O-^^_^L
 
 NEW TABLES OF 
 STONE 
 
 AND OTHER ESSAYS 
 
 BY 
 
 HENRY M. SIMMONS 
 
 BOSTON 
 
 JAMES H. WEST COMPANY
 
 Copyright, 1904 
 By HENRY M. SIMMONS
 
 THE FRIENDS WHO HAVE CALLED FOR 
 
 AND CAUSED 
 THTS PUBLICATION
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 NEW TABLES OF STONE 3 
 
 UNITY THROUGH DIVERSITY 25 
 
 NEW LEAVES OF SCRIPTURE 45 
 
 " THE COSMIC ROOTS OF LOVE " 67 
 
 AN OLD PARABLE EXTENDED 93 
 
 THE DIVINITY OF MAN 117 
 
 THE WATER OF LIFE 145 
 
 THE BOOK OF JONAH 155 
 
 THE KREATH OF LIFE 177 
 
 THE SIN IN A CENSUS 203 
 
 THE RISE AND FALL OF SATAN 215 
 
 THE ENLARGING THOUGHT OF GOD 237 
 
 CHRISTIANITY THEN AND SINCE 261 
 
 VARIOUS MEANINGS OF EASTER 289 
 
 THE NEW YEAR OF RELIGION 311
 
 NEW TABLES OF STONE
 
 NEW TABLES OF STONE 
 
 THE ancient world made much of sacred moun 
 tains. Many such there were, from the great 
 Meru of Hindu imagination, down to Helicon, 
 Ida, and a dozen different heights called Olympus. 
 There the gods were thought to dwell or come. There 
 they gave laws and revelations to men ; Ormuzd to 
 Zoroaster on the high Persian mount, Zeus to Minos 
 on the Cretan Dicte, Jehovah to Moses on Sinai. There 
 they showed themselves by storms ; from the great 
 Olympian god whose attribute was the thunderbolt 
 and whose common Homeric name was the " cloud- 
 gatherer," to the god of Israel who proved his pres 
 ence by " thunders and lightnings and a thick cloud 
 upon the mount." 
 
 Poetic minds still find truth enough in such 
 thoughts. In our own Colorado is a spot which even 
 a prosaic generation has named " the garden of the 
 gods " ; and on the high mountain-peak overlooking it, 
 the sights of old story are often seen. There, too, 
 that " thick cloud upon the mount " still comes,
 
 4 NEW TABLES OE STONE 
 
 sometimes so quickly that the shining peak, where 
 none seems possible that day, is the next minute 
 buried by it. Something like a miracle still seems 
 wrought there. The method of it may be explained, 
 but the power behind the method remains as mysteri 
 ous as in Moses time. Modern science has even 
 increased the marvel. It tells us that what seemed 
 a mere cloud is a galaxy of millions of mist-spheres, 
 each rounded as perfectly as a planet, and all made 
 from vapor that has perhaps been gathered from 
 furthest seas. Still more the wonder grows when we 
 hear about the substance of the cloud. Some tell us 
 that the minutest mote of mist is composed of more 
 atoms than a man could count in a month ; and that 
 each of these atoms is moving several miles in a 
 second, continually colliding with others, rebounding, 
 never resting. Some physicists even teach that each 
 atom, though many million times smaller than any 
 microscope could show, is yet in structure probably 
 a curious vortex-ring, such as you see puffed from the 
 mouth of a professional smoker or from the stack of 
 a locomotive, but imperishable and revolving forever. 
 The cloud seems much more miraculous after science 
 has explained it, than before. 
 
 There on the Colorado mount, the lightnings, too, 
 still come as in old stories. While I was descending,
 
 NEW TABLES OF STONE 5 
 
 without thought of storm, there suddenly came a 
 terrific flash and crash, as if the Olympian Zeus and 
 Sinaitic Jehovah were both still living right there on 
 Pike s Peak. The ancients would have heard in it the 
 voice of a god, and the moderns might, as well ; for, 
 with all our electrical science, the inner secret of the 
 lightning is not in the least understood. Its marvels, 
 too, have greatly multiplied. It is found able, not 
 merely to flash from the near clouds, but to fly invis 
 ible across the continent or under the ocean ; to do the 
 most powerful or the most delicate work, from draw 
 ing rail way -trains to delivering strains of music in dis 
 tant towns. This power, which used so to terrify, 
 was yet ready to run around the world on our errands, 
 to drive machinery all the day, to light our cities or 
 sick-rooms all the night, and to serve us in countless 
 ways which seem only beginning now to be found out. 
 It is not only mightier than the gods of old story, but 
 far more beneficent. The Roman Jove and Hebrew 
 Jehovah seem both still here, and both much better 
 than their ancient worshipers knew. 
 
 The Hebrew story told further how, on the mount, 
 Moses received two "tables of stone" "the work of 
 God," " written by the finger of God." It is not 
 strange that such "tables" or tablets of laws were 
 thought divine. The Roman " twelve tables " of
 
 6 NEW TABLES OF STONE 
 
 bronze were revered as "the fount of all law," and 
 Cicero praised them as " a library of all the philos 
 ophers." Venerated tablets were often connected 
 with the gods ; and the Greek Dionysos also had his 
 "two tables of stone." Sacred inscriptions were often 
 ascribed to the literal hand of some god. Bunsen 
 says portions of the Egyptian ritual "are expressly 
 stated to have been written by the very finger of 
 Thoth himself." All such stories are of course to be 
 read with poetic freedom. 
 
 But, speaking with the same freedom, is noth 
 ing similar still to be seen in our own mountains ? 
 The very thing which named that " garden of the 
 gods " is huge " tables of stone," set upright on edge 
 or end, and curiously carved. It was proper enough to 
 credit them to the gods, for they are the work of no 
 men, but are ages older than Adam. They have come 
 from the Creator as much as did the tables in the 
 Mosaic story, and have been " graven " by the creative 
 tools of rain and frost and wind. Elsewhere, too, the 
 mountains abound in still greater ones, heaved and 
 hewn as by a divine hand. A creative power, no less 
 mysterious because called by some geologic name, has 
 floored the continent with stone strata miles in thick 
 ness. A creative power, no less godlike because called 
 gravity, has crumpled the continent like a leaf, raised
 
 NEW TABLES OF STONE 7 
 
 the Alleghany ridges and Rocky Mountain ranges as 
 its wrinkles, broken and tilted the strata in Titanic 
 tables, and graven them by storm and stream. The 
 ancients called that creative power " God," and we 
 have not yet coined any better name. 
 
 But even more notable than those great mountain 
 tables are the myriads of small ones with which they 
 are filled ; the curious crystals with their shining 
 plates and prisms, their faces so perfect and lines so 
 precise. In their varied forms, their finish and endur 
 ance, they quite outdo the tablets that man makes. 
 Compare the slabs of ancient sculpture, or of yester 
 day, with the polished facets and perfect edges of a 
 quartz crystal that has stood a million years. Often, 
 too, crystals are as large as human tablets, and some 
 times weigh a ton. But more curious are the minute 
 ones, of countless forms, that have been built by the 
 million into the mountains. 
 
 Nor need we go to the mountains to see them, 
 but find them everywhere. They are embedded in 
 the rock by the roadside. Their sea-worn relics of 
 many hues shine in the sand beneath our feet. Their 
 dainty flakes and fragments float and sparkle even in 
 the dust above our heads. Or, if you wish the crys 
 tals whole and perfect, you will often find them glisten 
 ing by the hundred in the cavity of a sand-grain in
 
 8 NEW TABLES OF STONE 
 
 the street, too minute to see without a glass, but as 
 finished as if made for a coronation. 
 
 These tables, too, we may as well call divine. They 
 are older than man, and not even understood by him. 
 Mineralogists may explain them as a " symmetrical 
 marshaling of molecules"; but not even these long 
 words account for the crystal in the least, and there 
 still remains the question whence that wondrous mar 
 shaling came. Its cause is as much a mystery as ever, 
 and might just as well be called God. Indeed, it was 
 while speaking of this very thing that even Professor 
 Tyndall turned aside to deny the charge of atheism, 
 and to declare that the process of crystallization 
 always and especially moved his mind to revere the 
 miraculous power working through it. When we see 
 how this power has paved the whole planet with 
 tessellated granites and marble mosaics, and that the 
 lines of its sculpture still remain everywhere, from the 
 mountain rocks to the sand rolling in the sea, we feel 
 that the earth is filled with "tables of stone" no less 
 divine than those of the Hebrew story. 
 
 They are tables of law, too, though the laws be 
 only physical. Law is proclaimed in their every line 
 and angle, and nowhere more clearly. The angles are 
 of infinite diversity according to species, but each one 
 is true to the fraction of a degree ordered at creation.
 
 NEW TABLES OF STONE 9 
 
 To those quartz crystals, for instance, the order was 
 that one of the pyramid angles should be 103: 34 ; 
 and so it always is, whether coming from Alps or 
 Andes. To the feldspar mingled with the quartz in 
 the granite, the order was that one angle should be 
 63: 57 ; and so it always is. So with the innumer 
 able varieties of minerals. Each has its own set of 
 angles, but is hewn true to them, whether in the 
 latest rocks or ages earlier. Long before Moses was 
 born or Mount Sinai created, crystals with their unerr 
 ing lines were showing, through all the earth, stone 
 tables of laws that are never broken. 
 
 Nor are these laws without ethical meaning. Though 
 only physical, they at least typify moral laws. What 
 faithfulness is taught in those molecules arranging 
 themselves so much more truly than the soldiers of 
 any army, or than the angels of Dante s Eden ! What 
 a lesson of purity is taught by crystals casting out 
 uncleanness ! The beautiful Carrara marble, in the 
 mountains, has its white masses surrounded by beds 
 of dark matter which it has driven out in the process 
 of crystallization. It seems to tell, as well as any 
 preacher, to cast out inherited and inherent deprav 
 ities. The worth of order and purity is taught still 
 better in other minerals. Silicate of alumina, the sub 
 stance of common clay, by the orderly arrangement of
 
 io NEW TABLES OF STONE 
 
 crystallization, becomes the beryl which the apostle 
 puts in the walls of the New Jerusalem ; while in 
 purer form it becomes the beautiful aqua-marine, and, 
 in still purer, the emerald itself. Even carbon, the 
 substance of foul coal and soot, by the same process 
 comes to shine in diamonds that hardly kings can 
 buy. 
 
 Ruskin said crystals show a "stern code of morals," 
 and he wrote a whole book on " The Ethics of the 
 Dust." He might have carried his lessons further 
 had it then been known that every mist-speck in fog 
 or cloud has a minute particle of dust as its nucleus, 
 and that it never forms without this. Without the in 
 visible motes floating in the upper air, we should not 
 have the blessing of the cloud or the beauty of the 
 sunset. Even the dust has its gospel, and the crys 
 tallization behind so much of it is full of "ethics." 
 
 Nor need we go to old rocks and relics to find crys 
 tals. Their creation is ever continued. They are 
 still made, not only in the oceans, but in the air. On 
 the mountain that day, though it was a midsummer 
 noon, from the same sky that had shown its sudden 
 miracle of cloud and lightning, there came floating 
 down a myriad snoivflakes. They were all made of 
 crystals as curious as any in the rocks around me. 
 Even more wonderful than those of old oceans and
 
 NEW TABLES OE STONE n 
 
 ages, seemed these that were created so quickly in the 
 cloud that covered the mountain but a few minutes. 
 They were far more wonderful in structure, too. They 
 showed not only as perfect forms, but these combined 
 again into six-rayed stars, each ray enriched by rows 
 of sparkling gems, and often feathered like a fern- 
 frond, with each filament dusted with diamonds. 
 These stars were again combined in clusters, and a 
 single snowflake often contained a whole constellation 
 of them. 
 
 As great a marvel as any constellation of the sky 
 seemed these created so quickly in the air. The 
 Creator was still present in the cloud. The same 
 power that had globed great worlds in the heavens 
 was here globing these of mist by the million, 
 before my eyes and within arm s reach. The same 
 power that had floored the earth with crystals was 
 here filling the air with finer and more marvelous ones. 
 The God who made "tables" for Moses was still 
 making them, shaping them more beautiful than any 
 Sinaitic slabs, and handing them down by the myriad 
 from the very heavens. 
 
 "Tables of stone," too, they were in the eyes of 
 science, however easily they might melt. They were 
 all the more wonderful because melting so easily and 
 made from mere water. Eor that water had been
 
 12 NEW TABLES OF STONE 
 
 pumped from salt seas a thousand leagues away ; it 
 had been freshened, distilled, purified in the process ; 
 it had been lifted higher than the mountain peaks and 
 brought all this distance in the arms of the wind ; it 
 had been stored in the heavens, a vast ocean as invis 
 ible as spirit ; it had suddenly materialized in the 
 innumerable globes and galaxies of the cloud ; it had 
 crystallized in these wondrous stars, light as down, yet 
 more perfect than cathedral walls. As they fell on 
 the mountain that day, mysteriously dropped from 
 heaven as from a divine hand, not merely quarried and 
 carved in the skies, but newly created there, they 
 seemed, no less than the tables of the Hebrew story, 
 " the work of God " and graven " by the finger of 
 God." 
 
 But that was only a midsummer scene. In other 
 months they had been created so much more abun 
 dantly that old drifts of them lay a thousand feet 
 below, surviving the suns of many summers. Nor 
 need we go to the mountains to see them, but may 
 watch them falling in our city streets. Literature, 
 too, is full of them, back to Virgil and Xenophon, 
 and to Homer s dozen figures from snowfalls and 
 flakes. Job counted them among the wonders of the 
 Lord, and, referring to their mysterious source in the 
 heavens, mocked man s inability to visit " the store-
 
 NEW TABLES OF STONE 13 
 
 houses of the snow." But the "storehouses" were 
 nearer and stranger than Job knew, not only in the 
 heavens, but around our own heads, even in our houses. 
 We read how, in cold climates, in the heated and 
 moist air of a dancing-hall, a colder current sometimes 
 makes the snowflakes quickly form and fall. The 
 Creator of the crystalline mountains is right there in 
 the ball-room. He may be found in almost any room, 
 working the same creation on the window-pane, build 
 ing the moisture of the breath into stars and feathery 
 sprays. 
 
 For the snow does not exhaust this winter creation. 
 Without the fall of a flake, these crystals are often 
 formed by the million and hung in rich clusters to 
 every twig and grass-blade, making any old fence-rail 
 outshine a royal diadem. Here, too, the Creator is 
 still at work. Thoreau said, "God exhibits himself 
 in a frosted bush to-day, as much as he did in a 
 burning one to Moses." All around us, from the 
 autumn fields in a frosty morning, to the winter flakes 
 from the clouds, and the filmy stars that drop from 
 the clear sky upon our coats and cloaks, he is still 
 handing down his "tables of stone." 
 
 They are still tables of law, too ; and every flake 
 declares it as clearly as the quartz. Each of its crys 
 tals, in its every angle, tells of laws older than Adam.
 
 14 NEW TABLES OE STONE 
 
 Moral laws, too, it seems to teach, as well as do 
 Ruskin s crystals ; and the " ethics of the dust " are 
 surpassed by the ethics of the snow. Better than 
 emerald or ruby do these snow-stars teach the beauty 
 of order and purity; and, comparing our ornaments 
 with them, Thoreau scornfully asked, " Where are the 
 jewelers shops ? " Better than Carrara marble do 
 they teach to cast out uncleanness ; for they have 
 risen from brackish seas and filthy pools, and yet have 
 left the foulness of those all behind. Born in deprav 
 ity, they have been regenerated better than sinners 
 at a revival meeting. Look down a city street on a 
 cold winter morning, and you notice that the whitest 
 spots are the mouths of the sewers. You see them 
 shining half a mile away, clothed in cleanest crys 
 tals, which yet have come in the night from the 
 foul liquids below. They seem to repeat that precept 
 which the apostle made half of "pure religion," to 
 keep one s self " unspotted from the world." 
 
 Do they not teach some of the very commandments 
 of the Hebrew "tables" ? By showing how invisible 
 and infinite is the divine power, they too tell us not to 
 worship any other, and not to make " any graven image " 
 thereof, whether in wooden carving or worded creeds 
 and catechisms. They even suggest the command 
 ments against violence and passion, by their lesson of
 
 NEW TABLES OF STONE 15 
 
 work so gentle, so peaceful, and yet so powerful. The 
 snow crystal seems about the weakest thing in the 
 world. Born of invisible vapor, falling silently and 
 softly, lighter than the chemist can weigh, melted in a 
 moment by a breath or a sunbeam, what can it pos 
 sibly do ? Yet patiently they persist, dropping one 
 by one until they whiten the lawn, cover the county, 
 block the roads, stop the railway-trains, conquer the 
 mighty locomotive ; while in mountains they pile in 
 avalanches that can sweep off forests like stubble, or 
 pack in glaciers that do still more stupendous work. 
 Very gentle are those glaciers, too, crawling down 
 the valley slower than a snail, yet furrowing the rocks, 
 grinding quartz into clay, cutting off the mountains 
 like cheese, and changing the face of the continent. 
 
 Not only the power of patience and the law of 
 peace, but co-operation and brotherly union, the snow- 
 flake teaches. The juvenile rhyme makes it say to 
 its brothers : 
 
 " One of us here would not be felt, 
 One of us here would quickly melt ; 
 But I ll help you and you help me, 
 And then what a wonderful drift we ll see." 
 
 A "wonderful drift" indeed is one of those glaciers 
 that are moving to-day in so many mountains and 
 countries. Professor Wright says that the Muir
 
 16 NEW TABLES OF STONE 
 
 glacier in Alaska reaches the sea with a front some 
 thing like a thousand feet thick, from which a block 
 now and then breaks with a boom like a cannon, and 
 sends waves to "lash the shore with foam two miles 
 below." The great Greenland glacier is said to be 
 five times as large as Minnesota, with one of its sea- 
 fronts making for sixty miles " a solid glassy wall " 
 whose falling fragments float away as mighty icebergs 
 to frighten our summer tourists in mid- Atlantic. But 
 even that is hardly worth mentioning beside the ancient 
 glacier which is said once to have covered Canada and 
 a large part of the United States, and which had an 
 average depth of " three-fourths of a mile." That was 
 a snowdrift to remember. We speak of lowering 
 the ocean, as if that were the final absurdity ; but a 
 geologist estimates that, to get the snow for that 
 glacier, all the oceans on earth had to be lowered one 
 hundred and fifty feet. Or hear them tell what it 
 did ; cutting down the Canadian mountains, shoving 
 their moraines along to make our hills and inclose our 
 lakes, grinding rocks into clay for farms, damming up 
 great rivers and changing their course, digging out 
 vast hollows to make lakes Michigan and Erie. Some 
 think that the weight of that glacier even bent the 
 crust of the earth, forced lava out of the Pacific 
 mountains, as pressure does juice from an orange,
 
 NEW TABLES OF STONE 17 
 
 and perhaps even helped to raise the mountains. All 
 this, and more, they say, from these silent snowflakes 
 that melt before a breath ! These stone tables seem 
 to teach that patient co-operation which is the aim of 
 the decalogue. 
 
 They not only teach this law, but seem to sing 
 the beauty of creation. People praise the " beautiful 
 mantle" of the snow until we wish to hear no more 
 of it. For a change, think of the mantle s fibers, 
 the flakes themselves, with their wondrous structure. 
 Six-rayed stars, we have called them ; but we would 
 better say flowers, celestial species of the six- 
 petaled lily family, airier lilies of the heavens, of 
 more variety than those of earth. Still more marvel 
 ous these flowers become when we add the thought of 
 their origin. Jesus well said, " Consider the lilies of 
 the field, how they grow." But consider the lilies of 
 the firmament, how much more wonderfully they grow ; 
 without stem or root or seed, budding out of the 
 bosom of the storm, blossoming from the very blast ; 
 yet so beautiful that " Solomon in all his glory " was 
 indeed " not arrayed like one of these," and so abun 
 dant as to fall in bouquets by the billion. 
 
 Longfellow called the snowfall "the poem of the 
 air." Tyndall said the atoms of the flake arrange 
 themselves "as if they moved to music," and unite to
 
 1 8 NEW TABLES OF STONE 
 
 make " that music concrete and visible." The snow- 
 flakes seem not only tables of Law, but lyrics and 
 "Psalms." 
 
 PropJiets, too, the frost forms seem, foretelling the 
 flowers and leaves that are coming. Aldrich tells 
 it: 
 
 " These winter nights against my window-pane, 
 Nature with busy pencil draws designs 
 Of" ferns and blossoms and fine sprays of pines, 
 Oak leaves and acorns and fantastic vines, 
 Which she will make when summer comes again." 
 
 The frost leaves seem to foretell the living ones, and 
 the snow lilies to prophesy the flowers of spring. 
 
 They not only prophesy, but protect and help to 
 produce the living flowers. Though seeming only 
 cold, their work is just the opposite. Crystallization 
 always gives out heat, the scientists say. Every flake 
 and frost spangle has helped to warm the air. They 
 not only warm the air in forming, but blanket the 
 earth after falling. " He giveth snow like wool," says 
 the Psalmist ; and like a flannel robe it wraps and pro 
 tects the earth. The melting drift in March shows 
 the grass much greener under it than in the sunshine 
 outside. Half-way to the pole, I have in early spring 
 scraped away the snow and picked pansies that had 
 blossomed beneath. We read how, by lake Superior,
 
 NEW TABLES OF STONE 19 
 
 the snowbound settlers used to dig through the deep 
 drifts in the wood and find wild violets in bloom all 
 winter. Dr. Kane, praising " the warm coverlet of 
 the snow " in northern lands, said, " No eiderdown in 
 the cradle of an infant is tucked in more kindly than 
 this sleeping dress of winter about the feeble flower 
 life." What seems a messenger of cold is really one 
 of warmth ; a blessed blanket spun from the sea and 
 woven by the winds, to be renewed every winter and 
 removed every spring, without giving us the trouble 
 to take care of it the rest of the year. 
 
 Even more does the snow tell of warmth, for its 
 frozen form is only the last and least part of its life 
 history. The chief fact and force which it reveals is 
 not the cold which has finally crystallized it, but 
 the heat which lifted it so high from tropic seas, and 
 kept it aloft through all the weeks or months of its 
 wanderings before it reached us. Its real word is 
 warmth, so that Tyndall said even glaciers are 
 to be regarded as produced by heat rather than by 
 cold. Born from southern seas, begotten of the sun 
 shine, brought by the warm breezes, wandering for 
 months through the heavens, blessing the nations on 
 its way, now vanishing in vapor to soften the sun s 
 rays, now shining in the clouds of the day and colors 
 of the dawn, repeatedly melting and materializing
 
 20 NEW TABLES OF STONE 
 
 again, it leads its long, beneficent life. Freezing is 
 only the final act by which it dies and drops to earth 
 for burial. 
 
 And how cheery a message it brings about death 
 and burial ! For in dying it blossoms into stars 
 and Easter lilies, and assumes a more beautiful form 
 than ever before, as if rejoicing in the change that 
 morbid mortals fear. Death clothes it in new glory, 
 just as it does all our friends. As the dying leaves in 
 autumn put on their richest colors, so this dying vapor 
 is transformed into the most varied beauty, and seems 
 to say that death is the last thing we need to be 
 anxious about. 
 
 Nor does death end its work. Not only does it 
 warm the air in dying, not only do its dead forms 
 protect and bless the earth while they remain unburied ; 
 but their burial blesses it again. Their melting re 
 freshes the fields, cleans the yards and streets, carries 
 off the winter s accumulated filth that this may turn 
 into fertility and fruit ; like many a thaw in our own 
 lives, which seems to bring only loss, but is rather the 
 removal of worn-out forms to purify and prepare us 
 for a new season of growth. 
 
 Not even the snow itself is lost by its death and 
 decomposition. Its substance is all saved and cannot 
 perish. It vanishes, like all material things, but only
 
 NEW TABLES OF STONE 21 
 
 disappears to rise again and live in freer form. Re 
 vived by the unfailing sun, it is again raised to refresh 
 the summer air, to sparkle in the morning dew, to 
 float in clouds, to shine in sunsets, to fall in showers, 
 to freshen the fields, and to reach a still higher life in 
 leaf and flower. Whether soaring invisible in the blue 
 sky, or sinking in earth or sea, it is still alive, and, like 
 Shelley s "Cloud," it mocks the thought of death and 
 sings its own survival : 
 
 " I am the daughter of earth and water, 
 
 And the nursling of the sky ; 
 I pass through the pores of the ocean and shores ; 
 I change, but I cannot die. 
 
 "I silently laugh at my own cenotaph, 
 
 And out of the caverns of rain, 
 
 Like a child from the womb, like a ghost from the tomb, 
 I arise and upbuild it again." 
 
 So does even the winter storm seem a smile from 
 heaven. It is a Revelation, bringing not only tables 
 of Law, but Psalms of beauty, Prophecies of life, and 
 whispers of a Love underlying all law and infolding 
 all life.
 
 UNITY THROUGH DIVERSITY
 
 UNITY THROUGH DIVERSITY 
 
 NATURE seems ever to aim at diversity, and to 
 show more of it with every advance. One 
 nebula is supposed to have divided into all the 
 worlds of the solar system. In our world, a few 
 simple elements have formed countless compounds 
 growing ever more complex. In the most complex, 
 life came and multiplied the diversity far more. It 
 divided into vegetable and animal, and each of these 
 into species innumerable. In them, too, the higher 
 the form, the more diverse its parts. A human body, 
 with its intricate muscles, nerves, brain, is probably 
 the most complicated organism on earth. 
 
 The human race has also separated into countless 
 nations, with diverse languages, modes of life, and 
 divisions of labor. Unlike other genera, it has carried 
 its diversity even to individuals. The bees of a 
 hive, the birds of a flock, look much alike ; but men 
 quite unlike, and the more so the more they advance. 
 The members of a savage tribe show much resem 
 blance ; but in civilized society, even two brothers 
 often seem to belong to different orders, and to be
 
 26 UNITY THROUGH DIVERSITY 
 
 further apart than a hawk and a dove. In short, this 
 law of diversity, ever working from the nebula onward, 
 has at length, in the human race, brought innumerable 
 millions of forms, faces, even voices, hardly any two 
 alike. 
 
 It has brought no less variety in intellectual things. 
 Two men, with very similar faces or forms, may, in 
 their knowledge and thought, be no more alike than a 
 bird and a fish. Each one also differs, not only from 
 his neighbor, but from himself, often changing his 
 opinion. Pope said that every year of a wise man is 
 a censure of his past ; the one with the shortest life 
 lives long enough to laugh at half of it. For, the 
 more men advance, the more their thoughts differ, and 
 the greatest variety of opinion is among the learned. 
 Scholars cannot agree who Buddha was, whether 
 Homer was one man or twenty, when Zoroaster lived, 
 or whether he ever lived at all. Historians cannot 
 agree, and the more learned they are the less certain 
 they feel. The village school-girl in her essay settles 
 some historic question very easily, but Motley said 
 history cannot be written. Taine, after writing three 
 volumes on the French Revolution, began the fourth 
 with a confession that he had not yet been able to 
 arrive at any fixed principles about it, except that 
 "modern society is a vast and complicated thing."
 
 UNITY THROUGH DIVERSITY 27 
 
 Even about events in their midst, men differ. After 
 hearing testimony for weeks, the jury cannot agree 
 whether the prisoner is guilty or not. It is said that 
 Sir Walter Raleigh, after trying in vain to learn the 
 facts about a dog-fight in front of his house one morn 
 ing, went back with much less assurance to his great 
 work on " The History of the World." No more do 
 students of social questions agree. Each school has 
 some panacea which others think pernicious ; while 
 many think that all are, and that the true cure is to 
 let alone. D. A. Wells said that, in a congressional 
 inquiry concerning business depression, " the causes 
 assigned by the various witnesses were comprised 
 under no less than 180 heads," and that a British 
 Commission showed " almost equal diversity of opin 
 ion." Often, too, the opinions are most contradictory. 
 The protectionist and free-trader think each other 
 fools, and hardly can politeness or piety keep them 
 from saying so. 
 
 Even in matters of physical science, men disagree, 
 and the professors dispute at every meeting. Not even 
 in so vital a profession as the medical is there that 
 unanimity which we would like in case of sickness. 
 Doctors cannot agree whether the patient has cholera, 
 or what to give him if he has, or how much of it. 
 While one prescribes most generous doses, another
 
 28 UNITY THROUGH DIVERSITY 
 
 favors dilutions said to be about as infinitesimal as if 
 he should drop a pill into the upper Mississippi and 
 then treat the patient from the Gulf of Mexico. The 
 patients themselves are little more agreed. While 
 some people seem to think that disease is almost the 
 chief end of man, a large body to-day, who claim to 
 have reached the most advanced " Science," are teach 
 ing that there is no such thing as disease. After 
 being disgraced with deafness for thirty years, I was 
 the other day informed by a friend that she does not 
 believe it is possible for any person to be deaf at all. 
 
 When men thus disagree about physical things, 
 they of course will about spiritual. When two per 
 sons dispute about even the plain color of some form, 
 we cannot expect agreement about formless things 
 that no senses can perceive. As Dr. Holmes said : 
 
 " Why should we look one common faith to find, 
 When one in every score is color-blind ? 
 If here on earth they know not red from green, 
 Will they see better in the things not seen ? " 
 
 Certainly these unseen things have been subjects for 
 endless disagreements. Thoughts about the soul have 
 ranged from the idea that it is a secretion of the brain, 
 to the idea that it is a spark from deity ; from the 
 opinion that mind is only matter, to the opinion that 
 matter is all mind, and to the further one that both
 
 UNITY THROUGH DIVERSITY 29 
 
 are illusions, with no reality at all. Thoughts about 
 deity have ranged all the way from polytheism, with 
 its millions of Gods and motley fancies about them, to 
 atheism protesting against the idea of any God what 
 soever. 
 
 Even the belief in one God has brought no more 
 agreement about him, but has reached from the doc 
 trine that he is fickle and moved by prayer, to the 
 faith that he rules everywhere by law, making prayers 
 an impertinence ; from the thought that he has 
 human appetite and passion, to the thought that he 
 has not even personality. Not even the monotheists 
 worshiping the same Jehovah have agreed ; but Jews, 
 Christians, and Mohammedans have hated each other 
 in his name. Each of these three divisions has had 
 its subdivisions, too. Numerous sects have arisen 
 even in Israel. Still more have arisen among Moham 
 medans. Palgrave told of an Arabian preacher whom 
 he heard describing the seventy-two Moslem denom 
 inations and condemning seventy-one of them as des 
 tined to eternal fire. 
 
 Nor could even Christianity escape this tendency, 
 though its founder had based it on brotherhood and 
 unity. The divisions began very early, in the apostles 
 own time. Paul tells of several in the single church 
 of Corinth, and he especially urges them to become
 
 30 UNITY THROUGH DIVERSITY 
 
 united and " all speak the same thing." But they 
 could not. The law of Nature was against it, and 
 Christianity soon counted more sects than Christ left 
 disciples. In the second century, Irenaeus gave a 
 long list of them, and they soon outnumbered his list. 
 The Gnostic Christians alone, says Gibbon, " imper 
 ceptibly divided into more than fifty particular sects." 
 The fourth century saw not only the great division 
 between Athanasians and Arians, but many other 
 important parties. Among the Arians alone eighteen 
 sub-sects afterwards arose. In the fifth century 
 divisions were so frequent that Hilary wrote, " Every 
 year, nay, every month, we make new creeds," and 
 "there are as many doctrines among Christians as 
 there are individual inclinations." So active was the 
 tendency to division even in the church of Christ. 
 
 The so-called "dark ages" of course checked this 
 tendency, and for a time there was comparative agree 
 ment, especially in the Western church. But with 
 the renaissance and new life of thought, the divisions 
 again appeared. Not only was Protestantism divided 
 from the Roman and Greek churches, but its freer 
 thought made it the field for new diversities ever 
 increasing. Protestants, though especially professing 
 to base their belief upon an infallible book so clear 
 that "the wayfaring man though a fool need not err,"
 
 UNITY THROUGH DIVERSITY 31 
 
 yet soon found that they differed more, with this 
 book to unite them, than they had without it. Some 
 exalted one text and some another ; and all read, in 
 each text, not so much what the author put there, as 
 their own opinion. Hence they found the most diverse 
 doctrines, baptism by sprinkling, baptism by immer 
 sion, and no baptism at all ; the keeping of Sunday, 
 the keeping of Saturday, and the keeping of no day 
 whatsoever ; universal salvation and almost universal 
 perdition. Biblical texts have been distorted about as 
 badly as in Swift s satire, being made to prove any 
 doctrine, whether theologic or scientific. A clergyman 
 of my acquaintance, having been converted to the 
 theory of evolution, wrote an elaborate book to show 
 that it was all taught in the first chapter of the Bible. 
 Professor Gunning told of one he knew who had dis 
 covered protoplasm in one of the Psalms. A work 
 has been published taking great pains to show that the 
 book of Job was a prophecy of the nineteenth century, 
 and that its " leviathan " really meant a modern steamer, 
 its "behemoth" a railway-train. Nor are such inter 
 pretations any more remarkable than Mr. Moody s 
 familiar doctrine that the vicarious atonement was 
 taught in every Scriptural allusion to blood, and that 
 Christ s sacrifice to cover the sins of men was pre 
 figured even in Eden by the animals slain to clothe
 
 32 UNITY THROUGH DIVERSITY 
 
 Adam and Eve. So easy is it for human thought to 
 find any and all of its opinions in any book whatso 
 ever. 
 
 Hence, notwithstanding their devotion to the Bible, 
 Protestants increased their diversity of opinion and 
 their divisions. Not even the established Church of 
 England could prevent this, but has itself divided into 
 High, Low, and Broad ; while under its shadow dis 
 senting sects have multiplied until a recent writer 
 enumerated over a hundred and said that these are 
 probably only about one-third of them. The same 
 process has been active in our own country. A recent 
 census showed not only so many different denomina 
 tions, but the Baptists redivided into thirteen kinds, 
 the Lutherans into sixteen kinds, the Methodists into 
 seventeen, and even the little body of Mennonites 
 into twelve. More significant, perhaps, the quiet and 
 peaceful " Friends " had separated into four parties. 
 Even the little band of the "United Brethren" had 
 divided. Some churches seem to be moving toward 
 the state of the storied one which, by repeated division, 
 had been reduced to two members, each of whom was 
 beginning to suspect the other of heresy. To an 
 Irishman s remark that religion is "a very fine 
 thing," another replied : " Yes, indeed ; I get into 
 more fights about religion than about almost anything
 
 UNITY THROUGH DIVERSITY 33 
 
 else in the world." So perhaps does the human race, 
 though generally of course, in a far quieter way 
 than this strenuous Irishman would commend. At 
 any rate, they are ever dividing on religious ques 
 tions. 
 
 Nor would we condemn this in the least, as long as 
 it is carried on peacefully. This diversity is the law 
 of Nature, to be fulfilled in religion as in the race, 
 in faiths as in faces. The more we advance, the more 
 it will be seen. In religion as in life, the lower orders 
 may be classified in great genera and species, - 
 Protestant or Catholic, Episcopalian, or Baptist, or 
 Sandemanian, all true to their type ; but the higher, 
 like men, will diverge from the type, and, though keep 
 ing its name, will become individual, each member 
 forming his own opinion. " Agree," says the church ; 
 " differ," answers Nature ; and there is no doubt 
 as to which command will conquer. Diversity will 
 last and grow. 
 
 But diversity is only half the truth ; and while trac 
 ing it we have also been seeing the other half, 
 Unity, For we have seen that these diversities are 
 all connected by common origin, like the branches and 
 twigs of a tree by its trunk. These hundreds of sects 
 have sprung from a common Protestantism ; Protest-
 
 34 UNITY THROUGH DIVERSITY 
 
 ants and Catholics from a common Christianity ; 
 Christianity itself from the Hebrew stock grafted 
 with Greek thought ; and both Hebrew and Greek 
 thought have grown from the same human sentiments 
 which have produced all other religions. All the 
 countless present and past religious forms are but 
 branches of the same great tree of spiritual life, some 
 higher, some lower, some flowering and fruiting, some 
 barren and dead, but all one, at least in their origin. 
 Religion is beginning to see that all its diversities are 
 but superficial developments of a deeper unity. They 
 are, at any rate, akin, and ought to forget their former 
 quarrels, as the wise old Greeks ordained that, in 
 all their fraternal wars, the trophies must be made of 
 perishable wood and never renewed. 
 
 But beyond this unity of origin is another, that 
 of the common truths still held by all. These Chris 
 tian sects, with all their diversities, yet agree with 
 each other much more than they differ ; and agree 
 with Hebrews, heretics, and heathen more than they 
 differ from these. Most religions preach quite similar 
 ideals, while all fall short of them in practice. Most 
 religions have taught "to do justly and to love mercy 
 and to walk humbly with God," which, the Hebrew 
 prophet said, was all that the Lord required. Most 
 have exhorted their adherents to keep unspotted from
 
 UNITY THROUGH DIVERSITY 35 
 
 the world, and to visit the fatherless and afflicted, 
 which was the Christian apostle s definition of " pure 
 religion and unclefiled." In these essentials they 
 agree. 
 
 And how often the outward forms, in which they 
 disagree, have a kindred meaning ! Huxley said that 
 if Marcus Antoninus could descend from his marble 
 horse on the Capitoline hill and study the idolatry in 
 Rome to-day, the chief difference he would discover 
 between it and the old pagan idolatry would be in the 
 poor quality of modern idols as works of art. But 
 how much of the use of idols, both pagan and Chris 
 tian, has been only symbolic of what Dyer terms 
 " that worship of ideals miscalled idolatry." Most 
 religious observances cover some truth, which is kept 
 even by those who reject them. Howsoever good 
 people baptize, or whether they baptize at all, they 
 believe in the purity which baptism symbolizes. 
 Whether their leading sacrament be the sacrifice of 
 sheep at the altar, or the sacrifice of the mass, or the 
 sacrifice of their own substance and selves in the 
 duties of life, it is only a different expression of 
 the same truth. However diversely they may think 
 of the redeeming power and divinity of Christ, they 
 agree about the redeeming power and divinity of the 
 love which is that name s best meaning. After talk-
 
 36 UNITY THROUGH DIVERSITY 
 
 ing with a clergyman, I said to him, "We agree well 
 enough, only you insist that our ideal shall be called 
 Christ, while I care not what it is called." 
 
 Even the diverse forms of prayer are not so differ 
 ent as they seem. Whether men pray against disease 
 by turning Buddhist cylinders, by repeating Moslem 
 sentences, by taking medicine, or by learning the laws 
 of health, they are seeking the same thing ; and how 
 ever different the ways of seeking, each man is follow 
 ing the way he thinks best, and to that extent they 
 agree. Whether they pray for their daily bread by 
 spoken petitions, or by plows and patent planters, they 
 are making the same prayer to the God of the fields, 
 each man according to his intelligence. Whether they 
 seek more spiritual blessings by the way of appeal and 
 aspiration, or by the way of will and work, it is all the 
 same religion. 
 
 Often, too, the differences are only in names and 
 words ; as in that Eastern parable of the four travel 
 ers contending fiercely as to what particular food they 
 should buy, and finding at last that they had been 
 quarreling about four different names for the same 
 grape. Sometimes the names themselves prove to 
 have been the same, as in the discovery that 
 the Christian " Heavenly Father " is the same term 
 as the Roman "Jupiter." Language often teaches
 
 UNITY THROUGH DIVERSITY 37 
 
 this lesson of unity by showing the identity of the 
 most unlike words. Our "bishop" and the French 
 "foeqne" are as unlike as two words can be, not 
 having a letter in common ; yet they not only mean 
 the same thing, but are the same word, both having 
 come from the Greek " episcopos." They hint that 
 English Protestant and French Catholic, though often 
 thinking that they have nothing in common, are yet 
 one, and one with the Greek church ; one even with 
 the heathen Homer, who used the same word so many 
 centuries before Christianity, and even used it of har 
 mony, " episcopal harmoniaon" The word has still 
 larger suggestions, for its root, " skop," is also that of 
 our "skeptic." Bishop and skeptic are linked in lan 
 guage, and are learning that they are linked in religion 
 also, both laboring in the same sacred episcopate. 
 Religion needs the seers quite as much as the over 
 seers, and skeptics have often called bishops back to 
 the humane principles of Christ. It was once said 
 that Bradlaugh, the atheist, ought to be made Arch 
 bishop of Canterbury, since he was truer to Jesus 
 fundamental teachings of peace and forgiveness than 
 was the occupant of that sacred office. Nor can such 
 atheists be counted as irreligious even ; for they have 
 usually not denied Deity, but only narrow doctrines 
 about him, thereby asserting greater.
 
 38 UNITY THROUGH DIVERSITY 
 
 Beyond this unity of origin, and of common truth 
 beneath the diversities, is a third, which the diversities 
 have brought. They have themselves been cultivat 
 ing toleration, and bringing " the unity of the spirit 
 in the bond of peace." What indeed has done more 
 than these diversities to bring peace and charity among 
 men ? When a community all believe alike, they 
 cannot be charitable, but will persecute each new 
 thought, and the thinker with it, as the medieval 
 church did. But as they become divided in their 
 opinions, they are forced to endure and forgive each 
 other, as modern sects have been learning to do. We 
 want no more uniformity of belief. If even the most 
 liberal sect should become universal, it might found 
 an inquisition for heresy and hold an occasional 
 auto-da-fc. As Voltaire said : " If there were but 
 one religion in England, its tyranny would be terrible ; 
 if there were but two, they would cut each other s 
 throats ; but there are thirty, and they live in peace." 
 We may add that now, when there are 230, they are 
 still more peaceful. Men whose differences would 
 once have made them burn each other are joined 
 in new brotherhood, and bettered in many ways. 
 John Fiske, declaring that " uniformity of belief 
 should be dreaded as tending toward Chinese narrow 
 ness and stagnation," adds that England s " imperial
 
 UNITY THROUGH DIVERSITY 39 
 
 position in the modern world " is largely due to the 
 fact that, " on that hospitable soil, all types of charac 
 ter, all varieties of temper, all shades of belief have 
 flourished side by side and have interacted upon one 
 another." We want all these diversities ; for out of 
 them is coming a larger thought, a broader charity 
 and brotherhood, the best religious unity. 
 
 So we reach the full statement of the law of growth. 
 It is not merely " from unity to diversity," but "from 
 unity tJirongJi diversity to a truer Unity." This is 
 illustrated everywhere. The uniform nebula separated 
 into diverse worlds, only to become more closely united 
 in a system where each satellite moves in harmony and 
 sympathy with every other ; where a storm in the sun 
 quickly sways all the magnetic needles on earth. So 
 in animal life, the multiplying organs have brought 
 far closer unity. In contrast with those lower creatures 
 of uniform structure which can be cut into two pieces 
 without perceiving that anything has happened, the 
 complex human body is so united that, as Paul said, 
 " if one member suffer, all the members suffer with 
 it," and a mere scratch in the hand may bring con 
 vulsions and death. 
 
 So in society, which has been so often compared 
 to an animal body. The growing divisions of labor 
 and diversities of life have been uniting mankind.
 
 40 UNITY THROUGH DIVERSITY 
 
 In contrast to a molluscous society of savages dig 
 ging their roots and catching their lizards inde 
 pendent of the world and of each other, we depend 
 for breakfast on Dakota farmers and Minnesota 
 millers and Texas ranchmen and California fruit- 
 raisers and Javanese planters, and on many miners 
 and merchants and railroads. We cannot even get 
 the watch to tell us when to eat until a score of nations 
 and a hundred trades have combined to make it. All 
 lives have become so interlinked that Carlyle said 
 the Winnipeg Indian cannot quarrel with his squaw 
 without raising the price of pelts and making the whole 
 world suffer. 
 
 To the human body, with its "many members," 
 Paul compared religion also ; and he so liked the com 
 parison that he repeated it two or three times, and 
 once drew it out through most of a chapter. He did 
 not want men pressed into the same mold, like bricks, 
 to be baked and built into a rigid church, but likened 
 religion to the most living and free and complex body 
 known. Naturally, the Messiah was figured as the 
 head of that body ; and so he may be, if we mean 
 thereby, not a mere person about whom opinions 
 differ, but those principles of righteousness and love 
 which, to the best thinkers in Israel and Christendom 
 alike, the Messiah means. More and more are Chris-
 
 UNITY THROUGH DIVERSITY 41 
 
 tians becoming such a body, and more and more they 
 will unite with other religions in a grander body. Its 
 diverse members will all work and worship in their 
 own ways, but will have a common head in the 
 Messianic rule of righteousness, and a common heart 
 sending its warm circulation of sympathy through all 
 mankind. Should such a body ever be realized, there 
 would come a religious life compared with which the 
 present quarrels of sects would seem like savagery, and 
 mere uniformity of belief like a mollusc beside a man, 
 or a nebula beside the varied life of a May morning. 
 
 Welcome, then, to all movements for union. The 
 sacred name " pontiff," applied alike to the old Roman 
 and Jewish and Christian priesthoods, meant literally 
 a "bridge-builder"; and a movement to bridge the 
 chasms across which rival religions have long cursed 
 each other, and to join them in mutual intercourse and 
 charity, will make the best pontificate the world has 
 known. 
 
 Not that we would wish the dividing lines obliterated 
 and all religions merged in one. We want no univer 
 sal church based on compromise or on contradictions, 
 like that accommodating academy which advertised 
 that it would teach pupils to believe the earth round 
 or flat, as the parents might prefer. Rather, let each 
 religion and sect teach its own belief and worship in
 
 42 UNITY THROUGH DIVERSITY 
 
 its own way. But let each remember how much it 
 has in common with all the rest, and in this common 
 work let all be willing to unite. By such union none 
 will lose his religion, but all will find more. 
 
 As in a great cathedral men come out from the 
 little side chapels and shrines, to meet before the high 
 altar and beneath the vaster vault ; so, in leaving our 
 sectarian services to join with others in the common 
 work for justice and humanity, we find that we have 
 only come beneath a loftier religious roof, to unite in 
 a larger worship. Even if we do not so unite, our 
 worships do, as in that old English abbey where the 
 men and women sang their hymns apart, hidden from 
 each other by a dividing wall, but with their voices 
 mingling above it in harmony. The dividing walls 
 still stand in the religious world, and probably will for 
 many centuries to come. But above the walls, the 
 varied strains from womanly devotion and manly dar 
 ing, from all honest liturgies and labors, mingle in 
 one music to the Eternal Power by whom all have 
 been produced and all are accepted.
 
 NEW LEAVES OF SCRIPTURE
 
 NEW LEAVES OF SCRIPTURE 
 
 THE foliage has too long been used for funereal 
 lessons. Homer s Glaucus sang how human 
 generations come and go like "the race of 
 leaves" which "the wind sheds upon the ground." 
 Aristophanes " Birds " mocked men with the same 
 comparison. The great Hebrew prophet said, "We 
 all do fade as a leaf " ; and the figure often recurs in 
 the Bible. Dante made the falling leaves illustrate 
 the still direr fate of dead souls dropping one by one 
 into Charon s boat, to be borne over Acheron s " brown 
 wave "to the infernal pit and punishment. Modern 
 poets have continued the dirge ; from Bryant, moan 
 ing that " the melancholy days have come, the saddest 
 of the year," to William Watson, singing their glories, 
 but still hearing in them the " voice of everything that 
 perishes," the "metaphor of everything that dies." 
 Especially have preachers made the falling leaves a 
 favorite text, and drawn from them sermons drearier 
 than a November storm. 
 
 But this is hardly fair to either us or the leaves. 
 They may fade and fall ; but to make that their lesson
 
 46 NEW LEAVES OF SCRIPTURE 
 
 is to distort the truth. For the chief fact about the 
 foliage is not that it fades for a few days, but that it 
 flourishes for a whole season. The chief fact about 
 each leaf is not that it falls for a moment, but that for 
 month after month it refuses to fall, though all the 
 winds are trying to tear it from the tree. Through 
 long weeks of drought, through storms that wreck 
 ships and unroof houses, the leaf works on, with no 
 fears of a fall. 
 
 Even when it falls, it may not have faded. The 
 October landscape seems keeping festival rather than 
 funeral, and its foliage is often brighter than summer 
 blossoms. Thoreau called the scarlet oaks, in autumn, 
 " forest-flowers," and said, "these are my China-asters," 
 or "great oak roses," to be admired miles away, and 
 richer than " all that spring or summer can do." 
 Often, we may add, this autumn flower is not merely 
 a tree, but an acre of them, showing a whole forest 
 hollow turned into one blossom, whose stamens are 
 golden poplars or hickories, and whose petals are whole 
 hillsides of crimsoned oaks and sumachs, spotted with 
 blazing bushes and streaked with vines of more colors 
 than any corolla can show. The autumn landscape 
 seems to say that if "we all do fade as a leaf," we 
 need not lament. 
 
 Even if the falling leaves call for a funeral discourse,
 
 NEW LEAVES OF SCRIPTURE 47 
 
 it should be a healthy one, telling what they have done. 
 They deserve our eulogy for services innumerable. 
 Even literature owes them much, and the debt is 
 recorded in our very language. The leaves of plants 
 named the "leaves" of books. The great "folios" 
 took that title from the foliage ; and many kindred 
 terms come from what the leaves have made. The 
 word " paper " comes from the old papyrus plant. 
 Even " Bible " is but the Greek name of that plant. 
 The term "codex," given to precious old manuscripts, 
 originally meant a tree-trunk or stem. Even the 
 word " book " is derived from the beech, not only in 
 our own, but in several Teutonic tongues. So the 
 Latin word "liber" which has named books in so 
 many languages, from our "library," to the Italian 
 " libra " and " libretto" and the French " livre"- 
 originally meant, rather, the bark of a tree. Such 
 words are of course no mere fancy, but tell of the real 
 use of beech and bark and leaves in writing. The 
 ancient Sibyl wrote her revelations on leaves to be 
 scattered by the wind ; and, since then, many Chris 
 tian Bibles have been written on them. So is Script 
 ure indebted to the leaves. 
 
 But even without such writing, do they not bring a 
 revelation ? Theocritus sang the " sweet whispering " 
 of the pine ; and, long before him, a Greek poet told
 
 48 NEW LEAVES OF SCRIPTURE 
 
 how " the plane-tree whispers to the elm in spring." 
 Such whisperings were also thought divine. Pliny 
 said the trees were the earliest dwellings of the gods. 
 Even the American Mount Holyoke tells of the old 
 belief in holy oaks. The Greeks not only saw each 
 tree inhabited by a dryad, but thought the great Zeus 
 spoke his truest oracles through the sacred oak at 
 Dodona and the rustling of its leaves. Many a poet 
 still hears in them a revelation. 
 
 Do they not bring even a written one, a real 
 Scripture ? They are a tissue finer than any paper or 
 parchment, and inscribed for all who will inspect them. 
 Pick from under your feet the finest leaf of moss, 
 so small as to be covered by a grain of wheat, so thin 
 as to be almost transparent. Put it under a lens, and 
 see its hundreds of cells, as beautiful and as varied as 
 the letters of any alphabet. Increase the power of 
 the glass, and see a single cell dotted with its bright 
 array of separate green granules, a letter not only 
 illuminated, but alive and full of meaning to one who 
 can read it. Such cells, piled by the million in a 
 myriad shapes, compose all our leaves, from the grass- 
 blade up to the wonders of a tropical forest. They 
 are also combined to provide the leaf with all sorts of 
 aids, even with countless little " stomata " or mouths, 
 curiously two-lipped like a man s, and opening and
 
 NEW LEAVES OF SCRIPTURE 49 
 
 shutting in the changing weather, as if they had some 
 thing to say. Doubtless they do whisper truer rev 
 elations than the Greeks heard in the rustling oak at 
 Dodona. Doubtless oracles diviner than the Sibyl s 
 are still written on all the leaves scattered by the 
 autumn winds. For these, too, seem divine, pub 
 lished by no man, but only by the Creator, in 
 annual editions, reissued every spring from originals 
 which are older than Adam and which make all 
 human history seem in comparison but a morning 
 paper. We may not yet be able to read them as well 
 as Edwin Markam s poet who 
 
 " . . . knows the gospel of the trees, 
 And whispered message of the seas ; 
 Finds in some dead leaf dried and curled 
 The deeper meaning of the world ; 
 
 but doubtless each leaf has as deep a meaning as even 
 Tennyson s "flower in the crannied wall," and the 
 most prosaic man may read a little of it. 
 
 What is the leaf ? Chiefly and briefly, it is an organ 
 to gain more light and air for the creation of food. 
 That creation is seen nowhere else than in green 
 plants. Animals only appropriate and transform food 
 already made. A large class of plants do the same, 
 all the fungi and many a pale parasite. But the green 
 plants, and only they, create food from inorganic
 
 50 NEW LEAVES OF SCRIPTURE 
 
 matter, thus providing not only for themselves, but 
 for all other life. 
 
 To do this, they must have light as a first essential. 
 We see them everywhere reaching after it, from the 
 house-plant turning to the window, and the potato- 
 sprout in the dark cellar stretching toward the chink 
 in the wall, to the great forest-trees pushing outward 
 or upward to the light and thus shaped by it, and the 
 little vine in their shade climbing to the forest top to 
 spread its branches in the sun. 
 
 The lowest division of green plants, the algae, have 
 no special organs for receiving light, but get it through 
 their general surface, though often becoming flat 
 and leaflike to increase that surface. But the higher 
 plants learn to increase it more by leaves, which they 
 spread to catch more light and air, as a boat spreads 
 sails to catch more breeze. These leaves begin very 
 small in the mosses, but become large in ferns, and 
 thenceforth, through most of the higher orders, are 
 the chief means of obtaining light. They generally 
 even face it, except in climates and cases where the 
 heat would be hurtful. Sometimes they even turn 
 the whole plant-top with them, thus causing the names 
 "sun-flower" and "heliotrope" and the legend of 
 Clytie in love with the sun. 
 
 But what is done by this light which the leaves so
 
 NEW LEAVES OF SCRIPTURE 51 
 
 seek ? First, it colors those minute green granules, 
 such as we saw scattered in the microscopic cell of 
 the moss-leaf. It does this in the cells, not only of 
 leaves, but of all green surfaces. All vegetable green 
 is made only by the light ; and, when made, it dies 
 out in the dark, as in bleaching celery or buried grass. 
 It is all made in the same way, by that invisible 
 point, repeated by the million, until it paints the leaf, 
 lawn, prairie, and mountain-side, in varied tints that 
 no art can imitate. Man may indeed make a little of 
 something which he calls green, out of arsenic or other 
 poison, often bringing more anxiety than beauty ; 
 but the light, by the mere repetition of that invisible 
 point, makes it so abundantly as to clothe the con 
 tinent in beauty, and not merely harmless, but 
 feeding the cattle on a thousand hills. 
 
 That point feeds all other life, too ; for it is no 
 sooner made than it begins a still more wonderful 
 work. It is a busy little factory, not only painted, 
 but driven, by the light. It is even the most impor 
 tant factory in the world, making that starch which 
 is the foundation of all food and growth. Men may 
 claim to make this in their mills, but they only 
 collect what the leaves have made. The original 
 and only real starch-factory is that microscopic green 
 point.
 
 52 NEW LEAVES OF SCRIPTURE 
 
 Still more curious, it not only makes this rich prod 
 uct, but makes it from two poor ones that are often 
 pernicious. One of these is mere worthless water, 
 pumped from the wet ground. The other is a worse 
 than worthless gas, poisonous to breathe, but poured 
 out from animal lungs and all fires, and absorbed by 
 leaves from the air. This gas and water are both hard 
 to decompose by our chemistry ; but that little green 
 granule does it easily all the day. Still more wonder 
 ful, having decomposed them, it creates from their 
 elements that vital product which no human chem 
 istry can. And this starch not only feeds all plants, 
 and is stored up in their fruits and stems and roots for 
 animals, but is the basis of various other important 
 products, especially of the cellulose and woody fiber 
 that builds the forests. 
 
 With this process is connected the no less vital one 
 of refreshing the air. Man s factories poison the air, 
 but these purify it. They not only take away and 
 decompose that deadly gas, but give back the very 
 element for breath. The New Testament author, 
 telling of the "tree of life" in the New Jerusalem, 
 said its "leaves are for the healing of the nations" ; 
 and the Old Testament text, from which he took the 
 thought, said more clearly that they are "for med 
 icine." So are our leaves, the druggists say. But
 
 NEW LEAVES OF SCRIPTURE 53 
 
 they are better than medicinal, not merely healing 
 disease, but preventing it by purifying the air. 
 
 Nor are they doing this now only, but were for 
 ages before man. That poisonous gas was then too 
 abundant to allow man to live at all. But, through 
 long geologic ages, the leaves slowly removed and 
 decomposed it, sent back its oxygen into the air for 
 breath, and stored up its carbon to keep, in our rich 
 beds of coal. 
 
 So much do we owe to that microscopic green point. 
 Ages before man it was at work for him, providing 
 both air and coal. It still works on, turning his burned 
 coal into forests again, and his befouled air into food. 
 And as fast as he consumes the forests and food, it 
 again changes their gases into growing trees and 
 grains and fruits of a thousand kinds, still purifying 
 the air in the process, and turning its poison into both 
 bread of life and breath of life. Surely these are 
 leaves, not only of Scripture, but of a Gospel. 
 
 Or if Scripture must tell of marvels and miracles, 
 do not these leaves ? To the true thought, the marvel 
 is no less because following laws or because familiar. 
 Emerson said, " the foolish man wonders at the unusual, 
 but the wise man at the usual " ; and in every leaf and 
 grass-blade, wisdom sees wonders and miracles enough. 
 Their mystery no science has explained, and their
 
 54 NEW LEAVES OF SCRIPTURE 
 
 marvel should seem all the greater because renewed 
 every summer. Was Aaron s budding rod, in the 
 Biblical story, any greater miracle than the rods bud 
 ding by the million in the spring forest and from the 
 frozen ground ? Were the withered leaves of the 
 blasted fig-tree any better miracle than the leaves of 
 every field, unwithered by the summer drought, and 
 ever working to bless the world ? Was even the 
 multiplication of the loaves, or that " barrel of meal " 
 so miraculously increased for the widow, any more 
 miraculous than these green granules still multiplying 
 loaves for all the world, still making meal in every leaf 
 of summer ? 
 
 Or if Scripture must teach lessons, do not the 
 leaves ? Their lesson of the need of light is just 
 what all good teachers and preachers proclaim ; and 
 the apostle bids men abide and "walk in the light." 
 Light always stands for truth, and darkness for error 
 and ignorance. Lack of light dwarfs and deforms 
 minds as well as plants. Darkness bleaches souls as 
 well as celery ; and though it may give them a tempt 
 ing tenderness, it keeps them weak. It even makes 
 them unjust. Many of the worst wrongs in history 
 have been due to ignorance alone, and would have been 
 impossible in the light of a larger knowledge and 
 thought. Our lower life may fatten in the dark, like
 
 NEW LEAVES OF SCRIPTURE 55 
 
 fungi ; but a broad charity and justice can no more 
 grow without light than can the leaves. Truth is the 
 best thing in the world. 
 
 Nor need we dilute and adapt truth to weak souls 
 so timidly as is often done. Some of course want 
 less light than others, just as some plants do. But, 
 like plants, they keep their proper place, and are in no 
 more danger of following too strong a light than forest 
 ferns are of spreading into the sunny fields. Feeble 
 souls, that might be harmed by philosophy, never feed 
 on it. They even close, to exclude too strong a light, 
 -just as the animal eye does by contracting its iris. 
 Souls have their iris of prejudice, which is self-adjust 
 ing and contracts in a moment against any excessive 
 illumination. 
 
 This self-adjusting power is taught in the leaves, 
 too. In a perilous air, their stomata shut, like animal 
 eyes and human minds. The whole leaf sometimes folds 
 and shuts, as that of the clover against the even 
 ing chill, or that of the sensitive-plant against a shock. 
 In climates and species where the sun s heat would be 
 too severe, leaves often take a vertical position so as 
 to escape the noon-day rays ; sometimes even point 
 north and south so as to escape them better. In 
 many ways they show the providence in Nature and 
 tell us to trust her.
 
 56 NEW LEAVES OF SCRIPTURE 
 
 Leaves teach also the right philosophy of life. 
 They rebuke that false radicalism which seeks only to 
 outroot, and teach the truer radicalism which keeps 
 inrooted and uses roots rather than kills them. Soci 
 ety, like a tree, has grown from the ground of the 
 past. Beneath us lies a deposit of old opinions, tra 
 ditions, literatures, laws, customs, the accumulated 
 soil of the centuries. In this, society is rooted ; from 
 this it draws needful subsistence and much of the 
 "water of life." For us to cut loose from the past, 
 in order to advance, is much as if the gardener should 
 pull up his plant to make it grow faster. 
 
 But, on the other hand, leaves teach us to use the 
 past with the greatest freedom. They do not take 
 the sand and gravel of the soil, but only the fluid 
 found there ; and most of this is mere water freshly 
 fallen from the air. No more are we to absorb from 
 the past its petrified opinions or fossilized legends, but 
 only what is soluble and nutritious, what dissolves and 
 rises in our own thought to feed us. Even what we 
 do thus take is of no value until brought out into 
 the light and transformed into life, as in the leaves. 
 Though so dependent on the soil, their work is in the 
 wind, and their food is drawn almost entirely from 
 fallen showers and floating vapors. The great tree is 
 not a child of earth, but chiefly of air, light, heaven.
 
 NEW LEAVES OF SCRIPTURE 57 
 
 So is man ; and his work is not in the dark soil of the 
 past, but in the light and air of to-day. 
 
 Our best work is indeed just like that of the leaves : 
 to remove from the social atmosphere the poison 
 ever accumulating from the breath and fires of human 
 passions ; to decompose it and old opinions in the 
 light of thought and warmth of kindly feelings ; to 
 recombine the elements in new growth. In short, 
 to let the heavenly rays of reason and love work 
 in us to revitalize the air and build up the " tree 
 of life." 
 
 The leaves teach also the best way of doing this, 
 patiently, quietly, by the slow and silent processes, of 
 education. Nothing teaches better than they the 
 truth of greatest work by gentlest methods. Think 
 how, without sound of pump or sight of piston, there 
 is every day lifted through them, higher than the 
 house-tops, a flood compared with which that sent by 
 the noisy water-works of all our cities is as nothing. 
 Think how gentle is the light that paints the continent 
 and drives those little factories all the summer without 
 a sound. Yet they weave more wondrous tissue than 
 any loom, to carpet the prairies and drape the forests ; 
 they build trees taller and more lasting than human 
 temples ; they fill the valleys and mountains with 
 timber for homes and human arts; they have even
 
 58 NEW LEAVES OF SCRIPTURE 
 
 stored up the deep beds of coal to drive factories, draw 
 trains, and push ships across the seas. 
 
 The best human work is done as quietly. Even in 
 mechanics, the gentlest methods are most powerful. 
 Silent heat lengthens the iron bar better than any 
 hammers. Slow hydraulic pressure does work quite 
 impossible by quicker methods. The immense iron 
 tubes of the Britannia bridge, each longer than the 
 tallest tree and large enough to let locomotives through, 
 were yet lifted to their places, higher than ship- 
 masts, by the pressure of a column of water no thicker 
 than a finger. When in their places, it was found that 
 the silent sunshine arched and lifted those ponderous 
 spans, every day, more than the heaviest railway-trains 
 lowered them ; just as the same sunshine swells the 
 rocks and bends Bunker Hill monument. The gentlest 
 methods .are the strongest. The very builder of that 
 bridge, so familiar with mighty forces, when asked what 
 is the mightiest one on earth, replied, "A woman s 
 eye." 
 
 Not only in the physical, but in the social and moral 
 field, the strongest forces are of the same kind, 
 working silently, like sunshine, to lift and build 
 rather than break. Loud and violent ways do for 
 destruction, for blowing up cities, sinking ships, 
 killing men, and bringing disorder; but for building
 
 NEW LEAVES OF SCRIPTURE 59 
 
 cities or civilization, the opposite ways are needed. 
 The world does indeed still glorify the brutal methods 
 of its savage days, spending far more for wars than 
 for schools ; and even professing Christians, while 
 teaching that it was a " very God " who ordered them 
 to love their enemies, often teach that it is better to 
 butcher them in battles or in bombardments. But we 
 shall some time learn that a wiser and more Christian 
 lesson is this of gentle methods, taught by the light 
 and the leaves. 
 
 Even something like Christian brotherhood seems 
 taught by them. With all their eagerness for the 
 light, the leaves of the same plant are curiously care 
 ful not to deprive each other of it, being so arranged 
 and shaped, often so narrowed or divided, as to shade 
 others as little as possible. Even rival plants are 
 brotherly. Their competitions are in the method of 
 business rather than of battle, and much more humane 
 than many in human history. William Watson sings 
 the coming day when warring nations, 
 
 . . . wise from all the foolish past, 
 Shall peradventure hail at last 
 
 The advent of that morn divine 
 When nations shall as forests grow, 
 
 Wherein the oak hates not the pine, 
 Nor beeches wish the cedar woe,
 
 60 NEW LEAVES OF SCRIPTURE 
 
 But all in their unlikeness blend, 
 Confederate to one golden end." 
 
 Still more " confederate " they seem when trees of 
 many kinds not only interlace their arms in sisterly 
 way and help each other against the wind, but aid the 
 weaker plants. Horace sang the elm s friendliness to 
 vines, " amicta vitibus ulmo" Many trees not only 
 show this, but hospitably welcome the poor mosses 
 and liverworts at their base, and entertain the lichens 
 on their bark. The lichens themselves are now found 
 to be a brotherly combination of algae and fungi. 
 There are many such cases of " plant partnerships." 
 There are indeed many parasitic and thievish plants, 
 robbing the stores of others ; and some have most 
 cunning devices for capturing and killing insects that 
 prey upon them. But these are rare exceptions, and 
 most plants are all innocence. In Stevenson s fable, 
 the visitor from another planet, after inspecting our 
 various forms of life, concluded that trees, with their 
 calm and gentle ways, are the noblest people on earth. 
 When we think, further, how plants provide for all 
 other life, they seem to be an embodied beneficence 
 and to teach quite as good lessons as any church. 
 
 They even teach that lesson of unity which churches 
 have been rather slow to learn. Some religious sects 
 have been prone to think themselves quite distinct
 
 NEW LEAVES OF SCRIPTURE 61 
 
 from the rest of the human race, an exceptional 
 species of plant, kept apart in the conservatory of a 
 special providence, while all others form but a vile 
 wilderness, Satan s swamp, perhaps growing only to 
 feed the infernal fires. Such beliefs are quite corrected 
 by botany, which shows the kinship and unity of all 
 vegetable life. The leaves, through all their myriad 
 sizes and shapes, are formed of the same cells, and are 
 working in the same way. The varied flowers, with 
 all their parts, are but "metamorphosed leaves." All 
 the vegetable species, from mosses up to majestic 
 pines, from the sacred cedars of Lebanon and the 
 olive trees about Jerusalem, down to the microscopic 
 desmid in the ditch, have yet grown from the same 
 elements, just as all the varied religions from the same 
 sentiments. All are subject to the same laws, all 
 fostered by the same light, all filled with the same 
 life. Better than any creed in the world do plants 
 proclaim the truth of unity and brotherhood. 
 
 Do they not proclaim even a truer theology, a 
 better God? Science may indeed ignore this name; 
 but that is largely a matter of language. The poet, 
 describing the beauties of October, adds : 
 
 " Some of us call it Autumn, 
 And others call it God."
 
 62 NEW LEAVES OF SCRIPTURE 
 
 How much better a God is taught by the plants than 
 by much of the preaching ! Lowell lamented that the 
 old Greeks, with their "beautiful beliefs," such as 
 that "which gave a Hamadryad to each tree," had 
 been displaced by men teaching Satan s "horn and 
 hoof " and "the witch s broomstick," and 
 
 " Fearing their God as if he were a wolf 
 That snuffed round every home and was not seen." 
 
 But better than Greek Hamadryads, or than nymphs 
 of any faith, is the Power seen in every tree and 
 making the whole vegetable world so beneficent 
 that Emerson defined even weeds as plants whose 
 virtues had not yet been found out. The forests 
 correct our faith. A far better God is proclaimed in 
 the summer foliage than in the pious old folios. 
 
 Think of the leaves that men have published, repre 
 senting their God as a monster who saves a few 
 favorite children and sends all the rest to eternal 
 torture. Contrast such leaves with these published 
 by the Creator himself every spring, to bring blessings 
 impartially to all creatures. Seeing how they work 
 all summer to sweeten the air and fill the earth with 
 food, to make "grass to grow for cattle and herb for 
 the service of man," and to build the trees where the
 
 NEW LEAVES OF SCRIPTURE 63 
 
 " fowls of heaven have their habitation " and " sing 
 among the branches," we feel that they are as good 
 "leaves of Scripture "as any ever written. "Love- 
 letters from God," a poet called them ; and when, one 
 autumn day, a falling leaf dropped in my letter-box at 
 the door, I fancied that, if I could read it fully, it 
 would be a richer epistle than postman ever brought 
 or apostle ever penned. 
 
 Nor does the death of the leaves darken their 
 lesson. A noted botanist calls their fall, not a 
 breaking-off, but a "process of growing off." Their 
 season s work is done, and Nature brings a growth 
 that gently separates them from the tree. If they 
 " fade," it is often into new glory, as we have seen ; 
 much as men do in the esteem of their friends, when 
 they die. When they fall, it is to go dancing through 
 the streets and waltzing with the wind, as if rejoicing 
 in their liberty, like children released from school. 
 Even when trodden under foot, it is only to restore 
 their mineral matter to earth for growth again, while 
 their real life lives on and has not fallen at all. It is 
 only their dried skeletons that fall. The substances 
 which made their life have all been withdrawn before 
 they drop, and are securely stored away in stems and 
 roots and seeds, to survive the winter and rise again
 
 64 NEW LEAVES OF SCRIPTURE 
 
 in the buds and fruits of another year. They too 
 proclaim, " O grave, where is thy victory ? " 
 
 Thus do the summer leaves reveal, more sweetly 
 than the whisperings of Aristophanes plane-tree or 
 Theocritus pine, lessons of life and love ; and even 
 in their fall and decay are still "leaves of Script 
 ure."
 
 "THE COSMIC ROOTS OF LOVE"
 
 -THE COSMIC ROOTS OF LOVE" 
 
 ONE of the last papers published by John Fiske 
 is his Phi Beta Kappa address on the ethical 
 aim in Nature. It is entitled, " The Cosmic 
 Roots of Love and Self-sacrifice." It seems, however, 
 to leave these roots quite short of cosmic. It locates 
 them in the prolonged infancy and close motherhood 
 of mammalian life. But, surely, they reach lower than 
 that. The hen is no mammal, and her infants walk 
 the first hour ; yet she shows so much "love and self- 
 sacrifice " that even Jesus took her to illustrate his 
 own. Poets back to Euripides have praised the devo 
 tion of birds for their young. Nor is it limited to 
 their young, but we read of them dying of grief for 
 mates ; and Darwin tells of pelicans and crows, old 
 and blind, but faithfully fed and cared for by their 
 companions. Here seems a foregleam of the benev 
 olence that builds our hospitals for the aged and 
 infirm. Even the parental devotion in every bird s 
 nest shows the growth of love already begun. 
 
 Below birds it has begun, and Romanes says 
 " parental affection " is found among reptiles and fish.
 
 68 "THE COSMIC ROOTS OF LOVE" 
 
 Back in the old Jurassic swamps and Devonian seas 
 there was some virtue. Even below vertebrates, in 
 the insect world, there was something like it. Bees 
 sacrifice themselves for their community, dying for 
 their hive as patriots for their country, or attacking 
 another as devotedly as Christian armies sack Chinese 
 towns. 
 
 So the ant is praised by even the Bible as an example 
 for men ; and not only " sluggards," but most citizens, 
 might "consider her ways" and be wiser. Professor 
 Everett said, " In the ant-hill there is a civilization 
 very like our own," and in some respects it seems 
 better. An ant community may contain more mem 
 bers than there are men in Louisville ; yet Lubbock 
 says they never quarrel, but are all " laboring with the 
 utmost harmony for the common good." They may 
 have no moral sense, but they do their duty better 
 than many a man who boasts of his. They may have 
 little sympathy; but Lubbock says there are "good 
 Samaritans among them," helping wounded sisters 
 with something like " humane feelings," while all show 
 extreme devotion to the larval infants that are not 
 even their own. When we think further of their vast 
 numbers, more in a square mile than there are men 
 in America, all and ever busy in work which Spencer 
 calls " almost wholly altruistic," we see that " the
 
 "THE COSMIC ROOTS OF LOVE" 69 
 
 roots of self -sacrifice " not only reach far below 
 mammals, but pervade a vast world of social insects. 
 
 Lower still this social and altruistic principle may 
 be traced down the animal scale, to the very sponge, 
 which is a genuine society, made of many individuals 
 united in service of each other and their community. 
 Such societies may have no ethical or even conscious 
 life, but they already proclaim the ethical principle of 
 mutual service for the common good. They show the 
 "roots" we are searching, only roots, indeed, and 
 with no hint of the rich fruit to come, but already 
 started in life so low that it used to be thought 
 vegetable. 
 
 Even in vegetable life they have started. The 
 plant, too, is a sort of society, with varied members 
 united in mutual service and sacrifice. Leaves give 
 their lives for the tree, like good families for the State. 
 The flower is a family, botanists say, with even the 
 wedding of sexes and parental sacrifice for the off 
 spring. The flower may not be conscious of its 
 virtues, and we often wish that some human fam 
 ilies were, in this respect, more like it. But in it the 
 ethical principle is on the way to consciousness. 
 
 It is on the way far below the flower. Down among 
 the molds and microscopic algae, we see two cells of 
 different sexes giving themselves to each other and
 
 70 "THE COSMIC ROOTS OF LOVE" 
 
 their offspring with something of the same principle 
 and process seen in the bird s nest and the human 
 home. To such unions even so unfanciful a scientist 
 as Haeckel ascribed the origin of love, tracing its 
 source back to what he called " the elective affinity of 
 two differing cells." Even so orthodox a writer as 
 Drummond, using the same term as Mr. Fiske and 
 somewhat before him, spoke of their " self-sacrifice," 
 and said, " Love is not a late arrival," but " its roots 
 began to grow with the first cell that budded on this 
 earth." So do they reach to the lowest foundations 
 of life. 
 
 Do they not reach even back of life to the inorganic 
 world ? The same principle of union and co-operation 
 is found in everything there. In every rock and crys 
 tal of the mountains and drop of the sea, molecules 
 have united in systems ; and each molecule in turn 
 is called a marriage of atoms. Not only Haeckel s 
 "affinity of differing cells," but all chemical affinity, is 
 at least prophetic of that which unites us in societies 
 and families. 
 
 And is not the earth itself member of a society 
 which is something like a family ? Even the most 
 prosaic astronomers call the planets a "sisterhood," 
 which have all sprung from the solar mass as a common 
 mother, and have in turn given birth to a score of
 
 satellite daughters. All these worlds form a family ; 
 and, though they have separated so far, they are still 
 held together by a sort of family affection, which is 
 none the less real because named gravitation. Under 
 its rule, each daughter world not only bends her 
 onward impulse into a filial orbit around her mother, 
 but turns from her course to greet every passing sister 
 planet. Even the wayward comet sons come back 
 from their wide wanderings to be welcomed and 
 warmed again at the family hearth. 
 
 A foolish fancy, of course, but yet a fact ! The 
 very gravitation which unites the solar system is 
 another of these mutual attractions which we have been 
 tracing. Nor is it limited to our own, but is seen in 
 many a system of double or triple stars moving about 
 each other or around their common center. It not 
 only moves worlds, but gathered and globed them to 
 begin with, astronomers say ; and in the spiral streaks 
 of many a nebula we seem to see the movement start 
 ing, and matter slowly drawing together to shine in 
 new suns and systems. 
 
 So does this attraction and union, in one phase or 
 another, pervade the universe, a cosmic principle. 
 It is ever attended by the opposite one of separation, 
 but is the more creative of the two. It blesses every 
 where, from the gathering and warming of worlds in
 
 72 "THE COSMIC ROOTS OF LOVE" 
 
 systems, up to the gathering of animals in societies 
 and of men in families warm with sympathy and love. 
 In it, rather than in the mere prolongation of infancy, 
 would I see the "cosmic roots of love," reaching 
 back of mammals and of all motherhood, back of 
 Haeckel s cells and oldest suns, running through the 
 wreaths of the nebula, threading every atom, thrilling 
 through the infinite ether, already alive in that mys 
 terious gravitation which, like the spirit of God in the 
 Biblical story, first moved on the face of the abyss, 
 and said, " Let there be light." 
 
 I fancy there may yet come some poet-philosopher 
 who will commence his ethical study, not with Script 
 ure, not even with human souls or lowest cells or solar 
 systems, but back of them all, with the first move 
 ment of matter toward union. He will read in the 
 lines of the gathering nebula a heavenly scripture 
 already revealing the law of love, and in every star a 
 text in prophecy of Christ. He will simply trace this 
 cosmic principle of union through its advancing phases 
 in creation. 
 
 It is ever opposed by repulsion, separation, strife, 
 but is ever harmonizing the strife. Just as, in grav 
 itation, it gathered diffuse matter into globes, and the 
 separating globes in systems ; so on our globe, in the 
 finer chemical affinities, it combined atoms in molecules,
 
 "THE COSMIC ROOTS OF LOVE" 73 
 
 and these in compounds ever more complex. In con 
 densation and cohesion it brought liquids and solids. 
 In crystallization it built the myriad shapes of beauty 
 in the rocks. In more marvelous vital organization it 
 combined compounds in cells, and these again in the 
 countless forms of life. 
 
 Among these individual forms came that cruel com 
 petition and strife which pessimists make so much of, 
 and which has indeed given to Nature a tragic aspect. 
 But in melioration of the strife our principle took a 
 social form, uniting individuals in societies of mutual 
 help, which pessimists forget. This social principle 
 has everywhere prevailed, not only in the vast insect 
 world, but in animals of all sorts, from buffaloes on 
 the plain to beavers in the pond, bringing swarms, 
 schools, flocks, herds, and myriads of minor co-opera 
 tions, like those told in Kropotkin s book. He holds 
 that, even "as a factor of evolution," the fraternal 
 principle of mutual aid has been much more important 
 than " mutual strife," and has thus largely redeemed 
 Nature from the common charge of cruelty. 
 
 Most of these animal societies seem to be merely 
 utilitarian, with little real sympathy. But this comes 
 with the higher union of the family. The family 
 begins low, as we saw, and its affection is long fee 
 ble. Even conjugal love is at first fleeting. Among
 
 74 "THE COSMIC ROOTS OF LOVE" 
 
 some insects the bride does not hesitate to slay her 
 husband when the nuptials are over. Maternal love 
 may be no stronger. Even among vertebrates, eggs 
 and infants are widely left to perish, as they may 
 well be when there are so many of them. When the 
 progeny of a single herring would soon fill the ocean 
 solid, maternal care would hardly be a virtue. But, 
 with higher organization and fewer offspring, that care 
 increases. In birds it becomes proverbial; and the 
 mother, if not loving her neighbor as herself, at least 
 loves her infants as herself, and so seems almost to have 
 begun to be a Christian. Her love is very limited, 
 however, and lasts only a month, after which her 
 moral law is suspended till another season. 
 
 But the mammalian structure carries that union 
 further, unites mother and infant much more closely 
 and longer. At length, the delicate human body and 
 brain so prolong the helpless infancy that the union 
 has to last for years, and thus becomes a habit to last 
 through life. The family becomes permanent, and 
 its affection fixed. Its permanence also extends the 
 union, holds together parents and children and 
 children s children in a widening circle of kinsmen. 
 So we reach one of those clans, gens, or little tribes, 
 in which society seems everywhere to have started. 
 This cosmic principle of union, working from atoms
 
 "THE COSMIC ROOTS OF LOVE" 75 
 
 upward, has at length unfolded its higher meaning, 
 and brought, not merely a utilitarian society of animals, 
 but a human brotherhood inspired with sympathy. 
 
 This little tribe often shows that brotherhood perfect 
 between its own members, however cruel to others. 
 Boyle says that even the Dyaks, so famed for ferocity 
 and murders, were yet, among themselves, "humane 
 to a degree that might well shame " us. Some refuse 
 to believe this of savages, especially of heathen. 
 But why ? Why think affection impossible among 
 barbarians, when it abounds among birds ? Why 
 think self-sacrifice impossible among the heathen, 
 when it is the law of every ant-hill ? Why think 
 pagans cannot keep the ten commandments, when the 
 mere moon keeps every one of them, except that of 
 the Sabbath ? Kindness comes by nature, and even 
 by necessity, for the tribe cannot hold together without 
 it. It is still confined to the tribe, however, and per 
 haps is fiercely hostile to outsiders, only the narrow 
 harmony of a hornet s nest. 
 
 But our principle works on through history to 
 extend the harmony. It unites little tribes in larger, 
 and these in larger still, until a nation is formed. 
 The nation keeps new peace within, and cultivates 
 the juster ideals seen in ancient literature. Plato 
 wrote, " May I, being of sound mind, do to others as
 
 76 "THE COSMIC ROOTS OF LOVE" 
 
 I would that they should do to me " ; and already the 
 sentiment was familiar from Athens to the end of 
 Asia. This brotherhood, however, was only national. 
 Even the comparatively humane Greeks did not try to 
 be so to foreigners ; and Plato, in giving the Golden 
 Rule, did not mean for a moment that it was to be 
 practised toward barbarians. 
 
 But the principle worked on, joining nations in 
 larger union and extending the humanity. In the 
 West this extension came through the Roman rule, 
 uniting peoples from the British Isles to the Euphrates, 
 and giving to ethics a cosmopolitan tone. In the 
 century before Christ, Cicero and the Stoics preached 
 universal brotherhood ; Varro, in giving the Golden 
 Rule, no longer left it local, but said it should embrace 
 all the nations of mankind. In the time of the apostles 
 the pagan Lucan predicted that the world would soon 
 cast aside its weapons, and all nations learn to love. 
 In practice, too, there was for two centuries, in the 
 "Pax Romana" such a world-peace as earth never 
 saw before or since. The Romans, however, were not 
 the people to perfect that union. They had brought 
 it through vast wars, and still kept class divisions and 
 cruel wrongs that made the Stoics precepts seem a 
 mockery. 
 
 But now came from the nation of Israel a move-
 
 "THE COSMIC ROOTS OF LOVE" 77 
 
 ment to further that brotherhood, and, still more 
 important, to identify it at last with religion. That 
 nation itself well illustrates this law of ethical growth. 
 It had started, according to the Biblical story, in one 
 of those primitive families, with not even the domestic 
 virtues yet fully established. Jacob robs his twin 
 brother and deceives his dying father, and is incited 
 to this by his mother ; and his sons, the fathers of the 
 tribes of Israel, seek to slay their best brother and 
 finally sell him into slavery. These tribes, too, though 
 fairly united within, had fought each other, and had well 
 nigh exterminated Benjamin. But they had at length 
 united in a nation, reached a larger justice, and learned 
 the Decalogue. The justice, however, had been only 
 national. Even eminent saints in Israel denied the Dec 
 alogue in dealing with other peoples. They burned town 
 after town even in the name of the Lord, and " utterly 
 destroyed all that breathed." Of course, we need not 
 believe it was really so bad as this ; and the Bible often 
 shows these annihilated towns and tribes reappear 
 ing right afterward, active as ever. But the stories 
 show no less the low ideals of the authors, in both 
 morals and religion. These ideals, however, continued 
 to rise, until the great prophets of the eighth century 
 B.C. not only plead passionately for brotherhood within 
 the nation, but even predicted the union of nations,
 
 78 "THE COSMIC ROOTS OF LOVE" 
 
 when swords should be beaten into ploughshares and 
 the world should learn war no more. 
 
 But, most important of all, this brotherhood 
 was made the essence of religion. It was taught that 
 the Lord cared little for their ceremonies and prayers, 
 wanted no more blood of animals or men, but only 
 that they should "do justly and love mercy." This 
 teaching, though of course unheeded, continued among 
 the best Jews. Rabbi Hillel, in giving the Golden 
 Rule, called it " the substance of the law " ; and Jesus 
 called it both "the law and the prophets." Jesus 
 Beatitudes are all only ethical and do not hint that 
 religion is anything more. They give the highest 
 blessings to those who " hunger and thirst after right 
 eousness," to "the meek" and "the merciful" ; and, 
 if God is mentioned, it is "the pure in heart" who 
 shall see him, the " peace-makers " who shall be called 
 his " sons." It is the simple religion of righteousness 
 and brotherhood. Jesus seems to have cared for little 
 else. He preached " mercy and not sacrifice." He 
 ordered men to leave the altar until they were recon 
 ciled to others. This reconciliation was itself the best 
 prayer : "for if ye forgive others, your heavenly Father 
 will forgive you," and he will not otherwise. For 
 giveness was the true religion, and must be repeated 
 "seventy times seven" times. This was also taught
 
 "THE COSMIC ROOTS OF LOVE" 79 
 
 among his disciples, one of whom wrote that " if we 
 love one another, God dwelleth in us," for " God is 
 love." Love was itself God and the only way to find 
 him. Saint Jerome tells how John, when an old man, 
 kept repeating, "Love one another"; and how, 
 when asked why he said no more, he replied that no 
 more was needed. So did early Christianity promise 
 to perfect the union which the Roman empire had 
 brought. 
 
 But the promise failed. Between barbarians without 
 and corruption within, that uniting empire went to 
 pieces. Even before it fell, Christianity fell worse ; 
 fell from its high ideals of harmony to things that 
 divided. It separated into sects quarreling over 
 theological questions. It opposed the social senti 
 ments with ascetic practices, and sought sanctity by 
 fasts and bodily penance rather than by brotherhood. 
 Many a holy hermit abandoned his own children to 
 save his soul, and a nun was said to have been sent to 
 Purgatory for loving her mother too much. Formal 
 observances were again exalted until they seemed 
 holier than innocence itself. Baptism, which Paul 
 once thanked God he had practised so little, came to 
 be thought more important than purity ; and ceremonies 
 to atone for a crime seemed more meritorious than 
 not to commit it. Such opinions prevailed for cent-
 
 8o "THE COSMIC ROOTS OF LOVE" 
 
 uries, and Jesus religion of love was so buried that 
 his professing followers sometimes sought to serve him 
 by slaying each other. 
 
 Yet, all this time, the tendency to union was also 
 active, and was aided much by Christianity. What 
 ever the quarrels of the Church, it still taught broth 
 erhood. Amid all the divisions of the falling empire 
 and of the feudal system, the Christian name and 
 organization kept alive the feeling of unity. Even the 
 Crusades helped to unite Europe, and the wars which 
 followed them were partly redeemed by gathering 
 conquered peoples into great nations again. 
 
 But the union has been furthered more by the 
 secular forces that revived with the renaissance. The 
 arts undermined intolerance. Learning linked men 
 of even different religions and races in a common 
 cause and sympathy. Advancing science softened 
 bigotry ; and the agnostic spirit began to show the folly 
 of quarreling over questions about which neither side 
 knew anything. Increasing commerce joined the 
 nations ever more closely, and economics slowly 
 learned that the interests of each were the interests 
 of all. 
 
 The harmony of nations and the folly of their 
 quarrels was also taught more and more by eminent 
 men, from Sully and Grotius onward. Voltaire wrote
 
 "THE COSMIC ROOTS OF LOVE" Si 
 
 most earnestly against wars. Benjamin Franklin said 
 there never had been and never would be a good one. 
 Jeremy Bentham denounced war as "mischief on the 
 largest scale." Robert Hall condemned it as "the 
 temporary repeal of all the principles of virtue." 
 Carlyle asked whether the French and English sol 
 diers who " blow the souls out of one another " have 
 any real reason for it ; and he answered : " Busy as 
 the devil is, not the slightest." Long before General 
 Sherman, Channing said that a battlefield is a vast 
 " exhibition of crime," and that " a more fearful hell 
 in any region of the universe cannot well be con 
 ceived." Auguste Comte closed his " Positive Phi 
 losophy " with congratulation that the old evil was 
 ending ; and at about the same time Emerson wrote 
 that " war is on its last legs " and " begins to look like 
 an epidemic insanity." Charles Sumner called it 
 "international lynch-law " with works "infinitely evil 
 and accursed"; and he said that the greatest value 
 of the Springfield arsenal was that it had inspired 
 Longfellow s poem against war. Theodore Parker 
 wrote : " Posterity will damn into deep infamy that 
 government which allows a war to take place in the 
 middle of the nineteenth century." Even during our 
 Mexican war, Parker denounced it as " mean and 
 infamous," as not only a "great boy fighting a
 
 82 "THE COSMIC ROOTS OF LOVE" 
 
 little one," but as a fight where "the big boy is in 
 the wrong, and tells solemn lies to make his side seem 
 right." So Lowell opposed that war of his own coun 
 try, made Hosea Biglow " call it murder," and made 
 Parson Wilbur rebuke it in behalf of a higher " patriot 
 ism " and of that truer country which is not territory, 
 but justice. In 1848 and 1849, great Peace Con 
 gresses for international arbitration and disarmament 
 met in Brussels and Paris. At the latter, Victor 
 Hugo predicted the day when cannon would be obso 
 lete and seen only in museums, as curiosities. Even 
 England, during a whole generation of peace, had 
 reached the "belief that wars were things of the 
 past " ; and Buckle soon after wrote that the national 
 taste for them had become " utterly extinct." 
 
 The work of union continued, and even the wars 
 that followed were sometimes in its favor. Our own 
 Civil War was in the name of "the Union." Italy 
 was at last united again. The great German empire 
 was organized where hundreds of petty States had 
 once opposed each other. But union has been ad 
 vanced most by the peaceful processes of industry, 
 trade, travel, intercourse of every kind. Victor Hugo 
 contrasted the great Industrial Exposition at Paris, 
 where the nations had come together to learn good 
 from each other, with " that terrible international
 
 "THE COSMIC ROOTS OF LOVE" 83 
 
 exposition called a battlefield." Even the electric 
 flashes through the Atlantic cable moved Whittier 
 to sing, 
 
 "Weave on f swift shuttle of the Lord, 
 
 Beneath the sea so far, 
 The bridal-robe of earth s accord, 
 The funeral-shroud of war." 
 
 Every peaceable ship is a fuller shuttle for that shroud ; 
 every railway-train, with its merchandise and mail, 
 adds its thread to that bridal-robe. Through these 
 secular agencies, human sympathy has already widened 
 until men give their tears and treasure for suffering 
 heathen around the earth whom once they would have 
 thought it sacred duty to slay. The very laws of the 
 world are working for the true Christianity and the 
 final union of mankind. 
 
 Not, indeed, that we are near it yet. The nations 
 still try to out-trick each other in trade. In the most 
 " Christian " nations, the citizens sometimes do ; and 
 possessions are not shared with perfect brotherhood 
 even in the Church. No longer is Ananias struck 
 dead for keeping back part of his property, but he 
 and Sapphira sit safely in their pew, with no question 
 about their land. No longer is Dives sent to "hell" 
 on account of his wealth, but has become a deacon, 
 and the preacher has found a way to get the camel
 
 84 "THE COSMIC ROOTS OF LOVE" 
 
 through the needle s eye. Nor is Lazarus as peaceful 
 as he used to be. He is ready to dynamite, not 
 Dives only, but every Lazarus who will not join his 
 strike to cut off the country s needed coal or beef. 
 
 For the spirit of violence still survives to rend 
 society. It inspires not only the poor and ignorant, 
 but their leaders and rulers, and sometimes takes pos 
 session of a nation. That long dream of peace to 
 which we have referred was broken by a most destruc 
 tive series of wars. Those of the ten years ending in 
 1871 are said by Mulhall to have cost nearly a million 
 and a half of lives and nearly six billions of dollars. 
 Since then, the armaments in Europe have much 
 further increased. A standard new History tells us 
 that the " civilized Christian nations " now occupy 
 ing the old Roman territory, though no longer in 
 danger from outside barbarians, yet keep "under 
 arms ten or twelve times the forces " of the pagan 
 emperors. Military expenditures are vastly greater 
 than any other. Even in our own country, in 1 899, 
 the Naval and War departments and pensions con 
 sumed nearly three-fourths of the entire expenditures 
 of the National Government. President Eliot recently 
 reminded us that the sum granted to our great Agri 
 cultural Department for a year was "about the cost of 
 one day of the war with Spain"; while the annual
 
 "THE COSMIC ROOTS OF LOVE" 85 
 
 amount given to the beneficent work of fish-culture 
 was less than that spent in maintaining one battleship. 
 Fifty years ago, Charles Sumner said : " Every ship 
 of war that floats costs more than a well-endowed 
 college ; every sloop of war, more than the largest 
 library in our country." To-day, battleships are far 
 more costly and numerous, and eminent Americans 
 who profess much zeal for Christ want to increase 
 them. 
 
 They want to use them, too ; and even preachers 
 are not always opposed to this. General Francis A. 
 Walker wrote, in 1869, that in five years pretty con 
 stant attendance at church, and in listening to sermons 
 from fifty different pulpits, he had " not heard a single 
 discourse which was devoted to the primitive Christian 
 idea of peace, or which contained a perceptible strain 
 of argument or appeal for international good will." A 
 few years ago we kept our Christmas season of " peace 
 on earth " by a clamor for a mighty war with England 
 about a Venezuelan boundary. Our people and press 
 had just been crying out against the horror of a pro 
 posed pugilistic fight between two fools in Texas, but 
 now became eager to send into the ring half a million 
 Christians to engage in battles beside which prize-fights 
 would be bland and benevolent. Some even argued 
 that our national character would be ennobled by a
 
 86 "THE COSMIC ROOTS OF LOVE" 
 
 war, and our moral tone improved by bombarding a 
 few towns and butchering their people. The excite 
 ment passed, and how that boundary question was 
 settled few now know or care. But we have since 
 tried that method of ethical training, though on a 
 much smaller and safer scale. The ideals of the 
 battlefield and of the "water-cure " have spread among 
 the people, yet without the predicted moral improve 
 ment. Indeed, violence seems to have become un 
 usually popular, strikers club and kill other workmen 
 with medieval ardor, and now and then a community 
 gathers with the greatest delight to watch the writhings 
 of a Negro burning to death. In pessimistic moments, 
 one sometimes feels that our civilization is little more 
 than a film, beneath which the old savagery is still 
 seething. 
 
 These evils, however, are exceptional and we must 
 not make too much of them. A little bad gets all 
 attention, while the great current of good goes on 
 unheeded, just because it is so great and common. 
 The bad may even be a sign of progress ; and part 
 of the violence to-day is a passionate outcry against 
 wrongs that have long been allowed and that must be 
 ended. But amid the violence, peaceful methods are 
 advancing, and arbitration is more and more settling 
 labor-troubles and preventing wars. Even the wars
 
 "THE COSMIC ROOTS OF LOVE" 87 
 
 that do come are no longer between the foremost 
 nations, but have mostly sunk into expeditions of some 
 powerful people to conquer some feeble one. Even 
 these inglorious conquests have become so difficult and 
 expensive that they will not often be attempted ; 
 while real war between two great powers would be so 
 vastly more so that M. Bloch pronounced it already 
 impossible. Certainly war seems destined to die at 
 length by its own growth, to kill itself by its costli 
 ness. Even now, two equal nations could not long 
 continue it without the bankruptcy of both. 
 
 So do the laws of progress work for peace. A 
 wise man, when challenged, replied that any fool can 
 propose a duel, but it takes two fools to fight. The 
 nations will yet learn this. Already they are question 
 ing the wisdom of wasting most of their wealth in 
 endless preparation for wars which can be avoided 
 and which cannot come without mutual ruin. Already 
 they see a fallacy in the system which spends millions 
 on a battleship that soon becomes useless by the 
 invention of a better one ; and which is forever improv 
 ing walls to resist cannon, and then improving cannon 
 to destroy the walls. They begin to see the folly of 
 fortifying boundaries at infinite expense, when that 
 long one between us and British America has been 
 safe for nearly a century, without walls or warship,
 
 88 "THE COSMIC ROOTS OF LOVE" 
 
 by mere mutual agreement. They see something 
 worse than folly in the system which uses our noble 
 youth like Falstaffs ragamuffins, as " food for 
 powder" and "to fill a pit,"- and sometimes to ful 
 fill viler purposes. For the moral fallacy, too, is more 
 and more seen. Why condemn brutality and crime 
 at home, and then cultivate them abroad ? Why hang 
 for killing one man, and honor for killing a hundred ? 
 Why imprison a starving woman for stealing a loaf, 
 and then praise rulers or soldiers for looting cities and 
 stealing a whole country ? Shall justice be abolished 
 by a national boundary, and the moral law stop at the 
 State line ? 
 
 Emerson once said, "The arch-abolitionist, older 
 than John Brown and older than the Shenandoah 
 Mountains, is Love, whose other name is Justice, 
 which was before Alfred, before Lycurgus, before 
 slavery, and will be after it." That same Love and 
 Justice, older than battle-ships or the brutality that 
 wants them, is still here, was alive before wars 
 began, and will be after they are ended. 
 
 Doubtless this principle of union will work on until 
 it links all nations by just laws, and settles their 
 quarrels by peaceful courts. It will also unite all 
 classes in them. It will not, however, cement society 
 in any spiritless communism like an archaic sponge, or
 
 "THE COSMIC ROOTS OF LOVE" 89 
 
 bind men in any tyrannic labor-union which denies 
 liberty to its members. For individualism also has 
 been an aim in Nature, from rushing worlds to 
 roaming bees and soaring birds and free souls. The 
 perfect system will combine fraternity with freedom, 
 
 " liberty and union, one and inseparable, now and 
 forever." 
 
 This principle will perfect religion also. So ancient 
 prophets and apostles taught. So the best modern 
 ones have taught. Dr. Putnam said the one thing he 
 worked for was " the sense of universal unity and 
 brotherhood." Dr. Channing not only made this his 
 chief aim, but saw it as the substance of religion, and 
 said: "The love of God is but another name for 
 the love of essential benevolence and justice." So 
 Emerson declared this sentiment not only "the 
 essence of all religion," but the essence of Deity : 
 
 "If a man is at heart just, then in so far is he 
 God ; the immortality of God, the majesty of God, 
 do enter into that man with justice." These 
 words seemed profane, but they are almost the 
 same which the apostle wrote : " If we love one 
 another, God dwelleth in us," for "God is love." 
 Some pious people slur love as " not religion," but 
 " only ethics." Only ethics! Only love; that is, 
 according to the apostle, only God! But this is
 
 90 "THE COSMIC ROOTS OF LOVE" 
 
 exactly what pious people were seeking. The " cosmic 
 roots of love " are also those of religion. 
 
 Such is the sweep of this principle of union. It is 
 indeed a " cosmic " principle, working from the nebula 
 to now, from the primal atoms to the perfect civil 
 ization and religion. The great Kant adored two 
 wonders, the stars above and the moral law within. 
 But the two wonders are one, and all the more 
 wonderful because one. The moral law within is 
 the higher music of the same law which "the morn 
 ing stars sang together" and have been singing ever 
 since. It is sung ever more clearly through creation, 
 from solar systems up to human society, from 
 nebular mist up to minds that outshine the stars, and 
 to souls and sentiments that hope to outlast the stars. 
 It has brought love. Rather, it is love, and has been 
 love from the first. Its lesson is to work for love 
 now, and to trust the Love eternal.
 
 AN OLD PARABLE EXTENDED
 
 AN OLD PARABLE EXTENDED 
 
 JESUS longest parable, repeated also in three 
 forms, is that of "the sower." He rightly gave 
 the subject such prominence, for sowing is a 
 work, not only of half the human race, but of the 
 whole plant-world, and of a large part of creation. It 
 is widely, though unwittingly, carried on by beasts, 
 birds, insects, even by winds and waters, and seems 
 the chief aim of the vegetable world. To produce 
 seed is the end of flowers, leaves, stems, roots, of the 
 entire plant. Other organs may be dwarfed and 
 mostly disappear, other functions may largely fail, 
 but the seed-making is not forgotten. I was vividly 
 impressed by this, one August day, while climbing the 
 great Gray s Peak in the Rocky Mountains. Little 
 by little, in the ascent, the gnarled old pines and 
 spruces shortened their trunks until no taller than a 
 man, but they still produced their cones as below. 
 Little by little the willows shrank, until no longer 
 than a ringer, but they went to seed all the same. 
 Above the timber-line, the summer herbs more and 
 more contracted their stems and leaves, but only to
 
 94 AN OLD PARABLE EXTENDED 
 
 blossom more and brighter. Higher still, a thousand 
 feet above the lingering snow-banks, starved beds, with 
 no more foliage than the finest moss, were yet densely 
 carpeted with flowers of white or pink, and were some 
 times bluer than the sky above with forget-me-nots 
 which had forgotten nearly everything except to pre 
 pare their seed. Even on the wintry point of the 
 peak, in the crevices of the storm-swept rocks, 
 stunted grass and chickweed were still blossoming 
 and bearing their fruit ; while on the rocks, crowded 
 lichens, without any blossoms, spread their dainty 
 cups scattering spores by the million. So notable in 
 Nature is the production of seeds. 
 
 Hardly less so is their protection when produced. 
 They are guarded by tough pods, prickly burrs, bitter 
 rinds, to keep them from being eaten by animals, 
 and by hard coats to save them when eaten. Some 
 plants have protective movements so curious as to 
 make them seem almost endowed with mind. Watch 
 a head of common white clover, for instance, and see 
 how its little florets, as fast as fertilized, turn bottom 
 upward, so that in a shower each seed is covered by 
 its calyx as by an umbrella. Notice the familiar 
 dandelions, first held up to gain the light and insects, 
 but then drawn snugly to the ground for safety while 
 their seed is ripening. Or see the eel-grass and water-
 
 AN OLD PARABLE EXTENDED 95 
 
 lilies blossoming at the surface of the lake, but 
 then coiling up their long stems, as a sailor does his 
 rope, and drawing the seed-cases to the bottom. So 
 curious are the devices to protect seed. 
 
 Still more so are those for sowing it widely. Many 
 plants, by cunning springs, throw their seeds, like a 
 catapult, sometimes with much force. Countless 
 species clothe them with barbs and hooks, to fasten 
 upon roving animals and be scattered far ; or with 
 pulpy fruit to bribe the birds to eat and bear them 
 further. Many plants dry into bushy and rounded 
 forms, to be caught by the autumn winds and sent 
 rolling across the prairies, like a patent planter, sowing 
 their seeds as they go. Much more widely are seeds 
 scattered by water, being built more tightly than a 
 boat, and safely floated the whole length of a river, or 
 even across the ocean. Still more curious is their 
 wide sowing in the wind and by air-ships and sails of 
 many forms. That dandelion not only draws down 
 the seed-head to ripen safely, but, when ripened, 
 erects it again, even lengthens the stem to lift it still 
 higher ; then unfolds it into a plumy sphere, where 
 each of the hundred florets has spread its calyx into 
 a perfect parachute, and stands waiting for the wind 
 to carry its single seed into the next county. Or see 
 the thistle-head, not only guarded with serried spears
 
 96 AN OLD PARABLE EXTENDED 
 
 to defend it till ripe, but then opening, unfurling its 
 sepals into silken sails, launching its fairy, fruit-laden 
 fleet into the heavens, thus making the wind sow 
 one seed in Michigan and its neighbor in Maine. We 
 boast of our aeronautic art ; but, ages before Mont- 
 golfier or even man, Nature had perfected it, and 
 applied it to agriculture, had patented all sorts of 
 air-ships among her farming-implements, and was 
 using parachutes not only to scatter seeds broadcast 
 over a continent, but even to plant them right end 
 downward. 
 
 Nor should we forget the finer spores which in the 
 lower vegetable world serve the same end as seeds, 
 and even in the higher are essential for producing 
 them. These are sown from field to field and from 
 flower to flower by bees, butterflies, and various 
 insects ; and the flower itself is often cunningly shaped 
 to get them sown aright. They are sown by the 
 breeze, and floated by their own fineness. They drop 
 from the fern-fronds as dust. They rise from the 
 puff-ball by the million, as mere smoke. They fly 
 from molds and mildews and minuter plants, often in 
 finer form than the microscope can find. They are 
 carried wherever air goes, and hardly the wit of 
 man can shut them out. ^ 
 
 Through this sowing of spores and seeds is wrought
 
 AN OLD PARABLE EXTENDED 97 
 
 the eternal miracle of the perpetuation of life. The 
 summer herbs fail, their leaves fall, the stems die, the 
 very roots rot in the ground, and the life seems 
 gone forever. Yet, wrapped in these wonderful seeds, 
 it survives the decay ; and, after freezing for months 
 in the soil, or flying about in the winter winds and 
 snows, it unfolds again, and into wider life than before. 
 As in the familiar lines : 
 
 " You think I am dead, 
 
 A soft voice said, 
 Because not a stem or root I own ? 
 
 I never have died, 
 
 But close I hide 
 
 In a plumy seed that the wind hath sown. 
 Patient I wait through the long winter hours ; 
 
 You will see me again, 
 
 I shall laugh at you then, 
 Out of the eyes of a hundred flowers. " 
 
 Nor do seeds survive merely one winter, but many. 
 Dried for years, they grow again. Drowned, they 
 revive ; and the mud dredged from the lake-bottom 
 is soon green from their growth. Even behind the 
 fierce fire of forest or prairie, they are soon sprouting, 
 as if the very flames had left some safe in their grave 
 below. They survive eating, acids, perhaps ages. 
 Dr. Lindley, pointing to some raspberry-bushes in his
 
 98 AN OLD PARABLE EXTENDED 
 
 garden, said they had grown from seeds found in the 
 stomach of a body buried centuries before with coins 
 of the emperor Hadrian. 
 
 These physical facts are symbolic of spiritual laws. 
 In the fields of thought and feeling, seeds are contin 
 ually sown, in some form. One form is that of words. 
 Even much more widely than seeds, these are sown 
 and grow. " Winged words," we say ; and so they 
 are. A spoken word flies on wings lighter than bird s 
 or thistle-down, on invisible waves of air swifter than 
 any wind ; and not merely in one direction, but in all, 
 so that it may be planted in a thousand ears at once. 
 Written words even cross oceans and ages, and may 
 be sown a thousand times over, with no loss of their 
 vitality. Even though seeming dead, they keep their 
 life. The spoken word of a friend, long forgotten, 
 mysteriously starts up in memory, grows into new 
 deeds, and gives direction to a whole day. Written 
 words older than Hadrian s coins are still growing 
 around us to richer result than those berry-bushes. 
 Jesus sayings are more vital seeds than botany knows. 
 Sentences of Isaiah and ./Eschylus are yet sown and 
 bearing fruit every season. The stories of wheat 
 found in the wrappings of Egyptian mummies, and 
 made to grow, may all be fictions ; but good words
 
 AN OLD PARABLE EXTENDED 99 
 
 inscribed in those tombs are still full of life, and stir 
 souls to-day. Indeed, wise words cannot die. They 
 may be buried and lost forever, as most seeds are ; 
 but if found, they are always alive. They are more 
 vital than any seed, living longer, borne farther, 
 having power to be planted in a myriad places at once 
 and a million times over, but yet to remain as full of 
 life as at first. 
 
 Another form of sowing is by deeds.; and innum 
 erable are those which have not only shaped history 
 with unending influence, but still inspire mankind. 
 Even the most inconspicuous acts send on their life ; 
 like those invisible spores that rise from lowliest 
 plants to float everywhere and grow. Even without 
 acts or words, the silent thoughts, feelings, character, 
 still speak ; as in that woman who " wrought works 
 that cannot die " : 
 
 " It was not anything she said, 
 
 It was not anything she did ; 
 It was the movement of her head, 
 
 The lifting of her lid ; 
 Her little motions when she spoke, 
 
 The presence of an upright soul, 
 The living light that from her broke, 
 
 It was the perfect whole. 
 And as she trod her path aright, 
 
 Power from her very garments stole ;
 
 ioo AN OLD PARABLE EXTENDED 
 
 For such is the mysterious might 
 God grants the upright soul." 
 
 So in many ways is truth sown in the world, as 
 seed by the winds. It is sown even by those who 
 have no heed for it, like those barbed fruits carried 
 by the fur of animals. It is sown even by those who 
 seem to have destroyed it ; like those berry-seeds 
 eaten by birds, but only to be planted more widely. 
 Often in history a truth has thus owed more to its 
 foes than to its friends. It grows by opposition, and 
 even survives the flames of martyrdom better than 
 seeds do the prairie fires. It cannot be destroyed. 
 Much of it may fall on unfit places, and fail ; but 
 whenever finding a soul ready for it, it grows. 
 Thus the losses in one place are met by gains in 
 another, and the moral and religious life of the world 
 is preserved undiminished. 
 
 That life is not only thus preserved, but improved ; 
 and this is a further step in our parable. In the plant- 
 world few of the innumerable seeds find room to 
 thrive. Only the fittest can grow to ripeness and 
 reproduction. Thus Nature is constantly weeding out 
 the weaker, selecting the more suitable, aiding ad 
 vance. Through this process, patiently continued 
 through those seasons of the Lord whose days are a
 
 AN OLD PARABLE EXTENDED 101 
 
 thousand years, seems to have come much of the 
 vegetable progress, from algae of the primal seas up 
 to our stately forests and flowery fields. 
 
 But the social and moral evolution is quite as 
 evident as the physical. Error is weak and has to 
 give way. Only truth is " fittest " and finally sur 
 vives. In the intellectual world, it is sure to win, 
 aided by every agitation and even opposition ; so that 
 Paul well said, " We can do nothing against, but for 
 the truth." In the moral world, the right wins by the 
 same principle ; and, though often suppressed, shows a 
 general advance. See the moral progress, from prim 
 itive savages eating each other, to modern cities send 
 ing shiploads of food to the needy around the earth. 
 See the religious progress, since even the Biblical 
 Psalmist prayed for an opponent : " Let his days be 
 few, and his wife a widow " ; "let there be none to 
 extend mercy unto him, neither let there be any to 
 favor his fatherless children." See the advance, from 
 the fierce persecutions urged even by the Church only 
 a few centuries ago, to the universal charity preached 
 in so many pulpits to-day. Plainly the spiritual world 
 shows evolution as well as the vegetable. In both 
 alike, the sowing not only preserves, but advances 
 life, by the mere laws of Nature.
 
 102 AN OLD PARABLE EXTENDED 
 
 But the notable thing in Jesus parable is that it 
 takes us beyond unaided Nature, to human art, and 
 thereby gives us a higher lesson. He illustrated the 
 " kingdom of heaven," not by the forests and wilds 
 sowing all seeds at random, but by a man who "went 
 forth to sow," and again by "a man sowing good 
 seed in his field." For by man s sowing comes a far 
 faster progress than Nature s. She sows indiscrimi 
 nately, everything and everywhere, leaving the fitter 
 forms to fight their own way, and to win by the slow 
 process of natural selection. But man takes the selec 
 tion and sowing into his own hands, and carries them 
 further. He selects, not merely after the sowing, like 
 her, but before, and sows only the best. He selects, 
 not only the best species, but the best spots for their 
 growth. He not only sows, but protects and culti 
 vates. By this continued selection and cultivation of 
 the better varieties as they arise, his progress leaves 
 Nature s far behind ; and Thoreau said, man made 
 trees bear fruit that God never gave them. Nature s 
 growths seem about the same as ages ago ; but art 
 has developed the wild grains and fruits into richer of 
 countless kinds, and one flower into several hundred 
 varieties. Schliemann said he found still growing, on 
 the top of Mount Gargarus, the same violets and 
 hyacinths which Homer pictured there for the couch
 
 AN OLD PARABLE EXTENDED 103 
 
 of Zeus and Hera. But whatever may have been 
 Homer s flowers, hyacinths have since been so devel 
 oped that two thousand varieties of them are said to 
 have been cultivated in Holland a century ago. 
 
 We would not boast too much of human art. The 
 majestic pines of California grew without it. The 
 calypso blooms in its native bog, and the cactus on 
 the desert sands, with a glory that mocks our gardens. 
 But, in general, our orchards and greenhouses far 
 outdo the wilderness. By the aid of human culture, 
 the prairies, on which the buffaloes recently roamed, 
 are to-day feeding foreign nations ; and the forests 
 in which a few hunters led a half-starved life have 
 given way to populous States and the comforts of 
 civilization. So does art improve the produce of 
 the soil. 
 
 No less does it improve the produce in the social 
 and spiritual field. Here, too, the progress has largely 
 come through human effort and interference with nat 
 ural instincts. By such efforts, in governments 
 and laws and schools and churches, savage passions 
 have been cleared off, better principles planted in their 
 place, and these improved by continual culture, like 
 grain and grapes. Not that we would carry culture 
 to excess, and war against Nature, like the preachers 
 of " total depravity." We do not need to be contin-
 
 104 AN OLD PARABLE EXTENDED 
 
 ually harrowing children s minds, any more than 
 meadows ; and much of the spiritual field, like our 
 noble forest-parks, wants no replanting. Many of the 
 best human qualities grow like the pines, without even 
 pruning, and often on unpromising soil. In real kind 
 ness and devotion, the peasant s cottage often outdoes 
 the colleges ; and sometimes the very slums shame 
 the sanctuaries. 
 
 But, in general, the best fruits, of soil and society 
 alike, demand culture. Will the finest thoughts 
 flourish without being planted ? No more than wheat. 
 Leave Nature to sow that, and see what you will get ! 
 Even when planted, will the best principles thrive 
 without care ? Try it in the corn-field, and you find 
 the crop soon choked with a lower growth. Human 
 nature, like the soil, is full of poor seeds, and every 
 wind sows more of them. Nature prefers them, 
 too ; is partial to her own wild children, and not 
 fond of the more refined step-daughters of culture. 
 She likes weeds better than corn, rude strength 
 more than righteousness ; and without continued care 
 of the higher growth, you will hardly get back as 
 much as was planted. Even that will hardly be as 
 good as was planted. For there is a law of " rever 
 sion," the naturalists say, by which an improved form, 
 if left untrained, tends to return to its wild parent.
 
 AN OLD PARABLE EXTENDED 105 
 
 Though favoring advance, Nature wants it slow, like 
 hers, and puts back our more rapid progress when 
 she can ; makes our rich grains and graces alike 
 "revert" to ruder forms; makes our best vines and 
 virtues soon degenerate. Not only for making prog 
 ress, but for keeping what is made, there must be con 
 tinued planting of the best. 
 
 What, then, should be planted ? The good princi 
 ples from the past ; for this is the lesson of sowing. 
 Many indeed seem to doubt it. They say we have 
 now entered a new and scientific era, which should 
 cut loose from the old days of ignorance and start life 
 anew. But the farms rebuke that philosophy. The 
 crops cannot cut loose from the past. The modern 
 farmer may invent new and scientific methods of reap 
 ing and sowing, but he cannot invent the seed. 
 The despised past produced it for him, and had to 
 improve it for ages before he could glory in his grain- 
 fields and agricultural fairs. Civilization has grown 
 in the same way ; and the reformer who boasts his 
 independence of the past would do well to try the ex 
 periment first on his farm, burn up his seed-corn, and 
 try to manufacture better by his boasted machinery. 
 Wise men, from Confucius to Goethe, have agreed 
 that the great saving principles have all been taught
 
 106 AN OLD PARABLE EXTENDED 
 
 of old, and only need to be kept growing, with ever 
 wider use and improvement. Wise men revere ancient 
 laws and literatures, and Jesus well said, " Search the 
 Scriptures." 
 
 But he said " search " them, and perhaps that is 
 the word he emphasized. " Search the Scriptures,"- 
 not accept them indiscriminately. " Search " for the 
 good, select the best, keep and cultivate that, and let 
 the poorer go ; just as Paul said, " Prove all things, 
 hold fast that which is good." In practice, too, Jesus 
 followed this principle of selection which we have 
 traced ; and he abandoned much even in the Bible. 
 He left behind all its elaborate sacrificial Law, and 
 said the Lord wanted "mercy and not sacrifice." He 
 seems to have dropped some even of its Decalogue, 
 and, in quoting, always omits a part. He not only 
 omits the Sabbath law, but so violated it that one New 
 Testament passage says he had " broken the Sabbath," 
 and another that he " keepeth not the Sabbath day." 
 He even contradicts the Scripture, and quotes words 
 from its very Law, such as "eye for eye and tooth 
 for tooth," expressly to deny them. Indeed, the most 
 of that Law he virtually denied, and long chapters and 
 collections of its ceremonial orders his teachings 
 winnowed away as worthless chaff. Much else in the 
 Old Testament, all its precepts and practices of
 
 AN OLD PARABLE EXTENDED 107 
 
 vengeance and hate, Jesus treated as worse than 
 worthless. All its intolerance was attacked in his 
 teaching ; like those " tares " which he ordered to 
 "burn." 
 
 But though rejecting the weeds in old Scriptures, 
 Jesus kept the wheat ; and though winnowing away 
 its ritual chaff, he kept its kernels of righteousness 
 and love. He gathered these in his Beatitudes, and 
 made them the essentials and only essentials of relig 
 ion. He gave the Golden Rule as the sum of " the 
 Law and the Prophets" ; just as Paul said "Love 
 is the fulfilling of the Law." This is the seed which 
 Jesus selected and sowed and taught his followers to 
 sow. 
 
 But he also foresaw that this best religious sowing 
 would suffer from hostile conditions. He said it would 
 not grow much when falling on "stony places" or 
 "among thorns" or "by the wayside"; and that 
 even where it grew, the " tares " would soon be sown 
 among it and choke its growth. History has shown 
 that he was quite correct in this. Part of the Church- 
 field has been " good ground," where his seed has 
 brought forth "some thirty-fold" and "some a hun 
 dred-fold." But much of it has been " stony " with 
 old prejudices which did not allow it to take root. 
 Much has been full of the " thorns " of savage pas-
 
 io8 AN OLD PARABLE EXTENDED 
 
 sions and selfish policies, where "the care of the 
 world and the deceitfulness of riches choke the word." 
 Much has been "by the wayside" of formal routine, 
 and along hardened paths of habit, where " it was 
 trodden under foot " and kept from growing. Even 
 where Jesus teachings have grown, they have often 
 been crushed to death in quarrels about him and his 
 nature. The Church has often ceased to gather his 
 true grain of righteousness, and has harvested instead 
 all sorts of theological straw and ritual stubble. Even 
 the old intolerance and hate were soon sown again in 
 many forms, and the Church sometimes zealously 
 devoted itself to the burning of the Christian wheat 
 and to the cultivation of "tares." 
 
 Hence the seed that has been handed down needs 
 much cleaning to-day. Much worthless ceremonial 
 chaff needs to be blown away. Much worse inter 
 mixture of unrighteous weeds needs to be burned, as 
 Jesus said. The old parable reads that they should 
 not be burned until " the end of the world " ; but 
 that is because the writer thought the world was going 
 to end right away. Had he known it would last nine 
 teen hundred years, he would doubtless have wanted 
 them burned sooner. At any rate, the tares of intol 
 erance, in any form, have been the worst foe of Christ. 
 They have grown in every land to choke charity ; they
 
 AN OLD PARABLE EXTENDED 109 
 
 have leaved out in unjust laws and edicts and acts of 
 persecution ; they have blossomed blood-red in hun 
 dreds of battlefields and in the flames of countless 
 martyrdoms ; they have ripened seeds of hate that are 
 still growing in the religious fields. They have done 
 more than anything else to kill the Christian spirit, 
 and ought to be treated without the least tenderness. 
 Whatever teachings increase hate in the world are 
 infinitely worse than any weeds. We ought at least 
 to pluck them out of our own minds ; and we may be 
 allowed to protest against their culture in the minds 
 of others, to be sown through the community like 
 thistle-down. 
 
 Nor need we, in opposing any intolerant doctrines, 
 follow the cautious maxim to wait until we have per 
 fected better to put in their place. Their empty place 
 is far better than they are. To save them until we 
 get some perfect system is like saving wolves until the 
 lambs are born, or saving serpents until we get sing 
 ing-birds to "put in their place." We may always 
 rebuke any form of wrong without waiting until we 
 have elaborated the highest religion. Indeed, we 
 already have the highest religion, in the simple truths 
 of righteousness which Jesus selected and sowed. 
 
 Not that this religion came from him alone, or that 
 he ever claimed so. He saw it, not only in the Hebrew
 
 no AN OLD PARABLE EXTENDED 
 
 Scriptures before him, but in the heresies and heathen 
 isms around him. He told the parable of the good 
 Samaritan expressly to picture that heretic as holier 
 than the venerated " priest " and " Levite," and he 
 habitually showed more sympathy with " publican " 
 and pagan humanities than with the professional piety 
 of either the Jewish priesthood before him or the 
 Christian after him. 
 
 For the " good seed " has been growing under 
 many names and forms. Christianity may be the best 
 historic religion, the wheatfield in the kingdom of 
 God. But that does not make it the only good relig 
 ion, any more than wheat is the only good grain. The 
 same starch which makes the worth of wheat is found 
 in all other grains ; and the same righteousness which 
 makes the worth of Christianity is found in other 
 religions, in various degrees. If good in one, it is good 
 in another. If divine in Christianity, it is divine wher 
 ever found. Much of the preaching against heathen 
 faiths is as if the wheat farmer should denounce rye 
 as an ungodly cereal, or corn as a crop from Satan. 
 Much of the missionary effort to make pagan nations 
 adopt our theologic dogmas is like an effort to make 
 them adopt our diet. If we must pity the poor China 
 man for preferring rice, or the Mohammedan for eat 
 ing bananas, we ought not to denounce them for it.
 
 AN OLD PARABLE EXTENDED in 
 
 It is wiser to partake with them occasionally. Prob 
 ably in religion, as in life, the best diet is a varied one, 
 confined to no single faith, but gathering good things 
 from all, and combining their diversities. 
 
 This lesson of variety and combination is taught 
 even in our parable. Not only is there great diversity 
 of grains, but every " good seed " has come from the 
 union of opposite sexes. Even many of the smaller 
 spores are subject to the same law. Only the earliest 
 and lowest forms of life are without sex. Thence 
 forth, through the advancing series, the union of male 
 and female elements becomes more important ; and 
 no true seed has ever been produced without it. Still 
 further, the union of diversities is taught ; for the 
 higher orders not only thus unite two sexes, but often 
 unite them only from two different flowers or even 
 from two different plants. They show many a curious 
 device to prevent self-pollination from the same blos 
 som or plant, and a large part of them make it quite 
 impossible by producing the pollen only in another. 
 To bring it from elsewhere, even the winds and insects 
 are engaged ; as the Greek Theophrastus taught, 
 300 B. c., and as recent botanists have traced to a 
 surprising extent. To grasses, sedges, conifers, and 
 many forest trees, it is brought by the breezes. To 
 more conspicuous blossoms, it is brought by bees and
 
 ii2 AN OLD PARABLE EXTENDED 
 
 butterflies. Even the honey and perfumes are said 
 to be but baits to bribe insects to this work ; and 
 many think that even the colors are lures to attract 
 them. Often, as in orchids and milkweeds, the 
 flower is most curiously constructed so as to make the 
 bee unwillingly load himself with packages of pollen 
 from one blossom, and unload them in another. 
 Many of the irregular shapes of flowers are adapted 
 to the same end, to engage insects for this impor 
 tant work of cross-fertilization. Florists carry the 
 work still further, even to the crossing of different 
 varieties, and thus obtain new and richer. 
 
 So does even the plant-world protest against exclu- 
 siveness, and proclaim the need of variations, contrasts, 
 combinations, crossings. Probably the religious world 
 has the same need. The highest religion will be no 
 one-sided or one-sexed movement, such as is now too 
 often seen ; but, like every seed, will come from the 
 marriage of contrasts, from the wedding of finest fem 
 inine feeling with most fearless masculine thought. 
 The highest religion will show no exclusiveness ; but, 
 like the most advanced flowers, will welcome vari 
 ations, and even wish to be cross-fertilized from with 
 out. It will take truth from whatever source, as the 
 pine-cone gathers pollen from every breeze. Its best 
 missionaries will be no sectarian preachers trying to
 
 AN OLD PARABLE EXTENDED 113 
 
 impose some single faith ; but all men and movements, 
 however secular and unintentional, that are aiding in 
 tercommunication among the sects, bringing an inter 
 change between them, as bees do between the flowers. 
 From this cross-fertilization of faiths will come a more 
 charitable, vigorous, and richer religion, flowering in 
 sweeter sentiments and ripening a larger harvest of 
 human brotherhood. 
 
 Such are a few of the lessons involved to-day in the 
 parable of the sower. Chief of them is that old one, 
 
 to keep on ever selecting and sowing the best. 
 This is about all that we need to emphasize ; for if 
 we will but sow aright, Nature will take care of the 
 growth. As another form of the parable said, though 
 the sower might afterward sleep, yet " the seed should 
 spring and grow up, he knoweth not how ; for the 
 earth bringeth forth fruit of itself, first the blade, 
 then the ear, then the full corn in the ear." We need 
 not even spend much time warring against the tares, 
 
 for sowing is one of the best ways to do this. On 
 the western plains you may see wide fields of alfalfa 
 clover, a great sea of richest green without a weed in 
 sight, though millions are choking beneath. Get the 
 religion of love once well started, and the weeds will 
 not trouble us. The tares will die out of themselves.
 
 ii4 AN OLD PARABLE EXTENDED 
 
 The good grain will grow "night and day," while we 
 wake and while we sleep. It will bring the blessed 
 fruit of a better brotherhood. It will bring more faith 
 in that divine Power which everywhere, in soil and 
 society and souls, works this miracle of the seed, and 
 which follows every fall of leaves with the resurrec 
 tion of a larger life.
 
 THE DIVINITY OF MAN
 
 THE DIVINITY OF MAN 
 
 THE divinity of man seems much less clear to-day 
 than it did a few centuries ago. Then he was 
 thought made by the hand and " in the image 
 of God." Not only was he guarded by divine care, 
 but the great earth had been created especially for his 
 home. Even the heavens were made for him, the 
 sun for his light by day, the moon and all the myriad 
 stars for his lamps by night. 
 
 But such thoughts have been fading before the 
 modern sciences. First came astronomy, showing 
 that little sun a million times larger than the earth, 
 and turning those star-lamps into other and often 
 vaster suns, beneath which our earth seemed to shrink 
 to an atom, and our importance to shrivel with it. So 
 many of them were found, too ; their millions mul 
 tiplying with every advance in optical art, each one a 
 world and a supposed center of a system of worlds. 
 The Psalmist was right : " When I consider the stars, 
 what is man, that thou art mindful of him ? " Another 
 great Hebrew writer sublimely represented the Creator 
 weighing the mountains in scales and the hills in a
 
 n8 THE DIVINITY OF MAN 
 
 balance, and counting nations as but the fine dust of 
 the balance. But to-day the dust of his balance is 
 seen to be, not merely nations, but constellations in 
 which our whole earth would count as nothing. So 
 has astronomy mocked those medieval thoughts. 
 
 Geology has mocked them further. It has taught 
 that even this atom of an earth was not made for us, 
 but was filled with life for countless ages before us. 
 Through immeasurable eons, its lands were rich with 
 forests, but with no lumbermen to cut them. Through 
 earlier and vastly longer periods, its seas swarmed with 
 rich life, but with no human being to profit by it. 
 To the geologist, man, instead of being the aim of 
 creation, seemed more like an afterthought, and 
 very near not getting created at all. 
 
 Even when created, he appeared far from divine, 
 and each succeeding science seemed to leave him 
 lower. Anthropology pointed to his low origin, savage 
 and even animal. Physiology added that he is still 
 animal ; with his boasted mind closely connected 
 with the folds of his brain and the flow of his blood, 
 and with his soul quite dependent on the state of 
 his stomach. Chemistry analyzed brain, blood, heart, 
 without finding any soul. All the sciences, too, 
 showed life following fixed laws, which seemed to 
 disprove divine care, and to leave no need of a God
 
 THE DIVINITY OF MAN 119 
 
 except at creation. Finally came the doctrine of 
 evolution, seeming to add that there was no such 
 need even at creation, but that mere matter con 
 tained the " promise and potency " of all life, and that 
 the primal nebula of itself had developed into planets, 
 plants, men, mind, morals, as naturally as a seed 
 into a tree or an egg into an eagle. Man, instead of 
 being divinely created in the " image of God," seemed 
 only to have grown out of a gastrula, and out of a gas 
 behind that. So low did the modern sciences seem 
 to degrade us. 
 
 But it was a false alarm. A little thought shows that 
 they do not degrade us at all. Even astronomy does 
 not. In Fontenelle s famous " Plurality of Worlds," 
 the charming marquise declares that the doctrine of 
 the earth s inferiority will not humiliate her : " I assure 
 you that I esteem myself no less for it." Nor need 
 she, for anything that astronomy has shown. How 
 ever small the earth, it seems to rank well among the 
 planets. In Voltaire s " Micromegas," a huge visitor 
 from the great Saturn, after trying in vain with his 
 coarse eyes to see any inhabitants on earth, concluded 
 that there could be none, since, he said, it was so 
 contemptibly small a world that no creatures of good 
 sense would inhabit it. But to-day the earth is gen-
 
 120 THE DIVINITY OF MAN 
 
 erally admitted to be a far more sensible place to live 
 than his own Saturn. The British lady, traveling in 
 Asia, resented being called a foreigner, and said, " No ! 
 It s you natives that are foreigners ; I am English." 
 Many things seem to indicate that our earth is the 
 little England of the solar system, and that, when we 
 travel, we shall be entitled to treat the natives of the 
 larger planets with British condescension. 
 
 Nor need the immensity of the sun shame us. 
 Indeed, it is very gratifying to learn that he is so 
 great, since he is still our servant, rising faithfully 
 every morning to strike the light and start the fire, 
 and to work for us in a thousand ways. Even the 
 stars send us a pleasant message, in showing our 
 universe so rich in room and real estate. Astronomy, 
 after all, has not mocked man in the least, but only 
 shown him the grandeur of his world. 
 
 No more has geology, in showing the age of the 
 earth. Indeed, it would seem more honorable to have 
 our world made with such vast expense of time and 
 power, like a royal palace, than hastily in a week, like 
 a pioneer s cabin. Even that long succession of life 
 on earth before man, instead of dishonoring him, was 
 really a vast retinue of servants getting it ready for 
 his arrival. Those forests were making coal and oil 
 for him to burn, and better air for him to breathe.
 
 THE DIVINITY OF MAN 121 
 
 Those animals were helping to make the rocks to 
 be built into his walls and to be ground into his 
 farms. Geology seems rather to have raised the 
 rank of man, by showing this infinite preparation 
 for him. 
 
 Nor is the divine care made any less by this rigid 
 reign of law and order, but rather is shown more 
 faithful by it. The rigid order is itself kinder than 
 any interference with it would be. Ancient literature 
 has many old stories of the sun stopping in the sky, 
 at various times, to help a few people. But such 
 stories showed far less providence than does the daily 
 sun we see, forever moving with such faithfulness to 
 help all mankind, and never arrested to mock their 
 trust and derange their day. They showed far less 
 marvel, too ; and Ruskin refused to wonder at the 
 tales of the sun stopping, and said he always was 
 expecting it would stop, the miracle was rather in 
 its going so steadily. So in everything : to a wise 
 man it is the going rather than the stopping that 
 makes the marvel. However much miracle he may 
 see in the many old stories of rivers suddenly standing 
 still, as if gravitation had given out, he will see far 
 more in our familiar Mississippi forever flowing with 
 such force, forever refilled with waters that have been 
 fetched from far-off seas and fallen in rains to refresh
 
 122 THE DIVINITY OF MAN 
 
 a myriad farms, as if from the very hand of Provi 
 dence. However much miracle he may see in the 
 story of the blasted fig-tree, he will see infinitely more 
 in our millions of trees unblasted by summer drought 
 or winter frost, and full of a life which no botany can 
 explain and no familiarity make less mysterious. 
 
 Wisdom will see miracle in all life, and especially in 
 human life. Edwin Arnold tells of watching one day, 
 in the South Kensington Museum, a graceful English 
 girl looking at the exhibition of the various chemical 
 elements that compose a human body. It made him 
 think of the marvelous power in Nature, which could 
 combine those dead elements into the beautiful being 
 who stood before him overflowing with life and loveli 
 ness ; and which could still more marvelously make her 
 the sacred shrine for the reproduction and perpetua 
 tion of that life. Miracles are common, said he, clos 
 ing his paragraph. Yes, common as the cradle. And 
 to the wise man every human birth, with its unfathom 
 able mystery of life and love, is miraculous. 
 
 No life or process is any less divine because following 
 laws. For a law of Nature is nothing but the regular 
 way in which the power within it works, and no more 
 explains that work than the railway-track explains the 
 power of the rushing train. The fidelity of life to 
 law no more disproves deity than the fidelity of that
 
 THE DIVINITY OF MAN 123 
 
 train to the time-table disproves the conductor. In 
 deed, just as the very precision with which that train 
 reaches the station at the right minute proves that it 
 has a conductor, so the precision with which a planet 
 reaches its occupation at the appointed second seems 
 to suggest that the universe has one too. A poet 
 well said that the laws of the world are but the habits 
 of God ; and modern science has only been showing 
 that those habits are regular, and hence this God more 
 faithful than our fathers knew. The universal reign 
 of laws that can always be trusted would seem to be 
 the best proof of divine care. 
 
 Nor does even the theory of evolution deny this 
 care, but shows only a further extension of that 
 thought of order. Creation through evolution is sim 
 ply creation through law, and only extends through 
 time the idea already extended through space. Law 
 had already been found everywhere in the present, 
 making universal order ; and evolution only adds that 
 it has been everywhere in the past also, making that 
 order eternal and perfect. It does not make creation 
 any less divine, but all the more so, because infinite, 
 filling eternity instead of a week. John Fiske said 
 every one of the changes supposed in the theory of 
 evolution can be regarded as "the creative action of 
 God " ; and John \Veiss said every one is " God s dis-
 
 124 THE DIVINITY OF MAN 
 
 tinct statement that he is on the spot." The theory 
 does not make man s origin any less divine. 
 
 And how else can it disgrace him ? How can it 
 degrade the human race to have been developed from 
 a gastrular form, when every person in it is still so 
 developed ? When every one of us started from a cell 
 a few years ago, how can we be disgraced by suppos 
 ing that our race so started a few million years ago ? 
 Rather, the theory gives new dignity to human nature, 
 by showing it to be the outcome of an infinite process. 
 It makes the creation of man no mere work of a day, 
 but of all the ages and agencies of time. The gather 
 ing of the nebula and globing of the earth, the 
 crystallization of rocks and condensation of seas, the 
 lifting of lands and long succession of living forms ; 
 all these infinite changes are seen as steps in the 
 creation of man. He appears no late addition to the 
 earth, no mere inheritor of its riches, but the chief aim 
 of its activities, the being to whose creation suns and 
 seas and all the geologic eons have contributed their 
 life. Surely such a theory does not degrade us. 
 
 Nor do any ancestors that science may see fit to 
 give us. Henry Ward Beecher said he should con 
 sider it more honorable to have been created from 
 monkeys than from mud. Lowell, lying " under the 
 willows " that June day, said he cared not whether men
 
 THE DIVINITY OF MAN 125 
 
 trace their origin to " ape or Adam," but was inclined 
 to think a tree among his progenitors. Would it not 
 indeed be more honorable to have had the lowest 
 ancestors, and to have risen from them, than to have 
 had perfect ones, and then fallen into total depravity, 
 as used to be taught ? 
 
 And we may notice, in passing, that the Bible it 
 self corrects that doctrine. It teaches that our first 
 parents were far from perfect, and that their loss of 
 Eden was not a fall but a rise. The Eden of the 
 Bible, though blessed with abundant food and easy 
 living, still shows them leading a lazy and low life, 
 much indeed like that still seen in fertile tropical lands. 
 They are pictured in the story as being in a very back 
 ward state, almost animal ; naked and not even 
 knowing it ; disliking work and considering it a curse ; 
 ignorant and unmoral, not having yet tasted of the 
 "tree of knowledge of good and evil." And though 
 by tasting it they lose that Eden of animal ease 
 and ignorance, just as mankind has lost it, still 
 they lose it only to gain something better. They are 
 indeed driven out to a life of toil and hardship, and of 
 ceaseless hunger for higher things ; but that change 
 is itself a rise rather than a fall, and even Jehovah 
 says so, in the story. The wise serpent had declared 
 that by eating of that fruit of forbidden knowledge
 
 126 THE DIVINITY OF MAN 
 
 they would become "as gods"; and after they have 
 eaten it, Jehovah also declares that they have so 
 become, "as one of us," like the gods. This cer 
 tainly was no fall. To leave their naked animal life, 
 to go to work, to gain knowledge, to learn the differ 
 ence between good and evil, to become godlike, - 
 that was certainly a rise. 
 
 That old Biblical story not only is thus a story of 
 human progress, but, as such, it relieves Eve and her 
 sex from the censure they have so long suffered. It 
 makes her take a leading part in progress, just as 
 women always have done. It honors her as the first 
 to see that this fruit, which Adam feared, was " to be 
 desired to make one wise" and godlike. It honors 
 her as the first to pluck of that blessed fruit of 
 knowledge, just as she has been in many a place. 
 It then makes her persuade her slower husband to 
 partake of it, just as she still does in countless 
 families in America. 
 
 So, thanks largely to her, our ancestors lost that 
 lazy Eden of ease and animal content, and went out 
 to a life of labor, of thought, of unrest, of hunger, 
 and of endless effort and strife. The new life was 
 indeed harder, but higher, and Jehovah rightly declared 
 that they had thereby become as gods. Elsewhere, 
 too, the Bible says as much. One of the Psalms
 
 THE DIVINITY OF MAN 127 
 
 makes Jehovah say of men, "Ye are gods"; and 
 Jesus not only quotes the saying, but adds that it 
 "cannot be broken." That other Psalm, which asks 
 the Lord, " What is man, that thou art mindful 
 of him ? " adds, "Thou hast made him a little lower 
 than the angels"; and the Revised Version even 
 renders it, "but a little lower than God." 
 
 Cannot we still see this godlike in man ? That 
 Psalm shows it by his " dominion " over flocks and 
 fowl and fish and all things. But how much further 
 man has since carried that " dominion " ! He has 
 learned not merely to control, but to create. Those 
 "fish" he not only catches, but increases, and sends 
 to fill lakes and rivers where they never were before. 
 Those flocks and fowls he not only multiplies, but 
 makes to take new shapes and colors at his whim, and 
 has created many new varieties. In the vegetable 
 world, he is ever uttering that old divine fiat, " Let 
 the earth bring forth grass and herb and fruit-trees " ; 
 and he has created varieties innumerable. He also 
 makes new ground for them to grow in, redeems 
 deserts and marshes, beats back even the ocean and 
 founds farms and cities on the bottom of the sea, so 
 that the profane proverb says, " God made the earth, 
 but the Dutch made Holland." 
 
 He enslaves Nature s agents, makes the breezes
 
 128 THE DIVINITY OF MAN 
 
 pump and the brooks grind for him, makes the river 
 fetch his logs to mill and then saw and carry them to 
 market. He invents new agents, makes explosives 
 by which he gets up earthquakes of his own, rends 
 the rocks, blows out the bottom of rivers, bores through 
 miles of mountains, and builds his roads beneath them. 
 H makes all sorts of curious transformations, turns 
 foul ore into finest steel, worthless clay into aluminum, 
 banks of sand into glass clear as Nature s crystals, 
 even imitates her crystals so well that, when I asked 
 a girl how she told true diamonds from false, she 
 said : "By seeing what sort of persons they are 
 on." Still more curious changes man makes by his 
 chemistry. Emerson told of seeing a professor turn 
 his old shirts into pure white sugar. The professor 
 does much better now, and out of a refuse of coal-tar 
 makes a saccharine said to be three hundred times 
 sweeter than sugar. He imitates many organic prod 
 ucts, makes perfume of flowers without the flowers, 
 extracts of fruits without the fruits, even butter with 
 out cows (though some conservative people prefer the 
 old kind); and dreams of the day when he shall 
 make beef without them, and gain such control of the 
 elements as to manufacture food without the trouble 
 of farming. He improves upon his own organs, 
 makes a telescope to see a thousand times farther, a
 
 THE DIVINITY OF MAN 129 
 
 microscope to see a thousand times finer, and the 
 microphone to hear the footfall of a fly. He even 
 makes diseases destroy themselves, uses the dreaded 
 germs of many a one to cure it or to keep it away, 
 and so employs the deadly pestilence to promote 
 health and lengthen life. 
 
 Indeed, he often makes a danger thus undo itself 
 and do the very thing it forbade. The river-current 
 which forbids him to cross, he forces to ferry him 
 over. The raging sea which shuts him from another 
 continent, he persuades to float him and his freight 
 across. The fierce winds which blow eastward he 
 outwits by his sails and makes to carry him west 
 ward instead. Even the waves that want to drown 
 him he turns into steam to carry him faster, and, 
 as Emerson said, fulfills the fable of Eolus bag, and 
 bears " the two and thirty winds in the boiler of his 
 boat." 
 
 Even that electric demon of the storm, which was 
 once thought his worst foe, man has tamed and sends 
 in the signal-service to warn the world when the storm 
 is coming, and so disarms it. " Canst thou send light 
 nings ?" said Jehovah to Job in mockery of man s 
 weakness. " Yes," he replies to-day, " send them and 
 make them "; and he is making them continually to 
 do the mightiest and the most delicate work, to draw
 
 130 THE DIVINITY OF MAN 
 
 railway-trains or ring a door-bell, to run under the 
 ocean and around the world on his errands, or carry 
 his own voice across the land. The lying Yankee in 
 Europe, boasting what Americans have done, said we 
 no longer use whistles on the railroads, because our 
 trains go so fast that they get to the station before 
 the sound of the whistle does. But we do even better 
 than that now, and in the telephone send a mere 
 whisper fifty times faster than the sound of a whistle 
 goes, and fifty times farther, so as to save ourselves 
 the trouble of taking a train at all. And many think 
 man has only begun his work with electricity. Even 
 so eminent a scientist as A. R. Wallace said that it 
 might yet be used to increase the crops, to control the 
 clouds, to drive the showers into the night and leave 
 the days clear. In such case a man might order the 
 kind of weather he wants, about as confidently as he 
 would order an omnibus. 
 
 "Absurd ! " we say. But so has been said of many 
 other things that have since become too trite to attract 
 attention. Said Calonne to the queen, " If what you 
 want is difficult, it is done ; if it is impossible, it shall 
 be done " ; and a good deal of such has been done, 
 in the century since. "The impossible comes to 
 pass," says the proverb ; and we have seen so much 
 of it come to pass that we begin to expect that the
 
 THE DIVINITY OF MAN 131 
 
 rest of it will. So does man show that divine 
 "dominion" which the old Psalmist sang. 
 
 Nor is this dominion confined to the present, but 
 reaches backward through those geologic ages which 
 seemed so to mock him with his insignificance. In 
 his coal-fields, he cuts the forests of the carboniferous 
 era, gathers into his furnaces the gigantic ferns amid 
 which the old megalosauri fought, and brings back the 
 very sunbeams of bygone millenniums to warm his 
 parlor and drive his ships. In his quarries he harvests 
 the riches that those old animals and ages were so 
 kindly accumulating for him, and gets far more good 
 of them than if he had lived there himself. Indeed, 
 by his learning he does live there. The geologist 
 still fishes in the old Devonian seas and has caught 
 there countless creatures of all kinds. He still sails 
 the older Silurian ocean more truly than the trilobites 
 did, and knows its inhabitants much better than they 
 ever knew themselves. Man did not lose those 
 geologic ages, but virtually lives through them all. 
 
 Nor is he confined even to the earth, but explores 
 and exploits the heavens. Through the tide, he makes 
 the moon heave his ship over the bar and turn his 
 mill-wheel on many a coast. He makes the sun raise 
 and ripen his crops, even paint his portraits and make 
 the most perfect pictures of all sorts in the fraction
 
 132 THE DIVINITY OF MAN 
 
 of a second. He has already invented a steam-engine 
 that runs by mere sunshine, and which P>icsson said 
 would yet draw his railway-trains, so that he would 
 literally fulfill Emerson s saying and hitch his wagon 
 to a star. He virtually makes the heavenly bodies 
 come to him. By his telescope he makes the moon 
 come the most of the way, and by the spectro 
 scope he makes the sun come all the way and have 
 its gases analyzed as if he had them in his laboratory. 
 He even weighs the sun and puts furthest stars in his 
 scales. He even weighs them without seeing them. 
 For instance, a double star in the constellation Auriga 
 is so distant that its two points become to us only 
 one two-hundredth of a second apart, that is, nearer 
 together than a man s two eyes would appear if they 
 could be seen from a thousand miles away. Of course 
 no telescope can begin to separate those stars, yet Dr. 
 Huggins says the astronomer easily does it by his 
 spectroscope, and tells, besides, how fast each is mov 
 ing, and how much each weighs. This speaks well 
 for the power of man. If he could traverse that vast 
 distance and weigh those stars with his arm, how 
 mighty he would be ! But how much more so to sit 
 majestically at home, and weigh them with his mind, 
 without even seeing them ! 
 
 So has astronomy, which seemed to mock man with
 
 THE DIVINITY OF MAN 133 
 
 his littleness, been showing his greatness instead. 
 One who can comprehend the heavenly movements 
 need not feel mocked by their magnitude. To com 
 prehend meant originally to embrace, to include ; 
 and mind does include all it comprehends. The 
 astronomer is greater than any orb or orbit which 
 he can compute. The heavens are indeed high, but 
 man would never have found it out if he had not 
 been higher. They praise, not only their Creator, but 
 also the creature who has explored them ; and, 
 better than in Comte s day, " the heavens declare the 
 glory of man" too. 
 
 But this work with physical things does not show 
 man s highest quality. I speak of them because they 
 are what had most mocked him with his weakness. 
 But his greatness is seen best not in his physical sci 
 ences and material inventions, but in his finer arts, 
 his thoughts of things invisible, his work with a world 
 subtler than that of science, his achievements of imag 
 ination by which he has created ideal worlds of his 
 own. Often these ideals have been mightier than ma 
 terial things. The thoughts of Plato have outlasted 
 the conquests of Alexander ; the arts of Greece have 
 had more influence than all her armies ; the fancies 
 of Shakespeare have been stronger than the fleets of 
 Elizabeth ; and such is the power of song that Long-
 
 134 THE DIVINITY OF MAN 
 
 fellow said the hand of Burns still guided every plough 
 in Scotland. 
 
 Such are some of the ways in which man has 
 shown his power. These brilliant deeds are of course 
 the work of comparatively few men ; but they are the 
 work of faculties that are common to all, in one degree 
 or another, and hence are entitled to be taken to 
 illustrate human nature. 
 
 But diviner than even the mind of man is his moral 
 sentiment. It begins narrow in the love of the sexes, 
 but grows beyond lovers to their offspring, with such 
 power that the old Hindu poem said: "A mother s 
 heart outweighs the earth ; a father s fondness goeth 
 forth beyond the skies." It goes beyond the family, 
 to bind men in societies and sacred movements, mak 
 ing them ready to give their lives for a country or a 
 cause, as John Brown did for freedom, and Jesus for 
 human brotherhood. 
 
 Nor are such sacrifices confined to Christianity. 
 Herodotus tells how in his youth, 500 years before 
 Christ, two Greeks gave themselves as victims to avert 
 evil from their country ; and did it not merely in a 
 moment s excitement, but voluntarily made the long 
 journey to the Persian capital expressly to be put to 
 death, and then refused to accept office from Xerxes, 
 even to save their lives. Innumerable are those who
 
 THE DIVINITY OF MAN 135 
 
 have given their lives for a cause they thought 
 sacred : 
 
 " Up from undated time they come, 
 The martyr-souls of heathendom, 
 And to Christ s cross and passion bring 
 Their fellowship of suffering. " 
 
 Their fellowship of forgiveness, too. Xenophon told 
 how an unnamed Armenian urged forgiveness for the 
 king who had condemned him to death, much as 
 Jesus did for his murderers. Human godlikeness did 
 not have to wait for Christianity. Even so orthodox a 
 man as Father Taylor, when asked if any other hu 
 man being had ever been so good as Jesus, is said to 
 have replied, " Millions." All who love show the in 
 most essence of divinity, if " God is love." 
 
 Of course, human nature shows qualities quite the 
 opposite of these. Pascal said man is both the glory 
 and the scandal of the universe ; and even in the most 
 advanced times the scandals often outweigh the glories. 
 Our great material progress has not been attended by 
 a corresponding moral progress. With all the immense 
 advance in science and mechanical art, there seems 
 little advance in character, and one often questions 
 whether we have any nobler men to-day than are por 
 trayed by old heathen Plutarch and in many a page of
 
 136 THE DIVINITY OF MAN 
 
 ancient history. Mr. Dooley thinks that true prog 
 ress would be shown not by sky-scraping buildings, but 
 by sky-scraping men. Our progress in comforts and 
 luxuries is nothing very divine ; and our power to get 
 a great deal, and to go everywhere, is hardly so noble 
 as our fathers power to live nobly at home without 
 these. Mr. Ruskin ridiculed men for being so eager 
 to travel fast from one place to another, without doing 
 any noble work in either, and for boasting their power 
 to send a telegram to India when they had none worth 
 sending. He questioned whether even railroads had 
 blessed life to any great extent, and pointed to one 
 that had spoiled a beautiful valley where Apollo and 
 the sweet muses of light used to be seen. Now, the 
 beauty is gone, and the gods are gone with it ; and 
 the only gain is that " every fool in Buxton can be in 
 Bakewell in half an hour, and every fool in Bakewell 
 in Buxton." His statement is extravagant, of course, 
 yet tells the truth that our material progress has little 
 aided moral character. 
 
 It was well told too in that old French story of the 
 huge visitor from Saturn, who thought the earth so 
 small that no sensible men would live on it. By means 
 of a microscope, he finally found men, and, on learning 
 the wonderful sciences and arts of these " invisible
 
 THE DIVINITY OF MAN 137 
 
 insects," he concluded that they must be "all spirit" 
 and lead a most divine life. Far from it, one of them 
 replied ; the mass of men were both barbarous and 
 foolish ; and in proof of this he referred to the war 
 then going on between Russia and Turkey, where a 
 great army wearing hats were righting another wear 
 ing turbans. So, he said, all over the earth, from 
 time immemorial, men had been robbing and slaying 
 each other by the thousands in the foolishest quarrels 
 over some piece of land or petty question of politics 
 or religion. Very idiotic and fiendish it seemed to 
 that author. So it did to Benjamin Franklin, who soon 
 after wrote that other story of an angel visiting earth 
 and, at sight of a naval battle in the West Indies, 
 thinking he had been taken to hell instead. " No," 
 said the guide ; "this is earth, and these are men; 
 devils never treat each other in that cruel manner; 
 they have more sense and more of what men call 
 humanity." 
 
 Doubtless man is not all divine. Byron called him 
 half deity, half dust. The dust is apt to be the more 
 conspicuous half, too, and sometimes seems very poor 
 dust. Oh, we can keep the good old doctrine of de 
 pravity. The depravity is plain enough, and needs no 
 catechism to prove it, but is shown in every newspaper.
 
 138 THE DIVINITY OF MAN 
 
 It has had its place, too, in human development ; 
 and man s worst passions were helpful in the earlier 
 stages of society. But with progress they have been 
 giving way to a diviner nature, as that Biblical story 
 told ; so that the depravity is nowhere " total," as it 
 used to be called. The very calling it that disproved 
 it ; for if man had been totally depraved he never 
 would have found it out. A thoroughly bad man never 
 knows that he is bad. As soon as he sees that he is 
 bad he has begun to grow better. The doctrine of 
 depravity was only man s censure of his lower nature 
 by his higher, and was proof that he was leaving his 
 lower behind. His depravity is only the relics of the 
 old animal nature, and does not at all disprove his 
 divinity. 
 
 Nor is the divinity any less because so closely con 
 nected with matter. Indeed, matter itself, as science 
 sees it to-day, shows rather divine qualities. The late 
 Dr. Martineau, criticizing the modern tendency to deny 
 spirit and ascribe everything to matter, said : " But such 
 extremely clever matter, matter that is up to every 
 thing, even to writing Hamlet and finding out its own 
 evolution," seems a little too modest in disclaiming 
 the attributes of mind. And not only in man, but 
 everywhere, matter to-day shows rather spiritual qual-
 
 THE DIVINITY OF MAN 139 
 
 ities. "Dead matter," we used to say; yet it has 
 proved rather more alive than spirit was once thought 
 to be. Hear science describe a snowflake, for in 
 stance, so miraculously crystallized, its molecules 
 more than you could count in a lifetime, each hydro 
 gen atom forever flying at the rate of over a mile in 
 a second, and colliding with others several thousand 
 times a second, besides being perhaps a cunning 
 vortex-ring revolving eternally. No wonder the wit 
 said science denied free will to man and gave it to 
 atoms. Matter seems marvelous enough. Or take 
 other forces called physical. Think how electricity 
 flashes through the cable, leaves the message in Eng 
 land before the American finger is off the key, and is 
 in many ways more wonderful than any ghost or god 
 of old story. Think how light speeds more swiftly 
 from the stars, and, after a century s flight through 
 space, tells its story so truly. 
 
 If man were no more than these things, he would 
 still seem rather spiritual. But he is more, for he has 
 mastered them. Those atoms are coarse compared 
 with the thought that has found them, and that has 
 analyzed movements which no microscope can show. 
 That lightning is weak compared with the mind that 
 can make it and make such use of it. That light.
 
 140 THE DIVINITY OF MAN 
 
 though it would fly across the continent before you 
 could wink, is still sluggish compared with the man 
 who can overtake it ; as Foucault did when he timed 
 the flight of a ray through his room, and found it took 
 only one thirty-sixth part of the millionth of a second 
 (not precisely that, of course, but somewhere in that 
 neighborhood). These wonders tell of something in 
 man we may as well call spiritual. And all the more 
 spiritual it seems in those moral aspects, love, de 
 votion, and readiness to die for an ideal. Tyndall said 
 the passage from brain to consciousness is unthink 
 able ; and perhaps we should add that the passage 
 from brain to conscience is more so. 
 
 Man seems also to share the divine quality of infin 
 itude. Unlike other animals, he cannot be satisfied. 
 Even his avarice is infinite. He thinks he wants only 
 a few thousand dollars, but he makes a million, only 
 to be miserable until he makes some more. Most of 
 his misery is not because he has so little, but because 
 he wants so much. We smile at that farmer who 
 always wanted all the land that adjoined his; yet 
 who would be satisfied with less ? Probably the 
 humblest man in America would like to own a county, 
 and the country. But even if he could get the con 
 tinent, he would want another ; and if he owned
 
 THE DIVINITY OF MAN 141 
 
 the earth, he would still be eager for the deed of a 
 fine constellation or two, and for a first mortgage on 
 the Milky Way. His infinite avarice may not be com 
 mendable, but it is only the infinite in him coming 
 out in a coarse way, and hence it is still significant 
 of his greatness. And how often it comes out in a 
 better way. No knowledge satisfies, and the most 
 learned man always feels the least so. No moral 
 progress contents, but the good gained always rouses 
 a desire for better. Love, though a giving instead of 
 a getting, grows by the giving. Juliet says to Romeo, 
 "The more I give to thee, the more I have," since 
 love is infinite. 
 
 Man seems also to show something of the divine 
 attribute of indestructibility. The servant in the story 
 tried to slay a spirit by cleaving it with a sword ; 
 but thereby only made two spirits, each as active 
 as the one before. This is true of many a human 
 power, which is doubled by what opposes and tries to 
 destroy it. The human spirit gives, in many ways, 
 hints of divine endurance. At any rate, it seems 
 hardly logical to say that invisible atoms are eternally 
 active, but the infinite mind, which has found and 
 measured them, ends in a moment ; that physical 
 force persists forever, but human love, which is the
 
 142 THE DIVINITY OF MAN 
 
 mightiest force on earth, perishes in an instant. It 
 would seem more reasonable to suppose that the soul, 
 which has so enslaved the light and the lightning, and 
 so mastered the marvels of matter, has possibilities 
 as marvelous as any of them. It would seem more 
 reasonable to trust that the creative Love, which has 
 produced these loves of ours, will continue its good 
 providence for them.
 
 THE WATER OF LIFE
 
 THE WATER OF LIFE 
 
 MANY a town has long taken its water from 
 the river by which it stands. But with time 
 and growing population the stream becomes 
 polluted, from farms, mills, factories, cities, sewers. 
 Then the water problem becomes most important. 
 A large party of citizens wish to purify the river 
 by some system of nitration. This is sometimes 
 done with much success, as by the city of Hamburg ; 
 but oftener it fails, from the great labor and care 
 required. Some wish to go back of the corruptions, 
 and bring water from the source of the stream. 
 Others wish to bring it from some good lake far 
 away. Many and costly are the methods proposed 
 by the people. Yet, all the while, pure and distilled 
 water is falling from the heavens above them in every 
 shower. It bursts from the hillsides about them in 
 many a spring. Often it lies even in the sandy strata 
 beneath them, a vast reservoir already filtered, forever 
 refilled, and ready to supply the city if only brought 
 to the surface.
 
 146 THE WATER OF LIFE 
 
 Quite similar is the case with what preachers call 
 " the water of life." They are wont to take this from 
 the great stream of Church teaching and tradition, 
 which has flowed down through so many centuries 
 like a river, widening as it goes. This stream has 
 indeed been a noble one, blessing many lands and 
 times ; and its source in Jesus words and spirit is 
 purer and more refreshing than the springs of any 
 river. But it, too, has been corrupted in its long 
 course. This is indeed a natural result in all wide 
 historic movements. However purely such a move 
 ment may begin, still, as it flows on, it gathers pollu 
 tions. A political party, for instance, starts with a 
 little band of purest souls and loftiest principles, ready 
 to suffer shame and death for the abolition of some 
 slavery and the establishment of some right. But as 
 the movement extends and becomes successful, it 
 attracts self-seeking men who value a postmastership, 
 or popularity, above principles. The widening current 
 is used by politicians to drive the party "machine" 
 or to turn their own mills ; and, as it flows onward, 
 it absorbs many a corruption and sewerage of all 
 sorts. 
 
 A like result is inevitable in religious movements. 
 As they grow popular and powerful, they lose their 
 purity. Hence, even Christianity, though so clear
 
 THE WATER OF LIFE 147 
 
 and healthful in its source, as free and refreshing 
 as a mountain spring, has shown these changes of 
 the stream. In its long course through the foothills 
 and flats of history, it has lost its freshness. It has 
 sometimes spread and stagnated through malarious 
 marshes of ignorance and folly. It has here and 
 there been stopped by some cunning dam, which 
 has turned the "water of life" into a water-power. 
 It has been used to run the machinery of some church, 
 to grind out gain for some prince or pope, and to float 
 the schemes of some party or priesthood. It has 
 received the drainage of many a foul field, and some 
 times has been infected with false and cruel teachings 
 more fatal than any bacteria. In various ways, the 
 Christian stream has lost its original purity and 
 healthfulness, as really and quite as much as the 
 Mississippi. 
 
 Here, too, similar remedies are proposed. Most 
 people favor filtration. They say, " Let us revise the 
 Confessions and Creeds, repudiate all the unjust acts 
 of the Church, and strain out the corruptions as well 
 as we can." Others wish to go behind all the corrup 
 tions, and take the water of life only from its pure 
 source in the early Church. Still others would aban 
 don the Christian stream altogether, and supply them 
 selves from some other religion or theosophy or
 
 148 THE WATER OF LIFE 
 
 philosophy, from ancient India or Egypt or other land 
 remote in time and place ; just as many wish to get 
 the city water from some distant lake. 
 
 Yet, all the while, the best truths taught in all those 
 ancient religions and philosophies are still revealed in 
 modern life and thought, fresh as the summer shower. 
 Words and deeds of justice and mercy are daily drop 
 ping from thousands of lofty lives, like the blessed 
 rain from heaven ; and divine ideals of right are dis 
 tilled from the best social atmosphere, like the 
 morning dew from the air. The real religion of right 
 eousness and love is ever flowing forth through human 
 hearts and consciences, like springs from the hillsides. 
 It flows as copiously in modern as in ancient life, and 
 as purely in America as in India or Palestine; just 
 as the heavens fill the streams of Minnesota with quite 
 as good water as the sacred Ganges or Jordan. Below 
 these local and surface springs in daily experience, 
 there also lies a deep and permanent supply of right 
 eous principles, like a subterranean reservoir of the 
 water of life. It has been gathered from the ex 
 perience of the ages, filtered by centuries of trial, 
 and stored up in the deepest and best instincts of 
 human nature. It is found under all religions, Chris 
 tian, Hebrew, or heathen, substantially the same ; just 
 as God s good water is the same, whether drawn from
 
 THE WATER OF LIFE 149 
 
 a Buddhist spring or from the sacred well of Jacob 
 himself. The water of life underlies us all, and, like 
 the deep supplies beneath many a city, needs only to 
 be lifted to the surface. 
 
 Jesus, indeed, seems to have taught something like 
 this, in that famous talk at Jacob s well with the 
 woman of Samaria. She, like so many simple women 
 and men then and ever since, thought religion was 
 confined to a narrow name and people and place. But 
 Jesus, in a few words which Renan calls the best ever 
 uttered about religion, told her it was world-wide, and 
 that "neither in this mountain [of sacred Samaria] 
 nor yet at Jerusalem" was it any holier than else 
 where. For, he added, " the hour cometh, and now 
 is, when the true worshipers shall worship the Father 
 in spirit and in truth," or, as an old manuscript 
 reads, " in the spirit of truth." Worship was as wide 
 as the spirit of truth ; and the water of life did not 
 have to be sought in old and sacred places, but was 
 welling up in every honest soul. Turning to that 
 venerable well of Jacob, from which she was drawing, 
 Jesus said, " Whosoever drinketh of this water shall 
 thirst again," but his only true and lasting supply 
 " shall be in him, a well of water springing up unto 
 eternal life." The water of life was not a thing to be 
 borrowed and brought from any foreign or ancient
 
 ISO THE WATER OF LIFE 
 
 source, but must be found in the depths of man s own 
 nature, "springing up within him." 
 
 " Springing up " ! The water of life rises of itself ; 
 it does not have to be pumped. This is hardly, as 
 yet, the prevalent opinion. A Church with unnatural 
 doctrines and artificial observances, with elaborate 
 services and sensational preaching, and other prac 
 tices to frighten or excite men, sometimes suggests a 
 pum ping-system with laboring pistons to force piety 
 to an unnatural height, and with cunning valves to 
 keep it from backsliding. In his great poem, " The 
 Cathedral," Lowell even specified 
 
 "That drony vacuum of compulsory prayer, 
 Still pumping phrases for the Ineffable, 
 Though all the valves of memory gasp and wheeze." 
 
 How refreshing to turn from all such things to Jesus 
 representation of the water of life as needing no arti 
 ficial lifting or liturgy, but " springing up " of itself, 
 like a natural fountain, or like those artesian wells 
 which are flowing in so many lands and even amid the 
 sands of Sahara. 
 
 To obtain the largest flow may require the patient 
 digging and drilling of deep thought, a work which 
 the Church sometimes decries as leaving the soul 
 parched and perhaps to perish from the fires below.
 
 THE WATER OF LIFE 151 
 
 But the work is often well rewarded. Frenchmen 
 toiled for years at that famous well at Grenoble, 
 even spent a whole year in merely getting back the 
 broken drill that had dropped to the bottom. They 
 became discouraged and were about to stop, in despair 
 of finding water. " Go on," said Arago; "go on, and 
 you will get it." So they went on, until, one day, the 
 water came spouting up through nearly two thousand 
 feet, six hundred gallons a minute, and has been flow 
 ing for sixty years since, not only watering the town, 
 but warming the hospital from the heat below. Often 
 the drill of deeper thought, though at first piercing 
 only dry rock, at length strikes the divine springs, 
 and finds, instead of infernal fires, the saving water 
 of life, not only refreshing the soul but warming the 
 heart. As Lord Bacon wrote : " A little philosophy 
 inclineth man s mind to atheism, but depth in philos 
 ophy bringeth men s minds about to religion." And 
 not only deep thinking, but deep feeling in some stir 
 ring experience, often opens these flowing wells of the 
 water of life. 
 
 But they are oftenest found without deep searching, 
 spontaneously flowing forth in daily experience, 
 like the millions of natural springs in all the valleys 
 and among the hills. For Nature herself shows every 
 where this process which Jesus took to illustrate re-
 
 152 THE WATER OF LIFE 
 
 ligion. She shows it not only in her flowing fountains, 
 but through all the fields and forests, in whose every 
 tree and bush the water is of itself, all the summer, 
 "springing up unto life." She shows it in all the 
 showers and clouds and vapors, whose waters have 
 risen miles above the tree-tops, " springing up " from 
 the seas by the mere force of the natural sunshine. 
 The same Power that works in sunshine and clouds 
 and trees works in souls, too. As the seas beneath 
 the sky, as the sap within the maples, so beneath and 
 within every man lies a divine fountain which, if he 
 will but keep the way open for it by an honest life 
 and a receptive spirit, will become " in him a well of 
 water springing up unto eternal life."
 
 THE BOOK OF JONAH
 
 THE BOOK OF JONAH 
 
 THE book of " Jonah " is one of the best in the 
 Bible, but one of the most abused. Profane 
 people ridicule it without reason, and even 
 preachers pass by its merits and rarely give it rightful 
 praise. Both regard it mainly as the story of a fish ; 
 and many treat this story as the last absurdity, so that 
 jests about Jonah and the whale are among the stalest 
 things in speech. Yet the fish is a mere and minor 
 incident of the book, neither mentioned nor implied 
 except in three short verses ; and even these need no 
 apology, as we shall see. The real purport of the 
 work has nothing to do with the fish, but is its fine 
 lesson of forgiveness and charity. The real subject 
 is the impartial benevolence and fatherhood of God, 
 calling for benevolence and brotherhood among men. 
 In this teaching of charity the book of "Jonah" 
 anticipates the best in the New Testament, and is a 
 prophecy of Jesus. 
 
 Not that Jonah himself is benevolent ; but the 
 author of the book is, and teaches that God is and 
 that men ought to be. Jonah himself is just the
 
 156 THE BOOK OF JONAH 
 
 opposite, unforgiving, uncharitable, cruel ; and it 
 is one of the curiosities of religion that he has been so 
 widely honored. For this book hardly honors him at 
 all, but evidently aims to portray him as false to good 
 ness and to God. He enters it impiously disobeying 
 Jehovah, and, when ordered by him to go to Nineveh, 
 tries " to flee " in the opposite direction, to Joppa and 
 thence by ship westward to Spain. He is even so 
 poor a prophet as to think that he can thus sail 
 beyond the realm and reach of God, and is twice 
 described as trying to flee " from the presence of the 
 Lord." But he is soon taught that "the presence of 
 the Lord" covers the Mediterranean, too, raising 
 against the sinner " a mighty tempest in the sea, so 
 that the ship was likely to be broken." After his 
 guilt is discovered by lot, he confesses and persuades 
 the sailors to save the ship by casting him overboard. 
 This is the only good thing told of him in the book ; 
 and even this is not much to his credit, since he 
 repeatedly shows a desire to get rid of his life, and 
 twice implores Jehovah to take it. Jehovah, however, 
 is merciful, and now saves and brings to shore even 
 this poor wretch who has so disobeyed him. 
 
 Yet, after all this, Jonah is no better, but rather 
 worse. He has indeed learned to obey Jehovah, and 
 now goes to Nineveh; but he does it in the most
 
 THE BOOK OF JONAH 157 
 
 impious and ugly mood. He wants the destruction 
 of that great city, with all its 120,000 infants ; and 
 the Lord s mercy in sparing it " displeased Jonah 
 exceedingly, and he was angry." He even reproaches 
 the Lord for saving it, and for being "full of compas 
 sion and plenteous in mercy." He still hopes that 
 Nineveh will be destroyed, and he goes out to sit in 
 the suburbs and watch. He waits there in so petulant 
 a spirit that, at the mere withering of the gourd-vine 
 which the Lord had kindly raised to shade him, he 
 again becomes enraged. And when Jehovah reasons 
 with him about this, and asks if his rage is right, 
 Jonah impudently replies that it is : " It is right that 
 I should be angry, even unto death." With this curt 
 contradiction of Jehovah, the prophet makes his exit 
 from the story. 
 
 So little is Jonah honored in this book. He enters 
 it in disobedience, he goes through it in irreverence, 
 he leaves it in blasphemy. Unforgiving, unfeeling, 
 caring for neither man nor God, he is enraged at the 
 saving of the city, and insists against the Lord himself 
 that he is right to be angry because his little gourd- 
 vine has died and half a million men have not. Jonah s 
 portrait is compounded of impiety and ugliness ; and 
 it is very evident that the author did not in the least 
 honor him or want us to.
 
 158 THE BOOK OF JONAH 
 
 What the book honors is just the contrary. It 
 represents the Lord as reproving this inhumanity, 
 and proclaiming his own loving regard for these 
 Ninevites and their infants, even for cattle. Most 
 tenderly Jehovah speaks : " Should not I spare 
 Nineveh, that great city wherein are more than six 
 score thousand persons that cannot discern their right 
 hand from their left, and much cattle ! " In contrast 
 with Jonah, the book shows the benevolence that is in 
 God, and that ought to be in his prophets. It describes 
 him as " full of compassion, slow to anger, and plente 
 ous in mercy." It represents him as forgiving even 
 to a degree beyond human rulers, pardoning those 
 whom he had already sentenced. " God repented of 
 the evil which he had said that he would do unto them, 
 and he did it not." So humane this God is that he 
 revokes his own order, takes back his own words, 
 almost humiliates himself, in order to save that heathen 
 city which Jonah wants destroyed. 
 
 The book becomes still more significant when we 
 see its historic connection. Scholars are now fairly 
 agreed that it was written in the fifth century B. c., 
 and in order to oppose the intolerance of the times. 
 That intolerance came rather late in Hebrew history. 
 The early Israelites had been fairly free from it ; for, 
 though later accounts represent them as fiercely exter-
 
 THE BOOK OF JONAH 159 
 
 minating the Canaanites, the Bible contains abundant 
 evidence that they did no such thing, but intermingled 
 and intermarried with them, even adopted much of 
 their religion. For centuries, Israelites take the 
 daughters of the heathen for wives, and the very gods 
 of the heathen for worship. Even so late and revered 
 a ruler as Solomon has many such wives, and builds 
 altars in Jerusalem to at least four such gods, men 
 tioned by name. For several generations after Solo 
 mon the practice continues among both people and 
 princes. 
 
 But with the more definite development and organ 
 ization of the religion of Jehovah, this hospitality to 
 the heathen quite naturally diminished, and sometimes 
 changed to hatred. The prophet Elijah is represented 
 as slaying the four hundred and fifty priests of Baal ; 
 and later prophets have much to say against the pagan 
 nations, Moab and Assyria and others. With the 
 conquest of Northern Israel by Assyria, the hatred of 
 that nation naturally increased, and many a prophecy 
 and curse was uttered against its great capital, Nineveh. 
 Efforts also increased against the heathen worship in 
 Jerusalem. At length, about 622 B. c., the reforming 
 Jewish king Josiah tried to abolish it there ; and the 
 Bible tells how extensively he slew its priests and 
 destroyed its altars, among them, those which Sol-
 
 160 THE BOOK OF JONAH 
 
 omon had built. In connection with this reform of 
 Josiah was written the book of Deuteronomy, which 
 even orders each Israelite to slay his own wife and 
 children and brother, if they tempt him to heathen 
 worship. " Neither shalt thine eye pity, neither shalt 
 thou spare ; thou shalt surely kill him ; thou shalt 
 stone him with stones that he die." 
 
 During the Babylonian captivity, which began shortly 
 after, animosities to the heathen worship naturally 
 grew; and when, about 458 B. c., the famous Ezra 
 led a band of the exiles back to Jerusalem, he made 
 further efforts to end it there. Among them, he 
 particularly opposed those intermarriages with the 
 heathen. He tells how, at hearing of them : " I rent 
 my garment and plucked off the hair of my head ; and 
 said, Our iniquities are increased, and our trespass is 
 grown up unto the heavens." Ezra even organized a 
 divorce-court at Jerusalem, which forced the Jews to 
 put away not only their heathen wives, but " such as 
 are born of them " ; and there is no hint that any 
 alimony was allowed. The Bible gives the names of 
 one hundred and twelve men who thus cruelly turned 
 off their wives, merely for not being Jews, and in 
 order that " the fierce wrath of our God for this 
 matter be turned from us." So severe had now 
 become that hatred of the heathen.
 
 THE BOOK OF JONAH 161 
 
 But there was of course much friendly feeling for 
 them ; and it inspired at least two of the books of 
 the Bible. One of these is the beautiful little story 
 of " Ruth," which is now regarded as written in Ezra s 
 time and in order to justify these marriages with 
 heathen women. For its heroine, Ruth, is a heathen, 
 and is even one of those " Moabites " whom Ezra 
 denounced. Yet the book not only is the story of 
 her happy marriage with an Israelite, but makes her 
 become thereby the ancestress of the glorious King 
 David. Deuteronomy had ordered that no Moabite 
 family could enter the congregation of Israel in ten 
 generations ; but this one rose to the very throne of 
 Israel in four generations. Ezra declared that inter 
 marriage with the heathen had brought upon Israel 
 " the fierce wrath of our God " ; but in this book of 
 "Ruth," that same intermarriage brought the sacred 
 David himself and the whole royal line of Judah for 
 four hundred years. 
 
 The other and more important book in defense of 
 the heathen is this of "Jonah," supposed to have been 
 written about the same time. It took for its subject 
 one of those former Hebrew prophets who had so 
 often denounced the heathen and Nineveh ; and we 
 have seen what an unfavorable portrait it gave him. 
 But notice, on the other hand, how favorably it por-
 
 162 THE BOOK OF JONAH 
 
 trayed the heathen. It showed these sailors, though 
 they were idolaters and " cried every man to his god," 
 yet most merciful and doing their best to save Jonah. 
 Though the sea " wrought and was tempestuous 
 against them," and though they had found that throw 
 ing him overboard would stop the storm, " neverthe 
 less the men rowed hard to bring the ship to land, 
 but they could not." These heathen were ready to 
 risk their lives for another, and were almost as anxious 
 to save that one Israelite as he was to have the whole 
 city of Nineveh destroyed. In the same spirit, the 
 book shows these heathen Ninevites as doing the best 
 they knew. It tells how they repented and " turned 
 from their evil way," and how they humbled them 
 selves, from the least among them up to the great 
 king who left his throne and laid aside his royal robe 
 and put on sackcloth and "sat in ashes." So does 
 the author contrast the good heathen with this 
 Hebrew prophet watching them from his booth, 
 wanting to see them all perish, and angry at the 
 Lord for not destroying them. 
 
 The book also gave a benevolent solution of an old 
 problem which had much perplexed Israel ; namely, 
 why the destruction of Nineveh did not come when 
 Jehovah had so plainly and repeatedly proclaimed it ? 
 This work answers that it was because of the very
 
 THE BOOK OF JONAH 163 
 
 goodness of Jehovah, which made him change his sen 
 tence. He was so "full of compassion and plenteous 
 in mercy," so much kinder than men, that he " repented 
 of the evil which he said he would do unto them," 
 reversed his own orders, and saved the sentenced city. 
 Thus even what seemed to others a failure and false 
 hood in God was made by this author to show his 
 goodness instead. 
 
 So did this book, five hundred years before the New 
 Testament, rebuke intolerance and teach the broad 
 religion which sees the heathen also as God s people 
 and all mankind as one. It was the same lesson which 
 Jesus afterward taught in his parable of the Jewish 
 priest and Levite, full of religious zeal, but both pass 
 ing by the wounded man, while the good heathen 
 Samaritan stopped and helped him. It was the same 
 lesson which Jesus taught in his parable of the prod 
 igal son, with its rebuke of Judaism as that older 
 brother who, like Jonah, was sullen at the good father s 
 kindness, and " was angry " when the other brother 
 was forgiven. It was the same lesson which Paul 
 taught when he turned from Judaism to the gentile 
 world, ridiculed old formalities as "weak and beggarly 
 rudiments," and declared love "the fulfilling of the 
 Law " and the essence of religion. Even more humane 
 than Paul s God was this one who "repented," and
 
 164 THE BOOK OF JONAH 
 
 who so loved the world that he gave up his own plans, 
 and took back his own prophecies, in order to save a 
 heathen city. So long before Christianity did this 
 work protest against intolerance, and preach the uni 
 versal fatherhood of God and brotherhood of man. 
 In view of its broad charity and divine lesson of for 
 giveness, no wise reader will find any fault with its 
 little story of the fish. 
 
 Is, indeed, that story any blemish on the book ? 
 Even if the author intended that fish for a fact, we 
 can well excuse him. But why suppose he meant it 
 as a fact, any more than Jesus meant the parable of 
 the prodigal son for one ? Jesus parable is conceded 
 to be a fiction, told to teach a religious lesson. Why 
 not suppose that the book of "Jonah" is another? 
 
 But are we sure that the original book even con 
 tained that story of the fish ? Only those three little 
 verses mention it; and that psalm which Jonah is 
 said to have spoken " in the belly of the fish " quite 
 contradicts it. For that long psalm does not contain 
 the slightest hint of any such situation, or of any fish 
 at all, but is simply a general thanksgiving for escape 
 from drowning, and several times speaks of the escape 
 as already past. It represents the danger as entirely 
 over, the author safe ashore ; and whatever poems 
 may have been composed within a fish, this certainly
 
 THE BOOK OF JONAH 165 
 
 was not one of them. The poem is in fact widely 
 regarded as not belonging to the original book at all, 
 but as a later addition ; and the connected words about 
 the fish may easily have been another, a mere 
 " deus ex machina" to bring Jonah to land. 
 
 For such a method of escape has been very frequent 
 in story, the world around ; from the old Hindu 
 tale of Saktideva swallowed by a fish and cut out 
 again unharmed, to the Nova Scotia myth of the hero 
 carried to the sunset -land in a whale. Even our 
 Hiawatha was swallowed, canoe and all, by a fish, and 
 brought safely to shore ; as Longfellow told at consid 
 erable length, without being blamed for it in the least. 
 So "in many lands and ages," says the learned E. B. 
 Tylor, we find "legends of a hero or maiden devoured 
 by a monster and hacked out or disgorged again." 
 So common has been the story, among peoples who 
 have never heard of the Hebrews or of each other, 
 that it is often interpreted as a Nature-myth of sunset 
 and sunrise. We need not follow our imaginative 
 solar mythologists, to whom, one says, "all things 
 are possible " ; but certainly the story was so com 
 mon in antiquity that this author could very naturally 
 adopt it. Indeed, right there at Joppa, where Jonah 
 embarked, was often located the scene of the mon 
 ster seeking to swallow Andromeda; and ancient
 
 166 THE BOOK OF JONAH 
 
 writers, from Strabo and Pliny to Josephus, told how 
 the marks of the event were still shown there. And 
 not far away a Phenician myth told how Hercules was 
 not only swallowed by a fish, but, like Jonah, survived 
 three days in his stomach ; a myth which Rosen- 
 m tiller and many critics have regarded as the real 
 origin of the story in the Bible. 
 
 Not only that story, but probably the whole book 
 of Jonah, was intended as a mere fiction to teach a 
 religious lesson, and was no more meant as literal 
 history than was Jesus parable of the good Samaritan. 
 The author doubtless knew that great Nineveh, with 
 its many and venerable gods, never was converted and 
 " proclaimed a fast and put on sackcloth " for fear of 
 the God of little Israel. He doubtless knew that the 
 haughty monarch in that great palace, where he was 
 feared and adored as half divine, never humbled himself 
 and "sat in ashes" at the preaching of a poor Jew 
 with nothing but a gourd-vine to cover him ; but 
 would have been much more likely to order such a 
 missionary sunk in the Tigris. But these fictions of 
 the book do not at all affect its religious value. It 
 teaches that divine lesson of forgiveness and love so 
 well that no historical errors can harm it, no legendary 
 fancies lower it in the least. 
 
 The harm came when the legend was exalted at the
 
 THE BOOK OF JONAH 167 
 
 expense of the lesson. For that divine truth of for 
 giveness was soon forgotten, and the book came to be 
 remembered chiefly for the fish. That story fixed 
 itself in popular thought, and raised Jonah into new 
 prominence and false position. He came to be re 
 garded as quite a saint, and among the early Christians 
 that story of the fish was even taken as typical of 
 Jesus. 
 
 It is commonly supposed that Jesus himself taught 
 this ; but a careful study of the gospels leads to the 
 conclusion that he did not. The book of Matthew 
 does indeed make Jesus refer to the sign of Jonah 
 surviving in the fish. But in Luke s report of the 
 same event, Jesus makes no reference to the fish, but 
 only to the very different scene of Jonah preaching to 
 the Ninevites. And Mark, reporting the same con 
 versation, makes Jesus say nothing of any sign of 
 Jonah, but to declare explicitly that they shall have 
 no sign at all. Both Mark and Luke agree that Jesus 
 said nothing about the fish ; and Mark teaches that 
 he said nothing even about Jonah. By the usual 
 canons of criticism, Mark s simpler report is to be 
 preferred. If so, then Jesus refused to appeal to 
 signs in Jonah or anywhere else, but trusted more 
 divinely to the mere truth of what he said and did, 
 and was content to leave it without any of the miracles
 
 168 THE BOOK OF JONAH 
 
 which less worthy teachers have used to prop their 
 poorer work. How much more honorable to him to 
 see it so, and not to connect the divine truths he 
 taught with that fable of the fish ! How it dishonors 
 Jesus to say he was typified in any way by that 
 ugly preacher, who begins the story disobeying God 
 and ends it blaspheming him, who is eager for the 
 destruction of a great city and angry at the Lord for 
 saving it. Jesus was typified, not by the narrow 
 Jonah, but by the noble book which rebuked him and 
 taught Christian charity so many centuries before 
 Christ. 
 
 For Jesus was true to the spirit of that book. He 
 again taught its lesson of a brotherhood reaching 
 beyond any race or religion. He gave his blessings 
 not to the followers of the Jewish or of any special 
 faith, but to peacemakers and pure in heart, the meek 
 and merciful, wherever they might belong. And like 
 the Jehovah of this good book, Jesus carried for 
 giveness to the extreme ; forgave adulteress and 
 thief, was so forgiving that Renan says he had a 
 "divine incapacity for seeing evil," taught to forgive 
 seven times and seventy times seven, to love even 
 enemies, to turn the cheek when smitten and give 
 more when stolen from ; and in the same spirit he 
 closed his life by asking forgiveness for his own mur-
 
 THE BOOK OF JONAH 169 
 
 derers. Jesus was indeed a son and incarnation of 
 that God of extreme forgiveness and love, and 
 taught that every one should be. 
 
 Too often the Church has forsaken him and followed 
 the intolerant Jonah instead. Tolstoi says that when 
 a Jewish Rabbi asked him if Christians do turn the 
 cheek when smitten, he had nothing to reply, for just 
 then Christians were smiting the Jews on both cheeks. 
 Smiting has indeed been made quite a virtue in Chris 
 tendom. Jesus "Blessed are the peacemakers" has 
 been drowned in the roar of cannon ; and, instead 
 of loving its enemies, the Church for centuries made 
 a business of butchering and sometimes of burning 
 them. It now and then responded to its Master s 
 " Blessed are the merciful," by the shrieks of women 
 tortured on the rack, and taught for a thousand years 
 that most of mankind would be tortured far worse and 
 forever after death. 
 
 Such days and doctrines are now past, and Chris 
 tendom is getting nearer to the spirit of Jesus. There 
 is still indeed a wide-spread opinion that his beatitudes 
 need some amendment ; that the pure in heart shall 
 not see God unless they have also the proper theology 
 in their head, and that the merciful shall not obtain 
 mercy unless they bear the Christian name. But men 
 are learning that it is not theories about Jesus, but the
 
 i;o THE BOOK OF JONAH 
 
 spirit of Jesus, that makes true Christians ; and that, 
 if they have that spirit, is makes no difference whether 
 they bear his name or not. Indeed, Jesus himself was 
 far too noble to care for his name ; and, according to 
 the record, even rebuked those who should trust to 
 that, and who should claim that they had " prophesied 
 in thy name, and in thy name cast out devils, and in 
 thy name done" so many things. He said, not call 
 ing him Lord, Lord, but doing the will of the Father, 
 brought them into the kingdom. Jesus taught a relig 
 ion of principles instead of names, and those who are 
 true to him will not make it any narrower. They will 
 proclaim that uprightness is righteous, whatever church 
 it comes in ; that goodness is good and godlike, what 
 ever creed it grows with ; that in every land on earth, 
 and under every faith in history, Christian, heretic, 
 or heathen, peacemakers are sons of God, forgive 
 ness is divine, and love is itself religion. 
 
 Why should doctrinal differences make men foes ? 
 The girl in the story worried her brother and herself 
 about his doctrinal opinions until he lost patience and 
 said, " Oh, hang your theology, let us be brother and 
 sister ! " And would it not be better if the quarrel 
 ing religions of the world would hang up their theol 
 ogies for a season, and learn to be more brotherly and 
 sisterly ? For love is better than any catechism ;
 
 THE BOOK OF JONAH 171 
 
 or, rather, teaches the best. A Baptist clergyman, 
 when asked how his daughter came to marry a Cath 
 olic, replied that Cupid had never studied theology. 
 But it would be truer to say that he has studied it 
 better than any of the doctors of divinity. Love 
 learns it best, at any rate ; and the apostle well says, 
 " Every one that loveth is begotten of God and know- 
 eth God." 
 
 Jesus was wise in his emphasis of love, and our 
 best men imitate him. Said Longfellow, 
 
 " . . . I am in love with love, 
 And the sole thing I hate is hate ; 
 For hate is the unpardonable sin, 
 And Love the Holy Ghost within." 
 
 Longfellow was as good as his word, and never har 
 bored a bitter feeling. When Poe was abusing him, 
 he was giving lectures in praise of the other s poetry ; 
 and when it was proposed to make him a visitor of 
 Harvard College, the president of the committee said, 
 " What would be the use ? Longfellow could never 
 be brought to find fault with anybody or anything." 
 His biographer says that this was true, and that Long 
 fellow s whole life was bathed in that sympathy and 
 love " which suffers long and envies not, which for 
 gives seventy times seven, and as many more times 
 if need be."
 
 i/2 THE BOOK OF JONAH 
 
 And is not this spirit a practical power in the 
 world ? Call to mind the story of Henry Ward 
 Beecher s lecture in Richmond after the war. There, 
 in the large audience, sat Fitzhugh Lee, several other 
 Southern generals, and many indignant people, curious 
 to hear the great abolitionist orator, but ready to 
 hiss him. Calmly looking over the audience, Mr. 
 Beecher at length said, " Is this General Lee ? " 
 The general bowed, silently and icily. "Then," said 
 Mr. Beecher, " I want to offer you this right hand, 
 which in its own way fought against you and yours, 
 but which I would now willingly sacrifice to make the 
 South prosperous and happy. Will you take it, gen 
 eral ?" Amid the hushed surprise of the audience, 
 General Lee arose, stepped forward, and stretched his 
 arm across the footlights ; and as their hands clasped, 
 there arose from that changed assembly such ap 
 plause as the old hall had never before heard. This 
 abolitionist leader, who had done about as much as 
 any man in the country to bring on the war that 
 devastated Virginia, rode through Richmond next day 
 amid the cheers of men who, but a few hours before, 
 were almost ready to mob him. 
 
 Cannot this principle of brotherhood and love be 
 carried further in public life, and be trusted more than 
 it has ever been ? Was Jesus such a visionary in this
 
 THE BOOK OF JONAH 173 
 
 matter as the world and even the Church has sup 
 posed ? He was correct in it ; and the Sermon on 
 the Mount, however foolish it may seem to the stand 
 ards of the street and of the Church, is a prophecy 
 of the perfect State. Its principles will yet be the 
 law of society and of business. Poor Sissy Jupe, 
 when asked the first principle of political economy, 
 forgot her lesson and stammered out in her confusion 
 that it was to "do unto others as you would have 
 others do unto you." But she was right ; and the 
 political economy of the Golden Rule is the only one 
 that will make society safe. It works more wonders 
 than force, even among the worst classes. Cruel pun 
 ishments have increased crime, while gentler methods 
 have diminished it ; and doubtless the time will come 
 when society will treat adulteresses, thieves, and the 
 worst criminals more as Jesus treated them. Men are 
 to be moved, and society reformed, through the heart ; 
 and nothing touches and warms the heart like forgive 
 ness and love. Jesus was right in making so much of 
 them, and the world will come to it yet. 
 
 Too long the ship of State has carried the unforgiv 
 ing and intolerant spirit of Jonah, stirring up storms 
 worse than in the story. Let it, like him, be cast 
 overboard, with the prayer that no monster may 
 interfere to save it. Then the old miracle will be re-
 
 174 THE BOOK OF JONAH 
 
 peated, the waves will grow calmer, society safer, 
 and religion surer. Through the natural laws of the 
 world and the natural love of the heart, we shall 
 feel a higher Love infolding us, and find a God 
 who does not repent nor need to, but who is forever 
 "full of compassion, slow to anger, and plenteous in 
 mercy."
 
 THE BREATH OF LIFE
 
 THE BREATH OF LIFE 
 
 WITHOUT a parable spake he not unto them," 
 and modern preachers might use this method 
 more. Not only do fields, lilies, leaven, 
 still remain as texts, but science has unfolded them 
 further and found many others. Physical science, 
 however, does not exhaust their meaning, but, as 
 Wasson suggested, only parses Nature, shows the 
 mere syntax of the sentence, while leaving it still to 
 be read. Nature s meaning has even grown more 
 religious with advancing knowledge. Astronomy has 
 shown new harmony in the hymn which " the morning 
 stars sang together" ; and its heavens, hung with suns 
 and systems, declare a far greater creation than ancient 
 psalmists saw. The earth also has everywhere shown 
 new marvels, and revealed a rule more divine with 
 order. It has shown, not only the immeasurable age, 
 but the immense advance of life, from Archaean 
 algae to our forests, from Silurian sponges to human 
 society. As we read in the rocks this long record of 
 progress, geology seems theology, proving a providence 
 eons before Adam.
 
 i;8 THE BREATH OF LIFE 
 
 The same divine work continues, and issues new 
 Scriptures every year. The seasons themselves, with 
 all events recurring so orderly, are revelations of 
 " the Law." Winter even sends stone tables of it, in 
 the polished slabs of every pond and the plates of each 
 frost-crystal, graven with unerring lines and angles 
 by the same hand that carved the tablets on Sinai. 
 Even "Psalms" of beauty are sung by the winter 
 storms, which so quickly create their delicate snow- 
 stars more wondrous than the constellations, or blos 
 som in dainty florets fairer than a lily, to fall by the 
 billion and blanket and bless the earth. But spring 
 writes a still richer revelation. Its foliage, diviner 
 than old folios, not only drapes the earth in beauty, 
 but purifies the air, and out of poison creates both 
 breath and food for man and beast. To the thought 
 ful soul, every tree of the forest is a New Testament, 
 with its leaves all proclaiming the divine care. Each 
 flower of the field illuminates a manuscript of God. 
 Nor does autumn end the revelation, but brings a 
 better, declaring the endurance of life ; for each 
 falling leaf uncovers a bud, to stand bare through the 
 blasts of winter, and yet to spring into a new branch. 
 Each withering flower tells of more wondrous seeds, 
 which can forsake their stem, be borne far and buried 
 long, lie dried on a rock or drowned in a river, be
 
 THE BREATH OF LIFE 179 
 
 baked by summer heats or bear intensest cold, and 
 still grow into new flowers and fruit. Life seems safe 
 enough. It sleeps all winter, with the ice for its 
 pillow, and with blizzards for its lullaby ; but at the 
 touch of the spring sun it awakes refreshed, and, 
 singing, " O grave, where is thy victory ? " goes out 
 to work the miracles of another year. 
 
 So full of suggestions is Nature. Parables enough 
 are offered on every hand. As Emerson said, " What 
 is a farm but a mute gospel ? " 
 
 Leaving, however, these cheering phenomena of 
 life and growth, may we not find lessons also in 
 Nature s forbidding aspects of decay ? I venture to 
 choose one of her destructive processes, and to take 
 up the parable of the Breath. "Destructive," for 
 breathing is a genuine burning. It consumes fuel in 
 us as fire does in our stoves. It takes the same 
 oxygen from the air, combines it with the same 
 elements, evolves the same heat, and gives off the 
 same products in breath as in smoke. Respiration is 
 a real fire. Still, may we not find under even this 
 destructive process some beneficent spiritual law ? 
 
 We ought to, for it is also a most vital process. 
 "Breath of life," the Bible calls it; and life seems 
 more closely connected with breath than with any-
 
 i8o THE BREATH OF LIFE 
 
 thing else. Real life on earth begins with breathing, 
 ever depends on it, and ever advances with its increase. 
 The lesson of respiration seems to be that destruction 
 does not kill, that consuming does not destroy, that 
 burning even brings life. 
 
 But respiration is not limited to animals. It begins 
 in a lower, and rises into a much higher field. We 
 will try to trace this burning breath through its suc 
 cessive stages, and to show that everywhere it burns 
 to bless, and is indeed a " breath of life." 
 
 First, we notice it in the vegetable world. For 
 even plants, besides taking food for growth, take 
 true breath to burn out their growth. We are wont 
 to speak of Moses burning bush as a miracle unique 
 in history. But botanists say that every bush on 
 earth is burning. Through its every living cell that 
 fiery oxygen works all summer. Even the autumn 
 colors are associated with heat. Whittier put good sci 
 ence into his poem when he called " yon maple wood 
 the burning bush." In certain processes the breath 
 and fire become active enough to show their heat. 
 Such is the case in sprouting seeds. Such is the 
 case in flowers. Often a single blossom produces 
 heat enough for the thermometer to show, while dense 
 clusters of them in the Aroideae sometimes raise the 
 temperature five, ten, fifteen degrees, Sachs says. In
 
 THE BREATH OF LIFE 181 
 
 the sight of chemistry, flowers are all fires ; and one 
 great genus is well named phlox, flame. There was 
 fact enough in Hafiz fancy that roses were the flames 
 of a burning bush ; and botany adds that every bloom 
 ing plant is another, whether blazing in the cardinal- 
 flower or only smoking in the gray grass-blossoms. 
 
 But, just as in that bush of old story, this burning 
 does not harm. Rather, it is so helpful that the plant 
 dies without it, as surely as a man dies without air. 
 Not only does it thus save life, but creates more. 
 Out of that burning seed it brings a new plant. It 
 brings new energies, too. In each cell the fire creates 
 force, just as in the boiler of a boat. As a result, the 
 cilia of some algae lash the water like oars, the diatom 
 moves across the field of the microscope like a pro 
 peller across the lake, and the beautiful volvox goes 
 rolling through the water like the wheel of a steamer. 
 And out of that warmer fire in the flower how many 
 new creations come ! One is beauty. The leaves are 
 refined to softer petals, grow radiant with gold and 
 purple, and proclaim to us the spiritual law that the 
 highest beauty is reached only through the burning 
 out of our substance. The same process brings sweet 
 ness, too, turns starch to sugar, and loads the flower 
 with honey and perfume. It even brings something 
 like love ; and the blossom becomes a real marriage-
 
 182 THE BREATH OF LIFE 
 
 bower, where parents join in genuine wedding and 
 give themselves for each other and their offspring. 
 So the flower is consumed only to rise again from its 
 ashes, and to extend its life to distant lands and 
 ages. 
 
 Verily, in this familiar blossom burning to bring 
 new life, is not the old miracle still done and outdone ? 
 The reverent soul hears the God, who called to Moses 
 from the bush, still calling from every calyx, declaring 
 that, though he be named a " consuming fire," yet to 
 deeper insight his fire does not consume, but works 
 through the vegetable world as very " breath of 
 life." 
 
 But we see this law clearer in its second revela 
 tion in the animal world. Here breath is more active, 
 and grows ever more so through the rising animal 
 scale. And this deeper breathing always means faster 
 burning. Analysis shows, for instance, that the breath 
 of an average healthy man consumes carbon at the rate 
 of one hundred and seventy pounds a year, literally 
 burns up within him every month the substance of 
 over a bushel of charcoal. With this increasing fire 
 comes increasing warmth. The gilled fish hardly 
 shows it ; he cannot get much fire started there in 
 the water. Even air-breathing reptiles, with their 
 poor lungs, get so little draft that they only smolder,
 
 THE BREATH OF LIEE 183 
 
 and we call them cold-blooded. But with better bron 
 chial flues and more active breast-bellows the fire 
 burns freer and the blood grows warmer, until it 
 reaches the high temperature of mammals, and still 
 higher of some birds. The animal world, also, is all 
 burning bush. 
 
 Here, too, the fire does not consume. It does, 
 indeed, waste our substance, so that the animal, unlike 
 the tree, soon gets his growth. Some poor-lunged 
 creatures are said to lengthen as long as they live, like 
 an elm ; but better breathers burn up their accumula 
 tions, and men and birds keep but little body. Nor 
 do they keep even that ; but it is continually consumed, 
 several times during our lives, the doctors say, 
 muscles, nerves, lungs, heart, brains, bones, and all. 
 But this consumption is always restored, and does not 
 harm us in the least. Rather, it is just the thing that 
 keeps us alive. If we were not thus perpetually 
 destroyed, we should get sick, and die ; and the only 
 way we can keep alive and well is by being annihilated 
 every few years. Curiously, too, this destructive 
 process is just the one which cannot be suspended at 
 all. Other functions may be stopped for a season, 
 even the nutritive ones. A man can go even without 
 food, for a week, for forty days, some say, but 
 not without breath for five minutes. Eating seems to
 
 1 84 THE BREATH OF LIFE 
 
 be of quite secondary account in life. The really 
 important thing is burning up. When the fire goes 
 out, we die ; but so long as it is consuming us, we 
 thrive. Such is the paradox and first principle of this 
 mysterious thing called life. Burning saves and in 
 creases it. 
 
 Increases all its energies, too. The faster this 
 breath burns, the greater the activity. The tree has 
 roots for holding still, and can hardly be moved without 
 dying. But, with better breath, roots go out of fash 
 ion, and there come fins and feet for roving and wings 
 for rising ; and the more the breath, the more the 
 motion. In contrast with forests fixed by the river 
 come fish swimming in it, and amphibians lifting them 
 selves out of it, and better breathing quadrupeds 
 crossing the country ; while the burning bird soars 
 above the forests, flies over lakes and mountains, 
 makes the tour of the State on a summer morning, 
 and, when winter comes, goes to Florida like a gentle 
 man. Such a breath of life is this fire in the animal 
 world. 
 
 But this breath rises to a third stage in human 
 arts. For man breathes more largely than with lungs ; 
 and, learning how to burn that carbon anywhere, he 
 adds to Nature s slow fire within him a much faster 
 one without. He heats his hut and home ; and, instead
 
 THE BREATH OF LIFE 185 
 
 of having to migrate like an animal, he brings Florida 
 to his own fireside, and makes the tropics anywhere 
 to order. Learning how to make this artificial breath 
 ing taster, and fire fiercer, he gains new forces that 
 far outdo those of animals. Instead of crawling through 
 the country, like the quadruped, he makes this fire 
 carry him and all his family and furniture farther and 
 faster. Instead of flying fifty miles for his breakfast, 
 like a bird, he sits still like a lord and orders it, 
 beefsteak from Texas, rolls from Dakota, an orange 
 from California, and coffee from Asia. By this breath 
 under a boiler, he gets them brought so easily that 
 Mr. Atkinson says a good mechanic in Massachusetts 
 can get his whole year s meat and flour fetched from 
 beyond the Mississippi for one day s work. Sir Lyon 
 Playfair said that a ton of freight can be carried on 
 water two miles by a cubic inch of coal. 
 
 Nor does man stop with moving Nature s products, 
 but makes better, by this same principle. In his 
 manufactures and varied arts, he learns to consume 
 not merely a little in the form of food, like an animal, 
 but enormously in other forms ; not only acorns, 
 but oaks ; not only fruits, but whole forests ; not only 
 a few acres, but long ages of them condensed in 
 coal ; and not only coal, but ores and rocks and the 
 original elements themselves. Human art becomes
 
 186 THE BREATH OF LIFE 
 
 a boundless burning, destroying about everything on 
 earth. 
 
 Yet this burning, too, only helps. It turns the 
 forests into force, and the whole carboniferous era into 
 energy, turns ores and everything into something 
 better. It consumes only to create. Indeed, strictly 
 speaking, it does not consume at all. Not an atom of 
 carbon or anything else has ever been destroyed. 
 Burning only sets it free from old forms to enter into 
 life again ; and Nature is always waiting to start it 
 into life, is all the summer turning our smoke and 
 ashes back into new trees and corn. Food does not 
 fail, but is growing more abundant and cheaper every 
 year ; and many farmers are praying for a famine or war 
 or something that will reduce the supply. Fuel does 
 not fail. Professors predict that long before the coal 
 gives out, they will be able to get heat cheaper out of 
 something else, or get it for nothing out of sunbeams. 
 Nothing fails ; rather, the consumptions are all 
 restored and more, and the necessaries and luxuries 
 are yearly more abundant. Corn, clothes, goods of 
 every kind, more and more glut the market and beg 
 to be bought. The great social problem which troubles 
 us to-day is not, as once, how to produce, but how to 
 get the too abundant products distributed ; not, 
 as once, how to supply the world s table, but how
 
 THE BREATH OF LIFE 187 
 
 to pass the supplies that threaten to break the table 
 down. Production is easy enough, and some say that 
 overproduction is what ails us. The whole world, of 
 both Nature and art, is as good as the widow s cruse 
 and barrel ; even better, for use only makes it grow 
 fuller and overflow. Loaves and fishes and everything 
 else are forever multiplied ; and the fragments of the 
 feast are apt to be more than the first supply. 
 
 Destroying things seems somehow to increase them. 
 Even the wasteful destruction of a conflagration seems 
 to be a sort of creative process. What does a fire in 
 our streets mean ? Its deepest meaning is that a 
 better building will go up there. Chicago burns down 
 into higher blocks and more beauty and business. 
 The flames kindle also new energies in the men 
 who were burned out, and new currents of sympathy, 
 that run round the world and rouse the sentiment of 
 brotherhood in distant nations. Mourn as we may, 
 conflagrations still add new streets to our cities and 
 new strength to our citizens and new virtues to 
 our souls. In view of these results, one is tempted 
 to ask, Where is the fire out of which is not born 
 more than was burned ? So of other great material 
 losses : they often prove productive, arouse men, 
 and add to the wealth of the country. Consumption 
 seems somehow to be creative, even when it gets the
 
 i88 THE BREATH OF LIFE 
 
 start of us and runs wild in some great calamity. At 
 any rate, when kept in control and made regular, 
 as in respiration, this consumption, whether by fire 
 or other force, works through the world of industry 
 and material civilization, as the very " breath of life." 
 
 But above these material fields we trace the same 
 principle through a fourth phase, in spiritual life. 
 Thought is a breathing, ever inhaling fresh truth, 
 which consumes old ideas in society, just as oxygen 
 does old cells in the body. Indeed, those arts we 
 have just noticed have all come from this mental 
 breathing. How many established opinions had to be 
 consumed to bring ease of travel ! Once, even science 
 argued that no steamer could ever cross the Atlantic ; 
 and there was a time when everybody knew that steam 
 could not carry anything on land. The first modern 
 who suggested such a thing is said to have been shut 
 up in the Bicetre for it, as a lunatic. Afterward, the 
 Englishman who first advocated passenger railways 
 was called by the Quarterly Review "beneath our 
 contempt," while the wise old Edinburgh Review 
 said, " Put him in a strait-jacket." Prudent men pre 
 dicted that railways would ruin the country and kill 
 the people ; yet would not do even that, for nobody 
 would use them, and they never would succeed. One
 
 THE BREATH OF LIFE 189 
 
 Liverpool gentleman was so certain of this that he 
 said, if trains ever reached a speed of ten miles an 
 hour, he would eat a stewed engine- wheel for break 
 fast. Even in Massachusetts the Boston Courier 
 once called a proposed horse railroad to Albany a 
 " project which everybody who knows the simplest 
 rules of arithmetic knows to be impracticable," and 
 which, " if practicable, every person of common sense 
 knows would be as useless as a railroad from Boston 
 to the moon." So many and so firmly established 
 ideas have been consumed in a century in this mere 
 matter of travel. And this is only an illustration of 
 the consumption of old theories that has been going 
 on through the arts and sciences and philosophies in 
 all fields. See it in politics. Half of legislation is 
 repeal, Buckle said the best half. So, through all 
 fields, this spiritual breath of thought and feeling has 
 been burning fast. 
 
 Yet here, too, it has consumed only to create, and 
 been in still higher degree the "breath of life." It 
 has aided all those arts and sciences. It has advanced 
 society, too, just as breathing has advanced the 
 animal kingdom, and has brought to mankind a 
 progress about as great as from mollusks to mammals. 
 It has burned out social wrongs only to bring right. 
 Even when the destruction has come by the conflagra-
 
 190 THE BREATH OE LIFE 
 
 tion of revolution, as in France, it has still blessed. 
 See Taine s picture of society there, in the eighteenth 
 century, with a king wasting thirty-six millions on only 
 one of his mistresses ; with the people starving to 
 death by thousands, and yet having to pay four-fifths 
 of their income in taxes to support the luxuries 
 and vices of the nobles. The French Revolution, 
 , with all our just blame of it, still removed far more 
 wrongs than the Reign of Terror wrought, and brought 
 to the people a prosperity they never had before. Far 
 better is it, of course, when the political body does 
 not allow effete evils to accumulate so that it gets dis 
 eased and goes off in the spontaneous combustion of 
 revolution, but clears them out as fast as outgrown, 
 by the regular breathing of reform, as in England. 
 But, whether slow or swift, the destruction has gen 
 erally blessed, and kept mankind advancing. What 
 an advance history shows, from cannibal savages to 
 modern society feeding its hungry and founding hos 
 pitals and charities of a hundred kinds ! What an 
 advance even since our pious ancestors of last century, 
 when, Parton says, the best Christian in New England 
 saw nothing wrong in buying Negroes for rum, and 
 selling them for West India molassess to make rum to 
 buy more ! \Vhat a progress from the days when 
 David could slay a man to steal his wife, and still be
 
 THE BREATH OF LIFE 191 
 
 revered as the most sacred psalmist ; and when Sol 
 omon, with a whole regiment of wives, could be called 
 the wisest of men, and be thought worthy to make 
 the longest prayer in the Bible ! 
 
 For religion, too, has felt the effects of this spiritual 
 breathing, and has been advancing by it. Here, too, 
 ancient ideas have been burning out to bring better. 
 Samuel s Jehovah, ordering innocent men slain like 
 mice, gave way to Isaiah s God of justice and to Jesus 
 God of love. The Church did, indeed, in its unbreath- 
 ing centuries, fall far away from Jesus lofty relig 
 ion, and taught that God would torture heretics here 
 after and wanted Christians to begin it here. But 
 these barbarities have again been consumed, and have 
 given way to a more reverent faith. The burning has 
 always seemed bad, and always proved good. Even 
 the great conflagrations in religion have helped it. 
 The so censured skeptics of the eighteenth century 
 abolished much bigotry ; and even one of the most 
 honored Oxford professors has declared that "Voltaire 
 had done more good than all the Fathers of the Church 
 put together." 
 
 Modern thought, with all its destructiveness, has 
 only been enlarging religion. It has swept away the 
 little firmament and the creative week, only to find a 
 creation eternal and infinite, and filled with an order
 
 192 THE BREATH OF LIFE 
 
 diviner than Bibles ever told. It has swept away 
 certain supposed miracles of broken law, but only to 
 show all the world a better miracle of laws unbroken. 
 It has swept away the old theory of a petty Providence 
 deranging earth and heaven to help a few men, but 
 only to show an infinite and truer Providence helping 
 all by principles that can be depended on. Instead 
 of fig-trees blasted, and Jordan ceasing, and Red Sea 
 standing, and sun stopping, and gravitation going to 
 wreck, as if God were gone and his government a 
 sham, we find sun and seas and streams and trees 
 and all things forever true, as if God were always here 
 and to be trusted. Old ideas of Deity have indeed 
 been destroyed, but only to show the universe per 
 vaded by a Power more godlike than the God of 
 theology ever was, more mighty, just, and merciful. 
 
 Religion all remains, and broadened as never before. 
 Its old boundaries are getting wiped out, but only to 
 show religion reaching beyond them without bound. 
 We are learning to see Holy Land not in Judea alone, 
 but wherever men have worshiped. We are learning 
 to hear divinely inspired words, not merely from a few 
 ancient prophets, but in every human utterance for 
 justice. We are beginning to find a holy family, not 
 in Nazareth alone, but in every home consecrated by 
 love. We are beginning to admit a miraculous birth,
 
 THE BREATH OF LIFE 193 
 
 not merely from Mary, but from every mother on 
 earth, with a mystery which all our science still leaves 
 as deep as that of the hypostatic union. We are 
 beginning to see a real Son of God, not in Jesus alone, 
 but in every peacemaker, as Jesus said ; and to see 
 God dwelling in every one that loveth another, as the 
 apostle declared. We are beginning to believe in a 
 real Deity, not a partial and poor one visiting earth 
 in a few times and spots, to make his saints despise 
 all who differed from them ; but an infinite and eternal 
 One, enfolding and filling all things, ruling in all laws, 
 living in all life, loving in all love, and to be seen best 
 and served best by love. 
 
 So much higher and holier and humaner thought 
 has come with the destruction of old doctrines. This 
 spiritual breathing has advanced religion as much as 
 literal breathing has advanced animal life ; clearing 
 it of its old reptilian habits, warming it to more than 
 mammalian tenderness, and lifting it like a bird to sing 
 a sacreder psalm of love and trust. Here, too, the 
 burning has been a very " breath of life " ; and relig 
 ion ought to have learned ere this to breathe fearlessly, 
 and let its old forms be consumed as fast as they 
 will. 
 
 But the Church has sometimes forgotten this, and 
 has gone to the unbreathing vegetable world for its
 
 194 THE BREATH OF LIFE 
 
 religious symbols. The preacher has often called the 
 Church a vineyard, and exhorted his vines to guard 
 above all things the roots and leaves by which they 
 live and grow. Excellent advice, so far as religion 
 is a vineyard, and we ought to learn all that we can 
 from the vegetable world. Roots are indispensable, 
 and I protest against the radicalism that would outroot 
 any good thing. The ignorant servant, when asked 
 if he had trimmed the orchard as ordered, said he had 
 cut the trees all down, and was going to begin to trim 
 them next day ; and some who set themselves up for 
 reformers try to trim the tree of life in about the same 
 way. Roots teach us to value and venerate the past, 
 and to keep our vital connection with it. Leaves 
 teach religion the value of forms. To sweep away 
 religious customs and doctrines which men sincerely 
 believe, and by which they live, is as ruinous as to 
 strip an orchard of its June foliage. 
 
 But these conservative lessons have their limits, 
 and even the vegetable world tells us so. Even that 
 so necessary foliage teaches us to change religious 
 forms now and then. The trees these autumn days 
 are shedding their leaves quite freely, and seem to 
 tell the preacher to let old beliefs drop as fast as they 
 die, and not to spend too much of his precious time 
 trying to glue them on. Indeed, their falling is the
 
 THE BREATH OF LIFE 195 
 
 very sign of life. The live tree lets them go. When 
 your bare orchard shows a branch keeping them on in 
 January, what does it mean ? The leaves clinging 
 there tell you that the branch is dead. The dried 
 forms rustling on some branches of the religious tree 
 often seem to be saying something like that. Life 
 would cast them off, and without waiting for new 
 ones. That timid maxim not to let anything go 
 until you have something better to put in its place 
 is mocked by all the trees, which let their whole liturgy 
 go without the hope of getting another till May. 
 These October maples and mountain-sides, blazing in 
 a bonfire which goes out to leave them bare till spring 
 brings better, tell religion to drop, as fast as they are 
 outgrown, even the forms that have served it best, and 
 to trust the good Providence which made them, and 
 which will make more when needed. Even the vine 
 yard teaches this. 
 
 But religion is higher than a vineyard, and should 
 find its best symbols in that higher life which burns 
 itself out, not in October alone, but in every breath, 
 and which lives by so doing. Not leaves, but lungs, 
 bring the advanced physical life ; and not the leaves 
 of Bibles or of any books, but the breathing of our 
 own thought and love, brings the real spiritual life. 
 For spirit, in a score of languages, is well named from
 
 196 THE BREATH OF LIFE 
 
 breath ; and inspiration, in both etymology and true 
 theology, means breathing in, ever freshly, from the 
 infinite atmosphere of God that infolds us. 
 
 Religion ought to beware, and not let its lungs get 
 diseased. For confinement in close walls, where ven 
 tilation is feared like vice, and where even the truth, 
 by being breathed over and over again, soon loses its 
 vitality, has the usual result, develops consumption. 
 It locks the religious lungs in spiritual tuberculosis ; 
 although, as is usual with consumptives, the invalid is 
 sure that nothing ails her, mistakes paleness for piety, 
 and the hectic flush of a revival for religious health. 
 In such cases, the medical advice is: "Ventilate 
 your abode or, better yet, move out of it, change your 
 climate, try some other creed ; and, best of all, live out 
 under the open sky, rough it, start your lungs again, 
 and breathe God s living air as you were created 
 to do." 
 
 It seems hard to give up doctrines that have cost 
 us much. Some saints are like the asthmatic patient 
 who said he had worked so hard to get that breath in 
 that he did not mean to let it go again. But life con 
 sists in letting it go and getting another, and so on 
 forever, without any fear of the consequences. The 
 fear that a new thought may injure religion is like the 
 fear that a new breath may injure our tissue. Wisdom
 
 THE BREATH OF LIFE 197 
 
 says, " You had better take it, and leave the care of 
 the tissue to the Providence that always sees to its 
 repair." All that is really alive and worth living, in 
 our beliefs and bodies alike, will not be harmed. 
 Only the effete and hurtful will be burned out, and 
 they will bring new warmth and life in the process, 
 and will be replaced by better. 
 
 Let religion, then, breathe away, and continue to 
 enlarge its lungs and elevate its life. And when, in 
 its rising life, the roots of the vineyard are succeeded 
 by feet that carry faith somewhat beyond the old 
 theological trellis, or even by wings that lift it high 
 enough to overlook the Christian fence and see that 
 other fields are filled and flooded with the same light 
 and life of God, let the sight be welcome and be 
 sung with new joy. Religion ought to be like Shelley s 
 
 lark, that through the deep blue 
 
 " Wingeth, 
 And singing still doth soar, and soaring ever singeth "; 
 
 or like that other poet s bird, whose voice 
 
 " Came quickening all the springs of trust and love, 
 Dropping its fairy flute-notes from above, 
 Fresh message from the Beauty Infinite 
 That wraps the world around, and fills it with delight." 
 
 Breath brings its best lessons to private life. It 
 rebukes greed, and bids us burn out our gains gen-
 
 198 THE BREATH OF LIFE 
 
 erously. Gain is good, but must be followed by giving, 
 as eating by breathing, if we would rise above vegeta 
 bles. Indeed, our gains have to be given away, to get 
 the good of them. Miserliness is very near to misery, 
 as even etymology teaches. The wise preacher ad 
 vocated foreign missionary contributions, since, he 
 said, if they were of no help to the heathen, they 
 greatly helped the Christian contributors at home. 
 Giving does enrich the giver, whether it enriches any 
 one else or not. Beneficence is the bank that pays 
 the best interest on deposits, and it pays back in 
 better coin than was put in. Our proverbs have well 
 declared that the best way to keep what we get is by 
 giving it away in some good cause. 
 
 This truth of external possessions is still truer of 
 ourselves. They, too, must be given away, in order 
 to be kept, or even to be found at first. " The life of 
 life is when for another we re living," says a poet ; and 
 another tells of one to whom love was the first waking, 
 "The past was a sleep, and her life began." Love, 
 whether of a person or a cause, is indeed the highest 
 form of the breath of life. It consumes as nothing 
 else can, wastes with self-sacrifice and sorrows, yet 
 only to lift to larger life, to bless with new powers and 
 higher happiness. Selfishness is as fatal to the soul 
 as holding the breath is to the body. Burning our-
 
 THE BREATH OF LIFE 199 
 
 selves out in sacrifice for something is the only way 
 to keep the heart warm and the soul alive. This sav 
 ing of our selves by consuming them is the deepest 
 lesson of the breath. This is the central lesson in 
 Jesus religion also, and is summed in his saying, 
 " Whosoever shall lose his life shall preserve it." 
 
 And does not breathing give hint that life shall be 
 preserved ? Why assume that death ends us, when 
 it is the essence of every breath and the very thing 
 that keeps us from ending ? What if body must be 
 destroyed ? It has been destroyed several times 
 already, and the loss has always been bringing new 
 life. And what if we are doomed to such a future as 
 our good Calvinistic brethren prescribe for us ? It 
 would indeed be a hopeless case if we were not des 
 tined to eternal fire of some kind ; for that is the only 
 way to keep growing. The lesson of breath is not 
 fear of either burning or burial, but faith in things 
 that may survive both. It teaches more faith in 
 human life, which so endures through physical destruc 
 tions and grows by them. It teaches more faith in 
 human love, which is a deeper breath, burning out 
 our lives only to bless them. It teaches more faith 
 in the creative love, which breathes through ours, and 
 consumes only to enlarge us. Through this divine 
 fire, still burning in every bush to bring blossom and
 
 200 THE BREATH OF LIFE 
 
 fruit ; burning better in our bodies to bring life, and 
 better still in our minds to bring nobler thoughts, 
 and best of all in our hearts to bring higher loves and 
 hopes ; there seems to come a voice bidding us 
 trust, not only while bodily life lasts, but beyond. 
 " He who died at Azan " bade his friends mourn 
 
 not : 
 
 " For death, 
 
 Now I know, is that first breath 
 Which our souls draw when we enter 
 Life which is of all life center."
 
 THE SIN IN A CENSUS
 
 THE SIN IN A CENSUS 
 
 IT is a suggestive fact that the only public evil 
 charged to Satan in the Old Testament is the 
 taking of a census. His work with Job is only 
 personal, is hardly even sinful, since it is done at 
 the suggestion of the Lord. But when Satan appears 
 in this other passage and moves David to "number 
 Israel," it is so great a sin that the Lord sends a 
 severe pestilence to punish it. He even sends an 
 angel to destroy Jerusalem, and above Mount Zion 
 men see " the angel of the Lord stand between the 
 earth and the heaven, having a drawn sword in his 
 hand." So great is the danger that David seeks to 
 avert it at any cost ; buys the spot for "six hundred 
 shekels of gold," builds an altar and offers a sacrifice. 
 Then at length the Lord relents, answers " from 
 heaven by fire upon the altar," and makes the angel 
 " put up the sword again in the sheath." And this 
 altar is of such importance that its site afterward 
 becomes that of Solomon s Temple. So closely does 
 the Bible connect even the sanctuary and worship on
 
 204 THE SIN IN A CENSUS 
 
 Mount Zion with the work to atone for the great and 
 fatal sin of a census. 
 
 We need not insist upon the accuracy of the report. 
 Census reports are not expected to be accurate ; and 
 there is evidence enough that this, like most of them, 
 is exaggerated. For if we turn back from this story 
 in "Chronicles" to the earlier account of the same 
 event in " Samuel," not only are the census returns 
 found much smaller, but this " six hundred shekels of 
 gold" drops to "fifty shekels of silver," while both 
 the sword of the angel and the supernatural fire from 
 heaven disappear altogether. Even Satan disappears 
 entirely, and, instead of him, it is "the Lord" who 
 "moved David" to "number Israel." But though 
 the evil is so reduced in the older account, it is bad 
 enough. There, too, the census brings the same 
 pestilence with its seventy thousand deaths. 
 
 And, however contradictory the reported figures or 
 facts, the story itself is clearly true. For not only 
 Israel, but every good movement, must beware of 
 pride in numbers, and trust only to the truth of its 
 principles. Whenever a nation or denomination for 
 gets this, and begins instead to be vain of its size and 
 to think of its census, it falls into fatal sin. When 
 its leaders, instead of aiming at justice and right, 
 begin to "number" their following, Satan is always
 
 THE SIN IN A CENSUS 205 
 
 there, urging them to it, and rejoicing in his suc 
 cess. The pestilence, too, is sure to come. How 
 ever slow and insidious, it still spreads, infecting souls, 
 corrupting character, diseasing society. The avenging 
 angel stands with his sword drawn, certain to strike 
 if not averted. And the averting penitence and sac 
 rifice which, giving up shekels and show and the 
 desire to "number," returns to the trust in righteous 
 ness alone, builds ever, as in the old story, the best 
 religious altar, and leads to the temple of the Lord 
 and the truest worship. 
 
 Scripture often rebukes the trust in numbers. A 
 fine text says : " The Lord did not choose you because 
 ye were more in number than any people, for ye were 
 the fewest of all people." This power of the few is 
 one of the commonplaces of history. It was well 
 proved by these Israelites. Though " the fewest of 
 all people," and though so often defeated, dispersed, 
 oppressed, suppressed, they yet outlasted all their 
 enemies and conquered their conquerors. Their tem 
 ple and sacred city fell before great Rome, yet their 
 Jehovah soon superseded Jove, and his worship spread 
 through the Roman empire. They supplied to Chris 
 tendom even its Scriptures. While the Church was 
 cursing Jews, it used Jewish Psalms for its praise and 
 prayers, and revered Jewish writings as the only
 
 206 THE SIN IN A CENSUS 
 
 "word of God." It even declared a Jewess to be the 
 " mother of God," and still praises the son of a Jewess 
 as "very God of very God." 
 
 This little people have also shown their power in 
 secular life, in spite of their long persecutions. Re 
 leased at length from the Ghettos, they have rapidly 
 advanced to the front ranks, not only in finance, but 
 in literature, learning, even politics, almost making 
 panics in some of the great powers of Europe. Even 
 England, after banishing them for centuries, and after 
 abusing them in many a fiction, from Marlowe s 
 " Barabbas " and Shakespeare s " Shylock " to Dickens 
 " Fagin," had to see one of these despised people 
 become a powerful British Peer and even Prime Min 
 ister. Leroy Beaulieu happily pictures Lord Beacons- 
 field idolized not merely by the people, but in "the 
 parlors of Piccadilly " and by " the Mite of the most 
 aristocratic nation of the globe," and seeing "from 
 the top of his statue, on primrose day, the hands of 
 the most titled ladies spread at his feet baskets of his 
 favorite flower." Sometimes, too, they had to submit 
 to Disraeli s sarcastic words : as when he said all 
 Christendom is worshiping a Jew as its God, and all 
 Catholics are adoring a Jewess besides ; or when he 
 told of the persecution of the Hebrew by " that un 
 grateful Europe which owes to him the best part
 
 THE SIN IN A CENSUS 207 
 
 of its laws, a fine portion of its literature, all its re 
 ligion." So widely was little Palestine, with its poor 
 territory and "fewest of all people," to conquer the 
 world. 
 
 Little Greece was perhaps to conquer more. Its 
 handful beating back the hosts of Persia was symbol 
 of its far greater victories that still continue. Its 
 influence has lived on, while far more populous nations 
 have vanished like the summer flies. Said Sir H. S. 
 Maine : " A ferment spreading from that source has 
 vitalized all the great progressive nations of man 
 kind"; and "except the blind forces of Nature, 
 nothing moves in this world which is not Greek in 
 its origin." It is interesting also to notice that 
 Macaulay s famous fancy of some future traveler 
 finding only a few ruins of London and of the 
 great Saint Paul s, was first used by him to illustrate 
 the duration, not of the Catholic Church, but of 
 Athens, whose " influence and glory will still survive, 
 fresh in eternal youth, exempt from mutability and 
 decay." 
 
 Christianity, too, so despised in Paul s day, well 
 illustrated his words that God hath "chosen the weak 
 things of the world to confound the things which are 
 mighty," and " things which are not, to bring to 
 nought things which are." So in Christendom, much
 
 208 THE SIN IN A CENSUS 
 
 of the best and widest work has come from the small 
 est peoples. Think of little Holland, barely visible 
 on a student s globe, and with much of it repeatedly 
 buried by the sea, yet rapidly rising from such dis 
 asters, and from its long oppression by mighty Spain, 
 to a front rank in agriculture, trade, art, learning, 
 liberty, and religion. De Amicis says it became " the 
 adopted country of science, the Exchange of Europe, 
 the station for the commerce of the world." At the 
 beginning of the seventeenth century, says Taine, "in 
 culture as well as in the arts of organization and gov 
 ernment, the Dutch are two hundred years ahead of 
 the rest of Europe." At that time, says Hallam, 
 "Holland was pre-eminently the literary country"; 
 and Niebuhr calls a chamber in the University of 
 Leyden " the most memorable room in Europe in 
 the history of learning." Thorold Rogers tells how 
 Holland "taught the western nations finance," "com 
 mercial honor," " international law," and religious 
 tolerance. Says this Oxford professor of history : 
 " For a long time that little storm-vexed nook was the 
 university of the civilized world"; and "to the true 
 lover of liberty, Holland is the Holy Land of modern 
 Europe." 
 
 Nor are towns to be measured by their size. W. S.
 
 THE SIN IN A CENSUS 209 
 
 Landor enthusiastically wrote of Florence : " A town, 
 so small that the voice of the cabbage-girl in the 
 midst of it might be heard at the extremes, reared 
 within three centuries a greater number of citizens 
 illustrious for their genius than all the remainder of 
 the continent" in two thousand years. In our own 
 land, the little village of Concord contained within a 
 short distance, on a single street, not only the man 
 who was to feed the country with the Concord grape, 
 but Hawthorne and the Alcotts and Emerson, who 
 have fed the higher wants of the world still more 
 widely. Emerson himself used to expose the fallacy 
 of trusting in numbers. Said he : " The truth, the 
 hope of any time, must always be sought in the minor 
 ities " ; " The founders of nations, the wise men and 
 inventors who shine afterward as their gods, were 
 probably martyrs in their own time " ; " All history is 
 a record of the power of minorities, and of minorities 
 of one." Carlyle grimly answered from across the 
 sea, with unspeakable scorn for the judgment of major 
 ities, and for the political system which counts a fool s 
 vote as good as a seer s, the meanest wretch equal to 
 " Socrates or Shakespeare, and Judas Iscariot to Jesus 
 Christ." 
 
 Without going to any such extreme, we can keep
 
 210 THE SIN IN A CENSUS 
 
 the truth that the popular vote or verdict is not the 
 one to seek for. F. D. Maurice said he had been in 
 the minority all through this life, and hoped he should 
 be in the next. Perhaps it is better not to care 
 whether we are or not ; but to cease from counting, 
 and to remember the Scripture lesson that it is Satanic 
 to "number Israel." 
 
 The important thing wanted is simply to stand 
 for truth and rectitude. This is also taught in the 
 fine Biblical story of Gideon. That leader, with the 
 common notions about numbers, gathered a great 
 army to oppose the invading hosts of Midian. But 
 the Lord told him to cut it down, to let all leave 
 who wished. Most of them left, and thus reduced 
 the army to ten thousand. But the Lord did not 
 want even that number. They are " yet too many," 
 said he, and ordered Gideon to reduce them again. 
 This time he was told to test them by upright atti 
 tude ; to bring them to the water and reject " every 
 one that boweth down upon his knees to drink," like 
 brutes, but to keep those who, with more erect body, 
 sipped from their hands. Nearly all failed in this 
 test ; and less than a hundredth part of the original 
 army remained as the Lord s elect. Even these were 
 not to fight in any worldly way, but to leave all their
 
 THE SIN IN A CENSUS 211 
 
 weapons behind, to take only trumpets in their hands, 
 and lights concealed in pitchers. So they did, 
 simply " blew the trumpets and brake the pitchers," 
 showed the light, and shouted, " The sword of the 
 Lord ! " By this method alone these three hundred 
 men turned to confusion and flight that vast array of 
 Midianites, who were " like grasshoppers for multitude, 
 and their camels without number as the sand by the 
 seaside." 
 
 This story also may be overcolored, but it is cor 
 rect. The true army of the Lord always leaves be 
 hind those who are cowardly or unwilling. It still 
 further rejects all who bow themselves down in any 
 brutal or base fashion, and counts as his elect only 
 those who keep the manly attitude, upright with 
 integrity and honor. And these do not fight with 
 worldly weapons, but only blow the trumpet of truth, 
 and break the old pitchers and prejudices so as to let 
 the light shine out. For light is always the true " sword 
 of the Lord," and conquers by its own power. Again 
 and again in history have a little band of men, with 
 truth alone to help them, vanquished all opponents. 
 It is so in science, and Copernicus conquered the 
 Church. It is so in morals, and Garrison won the 
 victory. It is so in religion, and Christ will yet
 
 212 THE SIN IN A CENSUS 
 
 conquer Christendom. For though, in days of dis 
 couragement, men may think 
 
 " Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne, 
 Yet that scaffold sways the future, and, behind the dim un 
 known, 
 
 Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above his 
 own." 
 
 Men who stand erect for truth and right need never 
 count their company, but can be assured that, how 
 ever weak they seem, they have, as their allies, time 
 and eternity, the universe and God.
 
 THE RISE AND FALL OF 
 
 SATAN
 
 THE RISE AND FALL OF 
 
 SATAN 
 
 IT is widely assumed that Satan appears often in the 
 Old Testament, and notably in its opening story of 
 Eden. Yet one has only to read that story to see 
 that it does not mention him or contain the slightest 
 reference to him or to any being like him. It makes 
 the temptation come from one of those serpents to 
 which the ancient East ascribed so much cunning, 
 and it gives no suggestion of any worse agent. As 
 Professor C. C. Everett recently wrote, "there is no 
 hint of a devil " in that story ; and the notion that its 
 serpent is a demon, or is possessed by one, " finds no 
 justification " there. 
 
 Nor does Satan appear in the Biblical narrative for 
 ages after Eden. There is no sign of his presence 
 during the thousands of years from Adam to Moses, 
 nor in all the writings ascribed to Moses. The 
 Pentateuch, though tracing so many evils and their 
 causes, never refers one of them to Satan s agency. 
 The long and elaborate - Law," though professing to
 
 216 THE RISE AND FALL OF SATAN 
 
 tell all that religion needed to know, does not once 
 hint of his existence. 
 
 No more does the Biblical history or other writing 
 for many generations after. Satan is not so much 
 as mentioned in the long history of Joshua, or of the 
 two centuries of Judges, or of the four hundred years 
 of Kings, down to the end of their rule and the destruc 
 tion of Jerusalem. He is not once mentioned in any 
 of the other literature, on to the Babylonian exile. 
 The kingdoms of both Israel and Judah had run their 
 course and come to an end ; the sacred Jerusalem and 
 its temple had risen, reached their highest glory, and 
 fallen; but Satan had not yet been discovered.. 
 The famous religious leaders, from Moses and Samuel 
 and David and Solomon and Elijah and Elisha, on to 
 the great prophets, Amos and Hosea and Micah and 
 Isaiah and Jeremiah and Ezekiel, had lived and taught 
 and passed away ; but not one of them had left a 
 word about Satan or the devil or a demon or any such 
 being. 
 
 But during the exile in Babylonia, the belief in such 
 a being gradually grew among the Jews. For there 
 they came in contact with the Zoroastrian or Mazdean 
 teaching that the rule of the world was not mono 
 theistic and single, as their best prophets had taught, 
 but divided between a good God and an evil Power at
 
 THE RISE AND FALL OF SATAN 217 
 
 enmity with him. This new doctrine was thus not 
 only forced upon their notice, but was especially 
 attractive to them at that time, when their troubles 
 had so increased, and the very land and temple of 
 God had been conquered by the heathen. The prob 
 lem of evil naturally became prominent in their 
 thoughts ; and it seemed to find its easiest solution in 
 that Mazdean doctrine of an evil Power opposed to 
 God. This doctrine was indeed resisted by the best 
 minds among them ; and in protest against it, the 
 second Isaiah, the great Jewish prophet of the time 
 of the exile, makes Jehovah say : " There is none 
 besides me ; I am the Lord, and there is none else. 
 I form the light and create darkness ; I make peace 
 and create evil ; I, the Lord, do all these things." 
 Still, in spite of such protests from great prophets, the 
 doctrine grew that the Lord did not " do all these 
 things," but that evil was caused by that other Power 
 at enmity to him. 
 
 This evil Power soon took also that Hebrew name 
 which has since become so familiar. In the Mazdean 
 sacred books, the hosts of evil were sometimes called 
 " the opposition," or adversary ; and the Jews adopted 
 the same name, translating it, however, into their own 
 Hebrew term, "the Satan" Its use with the article 
 shows that it was not at first a proper name ; but it
 
 218 THE RISE AND FALL OF SATAN 
 
 soon came to be such, and to mean a personal opposer 
 or adversary. 
 
 Such was the beginning of both the idea and name 
 of Satan. It was so late in Biblical literature that it 
 appears in only three passages in the Old Testa 
 ment. The most important of these is in the book 
 of Job, which is now regarded by scholars as written 
 in that Babylonian exile, and which treats that same 
 problem of evil then so pressing. The book naturally 
 introduced this new " Satan " as the bringer of evil 
 upon Job ; but it also shows how little the idea of 
 him had then developed. For this Satan of the book 
 of Job is not yet a rival of Jehovah, or even opposed 
 to him, but is only his innocent agent. Satan appears 
 here, not at all as an infernal being, but in heaven, 
 " before the Lord," in " the presence of the Lord," at 
 a meeting of " the sons of God," as if one of them. 
 He goes out to bring various evils upon Job; but 
 only by the Lord s permission, and in order to test 
 Job. These evils come, not from Satan, but from the 
 Lord himself, as Job also declares, "Shall we re 
 ceive good at the hands of God, and shall we not 
 receive evil ? " Satan is only an officer of Jehovah s 
 court ; and M. Reville well compares him to the pros 
 ecuting attorney in our courts, appointed to try men 
 and search out their faults. That is all that Satan is
 
 THE RISE AND FALL OF SATAN 219 
 
 in this book, the prosecutor in Jehovah s court, 
 mercilessly questioning Job s righteousness, and, like 
 any district attorney, trying to make out the worst 
 case against him ; but showing no further enmity 
 toward him, and none at all toward the human race, 
 nor toward Jehovah. As Professor Everett says : 
 " The Satan of the book of Job is not at all Satanic, 
 in the later meaning of that term ; he is still an angel ; 
 and in no sense is he a tempter." He is only the 
 official accuser in the court of the Lord. 
 
 This also appears in the rather innocent name by 
 which this Hebrew " Satan " is translated in the old 
 Greek Septuagint, " DiabolosT This word is quite 
 interesting, since from it has come the Latin Diabohis, 
 the Italian Diavolo, the Spanish Diablo, the French 
 Diable, the German Teufel, the Dutch Duivel, and 
 the English Devil ; all words with very bad mean 
 ing. But the bad meaning is mostly of later growth, 
 and the original Diabolos meant only an accuser, or, 
 at worst, a false accuser. 
 
 Besides this passage in Job, there are in the Old 
 Testament two others, and only two, in which Satan 
 is mentioned. One is in the book of Zechariah, where 
 he stands by the high-priest, "to be his adversary." 
 It seems to have been much the same office which he 
 has in Job ; although Satan is here more unjust in
 
 220 THE RISE AND FALL OF SATAN 
 
 it, so that the Lord rebukes him, as he did not there. 
 The other passage is in Chronicles, a work written 
 some two centuries later, and one of the latest in the 
 Old Testament. It is especially interesting in show 
 ing how Jewish thought had then changed, so as to 
 ascribe to this Satan a particular act which had been 
 ascribed before to Jehovah himself. This act was in 
 moving David to number Israel. The older account 
 in the Bible (2 Sam. 24: i) had laid this to Jehovah, 
 and said : "The anger of the Lord was kindled against 
 Israel, and he moved David " to the numbering. But 
 this later account (i Chron. 21 : i), written after the 
 belief in Satan had come, lays it to him instead, and 
 says : " Satan stood up against Israel, and provoked 
 David to number Israel." So far had the change of 
 thought now gone, even substituting Satan for the 
 Jehovah of the older writing. But the change went 
 no further here ; and, except in these three late pas 
 sages, Satan is not mentioned in the whole Old Tes 
 tament. 
 
 Still less is he mentioned under the name of " the 
 devil." The word "devils," although occurring four 
 times in our common English translation, was an error, 
 and the Revised Version has removed it. But of "the 
 devil," or any being like him, even our English Old 
 Testament has not a word to say. Its nearest approach
 
 THE RISE AND FALL OF SATAN 221 
 
 to him is in those three late passages about Satan, 
 which still leave him innocent and not yet an enemy 
 of God. 
 
 But in the thought of the Jews he soon became 
 such an enemy, the cause of all evil, and hence of 
 everything which they did not like. They now began 
 to ascribe to Satan that temptation in Eden ; and it 
 was at length so taught in their apocryphal " Book of 
 Wisdom," a century or so before Christ. They also 
 began to assign to him subordinate agents, or demons. 
 Such soon abounded in Jewish thought, as the cause 
 of troubles of every kind, especially of insanity and 
 nervous diseases. Even so cultivated a writer as 
 Josephus taught this possession by them, and told 
 how he had himself seen a magician heal a person so 
 possessed and draw the demon out through the man s 
 nostrils. Still more would the common people show 
 such beliefs. 
 
 It would of course be quite natural for Jesus him 
 self to share this belief ; and if he did not, his 
 followers would be sure soon to teach that he did. 
 Hence he is very frequently connected with Satan and 
 demons in the thought of the early Church. The 
 apocryphal Gospels tell, for instance, how even in his 
 infancy his swaddling-clothes drove from another boy 
 "a great multitude of devils " "in the shape of crows
 
 222 THE RISE AND FALL- OE SATAN 
 
 and serpents " ; how from the boy, Judas Iscariot, 
 Satan once came " in the form of a dog " ; how he 
 once took possession of a woman and made her go out 
 and "throw stones at people." Such stories were of 
 course told in the New Testament, too. A large part 
 of Jesus miracles there are in casting out these devils 
 from the sick and insane. Not only these, but Satan 
 himself continually appears ; from the early chapter 
 of Matthew where he comes three times tempting 
 Jesus, on to the closing book of Revelation, which 
 has so much to say about him and his all-pervading 
 power in the world. 
 
 So curious, in this respect, is the contrast between 
 the Old Testament and the New. That word " devil," 
 which does not occur once in the former, occurs more 
 than fifty times in the latter, and more than seventy 
 times if we include its plural form. The greatest 
 prophet of the Old Testament had utterly denied such 
 a being, declaring that Jehovah does all things, evil 
 as well as good, and that there is none else besides 
 him ; but the New Testament puts this Satan beside 
 him, and sometimes triumphant against him, as even 
 "the prince of this world." 
 
 The Bible also shows this same contrast in regard 
 to the connected doctrine of eternal punishment ; 
 for this is inseparable from Satan and was " prepared
 
 THE RISE AND FALL OF SATAN 223 
 
 for the devil and his angels." This eternal punish 
 ment, whether of him or of men, is taught only in 
 the New Testament, and never in the Old. Our 
 English Old Testament has indeed many repetitions 
 of the word " hell " ; but the Revised Version has 
 removed most of them, and ought to have removed 
 the rest. For the original Hebrew word is always 
 " Sheol," with no such meaning, nor any very bad one. 
 Into this " Sheol "go at death, not only the wicked, 
 but the good. The Bible says that Jacob and Joseph 
 are going there, that Job prays to be there ; and the 
 Psalmist says that not only he and all men shall be 
 there, but Jehovah himself. " If I make my bed in 
 Sheol, behold, thou art there." With so many Biblical 
 saints and authors, and even Jehovah, in Sheol, it cer 
 tainly was no bad place. Scholars say that in the 
 early Jewish thought it was no place of punishment 
 at all, but only the underworld, where all alike 
 went at death. 
 
 But along with the growing doctrine of Satan, a 
 part of this Sheol became a place of punishment for 
 his followers. It was so pictured about a century 
 before Christ, in the apocryphal book of Enoch, which 
 tells of its terrible lake of fire and brimstone, and of 
 the tortures therein. Such beliefs continued to spread 
 among the Jews, were naturally ascribed to Jesus,
 
 224 THE RISE AND FALL OF SATAN 
 
 and were elsewhere clearly taught in the New Testa 
 ment. Not indeed by most of the authors, and 
 Paul in his Epistles furnished no texts for eternal 
 torment. Such texts are nearly all confined to the 
 two books of Matthew and Revelation, but are 
 there many and plain. In Matthew, for instance, 
 Jesus orders sinners " into the eternal fire which is 
 prepared for the devil and his angels." In Revelation, 
 that lake of fire and brimstone is asserted five times ; 
 and we are told that its inmates shall " have no rest 
 day and night," but "the smoke of their torment 
 ascendeth up forever and ever." So far does the New 
 Testament carry this doctrine which the Old had 
 utterly ignored or even denied. 
 
 But these doctrines were carried much further by 
 the Church, afterward. Nearly all the Church Fathers, 
 and authorities for more than a thousand years after, 
 expatiated more and more on that eternal torture. 
 Even infants, if not properly baptized or elected, were 
 consigned to it ; from the words of Augustine, who 
 declared that all such descended into "everlasting 
 fire," on to the American " Day of Doom," which 
 most graphically pictured Christ condemning infants 
 to "hell," and which Professor Tyler says was read 
 for more than a century as " the one supreme poem 
 of Puritan New England." That " lake of fire " within
 
 THE RISE AND FALL OF SATAN 225 
 
 the earth became a common subject, not only of 
 sermons, but of innumerable church paintings and 
 sculptures and books. Even so late as 1851, Dr. 
 G. S. Faber s book on " The Many Mansions in the 
 House of the Father " tells how, after the judgment, 
 the earth is to be remade. Its surface, "beautiful 
 beyond description," is to become "the home of the 
 redeemed " ; while within it " shall roll an ignited 
 ocean of liquid fire, two thousand miles in depth, the 
 peculiar residence of the wicked." For such suffer 
 ings beneath their feet would not at all interfere with 
 the happiness of the redeemed. This curious doc 
 trine has been taught repeatedly ; from the Church 
 Father Tertullian, who wrote how he should " rejoice " 
 and "laugh" in seeing "illustrious kings groaning 
 there," on to our great Jonathan Edwards words, that 
 "the sight of hell-torments will exalt the happiness 
 of the saints forever." 
 
 Along with this doctrine, that of Satan also contin 
 ued to grow, and he soon became more prominent in 
 Christian thought than Jehovah himself. Theology 
 taught, for more than a thousand years, that he had 
 gained possession of the whole human race by Adam s 
 fall, and that even Christ s atonement had been to 
 redeem the race from Satan, rather than to satisfy 
 God, as modern preachers teach. Nor did even that
 
 226 THE RISE AND FALL OF SATAN 
 
 redeem all the race, but the whole heathen world 
 remained in Satan s hands. Even among Christians 
 he was ever present and all-powerful. " In the 
 cathedrals," says Andrew D. White, carved devils 
 "clamber upon towers, prowl under cornices, peer out 
 from bosses of foliage, perch upon capitals, nestle 
 under benches " ; while " above the main entrance, 
 the most common of all representations shows Satan 
 and his imps taking possession of the souls of men, 
 and driving or dragging them into the flaming mouth 
 of hell." The worship also largely regarded Satan. 
 Sermons and prayers were to oppose him, sacraments 
 and ceremonies to exorcize him, and the chief object of 
 religion was to escape him. He was a prominent figure 
 in the miracle-plays, and in the lives of all the saints. 
 He was seen in life everywhere, and his fiends were 
 innumerable. They invaded homes as incubi and 
 succubi, and so left an ever-multiplying progeny. 
 Johannes Wierus wrote that in his day the demons 
 numbered 7,405,926, and were still increasing. They 
 were so many that one of them said, " If all the Alps 
 were divided among us, we should have but a pound 
 apiece." Burton, in his " Anatomy of Melancholy," 
 said that the air was fuller of them than of flies in 
 summer ; and Leo Suavius that it was as full as of 
 snowflakes in a winter storm. They were powerful,
 
 THE RISE AND FALL OF SATAN 227 
 
 too ; and even so late and learned a writer as Bishop 
 Bossuet said " a single devil could turn the earth 
 round as easily as we turn a marble." 
 
 Satan was hardly less active in the Protestant 
 church. Luther saw him everywhere, and his "Table- 
 Talk " has a long chapter on " the devil and his 
 works." He says Satan brings hail and lightning, is 
 "the cause and author of plagues," and "produces all 
 the maladies which inflict mankind." He saw Satan 
 even in his aches and dreams, in the flies lighting 
 on his book, and in the rats disturbing his sleep. 
 Indeed, he saw so much of Satan that he partly out 
 grew his fears, and tells how he was one night awak 
 ened by a noise in the cloisters, but, perceiving that it 
 was only the devil, calmly went to sleep again. But 
 not less did Luther fight against him ; and he once 
 said, " I should have no compassion on these witches ; 
 I would burn all of them." Such beliefs lasted long; 
 and even John Wesley not only advocated the per 
 secution of witches, but taught that Satan and his 
 agents often brought diseases and even earthquakes. 
 So in America, Increase Mather, in the same year in 
 which he became president of Harvard College, pub 
 lished a collection of marvelous deeds of devils, and 
 taught that thunder-storms came from Satan.
 
 228 THE RISE AND FALL OF SATAN 
 
 But to-day, what a change ! Such beliefs have 
 retired, until the college president who should hold 
 them would hardly escape a lunatic-asylum. Accord 
 ing to medieval thought, the witches Sabbath could 
 be held only in the night, and with the dawn the 
 demons vanished. That seems to be the law, they 
 live only in darkness. With the growing light of 
 recent times, the devil and all his agents, who were so 
 active among the apostles and for fifteen hundred 
 years after, have been vanishing, and among intel 
 ligent men have become about as non-existent as they 
 were in the Old Testament. 
 
 It is a change which we need not at all lament. 
 Aside from all the terror and suffering which that 
 belief brought, it caused immense injustice and cruelty. 
 Think of the wrong which it brought for centuries 
 against the insane, and only to make them more so. 
 Even the medicine it gave them was bad enough. An 
 old prescription for "a fiend-sick man," after naming 
 a long list of nauseous drugs, adds : " Sing seven 
 masses over it, add garlic and holy water, and let him 
 drink the dose out of a church bell." Quite likely 
 such a dose, given with kindness and to the soothing 
 sounds of music, might help, though perhaps it would 
 have helped quite as much without the lupine and 
 lichen and githrife and cynoglossun and such things.
 
 THE RISE AND FALL OF SATAN 229 
 
 But lunatics were seldom treated with kindness, 
 and could not be, while thought possessed by Satan. 
 Hence, while the church had its beautiful charities for 
 widows and orphans and invalids, and even for foul 
 lepers, it took almost no care of the insane. So late 
 as 1789, John Howard said they were better treated 
 in a Mohammedan asylum in Constantinople than in 
 Christian London ; and an authority says they had 
 been better treated by Moslems for a thousand years. 
 They were not only neglected, but tormented. An 
 old exorcism howled pages of curses into the ears of 
 the afflicted man or hysterical woman. The possessed 
 persons were also whipped and tortured, with the idea 
 that the torture was falling on the indwelling demon ; 
 and even Sir Thomas More commended this treat 
 ment. Still worse cruelties did this belief in Satan 
 bring upon " witches " ; and President White says that 
 " in Germany alone, according to the most modest 
 estimate, there perished within a single century, by 
 an excruciating death, for this imaginary crime, not 
 less than one hundred thousand lives." 
 
 In view of such wrongs we may well be grateful 
 for the loss of the old belief. That loss has been a 
 great gain in material things. The belief that disease 
 came from demons filling the air like snowflakes made 
 it all the more deadly ; but the knowledge that the
 
 230 THE RISE AND FALL OF SATAN 
 
 " demons " were germs, or other natural influences, has 
 been a successful exorcism indeed, healing thousands 
 and lengthening the average life of all Christendom. 
 Even more has been the moral gain, turning the old cru 
 elty into charity, until, to-day, Christians can hardly 
 credit that their greatest American preacher in the 
 eighteenth century said, " The sight of hell torments 
 will exalt the happiness of the saints forever." Hardly 
 less has been the religious gain, in seeing Deity no 
 longer baffled and beaten by a devil, but supreme, as 
 the great Hebrew prophet said, and ruling the universe 
 with eternal order. 
 
 Still, there was in the old doctrine of Satan a great 
 truth which we would not lose. To the human view, 
 there has always been evil as well as good in the 
 world, and always must be. Progress in earth s forms 
 has necessitated not only creation, but destruction, 
 not only growth, but decay, not only life, but death. 
 The progress of the human race, and of every person 
 in it, has come by the same process, the loss of 
 old habits, and the growth of better. To each advanc 
 ing society and soul, there is always the good ahead 
 to be gained, and the outgrown to be left behind ; 
 always the forward step to be taken, and the back 
 ward to be avoided ; always the higher life to be
 
 THE RISE AND FALL OF SATAN 231 
 
 sought, and the lower to be shunned. These oppo- 
 sites, though parts of the same system, must by each 
 individual be contrasted as good and evil, divine and 
 devilish. 
 
 "Devil" has only dropped its initial, and "evil" 
 still remains. Satan has lost his personality, but still 
 survives and tempts men as he did Jesus in the story. 
 He still tempts them in about the same way : first, 
 through "hunger," that is, animal passions; sec 
 ond, through vanity and the desire to make a show on 
 some " pinnacle " in the public view ; third, and worst, 
 through eagerness for worldly power, sacrificing 
 principles to gain "the kingdoms of the world and the 
 glory of them." And he is still to be conquered as in 
 that story, not by contention or abuse, but as in 
 Jesus words, "Get thee behind me, Satan." We 
 need no fight against evil as a fiend, no denunciation 
 of it as devilish, but only to put it " behind" us, as 
 a thing to be left and outgrown. We have only to 
 abandon it and go ahead ; 
 
 " Move upward, working out the beast, 
 And let the ape and tiger die." 
 
 Remember, too, that the "ape and tiger " have had 
 their place, and that all evil and good are parts of the 
 same creation, as that old prophet saw. Even the 
 destructive earthquakes and floods come from the
 
 232 THE RISE AND FALL OF SATAN 
 
 same forces which have shaped the earth and still 
 bless it. Even diseases come by the same laws by 
 which the grain grows in the field. Decay, destruc 
 tion, death are still advancing life, and are bad 
 only to our human outlook. Man, getting a moment s 
 glimpse of infinity through the pin-hole of his present 
 personality, must see what seem good and evil, sepa 
 rate and opposed to each other. But to the infinite view 
 they are only the noon and night of the same revolv 
 ing day, the spring and fall of the same celestial year, 
 the flow and ebb of the same eternal tide, the rise and 
 fall of the beating pulse of life and warming breath 
 of love. 
 
 So too with moral evils. The passions have all 
 contributed to the progress of life, and out of them 
 have grown higher principles. Sacrifice began in 
 selfishness, and even love in lust. Fraud, robbery, 
 slaughter, war, have all been natural and helpful in 
 the animal stages of life. Dirt has been defined as 
 only matter out of place ; and even our crimes and 
 vices might be called actions out of place. When 
 in place, in animal life and the evolution of the race, 
 they were right enough, and steps toward something 
 higher. 
 
 What we call good and evil are only the up and 
 down in morals ; a distinction most important to
 
 THE RISE AND FALL OF SATAN 233 
 
 dwellers on earth, but not to the Spirit of infinite 
 space, where up and down are unknown. Evils are 
 lower steps in the ascending path of life. Each 
 society or soul, looking up and down this path, must 
 divide it into the good above and bad below. But 
 the same ground which one looks down upon as 
 bad, some other is looking up toward as good. The 
 evil is only relative. It is not even real, to the in 
 finite vision, which sees the ascent all undivided and 
 one. 
 
 Through this thought we reach that spirit of for 
 giveness seen in Jesus, who, as Renan said, showed 
 "a divine incapacity for seeing evil." We reach that 
 impartiality which Jesus told men to observe and im 
 itate in the heavenly Father, making his sun to rise 
 and rain to fall on good and evil alike. We reach 
 that charity which Paul said "taketh not account 
 of evil." The highest thought will not dwell upon 
 evil, but will seek rather to strengthen the good, 
 which is the best cure of the bad. It will see, with 
 Jesus, that peacemakers and lovers of enemies are the 
 real " sons of God." It will see that human love is 
 the highest religion, the holiest worship, the truest 
 presence of God, and the best prophecy that the 
 divine Love which has produced it will make it 
 triumph over evil.
 
 THE ENLARGING THOUGHT 
 OF GOD
 
 THE ENLARGING THOUGHT 
 OF GOD 
 
 RELIGION seems to begin everywhere with gods 
 who are like men. Through its early stages 
 they have even the bodies of men. Even the 
 great Greek gods in the " Iliad " retain all their human 
 organs and nerves. Ares is wounded by the spear of 
 Diomedes, Hephaestus is lamed by his fall from heaven, 
 and the supreme Zeus is a wife-beating husband. 
 Relics of such thoughts are of course found in the 
 Bible. It tells how Jehovah was "walking in the 
 garden in the cool of the day " ; how he was often 
 seen "face to face," and "spake unto Moses face to 
 face, as a man speaketh unto a friend." Even the pas 
 sage which declares that men could not see Jehovah s 
 face and live adds that he said to Moses : " I will cover 
 thee with my hand until I have passed by ; then I will 
 take away my hand, and thou shalt see my back." 
 Such expressions are more than metaphor. They 
 show the old beliefs which Jehovah rebuked in the 
 Psalm, saying to man, "Thou thoughtest that I was 
 altogether such a one as thyself."
 
 238 ENLARGING THOUGHT OF GOD 
 
 After religion has outgrown the thought of gods in 
 human form, it long represents them with human 
 properties and passions, with the anger and even the 
 appetites of men. They are often worse than men, 
 since religion is conservative, keeping the ideas of a 
 lower past ; so that the people of Athens become 
 better than the gods of Olympus, whom Plato repudi 
 ates and Lucian ridicules. The gods are easily en 
 raged, and their anger is appeased by praise and gifts, 
 especially by gifts of food in sacrifice. For the sacri 
 fices which have been so common in all religions were 
 at first literal offerings of food to gods who were 
 hungry ; and Professor William Robertson Smith 
 says "a sacrifice is primarily a meal offered to the 
 Deity." 
 
 The Jehovah of the early Israelites naturally showed 
 these common human weaknesses. He is quick to 
 anger, and we often read of his " wrath." He is 
 vengeful, and savage in his vengeance, ordering whole 
 tribes to be slaughtered, to the last child. But his 
 vengeance can be averted and his anger appeased, like 
 a man s, by homage, praise, prayers, prostrations, and 
 the various ceremonies that show subjection. He is 
 especially moved by those sacrificial gifts of food ; so 
 that burnt-offerings are the chief part of his, just 
 as of a hundred heathen religions. These burnt-
 
 ENLARGING THOUGHT OF GOD 239 
 
 offerings by Israelites to Jehovah are even called, in 
 the Bible, " the bread of their God." He is also 
 gratified by pleasant odors ; from the early day 
 when he " smelled a sweet savor " in Noah s sacrifice, 
 on through all the elaborate laws for burning incense 
 before him. He is only a God of Israel, with many 
 rivals in heathen gods who are just as real. He for 
 bids the worship of other gods because he is "jealous " 
 of them ; and he declares that even his " name is 
 Jealous." But he cannot overthrow those other gods 
 in Israel ; and even the great Solomon builds shrines 
 to four of them at Jerusalem, and still later kings 
 long worship them. 
 
 But some of the later Old Testament writers, like 
 wise men in other religions, had quite outgrown these 
 earlier ideas. Monotheism had now come among 
 them, and Jehovah was seen as the God, not of Jews 
 alone, but of all nations and all Nature. A psalmist 
 finds him not only in Palestine, but in the uttermost 
 parts of the sea, in light and darkness alike, in heaven 
 above and Sheol below. Jeremiah makes him "fill 
 heaven and earth " ; and one says, " the heaven and 
 heaven of heavens cannot contain him." Or notice 
 the sublime sentences about him in the book of 
 Isaiah. Instead of the former God of Israel, " jealous " 
 of other gods, he upholds the whole earth, measuring
 
 240 ENLARGING THOUGHT OF GOD 
 
 its seas in the hollow of his hand, weighing the moun 
 tains in scales and the hills in a balance, and consider 
 ing the nations as but "the fine dust of the balance " ; 
 nay, "all nations before him are as nothing," and 
 "less than nothing." He says: "My thoughts are 
 not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways ; 
 for as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are 
 my ways higher than your ways." He wants no 
 temple, " where is the house that ye can build him ? " 
 He is too great for any sacrifices, and says all the 
 forests of Mount Lebanon are not sufficient for the 
 sacrificial fire, nor all its beasts for a burnt-offering. 
 He even hates the old offerings, and says, "he that 
 sacrificeth a lamb is as if he cut off a dog s neck," 
 and "he that killeth an ox, as if he slew a man." He 
 wants no more of their formal worship, " incense is 
 . an abomination to me"; "yea, when ye make many 
 prayers, I will not hear " ; but " cease to do evil, learn 
 to do well, seek justice, relieve the oppressed." So 
 Micah says the Lord requireth nothing of man but " to 
 do justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly " with 
 him. Such was the teaching of the higher prophets, 
 and of the best Jews after them. 
 
 Jesus continued it, making righteousness, mercy, 
 and meekness the true religious service ; especially 
 mercy, carried to the extreme of forgiveness and love.
 
 ENLARGING THOUGHT OF GOD 241 
 
 He also brought God into a nearer and tenderer rela 
 tion, emphasizing the doctrine that he is " our Father," 
 and that all who loved their enemies, and all peace 
 makers, were especially "sons of God." The epistle 
 of John dwells upon this idea, and declares that " every 
 one who loveth is begotten of God." It brings God 
 still nearer, and says, "if we love one another," he 
 " dwelleth in us." It even gives to the idea of God 
 an almost impersonal breadth, as of a principle, and 
 says, " God is love, and he that dwelleth in love dwell 
 eth in God and God in him." This writer does indeed 
 seem to see God in no love except that of the Chris 
 tians, but Paul extends the thought to others. He not 
 only writes to the corrupt Corinthian church, " Ye are 
 the temple of God, and God dwelleth in you," but, in 
 his reported address to the pagans, quotes their poet, 
 " in him we live and move and have our being " ; and, 
 in his supposed epistle to the Ephesians, he says, God 
 is " Father of all, over all and through all and in all." 
 Instead of counting the earth as his "footstool," and 
 all its nations as "less than nothing," God fills the 
 earth with his presence, lives in all its nations, and is 
 enthroned not only in the heavens, but in the human 
 heart. 
 
 So large a thought is found in some of the New 
 Testament writers. Not that it was peculiar to them ;
 
 242 ENLARGING THOUGHT OF GOD 
 
 for the thought of God immanent in all men and life 
 had long been taught among pagan thinkers, and was 
 a common doctrine of the Stoics. Nor was it taught 
 by all the New Testament writers, and their general 
 thought falls far below it. But here and there they 
 touch it. In one passage, God has outgrown not only 
 the human passions, but almost the human personality 
 of the earlier thought, and has become the principle 
 of love uniting Christians. In another, he has be 
 come larger than Christian love, and almost one 
 with universal life; and, instead of being enthroned 
 on high in the heavens, he infolds and fills the world 
 and all things in it. So does the Bible, with its many 
 strata of thought reaching through a thousand years, 
 show us the growth in the idea of God, from a narrow 
 and "jealous" Jehovah dividing men, to a universal 
 love uniting them ; from a person of human form 
 showing his body to Moses, to a life pervading all 
 things, too vast and spiritual to be limited by any 
 form. 
 
 This large thought of God was long kept by a part 
 of the Church. It was taught by Clement of Alex 
 andria, Origen, Athanasius, and others, who accepted 
 the teaching of the Stoics, regarded Deity as filling 
 the universe and ever working through natural laws. 
 Had their views prevailed, we should have had a noble
 
 ENLARGING THOUGHT OF GOD 243 
 
 Christian theology, seeing God everywhere in the 
 human and natural, and so identifying religion with 
 all knowledge and human progress. 
 
 But a very different theology was destined to pre 
 vail, and to separate Christianity from Nature. This 
 came chiefly from Saint Augustine, who followed the 
 opposite Gnostic teaching that man and Nature were 
 vile, and that Deity dwelt altogether apart from them, 
 acting upon them only occasionally through intermedi 
 ate and miraculous agents. For various reasons, says 
 John Fiske, " the Augustinian theology prevailed ; 
 and, in the dark ages which followed, it became so 
 deeply inwrought into the innermost fibers of Latin 
 Christianity that it remains dominant to-day alike in 
 Catholic and Protestant churches. With few excep 
 tions, every child born of Christians in Western 
 Europe or America grows up with an idea of God, the 
 outlines of which were engraved upon men s minds 
 by Augustine," more than three centuries after the 
 apostles. 
 
 Thus the narrow thoughts of God, which had been 
 so nobly outgrown in Hebrew prophets and heathen 
 sages, in pagan Stoics and many early Christians, all 
 returned. Instead of a " Father of all, over all and 
 through all and in all," Jehovah again became the God
 
 244 ENLARGING THOUGHT OF GOD 
 
 of a single religion, and at enmity with all others. 
 Not even in Christendom was he supreme, but was 
 thought half-dispossessed by Satan. Even among 
 Christians, he ceased to be the principle of love unit 
 ing them, and again became a person of jealousy and 
 hate, punishing every one who did not hold the proper 
 opinions about him, and so making Church history for 
 centuries mainly a series of quarrels over theological 
 questions. He again came to be pleased with the 
 fasts and forms in religion which Isaiah made light of, 
 and his worship came to consist mainly of liturgies, 
 ceremonies, and show. Even the old doctrine of sac 
 rifice came back in a form more dishonorable than 
 before, and it was taught that, if he did want no more 
 blood of lambs, he demanded that of his own son. 
 Almost his bodily form came back. He was painted 
 on church walls and windows with the limbs and 
 clothes of a man. In the miracle-plays he came on 
 the stage as a man ; and Lewes life of Goethe tells 
 of one where Jehovah was " seen sleeping on his throne 
 during the crucifixion," and, when waked up and in 
 formed of it, declared with astonishment that he had 
 known nothing about it. 
 
 God came again to be represented, not merely with 
 the weakness, but with the wickedness of men, and 
 with far worse cruelty than he showed to the Canaan-
 
 ENLARGING THOUGHT OF GOD 245 
 
 ites of old. The Church for centuries taught that he 
 wanted Christians to treat heretics worse than Joshua 
 did the Hittites, and in his name they butchered and 
 burned men in ways that made Saul s slaughter of 
 the Amalekites appear humane. Protestants did less 
 burning, but quite enough ; and they long continued 
 to teach that God himself would burn most of his 
 children forever, and that he wanted to be praised for 
 it. This was taught by even the best men. A simple 
 woman is said to have commended her minister as 
 " so good that he never said an unkind word against 
 any being except our heavenly Father." Good min 
 isters did indeed say the most unkind things against 
 him, in their many sermons on total depravity and 
 eternal torture. They represented him as infinitely 
 more cruel than the cruelest man, and worse than the 
 wickedest. All the cruelty and crime on earth did 
 not amount to a millionth part as much as preachers 
 charged against their heavenly Father every Sunday 
 for centuries. Against him, at any rate, they made 
 out a clear case of "total depravity." 
 
 Theology has indeed taught that God s " thoughts 
 are not our thoughts," but that they are far foolisher 
 than ours. It has taught, not that his ways are as 
 much better than ours as " the heavens are higher 
 than the earth," but that they are as much worse
 
 246 ENLARGING THOUGHT OF GOD 
 
 than ours as the idea of " hell " was worse than human 
 homes. 
 
 But the renaissance and return to Nature began 
 again to bring larger thoughts of God. These have 
 of course not seemed so in their time, and the enlarge 
 ment of the idea has always been feared at first as 
 the loss of it. Even the teaching that Deity has not 
 the bodily form of men seemed denial of him, and 
 made the old monk Serapion say in sorrow, " You 
 have taken away my God." But through these denials 
 the idea has ever remained, deepening and broaden 
 ing. 
 
 When men began to deny the doctrine of eternal 
 punishment, their thought seemed impious, almost 
 atheistic. But it was soon seen that the impiety was 
 on the other side, and that the real denial of God was 
 in the doctrine that made him so ungodlike. 
 
 When they began to doubt whether God died for 
 us on Calvary, this again seemed denial. But to-day 
 we see that the denial of Deity was rather in the 
 thought that he could die, and the atheism was in the 
 doctrine that he was slain by a few soldiers. 
 
 To question the atonement seemed impious at first. 
 But it was at length seen that the impiety was rather 
 in the dogma which made God demand the death of
 
 ENLARGING THOUGHT OF GOD 247 
 
 his dearest son before he would forgive his own chil 
 dren for sins which they did not commit. Lord Bacon 
 said, "It were better to have no opinion of God at all 
 than such an opinion as is unworthy of him"; and 
 Bacon went on to approve Plutarch s saying that he 
 would sooner have his own existence denied than be 
 accused of eating his children, as was told of Saturn. 
 
 Even the denial of Satan seemed profane at first. 
 But the profanity was rather in the thought of God 
 being so dispossessed by a rival, and the denial of this 
 doctrine was only the larger assertion of Deity. To 
 deny that the Bible was the infallible and only revela 
 tion of God seemed altogether impious. But, rather, it 
 offered an excuse for all the errors there, and showed 
 his larger revelation in Nature and history and human 
 souls. The doubt of miracles seemed at first to pro 
 fane God. But thinking men soon saw that these 
 interruptions of the divine order of Nature would be 
 no credit to him, and that the order itself reveals a far 
 truer Deity. As Mrs. Ripley said, she did not show 
 disbelief in God by denying miracles, but denied them 
 because she believed in him. 
 
 All the sciences enlarged the thought of Deity. 
 Geology, which seemed so irreligious in spoiling the 
 old story of creation, only shows a far vaster creation, 
 stretching through countless ages beyond those six
 
 248 ENLARGING THOUGHT OF GOD 
 
 days, and still continuing. Astronomy, which seemed 
 at first so atheistic, rather reveals an infinitely wider 
 world than Isaiah saw, and a God who holds in the 
 hollow of his hand, not the mere waters, but the 
 Milky Way ; who puts in the balance, not the hills 
 alone, but the whole heavens. Yet this God, though 
 so great, does not count the nations "as nothing," 
 nor the earth as his footstool, but cares for every 
 atom. The hand that hid him from Moses reveals 
 him to us, holding the heavens in eternal harmony, 
 and writing throughout the earth everywhere, from 
 stone strata up to seeds and souls, his eternal laws. 
 
 These laws seemed at first to deny God, but only 
 proved him. Newton, referring all the celestial move 
 ments to gravity, seemed to leave no room for Deity. 
 But to further thought, gravity only showed the uni 
 versal and divine order ; and Voltaire said Newton 
 had proved God, whom the catechism had only asserted. 
 Chemistry and other sciences, reducing all earthly 
 changes to law, seemed for a time to dispense with 
 Deity. But men soon saw that laws are only the way 
 in which a mysterious force behind them works, and 
 that their constancy, which we can always trust, only 
 shows how good is that way. Religion also learned 
 this ; and natural theologians at last took these same 
 sciences, which had been thought to deny God, as
 
 ENLARGING THOUGHT OF GOD 249 
 
 proof that he is much truer and better than the 
 church had thought. Order was only a sign of a 
 diviner world. 
 
 When the evolutionists came teaching a vaster and 
 more perfect order, that creation itself had been all 
 and always in accordance with law, they were of 
 course called atheists. But their doctrine promises 
 to be the most religious of all. To-day many clergy 
 men seem to see less objection to Darwinism than 
 Darwin did. They say that the doctrine of evolution 
 will only perfect the idea of God, by declaring that 
 his way has never been the fickle and human one of 
 starts and stops, but always that diviner way of un 
 varying law and unerring order. 
 
 So does the idea of God persist and progress. We 
 break each form of it, only to find that we have broken 
 into a larger. We lose one God, only to discover that 
 we have found a greater. We lose, one after another, 
 those ways of God which are our ways ; but, with 
 further thought, we see that, however good they 
 may be in man, they would be unwise in Deity, 
 faults in his perfection, limitations to his infinity. 
 Already, we see that the least trace of human fickle 
 ness or caprice would dishonor him. Already, wise 
 men see that will in the human sense of a purpose
 
 250 ENLARGING THOUGHT OF GOD 
 
 subject to change would be a weakness in the 
 Power that rules the world. 
 
 They see that even love, in our sense of the word, 
 would not be good in a God. That human fondness, 
 which we call love, is partial in its nature, and only its 
 absence makes possible that larger love which can 
 care for the universe. Love is the divinest feeling 
 we can know ; and seeing how life is ever born from 
 love, and ever rising towards more perfect love, we 
 can still say that "God is love." But infinite love 
 must be so broad and deep as to absorb all the little 
 meanings which we can give the word. Here, too, 
 the ways of God must be as much higher than human 
 ways as the heavens are higher than the earth. 
 
 We are beginning to see that even personality, in 
 any human sense of the term, would not honor Deity, 
 but would deny his infinitude and mar his perfection. 
 Even among men, the greatest are those who most 
 rise above the limitations of person, and live in imper 
 sonal principles, following truth and goodness regard 
 less of their own feelings. What we value in an 
 earthly ruler is not his personal feelings, but his 
 freedom from them, and his utter fidelity to the 
 right. The trouble with our officers is that they 
 have too much personality, warping them from that 
 fidelity and leading them to help themselves and
 
 ENLARGING THOUGHT OF GOD 251 
 
 their favorites. We want in our civil rulers as 
 much impersonality as possible ; and why should 
 we not want it in the ruler of the universe, see 
 ing that it would make him all the more divine ? 
 Hence Emerson said : "I feel that there is some 
 profanation in saying God is personal"; "I deny 
 personality to God because it is too little, not too 
 much." A prominent scientist said, "in denying 
 God s personality we need not consider him as below 
 the being of a person, but as infinitely above what 
 person means in the language of men." Here, too, 
 we find that God s ways are not our ways, but as 
 much above them as the heavens are above the earth. 
 For us to think that the highest must be limited by 
 personality, because we are, is somewhat as if the 
 oyster should think that the highest life must be shut 
 in by a shell. 
 
 What right have we to measure life by our little 
 experience ? The earth shows it rising from the 
 amoeba to man, and in man rising from the savage 
 who cannot count six, to the sage who calculates the 
 course of comets. The earth, too, is but an atom in 
 an infinite space filled with larger worlds, as our air 
 is with dust. With the rocks under us and the race 
 around us showing such progress, and with the heavens 
 shining above us to show infinite possibilities, shall we
 
 252 ENLARGING THOUGHT OF GOD 
 
 limit life by ourselves ? For man to conclude that he 
 has attained the summit of even earthly life is some 
 what as if the old Jurassic reptiles, when they repre 
 sented the highest civilization of the earth, had formed 
 the same conclusion. And for man, because he knows 
 no higher life, to suppose that Deity is like himself, 
 is about as wise as if the barnacles on a lone rock in 
 mid-ocean should suppose that they show the highest 
 possible existence, and that God is " altogether such a 
 one " as themselves. 
 
 It is more rational and reverent to admit with the 
 prophet that God s ways are not our ways, and to leave 
 him undescribed. This, too, the wisest Hebrew poets 
 taught when they wrote of a God " whom no man hath 
 seen or can see "; "we know him not"; "his great 
 ness is unsearchable"; "touching the Almighty, we 
 cannot find him out." This the wisest Christians and 
 deepest thinkers have confessed. Even Paul came 
 very near being an agnostic in his words to the 
 Corinthians : " If any man thinketh that he knoweth 
 anything, he knoweth nothing yet as he ought to 
 know." In the same century with Calvin, the revered 
 Richard Hooker wrote: "Our soundest knowledge 
 [of God] is to know that we know him not as indeed 
 he is, neither can know him ; and our safest eloquence 
 concerning him is our silence, when we confess with-
 
 ENLARGING THOUGHT OF GOD 253 
 
 out confession that his greatness is above our capacity 
 and reach." Spinoza said "to define God is to deny 
 him." A modern orthodox writer declares that "a 
 God understood would be no God at all," and "to 
 think that God is as we think him would be blasphemy." 
 Arthur Hugh Clough s poem praises him as " unknown 
 because divine." True reverence speaks in William 
 Watson s lines : 
 
 " Unmeet to be profaned by praise 
 
 Is he whose coils the world infold ; 
 The God on whom I ever gaze, 
 
 The God I never once behold ; 
 Above the cloud, beneath the clod, 
 The Unknown God, the Unknown God." 
 
 To leave God unknown and even unnamed is no 
 loss of him. It is perhaps a surer way to find him. 
 Hermann Melville remarked to Hawthorne that, if 
 God were but left out of the dictionary, he would be 
 seen in the streets ; and Robert Collyer s reported 
 saying is, "I ll believe in God if you ll let me alone." 
 Even the reverent Mr. Gannett not only sings how 
 
 " We find him not by seeking long, 
 We lose him not unsought, "- 
 
 but elsewhere represents God himself as rebuking the 
 too familiar use of and insistence upon his name :
 
 254 ENLARGING THOUGHT OF GOD 
 
 " Never more name me ! Nameless, I hold men ever, 
 draw them ever^on and on ; and you are atheizing 
 them with your kind stress about my name. Silence 
 names me as well as sound." But, though unnamed, 
 God still speaks, everywhere and better than of old. 
 Hear him in the poet s lines : 
 
 "I am the blush of the morning, and I am the evening breeze; 
 I am the leaf s low murmur, the swell of the terrible seas; 
 I am the mote in the sunbeam, and I am the burning sun ; 
 Rest here, I whisper the atom ; I call to the orb, Roll on ! 
 I am what was, is, shall be, creation s ascent and fall; 
 The link, the chain of existence, beginning and end of all." 
 
 Real atheists are rare, and Theodore Parker ar 
 gued that they are impossible. Of course many 
 men are called so ; and John Fiske tells of the min 
 ister in early New England who was charged by the 
 Puritans with setting up "a schole of athism," just 
 because he was an Episcopalian and used the Book 
 of Common Prayer. Of course many men profess 
 atheism. But they can hardly deny Deity even when 
 they try. Said a blatant and blundering lecturer, " I 
 am an atheist, thank God ! " Denial of Deity is 
 seldom any more successful . What is called " atheism " 
 is generally the denial of narrow definitions of God in 
 order to assert better, or to reach the best of all by 
 leaving him undefined. Emerson liked Thoreau s
 
 ENLARGING THOUGHT OF GOD 255 
 
 saying that God himself might prefer atheism. One 
 of Kenan s " Philosophical Dramas " is a dialogue in 
 heaven, wherein Gabriel, speaking of the earth and 
 its skeptics, says to Jehovah : " If I had thine omnipo 
 tence, I would quickly reduce those wicked atheists 
 to silence." But Jehovah benevolently replies : " Ah, 
 Gabriel, thou art faithful ; but thy fidelity makes thee 
 narrow. Learn my tenderness for men who doubt or 
 deny. They deny the image, grotesque or abominable, 
 which has been put in my place ; but, in that world of 
 idolaters and hypocrites, they alone really respect me." 
 Often, too, it is at length learned that they best 
 respect him. Spinoza was long thought the arch- 
 atheist of his time. He was called " the prince of 
 atheists" and "the wickedest atheist that ever lived." 
 But Novalis afterward called him " a God-intoxicated 
 man," as if too much possessed with the thought of 
 Deity. Schleiermacher said : Spinoza not believe 
 in God ? he did not believe in anything but 
 God ; and a recent scholar called him " the man 
 who possessed the highest consciousness of God in 
 his day." 
 
 So does the atheism of one age become the theism 
 of the next, and one theology fall to make room for 
 a better. Charles Lyell, traveling in France during 
 the revolution of 1830, and watching the crowd take
 
 256 ENLARGING THOUGHT OF GOD 
 
 down the cross from the cathedral of Perpignan, 
 heard some one say : " Each in his turn ; the good 
 God has had his." Rather, crucifixes and ceremonies 
 have their turn; cathedrals and churches, theologies 
 and philosophies, have their turn ; but God s turn is 
 eternity, and he survives all revolutions. Said O. B. 
 Frothingham : " Definitions of God have been vanish 
 ing, idols have been tumbling, symbols have been 
 falling away, trinities have been dissolving, person 
 alities have been waning and losing themselves ; 
 but the Being has been steadily coming forward from 
 the background, looming up from the abyss." 
 
 Nor has this " Being " lost the qualities for religion 
 to revere and love. Seeing how this Power pervades 
 an infinite universe, ever working the miracle of new 
 creation and advancing life, yet everywhere working 
 through laws that can be trusted, we are forced to 
 say that we have a far greater and truer God than 
 our fathers knew. Seeing how this Power works for 
 righteousness, making evil undo itself, making the 
 just cause prevail, and even out of physical defeat 
 bringing new spiritual growth and moral progress, we 
 can still say, " God is good." Seeing how this Power 
 fills the earth with joys that no sorrow can repress, 
 ever smiles upon us in the beauty of human faces, 
 and ever infolds us in the warmth of human affection,
 
 ENLARGING THOUGHT OF GOD 257 
 
 we can still say that "God is love," and can still 
 trust that this love is deeper and diviner than human 
 reason can fathom. 
 
 " The letter fails, the systems fall, 
 
 And every symbol wanes ; 
 The Spirit overbrooding all, 
 Eternal Love, remains." 
 
 Ana man still prays, more reverently than by any 
 name; as in Mr. Cranch s Psalm: 
 
 " Thou, so far we grope to grasp thee ; 
 Thou, so near we cannot clasp thee ; 
 Thou, so wise our prayers are heedless ; 
 Thou, so loving they are needless ! 
 In each human soul thou shinest ; 
 Human-best is thy divinest. 
 In each deed of love thou warmest ; 
 Evil into good transformest. 
 Soul of all, and moving center 
 Of each moment s life we enter ; 
 Breath of breathing, light of gladness, 
 Infinite antidote of sadness ; 
 All-preserving ether flowing 
 Through the worlds, yet past our knowing; 
 Never past our trust and loving, 
 Nor from thine our life removing ; 
 Still creating, still inspiring, 
 Never of thy creatures tiring ; 
 Artist of thy solar spaces 
 And thy humble human faces ;
 
 258 ENLARGING THOUGHT OF GOD 
 
 Mighty glooms and splendors voicing, 
 And thy plastic work rejoicing ; 
 Through benignant Law connecting 
 Best with best and all perfecting. 
 Though all human races claim thee, 
 Thought and language fail to name thee. 
 Mortal lips be dumb before thee ! 
 Silence only can adore thee ! "
 
 CHRISTIANITY THEN AND SINCE
 
 CHRISTIANITY THEN AND SINCE 
 
 THE strangest thing in Church history is the 
 contrast between Christ s own teachings and 
 those now called by his name. A large part of 
 the latter plainly did not come from him, but from 
 others long after him, and, as John Fiske said, were 
 "unwarranted by Scripture and never dreamed of by 
 Christ or his apostles." The dogmatic and harsh 
 doctrines of the later Church drop away, little by 
 little, as we go backwards through the previous writ 
 ings ; and the nearer we approach to Jesus himself, 
 the more reasonable, the more humane, the better he 
 appears. 
 
 We see this even in going to our common ver 
 sion of the New Testament, which contains only a 
 few passages supporting doctrines that are the sub 
 stance of later creeds. We see it more in going fur 
 ther back to the old manuscripts, which are used in 
 our Revised Version, and which omit some of these 
 passages. For instance, the famous verse about the 
 three witnesses, the chief passage for proving
 
 262 CHRISTIANITY THEN AND SINCE 
 
 the "trinity," and regarded by many as the only 
 proof, is altogether absent from the oldest three 
 manuscripts, is entirely omitted in the Revised Ver 
 sion, and is now universally rejected by scholars as a 
 spurious addition, not belonging to the New Testa 
 ment at all. Often, the later text adds theological 
 matter in this way. It adds the term " Christ " in 
 twenty-five places, and sometimes with entire change 
 of meaning. Where the early manuscripts and the 
 Revised Version declare (Eph. 3 : 9) that God " created 
 all things," our common version is that he " created all 
 things by Jesus Christ." That startling phrase mak 
 ing Jesus the Creator is only an addition to the orig 
 inal sentence. We need not suppose that the person 
 who added it was dishonest. He probably believed, 
 and quite innocently wrote those words making Jesus 
 the very Creator of the universe and of all things in 
 it. But the original text did not hint any such doc 
 trine, or so much as mention Jesus at all. 
 
 Not only particular beliefs, but even the need of 
 belief, and punishment for unbelief, have been thus 
 added. The apostle s requirement of the Ethiopian 
 eunuch that he must " believe," and the Ethiopian s 
 reply, " I believe that Jesus Christ is the son of God," 
 are both lacking in the early manuscripts, and are 
 both omitted from the Revised Version. Notice, too,
 
 CHRISTIANITY THEN AND SINCE 263 
 
 the passage in Mark telling how Jesus " upbraided 
 them with their unbelief," and added, "He that believ- 
 eth and is baptized shall be saved, and he that believeth 
 not shall be damned." This is the only passage in the 
 synoptic gospels that pronounces a curse on unbelief ; 
 and we know how often preachers have taken it for 
 text and drawn from it the most frightful sermons. 
 Yet it is wholly absent in the early manuscripts. That 
 curse on unbelief does not come from Jesus, or even 
 from the original gospel, but only from some later and 
 unknown writer who thought it ought to be there. 
 
 Thus do harsh and dogmatic sayings in our New 
 Testament fail to appear in its earlier forms, leaving 
 Christianity more reasonable and more humane. And 
 we infer that this would be seen even more if we could 
 go further back. When so much of the dogmatic and 
 narrow drops away as we go to the manuscripts of the 
 fourth century, doubtless yet more would if we could 
 go to the earlier ones of the second, and would leave 
 the New Testament a still better book. 
 
 But probably a much greater and better change 
 would be found if we could go behind the New Testa 
 ment record, to the real teachings of Jesus himself. 
 For when those teachings have been so changed and 
 corrupted even since they were written, how much 
 more so they must have been during the many years
 
 264 CHRISTIANITY THEN AND SINCE 
 
 while remaining unwritten. During those years they 
 were merely told from mouth to mouth, kept in faulty 
 memories, and misunderstood by faulty minds. That 
 they were so misunderstood even by the apostles is 
 repeatedly told in the New Testament itself. To 
 Philip, Jesus said, " Have I been so long time with 
 thee, and yet hast thou not known me, Philip?" 
 Even to the foremost Peter, Jesus once said, " Thou 
 art an offense unto me, for thou savorest not of the 
 things that be of God." Even John, who has so 
 curiously obtained a reputation for gentleness, Jesus 
 has to rebuke because John wanted to call down fire 
 to consume a village which would not receive them. 
 When Jesus thus censured the very apostles for their 
 harshness, narrowness, and misunderstanding of him, 
 the plain inference is that they did misunderstand 
 him, and that he was a much nobler soul than they 
 reported. 
 
 This inference is sustained by a closer study of the 
 New Testament. For the nearer we get to Jesus 
 himself, the less dogmatic, the more simple, humane, 
 and beautiful become both his teachings and his 
 character. The theology is found mostly not in his 
 reported words, but in the writings of others. It is 
 found chiefly in the many epistles from Paul and his 
 school.
 
 CHRISTIANITY THEN AND SINCE 265 
 
 Not, indeed, that we would underrate Paul. He 
 was a most brave and tender-hearted man. He was 
 of broad mind, the apostle to the gentiles, seeking to 
 widen Christianity from the little movement of a Jew 
 ish sect into a religion for all mankind. Paul was 
 peculiarly rilled with the spirit of Jesus, and his many 
 sentences for charity and love are among the best in 
 the Bible and in all literature. But not the less is he 
 an inadequate exponent of Jesus own thought. He 
 does not claim ever to have seen Jesus, except in a 
 vision after the latter s death. Nor did Paul try to 
 learn from the other apostles who had seen him, but, 
 as he tells us in his epistle to the Galatians, took 
 particular pains to keep away from them and from 
 Jerusalem. The New Testament shows that he often 
 disagreed with them, sometimes censured them ; and 
 even of Peter he says, " I withstood him to the face, 
 because he was to be blamed." Hence a considerable 
 part of the early Church did not regard Paul as an 
 authority, and hardly as a Christian. He was, besides, 
 a man of visions and speculative thought ; and, 
 though he was the chief founder of Christian theology, 
 he evidently evolved it from his own consciousness, 
 rather than from the traditions of apostles or from 
 words of Jesus. Hence, in seeking what Jesus himself 
 really taught, we must pass by the epistles of Paul
 
 266 CHRISTIANITY THEN AND SINCE 
 
 and his school, notwithstanding their abundant ex 
 cellences. 
 
 Of far more value for learning what Jesus taught, 
 is the epistle of James, which has been regarded by 
 many as written by Jesus own brother, and is regarded 
 by all as representing the thought of the Jerusalem 
 apostles. This epistle opposes and even makes light 
 of Paul s doctrine of justification by faith ; so much 
 so that Luther condemned it as teaching " contrary 
 to Paul." It is curiously free from theological doc 
 trines, and is mainly a moral exhortation to patience, 
 purity, and love. It rebukes the rich, pleads for the 
 poor, even for giving them a good seat at the meetings ; 
 and expressly defines " religion " as " to visit the father 
 less and widows in their affliction and to keep oneself 
 unspotted from the world." In all this, it doubtless 
 represents Jesus first followers. It is indeed much 
 like the recently discovered " Teaching of the Twelve 
 Apostles, "a work of the first century, which is mainly 
 moral and says nothing about faith. 
 
 We need not stop to notice any other New Testa 
 ment writing, except the four gospels. The so-called 
 epistles of Peter are now regarded as having been 
 written long after he died ; and perhaps even Peter 
 himself, with all his warmth and worth, would not 
 have given us a perfect knowledge of Jesus, since he
 
 CHRISTIANITY THEN AND SINCE 267 
 
 thrice declares with an oath that he never knew Jesus 
 at all. Nor can we learn of Jesus best through the 
 writings which bear the name of John. " The Rev 
 elation," though widely regarded as a genuine work of 
 the apostle John, treats of Jesus "second coming," 
 rather than of his earthly life ; and it evidently is not 
 true to Jesus spirit, for it ascribes to him the same 
 cruelty which he so rebuked in John. If Jesus so 
 censured John for wanting to destroy a few unbeliev 
 ers, he would have censured him far more for destroy 
 ing them all so fiercely in this book. The epistles and 
 gospel bearing the name of John put the same empha 
 sis on belief for which Jesus rebuked him. They 
 cannot rightly represent Jesus, even if they came from 
 John ; but most scholars agree that they were not 
 written until long after John died. They contain some 
 of the finest passages in all religious literature, and 
 the gospel contains much of great value about Jesus 
 life. But their theology, and their insistence upon 
 believing it, are of later origin, and must be omitted 
 in our inquiry as to what Jesus taught. 
 
 So we pass to the other and older three gospels as 
 our best authority. They are quite in the spirit of 
 that epistle of James. They give our fullest account 
 of Jesus life and sayings, and their accounts, when 
 disagreeing with the fourth gospel, generally agree
 
 268 CHRISTIANITY THEN AND SINCE 
 
 with each other. They agree in little things ; such 
 as in dating the crucifixion on the same day, while the 
 fourth puts it on a different day ; and in dating Jesus 
 cleansing of the temple in the same year, while the 
 fourth puts it in a different year. They all agree in 
 making Jesus teaching plain and simple, while the 
 fourth makes it metaphysical and mystical. Still 
 more important, they all agree in showing Jesus touch- 
 ingly human, tempted, suffering, and declaring his 
 weakness and want of knowledge ; while the fourth 
 shows in him no weakness, no temptation, no suffer 
 ing even on the cross, but makes him a God from all 
 eternity, knowing all things and even creating all. 
 Commentators try to reconcile these conflicting repre 
 sentations by saying that they show the two different 
 sides of Jesus nature. But the two sides will not go 
 together. He could not be weak and omnipotent at 
 the same time ; could not be ignorant of a thing and 
 know it all the while. We are forced to choose 
 between the two representations. Nor can we doubt 
 which to choose. The three agreeing accounts out 
 weigh the other ; the three earlier outweigh the later. 
 The fourth gospel is of great value, and rich in spirit 
 ual truths ; but as an authority for Jesus real teaching 
 we have to prefer the other three. 
 
 Nor can we take even these three without a critical
 
 CHRISTIANITY THEN AND SINCE 269 
 
 reading. They too, while containing our oldest account 
 of Jesus, were not written in their present forms until 
 long after his death. Hence they often disagree, 
 even where we should least expect it. For instance, 
 there is nothing in which they should more agree than 
 in their record of the inscription on Jesus cross, so 
 short and plain for all to see. Yet this inscription is 
 recorded in the four gospels in four different forms, 
 no two alike. Such disagreements are often not 
 merely in words, but in meaning. Even the records 
 of the beatitudes so disagree. Where Matthew makes 
 Jesus say, " Blessed are the poor in spirit," Luke makes 
 him say, " Blessed are ye poor," that is, in property. 
 Where Matthew makes him say, " Blessed are they 
 who hunger and thirst after righteousness," Luke 
 omits the " righteousness," and gives it, " Blessed are 
 ye who hunger now," that is, for food. So plain is 
 it that Jesus words are not always recorded with 
 accuracy even in the first three gospels. 
 
 But, however fallible in details, these gospels give 
 a general idea of Jesus teaching. They show how 
 it contrasted with our creeds, and even with other 
 New Testament writings. It contrasted in language ; 
 and in passing from the epistles and fourth gospel 
 to the first three, we pass from mystical speech to the 
 " breath and sunshine of the hills," as Dr. Martineau
 
 270 CHRISTIANITY THEN AND SINCE 
 
 said, " to the language of life, born in the field, the 
 boat, the olive ground." It contrasted in the same 
 way in the naturalness of its religion, and is curiously 
 devoid of the later doctrines about human nature 
 and about himself. 
 
 Even that fundamental doctrine which the Evangel 
 ical Alliance affirms, " the utter depravity of human 
 nature in consequence of the fall," is not found in 
 these gospels. Not once in them does Jesus allude to 
 any " fall," or speak a word about native depravity. 
 Instead of teaching that children are born depraved, 
 he even takes them for examples of purity ; and says, 
 " Suffer little children to come unto me," "for of such 
 is the kingdom of God." Instead of saying, with 
 Jonathan Edwards, that "in God s sight" children are 
 naturally " vipers and infinitely more hateful than 
 vipers," Jesus says they are just what God s kingdom 
 is made of. Nor did he want the children converted ; 
 but his words are, " be converted and become as little 
 children." The conversion he taught was not from 
 Nature, but from formalism back to Nature. Of any 
 mysterious regeneration, or of any depravity calling 
 for it, these three gospels have nothing to say. 
 
 Nor does Jesus in them teach the accompanying 
 doctrine of the "vicarious atonement." In Matthew 
 he does indeed have one clause about his blood shed
 
 CHRISTIANITY THEN AND SINCE 271 
 
 "for the remission of sins." But both Mark and 
 Luke, in reporting the same conversation and the 
 same sentence, omit this clause. Surely they would 
 not have omitted the most important part of the 
 sentence. Evidently they had not heard of it. Evi 
 dently Jesus did not say it ; but, like so many other 
 things, it was added by a later writer who thought he 
 ought to have said it. 
 
 Even about his own nature, Jesus teaching in these 
 three gospels is curiously unorthodox. In them he 
 nowhere hints that he is a God, but refuses to be 
 called even " good." If he calls himself " son of God," 
 he gives the same name to many others ; and even the 
 epistle of John declares, "now are we the sons of 
 God," and " every one that loveth is begotten of God." 
 Even if Jesus used the term in the especial sense of 
 the expected Messiah, still that Messiah, in Jewish 
 thought, was to be no god or demi-god. The Jew 
 Trypho, as quoted by Justin Martyr, said, "we all 
 expect that Messiah will be a man born of men." 
 Jesus nowhere hints even of his miraculous birth from 
 a virgin. Nor is that birth taught anywhere in the 
 New Testament, except in the introductions to Mat 
 thew and Luke ; and even Matthew and Luke deny 
 it repeatedly by declaring him the son of Joseph, and 
 still more by their elaborate genealogical tables tracing
 
 272 CHRISTIANITY THEN AND SINCE 
 
 his ancestry through Joseph. For why take such 
 pains to trace Jesus parentage forty generations back 
 through Joseph, if after all Joseph was not his parent ? 
 Those two miraculous birth-stories most clearly con 
 tradict the gospels in which they stand. They also 
 repeatedly contradict each other ; one making his 
 parents dwell in Nazareth before his birth, and the 
 other making them only migrate there after his birth ; 
 one inserting a long journey to Egypt which the 
 other makes impossible. Evidently these birth-stories 
 were told of him only by an adoring generation after 
 ward, just as they were told of so many other men 
 before him and in his own times. 
 
 In these three gospels, Jesus does not even seem 
 eager for personal honor. In one long passage he 
 expressly identifies himself with the poor and the 
 despised ; teaches that the true way to honor him is 
 to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, visit the prison 
 ers ; and says, " Inasmuch as ye have done it unto 
 one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done 
 it unto me." Even the sayings in which Jesus seems 
 to exalt himself are so opposed elsewhere as to make 
 us think he did not utter them. He is represented as 
 teaching that he should return supernaturally soon 
 after death, in that same generation, " coming in the 
 clouds of heaven with great glory " and with " a great
 
 CHRISTIANITY THEN AND SINCE 273 
 
 sound of a trumpet," to establish the kingdom of God 
 with sudden revolution. But when we find him teach 
 ing elsewhere so wisely that this kingdom was to be 
 of slow growth, like the silent grain and mustard 
 and unseen leaven, a spiritual kingdom in the souls 
 of men, coming "not with observation," we have to 
 conclude that the other and cruder portrayal of it 
 came not from Jesus, but from the ardent hopes of 
 those followers who were always misunderstanding 
 him. 
 
 He is also represented as working many mira 
 cles ; though no more than the man Elijah, who 
 also, according to the Old Testament, raised the dead 
 to life, and ascended bodily to heaven, and was ex 
 pected to return thence. But when we find Jesus 
 rebuking the desire for miracles or "signs," and 
 declaring that not one should be given to that genera 
 tion (Mark 8:12), we are disposed to think that he 
 really made no claim to work them, and that they, too, 
 were only told of him by credulous admirers, just as 
 they have been told of other great men. And when 
 we see his simplicity, his modesty, and the spirituality 
 of his teaching, we doubt whether he even claimed to 
 be that Messiah whom the common people were ex 
 pecting, and whether that doctrine also was not the 
 mere belief of his devoted followers.
 
 274 CHRISTIANITY THEN AND SINCE 
 
 So does a rational study of these three gospels 
 clear Jesus character of all fanaticism and superstition, 
 and exalt him into a spiritual teacher of the highest 
 order, whose divine lessons were distorted and low 
 ered by his disciples. He was a great and beautiful 
 soul, drawing followers by the charm and power of his 
 personality, and teaching the true religion of Nature 
 and humanity. For artificial forms and observances 
 he had little care. He broke the Sabbath, they said ; 
 did not fast, or teach his disciples to ; neglected the 
 ceremonial washings and ways ; ate with publicans and 
 sinners, and mingled with the disreputable. He took 
 the world for his church, common people and even 
 outcasts for its communicants, rebuked injustice and 
 exclusiveness ; and preached the simple religion of 
 life, of brotherhood, of love, and of trust in the 
 heavenly Father. 
 
 How he preached it, let the Church itself tell us. 
 In these gospels there is one long section, filling three 
 chapters, which the church calls Jesus "sermon on 
 the mount." His other sayings are mostly occasional, 
 but these are especially honored as his "sermon," his 
 real preaching. Critics also, though not regarding 
 them as a connected utterance, agree with the church 
 that they best show his religious teaching. They
 
 CHRISTIANITY THEN AND SINCE 275 
 
 seem to be the oldest and hence most genuine collec 
 tion of his precepts. Perhaps they are part of those 
 "Sayings of Jesus" which are said to have been re 
 corded first by Matthew ; and they may, therefore, 
 have given Matthew s name to this gospel in which 
 they are imbedded, and given it the first place in the 
 New Testament. At any rate, they are the best col 
 lection we have, and Dr. Davidson calls them "the 
 most authentic summary of what Jesus taught." To 
 these three chapters, then, criticism sends us for Jesus 
 most genuine, and the Church for his most religious, 
 teaching, for a "sermon" is just where he will 
 preach his religion. And here he does preach it. 
 Religion is the theme of these chapters. In them 
 Jesus speaks of God and heaven. He does not, in 
 deed, define God or heaven, and perhaps teaches 
 thereby that the true sermon should not attempt to. 
 But he tells how to gain heaven, how to see God, how 
 to be saved. 
 
 How ? Is it by sound theological beliefs ? The 
 sermon does not contain a word about the necessity 
 of any such, but sentence after sentence assuring sal 
 vation without them. The first verse tells who shall 
 gain "the kingdom of heaven." Who? Not proud 
 priests and dogmatists who claim to have compre 
 hended God and his plans; but "the poor in spirit,"
 
 276 CHRISTIANITY THEN AND SINCE 
 
 the humble, modest people. Nor is there any mistake 
 about it, for Jesus goes on to pronounce a blessing on 
 "the meek," who are much like them. 
 
 Then he blesses those who " hunger and thirst 
 after"- not theology but "righteousness"; as if 
 creeds had nothing to do with the case. Nor did he 
 mean hungering after " vicarious righteousness," for 
 in the next sentence he says that men are to be saved 
 for their own goodness : " Blessed are the merciful, 
 for they shall obtain mercy." God will save for mere 
 kindness of heart, and does not care what theology 
 goes with it. 
 
 Then comes a sentence telling who shall be so 
 blessed as to "see God." Is it "professing believ 
 ers " ? No, says Jesus, "the pure in heart " ; as if 
 prayer-books in their hands and catechisms in their 
 heads had nothing whatsoever to do with it. Then 
 follows a still higher beatitude, telling who shall have 
 that holiest name of "sons of God." Surely it should 
 be those who show most zeal for sound dogmas ! But, 
 no ; it is the " peacemakers," the very persons who do 
 not quarrel about dogmas or differences of any kind, 
 but rise above them all into the spirit of brother 
 hood. 
 
 Here, in short, are six beatitudes telling who are 
 to be most " blessed," but without a hint of any
 
 CHRISTIANITY THEN AND SINCE 277 
 
 theologic doctrine. A theologian would have made 
 them about the trinity and the atonement, human 
 depravity, and Adam s fall ; but Jesus ignores the 
 whole series. He makes men receive mercy, gain 
 heaven, see God, and become sons of God, without the 
 slightest allusion to " evangelical " doctrines. We 
 might go through the whole sermon with the same 
 result. There is not a suggestion in it that those 
 doctrines are necessary, or of the slightest impor 
 tance. 
 
 Is there any evidence in it that Jesus even believed 
 those doctrines ? If he did, he certainly would show 
 it in a sermon. But you cannot find a trace of them. 
 Not even the theologians can find them there, but 
 have to turn away from Jesus to get what they call 
 his teaching. Take, for instance, the Presbyterian 
 " Confession of Faith," and notice how, through its 
 long array of Biblical proof-texts, it avoids these say 
 ings of Jesus. Turn to its important chapter, " Of 
 God and of the Holy Trinity," and you find eighty- 
 one references to the Bible, but not one to Jesus 
 sermon. Turn to its chapter on man s fall and de 
 pravity, and you find sixty - eight proof - texts ; but 
 not one of them is from Jesus sermon. Turn to 
 its vital chapter on "Justification," telling how men 
 are saved. This is exactly what Jesus was talking
 
 278 CHRISTIANITY THEN AND SINCE 
 
 about, and his sermon is full of texts. But they 
 do not fit the " Confession," and it passes them 
 by to gather ninety-six elsewhere. It does indeed 
 take one from Jesus sermon, but apparently by mis 
 take ; for this text is from the very passage declaring 
 that all who forgive others shall be forgiven, and hence 
 need no other justification whatsoever ! So does this 
 " Confession " seek to show Jesus teaching by shun 
 ning the chief record of it ; as if you should study 
 your Shakespeare by shutting it up. To prove these 
 chief doctrines of Christian theology, it quotes 245 
 texts from the Bible ; but only one of them is from 
 Jesus sermon, and that one from a passage denying 
 the doctrine whose proof was sought. 
 
 For this sermon not only omits but denies much 
 of the Church teaching. It denies the doctrine of 
 eternal punishment. Although using the terms " hell " 
 and " hell of fire," it certainly did not mean any 
 thing like that of the Westminster Confession ; 
 for its command to men to love their enemies, and 
 so become " sons of God," clearly denied that this God 
 would burn his enemies forever, or torture them at 
 all. So that declaration, that all who forgive others 
 will be forgiven of God, denies the doctrine that they 
 will not be forgiven without faith. All the precepts 
 making religion to consist in love deny the doctrine
 
 CHRISTIANITY THEN AND SINCE 279 
 
 that it consists in beliefs. They even deny part of 
 Scripture. Jesus command, "love your enemies," 
 denies a considerable part of the Old Testament ; 
 and he even quotes words from it expressly to contra 
 dict them. Your Exodus and Leviticus and Deuter 
 onomy say, "an eye for an eye and a tooth for a 
 tooth ; but I say unto you that ye resist not evil," 
 and, when smitten on one cheek, turn the other. 
 Jesus even denies the common opinions about prayer, 
 and tells men to leave the altar, and first be reconciled 
 to their brethren, as if that were the more important 
 thing. He even tells them not to pray in public : 
 " but thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet," 
 and "shut the door." And instead of urging them 
 even there to repeat liturgies or long prayers of any 
 kind, he tells them not to use "vain repetitions" or 
 "much speaking"; and the prayer he leaves as a 
 model is less than a minute long, with part of that 
 lacking in the oldest manuscripts. He seems to have 
 taught the prayer, not of words, but of life. 
 
 How strange, too, are Jesus teachings about him 
 self in this sermon ! There is no word implying that 
 he is a God or even "son of God" in any superhuman 
 sense. Twice, indeed, he uses this term ; but in both 
 cases it is to apply it, not to himself, but to others, 
 and to declare that all who love their enemies, and all
 
 28o CHRISTIANITY THEN AND SINCE 
 
 peacemakers, "shall be called the sons of God." Nor 
 does he call himself even Christ, or say anything about 
 the Messiah. He does not seem to care for their 
 homage ; and expressly says that, not calling him 
 " Lord, Lord," but doing the Father s will, is what is 
 wanted. He does not ask them to use his name in 
 any way ; but, rather, he declares that, to many who 
 do use it, and who say, " Lord, Lord, have we not 
 prophesied in thy name, and in thy name done many 
 wonderful works," he will answer, " I never knew you, 
 depart from me, ye that work iniquity." This indif 
 ference of Jesus to his own glory gives us new admira 
 tion and reverence for him. It is perhaps the most 
 glorious thing recorded of him. It gives us reason 
 to think that he was really so unselfish, so great, so 
 noble, so divine a soul as not to care in the least that 
 men should ever use his name at all. 
 
 Finally, what a broad thought of God is found here ! 
 He is not only "our Father," but the God of all 
 Nature, who "feedeth" "the fowls of the air" and 
 doth "clothe the grass of the field." But the chief 
 thing Jesus declares of God is his utter impartiality, 
 in which he distributes his blessings upon all men 
 without inquiring what they believe or what they are : 
 " for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the 
 good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust."
 
 CHRISTIANITY THEN AND SINCE 281 
 
 Jesus also cites this impartiality, not merely as a fact, 
 but as the very perfection of God ; and he urges men 
 to be as "perfect" and impartial. Herein Jesus 
 teaches a religion, not merely of brotherhood and for 
 giveness, but wholly divine in its absence of prejudice 
 and its all-embracing charity. 
 
 Such is this part of the New Testament which 
 critics call " the most authentic summary of Jesus 
 teaching," and which the Church consecrates as the 
 one "sermon" that he has left us. What a strange 
 contrast to the teachings of the Church ! W. R. 
 Greg declared his " amazement," increasing with every 
 new " perusal of the genuine words and life of Jesus, 
 that out of anything so simple, so beautiful, so just, 
 so loving, and so grand, could have grown up, or been 
 extracted, anything so marvelously unlike its original 
 as the current creeds of Christendom." 
 
 Very unlike Christ indeed have been not only 
 the creeds, but the deeds of Christendom. Edmond 
 Kelly, in his recent book, says that, while Justin 
 Martyr s picture of a Church community in the sec 
 ond century was true to Jesus teaching, from Con- 
 stantine s day "the Christian Church ceased to be 
 Christian." Where indeed was the Christianity in 
 the wranglings of the Eastern Church for the next
 
 282 CHRISTIANITY THEN AND SINCE 
 
 thousand years, or in the persecutions and wars of 
 the Western still later ? How conspicuous was it in 
 the times of the Reformation, on cither side ? Luther 
 said if Christ should come back to earth, "without 
 doubt the Pope would crucify him again " ; and often 
 afterward the Pope might have returned the same 
 compliment to the Protestants. 
 
 A somewhat sarcastic observer, when asked if 
 Christianity had been a successful experiment, said it 
 had not been tried yet ; and how much indeed has it 
 been tried in modern times ? The French girl, read 
 ing about the brotherly and beautiful life of the early 
 Church, said : " Mama, in what country do the Chris 
 tians live ? Let us go and live in a Christian coun 
 try !" She did not find it in Catholic France. She 
 would hardly have found it in Protestant England. 
 Carlyle grimly said you might fire a pistol through a 
 church there without any danger of hitting a Chris 
 tian. Ruskin accused even the clergy of this defec 
 tion from Christ. He said that, during thirty years 
 attendance at church, he " never heard one preacher 
 deal faithfully with the question between God and 
 mammon " ; and that the very bishops, with the excep 
 tion of the heretic Colenso, had " forfeited and fallen 
 from their bishoprics by transgression and betrayal 
 of their Lord." He said English churchmen did not
 
 CHRISTIANITY THEN AND SINCE 283 
 
 try to keep even the Decalogue, but only to have it 
 " said every Sunday, and a little agreeable tune on the 
 organ played after every clause " ; while, in practice, 
 they treated it as " the ten crotchets of Moses," and 
 went " with armed steamers up and down the China 
 seas, selling opium at the cannon s mouth, and alter 
 ing the highwayman s Your money or your life ! 
 into Your money and your life ! Ruskin took his 
 illustration from the opium trade, for England had 
 not then sunk to the Boer war. 
 
 In the same spirit, our American poet Lowell wrote : 
 "The Church has corrupted Christianity. We are 
 still Huns and Vandals at heart. We have carved a 
 cross upon our altars ; but the smoke of our sacri 
 fice goes up to Thor and Odin still." Lowell after 
 ward wrote to Longfellow that Christ was "against 
 the Christianity of the world, and it must go down " ; 
 and Thoreau said the only way to understand Christ 
 was to get rid of Christianity. John Wilkes, from 
 whom the Wilkesites were named, said, in view of 
 their errors, that he was not a Wilkesite ; and one sus 
 pects that often, in the last fifteen hundred years, if 
 Christ had been on earth, he would have said he was 
 not a Christian. 
 
 Not that I would charge the Church especially with 
 disobeying Christ ; for others have done it no less.
 
 284 CHRISTIANITY THEN AND SINCE 
 
 But the Church makes that disobedience worse by its 
 doctrines about him. It disobeys him, while at the 
 same time it deifies him. It declares him supreme 
 Deity, yet treats his teachings as folly and falsehood. 
 It says we must believe that Christ was "very God," 
 but we need not obey him. We must believe that 
 he was "very God of very God " ; but we shall have 
 to disobey him, to keep the respect of Christen 
 dom. For, though his commands about property are 
 infallible, still, if you follow them, even the Church 
 will call you a fool. Though his commands about 
 brotherhood are divine, still, if you apply them in our 
 dealings with other nations, even the clergy will call 
 you a traitor. They say he ordered us to love our 
 enemies ; but we will loot them. He ordered us to 
 offer the cheek to those who have smitten us ; but 
 we will bombard and blow into shreds those who 
 have not smitten us. He ordered us to forgive the 
 offender 490 times ; but we will not forgive those 
 whose only offense is in defending their own lands 
 and homes. As a result, we send an army to some 
 foreign land, where it has no more moral right 
 to be than a Russian army has to be in Minnesota ; 
 we brand as "rebels" those who try to protect their 
 wives and daughters against us ; we burn their towns 
 and butcher their children ; and then, if there are
 
 CHRISTIANITY THEN AND SINCE 285 
 
 any left, we send missionaries to teach them that it 
 was a "very God" who forbade all these things. 
 
 A leading writer not long since said that if Jesus 
 could have foreseen on the cross the deeds that his 
 professed followers were going to do in his name, " it 
 would have been more cruel to his tender soul than 
 the thorns wherewith his enemies crowned him." 
 Certainly he has been, and still is, crucified worse 
 than on Calvary, and buried deeper than any sepulcher. 
 I too have kept Good Friday and Passion Week, 
 and kept them every week in the year for several 
 years. I have kept them, however, not so much for 
 any brief crucifixion by ancient unbelievers, as for 
 Christ s long and continued crucifixion by Christen 
 dom itself ; not for any harmless burial in Gethsemane, 
 from which he rose right away, but for this far sadder 
 burial of centuries, from which he has not risen yet, 
 and from which there is so little sign that the Church 
 even wants him to rise. 
 
 But all true souls will desire his resurrection and 
 reign. For our study has shown that Jesus was better 
 and nobler and greater than creeds have ever told, and 
 his teachings more reasonable and religious. Not that 
 they were the teachings of him alone. Most of them 
 were already familiar in his nation, and many of them
 
 286 CHRISTIANITY THEN AND SINCE 
 
 in other religions and literatures. But not the less do 
 we owe him for gathering these golden truths, for 
 refining and coining them into sentences to circulate 
 through the centuries. Not the less do we owe for 
 his life and character, which were still more powerful 
 sentences, perpetuating themselves through the souls 
 and lives of his true followers. 
 
 Reading Jesus story rationally, and seeing, through 
 all its distortions, his spirit of peace, forgivenesss, and 
 love, we can indeed crown him as a Messiah, a man 
 divinely anointed for the salvation of many. Using 
 that other title, too, in a higher sense than the Church 
 has given it, using it in the same sense which he 
 gave it, we must pronounce him pre-eminently a 
 "son of God." And, using the thought given by 
 the highest philosophy, and by the apostle s affirm 
 ation that " if we love one another, God dwelleth in 
 us," we shall conclude that Jesus was indeed divine, 
 and that he taught how all men may become so.
 
 VARIOUS MEANINGS OF EASTER
 
 VARIOUS MEANINGS OF EASTER 
 
 " \ V /HAT right have you heathen to keep 
 \\f Easter ? " said a good churchman to a 
 heretic. But the heathen seem to have a 
 better right than the Church. Easter is not exclu 
 sively Christian, and originally was not Christian at 
 all. The word does not appear in the Old Testament 
 or the New, nor in Church literature until rather late ; 
 and, when appearing, was only borrowed from the 
 heathen. The celebration, too, was partly borrowed 
 from northern Europe. Long before the Teutonic 
 peoples accepted Christianity, or even heard of it, 
 they kept their Easter festival ; kept it under the same 
 name, and with many of the same customs as now. 
 It was not only a pagan festival, but in honor of a 
 pagan goddess of spring ; and our word Easter is the 
 name of that goddess. The Church took the festival, 
 gave it the new and Christian meaning of the paschal 
 feast, and tried to purge it of its paganism. But the 
 latter was so established, and has so survived, that 
 even the pagan name remains ; and the Christian
 
 2 9 o VARIOUS MEANINGS OF EASTER 
 
 preacher cannot so much as pronounce the word 
 Easter without proclaiming that the heathen have an 
 older and better claim to it than himself. 
 
 But even older than this worship of Easter as god 
 dess of spring was another and still wider adoration 
 of her as goddess of the morning and of the dawn. 
 This meaning is told in her very name, in most of 
 the Indo-European languages. Even in our own lan 
 guage, the root of Easter is east, the place of the 
 dawn ; and in nearly all the languages of northern 
 Europe the words for Easter come from an old root 
 meaning the dawn. The same is seen no less in the 
 more southern literatures and languages of Europe 
 and Asia, although in them the root did not take that 
 final sound of / which it added in the north. In the 
 Greek, instead of our east, we have Eos, with the 
 same meaning of the dawn and the goddess of the 
 dawn. She is very familiar in Homer and Hesiod, 
 the rosy-fingered Eos, coming in radiant robes to bring 
 the morning light to gods and men. In the legends, 
 she is closely connected with the various phenomena 
 of the morning sky, being daughter of Hyperion 
 (the heavens), sister of the sun, and mother of the 
 morning breezes ; and she is often figured, on ancient 
 Greek gems and vases, driving her chariot before the 
 rising sun and sprinkling the earth with the morning
 
 VARIOUS MEANINGS OF EASTER 291 
 
 dew. Such was the goddess of the dawn in classic 
 Greek, Eos, whose name still sounds in our east 
 and Easter. 
 
 In the older Greek dialects she was called, the 
 etymologists say, by the slightly different names of 
 Auos and Ausos. The latter is especially interesting 
 as the connecting link with her old Latin name, on 
 one side, and with Sanscrit, on the other. For this 
 Ausos is the same as the Sanscrit Ushas, the goddess 
 of the dawn in the Vedic songs of ancient India. To 
 this goddess those poetic and pious old Hindus kindled 
 their morning fires, made their morning sacrifices, sang 
 many a morning psalm of praise ; and Professor Whit 
 ney says " the hymns to Ushas are among the finest 
 of the Vedas." They praised her as the immortal 
 "daughter of the sky," old yet forever young, reborn 
 in beauty every day, smiling " mother of the morn 
 ing," coming with " thy radiant face and luster of thy 
 golden hair to drive away the darkness and its 
 dangers, and to arouse all creatures to the works and 
 joys of another day. This was the original Easter 
 worship, the daily thanks, praise, and adoration for 
 the dawn. 
 
 In that Sanscrit name, Ushas, we also reach the 
 root and earliest known meaning of the word, Ush 
 and Us, meaning flame, and still heard in the Latin
 
 292 VARIOUS MEANINGS OF EASTER 
 
 ustio, a burning, and in the English " ustion " and 
 " combustion " and " combustible," and various kindred 
 words. From that root, meaning flame, all the names 
 of Easter have come. The Sanscrit UsJias and Greek 
 Ausos simply double it and apply it to the flaming sky 
 of the dawn and to the goddess there seen. 
 
 From the same Ausos, lengthened into Ausosa, 
 came the Latin Aurora, who holds the same place in 
 Roman mythology. As Aurora, she has become still 
 more familiar than Eos in modern literature, sung 
 in English by Shakespeare, Spenser, Milton, Landor, 
 and others. She has also reached much prominence 
 in modern art. Burckhart calls Guido Reni s picture 
 of her " the most perfect painting of the last two hun 
 dred years," and Hawthorne said it seemed painted 
 "with the morning sunshine which it represents " ; 
 though Taine prefers Guercino s Aurora, with its frol 
 icking girls in front of her extinguishing the stars, 
 and its Cupids tending the drapery and garland and 
 flowers for her to scatter. For flowers, too, were con 
 nected with Aurora, from early pictures, down to 
 Ramon s graceful girl sipping dew from the morning- 
 glory. 
 
 But in the northern languages, that same root Aus 
 added the sound of / or tr. In this form it left the 
 same name of the dawn in a score of tongues and
 
 VARIOUS MEANINGS OF EASTER 293 
 
 dialects, from the Lettic aust in Russia, across 
 Europe and the ocean to the Icelandic austr ; from 
 the German and Norse ost and ostr, to the Anglo- 
 Saxon east and the English east and Easter. It was 
 the same word, heard with slight changes, in the wor 
 ship of Scandinavians and Germans and Lithuanians, 
 of Romans and Greeks and Asiatics, back to the 
 old Vedas. Among all, too, it included the same 
 religious meaning, the same glad thanks and praise 
 for the dawn of a new day. This meaning, indeed, 
 long survived even in the Christian Easter ; and E. B. 
 Tylor told how, only a generation ago, the peasants 
 of Saxony and Brandenburg and northern Germany 
 still climbed the hilltops on Easter morning to watch 
 for the dawn, and built their bonfires to it, as they did 
 in heathen Hellas and ancient India in honor of the 
 same goddess, Eos or Ausos or Ushas. 
 
 That old worship is now dead; and not only in 
 English, but in most of the northern languages, that 
 old name of the deified dawn has come to mean 
 mainly the place where she appeared, a mere point 
 of the compass. But the poet and the scholar cannot 
 speak that word " east " without remembering the 
 time when east was Easter, too, when the eastern 
 sky was all alive with the presence of a glorious god 
 dess, robed in gold and purple, and radiant with beauty,
 
 294 VARIOUS MEANINGS OF EASTER 
 
 as she rose to wake the world and call mankind to 
 their morning worship. 
 
 That worship is one still worth commemorating on 
 Easter day. It helps the feeling of charity and human 
 brotherhood to remember how all these scores of 
 peoples, from Iceland back to India, have shared in 
 the same worship, and still preserve its words with so 
 little change in their divers languages. The Church 
 once had a long and bitter quarrel and division over 
 the Easter question. But the word itself rebukes 
 such division, telling how the worshipers, not only of 
 the Christian Jesus, but of the Roman Jove and the 
 Greek Apollo, and of many heathen gods, from the 
 Norse Odin to the Vedic Indra, have all been allied, 
 speaking the same language, feeling the same religion 
 of thanks for the morn and of praise for its Maker. 
 For certainly this feeling was just as religious under 
 a Greek or a German name, as under a Jewish. 
 
 Indeed, those pagan songs in praise of the god of 
 the sunrise were quite like the familiar Hebrew Psalm, 
 "The heavens declare the glory of God," and "in 
 them hath he set a tabernacle for the sun, that com- 
 eth forth like a bridegroom from his chamber, and 
 rejoiceth like a strong man to run his course." That 
 pagan adoration of the dawn was not very different 
 from Job s, telling how the same " day-spring " know-
 
 VARIOUS MEANINGS OF EASTER 295 
 
 eth its place ; and the old Latin Bible, the Vulgate, 
 even renders this day-spring " Aurora." The pagan 
 praise of the blessings and beauty of the dawn 
 was far more religious than the medieval catechism 
 which taught that its ruddy colors were the reflection 
 from the flames of hell below the horizon, and than 
 the modern confession of faith which accuses God of 
 punishing most of mankind in them. Jesus himself 
 rebuked such thought, and took the dawn to illustrate 
 the impartiality and perfection of the heavenly Father 
 who " maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the 
 good." 
 
 Not only was that adoration of the dawn religious, 
 but the poet still partakes in it. Nor can the most 
 prosaic or pessimistic soul fail to feel some joyous 
 wonder and worship at the coming of the sunrise, 
 when suddenly, as W. W. Story sang : 
 
 " There s a sparkle o er leagues of seas, 
 
 There s a rustle through miles of trees, 
 Life returns and the earth rejoices, 
 The air is astir with the murmur of voices ; 
 There s the low of a thousand herds 
 
 Feeding on fertile meadows ; 
 There s the joy of a myriad birds 
 Darting through leafy shadows. 
 Night with its shadow of death is done ; 
 The great new wondrous day has begun."
 
 296 VARIOUS MEANINGS OF EASTER 
 
 And though we may no longer see in the radiant 
 colors of the dawn the wondrous robes of a goddess, 
 yet even science has revealed greater wonders in the 
 light that wove them. This light shoots its ceaseless 
 shuttles through millions of miles, swifter than any 
 goddess of old legend ; and, with the mere waves of 
 ether for its loom, threads through the warp of mist 
 and haze to make that brilliant and ever changing 
 web, new every morning and fresh every evening. In 
 this wondrous weaving, science has shown a new 
 revelation of the God of the Psalmist, " who coverest 
 thyself with light as with a garment, who stretchest 
 out the heavens like a curtain." We feel this God 
 still here, too, and can sing the modern hymn : 
 
 " Still, still with thee, when purple morning breaketh, 
 When the bird waketh and the shadows flee ; 
 Fairer than morning, lovelier than the daylight, 
 Dawns the sweet consciousness, I am with thee." 
 
 It is the same power which those old Vedic worship 
 ers sang in their morning hymns, and which Greek 
 and Roman poets praised in their radiant Eos and 
 golden-haired Aurora. We can still keep that original 
 Easter-worship of the goddess of Dawn. 
 
 But t{iis Easter in time took another meaning. 
 She became the goddess, not merely of the morning,
 
 VARIOUS MEANINGS OF EASTER 297 
 
 and dawn of a new light, but of the spring, and dawn 
 of a new life in Nature. The change was natural, for 
 the two events are parallel. Their likeness is told 
 even in our language. The word for dawn in old 
 English, and in our English Bibles, is " day-spring," 
 the spring of the day, corresponding to the year- 
 spring. One means the rising of the sun from the 
 unseen sky to reach our horizon, and the other its 
 rising from the southern sky to reach our own hemi 
 sphere at the vernal equinox. One means the resurrec 
 tion of Nature from the darkness and death of night, 
 to the light and life of morning ; the other means its 
 resurrection from the worse death of winter, to the 
 warmth and life of May. So the same Easter who 
 had brought the resurrection of the day came to be 
 represented as bringing this resurrection of the year. 
 In the latter, as in the former, she was rightly figured 
 as a goddess, clothed in beauty. Still better than in 
 her fleeting robes of the morning sky, she now wove 
 a more real robe for the earth itself, clothing fields 
 and forests in foliage for the whole season, and em 
 broidering it with flowers that kept their colors when 
 the hues of dawn had disappeared. 
 
 Naturally too, this new meaning of Easter appears 
 especially in the northern nations, where winter was 
 so much more severe and the resurrection from it so
 
 298 VARIOUS MEANINGS OF EASTER 
 
 much more welcome. So while southern peoples 
 adored her chiefly in the dawn, this older meaning 
 was largely forgotten among the Teutonic races, and 
 she became almost entirely the goddess of spring. At 
 this season they kept her festival with fit offerings of 
 flowers and seeds and various emblems of the new 
 life of Nature, together with the many joyous customs 
 telling of the gladness that it brought. Such was 
 the Easter which the Christian church found estab 
 lished among those northern heathen, and to which it 
 added the meaning of Jesus resurrection and the 
 paschal feast. 
 
 But even that paschal feast seems to have had 
 originally a somewhat similar meaning. It came from 
 the Hebrew passover, which is regarded by many 
 scholars as having been at first a mere festival in 
 honor of spring. It was dated by the spring equinox, 
 when the Hebrews, like so many other peoples, began 
 their new year. Even its Hebrew name, Pesach, 
 meaning a passing, is regarded by many as referring 
 to the sun then passing the equator to the northern 
 heavens and the new year, just as we still speak of 
 its "crossing the line." Like the heathen Easter, this 
 great Hebrew festival was kept with spring offerings 
 of different kinds, not so much, however, from the 
 fields as from the flocks, as was natural in their ancient
 
 VARIOUS MEANINGS OF EASTER 299 
 
 pastoral life. The chief offerings were of course of 
 the new lambs, each family slaying and eating its own 
 with grateful joy ; and Josephus says that in his time 
 two hundred and fifty thousand were so slain at a 
 passover. Their blood was from of old sprinkled on 
 the door-posts of the houses at this beginning of the 
 year, probably for its supposed purifying and protect 
 ing influence, as was the custom of so many ancient 
 peoples. But in the course of centuries, this spring 
 festival of the Hebrews lost its original meaning, and 
 came to be interpreted as commemorating that chief 
 event in their traditions, the deliverance from Egypt. 
 It came to be thought that the eating of the lamb 
 commemorated the last supper before their depart 
 ure ; and that the name of the feast referred to the 
 legend of the Lord passing over the houses where 
 the blood was sprinkled. 
 
 So every spring, that equinoctial month became 
 doubly sacred ; and in the middle of the month, at 
 its full moon, the Jews kept their great feast of the 
 passover, their Pesach, which became PascJia in the 
 Greek. And, one year, in that paschal week, Jesus 
 is said to have been slain ; his death occurring, 
 according to the first three gospels, the day after the 
 feast, or on the day of the feast, according to the 
 fourth. Hence the first day of the following week
 
 300 VARIOUS MEANINGS OF EASTER 
 
 came at length to be kept in the Church as the festi 
 val of his resurrection. 
 
 This was the new meaning which the Christian 
 Church added to the old heathen festival of Easter, 
 and which has become its chief meaning in Christen 
 dom. Every year, at the first full moon after the sun 
 reaches the vernal equinox, the Jews still keep their 
 ancient passover. And the next Sunday, the Chris 
 tians keep Easter, but with its old meanings largely 
 forgotten. They feel no excessive sympathy for the 
 Jews, whose holy week underlies the Christian. They 
 keep many customs of the older festival of spring, but 
 with no sympathy for the heathen religions that made 
 so much of it ; while they ignore the original meaning 
 of Easter as an adoration of the divine power in the 
 dawn. They make it mainly, and often almost solely, 
 a commemoration of Jesus and his resurrection. 
 
 Would it not be better to keep all these meanings 
 and celebrate all these resurrections ? We have seen 
 how full of marvel and beauty is the first, the resur 
 rection of the "day-spring" from the darkness and 
 death of night. No less so is the second, the res 
 urrection of the year-spring from the death of winter. 
 Here is something diviner than the Hebrew deliver 
 ance from the bondage of Egypt. Quite as marvel-
 
 VARIOUS MEANINGS OF EASTER 301 
 
 ous as and far more beneficent than Moses rod waved 
 over the waters to turn them into blood, or raised to 
 drown the Egyptians, are the rods on every tree rais 
 ing the waters for the leaves and life of another season. 
 The God of the world is delivering, not merely one 
 people, but all nations and Nature from the bondage 
 of death. In swelling bud and seed, the God of 
 Nature is providing a paschal feast for all communi 
 cants, Christian and pagan, and for all creatures, 
 with a divine impartiality which makes our creeds 
 seem cruel and profane in comparison. And the nat 
 ural feelings of gratitude and joy with which we greet 
 these miracles are quite as religious as any ancient 
 ceremonies. When a little girl once jubilantly brought 
 me a green grass-blade plucked from beneath the 
 melting snow, it seemed just as much a worship, and 
 the same worship, as when the ancient Israelites 
 brought their spring offerings to the altar. Our nat 
 ural delight in the spring blossoms and singing of the 
 birds is a better worship than any animal sacrifice, 
 and is far better than any belief that the Lord has 
 demanded the blood of his own son. We may well 
 celebrate this Easter resurrection of life. 
 
 We may well commemorate the resurrection of 
 Jesus, too. Not necessarily the resurrection of his 
 dead body, which not even Paul seems ever to have
 
 302 VARIOUS MEANINGS OF EASTER 
 
 believed ; but his spiritual resurrection, greater than 
 Paul taught. For Jesus spiritual influence and power 
 has lived far longer than the disciples thought the 
 world was going to, and has spread through wide lands 
 whose existence they never dreamed of. His words 
 are read around the world every day, and something 
 of his spirit survives with them. For though Chris 
 tendom has often by its doctrines denied him worse 
 than Peter did, and by its cruelties crucified him over 
 and over again ; though it has often laid him in the 
 sepulcher and sealed the door until resurrection seemed 
 impossible ; still his spirit has survived through all, 
 and has ever been going forth, like his rising in the 
 story, to inspire deeds of love, and to work on with 
 an undying life that makes the story of his bodily 
 resurrection seem of no account in comparison. 
 
 The same is true of countless others, in various 
 degrees. John Brown s body lay a-mouldering in the 
 ground, but his soul went marching on ; has been 
 ever since, and will for centuries to come. Theodore 
 Parker, when dying in Florence, said, " You may bury 
 me here, but the true Theodore Parker is in Boston, 
 and will live and grow there " ; and he has lived and 
 grown in many other towns. Heber Newton tells 
 how, after a memorable Easter service in Westminster 
 Abbey, he went forth feeling that England s great
 
 VARIOUS MEANINGS OF EASTER 303 
 
 dead were not sleeping there in their tombs, "waiting 
 for the archangel s trump, but that in the living civiliza 
 tion they lived on, immortally alive." Of common 
 people, too, he said : " A sainted mother, a noble 
 father, a mated soul torn from the side, a child whom 
 men call dead, walk before us, leading us by the hand. 
 Our best influences flow from them ; our highest 
 aspirations they waken in us." 
 
 That is the resurrection that most appeals to my 
 feelings, as the best. That seems to me much the 
 noblest and most desirable survival ; to live on as 
 a joyous memory and influence in the hearts and 
 lives of friends and acquaintances ; to be 
 
 " Of those immortal dead who live again 
 In minds made better by their presence, live 
 In pulses stirred to generosity, 
 In deeds of daring rectitude, in scorn 
 For miserable aims that end with self"; 
 
 and so 
 
 " to join the choir invisible 
 Whose music is the gladness of the world." 
 
 Nor does this thought at all deny that personal res 
 urrection which is the theme of most Easter sermons. 
 That is not denied by science itself ; and even if it 
 were, might still be true. For science is not infallible, 
 but, as Holmes said of chemistry, is ever " spoiling on
 
 304 VARIOUS MEANINGS OF EASTER 
 
 our hands." We have heard of the book which proved 
 by exact science that no steamer could cross the 
 Atlantic, but was afterward brought across in one, 
 and brought to a continent whose very existence both 
 science and religion had denied. So if science should 
 prove that the soul cannot cross the ocean of death, 
 it might still cross, and find a solider continent than 
 religion ever told. 
 
 But science has not so proved. Even Huxley said 
 that science had found nothing new to say against 
 immortality, and many a scientist has told us that in 
 the nature of things it never can. On this question, 
 science is only agnostic. It is even better than ag 
 nostic, by showing such miraculous powers in Nature. 
 Though arousing doubts of what is not seen, it has 
 more than met those doubts by asserting unseen 
 things all about us, more active than the seen. It 
 tells of germs never seen, yet real as rocks, and sure 
 of resurrection. It says these germs are made of 
 atoms a thousand times finer still, yet substantial 
 as the sun, and more enduring than the stars. 
 
 It even shows things growing more active as they 
 become unseen. The apostle compared life to a vapor 
 vanishing away ; but vapor proves to be the most 
 powerful form of matter, and vanishing to be a sign 
 of vigor. Even gunpowder can do nothing until
 
 VARIOUS MEANINGS OF EASTER 305 
 
 vanishing in vapor, and the cannon-ball is harmless 
 until it gets a gas behind it, the more smokeless 
 and invisible the surer. Air is invisible vapor ; yet 
 it builds the forests, and can blow them down, or pick 
 up a town in a tornado. Water must put on utter 
 invisibility in the boiler before it can draw the train. 
 Still more active does it become when dissolved into 
 its elements, and one of those invisible hydrogen 
 atoms, as some scientists describe it, is about the 
 liveliest thing in the universe. The celestial ether, 
 according to modern theory, is rather the nearest to 
 nothing of all existences, yet the most energetic. 
 Matter seems to grow vigorous by vanishing, and to 
 be most active when on the edge of annihilation. 
 This evidence of things growing active as they slip 
 beyond the reach of sense and of science tells us not 
 to be alarmed because we cannot follow a man after 
 death. 
 
 Especially when we remember that we have never 
 been able to find him before death ! For this human 
 spirit, with all its powers, is yet airier than ether, 
 more invisible than any atom, found by neither lens 
 nor logic, eluding physics and metaphysics alike, so 
 that even Tyndall said it is no more understood to 
 day than before science began. Yet it is the solidest 
 and surest thing on earth, mastering everything else.
 
 306 VARIOUS MEANINGS OF EASTER 
 
 Nor need we be alarmed because it now seems so 
 dependent on body, or even produced by brain. So 
 is every seed dependent on and produced by its parent 
 plant, yet leaves it for a larger life. Spirit gets along 
 without much body even now ; and Sydney Smith told 
 of the gifted little Englishman who didn t have body 
 enough to cover his mind, but went about with his 
 intellect improperly exposed. Spirit shines in diseased 
 bodies, from the paralyzed Heine producing all those 
 poems from his "mattress grave," to the two Amer 
 ican geniuses who had "only one lung between them." 
 It is active in sleeping bodies ; from Coleridge, who 
 composed his finest poem in a dream, to the many 
 cases where sleeping men have solved problems and 
 written arguments as they could not in waking hours. 
 It is active even in dying bodies. Indeed, we are 
 dying all the while, the doctors say ; have had our 
 bodies destroyed several times already, and would 
 have been in our graves long ago but for this con 
 stant destruction that keeps us alive. 
 
 As Emerson was not alarmed because the world 
 was going to end the next week, but said we could 
 get along better without it, so perhaps we can without 
 this muddy "vesture of decay" which grossly hems 
 us in. Alfred de Musset, praising the soul s infinite 
 superiority to a piano of Erard or violin of Stradi-
 
 VARIOUS MEANINGS OF EASTER 307 
 
 varius, said life might be but the opening bar of the 
 melody, or even but the tuning of the instrument. 
 Science itself is full of hints of unseen worlds. Cyrus 
 Field tells of the night when, after weeks of searching 
 in mid-ocean for that broken cable, the grapnel finally 
 caught it. Slowly from the sea-bottom, miles beneath, 
 they lifted it hour after hour, and at last drew it to 
 the deck. They could hardly trust their eyes, but 
 crept to feel it and make sure, while strong men 
 wept and the midnight darkness was rent with cheers 
 and rockets. Even then they feared the cable was 
 broken somewhere else in its long course to land. 
 But at length their tests were answered by a feeble 
 spark flashed from a key a thousand miles away, 
 assuring them that the line was sound ; and soon there 
 came a message telling him of the safety of the dear 
 ones he had left by the Hudson. 
 
 We and our earth float like a ship on the mysteri 
 ous sea of being, whose depths the grapnel of science 
 does not sound, and we cannot expect to find a solid 
 line of logic connecting with an unseen world. But 
 there still flash at times, through feelings stronger 
 than cables and diviner than electric currents, intima 
 tions that vanished souls are on solider ground than 
 we, and that all are safe in the eternal Law and 
 Love.
 
 308 VARIOUS MEANINGS OF EASTER 
 
 " A thread of Law runs through our prayer, 
 Stronger than iron cables are ; 
 And love and longing towards her goal 
 Are pilots sweet to guide the soul. 
 
 " For Life must live, and Soul must sail, 
 And Unseen over seen prevail ; 
 And all God s argosies come to shore, 
 Let ocean smile, or rage, or roar."
 
 THE NEW YEAR OF RELIGION
 
 THE NEW YEAR OF RELIGION 
 
 RLL life has its seasons, its springs and falls. 
 Even lifeless movement shows something sim 
 ilar, in the rise and fall of its rhythmic waves. 
 These are found everywhere, from the ripples of the 
 pond and billows of the wheatfield in the breeze, to 
 the -unseen waves of sound in the air and of light in 
 the ether. There are tides, too, not only in the sea, 
 but in the periodic winds, even in the sunlight with 
 its daily ebb and flow, and in the life of the field 
 ebbing in autumn and swelling in spring. Every 
 where are seasons, from these of the year, to the vast 
 ones of geologic story, whose days were millenniums 
 and whose winters were long glacial ages. 
 
 The same principle prevails in society. Trade has 
 its tides of inflation and depression, slow, but sure as 
 those of the sea. The records of industries, prices, 
 wages, even crimes, when reduced to diagrams, always 
 show series of waves. The same principle is seen in 
 each person ; from the pulse-beats in his blood, and 
 ebb and flow of his breath, to his alternations of sleep
 
 312 THE NEW YEAR OF RELIGION 
 
 and waking, and of toil and rest when awake. It is 
 seen also in his mental and moral life, fertile thought 
 being followed by fatigue, and every enthusiasm by a 
 reaction. It is seen no less in his religion. Even 
 sanctity has its tides. Robert Collyer used to tell 
 how a devoted minister, when asked at his ordination 
 if he was eager to save sinners, frankly replied that 
 he sometimes was, but sometimes did not care if Satan 
 got them all. The Methodist theory of backslidings 
 and revivals is quite scientific. Religion, like all life, 
 has its noons and nights, its growing Aprils and drying 
 autumns, its summers of warm devotion and its winters 
 of freezing doubt and denial. 
 
 But beneath these fluctuations are far larger ones, 
 where the seasons are centuries. John Stuart Mill 
 divided religious history into long "organic periods" 
 of growth and long " critical periods " of negation. 
 He said such an organic period was seen in Greek 
 and Roman polytheism, and was followed by a critical 
 one under the philosophers. He said another organic 
 period came with Christianity and lasted until the 
 Reformation ; when another critical period began, 
 which has lasted ever since. Mr. Mill s "periods" 
 are but the alternating seasons of religion s life, the 
 summer and winter of that Power with whom "a 
 thousand years are as one day." It was indeed a
 
 THE NEW YEAR OF RELIGION 313 
 
 fertile summer when the Greek religion bore its lux 
 uriant foliage of fancies and legends, and its more 
 lasting fruit in temples, statues, and poems never since 
 surpassed. It was another summer when Christianity 
 leaved out in new beliefs and customs, and blossomed 
 in beautiful churches which bore so many fruits. 
 
 That summer lasted many centuries. It was not 
 only fertile with growth, but warm with fervent faith 
 and often fiery zeal. Its zeal inspired men not only 
 to build majestic cathedrals among their own hovels, 
 but to fight against heathen and heretics, and to die 
 for their church as they would for their wives and 
 children. Its faith filled the people and made 
 them sure their doctrines would last forever. The 
 Athanasian creed calmly condemned to perdition all 
 who would not believe it, and the Church dogmas long 
 kept their freshness not only in Catholic, but in 
 Protestant lands. Even Milton wrote of Adam s fall 
 as a historic fact, no more to be doubted than Crom 
 well s deeds. Depravity and damnation seemed as 
 sure. " The one supreme poem of Puritan New Eng 
 land," as our historian terms it, was Wiggles worth s 
 " Day of Doom " which consigned to everlasting pun 
 ishment even infants who died before they reached 
 the cradle. Lowell tells how this poem was read and 
 learned and sung, "the solace of every fireside";
 
 3H THE NEW YEAR OF RELIGION 
 
 and Cotton Mather predicted that its popularity would 
 continue until the judgment-day itself. So little 
 thought was there that the theological foliage of that 
 long summer could ever fall or fade. 
 
 But it had to. It could no more last forever than 
 can July. The autumnal air of cool criticism came 
 to kill whatever could not withstand it, and many a 
 medieval doctrine withered and died. That so popular 
 poem, which was to flourish till "the day of doom," 
 has fallen into such oblivion that it is now hard to 
 find ; and its teachings have become so repugnant 
 that many a preacher says they were never taught. 
 " Paradise Lost " is read no longer for its theology, 
 but only for its poetry, and many so dislike its theology 
 that they cannot see the poetry, "Adam s fall" is 
 nearly forgotten, and to many Christians Adam him 
 self has become more mythical than Admetus. That 
 Athanasian creed is condemned by half the Church. 
 Even the Westminster Confession has seen a large 
 part of its professors eager to revise it ; and many 
 who objected did so from the foresight that revision 
 would leave so little of it. With this disuse of dogmas 
 has also come that of various observances. 
 
 Of course, this doctrinal and ritual foliage has not 
 fallen everywhere. In many a retired garden and 
 church conservatory it is kept still fresh. But, where
 
 THE NEW YEAR OF RELIGION 315 
 
 freely exposed to the open air of thought, much of it 
 has withered. Poetic people have continued to see 
 beauty in it, as they do in the October foliage ; and 
 many seek to preserve it, like colored leaves upon 
 their walls, but for ornament rather than real use. 
 Coarser men, however, have seen no attraction in 
 these falling forms, but have rudely trampled them 
 under foot and rejoiced in their rustling. Some have 
 boyishly sought to make a huge halloween bonfire of 
 them all. And not only has so much of the religious 
 foliage fallen, but the air has lost its emotional warmth, 
 and sometimes sends the more mercurial spirits among 
 us down to zero and below. The whiter season of 
 religion has arrived. 
 
 Nor can we escape it. These changes are some 
 thing which we cannot stop, any more than we can 
 stop the sinking of the sun in the sky. Many preach 
 ers tell us to cling to the old beliefs, and not let them 
 go. They might as well tell us not to let the leaves 
 go from our maples in November. Our wills have 
 little to do with the process. When the sap of sincere 
 thought and feeling ceases to circulate through any 
 Church doctrines or ceremonies, they might as well 
 drop. We may cling to them, as many a tree does to 
 its dead leaves ; but they do not help us, and their 
 rustle is not religion. Real religion must have life
 
 316 THE NEW YEAR OF RELIGION 
 
 and sincerity ; and, when the winter comes, we may 
 as well admit it. 
 
 We may even welcome it, for it comes for good. 
 We do not want hot summer all the year. A season 
 of it is necessary; but, if prolonged, it becomes un 
 healthy. In religion, as in life, autumn is wanted to 
 check disease, and winter to kill its germs more com 
 pletely and to brace our systems to a higher health. 
 Warm seasons of feeling, and even hotter days of 
 fervor, are helpful to religious growth ; but, if too 
 long, they weaken us, and breed fevers in our souls 
 and all sorts of spiritual epidemics in society. The 
 emotional needs to be followed by an intellectual 
 revival, excitement by cool criticism, and fervor by a 
 touch of frost, to check the fevers that summer has 
 started. Warm feeling is indispensable for softening 
 us, but so are the cooling breezes of free thought fof 
 bracing us up. Revival-meetings are good in their 
 place, but so are science and skepticism in theirs. In 
 religion, as in the calendar, spring and fall are alike 
 natural and necessary ; and January is just as divine 
 as June. 
 
 So it has proved in history. The medieval mid 
 summer of devotion and zeal, however serviceable to 
 religion, was no more so than the subsequent Novem 
 ber season of skepticism. For zeal, like the fire
 
 THE NEW YEAR OF RELIGION 317 
 
 which typifies it, though a most blessed thing, needs 
 most of all things to be wisely controlled, or it will 
 burn us up. Indeed, that old Church zeal did burn 
 altogether too much. It set hearts on fire, not only 
 with love for their own doctrines, but with hate for 
 all others. It made men eager to burn, not only the 
 hated doctrines, but the people who held them. And 
 it would have gone on burning, had not criticism come, 
 like autumnal rains, to put out .the fires. Those 
 eighteenth-century skeptics who so chilled Church 
 zeal by their free use of reason and ridicule, by that 
 same process put an end to intolerances and inhuman 
 ities which the Church had allowed for centuries, and 
 some of which it had established. Even Voltaire did 
 so good a work in this way that Lecky said he had 
 done " more to destroy the greatest of human curses 
 than any other of the sons of men." So Lowell said 
 of him, " We owe half our freedom now to the leering 
 old mocker." Even Professor Jowett, as twice re 
 corded in his biography, said, " Voltaire has done more 
 good than all the Fathers of the Church put together." 
 In view of all that skepticism has done to overthrow 
 intolerance and bring a larger charity, we ought not 
 to complain of its low temperature, but give thanks 
 for the winter, too, however much it may have weak 
 ened the religious life.
 
 318 THE NEW YEAR OF RELIGION 
 
 Nor has it weakened the real religious life, but 
 proved its permanence and power. Even vegetable 
 life is not lost in winter, but only withdrawn from the 
 surface to show its endurance better than in other sea 
 sons. The leaves fostered by the June sun are no such 
 proof of vitality as are the little buds safely facing 
 the December storms. The fruits swelling in the 
 summer days are no such proof as are the minute seeds 
 blown about for months amid the snows, or locked in 
 frozen soil, but only to start again into new shoots. 
 It is the winter rather than the summer that tells the 
 strength of vegetable life. 
 
 In like manner the religious life is shown better in 
 its critical January than in its credulous June. Relig 
 ion flowering in churches and fruiting in deeds of 
 devotion, when its midsummer faith forced it into 
 activity, did not begin to show its strength so well as 
 when though stripped of its old forms and faith 
 it still kept its real life of righteousness and love. 
 It would seem easy for men to be saints when they 
 had those medieval fears and hopes to help them. 
 But were they any more saintly than the skeptics 
 themselves ? Contrasting the two, Macaulay says, 
 " On one side was a Church boasting of the purity of 
 a doctrine derived from the apostles, but disgraced by 
 the massacre of Saint Bartholomew : on the other
 
 THE NEW YEAR OF RELIGION 319 
 
 side was a sect laughing at the Scriptures, shooting 
 out the tongue at the sacraments, but ready to en 
 counter principalities and powers in the cause of 
 justice, mercy, and toleration." In these essential 
 things the skeptics appeared the more religious of 
 the two. And, since then, how many men called 
 infidels have still been leading saintly lives, unhelped 
 by the forms or faith of the Church ; fighting 
 wrong, not from fear of hell, but because it was 
 wrong ; doing right, not from hope of heaven, but 
 because it was right ; living the real religion of right 
 eousness ! If religion means "to do justly and to love 
 mercy," to help others " in their affliction, and to keep 
 oneself unspotted from the world," then it has counted 
 many of its best saints among men who have dropped 
 old liturgies and beliefs. The falling of these leaves 
 has only shown how deeply the real religion was 
 rooted. The winter has not harmed, but proved, the 
 religious life. 
 
 It will even lead to an increase of that life, just 
 as the annual winter is the passage to a larger growth. 
 As at the base of every fallen leaf lies a bud waiting 
 to grow into a new branch ; so beneath every fallen 
 doctrine lay a truth waiting to unfold into larger doc 
 trines. This is already seen, and everywhere wise 
 preachers are proclaiming a larger faith. Mr. Savage s
 
 320 THE NEW YEAR OF RELIGION 
 
 famous sermon, "What o clock is it in Religion?" 
 well shows how the old ideas of the universe and man 
 and God are giving way to better, and concludes that 
 it is the morning of a new day. Changing the figure, 
 we would say that it is the beginning of a new relig 
 ious year, which shall see, not merely the coming 
 of new light, but growth of life. In religion, as 
 in the January sky, the sun is starting for a new 
 summer. 
 
 It has indeed long since started, and made much 
 advance from its solstice. That lowest solstice in 
 religion was reached more than a hundred years ago, 
 and since then the whole tendency has changed. 
 Toward the close of the eighteenth century, intel 
 lectual men were wont to glory in the name " infidel " 
 and even "atheist." In a company of eighteen dis 
 tinguished men at Baron d Holbach s dinner in Paris, 
 when one said he doubted if any thinker could seriously 
 call himself an atheist, the host replied: "My dear 
 sir, you are now sitting at table with seventeen such." 
 It was often said an honest man must be either an 
 atheist or a fool. Even a deist was defined as " a man 
 who has not lived long enough to become an atheist." 
 Macaulay says " it was as necessary to the charac 
 ter of an accomplished man that he should despise 
 the religion of his country as that he should know
 
 THE NEW YEAR OF RELIGION 321 
 
 his letters." Such was the condition in much of 
 Christendom. Then was the December solstice of 
 religion. 
 
 But since then religion has been rising and return 
 ing, like the January sun. Nor has it been rising 
 merely to repeat a former season, but for the larger 
 life of a new one. The signs of this growth are 
 already seen in the broader thoughts on all subjects. 
 Ideas of Nature have enlarged ; and, instead of a little 
 world made in a week, we see an infinite creation fill 
 ing all time. Ideas of man have changed ; and, instead 
 of his fatal fall and almost universal perdition, we see 
 his rise, proving his worth and promise. Ideas of God 
 have enlarged ; and, instead of a limited person with 
 human passions and partiality, we see a far diviner 
 Power pervading all nations and Nature. Ideas of 
 Providence have broadened ; and, instead of occasional 
 miracles to help a few men, we see the infinite miracle 
 of universal laws forever helping all. Old ideas of 
 inspiration have widened ; and, instead of a few ancient 
 prophets and one sacred book, we see the same inspira 
 tion working everywhere through human reason and 
 conscience, making all good literature and lives an 
 unending Revelation. Old ideas of Christianity have 
 enlarged ; and we see that the goodness which was 
 divine in Jesus is just as divine wherever found, and
 
 322 THE NEW YEAR OF RELIGION 
 
 that the incarnation has been shown in innumerable 
 men, since every one " that dwelleth in love dwelleth 
 in God, and God in him." 
 
 This larger faith does indeed bring a new day in 
 religion, and outshines the old doctrines as sunrise 
 does the morning star. But it comes more like a new 
 year, to bring life as well as light, to melt old animos 
 ities in a larger charity, and to warm souls to a higher 
 growth. We may not yet feel its warmth. Like the 
 January sun, it still lies low in the sky, not yet shed 
 ding heat in our hearts, but only shining on our minds 
 with wintry rays. But, like that, it will rise ever 
 higher, until we not only see its splendor, but feel its 
 warmth. It will become not merely a truth convinc 
 ing the intellect, but a feeling kindling the soul. 
 Winter will yield to spring ; and the thoughts that 
 only sparkle now, like snow in the sun, will warm 
 and rise and flow in the circulation and life of a new 
 summer. 
 
 But that summer is still far away, and will be slow 
 in coming. Doubtless much cold weather is yet await 
 ing us. Hence the practical question is what to do 
 with it. Most animals avoid the winter, some migrat 
 ing to warmer climes, some seeking holes in which to 
 hibernate. But man faces it out, and often makes it
 
 THE NEW YEAR OF RELIGION 323 
 
 the busiest and best season of the year. So, in relig 
 ion, some souls, frightened by the wintry temperature 
 of thought, migrate to more tropical churches ; while 
 some retire from religious life altogether, and, like the 
 gophers, settle into a state of hibernation and spiritual 
 torpor, without even any hope of coming out of it. 
 But manlier souls say, " We will face the winter out, 
 and make the best of it, doing what we can to keep 
 ourselves and others warm." 
 
 But how shall this be done ? Some would war 
 against the cold. It seems such a positive force, 
 bursting vessels, killing men, covering lakes with ice, 
 creating glaciers that carve the very mountains and 
 carry them over the continents. But the physicists 
 tell us it is not positive at all, a mere negation, a 
 minus quantity. Heat is the positive thing, and cold 
 is only the absence of it. Of course, this seems a 
 useless distinction ; for a freezing man finds no com 
 fort in the thought that he is being killed by a mere 
 negation. Still, the distinction has some practical 
 value. For, cold being a nothing, we learn to waste 
 no time warring against it, but simply to seek heat. 
 So in religion we need wage no war either with neg 
 ative indifference, or with empty dogmas and hollow 
 forms. A hole in the lawn is removed, not by trying 
 to cart it away, but by filling it up. The religious
 
 324 THE NEW YEAR OF RELIGION 
 
 cold is a void to be filled, and all that we need is to 
 bring the warmth. 
 
 But how shall we get it ? The true way would seem 
 to be to go nearer to the sun, and to the truth which 
 it symbolizes. But, practically, this method does not 
 succeed. We climb a mountain toward the sun only 
 to grow colder, and shiver on its summit, while people 
 a mile below are broiling. The aeronaut soars still 
 higher, only to freeze. If our heat does come from 
 the sun, we get it reflected from the earth and bathing 
 us in the lower air. So spiritual warmth is found, 
 not by philosophers climbing the mountain-heights of 
 thought or soaring upward in search of truth, but by 
 the people who keep close to the interests of earthly 
 life. If it does come from above, it reaches us through 
 human hearts ; and those living in the humblest val 
 leys get most of it. The sparkling peaks of specula 
 tion look beautiful from below, but are icy and slippery 
 when reached, not a pleasant place to live. Relig 
 ious warmth comes not by climbing the heights of 
 truth, but by keeping close to human life and human 
 hearts. 
 
 We are near enough to truth at any time, and only 
 need to keep the right attitude toward it. Winter is 
 just the season when we are nearest the sun, they 
 say ; but we are cold because our zone has turned
 
 THE NEW YEAR OF RELIGION 325 
 
 its face away from him. We are some three millions 
 of miles further from him in summer ; yet have 
 grown warm by facing him more directly. So in the 
 wintry period of criticism, we are nearer the truth than 
 at any other time ; but we miss its warmth because 
 we are searching it with the intellect rather than turn 
 ing hearts and lives toward it with devotion. It is not 
 the nearness, but the devoted attitude, that brings 
 summer to the soul. And if we would take that atti 
 tude to-day, it would add warmth to the religious 
 winter, just as even January becomes quite com 
 fortable on the southern slope of a hill. 
 
 But even on that slope a house is needed. So, 
 in the religious winter, people need the shelter of 
 association and organization. Liberal people need it 
 more than others, since they live in higher altitudes. 
 Strong souls may indeed go without such help ; and 
 Emerson reminds us that Milton, the most religious 
 man of his time, attended no church. But most 
 people who try such independence lose by it, like 
 the hermit who spends the winter in the wilderness. 
 Among those who are living without the help of asso 
 ciation, many seem to have caught cold from the 
 exposure and to be far gone in spiritual consumption. 
 It is good to have church homes. It is good to warm 
 them with something besides our own natural heat.
 
 326 THE NEW YEAR OF RELIGION 
 
 Just as we warm our houses by the wood that grew 
 in former summers, or the coal from still more torrid 
 ages ; so we need to warm our hearts, not merely 
 by our own thoughts and feelings, but also by those 
 from more zealous times, preserved in devotional liter 
 ature. Of course this artificial method of heating is 
 liable to abuses. Some churches mine from Scripture 
 a rather bituminous fuel, and do not use sufficient 
 draft of thought to consume it thoroughly, but worship 
 in too sulphurous an atmosphere. Some prefer very 
 light fuel, so that their fire roars lustily for a time, 
 nearly burning them up, and then goes out, perhaps 
 leaving the weaker souls to take cold. Liberal sects 
 are apt to go to the other extreme. They affect the 
 solid anthracite of truth, shun sensational kindlings, 
 try to strike fire from philosophic flint with the steel 
 of intellect, hence seldom get too much heat, and 
 generally not half enough. They have not even the 
 furnace of a common faith, but, in their freedom of 
 thought, bring each his own individual belief, as 
 our grandmothers brought their foot-stoves. 
 
 But like the latter, they find help even in coming 
 together. For feeling and thought, like warmth and 
 light, are increased by sharing. Sentiments and ideas, 
 unlike dollars, are still retained while given away ; 
 so that, when men unite, each keeps his own and gains
 
 THE NEW YEAR OF RELIGION 327 
 
 the others , just as when they bring their lamps to 
 gether. They even arouse each other ; as in Carlyle s 
 figure of the coals of fire, which soon go out when 
 separated, but burst into a flame when put together. 
 Souls, when isolated, grow dull and die ; so that the 
 sagacious sailor said to Lowell, "Without society a 
 man does not know half the time whether he is 
 alive or not." But by union they keep alive and 
 kindle each other to a higher life. The proverb says, 
 When hand grasps hand, one and one are more than 
 two. In the arithmetic of hearts, 2 -\- 2 = 5, and 
 3X5= 20. The meeting multiplies the power of 
 its members, of the speaker also, if there be one. 
 The preacher of the story thanked the Lord that he 
 had a large audience, since he did not have talent 
 enough to satisfy a small one. By association we 
 help each other, help the cause, help ourselves, save 
 ourselves. For we can still keep the old phrase and 
 say that, by uniting with the church, we "save our 
 souls " ; save them not from foolish flames and fears, 
 but from the death of indifference, and to that higher 
 life which comes only by helping each other and unit 
 ing in a common cause. 
 
 But with association must of course go work, to 
 keep a healthy warmth. Heat is "a mode of motion," 
 and is produced by motion. Whatever our church
 
 328 THE NEW YEAR OF RELIGION 
 
 shelter, we must keep moving, and be warmed by our 
 own activity. The doctors tell us not to sit by the 
 fire too much, but to use good food, take abundant 
 exercise, and carry our own heat within us. Religion 
 must not breathe the close air of a sect, sit around the 
 church stove or depend on the pulpit for warmth, but 
 have abundant work, and do it. The wood-chopper 
 cares little for fire, so long as he has good food and 
 swings his axe. If we will take proper spiritual diet, 
 not mere sentimental soup or theologic crusts, but 
 the varied food of truth which fills the world ; if we 
 will take healthy exercise in the open air of life, and 
 be active in good works ; we shall not feel the cold, 
 but shall gain an inner warmth that can endure any 
 weather. 
 
 Of course, we cannot get it without sacrifice. That 
 is the lesson of heat. No physical warmth without 
 consuming something, whether fuel in the furnace or 
 food in the body. No spiritual warmth without con 
 suming ourselves, " Whosoever shall seek to save 
 his life shall lose it, and whosoever shall lose his life 
 shall preserve it." Spiritual life comes only by sacri 
 fice. Remembering this, we can keep warm through 
 the winter of the new religious year, and find it the 
 healthiest season of all.
 
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