- 32 TRANSCEjSTDElSrTALISM. vertible proof that the leading traits of the charac- ter of the Author of Christianity, as given in the so-called mythical Gospels, were familiar to the Chris- tian world within twenty-five years after his death (Thayer, Professor J. Henry, of Andover, Boston Lectures, 1871, p. 372). There is now in the hands of scholars incontrovertible evidence that even the Gospels had acquired authority with the earliest churches as early as A.D. 125. Schenkel, Kenan, Keim, Weizsacker, and others widely removed from the traditional views, teach that the Fourth Gospel itself could not have appeared later than a few years after the beginning of the second century. (See Fisher, Professor George P., Essays on the Svr pernatural Origin of Christianity, 1870, Preface, p. xxxviii.) These discoveries explain the new atti- tude of German scholarship. They carry back the indubitable traces of the New-Testament literature more than fifty years. They shut the colossal shears of chronology upon the theories of Baur, Strauss, and Renan. They narrow by so much the previously too narrow room used by these theories to explain the growth of myths and legends. Strauss demands a century after the death of Paul for his imaginative additions to Christianity to grow up in. It is now established that not only not a century, but not a quarter of a century, can be had for this purpose. The upper date of A.D. 34, and the lower date of A.D. 60, as established by exact research, are the two merciless blades of the shears between which the latest and most deftly-woven web of doubt is cut TRANSCENDENTALISM IN NEW ENGLAND. 33 in two. [Applause.] There is no room for that course of mythical development which the Tubingen school describes. As a sect in biblical criticism, this school has perished. Its history has been written in more than one tongue (Thayer, Professor J. Henry, Criticism Confirmatory of the Crospels, Boston Lectures, 1871, pp. 863, 364, 371). Chevalier Bunsen once wrote to Thomas Arnold this incisive exclamation : " The idea of men writing mytliic histories between the time of Livy and Taci- tus, and Saint Paul mistaking such for realities ! " Arnold's Life, Letter cxliv.) Paul had opportunity to know the truth, and was, besides, one of the bold- est and acutest spirits of his own or of any age. Was Paul a dupe ? [Applause.] But who does not know the history of the defeat of sceptical school after sceptical school on the rationalistic side of the field of exegetical research ? The naturalistic theory was swallowed by the mythi- cal theory, and the mythical by the tendency theory, and the tendency by the legendary theory, and each of the four by time. [Applause.] Strauss laughs at Paulus, Baur at Strauss, Ilenan at Baur, the hour- glass at all. [Applause.] " Under his guidance," says Strauss of Paulus (New Life of Jesus, English translation, p. 18), "we tumble into the mire; and assuredly dross, not gold, is the issue to which his method of interpretation generally leads." " Up to the present day," says Baur of Strauss (^Krit. Untcrs. iiher die canonische Evangel., 121, 40-71), "the mythi- cal theory has been rejected by every man of educa- 34 TRANSCENDENTALISM. tion." And yet New- York lips teach it here in modern Athens ! [Applause.] " Insufficient," says Renan of Baur {Etude cTHlst. Rel., 163), " is what he leaves existing of the Gospels to account for the faith of the apostles." He makes the Pauline and Petrine factions account for the religion, and the religion account for the Pauline and Petrine factions. " Criti- cism has run all to leaves," said Strauss (see Zeller, Life of Strauss, p. 143) in his bitter disappointment at the failure of his final volume. Appropriately was there carried on Richter's cof- fin to his grave a manuscript of his last work, — a discussion in proof of the immortality of the soul : appropriately might there have been carried on Strauss's coffin to his grave his last work, restating his mythical theory, if only that theory had not, as every scholar knows, died and been buried before its author. [Applause.] The supreme question concerning the origin of the New-Testament literature is now, whether, in less than thirty years intervening between the death of the Author of Christianity and A.D. 60, in which Paul's Epistles are known to have become authori- ties, there is room enough in the age of Livy and Tacitus for the growth and inwreathing of mythical fictions around an idolized memory lying in the dim haze of the past. An unscholarly and discredited theory was presented to you yesterday gracefully, bat not forcefully. Let us see what a vigorous and unpartisan mind says on the same topic. " I know men," said Napo- TRANSCENDENTALISM IN NEW ENGLAND. 35 leon at St. Helena — the record is authentic ; read it in Liddons' Bampton Lectures on the Divinity of Our Lord, the best recent book on that theme, — "I know men, and I tell you that Jesus of Nazareth was not a man." Daniel Webster, on his dying-bed, wrote on the marble of his tombstone " The Sermon on the Mount cannot be a merely human production." Kenan was particularly cited to you yesterday ; but when I went into the study of Professor Dorner, Schleiermacher's successor, at Berlin, and conversed with him about the greatest sceptics of Europe, I came to the name of Kenan, and said, " What are we to think of his ' Life of Jesus ' ? " " Das ist Nichts," he answered, and added no more. " That is nothing." [Applause.] Ko doubt, in the fume and foam and froth of liter- ary brilliancy serving a lost, bad cause, there may be iridescence, as well as in the enduring opal and pearl ; but, wliile the colors seven flashed from the fragile spray are as beautiful as foam and froth, they are also just as substantial. [Applause.] THE LECTUKE. Side by side under the lindens in the great ceme- tery of Berlin lie Fitche and Hegel ; and I am tran- scendentalist enough myself to liaTe walked one lonely day, four miles, from tlie tombs of Neander and Schleiermacher, on the hill south of the city, to the quiet spot where the great philosophers of tran- scendentalism lie at rest till the heavens be no more. I treasure among the mementos of travel some 36 TRANSCENDENTALISM. broad myrtle-leaves which I plucked from the sods that lie above these giants in philosophy ; and, if I to-day cast a little ridicule upon the use some of their disciples have made of the great tenets of the masters, you will not suppose me to be irreverent towards any fountain-head of intuitive, axiomatic, self-evident truth. You wish, and I, too, wish, cool draughts out of the Castalian spring of axioms. You are, and I, too, am, thirsty for certainty ; and I find it only in the sure four tests of truth, — intuition, instinct, experiment, syllogism, — all agreeing. [Ap- plause.] But of the four tests, of course the first is chief, head and shoulders above all the rest. Even in Germany the successors of the great tran- scendentalists have made sport for the ages; and no doubt here in New England it was to have been expected that there should be some sowing of " tran- scendental wild-oats." [Applause.] That plirase is the incisive language of a daughter of transcen- dentalism honored by this generation, and likely to be honored by many more. I am asking you to look to-day at the erratic side of a great movement, the right wing and centre of which I respect, but the left wing of which, or that which broke with Chris- tianity, has brought upon itself self-confessed defeat. What has been the outcome of breaking with Christianity in the name of intuitive truth in Ger- many? Take up the latest advices, which it is my duty, as an outlook committee for this audience, to keep before you, and you will find that Immanuel Hermann Fichte, the son of this man at whose grave TEAXSCENDEXTALISM IN NEW ENGLAND. 3T I stood in Berlin, has just passed into the Unseen Holy ; and that, as his last legacy, he left to the ages a work entitled " Questions and Considerations con- cerning the Ne^yest Form of German Speculation." When, one day, the great Fichte heard the drums of Napoleon beat in the streets of Berlin, he closed a lecture by announcing that the next would be given when Prussia had become free ; and then enlisted against the conqueror, and kept liis word. The son has had a more quiet life than the father ; but he has given himself exclusively to philosophy. The second Fichte was the founder of the " Journal of Specula- tive Philosophy," now conducted by Ulrici and Wirth ; and he has lived through much. He knew his father's system presumably well. Has it led to pantheism or materialism with him, as it has with some others? If Emerson has made pantheism a logical outcome of Fichte' s teachings, ivhat has Fichte' s son made of them? The son of the great Fichte has been a professor at Dusseldorf and Bonn, and, since 1842, at Tiibingen. He is a specialist in German philosophy if ever there was one ; and his latest production was a history of his own philosophi- cal school. He attempted to show that the line of sound philosophy in Germany is represented by three great names, — Leibnitz and Kant and Lotze. You do not care to have from me an outline of his work ; and perhaps, therefore, you will allow me to read the summary of it given by your North-American Review, for that certainly ought to be free from partisanship. Thus Fichte loftily writes to Zeller, 38 THANSCEXDENTALISM. the biographer of Strauss, and his positions are a sign of the times : — " Ethical theism is now master of the situation. The attempt to lose sight of the personal God in nature, or to subordinate his transcendence over the universe to any power immanent in the universe, and especiall}^ the tendency to deny the theology of ethics, and to insist only upon the reign of force, are utterly absurd, and are meeting their just condemnation." [Applause.] (^North-American Review^ January, 1877, p. 147.) Concord once listened to Germany. Will it con- tinue to listen ? Cambridge cannot show at the foot of her text-book pages five English names where she can show ten German. In the footnotes of learned works you will find German authorities a dozen times where you can find English six, or American three. Let us appeal to no temporary swirl of cur- rents, but to a Gulf Stream. Of course, history is apt to be misleading, unless we take it in long ranges. Read Sir William Hamilton's celebrated summary (Note A, Ajjpendix to Reid's works), if you wish to see the whole gulf current of belief in self-evident truth since Aristotle. But here in Ger- many is a vast stretch of modern philosophical dis- cussion, beginning with Leibnitz, running on through Kant, and so coming down to Lotze ; and it is all on the line of intuitive truth, and it never has broken with Christianity, nor been drawn into either the Charybdis of materialism or the Scylla of pantheism. [Applause.] TRANSCENDENTALISM IN NEW ENGLAND. 39 The latest and acutest historian of German the- ology, Schwartz of Gotha, saj-s that Strauss desig- nates not so much a beginning as an end, and that the supreme lack in his system is twofold, — the absence of historical insight and of religious sensi- bility. Now, I will not deny that rationalism in New England, with eight generations of Puritan culture behind it, has often shown religious sensitiveness. Some transcendentalists who have broken with Christianity I reverence so far forth as they retain here in New England a degree of religious sensibility which is often utterly unknown among rationalists abroad. Heaven cause my tongue to cleave to the roof of my mouth if ever I say aught ironical, or in any way derogatory, of that consciousness of God which underlay the vigor of Theodore Parker, which is the transfiguring thing in Emerson, and which, very much further down in the list of those who are shy of Christianity, is yet the glory of their thinking, and of their reverence for art, and is especially the strength of their philanthropic endeavors ! [Ap- plause.] We have no France for a neighbor ; wars have not stormed over America as they have over Europe ; and it cannot yet be said, even of our erratics, as undoubtedly it can be of many French and German ones, that they have lost the conscious- ness of God. What is Transcendentalism ? You will not suspect me of possessing the mood of that acute teacher, who, on the deck of a Missis- sippi steamer, was asked this question, and replied, 40 TRANSCENDENTALISM. " See the holes made in the bank j^onder by the swallows. Take away the bank, and leave the aper- tures, and this is Transcendentalism." The answer to this is the certainty that we are all bank-swallows. The right wing and the centre of this social, twitter- ing human race live in these apertures, as well as the left wing ; and it would be of little avail to ridicule the self-evident truths on which our own peace de- pends. I affirm simply that Transcendentalism of the left wing has not been consistent with Transcen- dentalism itself. My general proposition is, that rationalistic Tran- scendentalism in New England is not Transcendental- ism, but, at the last analysis, Individualism. Scholars will find that on this occasion, as on many others, discussion here is purposely very ele- mentary. 1. The plan of the physical organism is not in the food by which the organism is sustained. 2. The mechanism by which the assimilation of food is effected exists before the food is received. 3. But, until the food is received, that mechanism does not come into operation. 4. The plan of the spiritual organism is not in the impressions received through sensation and associa- tion. 5. The fundamental laws of thought exist in the plan of the soul anterior to all sensation or associa- tion. 6. But they are brought into operation only by experience through sensation and association. TRANSCENDENTALISM IN NEW ENGLAND, 41 7. It is absurd to say that the plan of the body is produced by its food. 8. It is equally absurd to say that the plan, or fundamental intuitive beliefs of the soul, are pro- duced by sensation and association. 9. Therefore, as the plan of the body does not have its origin in the food of. the body, so the plan of the mind does not have its origin in the food of the mind. You receive food, and a certain plan in your physi- cal organism distributes it after it is received, assim- ilates it, and you are entirely sure that the mechan- ism involved in this process exists before the food. It may be that every part of my physical system is made up of food and drink which I have taken, or of air which I have breathed ; and yet there is one thing in me that the food did not give me, or the air ; and that is the plan of my physical organism. [Ap- plause.] Not in the gases, not in the fluids, not in the solids, was there the plan of these lenses in the eye, or of this harp of three thousand strings in the year. Besides all the materials which go to make up a watch, you must have the plan of the watch. If I were to place a book on my right here, and then take another copy of the book and tear it into shreds, and cast these down on the left, it would not be law- ful to say that I have on one side the same that I have on the other. In one case the volume is arranged in an intelligible order : in the other it is chaotic. Besides the letters, we must have the co- 42 • TRANSCENDENTALISM. ordination of the letters in the finished volume. So in man's organism it is perfectly evident that the food which we eat, and which does, indeed, build every thing in us, is not us ; for the plan of us is something existing before that food enters the sys- tem, and that plan separates the different elements, and distributes them in such a way as to bring out the peculiarities of each individual organism. Now, whether or not you admit that there is a spiritual organism behind the physical, whether or not you agree with your Beales and Lotzes and Ulricis in asserting that the scientific method re- quires that we should suppose that there is in us a spiritual organism which weaves the physical, you will at least admit, that, so far as the individual ex- perience is concerned, we have within us laws, funda- mental, organic, and, if not innate, at least connate. They came into the world with us ; they are a part of the plan on which we are made. When we touch the external world with the outer senses, and the inner world with the inner senses, no doubt food is coming to our souls ; but that plan is the law accord- ing to which all our experiences through sensation and association are distributed. 10. The school of sensationalism in philosophy maintains that the soul's laws are only an accumula- tion of inheritances. 11. To that school, self-evident truths themselves are simply those which result from an unvarying and the largest experience ; or those which have been deeply engraved on our physical organisms by the TRANSCENDENTALISM IN NEW ENGLAND. 43 uniform sensations of our whole line of ancestors back to the earliest and simplest form of life. 12. Human experience cannot embrace all space and time. 13. Sensationalism in philosophy, therefore, which holds that all the intuitive or axiomatic truths arise from experience, must deny that we can be sure that theee truths are true in all space and time. 14. But we are thus sure ; and sensationalism is wrecked on its palpable inability to explain by experience this confessed certainty. Face to face with this inadequate explanation which evolution offers for the self-evident, necessary, and universal truths of the soul, let us look at the worst. It matters to me very little how my eyes came into existence, if only they see accurately. You say con- science was once only a bit of sensitive matter in a speck of jelly. You affirm, that, by the law of the survival of the fittest, in the struggle of many jelly- specks with each other for existence, one peculiarly- vigorous jelly-speck obtained the advantage of its brethren, and so became the progenitor of many vig- orous jelly-specks. Then these vigorous jelly-specks made new war on each other ; and individuals, ac- cording to the law of heredity with variation, having now and then fortunate endowments, survived, and transmitted these, to become better and better, until the jelly-specks produce the earliest seaweed. By and by a mollusk appears under the law of the sur- vival of the fittest, and then higher and higher 44 TEANSCENDENTALISM. forms, till at last, tkrougli infinite chance and mis- chance, man is produced. Somewhere and somehow the jelly-specks get not only an intellect, not only artistic perception, but conscience and will, and this far-reaching longing for immortality, this sense that there is a Mind superior to ours on which we are dependent. Now, for a moment, admit that this the- ory of evolution, which Professor Dawson, in an arti- cle in the last number of the " International Review," on Huxley in New York, says will be regarded by the next age as one of the most mysterious of illu- sions, is true, the supreme question yet remains, — whether my conscience is authority. Take something merely physical, like the eyes. When I was a jelly-speck of the more infirm sort, or at least when I was a fish, I saw something, and what I saw I saw. When I was a lichen, although I was not a sensitive-plant, I felt something, and what I felt I felt. So when, at last, these miracu- lous lenses began to appear, as the law of the sur- vival of the fittest rough-hewed them age after age, I saw better and better ; but what I saw I saw : and to-day I feel very sure that the deliverance gf the eyes is accurate. I am not denying here any of the facts as to our gradual acquisition of the knowl- edge of distance and of dimension ; that comes from the operation of all the senses ; but we feel certain that what we see we see. Suppose, then, that, in this grand ascent from the jelly-speck to the archangel, the process of evolution shall at last make our eyes as powerful as the best TRANSCENDENTALISM IN NEW ENGLAND. 45 telescopes of the present day. It will yet plainly be true, will it not, that what we see we see ? and as the eyes are now good within their range, so, when they become telescopic, they will be good within their range. Just so, even if we hold to the evolu- tionary hypothesis in its extremest claims, we must hold, that, if conscience was good for any thing when it was rudimentary, it is good now in its liigher stage of development. If by and by it shall become tele- scopic, what it sees it will see. [Applause.] I will not give up for an instant the authorit}^ of connate^ although you deny all innate truth. You may show me that fatalism is the result of your evolutionary hypothesis ; you may prove to me that immortality cannot be maintained if your philosophy is true ; you may, indeed, assert, as Hackel does, " that there is no God but necessity," if you are an evolutionist of the thorough-going type, that is, not only a Darwinian, but an Hiickelian. But let Hackel's consistent atheistic 'evolutionism, which Germany rejects with scorn, be adopted, and it will yet remain true that there is a plan in man ; and that, while there is a plan in man, there will be a best way to live ; and that, while there is a best way to live, it will be best to live the best way. [Applause.] There is, however, no sign of the progress of the Hiickelian theory of evolution toward general accept- ance. On every side you are told that evolution is more and more the philosophy of science. But which form of the theory of evolution is meant? The Darwinian is a theory, the Hackelian is the theory, of evolution. 46 TRANSCENDENTALISM. 15. Observing our mental operations, we very easily convince ourselves that we are sure of the truth of some propositions, concerning which neither we nor the race have had experience. 16. If it be true that all these certainties that we call self-e^ident arise simply from experience, it must be shown that our certainties do not reach beyond our experience. It is very sure, is it not, that the sun might rise to-morrow morning in the west? Neither we nor our ancestors have had any experience of its rising there. Space is a necessary idea, but the rising of the sun in the east is not ; and yet our experience of the one is as invariable as that of the other. That blazing mass of suns we call Orion might have its stellar points differently arranged; and yet I never saw Orion in any shape other than that which it now possesses. I am perfectly confident that the gems on the sword-hilt of Orion might be taken away, or never have been in existence ; but I never yet saw Orion without seeing there the flashing of the jewels on the hilt of his sword. John Stuart Mill would say, and so would George Henry Lewes, — whose greatest distinction, by the way, is, that he is the husband of Marian Evans, the authoress of " Daniel Deronda," — that, although my own experience never has shown to me Orion in any other shape than that which it now possesses, per- haps my ability to give it another shape in thought may arise from some experience in the race behind me. We are told by the school of evolution, that it TRANSCENDENTALISM IN NEW ENGLAND. 47 is not our indi\'idual experience that explains our necessary ideas, but the transmitted experience of the race behind us. We have inherited nervous changes, from the whole range of the development of the species ; and so, somewhere and somehow in the past, there must have been an experience which gives you the capacity to say that the sun may rise in the west, and that Orion might have another shape. But is it not tolerably sure that none of my grand- fathers or great-grandfathers, back to the jelly-speck, ever saw the sun rise in the west ? The human race never saw Orion in any other shape. The truth is, that experience goes altogether too short a distance to account for the wide range of such a certainty, as that every effect, not only here, but everywhere, must have a cause. 17. Experience does not teach what must be, but only what is ; but we know that every change not only has, but must have, a cause. I never had any experience in the Sun, or in the Seven Stars. I never paced about the Pole with Ursa Major, across the breadth of one of whose eye- lashes my imagination cannot pass without fainting ; I know nothing of the thoughts of Saggitarius, as he bends his bow of fire yonder in the southern heavens: but this I do know, that everywhere and in all time every change must have a cause. You are certain of the universality of every necessary truth. Plow are you to account for that certainty by any known experience ? 18. We cannot explain by experience a certainty that goes beyond experience. 48 TEANSCENDENTALISM. Jolm Stuart Mill, perfectly honest and perfectly luminous, comes squarely up to this difficulty, and says in so many words, " There may be worlds in which two and two do not make four, and where a change need not have a cause." (Examination of Hamilton's Philosophy; see, also. Mill's Logic^ book iii. chap, xxi.) So clearly does he see this ob- jection, that, astounding some of his adherents, he made this ver}^ celebrated admission, wliich has done more to cripple the pliilosophy of sensationalism, probably, than any other event in its history for the last twenty-five years. Even mathematical axioms may be false. You and I, gentlemen, feel, and must feel, that this conclusion is arbitrary ; that it is not true to the constitution of man ; that we have within us something which asserts not only the present earthly certainty, that every change must have a cause, but that forever and forever, in all time to come, and backward through all time past, this law holds. 19. Everywhere, all exact science assumes the universal applicability of all true axioms in all time and in all places. Rejecting in the name of exact science, therefore, Mill's startling paradox, we must conclude that we are not loyal to the indications of our own constitu- tion, unless we say that there is in us a possibility of reaching certainty beyond experience. Now to do that is to reach a transcendental truth. 20. Transcendental truths are simply those neces- sary, self-evident, axiomatic truths which transcend TRANSCENDENTALISM IN NEW ENGLAND. 49 experieuce. Transcendentalism is the science of such self-evident, axiomatic, necessary truths. Kant gave this name to a part of his philosophy, and it is by no means a word of reproach. Of course I am treating Transcendentalism, not with an eye on New England merely, but with due outlook on this form of philosophy throughout the world, especially upon Coleridge and Wordsworth, INIansel and Mau- rice, and Sir William Hamilton, and Leibnitz and Kant and Lotze. I am not taking Transcendental- ism in that narrow meaning in which some opponents of it may have represented it to themselves. That every change, here and everywhere, not only has, but must have, a cause, is a transcendental truth : it tran- scends experience. So the certainty that here and everywhere things which are equal to the same thing are equal to each other is a transcendental certainty. Our conviction in the moral field that sin can be a quality only of voluntary action is a transcendental fact. This moral axiom we feel is sure in all time and in all space. There are moral intuitions as well as intellectual. There are aesthetic intuitions, I be- lieve ; and they will yet produce a science of the beautiful, as those of the intellect and the conscience produce sciences of the true and the good. If man have no freedom of will, he cannot commit sins in the strict sense, for demerit implies free agency ; and we feel that this is a moral certainty, and you cannot go behind it. Coleridge complained much in his time of "that compendious philosophy wliich contrives a theory 50 TEAifSCENDENTALISM. for spirit by nicknaming matter, and in a few hours can qualify its dullest disciples to explain the omne seihile by reducing all things to impressions, ideas, and sensations " (B'wgra-pli. Literaria, chap. xii.). What would he have said to the recent attempt by Tyndall to niclmame matter, and call it mind, or a substance with a spiritual and physical side ? Only the other day, Lewes endeavored to nickname sensation, and call it both the internal law of the soul and the ex- ternal sense. Will you please listen to an amazing definition out of the latest, and perhaps the subtlest attempt to justify sensationalism in philosophy? " The sensational h}^othesis is acceptable, if by sense we understand sendhility and its laws of opera- tion. This obliterates the very distinction insisted on by the other school. It includes all psychical phenomena under the rubric of sensibility. It en- ables pyschological analysis to be consistent and ex- haustive." (Lewes's Problems of Life and Mind, 1874, vol. i. p. 208.) This passage affirms, that, if you will say food is the body, food will explain the body. If you will take the metal which goes to make the watch as not only the metal, but the plan of the watch too, then your matter and your plan put together will be the watch. He wants sensation to mean sensibility and its laws ; that is to say, he would have the very fundamental principles of our soul included in this term, which, thus interpreted, I should say, with Coleridge, is a nickname. Such a definition concedes much by im- plication ; but Lewes concedes in so many words, tJiat, TRANSCENDENTALISM IN NEW ENGLAND. 51 " if by sense is meant simply the five senses, the reduction of all knowledge to a sensuous origin is absurd." Such is the latest voice, my friends, from the oppo- nents of the Intuitional school in philosophy ; and it is substantially a confession, that, unless a new defini- tion be given to sensation, the sensational philosophy must be given up. Stuart Mill afiirmed that two and two might make seven in Orion, and that a change possibly might not have a cause in the North Star. He was forced to no greater straits than the husband of George Eliot is, when he says that the only escape from the necessity of adopting the intuitional philoso- phy is to assume its definitions as those of the sensa- tional school itself. Bloody, unjust exploits, are often performed by lawless men on the battle-field of philosophy ; but, after all, the ages like to see fair play. We must observe the rules of the game. When Greek wrestlers stood up together, the audience and the judges saw to it that the rules of the game were observed. These were defined rigidly. All religious science asks of scepticism, in this age or any other, is, that it will observe the laws of the scientific method. We must adhere to the rules of the game ; and when established definitions are nicknamed, as they now are by materialism, suicide is confession. [Applause.] m. THEODOEE PARKER'S ABSOLUTE RELIGION. THE SIXTY-FIRST LECTURE IN THE BOSTON MONDAY LEC- TURESHIP, DELIVERED IN TREMONT TEMPLE JAN. 15. " Si I'experience interne imme'diate pouvait nous tromper, il ne saurait y avoir poirr moi aucune ve'rite de fait, j'ajoute ni de raison." — Leibnitz. " Corpus enim per se communis deliquat esse, Sensus; quo nisi prima fides fundata valebit. Hand erit, occultis de rebus quo referentes, Confirmare animi, quicquam ratione queamus." LUCKETIUS. m. THEODORE PARKER'S ABSOLUTE RELI- GION. PRELUDE ON CURRENT EVENTS. It was once my fortune in the city of Edinburgh to visit the famous room in which Burke and Hare committed fourteen murders by dropping men through a trap-door, and afterwards strangling them, that they might obtain human skins to sell to physicians for medical purposes. Across the street from this classical cellar of horrors, there used to be an old tan-loft, in the midst of a population one quarter of which was on the poor-roll, and another quarter measly with the unreportable vices. When Thomas Chalmers was a professor in the University of Edin- burgh, he deliberately selected this verminous and murderous quarter as the spot in which to begin a crucial trial of a plan of his for the solution of the problem as to the management of the poor in great cities. It was his audacious belief, that there is no population so degraded in any of our large towns, that it will not maintain Christian institutions if once these are fairly set on foot. Southward from 55 56 TRANSCENDENTALISM. the gray cliff on which Edinburgh's renowned his- toric castle stands, he took the district called the West Port, with a population of about two thousand, and divided it into twenty sub-districts, and ap- pointed over each one a visitor, sometimes a lady, and sometimes a gentleman. It was the business of these angels of mercy to go once each week into every family, without exception, and to leave there, not often money, not always food, but an invitation to the cliildren to attend the industrial and religious schools, and to parents to become members of the church of which Chalmers had the supreme courage to begin the formation in the old tan-loft, face to face with that room in which fourteen murders had been committed. This visitation was made thorough. Every person aided was taught to pay something, however little, for the support of the school and church opened for his benefit. A feeling of self- respect was thus systematically cultivated. This was an essential portion of the Chalmerian plan. The enterprise of founding a self-supporting church among the poor and vile in the West Port of Edin- burg was in five years so successful, that, out of a hundred and thirty-two communicants, more than a hundred in the church were from the population of the West Port. Not a child of suitable asre lived in the district and was not in school. A savings bank had been instituted, a washing-house had been opened, an industrial school had been maintained day and night in the secular portions of the week. Better than all, the entire expense of all these insti- THEODORE PARKER's ABSOLUTE RELIGION. 57 tutions, amounting to thirty thousand dollars a year, was paid by the AVest Port ; and that improved section of paupers had money enough every year to contribute seventy pounds for benevolent purposes outside the borders of their own territory. [Ap- plause.] It was thought this enterprise would fail on Chal- mers's death ; but, so far from doing so, his famous territorial church is to-day in a flourishing condition, and has been extensively copied in Scotland. His plan of territorial visitation and self-supporting reli- gious enterprises has become one of the best hopes of the poor in Scotland's great cities. I worshipped once in the West Port church, and found there the names of fifty or sixty church-officers of various kinds posted up on the doors, and arranged in couples, with their specific districts for visitation definitely named on the bulletin. A hushed, crowded audience of the cleanly and respectable poor listened to a vigorous address, and made touching contributions for reli- gious purposes. Mr. Tasker, the pastor whom Chal- mers had chosen, said to me at his tea-table, " There is nae rat in yon kirk. I told the people at the first I would na minister to a congregation of paupers. Every steady attendant pays more or less, and so keeps up self-respect. He helps the poor most who helps them to help themselves. Yon kirk is self-sup- porting." Chalmers did not live to see these larger results ; but he saw enough to cause him to anticipate them ; and he perfectly understood the vast political impor- 58 TRANSCENDENTALISM. tance of the complex problem lie had attacked. He foresaw that more and more the population of the world must mass itself in cities. His experiment he did not consider complete without aid from the civil arm, which ought to second the efforts of philanthro- py by executing all righteous public law. Most eloquently Chalmers wrote in his advancing years : " I would again implore the aid of the author- ities for the removal of all these moral, and the aid of the Sanitary Board for the removal of all those physi- cal, nuisances and discomforts which are found to exist within a territory so full of misery and vice at pres- ent, yet so full of promise for the future. Could 1 gain this help from our men in power, and this co-opera- tion from the Board of Health, then with the virtue which lies in education, and, above all, the hallowing influence of the gospel of Jesus Christ, I should look, though in humble dependence on the indispensable grace from on high, for such a result as, at least in its first be- ginnitigs, I could interpret itito the streaks and daivnings of a better dag ; when, after the struggles and discomforts of thirty years, I might depart in peace, and leave the further prosecutioii of our enterprise with comfort and calmness in the hands of another generations'^ (See Me- moirs of Chalmers, by Reverend Williaim Hanna, London, 1859, chapter entitled " The West Port," p. 413.) Chalmers's celebrated scheme for throttling the troubles of the poor and vicious in great towns em- braced these three provisions : — Territorial visitation, or systematic going about from house to house doing good. THEODORE PARKER'S ABSOLUTE RETJGION. 59 Self-supporting benevolent and religious institu- tions among the needy and degraded. The execution of righteous law against the tempt- ers and fleecers of the poor. [Applause.] Gentlemen, some of us here are young yet ; and we have heard the departing footsteps of the great problem of slavery in our own land. We who have in expectation our brief careers are listening to the first heavy footfalls of a far more menacing* problem, that concerning greed and fraud in politics, when the gigantic and crescent party-spoils of a land greater than Caesar ever ruled are made the reward of merely party success. But behind that black angel, with his far-spreading Gehenna wings shadowing both our ocean shores, some of us who are looking forward, and are rash, as you think, can but notice the stealthy ad- vance of another fell spirit with whom we must con- tend; and his name is, The Metropolitan. He is the genius that presides over the neglect of the poor in great towns. He is the archfiend, who, as the growth of all means of intercommunication, causes the world to mass its population more and more in cities, breathes upon many fashionable churches the sirocco of luxury, and leaves them swinging in hammocks, attached, on the one side, to the Cross, and on the other to the forefinger of Mammon, and not easy even then, unless they are eloquently fanned [applause], and sprinkled, as the Eastern host sprinkles his guest, with lavender ease. [Applause.] Meanwhile, the fiend Metropolitan Evil advances with a footfall that already sometimes rocks the continent, and yet it appears 60 TRANSCENDENTAIJSM. to be unheard. Now and then the cloven, ominous hoof breaks through the thin crust, and there starts up a blue flame, as at Paris in communism ; but the light is unheeded. Twenty centuries will yet be obliged to look at it. One-fifth of the population of the United States is now in cities, and we had but one twenty-fifth in cities at the opening of the century. The disproportionate growth of great towns is a phenomenon of all civilized lands, and not simply of the United States. London increases faster than England, Berlin than Germany, as well as New-York City than New- York State, and Chicago than Illi- nois. This last week in Boston, the American Social Science Association discussed work schools in cities, — a topic not likely to look empty to honest eyes. Much after Thomas Chalmers's plan, there was found- ed at the North End, yesterday, a biblical and evan- gelical, but wholly undenominational, church for the poor. It is a good sign. [Applause.] Boston is now a crescent, stretching around the tip of the tongue of Massachusetts Bay, from Chelsea Beach to the Milton Hills. When you and I are here no longer, this growing young moon will embrace Mount Auburn, and line with its increasing light both shores of our azure sea for miles toward the sunrise. It is, however, unsafe to act upon the supposition, which some seem to harbor, that all the old peninsula here will be needed as a stately commercial exchange, and that the very poor can be crowded out of it, into homes beyond a ferr}'^, or reached only by railway. THEODORE PARKEE's ABSOLUTE RELIGION. 61 The poorest of the poor must live very near their •work. We want model lodging-houses for them, like the London Waterlow buildings, which pay six per cent on their cost. For a more fortunate class we must have cheap houses outside municipal limits. But, more than all, we want self-supporting churches among the destitute and degraded. Boston is more favorably situated than any other American city to show how democracy and Chris- tianity can govern a great town well. First at the throat of Slavery, will Boston be the first American city to throttle Metropolitan Evil ? Chalmers used to affirm, that cities can be managed morally as well as the country-side, if their religious privileges are made as great in proportion to their population. But, gentlemen, wliile we embrace every opportu- nity to call out the efforts of the church in personal visitation of the poor, and in the founding of self- supporting religious institutions, let us not forget the responsibility of the civil arm for the shutting up of the dens of temptation. [Applause.] If you will visit your more desolate quarters in this city, — and the most infamously vicious are not at the North End, — you will find reason to go home with something more substantial as your programme of future efforts than weak regrets, expressed at your fireside over aesthetic tea and your newspaper, about the lack of the execution of good laws here. [Applause.] Sev- enty-five millions of dollars in this city are engaged in the liquor-traffic ; and, if I could shut up the multi- 62 TRANSCENDENTALISM. tiidiiious doors to temptation, I might shut up the alms-houses. This is so trite a truth, that you blame me for presenting it ; but your Governor Andrew used to say, that this truth is trite only because it is so superabundantly true and important as to have been repeated over and over. You loathe the unjust judges of history; you place in pillories of infamy men whose duty it has been to execute law, and have not done it. Are you safe from such pillories ? When we, as American freemen, give in our account before that bar where there is no shuffling, we shall do so as a population to whom the sword of justice was given largely in vain. We the people, and especially that professional class represented here, are intrusted with power, most of which is not a terror to evil-doers, nor a praise to them who do well. Under the murky threats of the years ahead of us, it is the duty of the parlor, the pulpit, the press, politics, and the police — the five great powers of these modern ages — to join arms and go forward in one phalanx for the execution of all those just public enactments which shut places of tempta- tion, and leave a man a good chance to be born right the second time by being born right the first time. [Applause.] THE LECTURE. Professor Tholuck, in his garden at Halle-on-the- Saale, once said to me, " The Tiibingen school, as you know, is no longer in existence at Tiibingen it- self : as a sect in biblical criticism, it has perished : THEODORE PARKER's ABSOLUTE RELIGION. 63 its history has heen written in more than one lan- gnage. Only a few years ago, however, we had six broad-backed Englishmen take their seats on the university benches at Tiibingen, and ask to be taught Bauer's theology. But Professors Beck and Landerer and Palmer, who oppose that scheme of thought, now outgrown among oui' best scholars, told tlie sturdy sons of Britain, that they must seek elsewhere for instruction of that sort ; whereupon they turned their faces homeward, sadder, but wiser." Theodore Parker was a scholar of the Tubingen school. His characteristic positions concerning the Bible are those which have seen battle and defeat of late in Germany. They are perfectly familiar to all who have studied that great range of criticism called the Tiibinrjen exegetical biblical criticism. This had great influence about the time Parker was forming his opinions; and he began his public career by launching himself upon what time has proved to be only a re-actionary eddy, and not the gulf-current, of scholarsliip. (See article on the " Decline of Ra- tionalism in the German Universities," Bih. Sacra., October, 1875.) His first work was a translation of De Wette. In his formative years of study the now outgrown Tubingen critics were his chief reading. In philosophy, as distinguished from biblical re- search, we all see that Theodore Parker has founded no new school. His distinctive positions have no large following, even among our erratics. Mr. Frotli- ingham of New- York City, who is one of his biogra- phers, and perhaps more nearly than any other man 64 TEANSCENDENTALISM. his successor, said in 1864, in the North American Review, that he anticipates for Theodore Parker as a metaphysician no immortality. Let me quiet your apprehensions, gentlemen, by aihrming at the outset my reverence for Theodore Parker's antislavery principles. [Applause.] Theo- dore Parker's memory stands in the past as a statue. The rains, and biting sleet, and winds beat upon it. A part of the statue is of clay : a part is of bronze. The clay is his theological speculation : the bronze is his antislavery action. The clay will be washed away ; already it crumbles. The bronze will endure ; and, if men are of my mind, it will form a figure to be venerated. [Applause.] What are the most essential positions of Theodore Parker's absolute religion '? 1. That man has an instinctive intuition of the fact of the Divine existence. 2. That he has an instinctive intuition of the exist- ence and authority of the moral law. 3. That he has an instinctive intuition of his own immortality. 4. That an infinitely-perfect God is omnipresent or immanent in the world of matter and in that of spirit. 5. That this idea of the Divine Perfection and Im- manence is unknown to both the Old Testament and the New, and to every popular theology. 6. That the accounts of miracles in the Bible are all untrustworthy. 7. That, when we are free from the love of sin, we are also free from the guilt of it. THEODORE PARKER's ABSOLUTE RELIGION. 65 8. That sin is the tripping of a •child who is learn- ing to walk, or a necessary, and, for the most part, inculpable stage in human progress. A very ugly and dangerous set of propositions are these last four ; a rather inspiring set are the first four: but all eight were Theodore Parker's. (See Weiss's Life of Parker, vol. ii. pp. 455, 470, 472.) Some of his hearers fed themselves on the former, some on the latter ; and hence the opposite effects he seemed to produce in different cases. It was on the first four that he not doubtfully supposed himself to have been successful in founding what he called an absolute, or natural rehgion. No other document written by Theodore Parker is so important, as an exposition of his views, as that touching, but in places almost coarsely irreverent, letter sent from the West Indies to the Tv/enty eighth Congregational Society, after he had fled away from America to die. Nothing else in that letter, which he called " Parker's Apology for Him- self," is as important as this central passage : — " I found certain great primal intuitions of hiiman nature, ■which depend on no logical process of demonstration, but ai'e rather facts of consciousness given by the instinctive action of human nature itself. I will mention only the three most im- portant which pertain to religion : — " 1. The instinctive intuition of the divine, — the conscious- ness that there is a God. "2. The instinctive intuition of the just and right, — a con- sciousness that there is a moral law mdependent of our will, which wo ought to keep. " 3. The instinctive intiiition of the immortal, — a conscious- QQ TRANSCENDENTALISM. ness that the essential,element of man, the principle of individ- uality, never dies. " Here, then, was the foundation of religion, laid in human nature itself, which neither the atheist nor the more pernicious bigot, with their sophisms of denial or affirmation, could move, or even shake. I had gone tlirough the great spiritual trial of my life, telling no one of its hopes or fears; and I thought it a trimnph that I had psychologically established these three things to my own satisfaction, and devised a scheme, which, to the scholar's mind, I thought could legitimate what was sponta- neously given to aU by the great primal instincts of mankind. . . . From the primitive facts of consciousness given by the power of instinctive intuition, I endeavored to deduce the true notion of God, of justice, and futurity. Here I could draw from human nature, and not be hindered by the limitations of human history; but I know now, better than it was possible then, how difficult is this work, and how often the inquirer mis- takes his own subjective imagination for a fact of the universe. It is for others to decide tvhether I have sometimes mistaken a little grain of brilliant dust in my telescope for a fixed star in heaven. [Applause.] (Weiss: Life of Parker, vol. ii. p. 455.) Julius Miiller, professor in the University of Halle, is commonly regarded now as the greatest theologian in the world. His chief book is a discussion of sin. From first to last, his scheme of natural religion is built with scientific exactness on self-evident, axiom- atic, intuitive truth. The very rock on which Parker planted his foot is a corner-stone of the acutest evangelical theology of the globe to-day. Read Julius Miiller's discussions (^Doctrine of Sin, trans, in T. & T. Clark's Library, Edinburgh), and you will find liim more reverent than Theodore Parker toward intuitive, axiomatic, self-evident propositions of aU THEODORE PAEKER's ABSOLUTE RELIGION. 67 kinds. He, however, has cleared the whole surface of the rock of wliich Parker, in his haste, saw but a part. Instead of building on that broader founda- tion a slight structure, he has begun the erection of a palace. He has been obliged to stretch its founda- tions out to correspond in every part with the once unsuspected extent of this whole support of natural adamant. Parker strangely overlooked the fact that we have an intuitive knowledge of sin as a fact in our personal experience. That knowledge must shape our philosophy. Building upon it, Julius Miil- ler did not ask whether the rising walls he con- structed would or would not meet, point for point, the walls of the celestial city, which, Revelation teaches, lay in the air above liim. He did not look upward at all, but downward only, upon this revela- tion in the constitutional intuitions and instincts. He explored conscience. He brought to the light the surface of the whole rock of intuitive moral truth, and not merely that of a part of it. He built around its edges after the plan shown in the adamant itself. It turns out, that to-day Germany calls that man her chief theologian, because it has found that these walls, rising from the adamant of axiomatic truth, wholly without regard to the foundations of the floating celestial city above, are conterminous and correspondent with those upper walls in every part, and that the two palaces are one. [Applause.] It is a solemn provision of the courts of law, that a man under oath must tell the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. In the use of intuitions and 68 TRANSCENDENTALISM. instincts, experiment and syllogism, the thing I am chiefly anxious about, is, that we clear the whole platform before we begin to build. We must take the testimony of all the intuitions ; we must be will- ing to look into the deliverance of all the instincts ; we must neglect no part of man's experiments, con- tinued, age after age, in his philanthropic and reli- gious life ; we must revere the syllogism everywhere. James Freeman Clarke has repeatedly pointed out, that an inadequate use of our intuitive knowledge of the fact of sin in personal experience is a most searching and perhaps fatal flaw in Parker's scheme of thought. Give our intuitive knowledge of the fact of sin its proper place, and, if you are true to the scientific method, the fact that you are sick will make you ask for a physician. I am not asserting the sufficiency, but only the efficiency, of a wholly scientific, natural religion. Every day it becomes clearer to philosophical scholarship, that the whole deliverance of the Works is synonymous, in every vocal and in every whispered syllable, with the whole deliverance of the Word. Certain it is, that the whole list of moral intuitions, of which Theodore Parker made use of but a part, is the basis of the acutest evangelical natural theology to-day. When I compare the structure that Theodore Parker erected here in Boston on a fragment of this adamant of axiomatic truth, it seems to me a careless cabin, as contrasted with Julius Miiller's palatial work. What your New-York palace, appointed in every part well, is to that wretched squatter's tenement, THEODORE PARKER's ABSOLUTE RELIGION. 69 standing, it may be, face to face with it in the upper part of ]\Ianhattan Island yonder, such is the com- plete intuitional religious philosophy, compared with Theodore Parker's absolute religion. [Applause.] What are the more important errors in Theodore Parker's system of thought ? 1. It is possible to imagine that, the soul is not immortal. Every materialist here will of course grant me this proposition. I am willing to admit that I think it entirely possible to imagine the non-existence of the soul as a personality after death. The idea of the soul's immortality is, therefore, not a necessary idea. Of course spiritual substance, like material substance, we suppose to be indestructible ; but, as a personal- ity, the soul may at least be imagined to cease to exist. I cannot, however, so much as imagine that space should not exist, or that time should not, or that every change should not have a cause. There is a perfect incapacity in my mind to conceive of the annihilation of space or time : therefore it is per- fectly clear that the idea of the soul's immortality is not a necessary idea in the same sense in which my ideas of space and time are necessary ideas. Nor is this idea of immortality a universal idea, as that of space or time is. Some sane men appear to be without any confidence in immortality as a fact ; but there never was a sound mind that did not act upon the practical supposition that every change must have a cause, and that a thing cannot be and not be at the same time in the same sense. Your 70 TRANSCENDENTALISM. urcliin on Boston Common who holds a ball in his hand behind him, and who hears the assertion from some other urchin, that the ball is in another place, knows better. lie has the ball in his hand; and he is perfectly confident that the same thing cannot be and not be at the same time and in the same sense. You state that proposition to him, and he will stare at you with wide eyes. He knows nothing of the metaphysical statement: nevertheless, that propo- sition is in his possession implicitly, though not explicitly. He acts upon it with perfect intelligence. He knows that the ball is in his hand, and that therefore that ball is not anywhere else. This is a self-evident, axiomatic, necessary belief, or an intui- tion in the scientific sense of the word. Not in that sense, can we call the fact of immortality an intuitive truth. We have an instinctive anticipation of existence after death. We can prove that. There is no real intuition of existence after death. The proposition that the soul is immortal is there- fore not marked by the three traits of intuitive truth, — self-evidence, necessity, and universality. Only a slovenly scholarship could assert that this proposition is marked by these traits. Theodore Parker asserted, however, that the fact of immortality is an intuitive truth. This unsupported assertion was a corner-stone of his absolute religion. You will, therefore, allow me to say, that, — 2. Theodore Parker did not carefully distinguish from each other intuition and instinct. THEODOIIE PAEKER's ABSOLUTE RELIGION. 71 To blunder on that point is so common, that I shall be unable to convince you of the importance of error there, unless you take pains in your libraries to apply these tests of self-e%ddence, necessity, and imiversality to a certain class of truths, and see how the tests distinfTuish that class from every other set of proposi- tions that you can imagine. Only those truths which show the traits of self-evidence, necessity, and univer- sality, are intuitive. Loose popular speech may use the word intuition carelessly; but when a great reader like Theodore Parker confounds instinct and intuition^ and speaks now about our having an intui- tion, and now of our possessing an instinctive intui- tion of the immortality of the soul, we must say that he is careless ; for it is two thousand years now that self-evidence, necessity, and universality have been used as the tests of intuitive truth. Between an in- stinct and an intuition there is as palpable a distinction as between the right hand and the left ; and to con- fuse the two, as Theodore Parker's deliberate speech does, is unscholarly to the degree of being slovenly. I put once before the chief authority of Harvard Uni- versity in metaphysics the question, whether meta- physical scholars have commonly classed immortality among the intuitive truths.^ He smiled, and said, " Who taught you that they have ? " — " Why, I have read," said I, " that there was once in Boston a reli- gion built up on the idea that immortality is an intu- ition." And the smile became even broader, although the man was very liberal in his theology. " Theodore Parker," said he, " was not a consecutive, philosoph- 72 TRANSCENDENTALISM. ical thinker. No metaphysician of repute has ever classed immortality among the intuitive truths, al- though it has again and again been classed as a deliv- erance of our instincts." 3. It is not safe to assert, as Parker does, that the Divine Existence is a strictly intuitive truth. Pace amantis ! Peace to all lovers of the doctrine that belief in the Divine Existence is intuitive ! I wish to treat reverently that school of philosophy which asserts that we have an intuition, strictly so- called, of the fact that God exists. To me the Di- vine Existence is evident ; but it is not, strictly speaking, self-evident. It is evident by only one step of reasoning, and is the highest of derivative, but is not really a primitive, first truth, or axiomatic fact. It is as sure as any axiom ; but it is not an axiom that God is. I can, I tliink, imagine that God might not exist. I cannot imagine that space does not, or that time does not. I know that Sir Isaac Newton said that space and time are attri- butes, and that every attribute must inhere in some substance, and that if space and time are necessary existences, and are really objective to the mind, and not merely a green color thrown upon the universe by the mental spectacles which we now wear, then God must be, for space and time must be. Pace amantis^ once more I I know how many scholars agree in the opinion that time and space are merely necessary ideas, and not objectively real. They are in the color of the glasses through which we look. The truth is, that recent philosophy more and more THEODORE PARKER's ABSOLUTE RELIGION. 73 approaches the conclusion of Sir Isaac Newton, that space and time are objectively real. Dr. INIcCosh of Princeton, George Henry Lewes, materialistic though he is, and a score of other recent representatives of rival philosophical schools, regard space and time as mysterious somewhats, which very possibly have a real existence outside our spectacles. They are not simply necessary ideas, fixed colors in our spectacles, but something outside of us. Now it is true, that, if space and time be objec- tively real, they imply the existence of something that is just as necessary in its existence, and just as eternal, as they. If they are qualities of any thing, instead of mere colors in the lenses through which we look, there must be a substance that is necessary in its existence, eternal, and absolutely independent ; and that can be only an infinitely perfect being. You cannot imagine the non-existence of space or time ; you cannot think that they ever were not, or that they ever will cease to be ; and so, if they are attributes, they are the attributes of a Being that was, and is, and is to come. Many are now turning to that philosophy which the later and the older investigation supports, — namely, that space and time are objectively real, and that this fact contains incontrovertible proof of the Divine Self-Existence. But you derive that argu- ment from the existence of space and time ; you do not look directly upon the Divine Existence even then. There is a single step of reasoning ; and so the truth, although evident, is not self-evident. 74 TRANSCENDENTALISM. I know how many are puzzled to prove the Divine Self-Existence. Paley's argument from the watch, we are told by some who misunderstand it, proves too much. A design proves a designer? Yes. But must not God himself, then, have had a designer, and his designer a designer, and his designer a designer, and so on forever? This inquiry is familiar to reli- gious science under the name of the question as to the Infinite Series. The reply to all that tantalizing ob- jection is, that intuitive truth demonstrates the exist- ence of dependent being, and that there cannot be a dependent without an independent being. There cannot' be a here without there being a tliere^ can there ? There cannot be a before without there being an after^ can there ? There cannot be an upper with- out there being an under^ can there ? If, therefore, I can prove there is a here, I can prove there is a there ; if I can prove there is a before, I can prove there is an after; if I can prove there is an upper, I can prove there is an under. Just so, by logical necessity, there cannot be a dependent being without an independent ; and I am a dependent being, and therefore there is an Independent or Self-Existent Being. [Applause.] • Thus I must be cautious or modest enough not to assert that we have a direct intuition of the Divine Existence. This truth is instinctive, not intuitive. It seems to lie capsulate in all our highest instincts. Our sense of dependence and obligation, great facts, if barely scratched with the point of a scalpel of analysis, reveal Almighty God, and make the soul's THEODORE PARKER's ABSOLUTE RELIGION. 75 cheeks pale. I cannot affirm, however, that the Divine Existence is self-evident, although it is evi- dent as the noon. Theodore Parker's assertion that the Divine Exist- ence is known to us by intuition implies that this truth has the three traits of self-evidence, necessity, and universality. Only a slovenly scholarship can assert that the truth possesses these traits. On a score of other points, it might be shown that Parker was misled, by not making a sharp distinction between instinct and intuition. 4. He did not carefully distmguish inspiration from illumination. Once more : peace to the lovers of the doctrine that modern men of genius are inspired more or less — especially less I There is a book composed of sixtj^-six pamphlets, written in different ages, some of them barbarous ; and I affirm that there are in the volume no adulter- ate moral elements. It is a winnoAved book. Its winnowedness is a fact made tangible by ages of the world's experience. Of course I need not say to this distinguished audience, what Galileo said to his persecutors, that the Bible is given to teach how to go to heaven, and not how the heavens go. Do not suppose that inspiration guarantees infallibility in merely botanical truth. A small philosopher said to me once, " The Bible affirms that the mustard-seed L<3 the smallest of all seeds. Now, there are seeds BO small, that they cannot be seen with the naked 76 TEANSCENDENTALISM. eye. Where, therefore, is your doctrine of inspira- tion?" I thought that man's mind was the smallest of all mustard-seeds. Inspiration is rightly defined in religious science as the gift of infallibility in teaching moral and religious truth. The Scriptures are given by inspiration in this sense, and therefore are profitable for what ? For botany ? That is not the record. They are profitable for reproof, correc- tion, and instruction in righteousness. They are a rule of religious, and not of botanical, faith and practice. My mutsard-seed philosopher, like many another objector to the doctrine of the inspiration of the Scripture, appeared to be in ignorance of the definition of inspiration. Perfect moral and religious winnow edness exists in the Bible, and in no other book in the world. Is there any other book the ages could absorb into their veins as they have the Bible, and feel nothing but health as the result? Mr. Emerson told a convention of rationalists once, in this city, that the morality of the New Testament is scientific and perfect. But the morality of the New Testament is that of the Old. Yes, you say; but what of the imprecatory Psalms ? A renowned professor, who, as Germany thinks, has done more for New-England theology than any man since Jonathan Edwards, was once walking in this city with a clergy- man of a radical faith, who objected to the doctrine that the Bible is inspired, and did so on the grovmd of the imprecatory Psalms. The replies of the usual kind were made ; and it was presumed that David THEODORE PARKER'S ABSOLUTE RELIGION. 77 expressed the Divine purpose in praying that his enemies might be destroyed, and that he gave utter- ance only to the natural righteous indignation of conscience against unspeakable iniquity. But the doubter would not be satisfied. The two came at last to a newspaper bulletin, on which the words were written, — the time was at the opening of our civil war, — "Baltimore to be shelled at twelve o'clock." " I am glad of it," said the radical preach- er; "I am glad of it." — "And so am I," said his companion ; " but I hardly dare say so, for fear j^ou will say I am uttering an imprecatory psalm." [Ap- plause.] One proof of the inspiration of the Bible is its perfect moral winnowedness; and there are a thou- sand other proofs. Inspiration must at least guaran- tee winnowedness ; and I find no modern inspiration that guarantees even as little as that. I am not giving the proof of inspiration, but only illustrating the distinction between inspiration and illuynination. Why, our literati will probably bow down before Shakspeare as an inspired man, if that phrase is to be taken in the loose, misleading sense in Avhich Parker used it. How often otherwise brilliant litera- ture tells us that inspiration is of the same kind in all writers, sacred and profane, differing only in degree ! Very well : if any modern man has been inspired, perhaps Shakspeare was. But is there moral winnowedness in his writings? Shakspeare's father was a high bailiff of Stratford-on-Avon. John Shakspeare, alderman, high bailiff, and justice of the 78 TEANSCENDENTALISM. peace, the worshipful, — these were Shakspeare's father's titles ; and it was his business to execute the laws. But in 1552 he was fined for the unsavory offence of allowing a heap of refuse to accumulate in front of his own door. The next year he repeated this violation of law (White's Sliakspeare, vol. i. p. 15). The son afterwards exhibited by fits much of the father's mind. [Applause.] I never read certain passages in Shakspeare without thinking of that experience of the high bailiff on Henley Street, in Stratford. Nevertheless, although Shakspeare's mir- ror is so wide that it takes into its lower ranges the gutter and the feather-heads, it takes in, also, in its upper ranges, eternity itself. [Applause.] This great soul held the mirror up, not merely to time, but, in some sense, to the Unseen Holy. I reverence him fathomlessly, but not as a winnowed writer. " He never blotted a line," said Ben Jonson. "Would he had blotted a thousand ! " There is no winnowed writer outside of the Bible. You cannot put together out of the world a dozen, or six, to say nothing of sixty-six pamphlets, that shall contain, as the sixty-six in the Bible do, an harmonious system of religious truth, and no morally adulterate element. Where are there six volumes that could be stitched together, even from among those that Christianity has inspired, of which we can say they possess this lowest, and by no means ex- liaustive trait of true inspiration, — perfect moral and religious winnowedness? The difference between illumination and inspiration is as vast as that between THEODORE PABKER's ABSOLUTE RELIGION. 79 the east and west. Long enough we have heard, here in Boston, that all men are inspired more or less ; and long enough have we learned that the con- fusion of inspiration and illumination with each other may work endless mischief, even when a man as honest as Theodore Parker endeavors to build up, after confusing them, a system of faith. It is not unimportant to notice that our faith in inspiration, rightly defined, would not be touched at all, even if we were to prove a geological error in every verse of the first chapter of Genesis. I do not believe there is any geological error there. With Dana, with Guyot, with Pierce, with Dawson, we can hold that the record of the progress of events in the creation of the world is correct. If this is correct, it must have been inspired ; for, unless it was taught to him from above, no man could have known the^ complex order accurately of events that occurred before man was. Dana says, in his last chapter of his Geology, " This docuynent in the first chapter of Genesis^ if true, is of divine origin. It is profoundly philosophical in the scheme of creation it presents. It is both true and divine. It is a declaration of authorship, both of creation and the Bible" {Geology, pp. 767, 770). Read Thomas Hill's subtly powerful articles just issued in a book on "The Natural Sources of Theology," and you will find this ex-president of Harvard University, together with Professor Pierce, holding similar views. The biblical record states that light was created before the sun, — a most searching proof of inspii-a- 80 TRANSCENDENTALISM. tion ; for we know now that the first shiver of the molecular atoms must have produced light ; and the sun, according to the nebular hypothesis, must liave come into existence long afterwards. But what if merely geological or botanical error, touching no religious truth, were found in the Bible, we should yet hold, that, in the first leaves of the Scriptures, we have most unspeakably important religious truth. They teach the spiritual origin of creation ; they teach that man had a personal Creator ; they show, that in the beginning, God, an individual Will, brought into existence the heavens and the earth. I do not admit that scientific error has been proved against the Bible anywhere ; but if an error in merely physical science, touching no religious truth, were proved, inspiration would yet stand unharmed. Parker's trouble with the Bible arose largely from his carelessness in definitions. Confusing intuition and instinct, and inspiration and illumination, he made almost as great mistakes as when he confused the supernatural with the unnatural. Call up, gentlemen, that day when Theodore Par- ker left New York, and put in his Bible an Italian violet opposite the words, " I will be with thee in the great waters." I stood alone at Florence, at the side of the grave of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and looked on the grave of Theodore Parker. The sturdy Apennines gazed on the soft flow of the Arno ; melodious murmurs whispered through the fatness of the olive-branches ; there fell in deluges out of the unspeakable azure in the Italian sky the light of the THEODORE PARKER'S ABSOLUTE RELIGION. 81 sun and of the sun behind the sun. I remembered the culture of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and her faith. I could not forsfet how wide was her outlook upon the inner world as well as upon the outer, how subtle beyond comment her instincts and intu- itions; and in my solitude I asked myself, which faith — hers, or his — was likely to be of most service to the world in the swirling tides of history, and which the best support to individual souls in the great waters on which we pass hence. I remembered tenderly the good there was in this man and in this woman ; but I asked which had the better faith for service in great waters. Both loved the poor ; there was in each one of these souls at birth a spark out of the empyrean ; and, under that Italian azure, I asked which faith had been the most efficient in fanning that spark to flame. It seemed to me, at the side of those graves in Italy, that Elizabeth Bar- rett Browning, had she stood there alive, would have had eyes before which those of Theodore Parker would have fallen, to rise again only when possessed of her deeper vision. Strike out of existence that teaching which has come to us through the God in Christ, whom Elizabeth Barrett Browning wor- shipped, but whom Theodore Parker held to be a myth, or merely a man ; strike out of existence that healing which is offered to the race in an ineffable Atonement, which in the solitudes of conscience may be scientifically known to be the desire of all nations ; strike out of existence these truths, — and then, if the moral law which Parker glorified none too much 82 TRANSCENDE1S]"TALTSM. continues its demands, you will have stricken out the solution of life's greatest enigma. Great is the law, said Theodore Parker. Yes,' I know it is great, said Elizabeth Barrett Browning ; I know that the law is spiritual ; it is glorious ; all you say of it, I affirm with deeper emphasis : but I am carnal ; I am not at peace before that law : who shall deliver me ? Faith- fulness to all the intuitions would have brought that man, as it brought this woman, to this supreme ques- tion, the resounding shore of our mightiest inner sea ; and it would have given assured safety there in the last day for your reformer who disbelieved, as for your poetess who believed; and the safety would have been in this only possible answer : " I will be with thee in the great waters." [Applause.] IV. CARICATURED DEFINITIONS IN RELIGIOUS SCIENCE. THE SIXTY-SECOND LECTURE IN THE BOSTON MONDAY LEC- TURESHIP, DELIVERED IN TREMONT TEMPLE JAN. 22. "In natural philosophy there was no less sophistry, no less dispute and uncertainty, than in other sciences, until, about a century and a half ago, this science began to be built upon the foundation of clear definitions and self-evident axioms. Since that time, the science, as if watered with the dew of heaven, hath grown apace: disputes have ceased, truth hath prevailed, and the science hath received greater increase in two centuries than in two thousand years before." — Reid: Collected Writings, vol. i. p. 219. "It is well said by the old logicians, Omnis intuitiva notitia est definitio; that is, a view of the thing itself is its best definition. This is true both of the objects of sense and of the objects of self- consciousness." — Sib William Haihilton. IV. CARICATURED DEFINITIONS IN RELI- GIOUS SCIENCE. PRELUDE OX CURRENT EVENTS. If Belgium or Holland had two kings, we should loftily look down on those European states as illus- trations of the effeteness of monarchical government. But South Carolina is twice as large as Belgium, and Louisiana three times as large as Holland, and each of these States has two legislatures elected in our centennial year. Nevertheless, face to face with our wide areas of Mexicanized politics, we loftily foster our pride, or lightly excuse ourselves from political duties, as if after us were to come the deluge. Something of a deluge, one would think, has already swept over us in a civil war; but it fell out of a cloud that was once thought to be not larger than a man's hand. A murky threat in it, indeed ; but when that cloud had overspread all our national horizon, when its leagued massive thunders filled all our azure, when its forked zig-zag threats blazed above all business and bosoms, the best of us were yet doubtful whether there was to be much of a shower. 80 86 TEANSCENDENTALTSM. The most popular orator of this nation I heard address a collegiate audience three days before Sumter fell ; and, walking to the edge of the plat- form, he asked, " What is going to happen ? " and then whispered, with his hand above his lips, " Just nothing at all." Perhaps it is worth while to look a little at the murk}^ threat of Mexicanization in portions of our politics ; for who knows whether we are to be saved from all our difficulties by an ex post facto electoral law ? Will troubles never come again ? What if a presidential election as close as the last had taken place in the midst of our civil war ? Will indecisive contests for political primacy in a territory greater than Caesar governed never again tempt the gigantic contestants to fraud ? Will colossal partisan spoils and political corruption soon cease to stand in the relation of cause and effect? Our fathers studied British precedents to avoid British dangers ; but is it not high time to begin to study American precedents in order to avoid American dangers ? Are we now seeking to throttle the real causes of our civil dis- tresses, or dealing only with a few of their effects ? How long is intimidation to last on the Gulf? How long will the ignorant ballot be a threatening politi- cal fact in the slums of Northern cities ? Massachusetts, you say, is very highly cultured, and is outgrowing the evils that attend on the youth of republics. Are you sure, that, when the popula- tion of Massachusetts is as dense as that of England, your Massachusetts laws will make every thing CARICATURED DEFINITIONS. 87 smooth here ? Has this Commonwealth a right to be proud of its exemption from illiteracy? There are here a million, six hundred thousand people, and a hundred thousand of them are illiterates. Of a hun- dred thousand citizens in Massachusetts above ten years of age, and of seventy-seven thousand above twenty-one, it is true either that they cannot read or that they cannot write. The daj's that are passing over us are serious in th,e last degree, because it is very evident that our present difficulties — with the ignorant ballot, and with intimidation and trickery in close elections, and with tlie atrocious rule that to political victors belong all political spoils — will grow. Certainly the perils arising from the ignorant ballot, and from greed and fraud in contests for spoils greater than Csesar, Antony, and Lepidus fought for, will enlarge as cities grow more numerous and populous, and as political party patronage becomes fatter and vaster. We may escape from intimidation at last, but not in your generation or mine. There will be, while we are in the world, whole ranges of States, in which it will be at times hardly safe to vote against the will of the governing class, and where a perfectly free election will be the exception, and not the rule. Lord Macaulay, you know, in letters lately pub- lished, though written in 1858, predicted, that, when- ever we have a population of two hundred to the. square mile, the Jeffersonian and Jacksonian parts of our civil polity will produce fatal effects. You say Macaulay is unduly full of tremor as to the future 88 . TKANSCENDENTALTSM. of republican institutions, and that France frightened him too much with her revolution ; but he is exceed- ingly cautious. Europe has only eighty inhabitants to the square mUe ; and this historian says, that, when we have two hundred to the square mile, we shall be obliged to manage our politics on some other plan than that which supposes that all problems can be settled "by a majority of the citizens told by the head ; that is to say, by the poorest and most ignorant part of society." What do I want ? Am I here to make a plea for aristocratic institutions? Massachusetts has a read- ing-test : New York has not. It was my fortune, or misfortune, to be born in the Empire State, and it is a grievous thing to me to know that that vast com- monwealth, which, above and west of the Highlands of the Hudson, is only a prolongation of New Eng- land, is politically under the heels of New York, below the Highlands, and would not be if the read- ing-test, which my . State used to have, had been retained in the popular suffrage. In 1821 our State constitution was revised in New York ; and Martin Van Buren, when the reading-test was stricken out, predicted precisely the metropolitan evils which have arisen from the ignorant ballot in New-York City. Eighteen or twenty thousand votes in ever}'- munici- pal election in New York cannot read or write ; and they are a make-weight sufficient, in the hands of a few astute and unscrupulous men, to determine the result of any ordinary political contest in that city. Drop out her twenty thousand ignorant ballots, CARICATURED DEI'INITIONS. 89 and New- York City, politicians say, could, with no great difficulty, be restored to the control of her industrious and intelligent classes. If New York were London, and if her ignorant ballot were large in proportion to her size, not merely New-York State, but, I fear. New England, would be under the heels of the lower half of New- York City. "VYliat are we to do about these things ? Civil-ser- vice reform is up for discussion from sea to sea; and why should not President Grant's repeated offi- cial words on the ballot be also up in this serious time for public thought ? In tliis distinguished audi- ence it cannot have escaped attention that his recom- mendation of the reading-test in the national vote has escaped attention. President Grant would take the ballot from nobody who has it now. He would let all men who have received the right to vote hold that right. But he would open the school doors ; he would cause a common school education to be free as the air; he would make it as compulsory as the summer wind is upon the locks of the bo}', trudging his way to the recitations of the morning ; he would remove every obstacle to the acquisition of a knowl- edge of reading and writing ; and then, after, say, the year 1890, he would refuse the ballot to everybody who has not learned to read and write. [Applause.] I am glad that Boston does not let this presidential recommendation sleep. We must be more thoughtful of what is to come in America, or much will come of which we do not think. Which is the more worthy of the culture of 90 TRANSCENDENTALISM. a scholar in politics, — to throttle evils before, or only after, they themselves throttle us? Theodore Parker was a pastor in Boston, and he writes in his journal one day, concerning William Craft, the fugitive slave : " I inspected his arms, — a good revolver with six caps on, a large pistol, two small ones, a large dirk and a short one : all was right." That was efficient pastoral inspection of a parish. Yonder, on the slope of Beacon Hill, Theo- dore Parker performed the rites of marriage for William and Ellen Craft, two cultured colored people belonging to the society of which he had charge. At the conclusion of the ceremony he put a Bible into the left hand of the hunted black man ; and, as some one had laid a bowie-knife on the table, an inspiration of the moment caused Theodore Par- ker to put that weapon into the man's right hand. He then said to the escaped slave, " If you cannot use this without hating the man you strike against, your action will not be without sin; but to defend the honor of your wife, to defend your own life, and to save her and yourself from bondage, you have a right to use the Bible in your left hand and the bowie-knife in your right." Say, if you please, that all that was melodramatic ; say, if you will, that this style of action was Parker's first, and not his second or his third thought. I affirm, that, in the little cloud which we thought had in it no deluge, he fore- saw civil war ; and that, if pastors all through the North had been equally efficient, there would have been no bloody rain at Gettysbiu'g. [Applause.] CAEICATURED DEFINITIOXS. 91 THE LECTURE. "Wlien Daniel Webster was asked how he ob- tained his clear ideas, he replied, " By attention to definitions." Dr. Johnson, whose business it was to explain words, was once riding on a rural road in Scotland, and, as he paused to water his horse at a wayside spring, he was requested by a woman of ad- vanced age to tell her how he, the great Dr. Johnson, author of a renowned dictionary, could possibly have defined the word "pastern" "the knee of a horse." "Ignorance, madam," was the reply, — "pure igno- rance." For one, if I am forced to make a confession as to my personal difficulties with Orthodoxy of the scholarly type, I must use, as perhaps many another student might, both Webster's and Johnson's phrases as the outlines of the story. Before I attended to definitions, I had difficulties : after I attended to them in the spirit of the scientific method, my own serious account to myself of the origin of my per- plexities was, in most cases, given in Johnson's words, "Ignorance, pure ignorance." Theodore Parker's chief intellectual fault was inadequate attention to definitions. As a conse- quence, his caricatures or misconceptions of Chris- tian truth were many and ghastly. I cannot discuss them all ; but in addition to his failure to distinguish between intuition and instinct^ and between inspira- tion and illumination^ it must be said, in continuance of the list of his chief errors : — 5. He did not carefully distinguish from each other inspiration and dictation. 92 TRANSCENDENTALISM. "When Benjamin Franklin was a young man, one of his hungriest desires was to acquire a perfect style of Avriting; and, as he admired Addison more than any other author, he was accustomed to take an essay of the " Spectator," and make very full notes of all its thoughts, images, sentiments, and of some few of the phrases. He then would place his manuscript in his drawer, wait several weeks, or until he had forgotten the language of the original, and then would take his memoranda, and write out an essay including every idea, every pulse of emotion, every flash of imagination, that he had transferred from Addison to his notes. Then he would compare his work with the original, and humiliate himself by the contrast of his own uncouth rhetorical garment with Addison's perfect robe of flowing silk. He studied how to improve his crabbed, cold, or obscure phrases by the light of Addison's noon of luminousness and imaginative and moral heat. Now, Franklin's essay was, you would say in such a case, not dictated by Addison, but was inspired by Addison. Plainly there is a difference between inspiration and dictation. Orthodoxy believes the Bible to be inspired ; and her definition of inspiration is the gift of infallibility in teaching moral and religious truth. But, by inspiration thus defined, Orthodoxy does not mean dictation. She means that the Bible is as full of God as Franklin's echoed essay was of Addison. As in his essay there were both an Addi- sonian and a Franklinian element, so, speaking roundl}^ there are in the Bible a divine and a human CARICATUEED DEFINITIONS. 93 element ; but the latter is swallowed up in the for- mer even more completely than the Franklinian was in the Addisonian. All the thought in Franklin's essay is, by supposition, Addison's, and some of the phrases are liis ; but Franldin's words are there. All the moral and religious thought of the Bible is, ac- cording to the definition of inspiration, divine, and so are some of the phrases ; but human words are there. The chief proof, after all, that the Bible is good food, is the eating of it. The healing efficacy of a medicine when it is used is the demonstration that it is good. Now, the world has been eating the Bible as it never ate any other book, and the Bible has been saturating the veins of the ages as they were never saturated by the food derived from any other volume ; but there is no spiritual disease that you can point to that is the outcome of biblical inculcation. We all feel sure that it would be better than well for the world, if all the precepts of this volume were ab- sorbed and transmuted into the actions of men. The astounding fact is, that the Bible is the only hook in the world that toill hear full and permanent translation into life. The careless and superficial sometimes do not distinguish from each other the biblical record and the biblical inculcation. I know that fearful things are recorded in the Bible concerning men, who, in some respects,werc approved of God ; but it is the biblical inculcation which I pronounce free from adulterate elements, not the biblical record. Of course, in a mirror held up before the human heart, there will be 94 TRANSCENDENTALISM. reflected blotches ; but the inculcation of the Scrip- tures, from the beginning to the end of the sixty-six pamphlets, is known by experience to be free from adulterate elements ; and I defy the "vvorld to show any disease that ever has come from the absorption into the veins of the ages of the biblical inculcation. [Applause.] And, moreover, I defy the ages to show any other book that could be absorbed thus in its inculcations, and not produce dizziness of the head, pimples on the skin, staggering at last, and the sow- ing of dragon's teeth. [Applause.] There is something very peculiar about this one book, in the incontrovertible fact that its inculca- tions are preserved from such error as would work out, in experience, moral disease in the world. Plato taught such doctrines, that if the world had followed him as it has the Bible, and had absorbed not his account of men's vices, but his positive inculcation, we to-day should be living in barracks, and we could not know who are our brothers, and who are our sisters. (Geote's Plato^ TJie B-cpuhlic^ " Social Laws.") There was in Plato, you say, inspiration. Very well. His inculcation under what you call inspiration, and I call illumination, would, as every scholar knows, have turned this fat world into a pasture-ground for the intellectual and powerful on the one side ; but the poor on the other side it would have ground down into the position of unaspiring and hopeless hewers of wood and drawers of water ; and, worse than that, it would have quenched the divincst spark in natural religion, — family life. [Applause.] CABTCATT7RED DEFIKTTIONS. 95 Dictation and plenary inspiration are not the same. I avoid technical terms here ; but you must allow me, since Theodore Parker so often spoke against the plenary inspiration of the Bible, to say, that, by plenary inspiration. Orthodoxy does not mean verbal inspiration. Franklin's essay was plen- arily, but not always verbally, inspired by Addison. If the Bible is written by dictation or verbal inspira- tion, as Theodore Parker often taught that Orthodox scholarship supposes that it is, even then it would not be at all clear that any translation of the Bible is verbally inspired. If any thing was dictated, of course, only the original was dictated. In places I believe we have in the Bible absolute dictation ; and yet inspiration and dictation are two things ; and the difference between them is worth pointing out when Orthodoxy is held responsible for a caricature of her definition, and when men are thrown into unrest on this point, as if they were called on to believe self-contradiction. The fact that all portions of the Bible are inspired does not imply at all that King James's version, or the German, or the French, or the Hindostanee, or any other, is dictated by the Holy Ghost. Even these versions, however, are full of God, as Franklin's essay was of Addison, and fuller. They., too., ivill hear translation into life. Sometimes, as in the Decalogue and the Sermon on the Mount, and in transfigured Psalm and prophecy, it well may be that we have in the original, words wliicli came not by the will of man. There are tliree degrees of inspiration ; and the 96 TEANSCENDEXTALISM. distinctions between them are not manufactured by me, here and now, to meet the exigency of this dis- cussion : they are as old as John Locke. It is commonplace in religious science to speak of the inspiration of superintendence, as in Acts or Chroni- cles ; the inspiration of elevation, as in the Psalms ; and the inspiration of suggestion, as in the Prophe- cies. The historical books of the Scriptures have been so superintended, that they are winnowed com- pletely of error in moral inculcation. But the inspiration of superintendence is the lowest degree of inspiration. We come to the great Psalms, which assuredly have no equals in literature, and which are palpably rained out of a higher sky than unassisted human genius has dropped its productions from. These Psalms, we say, are examples of the inspiration of elevation. But we have a yet higher range of the action of inspiration in passages like the distinct predictions that the Jews should be scattered among all nations, and nevertheless preserved as a separate people, as they have been ; or that Jerusalem should be destroyed, as it was ; or that there should come a supreme Teacher of the race, as he has come. We find in the biblical record unmistakably prophetic passages, and these are seals of the inspiration of suggestion ; for they could have been written only by suggestion. Infidelity never yet has made it clear that the Old-Testament predictions concerning the Jews have not been fulfilled. Rationalism, iu Germany, whenever it takes up that topic, drops it like hot iron. " What is a short proof of inspira- CAEICATUEED DEFIXITIOXS. 97 tion ? " said Frederic the Great to his chaplain. " The Jews, your majestj^" was the answer. If there be in the Bible a single passage that is plainly- prophetic, there is in that passage a very peculiar proof of its own divine origin. We have our Lord pointing out the prophecies concerning himself, and he makes it a reason why we should turn to the Old Testament, that they are they which testify of him. Now, if there be some passages of the Bible that contain these prophetic announcements, then the Teacher thus announced is divinely attested, and we are to listen to him. If, however, we stand simply on the amazing fact of the moral and religious winnowedness of Scrip- ture, we have also a divine attestation. That win- nowedness is providential. What God does he means to do. He has done this for the Bible, — he has kept it free from moral and religious error in its inculcations. He has done that for no other book ; and what he has done he from the first intended to do. Therefore the very fact of the winnowedness of the Bible is proof of a divine superintendence over it. Superintendence, elevation, suggestion, are differ- ent degrees of inspiration, which is of one kind. But inspiration and illumination, according to estab- lished definitions, differ in kind, and not merely in degree ; for inspiration, as a term in religious science, — I am not talking of popular literature, — always carries with it the idea of winnowedness as to moral and religious truth. 98 TRANSCENDENTALISM. Tliere is nothing in the intuitive ranges of truth that comes into collision tvith biblical inculcation ; but there is no other sacred booh on the globe which those same ranges of axiomatic moral truth do not pierce through and through and through in more places than ever knight's sword toent through an opponent's shield. A few brilliants plucked out of mucli mire are the texts sometimes cited to us from the sacred literature of India, China, Arabia, Greece, and Rome. I defy those who seem to be dazzled by these fragments, to read before any mixed company of cultivated men and women the complete inculcations of the Vedas, Shastas, and Koran. Those books have been ab- sorbed into the veins of nations ; and we know what diseases have been the result. Theg must be tried by the stern tests tvhich the Bible endures; that is, by intuition, instinct, experiment, and syllogism. All the sacred literatures of the world come into collision with the intuitions of conscience, or with the dic- tates of long experience, except that one strange volume, coming from a remoter antiquity than any other sacred book, and read to-day in two hundred languages of the globe, and kept so pure in spite of all the tempests of time that have swept through its sky, that above the highest heavens opened to us by genius, and beyond all our latest and loftiest ideals, the biblical azure spreads out as noon risen on mid-noon. [Applause.] 6. Theodore Parker was not careful enough to dis- tinguish between inspiration and revelation. By revelation I mean all self-manifestation of God, CAEICATURED DEFINITIONS. 99 in liis "words and his works both : inspiration is his self-manifestation in the Scriptures alone. Allow mo to assert, face to face with the learning of this audi- ence, in the presence of which I speak with sincere deference, that Christianity would stand on the basis of revelation, — that is, on the self-manifestation of God in his works, including the facts of the New- Testament history, — even if the doctrine of inspira- tion were all thrown to the winds. You have been taught too often by rationalism that Christianity stands or falls on the truth of the doctrine of inspi- ration, whereas the nature and the degree of inspira- tion aro questions between Christians themselves. Christianity, as a redemptive system, might stand on the great facts of the New Testament, if they were known as historic only, and the New-Testament literature were not inspired at all. Religion based on axiomatic moral truth would stand on revelation thus defined, even if inspiration were given up as a dream. [Applause.] Will you remember that the configuration of New England is the same at midnight and at noon ? It is my fortune to be a flying scout, or a kind of outlook committee, for my learned brethren here, and I carry a guide-book to this delicious nook of the round world; but what if I should lose that volume? Would not the IMerrimack continue to be the most industrious river within your borders, the Connecti- cut the most majestic, the Wliite Hills and the Green ^lountains the most stately of your elevations? Would there bo any gleaming shore on your coast, 100 TRANSCENDENTALISM. where the Atlantic surge plays through the reeds, that would change its outline at all by day or by night because of the loss of my guide-book ? Would not north and south, east and west, be just the same ? Inspiration gives us a guide-book : it does not create the landscajje. Our human reason, compared with inspiration, is as starlight contrasted with the sunlight ; but the landscape of our relations to God is just the same whether it be illumined or left in obscurity. We might trace out by starlight much of the map. The sun of inspiration arises, and we know the Merrimack and Connecticut as never be- fore ; but the sun did not create the Merrimack or the Connecticut. On all our shores the orb of day shows to the eye the distinction between rock and wave ; but it does not create that distinction, which we not dimly knew before by the noises in the dark, and by the wrecks. There is a soul, and there is a God ; and, since law is universal, there must be conditions of harmony between the soul and God. Since the soul is made on a jylan, there must be natural conditions of its peace^ both ivith itself and ivith God; and these conditions are not altered by being revealed. [Applause.] New- ton did not make the law of gravitation by discover- ing it, did he ? The Bible does not create, it reveals, the nature of things. As long as it remains true that there is a best way to live, it will be best to live the best way ; and religion is very evidently safe, whether the Bible stands or falls. [Applause.] 7. Theodore Parker did not carefully distinguish CARICATUEED DEFINITIONS. 101 from each other the supernatural and the unnatu- rah There are three kinds of natural laws, — physical, organic, and moral. It is very important to distin- guish these three from each other ; for penalty under the one class of laws does not always carry with it penalty under the others. A pirate may enjoy good health, and yet lose his desire to be holy, and thus be blessed under the organic, but cursed under the moral, natural laws. A Christian, if he is thrown into the sea, will sink in spite of his being a saint ; that is, he will be condemned under the physical law of gravitation, although blessed under the moral. We are stupid creatures; and so we ask naturally whether those on whom the Tower of Siloam fell were sinners above all others. Were those who per- ished in the Ashtabula horror sinners above all others? A sweet singer — one whose words of mel- ody will, I hope, for some centuries yet, prolong his usefulness on this and every other continent — may have been rapt away to heaven in a bliss which his own best poems express only as the spark expresses the noon. But there was somewhere and somehow a violation of physical law, and the penalty was paid. While that penalty was in process of execution, the bUss of obedience to the moral law may have been descending also ; and thus, out of the fire and the ice, and the jaws of unimaginable physical agony, this man may have been caught up into eternal peace. [Applause.] The distinction between the physical, organic, and 102 TEAJSrSCENDENTALISM. moral natural laws, however, is not as important as that between the higher and the lower natural laws. Do you not admit that gravitation, a physical law, is lower than the organic force that builds animal and vegetable tissues ? In the growth of the elms on the Boston mall yonder, is not gravitation seized upon by some power superior to itself, and is not matter made to act as gravitation does not wish ? Is it not a common assertion of science, that chem- ical forces are counteracted by the organic forces which build up living tissues ? Has not my will power to counteract the law of gravitation ? A higher may anywhere counteract a lower natural law. Scientific Theism does not admit that all there is of God is in natural law. He transcends nature : therefore he may reach down into it, as I, with the force of my will, reach into the law of gravitation. If he counteracts nature, his action is supernatural, but it is not unnatural. Charles Darwin and your Archbishop Butler say that the only clear meaning of the word " natural " is " stated, fixed, regular," and that " it just as much re- quires and presupposes an intelligent agent to effect any thing statedly, fixedly, regularly, that is, natu- rally, as it does to effect it for once, that is, supernat- urally " (Butler's Analogy, part i. chap, i., cited as a motto in Darwdt's Origin of Species'). Accord- ing to Darwin and Butler, therefore, a natural law is simply the usual, fixed, regular method of the Divine Action. A miracle is unusual Divine Action. hi the former we see the Divine Immanency in Nature ; CARICATURED DEFINITIONS. 103 in the latter the Divine Transcendency heyond it. In fundamental principle a miracle is only the subjcc tion of a lower to a higher law, and therefore, al- though supernatural, it is not unnatural. (Art. on "Miracles," Smith's Bible Dictionary.') But Theo- dore Parker taught that " a miracle is as impossible as a round triangle " (Weiss's Life of Parker, vol. ii. p. 452), because it involves a self-contradiction. Brought up in the benighted New-England and Ger- man schools called evangelical, it never entered my head that self-contradiction was involved in the supernatural ; for I was trained to think that there is a distinction between the supernatural and the unnatural. Mr. Furness of Philadelphia says that a marvel- lous character, such as our Lord was, must be ex- pected to do marvellous works. We know, that, when men are illumined by the poetic trance, they have capacities that no other mood gives them. There are lofty zones in human experience, and, when we are in them, we can do much which we can do in none of our lower zones. What if a man should appear filled with a life that leaves him in constant communication with God ? What if there should come into existence a sinless soul ? What if it should remain sinless? What if there should appear in history a being in this sense above nature, is it not to be expected that he will have power over nature, and perform works above natiire ? Endowed as the Author of Christianity was, we should natu- rally expect from that supernatural endowment works not unnatural, but supernatural. [Applause.] 104 TRANSCENDENTALISM. It is Parker's teacliing that said the resurrection has "no evidence in its favor." De Wette, whose book he translated, affirmed in his latest volume, as I showed you the other day, that the fact of the res- urrection, although a mystery that cannot be dissi- pated hangs over the way and manner of it, cannot be brought into doubt, any more than the assassina- tion of Cffisar. Theodore Parker, in his middle life, stood vigor- ously for the propositions which he reached at the Divinity School at Cambridge and in West Roxbury. He was attacked too early. He says himself that he had not completed his system of thought. But he was attacked vigorously ; and with the spirit of his grandfather, who led the first charge on the British troops, he stood up and vehemently defended himself. [Applause.] But that early attack caused some of his crudities to crystallize speedily. He was after- ward too much absorbed in vast philanthropic enter- prises to be an exact philosopher in metaphysics or ethics. He never made himself quite clear in these sciences, or even in the latest biblical research. His own master, De Wette, went far beyond him, and admitted, in the face of German scholarship, that the resurrection can be proved to be an historic certitude. Theodore Parker, although De Wette did not make that admission till 1849, lived ten years longer, and never made it. Attacked early, and defending his unformed opin- ions vigorously, Parker's scheme of thought crystal- lized in its crude condition. Theodore Parker's also- CARICATURED DEFINITIONS. 105 lute religion is not a Boston, hut a West Roxhury creed. [Applause.] It is the speculation of a very young- man, besides. 8. Theodore Parker seemed to understand little of the distinction between belief and faith. He never misconceived Orthodoxy more mon- strously than when he said, " It is this false theology, with its vicarious atonement, salvation witJiout moral- ity or inety, only hy belief in absurd doctrines, which has bewitched the leading nations of the earth with such practical mischief" (Weiss, Life of Theodore Parker, vol. ii. p. 497). Gentlemen, is that Ortho- doxy ? [Cries of " No ! " " No ! " " No ! "] This audi- ence says that this is not a fair statement : I therefore shall undertake to call it a caricature. It is omni- present in Parker's works. Whether it was a dis- honest representation I care not to determine. My general feeling is, that Theodore Parker was honest. He rarely came into companionship with Orthodox scholars of the first rank : when he did, he seemed to be pleased and softened, and was, in many respects, another man. Attacked, he always stood up with the spirit of the drum-major of Lexington under his waistcoat. [Applause.] What is saving faith ? What is the difference be- tween belief and faith ? I venture much ; but I shall be corrected swiftly here if I am wrong. Saving faith, rightly defined, is — 1. A conviction of the intellect that God, or God in Christ is, and 2. An affectionate choice of the heart that God, or 106 TRANSCENDENTALISM. God in Christ, should be, both our Saviour and our Lord. The first half of this definition is belief; the whole is faith. All of it without the last two words would be merely religiosity, and not religion. There is noth- ing in that definition which teaches that a man is saved by opinion irrespective of character. Belief is assent, faith is consent, to God as both Saviour and Lord. On April 19, 1775, a rider on a horse flecked with blood and foam brought to the city of Worcester the news of the battle of Lexington, in which Theodore Parker's grandfather captured the first British gun. The horse fell dead on the main street of the city, and on another steed the rider passed westward Avith his news. Some of those who heard the intelligence were loyal, and some were disloyal. They all heard that there had been a victory of the American troops over the British, and they all believed the report. Now, was there any political virtue or vice in the belief by the Tory in Worcester that there had been a victory over the British ? Was there any political virtue or vice in the belief by the patriot yonder that there had been a victory over the British ? Neither the one nor the other. Where, then, did the political virtue or political vice come in? Why, when your Tory at Worcester heard of the victory, he believed the report, and was sorry ; and was so sorry, that he took up arms against his own people. When the patriot heard the report, he believed it and was glad ; and was so glad, that he took up arms and put him- CARICATURED DEFINITIONS. 107 self side by side with the stalwart shoulders of Par- ker's grandfather. [Applause.] In that attitude of the heart lay the political virtue or political vice. Just so, in the government of the universe, we all hear that God is our Saviour and Lord, and we all believe this, and so do all the devils, and tremble. Is there any virtue or vice in that belief taken alone ? None whatever. But some of us believe this, and are sorry. We turn aside, and, although we have assent, we have no consent to God ; and we take up arms against the fact that he is our Saviour and Lord. Others of us believe this, and by divine grace are glad ; we have assent and consent both ; Ave come into the mood of total, affectionate, irreversible self- surrender to God, not merely as a Saviour, but also as Lord. When we are in that mood of rejoicing lo3'alt3^ to God, we have saving faith, and never till then. [Applause.] How can salvation be obtained by assent alone, that is, by opinion merely ? What is salvation ? It is permanent deliverance from both the love of sin and the guilt of sin. Accepting God gladly as Saviour, we are delivered from the guilt of sin, and, accepting him gladly as Lord, we are deliv- ered from the love of sin. Only when we accept God as both Saviour and Lord are we loyal ; only when we are affectionately glad to take him as both are we or can we be at peace. When we believe the news that he is Saviour and Lord, and are glad, and so glad as to face the foe, we are in safety. [Ap- plause.] I V. THEODORE PAEKER ON THE GUILT OF SIN. THE SIXTY-THIRD LECTURE IX THE BOSTON MONDAY LEC- TURESHIP, DELIVERED IN TREMONT TEMPLE JAN. 29. ipEt (pspovT', Ikt'lvei d' 6 Kaivuv uifiVSL 61 fi'ifivovTog kv xpovu Awf, Jraditv Tov ep^avra • dEOfxiov yup. JEscHYLUs: Af/amemnon, 1562. EiTrep iariv f/ T:a?ial to be found only in the acts of choice. Conscience intuitively perceives intentions, or choices, to be either good or bad. Here stands on one side of the will a motive, and on the other is another motive ; and, looking on what we mean to do, we decide whether we will do the best we know or not. [An- 124 TEANSCENDENTALISM. plause.] Riglit and "wrong in motives are pointed out by conscience, and not in merely external ac- tion. I do not know by conscience, but only by judgment, whether it is best for me to vote for the electoral bill or not ; but I should vote for it if I were in Congress. [Applause.] There is -in conscience the power of tasting mo- tives, just as in the tongue there is the power of tasting flavors. I know by the tongue whether a given fruit is bitter or sweet. No doubt we bring up the fruit to the lips by the hands ; no doubt we look at it with the eyes; no doubt we perceive its odor by the nostrils : but only by the tongue do we taste it. So, no doubt, the intellect is concerned in bringing up considerations before the inner tribu- nal; but, after all, the moral character of our motives is tasted by a special power which we call conscience. This perceives intuitively the difference between a good intention and a bad. But a good motive is one which conscience not only pronounces right, but one which conscience says ought to rule the will. Two things are thus pointed out by conscience in motives, — rightness and oughtness. The former is perceived intuitively ; the latter is felt instinctively. The oughtness is a mysterious, powerful constraint cast upon us by some force outside of ourselves, and operating through all our instincts. I am willing to define conscience as that which perceives and feels rightness and oughtness in motives or intentions. You cannot go behind this rightness and ought- ness which conscience points out. Why is this fruit THEODORE PARKER OX THE GUILT OF SDT. 125 bitter to the human taste ? Why is this other sweet ? We are so made, that the tongue tastes here bitterness and there sweetness, and you cannot go behind that ultimate fact. You are so made, that, if you do what you know has beliind it a wrong intention, there is a constraint brought upon you. You have violated the supreme law of things in the universe. You are in dissonance with your own nature; and there springs up in you, under the inflexible law of con- science, a sense of guilt. 4. Conscience reveals, therefore, a moral law. 5. That law is above the human will, and acts without, and even against, the consent of the will. 6. There cannot be a thought without a being who thinks ; nor a law without a being who wills ; nor a moral law without a moral lawgiver. There must have been the thought of the right and of the good before there could have been a law promulgated in the universe supporting the right and the good. That thought of the right and the good, which must have gone before the law, could have existed only in a thinker. The choice of that tliinker to promulgate a law eternally supporting the right and the good could have proceeded only from a righteous thinker. There cannot be a law with- out a being who wills ; for law is only the method of the operation of a will. That is Darwin, if you please. That is not Hackel, nor Huxley ; but it is Charles Darwin, and ninety-five out of a hundred of all the foremost men of physical science. It is Archbishop Butler too, and Julius Miiller, and none 126 TRANSCENDENTALISM. the worse for that. [Applause.] Ther^ cannot be a moral law without a moral lawgiver. 7. When, therefore, the will chooses to act from a motive which conscience pronounces evil, that act of the will is disobedience, not to abstract law only, but to God. 8. Thus evil becomes sin. I have defined moral evil as that which ought not to be, or as that which is condemned by the moral law revealed by conscience. Sin is disobedience to the moral law considered as the revelation of a Personal Lawgiver. Sin is a choice of wrong motives. Per- sonal disloyalty to the Infinite Oughtness — that is sin. All agree to this latter definition; but the Somewhat, which I call the Infinite Oughtness, is to all men who think clearly, not merely a Somewhat, but a Someone. [Applause.] Let us now proceed cautiously, step by step, and convince ourselves that on this theme much may be placed beyond controversy by a simple statement of the acknowledged laws of the operation of con- science. 9. It is incontrovertible, that man often hears a still small voice within him saying " I ought." Does anybody deny tliis ? I wish to be very ele- mentary, and to carry the assent of your minds point by point; and I forewarn you here and now that immense consequences hang on your admission of these fundamental, simple principles. Be on your guard. Do you deny that sometimes we all hear a still small voice within us saying " I ought " ? If a THEODORE PARKER ON THE GUILT OF SIN. 127 man is conscious of any great defect in his organiza- tion, — intellectual, moral, or physical, — he does not blame himself for it ; but the instant a man violates a command of conscience uttered in this whispered "I ought," he blames himself. I may have limita- tions of my faculties, such that I never can amount to much ; but I do not blame myself. But, the in- stant I do what conscience pronounces lorong, that moment I know that I am to blame. That is human nature ; and Edmund Burke used to say, "I cannot alter the constitution of man." It is in every sane man to say " I ought." 10. It is incontrovertible, that man often answers the voice which says " I ought " by saying " I will not." You doubt that ? Is it not a fact, certified to you by any narrative of your own experience, that you have multitudes of times replied to this still small voice " I ought," by a soft or vehement " I will not." 11. It is incontrovertible, that instantly and inva- riably, after saying to " I ought " " I will not," a man must say, " I am not at peace with myself." 12. It is incontrovertible, that he must say also, " I am not in fellowship with the nature of things." Why, tills is only tautology. If a man has a pow- erfid faculty within him that says one thing, and another powerful faculty wliich says another thing, there is within him civil war. Peace ends. He recognizes the condition of the republic of his faculties by his wails of unrest. He knows that the 128 TRA^^SCENDENTALISM. disturbance of his nature resulted from his saying " I will not " to the still small voice, " I ought." 13. It is incontrovertible, that he must say also, " I have lost fellowship with God." What is there in sin more mysterious than the sense which always comes with it, that the stars in their courses fight against us when we do not say " I will " in response to " I ought " ? There is iq the inner heavens a voice saying " Thou shalt," " Thou oughtest ; " and we reply to that celestial summons, " I will not : " and instantly out of the inner heavens falls on us a thunderbolt. It is by irreversible, natural law that every man who says " I will not," when the inner voice says " I ought," falls into disso- nance with himself, and into a feeling that the stars in their courses fight against him. There is nowhere a heart, given at all to sensitive self-study, that does not understand perfectly how the sun behind the sun may be put out by saying " I will not " to the still small voice which says " I ought." God causes the natural sun to rise on both the just and the unjust^ hut not the sun behind the sun. We are so made, that the only light of our inner sky is peace with our- selves. In the nature of things, the sun behind the sun comes not, and cannot come, forth for us, from the east, if we say "I will not," when conscience says " I ought." The simple refusal to follow that still small voice leaves a drought in the soul ; for it dries up the sweetest rains from the sky behind the sky. It is terrific, scientific, penetratingly human truth, that the sun behind the sun does ^lot rise THEODOKE PAEKER ON THE GUILT OF SIN. 129 equally upon the just and tlie unjust ; and that the rains from the sky behind the sky do not fall, never have fallen, and in the nature of things never will or can fall, in this world or the next, equally iipon the righteous and the unrighteous. [Applause.] 14. It is incontrovertible, that he who is disloyal to the voice which says "I ought" must also say, "I ought to satisfy the injured majesty of the law I have violated. Sin creates an obligation to satisfy the in- jured majesty of the moral law. (See Julius Mul- LEE, Doctrine of Sin, vol. i. pp. 1-200.) 15. It is incontrovertible, that, in the absence of expiation, man forebodes punishment. That sounds like a theological and biblical propo- sition: it is simply an ethical and purely scientific one. It is what is taught everywhere in Shakspeare and the Greek poets. It is what is illustrated by all the history of Pagan sacrifices since the world began. If we are to estimate the strength of any human im- pulse by the work it will do, then tliis perception that SLQ creates an obligation to satisfy the injured majesty of the moral law must be presumed to have behind it a most powerful force. Again and again, age after age, it has shown itself to be stronger than love or death. There is nothing clearer than that a man is so made, that after he has been disloyal, after he has looked into the face of God, and said " I will not," he feels that tliis act has created an obligation which must in some way be discharged to satisfy the majesty and the moral right of the moral law. 130 TEANSCENDENTALISM. It is not a pleasant thing to say that that is the way a man is made ; but that is the way he is made. A liberal theology is one that looks at all the facts. "Instead of fashioning with great labor a theory that would account for all the facts," Theodore Parker, his biographer Mr. Weiss says, "overcame doubt by a humane and tender optimism " (Z/fe of Parker, vol. i. p. 150). Gentlemen, there must be a philosophy that will account for all the facts of human nature, if we are ever to have a religious science ; for whether you will or not think boldly, north, south, east, and west, men by and by will do so, and they will look into all these astounding certainties of human nature. When a man says "I ought," and then says " I will not," he must say, " I am not at peace with myself," "I am dropped out of fellowship with the nature of things," " I am not in fellowship with God," "The stars fight against me," "Nature is against me," "I ought, I ought to render satisfac- tion." That is the way Nature acts. Shakspeare was philosopher enough to make one of his characters say, when one complained that he was a man whom fortune had most cruelly scratched, that it was " too late to pare her nails now," and that " Fortune is a good lady, and will not have knaves thrive long under her " (^AlVs Well that Ends Well, act v. sc. ii.). Even Shakspeare speaks of a " primrose way to the everlasting bonfire " (^Macbeth, act ii. sc. i.), and of " the flowery way that leads to the broad gate and THEODOKE PAKKER ON THE GUILT OF SIN. 131 the great fire " (AIVs Well that Ends Well, act. iv. sc. v.)« Too late ! Probably Sliakspeare meant some- thing by that phrase, and knew what he meant. For one, I think he meant that it is possible for a man to fall into a final permanency of character, hating what God loves, and loving what God hates. 16. It is incontrovertible, that, even after a man disloyal to conscience has reformed, he has behind him an irreversible record of sin in the past. It will always remain true that he has been a de- serter; and therefore conscience will always leave him at far lower heights than those of peace, if he be not sure that some power beyond his own has sat- isfied the moral law. [Applause.] 17. It is incontrovertible, that, when man is free from the love of sin, he is not free from constitu- tional apprehension as to the effect of the guilt of past sin on his personal future in this world and the next. 18. It is incontrovertible, that the desire to be sure that the guilt of sin will be overlooked is one of the most powerful forces in human nature. 19. It is incontrovertible, that an atonement may thus in the solitudes of conscience be scientifically known to be the desire of all nations ; that is, of all who have fallen into that disturbance of the moral nature which is called sin. [Applause.] 20. The atonement which reason can prove is needed, revelation declares has been made. [Ap- plause.] 132 TEAJSrSCENDENTALISM. I do not a£&rm, my friends, that by reason I can prove the fact of the atonement. I believe, as assur- edly as that I exist, that by reason I can prove our need of the atonement. [Applause.] I do not assert the sufficiency of natural religion; I assert merely its efficiency. I believe that Julius Miiller, building on the same axiomatic truths which Parker relied upon, and forming his system with entire free- dom, and at last finding it correspondent with Chris- tian truth, has been far more loyal to the scientific method than he who asserted that there is in man no enmity against God. That an atonement has been made you must learn from revelation ; that an atone- is needed you can learn from human reason. Old man and blind, Michael Angelo, in the Vatican, used to stand before the Torso, the famous fragment of a statue, made, possibly, by one of the most skilled chisels of antiquity ; and, with his fingers upon the mutilated lines, he would tell his pupils how the entire figure must have been formed when it was whole. He would trace out the fragmentary plan, and say that the head must have had this posture, and the limbs that posture, and that the complete work could have been only what the fragments indicated. Reli- gious science with the dim torch of reason, and not illuminated by revelation, is a blind Michael Angelo, standing before the Torso of the religious universe, and feeling blindly along fragmentary lines. Al- though the head of this statue is infinitely beyond oiu' touch or sight in the infinities and the eternities THEODORE PAHKEK ON THE GTHLT OF SIN. 133 above us, and althougli its feet stand on adamant lower than thought can reach with its plummet, we do know, in the name of the universality of law, that the lines we touch in our blindness in natural religion would, if completed according to the plan which is tangible to us, be revealed religion, and nothing less. [Applause.] VI. FINAL PEEMANENCE OF MORAL CHAEACTER. THE SIXTY-FOURTH LECTURE IN THE BOSTON MONDAY LEC- TURESHIP, DELIVERED IN TREMONT TEMPLE FEB. 5. ' Repeated sin impairs the judgment. He whose judgment is impaired sins repeatedly." Bhagvat Gheeta. TToXaiyEV^ yap 7i£y Smote the chord of self, which, trembling, passed m music out of sight." Is there any hand but that of love that can pro- duce this effect ? Under natural lata can 7nan he made unselfish or Tioly in any other way than hy loving a holy person? Tennyson knows of no other way; religious science knows of no other. The truth is, my friends, we are acquainted with no furnace which will burn selfishness out of a man, except this fiery bliss we call a supreme spiritual affection. There is admiration of men by each other ; but there is no burning the selfishness out of men until they come to trust and to love, and to that in- tersphering of soul by soul which is always the re- sult of trust of the transfigured sort, — one of the rarest things on earth. Do not think that I am put- ting before you a low ideal of trust ; for I speak of those forms of love — conjugal, filial, paternal — which the poets love to glorify. COMMUNION WITH GOD AS PEK&ONAL,. 231 I read, the other day two Boston sonnets entitled " Trust," which made of the crystalline window of one of the deepest human experiences an opening through which to look into the sky behind the sky. I know that thou art true and strong and piu-e. My forehead on thy pahn, I fall asleep: My sentinels with thee no vigils keep, Though elsewhere never without watch secure. How restful is thy palm ! I life endure : These stranger souls whose veUs I shyly sweep, These doubts what secrets hide within the deep, Because, aglow within the vast obscure, Thy hand is whitest light! My peace art thou; My firm green isle within a troubled sea ; And, lying here, and looking upward now, I ask, if thou art this, what God must be: If thus I rest within thy goodness, how In goodness of the infinite degree? But there are lightnings wherever there is love ; for character cannot have one side without having two sides ; we cannot love good, and not abhor evil ; and so the second sonnet, equally true to trust, con- trasts with the first : This crystal soul of thine, were it outspread Until the drop should fill the universe. How in it might the angels' wings immerse; And wake and sleep the living and the dead ; Bereaved eyes bathe ; rest Doubt its tossing head ; Swim the vast worlds; dissolve Guilt's icy curse; And sightless, if but loyal, each disperse Fear by full trust, and, by devotion, dread! And yet these perfect eyes in which mine sleep Would not be sweet were not their lightning deep. 232 TRANSCEITOENTALISM. In softest skies the swiftest fire-bolts dwell. Thine eyes mix dew and flame, and both are weU. If thus I fear this soul, Gk>d! how thee, Both love's and lightning's full infinity? [Applause.] In the Portuguese Sonnets, the most subtle and tender and sublime expressions of affection ever written by woman, it is not so much Mrs. Browning who sings, as Robert Browning, the future husband. When Tennyson, in the In Memoriam commemo- rates the young Hallam, it is not Tennyson who sings, so much as Hallam. When Robert Hall and Canning form a friendship for each other at Eton, it is Canning who appears in Hall, and Hall who appears in Canning. When Thomas Carlyle, John Sterling, and Edward Irving, are friends, it is Irving that appears in Carlyle at times, and Carlyle that appears in Irving ; and, when Sterling lies dying, it is Carlyle that makes up more than half his soul. Always when two human personalities are united by a supreme spiritual affection, they intersphere each other, and produce the moods of one in the other ; and, when there is a transfiguration in personal affection, there is thus a smiting of the chord of self, till it passes in music out of sight. Of course, there- fore, there is no method to produce growth, strength, and bliss in the soul, like the pure contact of spirit with spirit. Carlyle says we grow more by contact of soul with soul than by all other means united. Literature, if possessed of power, is the mirror of soul, and causes those who love it to grow by contact with the pulsating, reflected depths of genius. COMMUNION WITH GOD AS PERSONAL. 233 But a Persian proverb says, " Look into the sky to find the moon, and not into, the pool." Look into the faces of .your elect living friends, and into the souls of those whom you trust most. Make much of your giant friendships of all kinds, and be thank- ful if you have one genuine friendship of any kind, and let unforced trust enswathe you, if you would be transfigured. You grow more in these high moments of personal affection when you look at the moon in the sky than by much meditating on the moon in the pool. Friendships with authors and heroes in a far past are undoubtedly honorable to us, and transfiguring, and in loneliness are, perhaps, the highest human solace ; but they are not the highest possible to man ; they are not the moon in the sky. Gentlemen, you all foresee that I am to affirm that a human spirit may commune with the Infinite Spirit, and that all these laws of transfiguration are to be kept in view when we would explain the renovating power on man of the communion of the soul with God as personal. You anticipate that in a moment I shall be asking, in the name of the scientific method, that you, face to face with the Holy Person the conscience reveals, should give free course to all those majestic natural laws by which soul transfigures soul through personal affection. Gentlemen, I do ask this, and in the stern name of the scientific method. Is any one thinking, that, as a benighted soul, brought up in the mossy mediccval- ism of our latest theology, I cannot worship one 234 TRAITSCENDENTALISM. God, because I believe in three Gods ? Do not pit y medigevalism too much ; it knows the difference between Trinity and Tritheism. I wish just now to thank God, if you can worship one God as Derzhavin does. I rejoice with you, if you can go as far as scientific Theism does, and worship one God, who was, who is, who is to come. Let us to-day not go farther than with Derzhavin to admire, obey, adore One King, eternal, immortal, invisible, and in con- science spiritually tangible. Samuel Johnson, when he had finished his great dictionary, received a note from his publisher in these words : " Andrew Miller sends his compliments to Samuel Johnson, with the money in payment for the last sheet of his dictionary, and thanks God he is done with him." To this rude note Johnson replied, " Samuel Johnson sends his compliments to Andrew Miller, and is very glad to notice, as he does by his note, that Andrew Miller has the grace to thank God for any thing." [Applause.] You call your- selves deists ; you call yourselves theists ; you hold, that, in the name of science, we can worship one God, who must be behind all natural law. I thank God that you believe as much as that. Perhaps more lies wrapped up and capsulate in your belief than you think. Here are a few slight notes from a Boston marching-song, on which my eyes fell the other day, when I was alone. They are sung in the name of exact science ; and surely we can sing together any thing attuned to that key-note. COMMUNION WITH GOD AS PERSONAL. 235 Bounds of sun-groups none can see ; Worlds God di-oppeth on his knee ; Galaxies that loftiest swarm, Float before a loftier Form. Mighty the speed of suns and worlds; Mightier who these onward hurls ; Pui-e the conscience's fieiy bath; Purer fire God's lightning hath. Brighter He who maketh bright Jasper, beiyl, chrysolite; Lucent more than they whose hands Girded up Orion's bands. Sweet the spring, but sweeter still He who doth its censers fill ; Good is love, but better who Giveth love its power to woo. Lo, the Maker! gi-eater He, Better, than His works must be : Of the works the lowest stair Thought can scale, but fainteth there. Thee with all our strength and heart, God, we love for what Thou art; Ravished we, obedient now, Only, only perfect Thoul [Applause.] Will you sing that tremorless song of science, and keep entranced, stalwart step to your singing, and then turn to me and say that these sublime natural principles by which human affection transfigures the 236 TRANSCENDENTALISM. soul do not apply in the sphere of man's relations to the Ineffable Holy Person the moral law reveals? There is such a law ; there is such a person. It fol- lows that there are relations between that holy per- son and ourselves. In the name of ascertained natural law, I affirm that men as they are can be made holy only by loving a holy person. [Applause.] In the religious as well as in the social zone of our faculties, only love can smite all the chords with might, or smite the chord of self into invisibility and music. But the love which can do this is not admiration only ; it is adoration. Theodore Parker's absolute religion fails to dis- tinguish properly between the admiration and the adora- tion of the Ineffable Holy Person which Parker admits that the moral law reveals. 1. Admiration does not always imply a full and vivid view of the Infinite Holiness of the Infinite Oughtness revealed by the moral law. Adoration always does imply this. 2. Admiration does not always imply a glad self- commitment of the soul to the Infinite Holiness. Adoration always does. 3. Admiration usually has but a fragmentary view of the Divine attributes as revealed in the nature of things. Adoration has, or is willing to have, a fuU view. 4. Admiration may give pleasure for a time. Ado- ration gives bliss. 6. Admiration may have delight in only a few of COMMUNION WITH GOD AS PERSONAL. 237 God's attributes. Adoration is supreme delight in all God's attributes. 6. Admiration of God is often all that is found, or all that it is thought necessary to require, in the dis- tinctively literary or poetic schemes of sceptical reli- gious thought. Adoration, however, and not merely admiration, of an Infinitely Holy Person revealed by the moral law, is scientifically known to be necessary to the peace of the soul with the nature of things. What are the signs of this error in Parker's writ- ings ? 1. Theodore Parker made only a fragmentary use of the intuitions or self-evident truths of the soul. 2. Hence his view of that portion of the divine nature which may be known to man was fragmen- tary. 3. The inadequate emphasis he laid on the fact of sin shows how fragmentary this view was. 4. Parker's fragmentary view of the Divine nature is shown in his constant undervaluing of the nature of things as it is faithfully represented in the Old Testament. Goethe's literary insight, you will probably think, was quite as keen as Matthew Arnold's is ; and he, long before Arnold, applied purely literary tests to the Hebrew Scriptures, as religious science herself has been doing for a hundred years. The Old Testament is not sterner than the nature of things. It is amazing that Matthew Arnold believes his famous literary test to be a new one. Goethe said, and Parker used 238 TRANSCENDKNTA1.ISM. in his earlier career to quote the words admiringly, " The Hebrew Scriptures stand so happily combined together, that, even out of the most diverse elements, the feeling of a whole stni rises before us. They are complete enough to satisfy, fragmentary enough to excite, barbarous enough to arouse, tender enough to appease." (See Frothingham's Parker^ p. 56.) The Old Testament Scriptures out of date ? Not till the nature of things is ! [Applause.] I rode once from a noon on the Dead Sea, through moonlight on the Mar Saba gorges, to Bethlehem in the morning light. I passed through the scenes in which many of David's psalms had their origin, so far as human causes brought them into existence. On horseback I climbed slowly and painfully out of that scorched, ghastly hollow in which the Salt Lake lies. I found myself, as I ascended, passing through a gnarled, smitten, volcanic region, and often at the edge or in the depth of ravines deeper than that eloquent shaft yonder on Bunker Hill is high. At a place where, no doubt, David had often searched for his flocks, I found the famous convent of Mar Saba clinging to the side of its stupendous ravine, and I lay down there and slept untU the same sun rose which David saw. I looked northward from above Mar Saba, and saw Jerusalem above me yet to the north ; for I had] been ascending from a spot greatly below the level] of the Mediterranean. As I drew near Bethlehem, through brown wheat-fields in which a woman called Ruth once gleaned, I opened and read the book which ] will bear her name yet to thousands of years to come. COimvrTTNION WITH GOD AS PERSONAL. 239 Johnson, you remember, once read that book in Lon- don, and moved a parlor full of people to tears by it, and to curiosit}^ enough to ask who was the author of that beautiful pastoral. In my saddle there in Syria I was moved as Johnson's hearers were in London ; but when I opened the Psalms, one by one, and looked back over the ravines toward the Dead Sea, and northward toward Jerusalem, and upon the hill of Bethlehem, to which all nations after a gaze of nineteen hundred years in duration, were looking yet, and at that season sending pilgrims ; when I remembered how that terraced hill of olive-gardens had influenced human history as no other spot on the globe has done, and that in God's government of this planet there are no accidents ; when I took up the astounding harp of Isaiah, and turned through the list of the prophets to find mysterious passage after passage predicting what would come and what has come ; and when I thought of those critics under the western sky who would saw asunder the Old Testa- ment and the New, and put into the shade those Scriptures which Goethe calls a unit in themselves, and which are doubly a unit when united with the New Testament, I remembered Him who, on the way to Emmaus, opened the Old Testament Scrip- tures, and with them made men's hearts bui-n. [Applause.] God and the nature of thinr/s have no cross-purposes. Truth works well, and ichat works well is truth. If we are out of harmony with the nature of things, we may be scientifically certain that we are out of harmony with God. 240 TBANSCENDENTALISM. Only a religion consisting of delight in all God's attributes, or adoration of the whole nature of things as representative of the Divine Nature, can satisfy the demands of self-evident truth. With multitudes of other careless students of the nature of things, Theodore Parker taught the admi- ration rather than the adoration of God. I do not forget those prayers of this man, which seem to ascend always as into a dateless noon of mercy, and I do not deny the existence of that date- less noon ; but, even if I were to forget, uncounted ages would yet remember that the prayers which caused great drops of blood to fall down to the ground were not quite in that mood, and that no doubt He who offered them knew the full reach of the Divine Mercy, and that it would go as far as the Divine Justice can, but that there are moral impossi- bilities to a Holy Being. My friends, you may do as you please ; but I, for one, will not take my leap into the Unseen Holy without looking for the truth around the whole hori- zon of inquiry ; and 1 find that the most sceptical of you are agreed that there is a stern and an infinitely tender nature of things ; and that, even if God exists not, you must be reconciled with the nature of things ; and that, if God exists, you must yet be reconciled with it, for God himself has no cross-purposes with it. If a vivid view of the nature of things produced this bloody sweat, perhaps you and I ought not to dream through life, thinking that every fall is a fall COMMUNION WITH GOD AS TEESONAL. 241 upward, and that it can never be too late to mend. All history proves that such a faith does not work well. A faith that does not work well is scientifically known to be out of harmony with natural law. What effect arises hy natural law in the soul when a man is brought to a vivid sense of the nearness of the Holy Person the moral law reveals ? This question I, for one, am anxious should be investigated in the light of exact research ; for the use of the scientific method in answering this inquiry opens the door to the proof that Christianity is the religion of science. 1. The more a man has of the religion demanded by the nature of things, that is, the more adoration he has of the Infinite Holiness of the Infinite Ou^ht- ness revealed by the moral law, the more he is thrown into silence as to his own righteousness, into self-condemnation, and into unrest and fear as to the future effect of his past sins. Gentlemen, I affirm that this is a fair rendering of the history of the human heart age after age. When a man comes near to God, his mood is not that of self-justification. Wait until eternity breathes on your cheek, wait until you come face to face with Somewhat in conscience that Shakspeare says makes cowards of us all, and then ask whether the Infinite Holiness of the moral law will be altogether satis- factory to you. Put the question here and now, whether we, in our characters as they stand at this moment, should be happy if we were in heaven with our characters unchanged. Whitefield asked that question on Boston Common yonder in 1740. It has 242 TEAJ^SCENDENTALISM. been asked in every century for eighteen hundred years, and now is asked by science ; and every one in his senses, when listening to the still small voice, has said, " As for me, I am the son of a man of un- clean lips, and I am a man of unclean lips, and in my own righteousness I cannot stand alone before God." What are we to make of this action of human nature ? It is a fact, and it is an immeasurably significant fact. That is the way of history ; and I defy any man to show that I am not true to the unforced outcome of human nature outside of all the creeds, when I say that a view of all God's attributes humiliates man, puts him out of conceit with his own righteousness, and brings him more and more, even after he has reformed, into fear lest it may not be well with him, because there is a past behind him which ought to be covered. We are made so ; and, when a religion will not work well in those deep hours in which we see the structure of our own souls, I am afraid to take it in my lighter hours. Addison said that a religion should work well in three places, if it is good for any thing, on death-beds, in our highest moments of emotional illumination, and when we are keenest rationally. A religion does not work well anj^where unless in all these three places. Take your scheme of thought that assumes that it is never too late to mend, or that every fall is a fall upward, and bring it face to face with these deepest expressions of human nature, age after age. Does, it work well there in these deepest moments ? If I find, that, age after age, a scheme of thought is not likely to make COMMUNION ■WTTH GOD AS PERSONAL. 243 men better, is not improving society, is not taking hold of bad lives and making them good, that is for me a sufficient proof that it is out of harmony with natural law. If, in the long course of experience, a scheme of thought does not make me better, does not put a bridle upon passion, does not lift me into harmony with all the divine attributes, I know from that fact scientifically that it is out of harmony with the Infinite Oughtness which stands behind the moral law. [Applause.] 2. The only conception of God's character given under heaven or among men, by which a man who worships all God's attributes can be at peace, is Christ's conception. 3. The superiority of Christianity to all schemes of natural religion is, that it presents the idea of God as an Incarnate God and as an Atoning God, and of personal love to that Person as the means of the purification of the world. Christianity does not teach that personal demerit is taken off from us, and put upon our Lord. Such transference is an impossibility in the nature of things. But I hold that Christianity, with the Atone- ment as its central truth, matches the nature of things, and turns exactly in the wards of the human soul. It has, as a theory of religious truth, a scien- tific beauty absolutely beyond all comment. The returned deserter, knowing his own permanent and unremovable personal demerit, may yet be allowed to escape the penalty of the law by the substitution of the king's chastisement for the deserter's punish- 244 TRANSCENDENTALISM. ment ; and tlien that deserter, looking on his king as both his Saviour and Lord, needs no other motive to loyalty than the memory of his unspeakable conde- scension, justice, and love. That memory gives rise to adoration. Whether or not this scheme of thought be the correct one, I am not asking you now to deter- mine ; but certainly it is the most moving, the most natural, and the most qualified to regenerate human nature, of all the schemes the world has seen. I speak of it here and now only as an intellectual sys- tem, and affirm, in the name ai the cool precision of the scientific method, that Christianity, and it only, as a scheme of thought, shows how man ynay look on all God's attributes, and be at peace. It and it only pro- vides for our deliverance from both the love of sin and the guilt of sin. Merely as a school of ideas adapted] to the soul's inmost wants, Christianity is as much above all other philosophy in merit as the noon is more radiant than a rushlight. " The cross," said aj successor of Theodore Parker to me the other day, " is full of the nature of things." God be praised! that this incisively scientific sentence has come from] the lips of a successor of Theodore Parker ! " The cross is not an after-thought." We are to love aj God who from eternity to eternity is our Redeemer : and, looking on him as such, we are to take him aifec- tionately as both Saviour and Lord. Christianit;) includes all ethics ; it teaches adoration before all! the divine attributes ; it is a philosophy ; it is anj art ; it is a growth ; and it is also a revelation of the! nature of things which has no variableness nor shad- COMMUNION WITH GOD AS PERSONAL. 245 ow of turning. But its central thought is that of a Holy Person revealed by the moral law, and at once Redeemer and Lord, and of love for that Person as the means, and the only possible effective means, for the purification of the world. God as an atoning God, God as revealed in history, the Cross full of the nature of things, the personal love of Infinite Perfec- tion as a regenerating bath, this is the beautiful and awful which has triumphed, and will continue to tri- umph. [Applause.] X. THE TRINITY AND TRITHEISM. THE SIXTY-EIGHTH LECTURE IN THE BOSTON MONDAY LEC- TURESHIP, IN TREMONT TEMPLE MARCH 6. I "ovK tx(^ TTpoaEiKuaai, ttuvt' ETnaTad[J.iJfievoc, ttA^v Aibg, ei to fiiiTav and povTidog uxOog XPV jSuXecv eTrjTVjicjg. ov(5' boTtg -nupoiOev rjv fiiyctg, nanjMiX(fi Opaaci (ipvuv, ovdiv av Tl^ai nplv uv, bg 6' etteit' E(pv, ~pia- KTTjpoq olxErni Tvxuv." ^scHTLUs: Agamemnon, 16^171. " Simul quoque cum beatis Aadeamus Glorianter vultum Tuura, Christe Deus, Gaudium quotl est immensum atque probum, Ssecula per infinita sseculorum." Rhythm. Eccl. J X. THE TRINITY AND TRITHEISM. PKELUDE ON CURRENT EVENTS. CrvTL-SERViCE reform is to-day to be nominally, and perhaps really, crowned in Washington. Both political parties have demanded on paper the reforma- tion of our system of giving all political spoils to political victors ; and that reformation we can now have, if Congress and the people are agreed. The executive and legislative powers and popular senti- ment once united, any reform can be carried in the United States. If signs commonly thought sure do not mislead, it may be asserted that popular senti- ment and the Executive are now united in favor of what is known as civil-service reform. This is the best news since Gettysburg. The question now is, whether the upper and nether mill-stones of execu- tive and popular power can grind to pieces any self- ish or obtuse opposition in Congress, or among the placemen of party to this righteous and momentous cause. In expressing a hope that we may return 249 250 TRANSCENDENTALISM. from the Jacksonian to the Jeffersonian and Wash- ingtonian policy in regard to our civil service, I shall offend no man's prejudices. I assume that every one who is disaj)pointed in the result of the presiden- tial contest would be sincerely glad to have all that was promised in the Democratic platform carried out in our politics. I shall also assume, with equal audacity, that every member of the political party now in power holds sincerely the propositions an- nounced in the letter of acceptance of him who is to-day inaugurated as the President of a people who will number fifty millions before his term of office expires. Scholars in politics assuredly are agreed that re- sistance to the crescent and now haughty evils which have arisen from the application of Jacksonian principles to our national politics cannot be made too swift and decisive. I do not couple Jefferson's name with Jackson's ; for the truth is, that we are now beginning to go back from the democracy of Jack- son to that of Jefferson. The action of the latter, so far as the civil service is concerned, was one with the practice of Washington and Adams, Madison and Monroe. Never forget, what cannot be too often repeated, that Washington, in all the eight years of his administration, removed only nine men from office ; Adams, only nine ; Jefferson, thirty- nine, but none for political reasons ; Madison, nine ; Monroe, five ; John Quincy Adams, two ; Jackson, according to his opponents, two thousand, and, according to his own admission, six hundred and THE TRINITY AND TRITHEISM. 251 ninety. (See Greg, Mocks Ahead^ Appendix on American Politics.') * Some of us j-ounger men, who never saw in use in the civil service an}- other than our present spoils system, think that the arrangement by which all political spoils are to be given to political victors is a natural law, and originated in that time when the morning stars sang together — not for joy. jM}- State of New York, empire in both commerce and iniquity, — God save her ! — saw the origination of the spoils system in the factious quarrels between the ius and outs among the Clintons and Livingstons, from 1800 to 1830. Sitting over the mahogany of their dinner-tables, these great aristocratic families of the Hudson distributed offices among their adher- ents according to the principle that to party victors belong party spoils. Rotation in office began to be practised in New York and Pennsylvania near the beginning of the century. It was Jan. 24, 1832, when Marcy, making a speech in the Senate in favor of sending Van Buren to England as an ambassador, first defended in Congress the principle that to po- litical victors belong political spoils. It was Aaron Burr himself, who, in 1815, writing a letter to liis son-in-law, Allston of South Carolina, first sufrsrested for President Andrew Jackson, — one of the bravest, but not one of the broadest, men the world ever saw. No doubt, if Jackson were alive to-day, he would be among the first to seize by the throat the serpent which came out of the egg which was hatched in our national politics in his administration, although 252 TEANSCENDENTALISM. laid first in New- York State. Civil-service reform takes patronage from party, and gives it to the people. It was between 1830 and 1840 that the initiative of the people died out in our national politics. While we were busy with an opening West and with an- thracite coal and railways, and modern political news- papers, and the electric telegraph, and California, the spoils system grew up. An astounding civil war drew on apace. We had no time to study minor dangers ; it was necessary to make Congress strong. In our first centennial year we had eighty thou- sand, and, before a second or third centennial, we shall probably have two hundred thousand or three hundred thousand civil-service offices. Are we to follow the spoils system, and turn out or put in that number of partisan placemen with every change of administration ? If so, we shall do well to remem- ber Macaulay's predictions, that, when the United States have a population of two hundred to the square mile, the Jeffersonian parts of our polity will produce fatal effects. If you think the Jeffersonian will not, ask yourself, face to face with recent events, whether the Jacksonian will. Massachusetts has not yet a population of two hundred to the square mile. But what if the whole land were as thickly settled as Massachusetts, and we were to manage every thing as now, by the Jacksonian rule, that to political vic- tors belong all political spoils ? Twice our land has been washed in blood in the first hundred years of its history ; and yet, after that washing, Lowell calls America the land of broken THE TRIXITY AND TRITHEISM. 253 promise. There is not on the globe a more patriotic poet than he ; and you may count the graves of his relatives who fell in the civil war, if you will go yonder to the eloquent sods the spring is kissing in Mount Auburn. Your Lowell says, and the poem is fit to be read in Boston on this inauguration noon : " The world turns mild. Democracy, the;f say, Hounds the sharp knobs of character away. The Ten Commandments had a meanhig once, Felt in then* bones by least considerate men. Because behind them public conscience stood, And without wincing made their mandates good. But now that statesmanship is just a way To dodge the primal cm-se, and make it pay, . Since office means a kind of patent di'ill To force an entrance to the nation's till; And peculation something rather less Risky than if you spelt it with an S, Now that to steal by law is grown an art. Whom rogues the sii'es, their milder sons call smart." Tempora Mutantur. [Applause.] Remembering that this President who is inaugu- rated to-day went into the civil war, and brought back alive only a third of the officers who enlisted under him ; remembering that he, at least, has not corruptly or even anxiously sought his present higli position, however much there may liave been of greed and fraud behind him in the organization that has elected him ; remembering that he has a charac- ter, a new thing, rather, in high places ; remem- bering that he left Ohio as Lincoln did Illinois, 254 TRANSCENDENTALISM. asking the prayers of all men that the Eternal Providence might watch over his course ; remember- in": that there are things in our land which war could not settle, and which only wise, victorious, patient politics can arrange in a manner to satisfy North and South, East and West alike ; remember- ing especially that this party which the present Chief Magistrate represents has been sixteen years in power, and therefore has presumably had a great deal of temptation [applause], shall we not unite, not only our prayer, but our watching, and send a keen atmosphere of both from the four winds, to breathe on our legislative power, till the civil-ser- vice practice of Washington and Jefferson shall start up as a flame from its dying embers, and, fed by the colossal fuel of our new political conditions, become once more the light and the glad fireside of the land ; and Macaulay and observant Europe, as they gaze into our future, can have on this point no more ground for fear ? [Applause.] THE LECTURE. There is a dim twilight of religious experience in which the soul easily mistakes Ossa and Parnassus for Sinai and Calvary. ]\Iy feeling is, that orthodoxy itself lives much of the time in this undispersed twi- lisfht : and that the unscientific and lawless liberal- ism of many half-educated people who have lost the Master's whii3 of small cords, believe in aesthetic, but not in moral law, and proclaim, that, in the last analy- sis, there is in this universe nothing to be feared (Dr. THE TRINITY AND TEITHEISM. 255 Bartol says so), and therefore, we must add, nothing to be loved ! — is always in an earlier and deeper shadow of that misleading haze. The graj^ brindled dawn is better than night ; but the risen sun is better than the gray, brindled dawn. We must startle mere aesthetics and literary religiosity out of its dream that it is religion, by exhibiting before it the difference between the admiration and the adora- tion of the attributes of the Holy Person the moral law reveals. If any who are orthodox in their thoughts worship in their imagination three different beings, they, too, must be startled from this remnant of Paganism by a stern use of the scientific method. As Carlyle says of America, so I of this hushed, reverent discussion, — do not judge of the structure while the scaffolding is up. A glimpse only of the opening of the unfathomable theme which the dis- tinction between the Tri-unity of the Divine Nature and Tritheism suggests can be given here and now; and more than this will be expected by no scholar. Reserving qualifications for later occasions, I jour- posely present to-day only an outline unobscured by detail. I know what I venture in definition and illustration ; but I am asking no one to take my opinions. Nevertheless, in order yet further to save time, I am to cast myself abruptly into the licart of this topic, and to give you personal conviction. After all, that is what serious men want from each other ; and the utterance of it is not egotism in you or in me. It is the shortest way of coming at men's hearts, and it is sometimes the shortest wi.y in 256 TRANSCENDENTALISM. wliicli to come at men's heads, to tell what you per- sonally are willing to take the leap into the Unseen, depending upon. What is the definition of the Trinity ? 1. The Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost are one and only one God. 2. Each has a peculiarity incommunicable to the others. 3. Neither is God without the others. 4. Each, with the others, is God. That I suppose to be the standard definition ; and, if you will examine it, you will find it describing neither three separate individualities, nor yet three mere modes of manifestation ; that is, neither tri- theism nor modalism. In God are not three wills, three consciences, three intellects, three sets of affec- tions. The first of all the religious truths of exact research is that the Lord our God is one God. It is the immemorial doctrine of the Christian ages, that there are not three Gods, but only one God (Athana- sian Creed). He is one substance, and in that one substance are three subsistences ; but the subsistences are not individualities. All the great symbols teach decisively that we must not unify the subsistences ; but with equal decisiveness they affirm that we must not divide the substance. In our present low estate as human, we find by the experience of centuries that we do well to heed both these injunctions, and to look on the Divine Nature on all the sides on which it has revealed itself, if we would not fall into the narrowness of materialism on the one hand, or THE TRINITY AND TEITHEISM. 257 into the vague ways of tritheism or pantheism on the other. How shall we make clear in our intellectual and emotional experiences the truth of the Trinity, and at the same time keep ourselves in the attitude of those who worship one God, and who therefore do not break, or wish to break, with science, and yet in the position of those who, in the one substance, worship three subsistencies, and therefore do not break, or wish to break, with the very significant record of the most fruitful portion of the church through eighteen hundred years ? For one, accepting the definition of the Trinity which I have now given as neither tritheistic nor modalistic, — if the learned men here will allow me for once to use technical language, — I per- sonally find no difficulty in this doctrine in the shape of self-contradiction in either thought or terms ; and I find infinite advantages in it when I wish to con- join biblical and scientific truth as a transfiguration for life. It is sometimes despairingly said, that the doctrine of the Trinity cannot be illustrated ; and this is true. It is the proverb of philosophy, that no comparison walks on four feet ; and what I am about to say you will take as intended by me to exhibit only the par- allelisms which I point out. I am responsible for no unmentioned point in a comparison. No doubt you can find as many places where the illustration I am to use will not agree with the definition as I can places where it does agree. Nevertheless, after dwell- ing on perhaps a hundred other illustrations, my own 258 TRANSCENDENTALISM. thoughts oftenest, and with most of reverence, come back to this. Take the mysterious, palpitating radiance which at this instant streams through the solar windows of this Temple, and may we not say, for the sake of illus- tration, that it is one substance ? Can you not affirm, however, that there are in it three subsistencies ? It would be possible for me, by a prism here, to pro- duce the seven colors on a screen yonder. I should have color there, and heat here, and there would be luminousness everywhere. But in color is a property incommunicable to mere luminousness or to heat. In luminousness is a property incommuni- cable to mere heat or to color. In heat is a property incommunicable to mere color or to luminousness. These three — luminousness, color, heat — are, how- ever, one solar radiance. Heat subsists in the solar radiance, and color subsists in the solar radiance, and light subsists in the solar radiance. The three are one ; but they are not one in the same sense in which they are three. It is one of the inexcusable mistakes of a silly kind of scepticism, which no one here holds, that there are in the Trinity three persons in the literal or colloquial sense of that word. Sometimes with tears, and sometimes with laughter, one pauses over this astounding passage, printed in his manhood by Thomas Paine, in his Age of Reason ; and yet what he heard read was, I presume, an atrociously careless orthodox discussion. THE TRINITY AND TRITHEISM. 259 " I well remember, when about seven or eight years of age, hearmg a sermon read by a relation of mine, who was a great devotee of the church, upon the subject of what is called redemp- tion by the death of the Son of God. After the sermon was ended, I went into the garden ; and, as I was going down the garden-steps (for I perfectly recollect the spot), I revolted at the recollection of what I had heard, and thought to myself that it was making God Almighty act like a passionate man that killed his son when he could not revenge himself any other way; and, as I was sure a man would be hanged that did such a thing, I could not see for what puqiose they preached such sermons. This was not one of those kind of thoughts that had any thing in it of child- ish levity: it was to me a serious reflection, arising from the idea I had, that Grod was too good to do such an action, and also too almighty to be under any necessity of doing it. I believe in the same manner at this moment. . . . The Christian mytholo- gy has five deities; there is God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Ghost, the God Providence, and the Goddess Nature. But the Clu-istian story of God the Father putting his Son to death, or employing people to do it (for that is the plain language of the stor}^) , cannot be told by a parent to a child ; and to tell him that it was done to make mankind happier and better is making the stoiy still worse, as if mankind could be improved by the example of murder " (Age of Reason, part i.). There is nothing in Paine's Age of Reason worth glancing at now, except this curious paragraph, in which he details the circumstances of the life-long unconscious obtuseness and ignorance out of which arose his opposition to Christianity. Possibly, if he had understood the distinction between the Trinity in God's nature and tritheism, this sharp and crac- kling pamphleteer for freedom, in spite of his narrow brow and coarse fibre, would not have fallen into (his amazing error, which, according to his own account, 260 TEANSCENDENTALISM. underlay all his subsequent career as an infidel. Three separate beings, he thought, Christianity teaches us to believe exist in one God, and one enraged person of these three had murdered another person. But scholars as a mass, following St. Augustine, centuries before poor Paine's day, copiously affirmed that the word person in the discussion of the Trinity does not mean what it does in colloquial speech. The word in its technical use is fifteen hun- dred years old ; and it means in that use now what it meant at first. How commonplace is St. Augustine's remark, repeated by Calvin, that this term was adopted because of the poverty of the Latin tongue ! Every- body of authority tells us,, if you care for scholarly statement, that three persons never meant, in the standard discussions of this truth, three personalities ; for these would be three Gods. This Latin word persons is incalculably misleading in popular use on this theme. For one, I never employ it, although willing to use it if it is understood as it was by those who invented the term. Let us use Archbishop Whatelev's word " subsistence ; " for that is the equivalent of the carefully-chosen, sharply-cut, Greek term " hypostasis " (^Note to Whateley's Treatise on Logic). We had better say there are in one sub- stance three subsistences, and not mislead our gen- eration, with its heads in newspapers and ledgers, by using a phrase that was meant to be current only among scholars. All these scholars will tell you THE TEIXITY AXD TKITHEISM. 261 that it is no evasion of the difficulties of this theme for me to tlirow out of this discussion at once the word persons as misleading ; for that word had originally no such meaning in the Latin tongue as the word j^erson has in our own. Cicero says, U(jo umis, sustineo tres personas : I, being one, sustain tliree characters, — my own, that of my client, and that of the judge. Our English language at this point is, as the Latin was not, rich enough to match the old Greek. With Liddon's Bampton Lectures on " The Divinity of our Lord," the best English book on this theme, though not exhaustive of it, let us say, " One substance and three subsistences," and thus go back to the Greek phrase, and be clear. Can the four propositions of the definition I have given be paralleled by an illustration ? 1. Sunlight, the rainbow, and the heat of sunlight, are one solar radiance. 2. Each has a peculiarity incommunicable to the others. 3. Neither is full solar radiance without the others. 4. Each with the others is such solar radiance. Sunlight, rainbow, heat, one solar radiance ; Fa- ther, Son, Holy Ghost, one God ! 1. As the rainbow shows what light is when un- folded, so Christ reveals the nature of God. 2. As all of the rainbow is sunlight, so all of Christ's divine soul is God ! 3. As the rainbow was when the light was, or from eternity, so Christ was when the Father was, or from eternity. 2G2 TEANSCENDENTALISM. 4. As the bow may be on the earth and the sun In the sky, and yet the solar radiance remain undi- vidso. *so God may remain in heaven, and appear on ear'^h as Christ, and his oneness not be divided. 6. As the perishable raindrop is used in the revela- tion of the rainbow, so was Christ's body in the reve- lation to men of God in Christ. 6. As at the same instant the sunlight is itself, and also the rainbow and heat, so at the same moment Christ is both himself and the Father, and both the Father and the Holy Ghost. 7. As solar heat has a peculiarity incommunicable to solar color, and solar color a peculiarity incom- municable to solar light, and solar light a peculiarity incommunicable to either solar color or solar heat, so each of the three — the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost — has a peculiarity incommunicable to either of the others. 8. But as solar light, heat, and color are one solar radiance, so the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost are one God. 9. As neither solar heat, light, nor color is itself without the aid of the others, so neither Father, Son, nor Holy Ghost is God without the others. 10. As solar heat, light, and color are each solar radiance, so Father, Son, and Holy Ghost are each God. 11. As the solar rainbow fades from sight, and its light continues to exist, so Christ ceases to be mani- fest, and yet is present. 12. As the rainbow issues from sunlight, and re- THE TRINITY AND TRITHEISM. 2G3 turns to the general bosom of the radiance of the sky. so Christ comes from the Father, appears for a while, and returns, and yet is not absent from the earth. 13. As the influence of the heat is that of the light of the sun, so are the operations of the IIol}'' Spirit Christ's continued life. 14. As is the relation of all vegetable growths to solar light and heat, so is the relation of all religious growths in general history, in the church, and in the individual, to the Holy Spirit, a present Christ. It was my fortune once, on an October Sabbath evening, to stand alone at the grave of Wordsworth, in green Grasmere, in the English lake district, and to read there the Ode on Immortality, which your Emerson calls the highest-water mark of modern poetry and philosophy. While my eyes were fas- tened on the page, the sun was setting behind the gnarled, inaccessible English cliffs, not far away to the west, and a colossal rainbow was spread over the azure of the sky, and the glowing purple and brown of the heathered hills in the east. A light rain fell on me, and with my own tears wet the pages of the poet. What, now, if some one, as I worshipped there, had come to me, in a holy of holies in my life, and had said roughly, in Thomas Paine's wa}^ " You believe in five Gods; you are not scientific"? Or what if some one had said, in Parker's way, " The perfection of God has never been accepted by any sect in the Christian world. In the Ecclesiastic conception of Deity there is a fourth person, tlic 264 TEANSCEISTDEXTALISM. Devil, as much a part of Deity as either Son or Holy Ghost" (Weiss's Life of Parker, vol. ii. p. 470). " Vicarious atonement teaches salvation without morality, only by belief in absurd teaching " (Ibid., p. 497). "According to the popular theology there are three acknowledged persons in the Godhead. God the Father is made to appear remarkable for three things, — great power, great selfishness, and great destructiveness. The Father is the grimmest object in the universe " (^Sermons on Theism^ p. 101). "He is the Draco of the universe, — more cruel than Odin or Baal, — the author of sin, but its unforgiving avenger. Men rush from the Father ; they flee to the Son." "The popular theology makes Jesus a God, and does not tell us of God now near at hand. Science must lay his kingly head in the dust. Rea- son veil her majestic countenance. Conscience bow him to the earth, Affection keep silence, when the priest uplifts the Bible " (^Discourses on Religion^ pp. 425-427). How would all that speech of the Parkers and the Paines have- jarred upon my soul, if standing there alone in a strange land, and at the grave of Words- worth, I had heard the profane collision of their accusations with the holy sentences of this seer, fed from the cradle to the tomb upon Christian truth ! If, at Wordsworth's grave, disturbed by such ghoulish attack, I had needed a spell to disperse the accusa- tions, what better Procul, procul, este profani could I have chosen than these words, once uttered in this THE TRINITY AND TRITHEISM. 265 city by a renowned teacher of this accused theology, a man of Avhom it might be said, as he once said of Jonathan Edwards, that he might have been the first poet of his nation, if he had not chosen to be its first theologian ! [Applause.] A majestic discourse delivered at the installation of the revered pastor of the Old South Church yon- der says, " Other men may be alone ; but the Chris- tian, wherever he moves, is near to his JMaster. Every effect is the result of some free will ; but many effects withhi and without us are not produced by a created will : therefore they are produced by an uncreated. On the deep sea, under the venerable oak, in the pure air of the mountain-top, the Chris- tian communes with the Father of spirits, who is the Saviour of men. All ethical axioms are his reve- lation of himself to his children. Their innocent joys are his words of good cheer. Their deserved sorrows are his loud rebukes." In these words of Professor Park, a benighted believer in three Gods, as you say [applause], is God afar off? Are there three Gods here? Does Science bow her head. Affection grow dumb. Reason muffle her face, as this priest lifts up the Bible ? As the rainbow shows the inner structure of the light, so the character of our Lord shows the inner moral nature of God, so far as that can be known to man. A rainbow is unravelled light, is it not? It was assuredly better for me at Wordsworth's grave to lof)k on the bow I saw in the East than to gaze on tlie white radiance that fell on the poet's page, 266 TKANSCEKDENTALISM. when I wished to behold the fullest glory of the light. So assuredly it is better for us to gaze on God's character as revealed in Christ than on God's character as revealed in his works merely, if we would understand God's nature. As the rainbow is unrav- elled light, so Christ is unravelled God. At Words- worth's grave I might have heard these hoarse voices from the Paines and the Parkers, and these softer, and I think more penetratingly human ones from the Words worths and the Parks ; but, in the name of the scientific method, it would have been impossible not to have asserted in my soul that the God who was revealed in Christ was, and is, and is to come ; for there is but one God, and he was, and is, and is to come ; and, therefore, when the bow faded from the East, I did not think that it had ceased to be. It had not been annihilated ; it had been revealed for a while, and, disappearing, it was received back into the bosom of the general radiance, and yet continued to fall upon the earth. In every beam of white light there is potentially all the color which we find un- ravelled in the rainbow; and so in all the pulsations in the will of God the Father in his works, exist the pulsations of the heart of Him who wept over Jeru- salem, and on whose bosom once the beloved disciple leaned ; for there is but one God, who was, and is, and is to come ; and on the same bosom we bow our heads whenever we bow our foreheads upon that Sinai within us which we call the moral law. [Applause.] The Holy Spirit to me is Christ's continued life. But you say, my friends, that this may be philo- THE TKIXITY AND TRITHEISM. 267 sophical, but that it is not biblical truth. You affirm that I teach m3'self this by science rather than by Scripture. Gentlemen, under the noon of New-Eng- land philosophical and biblical culture, and in pres- ence of I know not Low many who dissent, I ask you to decide for yourselves what the Scriptures really teach as to the unity of the three subsistences in that Divine Nature which was, and is, and is to come. Assuredly you will be ready, in the name of literary science, to cast at least one searching glance upon this whole theme from the point of view of exclu- sively biblical statement. " It is expedient for you that I go away. I have yet many things to say unto you. I will not leave you orphans. I am coming to you. A little while and ye shall not see me, and again a little while and ye shall see me, because I go to the Father." They who heard these sentences said, " A little while and ye shall not see me, and again a little while and ye ■ shall see me, and because I go to the Father? What is this he saith? We cannot tell what he saith." But there came a later day, when lie who had made that promise breathed upon them, and said, ''Receive ye the gift of the Holy Ghost." We shall not be here, all of us will be mute, and most of us forgotten, when, in a better age, the meaning of that symbolic act of the Author of Christianity is fathomed. Next there came a day when there was a sound as of a rushing, mighty wind ; and this filled all the house where they who liad witnessed that act were sitting. This is but the experience of many nations 268 TKANSCENDEXTALISM. since then, — the rushing sound of a new influence in human history, quickening human consciences, transforming bad lives into good, but, until that time, never felt in the world in deluges, although it had appeared in streams. When that influence came, what was the interpretation put upon it by the scriptural writers ? Peter, standing up, said, " We heard, from him whom we know that God has raised from the dead, the promise of the Holy Ghost. He hath shed forth this ; therefore, let Jerusalem know assuredly that God hath made him Lord." I call that Peter's colossal therefore. It is the strongest word in the first oration delivered in the defence of Christianity. The Holy Spirit was prom- ised ; it has been poured out : therefore, let those who receive it know that the power behind natural law — our Lord who was, and is, and is to come — is now breathing upon the centuries as he breathed upon us symbolically. He has shed forth this : therefore, let all men know assuredly that God hath made him Lord. When they who were assembled in Jerusalem at that time heard this therefore^ they were pricked in the heart. I affirm that it is incontrovertible, that the New- Testament writers, everywhere with Stephen, gaze steadfastly into heaven, and behold our Lord, not in Galilee, not on the Mount of Olives, but at the right hand of the Father. Our imagination always looks eastward through England, as through the East win- dow of a cathedral ; and so we look out through vapor sometimes, through literalness, or through material- THE TRINITY AND TEITHEISM. 269 istic haze, thicker than vapor occasionally ; and we have not strength of imagination or fervor of spirit enough to understand this literature of the East, on the face of which the world has gazed eighteen hundred years, and seen its face to be like that of Stephen, as the face of an angel, and from the same cause. The whole New Testament, being full of the Holy Ghost, gazes, not as England and America do, into Gethsemane, or upon any sacred mount, but into heaven, and beholds our Lord at the right hand of the Father. I have bowed down upon the Mount of Olives, I have had unreportable experiences in the Garden of Gethsemane, and on the banks of Jor- dan, and on the white, sounding shore of Galilee, and on Lebanon, and on Carmel, and on Tabor ; and God forbid that I should underrate at all a religion that reverences sacred places ; but, of these sacred places the New Testament proclaims, " He is not here : he has arisen and is ascended." It nowhere exhibits our narrowness of outlook. What if, under the dome of St. Peter's, there were but four windows ? What if children were broucrht up to look out yonder upon the Apennines, and here upon the Mediterranean, and there upon the Coli- seum, and here upon St. Onofrio's oak, under which Tasso sung? If children were brought up before these windows, and did not pass from one to the other, they might possibly think the outlook from each one was Italy ; and so it is ; but it is only a part of Italy. We are poor children, brought up, some of us, before the window of science, some of us 270 TEANSCENDEXTALISM. before the window of art, some of us before the window of politics, some of us before the window of biblical inculcation ; and we say in petulant tones to each other, each at his accustomed outlook, "This is Italy." What is Italy? Sweep off the dome, and answer, " There is but one sky." [Ap- plause.] And that and all beneath it is Italy. As a fact in literature, it must be affirmed that this is the central thought of the New-Testament Scriptures. We find, that, when one called Saul of Tarsus jour- neyed to Damascus, — this is trite, because eighteen hundred years have heard it, and the trite is the important thing in history, — he heard, from a light above the brightness of this noon, the words, " I am Jesus ; " and so, later on, Paul ^vrote, that " we, be- holding, as in a glass, the glory of the Lord, are changed with the same image from glory to glory as by the Lord the Spirit." " The Spirit is the Lord," was St. Augustine's reading of Paul's words. So, in the last pages of Revelation, I find that he who was the beloved disciple was in the Spirit on the Lord's Day, and that he beheld " one whose voice was like unto the sound of many waters, and whose countenance was as the sun shineth in his strengfth." " When I saw him," says this great poet and prophet and apostle, " I, who have been called a son of thun- der ; I who, when Cerinthus was in the same bath with me, cried out. Away, thou heretic ! I who have been ready at any time to suffer martyrdom, — I fell at his feet as dead. He laid his right hand on me, say- TEDS TRINITY AND TRITHEISM. 271 ing unto me, fear not ; I am the first and the last ; I am he that liveth, and was dead ; behokl I am alive forevermore, and have the keys of life and of death." It is significant beyond comment, that our Lord was often called " The Spirit," and " The Spirit of God," by the earlier Christian writers. " The Son is the Holy Spirit " is a common expression, Ignatius said, " Christ is the Immaculate Spirit " (^Ad Smijm. init.}. Tertullian wrote, " The Spirit of God and the Reason of God — Word of Reason, and Reason and Spirit of Word — Jesus Christ our Lord, who is both the one and the other " {Be Orat. init.') Cyprian and Irenceus said, " He is the Holy Spirit." (See Delitzsch's Sijstem of Biblical Psycliology.^ Neander, in paraphrase of Peter's oration, says, in summarizing the New-Testament literature, " From the extraordinary appearances which have filled you with astonishment, you perceive, that, in his glorified state, he is now operating with divine energy among those who believe in him. The heavenly Father has promised that the jNIessiah shall fill all who believe on him with the power of the Divine Sj)irit, and this promise is now being fulfilled. Learn, then, from tliese events, in which you behold the prophecies of the Old Testament fulfilled, the nothingness of all that you have attempted against him, and know that God has exalted Him whom you crucified to be Mes- siah, the ruler of God's kingdom ; and that, through Divine Power, he will overawe all his enemies." (Neander, Planting of Christianity, Bohn's edition, i. 19. Summary of Peter's speech in Acts ii.) 272 TRANSCENDENTALISM. So Alford writes, " Christ is tlie Spirit ; is identical with the Holy Spirit, not personally nor essentially, but (as is shown by the spirit of the Lord following) in this department of his divine working : Christ here is the Spirit of Christ " (^Remarks on 2 Cor. iii. 17). Lange, writing on the same passage of this litera- ture, adds, " We find here such an identification of Christ and the Holy Spirit, that the Lord to whom the heart turns is in no practical respect different from the Holy Spirit received in conversion. Christ is virtually the Spirit. The Holy Spirit is his spirit " (Lange, 2 Cor. iii. 17, 18). What if Peter at Antioch had beheld the earliest triumphs of Christianity under persecution, and had heard the story of the martyrdoms which became the seed of the church, and caused Christians to be called by that name, and that shot througli with hope the unspeakable despair of Homan Paganism as by the first rays of the dawn, could he not, looldng on Leba- non and Tabor, on Jerusalem and Galilee, have said, " He hath shed forth this advance of Christianity in h Liman affairs ? God has a plan, and he thus reveals it. God is giving triumph to Christianity : therefore let Lebanon and Tabor, let Jerusalem and Galilee, know assuredly that God hath made our Lord the Lord of the Roman earth indeed, and that the influ- ence of the Holy Ghost is Christ's continued life." What if, later, when Christianity had ascended the throne of the Cfesars, Peter had stood on the Tiber, and had beheld philosophy, little by little, permeated THE TRINITY AND TRITHEISM. 273 by Christianity ? What if he had looked back on the persecutions and martyrdoms which gave purity and power to early Christianity, and which make her record, even to your infidel Gibbon, venerable be- yond comment ? Could not Peter, there on the Tiber, have said, looking on the Apennines and Vesuvius and the Mediterranean, and on Egypt, " Let Rome and the Tiber, let Alexandria and the Nile, know as- suredly, since our Lord — who was, and is, and is to come — hath shed forth this, that he is Lord" ? What if, later, Peter, standing on the Bosphorus, when Rome had lost her footing on the Tiber, had beheld the rushing in of the Turks to pulverize the sunrise foot of old Rome ; what if he had remem- bered the day, when, standing on two feet, Rome, planting herself on both the Tiber and the Bospho- rus, folded her arms, and looked at the North Star, and proclaimed herself likely to be as eternal as that stellar light ; what if, remembering all that had come, and all that had gone, he had beheld that Colossus topple toward the West, smite itself into pieces on the Alps, and fall in fragments on the Rhine, on the Elbe, on the Oder, some pieces scattered across the howling North Sea to the Thames, and to the sites of Oxford and Cambridge, these fragments of old Rome, built up in these places into universities which caused at last the illumination which brought the Reforma- tion ; what if Peter, beholding thus the Greeks driven toward the sunset, and old Rome becoming seed for the Reformation, had stood on the Seine, on the Elbe, on the Oder, and had witnessed the varied progress 274 TRANSCEXDEXTALISM. of the ideas of Him who affirmed once that he had many things yet to say, — might not Peter there, side by side with Luther, have said once more, " He hath shed forth this : therefore, let the Alps and the Rhine and the Seine and the Elbe, the Thames and the German Sea, know assuredly that this Gulf Cur- rent in human history, now two thousand years old, is not an accident [applause] ; that it means all it expresses ; for what God does, he from the first in- tends to do? He who has thus watched over the cause of Christian truth, and has been breathing the Holy Ghost upon the nations, hath shed forth this ; and, therefore, let Berlin and Paris and London, and Oxford and Cambridge, know assuredly that God hath made him Lord." What if, later, when the tempest of persecution, rising out of the sunrise, smote upon those universi- ties, and blew the INIayflower across the sea, Peter had taken position in that vessel, as its billowing, bellying, bellowing sails fled across the great deep in the icy breath of that time ; and what if he had seen, on the deck of that Mayflower, a few rush- lights taking their gleam from those universities, themselves illumined by the fire that fell at Pente- cost? What if Peter, afterward, standing on Plym- outh Rock, had seen these rush-lights kindling others, and a line of rush-lights, representing the same illumination of the Holy Spirit, go out into our wilderness, until they glass themselves in the Con- necticut and in the Hudson, and in the eyes of the wild beasts of the murmuring pines and hemlocks, THE TRINITY AND TRITHEISM. 275 and in the eternal roar of Niagara, and in the Great Lakes, and in the Mississippi, and in the springs of the Sierras, and at last in the soft, hissing foam of the Pacific seas; what if, beholding these rush-lights thus carried across a continent by. divine guidance, Peter had stood here, — would not the force of his word therefore have had new emphasis as he should have said, " He hath shed forth this : therefore, let Boston, let New York, let Chicago, let San Francisco, let the surf of the Bay of Fundy, let the Avaterfalls of the Yosemite, know assuredly that God hath made him.Lord"? But what if, when a tempest sprung out of the South, and these rush-lights were, I will not say ex- tinguished, but all bent to the earth, and painfully tried, some "of them blown out, he had beheld the lights, little by little, after the tempest had gone down, begin to be carried southward, and at last glass themselves in the steaming bayous and the Gulf? what if, although some had been extmguished for- ever, he had seen them shining on the breaking of the fetters of three million slaves? what if the churches, when the tempest ceases, grow brighter in their assertion of the value of their light, and are filling the land with its influence, and, if God con- tinues to illumine them, will make the rush-lights glass themselves yet in all the streams, in all the springs, and in all the sprays on all the shores of all the land, — could not he, looking on such results in a territory greater than Rome ever ruled over, have said, " He hath shed forth this : therefore, let America know as- suredly that God hath made him Lord " ? 276 TRANSCENDENTALISM. But what if, lastly, Peter had beheld a rush-light taken across the Pacific to the Sandwich Islands, and one to Japan, and one to China, and one to India, and had seen the soft rolling globe enswathed in all its zones by rush-lights bearing the very flames which fell at Pentecost, and beaten on, indeed, by persecu- tion here and there, but not likely to be beaten on ever again as fiercely as they have been already ; not likely to be blown out everywhere, even if they are in some places, and thus ensphering the globe so that it is not probable at all, under the law of the survival of the fittest, that they will be put out [applause] , — could not Peter, then, looking on what God has done, and what he therefore intended to do ; looking on the incontrovertible fact, that the islands of the sea and the continents have been coming to prefer Christian thought, and seem likely to remain under its influ- ence, — could he not, while standing on scientific and biblical ground at once, have affirmed in the name both of science and of Scripture the transfiguring truth, " He hath shed forth this : therefore, let Asia on the Himalaya tops, let Europe in the Parthenon and Coliseum, let London's mystic roar, let the New World in her youthful vigor, let all the islands of the sea, know assuredly that the fittest has survived, and that the fittest will survive ; and that God hath made him Lord who is fittest to be so " ? All the seas, in all their waves, on all their shores, would an- swer to such an assertion, Hallelujah ! So be it. The influences of the Holy Spirit are Christ's continaed life. [Applause.] XL FEAGMENTARINESS OF OUTLOOK UPON THE DI- VINE NATURE. THE SIXTY-NINTH LECTURE IN THE BOSTON MONDAY LEC- TUKESHIP, DELIVERED IN TREMONT TEMPLE MARCH 12. " Vox nostra quae sit accipe. Est Christus et Pater Deus: Servi hujus ac testes sumus; Extorque si i)otes fidem. Tormenta, career, ungulae Stridensque flammis lamina Atque ipsa poenarum ultima; Mors Christianis Indus est." Prud. Peristeph. Hymn, 5. 57. " Dens antem et Pater Domini nostri Jesu Christi, et ipse Sempi- ternns Pontifex, Dei Filius Jesus Christus, sedificet vos in fide et veritate et in omni mansuetudine, . . . et det vobis sortem et partem inter sanctos suos." — Polycarp, ad Phil., 12. XI. FRAGMENTARINESS OF OUTLOOK UPON THE DIVINE NATURE. PRELUDE ON CURKENT EVENTS. In 1640 the whole population of New England was English, and consisted of only about four thou- sand families, or twenty thousand persons. Bancroft points out, that, after the first fifteen years following the landing on Plymouth Rock, there was no consid- erable addition from England. Your Palfrey shows, that, for one hundred and fifty years, the four thou- sand families multiplied in remarkable seclusion from other communities, and that it is only within the last fifty years that the foreigners have come. New Eng- land is clianging the character of her population to such an extent, that we must now look for the de- scendants of those who crossed in the Mayflower, not so much on the Atlantic slope as in the Missis- sippi valley and on the Pacific coast. It is not true that New England is becoming New Ireland ; but it 279 280 TRANSCENDENTALISM. is hardly epigrammatic to say that manufacturing New England is New Ireland already. Perhaps we shall do well to remember, that, while the population of the manufacturing centres of New England is increasing with extraordinary rapidity, that of the agricultural and commercial districts is fluctuating, and, in many cases, on the decrease. The distinctions between the rich and poor are becoming wider in the manufacturing districts. This is partly the unavoidable result of the natural growth of the power of capital. It is, in part, the consequence of the massing of men in cities as distinct from small towns. It is, to some extent, the effect of the organi- zation of manufacturing industry in great corpora- tions on the one side, and an operative population on the other. It is, in large measure, the result of the fact, that, in the manufacturing districts of New Eng- land, a vastly greater proportion of the population is now of foreign descent than fifty years ago. The two most typical things in the territory east of the Hudson are the college bell and the factory chimney. The first New England was a church; the second New England is to be a factory. What is the worth of the church to the working- man? Look at the seven cities on the Merrimack River. I often hang in imagination over that stream as the best emblem of the industrial life of Eastern New England. Child of the White Mountains and the Pemigewasset, the Merrimack rushes under the spin- dles of seven cities to the sea, — Concord, Manches- OUTLOOK UPON THE DIVINE NATURE. 281 ter, Nashua, Lowell, Lawrence, Haverhill, Newbury- port, — doing more work than any other river of its size in the world, and typical more and more of the future into which our Atlantic New-England slope is drifting. These seven cities have in the aggregate, in the last twenty years, more than doubled in wealth and population. Romish cathedral churches are ris- ing in our manufacturing centres, and are not likely to be empty. But, under the voluntary system, many of our Protestant churches are looked upon by a portion of the operatives as close corporations. When a church is not mossy, it is aristocratic, our working- men too often think ; and so our floating, unchurched populations are coming to be very large in our factory centres. If I were a working-man, I presume I should want fair play between employers and employed. I think I should care for my children, and desire to have a better place for them than Old England gives the very youngest at the factory-wheel. It seems almost incredible, that some of the acutest members of our Protestant foctory-population are falling into neglect of the church, when it is certain that only by the diffusion of conscientiousness among the laboring- classes can co-operation ever succeed ; and that con- scientiousness will not be diffused without the use of means which the Church herself employs none too thoroughly, but which no other organization pretends to employ at all as a permanent system for the cul- ture of society. Can co-operation ever succeed, un- less there are large numbers of honest men in society ? 282 TEANSCENDENTALISM. How are these to be made ? In commerce you want a revival of business. You want, therefore, a revival of undefiled religion. How are you to have that, if 3^ou are to neglect, I will not say this or that branch of the church, but the church as a whole ? If you are to shut the doors of God's house on the Sabbath, how are you to be sure that diffusion of conscien- tiousness will come ? Why do not working-men see the great impropriety of their neglecting the church, and that the church is made up of men, many of whom have risen from the bench of the shoemaker, or from the wheel of the operative ? Our New-Eng- land society is not divided into hereditary and fixed classes. We must look on our churches as the work of the people ; and it is not American for a portion of our New-England population to regard our churches as aristocratic machines. Perhaps some of them are ; I am not defending the whole list of them ; but most of them, I think ninety out of a hundred, are eager to be of service in the diffusion of consci- entiousness, and all culture and comfort, among the factory population, and in the beating down of all the walls of division between the workmen and their employers. [Applause.] You want arbitration committees ; you want fair consultation between capital and labor ? Bring your whole population together once a week in the church, where all class-walls are, or ought to be, broken down. [Applause.] I am not speaking of all the churches ; for God has not granted to all men the capacity to burst asunder the silken bonds of luxury : OUTLOOK UPON THE DIVIXE NATURE. 283 he has to some men, and to some who are very- weal thy. But the most of our churches m New England were built by the people, and come from the hearts of the average population ; and it is abso- lutely suicidal for the working-man to let his chil- dren grow up without the religious culture of the church. [Applause.] Have you ever heard that the Sabbath schools have been greatly improved in the last fifty years ? There is a liberal denomination which lately has been issuing Sabbath-school volumes with questions about the relations between religion and science. I thank God for that step in advance. Let it be understood that the Sabbath school is now a better thing than it used to be, and that you cannot let your children stay out of it without putting them behind other children. Do you wish to have that spirit of good sense pervade the community which you would like to find in the arbitration board? You will never have it, unless you take possession of the church and of the ministry. The latter are rather a numerous and well-educated class, and they have much oppor- tunity to study public questions : why cannot you win them to y^our side ? [Applause.] There is a strategic act for workingmen to do on the JNIerri- mack ! [Applause.] When you and I are no longer in the world, the supreme question in New-England civilization will be how to make Plymouth Rock the corner-stone of a factory. [Applause.] Do not say that I am uttering any thing irreverent, when I speak of that 284 TRAJSrSCENDENTALISM. sacred spot on the shore yonder as fit to be the begmning of the newest New England, as it was of the earliest. Plymouth Rock was the corner-stone of the first New England : shall it be the corner- stone of the second ? Where are the builders that shall place that jagged and fundamental rock in line with the other stones of the wall ? Shall we hew the factory to make it fit Plymouth Rock, or Plj^m- outh Rock to fit the factor}^ ? God send us no future into which Plymouth Rock cannot be built unhewn ! [Applause.] You think it is a very unpoetic, prosaic fact, that New England is to be a factory. Goethe, our modern philosopher and poet, used to say the sound of spindles in Manchester was the most poetic sound of this century. Not every man has Goethe's ears. He foresaw the time when a greater proportion than now of the population of the world will be in cities, and when the most numerous inhabitants in cities will be of the opera- tive class. Thomas Carlyle says somewhere, " Have you ever listened to the awakening of Manchester in Old England at half-past five by the clock? ten thousand times ten thousand looms and spindles all set moving there, like the broom of an Atlantic tide. It is, if you think of it, sublime as Niagara, or more so." Sometimes I have repeated to myself these words when awaking in the gray morning on Beacon Hill, as I have listened to the factory bells, and allowed imagination to move up the Merrimack, past Newburyport, Haverhill, and Lawrence and Lowell, and Manchester and Concord, and to see the crowds of OUTLOOK UPON THE DIVINE NATURE. 285 the operative class coining out in streams in the early dawn. It is sublime, and it is to be more and more sublime as the years pass ? But only the church, cap- tured by the working-men, and able to capture the •working-men in return, can prevent in our free so- ciety, when once New England is crowded with manu- facturing centres, those collisions between capital and labor which have arisen in the Old World. [Ap- plause.] You never can bridge the chasm between capital and labor here by a kid glove. [Applause.] You never can bridge it with the bayonet. [Ap- plause.] In the Old World it has been bridged by the bayonet on the continent and by the kid glove in England ; but in New England the only bridge that will cross that chasm is popular, scientific, aggressive, deadly Christianity, laid on the buttresses of the Sabbaths and the common schools. [Ap- plause.] THE LECTURE. The River Rhine is a majestic stream, until, in the Netherlands of the North Sea shore, it divides into shallows and swamps and steaming oozes. Man's adoration of God is a majestic stream, until, in the Netherlands of religious experience, it divides among three Gods, or among many Gods, and so becomes a collection of shallows and swamps and steaming oozes. Out of these North Sea hollow lands, wher- ever they have existed in any age of the moral experience of the race, there has invariably arisen a vapor obscuring the wide, undivided azure, and even 286 TRANSCENDENTALISM. the near landscapes of natural truth. Give me the Christian and the scientific surety of the unity of the Divine Nature, and let my whole soul flow toward one God ; let me not worship three separate wills, three separate consciences, three separate sets of affections, but one Will, one Conscience, one Heart, which was, and is, and is to come ; and so long as the Alps of thought feed me with their cool, im- petuous, crystalline streams, I shall be like the Rhine, deep enough in the current of my adoring affections to drive out the drift-wood and bowlders in the stream, and not permit them to accumulate, and form islands to divide the river into shallows and oozes. Let me move toward God, one in nature outside of the soul, one in Christ revealed in history, one as tangible to the gonscience in the intuitions. Let me feel that all these subsistences are one Sub- stance ; and it may be that the Rhine of the human affections, turned thus toward God as one Will, one Heart, and one Conscience, will be majestic enough to float fleets both for peace and for war [applause] ; and will go out into the ocean at last, not as a set of befogged shallows and oozes, but as the Amazon goes out, an undivided river into an undivided ocean, a thousand flashing leagues caught up into infinite times ten thousand flashing leagues, the interspher- ing of wave with wave in every case, the interspers- ing of a portion of the finite personality with the Lifinite Personality^ one, invisible, omnipotent, omni- present, eternal, the same yesterday, to-day, and forever, holy, holy, holy, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. OUTLOOK UPON THE DIVINE NATUEE. 287 For one, I had rather, my friends, go back to the Bosphorus, Avhere I stood a few months ago, and worship with tliat emperor who Lately slit his veins, and went hence by suicide, than to be in name only an orthodox believer, or in theory to hold that there is but one God, but in imagination to worship three Gods. I am orthodox, I hope ; but my first concern, is to be straiglitforward. I purpose to be straight- forward, even if I must be orthodox. [Applause.] Revere the orthodoxy of straightforwardness ; and when that justifies j-ou in doing so, but only then, revere the straightforwardness of orthodoxy. [Ap- plause.] ^Mahometan Paganism yonder contains one great truth, — the Divine Unity ; and I never touch this majestic theme of the Divine Triunity without remembering what that single truth, as I heard it uttered on the Bosphorus, did for me when I knelt there once in a mosque with the emperor and with the peasants, with the highest officers of state and with the artisans, and saw them all bow down, and bring their foreheads to the mats of the temple, and heard them call out, from the highest to the lowest, as they prostrated themselves, " Allah el akbar ! " " God is one, and God is great." So, prostrating themselves, they three times called out, " Allah el akbar ! " and then remained silent, until I felt that this one truth had in it a transfiguration. I affirm that I had rather go back to that shore of the azure water which connects the Black Sea with the Med- iterranean, and, omitting the leprosy of j\Ialiome- tanism, take for my religion pure Theism, than to 288 TRANSCENDENTALISM. hold that there are three Gods with three wills, three sets of affections, three intellects, three conscienceSj and thus to deny the assurances of both scriptural and scientific truth, and make of myself the begin- ning of a polytheist, although calling myself ortho- dox. At what should we arrive, however, if we should adopt the bare idea of the Divine Unity without taking also that of the Triunity ? Should we thus be faithful to the scientific method? Should we thus be looking at all the facts ? Should we obtain by this method the richest conception of God, or should we see from such a point of view only a fragment of that portion of his nature which man may apprehend ? Theodore Parker taught God's Immanence in mind and matter, and it is amazing that he thought this truth a new one. If you are of my opinion, you will reverence that one portion of his far from original teaching ; for it is at once a scientific and a Chris- tian certainty, that, wherever God acts, there he is. The Bridgewater Treatises affirm this truth with more emphasis than Parker ever laid upon it. The one chord which he struck in theology to which all hearts vibrate was the certainty of the Divine Imma- nence in matter and mind ; and this one certainty was the secret of any power he had in distinctively religious endeavor. Men, he said, have a conscience ; and in that conscience the moral law is revealed; and that moral law reveals a Holy Person. Your Helmholtz and Wundt, and Beale and OUTLOOK UrOX THE DIYIXE NATURE. 289 Carpenter, and Herschel and Faraday, and Darwin and Agassiz, as well as your Lotze and Kant and Leibnitz, and your St. Chrysostom, and Jeremy Taylor, and Archbishop Butler, all unite with Plato and Aristotle, and David and Isaiah, in asserting the Divine Personal Immanence in matter and mind. There is no cloud at this moment shot through by the noon so completely saturated by light as all mind and matter are by the Divine Immanence ; that is to say,- by this invisible, incomprehensible Person- ality which the moral law reveals. BuU granting the fact of the Divine 'Personal im- manence in matter and mind, to what results must a rigid use of the scientific method bring us on the theme of the Triunity of the Divine Nature ? I know of no question on this topic fairer or more fruitful than this. 1. Since a Personal God is immanent in all mat- ter and mind, it follows, that, in all nature outside the soul, we look into God's face. 2. For the same reason, it Is incontrovertible, that in the soul we call Christ, and in his influence in history, we look into God's face. 3. For the same reason, it is certain, that, in the intuitions of conscience, we look into God's face. 4. These three spheres of his self-manifestation em- brace all of God that can be known to man. 5. Irv. each of these spheres of the self manifestation of the Divine Nature, something is shoivn which is not shoivn with equal clearness in either of the other spheres. In each of them, the Ineffalle Immanen Person says something new. 'd 290 TRANSCENDENTALISM. 6. In external nature he appears chiefly as Creator; in Christ chiefly as Redeemer ; in conscience chiefly as Sanctifier. 7. These are all facts scientifically known. 8. A scientific scheme of religious thought must look at all the facts. 9. When all the facts known to man are tahen into view, -a Trinity of Divine 3Ianifestations is, therefore, scientifically demonstrable. 1 0. But, according to the admitted proposition that a Personal God is immanent in all matter and mind, he reveals himself in each of these manfestations as a Person, and yet as one. 11. ^ Personal Triunity, of which Creator, Re- deemer, and Sanctifier are hut other names, is therefore scientifically Icnoivn to exist. 12. This is the Trinity which Christianity calls Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, and of all parts of whose undivided glory it inculcates adoration in the name of what God is, and of what he has done, and of what man needs, All these propositions you will grant me, except the second; hut you cannot deny that, without throwing away your oivn admission that a Personal God is im- manent in all matter and mind. Even Rousseau could say that Socrates died like a man, but the Founder of Christianity like a God. Carlyle afiirms that Voltaire's attacks on Christi- anity are a battering-ram, swinging in the wrong direction. ■ Who doubts, that, at the head of the effect we call Christianity, there was an adequate' OUTLOOK UPON -THE DrVIN-E NATURE. 291 Cause, or a Person? and who can deny, that, in the soul of that Person, God spake to man as never before or since ? Scholarship has outgrown the old forms of historical doubt ; and historical science now admits, that, whether we say Christ possessed proper Deity or not, he assuredly has been the chief religious teacher of the race. But that fact means more than much, if looked at on all sides. Keep in mind here that glimpse of the world history on which we were gazing when last w^e parted from this Temple. Xapoleou at St. Helena said that something mys- terious exists in universal history in its relation to Christianity. " Can you tell me who Jesus Christ was ? " said this Italian, greater than Csesar, and as free from partisan religious prejudices. The question was declined by Bertrand ; and Napoleon proceeded, " Well, then, I will tell you." I am reading now from a passage authorized by three of Napoleon's biographers, and freely accepted by European schol- ars as an authoritative statement of his conversation in exile. (See Liddon's Bampton Lectures, Eng. ed., p. 148, for a full list of authorities for this ex- tract.) " Alexander, Cajsar, Charlemagne, and I my- self have founded great empires ; but uj)on what did these creations of our genius depend ? Upon force. Jesus alone founded his empire upon love ; and to this very day millions would die for him. ... I think I understand something of human nature ; and I tell you all these were men, and I am a man. No other is like him : Jesus Christ was more than a 292 TRANSCENDENTALISM. man. I have inspired multitudes with such an enthu- siastic devotion, tliat they would have died for me : but, to do this, it was necessary that I should be visi- lly present with the electric influence of my looks, of my words, of my voice. When I saw men, and spoke with them, I lighted up the flame of self-devo- tion in their hearts. . . . Christ alone has succeeded in so raising the mind of man toward the Unseen, that it becomes insensible to the barriers of time and space. Across a chasm of eighteen hundred years Jesus Christ makes a demand which is beyond all others difficult to satisfy. He asks for that which a philosopher may often seek in vain at the hands of his friends, or a father of his children, or a bride of her spouse, or a man of his brother. He asks for the human heart ; he will have it entirely to liimself ; he demands it unconditionall}'', and forthwith his de- mand is granted. Wonderful ! In defiance of time and space, the soul of man, with all its powers and faculties, becomes an annexation to the empire of Christ. All wJio sincerely/ believe in him experieyice that remarkable supernatural love towards him. This phenomenon is unaccountable ; it is altogether beyond the scope of man's creative jyowers. Time, the great destroyer, is powerless to extinguish this sacred flame : time can neither exhaust its strength, nor put a limit to its range. This is what strikes me most : I have often thought of it. This it is which proves to me quite con- vincingly the divinity of Jesus Christ.'''' [Applause.] It is beyond all controversy, that precisely this central thought of Christianity which convinced OUTLOOK UPON THE DIVINE NATURE. 293 Napoleon was what most struck tho ancient Roman philosophers. Christ's continued life in the Holy Spirit, was that heard of in the first centuries ? Why, I open an ancient book, written in opposition to Christianity, and cited by Arnobius, and I read, " Our gods are not displeased with you Christians for Avor- shipping the Almighty God ; but you maintain the Deity of one who was put to death on the cross ; you believe him to be yet alive (^et superesse adhuc creditis^^ and you adore him with daily supplications " (Ae- NOBius, adv. Gentes, i. 36). Pliny's letter to Trajan implies all this, but is so celebrated, that I need not recite its majestic facts here. Men showed me at Rome, in the Kircherian Muse- um, a square foot of the plaster of a wall of a pal- ace, not many years ago uncovered on the Palatine Hill. On the poor clay was traced a cross bearing a human fifrure with a brute's head. The ficrure was nailed to the cross ; and before it a soldier was repre- sented kneeling, and extending his hands, in the Greek posture of devotion. Underneath all was scratched in rude lettering in Greek, " Alexamenos adores his Gody That representation of the central thought of Christianity was made in a jeering mo- ment by some rude soldier in the days of Caracalla ; but it blazes there now in Rome, the most majestic monument of its age in the world. (See Liddon, Bampto7i Lectures., p. 39G.) You believe your Lord is yet alive? You adore him? All the history of the early persecutions of Christianity accords with tire import of tliis Kir- 294 TRANSCENDENTALISM. cherian sjrmbol. Listen to the last words of the mar- tyrs through all the first five centuries of Christian- ity. They are these, and such as these : " O Lord God of heaven and earth, Jesu Christ, to thee do I bend my neck by way of sacrifice ; O Thou who abidest forever." These were the words of Felix, an African bishop, condemned to death at Venusium. (See for a multitude of similar instances Ruinakt's celebrated work. Acta 3Iartyrum Sincera^ edition Ve- ronae.) " O Lord Jesu Christ, Thou Maker of heaven and earth, give peace unto thy Church." So spoke Theodotus of Ancyra in the extremity of torture. {Ihid., p. 303.) Poor Blandina, there at Lyons in the year 177, you remember how they roasted her, frail girl, on the reel-hot iron chair ; put her in a net and exposed her to the horns of oxen; whirled her in instru- ments of torture until her senses were lost, and then plunged her into flames ; and day after day did that, while she apparently experienced little pain, calling out at every interval when her strength came back, " I am a Christian : there is no evil done among us." And so she passed hence, but speaks to us as one yet living. (See Eusebiijs, v. 1-3, for a con- temporary account of Blandina in a letter written from the churches of Lyons and Vienne to those of Asia Minor.) She " hastened to Christ," says an .account written by eye-witnesses of her sufferings ; and they send " to those having the same faith and hope," " Peace, and grace, and glory from God the Father, and Christ Jesus, our Lord." Multitudes OUTLOOK UPON THE DIVIXE NATURE. 295 and multitudes, a great army of martyrs, passed out of the world, believing tliat the influence of the Holy Spirit was Christ's continued life ; and, if there is any thing mysterious in history, Napoleon had his ej'e upon it when he asked what it is that makes the martyrs in every age painless when on the bosom of their spouse. There was a God in Christ, whether you regard him as divine or not ; and that was one revelation of God which was made, and is now making, in this in- controvertible fact of his earthly influence, which Na- poleon thought utterly inexplicable on merely human lines of cause and effect. But in conscience there is a God. In the moral intuitions of the soul we look into God's face. Assuredly, even if you and I were not to have, a better age will have, a religious science that will take into view all these facts. There is a God in external nature ; there is a God in Christ ; there is a God in the intuitions of the human spirit : and if I could not have any other Trinity than that, although I do not believe that to be the best, I would have that, for I want all the truth I can reach. I, therefore, will look on God as manifesting himself in external nature, and in our intuitions, and in history as influenced by his spirit ; and my God will be thus revealed to me with more fulness than he could be if I had only one of these three personal revelations of himself. In each of them he says what he does not say elsewhere. Science must be hungry to hear all that all facts say. God is a person in each one of these revelations. 296 TRANSCENDENTALISM. He is a person in the strict sense, as seen in external nature. As seen in our Lord, he is a person in the strict sense. As revealed in the moral law, he is a person in the strict sense. But there are not tJiree per- sons : he is one person in the strict sense ; for natural lato is a unit in the universe, and reveals but one ivill. Tliree revelations of God are all one person, although in each revelation he is a person. Now, is that mys- tical ? or does that straightforward use of the scien- tific method give a richer view of human history, a richer view of the human soul, a richer view of external nature, than mere deism, or theism, or ma- terialism, or pantheism, however fortified by modern science, can present to you? Thus far, gentlemen, I have asked you to notice only what is involved in Theodore Parker's admis- sion that a personal God is immanent in all matter and mind. On this point, as on so many others, Theodore Parker failed to carry out consistently his own principles, and fell into error not so much through a wrong direction as through haste, and in- completeness of research. If, my friends, I must at this point, to save time, drop analytical discussion, and give personal conviction, let me say that Theo- dore Parker's scheme of thought, melodious as that one feebly-struck note of the Divine Immanence in mind and matter is, compares to me with Christian- ity as water compares with wine. Tennyson makes one of his characters say to another, " All thy passions matched with mine Are as moonlight unto sunlight, And as water unto wine." OUTLOOK ITON THE DIVIXE NATURE. 297 So I aver, in the name of the precision of the sci- entific method, that any scheme of tliought not Chris- tian, as matched with Christianity, and tested fairly by intuition, instinct, syllogism, and ages of experi- ment, is as moonlight matched with sunlight, or as water matched with wine. I want supremely such a view of religious truth as shall set me at rest about my irreversible record of sin. [Applause.] I want such a view of God as shall present him as an atoning God, on whom I can- not look without the regeneration of my own nature through gratitude, and on whom I can look, and yet, for his sake, be at peace. Why do the ages cling to the doctrines of the Trinity? Perhaps their wants have been much like yours and mine. Is the truth of the Divine Trinity dear to us, because it is a fine piece of philosophical speculation ? Ah, gentlemen, you know life too well to think that eighteen centuries have offered up their martyrdoms, and the personal careers, which, not end- ing at the stake, have been bound to the stake per- haps through the better part of the time from birth to death, and that these ages have had nothing more than philosophy behind them. Great human organic wants are revealed by the reception the world has given to the deepest religious truths. We knoiv ive are going hence. We wish to go hence in peace. We want a reli- gion that can wash Lady 3Iacbeth's red right hund. We need to know that an atonement has been pro- vided, such that we may look on all God's attributes, and then in his merit, not in our own, be at peace 298 TEANSCENDENTALISM. here and in that Unseen Holy into which it is scien- tifically sure that iill men haste. Religious science never teaches that personal de- merit is or can be transferred from an individual, finite personality to God. That is a ghastly error which has been charged to Christianity in every age, and nowhere more audaciously or inexcusably than in this city. [Applause.] It is one of the most monstrous of misconceptions, one of the most unphi- losophical of all the hideous caricatures set up by Theodore Parker before the public gaze, that Chris- tianity teaches that personal demerit or blame-worthi- ness may be taken off one soul, and put upon another, and that one an innocent being. We hold nothing of the sort; but we have been taught that there is revealed in Christianity a view of God which repre- sents him as substituting chastisement for punish- ment, and as thus making possible the peace of all who are loyal to him ; and this has been the regen- erating influence which has brought the human spirit to the highest summits it has ever attained ; so that, both by ages of experience and by philosophy, we know that this central portion of the Christian scheme of thought is adapted to man's deepest wants. [Applause.] If you deny the doctrine of the Trinity, you must deny the whole central portion of this crowned sys- tem of truth, in all its philosophical glory and in all its prolonged and multiplex breadth of power in hu- man experience. There was nothing so touching, when Professor Huntington of Harvard University yonder OUTLOOK UPON THE DIVINE NATURE. 299 turned toward the doctrine of the Trinity, as his proc- lamation of the " life, comfort, and salvation " which burst upon his vastly enlarged horizon as he attained at once the scientific, the biblical, and the only his- torically radiant point of view. (See Huntington, Archbishop, Christian Believing and Living.^ Only an undiluted Christianity gives such a view of God, that we can be true to the scientific method, and yet at peace with all his attributes. Gentlemen, you will not soon drive out of human nature the desire to go hence in peace. You will not soon remove from human nature the feeling it has exhibited in every age, that peace does not come even when we reform. You will not soon change the natural operations of conscience. You will not soon cause the past to be reversible. You, therefore, ■will not soon make the atonement any thing other than a desire of all nations. But, until you have done all these things, there will be life, there will be a wholly natural and abounding vitality, in that exhi- bition of God's nature to man, which represents him as an atoning God, and as a person who was, and is, and is to be with us, because one with Him who made heaven and earth, and with Him who speaks in con- science at this hour, and who, from eternity to eter- nity, is our Saviour and our Lord. But, next, I want in my view of religion some- thing that will bring me into harmony with all exact research. I want no mysticism, no mediievalism, no doctrine supported simply by the schools, or of doubtful worth under the microscope and the scalpel. 300 TRANSCENDENT AI.ISM. I find it beyond controversy, as Theodore Parker held, that a Personal God is immanent in matter and mind. It is beyond all debate that there is a Holy Person revealed by the moral law. I want a God who shall be one in history, in external nature, and in my intuitions ; and I turn to Christianity, and I find a breadth of outlook more than equal to the loftiest philosophical demand. I read that He who is the light that lighteth every man that cometh into the world, that is, the Personal God who is revealed in conscience, is also He whose light shone in the darkness, and the darkness comprehended it not ; and who was in the world which was made by him, and the world knew him not. He who speaketh in the still small voice is he who spoke, and who yet speaks, as never man spoke. If we do not force upon the Scriptures our own narrowness of thought, we find that science and Scripture are agreed, for both make God perfect and one ; and, according to the Scriptures, the Holy Spirit is Christ's continued life. What are the great proofs in Scripture that God is presented to us as triunity in unity ? What are the great biblical proofs that God is triune ? What are a few of the tremorless bases of conviction that the Trinity is taught in the New Testament ? I hold, my friends, that it is a cheap reply to the assertion that the Trinity is taught in the New Testament, to say that the word is not there. The word " Chris- tianity " is not there ; the word " Deity " is not there ; the word " humanity " is not there. The ques- OUTLOOK UPON THE DIVINE NATURE. 301 tion is, whether it is not taught in the New Testa- ment that God is one. You say, Yes. If it be taught in the Xew Testament that God is one, and that each of the three subsistences is God, the Trinity- is taught there implicitly, though not explicitly. After ages of debate, you know what nine out of ten of the devoutest and acutest think the New Testament teaches in the baptismal formula and the apostolical benediction, two incisive biblical summa- ries of Christian truth. The direction to the apos- tles as to baptism was, " Baptize all nations in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost," a Triune Name, no distinction being made between these three. So, too, the benediction was pronounced in the Triune Name : " May the love of God, the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the communion of the Holy Ghost, be with you." You have been told that Neander says that there is not a passage in the New Testament which asserts the doctrine of the Trinity explicitly ; and Neander does say so : but he says a great deal more ; namely, that the whole New Testa- ment contains the doctrine implicitly. [Applause.]" " In the doctrine of the Trinity," he writes, " God becomes known as Creator, Redeemer, and Sanctifier, in which threefold relation the whole Christian knowledge of God is completely announced. Ac- cordingly all is herein embraced by the apostle Paul, when, in pronouncing the benediction, he sums up all in the formula, the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit. God as the living God, the God of mankind, and the 302 TRANSCENDENTALISM. God of the church, can be ^truly known in this way only. This shape of Theism presents the perfect mean between the wholly extra-mundane God of deism and the God brought down into, and con- founded with, the world of pantheism. This mode of the knowledge of God belongs to the peculiar science of Theism and the Theocracy" (Neander, Jllst. of the Chr. Mel. and Ch., Torrey^s trans, i. 572). As many windows, gentlemen, as there are facts, let us use when we gaze on religious truths. Your mere theism shuts me up to one window. You will not let me look on all quarters of the sky. You shut your ej^es to the light when you will not recognize what Napoleon saw in history. I want no pulpit that is not built on rendered reasons ; but I must be allowed to find reasons wherever they exist, whether the heavens stand or fall. Let research, with the four tests of intuition, instinct, experiment, and syllogism, have free course, and I am content. For fear that your conclusions may be a little broader than you like, you will not fail to gaze on the evidence which convinces Neander that the outcome of all looking into the Scriptures and into mere reason must be a belief in a Creator, in a Redeemer, and in a Sanctifier, the three one God, personal, omnipresent, and in conscience tangi- ble. When I thus use all my light, I am delivered from materialism ; when I thus look on God, I am deliv- ered from pantheism. Whoever searches the Bible in the spirit of those OUTLOOK UPON THE DIVINE NATURE. 803 who wrote it, and of the martyrs, will be kept free from an utterl}'- unscientific narrowness which feels that God in Christ loas rather than that He is. We are not abreast of our privileges when we live always in Judaea. [Applause.] The Scriptures are a map of the universe, and not of Palestine merely. If we are full of their spirit, the wings of philosophy will tire us only by their tardiness, and narrow range of flight. There are in all ages, and particularl}^ in this age of special studies, the most terrific dangers in a frag- mentary view of God. I want this doctrine of the Trinity to save me from fragmentariness of outlook upon the Divine Nature. I will not allow myself to see God merely in my intuitions, and shut up the windows of external nature and of history ; for thus I may easily drop down into pantheistic individu- alism, which, with supreme felicity of speech, your brave, broad, and massive Thomas Hill calls Egothe- ism. [Applause.] (See Hill, ex-president of Har- vard University, The Theology of the Sciences, 1877.) Neander says that the doctrine of the Trinity im- plies that of the Theocracy, or of a government of God in the universe and in national history. Remem- ber, gentlemen, that our fathers came here avowedly to found a Theocracy. What did that mean ? A state of which natural law and revelation together, shining under, in, and about legislation, should be the masters ; a state where what can be known of God by reason on the one side, and revelation on the other, should lock its two hands around the neck of all vice, and throttle whatever would throttle the 304 TRANSCEXDEXTALISM. Christian well-being of the poorest or the highest, and should thus build up in history a state fit to be called at once natural and God's own. When the Jesuits came to the mouth of the St. Lawrence, they intended to found a Theocracy. The great dream that lay behind Milton's and Cromwell's and Hamp- den's thoughts and dee.ds was, that human legislation should be a close copy of the divine and natural law. At the point of view to which exact research has now brought us, Ave must assert that the fact of the Divine Immanence in matter and mind makes the world and nations a Theocracy ; and that politics and social life, no less than philosophy, must beware of fragmentary outlooks on the Divine Nature. Richter said, " He who was the Holiest among the mighty, and the Mightiest among the holy, has, with his pierced hand, lifted heathenism off its hinges, and turned the dolorous and accursed centuries into new channels, and now governs the ages." History, the illuminated garment of God ; the church, Christ's Temple, — did you ever hear of the former in the name of science, or of the latter in the name of Christianity? But to your Titanic Richter the two are one. De Tocqueville affirms anxiously that men never so much need to be theocratic as when they are the most democratic. Democracy will save itself by turning into a Theocracy, or ruin itself by not doing so. [Applause.] Transfigure society with Richter's thought. Satu- rate the centuries with the certainty of the Divine Personal Immanence in matter and mind. Do this, OUTLOOK UPON THE DIVINE NATURE. 805 and, in the name of science itself, tlie laboring ages will slowl}- learn, not merely admiration, but adora- tion, of one God, incontrovertibly known in external nature, history, and conscience as Creator, as Re- deemer, as Sanctifier. When they touch the hem of the garment of a personal God thus apprehended, and never till then, will they be healed of the meas- ureless evils arising from fragmentariness of outlook upon the Divine Nature. Let the forehead of sci- ence, in the name of Christianity, bow down upon the moral law as the beloved disciple did upon our Lord's bosom. Let Richter lead ; and a time will come when all clear "thought, all political action, all individual growth, will call out : Glor}^ be to God revealed in external nature ; glory be to God revealed in Christ and the church ; glory be to God revealed in Conscience ! To this secular voice the church will answer, in words which have already led eighteen centuries, and science will add at last her momentous acclaim ; Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost ; as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. [Applause.] Franklin Press: Jlanrl, Avery, £ Co., Boston. % ■y THE INDEPENDENT FOR. ISTS •will have to be a very good paper to satisfy the thousands of readers who have become famUiar with its good qualities in the past. Some of them have talven it for nearly thirty years, and know how carefully its standard of excoUonce is maintained. 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