Ethi F^ELIGION W. /n, 5al,T!':k GIFT or Professor O. R, Noyes (^ i L^^-^ Ethical Religion. BY WILLIAM MACKINTIRE SALTER. r BOSTON: ROBERTS BROTHERS. 1889. -^^v^'^'^ s^ Copyright, 1889, By William Mackintire Salter. ovke^ i'" 't * 1-^ t ,^ ^ ' < ' • • » V * t "1 John Wilson and Son, Cambridge.
men, but simply men so far as actuated hy business motives. It is a principle I have in mind, — a principle contradic- tory to the principle of the social ideal. Sometimes one may hear the commercial estimate of workmen expressed in the most outspoken and un- hesitating manner. " Will any business man,'' said the president of a horse-car company, in Boston, a few years ago, "tell me the difference between buy- ing labor and buying hay, grain, horses, and other supplies ? " And I think the answer must be given that there is no diiference, from the purely business standpoint. If the employer has only his own ends in view, what difference can it make to him what the means are by which the ends are reached ? A ma- chine in a factory is just as good as a man, perhaps as a dozen men, viewed merely as so much muscular force and skill ; and the purely business manufacturer will have machines just as fast as he can get them, for in fact they require no wages at all. He may use machines, and the finer and more ingenious they are the better ; and he may treat them as he likes. He may make fire, wind, steam, water, all the forces of Nature, his servants. Yes, he may harness the beasts of the field, and make them to do his bidding ; for I join in that old sentiment of human dignity which finds all that is not moral and rational to be rightfully tributary to man. But when he touches THE SOCIAL IDEAL. 137 another human being this whole order of subordi- nation ceases, and he dares not, — in the name of the Highest Law, I say it, he dares not, — make him a mere tool or servant for himself. Eather must he say, " Together we stand, together we win whatever recompense for our toil we do win ; and though I, as the leader in the enterprise, have the right to the leader's honor, and to the leader's share of the recom- pense ; and though, as I undertake the task, you must submit to my directions, and not I to yours, — you are my fellow-soldier, and not a hireling; I am, at best, your captain, not your master, in the march of industry." The solution of the industrial problem, — the aboli- tion of all poverty that is not in itself dishonorable, the lifting of the laboring classes to the full dignity and worth of freemen, the granting to all at least the means and the opportunity for true and noble lives, — is after all a very simple thing: a simple thing, I say, though it has not been achieved in the centuries of the past, and though it should not be achieved, alas ! for many centuries to come. It is not by combinations of labor (though these are necessary and justifiable in the present distress), for this is but matching selfish- ness against selfishness, class against class ; it is not by government assistance to labor, it is not by any species of legislation, though these may both serve in their way ; it is not by profuse charity, which often injures those who receive, and by no means always blesses those who give, as the very means for charity are often won by headlong selfishness and wrong. It is a much simpler and a much more radical remedy than any of these. It is in the reception of a new 138 ETHICAL RELIGION. principle into the hearts of men; it is in taking the law of the social ideal and making it the law of busi- ness itself ; it is in treating every man in our employ not as a tool, but as a man, and giving him the means to realize the ends of a man ; it is in knowing no profit that we do not, in some measure, make common with him. There are still other and closer bearings of the social ideal on our lives. I can only hint at them. We stand in the relation to one another of husbands and wives, of parents and children. Here, too, the instincts of self-assertion have had free play in the past ; and the notion is but dawning upon us that the wife is not rightfully the servant of her husband, nor are the children merely means for the parents' ends. Though the sphere of the wife may be different, it is an equal sphere to that of her husband. As has been said,^ she is not a satellite, but a twin star with him. And the children, — though their weakness exposes them to mistreatment, all the more sacred is the obligation to bear in mind the manhood and the womanhood that are developing in them, to make them independent ends of our action and our love. But though the bearings of the principle here are being increasingly recognized, are there no others in our homes whom we still incline to regard as means merely to our own ends ? Yes, there are those in our houses, if not our homes, whom we distinctly indicate by the title " servants." Do you say. Ah, but they are not ours ; they are merely waiting on us ; we support them, and we support them amply, and they are in- deed incidentally getting a valuable training with us 1 By Professor Adler. THE SOCIAL IDEAL. 139 that will be of use to them in the future ? I grant all this. I know they are not slaves ; I know they may be kindly treated ; I know, on their side, they may be satisfied with what they have and get. But I ask, Are we satisfied ? Are they not human beings ; have they not the ends of human beings, and can we rest till we concede them these ends ? Can we rest short of a universal application of this law of the social ideal ? I confess that I want no one to be iny " ser- vant," in the ordinary, one-sided use of that term. The consciousness that any one is, does not at all elate me. I like not these fawning airs, these humble looks, this punctiliousness and obsequiousness. They do not become man, or woman either ; they humble me, as if I were guilty of them myself. I want no service that I do not return. I feel that if I do not honor another I do not honor myself, for I funda- mentally am every other : it is one common nature, wherein we all share. I am lifted with every honor, and cast down with every shame, that comes to an- other child of man. Am I asked, What, then, are to be the forms of our domestic life ? I answer, I have no thought of forms, I have no thought even of the destruction of the present forms. I ask only for the admission of a principle into men's hearts ; I only ask that it be trusted, and allowed to modify and fashion, or destroy and recreate, as it will. Though I have traversed much ground, I have done so only to illustrate the compass and sweep of a prin- ciple. And though I have not sought to picture the social ideal, but only to indicate its principle, and test the present order of our life by it, yet if we can im- 140 ETHICAL RELIGION. agine the State, and the intercourse of the States, transfigured by it; if we can imagine business and industry transformed under its hallowing influence ; if we can see our homes, and our relationship to the humblest, lit up and glorified by the free acceptance of it, — we can, to the inward eye at least, dimly pre- figure what the answering reality would be. I deem it not too great a thought for the humblest man. The humblest man has that in him which will respond to it ; the loneliest man may yet cherish those feelings and purposes which would fit him for membership in the ideal society ; the poorest man may find existence for a moment rich in the contemplation of it; the sick man may find in it " medicine for sickness ; '' the dying man may feel himself growing eternal in the thought of it. For the issues of every individual existence are there; our spirits live or die, as they rise to its demands. It is, I believe, no merel}^ human ideal, but a world-ideal, and the world-purpose is quick to own those who cleave to it. Eeligion has been described by Professor Adler as the "homesickness of the soul." In truth, it is so. There is something in us which tells us that we do not belong to a realm of jarring discords, of clashing interests, of selfish triumphs. We have another coun- try. The home of the soul is — I know not where ; it is not here. We belong to peace ; we belong to love; we belong to all that is covered by the sacred name of the Good. Where are those who will assert these high belongings, and by their surrender to sovereign principle, by the sanctity with which they envelop every human being, by the new order of their lives and the peace of their spirits, prove that even here on THE SOCIAL IDEAL. 141 the earth they are connected with " realms that know not earthly day " ? The trouble with the established religion is, that it has ceased to stand for ideal convictions. The churches are friends of the established order. Mo- rality has become a tradition. Little is now said to shame men, and to contradict their lives and the or- der of society with an ideal of what these should be. Who will once more lift up the standard of absolute righteousness ? Who will strip morality of its con- ventional expressions, and rebuke sins that now go unrebuked, and make demands upon men that now they do not dream of ? They who do, who see the infinite element in morality, who identify religion with justice, and make the law of the Highest the law for all life, — they will be the heralds, the prophets, of the Religion of the Future. VIII. THE RIGHTS OF LABOR. NOTHING is plainer at the present day than that the feelings of men are strongly stirred on the Labor question. In the discussion of it there is apt to be more heat than light. Those who do not range themselves on one side or the other are liable to be harshly handled. Men who cannot subscribe to the orthodox political economy are berated as sentimental- ists. On the other hand, I have heard it urged that the time is gone by for discussion when men are suf- fering, and women and children are starving; there must be action, it was said, — and action was identi- fied with using violence against capitalists and the civil authorities ! There is no sane man who does not believe in action in regard to this mf^tter ; but the question is, how to act, — with reason or without it ? One might better fold his arms and do nothing, than to take such action as would make ten starving men where there is now one. We need more reason, more consideration, more humanity all around in deal- ing with the great problems of society. We should try to do equal justice to varying points of view. I hardly know of a more striking instance of the lack of this ethical spirit than the claim sometimes made for workingmen that they are the producers of all wealth, and hence that the wealth of the commu- THE RIGHTS OF LABOR. 143 nity belongs to them. Aggressive as what is called "capital" sometimes is, it never makes so sweeping a claim as this for itself. Let me illustrate. Suppose a workingman has saved enough to pay for the erec- tion of a modest dwelling. He must himself continue to work, however, and therefore he hires other per- sons to excavate the cellar and lay the foundations and build the house. Let us suppose that these hired men do all the work, — that not a shovelful of earth is thrown by the man himself, or a stone or brick laid or a nail driven by him. The hired men build the house : do they therefore own it ? I cannot imagine any one seriously saying so. Yet it would be just as true to say so as to say that because workingmen have built the railroads of the country, therefore they own them ; or because they have done all the physi- cal work in manufacturing boots and shoes, or cotton cloths, or reaping-machines, therefore the total pro- duct is their rightful property. Any one who will re- flect for a moment will see that in most cases there are three factors in business enterprise : first, the labor ; second, the direction and superintendence of the la- bor; and third, the providing of the materials on which the labor expends itself, and perhaps the shelter under which the labor is performed, and the machinery or tools by means of which it works. All these factors may be united in the same hands. Labor may super- intend itself, and find the market for its own products ; it may own its own materials, its tools or machinery, and the necessary shelter. This is the case in all strictly co-operative enterprises. There is absolutely nothing in our laws or customs, or in the accepted teachings of political economy, to hinder all industry 144 ETHICAL RELIGIONv being organized in this manner, — thus doing away with all necessity for separate employers and capi- talists. Under such circumstances labor would have, and would be entitled to have, the total value of its product to itself. Not a cent of profits or of interest would have to be paid ; all that is ordinarily called profits and interest would then be a part of labor's reward. Moreover, since profits, interest, and wages would in such a case all go to the same persons, such co-operative enterprises could afford to work for lower profits and interest than can business enterprises as ordinarily conducted at present, and could successful- ly compete with them. Why, then, is industry not so organized at present ? It is in a few cases : why not in all ? The answer is apparent. The hindrances are not external, but internal. Labor is not ordinarily able to superintend itself, and to find the market for its products. It does not ordinarily own the mate- rials on which it must work, nor the machinery nor the shelter it stands in need of. Some one else must supply these desiderata. Instead of one person or set of persons doing all, two, and often three, sets of persons are necessary. The workman, the employer, and the capitalist often join hands together and be- come partners in a common enterprise. No one of them would be employed unless he were needed ; and, in simple equity, each one is entitled to some recom- pense for his services. It is preposterous, it does violence to every sentiment of right, to say that the whole product belongs to the workmen, when the em- ployer and the capitalist are equally necessary factors in the enterprise. The rights of labor do not, then, involve the ordi- THE RIGHTS OF LABOR. 145 nary socialistic claim. The legitimate demand of labor is simply that it shall have a fair share of what it helps to produce. I do not say a fair share of what it produces, for it is entitled to all it produces ; l)ut in the complex system of modern industry labor is but a factor, and so I say a fair share of what it helps to produce. When a shoemaker makes a pair of shoes in his own shop, out of his own material and with his own tools, he is entitled to the whole value of the shoes ; but when he works in a factory which is not his, with leather and machinery that some one else has provided, it would he simple rob- bery for him to claim the entire value of the pair of shoes for himself. A fair share of w^hat the work- ingmen help to produce, — this is all that in equity they can ask for. But do they not have a fair share now ? I do not think they do ; and here, to my mind, lies the real gist of the labor question. T am far from wishing to bring any railing accusations against employers or against society. Every one as he grows in years, if he gains new points of view at the same time, must feel increasingly how deep and wide and many-sided the labor question is. Almost always we incline to leave some factor out of the account, not because w^e mean to do so, but because our minds are not able to take account of everything at once. I do not forget, for example, that workingmen cannot have more out of the wealth they help to create than that wealth amounts to. Workingmen are all too apt to think that if they are busy at work, money is being made somewhere, and probably a great deal of it ; they are apt to think that their employers, simply because 10 146 ETHICAL RELIGION. they are employers, are making profits, and most like- ly large profits. But this by no means follows. 'No one goes into business for himself without the hope of profits ; but that many do not realize this hope to any great extent is shown by the fact that after a time they go out of business no better oft", and per- haps worse off, than when they went in. What does the large per cent of failures in the business world mean but that in these cases no profits at all have been realized? Ninety per cent and more of busi- ness enterprises, it is said, so fail. It is impossible to speak of the rights of labor to higher remunera- tion in a business that is barely paying its way, and may at any time be obliged to suspend ; the enforced claim to higher remuneration in such a case might cause a suspension. Two years ago I read of a strike for higher wages among the compositors of a New Jersey newspaper. The paper was not a success, and the proprietor showed his books to the working- men ; he even offered to give the paper over into their hands for three months, they to receive all the profits. They refused the offer, and insisted on their terms, and the second day the paper ceased to appear.^ It is plain that the compositors had no idea of the em- barrassments of their employer, and that they did as much injury to themselves as to him by their fool- ish conduct. I know a printer in Chicago who says he w^ould be glad to make as much as his foreman. It is difficult to get statistics bearing on this point, but the Massachusetts Labor Bureau Report of 1883 showed that while some business enterprises in that State were making large profits, thirty-two per cent A See The Nation. May 6, 1886. THE RIGHTS OF LABOR. 147 out of 2440, in regard to which information was ob- tained, made none at all, the value of the product being only sufficient to meet the running expenses and to pay the current rate of interest on the capital invested. Where an employer is making no profits, how can his workmen expect to have higher wages than those they actually receive ? It is, in truth, a superstition to suppose that wages can be raised to any extent, provided the workingmen are only suffi- ciently united and determined therefor. Wages must stop considerably short of the value of the articles produced, — that is, enough short to give fair compen- sation to the employer for his oversight and direction, and to the capitalist for the use of his capital. But because there are limits beyond which the re- turns to the workingmen cannot go, it by no means follows that the ordinary returns to workingmen at present are fair and just. What determines the rate of wages ? At first sight it may seem as if it were the worth of the service rendered. It is certainly true that as a rule skilled labor is more highly paid than unskilled ; but if we go a little deeper, and ask the reason why, it is not hard to discover that skilled labor is paid more highly, not because it is skilled, but because it is rare. In what branch of work is more mind required than in teaching in our schools ? What service ranks higher in relation to the welfare of the community ? Who exercise more power for good or for ill than those who are giving the first lessons in knowledge and virtue to our children and youth ? Why, then, are our teachers so poorly re- warded ? The only answer is, to put it bluntly, be- cause there are so many of them, — at least, so many 148 ETHICAL RELIGION. ready to be teachers. And why are teachers who are women paid less than teachers who are men, though they may be just as capable, though they may even take the same places that men have occupied ? Be- cause there are so many more women ready to be teachers than there are men. In other words, it is not the worth or dignity or intellectual character of the services rendered, but the number of those who are ready to render them, that determines their price. In technical language, it is supply and demand. If skilled labor, through trade-schools or the incorpora- tion of manual training into the public schools, should become more common than it now is, there is hardly a doubt, other conditions remaining the same, that it would command less high wages than it now does. I say not a word against manual training, and believe in it as much as any one can ; I simply note what I think would be the fact. If skilled labor should be- come as common as unskilled labor now is, its wages would be just as low. When the value of a thing is regulated by supply and demand, in proportion as it is common it is cheap. Now, there can be no objection to this so far as the value of commodities in general is concerned. Air is so free now, so cheap, that it costs nothing at all : no one would wish it to be different. Water is al- most as cheap ; and commodities in general — shoes, hats, clothing of every description — can hardly be too abundant and too cheap. But when we come to human life, every one with a heart feels as by instinct that the problem changes. All these commodities ex- ist for man ; air, water, and the very earth we value according to their power to serve him, and to con- THE RIGHTS OF LABOR. 149 tribute to his happiness. Other things exist for man, but man exists for himself ; we feel it to be a kind of degradation, a kind of profanation of the highest and holiest we know, to turn liim too into a commod- ity, and treat him as we would a garment which one wears or the food which one eats. Yet human labor is indistinguishable from human life ; it is the means by which in most cases life is supported. That labor shall be cheap means that life shall be miserable. It means less food and poorer ; it means scantier cloth- ing ; it means less opportunities for the mind ; and if not necessarily, yet all too naturally, it means in- creased temptation to dissipation, to vice and shame. We want commodities cheap for man's sake ; but for whose sake, in Heaven's name, will you make man himself cheap ? The fact is that man is never made cheap save that some other man, who ought to be his brother, may get rich off his labor. Man is never made merchandise of save that somebody may make money out of him. Oh, the shame of it, that we who are brothers to one another, and should hold one an- other in honor and seek one another's good, should not hesitate to use one another and make profit out of one another, and gain for ourselves by making our brother lose, — yes, perhaps by beating hira down to the very dust ! For this is what the law of suppl}'- and demand often involves when men apply it in their dealings with one another. It means that the many shall be sacrificed to the few. It means that the few capable of leading in business enterprises shall have great re- turns for their services, — shall have great returns sim- ply because they are few, — and that the many, who perform the physical labor and are just as necessary 150 ETHICAL RELIGION. as the few, shall have small and often pitiful returns. It means that the few shall buy out the many ; and because the many are many, and eacli must have bread and covering for his back, they crowd against one another, each in his anxiety making a lower bid than the other, — and the result is that those who make the lowest bid, other things being equal, succeed in get- ting the employment, and wages as a rule tend to the lowest point that men will consent to live upon. The employers gain by this process, and perhaps also so- ciety, so far as it is not made up of working-people ; but the laborers, I hold, are wronged. It is this sense of wrong, that gives rise to socialistic and anarchistic agitation, though the wrong may often be exaggerated and so give plausible occasion on the other side to a denial that any wrongs exist. Any one is wronged who has an honest service to render to society, which society needs, and is yet beaten down by competi- tion to take returns for it that will barely hold soul and body together. Competition is good within lim- its. There may be services that are held too high ; competition is good to bring them down to something normal and reasonable. There are many places in our industrial system where not less, but more, competi- tion is needed. But competition, when it pauperizes people, when it leads men to struggle against one another for the very chance to live, is worse than useless, — it is a curse. Competition at the best can never be more than a maxim, a rule of expediency ; it can never be a principle in a true political econ- omy. For principles we must look to morality, to the sentiments of justice and equity, which are as rightfully sovereign in industry as they are in law, THE RIGHTS OF LABOR. 151 in government, in religion, in every department of human life. I have stated my conviction that labor as a rule does not get a fair share of the wealth it helps to produce ; further, why this must be the case so long as Nature endows mankind more lavishly with mus- cular than with mental force, and those with the supe- rior capacity are not restrained in their dealings with workingmen by moral principle. I hardly need cite statistics and facts. Labor is slightly better off in solid and successful business enterprises than it is in those which are struggling to live ; but it is not, as a rule, better off to anything like the extent to w^hich the enterprises are successful. Successful enterprises pay the market rate of wages and salaries about as others do ; and, indeed, any other course would be deemed unbusiness-like. To pay more than is neces- sary to get a certain service done is deemed contrary to business principles. The employer buys the cheap- est labor (other things being equal) just as he buys the cheapest raw material (provided it is equally good), and just as he borrows capital at the lowest rates. An industrial system of this sort is bound to create poverty among the mass of men. Mr. Edward Atkin- son has recently made an interesting analysis of the cost of running an average New England cotton-mill.^ His object is to show how slight a margin of profit enters into the selling price of each yard of manufac- tured cloth. The profit, he says, is only one third of a cent in a yard' that sells for 6^ cents. The number of working-people in the mill he puts at 950, working on the average for $300 a year each. The largest 1 The Margin of Profits. G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1887. 152 .- ETHICAL RELIGION. item in the expenses of the inilly next to that of the raw cotton, is that of wages, — $285,000 in all. The profit of the three mill-owners, over and above all ex- penses, insurance, taxes, and a liberal allowance for depreciation of the mill, he estimates at $60,000, or $20,000 each. I have pondered much over these fig- ures. Out of this $60,000 profits^ he supposes that $22,000, or a little over a third, may be wasted " on fast horses, champagne, fancy farms, and that sort of thing." A good part of the remainder, he conjec- tures, will be turned into fresh capital. Who will say that this is a fair division of the product of the mill among those who joined to produce it ? — a little less than a quarter as much for the three owners as for all the 950 men, women, and children employed put together ! Or, to put it differently, one owner has sixty-six times as much as one of his employees ! I advocate no socialism ; I recognize the rights of the owners ; I admit they do much more than any of their employees, and are entitled to a much greater reward ; but sixty-six times greater — it is impossi- ble ! It ca.nnot be denied that the owners might have made their employees partners in their prosperity, as they were partners in the labor of production, with- out any sensible loss to themselves. According to Mr. Atkinson's supposition, the owners could scarcely spend their income save by resorting to *-fast horses, champagne, fancy farms, and that sort of thing." For my part, I cannot rid myself of the feeling that of a good part of this $22,000 spent in so questionable 1 The term is loosely used by Mr. Atkinson, no doubt; techni- cally it would be divided into interest on capital, wages of super- intendence, and "profits," strictly so called. THE RIGHTS OF LABOR. 153 a manner the workingmen and women and children of the mill were despoiled ; that it was wrung from them simply because they were not in a position to demand it. I cannot rid myself of the feeling that these owners were fattening on the toil and blood of others as effectually as if they had been their slaves. "It was written in the bond," do you say ? Oh, yes ! the lives and liberties of slaves have been signed away *'in the bond." But such bonds do not stand; before the white bar of justice they have not the weight of the paper they are written on, or of the cubic inches of air consumed in consenting to them. Free contract ? There is no free contract when on the one side is ability to live at one's leisure, and on the other no bread in the house unless work is instantly obtained. Speaking in a large way, and making full allowance for the business enterprises that fail or that barely make their way, it is doubtful if labor has its rights in this country or in any other. Wherever self-interest has had its way unhindered by higher scruples, labor has almost always been imposed upon. In most ages of the world labor has been enslaved and virtually denied to have any rights which its owner was bound to re- spect. Where not literally enslaved it has been treated as an attachment to the soil, and sold as if a part of it. And though the workingman in modern civilized countries is rarely either a slave or a serf, he is at the mercy of the market, and may sometimes be purchased as cheaply as in the days of slavery or serfdom, if not more so. The abolition of slavery, it is said, is no longer regretted at the South ; and a remark made to me not long ago by a Southern gentleman suggests a 154 ETHICAL RELIGION. reason why. He said in substance that the free negro was, after all, cheaper than the slave, since formerly the master was obliged to care for his slave all the year round, and to provide food and shelter for him in old age, while now wages have only to be paid to the negro while he is at work, and during slack times or in old age he may be left to his own resources. How little do we seem sometimes to have advanced on the days of Homer, one thousand years before Christ, when the type of the abjectest misery was not the slave, but the free laborer ! ^ We have a better thought of the laborer now, but we have not created for him a much better condition; and it is the contrast between our thoughts — which are coming to be his thoughts too — and his condition wliich makes " the rub," the sore and grievous problem of the present time. The laborer feels himself a man, but he is still treated like a thing, a commodity. He believes in brotherhood, or at least he hears of it ; but he fails to experience it. The only brotherhood he knows any- thing of is that of the " Union," and the only thing beyond that which is apt to seem practicable to him is the brotherhood of all workers against the forces arrayed to keep them down.^ What can be done ? First, we can hold fast to our thoughts as to how labor should be treated. This of itself is a great thing, — not to succumb, not to give 1 Cf. Odyssey, xi. 489, and Gladstone's comment thereon in " Studies on Homer," iii. 74. 2 Cf. Adam Smith (Wealth of Nations, ii. 70) : "Masters are always and everywhere in a sort of tacit, but constant and uni- form, combination not to raise the wages of labor above their actual rate." THE RIGHTS OF LABOR. 155 up our ideal, because the facts are the other way. It is a great temptation to settle down to the idea that as things are and have been so they must be. It in- volves a strain, and is a positive virtue, to hold fast to an ideal when the facts contradict it. There is a fatality about our thoughts. If we think things cannot be different from what they are, we but add so much to the dead inertia of the world, which keeps them as they are ; while if we will not succumb, we may be part of the very forces that will help to make things different. Let us keep our faith ; let us keep our discontent and spread it in the community ; let us never cease to ask that ethics become a principle in business life, that the Golden Eule be made the rule of industry, till the common remark that "busi- ness is business," when applied to the remuneration of human labor, shall be turned into a reproach and a shame to those who use it. Secondly, let us make our thoughts as clear as pos- sible as to what constitutes a fair return to labor for its services in the work of production. It is im- possible to speak of what are just and unjust wages in terms of money; the purchasing power of money changes according as the cost of producing commod- ities becomes greater or less. AVhat we have a right to ask for the workingman, who year after year ren- ders service to society, is that he shall have enough in return to enable him (1) to run a fair chance of liv- ing out the average term of human life ; (2) to have a family of moderate size ; (3) to let his children go to school till they are at least fifteen years of age ; (4) to let his wife attend to the duties of a mother and a housekeeper ; (o) with reasonable economy to lay aside 156 ETHICAL RELIGION. something for his support in old age. These are the wages, whatever their money equivalent may be, which every one who works with his hands — I care not how commonplace and rude his work may be, so that it be necessary work to society — should receive. There is not a day -laborer who works on our streets who ought not to have so much. I advocate nothing at all for those who will not work — not even charity ; though for those who cannot work — for those whose minds or whose bodies are too feeble — I ask the ten- derest consideration and the amplest charity. But for those who can and who do work, such remuneration as I have described above I ask for as simple justice. Competition may reduce wages below this point, — nay, it does. There are plenty of skilled as well as unskilled laborers who do not get such remuneration. Employers, whether private or public, allow them to bid against one another, and, to the end of putting money into their own pockets or of reducing taxation, allow them to work on terms that tend to cut short their lives, to drive their children of tender years into the factory or the street, to force their very wives to work with them or in competition with them, and to bring all sometime or other to misery, to want, and perhaps the poor-house. It is all a monster ini- quity. Below the point I have described, competition should never be allowed to determine the wages of the laborer. Thirdly, we can do something by encouraging every honest attempt of labor to get at least this minimum of remuneration for itself. The Unions that work- ingmen form and the "strikes" they enter upon are not useless. The Unions may have many unjust and THE RIGHTS OF LABOR. 157 foolish rules, their members may sometimes overreach and go on false principles in entering upon " strikes." To demand equal wages for all alike, whatever their degree of skill and competence, is plainly unjust ; to use violence against those who take their places when they leave work is criminal ; to "strike" against an employer who is barely making his way, or to take advantage of his necessities, is as deserving of cen- sure as for the employer to treat in a similar way his men. But where a business is successful, where divi- dends and profits are large, there, I conceive, it is both allowable and just that workingmen should share in the prosperity which they help to create, and the public should encourage them in every effort to reach at least that minimum of compensation which I have described. Fourthly, if we are in business ourselves, the mat- ter comes home to us in a peculiar way. I am well aware that a man starting in business cannot always do as his heart prompts. He starts in a competitive field. There may be employers ready to undersell him and drive him out of the market. He has to make himself a foothold in the midst of a stream that would be glad to carry him away. He is perhaps thence obliged to begin by paying the market rate of wages to his workmen ; he has to appear to stand in a purely commercial relation to his men. Meanwhile, however, the higher thoughts may truly dwell in him. He may still cherish the wish to establish a real brotherhood with his employees, to run the race not against them but with them, to treat them as his co-workers and his partners ; and gradually, as his enterprise succeeds, he may carry his thoughts into 158 ETHICAL RELIGION. effect, — not with professions, but rather cautiously ; not disappointed because his men do not at once be- lieve in him, but determined by perseverance and evident good-will to make them believe in him. In technical language, he may either raise their wages, or allowing their nominal wages to remain the same, may make them share in his profits. This to my mind would be, so far as present circumstances ordinarily allow, the ideal form of industry. At any rate, it would be ethics carried into business life ; it would be the Golden Eule entering a realm where it is ordi- narily thought to be inapplicable. Love is thought to be a dream ; it is, in fact, the only thing that is prac- tical. It so truly belongs to the world that there is no harmony or security, or even peace, without it. IX. PERSONAL MORALITY. THERE is no more wonderful or more moving thought than that of personal responsibility. It seems to go straight to the centre of our being, which is not the mind or the conscience or the heart, but the will. A voice seems to say : " To thee, individually, Man, is given a task. Thou art not one of a mass merely ; thou countest by thyself. Thou art what no one else in the world is. Thou hast a duty that no one else in the world can do. Sacred art thou in the plan of the world. Eevere thyself, then, and fill out thy arc of the great circle of duty. Without thee that circle must remain for- ever incomplete ! " The first lesson of personal ethics is self-reverence. Morality is sometimes resolved into sympathy and regard for others. But there is something due our- selves as truly as to father or mother or wife or sister or friend; the same reason that exists for re- specting them exists for respecting ourselves. I want no one to show signs of respect to me who does not stand on his own ground, and in his bearing and demeanor show that he has an equal sense of what is due himself. I cannot conceive anything more 160 ETHICAL RELIGION. lamentable than that one should think that obliga- tion first arises when we consider the claims of others, and that in his personal and private life he may do this or that, and just as he pleases, because it con- cerns himself alone. He who questions that there is a duty to himself is liable to question, sooner or later, whether there be any real duty to others ; for others are only human beings like himself, and if he feels no obligation to himself, why should he to them ? The truth is, all are sacred, — others and himself. To each one is given a task, — to each one particu- larly and individually, as if no one else were in ex- istence ; and the task must, to a certain extent, be accomplished by each one separately and alone. What are the things for which we are thus person- ally responsible; what are the things over which we ourselves have control ? First, certainly, our pri- vate habits. These may be known by no one but ourselves, yet we are as responsible for them as if they were known to all the world. We are respon- sible, not merely because of their effect upon others, but because of their effect upon ourselves, — because we ought to have pure habits, since these alone are worthy of human beings. Every one should be watch- ful of himself, should take an honest pride in ruling his own impulses, in avoiding all temptations that he knows may be too strong for him, in keeping his body as well as his soul — what is unseen and what is seen — sweet and clean. Tell me, if it w^ere pos- sible, what a man's private and most solitary habits are, and I will tell you whether he really respects him- self, — whether whatever decency and respectability he has are for show or are a part of his very fibre PERSONAL MORALITY. 161 and make-up as a man. I have read of some one who, when alone, sat down to dinner with the same regard for form and ceremony as if he were enter- taining a company of friends. His instinct, at least, was right; for whatever measure of form and cere- mony is proper on such an occasion is so because human beings sit down to the table, and not because of their number. All our private habits should re- veal our sense of what is due to the humanity in us. Therefore we should not drink to excess or eat to excess, for this is brutish ; therefore we should con- trol all our appetites, — otherwise there is the abdi- cation of the reason, which makes the truly human part of us ; therefore the body should be treated with reverence, because it is the abode and taberna- cle of our humanity ; therefore neglect of the person and slovenliness are disgusting, because they reveal the lack of a sense of what is becoming to a man. By every unchaste act, by every surrender of reason to passion, by all excess and by all meanness in our manner of life, by neglect of the body as well as neglect of the soul, the fair humanity that is in us and ought to be reflected in our person and behavior is dishonored ; we sink to the level of the animal instead of rising to the stature of the man. Another field wherein we alone have control, is that of our personal aims in life. An aim is nowise set save by the person whose aim it is. An aim is simply the direction of our own will. A good aim cannot be given to a man save by himself. He may hear of it, but it is not his own till he makes it so. Our outward acts may be constrained, they may not express us ; but the will is the centre and citadel of 11 162 ETHICAL RELIGION. our personality, and no power in heaven or in earth is master there but ourselves. With this magnificent power we can choose higher or lower aims, we can direct the channel of our life in this of that direction ; or, if we will, we can refuse to aim at anything at all, and simply drift, and become waifs and ignoble wanderers on the earth. Now, any aim is better than none ; but the highest aim is alone worthy of a man. What is the highest aim ? I will venture to reply that it is to contribute to an ideal order of human life. The other answers commonly given are either ignoble or unreal to us. To save one's soul, — who of us can consider that the noblest aim we can have ? To glorify God and enjoy him forever, — how far away and unreal and unpractical does that seem to us ! To seek the kingdom of God, — ah ! but what is the kingdom of God ? To do the will of God, — but who will tell us what the will of God means ? for that sanction has, in the course of man's religious history, covered almost every conceivable aim of man, high and low, devilish and divine. But to contribute to an ideal order of human life seems to me an aim that man can lay hold of; and it is an exalted aim. For we love this human life of ours, and wish to see it lifted to its ideal. We love it most truly, not for what it is, but for what it may be. We are in love with its ideal. The aim I have proposed is legitimate for the merchant, for the lawyer, for the physician, for the mother, for the child, for the workingman. One may accomplish little, yet he can have the aim ; and the aim is that for which alone we are responsible, and may give significance to our smallest actions and a priceless value even to our ineffectual strivings. PERSONAL MORALITY. 163 Once in a while we need to turn back on these busy lives of ours, and ask how far this aim is really regulative of them. Are the actions we are doing, the sort of lives we are leading, tending toward an ideal form of human life ; are they such as, if they were general in the community, would bring that ideal form of life nearer to the earth ? Let the mer- chant ask himself what are the customs, the maxims of his trade; and if they are not what they should be, is he by consenting to them helping to perpetuate them, or is he striving to change them ? Let the lawyer and the physician ask themselves as to the morality of their professions, and whether the su- preme aim is keeping them from aught that is dis- honorable, and constraining them to seek to elevate the tone and practice of their professions in every possible way. Let the mother ask herself, " Am I training my child so that it will be a new factor in the world, or merely a perpetuator of old-time preju- dices and hatreds and shams ? " Let the child too have its solemn hour, when it shall nurse its grow- ing soul on deeds of heroism and faithfulness, and ask itself whether it too could venture for an idea, and be patient under adversity and the world's con- tempt. Let the workingman ask himself, "What is my motive ; and would it if it were general tend to an ideal form of life ? Do I work merely for hire, or do I take pride in a piece of honest, thorough work ? In my demand for changes, perhaps revolu- tions, in the industrial world, am I actuated by the spirit of malice and revenge or by the simple thought of justice ? '^ Yes, even the unemployed workingman may feel the pressure of that supreme aim upon him, 164 ETHICAL RELIGION. and in his sorest misfortune may will to commit no crime, and though he be insulted, not to insult again, and to bear even to the death rather than do a wrong to others. Everywhere does this supreme aim hold good; everywhere may it take from the pride of those who are great, and give dignity to those who are humble. How quickly does it recall us from those aims in which it is so easy to settle down ! To earn a comfortable living, and provide for wife and chil- dren, — how many seem to have this practically as their aim in life! But there is nothing peculiarly human about this ; beavers and the whole tribe of animals do the same. Man has intelligence, has im- agination, has a moral nature, has dreams of uni- versal justice ; yet sometimes he forgets the dignity and glory that belong to him, turns his back on his dreams, perverts his conscience, loses his imagination, and uses his godlike intelligence only so far as to provide for himself a comfortable living, perhaps in his selfishness and hardness leaving even wife and children out. O Friend, lift up thy thoughts ! think of what thou art called to be ! Light up thy heart, thy imagination, and thy life with a great aim ! Do it, because with all thy hoarding and saving thou art wasting thyself, becoming little while thou shouldst be becoming great, growing old while thou shouldst be keeping ever young, turning life into a game of profit and loss while it should be an opportunity for all noble action and the service of all good causes ! The old religion contains a subtle word, — " Thou must be born again." Strange and unmeaning to us as is the theological dogma that has been based upon it, it hides a vital truth. 'T is not the mending of PERSONAL MORALITY. 165 our actions that is first needed ; 't is not the forming of this or that habit; 'tis not any outward change. It is the renovation of the fountains of our life; it is the making victorious a new aim in life ; it is the changing our thoughts and experiencing the trans- forming power of a new purpose. This does not alone help us in one particular, but in all : it involves an advance along the whole line of duty. And the dif- ference from the old religion is simply, that, while it seems to say that such a purpose must come from God, we say that it must be formed by ourselves. We do not fall on our knees and pray : we arise, and summon our energies, and resolve. And though the old nature in us may not yield at once, though old faults may persist and old habits be stubborn, yet we can gradually win the victory over them ; and our connection with that Supreme Power which upholds the world and supports the human soul, is simply in the belief that he is behind us and beneath us and above us, and pours his all-mightiness into us, so that we can ourselves do all that in our nature we are summoned to do. Not only the supreme dominant aim of our lives, but our motives in all our actions, are under our con- trol ; and for purifying them we are responsible. It is here that the ethics based entirely on the results of our actions altogether fails. An action may have exactly the same results, yet at one time have moral worth and at another have none. A dollar given to a poor man w^ill go just so far, provide so much bread, whether given to rid one's self of his presence or out of love for the man. But an act of the former sort is not a moral act at all. It is wonderful how com- 166 ETHICAL RELIGION. pletely our moral value is hidden from all the world but ourselves, and yet how in importance it tran- scends all else we can think of. I would not ignore the question of results in the theory of ethics. Our acts must not only be moral, — they must be right, they must correspond with an objective standard ; and with the determination of that, the results of our actions have a great deal to do. An action is right which tends to the good of humanity, the results of which are actually beneficial to humanity. A moral action is one that, in addition, aims at the good of hu- manity. It is not enough to be perfectly righteous, — we must mea7i to be righteous ; and in our so mean- ing, wanting, purposing, our whole moral worth con- sists. The real life of man is not the seen, but the unseen one ; what we see are but effects, — the causes are hidden away. The world is satisfied with a cer- tain decorousness, and we ourselves all too easily in- cline to take the world's standard ; but in our graver moments we know what a surface thing it is, and that our unclean thoughts, our jealousies, our envies and spites, and all our littlenesses and uncharitablenesses, though no one else knows of them, are the things that defile us. Oh for a clean heart ! Oh to be holy within ! — to be as pure in our own eyes as we would be in the eyes of the world without ! Oh to ban- ish all selfishness, and to look on others only with love ! — so that if we chide or are severe toward them it shall not be in anger ; so that if they wrong us we shall not hate them, and if we are injured, we shall not injure again. The highest care, after all, of each one should be for himself, and for that which is most personal to himself. There, in that PERSONAL MORALITY. 167 inner realm, no one else can help him. Each morning, I conceive, a man might well arise, and say, " This day I welcome to my heart all good thoughts, and will that they should prompt and guide all my ac- tion. I banish hate, I banish spite, I banish all low cunning and greed ; and I will not let a word escape my lips, or an act be done, that truth and honor and love cannot sanction ! " It is easier, I know, to con- trol our actions than our motives. It takes great watchfulness, it may involve a long discipline, and mean many a struggle to be able to banish an un- worthy thought as soon as it appears, to check an unholy impulse as soon as it arises. It implies that we have ourselves well in hand, that the will is strong. Ah ! but this is our task, this is that to which we are called. There were no honor in easy victories. To contend against odds, to hold to the fight after defeat once and twice, — yes, though the body js weak and the heart is faint, to keep the purpose strong, — there is glory in that ; and into the secrets of such a strife the angels might well look with wonder and awe. 'T was Hesiod of old who said that before the temple of virtue the immortal gods had placed labor, and the way to it was long and steep. 'T is hard to know, indeed, what good thing in life is to be had for the asking. The whole significance of our being is that we are madfe imperfect, and called to be perfect. " And, nil, if Nature sinks, as oft she may, *Neath long-lived pressure of obscure distress, Still to he strenuous for the bright reward, Still in the soul to admit of no decay, Brook no continuance of weak-mindedness, — Great is the glory, for the strife is hard." 168 ETHICAL RELIGION. It is wonderful how every great religious move- ment in the past has been marked by a new sense of the need of personal righteousness. ^T was thus when real religion arose among the ancient Hebrews, and a cry went forth from the prophetic lips, " Create in me a clean heart, and renew a right spirit within me! " ^Twas so when Jesus called for a deeper right- eousness than even the most religious of his own day practised. ^T was so when Luther threw off the bond- age of dead works, and wrote and spoke to the con- science, and said that an act in itself good becomes sinful if its motive is sinful. If I ever have a doubt of the possibility of a religion arising out of Liberal- ism to-day, it is because Liberalism speaks more of the rights of men than of their duties ; because it talks more of the reform of society than of the re- form of ourselves ; because its ideal is philanthropy rather than justice ; because it forgets that ^- society gains nothing," as Emerson says, " while a man not himself renovated attempts to renovate things about him," or, as John C. Learned says, that those '^ who are in the w^rong cannot cure evils." Let us pu- rify ourselves, let us leave the world's standards be- hind us, and ask what manner of men we ourselves are ; and if we find ourselves unholy, unchaste, pas- sionate, envious, ready to take advantage, petty in spirit and narrow in sympathy, oh, let us leave doctoring the ills of the world, and first cure our- selves ! But life is not all in doing. Duty is not all in striving and battling, — it is sometimes in waiting, in enduring, in bearing what we cannot remove. Per- haps our sharpest battles are with our impatience, and PERSONAL MOKALITY. 169 with what seems a cruel fate that assigns us burdens heavier than we can bear. Sympathy often we cannot receive ; often, we cannot tell our griefs. The trage- dies of our life are in secret, and this is what makes them tragedies. I allow myself to believe, however, that nothing is given us in life greater than we can bear. It may seem as if the adversity were too sore, but we can endure it. We cannot always control our bodily health, but we can our spirits. We can bear the death of friends ; we can bear the ingratitude of friends, or their unfaithfulness ; we can bear to have our hopes defeated; we can bear to have light and joy vanish out of our skies, — bear it without bitterness, bear it with magnanimity. The deep purpose of our being does not lie in anything that can be taken from us. ^T is not in our prosperity, and it may be accom- plished in spite of adversity ; 't is not in the rela- tionships of home, in tender companionship with friends, in public honor or regard. Thy worth, O Fellow-man or woman, is in thyself, — in thy patient soul, in thine incorruptible will, in thy readiness to accept whatever post the universe assigns thee, in thy quiet faithfulness there, whether amid sunshine or the dark, amid joy or sorrow. We know not any more than Socrates what we ought to wish for our- selves ; we know not, in truth, what is best for us ; we know not what will bring out that which is most truly divine and godlike within us. The lamented Garfield said we could no't know any one perfectly well " while he was in perfect health ; and as the ebb-tide discloses the real lines of the shore and the bed of the sea, so feebleness, sickness, and pain bring 170 ETHICAL RELIGION. out the real character of a man." Matthew Arnold says of a friend : — " I saw him sensitive in frame, I knew his spirits low, And wislied him health, success, and fame, — I do not wish it now. " For these are all their own reward, And leave no good behind ; They try us, — oftenest make us hard. Less modest, pure, and kind." Emerson even says, *^ Adversity is the prosperity of the great ; " and if this seems strained, we do not feel it so when we see some heroic man or woman bearing up under great ills with godlike equanimity and patience. Friend, think not thyself off the track of destiny because things are awry, and fortune does not smile upon thee, and thou hast not, perhaps, a thing that thou cravest ! think not that the World Spirit has not an}" path marked out for thee to follow! The path of duty is still the predestined path ; and though it be no longer to do, but to bear, bear but as bravely as thou woiildst do, and never was there better soldier of duty than thou ! IL The field of our thoughts is a wide one ; the field of our actions is ordinarily a narrow one. Ethics covers both. It asks that we have just thoughts, true thoughts, everywhere; it gives the ideal also for each day's smallest and, as it may seem, most insignificant actions. The real world to most of us is not at all large ; it is so near and commonplace PERSONAL MORALITY. 171 that we are apt to slight it. Our real world, that which we daily see and are acting in the midst of almost constantly, is made up of those in our own household, of a few friends, and of a few more ac- quaintances, and of ourselves. Yet it is here that our actions tell, and here that our responsibility centres. The home lies closest about us. How tender we should be there ! What solace ought every member of that intimate circle to find there ! If in the world without we feel that we are misunderstood and mis- judged, how should the fret and depression that come from it vanish and dissipate as we return to that lov- ing, genial atmosphere and to those generous hearts who take us at our best, and by trusting us tend to keep us so ! What opportunity equals that of parents toward their children, that of elder brothers or sis- ters toward the younger ? With what ample consid- eration should we treat those who are not so strong as others, not so bright in mind, or who have some failing that causes the world to look down upon them, and the sense of which brings to themselves at times confusion and mortification ! How watchful we should be about hurting them ! How we should strive to keep in them something of that self-respect which is the basis of all the virtues ! What is more pitiable than a child ignored or contemptuously treated at home ? Yet, strangely enough, those who are brought nearest to us, and for whom we can do most, we sometimes treat the most coolly and for them do the least. Many a man who is courtesy itself to other women, comes to show little to his wife ; many a son who has great deference for men in general, shows little before his own father ; many 172 ETHICAL RELIGION. a young woman who has ample consideration for the failings of her sex, is yet impatient and ungenerous toward her own sisters. Oh that we might learn that our nearest duties are the highest ; that we might think more and more tenderly of those whom we daily and perhaps hourly see ; that we might keep our reverence for them ; that we might bear with them, and always have the will to do them good ! Father, mother, wife, child, brother, sister, — thou wilt never know any as precious as these ; none who have such a right to thy love ; none for whom thou wilt ever have a right to do so much ! Nothing more befits a man in his intercourse with his acquaintances than magnanimity, — a certain largeness of temper and soul. It might be almost called the courtesy due to human nature as such to be generous toward it. Men are so constituted that if we think evil of them we are apt to find some evil, and if we look for what is good we find the good instead. Magnanimity means looking for the good, expect- ing it, not being willing to allow the contrary till we are forced to. It means, where there are two inter- pretations of a man's conduct possible, the being in- clined to take the more generous one, — not out of charity, but because of an instinct of breadth and lib- erality. Magnanimity is ordinarily thought to consist in overlooking injuries, but I should say it was more truly shown in unwillingness to credit them. Some- times we are like the boys who put chips on their shoulders and dare some one to knock them off ; and then injuries come to us that are never meant to be injuries, that exist only in our active imagination and PERSONAL MORALITY. 173 our suspicious minds. "Trifles light as air," says Sliakspeare, *' are to the jealous eontirmations strong as proofs of holy writ ; " but to the magnanimous they are like those discords of which George Eliot speaks, that, " quenched by meeting harmonies, die in the large and charitable air." I have seen misunderstandings arise between persons who I am sure meant no ill to one another, yet simply because each was jealous of his own rights and suspicious that the other was willing to wrong him, involved themselves in grave and sad complications ; and I have thought that the way out of the difficulty was not in finding how far each was right and each was wrong, but in the gain- ing by both of a larger and nobler temper. I see no way to go along smoothly in the world without an habitual large-mindedness. There are so many "touchy" persons, to use a colloquial phrase, who are making others uncomfortable all the time, and, what is quite as bad, making themselves uncomfortable too. They are on the watch, as it were, lest some one tres- pass on their rights ; they constantly misinterpret others, and come to wear often a gently injured air, which would be amusing were it not so annoying. All this is the opposite of magnanimity. A mag- nanimous man never doubts that others will respect him. He is impatient with those who magnify tri- fles ; he is conscious of rectitude in himself, and be- lieves in it in others in spite of a few appearances to the contrary. And what an occasion for magnanimity arises in the little differences of opinion, in the discussions between friends and acquaintances, that often arise ! How profitless many of our discussions are, because 174 ETHICAL RELIGION. we persist in keeping our own point of view, and do not even try to understand what the other person really means ! How we are apt to seize upon some trifling mistake, to magnify some petty error, and overlook the drift and tenor of the differing opinion as a whole ! What a change it would be, if neglect- ing these minor blemishes we seized upon the main idea of the person with whom we are conversing, and sought to do justice to it, and to understand it! Surely, one has little confidence in the truth of his own view who is not willing for a moment to enter- tain a different one. A discussion never should de- generate into a dispute ; if ill-will arises, there should be an end of it. Bigotry can never be conquered by bigotry. Bigotry can only be conquered by candor, and by a noble breadth of view that will make even the idea of the bigot swim in a sea of larger thought. Let Liberals not harbor narrow prejudices against those of Jewish or Christian faith. Let us be willing to con- sider all the truth there is in the old religions, all the services they have rendered mankind, all the uses to which their nobler adherents are still putting them in the world. And let us do this not grudgingly, or as if we were conceding something, but with a truth-loving spirit ; and this spirit will perchance pass to those with whom we converse, and lead them to deal with us in a fairer temper. The test of any set of views is, after all, to what extent open, candid, truth-loving minds can hold them. The best argument in our favor lies in the noble temper we at all times show, in our aversion to all the tricks by which the passions and prejudices of men are stirred, in our magnanimity to friend and foe alike. PERSONAL MORALITY. 175 Another disposition, upon which the smoothing and sweetening of our daily life much depends, is thoughtfulness about little things. There is much conceit and nonsense about what makes the gentle- man or lady. One essential mark of such persons, I should say, is mindfulness of little attentions, the habit of rendering little kindnesses of which the or- dinary, grosser man or woman scarcely thinks. The root of courtesy, after self-respect, is in a fine sym- pathy with others. We widely err in thinking that great things are necessary to make us happy. A wo- man does not ask much from her husband; but she asks his love, — and this shown in numberless, trifling ways. You do not count on great favors from your friend ; but a little, done with real friendship, goes a long way with you. I verily believe that the happi- ness of most of us, so far as others are concerned, depends more on their manner, their look, their voice, their evident friendliness for us, than upon anything they can do for us. 1 believe that nothing so contri- butes to the evenness and serenity and cheerfulness of our own minds as the habit of saying pleasant words, rendering little attentions, and doing little insignifi- cant services which we should be ashamed to speak of, after they are done. " Small service is true ser- vice while it lasts,-' says Wordsworth : yes, if we put love into it. It is these small services that bind friends, that keep the love of lovers fresh. They are the flower of courtesy : they go to make up what the same poet calls " That best portion of a good man's life, — His little, namelesS; unremembered acts of kindness and of love." 176 ETHICAL EELIGION. Many persons are oppressed with the littleness of their lives ; they would like to be doing great things, and the petty duties of each day take up all their time. They do not recollect that faithfulness is the first and highest thing required of us, that this may be shown in little things as well as in great, and that the commonest lot may be transfigured by the love, the patience, and the sweetness we put into it. What is, after all, wanted most in the world is not great persons fitted for great occasions, or ordinary ones fitted for the ordinary, but great persons who will throw their greatness into the ordinary ; who will show how much dignity, how much goodness, how much sweetness may characterize the life of every day ; whose minds are conversant with princi- ples that their most private actions exemplify ; whose very ^' good-morning " makes us glad,- and whose " good-by " seems like a benediction ; whose daily look mirrors a heaven of love, of self-renouncement, and of peace. Ah, Friend, fight the battle in thy ob- scure corner of life, — fight the battle with thyself, thy restlessness, thy fears, and accept thy lot ! Thou canst not choose thy task, perhaps, but thou canst ^^ choose to do it well." Thou canst not do what thou wouldst, yet thou canst do bravely what thou must. Do it! for the deepest law of human life is faithfulness, and by obeying it thou dost acquire a worth that life itself cannot exhaust and death can- not destroy. "He that is faithful in that which is least is faithful also in much," said Jesus. A great saying, for it upsets the measurements of the world and of our worldly morality. It is enough to endear him to the hearts of men ; for it shows that he looked PERSONAL MORALITY. 177 upon the heart, and judged men by what they were, and not by what they could do. Another virtue much needed in our daily inter- course with others, is readiness to own a fault. The whole virtue is in our readiness, — in being quick to own we have been in the wrong. We do not like of course to shame ourselves, not only before others, but in our own eyes. Nothing is more unwelcome. Therefore there are few more genuine moral experi- ences than those of confessing a fault, provided it be spontaneous, and we are not driven or compelled to it. We separate ourselves in such an act from what we ought to be, and feel the " ought to be '' as above us and as it were condemning us. It is sensitiveness we need to have. Most persons know when they do wrong, but they do not rue it, they do not grieve over it ; they do not confess it — if they confess at all — until the feelings of contrition have lost their warmth and the confession half its virtue. It is an affecting passage of Scripture : " Let not the sun go down upon your wrath." Each blessed day in this life of ours makes a kind of whole, and no evil should be done in it that is not repented of before its close. For who will allow that confession is only a childish virtue, — or, if it were, would not ask that he might keep the child's heart and the child's habit, and even if it be before some sainted spirit of the dead, or before Jesus, or before some image of the Highest, which seems to bend over and listen to him, might pour out his sorrow and his shame rather than not have any sorrow and shame at all ? But the man's habit should differ from the child's only in that while the child confesses to a father or mother, the 12 178 ETHICAL RELIGION. man should confess to himself. The dignity of man is that he is both the doer and the judge of his actions. The child could not humble itself before the parent, did not the parent voice the dormant con- science of the child. The man only reaches the true stature of a man when his conscience becomes awake and alive. " Sits there no judge in heaven, our sin to see ? More strictly, then, the inward judge obey." Is this impossible ? No ; an unwelcome, a difficult task it may be to sit in judgment on ourselves, but not impossible. I believe a man can be as vigilant over himself as ever God or angel could be. I believe he may be as impartial toward himself, as high in his demands, and as sure in his condemnations. There is a God in every man, and it is for us to let him speak, and to hear him ; and not till we do this is the true aim of our being carried out. X. ON SOME FEATURES OF THE ETHICS OF JESUS. THERE have been noble-minded men, like Schil- ler and John Stuart Mill, who have been offended with one aspect of the teaching of Jesus. The charge is in substance that his teaching is sometimes mer- cenary, — that he does not ask men to do right be- cause it is right, but because they shall be rewarded in a future state if they do, or punished if they do not. There are certainly passages which lend them- selves to this interpretation. Jesus unquestionably believed in future rewards and punishments; and it is a mistake to imagine him a mild, modern humani- tarian, without a sense of law or of the just deserts of men. But this is not saying that he appealed to the self -regarding motives ivhen urging upon men moral conduct. It is one thing to recognize that wickedness will call down vengeance from heaven ; it is another to seek to dissuade from wickedness solely or chiefly for fear of that vengeance. I cannot consider the sayings of Jesus in detail, but a general key to their understanding seems to me to lie in the distinction between the prophet and the mere exhorter or preacher. Many Christian preachers have used the ideas of heaven and hell as motives to deter- 180 ETHICAL RELIGION. mine men in their conduct ; and Christian morality, as commonly taught in the past, has been deeply tainted with the mercenary spirit. But Jesus was not pri- marily a preacher or exhorter ; he makes few appeals to men. His frequent attitude is one all uncommon, if not well-nigh unintelligible to us of the Western world ; he stands for the Highest, and as a prophet declares the law of the Highest to men. Who does not at times crave a justification of the ways of the Eternal ? Who has not at times had his soul stirred within him as the course of things has seemed to favor, if not to be in league with, the unjust man and the oppressor, and to be coldly indifferent, if not hos- tile, to the good ? Who has not cried out for judg- ment, and asked : " Why standest thou afar off, O Lord ? . . . Break thou the arm of the wicked and the evil man ! '' A Hebrew psalmist once pictured the righteous man as a lamb, graciously tended and pro- tected by the shepherd, Jahveh. No one can fail to see the beauty and the pathos of the picture ; but how often is it true ? Yet we believe it ought to be true, — that the deep nature of things must some- how prefer the just to the unjust man, and that this preference ought to be made manifest. The prophet addresses himself to this problem, or rather brings an answer to it ; and the answer which Jesus gave has written itself into the hearts of myriads of men, and has been the stay and consolation not only of actual sufferers, but of those harassed with doubt, — of those who but for it would have lost all intellectual satis- faction with life. A great change was impending in human affairs, he declared ; the power of evil and wrong would soon come to an end ; the world would SOME FEATURES OF THE ETHICS OF JESUS. 181 show itself on the side of the poor and the merciful and the pure in heart, and of those who love peace and thirst for justice. For these a new day would soon dawn ; the " kingdom of heaven " should greet them, and mercy and blessedness and the vision of the Highest should be theirs; while for the proud, the contentious, the self-willed, and the wicked there should be, as there ought to be, humiliation, shame, gnashing of teeth, and the fire that is not quenched. The "kingdom of heaven,'' so soon as Jesus thought to be ushered in, was his answer to the great problem ; it was his justification of the ways of the Eternal to men ; it was to be the end of the strange mazes and the solution of the riddle of human history. Hence, when Jesus says, " There is no man that hath left house or brethren or sisters . . . for my sake and the gospel's sake, but he shall receive an hundred-fold now in this time, . . . and in the world to come life everlasting," I do not conceive that he is making an appeal to or even consoling men so much as declaring a law, uttering what to his mind, in the moral nature of things, must be, and what the appar- ent contradictions of experience put upon him a pas- sionate necessity of declaring. At another time, when Jesus violently drove the money-changers out of the Temple, we are told that his disciples called to mind a saying out of the Psalms, "The zeal of thine house shall eat me up." If we in these secular days could realize the meaning of such a passion, — if we could enter into that " zeal for God " and for the vindica- tion of a Divine order in the world which made, along with a kind of tender pity for the wronged and baffled, one of the leading motives of Jesus' life, — we should 182 ETHICAL RELIGION. not find it so easy to call his morality mercenary, and should reserve our impatience and indignation for those who conceive no other uses for his words than as allurements or as threats to keep men in the way of righteousness. An objection to another part of Jesus' moral teaching is that it is extravagant a7id impracticable, *'How can we," it is said, " resist not evil, turn the other cheek, give away our cloak to one who takes our coat, and freely lend to every one ? Are not law and economy equally opposed to such precepts ? How long would orderly society endure if they were obeyed ? Is it not the teaching of the new charity that we are not to give and not to lend save on some kind of business princi- ple ?" I think a measure of confusion is betrayed in questions of this sort. Jesus does not, if I understand aright, condemn resistance for self-defence, but has in mind the old precepts of "an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth," and the spirit of retaliation which was at their basis. For self-defence, we may use vio- lence to protect our person or our property or our rights. For self-defence, one nation may rise against another, or one class against another. If Jesus would have condemned such self-defence, it was in connection with a view of Providence which we of to-day can no longer share. Eetaliation, however, is an entirely dif- ferent matter. I know of no rule of equity according to which we may return blow for blow or oppression for oppression. This would not be righting a wrong, but making a double wrong. Better than this would be actually turning the other cheek and going the sec- ond mile. Nor do the new rules of charity now happily making SOME FEATURES OF THE ETHICS OF JESUS. 183 their way in our midst contradict the precepts of Jesus. A business charity, in one sense of the word, would not be charity at all. To give help to no one asking for it, because of a rudely conceived principle that every one ought to help himself, would not be to make an advance upon Christian practice, but to go back to the hardness of heathenism. It must not be because we love less or are ready to do less that we give up the old habit of almsgiving, but because we love more, be- cause we wish to institute more radical means of relief, and thereby not merely temporarily relieve distress, but do something toward checking it at its sources. If there is merely the economical or the business spirit in the new charity, if the aim is chiefly to rid ourselves of annoyances and banish unsightly objects from the public gaze, depend upon it, no great results will come from it, — no such results as came from that mighty movement of pity and tenderness which streamed from the heart of Jesus, and took the weak and unprotected under its special care, which established beneficent institutions,^ and made the relief of want or suffering one of the primary virtues. No ; only a new birth of love, a new enthusiasm for humanity, will effect any radical revolution in human conditions ; only a new wave of such tender feeling as was in Jesus him- self, though it be in connection with our view of the world and not with his, and guided in its manner of expression by all the light that past experience and scientific observation and experiment can give us. The best machinery will after a time lie idle, if there is not the force of human love to propel it. 1 The first general Council of the Church (at Nicaea, 325 a. d.) ordered the erection of a hospital in every city. 184 ETHICAL RELIGION. Nothing — not all knowledge or skill . — will take its place. Jesus told the rich young man to go and sell all that he had and give to the poor. Let us very care- fully discriminate, if we object to that saying. I might almost say it is at our peril if we do so ; for the very breath of it is the utterness of consecration it enjoins. According to it, there is nothing which is to be cher- ished as privately our own : what we have and all of it is for common blessing. I have a deeper faith in man than those economists and sophisters (and there are some "ministers of religion" among them) who think it necessary, in explaining this precept, to strip its ex- actions of their grandeur, and trim and adjust them to the levels of conventional benevolence. I believe man at his deepest does not want to be left where he is, but to be lifted higher. I believe that he can give unselfishly, can give all he has, — his possessions, — yes, not hesitating at his life, when some cause makes transcendent claims upon him. Prudence is indeed called for ; but there are two kinds of prudence, — the one springing from selfishness, the other born of re- ligion itself. The same outward acts may have mean- ings at a heaven-wide distance from each other. Sup- pose, for example, that I refuse alms to a beggar on the street. I may do so because, having hardened my- self into the idea that every man is himself entirely responsible for his condition, I feel no promptings of pity in my breast ; on the other hand, I may refuse for very pity and bewilderment, knowing how little such help would be, how much greater are his needs than those I could thus cover, and with the thought either to go with him to his home and learn well of SOME FEATURES OF THE ETHICS OF JESUS. 185 his misfortunes, or to send some one wiser and better qualiJied than I to do this for me. This would be a totally different prudence, and would be nowise con- tradictory to the precept of Jesus himself: *^Give to him that asketh thee, and from him that would bor- row of thee turn not thou away." The indiscriminate and unthinking giving of alms, which has been too characteristic of the Christian Church, we may indeed censure, — doubtless, it has done and still is doing much harm ; but it must be because there is rising within us a deeper and more serious sj^irit of hu- manity than the Church has ordinarily exhibited in the past. Another objection to the moral teaching of Jesus 1 shall i3ass over lightly ; it is astonishing that an earnest radical thinker should ever make it. It is that Jesus slights the family relations. That he held sacred the idea of the family and of the marriage bond, which is at its basis, is shown by words so se- vere and exalted that few of his followers nowadays are able to bear them, — I mean those which declare marriage indissoluble save for the single cause of adul- tery. Only the Catholic Church, which along with whatever additions and Aberglauhe seems yet most faithfully to have preserved the primitive Christian traditions, insists upon obedience to these words. But it is at a practical slighting of family ties that the objection is aimed. It is true that Jesus called upon men to leave brothers and sisters and parents, and follow him. He would not even suffer a disciple to go and bury his father, rather rudely, as it may seem, saying, "Let the dead bury their dead." He said, not peace, but a sword, was he introducing 186 ETHICAL RELIGION. into the world : he was come to set a man at vari- ance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and to cause a man's foes to be those of his own household. And when his own mother and brothers wished to see him, we are told that with no very decided show of affection he pointed to his disciples, and said, ^* These are my mother and my brethren." Now, if morality has no other intent than to pre- serve mankind in families as the families may hap- pen to be constituted at any one time, then is Jesus plainly at fault. But can this be admitted ? Is all possible good already realized and incorporated in social institutions? Is there no justice, and no call for its execution, as wide as the human race, and immeasurably in advance of that which our present laws and social habits reflect ? In truth, those who object to the divisions in family life which necessa- rily followed in the wake of Christianity, deny the logic by which all great forward movements in his- tory are made : they go over into the ranks of the conservatives. Any principle thrown into the fer- ment of human thoughts and aspirations is a princi- ple of division ; those who assent to it are parted from those who do not. If it be indeed a sover- eign principle, like that of justice, then no lower al- legiances have a right to interfere with the supreme allegiance due to it. Man must choose the highest ; he has no peace or honor in his own eyes save as he does. And consistently with this choice all his other relations in life must be ordered ; they dare never assert that it shall be modified and accommodated so as to harmonize with them. SOME FEATURES OF THE ETHICS OF JESUS. 187 Jesus did set a man at variance against his father. He was stern and exacting in his demand of absolute allegiance to the cause he represented ; he did feel a closer tie of kinship to those who heard his call and obeyed it than to any earthly mother or brothers ; and no cause has ever thrived in the world that has not in a measure repeated these facts. No religion of the future will be a worthy successor of the religion of the past that does not introduce a similar division, that does not have a similar attitude of exaction to all wavering and double-minded persons, and does not introduce a bond of union over and above, if not some- times in contradiction to, the traditional bonds that now hold men together. The pathway of that future religion, of which we know so little and yet believe so much, is strewed with flowers to many a prophetic young heart of the present. I have no idea that it will be so. I have no idea that there will be any less call for self-denial, for stern faithfulness, for courage, — yes, for daring for the right, — than there has been in the past. Humanity has not gone one-tenth or one- hundredth part of its journey. We compare ourselves with the past, with pre-Christian or with mediaeval times : it is for us rather to compare ourselves with the idea of the perfect, to feel how great, how well- nigh measureless is the distance yet to be travelled over. The goal is still far aloft, and the way to it is no easy one, but steep and winding, and perchance has many a danger lurking by its side. Are we ready for new toil, for more heroic aims, for severer duty, or will we take our ease on the spot we have already reached, — this is the question, answers to which will reveal whether or not we are children of the coming time. 188 ETHICAL RELIGION. II. I turn now to some features of the ethics of Jesus having such clear and positive merit that little ob- jection is likely to be made to them. I essay no comparison of him with Socrates or Sakya-mouni or Confucius. This is a difficult and delicate task, which should not be undertaken without an equipment of historical knowledge and sympathy and imagination, which few of those who so often and so lightly make the attempt seem to me to have. I do not deny, in- deed, that there may be no one idea in Jesus' teaching that is not found in the teaching of others as well; but I have rather in mind the prophet of Nazareth in connection with the times in which he lived, and the actual influence he has had upon men living in our Western world. It cannot be claimed that we stand in any such relation to Socrates or the Hindu prince or Confucius, as to Jesus. Socrates has not been with- out influence upon us, but it cannot be soberly called a tithe of that which Jesus has had. Would that men read the "Apology" oftener, — they would find meat and drink in it, a tonic and an inspiration for their lives ! But there is need for no such wish in relation to the Gospels. Jesus is an ideal of goodness, all too indistinct often, but hovering in the thought of well- nigh every one of us. It is true that there is much uncertainty relating not onl}'' to his life, but to his teaching ; yet as there need be no doubt as to the main tenor and events of his life, so there need be none as to the commanding features of his teaching. They make too largely consistent a whole, and be- speak a mind of too much freshness and originality SOME FEATURES OF THE ETHICS OF JESUS. 189 and power, to allow us to think of them as coming in an indeiinite way from an age otherwise so traditional, so barren, and so prosaic. First, we notice that he opposes the traditional mo- rality of his time. And in this relation, what other function, we may ask, is there for the prophet than to purify and enlarge the moral ideal of men, to strip righteousness of conventional expressions and reveal its absolute and all-encompassing nature? To acquiesce iu the moral requirements ordinarily allowed, to pro- claim merely the old Mosaic law, so called, and insist upon all tlie particularities of its observance, — what need for Jesus to do that ? All this was being done by the existing teachers of the nation, and especially the Pharisees. The Pharisees were, no doubt, eminent patriots, conservers of the national religious life and its ancient traditions, and stood, as some one has re- marked, to orthodox Judaism much as the Jesuits do to the Catholic Church in its contiict with liberal ideas. They had on their side, too, the majority of the law- yers of the nation, — a class naturally inclined to con- servatism, and whose function is somewhat obscured to us by the title Scribe, which is usually given them in the New Testament. As the Pharisees with this legal following had a cause and an enthusiasm for it, they were more influential and held in higher honor by the mass of the people than the party of the Sad- ducees, who, with their inclination to liberalism, and their varnish of foreign ideas and manners, had lost a measure of both religious and patriotic zeal. But it was the mistake of the Pharisees to esteem as final the moral code contained in their Scriptures. Chris- tians affect to find this very strange in view of the 190 ETHICAL RELIGION. added legislation of Jesus ; but that it is not strange is shown by the very fact that they regard Christian morality as final and incapable of being superseded. It is, in fact, the part of a conservative temper the world over to believe that things materially better than the old cannot come. This is just as true now as at any time. I find Liberals, even, who look with a kind of disapproval, if not disbelief, upon any de- parture from and advance upon their present religious attitude. That which we know and are accustomed to — the old wine — we all naturally think is best. But Jesus did add to the old legislation ; he was, in fact, a second '^ Moses " to those who accepted him. We will not attempt to say how far his legislation was new, and to what extent there were anticipations of it in the old Law and Prophets. It is interesting to note that almost always, when advances are made in the world, — either intellectual or moral advances, — we are all ready to accredit them, after they are accom- plished, to the authorities whom we revere, though when they were making, the authorities spoke to us with no such clear voice, and our uncertainty may have practically amounted to hostility. So, in the future, it is possible that no reforms will ever be accomplished for the human race that clever Chris- tians will not claim, after they are accomplished, to have been the natural expression of their own princi- ples ; yet now it can hardly be said that their Master speaks to them in such a way as to make them feel that they must themselves accomplish the reforms. One reformer always honors another, one prophet always feels that he belongs to a succession. Each knows well that it is not this or that particular cause, SOME FEATURES OF THE ETHICS OF JESUS- 191 as such, he is serving, but these as forms of one cause, — demands of one principle, — which is itself absolute though they all be relative, limitless though they all be finite. Ever is it the triumph of the ideal good, the victory of the just in the world. Only he is a genuine reformer or prophet who serves his cause solely be- cause of its Tightness, and gives to his special task the form of this absolute consecration. It by no means fol- lows, however, that each prophet honors the disciples of another prophet, who perhaps cherish his words with- out being aware of the animus and reach of thought that lay behind them. Circumstances and conditions change, and the eternal motive must prompt to new words and new actions. As he would be no prophet to us to-day who should merely repeat with skilful com- mentary the message of eighteen hundred years ago, so Jesus, had he but strikingly recast the words of Moses or Isaiah, would have been a Scribe along with the rest. One with them in fundamental thought he was ; but he spoke from his own consciousness and not from theirs. He vindicated the ideal to a gener- ation in which idealism had become chiefly a tradition, and convinced the most scrupulous followers of the old law of sin, of righteousness, and of a judgment that, to his rapt vision, hung over their nation. Speaking more particularly, he gave the moral law a more distinct inward application, saying that our thoughts and words have a moral significance like that of our actions. That we are not to act from wrong motives is indeed a commonplace of morals ; but Jesus virtually teaches that we are not to have the wrong motives. Kepression has been the rule ordinarily laid down. Jesus implies an exalted state of mind, in which 192 ETHICAL RELIGION. there shall be no call for repression. Is it said that this is impossible, — that our inward feelings are be- yond our control, and that in any case we cannot be held responsible for them, but only for the harm they may lead us to do others ? Jesus will allow none of these things. Nothing in the line of what is good is impossible. If our inward feelings are wrong, we are responsible for allowing them to exist, and can change them ; and there is such a thing as harming ourselves in a more serious sense than we can ever harm others. Life is to become serious, to be held to a purpose, to involve discipline, and the ideal on which we set our hearts is not to be abandoned for numberless failures to win it. What a profound — yes, I may say awful — moral seriousness does Jesus reveal in his commands; "If thy right eye causeth thee to stumble, pluck it out, and cast it from thee. ... If thy right hand caus- eth thee to stumble, cue it off, and cast it from thee." Yet the truth may be all with him, and none Avhat- ever on the side of the easy conscientiousness that makes the moral outfit of most of us. It may be that there is no injury in life really to fear but a moral in- jury ; that there is no comfort nor pleasure, no grace of body or of mind, that can make up for the stains on the moral nature that come from any species of ac- tual or imagined sensuality. It may be that it would be actually better to lose the e^^e or the hand than to allow either to become an instrument of degrada- tion to the spiritual nature. Is this asceticism ? No ; but verily better, nobler, w^ould be asceticism of the severest type than the torpor of conscience which al- lows us to feel only passing reproaches, and no stings and smarts, when unworthy acts or unworthy thoughts SOME FEATURES OF THE ETHICS OF JESUS. 193 are indulged in. There is no relaxing, to my mind, of the command of absolute purity. Are we thereby straining the possibilities of human nature ? Lecky tells us that when the Eoman consul "Marius had vanquished an army of the Teutons, their wives be- sought the conqueror to permit them to become the servants of the vestal virgins, in order that their honor, at least, might be secure in slavery. Their request was refused, and that night they all perished by their own hands." ^ No ; if honor be a dream to many, in others the tine impalpable thing is their very life. Further, Jesus removes all barriers to the love we owe our fellow-men. Brotherly and neighborly kind- ness had indeed been granted before, and doubtless the prophetic mind now and then caught glimpses of a time of universal love and brotherhood. With Je- sus, however, this love was to become the present and abiding rule of life. Even our enemies are to be loved ; no kind of malice or wish to injure is to be tolerated. We are to forgive, not merely seven times, but sev- enty times seven ; that is, forgiveness is an unlimited Obligation. These are, it is true, commonplaces to-day, though it be commonplaces of thought or speech rather than of actual sentiment. But when Jesus uttered them they were not even commonplaces of thought. The humanity of the ancient world was, at best, a tri- bal or a national rather than a universal humanity. It may seem strange, and yet it is strictly true, that the natural condition of mankind is one of mutual enmity rather than affection, save in limited circles of relationship : nay, with all our professions, and with all our real advances in feeling, this is probably 1 History of Morals, ii. 361. 13 194 ETHICAL RELIGION. to a great extent true to-day. It is true frequently of nations, true of classes, true of corporations, true of private individuals who are seeking the same prizes in life. The reason is obvious : it is the instinct of self- preservation, the desire to maintain ourselves and to get the best places in life. Those, it is often said, can love most who have least to do with the actual strug- gle of life. They who are in the battle must assert themselves ; they can have no fine scruples, but must take advantage where they can, and may even injure where they must. The battle, it is said, that science has recently revealed to us as going on in the lower world is going on equally in human society. Love and brotherhood are hence for the idealist to talk of, pos- sibly for the kingdom of heaven to realize somewhere ; but in this world victory is for the strong. And per- haps it is childish and sentimental, even if it is Chris- tian, to care for so many weak and unprofitable mem- bers of our species. Why not follow Nature, or rather simply let Nature have her own way, and then only the strong and the fit w^ould survive ? In sober truth, I believe that all this is but the as- sertion of the brute instincts in us, seeking indeed to give a specious justification to themselves, taking on the airs of science and human reasoning, but nowise the utterance of what is strictly human in us. The human is developed in us according as w^e act from other motives than those of self-assertion, as we re- member the ties that bind us to one another, and seek only that good for ourselves which is consistent with the good of all. It is the thought of humanity that makes us human ; it is the bond linking us to and making us a part of humanity — a bond which is no SOME FEATURES OF THE ETHICS OF JESUS. 195 natural force compelling us, but a fact in the ideal na- ture of things, and constraining us only with an ideal constraint — that makes our very dignity and glory. Human brotherhood, as Jesus taught it, is an idea which, if it took possession of human hearts, would not allow some of the features of our present political and social institutions to last a day. We act for the most part from the lower motives, with slight modifica- tions and a slight tempering of the conduct owing to the influence of ideas from above. Eeligion demands that the ideas have an absolute, an all-controlling supremacy. In the " kingdom of heaven," of which Jesus spoke, this demand was to be realized. None should be members of it save those in whom love was the absolute principle ; and this should be proved by their having owned the claims of the lowest of their brothers, — those who, in the bitterness of fate or in return for their own sin, had come to nakedness or famishing or the disgrace of prison walls. There is this element of truth in Jesus' view, that the " kingdom " is to come from above, and not in the natural course of things ; namely, that it is not to come, and cannot, from the onworking of man's natural self-regarding impulses. It is the dogma of a certain school of Liberal philosophers that if men " are left free to act in accordance with their obvious interests and their natural dispositions, their conduct will tend to the benefit of the whole of mankind." There is, to my mind, a grain of truth and a mass of error in such a dogma. The Middle Age was a time when the natural differences between men had comparatively free play, when law and government meant little but what those strong enough chose to 196 ETHICAL RELIGION. make them. Did the differences happily supplement one another, and the conduct of the strong and capa- ble " tend to the benefit of the whole of mankind " ? Instead of this, history discloses to us the strong, — few in numberS; yet almost wanton in pride and power ; princes, ecclesiastical as well as secular, — "benefiting" men by making them their vassals and slaves ; and a part of the significance of the rise of the absolute monarchy in the fifteenth century con- sisted in putting checks upon the unrestricted free- dom of the strong, in preventing them in many an instance from following their "obvious interests and natural dispositions," — in a word, in diminishing the inequalities which in a pure state of nature and free- dom are always bound to show themselves. And ill will it fare with any republic when its boasted free- dom comes to mean simply the freedom of one class of its citizens to appropriate to itself the services of the remainder. The future will join with the past, in my opinion, in showing it to be but a pleasing dream that the selfishness of one man shall so neatly adjust itself to the selfishness of another that they will perforce live together as brothers. Brotherhood means no such contrivance ; it is a thing of the heart, and must come from the heart. It must crown our selfish impulses ; it can never spring from them. It will descend, if ever it does descend upon the earth, out of an ideal region, and rule us, if it does rule us, by the spell and might of its ideal beauty and its ideal riglit. Hence, the significance of that primary aim which Jesus would set to human life, — namply, to seek the " kingdom of God." How little of reality have those SOME FEATURES OF THE ETHICS OF JESUS. 197 words to us now ! — I mean, not merely to Liberals, but, comparatively speaking, to the whole modern Christian world. How we seek to turn the kingdom into a metaphor, or to substitute for it all manner of abstractions ! Or if we still hold to its concrete sub- stance, how we put the divine city and fellowship afar off in the clouds and to the end of time, inwardly say- ing that it is well enough there, but cannot be seri- ously thought of as giving the ideal and the rule for this present life ! Accordingly, the present enthusi- asms of men, so far as they have any, seem so meas- ured and finite ; they do not lift us to any height, nor do they touch our depths. Ah ! to have lived — who does not at times wish it ? — when the measureless good of the *' kingdom of God" seemed waiting for men to enter into it; when human life was lit up with the transcendent hope ; when heaven seemed about to descend and touch and sanctify the earth ! There is no wonder that the multitude of those early believers were of one heart and soul ; that not one of them said that aught of the things he possessed was his own, but they had all things common. As they were not play- ing with words, but believed in the "kingdom of God,'^ how could they forbear to live in some measure then, in their earthly lives, as they believed they should live thereafter ? The phrase "kingdom of God" is perhaps outworn for those who would not, under a cloak and venerable remnant of piety, hide the light that is in them ; but the thought which lies at its. basis is of perennial interest and worth. Of what is untrue and harmful in the Christian conception of it, I may speak later. The truth underlying it may be stated in a few words : 198 ETHICAL RELIGION. It is that man belongs vitally to another order of things than that of which he has experience. He can see what is, and at the same time' form a conception of what ought to be ; and in that conception he finds the goal of what is and the end to which his thoughts and energies rightfully turn. And as he forms this con- ception in virtue of the rationality that is in him, all rational beings can form it, and, as matter of fact, with varying clearness do form it ; and the goal is thence a goal for all rational beings. Moreover, the goal is of nothing that is absolutely apart from those who contemplate it, far beyond and above them as it is ; it is a goal for rational beings, and is nothing more nor less than that of a perfect society or community of them. Anciently designated a kingdom, we now may more naturally call it a republic, if we are not thereby made to forget that the laws of it, though in one sense of our own making, are in another sense set for us in the ideal nature of things as unalter- ably as the goal itself. For us, is really only the creation of ourselves after the ideal pattern. But bet- ter still, perhaps, we may call it a brotherhood, since thereby the idea of association, of a common interest, a common life, a common joy, are most effectually and most touchingly suggested to us. There is a yearn- ing in our human nature for brotherhood. We are no more satisfied with the modern aim of self-culture than with the older one of the salvation of our indi- vidual souls. We want in our deeper moments to rise above the self, the individual, and feel that we are parts of some grander whole, some nobler society, and that we have in it a more than private mission and work. The very good and happiness we crave we do SOxME FEATURES OF THE ETHICS OF JESUS. 199 not wish to win for ourselves, but to have come in consequence of our world-connections, to be a kind of bounty and answering benediction from the whole. This only is religion, when the law for me is the law for all ; when the good for me is the good of all ; when the tides and the gladness of universal being sweep through me, and I know it is no longer this poor finite self that lives, but the world-self that lives in me, and the world-purpose that leads me on. And so truly do I believe the " kingdom of God " in its essential meaning' to be the central theme of religion, that I regard some fresh apprehension of it, some feeling of its truth so real and deep that all uncertain and merely traditional language shall be avoided in publishing it, and some clear, simple, un- ambiguous statements of its practical meaning in con- nection with to-day's habits of thought and life, to be the indispensable preparation for a Keligion for the Future. And in this sense we are still on the foundation of the prophets, Jesus himself being the corner-stone. XI. DOES THE ETHICS OF JESUS SATISFY THE NEEDS OF OUR TIME? IT is impossible to forget the moral services which Judaism and Christianity have rendered to the world. To seek to relax the obligations wliich the old religions have made us feel, to lower or anywise abate from the loftiness of the ideals which they have given to the world, would be to make not progress, but retrogression. Who would ignore the moral in- sight and heroism of an Amos or an Isaiah ? Who would put out of his mind, or could if he would, the lessons of gentleness, of humility, of purity of mind, of charity, of brotherhood, which fell from the lips and shone out in the life of the Prophet of Nazareth? Surely, not by forgetting, but by treasuring all the good the past has won, can we hope to advance in the future. None the less must the advance be made ; and in truth all prophecy, Jevrish and Christian included, has a temporary as well as a permanent element. Jesus spoke to those of his time, and with the lan- guage and the thought — and we may add with the limitations — of his time. But the time and the language and the thought of men change, and wider horizons are opened to their minds. What is the voice of prophecy for to-day ? is the question. All DOES THE ETHICS OE JESUS SATISFY? 201 in vain would it be for me to assume the prophetic attitude. The prophet does not raise questions, — he answers them. He has none of that hesitating, ten- tative spirit and method which mark the thought of even the best men of this transition age, and which will only cease when the new age shall have come, and the fire of irresistible convictions shall once more burn in the human breast. I am but a questioner along with the rest. I but seek to turn the attention toward the needs and problems of the present, and to show that they at least call for distinct answers and solutions, such as we look for in vain in the teaching of Jesus. For though I am far from denying, but rather have asserted, that Jesus taught eternal prin- ciples, I must add that we want more than this ; we want the application of the principles to the issues and questions of to-day, and in a form apprehensible to the thought of to-day. Else, as has been said, the principles may become as barren as they are old.^ Nothing is so common in these days as seeming rever- ence for the great rules of righteousness, along with ignorance of or indifference to what they mean and exact in the conduct of life. We want to make this impossible, save with a distinct consciousness of hy- pocrisy. Yes, sometimes those who themselves most sincerely and impressively utter the great ideas are unconscious of the full sweep of their application. The personage in Terence's play who utters the ^ Conscience, righteousness, what is there new in these ? Tlicir maxims are as old as tlie hills. Truly, and as barren often as the rocks. Tlie novelty of righteousness is not in itself, but in its novel application to the particular unrighteousness of a particular age. — Felix Adler : Creed and Deed, p. 164. 202 ETHICAL RELIGION. famous sentiment, "Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto," has no horror at infanticide, and calls it irrational to keep a child alive who is in danger of growing up into a career of shame.-^ I do not cite it as a parallel case ; but it is not to be forgotten that Jesus who utters the Golden Kule, which adequately interpreted would put an end perhaps to all the ills of society, makes no condemnation of slavery ; and this, though a party existed in his day which had reached a height of moral development from which it was condemned, — the Essenes. Hence, ** Chris- tian ethics " could be of slight service in the late Antislavery struggles in our land. There is nothing in the New Testament inconsistent with the main- tenance of slavery, if only masters are guilty of no wilful oppression or inhumanity. It was only by going back to principles of which Christian ethics themselves are but a partial statement, and which strangely enough have found modern expression in that philosophy of human rights to which the Chris- tian Church has as often taken an attitude of hos- tility as of sympathy, that the way was prepared for the abolition of slavery in this country. What then, let us ask generally, though without essaying any kind of formal completeness, are some of the moral needs of our time ? 1. First, I will mention that of intellectual scrupu- lousness and honesty. It ^vas an old Eoman saying that "two augurs could never meet each other with- out laughing." I doubt if there is any intellectual vice to-day so flagrant or coarse as this. I have rather in mind what may seem to many light faults, — for 1 Lecky, History of Morals, ii. 30, n. DOES THE ETHICS OF JESUS SATISFY? 203 example, putting interpretations on doctrines not in accordance witli their natural meaning, conforming to usages after the ideas at their basis have ceased to be matters of conviction, staying in a church or denomi- nation on sufferance and not because of a hearty common belief with them. Doubtless this is often done with good intentions, and some good may be mingled with it as with all evil ; but it strikes at what is of priceless value — I might say, rather, of absolute necessity — to the religious teaclier ; namely, the full heart and the consciousness of entire ve- racity. Experience proves, too, that doctrines and institutions which require this kind of support are themselves on the downward road ; and the process of decay can at the best be stayed, and may even at times (as if in irony of our equivocal intentions) be hastened, by the use of such means. Carlyle is said to have pointed out Dean Stanley to a friend, and remarked, "There goes our friend the Dean, boring holes hi the bottom of the good ship Church of Eng- land, — and does n't know it ! " ^ Yet not of the uselessness of the compromising spirit, but of the fact that it is contrary to a true standard of intellectual honor, would I, speak. Not a few have apparently yet to get the idea that the intellect as well as the will and outward life is under law ; that they are not at liberty to believe what they like ; that conviction is only honorable as it is only possible in any strength, when formed in obedience to some kind of necessity. I do not wonder that with such notions men deem ethics too small a thing to 1 The anecdote is related by G. W. S. in the New York " Tribune " (semi-weekly), Feb. 25, 1881. 204 ETHICAL RELIGION. become religion. It is too small, when so partially un- derstood. But ethics really means whatever ought to he, and hence is not without bearing on every part of life ; it holds up an idea for the intellect as well as the outward actions, and searches the most hidden motives and processes of the soul of man. "Thou shoLildst believe the truth," it says ; '' and thou mayst not twist it to thy liking, or anywise play with it; and the truth must be according to thine own reason, else thou art guilty of profaning the holiest within thee." And yet the evil is not one that can be met by any precept. It is a secret spirit, and can only be met by another spirit, which shall, as it were by magic, put health and soundness into the whole intellectual nature. It is the spirit of downrightness, of absolute and utter sincerity. If such a spirit should get abroad in the community, it would turn many a young man from the easy, compromising course he is now con- templating, and empty churches of not a few who listen as well as of some who preach. A new seriousness is needed in all our thinking. Men play w^ith phrases, and think if they can use the same words, differences of thought need not seriously concern thenr. They build enormous conclusions on the slenderest premises, and assume to know on the ground of positive science, for example, what never was so learned, materialism being often as assumptive and headlong as the opposite way of thinking. Or perhaps the ground of rational thought is. abandoned, and by will or arbitrary faith, or for some species of subjective interest, a settlement of philosophical prob- lems is assumed to be reached. What, now, have we in the ethics of Jesus that DOES THE ETHICS OF JESUS SATISFY? 205 can be distinctly felt by men to have a bearing upon this lack of straightforwardness, this arbitrariness, not to say dishonesty in matters of the intellect ? It is hard to find anything. I do not mean that Jesus positively slights the intellectual virtues, and I do not agree with those who put this interpretation on the first beatitude. It is simply that he does not take any account of them ; that there is not a sin- gle passage, to my recollection, in wdiich he makes any emphatic statement concerning them ; and let it be remembered it is such distinct utterance that the moral haziness of the present time calls for. The rea- son of. the silence of Jesus is not far to seek. The duty of man was simpler in that day, because life itself was simpler and the horizon of man narrower. More- over, the supernatural order, it was conceived, would soon break in upon the natural ; and only the primal duties of the heart and life were emphasized. Science and criticism were not as now breaking up an old view of the world ; and so far as the time was transi- tional, it was conceived to be simply toward the com- pletion and practical realization of a view which had long had currency. At the present time, our views of Nature and of man are being in many ways radi- cally recast ; nothing less than a new philosophy, a new general view of the world, seems to be in process of development, and never before was there such oc- casion for the exercise of severe intellectual virtue. As matter of fact the ethics of the intellect, instead of being taught by the followers of Jesus, are most impressively displayed by those whom Christian teach- ers have generally thought it their duty to oppose or rebuke : I mean the students and investigators in 206 ETHICAL RELIGION. science and history. I am no believer in the all- sufficingness of science, or in the finality of the les- sons of history; yet the researches of students in these departments have in many cases illustrated to us an open-mindedness, an eagerness and reverence for truth, and a simple faithfulness of utterance that make a model for the conduct of all thinking. A lesson in morals, in ideal scrupulousness, is conveyed by every genuine scientific investigation, and by none more notably than those of the revolutionizer of our views of Nature, the foremost scientific figure of the century, Charles Darwin. Let the same openness, the same fearlessness of investigation, the same virility of thought, and the same exact 'correspondence of word to thought characterize our religious thinking, and a revolution of equal consequence in this depart- ment of human interest will be the result. *2, T turn now to the need of higher political con- ceptions and morality/. The State is not merely, as some would have it, a necessary evil, but has a sacred, I might almost say, a religious character and mission. One of its functions is, indeed, to prevent violence, to restrain passion, to act as society's police. As the law of gravitation keeps the planets in their courses and binds every atom to every other, so outwardly, at least, the State is to maintain a similar order among men. But, far more and higher than this, the State is a Commonwealth, and is to secure the ends needful for all. Each man has an individual sphere of action, where he is responsible only to himself ; but when his action touches the interest of another, he has another responsibility, — namely, to the State. The State must see that in matters and affairs where the ends DOES THE ETHICS OF JESUS SATISFY? 207 of the many are affected, those ends are not made impossible of realization ; it cannot allow individuals or combinations of individuals to win advantages at the expense and to the loss of others. Particularly in our own country, where ideas of equality are at the basis of the political system, is such practical injustice out of place. We have dispossessed kings and priests of their rights over us ; we have a govern- ment of the people. The question is. Shall it be a government for the people ? I do not mean a class called by that name, but for all. Shall the common, the universal good be secured, and no individual free- dom or rights be allowed which tend to the destruc- tion of the freedom and rights of others ? These questions must be answered, one way or another, in the next century of our national existence ; and if the choice were between a religion of the old sort and a politics intent on giving them a righteous answer, I see not how any generous-minded young man could hesitate to choose the service of the State. There is a touch of religion in all unselfish devotion to public ends, and it is just such devotion that is the crying political need of our time. The question of better civil service is at bottom nothing else. But what are the lessons which the Christian Gos- pels read us in political morality ? The political ideas of Jesus are a strange contrast to anything we know of by experience. His land was a Eoman province. There is no evidence that he did not love it, and every reason to believe that his feeling for it was strong and deep. But his method of political redemption was one of which we in these days can scarcely entertain the idea. It was not indeed politi- 208 ETHICAL RELIGION. cal redemption, but rather deliverance at the hand of one from whom emperors and empires derive their powers, and who, though the Lord of the whole earth, was in a special sense the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Do we suppose that the nobler motive which leads men into the service of the State, — the passion for justice and the common weal, — was ab- sent from the breast of Jesus ? Rather can our sense of justice be nowhere better refreshed than by drink- ing in his words ; nowhere has the tenderness for the least among men been more strikingly shown than in the memorials left us of his sacred life. If justice w^as not to come from the State, it was, as he believed, to come from a higher than the State ; if not through blundering human instrumentalities, it w^as to come through the heaven-sent " Son of Man,'^ before whom and his angel ministers all mankind would soon be gathered. Christian men and women lived on this faith in the early time, and nothing is more pathetic in history than the story of its gradually fading out of human souls. Even now one will find it in the creeds ; and a slight sense of the old awe and the old triumph may perchance come over us as we listen to the chanting of the Te Deiim, that chiefest of Chris- tian hymns, and hear the words, "We believe that thou shalt come to be our Judge ; ^^ but such confes- sions are on the lips rather than in the hearts of the worshippers. Accordingly nothing is so lightly and even apologeti- cally treated by liberal Christian critics and teachers as this- primitive and alwaj's, at least, professed Chris- tian belief. Yet it is no accident, no bit of Oriental coloring, however much of this there may be in filling DOES THE ETHICS OF JESUS SxVTISFY? 2C9 out the details of the final scene, but the climax and consummation of the Christian view of the world, — an answer to that deep question of man's heart, which is not merely what are the just and the good, but hoiv are they to be accomplished ; how is an actual end to be made of injustice and wrong. Religion will dawn anew on the world when the old problem again mightily engages us, and another and equally wide-reaching answer is won. The problem is justice, — the bringing to every one the means and opportu- nity for the highest and best things. To every one, — this is the very meaning of justice. The highest and best things are not for you or for me, or for any sort or class of men, but for all : they are the end, the right, the ideal destiny of every human being. But if this is the problem, Jesus' method of solving it is no longer capable of belief. In simple honest}^, it must be said to belong to the category of humanity's blighted hopes. The " Son of Man," who was to come so soon, has not come in all these centuries to bring the prom- ised redemption : the very idea of his coming belongs to a way of thinking now outgrown. Since Jesus believed in the impossible, he outlined for us no really practicable way of reaching the de- sired end. He was not concerned with the State, indicating neither ideal nor practical course for it to follow. A similar indifference to and unbelief in what is to us practicable is shown in the writings of the Christian Fathers. Tertullian, early in the third cen- tury, says that " nothing is more remote from his interests than public affairs." ^ Lecky remarks of ^ Ncc uUa res aliena rnagis quam publica. — Apology^ chap. xxxviii. 14 210 ETHICAL RELIGION. Saint Cyprian (who belongs a little later in the same century) that ^^the conception of a converted empire never appears to have flashed across the mind of the saint : the only triumph he predicted for the Church was that of another world." ^ Saint Augustine, a cen- tury later, pathetically asks, " What difference can it make to a man who is about to die whose government he lives under, if only there is no compulsion to im- piety and injustice ? " ^ His great work, from which this quotation is made, was intended to show, accord- ing to Lecky,* that the "city of God" was not to be on earth, and that the downfall of the empire, under barbarian invasions, need not trouble his fellow Chris- tians. If we wish a worthy conception of the mission of the State, we shall find it in the old heathen phi- losophers and emperors and lawyers rather than in Jesus or his followers. Marcus Aurelius, says Lecky, "made it his aim to realize the conception of a free State in which all citizens are equal, and of a royalty which makes it its first duty to respect the liberty of the citizens."* "Slavery," says the Eoman lawyer Morentinus, is " a custom of the law of nations, by which one man, contrary to the law of Nature, is sub- jected to the dominion of another." " As far as natural law is concerned," said another (Ulpian), " all men are equal." "By natural law," again, "all men are born free." 1 History of Morals, i. 485. 2 De Civitate Dei, v. 17, — "Quid interest sub cujus imperio vivat homo moriturus, si illi qui imperant, ad impia et iniquia non cogent." 3 Morals, i. 435. * Morals, i. 264. Cf. M. Aureliu8*s Meditations, i. 14. DOES THE ETHICS OF JESUS SATISFY? 211 These conceptions, with all that they imply, were never taken up by the Church ; and the work of giv- ing them effect through the State is a far more diffi- cult one than that of trusting and praying for the *' kingdom of God," as the Church has done. We are now coming to feel that if justice is to be done in this world (and perhaps equally in any other), it is we (that is, rational beings) who must do it, that pray- ing for its accomplishment is but wasted energy ; that its very sacredness commands that we cease all such trifling with it as prayer has now come to be, and give it a seat in our own hearts and an execution in oar laws and institutions. Man is to inherit the sanctity and the glory that were to invest the " Son of Man," sitting on his judgment-seat. For, I take it, the doing of justice is a sacred thing. There is a divinity hedging about every king or judge or magis- trate or private citizen who takes this task into his hands. For though justice as a reality in human conduct and government is a poor shifting thing, the demand for it is eternal, and issues not from man, nor from the earth, nor from the stars, but from somewhat older than they ; and he who executes it acts in that moment as the delegate of God. A new reverence for the State we want, then, — not the blind submission, not the passive obedience which has so often been the attitude enjoined upon Christians, but a reverence for the mission of the State, for its idea ; a reverence which shall recognize the dignity of the servants of the State, which shall demand that all legislation and administration shall in increasing measure fulfil the demands of the idea; a reverence which shall thus be the source of prog- 212 ETHICAL RELIGION. ress, and not the support of unreasoning conserva- tism. A new patriotism we want, not as an append- age, but as a part of ethics and religion. Here is not merely where we eat and sleep and work and travel, but this land is a field of duty ; here we are stationed, hfere we have a task. We are linked to a larger whole than our family or the circle of our business interests. For public ends we are to live. The public service must come to have a dignity and honor in our eyes such as no work on private ac- count can have ; and we shall enter it, if to this we are called, as priests might enter a temple, and with thoughts as religious as theirs. The more do we need a new patriotism, since as men are now so largely studying the past, considering what has been rather than what may and ought to be, and learn- ing that free institutions have so often failed, a kind of scholarly scepticism is arising as to the future of this land, if not, indeed, a distrust of our funda- mental doctrine of the rights of man. It is a great experiment, viewed from the standpoint of history, — this giving of the sovereign power equally into the hands of all citizens j and those who will have cer- tain proof of success before they act must halt and tremble, if not sigh for other times. But those who have it in their blood to believe in the experiment wdll, by their very belief, help to carry it on to tri- umph. American patriotism is more than attachment to this land of ours : it is attachment to an idea, it is belief in a cause, — the cause of liberty and hu- man rights ; and for the issue every one of us has a measure of responsibility. The State itself must also advance. It must assume DOES THE ETHICS OF JESUS SATISFY? 213 new duties, — new, that is, not to its mission, but to its past performance. Freedom is good, but it must be universal ; and if my freedom tends to the destruc- tion of another's, mine must be limited. What makes the right of the State to interfere and prevent domes- tic slavery ? What but its very mission to secure and maintain the personal rights of every one within its borders ? Are there then no other encroachments of the naturally stronger over the naturally weaker ? I will not now undertake to answer this question specifically ; but wherever there is a tendency of this sort ; wherever one man or a set of men get property in land or means of transportation or instruments of production or the means of subsistence, to such an ex- tent as to place others largely at their mercy, — there the State should interfere, and, whether by legisla- tion or actual administration in its own name, prevent the mono[)oly, and act for the good of all. The State with us is not, as it often was in old time, the rule of the stronger over the weaker : if it were, it would have no sanctity or defence ; if it should become so, then revolution would be commanded. The State is for justice, — to see to it that the strong do not rule the weak, to break the force of the brute struggle for existence. Most ominous of all would be the future of that State wherein freedom should be ostensibly hon- ored, and yet in the very name of freedom the bonds of servitude be put on men, women, and children ; ^ wherein freedom would thus mean a freedom from law, from State examination and supervision, and be 1 Cf. John Stuart Mill (Political Economy, ii. 579): "Frecriom of contract, in the case of children, is but another word for free- dom of coercion." 214 ^ ETHICAL RELIGIOK only a specious cloak behind which men might pursue their worst seltishness. A very different spirit must animate the new re- ligion from that which animated the old. The Stoic maxim and not that implied in the teaching of Jesus must furnish the rule for human life : " The wise man must take part in public life/' — TroXiTeveo-Oat t6v crocf^ov. For through the State rather than through any mythical judgment in the clouds, the ends of justice and right are in an important measure to be worked out. 3. But if we have need of a new political morality, very closely related thereto is our need of a new in- dustrial ethics. While the State should to my mind include economy to a certain extent, so that there might be some meaning in the phrase '' ijolitical econ- omy," — and hence the true tendency is toward the assumption, or at least direction, by the State of such properties and businesses as become large and public in their influences, — the time is yet far distant when a perfect and detailed and particular justice can be prescribed or done by the State. In any case, indus- try may, relatively speaking, be treated as a separate topic. We live from day to day by our own industry or by that of others ; for I mean by industry not all kinds of pursuits, but those which aim to satisfy our physical needs and provide for our material comfort. Industrial concerns are those which touch us to the quick : a disorder here means so much less bread for some one to eat, so much of an increase in the death- rate. Society has always been partially, I may say largely, made up of those whose only means of com- manding the necessaries, not to say the comforts, of DOES THE ETHICS OF JESUS SATISFY? 215 life lay in their hands and arms, either by way of labor or of threatening. I say always, yet I do not say necessarily ; and here is the whole point. There are doubtless native inequalities among men, and there always will be. But the true industrial order would be one in which the inequalities would mutually sup- plement one another, according to an ideal law of jus- tice and humanity. This ideal order does not however belong to history, but to the future, — society did not fall from it, but is to rise to it ; and the call to rise to it is felt to lie in the very nature and constitution of humanity, whenever it sees through its muddy vesture of brutality and selfishness, and becomes aware of the beatings of its own heart. The ideal order is, in a word, co-operation. It means for those engaged in the production of any means of subsistence or comfort that they seek no more than a fair profit from the communit}^ which they serve, and that they divide the profit fairly among themselves. There is apparently little thought of fairness and justice in the present industrial arrange- ments. Services are doubtless done both to the com- munity and by the employer to the employed, as by the employed to the employer; but the simple fact that business is ordinarily undertaken for " profit," or, as is said, with " business motives," shows that fair- ness or equitableness, not to say humanity, are not the determining motives. The upward limit of the employer's prices is not ordinarily any thought of justice, but the knowledge of what can or will be paid. And the wages he is apt to pay go as high, not as considerations of jus- tice would suggest, but as the demands of the labor- 216 ETHICAL RELIGION. ers can make them go, and sink as low as men or women — and perhaps children — can be found who will take them. *' The very idea," says John Stuart Mill, "'of distributive justice, or of any proportional- ity between success and merit, or between success and exertion, is in the present state of society so mani- festly chimerical as to be relegated to the regions of romance." ^ A reviewer naively remarks, " The at- tempt of writers like Bastiat to show an exact har- mony between the rules of political economy and the demands of absolute justice involves, like the opposite error of Mr. Froude, a confusion between economical rules and moral precepts." ^ That is, in j)lain words, economy is one thing, and ethics quite another ; and by the '^ opposite error of Mr. Froude " was probably meant a demand on his part that there be an infusion of ethics into economy, which is at least more hon- orable, and I believe more likely to succeed, than the attempt of those who would defend and justify the present industrial arrangements on the ground not only that they are rooted '• in the nature of things," but that they always mean "service for service."^ Service for service ? In words, yes ; but what not only of the intention, but of the equity of the exchange ? Suppose that I succor a drowning man, and before doing so, exact of him the greater part of his posses- sions. That is undoubtedly service for service ; his life he plainly values more than his possessions. But ^ Chapters on Socialism. 2 Tiie Nation, Oct. 4, 1877, p. 216. 3 Cf. article on the identity of " Private Wenlth and Public Welfare," by Hon. Edward Atkinson, in Unitarian Review, Decem- ber, 1881. DOES THE ETHICS OF JESUS SATISFY? 217 what should you say of my exaction ? So there are those who take the possessions of men to-day, often the entire possessions, — for myriads possess little or nothing but strength of hand and limb, — and in return give them but the bare means of subsistence. precious Equity ! A new ethics of industry must arise ; or, I might almost say, ethics must be now applied for the first time in this department of human activity. What does the ethics of Jesus give us in this direction ? In truth, if we turn from the ideas of our time to those of Jesus, it is almost like going from one world into another. Did he not feel for poverty ? Yes ; his sympathies were boundless. But his remedy for it, aside from gifts of charity, indicates a notion of provi- dence, of the relation between man and God, that may at times adorn a poem or a tale, but has lost all hold upon our sober belief. It was not so much even individual toil and labor as trust, — belief that as we are of more value than the sparrows, so we shall be no less provided for than they. Consider the birds, he said, that neither reap nor gather into barns ; the lilies, that neither toil nor spin ! How strangely con- trasted with this idyllic view of the world is that to which we in recent years have become accustomed ! The language of Darwin is here better than any para- phrase : " We behold," he says, " the face of ^Nature bright with gladness ; we often see superabundance of food. We do not see, or we forget, that the birds which ar^idly singing round us mostly live on insects or seeds, and are thus constantly destroying life ; or we forget how largely these songsters, or their eggs, or their nestlings, are destroyed by birds and beasts 218 ETHICAL RELIGION. of prey. We do not always bear in mind that though food may now be superabundant, it is not so at all seasons of each year. ... I estimated/' he says again, " chiefly from the greatly reduced number of nests in the spring, that the winter of 1854-55 destroyed four-fifths of the birds in my own grounds." ^ The fact is that the "heavenly Father," of whom Jesus spoke, probably denies food and protection to more of his creatures than he actually provides for ; if he did not, the earth would soon be covered by the progeny of any single pair of them. Hence, there often arises a struggle for existence, which for severity and piti- lessness can hardly be surpassed by anything our im- agination can conceive. Man also is involved in the same process. Is he not often equally pressed with the struggle, and as unconcernedly left to his fate by the " heavenly Father " ? Darwin would console us, in reference to the lower orders of being, " with the belief that the war of Na- ture- is not incessant, that no fear is felt, that death is generally prompt, and that the vigorous, the healthy, and the happy survive." Ah ! but man is not one of the lower orders of being, and the consolation nowise fits our grief for him. Man is an animal who thinks, and does feel fear ; his death is often miserably drawn out ; he survives often long after he or others can see the use of living; and sometimes it is at last forgotten that he is a man, and he becomes to many but a mass of flesh or filth, cumbering the ground. Oh, if we have a view of human nature that causes u» no shud- der and no resentment when we think or know of this ; if we do not say, O remorseless struggle, thou ^ Origin of Species, pp. 49, 54. DOES THE ETHICS OF JESUS SATISFY? 219 Last no right or place in the circle of human rela- tions, there only the law of respect and help and pity- should have sway ! — then am I at loss to know how to proceed. I can only address myself at the outset to those who have a different estimate of human nature, who respond to the thought of Jesus' words, if not to the inference he draws from them, " Ye are of more value than many sparrows ; " who believe that Ham- let's words, ^' How noble in reason ! how infinite in faculties ! in form and moving how express and admi- rable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god ! " — that these are none too good for man, since though they flatter him as he often is, it is with the portrait of what he may be. I can only address those who see in man, in every man, some- what of measureless possibilities, of priceless worth. On those who think in this way a new burden is laid. We can no longer, without hypocrisy, commend the poor and unfortunate to the care of the "heavenly Father ; " nor can we assent to the cool indifference and practical materialism of laissez-faire doctrinaires, though the facts of the economist and the thoughts of man lying at the basis of the Christian confidence have equally our acknowledgment. We have, in a word, to cherish the thought and to change the facts. For though the facts of external Nature — of rain and the soil and its fruits — are not in our power, the facts of human institution and custom and will are ; and I believe there is no need that a single human being in the limits of civilization should suffer or want, or live any but a nobly human life, if society would but awake and respond to the task laid upon it. There is no trouble in the nature of things ; 220 ETHICAL RELIGION. the nature of things even points and commands, and in a single way. The trouble is with man, who will not accept ideal guidance, but prefers each one to take his own way, and to act without reference to the good of all. Hence, if the old religion centred in prayer to God, the new must be an address to man, — and yet not as if the word merely came from man, but in the name of the Highest, and with the aim of connecting hu- man life once more with a supreme sanctity. This sanctity is that of justice. Jesus, as we have said, taught the Golden Eule, which is a popular and ap- prehensible, if somewhat rude, statement of justice ; but he left no distinct and binding impression that industrial life must be ordered thereby. With his peculiar view of Providence and of the great change impending in human affairs, the problem of life was hardly serious enough to call for such distinct inculca- tion. Hence, though for the little time that his spirit was a fresh and powerful force in the minds of his followers, his high demands were matched in the or- der of their lives, and the earliest Christianity had some of the features of a genuine brotherhood, when discouragements came, there was felt to be no binding obligation to continue these features ; and later on, and through the centuries of Christian history, very little was done to abolish the class separations into which human society always naturally falls. The practical working ideal of the Church has been, for the most part, that of charity and pity and considera- tion on the part of the higher classes in their treat- ment of the lower, and of deference and submission from the lower to the higher. Justice would make DOES THE ETHICS OF JESUS SATISFY? 221 charity, in great measure, unnecessary, and the airs of self-humiliation an offence. Instead of *^ Christian society," — including the poor and the rich, the alms- giver and the beggar, — justice would give us a high society of equals, wherein should be neither patron- age nor obsequiousness, 1 but only a noble, mutual courtesy and respect. " One hour of justice," said an old Mahometan precept, " is worth seventy years of prayer." Let us say the same of charity. All these hospitals and homes and asylums while in one way an honor, are in another an indication of the disease of our civili- zation. We do not strike at the root by raising up more of them, though while the evils last this must be done. Yet the Eeligion of the Future will only come with those who do strike at the root, and who, whether at the command of the State or in obedience to the law in their own hearts, do no business and engage in no industry in which ample justice is not meted out to all who join them in it ; who will use talents for leadership and initiatory enterprise, not to give them mastery over others, but as Godin and Leclaire in France have done, for the elevation of others, and will feel in all they do, and in their most material concerns as well, an o'er -mastering religious constraint. For though religion by no means neces- sarily includes a system of theological dogmas, or prayer or worship in the customary senses, I have no confidence that any great industrial reform will come save as a product of religion. All man's natural self- regarding impulses are against any reform. Those 1 The old social ideal is finely portrayed in Addison's " Sir Roger de Coverley.'* 222 ETHICAL KELIGION. winning in the battle would rather have the battle go on as it is ; and those who do not win, and who may some time, instead of fighting for what they can only most scantily get, turn and fight their successful com- petitors who seem to be keeping them from getting more, — they, even if they should triumph, would only solve the problem for themselves and not for humanity, and would perhaps in turn have to give way to another inferior class who, stung by their op- pression, would rise and overthrow them. The root of the matter, the solution of the industrial problem, is no more with the working classes than with their employers. Both are equally striving for the mastery, and I have heard it said by a manufacturer that no foreman was so self-assertive and tyrannical as one suddenly elevated from the rank of a common work- man.^ The solution of the problem is only in an idea, a principle, and in persons only as they are permeated and actuated by the idea and principle. Moreover, the acceptance of the idea under the stress of no merely selfish desire or impulse, but because it is just and commanding in itself, is religion, proving as it does man's link with what is higher and the Highest, and hinting to him as in a dream — *' The hills where his life rose, And the sea where it goes." 4. A fourth ethical need of our time is that of a new statement of the end of human existence. There is general dissatisfaction with the idea that this end is for each one in the saving of his own soul. The 1 Cf. Aeschylus (Prometheus Bound, 36) : " Who holds a power But newly gained, is ever stern of mood.'* DOES THE ETHICS OF JESUS SATISFY? 223 early Christian idea of the " kingdom of heaven " was much nobler, and has indeed a basic meaning of in- estimable worth; yet the form and expectation with which not only the early Church, but Jesus himself, connected it have proved untrustworthy and delusive. The righteous ordering of human life, which was to come with the reappearance of the " Son of Man,'' and to come so soon, has failed to come in all these centuries. And the notions which are the survival of that old conception, — of a heaven beyond the skies, of a Deity who will be seen, a Son sitting on his right hand, and of angels who are their ministers, — belong rather to the realm of fairy-land than to that of actual fact. There is, hence, a wide-spread ten- dency to find the ends of existence in what is near, palpable, of present, even of material, interest. Now, though it is impossible not to sympathize with this tendency, so far as it contrasts with the old one of paying slight attention to human affairs and interests, it too has its limitations ; and there are deeper moments in our experience in which we dis- tinctly feel them. There is something within us which, at least in thought and .purpose, rises above . all limits and seeks a measureless good. As that something impels one to find a large share of his happiness in that of others, so it makes it impossible to find content in seeing others merely happy. One feels that the merely happy have but learned the alphabet of existence ; that the notion of perfection includes the disposition of the heart, the worthiness to be happy, the enlargement of the mind, the en- nobling of the moral life, — these all carried on to heights beyond our experience or even imagination ; 224 ETHICAL RELIGION. and that nothing less than the perfect, and this shared in by all, can be the end, the goal. It is character- istic of religion to start from the idea of this limit- less good, to discern the worth of all minor or partial goods from their tendency to ultimate therein, to send our aspirations to the very stars, and thus lend an infinite sanctity to each particular act. Jesus struck the note of religion when he counselled his disciples to be content with no traditional rules of goodness, but only with perfection (Matt. v. 48). His impas- sioned apostle struck it when he wrote, " Whatsoever things are true or honorable or just or pure or lovely, think on these things " (Phil. iv. 8). Eeligion is the passion of the soul for all good. As there are means and ends in the world, — as for example, matter is for form, and lower forms for higher, inorganic for organic, insentient for sentient, and the merely sentient for the rational, — so the ends of rational existence are the ends of the world, and perfection is not merely a human but a world problem. On every act of virtue the stars shine ; for every choice of the higher for the lower, for every sacrifice of private to universal good, a mute sympa- thy runs through universal nature. And no act of ours born of that upward aim can fail of its issue. There can be no destruction of what is truly good. There is something we mortal men can do that is not mortal ; that ** Will last and shine transfigured In the final reign of Right, It will merge into the splendors Of the City of the Light." i 1 Prof. Felix Adler, " The City of the Light." DOES THE ETHICS OF JESUS SATISFY? 225 It is no mere earthly paradise that is hinted at in these lines, though to strive for a nobler social order on the earth as a proximate form of the perfect is necessary, but an end and outcome of human toil and struggle unaffected by earthly changes or earthly dissolution, — in truth, a world-city, wherein world- issues are to be gathered up and a world-purpose con- summated, and the thought of which is once more to give dignity and the sense of permanence to life. Do we survive with this good ; shall we know in some other state of existence the good we have done in this ; shall we meet those for whom we have done, and recognize those whom we love ? I know not ; and I hold it to be at the best a curious question, al- beit one deeply touching these clinging affections that make up so much of the sweetness of human life. The ends of moral perfection are not for our personal satisfaction, but we for them. He who loves not the true and the good better than himself ; he who does not put them above all personal attachments ; who does not find in the dearest object of his love a re- flection of somewhat above and higher, and not a purely individual possession, — he, however else for- tunate or gifted, has never found himself in an act of religious veneration. For this is not man meeting with man, but man bowing before the unalterable, the eternal ideal nature of things ; not God, in the ordi- nary sense of that term, but the God of gods, — some- thing so secret and necessary that were it to cease, the stars would vanish out of the sky, and were it only to cease in human consciousness, human society would relapse into barbaric chaos. Emerson said not long ago: "I see that sensible men and conscientious 16 226 ETHICAL RELIGION. men all over the world were of one religion, — the religion of well-doing and daring, men of sturdy truth, men of integrity, and of feeling for others. My infer- ence is that there is a statement of religion possible which makes all scepticism absurd/^ ^ It is such a statement of religion that the time needs ; and I can hardly believe that personal conceptions of God or immortality will make a necessary part of it, — which is far from saying that men shall be forbidden to entertain them. The certainty and the sanctity of religion lie, to my mind, in man's moral nature. Here alone is, in addition to the may-he or the can-be, the MUST, — the voice of command, the tone of authority, without which, and without assent to which, religion is but a playing with our opinions or our feelings. We are under orders ; though we are free to obey or not, honor and safety lie only in obedience. And religion will come to us afresh when there is a new perception of this fact, and a new recasting of life and thought and all our human relations in obedi- ence to it. 1 " The Preacher," in Lectures and Biographical Sketches. XII. GOOD FRIDAY FROM A MODERN STANDPOINT. GOOD FRIDAY commemorates one of the most pathetic events in history. The orthodox idea of the death of Jesus takes us back to the dim begin- nings of Hebrew history, when Jahveh, the national god, was conceived as the special source of thunder and the storm, of plagues and pestilence, and when, according to the legend, the fierce wrath with which he smote the Egyptians, destroying the first-born in every house, was only stayed as against the Hebrews by the blood of lambs dashed upon the door-posts or the lintels of the houses wherein they lived. The sight of blood was thought, according to the legend, to have softened the heart of the stern god, and in his mercy he passed by the houses of the Israelites. Thence, according to the Biblical account, arose the festival of the Passover. Thousands of lambs were slaughtered every spring in ancient Israel, to com- memorate the god's favor in the past and to secure his favor for the future. It happened that it was during one of the Passover festivals that Jesus came to his untimely end, and the coincidence could not fail to affect the imagination of the early Christians. Jesus was their Passover, they declared, — their lamb, — and they had no need to sacrifice any other. Be- hind him and his blood they could take shelter, and 228 ETHICAL EELIGION. the destroying hand that would soon be stretched out in the dread day of judgment would pass them by. The Gospel traditions even represent Jesus as taking this view of his death. As the shadows of his coming fate fell upon him he spoke mysteriously of giving his life as a ransom, by which the destruction of many should be averted ; and the night before the cruci- fixion, at the last meal with his disciples, he identified the bread and wine upon the table with his body and blood, which were about to be offered up as a propitia- tion to Israel's God. This is the meaning of the com- munion which all Christian churches celebrate ; here lies the significance of the Catholic mass : to Prot- estants figuratively, to Catholics really, the bread and the wine are the body and blood of that precious pas- chal lamb whose life was taken eighteen centuries ago. Unless God is appeased, unless blood is shed, there is thought to be no favor from the unseen world for man ; and to those who do not trust in this sacrifice already made there is only, to use Scriptural language, a certain fearful expectation of judgment and of fierce, devouring fire.^ Here is one explanation of the power which orthodox Christianity still has over the minds of men. At bottom it is a religion of fear ; and before the advent of science and its disclosures of an equable reign of law, fear is more natural to men in contem- plating Nature than any other feeling. There is noth- ing men crave so much as to have their fears allayed ; and so to ignorant, anxious men and women every- where, — whether among the earliest Jewish converts, or among the thronging multitudes of Eome, or among the untutored barbarians of the north, or among the 1 Hebrews, x. 27. GOOD FRIDAY FROM A MODERN STANDPOINT. 229 uneducated masses in our great cities to-day, — Chris- tianity has come as a boon, assuring them that if they will trust in " the blood " that has been shed for them, the unseen powers of the world will be kind and gracious. What occasion have those to whom this whole circle of belief is illusory and pitifully erroneous to speak of Good Friday ? I answer. Because the death of Jesus may be looked at from a different standpoint. We may ask ourselves. What led to it ; what does it show us as to his character ; what is its meaning as an incident in the moral progress of the race ; what value has it still for us personally, when we look upon it simply as the death of a great and heroic man ? We may treat the death of Jesus as we would that of Socrates or of Savonarola or of John Brown, — tragic deaths, all of them ; deaths that have moved the hearts of men and influenced the course of history, and still have an inspiring power. The death of Jesus, it seems to me, surpasses them all in pathos and in its influ- ence on the fortunes of mankind. I think it not pre- sumptuous to depart from Jesus' own estimate in this matter. We human beings often fail to understand ourselves. President Garfield said that "the lesson of history is rarely learned by the actors themselves.'' We who are really living are too earnest about the matter to sit down and form calm judgments ; time and the perspective which time gives are necessary. Jesus may have valued his death for one thing, — history may value it for quite another. How was it that Jesus died so soon ? Why did he not live on to a ripe old age, like Socrates ? I answer, essentially because he was not a philosopher, but a 230 ETHICAL RELIGION. reformer, an agitator. For this reason his predeces- sor, the ascetic Baptist, was cast into one of Herod's dungeons, and came out only to be decapitated ; he had spoken too boldly of social iniquity in the court. Jesus had no ascetic ways about him. He did not love the lonesome wilderness, — he frequented the towns and cities where men were congregated, and was touched by human sufferings and privations as well as human wickedness. But he threw himself into the social agi- tations of his day ; and the one agitating thought — that with which all secretly sympathized, though few dared to promulgate and hope anything immediately from it — was that of an overthrowal of the hated Eo- man power, and the inauguration of a new social and political order, under the name of the " kingdom of heaven." This was the Messianic dream of his people. During his youth or early manhood there had been actual uprisings and bloody resistance to the Koman authority. Jesus had a horror of war, and looked not to the hands of any soldiery to accomplish the great revolution on which he, too, had set his heart. The great god Jahveh, — he who had flashed fire out of heaven in approval of his faithful prophets, who had parted the waters of the Eed Sea to let his people pass through and escape from their oppressors, — his arm, Jesus thought, would be stretched out again ; and it was necessary only that he be trusted, and that the people be gathered out of Israel who should be worthy to form the new and glorious kingdom. By a bold leap, and yet no bolder than other Mes- siahs took before and after him, Jesus assumed the leadership of a new movement, gathered followers, spoke with authority, foretold the coming change. GOOD FRIDAY FROM A MODERN STANDPOINT. 231 and made others feel, and believed himself, that when the "kingdom of heaven" should come, he should be at its head. "The old order will soon cease," he said, "and a new one is coming; in the old is oppression and cruel suffering and abject misery and sensuality and all manner of evil ; in the new there will be a recompense for every wrong, and comfort for all who mourn ; in the new, the poor and the per- secuted and the pure in heart, and those who love others as they do themselves, will be the privileged ones, while all who oppress, all who are sensual, all who are hypocritical and for a pretence make long prayers, shall be humbled and cast out." The heart of the people responded to such fervid utterances. Those in authority, on the other hand, — the props, the pillars, the ornaments of the old order of things, — looked askance at Jesus. It is the old story of conflicting interests ; the Sadducean nobility, the zeal- ous, punctilious Pharisees, the lawyer-scribes were in a place of reverence, and it did not look as if in the dream of the future which Jesus unfolded they should have any place at all. On the other hand, those who were oppressed and miserable had every- thing to gain ; and that many of them were inspired by no higher motives is shown by the fact that when Jesus got into the clutches of the civil power they made a very rabble against him. The Eoman author- ities never seem to have troubled themselves at all about Jesus ; so peaceful was his attitude and so ex- clusively did he address himself to his own country- men, that they scarcely knew of him ; and when he was brought to trial before them they seem to have regarded him as a harmless dreamer, and would never 232 ETHICAL RELIGION. have consented to his death had they not been driven to do so by the fierce and determined attitude of the leaders of Jewish orthodoxy. But the conflict into which Jesus had precipitated himself could have no other issue. He did not trim his words, — he spoke as conscience prompted him to speak. Sharper invective than that he poured out against the false guides of his people was perhaps never heard, — they would not en- ter into the " kingdom of heaven/' nor would they let others go in. It was but a question of time ; and when one of his disciples, momentarily chagrined at a re- buke his master had given him for his penuriousness, or possibly with the thought of forcing him to take his position as the nation's king, offered to put the Jewish authorities in possession of him, the offer was readily closed with; Jesus was made a prisoner, and the next day, after being hurried through a judi- cial trial, which was little better than a farce, he was nailed to the cross. Such were the causes that led to the event which Good Friday celebrates, — so far as they can be gath- ered into a few words. Jesus died the victim of a great hope for his people and for the world. He belongs to the company of those who cannot be pa- tient with things as they see them, and who, because they cannot, meet with suspicion and opposition and hatred, and perhaps violence and death. His hope was not free from illusion, — nay, in one sense it was altogether illusion ; for wrong and oppression will never cease in this world by the intervention of divine power to judge and punish them, nor do men return from the dead to do the work which they have left undone on earth. But we have to distinguish GOOD FRIDAY FROM A MODERN STANDPOINT. 233 between one's aivi and the means by which one may hope to see that aim accomplished ; and there is more hope for the world from one Jesus than from a dozen or a thousand men trained to scientific habits of thought, yet without any transcendent aim and passion for a reign of right. The aim of Jesus was sound; it was perfect, it was unsurpassable. There is no other supreme aim for man than that reign of justice and of love upon which Jesus set his heart. To-day, in the measure that we have that aim and try to realize it there is order and safety and joy in the community ; and that there is so much lawlessness and defiant wickedness abroad is simply evidence to how great an extent men have it not. We must seek first, not wealth, not power, and not science nor art, but the "kingdom of God," — there is perpetual in- spiration for man in this lofty thought of Jesus. The significance to us of the death of Jesus is simply that he kept this aim, in the only form that was possible to him, to the bitter end. We now can distinguish the aim from the method by which it was to be real- ized ; we can separate the form from the substance of Jesus' thought. But Jesus was not a philosopher, — his consciousness was one and indivisible ; and for him to doubt that he was the Messiah would have been to doubt that there was any Messianic reign to be ; and to doubt that would have been to aban- don his faith in Israel and in Israel's God ; and that he could not abandon, — it was a part of him, in his blood and in every fibre of his being. For my own part, I can say that there are no events in Jesus' life so touching as those toward the close. At no time does he reveal so much character. To stand 234 ETHICAL RELIGION. by our faith when all things go well with us, — there is no great virtue in that ; to stand by it when it is assailed, when we may suffer loss from our adhesion to it, — that tests whatever manliness there is in us. Jesus had no stoical feeling about death. It was not a matter of indifference to him whether he lived or died. He who loved the flowers of the field and the birds of the air, the lakes and the hillsides of his na- tive Galilee, and the proud city of Jerusalem, to which he had made yearly pilgrimages from his boyhood up, could not turn from all these without some rendings of the heart and tears ; and sharper pang than all, he who had counted on divine assistance, he who had looked to being elevated to a divine throne, whence he could execute the justice that was burning in his heart, — how could he die like other men and leave his great work undone ? In theory Jesus had as- sented to his death : on his way from Galilee to Je- rusalem for the last time, he surmised what the end would be ; yes, on the night before his death, as we have seen, he made a mournful comparison of him- self to the paschal lamb. But afterward, when in the darkness of the night the dread spectre of death actually stood before him, his human shrinkings were too strong; he fell on his face and prayed to God that the cup might be removed from him, — prayed three times, and sweat fell like blood from his face. It was an almost mortal agony, so that to-day we hold our breath as we read of it, — we feel the wrestling as if it were our own, we hear the cry of pain ; and then the cry ceases, and a more than mor- tal calm passes through his breast, — he has jdelded his strong love of life, he goes forth to the sacrifice. GOOD FRIDAY FROM A MODERN STANDPOINT. 235 Never was man serener than Jesus before his judges. When idle charges were trumped up against him he was silent, — he would not honor them even with a de- nial. But when asked as to the central core of all his faith, — whether he was the Messiah, — he promptly answered, "I am," and took the oath administered to him by the high-priest, though he had enjoined his followers not to swear ; he pointed his persecutors away to the time when he should sit on the right hand of God, and come in majesty on the clouds of heaven ; and when in return the priestly hirelings spat in his face and cuffed him and jeered at him, he held his peace. Before Pilate Jesus preserved the same dignified attitude, affirming his royal rank, but replying nothing to the charges urged by the priests and elders. He submitted to the insults of the brutal Roman soldiery : in cruel mockery they put a red gown upon him, and placed a crown woven of thorn-branches upon his head, and for a sceptre put into his right hand a reed, and then filed before him, kneeling in turn and saying, "Hail, King of the Jews ! " and not a murmur escaped him. On his way to the place of execution he had to bear his own cross, until in his weakness he could carry it no longer, when a passer-by was impressed into the service. On arriving at the dreary hill-top he was offered, "according to Jewish usage, a highly spiced wine, an intoxicating drink, which from a sentiment of pity was given to the sufferer to stupefy him." ^ He touched the cup to his lips and put it from him. As Renan says, "this sad solace of common criminals was unsuited to his lofty nature ; " he would face death 1 Renan's Life of Jesus, ch. xxv. 236 ETHICAL RELIGION. with mind unclouded. The physical horrors of that death no one could describe ; nor shall I attempt to. Crucifixion was reserved for slaves and the lowest criminals ; it was a horrid torture, and ordinarily long drawn out. But if we may trust the Gospel traditions, no outcry escaped the lips of Jesus, unless it was once when consumed with burning thirst. So magnanimous was he, that he prayed God to forgive his executioners, since they knew not what they were doing ; and though for a moment his heart failed him, and he felt as one for- saken, he reassured himself at the last, and trustfully commended to the hands of God his parting spirit. Where shall we read of a more tragic, a more noble death than this ? Where is one that more stirs our mingled feelings of indignation and pity and admira- tion ? Do we wonder that by his death Jesus has won a closer place in the hearts of men than he could ever have by a most splendid and successful life ; that the crucified one has been covered with honor and glory ; that men have raised him to a height of praise equal only to the depth of shame in which he was once plunged ? Who would not like to be a believing Chris- tian for a moment on Good Friday even more than on Easter Day, since all the instincts of honor and pity in a man incline us to take the side of one who was once placed at such bitter disadvantage? — and we should rather err with such an one than keep com- pany with those who are coldly correct, and have not hearts large enough for a noble mistake ! I for one would cast my tribute of honor at the feet of Jesus. There are Liberals who would ignore him, who would bring up their children in ignorance of him, or per- chance would ridicule him. I am not of their num- GOOD FRIDAY FROM A MODERN STANDPOINT. 237 ber. Jesus is no paragon to my mind, — no model of spotless virtue or of infallible wisdom ; I do not call myself his follower. But this he is to me, — inspiration ! He touches my heart, he stirs my con- science, he warms me with love of a noble ideal ; and this is something which few philosophers. Liberal or other, have done or are doing for men, — so that while in certain lines they may give correct opinions, Jesus 'and a few others like him give that indefinable thing we call life. I should rather have the impulses which Jesus communicates and be left to form my own opin- ions, than to have the opinions of our wisest philoso- phers without that motion of the heart toward good- ness and all unselfishness which is so naturally stirred by the spectacle of the life and death of this son of man. It is not knowledge that moves the world, but character, love ; and outside of , the holy Buddha, where is there a man who has so impressed himself upon the world, and created and deepened so many channels of pity and tenderness, as Jesus, whose opinions we may outgrow, but whose heart never ? The death of Jesus sets the last seal to his sincerity, and to the reality of that wonderful love of man which made him brave so much and count the cost so little. A man of commoner mould would never have risked so much ; a man Avith a heart less pure would never have assumed so high a mission. We are compelled to say, that if Israel and the world were to be redeemed and purified and transformed according to the outlines of his dream, he was worthy to be the instrument of the Unseen in doing so ; for never was there one who had less self-will, who more completely identified him- self with the will of the Highest as he conceived it, — 238 ETHICAL RELIGION. never one better qualified to sit at the right hand of his Father, as he thought he one day should, and dis- pense justice and merciful judgment to the assembled nations of men. As an incident in the moral progress of humanity the death of Jesus may be said to have a threefold significance : — 1. It is the consecration of sorrow, of suffering. Cast over in your mind the gods of the Grecian and Roman* pantheon, and where shall you find one with the down- cast, sorrowful visage of the Son of Man ? where among the fair goddesses shall you find a face so tenderly beautiful as that which Christian imagination has given to the Mater Dolorosa ? A suffering god — what an in- congruous thing to a Greek or a Roman ! But a suf- fering god, a suffering man whom his followers have made a god, is the central figure in Christian worship. This means an immense difference in the moral senti- ments of men. It means a compassion strange to the ancient world, — it means that the more men suffer (other things being equal), the more they shall be cared for ; while in Pagan civilization it was too apt to be the case that the more men suffered, the more they were neglected. No one can turn in reflection to the cross of Jesus, or to any of the affecting incidents of the last two days of his life, and not feel his heart softened toward all the sufferings of his fellow-men, and a double aversion to all the jeering spirit with which one man sometimes makes light of another man's distress. Such incidents as those at the trial and cru- cifixion of Jesus would not be tolerated now, even in the punishment of our worst criminals ; the dignity of humanity, even in crime, is felt now, and a lynching GOOD FRIDAY FROM A MODERN STANDPOINT. 239 mob would hardly subject its victim to such indignities as were heaped on Jesus. It is not by accident, then, that we care for the sick now as never was the case in the old world, that the poor have a love shown to them that they never had in Greece or Eome ; it was not by accident that in old Rome itself the glad- iatorial shows were stopped when Christian influences gained the upper hand in the State. Everywhere a new humanity arose, a new pity for all the outcast members of society ; for no one suffered shame and loss without exciting the remembrance of him who was in his day "despised and rejected of men," and who asked no honor for himself save that of being remem- bered in the form of the least and feeblest of those who were his brethren. 2. The death of Jesus brings home to us in a vivid way that sacrifice is a law of progress. It is not that the unseen Spirit is angry and will not be favorable to man until some offering of blood is made to him, but that the conditions of things are such that progress is only possible through effort and pain and sacrifice. "What good thing have my brothers," exclaims the Buddha, " but it came from search and strife and lov- ing sacrifice ? " It is a beautiful ideal that each of us should live a full and complete life, without any marring of it, any cutting of it short for the sake of others ; but it is the goal of evolution rather than an always present possibility ; in the mean time we have often to suffer injury to ourselves that good may come to others. What mother, what devoted friend, what leader of reform, what helper in any useful cause, does not know that without willingness to part with some- thing, — with time or means or strength or health, 240 ETHICAL RELIGION. perhaps with life itself, — they are not fitted to the tasks to which nature or their own hearts call them ? And this is why the innocent ideal of pleasure, of happiness for ourselves, falls so far short of the real requirements of life. It is summer-weather philoso- phy; and if we have cherished it, the first storm of adversity, the first disappointment, may dispel it like a dream from our minds, and is only too apt to leave us bitter because we were so unprepared. For we are in truth bound to one another, — we belong to humanity. It is against our nature to seek a good for ourselves, alone and apart ; it is according to our nature to find our happiness in the common happiness, — to give, to spend and be spent in the service of humanity. None of the lower goods on which we so often set our hearts are absolute. Health we should seek ; but we may dis- regard it, and suffer, as George Eliot says, "glorious harm " in some noble, disinterested service. " Who would not rather be sick," says Eenan, " like Pascal, than in good health like the multitude ? " Who would not rather suffer, I would add, and bear his cross like Jesus, and be buffeted and spit upon and made the butt of cruel jests, and at last be crucified, than to live to a good old age as the high-priest did who con- demned him to death, and left children after him, so that, as Josephus says, he was held to be one of the most fortunate men of his century ? Let us not use words lightly ; let us not rate ourselves too high. I do not forget the truth of those lines of Newman, — •* Prune thou thy words, the thoughts control That o'er thee swell and throng ; They will condense within thy soul, And change to purpose strong. GOOD FRIDAY FROM A MODERN STANDPOINT. 241 " But he who lets his feelings run In soft, luxurious flow, Shrinks when hard service must be done, And faints at every woe." Ah ! we should shrink from the cross of Jesus. We shrink from being ill-spoken of now ; we shrink from all the little crosses that duty brings us from day to day. Perhaps I should not say we should rather suf- fer like Jesus ; but oh that we might be ready to ! that we might school ourselves now by acts of self- denial, by patience under suffering, by continuing to love though there are those who hate us, by constantly surrendering our self-will in face of the divine neces- sities that surround us, — school ourselves so that we shall be ready, should we be called upon, to render the last sacrifice, and withhold not life itself from the service of the world ! Death is a sorry fact ; there is no beauty in it that we should desire it, — it is the opposite of all we crave ; we do not like to think of it, we turn from it when the mention of it is made. O hard, ungracious visitor ! stern, repulsive visage ! yet thou mayest be transfigured, thou mayest even be made welcome. " Let death come straightway," said Achilles, *^ after I have punished the wrong-doer, so that I remain not here by the beaked ships, a laughing-stock and a useless burden of the earth." Jesus said, " Let death come." Death is almost made sacred since Jesus and other heroic, generous souls have died ; there have been impetuous spirits that have even courted it, — that have been ready to throw the world away that they might follow in the footsteps of the great whom they revered. Do not fear death, O Friend! but rather fear that thou mayest not die 16 242 ETHICAL RELIGION. worthily, — selfish, fretful, bitter, rebellious, when thou shouldst be full of love, and peaceful and thankful and ready to yield, and even glad if in any way thy death may contribute to the world's good. 3. There is another aspect of the death of Jesus. It is impossible to put out of mind the element of illusion in the hope to which he fell a martyr. The world's progress is not all in a straight line. Those who would benefit the world we remember the more tenderly for their mistakes. The road to humanity's perfect goal is not revealed to us by flashes from heaven, — we have to find it out by experience ; and incidental to humanity's experience are mistakes and failures numberless. The hope of Jesus to come again to the world in power and glory was illusory ; the solemn prediction he made to the high-priest at his trial was illusory. Had he had no illusions he would not have died as he did, — he would not have endured to be spit upon and mocked and tortured and cruci- fied. But when I think of this aspect of the case I call to mind George Eliot's words ; — " Even our failures are a prophecy, Even our yearnings and our bitter tears After that fair and true we cannot grasp, — As patriots who seem to die in vain Make liberty more sacred by their pangs." Jesus died in vain, as have others before him or since his time ; but his cause is the dearer to us be- cause he failed in it. I would we might write his thought on our foreheads and in our hearts ; I would we might make it the great sovereign aim of our lives to bring that " kingdom of heaven " for which he sighed GOOD PRIDAY FROM A MODERN STANDPOINT. 243 and prayed and died, to pass in the world. What are we living for ? What thought is topmost in our souls ? Nothing is fitted to be there but the thought which Jesus cherished. Let us purify it from all that belonged merely to his time and race ; let it be to us a hope for America and the world, instead of, as it was to him, for Israel and the world ; let us strive to build a true kingdom of justice, a city of the light; let us hold to such an aim against our fears, against the selfishness of men, against our own selfishness, against all the odds that count on the other side ; and then though we in turn make mistakes, others will remember us the more tenderly for them, and press the harder to find the way that is true and sure. XIII. THE SUCCESS AND THE FAILURE OF PROTESTANTISM. WHAT is the significance of Protestantism ? In what respect has it been successful ; in what has it failed ? Protestantism was successful in the first place, in that it was a break with the Catholic Church, and not a mere reform of it. Here Luther himself was great, and not merely the logic of his doctrines. Luther was indeed no violent despiser of tradition and authority. In his very theses, nailed up on the door of the church at Wittenberg, he did not, con- trary to the common opinion, attack the Pope nor the Pope's power to pardon sins. He said, "Cursed be he who speaks against the indulgences of the Pope ; but blessed be he who speaks against the foolish and impudent language of the preachers of indulgence ! '' To the second ambassador from the Pope Luther even offered to be silent on the matter, and to let it die away of itself, if only his opponents would be silent on their part ; though he added, ominously, " if they continue attacking me, a serious struggle will soon arise out of a trifling quarrel." He declared that he had made his protest against indulgences " as a faith- ful son of the Church,'^ and offered to address the public to that effect. And in this public explana- SUCCESS AND FAILURE OF PROTESTANTISM. 245 tion he said that though everything was in a very wretched state in the E-oman Church, "this is not a sufficient reason for separating from it. On the con- trary, the worse things are going on within it the more should we cling to it ; for it is not by separa- tion that we shall make it better." Luther was not, then, spoiling for a fight ; in truth, he fought only be- cause he had to. And I do not know of a sublimer instance of the courage and the daring and the defi- ance which a simple inward necessity may put into a man. He took his stand because he must ; because, as he said before the assembled princes at Worms, he could not do otherwise. I need not recount the steps by which Luther was led to break with the Church. I need not recall his lonely spiritual struggles in the monastery at Erfurt, when he came to feel the futility of all mere outward works, and that only by faith can man be justified, — though this was the seed-thought of the Eeforma- tion. I need not describe his disputations with Eck at Leipsic, where he realized that his own views were like those of Huss and Wyclif before him, and hence if popes and councils had condemned them, that popes and councils could not be infallible. I need not re- count the stages of his rapid intellectual development at about this time ; how his spirit seemed to rise at the rumor of a papal Bull against him ; how he saw that his cause was the cause of Germany, and hence issued his address to the German nobility ; how in an almost boyish exuberance of spirits he burned the pope's Bull ; and how at last he took his world-historic stand before the imperial diet at Worms, saying he would not recant, knowing that to act against con- 246 ETHICAL RELIGION. science, though a mighty church and a mighty empire should approve, is neither right nor safe. But though the man is great, the significance of the scene is greater. That was the first act of the Prot- estant revolution. Ill would it have fared with the world had Erasmus stood there. He, in common with other scholars of the day, was disaffected ; he wrote satires on the monks and schoolmen, and in general sympathized with Luther ; but he would stay in the Church, would reform from within, and conciliate and compromise at any cost. He continued his satires and preached tolerance to the last ; but he could not endure schism, proclaiming that "peaceful error was better than tempestuous truth." It was as it is to- day with the Broad Churchmen who stay in the Eng- lish establishment, or the Liberals in general who feel that they cannot stand on their own feet outside the Church. Above every other fear is that of breaking with the past, of a seeming disloyalty to the institu- tions in which they have been nurtured. Luther knew but one thing however, — loyalty to the convictions that were in him ; if the Church did not give him freedom to hold to and express them, he would do so all the same. We can hardly imagine to-day what an immense fact resting on the past Luther had to face. To break with orthodoxy or any form of Protestant Christianity is an insignificant thing compared with putting one- self out of the pale of that communion which held the keys of earth almost as truly as it seemed to those of heaven. For if the Catholic Church is com- paratively harmless now, then it was an empire that brooked no rival. The State was no more than a SUCCESS AND PAILUKE OF PROTESTANTISM. 247 body, with the Church for its soul. It was a univer- sal empire, and knew no national distinctions ; it had its system of taxation, like any other kingdom, — a tenth part of the produce of the soil of Christendom went to it ; it owned almost a third of the land of Europe. The officers of this empire were not amena- ble to the civil jurisdiction, — they could be tried only in their own courts, and under the cover of this pro- tection to themselves they could fleece their flocks about as they liked ; they alone could marry people, and they alone could grant divorces ; they had the disposition of the property of deceased persons, — a will had to be proved in their courts ; they alone buried the dead, and could refuse Christian burial in the churchyards. And this empire touching men in almost every relation in life centred in Eome, and its affairs, it was well known, were administered not for the benefit of its subjects everywhere, but to heighten the influence and pomp and power and to swell the revenues of Koman popes and cardinals, — even as in the old days of the Caesars, the masses of the people scattered through the provinces were ruled by gover- nors, not for their own but for the conqueror's good. It was this empire over the souls and bodies of men ; over life and death, and what was believed to come after death ; over what Inen should think, and how they should act, — and not in the name of truth and the progressing knowledge of men, but of a view of the world which almost every scientific discovery and al- most every independent philosophical reflection tended to undermine, — it was this old antiquated empire that was broken, smitten on its crown and set to totter- ing on its feet, when Luther lifted up his voice over 248 ETHICAL RELIGION. three hundred and fifty years ago. All hail, valiant man, for this first and mighty blow ! We breathe freer now at the very thought of it. Other blows .will follow after ; and notwithstanding all the reforms the papal empire may undertake, notwithstanding all the efforts it may make to show its harmony with mod- ern thought and the principles of political freedom, notwithstanding all its councils of Trent, and all its Capels leading captive here and there a weak-minded man or silly woman, it will never again have its old supremacy. It is an outlived institution ; humanity and the spirit of progress have passed it by. This was the first success of Protestantism. A second is closely related to it, and for this too we are indebted to Luther himself. Goodness had become an external, formal thing in the Catholic Church. It always tends to become so. It first creates certain forms and then loses itself in them ; and as men are counted good citizens who pay their taxes, vote, and hold ofiice, irrespective of their thought and motive in so doing, so men were counted good Christians who simply obeyed the rules of the empire I have described, who said so many Aves or Pater-nosters, did so much fasting or penance, gave so much money or received of such and such sacraments. That is, there was an external test of character, — and the significance of Luther is that he proposed an internal test. In one of his earliest discourses, two years be- fore he published his theses, he strongly urged the doctrine that piety consists not in outward works, but in an inward principle ; that an act in itself good even becomes sinful if the motive is sinful.^ Luther 1 Sears's Life of Luther, p. 169. SUCCESS AND FAILURE OF PROTESTANTISM. 249 did not use philosophical language, and his thought was cast entirely in theological moulds ; but the fun- damental significance of his great doctrine of justifi- cation by faith rather than by works seems to me to have been this, — that the inward attitude alone deter- mines the worth of a man ; so that though a man's whole outward life were right, yet if the thought or impulse that lay within and behind were merely sel- fish, he would still be in the wrong. Luther did not say works were of no account, nor does his principle of justification involve of itself any contempt of the rules and ritual of the Church ; he did say that works or acts severed from their motive, and conformity to rites and rules in themselves, were of no account, — yes, that when viewed as themselves giving those who practise them moral worth, they were harmful and an offence. Only, Luther said " in the sight of God '' where I have said " moral ;'^ and an offence to him was not simply to an ideal law, but to a j)ersonal, angry God. Protestantism thus sprang from a quick- ening of the conscience and a deepening of the moral life. Luther could find no rest in fastings and pen- ances and almsgiving, — they humbled the body, they did not purify the soul. It was at the centre of his being that he wanted rest ; and he found it, while still at the Augustinian monastery in Erfurt, in the suggestions of a passage of Scripture, " The just shall live by faith ; '' and ever and anon it would ring in his ears and send a strange peace over his soul, — " The just shall live by faith." May I give a mod- ern version of that old experience ? In the charming Norwegian story of Arne, a simple peasant girl says, " I often think there 's something that sings when all 250 ETHICAL RELIGION. is still ; '' and she spoke in a voice so soft and low, the narrative goes on, that her companion felt as if he had heard it now for the first time. " It is the good within our own souls," he answered. And it is true that when a man, instead of seeking to do this or that external thing which will commend him before the world or give him a kind of vain-glory in his own eyes, turns and gives himself over to the good, forever to obey it, something does sing within ; and whether we call it the good or God, whether we say " the good sings " or " God is well pleased," it is all the same ; the differences are differences of dialect, not of fact. Protestantism is thus, so far as it is true to the original Lutheran spirit, more inward, more searching than Catholicism ; its religion is more per- sonal ; it may make less show, but it has more sub- stance ; it places men face to face with the central truth of things, it brings them immediately before the nameless Authority of which all else is shadow and reflection. I do not say this of Protestantism every- where. In England it was more a political affair, and instead of heightening the moral life, it came into being only with a lowering of it, in obedience to the intrigues of Henry VIII. The Puritans were the first true Protestants in England, as the Huguenots were in Erance, and the followers of Zwingle and Calvin in Switzerland. But in general Protestantism surely brought a new moral seriousness into life. Compare but for one moment Luther or Zwingle or Calvin with Leo X., and see the difference in the type of man. In another way, also. Protestantism has been a success ; it has given us freedom of conscience. It must be confessed that here Luther himself is not so SUCCESS AND FAILURE OF PROTESTANTISM. 251 great as the logic of the movement which he started. Luther was no advocate of freedom of conscience as a principle ; he desired freedom simply for his own conscience. But the logic of history does not rest on any individuaFs partial interpretation of it. When Luther said at Worms, " It is not safe nor right to do anything against conscience ; here stand I, so help me God," he virtually stood for every sincere re- former since ; he spoke for every progressive move- ment in thought and society down to our day. It is not fair then, to my mind, to charge the narrowness and bigotry of many Protestants, whether individuals or churches, to their Protestantism ; it is to be charged to them as men or as associations, for narrowness and bigotry too easily attach themselves to men and associations : it may sometimes be charged to them as Christians and as Christian churches, but it can only be due to the lack of real Protestantism. The very meaning of Protestantism is freedom. Puri- tanism was a characteristic Protestant movement, for it was an assertion of conscientious scruples against the laxness and formalism of the English church. Unitarianism was another characteristic Protestant movement, for it was a revolt of reason and con- science against the dogmas of Orthodoxy. When any one stands up for the private conviction of his soul against whatever assembly of magnates or respecta- bilities, he is in very essence a Protestant. If Luther then persecuted Carlstadt, if Calvin burned Servetus, if the Puritans banished Eoger Williams, they were so far not Protestants ; and in the very name of the principles by which they secured their own freedom, they may be condemned. It takes a long while for 252 ETHICAL RELIGION. a principle thrown into history to work out its conse- quences, but sooner or later it will. This principle of freedom of conscience is perhaps first realized in any completeness in this country ; but it is a fruit of Protestantism, — it was thrown in among the forces of history, though he little knew all he was doing, by the hand of Martin Luther. As a fourth success of Protestantism, and as a re- sult of this spirit of freedom working in connection with the tendencies of modern thought, not only the old church but the old religion is gradually break- ing up. Christianity itself is dissolving and passing away. Christianity was not half so much hurt in the last century by Paine and Voltaire as it is in the minds of the most serious and thoughtful men to-day by the new indirect influences of science and historical criticism. Men who never hear popular liberal lectures, who have never read Paine or Vol- taire, are getting a new view of the world in the very intellectual atmosphere they breathe, and the old ideas of miracle and prayer and Providence drop away so silently that they do not know they have lost them. The new thought is in literature, in poetry, in science, in the daily newspaper. The differences between cultivated men in all churches and in none are really surprisingly small. If we do not ask for particular opinions, much less attack them, but simply note how they are reflected in a man's view of life, society, trade, politics, — and this is the only real test, — educated Presbyterians do not differ essen- tially from educated Baptists or Methodists or Unita- rians. Their particular denominational connections are a matter of birth and tradition ; their religion SUCCESS AND FAILURE OF PROTESTANTISM. 253 is, under a disguise of pious names and phrases, a reverence for goodness and a confidence that the universe is on that side ; their Christianity is much like that of a friend who once said to me he was not anxious for the name Christian, but if any one should say he was not a Christian, he should resent it. The special ideas that were at the foundation of the dif- ferent denominations have little interest for any man now, unless he be an antiquarian or a zealot. Indeed, no other result could well follow from the Protestant principle of freedom of conscience and private judg- ment; for it could hardly be expected that private judgment would rest with simply interpreting the Bible, — sooner or later it must essay to judge of the worth of the contents of the Bible. Luther helped to strengthen the mind in the consciousness of its own perceptions over against the authority of the Church ; when the mind reaches perceptions incon- sistent with the teachings of Scripture, the same logic inspires to a similar confidence here. Nor can any sacred person more than any sacred book be allowed to remain an unquestioned authority over the mind; yet when Jesus ceases to be an authority, Christian- ity in any distinctive sense ceases to be. Thus fear- lessly and relentlessly is the logic of Protestantism conducting out of the very religion in which it was born. Luther would have stood aghast at those who no longer call themselves Christians, to whom Jesus is no longer a Lord and Master ; yet no other result could ultimately follow, and he is finally responsible for it, and to the future this result will be counted as one of the successes of Protestantism. For humanity cannot wear forever its old garments ; as it casts off 254 ETHICAL RELIGION. old churches, so it does old religions. The spirit of the future calls upon it to do so; for the future is rich with possibilities, and will yield grander things than ever the past has known. As I pass now to my fifth point, I am at loss to know whether to rank it among the successes or failures of Protestantism. It is that Protestantism has prac- tically given us the Bible (for it was almost a sealed book before), and particularly that it has brought us face to face with Jesus and the apostles. The common people in the time of Luther knew little or nothing of the Bible ; Jesus and the apostles they vaguely thought of as the founders and pillars of the great empire that was everywhere about them, rather than as living figures in history. And if the secular renaissance is to be commended for reviving an in- terest in the old Greek and Eoman literatures, irre- spective of ecclesiastical commentary, so is the later religious renaissance worthy to be praised for putting the old Jewish and the early Christian literatures into tongues in which every one could read them for himself. Everywhere as a result of the Eeformation the Bible came to be the property of the common man, and Jesus and the apostles were seen somewhat as they actually were. So far Protestantism was a success. For I regard it as no part of a genuine radi- calism to condemn the Bible indiscriminately, and to wish that the world should know nothing of it. The Bible has had its uses in history ; it testifies to and is the product of some of the creative periods in his- tory. Most of the prophetic writings, for example, of the Old Testament, the narratives about Jesus and the writings of his early followers in the New Testament, SUCCESS AND FAILURE OF PROTESTANTISM. 255 came from real men, to whom religion was not a sham, and whose minds were intent on the supreme thing in life ; namely, the accomplishment of righteousness. The very superstitious reverence for the Bible that so many have had is a testimony to its power : Cicero and Plato and Aristotle never touched the heart and conscience deep enough to produce any superstitions about themselves. Nevertheless, while in one way the open Bible of Protestantism was one of its successes, in another it has been and is coming more and more to be seen to be one of its failures. The Bible glows with the idea of righteousness as no other book does that has become the property of our Western world, and to those who have the wit to distinguish substance from form it is still, and may always be, a means of moral inspiration. But the whole intellectual setting of this idea is no longer true to us. Eighteousness gains nothing in authority to us by being regarded as the will of a supernatural being ; our confidence in its triumph in the world is nowise heightened by the picture of a judgment which shall some time separate the righteous and wicked as sheep and goats. The open Bible was not even an altogether successful defence against the Eoman Church. True, the Bible said nothing of the Koman Church or the Pope, or of councils or purgatory, or of the intercession of the saints ; and this to many narrow-minded Prot- estants may have been enough. But the Bible does furnish premises from which some Catholic doctrines are by no means illogical conclusions. If one man spoke with infallible authority, is there any reason in the nature of things why others should not speak with the same authority ? If one man could forgive 256 ETHICAL RELIGION. sins, it can hardly be denied that he might have left this power to others who should come after him, — as indeed he is reported to have done. If we may- pray for those who are still on the earth and our prayers may avail, why may we not for those who have gone into the mysterious beyond ? If .the inter- cession of righteous men now may avail before God, why not much more truly the intercession of those who have become saints in heaven ? Protestants af- fect a great horror that Catholic priests should claim, for example, to forgive sins ; the Pharisees manifested a similar horror when Jesus claimed to, yet we read that he gave the same power he had himself to his apostles, saying, "Whosesoever sins ye remit they are remitted, and whosesoever ye retain, they are re- tained.'^ ^ Was there some peculiar reason why men should be forgiven in the first century of the Christian era that does not hold of the subsequent centuries ? But however lame an instrument the Bible may be against Catholicism, it can still less be a rule of faith and practice for men to-day. Its idea of righteous- ness is of perennial value, but the whole stage of cul- ture in which it was written is now superseded by a higher stage. We cannot think as the Bible would have us think, we cannot believe or hope as Jesus and the apostles would have us believe and hope, we can- not live and act as they command us to act ; we are separated from them not merely by eighteen centuries of time, but by eighteen centuries of experience, of knowledge, and of thought. Passing over minor dif- ferences, what man in sympathy with the culture of 1 John XX. 23. If this Gospel be regarded as of doubtful au- thority, a saying of similar tenor is found in Matthew xvi. 19. SUCCESS AND FAILURE OF PROTESTANTISM. 257 to-day can believe in the kingdom of heaven as Jesus believed in it ; what man can look out on the world and trust in a personal Providence as Jesus trusted ; what man can believe in miracle as Jesus believed, or pray as Jesus prayed, or entertain the thought of Jesus that Jesus had of himself ? Jesus is no longer authority to us, the apostles are no longer authority to us ; the whole Bible represents what the Germans call an uherwundener Standpunkt (a point of view that has become outgrown). Men only fancy the Bible is authority to them, as they are not really acquainted with it, as they have never taken the pains to look at it in the light of the circumstances in which it was written. Protestantism hoping to rule the world with its open Bible is a failure. Another failure of Protestantism is that it has not given us any new faith, such as the world needs. Protestants have for the most part simply clung to certain remnants or shreds of an old garment; they do not see that humanity cannot live on remnants, and they have given to the world no positive new regen- erative principle. The Catholic Church has all the positive parts of the Protestant system of doctrine. The Unitarians, for example, save themselves by keeping the Christian name and professing disciple- ship for Jesus ; but Catholics are all Christians and all disciples of Jesus. Orthodox Christians believe in the Divinity of Jesus, the Trinity, and the Atone- ment ; but Catholics believe in all these doctrines and many more. Episcopal churches have their priests and bishops and ritual ; but all this the Catholic Church has in much grander style. Por freedom of conscience and thought is hardly a positive, but only 17 258 ETHICAL RELIGION. a formal principle. It means standing by the truth, as we see it ; or, at best, readiness for truth : it does not mean new and positive truth itself, — and before there can be a new faith, there must be new ideas. Again, the holding of an internal as opposed to an external test of character is not enough. The thought alone gives dignity to the life ; but what shall be the thought? Protestantism has developed no new thought ; it has no new ideas of life and society ; it has seemed to regard moral idealism as exhausted in the statements of the Sermon on the Mount : it has even no genuine understanding of these statements, for if it had, it would take the hint they give, and elab- orate an ideal of social righteousness for the world. For this is wliat the world wants, — not the Bible, nor revisions of it, nor a rational understanding of it ; no, nor Jesus himself, nor a true estimate of his life and work, but an era of social righteousness. This is what Protestantism has not given us, what it has apparently had no aim of giving us ; for its thought of a perfect social order is nowise different from that of Catholicism, as being something that has elsewhere its accomplishment, something which is not of our creation and has slight bearings on this actual order in which we now live. Protestantism, as Christianity generally, has given a kind of sanction to the order of society that it finds, and feels slight impulse to create a new one. Therefore a new religion must come, not preaching acquiescence and submission, but holding up a contrast to what we see about us, — saying that in the idea alone is sacredness and authority, and that contrary facts, though as secure as the earth and as habitual as day and night, have no warrant before it. SUCCESS AND FAILURE OF PROTESTANTISM. 259 The world needs no kind of an ecclesiastical religion, with priests and prayers and holy books ; it needs a religipn of justice. In the new religion, nothing will count but clear thoughts and honest deeds. Prayer, trust in an outside justice, all reliance on another for what man must do himself, will be abandoned ; man will have his connection with the Unseen in the command which issues from it, "Thou must do the justice that thou cravest," and in his answering obedience. Yes, Protestantism in the person of Luther cast the weight of its influence against the era of social right- eousness on which the hearts of the poor oppressed German peasants were set. It must suffice to-day to refer to this single instance of Protestant faith- lessness. The German peasant wanted freedom, — he wanted ecclesiastical and political freedom. The Church and the feudal lord united in despoiling him ; he had no rights worth mentioning against either. He was bound to the soil, was obliged to render any service the lord called for, and had lost his right to the old common woods and fishing grounds and pas- tures ; and to the Church he paid not only tithes, — the tenth part of all his corn, grass, colts, calves, lambs, pigs, geese and chickens, and even every tenth egg, — but he paid money for every particular ser- vice he got from the Church. A Catholic writer of that period, brother to the secretary of the Emperor Charles V., says : "We can hardly get anything from Christian ministers without money ; at baptism, money ; at bishoping, money ; at' marriage, money ; for con- fession, money — no, not extreme unction without money. They will ring no bells without money, no 260 ETHICAL RELIGION. burial in the church without money ; so that it seemeth that Paradise is shut upon them that have no money. . . . The rich man may readily get indulgence^, but the poor none, because he wanteth money to pay for them." No wonder the peasants protested against such a double tyranny. They drew up twelve arti- cles, in which they stated their demands, — 1. The right to choose their own pastors. 2. They would pay tithe of corn ; but small tithes, as every tenth calf or pig or egg, they would not pay. 3. They would be free, and no longer serfs and bondmen. 4. Wild game and fish to be free to all. 5. Woods and forests to belong to all for fuel. 6. No services of labor to be more than were required of their fore- fathers. 7. If more service required, wages must be paid for it. 8. Eent, when above the value of the land, to be properly valued and lowered. 9. Punish- ments for crime to be fixed. 10. Common land to be again given up to common use. 11. Death gifts (that is, the right of the lord to take the best chattel of the deceased tenant) to be done away with. 12. Any of these articles proved to be contrary to the Scriptures or God's justice to be null and void. What a chance in view of this for a religion that meant to be of any use in this world, that meant to vindicate the right and put down the wrong, to assert itself ! By this time many of the princes had be- come Protestant. Did their Protestantism mean any increased sense of social justice ? What did Luther himself say ? He was not indeed without sympathy for the peasants, — he was too much of a man, to say nothing of Christian, for that ; and he did not fail, as a valiant man, to give the princes his opinion of SUCCESS AND FAILURE OF PROTESTANTISM. 261 them. Even before the articles were published, he said : " The common man, tried beyond all endurance, overwhelmed with intolerable burdens, will not and cannot any longer tamely submit ; and he has doubt- less good reasons for striking with the flail and the club, as he threatens to do/' Again, of the articles he says to the princes that some of them "contain demands so obviously just, that the mere circum- stance of their requiring to be brought forward dis- honors you before God and man ; '' and he reminds them that " government was not instituted for its own ends, nor to make use of the persons subject to it for the accomplishment of its own caprices and evil pas- sions, but for the interests and advantage of the peo- ple. Now, the people have become fully impressed with this fact, and will no longer tolerate your shame- ful extortions. Of what benefit were it to a peasant that his field should produce as many florins as it •does grains of corn, if his master may despoil him of the produce, and lavish like dirt the money he has thus derived from his vassal in fine clothes, fine castles, fine eating and drinking ? " But when the princes refused to yield to his exhortations, when the peasants began to make good their words by their deeds, when they threatened to arise in revolt, Luther himself yielded, and practically went over to the other side. It is not a pleasant task to quote Luther's language against the peasants after they were once fairly started on their violent career. It is not the man but the churchman who speaks. His theory was, " Christians must suffer rather than take up arms ; " they must bear the cross, — " that is a Christian's right," he 262 ETHICAL RELIGION. said, "he has no other." He spoke of Christians as flocks of sheep, not to be tended but to be slaughtered, one after the other, — "Nicht Weideschaf — Schlacht- schaf ! nur so hin ; eins nach dem anderen ! " If they rebelled against the civil power, there was but one fate for them. As to the "murderous and robbing hordes of peasants," as he styled them, he said to the princes, " Let them be destroyed, strangled, stabbed, secretly or publicly, by whomsoever is able to do it, even as a mad dog is killed, right away !" I do not believe that this was all due to cowardice and a de- sire to side with princely authority, — though these motives may have partly operated with Luther ; for as he did not fail to commend clemency at the end of the war, he did not during its continuance cease to speak of the "mad tyranny" of princes and lords. In my judgment, it was not Luther merely that failed at this critical moment ; it was not merely Protes- tantism that failed, — it was Christianity, and its impracticable, unphilosophical, and untrue doctrine of non-resistance. It was the Christian doctrine that we are not to take justice into our own hands, but must leave it to another, that was answerable for the horrors of the Peasant's War. Luther had said this, and quoted Scripture passages to this effect from the very start. There was not so much a change in his view or his sympathies, as in the circumstances to which his view could apply. He said from the begin- ning such things as these : " To revolt is to act like heathen; the duty of the Christian is to be patient, not to fight ; defensive justice is for God alone. No one can be his own judge ; an attempt to be that is something which God cannot endure, — it is against SUCCESS AND FAILURE OF PROTESTANTISM. 263 God and God is against it." Such a view is to men* to-day mythological ; but to Luther, following closely after the teaching of his Master, it was sober truth. But if Luther had been more of a heathen, he would have stood before the world a truer man. Not on the basis of such a view has progress been made in the world. Had Christianity been the rule of life for intelligent Frenchmen a hundred years ago, there would have been no French Eevolution ; had the thought that paralyzed the arm of Luther been the conviction of our forefathers in 1776, this magnificent republic might still have been a British province. Progress is with those who know that justice is to be done by them, who would not honor themselves did they not defend themselves against those who out- rage their rights. I do not answer for all that the peasants did; many of them were as fanatical as Luther, and they were as little disposed to mercy as Luther charged the nobles to be to them. But the question is, were they not right in their claims at the outset ? How mean an idea of the significance of this whole matter many have ! D'Aubigne says that the people were not ripe for the enjoyment of political reform, that many unregenerate souls were not prepared for liberty.^ The cant of it ! Fortunately for social or- der, he says, the gospel preserved Luther ; for what would have happened had he carried his extensive influence into the camp of the peasants ? One can conjecture what would have happened ; namely, the victory of the peasants, assisted by the towns and cities, which were almost equally hostile to the no- 1 History of the Reformation, ill. 181. 264 ETHICAL RELIGION. bles, and perhaps a peaceable victory, the horrors of massacre averted, and no two hundred added years (as was actually the case) of miserable serfdom for the peasantry and of pride and power for the lords. Froude can only speak of the Peasants' War as the "first scandal" to the Eeformation ; ^ in truth, had the Reformation possessed the moral fibre which we de- mand of a religion to-day, it would have been its first golden opportunity. A biographer of Luther speaks in this connection of the " dark clouds " that threat- ened a new danger to the cause of the Reformation : ^ what a cause, I am tempted to say, that did not find a part of its very mission in meeting the danger ! Apol- ogists who look at the question with the sympathies of to-day can only say it was a religious reformation that Luther had supremely at heart. But what is religion ? Must not our very concern for truth and justice lead us to disown religion as thus understood ? The only religion a free man could care anything about would involve taking up the cause which Lu- ther practically deserted, and striving to usher in an era of social righteousness on the earth, — doing so, that is, with the feeling that we are bound to do so, that the world and the invisible necessity of things call us to the work. Who are preparing the way for such a religion, as much needed now as ever it was in the days of feudal and ecclesiastical oppression ? If you doubt it, listen to the bitter cry of the outcast poor in Protestant London ; listen to the cry of the poor in all our Protestant cities ; listen to the cry of the poor 1 Contemporary Review, August, 1883. *^ Dr. William Rein's Life of Luther, p. 124. SUCCESS AND FAILURE OF PROTESTANTISM. 265 in Chicago. Not Protestants as such, not Christians as such, not ministers and churches as such are pre- paring the way for such a religion, — but they who anywhere or under any name utter or listen to a call of justice. Now and then a man dares lift up his voice against unprincipled wealth and power; now and then a man utters his belief that unselfishness may be lived and not only dreamed of; now and then a demand is heard that public ends be put above private ends, in politics, business, everywhere j now and then the community is appealed to, to regard no slightest interest of its humblest member as outside the realm of its rightful concern. Heard now and then are these voices, — heard on the street, heard in the secular newspaper, heard when companies of re- formers come together ; and though they say not one word of religion, they are the voices in our night that tell of the coming day ; they are the witnesses to an unbelieving age of an ideal truth and an ideal authority; and that wherein Luther and Protestant- ism and Christianity have failed, shall be their success and their triumph. XIV. WHY UNITARIANISM FAILS TO SATISFY.i UNITAEIANS are not dogmatists ; they are per- haps as a class exceptionally humane and public-spirited, given to good works as freely with- out as within ecclesiastical lines ; they have little other-worldliness, and religion is perhaps with them nearer to being a sentiment to cover and refine the daily life than with any other body of Christians. Why then do they not satisfy ? In the first place, they ask too much in the way of speculative beliefs. They have taken a step, indeed, in the right direction. Other churches will not allow the doubt that the Bible is the word of God, or that Jesus is Divine. Unitarianism does not regard these and many other doctrines as essential. It holds only to the simplest postulates of Christian faith ; namely, that men have a Father in heaven, that they will live again after they die, and that Jesus meantime is our Guide and Master. But the time has come when even these postulates are under a shadow for some good and earnest men. Not any moral unfaithfulness, not any craving for novelties, but simply reflection, seri- ous reflection, has led not a few to regard a personal Deity and individual immortality as problems rather than matters of faith, and to look on Jesus as too far 1 I beg not to be understood in this lecture as instituting any comparison between Unitarianism and the Ethical Movement. I speak altogether from an ideal standpoint. Whether the Ethical Movement itself shall be true to its ideal inspirations remains to be seen. WHY UNITARIANISM FAILS TO SATISFY. 267 removed from us, in his thought of the world and his hope for humanity, to be our guide and master. This attitude of mind is growing; and yet before it was distinctly taken, before there was any break with his- toric Christianity, and while there was only a vague unwillingness to call Jesus by the title " Lord " and ^•' Master,'' it was frowned upon, if not repudiated, by the Unitarians in their National Conference. The result was that those who manifested this unwilling- ness felt obliged to leave the Unitarian fellowship. The Free Eeligious Association which they formed aimed at a fellowship limited by no confession. Chris- tian or other, — a fellowship in the spirit. Since the time of that Conference, the professions which Uni- tarians sometimes make of allowing complete liberty of thought, and of ranking the deed above the creed, have an air of inconsequence. An individual Unita- rian may, of course, speak in this way ; but Unitarian- ism, so far as that word has any propriety, has spoken differently. The Conference I have referred to had the alternative distinctly before it, formally to avow these broader principles or to confess "the Lord Jesus Christ ; " and it chose the latter, " voting," as Mr. E. E. Abbot has tersely said, " against freedom in the name of its own Lord." ^ Unitarianism thereby ranged itself among the Christian denominations, — the freest indeed of them all, and allowing many vari- eties of belief, but all within the fundamental Chris- tian limitations, — and closed the door which was opening out on the religion of the future. For such ^ See a most instructive pamphlet, ** The Battle of Syracuse : Two Essays by Rev. J. F. Clarke, D.D., and F. E. Abbot," Boston, 1876. 268 ETHICAL RELIGION. a forward-looking thought had been the inspiration of many Unitarians. Channing prophesied a new order of things, though he lamented toward the end of his life that what he called a "Unitarian Ortho- doxy"^ was taking the place of the old spirit of progress. An Abbot, a Frothingham, a Potter joined in such a high hope when they responded to the call for that Conference of which I have spoken ; they did not believe there would be a break, but an alliance with the free spirit of the time, and that the future would be a natural growth from the past. Sad men they were at the result; Mr. Abbot writes that he never went to rest with a sadder heart than after one of those memorable days of fruitless struggle. But in truth we may be sadder for Unitarianism than for him and his companions, since it thereby cut itself off from one of the most magnificent careers that ever opened out to a religious body, while he and those 1 Life (one vol. ed.), p. 435. Recent Unitarian Orthodoxy is perhaps fairly represented in the following from the Unitarian Review (July, 1880, p. 83) : " There are Unitarians who believe in God, and honor Jesus, and hope for the life everlasting, and to whom this faith is the substance of their religious life, its procla- mation their main work, its fellowship their main joy. The work they seek to do for humanity finds in this faith its chief sanc- tion and inspiration; and while they rejoice in all work done for righteousness and humanity on whatever basis, and desire not to be found backward in any fellowship of philanthropy, they will not compromise in their religious fellowships the very basis of all religious union, nor invite to the place of instruction in their churches those who contradict and contemn the main agencies of religious cul- ture and the fundamental postulates of Christian truth." (The italics are ours.) The " basis of religious union " is still found in belief in God, Jesus, and immortality. I need not point out how far removed this is from a pure religion of righteousness. WHY UNITAKIANISM FAILS TO SATISFY. 269 with him have only to wait for the future to do them adequate honor. XJnitarianism, as a body, has made no progress worth mentioning since that day.^ But there is another and deeper reason for dissatis- faction with Unitarianism. Complete freedom for the mind is good, and the modern world will have it ; but there is something better, — a complete morality. I have said Unitarianism demands too much of us on the speculative side ; I will add, it demands too little on the practical side. Unitarians manifest no great discontent with the world about them ; they inaugu- rate charities, but they do not go very deep with them, and their thought hardly seems to go beyond charity. Their conception of duty is pure, good as far as it goes, but commonplace ; any great ranges of duty, any mighty responsibility such as would put enthusiasm into the souls of those who assume it, they do not seem to be aware of. They responded 1 It should be stated, however, that the Free Religious spirit has infected some of the Unitarian churches in the West, and that under its influence the Western Unitarian Conference has recently taken a remarkable step forward. The last remnant of a theo- logical creed was dropped from its platform in 1886, and it now boldly welcomes to its fellowship all who care for the cause of truth, righteousness, and love in the world. The churches belong- ing to the Western Conference — for those wishing to continue the historic attitude of Unitarianism have formed a separate associa- tion—have thereby placed themselves in the very vanguard of progress. Why, however, one can hardly help asking, if the his- torical meaning of Unitarianism is abandoned, is the Unitarian name retained? Why is not union sought with those who have been advocating and seeking to maintain an ethical basis of fel- lowship for some time past? It is surely to be hoped that in the near future all who believe in a religion of goodness, whatever their historical ancestry, may join hands in one fellowship. 270 ETHICAL RELIGION. but mildly to Dr. Channing's great-hearted plans for the elevation of the poor in Boston,^ giving them but slight support, and manifesting little of his kindling emotion at the thought of great improvements in human society. Too often has their thought been one which, if it ever consoled, now benumbs the world ; namely, that the varying lot of men is ordered by Divine Providence, that the social order which exists with its classes and distinctions has a divine sanction. Let me make plain what I mean, by quoting the actual language of one who became a leader, perhaps the leader, of Unitarian opinion in later years : — "The inequalities — wealth and poverty, knowledge and ignorance — of our social condition must be felt to be the allotment of Providence, a wise provision for the greatest happiness of all, before the poor can be regarded with the tenderness and respect they deserve. . . . The Saviour has told us, ' The poor ye have always with you ; ' and the Chris- tian would not have it otherwise. He learns too many lessons of resignation and faith and hope from the poor ; he enjoys too much satisfaction in ministering to their necessi- ties; he receives too many admonitions to his pride and self-indulgence; he is made to feel his own privileges too gratefully, — to wish that poverty were no longer known on the earth." 2 How such a view as this strikes at the root of all deep reform ! How it lulls to rest, — I do not mean to inactivity, but to a feeling that with a little kindness and charity on our part all things are well ! How slight a sense does it betray of a 1 Works (one vol. ed.) p. 98. 2 Sermon before the Boston Young Men's Benevolent Society, by Rev. H. W. Bellows, Dec 9, 1838. WHY UNITARIANISM FAILS TO SATISFY. 271 great creative responsibility and task intrusted to hu- man society ! Do we wonder that Dr. Channing tells us that no sect took less interest than the Unitarian in the slavery question, or was more inclined to con- servatism ? ^ " Even in his own parish/' says a com- petent witness, " his message was unheard save by a few. When he asked that the doors of his church might be open for a eulogy to be pronounced upon his beloved friend Dr. Follen, a warm-hearted Aboli- tionist, by another dear friend Rev. S. J. May, they were rudely shut in his face.^'^ ^^ wonder that, according to his biographer, such an occurrence led him to question the usefulness of his whole ministry, and to ask to what end had he poured out his soul all those years, if this was the answering conduct on the part of his people. John Quincy Adams even says that Channing was " deserted by his followers," in the later years of his life, and was actually driven from his active pastorate on account of his Antislavery 1 Memoirs, vol. ii. p. 394. The passage (from a letter to J. Blanco White) is not given in the one-volume edition published by the American Unitarian Association. It is perhaps worth quot- ing entire : " I wish I could look to Unitarianism with more hope. But this system was, at its recent revival, a protest of the un- derstanding against absurd dogmas, rather than the work of deep religious principle, and was early paralyzed by the mixture of a materialistic philosophy, and fell too much into the hands of scholars and political reformers ; and the consequence is a lack of vitality and force, which gives us little hope of its accomplish- ing much under its present auspices or in its present form. When I tell you that no sect in this country has taken less interest in the slavery question, or is more inclined to conservatism than our ^ody, you will judge what may be expected of it." 2 Oliver Johnson in Channing Centennial Volume, p. 61. Cf. Channing's Life (one vol. ed.), p. 671. 272 ETHICAL RELIGION. views. 1 I do not adduce these things in any spirit of idle criticism or hostility, but simply as showing that to whatever degree of perfection Unitarians may have carried the conventional Christian virtues, — and I believe they have carried them to a high degree, — they have had no deep moral convictions, and have been without a deep moral life. In truth, this might be said of the churches in general during the last hundred years. The highest moral ideas have been conceived, the largest move- ments of moral life have gone on, outside of them. And the fact is not without connection with the fun- damental Christian view of things. In the estimation of the founders of Christianity a judgment was to be accomplished and general justice done by another Power than man ; human beings were to love one an- other, to be kind and pitiful, and yet justice and the reorganization of society -were too great, too difficult tasks to be assumed by human hands. In its large general features the world was accepted as it is, and a perfect, an ideal order of things was thought to be held in reserve for us. The noblest exercises of Chris- tian piety have been in longing, praying, preparing oneself for that future kingdom. The present age is waking up to another thought. It is not inclined to accept the order of human life as it is, but to try it and test it by a thought of what it ought to be ; to see whether it meets the wants, the rights of human beings and of all human beings. It is mightily in- clined to believe, too, that the satisfaction of these wants and the doing justice to those rights need not 1 See Adams's published Diaries, and the comment thereon in the Unitarian Review, August, 1881, p. 151. WHY UNITARIANISM FAILS TO SATISFY. 273 be delayed to a future world, but may be undertaken here, and that by no other power than ourselves. This thought was at the basis of the French Ee vo- lution ; it lies at the heart of all the social unrest of our time. I believe, indeed, that it makes a seed- thought for a new religion : already we hear more idealism, higher ethics, yes, more faith from the social reformers of our time than from almost any other class of men. The modern world is tired of hearing of the " kingdom of heaven ; '' and if one insists on put- ting any good thought he has under that old-time form, it passes him by. What it wants is a plan of justice ; what it wants is a searching and trying of all our in- stitutions by that ideal standard ; what it wants is a company of men who will make that plan an object of religion, and vow loyalty to it for life and death. I must say I see little of this spirit among Unita- rians : there is much laudable effort to make things a little better, but no surrender to principle, no incli- nation to take life in hand and count it well spent and lost in devotion to an idea. I cannot discover that they have in mind any world-transforming princi- ple or grand idea. Goodness, righteousness, brother- hood are often enough on their lips, — I cannot see that they mean much by them. For morality surely is not simply what is left of the old religions, after their dogmas are given up. To make morality the basis of a religious movement does not mean that the souls of men shall be fed with a few kind feelings or good habits, adding perhaps, for the sake of nov- elty, a philanthropy or two. No ! morality is nothing save as it is vastly more than this ; and philanthropies are nothing save as they are incidents of a thought 18 274 ETHICAL RELIGION. that takes not this or that special good, but all good in its grasp. What we want is a sight of principles ; to aim not at the better, but at the best ; to fear not to make the rule of a perfect life the rule of every day ; to bring the glory and sanctity of heaven here on the earth. How do our lives stand with the moral law; how will our treatment of one another in our business, our homes, bear the reflection of the white searching light of truth and justice? Do we ever take advantage of the weakness or the ignorance of another ? Do we ever gain anything by another's losing ? Do we ever profit by lies, by false represen- tations ? Do we ever excuse ourselves by saying they are necessary ? Has shame gone out of us when we have done a wrong thing, an impure thing ? Do we divert or amuse ourselves, when we might better be doing penance ? Ah, think not that in acknowledg- ing morality you are taking up with an easy master ! It indeed nowise limits or offends our reason, but it imposes no light or transient obligations on the will and life. It has a grave face ; its joys are severe ; ^ it makes no promises, and will not be served for ease, pleasure, or any personal good. It may command the renunciation of all these ; it may once more speak to the world as it did through Jesus, and say that neither father nor mother nor wife nor child, nor any station or business or prosperity in life, shall be so dear as itself. I know that it means order, that it involves the general good, the universal happiness ; but it does not mean the order of any particular stage of society, nor a good or goods which one class of men share and another do not, nor my happiness nor your happiness 1 " Res severa est verum gaudiura." WHY UNITARIANISM FAILS TO SATISFY. 275 save in so far as they are a part of the universal hap- piness. Morality may destroy as well as build; it may uproot as well as plant ; it may say with Chan- ning of a social order which blesses a few and rests on the depression of the many, Let it perish ! ^ Mo- rality means the good of all ; moral questions are largely social questions ; and there has scarcely been a man, to my knowledge, among Unitarians who has addressed himself in the spirit of Channing to the social questions, or even repeated his words : nay, they sometimes even have said that their great leader was over-sensitive, and that he had an almost morbid vision of moral evil.^ When I say Unitarianism demands too little of us on the practical side, I do not mean that it does not undertake a few more charities, nor that it is not benevolent, humane, philanthropic, as those words go, but that it does not call on us to create a new heaven and a new earth ; that it does not appeal to the infi- nite side of human nature ; that its enthusiasm only matches with the tasks it proposes, — for example, putting churches in University towns, endowing theo- logical schools, building denominational houses and club-rooms, and supporting old churches whose natu- ral lives seem to be already spent. A great work comes only out of a great thought, and I do not discover any such great thought in Unitari- anism. Think of the growth of early Christianity, of those first three centuries when the Church moved, 1 Works (one vol. ed.), p. 32. 2 Cf . Prof. J. H. Allen's " Our Liberal Movement in Theology " (p. 61), — a book, it should be added, giving a remarkably candid review of the history of Unitarianism. 276 ETHICAL KELIGION. as has been said,^ with the pace of a goddess, conquer- ing and to conquer ! It was not force that was the secret of her victory ; it was not schools, it was not churches, nor bishops, nor bibles ; it was not even the sweet tale of the life, nor the tragic story of the death, of the man of Nazareth ; no, nor the innocent myth of his triumphant resurrection and ascension : it was something back of and above all this, — it was the grand thought of the " kingdom of God." In the larger proportions of that idea Jesus got his sanctity, from it churches derived their strength, in it a long- ing world found satisfaction and redemption. That idea was nothing but a dream of the perfect : worship went thither, love and tears mingled at the thought of such a consummation, death itself was holy when be- yond it men saw the eternal splendors. Do you won- der when I say that no less great a thought than this can produce another religion, — something encompass- ing life and sanctifying death ; something making us despise the world as we see it and long for a better ; something awakening worship again, stirring love and tears and song and joy ? Yet I believe it. Man can- not thrive on petty plans. He must have something before him as great as his grandest thought of the pos- sible ; nothing but the perfect, nothing but a perfect society, an ideal fellowship, a "City of the Light," can satisfy him. It is not necessary that he hope act- ually to witness the final triumph, — it is enough, I be- lieve, that he can think of it ; that something of the glory of it may descend upon him as he toils for it ; that the labors of his hands have an eternal issue there. " Though we die," said a recently condemned 1 John Henry Newman. WHY UNITARIANISM FAILS TO SATISFY. 277 Nihilist, " we have bright hopes." He did not ask to see the nobler political and social order that he be- lieved was to come ; it was enough for him that it would come, and that he could give his life for it : nay, in thought he could leap across the years that sep- arated him from it, and cry, as if standing even then in the midst of an emancipated fatherland, "Long live the Eussian Kepublic!" Can we not so think and speak of the grander republic, the Commonwealth of Man, the universal society, wherein "the perfect Eight doth reign," — which the heart and conscience and reason unite in demanding as the end and con- summation of the whole course of human history, the outcome of the toils and struggles of all the genera- tions of men ? What matters it if it is far on in the distant future, — can our thought be prevented from leaping out to it ? And can we not even now take our stand in imagination with it, trying our actual lives and institutions by it, and finding rest and con- tentment only as we know that we and the world are going on toward the perfect goal ? Not from Unita- rianism, not from Christianity, has come the song that best utters and almost chants this thought. It is from Felix Adler, upon whom, I sometimes think, more than upon any other man of our day, the mantle and prophetic spirit of Channing have fallen, and whose words, I almost believe, are those which Jesus him- self would utter, should he come and put his solemn thought and passion into the language of to-day : — ** Have you heard the Golden City- Mentioned in the legends old 1 Everlasting light shines o'er it, Wondrous tales of it are told. 278 ETHICAL RELIGION. Only righteous men and women Dwell within its gleaming wall; Wrong is banished from its borders, Justice reigns supreme o'er all. Do you ask, Where is that City, Where the perfect Right doth reign ? I must answer, I must tell you, That you seek its site in vain. You may roam o'er hill and valley. You may pass o'er land and sea, You may search the wide earth over, — 'T is a City yet to be ! We are builders of that City, — All our joys and all our groans Help to rear its shining ramparts ; All our lives are building- stones. What that plan may be we know not. How the seat of Justice high. How the City of our vision Will appear to mortal eye, — That no mortal eye can picture, That no mortal tongue can tell. We can barely dream the glories Of the Future's citadel. But for it we still must labor. For its sake bear pain and grief, In it find the end of living And the anchor of belief. But a few brief years we labor. Soon our earthly day is o'er ; Other builders take our places, And *' our place knows us no more." WHY UNITAKIANISM FAILS TO SATISFY. 279 Bnt the work that we have builded, Oft with bleeding hands and tears, And in error and in anguish, Will not perish with our years. It will be at last made perfect In the universal plan ; It will help to crown the labors Of the toiling hosts of man. It will last and shine transfigured In the final reign of Right ; It will merge into the splendors Of the City of the Light ! " Does not this cover life ; does it not sanctify death ; does it not take hold of the deepest needs, the highest longings of our nature ; are we not touched with un- speakable awe to know that our humblest work, even though done " in error, in anguish/' and " with bleed- ing hands and tears/' cannot fail of its end, but helps on to the ultimate consummation ? I am Reminded of George Eliot's words, — " Even our failures are a prophepy, ^^^/^ Even our yearnings and our/oitter tears After that fair and true ^^ cannot grasp, — As patriots who seem pS die in vain Make liberty more sacred by their pangs." ^ Not a patriot, not a martyr, not an ideal reformer, has ever said or can ever say his word or do his deed in vain. They only live in vain who compromise with their ideal convictions, who believe in no grand goal for humanity, who would rather live well, comfortably housed and honored in this present order of things, than dare condemn it and help to create a better. 1 A Minor Prophet. 280 ETHICAL RELIGION. I have said Unitarianism is unsatisfactory on its practical side, because it lacks a great thought ; and this thought is to my mind, — I utter it at the risk of seeming extravagant, — that the perfect order of things, which Omnipotence was to produce for us in another world, we are ourselves to create here. I believe there is a kind of omnipotence in human na- ture : I do not mean, of course, as men ordinarily are, eating, drinking, wrapped up in pleasure, business, and personal interests, but as they might be, under the influence of ideas. I might more properly say, I believe in the omnipotence of ideas, and of men in so far as they are possessed with them, — and men only need to open their hearts to be so possessed. The true atheist is he who does not believe that an ideal justice and right can conquer in the world, that men — all men — and universal human society and gov- ernment cannot will and do the good, the perfect good. There is no need of the miracle-working, heaven-creat- ing God of the old theology ; nay, he is our enemy to the extent that men are led to give to him the tasks and trust him for the results which they should ac- complish themselves. There is a miracle-working, a heaven-creating power in ourselves. So long as we pray, this divinity is dishonored. Until he awakes, there is no salvation. Unitarianism does not see this, and does not because of what I must call — and this is my third point — its general lack of seriousness in treating of the issues of the day. Nowhere is this better shown than in its attitude toward this subject of prayer. Prayer for temporal things, for rain or fair weather, for food or shelter, Unitarians do not make, except by a slip of the WHY UNITARIANISM FAILS TO SATISFY. 281 tongue ; but they pray for spiritual blessings, for the kingdom of God. But are not these just the things that need praying for the least, that are most within our own power ? Eain or fair weather are very evi- dently in some other control than our own ; but purity, charity, truth, how can these ever come to us save by our willing to have them ? A perfect order of society, how can it ever dawn on the earth save as man sets his heart upon it and determines that it shall be ? Certainly these are the best things, and if prayer would bring them, they would be the most worth praying for ; but because they are the best, ay, the most sacred things, therefore all the more scrupulous should we be in laying hold of only the true and effectual means for getting them. The dif- ference between those who do not pray and those who do, is not in any lessened value the former set on these higher things, or in any diminished aspira- tion or craving for them, but simply in the sense of the law of cause and effect. Kain does not come save as there are certain conditions in the atmosphere ; truth, justice, and the reign of the right can no more come save as there are certain conditions in the hu- man soul, certain widespread dispositions in human society. Prayer is a survival from an old uncritical, unscientific habit of mind; it remains with men to- day chiefly because it is a habit ; it remains above all with Unitarians, who are rationalized in so many ways, almost purely and solely because it is a habit. And they do not see that it is a confusing habit, to abandon which is not to give up a form or a few words merely, but to recognize the change of view that has come over the world in respect to the means 282 ETHICAL RELIGION. of accomplishing the highest and dearest ends. Jesus did not vaguely aspire for the kingdom of God ; nor did his followers, when, after he had gone on high as they imagined, they besought him to come again quickly : they believed he would come, and he be- lieved that the faith which might remove mountains could also be answered by the establishment of the Divine Kingdom. How vain then is it to repeat his or their language, when the mighty belief that was in it is no longer ours ! Let those who have a new belief not dally with an old form. Let us appeal to men as fervently and with as absolute a faith as ever of old prompted prayer to God; and the slumbering divin- ity that lies down deep in us all will arise, and, loosed from his bonds, go forth to recreate the world. There is a similar lack of seriousness in the Uni- tarian attitude toward Jesus. As they pray without any deep belief in prayer, so they own Jesus as Mas- ter with scant sense of that supreme devotion, that passionate love, which has inspired earnest Christian men and women the world over. It is a venerable and beautiful form of words, " our Lord and Master," and Unitarians often seem to use it because they can^ rather than because they must. Sometimes their claim has been to represent primitive Christianity ; but in simple truth it must be said they have made little effort to understand primitive Christianity : they have generally looked at it from nineteenth cen- tury and not from first century eyes ; they have been anxious to see what interpretation the Gospels would hear, rather than what they really teach.^ And at 1 Rev. Dr. James Martineau — an English Unitarian who com- bines in a remarkable manner ideal philosophy with the historical WHY UNITARIANISM FAILS TO SATISFY. 283 best, granting whatever formal resemblance there may be in Unitarianism to primitive Christianity, it is as much really like it as the framework of a building that is falling to pieces is like a similar framework around which a noble structure is going up. The framework in both cases may be the same ; but in the case of early Christianity the house was building, and to-day it is falling in ruins. One cannot, I venture to say, be a genuine, whole-hearted Christian after the primitive type without being caught up by the spirit of the movement, and becoming something more. And even those Unitarians who do not own Jesus as Master or claim to represent primitive Christianity, incline to play fast and loose with the Christian name. They rarely treat Christianity in a generous way as a great historical movement, and only by an ungracious minimizing of its essentials do they make out that they have a right to be called Christians at all. Some- times their' Christian faith is at so low an ebb, that they claim the Christian name only because they are of Christian descent or live under a Christian civili- zation ; and if they actually give up the Christian name, it is with so little heartiness that they bring no enthusiasm to the cause of a new religion. Yes, in the conception of religion itself Unitarians sometimes manifest a lack of deep seriousness. Is spirit — says : " No one who has once become familiar with the definite images and ideas of the Messianic Christianity in any of its forms can ever again give to its language the loose and large interpretation which alone renders it available for the voice of living piety. He knows it really means what he cannot mean ; and if constrained to adopt it, he feels that his * Kingdom of heaven suffereth violence.'" 284 ETHICAL RELIGION. it not something to give oneself over to the right in a covenant never to be broken ? Is that an easy thing, a light thing ? Is the mood in which one does it a mood that comports with the use of such adjec- tives as " welcome, delicate, rare, and exquisite " ^ to describe it ? Yet there is a great deal of this "deli- cate, rare, and exquisite " religion among Unitarians. Another writer says that "there is a grace of sen- timent, a tenderness of feeling, that is as beautiful as it is rare, which is more truthfully represented by this word ' religion ' than by any other in our lan- guage." ^ Did any great religious movement ever start with such conceptions as these ? Does not real religion try men, and set before them arduous tasks ? Hear the words of the old prophets : " Wash you and make you clean, and put away the evil of your do- ings ! " Hear the words of Jesus : " Let the dead bury their dead, but go thou and preach the Kingdom of God ! " Hear Luther, hear Channing, and you will not fail to realize that religion means higher and grander thoughts of duty, stricter rules of life; and that it must be a religion out of which strenuous convictions are gone, and wherein only a few pretty flowers of sentiment remain, that can bear to be described in these "rare, delicate, and exquisite" terms. I said in the early part of my discourse, that religion with Unitarians was a sentiment to cover and refine the daily life ; but religion must be more than this. A new religion must call for a new daily life ; its in- fluence must be not to make us pass our days serenely as our fathers passed theirs, but to stir a divine un- ^ Rev. Dr. H. W. Bellows, Boston Unitarian Anniversary, 1881. 2 Unity, Nov. 16, 1881, p. 342. WHY UNITARIANISM FAILS TO SATISFY. 285 rest for a higher life. The religion of Unitarians is too near this world, — it offers too few contrasts with it ; it does not rap our souls away into the vision of an eternal beauty that lies beyond it. I have in mind a picture, — I cannot tell whether I ever saw it, or whether it is made up in imagination from hints that I have somewhere found in reading, — of Saint Augustine and his mother, sitting together, with eyes turned upward and seeming to rest on some distant transcendent glory. It is this attitude which I miss in Unitarianism, and which I seem to find in the touching song of a glorified humanity which I have already quoted. To look away from this present or- der of human life to an ideal order, to feel that our true life and home are there, — this, whether the ideal is conceived as another species of reality, only sepa- rated from us in space and time, or the image and form after which we are to shape and recreate pres- ent reality, as I hold, — this is indeed the meaning of Ethics, and must be the supreme attitude of an Ethical religion. I am aware that I have considered Unitarianism in its actual character and history rather than in those higher inspirations that have now and then visited it. They were mostly before Unitarianism began an or- ganized existence. Then were heard grand assertions of the rights of the mind as over against external authority, vindications of the moral and rational na- ture of man ; then it was said that religion was not in name or form or creed, but in lifting the soul to the love and practice of goodness : almost prophetic strains they were, which redeemed, and still redeem, 286 ETHICAL RELIGION. as we read them, the dreary Biblical and theological controversies of those early times. And the only reason why Unitarianism cannot become the religion of the future, is that when it came to publish its word to the world it was not willing to take its stand on that high ground, but felt it must, before all, keep its standing in the Christian Church, and cling to its small half-believed remnant of the Christian creed. May the brave little company of ^^ Ethical" Unita- rians in the West,i and other earnest individuals here and there, yet reclaim the larger body to which they belong, and lift it to the level of its highest inspirations ! 1 See note to p. 269. XV. THE BASIS OF THE ETHICAL MOVEMENT. THE Ethical movement has a serious aim. It is not a literary movement ; nor is it primarily a philosophical movement. It does not aim at culture, in the ordinary sense of the word. A wider knowl- edge of man and of the best products of the human spirit, — that is very desirable, but it does not make our central aim. We want to touch the springs of man's moral life, to influence character and conduct. Our aim is moral culture ; and it is natural that I should try to answer the question. On what basis does such a movement rest ; what is our starting- point, what is the unmovable rock on which we plant our feet? First, I must frankly say that the Ethical movement does not find a sure basis in the great religions that have come down to us, nor even in the rationalized forms of them that are becoming more or less current. There is no occasion for jeers and gibes at Judaism and Christianity. They are not aliens, but in the order of history, — the ancestry from which we have sprung, the mother of us all. Taunts are sometimes directed against them as if the human mind were not responsible for them, as if they were imported from without or had descended ready-made from heaven. But this is a shallow view, and really proceeds from 288 ETHICAL RELIGION. the standpoint of tLe religions themselves. The truth is, that mankind has developed its own religious be- liefs ; that neither God nor Devil revealed them ; and hence that to ridicule them in a wholesale way is to ridicule the human mind itself. None the less are the old beliefs inadequate to our present light and knowledge. Though it is simply one stage of human culture succeeding another and lower stage, the tran- sition is so great as to amount to a revolution. To go straight to the heart of the matter, men have here- tofore conceived of the Supreme Power of the world as a personal being like themselves ; and they have had so slight a notion of the order of Nature and the fixity of Nature's laws, that they have thought they might pray to him and ask him to do for them what they could not do for themselves. Many to-day, on the other hand, owing partially to the influence of philosophical criticism and partly to that of positive science, are constrained to regard the personality of Deity as an open question, and prayer as a useless expenditure of human energy. Personality is a con- ception borrowed from our experience in connection with human beings ; it may be questioned whether we have a right to apply it to what is beyond all expe- rience, unless it be by way of metaphor or figure of speech, — as we may speak of the unknown mystery as a sun, or as light or life. Theology is simply turn- ing poetry into prose. That unseen Power by which we live is greater than all our figures of speech, out- shines our most brilliant metaphor, — is indeed light unapproachable, unthinkable. Prayer seems almost a belittling of that solemn mystery in the bosom of which we and this wide world rest. Por it is not, THE BASIS OF THE ETHICAL MOVEMENT. 289 let me distinctly say, in the name of materialism or phenomenalism, but because of a deeper sense of that mystery, that I abandon prayer. At the same time that we are less able to make dogmatic assertions re- specting the unknown, we are learning, and are able to assert, more and more in the field of the known. A vision of law and order is dawning upon us ; the sphere of caprice is diminishing and vanishing before our eyes ; a conception of the universe is developing which if it has less fascination for a childish mind, has infinitely more and is unspeakably grander to the thoughtful and mature. Arbitrary will, purposes that change and bend, these may be in man, but they are not in Nature ; they are not in that ultimate and total order of things of which man and Nature are parts.. We may pray to our fellow-men, we may appeal to one another to respond to our varying wishes and wants ; but prayer to the Unknown God involves a double vice, — first, distrust of the beneficence of that order through which he is already manifested, and which holds fast whether we pray or not ; second, a despair of our ability to act as proximate causes, and to bring about the results we wish ourselves. Such, very hastily expressed, are the results to which modern thought is leading some reflecting and earnest men at the present time. It is because the rationalized forms of the old religions do not make room for those who fearlessly and frankly accept these results, that their fellowship is too narrow for me. For with much of the work of Liberal Christianity and reformed Judaism it is impossible not to sympa- thize. They have battled with and left behind many old and outworn notions and forms ; they have tried 19 290 ETHICAL RELIGION. to reconcile reason with religion, and freedom with a spiritual faith. But they have not gone far enough with their rationalism. I find fault with them, not for what they have done, but for what they now seem unwilling to do. Liberal Christians, for exam- ple, no longer believe in the three persons of the old theology, but they seem to cling with no less energy to the doctrine of one person. Judaism has from the beginning tenaciously held to this doctrine. Do we now and then, perhaps, hear that this must not be taken literally and dogmatically ; that it is only poetic personification that is had in mind; that the term " God,^' as ordinarily used, is but a metaphor ? But how much seriousness are we to attribute to such explanations when the old forms, that have their meaning only in connection with the old ideas, are persisted in ? Is it child's play which I am witness- ing, when after the concession that " God '' may be but a metaphor, I hear a solemn address to him, or a solemn benediction invoked from him upon the peo- ple ? Which word, indeed, of the preacher or rabbi shall I believe, which does he really mean ? Or is it possible that religion — which is, one would suppose, the sincere, the utterly truthful attitude of the soul before what is highest and best to it — is ceasing to be, and men are contenting themselves with shifts and compromises and the use of words with double meanings ? Hear, too, what is said and then done in regard to prayer. He would be a foolish man now- adays who would ignore or deny the reign of law in the world; and the Liberal pulpit recognizes and teaches it. The bearing of it upon prayer is also shown, and we are told that prayer cannot change or THE BASIS OF THE ETHICAL MOVEMENT. 291 suspend the Divine laws, but only bring us into con- formity with them ; and straightway we hear not only an address to Deity, but an appeal that he will bless our community and our families, that he will heal the sick and defend the poor, — all which involve a prac- tical denial of the view presented in the discourse. Meanwhile the community continues unblessed, and the sick are not healed, and the poor are defence- less ; and in the name of truth, I ask would it not be better for the pulpit to address its entreaties to the men and women in the pews, and say that to them is trusted the care of the community and the guar- dianship of their families ; to them is the sacred task committed of going out and healing the sick and rais- ing up the unfortunate ; to theniy in their laws and in their business, is the work given of establishing jus- tice for the poor? Oh for a wave of seriousness to sweep through the churches ! Yes, for myself, not merely the rationalized forms of Christianity and Judaism, but religion itself, as it is popularly understood, does not give an absolutely sure basis on which to stand. Eeligion, in the popu- lar sense, hinges on faith in God, Prayer, and Immor- tality. I do not indeed forget that there is a wider sense of the word religion, — a sense that would give a place to Buddhism, which at its inception was with- out any of the beliefs already named, and would in- clude any system which sets a supreme ideal before the human mind and prescribes a rule for its attain- ment; and further, I do not conceal my own faith that out of a fresh sense of the demands of morality upon us, out of a new contact with the higher ideal tendeiioies of the world, tbero will dawn upon us and 292 ETHICAL religion! burn into us a new conviction as to life, its meaning and its issue, a new sense of a world-purpose and a world-goal. But now, and at the start, our word is a simple one. We do not propound new views of the universe. We wish rather a new sense of duty ; we wish to throw ourselves into the stream of moral progress. We need not ask how it is there ; we need not peer down along its course to catch a glimpse of the sea into which it flows. We want to throw our- selves into it and bathe in it, because we know it is good ; because when we have so much as touched our feet or hands to it, we have experienced its sweet- ness and felt the life and quickness of its waters : we want to because we are parched and dry, and there is only an arid waste around us. But if not the current religious doctrines,^ is it per- haps science, or that philosophic attitude of much of modern science known as agnosticism, which is to fur- nish a basis for the new movement ? This seems to be the impression of many; we will accept nothing, as they think, which we cannot scientifically demon- strate. There is a certain amount of truth in this impression. One should be hospitable to all the re- sults of scientific demonstration ; one should cling to no old-time belief against which there is a balance of scientific evidence. I am myself in sympathy with the methods of modern science, — and with agnosti- cism, which instead of affirming positive knowledge 1 It must not be understood that we thereby propose a negative dogmatism, and would exclude those who believe in the " current religious doctrines ; " we differ from the churches simply in not requiring assent to them, in not putting them at the basis of the Ethical Movement. THE BASIS OF THE ETHICAL MOVEMENT. 293 is a confession of what we do not and cannot know. Kant in the last century and Herbert Spencer in this were perhaps the first to draw the line clearly be- tween the realm of the known and knowable and that of the unknowable. Knowledge is limited to expe- rience : what is beyond experience may be guessed, imagined, or thought about ; but in the nature of the case no guess or imagination or thought can be veri- fied, and thus converted into scientific knowledge. This critical distinction has undermined the very foundations of theological dogmatism, and has taught to philosophers as well as theologians a long-needed lesson of modesty and humility. All this, however, is very different from regarding agnosticism or positive science as the basis of our movement. In the new and clear atmosphere of mod- ern thought, many of us have seen the old "castles in the air " vanish from our view ; one by one they have seemed to lose their basis in this world of experi- ence in which we live. But an atmosphere is hardly a thing on which to build, — it is at best a trans- parent medium through which and by the light of which we may discover the real foundations. Agnos- ticism is no more than a confession of the limita- tions of our knowledge. But what we do not know is hardly a basis for action. Simply because men no longer believe in the old dogmas is no reason why they should form an Ethical Society. There are plenty of agnostics who have little sympathy with us, whose unbelief may perhaps extend to the foundations of morality as well as to those of theology, and who may live simply lives of supercilious and refined ego- tism. Agnosticism is but the dry light of the intel- 294 ETHICAL RELIGION. lect, which may be used to the noblest ends, but may also be perverted to the meanest. Nor is science, teaching us positively what we do know, a sufficient guide for us. I will yield to none in my admiration and wonder before the world which science has re- vealed to us. How has space widened and time grown infinite, and how does one law seem to hold in its grasp the mighty movements of systems and the least tear that trickles down a child's face! It is a wmverse, majestic, solemn, in the midst of which we live, and it would seem to suggest to us great and solemn thoughts as to what our own lives should be. But when I turn from Nature to consider human life and the order of human society, my reverence in one way lessens rather than grows deeper. The science that reports faithfully, philosophically, the varied facts of our human existence is not altogether a plea- sant page to read. History, which is one branch of the science of man, tells of animalism, of brutal sel- fishness, of towering wrongs, of slow-returning jus- tice, often of a blind infuriated justice that punishes the innocent and leaves the guilty free. And obser- vation — statistics, which is nothing else than scien- tific observation — reveals almost as many things that ought not to be as things which should be. Statis- tics of crime are just as much science as would be statistics of peace and order, — statistics of prosti- tution as truly scientific as those of family purity, of poverty as truly as those of comfort and competence. What science teaches must invariably be accepted as fact, but it may none the less provoke moral repul- sion and rebellion. We may say to some of the facts, "You have no right to be!" Yes, the very end of THE BASIS OF THE ETHICAL MOVEMENT. 295 our scientific observation may sometimes be to render such observation in the future impossible, — that is, to destroy the facts. Plainly, then, science is not ul- timate. It tells us simply what is ; it tells us noth- ing of what ought to be. What ought to be, — that is reported to us by a higher faculty than that of scientific observation ; it is an assertion, a demand of the conscience. Here, then, is to my mind the true basis of our movement, — not the old religions; not religion itself, in the popular understanding of that term ; not ag- nosticism, though as matter of fact some of us may be agnostics ; not science, though the facts of science, every one of them, should have our recognition. It is something deeper and more ancient, I might say, than any of these : it is the rock of conscience, the eternal laws that announce themselves in man's moral nature. Our knowledge may be limited to the senses ; but conscience is not knowledge, — for knowledge is of what is, and conscience is the thought of what ought to be. It may be that our senses have never revealed to us a perfectly just man ; that we have never known or heard of an absolutely just govern- ment. None the less does conscience say to every man, " Thou oughtest to be just ! " And if it could find voices clear and strong enough, it would publish aloud to every community and every State to-day, " There is no other law for you save that of absolute justice, and in the measure that you fail therein, you have no sanctity and no defence.'^ Conscience, in a word, ushers us into an ideal realm. Genuine ethics have in this respect more in common with art than with science. For true art, I take it, is not minute 296 ETHICAL KELIGION. painstaking photography ; it does not consist in ren- dering an object in the terms of the senses unillumin- ated by the mind, but in catching the idea of the object, so that in witnessing the picture or the statue we seem to feel the flush of the artist's thought, and are touched with the inspiration wherewith he con- ceived and wrought. If the great master Shakspeare said that the object of his art was simply "to hold the mirror up to nature, to show virtue her own fea- ture, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure," I must say that ethics is an art of very different character. It holds up the mirror, not of the actual, but of the ideal, — that mirror whereby we feel vice to be vice, and know virtue to be virtue, and by which we judge the age and body of the time, and declare what its form and pressure ought to be. It is ideal rather than realistic art to which I would compare ethics, — the art re- vealed in the matchless bearing of an Apollo, in the divine grace of a Venus of Milo, in the majesty of an Angelo's Moses, in the radiant freshness of a Eapha- el's Madonna. These are human, and yet they are more than human ; for the artist's thought of the per- fect has worked in them, and we feel in looking at them a reflection of that "light which never was on land or sea." Art is the realization of the beautiful ; ethics means the realization of the good. As we look on men and women, we see the possibilities of the perfect that are in them, — we think of what they are meant to be, rather than of what they are. We are to regard ourselves and society about us as plastic material, in which the divine ideas of goodness have begun to take form, but have never reached adequate THE BASIS OF THE ETHICAL MOVEMENT. 297 form, — and are so hemmed and hindered, that if we judged with the senses alone we might doubt if they existed, and yet to the eye of the soul are still there, and need only to be seen and believed in to again stir and move, and to shape human life to finer forms and nobler issues. Who as he looks on the face of human society can be content with what he sees there ? Who does not find his notions of justice, of humanity, of the brother- hood in which men ought to live, contradicted ? Who with a conscience or a heart has not felt that this sys- tem of things, in which self-interest is not only the impulse but the rule ; in which we consider not so much the rights or claims of men as the extent to which they may serve us and contribute to our own gains ; in which any means, any oppression, any grind- ing down that do not involve open violence or fraud are viewed as legitimate, and something which any one must practise because all do, — who, I say, has not felt that this system of things, even though he be a partner in it, is wrong, and longed, as a man in thick darkness longs for light, for some other order of things, in which he should not be compelled to beat back the best and purest impulses of his nature ? The social questions are the questions of the day. And the social questions are fundamentally moral questions ; they involve the relations of man to man, — and morality is nothing but an ideal of what the relation between man and man should be. Not the smallest subject, or the merest detail of it, bearing on the rights of human beings is out of the province of a moral teacher. Morality is as wide as humanity ; it has a bearing on the whole life of humanity ; it 298 ETHICAL RELIGION. demands nothing less than that every man have at least the means and opportunity for a truly human life. Material interests have a sanctity if they are human interests ; the question of wages has a moral bearing if wages mean the substratum of food and drink and clothing and shelter, on which a human being is to build up his higher existence. Education has a moral bearing : the devising and putting into operation a rational and human scheme of education is one of the moral problems of the time. Politics have a moral bearing : the State has no other end than justice and the general good, and justice and the general good are a demand of morality. " Political " life should mean public life, — the abandonment of private interests or class interests, and the dedication of one's self to public interests. I know not indeed on what depart- ment or phase of life to cast a glance and find that morality has no bearing there. Morality is not a suppliant, a beggar asking for an entrance and protec- tion in one corner of our existence ; it is a sovereign, and though it be unheard and unnoticed, prescribes the law and ideal for the whole. It has a bearing on the intellect, and condemns the conscienceless inter- pretations of great doctrines, the clever playing with words not uncommon in some of our churches. It has a bearing on our domestic life, forbidding that any one should be a slave there. It has a bearing on our pleasures, on our business, on the conduct of the State. It is indeed an invisible companion cleaving to us wherever we go, — rising, as a great English- man^ has said, with us in the morning and going to rest with us at night, and only leaving us as we 1 Gladstone, Vatican Decrees, § 4. THE BASIS OF THE ETHICAL MOVEMENT. 299 leave the light of life. A companion do I say ? Ah, it is closer than any companion, for though it warns us and commands us, it does so in that supreme act in which we warn and command ourselves ; it is the utterance of the God in us, of the '^ prophetic soul " in which we all share, and signifies that we are part and parcel of another order of things than that which we can see and handle, and are rooted in somewhat firmer than the earth, and more ancient, more vener- able than the heavens. To get a new sense of this inward monitor ; to feel that its demands are be- yond any mere traditional rules of goodness, that it means not this or that good thing, but all good ; to have thus an infinite horizon open to our view, and to feel that a path of ceaseless progress lies before us, — this is to me the aim and significance of the Ethical Movement. I know the churches speak sometimes of "mere morality,'' and ask if that can save a man. I answer readily that a surface, mechanical morality, no matter by whom practised, does not and cannot save a man. But if so, the call in my judgment is not for some- thing to take the place of morality, but for a larger, a more perfect morality, — one covering the whole of life, and allowing no nook or corner of it to lie outside of the sacred sway of the just and the good. It is a higher standard of righteousness which the world needs, — one which shall convict even the religions of the day of the lowness of their own standards ; which shall awaken the slumbering consciences of men, and regenerate life, private and social. If the churches had the idea of morality as a principle, would they dare to speak of it in this slighting way? No; by 300 ETHICAL EELIGION. morality they mean custom or tradition, or at best a set of commands given by Moses or Jesus, and written down in a book. That it is an independent idea and ^ law of man's own mind, prior to all custom and tradi- tion and books and persons, and so capable of super- seding them all and making them antiquated, is hard- ly imagined. But it is nothing else than this that 1 mean by proposing the pure dictates of conscience as the basis of our movement. We assert the independ- ence of morality. We do not rest on dogma, because there is something in man closer and more constitu- tional to him than dogma ; we do not rest on history, because we believe that within man lie the springs of history, and that history's grandest movements started from no inspiration that we cannot draw on equally well to-day. The modern world talks of pro- gress : we believe in moral progress, that the ideas of righteousness are not stationary, but capable of end- less expansion ; that there can be no final statement of ethics ; that men may get scruples in the future that they have no thought of now ; that, for example, a sense of justice may develop that will make our present manner of conducting business and industry a reproach and a shame. It is a word of this sort which I should like to throw out among men and women of to-day. It is a new centre of interest, a new basis of union, that we have to propose. The old religions, and Liberalism in its present forms, rest on other issues. Judaism is a race religion, — a pure, a lofty religion, but still a race religion. Christianity is more universal, but it is founded on and limited by Jesus of Nazareth ; and though I will not be surpassed in genuine rev- THE BASIS OF THE ETHICAL MOVEMENT. 301 erence for that unique figure, that image of blended majesty and gentleness which has cast a light down the centuries, and has rarely been without influence, even when Christians were maddest and most bigoted, truth equally compels the admission that Jesus does not furnish a basis broad enough and large enough for the present and coming time. Yes, Jesus him- self rests upon a deeper foundation in the reason and conscience of man ; and on that bottom rock we may stand to-day as truly as he stood, and may build upon it as serenely, with as undaunted a faith and as firm a hope, as ever he or his followers did eighteen hundred years ago. No more satisfactory is ordinary Liberalism. It is still largely critical ; it is often but a wild and bitter attack on the old religions ; it is at best a calm and clear perception that the old re- ligions are no longer possible ta us ; it is not sel- dom coupled with indifference to moral questions, and where it is zealous, its zeal must often be confessed to be on the wrong side. I believe the future is for those who have cut loose from the old-time forms and creeds, and who have no patience with them. But their impatience must go further ; they must become impatient with themselves and with the moral state of the community ; they must turn a deaf and relent- less ear to all the siren calls that would confound liberty with license; they must rather own the call of stricter rules, of higher ideals of duty, and feel that with the old citadels of faith in ruins at their feet their work has but begun. It is to earnest and brave-hearted men and women who will turn their faces in this direction, that the Ethical Movement addresses itself. 302 ETHICAL RELIGION. For let me make clear that tlie basis of our move- ment is not a theory of morality, but morality itself. The moral teacher is not primarily to give a metaphy- sical philosophy of ethics, to propagate transcenden- talism or utilitarianism, — though he may have views ' of his own, and on occasion need not refrain from ex- pressing them.^ He desires rather, if he can, to hold up the idea of the good itself ; to make men love it for its own sake, and own its beauty in the conduct, in the beautiful order and beneficence of their lives. There is but one theory of morals against which I have any feeling, and this not because it is a theory, but because it is subversive of morality itself. I mean the view which we now and then hear advo- cated, that morality is but a refined selfishness, a long-sighted prudence ; that the end of life is and can be nowhere else than in the accumulation of in- dividual pleasures, and the avoidance of individual pains. That man cannot go out of himself; that he cannot love another equally with himself; that he 1 I may be permitted to quote the following notable words of the late lamented Professor T. H. Green, of Oxford, which I have come upon since writing the above : — ** It is probable, indeed, that every movement of religious reform has originated in some clearer conception of the ideal of human conduct, arrived at by some person or persons, — a conception, perhaps, toward which many men have been silently working, but which finally finds in some one individual the character which can give decisive practical expression to it. But in the initiation of religious reforms, the new theory of the ideal, as a theory, always holds a secondary place. It is not absent, but it is, so to speak, absorbed in a character, — a character to which the specu- lative completeness of the theory is of little interest ; and it is this character which gives the new conception of the ideal its power in the world." (Prolegomena to Ethics, p. 36L) THE BASIS OF THE ETHICAL MOVEMENT. 303 cannot find an end of his being in his family, in the community, in the State ; that for all these he cannot live, and cannot die rather than see them dishonored, — this is what I call the real infidelity, and whether uttered by priest or philosopher has and always shall have my dissent and my rebuke. Morality is this going out of one's self and living in, living for, some- thing larger. Prudence, selfishness, — these are and may well be the servants, the attendants on morality ; they never dare take the place of masters. Aside from this, which is not a theory but a statement of moral- ity, a moral teacher need have little to say, at least at the start, of the philosophy of ethics. It is something far more primary and simple than philosophy, even the truest, that must be our immediate concern. It is the practically proving to the world that morality is an adequate foundation for our lives ; it is the de- monstrating that unselfishness can be by showing it ; yes, it is, I sincerely hope and trust, proving that a higher morality is possible than the world now allows, — proving it by the stricter purity of our private lives, by higher notions of honor in our business or professional relations, by juster conduct to our em- ployees ; yes, by a new wave of sympathy and human- ity that shall take us out of ourselves and out of our business, and make us bear the burdens of the sick and the poor and the forlorn in our community as they have never been borne before. XVI. THE SUPREMACY OF ETHICS. WHEN all else that tlie religious world holds dear falls or becomes uncertain, confidence in duty may remain unshaken. One may doubt all the articles of the Christian creed, and have much pain in doing so, yet never be confused, never have shame ; but to doubt that love and truth and honor are binding upon us is so unnatural that it can only be accounted for on the supposition of some moral obliquity. These moral laws of our being are so close and constitutional to us, that the very existence of virtue is bound up with a recognition of them. A man is virtuous on principle, or he is not virtuous at all, though he may conform to all the external re- quirements of virtue; and if there is no principle, no sovereign ought, constraining, commanding, and forbidding, there is no morality. Morality is not a matter of taste, of personal preference, or of tem- perament ; it is obedience to a command, it is self- surrender to the OUGHT that sounds within us, it is the free choice of what we cannot avoid choosing without shame and dishonor. "If that fail, The pillared firmament is rottenness, And earth's base built on stubble." THE SUPREMACY OF ETHICS. 305 The Ethical Movement, as I understand it, plants itself on this ultimate crowning fact of man's na- ture. We start with a certainty. Human beings do not choose the sovereign laws of duty and make them laws those laws would be over us, did we not choose them ; they rather choose us. Man no more creates the moral world of obligation than he does the phy- sical one of fact ; he has only to fit himself into it, and let its sublimity make him sublime. Man is not the summit of things : as the heavens bend over his body and the stars unalterably shine, so the moral law arches over the soul of man, and he is greatest as he bends in lowly worship to it. Nobleness, magna- nimity, great-hearted love, unswerving truth, — these are not ours, but we are theirs, bound to them as the iron to the magnet, as the needle to the star, as the tides to the ^^ far-off orb" of heaven ; bound to them, that is, in idea, and should be in fact. Great and reassuring are the lessons of the moral sentiment. It gives us a place whereon to plant our feet. It casts out fear. See how it deals with the fear of so many anxious minds that in face of modern conditions not only Christianity, but religion itself will pass away from the world. We live in an age of transition, and all the way from the Catholic to the Unitarian there are mutterings and tremblings, as if in case this or that or the other creed loses its hold on man the stays and consolations of human life will be gone. Idle fears ! Religion, so far as it has not been the outgrowth and blossoming of the moral sen- timent, has been at best an expensive luxury to the race, and has come near to being a curse. That man's peace and happiness and safety depend upon beings 20 306 ETHICAL RELIGION. whose favor must be gained by costly sacrifices and prayers, — this belief, that made the basis of primi- tive religion, and survives in all the great branches of the Christian Church, has caused more distress of mind, more false torments of conscience, more waste of energy, moral and material, than we can ever cal- culate or dream of. Eeligion — the thought of it in the past, I mean — is only endurable to the free man and earnest lover of his kind as moral elements have been taken up into it and an end has been made of sacrifices ; as the prayers have come to be prayers for righteousness, — or else have ceased altogether before the stern determination to be righteous at whatever cost; as religion has come to mean right- eousness, and the will of God has been identified with the good of man. But the moral sentiment that has played such a transforming and revolutionary part in the field of religion in the past is still with us ; it was never more alive than to-day. It is born into the world with every child ; it is as fresh as if this were creation's morn. It is that from which we can- not get away, in regard to which scepticism is absurd, and out of which, in conjunction with modern culture, shall come, I believe, a nobler religion than the world has ever known before. The depths, not of fear, but of awe, were never stirred in man till he felt the sublime promptings of the OUGHT within him. The ancient gods or goddesses were never truly reverend and august till they were regarded as the authors of the pure and high com- mands that give the law to man's life and conduct ; and so far as they were interpreted in this way, they must always be revered. The moral sentiment bios- THE SUPREMACY OF ETHICS. 307 soms as naturally into a religious faith as the buds of spring open out into leaf or flower. A man may give up all that passes current as religion, — give up God and Immortality and Prayer (in the customary senses), as well as the claims of the Church or of Jesus, — yet if he keep his hold on morality, if he bend before Truth and Justice and Love, if he feel there is something sovereign within him which it were better to die than to forget, he is on the open highway that leads to those grand confidences and trusts that are the imperishable part of religion. For the sense of morality is the sense of somewhat sacred, holy ; it is the sense of a law above all other laws. There is not a law of Nature that may not con- ceivably be altered or suspended, or that we may not violate or defy, should duty command. We use Na- ture every day, — her forces, her laws, we are forever turning to account. We cannot worship Nature or the sum of Nature's powers. That sovereign allegiance and fealty we owe to what is absolutely inviolable, to what we dare not use, to what exists for its own sake, and we for it, — to Goodness, to Love, to eternal Truth. The moral sentiment dwarfs Nature, it goes out to that which is beyond Nature. What is reg- nant in the universe is no fact, nor sum of facts ; no law in the actual sense, nor sum of laws, — but a commandment. And the deepest, the bottom thing in the universe must be that which is capable of giving a commandment : not matter, then, nor force, nor will, but reason, or that ineffable reality of which human reason is a poor and shadowy suggestion. Matter is phenomenal ; our thoughts come and go, our acts are ill-matched even with our thoughts; but that to 308 ETHICAL RELIGION. which our thoughts aspire, and from which alas they so often wander, does not change with our changing, does not rise when we rise, or fall when we fall, — but though we die, though the wide earth and the ever- lasting hills fade away into insubstantial mist and the heavens are rolled together as a scroll, lives for- ever ! Without morality and the infinite suggestions it makes, worship could not find an object, and the word "adorable" would have to pass out of literature, — and this, though so-called religious men at the pres- ent day have such partial conceptions of morality that they contrast religion with it, and speak of something above morality, and in addition to ethics plead for de- votional truths as well. Something above justice and goodness ! — there is nothing above. Devotional truth in addition to ethics ! — 't is the merest sentimental- ity. Eeligion has had connected with it much besides ethics in the past ; it has been weighted with blood and with lust, and to-day it is weighted with unre- ality and maudlin sentiment and cant. But so far as it has had more, it has been a disturber and full of harm to men ; and so far as it has more to-day, being no longer taken seriously, it is at best a su- perfluity, which self-respecting men and women are apt to do without. Duty is ordinarily divided into duties to man and duties to God. But there are no duties to God in the sense implied, nor have we reason to suppose that God as so conceived exists. "God'' is the infinite element in all duty, its eternal basis, without which duty and man and the world would alike disappear. And what an aim does ethics give to man ! With what solemnity does it invest our life ! We are here THE SUPREMACY OF ETHICS. 309 to lift ourselves to the measure of perfect goodness ; society exists to lift itself to perfect justice. Life is not for living merely, but for living so that some- what divine may be incorporated into it. How low men's thoughts ordinarily are ! Eeligion itself some- times takes sides with the world as it is, and dis- trusts reform. How many in his Church to-day would hear Jesus, should he come again enraptured with his thought of a coming kingdom of God ? Was ever socialist so wild and visionary as he ? Car- lyle used to say there was properly no religion in England. A stern saying, but when we remember how stern a thing religion is (or it is nothing) ; when we remember the fact of absolute obligation, which is its essence, and ask ourselves how many men and women in our own country live invisibly bound to truth and honor and justice, — we cannot deny all credence to the saying, and may ask ourselves. Are we in America much better off ? Our own Emerson spoke nearly fifty years ago of " the universal decay, and now almost death, of faith in society.'^ The Church, he declared, " had lost its grasp on the affec- tion of the good and the fear of the bad." ^ It is as if Christianity had at last got itself well lodged in this world, and had forgotten its dreams of another. Yet its dream of another, its vision of a perfect so- ciety that should replace the present order based so largely on selfishness and cruelty and wrong, was at the beginning its very inspiration and life. Hence its high demands, its seemingly impracticable pre- cepts ; hence its enthusiasm, that swept through an old decaying society like fire, destroying and recre- 1 Divinity School Address, 1838. 310 ETHICAL RELIGION. ating. There is little of this enthusiasm now. You cannot have enthusiasm and commonplace aims. En- thusiasm is born of an idea, and idealism is at a low- ebb among the churches. There is probably more idealism outside the Church than within it; it is born in mangers again, and makes its home in despised social reformers, among men who cannot live and see the world go on as it is. The trouble, on the other hand, with our social reform is that it does not start from within, that it is partial, that its aims are not severe and grand enough ; and so its enthusi- asm is finite, and does not reach the depths of man. Not resentment and not wrath, but the moral senti- ment must give anew the aim to human life. Once more must the call go forth for a perfect life ; once more must it be brought home to man that not food nor raiment nor shelter, not comfort nor ease, not sci- ence nor art, are the end of existence; but the " king- dom of God ; " and that this is not only the end but the beginning, since without justice and human sym- pathy science and art may minister to vice as well as virtue, and not even comfort or daily bread are necessarily within the reach of all. Louise Michel, predicting the outcome of the social revolution, says that man, having at last attained his plenitude, being no longer hungry nor cold, nor afflicted by any of the miseries of the present time, will be good.^ I see not one ray of hope for humanity in such a philosophy. The tendency of the evolutionary doctrine is, to a certain extent, to hold justice impracticable, save in an ideal state of society. But justice is commanded, and is the only thing that is practicable now or in 1 Chicago Times, Feb. 14, 1885. THE SUPREMACY OF ETHICS. 311 any state of society. Goodness is the sovereign law of life, first as well as last ; it is sovereign over life, as even Patagonian Indians may feel, — three of whom, Darwin tells us, once allowed themselves to be shot, one after the other, rather than betray their com- panions in war.^ I look for the social reformer who shall appeal to the sublime in man ; who shall be able to hold a savage, angry mob in check, and make them more willing to die than to do wrong ; and who shall pierce with the power of his convictions through the lying and sophistical selfishness of the prosperous, and make them own with trembling the law they now defy, and by his persuasiveness entreat them and woo them, so that with tears and penitent gladness they will do tasks of love and tenderest good-will. Such social reform will be religion once more on the face of the earth ; such a reformer will be another Christ, come with his solemn p.urity, his high faith, his un- conquerable love, to shame and to heal the world. What power, what omnipotence, will come in that day to our poor old human nature, — poor now only because it will not surrender itself to the moral senti- ment, because it will not unlock its heart and receive of the infinite riches of justice and love that lie for- ever waiting and even knocking at the door ! The moral sentiment is deliverance, — it is the open door to infinite power. When, in answer to the inner impera- tive, man obeys, he is rejuvenated, and feels the fresh- ness of an eternal day in his heart and through all the arteries of his being. There is no age to the spirit that lives in high sentiments. " Always young for liberty," exclaimed Dr. Channing. The faith born 1 Descent of Man, p. Ill, n. 312 ETHICAL RELIGION. of ethics is that man can do the right. The impera- tive itself brings the power to meet it. To say that duty commands us but that we cannot obey, is to suppose a lie in the nature of things. There is no duty if I cannot perform it. And as duty exists and charms and binds me, I know I can do it. The will is not bound. Men say we are born selfish, avaricious, lustful, and cannot be otherwise. You can be ; and the first thing is to feel in your heart of hearts that you ought to be, — and the iron weight of that ob- ligation felt in your inmost soul will transform you and give you its iron strength. Yet how the reli- gion of the day travesties our nature ! Not only does Orthodoxy teach the impotency of man, but Liberal Christianity teaches the necessity of prayer, which comes to the same thing, — saying that we poor crea- tures are weak and must have help. But Emerson answers, " Such as you are, the gods themselves could not help you." Again, '^ The weight of the universe is pressed down on the shoulders of each moral agent to hold him to his task. The only path of escape known in all the worlds of God is perform- ance."^ There is a breath as of mountain air in such words, — invigoration and re-invigoration for the moral life of man, and the secret of regeneration for religion, which, as Emerson says, now effeminates and demoralizes. It is a sublime faith that whatever the outward seeming, man is made for the good ; that, starting imperfect, he is called to be perfect ; that society and all the races of men have the way open to an infinite goal, which they will fail to reach only if they do not will to. What is wanting in us, what 1 " Worship," in Conduct of Life. THE SUPREMACY OF ETHICS. 313 is wanting in society, is not the power, but the wiH, to do and dare and suffer. The wide earth might be a scene of justice to-morrow, and every city of our land transformed into a City of the Light, if men and women would wake with to-morrow's sun to will the good which now lies like a half -formed vision in their minds. It is thus that the moral sentiment gives a great peace to the soul. Things often seem so bad about us that we are tempted to think evil cleaves to the na- ture of things. With all the boasted progress of the modern world in industry and inventions, things seem little better for the mass of men. The spectacle of debasement and misery among large classes in the very centres of our civilization and culture, is almost maddening to a sensitive nature, and easily breeds despair. If all this suffering and wrong are neces- sary, there is no escape from the conclusion that this is a black and cruel world we live in ; and the only way to live and to have any contentment is to harden one's heart and keep out of suffering one's self. But suffering and wrong are not necessary ; they might as well not be as be, — nay, they never would be if men listened to the promptings from on high that visit them. Suffering and wrong are foreign to the nature of things, they are contradictory to it, they exist despite it. The Heart of the world is sound ; and would we but give way to it in our own hearts, the face of society might be as fair as Nature is in her most joyous moods. We have not to make the world over, but only ourselves. In the midst of our work we can adore, and pass into that central peace which laps the world about, and which all our heat 314 ETHICAL KELIGION. and worry cannot disturb, nor man's extremest faith- lessness mar. If man does not do the good, he can- not have peace, — that is all. An ethical religion is nowise concerned with the justification of the order of society as it is ; it has little in common with the weak optimism that sometimes passes current as re- ligion ; it must oppose those canting economists who say that there being no such thing as chance, the Christian must regard present social conditions as the best possible, else they would not be consistent with the orderings of a wise Providence. If a man is given a task, and is not faithful to it, the result cannot be the best possible. The integrity and sanity of things nowise requires a justification of the pres- ent order of things. The high God commands to almost all the mighty of this world, and to many more besides, to do differently from what they do ; and as long as they do not obey, they are off the track appointed for them, and the integrity of things is only concerned in forever bringing them to nought. Where did Jesus find peace as he confronted the order of society in his day ? In the thought of a judgment that should destroy it. Oh, Friend, curse thyself, curse thy neighbor and society about thee, but not the fundamental arrangement of things ! — bless that; thou canst not dream so high as it makes possible. Heard already are the voices which if thou and all wouldst hear, the dread chaos and anarchy that now dishearten thee would pass away. Out of all this high spirit of faith and obedience, and as the issue of it all, is bred a great hope. Our current doctrine of immortality is weak ; it has little moral fibre in it. That august possibility for valor- THE SUPREMACY OF ETHICS. 315 ous and virtuous souls is made the property of all alike ; and no drivelling saint or damnable sinner but imagines he or she is going to live again, and live forever. There was never such effrontery. We have reason to believe there is another life, if there are souls worthy of it. The mystery is that wicked, frivolous, selfish men and women live out their nat- ural term of life here ; the gods are surely gracious and long-suffering to permit it ; and when death brings to an end their vain career, 't would seem the part of piety to let them rest in eternal forgetful- ness. But for the good the heart conjectures a bet- ter fate. The good are simply those who respond to the demands which the invisible world makes upon them. They only are good who are so because they must be, because a divine necessity constrains them, because they could not hold up their heads if they were unfaithful, because in such a case they would feel like traitors to the trust the universe had assigned to them. The value of a faithful soul is beyond all estimation. Duty is that by which we link ourselves to absolute being, and by which absolute being links itself in turn to us. Perishing man looks aloft and sees the imperishable, and with every moral act the imperishable becomes a part of him. JSTo atom, no tree, no animal, no man incapable of self-surrender, has this worth and incomparable dignity. The stars in heaven are not so grand as man living in obedi- ence to the moral sentiment, and dying when it is " better not to live." Yet there is no caste in virtue. In this lore, in this imperishable wealth, the great of this world have no monopoly. The dignity that dignifies the highest is within reach of the lowliest. 316 ETHICAL RELIGION. The savage Patagonian, the obscure reformer, martyrs and heroes who died in nooks and corners of the world, and all who loved and did the right, are the stars that shine in this firmament ; and all others count for nothing. This world will pass away; the generations of men are going, and sometime will all be gone ; nothing in Nature or that belongs to Nature stays ; there is nought permanent or everlasting out- side the blessed Powers that are over all and in all. Yet a high presentiment arises in the breast that out of all the countless personalities that have been or shall be born on " this bank and shoal of time," there shall be some accounted worthy to share with these blessed Powers their own eternity. Such a faith is too great for demonstration ; it rests on the cumula- tive suggestions and inspirations of the moral senti- ment. But it is that kind of immortality which has supreme interest for the morally serious man. That we are inherently immortal I can discover very little reason for supposing ; that any authority, whether of holy book or holy church, could settle the question for us seems like an offence to reason. Our personal affections and desires of reunion do not appear to be a solid foundation ; Jesus says not a word in their favor, though he does speak of those who shall be "accounted worthy to attain to that world and the resurrection of the dead." ^ That science can ever give us proof of immortality seems improbable, since science, save in its purely formal aspects, deals with the sensible (that is, with what may be observed or experimented upon) ; and immortality is a truth, if it be one, of the super-sensible. The doubtful vistas of 1 Luke XX. 35. THE SUPREMACY OF ETHICS. 317 Spiritualism make the other world but a poor faded copy of this, .with immortal eats and dogs as well as human beings, until that life seems more feeble and ineffectual even than this. What reason for the perpetuation of an old worn-out show ? For my part, I would rather leave death begirt with all its solemn and touching mystery, and simply trust that some- how transcendent issues will be worked out through it. There is no thought of reward for the good in what I say. As the good are so for goodness' sake, so their high destiny must come unbought and un- sought. Such are some of the lessons of the moral senti- ment as they have made themselves felt in my own miental experience, and such is something of what I conceive would be the gist and scope of an Ethical religion. Ethics is not a closed circle, so that when one has forborne to cheat and paid his debts, he is at the end of it. It starts with the lowest uses of earth, but covers the highest and widest flights of the spirit of man. To plant oneself on the funda- mental verity, and then allow its natural suggestions and implications to have an unhindered development in one's mind and in one's life, seems to me one of the most important and inspiring tasks of the present day. What a prospect is that which Emerson held out ! "There will be a new church," he said, "founded on moral science ; at first cold and naked, a babe in a manger again, the algebra and mathematics of ethical law, — the church of men to come, without shawms or psaltery or sackbut. But it will have heaven and 318 ETHICAL RELIGION. earth for its beams and rafters, ^ science for symbol and illustration ; it will fast enough gather beauty, music, picture, poetry. Was never stoicism so stern and exigent as this shall be. It shall send man home to his central solitude, shame these social supplicating manners, and make him know that much of the time he must have himself to his friend. He shall expect no co-operation, he shall walk with no companion. The nameless Thought, the nameless Power, the super- personal Heart, — he shall repose alone on that. He needs only his own verdict. No good fame can help, no bad fame can hurt him. The Laws are his con- solers ; the good Laws themselves are alive, — they know if he have kept them, they animate him with the leading of great duty and an endless horizon." ^ 1 *' Worship,-' in Conduct of Life. XVII. THE TRUE BASIS OF RELIGIOUS UNION. I HAVE had the privilege of expressing myself with the utmost freedom in the preceding pages. It is, however, one thing to express one's views freely, and another to propose them as a basis of re- ligious union. This I am distinctly unwilling to do. All that one can ask at the present time is that he shall be free to think and to express himself, that he shall not be put under the ban because his views do not accord wdth old-time standards ; but to pro- pose any new set of views ^ as a part of the basis of religious fellowship would be so far to revive the intolerance of ancient orthodoxy. I wish to ask now, not what is the truth with re- spect to various doctrines, ancient and modern, but what should make the fundamental terms of fellow- ship in a religious body ? This is an entirely prac- tical question, though I am aware that in trying to answer it I may develop an ideal of religious fellow- ship which has little or no relation to any existing religious movement.^ 1 Mr. Prederic Harrison declares that the Positivist " bond of union is a real, scientific, demonstrable conception of Nature and of man " (Unitarian Review, March, 1888, p. 236). 2 The only bodies of which I have any knowledge, whose platforms suggest such an ideal as I have in mind, are the Free Religious Association, the Western Unitarian Conference, and the 320 ETHICAL RELIGION. In general, I conceive that assent should not be re- quired in a religious body to any truth about which it is possible for a thoughtful and good man to doubt. The basis of fellowship should be so broad that no person striving for an ideal order of human life, no one striving to live blamelessly before conscience, should be perforce excluded from it. Hence, assent to the doctrines of Catholic or Protestant Christianity, or even of pure theism, should not be required. No one will deny that serious and good men can, and in some cases do, question these doctrines. Shall they, therefore, be excluded from the most sacred of all unions between man and man ? For my part, there is no materialist or atheist who yet loves and pursues the goodj^who feels that truth and honor bind him, whom I do not wish to call in the deepest and most sacred sense my brother. The truth which it appears impossible to doubt is that duty hinds a man. Not that we always know our duty, and not that we need always be sensible of its binding force. There may be — to quote from Wordsworth's " Ode to Duty '' — Union of the Societies for Ethical Culture. The Free Religious Association aims " to promote the practical interests of pure reli- gion, to increase fellowship in the spirit, and to encourage the scientific study of man's religious nature and history." The West- ern Unitarian Conference declares its " fellowship to he condi- tioned on no doctrinal tests," and welcomes "all who wish to join us to help establish truth and righteousness and love in the world." Tlie aim of the Ethical Movement, as represented by the Union, is ** to elevate the moral life of its members and that of the com- munity ; and it cordially welcomes to its fellowship all persons who sympathize with this aim, whatever may be their theological or philosophical opinions." THE TRUE BASIS OF RELIGIOUS UNION. 321 " Glad hearts, without reproach or blot, Who do thy work, and know it not ! " For duty may become one with life, happiness, and joy ; the antagonism between what we wish to do and what we ought to do may pass away. Yet duty does not cease to he binding because it is no longer felt to be. We may sometimes be ignorant of duty ; but when we learn what it is, we know thai! we are bound by it. It is also true that men may differ in their theories of the ultimate grounds of duty ; but the fact of moral obligation and the broad outlines of personal and social duty remain under any theory. The truth is, that the thought of what ought to be is as elemen- tal a part of man's being as the sense of what is. It is even possible to be more clear as to what we ought to do than as to what we actually have done or are doing. We know we should be just : whether we are so or not, may be often a difficult question to decide. The thought of the right is indeed one that cannot be outgrown, that has entered into every religion worthy of our reverence, that even the savage has in some half-conscious imperfect fashion, that man can lose only as he loses his reason. One could easier drive the sun from the heavens than banish the moral sen- timent from the mind of man. \ can imagine our living under other skies, in other spheres, and all the dear familiar experiences of this earthly life no longer known ; but without the moral sentiment we should cease even on the earth to be men, and the sun and all the stars would only shine on vacancy. We can not say, however, that the propositions of the Atha- nasian or even the Apostles' Creed are thus rooted in the nature of man; neither can this be said of the 21 322 ETHICAL RELIGION. theistic or perhaps any distinct speculative doctrine. A true religious fellowship, then, would not oblige as- sent to any of these doctrines ; it would require only the recognition that duty hinds a man. Positively speaking, the ideal religious body would be a union of all those who owned the authority of duty, and who sought to live as duty commands. The fellowship aimed at would be that of all good men ; that is, of all striving to be good and to advance the cause of goodness in the world. For the omission of a doctrinal basis does not mean a " mush of conces- sion," or the drowning of conscience in sentimental- ity. Not because one is a human being, but because he strives to realize the ideal of humanity in his life, and "to contribute to the establishment of an ideal order of human life on the earth, should he be wel- comed to the moral communion. Love cannot have fellowship with those who hate ; just men cannot be joined in sacred union with tyrants and oppressors; men who are trying to lead pure lives cannot frater- nize with those who are reckless and profligate. Con- ditional for admission must be the desire to purify oneself of all that is unworthy, to live according to one's best ideals. But other conditions should be un- known. One should not be obliged to confess himself a Christian or to confess himself a Jew ; the antago- nisms of Protestant and Catholic, of Evangelical and Unitarian, should be forgotten ; all barriers should pass away save those which conscience sets up. I am aware that the realization of such an ideal involves a great change in the habits and sentiments of men. It argues a new object of central inter- est, a new enthusiasm, a new magnanimity blended THE TRUE BASIS OF RELIGIOUS UNION. 323 with a new ardor. It is not uncommon to hear, even in the most liberal of Christian denominations (the Unitarian), that a religious body must, as a matter of course, have religious doctrines.^ It seems to be taken for granted that good and earnest men who differ intellectually cannot belong to one fellowship, that varying theological or philosophical views are necessarily more potent to divide than moral aims can be to unite. It is a sad and saddening opinion ; yet I am afraid there is more in the religious history of the race to confirm it than there is to encourage the aim I cherish. Never has there been, to my knowledge, such a fellowship as I crave. Men seem always to have been ready to magnify their intel- lectual agreements or disagreements, and to put a slight on the good purpose and the pure heart. I have come across, indeed, in Matthew Arnold's essay on " Saint Paul and Protestantism," ^ an observation of Epiphanius, one of the Christian Fathers, to the effect that in the primitive period of the Church wickedness was the only heresy ; that impious and pious living divided the whole world into erroneous and orthodox. I should like to believe that this was so, and no doubt there was some approximation to it ; but I am afraid that it was largely an ideal of the bishop's mind, transferred to a time in regard to which he had imperfect knowledge. In any case, not much later than the time of Epiphanius, when a bishop was charged in a Church council with unchas- tity, the cry went up, " What do we care about his chastity? Is he orthodox? — that is the question;'' 1 See " The Unitarian/' October, 1888, p. 442. 2 Page 120. 324 ETHICAL RELIGION. and again, "Worse than a Sodomite is he who will not call Mary mother of God ! '' ^ No, history does not give much encouragement to such a fellowship as I propose ; and as with morality in general, the dream of a moral basis of religious union is an ideal of the heart rather than anything else. Those who believe in it will have to strive for it : it will not come of itself. Yet it has on its side, I make bold to say, the best instincts of not a few men to-day ; the larger minds in almost all the historic Christian communions are moving in this direction, though they may be far from having a clear vision as yet of the goal. Any one who is impatient with old walls of separation between churches, and asks that all who love the Lord Jesus Christ shall join hands for united war- fare against sin and wrong, really works in this di- rection ; any one who still more generously summons all, whether Christians or not, to unite in the love of God and the service of man, really works in this direction. Yes, both are prophets, however uncon- sciously, of that grander fellowship to come, which shall include all who, whatever their differences in the past and whatever their intellectual differences still, are ready to work together to put down the evil and to enthrone the good in the world. Let me now state a little more distinctly what a moral basis of fellowship would involve. First, it would not necessitate the giving up of any theological or philosophical beliefs which one might hold dear. Because one's beliefs are not made a part of the bond of union does not mean that one shall 1 See an article bj^ Rev. Dr. F. H. Hedge, in Tlie Unitarian Review, January, 1884, p. 14. THE TRUE BASIS OF RELIGIOUS UNION. 325 not be free to hold them. If one found satisfaction in the theistic theory of the universe, he should be free to cherish it ; if one felt compelled to be an agnostic as to the nature of Deity, or if one took materialistic ground, he should be equally free. The aim of the fellowship would not be to make theists or materi- alists or agnostics, but to confirm the good purpose in the soul, to make good citizens, good fathers and mothers, to make lovers of justice and haters of all wrong. If one wished to keep company only with those of his own creed, he would of course not enter the body ; but the body would not exclude him : he would simply, by the narrow range of his sympathies, exclude himself. One would not have to renounce Christianity nor Judaism in entering the fellowship ; his entering would simply involve a willingness to live on terms of brotherhood with others w^ho might not be Christians or Jews ; that is, he would give up Christianity or Judaism as the basis of religious fellowship. Secondly, the free expression of theological or philo- sophical opinions w^ould not be prevented any more than the holding of them. It might even happen that those who were drawn together by the affinity of in- tellectual conviction would form subordinate groups, just as those who were united in holding to certain practical solutions of the problem of society might do the same. Uniformity is not to be expected nor de- sired ; uniformity is apt to be the high road to spirit- ual death, while unity in variety means life. The only necessity would be that no group should make so much of its peculiar views and aims that it would be in danger of losing sympathy and the sense of 826 ETHICAL RELIGION. union with the body at large. One fellowship with many branches, one body with many members, one subtle life-blood running through the whole and mak- ing every part kin to every other, — that would be the ideal of a true religious fellowship. Hence, thirdly, a new meaning would attach to heresy in connection with such a fellowship. That word, I well know, is no longer covered with oppro- brium. Men who have stood faithful to the light that was in them, and have refused for the sake of life itself to be untrue to it, have made heresy almost glorious. Apart, however, from its historical associa- tions, the meaning of heresy is simply separation : a heretic is one who is separated, or separates himself, from a religious body. Whether heresy is honorable or dishonorable depends, then, on the attitude of the religious body in question. The Christian Church has not allowed liberty of thought, save within compara- tively narrow limits ; it has even decreed from time to time that certain ideas were to be accepted on pain of eternal damnation. The Church has thus become to many minds a very emblem of intolerance. A fundamental principle, however, of the ideal religious fellowship I have in mind would be freedom of be- lief; the body should neither decree nor prescribe, nor in any way stand for, an}^ set of theological or philosophical opinions. The query might arise, would not heresy cease to have any meaning in connection with such a body ? It certainly would, in the cus- tomary sense of the word. There would be neither necessity nor motive for any one to leave the body, to the end of gaining liberty of thought or utterance. But suppose that another set of motives should arise. THE TRUE BASIS OF RELIGIOUS UNION. 327 Suppose that the theistic members of the body should say, "Our theism has become so precious to us that we cannot hold out any longer the fraternal hand to materialists or agnostics.'' Suppose that agnostics or materialists should say, "We cannot have patience with theism ; it is an antiquated, exploded doctrine, and we must refuse to fraternize with those who cling to it." Suppose a socialistic group should say, " Indi- vidualists must necessarily be without heart or con- science ; " or that individualists ^ should retort that socialists must be bad men. In any of these cases, the fundamental bond of union of the religious body would be assailed ; each and every group which thus withdrew and formed a new body would be, in the literal sense of the word, heretical. Instead of stand- ing for freedom, heresy would thus stand for the spirit of intolerance. The heretic would be one who re- fused to concede to others the same rights he claimed for himself ; who said in effect. " I am determined that all others shall think as I do, and if they do not, I will have no part or lot with them." No one has argued more finely against the secta- rian, dissenting spirit than the late Matthew Arnold. " The dissidence of dissent and the protestantism of the Protestant religion" was the object of his deli- cate and yet merciless satire. The various dissenting bodies in England were for the most part " hole-and- corner" churches, out of relation to the great common religious life of the English nation. His argument ^ I am aware that all these minor classifications are somewhat arbitrary, and beg that they shall be taken simply as attempts to illustrate the principle I am seeking to elucidate, not as necessary implications of it. 328 ETHICAL RELIGION. was only vitiated by the assumption that the Church of England was representative of that nation's com- mon religious life. He called it "a national associa- tion for the promotion of goodness.'* It is in truth not only that, but an association equally well for the promotion of the ideas embodied in the Apos- tles' and Nicene, not to say the Athanasian, creeds. But though in judgment he was wrong, his ideal was right. There should be an association in every na- tion for the promotion of goodness, — one that would gather to itself all the elements in the nation ready to work for that high end : whether it should have any official connection with the political organization of the nation is another matter; I think not. And when a genuine and all-inclusive society of this nature does arise, whether in England or elsewhere, then all that Mr. Arnold so eloquently said of the spirit of dissent will hold good. Then the separate churches that may be set up by the theistic or agnostic or so- cialistic or individualistic sects will be justly called "hole-and-corner" churches; but, I must add, not till that day. Almost all the dissenting churches in Eng- land, and almost all the separate denominations in this country, have had an excuse for being ; they have arisen, because freedom in the mother-churches from which they separated was not allowed. Better dis- order and confusion and an infinite number of "hole- and-corner" churches than despotism and iron law. When a better day shall dawn, however, and a reli- gious order with liberty — making, indeed, a principle of liberty — shall arise on the earth, then only could narrowness and bigotry, the very spirit of schism and odious heresy, lead to separation from it. THE TRUE BASIS OF RELIGIOUS UNION. 329 Fourthly, it would follow that through the entire body, and in all its groups and local branches, more should be made of the common aims and ideals of the body than of anything else. A theistic branch which made more of theism than of the love and practice of goodness, would be forgetting its function as a branch of the general body, and in danger of becoming sec- tarian. A materialistic group which gave itself up to expositions of materialistic philosophy, would be in similar danger. Varying philosophical views or eco- nomic aims could only make a kind of atmosphere in each group or branch, but could not take the form of a creed or binding statement. The basis of local fel- lowship should be the same as the basis of the gen- eral fellowship ; nothing should be required anywhere which was not required everywhere. In other words, the questions of personal and social morality should have the first (I do not say, the only) claim on the attention of every branch or local organization. If from any meeting some one should not go away with clearer light as to duty, or with some fresh impulse toward the ideal life, the holding of that meeting would be well-nigh vain. Duty is not a formula, it is a life ; it is as full, as many-sided, as exhaustless as life, — yes, it is often as perplexing as are many of the situations of life. There are few men who do not sometimes crave light, or help and inspira- tion to follow the light they already have. Eight living is in one sense the most natural thing to man ; in another, it is at times a most difficult and arduous thing, and seems to require almost super- human watchfulness and strength. Those most hon- est with themselves are the aptest to feel that the 330 ETHICAL RELIGION. better part of them is not what they are, but what they aspire to be. As for our actual selves, some of us know we are self-conscious, anxious for notice, tickled with applause, without seriousness, and good only by impulse. Others know they are proud, glo- rying in mastery and in having others obedient to them. Others still are full of irrational aversions and prejudices, and scarcely try to let the calm, puri- fying light of reason penetrate their minds. Some are sensual, and others are close and ungenerous. Then in the realm of social morality, how we floun- der ! We know that selfishness as a principle is dis- organizing and anarchic, and yet our industrial order is to a great extent founded on it, and we think it is all right ! We call it in the abstract a devilish maxim, that every one should look out for himself, and woe betide the hindmost ; yet in our business re- lations we are apt to act upon it, and there are those who can scarcely imagine business being conducted on any other basis. Ethics, the principles of justice and love, are pooh-poohed, when they are sought to be applied in this realm ; to advocate them is thought to be sentimentalism or, at best, philanthropy. The religious world is divided into theological camps, when it ought to be a unit in devising a plan of peace and brotherhood for the industrial life of soci- ety. It is not enough to preach the Golden Rule; it is necessary to say what the Golden Eule means. To hold up more elevated ideals of personal and social life, to create and to sustain an enthusiasm for them, to lift life actually to higher levels, — this would be the sovereign and the central mission of a true religious body. THE TRUE BASIS OF RELIGIOUS UNION. 331 But is all this religion, it may be asked? Is it not morality ? I answer, that for my own part it is impossible to distinguish between them. Morality is only true morality when it is given religious con- secration, and religion is first a truly sacred thing when it becomes an exalted moral enthusiasm. I am aware that, historically, religion arose independently of morality, — as, happily, morality arose indepen- dently of religion. But the deepest thing, the root- thing in religion was not so much any peculiar object to which the religious sentiment went out, as the feeling that the object was sacred. It is reverence and awe that make the heart of religion. Whoever holds to something as sacred, has a religion or the elements of one. It is a mistake to bind up religion with any special theory of the universe ; he who con- sciously has no theory may yet be religious, if, as he turns his mind this way and that, it falls sooner or later on something that strikes him with indescriba- ble awe and reverence. Duty — the thought of the laws under which we live, of their inviolable nature, of their supreme authority, in obedience to which is safety and life and joy, and in departing from which we stray into darkness and the night — may as truly excite awe as did the phenomena of Nature, the powers of earth and sky, which first enchained the attention of the forefathers of the race. The reli- gion of morality may be as real and as sacred as the religion of Nature, of which almost all histori- cal religions are varied forms. The most perfect re- ligion, to my own mind, would be a blending of the religion of morality and the religion of Nature into an ideal unity. 332 ETHICAL RELIGION. But whether such a fellowship as I have sketched the ideal of, would be colled religious or not is a comparatively unimportant matter. It might not call itself religious, conscious of the uncertainty and am- biguity in the current use of that term ; and there would be no harm in this. But what it should he^ whether it was faithful to its ideal or not, — on this everything would depend. University Press : John Wilson & Son, Cambridge. ,-t/ 14 DAY USE RETURN TO DESK FROM WHICH BORROWED LOAN DEPT. This book is due on the last date stamped below, or on the date to which renewed. Renewed books are subject to immediate recall. !aR27'530T ki^i^sJ kJ iuij 0£C 1 '84 -HAM KcC O lO TH' Vi^f\ s . \ NOV 5 '64 -2^1 (O/t^^yit^ LD 21A-50m-ll,'62 (D3279sl0)476B General Library Univclrsity of California Berkeley YCl 13533 M 5515 S3 THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY