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THE RELIGION 
 
 OF DEMOCRACY 
 
 A MANUAL OF DEVOTION. 
 
 BY 
 
 CHARLES FERGUSON. 
 
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 F. TENNYSON NEELY, 
 
 PUBLISHER. 
 LONDON. NEW YORK. CHICAGO. 
 
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Copyrighted, 1899, 
 
 in the 
 
 United States 
 
 and 
 
 Great Britain, 
 
 by 
 
 F. Tennyson Neely. 
 
 (All Rights Reserved.) 
 
 % ;/v^ 
 
FORE WORD. 
 
 A SYMBOL. 
 
 On the way across the park that stretches its 
 parterres between the Capitol and tie new Con- 
 gressional Library, one raay stop and rest on a 
 stone bench in front of the vast, pillared, 
 porticoed, Graeco-Roman building where Con- 
 gress meets. Close by is the togaed statue of 
 Washington, seated in a kind of curule chair, 
 and pointing, with one finger, up to heaven. 
 To the right and left, in flawless synametry, 
 stretch the classic wings of the Capitol, fit each 
 for a Parthenon; and over all, the pompous 
 dome, Argus-eyed with serried little glimmer- 
 ing windows, broods and settles mightily down 
 in obstinate immensity. 
 
 Seen thus, in the afternoon sun, the building 
 grows into one's mind as a symbol of things 
 that have been, but are passing away. The 
 suggestions of the scene are reminiscent. This 
 is the America of foreign and ancient tutelage, 
 trailing the Old World; the nation that did not 
 know the originality of its vocation, and did 
 not venture to breathe deep. It is the America 
 of the paper constitution, of orations on the 
 classic model, of moralizing art, and intolerant 
 virtues; the land of Spartan seclusion from the 
 world, yat of huge comfortableness; the land of 
 the perfect plan that must not be spoiled ; the 
 
 • • • 
 
 ui 
 
Fore Word. 
 
 sophomoric land that had not yet loved and 
 suffered. 
 
 Over against this picture there is in my mind 
 a vision of very different suggestion. There 
 are nights when, looking from my window 
 across huddling chimneys and the flat roofs of 
 houses, I see the Capitol transfigured. The co- 
 lossal dome, white and magnificent in the 
 moonlight, swims in a luminous, electric mist 
 that comes brimming up from the cit.y. The 
 glorious ghost of the Capitol, looming over sor- 
 did chimney-tops, seems like a symbol of the 
 new age and the America that is in the mak- 
 ing. Here is modernity, the age of electricity^ — 
 and mystery. Here is the type of the longing of 
 the people, the awe of science, the passion for 
 the eternal, the cosmic fear, the victorious faith, 
 the contradictions of life, the problems, the pov- 
 erty, the tragic perplexity, the cry in the night; 
 here steel-clad battleships and sudden war, the 
 knight-errantry of the Republic, the pathos of 
 Spain and Italy and Greece and China, im- 
 mense expansion and contraction, the old ethnic 
 hate, the effacement of boundaries, world-wide 
 equality, fraternity, ecumenic democracy, una- 
 nimity. 
 
 This shimmering dome in the moonlight, mys- 
 tic, aerial, portentous, seems a wraith of revo- 
 lution — the prophetic, insurgent spirit of the 
 nation. 
 
 I perceive how deep down in the infinite are 
 the springs of history. And I am reassured of 
 the love of God. 
 
 Washington, 1899. 
 
 iv 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 CHAPTER I. PAGE 
 
 The Return to the Concrete 7 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 The Man of the Modern Spirit 24 
 
 CHAPTER UL 
 The Revolution Absolute 86 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 The Discovery of America 57 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 The Discount of Glory 70 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 The Sovereignty of the People 91 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 The World of News 110 
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 The Caste of Goodness 134 
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 The Rise of a Democratic Catholic Church 145 
 
The Religion of Democracy. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 THE RETURN TO THE CONCRETE. 
 
 I. — The spirit of the age is saying to its chil- 
 dren: Have faith. Make yourself at home. This 
 is your own house. The laws were made for 
 you, gravitation and the chemical afiSnities, not 
 you for them. No one can put you out of the 
 house. Stand up; the ceiling is high. 
 
 This is eternity — now — you are sunk as deep 
 in it, wrapped as close in it as you ever will 
 be. The future is an illusion ; it never arrives. 
 It flies before you as you advance. Always it 
 is to-day, and after a long while it is still to- 
 day ; and after death and a thousand years, it 
 is to-day. You have great deeds to perform, 
 and you must do them now. 
 
 If you should act with simplicity and bold- 
 ness, do you think that you would have to stand 
 alone and take the consequences? Have you no 
 
 7 
 
The Religion of Democracy. 
 
 idea that God would back you up? That is as 
 if you thought this world were mainly bones, 
 and the soul a pale prisoner, looking wistfully 
 through the ribs of it. It is as if God were 
 caught iu His own body, and could not move 
 otherwise than according to the laws laid down 
 in the books, and as if all the people that pass 
 in the streets had wan, scared souls caught in 
 their bodies like animals in a trap. For if God 
 may not do as He likes, how can a man be other 
 than a prisoner? 
 
 God is free. Go out doors and see for your- 
 self. Are not the trees wayward and whimsi- 
 cal? Is not the wind let loose, and is not the 
 sea savage enough? Do not the birds wheel 
 and turn as they like? So does God do as He 
 likes. He is not caught in His body; neither 
 are you. You can move if you try; have faith. 
 Have faith in God. • 
 
 I come to you with great ideas, ideas big 
 with revolution — but they are common. You 
 will recognize them as your own. Only it is 
 necessary to put words to them. Words are 
 the wings of ideas ; without words they brood, 
 but cannot fly. And these ideas of ours must 
 fly from land to land and kindle the whole 
 earth. 
 
 Civilization grows senile; but the soul is al- 
 
 8 
 
The Religion of Democracy. 
 
 ways young. Witness stoutly for the soul, and 
 you shall renew the youth of the world. 
 
 II. — Are you grieved to see a crowd of peo- 
 ple met together to worship God, but not frankly 
 believing in God, and not daring to risk their 
 lives upon the moral law? Do you dislike to 
 see a crowd of bankers and business men met 
 together to worship Money, but not frankly be- 
 lieving in the power of money or daring to trust 
 their souls to it? Does it pain you to hear them 
 talk of good faith and honor and the morals of 
 the country? Do you long to see men simple of 
 heart and honest, believing flatly in the soul, 
 or in the five senses, without dodging or subter- 
 fuge? Come, then, it shall be so. Stop here 
 and resolve that you will not compromise any 
 
 more. 
 
 It is not so bad to be a materialist. If you 
 keep to the facts you will not get away from 
 God. The moral laws are not separate from 
 matter. They are wrought into the fiber of the 
 material world. You cannot dig anywhere 
 without striking them. 
 
 III.— The desire and passion of God is to be- 
 get souls of men through the long-birth proc- 
 esses and the eons of nature; souls that shall 
 
 9 
 
The Religion of Democracy. 
 
 be separate from His own soul, and that shall 
 stand over against Him, so that He can look 
 upon them, and have communion v^ith them 
 and be not Alone. And in order that the souls 
 of men shall become thus separate and distinct 
 from the soul of God, it is necessary that God 
 should hide Himself, and that men should 
 learn to trust their own thoughts and their own 
 eyes. In this withdrawal of God is the peril 
 and crisis of creation, the inevitable opportu- 
 nity of sin, the tragedy and pathos of our life 
 upon this earth. 
 
 Do you not understand the taciturnity of 
 God? Do you not see why it is that He does not 
 blazon His name in the sky, or accost you with 
 words — why He bosoms you in His arms, and 
 turns His face away, and waits, and is patient 
 and silent? Have you had dreams of Nirvana 
 and sickly visions and raptures? Have you 
 imagined that the end of your life is to be 
 absorbed back into the life of God, and to flee 
 the earth and forget all? Or do you want to 
 walk on air or fly on wings, or build a heav- 
 enly city in the clouds? Come, let us take our 
 kit on our shoulders, and go out and build the 
 city here. 
 
 IV. — You need not doubt that the embryo of 
 
 10 
 
The Religion of Democracy. 
 
 the soul of man is to be found in the plants and 
 
 animals. 
 
 Environment is the body of God, and the ger- 
 minal soul of man is lapped in God like a child 
 in the womb. The desire and longing of God 
 is to get the soul born ; and there is a labor of 
 eons in the parturition. 
 
 God could not make a free soul out of hand. 
 He could not make it at all. The soul must 
 claim its own liberty and life. 
 
 And so one must say that the free spirit of 
 man is uncreated, is not made by God, but be- 
 gotten of Him. Words fail, for you touch here 
 the hem of the robe of the eternal mystery. 
 But it is not to be wondered at that God should 
 suffer so long to integrate a soul out of His own 
 goul— a soul that should look Him in the face 
 and be faithful to Him. 
 
 v.— Environment is not everything: life has 
 had a will of its own from the beginning. The 
 living thing is pressed up close against the life 
 of God. God is free and omnific, except that 
 He cannot compel what is his heart's desire- 
 that the creature shall act from within itself. 
 He cannot require that it shall have faith. 
 
 The living thing is free, but weak and faint 
 of heart; and with great difficulty it learns to 
 
 11 
 
The Religion of Democracy. 
 
 believe and strive. Mystery of the love of God, 
 and the infinite patience and tenderness ! Like 
 a baby's fingers feeling vaguely over the 
 breasts of a woman, and like the thrill and re- 
 sponse and the tightening clasp, so does God an- 
 swer back every vague and timid adventure of 
 faith ! And this they call Natural Selection. 
 
 How perverse and pathetic the desires of the 
 animals. But they all get what they ask for 
 — long necks and trunks, flapping ears and 
 branching horns and corrugated hides — any- 
 thing, if only they will believe in life and try. 
 
 What imaginable caricature has not God 
 submitted to in order that a man might be born 
 in His image — and a beautiful woman ! 
 
 "V"!. — Civilizations are destroyed by great 
 ideas, apprehended, but not lived up to. 
 
 Philosophy, poetry, science, art and the 
 mysteries of religion are forever beckoning men 
 on to a more intimate contact with God and 
 with the interior and elemental world. If men 
 would think, and dig, and pray, and paint and 
 carve with a perfect daring, all would be well 
 and they would have built the Holy City long 
 ago. But they have not faith enough : they 
 recoil from the shock and risk, touch the deeper 
 mysteries and shrink back. They become sen- 
 
 12 
 
The Relig-ion of Democracy, 
 
 timental about God and separate the sacred 
 from the secular. They refuse the desire of 
 the heart and breed in their bodies a swarm of 
 petty appetites, divisive and corrupting. The 
 force of the divine and elemental passion in 
 them goes to the refinement of prurient arts. 
 And the corruption of the best is the worst cor- 
 ruption. 
 
 The death of nations is in the rejection of 
 their own most wistful desire. The Truth ap- 
 pears, is seen, touched, handled, and debated, 
 is accepted notionally, but rejected in fact, and 
 crucified. 
 
 Europe and America to-day are sick with the 
 nightmare of their dreams. They have dreamed 
 of Democracy, and in their dreams have 
 achieved liberty — but only in their dreams, not 
 otherwise. 
 
 The madhouses are full of people that breathe 
 in the real world, but live in their ideals. And 
 the nations are mad with this madness, and are 
 ready to kill the Lord of Life. 
 
 With God the thought and the act are one. The 
 worlds are sustained in their courses, the storm 
 rages, the birds sing, and your heart is beating 
 because God is thinking. 
 
 But we see that the world is full of sentimental- 
 ists. The courts, the academies and the cham- 
 
 13 
 
The Religion of Democracy. 
 
 bers of commerce are mostly ruled by absent- 
 minded people who say and do not, and know 
 not what they do. 
 
 The Devil's right name is abstraction. To lie 
 and to know it is to evince that one is not alto- 
 gether a liar ; but to lie and not to know it is to 
 be false indeed. This is Sin, and the end of it 
 is death. But death is better than sin. It must 
 be better than sin, because it is nearer the truth. 
 
 YII. — These wretched fellows that scramble 
 so breathlessly for a competency, and cannot 
 bold up their heads if their coats are rough — 
 Les miserables! Have pity. 
 
 And these others that are seeking a'fabulous 
 chimera — what they call millions — with sharp, 
 metallic speech like the click of a telegraph, 
 who think in numbers only and cabalistic signs 
 and counters; who give each other winks and 
 tips — men that know everything and nothing, 
 that can predict eclipses and cause them, make 
 famines with a turn of the wrist, without mean- 
 ing any harm; these fantastical triflers, fooling 
 with their punk in the powder magazine — cer- 
 tainly they hold their place by a slight and pre- 
 carious tenure. They scarcely touch the facts 
 of God's earth with the tips of their toes, and 
 they are as little indigenous here as shining 
 
 U 
 
The Religion of Democracy. 
 
 angels with wings. Their ignorance of values 
 is profound. They know not how much blood 
 goes into things. And they are practical men 
 in the same sense as the old-card-cronies that sit 
 and play in the back rooms of the saloon behind 
 the green baize screens. They know the rules 
 of the games that they have spun like spiders 
 out of their own bodies, and they can play to 
 win without troubling to think. 
 
 The business interests of the country— myste- 
 rious, intangible thing! Do the business inter- 
 ests require that people shall be fed and clothed 
 and housed? And does the doing of business 
 mean that things worth doing shall get done 
 somehow? No; only that there shall be bustle 
 and running to and fro, with infinite complica- 
 tion of accounts, and in the end that somebody 
 shall— make money! Golden cloudland and 
 most delicate moonshine ! Oh, practical men I 
 
 VIII. — And has any one yet seen a cultivated 
 man or made the acquaintance of a man of the 
 world? Certainly not among the pampered or 
 the privileged. These read all the poems of the 
 ages, and skim through all the sacred books, 
 but do not understand one line; flit restlessly 
 from town to country and circumnavigate the 
 globe, yet never see a sunrise or meet a man! 
 
 15 
 
The Religion of Democracy. 
 
 How can one who lives without thanks upon 
 the labor of others, who has been dandled all 
 his life in the strong arms of the laborers so 
 that his feet have never for a moment felt the 
 drastic earth, who has never wrestled naked 
 with God for a blessing, or felt a common ele- 
 mental need — how can such an one know any- 
 thing of the omens of history, how judge 
 rightly and decide what is human and of immor- 
 tal value in books and pictures, or what is just 
 in laws? How can he fight the battles of the 
 weak, or answer the questions of the simple; 
 interpret the meaning of the prophets, or com- 
 prehend the passion of Christ? 
 
 Did any one suppose that be could get the 
 humanities and leave out mankind? 
 
 This aristocracy of culture, this pomp and 
 foolery of bibelots, must seem to the strong, 
 battling saints and scripture-makers that look 
 down upon it, like a masquerade of footmen, 
 a kind of high life below stairs. Is it not 
 known that books are sacrificial, that they must 
 be lived and suffered before they are written, 
 and lived and suffered before they are read? 
 
 Is not a poem an enterprise and an act of faith? 
 And are these fireside story-tellers, these table- 
 talkers and ramblers in the woods— poets? Do 
 tbogr put words to what you mean to do? Are 
 
 16 
 
The Religion of Democracy. 
 
 they the makers of new cities and new eras? Are 
 they the spokesmen of the laborers? Do you 
 think they know what Democracy means? Can 
 they put into speech the dumb, passionate long- 
 ing of the people? Can they face a mob without 
 flinching— the mob of moneyed men and men of 
 fashion and men of letters— and the madness of 
 the people? 
 
 IX.— -If you pass by the least considerable 
 man, you pass by all the humanities and the 
 divinities, and set your heart on what is tran- 
 sient and cheap. There is a wide ocean of dif- 
 ference between taking in the last man and 
 leaving him out. It is not a question of one 
 man, but of humanity. If you leave anybody 
 out, you must leave your own soul out, and 
 must live thenceforth by the butler's standard. 
 It is a fearful thing to belong to the exclusive 
 
 circles. 
 
 Every interest that does not directly relate to 
 the soul is an abstraction. The soul is the con- 
 crete absolute. This is the souPs world clear 
 through, and the inmost law of it is the law of 
 the relation of persons. And to deal with ma- 
 terial objects or with ideas without reference to 
 persons, is to invert the order of the universe 
 and to take things altogether as they are not. 
 
 17 
 
The Religion of Democracy. 
 
 Do you suppose that God cares anything for 
 His performances except as they relate to per- 
 sons? Do you suppose that He is vain of the 
 shimmering sea or the tints of the evening sky? 
 Do you not understand that Life rules here, and 
 that everything exists for Life? The sun does 
 not make signs to the moon, and the stars 
 do not beckon one another; but everything 
 beckons the living soul. It is a shame, then, to 
 dodge and defer to things or to 3^our own 
 achievements or to any man's. It is a shame 
 to take circuitous courses or to desire social con- 
 sideration and influence as a means of accom- 
 plishing one's ends — as if one were a stranger 
 and an alien here, picking his way fearfully 
 through an enemy's country and compelled to 
 make the most of a scanty equipment. 
 
 You need not be afraid, any more than a 
 duck is afraid of drowning or a bird of falling, 
 In your inmost soul you are as well suited 
 to the whole cosmical order and every part of 
 it as to your own body. You belong here. Did 
 you suppose that you belonged to some other 
 world than this, or that you belonged nowhere 
 at all — were just a waif on the bosom of the 
 eternities? Is not that unthinkable? Incontest- 
 ably you belong here. Have not the biologists 
 told you all about it? Nothing is plainer than 
 
 18 
 
The Religion of Democracy. 
 
 that God has been at measureless pains that 
 you should suit your surroundings, and that 
 your surroundings should suit you with a per- 
 fect correspondence at every point. Conceiva- 
 bly He might have flung you into a world that 
 was unrelated to you, and might have left you 
 to be acclimated at your own risk ; but you hap- 
 pen to know that this is not the case. You have 
 lived here always; this is the ancestral de- 
 mesne ; for ages and ages you have looked out 
 of these same windows upon the celestial land- 
 scape and the star-deeps. You are at home. 
 
 X. — If there is any cosmical ordinance that 
 you do not like, then there is something wrong 
 with you. If there is any necessary thing that 
 you shrink from — as death, or labor, or growth 
 and long waiting — then you are not well and 
 sound. To draw back from a fact is to prefer a 
 lie. 
 
 If you say you do not like the contact of the 
 earth, or the contact of the people, and would 
 withdraw yourself from them, then there is 
 nothing left for you but to live in a world of 
 phantoms and shadows. A hundred million 
 men, possessed of the same illusions, can agree 
 to reject death, and labor and love, and to pass 
 their days as if these things did not exist, or 
 
 19 
 
The Religion of Democracy. 
 
 were altogether alien; they can agree upon 
 arbitrary signs and can regard as great and 
 weighty the things of their own imagination 
 and the passing fashions — but they are dream- 
 ers, and the facts remain to be reckoned with 
 at last. 
 
 The cosmos is sound all through, absolutely 
 valid; and it covers the whole ground. There 
 is no room for another universe. If you do not 
 like this one, the door is open into the inane. 
 
 In the old Hebrew story, Adam would not 
 dress and keep the garden, and so get wise in 
 the divine and vital way by daily contact with 
 real things, but would eat wisdom and rumi- 
 nate upon it. The original sin was the rejec- 
 tion of the real world and a flight to dreamland ; 
 and the healing penalty was a hard necessity 
 that should draw back the man and the woman 
 to the firm, resistant earth — labor, in bread- 
 getting and in child-bearing. 
 
 All the failures of the world have come from 
 this flinching from the keen and open air — the 
 attempt to escape into a made-up world within 
 fences and behind doors. The failure of his- 
 tory is in egotism, and this is egotism — to 
 consider oneself as having no essential rela- 
 tionships, no Tootage in the real world. 
 
 20 
 
The Religion of Democracy. 
 
 XI. — Does there rise before you the vision of 
 the long-drawn misery and terror of the world, 
 the tyrannies and blasphemies, the collapses, 
 the mere dull cycles and aimless, rotary mo- 
 tion? Do you feel yourself environed to-day 
 by a vast and intricate fabric of make- 
 believes, and things-agreed-upon — religions, 
 politics, and social customs that do not take ac- 
 count of God and the soul; charitable institu- 
 tions contrived as makeshifts to avoid the in- 
 sistent obligation of the moral law, riches that 
 are afraid of their own shadow, and poverty 
 that is afraid of riches; art that is at war with 
 nature ; and science that spies and pries in the 
 forms and phenomena of things, but falters at 
 the primal, living fact? 
 
 Do you discern the cause of the contradiction 
 between what is right and what seems to be 
 expedient? On one hand is the real and ele- 
 mental world, with its eternal perspectives, its 
 insistent and tender intimacies with your inner 
 heart, commanding your trust and obedience, 
 your consecration to the aim of God in the ful- 
 fillment of the destiny of mankind; and on the 
 other hand is the sham world fabricated with 
 immense labor, a hundred times destroyed by 
 the inrush of the elements, and a hundred times 
 reconstituted by the conceit and fear of men — 
 
 n 
 
The Religion of Democracy. 
 
 an asylum of escape from nature, and'truth,'and 
 the strong compulsions of love and duty, a cas- 
 tle of compromise, wherein there is no right and 
 no wrong, but only a shifting expediency and 
 escape from conclusions; wherein religion is 
 made a question of credulity and of being 
 baptized, and the only object of devotion that 
 is offered to the soul is comfort, money, and to- 
 be v/ell thought of. 
 
 Of these two worlds, it is the latter — the 
 world of compromises — that is nearest at hand 
 and most in evidence. It surrounds you and 
 inmeshes you. If you start to do anything in 
 a straightforward and natural way, it constrains 
 and embarrasses you. You are made to feel 
 that your deepest instincts are not to be trusted, 
 that senility is wiser than youth, that the 
 roundabout way is shortest to your aim, and 
 that as between right and wrong, the truth and 
 a lie, a middle course is always best. The 
 business of living becomes a delicate art of bal- 
 ancing, everjT-thing is at last a question of ex- 
 pert testimony and statistics ; there is no sure 
 good or sure evil until after all the committees 
 have reported ; meanwhile, your aif air is to be 
 as comfortable as you can. This is the world 
 that environs you and holds you close in its 
 intricate tissue of expediencies. Over beyond 
 
 ^'2 
 
The Religion of Democracy. 
 
 is the world of the elemental moral forces, the 
 divine passions and devotions, the world where 
 the artists work free, and daring, and youth is 
 sure and swift to its aim. And between your 
 world of prudent hypocrisies and that passion- 
 ate, real world, there is a valley of shadows 
 and dreadful doubts. 
 
 Do you not see that there is need of but just 
 one thing, and that that one thing is— faith? 
 
 Have faith, then. Come, take the risks. It 
 is time to go through the valley and try what 
 is beyond. 
 
 fl^ 
 
The Religion of Democracy. 
 
 CHAPTER 11. 
 
 THE MAN OF THE MODERN SPIRIT. 
 
 I. — The greatness of the modern spirit is its 
 humility. It keeps close to the puissant ground; 
 it will walk in the real world. Do not be de- 
 ceived by the brag and flourish ; the heart of 
 the age is humble. And it is only by humility 
 that you can enter into its meaning, utter its 
 longing, or fulfill its faith. 
 
 The modern spirit is a tall, fair woman, 
 standing at her door expecting to see the Lord 
 of Heaven and Earth pass by in the dusty road 
 and get a message from Him. Or shall we say 
 that it is a strong man, horsed and riding 
 through the world, challenging all pleasant 
 lies and vain pretensions, seeking a sacred fact 
 even in the face of despair, and as he rides, 
 crying: "Truth, the truth; though it slay me, 
 yet will I trust it." Or, again, it is, if you 
 like, a laborer, crowned, or a king in gray 
 clothes, toiling. 
 
 The quintessence of the modern spirit is faith 
 
 24 
 
The Religion of Democracy. 
 
 in the incarnation. Tiie faith that has gone out 
 from the pulpits and the pews is walking 
 abroad in the streets. Parsons and priests, 
 synods and sacred councils, may not be half so 
 sure that the Son of God must needs be brought 
 up in Nazareth as the workers and fighters are, 
 and the plain people that pass by. Do you 
 know why this name of Jesus pursues you; 
 why you cannot turn and look over your shoul- 
 der without seeing Him, or something that re- 
 minds you of Him? It is because He is the man 
 of the modern spirit. 
 
 He does not talk in abstractions ; He is con- 
 crete, practical, personal. He rests on what He 
 is — rests on the facts and their self-vindicating 
 power. He makes no boasts and no excuses. 
 He is like nature; there is in Him the calm of 
 nature and its violence ; the passion of nature 
 and its incompleteness and progress. He has 
 nature's grand silences; He waits sublimely. 
 He keeps close to the earth, the ground is al- 
 ways under His feet. A sea or a mountain can- 
 not put Him out or make Him little. He speaks 
 with authority because He is at home in the 
 world ; He rises from the dead because He is on 
 good terms with death. The age is dawning 
 that shall understand these things; it is the 
 mission of the modern spirit to explain them. 
 
 25 
 
The Religion of Democracy. 
 
 The message of Jesus is moral adventure; 
 go on, take the risk; commit yourself confi- 
 dently to the eternal currents and the natural 
 order. 
 
 He takes in the unity of the cosmos, and is 
 tranquill}'' confident of the validity of its laws. 
 He is determined to get at the facts; He 
 shrinks from nothing, not from disease, or the 
 sweat and grime. He is sure of the inexhausti- 
 ble resources of health and of the forgiveness 
 of sins. He never compromises because He is 
 close to His facts, and they do not compromise. 
 He moves straight to His conclusion with an in- 
 flexible logic. He demonstrates the axioms of 
 the concrete; He does not argue; He illustrates. 
 His is the absolute science and the consummate 
 art and enterprise. He is the pioneer of a new 
 world, and the Man of Destiny. He compre- 
 hends Europe, America and the future. He 
 knows what is bound up in Democracy. He 
 radiates courage and power, and to believe in 
 Him is to have faith. 
 
 II. — Shall one suppose that God regards a 
 subject from all sides and in every possible 
 light before He decides what to do, or that He 
 attends specifically and separately to every mo- 
 tion that comes from the brain of an ant, or the 
 
I 
 
 The Religion of Democracy. 
 
 wing of a fly? Is it not plain that the universe 
 is governed by vital impulses; that millions and 
 millions of consequences flow from the whir of 
 a fly's wing, and that its footfall shakes the 
 firmament? Most likely God does not attend 
 to the consequences; He attends to the life of 
 
 the fly. 
 
 You lift your finger and stir every atom m 
 Sirius and Orion; and so every living thing 
 occupies the whole universe, and has something 
 to do with every mass and every motion. How 
 all the lines cross and recross in an infinite 
 maze! What a weltering . palimpsest is the 
 world of phenomena! No man ever read a 
 word of it except he had the key of it all in his 
 
 own soul. 
 
 Behind mass and motion is might, and back 
 of might is mind ; and the beginning of science 
 is in congeniality with God. 
 
 The larger word for science is conscience. 
 And the final test of the authenticity and per- 
 manence of a physical fact is its moral reason- 
 ableness—its congruity with right. Do you 
 protest sometimes with vehemence that God is 
 cruel and unjust? Justice must then be rooted 
 very deep in the heart of things, since it dares 
 =-~-te confront omnipotence with a fist so feeble to 
 back its claim ! But you say well ; you must 
 
The Religion of Democracy. 
 
 not submit to be bullied by earthquakes and 
 tornadoes, or by the sun, moon and stars. If 
 royalties, and usuries, and monopolies are un- 
 just, they must not be tolerated ; and if gravita- 
 tion and cohesion are unjust, they must be put 
 down. 
 
 III. — Unless you believe in the reasonable- 
 ness of the world it is idle to think about it at 
 all. And if you should spend your life in plot- 
 ting to escape what is inevitable or in denying 
 the plain ordinances of human kinship, then 
 you would be derationalized ; and science would 
 become impossible to you. If one is unloving 
 and a coward, it is impossible that he should 
 know anything; there is no use in having 
 brains without faith and courage. 
 
 A man cannot stand aside and learn the lavv^s 
 of this whirring, dangerous world by holding 
 out his brains at arm's length; his frail body 
 must go with his brains into the midst of the 
 melee. You cannot learn any more than you 
 now know without venturing something that 
 you have not tried. Did any one suppose that, 
 sitting at ease in his study chair, cushioned and 
 walled in, he could draw knowledge out of 
 printed books? It is impossible. And Holy 
 Scripture, when the devil reads it, is devilish. 
 
 28 
 
The Religion of Democracy. 
 
 For a long while we have been under the 
 spell of those men of science that have fancied 
 that they could separate their minds from them- 
 selves, have supposed that they could set their 
 brains working in the midst of things, while 
 themselves standing aloof, disengaged and non- 
 chalant, waiting for results. They have sent 
 forth the fabulous instrument of knowledge as 
 far as possible from the center of the w^arm 
 and vital sphere of human feeling, and have 
 set it down on the frontiers of consciousness, 
 where humanity is reduced to its lowest terms 
 almost is not humanity. If they could, 
 wholly outside of consciousness they would' 
 have done it; but they could not. So they have 
 put up with so much of feeling as goes to the 
 perception that things are bulky and that they 
 move. It is not much of a perception ; proba- 
 bly worms can perceive that much. Starting 
 thus, the aim of these absent-minded savants 
 has been to work their machine of knowledge 
 back to themselves, taking notes by the way, 
 automatic, mecbanical, exact. They have tried 
 to explain themselves by something as nearly 
 as possible foreign to themselves, to construe 
 love and rage and hunger in terms of mass and 
 motion. It is prodigious gymnastics, but it 
 will have to be given up. 
 
 29 
 
The Religion of Democricy. 
 
 And 3'et this thing which has been called the 
 method of science is not wholly perverse. It 
 has a history and a rationale, an excuse — even a 
 kind of justification. So long had men looked 
 out upon the world with mere greed and fear, 
 so long had they looked through eyes blinded 
 with passion and seen only the reflection of 
 their own superstition and lust, so long been 
 confounded by the irrefragible fact, which 
 never would wait upon their wishes; it was 
 natural and inevitable that science should turn 
 ascetic and pharis^o, that it should mortify 
 and flagellate every human feeling, should re- 
 solve to be only eye — as the monks of the desert 
 resolved to be only soul— that it should reject 
 the cosmic gospel, worship the law, and crucify 
 the Son of Man. It was a bitter error and fail- 
 ure, but it was natural enough. 
 
 So, then, both the old knowledge roads turn 
 out to be blind alleys. One we have already 
 decided to abandon, and the other we shall 
 soon give up. Not if we know it do we travel 
 nov/ the old blundering road of rapturous 
 superstition and conceit, expecting the laws 
 of the universe to budge and conform when- 
 ever we cry or clap our hands. Our dis- 
 illusioned savants have fixed their no-thor- 
 oughfare at the hither end of that byway, 
 
 30 
 
The Religion of Democracy. 
 
 and so have done us a service. But the road 
 that they have led us into is bad with an- 
 other kind of badness; and there is a blank wall 
 at the end of it, with a death's-head on it for a 
 sign. That road, too, we shall abandon, and 
 turn back with shuddering fear. The haughty 
 high priests of science may rend their gaber- 
 dines and cry their law; but we will not listen, 
 for by their law we die.' And the emaciated 
 scientific monks may preach from their pillars 
 their stifling clinic gospel till they drop, but 
 they cannot stay us. The heart of the age is 
 hungering against them for love and liberty; 
 for health and the tonic air. 
 
 IV. — The way of valid science is the way of 
 the modern spirit. It begins with an act of 
 faith — an immense assumption — to wit, that the 
 whole world is constitutionally at one with it- 
 self ; that it is a universe; that it has no alien 
 elements, no unassimilable fate, no intrinsic 
 contradictions. This assumption is the great 
 adventure of the age. We are committing our- 
 selves to it without calculating the conse- 
 quences. It distinguishes this age from all 
 other ages as, par excellence, the age of faith. 
 
 There is nowhere in Europe or America to- 
 day an accepted philosophy that can be called 
 
 31 
 
The Religion of Democracy. 
 
 skeptical in the ancient sense of that word. 
 Nobody denies now the possibility of knowl- 
 edge; nobody draws a crowd now to the teach- 
 ing that the world is, for practical purposes, 
 unknowable. The nearest approach to old-time 
 skepticism is made by the straight sect of ortho- 
 dox theologians. For to teach, as they do, that 
 the most useful and important knowledge can 
 neither be got nor proved by contact of living 
 men with the present world, but must be 
 handed down from some luminous spot in the 
 past and received by authoritj^— this is pretty 
 nearly Pj'rrhonism: it is Pyrrhonism plus a 
 miracle or two. 
 
 The vast majority of our contemporaries, 
 now in the dawn of the twentieth century, for 
 the first time in history are ready to assume 
 somewhat recklessly and airily for the most 
 part, as not counting the cost, but in good faith, 
 too, that the whole world is reasonable, that it 
 hangs together to the minutest detail, and that 
 there are no gaps or crevasses in it to swallow 
 up the mind. This assumption is made in the 
 face of death, disease, the antagonism of na- 
 tional and private interests and the sum total 
 of adverse experience. It is a magnificent 
 risk; probably most of us would shrink from it 
 if we should measure the height and depth of it. 
 
 d'2 
 
The Religion of Democracy. 
 
 Nay, do we not all shrink and falter and deny 
 the spirit of the age? The first comer will tell 
 you that in his view death and labor are a dis- 
 advantage, and that his interest and yours are 
 at variance. 
 
 - But if death is a disdvantage, and yet is in- 
 evitable, how then can the world be reasonable? 
 And if your interest is opposed to your neigh- 
 bor's, what becomes of the congruity of things 
 and the unity of the world? If that is good for 
 him which is bad for you, then there are at 
 least two universes— yours and his; and two 
 gods, or else there is confusion and no God. 
 
 v.— You cannot understand what God does 
 unless you are of the same stuff as God. Shall 
 the clay say to the potter: What doest thou? 
 Can things be understood by a thing? Must 
 not the creature pass over to the status of the 
 Creator before it can understand anything of 
 the creation? Can a savant be other than a 
 savior? Does any one suppose that a man that 
 feels that he is transient and is afraid of death, 
 can make contributions to science, or that that 
 which flows ^ith the stream can measure its 
 force or survey it? 
 
 It is a vast pretension, but doubtless it is the 
 will of God that it should be made. The chil- 
 
 33 
 
1 
 
 The Religion of Democracy. 
 
 dren of the spirit of the age are passing the 
 timid and halting creeds, and professing their 
 confidence in the possibility of science. Mys- 
 tics! Transcendentalists I They will believe 
 what they cannot prove, if only it is reason- 
 able, and they will deny what seems most obvi- 
 ous, if it is absurd. 
 
 It is announced that it is not necessary to 
 clutch at the face of nature for a living; that 
 we are here to stay, and that there is harm, not 
 in hunger or death, but only in that which is 
 inhuman. 
 
 They do not offer proofs that pain is power- 
 less, that it is expedient to be just, or that the 
 soul is immortal. But they accept the wit- 
 ness of the spirit of the age that God is reason- 
 able, and that we can get rid of our unreason- 
 ableness and can understand His meaning. 
 Pain, then, will be to us what it is to Him ; jus- 
 tice will be as good for us as it is for Hiro, and 
 we shall not die unless He dies, nor be impris- 
 oned unless He is arrested. The spirit comes 
 with no credentials that can be weighed in the 
 higgling scale of culture; there are no certifi- 
 cates or statistics. Confessedly this is a jan- 
 gling world for one bent on quick pleasures, but 
 there may be rhythm and music in it for a lover 
 who can wait. 
 
 34 
 
The Religion of Democracy. 
 
 The propositions of the spirit are not on 
 trial, but the world is on trial. The sunset of 
 the age is full of flaming portents. So it was at 
 the end of the eighteenth, and at the beginning 
 of the nineteenth century. They set up then 
 on the altar of the Church of Our Lady in Paris 
 a kind of hoyden Goddess of Reason — striking 
 symbol of a science that rejected the generous 
 risks of faith, and would make sure of its pas- 
 times. The portents were then fulfilled, and 
 the science that would risk nothing lost every- 
 thing — lost its senses at last, and went stark 
 mad. It shall not be so again if it can be 
 helped. There may be blood and tears, but not 
 like that. It is necessary to deal more mag- 
 nanimously with God, and take the risks. 
 
 35 
 
The Religion of Democracy. 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 THE REVOLUTION ABSOLUTE. 
 
 I. — Democracy implies infinity. Men are 
 declared to be equal because it is discovered 
 that all men, the least as well as the greatest, 
 have or may have access to the Infinite. The 
 obvious disparities become insignificant, in 
 view of this great commonness. Infinity plus 
 a million is seen to be no more than infinity 
 plus one. If it were not for religion democracy 
 would be inconceivable; if a man's soul is 
 measurable and transient, democracy is ridicu- 
 lous. 
 
 II. — At the heart of life there is a primal 
 contradiction. That is why the deepest sayings 
 have the form of paradox — as that a man must 
 die to live; must lose his life to find it. 
 
 To resolve this antinomy is to resolve all 
 antinomies; it lies back of all and comprehends 
 all. It is the Sphinx riddlo of the ages, and it 
 gives to life its tragic perplexity. It is the 
 
 36 
 
The Religion of Democracy. 
 
 burden and passion of the social struggle upon 
 which we are entering. Never before was the 
 question proposed so squarely and inevitably ; 
 never before did the world-issue translate itself 
 into historic terms so concrete and practical. 
 That is why this period is the most signal and 
 momentous of all historic epochs. The revolu- 
 tion that is impending is not relative and pro- 
 visional; it is the revolution absolute. 
 
 The world riddle may be come at in three 
 principal ways: to wit, p.s cosmical— compre- 
 hending the whole world process; as historical 
 — having relation to the narrower horizon of 
 human history ; and as personal, relating to the 
 issues of the individual life. 
 
 Regarding the cosmical process, we see, to 
 speak according to the books, the mechanical 
 passing into the chemical, chemical into vital, 
 vital into psychic, and psychic into spiritual. 
 The divisions are arbitrary and school-made, 
 and they have served to complicate the simple 
 principle that is involved. The process has 
 been called evolution : it may be that, but it 
 is more; it is revolution. It is characteristic- 
 ally, not only a development, but a conver- 
 sion ; not only a progression, but a right-about- 
 face. The object becomes subject; the thing 
 made becomes maker; the clay becomes potter. 
 
 37 
 
The Religion of Democracy. 
 
 III. —Regard the historic drama. History 
 begins with the birth of the idea of liberty; 
 what went before was prehistoric, dim, undif- 
 ferentiated, protoplasmic. The primeval tribe 
 and village commune, brooding under the 
 unchallenged sway of habit and tradition, are 
 cast for no role in the historic drama. Theirs 
 is the prologue of the play, serving only to indi- 
 cate the point from which the story runs. His- 
 tory begins when the hard cake of custom is 
 shattered by ambition and the will-to-live. The 
 action is dual, has two principal phases; and 
 these stand in sharp contrast and contradic- 
 tion. History is ancient and modern. 
 
 The ancient spirit had free course until this 
 era; it maintains a prevailing influence to this 
 day. The modern spirit proceeds from the Man 
 of Nazareth ; it grapples with the other in irre- 
 ducible antagonism. Both strive for liberty; 
 but the liberty of one is in self-assertion, of the 
 other in self-abandonment. One has pride, au- 
 thority, ambition, circumspection; the other, 
 humor, veracity, enterprise, insight. One finds 
 its characteristic expression in philosophy, the 
 other in science. The master of all ancient so- 
 ciety—and of modern society only in its failure 
 and reaction— is the self-made man— or, if you 
 please, the cultivated man — the man intent 
 
 38 
 
The Religion of Democracy. 
 
 upon the process of his own making. The idea 
 that life is fulfilled through studied effort to 
 make the most of oneself was the idea of Cato 
 as well as Caiaphas. Pericles and Plato, Seneca 
 and Cicero, all gave their best energies to self- 
 improvement— if not to material advancement, 
 then to intellectual and spiritual culture. They 
 were all self-made men. There is the pomp 
 and pretentiousness, the artificiality and rejec- 
 tion of nature's flowing grace. And there is 
 about them all a touch of that self-conciousness 
 that belongs to men that have made themselves 
 and are disposed to admire the performance—a 
 certain lack of humor, or, if you please, of humil- 
 ity. The notion that the creations of antique 
 art are representative of the tone and color of 
 antique living is one of the great historical 
 illusions; they were but wistfully reminiscent 
 of a fancied golden age that had passed away. 
 Great Pan was dead, and the sweet divinities 
 had fled from wood and stream before the dawn 
 ' of history. When the self-made man came into 
 the world, the gods of nature gave up and left. 
 The gayety of nature is a gift that the mod- 
 ern spirit has in store; for characteristically 
 the modern man is not proud, but keeps to the 
 ground. He cares not much for what is called 
 culture, feeling that it is somehow vitally ab- 
 
 39 
 
The Religion of Democracy. 
 
 surd that a man should fix his eyes on his own 
 spiritual processes or spend his time in improv- 
 ing his own mind or his own soul. The mod- 
 ern man cares for science and reverences a 
 fact, keeps close to the real world and gives 
 himself to his work. His concern is with 
 things external to himself, and he counts him- 
 self successful as he becomes participant in the 
 ordinary business of the universe. The man 
 of the ancient spirit fled from the common peo- 
 ple ; the modern man turns back to the laborers 
 and the poor. 
 
 In a word, the typical man of the old order 
 feels himself caught and confounded in the cre- 
 ation, and his freedom is to get out to the 
 Creator; while the typical man of the new order 
 feels himself identified with the Creator, and 
 his freedom is, like God's, to get into the crea- 
 tion. 
 
 The historic drama thus reveals the same 
 contradiction that we encounter on the wider 
 stage of the cosmos. The innumerable contra- 
 dictions of history are resolvable into one primal 
 contradiction. The object becomes subject; 
 man passes from the status of the creature to 
 that of the creator. The old order is not im- 
 proved, but is dissolved by its antithesis. Histo- 
 ry is not only evolutionary, but revolution- 
 
 40 
 
The Religion of Democracy. 
 
 IV. — We discern the same principle again 
 when we look to the issues of life in the individ- 
 ual. The typical man is a microcosm and he 
 resumes in his own experience the history of 
 the race. His life is a revolution. At first he 
 broods and is silent; he is protoplasmic, tribal, 
 passive. He rises thence to the passion for 
 liberty — feeling the encumbrance and con- 
 straint of the creation. He tries to escape into 
 the ideal — becomes an ambitious dreamer, a 
 philosopher, and politician, and breaks with 
 his kin to dispute with the doctors. With the 
 refinement of his will he is more subtly beset 
 with the longing for power and prodigy and 
 glory, and these things possess him for a time. 
 But to the strophe succeeds the antistrophe. 
 In the crisis of his life he puts behind him all 
 the things that had been set before him, and 
 faces the other way. Thenceforward his in- 
 terest is not what may become of him, but 
 what may the creation become, and he sets his 
 face steadfastly toward Jerusalem. He is no 
 longer creature, but creator; not made, but be- 
 gotten; not the child of heredity fatality and 
 circumstance, but the Son of God. This was 
 the beginning of modernity. 
 
 V. — Democracy stands to-day at the grand 
 
 41 
 
The Religion of Democracy. 
 
 junction and crossroads of history. The world- 
 antinomy now announces itself in unescapable 
 contradictions. The old order and the self- 
 made man have now at length to reckon with 
 the new order and the man of the modern spir- 
 it. We can postpone the issue no longer. De- 
 mocracy now at length, the world over, takes 
 in the last man ; and that is fatal to the old 
 way of the world. For the last man is a mil- 
 lion — the hitherto bulked, estimated multitude. 
 It was something that the masses should get 
 themselves enumerated, and should become a 
 multitude. But that is nothing to what is in 
 store; the counters are going to take a hand in 
 the play. 
 
 This is the very whirlwind of moral revolu- 
 tion. The world has never seen anything like it 
 up to this date. Always, heretofore, revolutions 
 have meant merely some wider distribution of 
 privilege, more top hats and togas, and that ten 
 thousand instead of ten should mulct the multi- 
 tude. But now.at length it has been decided 
 that the multitude should not be mulcted any 
 more; and this resolution, adhered to, will turn 
 the world around and set the foundations of 
 society on new and hitherto undiscovered bases. 
 
 The bottom fact of social philosophy, rang- 
 ing wide through literature, the amenities and 
 
 42 
 
The Religion of Democracy. 
 
 courtesies, religion and the fine arts, is an econo 
 mic fact. The books and pictures, the etiquettes 
 and rituals, are what they are, accordiog to 
 the terms of the settlement of the bread ques- 
 tion. And this, not because flesh is God, but 
 because God is flesh. 
 
 Now the broadest, the basic fact of the old 
 world which democracy comes to destroy, is 
 that it has got its bread with injustice. The 
 old world has been, by the witness of all the 
 wise, a vain world and a liar, a world of 
 dreams and inveterate illusions. And the 
 spring and source of all its lies is theft. Specu- 
 lative mistakes in the theory of morals may be 
 got along with; it is the practical lie that 
 kills. And theft is the root of all abstraction 
 —the very substance of vanity, the stuff that 
 dreams are made of. 
 
 Always one class has preyed upon another 
 class. The strong, from the beginning, have 
 stolen their bread; and, what is worse, they 
 have despised their bakers. They have dis- 
 credited the natural facts of alimentation, and 
 they have sponged upon the poor. What hope 
 of wise, deliberate science, of joyous, perennial 
 art and permanent civic glory in a world that 
 is ashamed of its stomach, filches its food, and 
 despises the souls of laborers? What hope of 
 
 43 
 
The Religion of Democracy. 
 
 religion if you flout the central sacrament of 
 the body of God? 
 
 To be sure, there has always been a man that 
 would not lie — an artist, a poet; there have 
 been true books and pictures, and perfect deeds, 
 an unbroken tradition and prophecy of democ- 
 racy. Nobody ever wrote, ruled, carved or 
 painted, and left any one out, without leaving 
 himself out, and being forgotten. The torch has 
 been carried on, but flickering, like a candle in 
 a cave. And the prophecy is still waiting its 
 fulfillment. 
 
 Do you wonder that the fine arts are overfine 
 or underfine ; that their beauty is wistful ; that 
 the literatures lapse and die, and the great 
 scriptures of the world, given for joy, sound in 
 our ears only of judgment; that history swirls 
 in dizzy, bewildering cycles; that science is full 
 of panic and terror, and philosophy is only a 
 wan surmise? It is to be written on the sepul- 
 chers of the old cities : They took the bread of 
 the poor, and they despised the souls of the 
 laborers. 
 
 VI. — Yet remember this contempt for the 
 poor is not the imperfection, the flaw in the old 
 social systems that are passing. It is their 
 principle, and sine qua non. The flaw is the 
 
 44 
 
The Religion of Democracy. 
 
 suspicion of an infinite soul, a qualm of the 
 sense of eternity. So long as contempt for the 
 poor is steadfast and consistent, it furnishes an 
 entirely practicable ground of social stability. 
 It bases and sanctions a social arrangement 
 that is satisfactory to the strong— to those able 
 to maintain it— and unsatisfactory only to the 
 weak, who are unable to overthrow it. On the 
 one side, the gains are allied to force ; and on 
 the other, loss goes hand in hand with disa- 
 bility. That is a workable arrangement; left to 
 itself it might endure a million years. But it 
 has not been left to itself. There has come into 
 the world a great power of revolution. Con- 
 tempt of the poor has been abashed in a great 
 presence— the presence of a poor man— a la- 
 borer and a victim. The awe of suffering, de- 
 feat, death— that is the destroyer of the aristo- 
 cratic regime. The man of the people is the 
 man of sorrows. 
 
 VII. -—The man willing to die becomes the 
 master of the world. This is an overture of 
 universal emancipation; it excludes no one. 
 The beginning of liberty is the discovery of 
 the beautifulness and the infinite succor of 
 death. There can be no freedom amoEg men 
 who are afraid to die ; and a people to whom 
 
 45 
 
The Religion of Democracy. 
 
 snccess is necessary cannot build a city that is 
 great. The cities of the world, New York, 
 London, Paris, are provincial ; we have yet to 
 build a metropolis — a city of the soul, a city 
 whose citizens are not afraid of death — a capi- 
 tal of democracy. Death is the revealer of the 
 soul; therefore death is the great democrat. 
 
 VIII. — The soul is infinite, and it cannot rest 
 until it rests in the infinite. But lust and hun- 
 ger are not infinite, and neither are the titil- 
 lations of pleasure and praise. And the agony 
 or hope of unescapable death — of involuntary 
 dying — these one can measure. But there is 
 something in death itself and in the master of 
 death that you cannot measure. There is no 
 infinity in just dying; but to see a man that is 
 willing to die for love, that goes to meet death 
 in the way, that makes a boast of pain, and, 
 with perfect sweetness and sanity, celebrates 
 defeat — that is to be witness of the palpable 
 infinite. It is like an arrow passing swiftly 
 up into the air and not returning; like the still 
 energy of planets or the resistless growing of 
 the grass, or like the haunting, thrilling mur- 
 mur of remembered music that faded down the 
 avenue as the soldiers went to war. You are 
 left endlessly expectant ; you cannot come to an 
 
 46 
 
The Religion of Democracy. 
 
 end, but must follow that which is beyond, and 
 still beyond. 
 
 This is greatness. In this immensity the 
 soul comes to its own and finds what is good 
 and satisfactory. It is this that is intended by 
 the repose in action, the poised energy of great 
 
 art. 
 
 It remains with you and consoles. After 
 the money-lord has passed by, clinking his 
 gold, and the war-lord, clanking his steel, this 
 stays, and is sufficiently great. 
 
 IX.— Is it to be supposed that the people will 
 prefer what they know is transient and cheap? 
 Do you expect that they will defer to the 
 learned after they themselves have read books ; 
 that they will take counsel of Croesus after 
 they know how millions are made and have 
 traced the processes ; or that they will adore suc- 
 cessful warriors when fighting has become safe 
 to those who know how to manage the ma- 
 chines, and they themselves know how? Is it 
 not plain that men have always given their 
 homage only to the persons and things that 
 have stood for the immeasurable — the infinite; 
 that scholars have been looked up to because 
 books and brains were a mystery ; rich men, be- 
 cause riches were supposed to go with godlike 
 
 47 
 
The Religion of Democracy. 
 
 gifts and manners ; and fighters, because they 
 died fighting? 
 
 Sic transit gloria mundi! Now that it has 
 been discovered with how little wisdom the 
 world is governed, what fresh adventure is left 
 to a man of spirit but to be honest and to be- 
 lieve in God ! 
 
 X.— -The old order is passing, and the new is 
 swiftly preparing. It is nothing that the in- 
 capable and those that fail are discontented. 
 If that were all, there might indeed be social 
 changes — even what is called a revolution ; but 
 it would be only an oscillation, a vicissitude, a 
 jar. There might be a new distribution of gains 
 and honors; some would get more of praise 
 and money than had been the former wont, 
 and some less. But the old order, the world of 
 the self-made man, would abide after all. The 
 money and the honors would go to those that 
 were strong and cunning enough to get and 
 keep them, and the foundation of the social 
 peace would rest upon things in sight, the phe- 
 nomenal, the transient, as of old. It is noth- 
 ing that those who fail are discontented ; they 
 always, alas ! were discontented. But now those 
 also that can move things and prevail are smit- 
 ten at the heart, and restless; the successful are 
 
 48 
 
The Religion of Democracy. 
 
 discontented with their success. That is of 
 great omen. Not passionate, vacillating, inco- 
 herent sans culotterie alone is in revolt, but the 
 principled, punctual world-power is insurgent 
 against itself— a quite unprecedented state of 
 things. There will be great changes— the mak- 
 ing of a new world. The little revolutions are 
 little because they begin at the bottom, and es- 
 say to run up; but the great revolution of the 
 world begins at the top and, in the course of 
 nature, runs, gathering mightily, down. But 
 do not mistake the upper classes. They are the 
 people that can steadily will. They do not nec- 
 essarily live on the, avenues, or have five 
 courses at dinner. They are the youth of the 
 world, and the people of sound nerves, those 
 that have courage and that grip the real things. 
 These are holding indignation meetings every- 
 where to protest against their own prosperity. 
 It is an augury of the very greatest event— 
 the revolution of revolutions. 
 
 For history can know but one great revolu- 
 tion. Only once can the world turn prodig- 
 iously on its moral axis, shifting its center of 
 gravity from the temporal to the eternal. It 
 has taken thousands of years to prepare for 
 this, and it may take as many thousand more 
 to fulfill it. But there is a moment in time, 
 
 49 
 
The Religion of Democracy. 
 
 a supremely critical moment, when the scale 
 
 turns. 
 
 A featherweight may turn the balance of 
 tons, and a footfall on the mountain may start 
 an avalanche. So the grand crisis of the world 
 may come and go, and the occasion be not other 
 than a little thing. 
 
 XI.— We see the old order — the regime of 
 the self-made man — in the latter degrees of de- 
 crepitude. It is sick to exhaustion. Its pride 
 is flouted in the streets and its props are decay- 
 ing. The people do not have respect for digni- 
 ties any more, and they cannot any longer be 
 ruled by dignities. 
 
 Aristocracy has had its gifts and virtues. 
 One is sorry to see them go — rather, one would 
 be sorry if one really supposed that they were 
 going; that other than the clothes and skins of 
 them were going. And since the people do not 
 now care for these brave, fair-showing things, 
 and will not give them reverence, let us weep 
 for the loss of beauty, having first made sure 
 that beauty is really lost. 
 
 Democracy has shown ugly features; there 
 have been times when one might have wished 
 it out of the world. It has ruined many good 
 pictures, broken acres of painted windows and 
 
 50 
 
The Religion of Democracy. 
 
 corrupted court manners to a"common level. A 
 satyr-hoof has been in all the rose gardens, and 
 has raped away the stately graces that strolled 
 upon the terraces. 
 
 XII.— But there are grounds of thrilling 
 hope. The destruction of the symbols of glory 
 makes way for what is glorious. And what, 
 after all, is glorious, but fearless, free spirits 
 that dare everj^thing for love! 
 
 Democracy has such in store. They will come 
 to the relief of the saintless, poetless nations, 
 before all the islands of the sea are tossed to the 
 bargain counter, and the cities are wasted with 
 war. 
 
 Out of democracy shall come poets, saints, 
 artists, world-lovers of an unprecedented kind. 
 How do we know? They will come because it 
 is necessary. 
 
 XIII.— The world has had enough and has 
 come to the end of that blighting, consumptive 
 quality of democracy which has gone so far to 
 make the world seem a moral wilderness, arid 
 and flowerless of beauty. Democracy has razed 
 temples and palaces; let us see now what it 
 can build! We have had the Nay of it; we 
 await the Yea. It has advertised the things 
 
 51 
 
The Religion of Democracy. 
 
 that are not great; its pressing engagement now 
 is to disclose the things that are. It has set its 
 brand on pride and privilege, the boast and 
 pomp of rank and honor — marked for destruc- 
 tion the glory of this world. It is time for the 
 revelation of the greater glory. 
 
 We have had the law ; we expect now the 
 gospel of democracy. So far it has been Mo- 
 saic, prohibitive— its message mainly a "Thou 
 shaltnot." It has despised old shams, but it 
 has not invented new valors. It has put down 
 the mighty, but it has not made the commons 
 royal. It has withheld its trust from princes; 
 but it has not known where else to put its trust. 
 
 The people are sick of negations ; it is neces- 
 sary that the poets and the artists should come. 
 The world has lost interest in the discouraging 
 theorem that one man is no better than another. 
 Nor does it find satisfaction in the rule of the 
 majority. There is no advantage in being bul- 
 lied by a crowd. The democracy of blank ne- 
 gations is played out. 
 
 XIV. — Yes, let us confess it plainly, if de- 
 mocracy contained what the politicians have 
 Baid that it contains, and nothing more, it would 
 be an entirely hopeless enterprise — the climax of 
 unreason, the apotheosis of the absurd, the con- 
 da 
 
The Religion of Democracy. 
 
 summate delusion of history, the destruction of 
 every sweet and human thing, and the end of 
 the world. 
 
 Were it not better to be a peasant and rever- 
 ence a lord, than be a politician and reverence 
 nothing? 
 
 Democracy, regarded as a balloting contri- 
 vance for equating the hoof and claw of warring 
 private interests, is an ingenious futility. Let 
 it pass now to its place in the museums of an- 
 tiquities along with the devices for the solution 
 of impossible mechanical problems, like that of 
 perpetual motion. 
 
 The old aristocratic idea had more blood in it 
 than that, and was mure nearly a real and 
 credible thing. A lord, a peasant, a priest- 
 good enough, if only the lord had fed the peas- 
 ant, and the priest had reverenced his soul ; but 
 since the peasant fed the lord and had to him- 
 self all the reverence in his own narrow, glim- 
 mering heart, he grew and lightened, and came 
 to be at length himself both lord and priest! 
 That is the authexitic biology of democracy. 
 Democracy is born out of the abyss of the infi- 
 nite. It answers to the longing for beauty, the 
 hunger and thirst after righteousness. If al- 
 ways men must live from hand to mouth, must 
 dodge and calculate and gain by frugal shifts, 
 
 53 
 
The Religion of Democracy. 
 
 then the self-made man must always win, and 
 his sordid customs must be set up for good as 
 the standard of the soul. But if it should turn 
 out that a common man may have access to the 
 springs of beauty and the eternal health, may 
 look out upon the universal landscape from a 
 commanding point of view and see things in 
 their proportions, may cease to have mere static 
 relations to the cosmos, and may establish 
 dynamic and vital relations, why, then, it is all 
 over with tyrannies and vested privileges. Sta- 
 tus must give way to the dynamic laws; the 
 arbitrary must yield to the essential. This is 
 scientific; it is the ultimatum of the modern 
 spirit. In the presence of the natural facts we 
 are not interested in the things that were agreed 
 upon. Etiquette, custom, the maxims of the 
 wise and prudent, tradition, politics and the 
 Revised Statutes —must make way for the ele- 
 niental forces. 
 
 The social constitution becomes a pis aller. 
 Let it wear for a week and then we shall get a 
 better. We hold the civil laws lightly, because 
 we perceive that they are only approximate; 
 we shall get nearer the facts by and by. The 
 beginning of democracy is the discovery that 
 morality is not an appendix, but the bulk of the 
 volume of natural philosophy— that righteous- 
 
 5A 
 
The Religion of Democracy. 
 
 ness is as large as all outdoors. The Magna 
 Chart a of democracy is the revelation of the 
 immediate accessibility of God. It is a scandal 
 to the ecclesiastics, politicians and bookmen be- 
 cause it makes faith the mother of science, and, 
 in the scale of human faculties, gives the pri- 
 macy not to the intellect, 'but to the will. It 
 refuses to stop to think out a way to right liv- 
 ing, but will go ahead to live out a way to right 
 thinking. There is in it a stored, balked and 
 latent energy to transform the world in a year. 
 Democracy is born out of the brooding sense of 
 the eternal; it takes up the message of the 
 timeless Man of Nazareth ; it will be true to the 
 great evangel of Reformation and Renais- 
 sance from which Church and State have apos- 
 tatized ; it will put to confusion every ecclesias- 
 tic, dynastic and diplomatic scheme, and bring 
 the nations together out-of-doors, in the eternal 
 open air. 
 
 XV. —The new century opens with great ex- 
 pectancy. The future is full of charm. The 
 past is past, and the children of the age are 
 glad. There stretches before them an alluring, 
 radiant vista, though the dawn dazzles their 
 eyes, and they cannot clearly distinguish even 
 what is near. No matter; they are not afraid. 
 
 6j 
 
The Religion of Democracy. 
 
 The stupefying spell of custom has been 
 broken. The conspiracy of hebetude has been 
 betrayed. Ideas, colossal, magnificent, are in 
 the saddle, and are sailing the sea in ships. 
 There is thunder in the air and azone. 
 
 Oh! democracy of dead lift and suction, de- 
 mocracj^ of pull and haul, of covetousness, cau- 
 tiousness and cunning, they give you up at last. 
 You are not worth while. And your sapless 
 platitudes, your sentimental pieties and patriot- 
 isms, they spew them out! 
 
 Allons! A new democracy — yet the oldest 
 — shall renew the world; a democracy that 
 shall not exclude foreigners or those that do 
 not speak English ; that shall take the earth to 
 be its colony and the cosmic laws for statutes 
 and ordinances. The Philippines, the Antilles 
 and all the other islands of the sea, and the con- 
 tinents, coast-lands and hinter-lands, they shall 
 all be taken in. We announce the dissolution 
 of the old 7'egime of privilege, exclusion and 
 monopoly, and we proclaim a new constitution 
 according to the essential law. 
 
 66 
 
The Religion of Democracy. 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 THE DISCOVERY OF AMERICA. 
 
 I. — This land, America, shall be the land of 
 the incarnation. On this ground the ideal is to 
 come to terms with what is common and mat- 
 ter-of-fact. Here, on a grand scale, for the first 
 time, labor shall be accepted without shame and 
 death without fear. This shall be the country 
 of material things, the land of the universal 
 sacrament. We perceive that God does noth- 
 ing for a show, or to prove propositions, or just 
 to save souls; therefore we will have no art 
 for the sake of art, we will not be governed 
 by preaching, and we will do everything for 
 utility, as God does. This shall be the land of 
 commerce and manufacture; the land of money 
 and credit, of the painters of pictures, the 
 writers of books, and the carvers of statues for 
 utility and the sweetening of the earth. We 
 reject Utopias and abstract propositions. We 
 will have no thinkers that do not dig, and no 
 diggers that do not think. 
 
 d7 
 
The Religion of Democracy. 
 
 America shall be, we hope, the land of the 
 open and flowing sea— the land of ships, of 
 universal exchange; the builder of roads 
 through the remote places, and of interoceanic 
 canals; the destroyer of political boundaries. 
 
 This shall be the land of change, flux, prog- 
 ress; everything must flow. We will have 
 nothing fixed and settled, since nothing in na- 
 ture is fixed and settled— not the ribs of the 
 earth nor the anatomy of a man. We take every- 
 thing to be plastic, and we do not think that 
 any beautiful thing is impossible. We expect 
 the miraculous according to the ordinary run. 
 
 This shall be the land of modernity and the 
 present day. We will not judge this day by 
 the old times, but we will judge the old time 
 from this eminence. We are interested to hear 
 of anything that the fathers did freely and un- 
 precedentedly; but what they did in the way 
 of habit and reflex action we will note at first 
 hand in the common animals. 
 
 We know that this day has lasted from the 
 beginning, and will last; we are not discon- 
 certed by sleep or the sunsets ! ' We will regard 
 everything from the eternal point of view. 
 
 II.— The grand event of the century dawn 
 shall be the discovery of America. America 
 
 58 
 
The Religion of Democracy. 
 
 -—brooding in the old world spell, under fog- 
 banks of tradition and habit— at last shall lift 
 up its sunlit Sierras out of the mist and stand 
 revealed to Europe and to itself. 
 
 It is said that America is to stand forth as an 
 equal partner among what are called the Great 
 Powers, that now at length she is to rise to the 
 level of the jealousy and fear of Europe, and to 
 clutch at her distributive share in the partition 
 of Asia, Africa and the islands; that she is to 
 produce statesmen and soldiers on the European 
 model, and generally that she is to go ahead of 
 what is going. 
 
 We do not think that America is to be re- 
 vealed in that character. We do not believe 
 that the mission of the United States is just to 
 do better than its competitors the things that 
 are being done. We look for new enterprise, 
 and a renaissance, the discovery of a new 
 
 world. 
 
 It is childish to suppose that we ever have 
 been, or could be separated from Europe. The 
 meaning of this epoch is not that the United 
 States, long isolated, is now at length to make 
 connection with the transatlantic world ; nor is 
 it that America, thralled in European bond- 
 age, is now at length to break away. The 
 meaning of the epoch is the transfer of the moral 
 
 59 
 
The Religion of Democracy. 
 
 hegemony of the world from the East to the 
 West, from the romantic, earth-spurning, tipsy 
 morning lands, the lands of prince and priest and 
 soldier, of castle-building and Babel towers, to 
 the lands of the sobering sunsets, of labor and 
 science and strong, resurgent youth — in a word, 
 from Aristocracy to Democracy. 
 
 It is not that Europe is to fade away and be 
 but the evening shadows of the Western hills, 
 nor that the East has definitely failed, nor 
 that the West has now an advantage. It 
 is not that Americans are generally good and 
 wise, and Europeans bad and foolish. But this 
 is the denouement of a world-drama in which 
 all are equally concerned. And there is in this 
 tall, rude, prodigal West, a youth that has been 
 in the wilderness, and has slept on the ground ; 
 that has been angered and has not been unfor- 
 giving; learned humor and humility and grown 
 strong by labor; and he is now to play a great 
 role of faith and redemption for the saving of 
 the nations. 
 
 III. — We cannot be separated from the rest. 
 In spite of tariffs, the illimitable seas and all the 
 old ethnic jealousies and exclusions, the world 
 has all things common. Whatever happens to 
 one man, happens to everybody. You cannot 
 
 60 
 
The Religion of Democracy. 
 
 take your tea and be careless of the coolies. 
 You would have to settle with them anyhow in 
 a thousand years. You must settle a great 
 deal sooner now, considering the regularity of 
 the mails and the facilities of circulation. 
 
 There is no social question anywhere that is 
 not in the United States. There is no sort of 
 tyranny, profligacy, or hardness of heart in any 
 other country that is not here. The great con- 
 tradiction of the age is wrought out here as it 
 is in Europe. Here, as there, the old order, the 
 regime of pride and privileges, is still lofty- 
 looking, however desperately stricken with 
 years and however fearsomely arrayed against 
 the invincible standards of democracy. 
 
 IV. — There is no doubt that democracy — or 
 something that goes by that name — will every- 
 where prevail. But it might be as the preva- 
 lence of hell were it not for the youth and faith 
 in the heart of America. 
 
 The choice lies between the democracy of 
 envy and emeutes, the lust for a dead level, 
 always distractedly sought after, but never 
 achievable in this world, and making all things 
 beautiful forever unachievable, a desperate pen- 
 dulum-swing between triumphant mercantilism 
 and fierce, disruptive intestine wars; the choice 
 
 ei 
 
The Religion of Democracy. 
 
 lies between this and the parturition-pain of a 
 new and unexampled world-order, a democracy 
 of inner and sacramental equality, begotten of 
 the modern sense of the eternal, and realizing 
 itself in an elation of labor and commerce, in 
 joyous, creative art, in wide-embracing com- 
 radeships, and a new taste in living. Expecta- 
 tion and the preparation for this event are every- 
 where latent, wistful, passive ; but in the United 
 States is the active principle of it, the genetic, 
 begetting power. That principle and power is 
 the unconscious embryonic soul of America, 
 which now is brought forth in the shock of 
 war, and which shall come to know itself and 
 understand its destination. "What but the 
 greatest things can come of the nation that has 
 conceived the idea of the sacredness of labor, 
 and that has sincerely expected prophets from 
 the back-country, and salvation out of Naza- 
 reth ! This inspiration is not of the old order of 
 things, nor by any means to be conciliated 
 therewith. It is a blast of destruction for the 
 old order, and a breath of creation for the new. 
 
 V. — The motive of the old regime^ the spring 
 of its energy, the explanation of what we have 
 chosen to call its virtues and what we have 
 chosen to call its vices, is, as has been said, the 
 
 62 
 
The Religion of Democracy. 
 
 endeavor to escape into an ideal world. The 
 masters of the old regime, the admired and in- 
 fluential men, are the agents and examplars of 
 glory, terrestrial or celestial— in a word, the sol- 
 diers and the priests. 
 
 The energy of the new regime arises in an 
 opposite quarter and runs the other way, so 
 that the two systems are at utter variance and 
 can never come to terms. 
 
 The power of the new order, the elan of the 
 modern spirit, comes of taking the ideal world 
 for granted and proceeding, in the faith of it, to 
 the conquest of the real. The soldier and the 
 priest fall back, and the artist, the mechanic, 
 and the man of business become the masters of 
 society. 
 
 The historic symbol and prophecy of this 
 great transaction—by no means yet fully ac- 
 complished, but awaiting fulfillment in the 
 newly-discovered West— is that epochal mo- 
 ment when the Middle Ages began to be mod- 
 ern with the decline of the feudal powers and 
 the rise of the free cities of art and commerce. 
 The burghers came to be more considerable 
 than knights and friars, not because the Cru- 
 sades had utterly failed, but because they had 
 not utterly failed ; not because men had aban- 
 doned the desire for the beautiful and settled 
 
 63 
 
The Religion of Democracy. 
 
 down to be sordid, but because they had found 
 and fastened upon somewhat of the beautiful, 
 and w^ere determined to put it to use — deter- 
 mined to make the cities free. It was a great 
 moment, the beginning of the visible prevalence 
 of the modern spirit. The gains may seem to 
 have been small and easily lost; but they were 
 not lost. The world sometimes moves slowly, 
 and the road seems long, but the burghers had 
 set out hopefully on the way that leads from 
 Nazareth to the cosmopolitan city of the soul. 
 
 Ever since the rise of the Italian and Han- 
 seatic commercial towns the man of business has 
 gained upon the politician and the ecclesiastic, 
 upon the soldier and the priest. Spite of all his 
 undeserving, spite of usury, luxury, extortion 
 and monopol3% spite of the valor of soldiers 
 and the love of saints, he has gained. He has 
 gained because he is in the way of tha destiny of 
 the world. Up to this time the man of business 
 has, to speak broadly, done his best to miss his 
 opportunity ; but the opportunity remains. Nay ! 
 the end of the century presents to him an occa- 
 sion that not only invites, but also commands 
 and threatens. Now at last the business man 
 must, on dreadful pains and penalties, get 
 down to business — must stop his ears to the 
 brandishments of old world oracles, and com- 
 
 64 
 
The Religion of Democracy. 
 
 mit himself fearlessly to the new world mis- 
 sion. The trouble has been that the man of 
 business has not believed in his calling; he 
 has deferred to priests and soldiers; he has 
 caught the contagion of the dreams of glory- 
 seekers. His mind has been elsewhere than on 
 his work. He has fed the hungry, some of 
 them, and clothed the naked abstractedly; he 
 has tamed fierce wildernesses, but he lias not 
 cared for the people that should inhabit them; 
 he has built ships, railroads, Suez canals, in an 
 absent-minded way, thinking of other things, 
 of money, power, politics, social esteem, caste, 
 colleges, carriages. We have net yet seen a 
 modern man of business. We have had mer- 
 chant princes to spare, but not yet a prince of 
 merchants. Perhaps, after all, the priest? and 
 soldiers had better turn traders and engineers, 
 and let the mooning men of business, for a 
 while, tell the beads and wear the gilded sashes. 
 
 VI. — It has been supposed that we could 
 first settle the bread question, and then proceed 
 to finer issues. But there are no finer issues — 
 there is nothing finer than common bread, un- 
 less it be bread of a finer kind; or than a cup 
 of water, unless it be a cup of wine. The pal- 
 pable, real world is unfathomable, mysterious, 
 
 65 
 
The Religion of Democracy. 
 
 spiritual, and there is room in it for the most 
 magnificent adventure of the ideal. It is not 
 necessary to go apart from it in order to think 
 or to aspire; the dignity of thinking is in labor, 
 and the dignity of labor in thinking. The 
 sphere of economics is without bounds; it takes 
 in all the fine arts and the unnamed fimer arts, 
 and there is no magnanimity or love that cannot 
 be expressed somehow in terms of bread and 
 wine. 
 
 It is common to speak of the laws of nature, 
 of chemistry, biology, and so on, as if they 
 were distinguishable from the essential moral 
 laws. But they are not local shifts ; they are not 
 other than the essential, moral laws, and there 
 is no natural law or section, or sub-title of a law 
 that does not exist for the sake of the liberty of 
 the soul. The question of food and clothes is 
 inextricably bound up with the interests of art 
 and letters, and all together are meshed and 
 woven in with the grand, eternal issues, so that 
 we cannot make an inch of progress in the set- 
 tlement of economic questions save as we make 
 progress in the settlement of the other ques- 
 tions. 
 
 We have had a theory in America that we 
 could first lay a solid foundation of economic 
 prosperity, that we could proceed then to litera- 
 te 
 
The Religion of Democracy. 
 
 ture and art galleries, and finish up with cathe- 
 drals and religion. The religious specialists 
 will tell us that all this is exactly preposterous; 
 that the progression must begin at the other 
 end, and run in the other direction. But these 
 nice discussions are out of date. The day 
 dawns for the lovers, and the men of action, 
 who have souls to their bodies, and bodies to 
 their souls, and are not too curious about the 
 distinction. 
 
 VII. — Not without travail the new nation is 
 born. In vast transportations over seas, in hot, 
 malarial campaigns, in Malaysian and West 
 Indian jungles, in battles not all a holiday and 
 gay in victories, America breaks through its 
 integumentary barriers of protective tariffs, 
 immigration acts, passe presidential doctrines, 
 hypocritical neutralities, and wins out into the 
 wind-swept highways of the world. Through 
 the swinging Janus gates the youth and faith 
 of America go forth as not knowing whither, 
 yet going East and West, following the equa- 
 tor and the tropics, until they shall somehow 
 meet and girdle the earth and embrace it. Once 
 more, after four hundred years, the galleons of 
 Spain have sailed West, and discovered a 
 world I 
 
 67 
 
The Religion of Democracy. 
 
 VIIL— Universality, nnanimityl America 
 shall be the crossroads of the world. The na- 
 tions shall flow into it, and pass through it. 
 We renounce old habits. We have no patent 
 on democracy; we will not make the abolition 
 of privilege itself a privilege. 
 
 We will make here a clearance of every law- 
 made privilege and monopoly, and we will 
 make it intolerably hard for other countries to 
 maintain privileges and monopolies. There 
 shall be newspapers at length and universities, 
 and there shall be ideas that march. We know 
 that we cannot win liberty or justice for one 
 country without winning it for all countries; 
 that to lift one is to lift all, that the load is an 
 Atlas- load. But the shoulders of democracy are 
 
 broad. 
 
 Bonaparte announced at the beginning of the 
 century la carriere %erte aux talents. What 
 he meant was a free course for men of brains. 
 The men of brains have had their day, and we 
 see what they have done for us. America offers 
 at the end of the century a career for men of 
 faith. 
 
 The invitation is not for those that would 
 like in the intervals of other business to do what 
 is called a little good, but for those that love 
 the risks of faith and the di-ine adventure, that 
 
 68 
 
The Religion of Democracy. 
 
 know the release and expansion of a lover, and 
 can lose themselves in their enterprise, and live 
 hard and like it. For such there is a clear vo- 
 cation and a career. It is no smooth boulevard, 
 no lounger's promenade: it is a rugged, narrow 
 path through the world chaos; but it is a high- 
 way of great discovery. 
 
 69 
 
The Religion of Democracy. 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 THE DISCOUNT OF GLORY. 
 
 I. — In the harbor of Manila, at Santiago de 
 Cuba, and elsewhere, the guns of the old re- 
 gime slacken their fire and are silenced. In the 
 way of powder, steel and fighting machines, 
 the old order has not now any great hope. War 
 becomes a kind of inverted manufacture, a 
 grim, terrific commerce. The Soldier and the 
 Priest have no longer a chance in this pursuit 
 against the Mechanic and the Man-of-business. 
 It is demonstrated that a democracy a little faith- 
 ful to its charter of humility would be invinci- 
 ble against the pompous armaments of the 
 world. The meekness of mechanics shall make 
 the Powers powerless. Bulk is nothing; but 
 to know how things go in this God's world is 
 something. To be en rapport with the universe, 
 to have the feel of it in your bones and the law 
 of it leaping in your blood — that is everything 
 in modern war. 
 
 Ten thousand men with cosmic justice in 
 
 70 
 
tk^- 
 
 The Religion of Democracy. 
 
 them, the divine entente with Nature's soul, 
 could put the whole big, blustering world to 
 ignominious rout. 
 
 They could do it; but they would not. For 
 this cosmic justice, this miracle behind me- 
 chanics, is magnanimity and love. The meek- 
 ness that is might is also mercy. And when 
 winning comes to be too easy and too safe, it 
 will cease to seem so glorious. A few more 
 victories like i^at of Dewey and Sampson, and 
 Victory herself will be smitten with a kind of 
 shame, and will appoint days of fasting in love 
 and pity for her enemies. 
 
 II. —America is strong and can win battles 
 because of its labor and its earth-grip; because 
 of its mechanics that can build a ship or punctu- 
 ally sink one with simple and loving devotion, 
 but it is not invincible; it is weak because of its 
 sentimental abstractions, its longing for privi- 
 leges and glory, its passion for prize money. 
 The enemy was weak in ships; but his death- 
 clutch held us close, and he is strong in viru- 
 lent contagion. Rome revenged herself on her 
 conquerors by corrupting them, and so Spain, 
 too, may get revenge— may infect us with the 
 full fire and venom of the old-world glory dis- 
 ease. 
 
 71 
 
The Religion of Democracy. 
 
 It was a dramatic thing — so subtle and sure 
 is the inner logic of history — this wrestle on 
 the threshold of the new era, of the young giant 
 of democracy with the choicest champion and 
 Paladin of the ancient regime. Spain, the classic 
 land of the soldier and the priest, ultra-undem- 
 ocratic Spain, the country that least believes in 
 the intrinsic justice and reasonableness of the 
 real world, and most believes in things-agreed- 
 upon, in honor, orthodoxy, and authority — 
 Spain, the arch-agent and exemplar of the great 
 political and ecclesiastical superstition, was 
 well matched in mortal combat with the demo- 
 cratic land. 
 
 It is a conflict the issues of which are to be 
 lifted up and graven high ; but the firing of 
 guns was incidental. The allies of Spain are 
 not mostly Spaniards. Everywhere through the 
 Rockies and the Alleghenies, by the Missis- 
 sippi, the Hudson and the Potomac, the soil of 
 democracy teems with a kind of treason, albeit 
 a kind that is not a crime in law. It fills the 
 newspapers and magazines, and Ferdinand and 
 St. Ignatius Loyola from congenial constituen- 
 cies have got themselves sent to congress. No 
 man can say to another : you are a spy, because 
 in every man, the accuser as well as the ac- 
 cused, there is a conspirator against the sover- 
 
 72 
 
The Religion of Democracy. 
 
 eignty of the outdoors God, a prebendary of 
 the old regime pleading for honors and privi- 
 leges, for Pope-holy pieties and patriotisms, 
 against the liberal, open-air view of things, 
 which is democracy. 
 
 III. — The thing that has been most steadily 
 desired since the world began is not money, or 
 long life, or pleasant pastimes, but a guaranteed 
 god — a god with solid, institutional backing, 
 advertising himself in distinct terms, and 
 plainly discriminating between deserving per- 
 sons and nations, and the undeserving. 
 
 Disappointments have been heaped up from 
 age to age ; but every turn of the world has 
 found the people newly disposed to believe that 
 God has established himself at last and settled 
 down in some high political, scholastic, or ec- 
 clesiastical seat, so that the divine judgment on 
 human conduct can be obviously and immedi- 
 ately translated into brands of infamy and med- 
 als of honor. 
 
 It is this longing for an unquestionably re- 
 spectable and plain-spoken God that has been 
 the stronghold of all the monarchies, aristoc- 
 racies and ecclesiocracies of the world. The 
 privileged classes have kept their privileges 
 and have ruled the people not only or chiefly 
 
 73 
 
The Religion of Democracy. 
 
 on acconnt of their superior wisdom and 
 strength, but because they have been supposed 
 to be the special backers and spokesmen of God. 
 Their ribbons, and title-givings, their blessings 
 and anointings have seemed to be veritable 
 means of grace and bestowments of spiritual 
 pov^er, because it has been supposed that the 
 givers were the depositaries of peculiar and in- 
 communicable divine revelations; that they 
 stood nearer God than the people did, and 
 nearer than the people could. Back of every 
 social organization under the old regime is 
 some kind of supposed guaranteed revelation of 
 God, some form of denial of the fundamental 
 democratic doctrine of the utter commonness of 
 revelation. The modern spirit is in these days 
 lifting up its voice to bear witness against every 
 pretension of those that claim a right to speak 
 conclusively for God. Democracy cannot come 
 to anj' kind of terms with specially guaranteed 
 revelations. For such things, whether inter- 
 preted by priests and princes, or by scribes and 
 doctors, mean the establishment of authority 
 outside the conscience of the people — mean, in a 
 word, the negation of self-government. 
 
 IV. — Infinitely pathetic and man-endearing 
 is the heartbreak of the hundred ages, this 
 
 74 
 
The Religion of Democracy. 
 
 alienation of the old world from the God of the 
 open air. One would think that sometimes, in 
 moments like this, when the strain is great, God 
 would long to break the interminable silence 
 and tell us plainly, in some prodigious and un- 
 deniable way, that this is the soul's world, and 
 that we need not be afraid. Doubtless he does 
 so long, and his withholding is a continual 
 passion. 
 
 Certainl.y the righteousness, the moral sym- 
 pathy, of the universe does not impose itself 
 upon us— it is not undeniable. We are left free 
 to believe that the whole scheme is bad or un- 
 feeling, and that the God of it is not our God. 
 There is a silence in it that seems like indiffer- 
 ence, and a hardness that seems like wicked- 
 ness, and contradictions that look unreason- 
 able. For thousands of years we have stood off 
 at a distance, lynx-eyed, inquisitive, suspicious, 
 and tried to construe it to the understanding to 
 see it steady and whole in logical perspective; 
 but nobody has yet succeeded in doing that. 
 There is always an unassimilable remainder, 
 a surd. It is oefr always possible to turn away 
 and say: *'I do not find myself here. I will 
 get my living out of this, since I must; but I 
 will live in another, an ideal world." So thick 
 are the veils, so patiently does God hide his 
 
 76 
 
The Religion of Democracy. 
 
 face, that men may believe without compulsion, 
 may achieve original love and be free. 
 
 It is a part of the ground plan of the world 
 that it should be always possible to doubt the 
 safety of doing what is beautiful and right, 
 possible to doubt whether the ultimate authori- 
 ties of the universe would back one up in that 
 kind of enterprise. It seems that tonic, drastic 
 doubt is forever necessary in order that beauty 
 and right should grow indigenous in man. The 
 measure of the beautifulness in a man is the 
 amount of ugliness that he can meet without 
 despairing, and the dignity of the stature of his 
 faith is in proportion to the clearness and san- 
 ity with which he doubts. The man of the 
 modern spirit is a mighty doubter; and the 
 depth of his Gethsemane measures the height 
 of his Golgotha. 
 
 The death of religion is in a dead certainty. \ 
 Perhaps God would sooner destroy all the Bi- 
 bles of the nations and efface all the miracles 
 of faith, than remove the possibility of that 
 spirit-stirring doubt. 
 
 V. — It is not that God has filled the earth 
 with little traps to catch us and perplex us. 
 The question of faith is not a matter of the pre- 
 ponderance of evidence — beak and claws on one 
 
 76 
 
The Religion of Democracy. 
 
 side, rosebuds and summer on the other. It is 
 perceived that since all things hang together, 
 one thing must be as good as another, and no 
 better. The doubt spreads over all and takes 
 in everything. 
 
 Looked at in the way of this all-comprehend- 
 ing doubt, the world seems \o the moral sense 
 a desert swept clean by the wind of every foot- 
 print of divinity; there are no exceptional phe- 
 nomena, no oases; all is sapless, siccate, bare. 
 There is no meaning in the patient valor of 
 Jesus, the suffering of the poor, the ineffable 
 charm of womanliness and manliness, the 
 great poems and pictures, the grand rituals of 
 worship; there is left only the opportunity to 
 improve one's own mind and better one's con- 
 dition. Yea, the last marvel of nature and its 
 furthest reach toward the infinite is just a cu- 
 rious, selective mind whereby you may accel- 
 lerate the process of your making. You are 
 the choicest, quintessent creature! 
 
 From all this the soul of a man turns away 
 in bitterness. If he is nothing but the Finest 
 Thing Made, then it is all over with religion 
 and great art, and it is all over with magna- 
 nimity and valor. 
 
 YL — You may choose to look at things so if 
 
 77 
 
The Religion of Democracy. 
 
 you will ; or if you will the world may roll out 
 its landscape in another light. You find in 
 yourself a witness that you are not altogether 
 made but are also maker. This seems a 
 voucher of eternity. You see yourself not as 
 the last term in a process of development, but 
 the first term. You date back of Abraham, 
 back also of the amoeba. You rise up from 
 your passivity; you cease to wish and begin to 
 will. You claim a share in the business and 
 passion of creation. This is faith ; it is also the 
 principal of democracy. It is the assertion, in 
 spite of doubt, that the sovereignty of God is 
 in some real sense within yourself, and so in 
 conflict with the disorder and brutality of the 
 world you are like a king contending for your 
 own kingdom. You back up against the im- 
 pregnable eternities, and are ready to die a 
 thousand deaths for what to the soul seems 
 sweet and just. 
 
 VII.— Always this antithesis of doubt and 
 faith has, in terms more or less distinct, been 
 presented to the souls of men ; and the antithe- 
 sis will doubtless stand. 
 
 After thousands of years of investigating and 
 philosophizing the sat;anfs have at last in these 
 latter days got the case approximately stated 
 
 78 
 
The Religion of Democracy. 
 
 — which is a gain; perhaps the greatest gain of 
 the century. But the men of action and the 
 mass of the people were a long way in advance 
 of them in the discovery of the fact — the fact 
 that the antithesis exists, and that it is unescap- 
 able and irreducible. 
 
 The discovery of this inexpugnable doubt is 
 the negative power of the modern spirit. 
 Herein at last is one thing logically settled — to 
 wit, that the final issue of life is not capable of 
 logical settlement must be allowed to remain, 
 so far as mere intellect goes, an open question. 
 There is no blackboard demonstration that God 
 is good; you must risk it, or die a coward. -. 
 There is no earttry help for you; you cannot i 
 shift the responsibility. There is no insurance 
 society that can guarantee you against loss; 
 there is no prize-money promise of the ruling 
 powers that the general government of the 
 world may not at last, after all, repudiate. 
 
 No extant person, natural, legal or mystical, 
 is qualified to assume your soul. God has de- 
 cided to withhold himself, and has appointed 
 no agents with power of attorney. The corpo- 
 rations that pretend to the function of bless- 
 ing and cursing, rewarding and punishing, are 
 not authentic. The authority of the Church 
 becomes a fading specter and the sovereignty of 
 
 79 
 
The Religion of Democracy. 
 
 the State a legal fiction. There is only one 
 sovereignty, and its exterritoriality is, for this 
 day, in your own body. You are to make your 
 report, not to the majority, or to the ordained 
 and the anointed, but to that. 
 
 God withholds himself, and there is on this 
 earth no sure fountain of salvation or honor. 
 The Church can excommunicate, but it cannot 
 effectually exclude; the State can crucify, but 
 it cannot convict. There are instituted powers, 
 but there are no instituted authorities. One 
 may be hanged, drawn and quartered, perhaps 
 with good desert; but he cannot, here, be 
 judged. 
 
 The Judge and Rewarder has not in Church 
 or State, or anywhere save in conscience and 
 the common, cosmic law, set up here His court. 
 
 VIII. — These things follow from the discov- 
 ery of the invincible doubt; the discovery that 
 the final issue is deep down in the core of con- 
 sciousness, where the everlasting yea and nay 
 are met, that the final question cannot be re- 
 solved by the understanding, but must be en- 
 countered, and somehow practically determined 
 by the will. This discovery is a cardinal reve- 
 lation, because it clears the road for faith. 
 Faith could never have been in this world if 
 
 80 
 
The Religion of Democracy. 
 
 the scribes and doctors had had their cock-suro 
 way. It would have been impossible for the 
 people to trust in God if the authorities had 
 not been first discredited. If it had been per- 
 fectly certain that the overwhelming presence 
 of God was at Mt. Sinai, there would have 
 been place for fidelity and endless deference, but 
 not of faith. Moses himself was not quite sure, 
 else he would not so command our reverence. 
 And all along the old heathen and Hebrew 
 ways in the dust of the unremembered throng 
 that were convinced of Moses' law or Mo- 
 loch's, are the vestiges of loving and valiant 
 souls that were not quite sure of the oracle, and 
 were fain to trust in God. 
 
 IX.— It is the distinction of the Jews, that 
 they were from of old comparatively modern. 
 Might not one say that modernity itself is of the 
 Jews? They were the best doubters in an- 
 tiquity, and accordingly had most of faith. 
 Less than their neighbors did they concern 
 themselves with what is called the future life, 
 and they looked not for rewards and penalties 
 from thence. The insoluble questions they were 
 content to leave insoluble. They did not expect 
 ealvation or honor from an institution. Their 
 immortal glory is that they did not thirst for 
 
 81 
 
c:>,. 
 
 The Religion of Democracy. 
 
 glory; and they were the only first-class power 
 of the ancient world that did not found an 
 empire. They were of all the least sentiment- 
 al, and had the least of superstition. Even to 
 this da5% when modernity itself seems waver- 
 ing, and in religion and politics, in art and let- 
 ters, is meditating a retreat to Medisevalism, 
 or further back, the Jews go bravely on their 
 mission, freest of the taint of morbid ideality 
 and most exposed to the fury of enthusiastic 
 wrong. 
 
 The genius of the Jews is of the concrete 
 only. There is in it a sterling realism, a manly, 
 quick settlement of accounts. Their world- 
 mission has been to witness for the intrinsical- 
 ity, the self-sufficiency of right, against every 
 sort of spiritual dodge and shift, and deus ex 
 machina. 
 
 The Jewish Scriptures are shot through from 
 beginning to end with this idea. It is the prin- 
 ciple that grips the Old Testament with the 
 New, and co-ordinates their seeming contradic- 
 tions. Right, in the Bible, is never a bitter 
 thing, which, if you will take you shall have 
 sweet things for bonus. The right of the Jew- 
 ish Scriptures is always sweet and desirable, 
 and proves itself as it goes. In the Old Testa- 
 ment are manna, milk and honey, purple and 
 
 82 
 
The Religion of Democracy. 
 
 fine lineo, flock? and herds and length of days 
 in the New Testament there are other and dif- 
 ferent things that it takes more of a man to 
 come up with ; but there is never anywhere a 
 suspended payment or a getting ahead of God, 
 no works of supererogation, no meritorious serv- 
 ices, no honors or titles, no ribbons or medals, 
 no extraneous glory, no prize money. One 
 plants and digs and gets corn and wine, but not 
 testimonials or promotions. The blessings and 
 cursings do not count against the law ; every- 
 thing goes to its own place. 
 
 The faith of the Bible is not a conviction 
 about God, a conclusion stubbornly stuck to, 
 or dictated by authority. It is not a convic- 
 tion at all; it is a willingness, a resolution to 
 take risk that this world really is at bottom 
 what it ought to be, and that it can in its very 
 nature fulfill the heart's longing. Jesus spoke 
 with authority to the Jews, precisely because 
 he spoke from this ground of the intrinsic and 
 elemental, and did not speak as the authorities 
 did. It would have been different in the Fu- 
 (/l^ rum or. Areopagus among the worshipers of 
 an emperor or the partisans of philosophers. 
 There were more Pharisees in Rome or in Ath- 
 ens than there were in Jerusalem, more men 
 with an obsession, more victims of an ideal. 
 
 ^3 
 
The Religion of Democracy. 
 
 The excellence of the Jews was their superior 
 sanity and earth-titness. It was by no accident 
 that the typical modern man was born a Jew, 
 and that he spoke not to the people whose inspi- 
 rations were the exquisite, wistful imagining 
 of Homer or Virgil, but to those whose poems 
 were full of labor and migrations and patient 
 waiting, of the laying out of the land, the rear- 
 ing of children, and the acquisition of flocks 
 and herds. The great men of Jewish literature 
 were neither priests nor soldiers, but economists 
 and men of affairs — Abraham, Isaac and Ja- 
 cob. And these were admired not for their 
 performances — their fame abashed nobody — but 
 for their method, their faith which was under- 
 stood to be equally available for all. Thus caste 
 was excluded with the sentimentalities of hero 
 worship and the blind devotions of royalty. 
 Men were put in possession of themselves, and 
 the way was cleared for the evangel of modern 
 democracy. 
 
 The Jewish people were the religious people 
 par excellence, simply because they did not 
 make religion a specialty, and did not occupy 
 themselves with vain questions concerning the 
 immortality of the soul. The progress of relig- 
 ion throughout the ages has consisted in with- 
 drawing men's minds from another world to 
 
 84 
 
The Religion of Democracy. 
 
 this; it is the passing of the hope of immortal- 
 ity into the present sense of eternity. 
 
 Materialism is the raw material of religion. 
 In all times the enemy of faith has been, not 
 carnality and world liness, but a strained and 
 distempered ideality — a longing for a mystical 
 or artificial world-order whose law should be 
 other than the law of the present world— a 
 pruriency of ecclesiastic or imperialistic ambi- 
 tion. The defenders of the faith have made it 
 hard to believe in God ; and the champions of 
 an imperial order have cast us into a wilderness 
 of politics. The cruelest men have been the 
 makers of empires, as Napoleon and Philip II. 
 
 of Spain — excepting only the makers of 
 churches, as Torquemada and Calvin. God 
 will have sons.' And the twentieth century 
 belongs neither to the priests nor to the poli- 
 ticians. 
 
 X. — The mission of democracy is to put down 
 the rule of the mob. In monarchies and aris 
 tocracies it is the mob that rules. It is puer- 
 ile to suppose that kingdoms are made by 
 kings. The king would do nothing if the mob 
 did not throw up its cap when the king rides 
 by. The king is consented to by the mob 
 because of that in him which is mob-like. The 
 
The Religion of Democracy. 
 
 mob loves glory and prizes; so does the king. 
 If he loved beauty and justice, the mob would 
 shout for him while the fine words were sound- 
 ing in the air ; but he could never celebrate a 
 jubilee or establish a dynasty. When the 
 crowd gets ready to demand justice and beauty, 
 it becomes a democracy and has done with 
 
 kings. 
 
 The crowd is protoplasmic; it is the raw ma- 
 terial of humanity. It is in process of being 
 made; it has not yet acquired status as maker. 
 It is passive and yields to every suggestion. 
 It wishes, but hardly wills. For the most part, 
 indeed, it follows the suggestions of nature and 
 the immanent God. It performs marvelous 
 feats of wisdom and devotion, because of its 
 utter receptivity. It makes languages, invents 
 v7orils whose insight surpasses all philosophy, 
 suffers prodigies of toil and fights great bat- 
 tles. But it is capable also of every infamy and 
 atrocity if conjured thereto in the name of pa- 
 triotism, liberty, or any other woU-sounding 
 
 word. 
 
 The crowd, touched with morbid ideality, be- 
 comes the mob. A mob is the crowd corrupted 
 by Tinrealizable abstractions. The September 
 massacres in Paris and St. Bartholomew's day 
 are corollaries of the divine right of kings and 
 
 86 
 
The Religion of Democracy. 
 
 priests. A slum is the reflection— io a puddle 
 —of the dilettanteism of drawing rooms and 
 the cant of sectarian churches ; as a museum 
 of horrors is of like inspiration with a charity 
 ball. Both make a pomp of misery and shame. 
 
 XI. — Psychologically speaking, it is the 
 definition of the old regime that therein the 
 practical understanding which proceeds from 
 the will is subordinated to the faculty of pass- 
 ive thinking— call it intuition, cognition, reflec- 
 tion, abstraction, pure reason, as you like— 
 which proceeds from the emotions, from that in 
 a man wherein he is moved, but is not a 
 mover. The strife of the ages is to get this 
 order reversed, to master the thinking that re- 
 flects by the thinking that grapples with things 
 and creates— the thinking that conceives ideals, 
 by the thinking that achieves them. 
 
 The loftiest thing in a man is not his pure 
 reason; it is in this that he draws nearest 
 to the primal, passive, dream state of the un- 
 differentiated crowd, and to the mind and 
 instinct of animals. A man is a man not be- 
 cause his mind reflects the world with ideal 
 variations; the mind of a dog does that. He 
 growls in his dreams to prove himself capable 
 of abstract and conceptual thinking. And 
 
The Religion of Democracy. 
 
 every donkey is a master of inductive science 
 and argues of carrots in general from particular 
 carrots. A man is a man not because of his per- 
 cepts or his concepts, but because he under- 
 stands the world somewhat, believes in it, and 
 will improve it. 
 
 To this general issue runs the monumental 
 demonstration of Immanuel Kant, that unwit- 
 ting expounder of revolutionary, democratic 
 dialectic, the Copernicus of social philosophy, 
 who, walking his prim, punctual way in his 
 Konigsberg garden has set the world a-spin- 
 ning and turned things upside down. Civiliza- 
 tion waits for the practical understanding to 
 answer back and corroborate the reason and to 
 fulfill the heart's desire. It is the response of 
 the Son of God to the summons of the Father. 
 From this proceed all proper human enterprise 
 and wisdom. It is the essential human mind. 
 The wa}^ of intellect is in labor and self-denial, 
 the striving energy of creation. The typical 
 act of intellect is an act of justice or the fash- 
 ioning of a thing that is beautiful; and its ax- 
 iom is the plasticity of all materials to what is 
 best. 
 
 XII. — But the old regime — the regime of re- 
 flection, tradition, culture — is at the mercy of 
 
The Religion of Democracy. 
 
 the mob because its axiom is that things are in- 
 evitably what they are; and it has nothing to 
 offer to the god -thirst of the people but a swoon 
 or a glory charm. The sway of ' 'pure reason" is^ 
 free swing for fanaticism and every fine frenzy. ^^ 
 It is also the condition of solid, established tyr- 
 anny, and the supremacy of dogma. It makes 
 smooth the way for the strut of the pedant, the 
 superciliousness of science for its own sake, and 
 art for the sake of art. It is the rule of princes, 
 priests, aristocrats, and sentimentalists. It is 
 the rule of the mob, because the mob is in its 
 rulers. The man that feels himself endowed 
 with exclusive and peculiar rights to be royal, 
 noble, religious, artistic or scientific is a vision- 
 ary ; the rapture and fanaticism of the mass is 
 in him. He is not yet integrated and individ- 
 ualized ; he has yet to become a self-governing 
 person, a poet, an artist, a man of the people. 
 
 XIII. — The man of the modern spirit refuses 
 to rule the people; he would rather die than do 
 it. He gives his life that the people may rule 
 themselves. He will not raise a flag, pronounce 
 a shibboleth, or preach a crusade. He will not 
 drive the people mad with a fine sentiment, or 
 kill his enemies with an abstraction. He does 
 not care for clans or gangs, for the union of 
 
The Religion of Democracy. 
 
 labor, the commnnism of capital, or for any 
 other kind of mobbery. We will make the 
 masses men. He has set his heart not upon 
 solidarity — the union of men in interest and 
 sentiment — but upon unanimity, the union in 
 faith and will ; and he will dissolve every bulk 
 and corporation that withstands him until he 
 shall arrive there. 
 
 90 
 
The Religion of Democracy. 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 THE SOVEREIGNTy OF THE PEOPLE. 
 
 I. — To say that the sovereignty is in the peo- 
 ple is the same as to say that the Kingdom of 
 God is within you — which is the creed of the^ 
 religion of democracy. It requires that every 
 man shall be his own taskmaster, and it is the 
 negation of every external and conventional au- 
 thority. The life of government is force, and 
 when a democratic man uses force he takes a 
 personal responsibility, and will not shelter 
 himself behind a governmental corporation. 
 In that there is no sovereignty ; the sovereignty 
 is in the man. The justification of force is its 
 justice; there is no longer any other available 
 sanction. It is no longer necessary to be patri- 
 otic, or what is called in the cant of courtiers, 
 loyal, but it is necessary to do what to you 
 seems human, and to meet God. There is no 
 power in the state to shrive you ; how then dare 
 you do the bidding of the state? 
 
 9X 
 
 ■"«^ — — - ■ 
 
The Religion of Democracy. 
 
 This fiction of governmental sovereignty — 
 snag of the old regime — sticks fast here in the 
 soil of democracy; but it must, at whatever cost 
 of sweat and blood, be rooted out. Vicksburg 
 and Gettysburg have given their witness for 
 the sovereignty of the people; and so, we trust, 
 have Manila and Santiago de Cuba. 
 
 We have no right in the Spanish islands but 
 human rights, and the sovereignty of the Span- 
 ish state has withstood us. But what have the 
 people cared for that? Over the ruins of the 
 Spanish state sovereignty the guns of the Amer- 
 ican people have saluted the enfranchised citi- 
 zens of Spain. The people must do what is 
 necessary to make this message good, though 
 every gibbering ghost of European political 
 witchcraft should rise up and menace in the 
 way. For we have a greeting also for the peo- 
 ple of Russia and France, the people of Eng- 
 land, Italy, Germany and Austria; we have 
 guns for a royal salutation to all the awaken- 
 ing peoples of the world. But Americans who 
 talk of empire know not what manner of spirit 
 they are of. 
 
 II. — They dream also who suppose that the 
 Civil War was fought over a question of geog- 
 raphy, like the old dynastic feuds. America 
 
 'J% 
 
The Religion of Democracy. 
 
 did not spend a million lives of men for the 
 sake of transferring the sovereignty of state 
 from Richmond to Washington. The Civil 
 War was the revolt of the people against the 
 priests of politics; it defied the constitution 
 and flouted every rite of legalism to free slaves. 
 The Civil War was a revolution. It was fol- 
 lowed, like every other revolution wrought in 
 violence, by a recoil, a counter-revolution ; and 
 the old political superstition has thriven like a 
 ghoul on the graves of the revolters. 
 
 Treason? — that is a word to be written by the 
 side of heresy iu the catalogue of crime. Both 
 are relics of the old regime. A man may still 
 be a rascal and a liar, but leze majesty? — it is 
 unintelligible. If you run counter to the crowd 
 you may be done to death, as in the old times, 
 but we will not damn you by law. We do not 
 pass bills of attainder any more, or bestow bless- 
 ings and curses in statutes. There can be in a 
 democracy no such thing as the crime of trea- 
 son, unless indeed it be such to attempt to set 
 up, over against the sovereignty of the people, a 
 governmental corporation to keep their con- 
 sciences. On the day that it ceased to be right 
 to do a thing on the sole grouud that the priest 
 or the prince commanded it, the crime of trea- 
 son and the crime of heresy became alike ab- 
 
 93 
 
 r\ 
 
The Religion of Democracy. 
 
 surd. If John must judge for himself on peril 
 of his soul, it is hardly reasonable to excommu- 
 nicate him for judging against the crowd. 
 
 The Revised Statutes of the United States 
 make it treason for an American to say any- 
 thing to any foreign man and stranger that 
 might make it harder for the American govern- 
 ment to do whatever it may have in its mind 
 to do. But the Revised Statutes are to be 
 again revised. 
 
 Democracy lifts up its Standard against both 
 Guelph and Ghibelline, and sees not much 
 difference between the politics of Ultramon- 
 tanes and the Ultramontanism of politics. 
 
 III. — The radical idea of the sovereignty of 
 government is unquestionable right and un- 
 contiollable power lodged in some person or 
 corporation whereunto the people must and 
 ought to yield obedience. It is the product of a 
 refined ecclesiastical philosophy, and by subtle 
 implications it links to the temporal a kind of 
 spiritual authority. It grew up out of the me- 
 diaeval strife between Pope and Emperor, and 
 reached its full bloom and perfection after Prot- 
 estantism had bereft the people of their former 
 spiritual masters. It is not necessarily asso- 
 ciated with the divine right of kings; the di- 
 
 94 
 
The Religion of Democracy. 
 
 vine right of parliaments, and popular majori- 
 ties have served as well— jnst as Protestant 
 church councils have served as well as the Pope 
 to settle orthodoxy and punish heretics. 
 
 Of course the freshness has gone now from 
 the bloom of the thing; and the sovereignty of 
 the State to-day is only a faded remnant of 
 what it has been in the past. It has become 
 difficult to explain; the doctors of law write 
 voluminous chapters about it, without making 
 the matter clear. However, a historical prin- 
 ciple may live on for a while, though the brains 
 be out of it. 
 
 The practical effect of the tradition is the 
 current theory of national solidarity which 
 makes it disgraceful, if not a crime, for a citizen 
 to dissent from the majority in any matter con- 
 cerning the people that live outside the charmed 
 circle of the national lot. Time was when such 
 a notion was an ingenuous superstition; but it 
 is difficult now to let it pass under that descrip- 
 tion. As a policy it is reactionary and anachro- 
 nistic, and r.s a sentiment it seems to be cant. 
 
 This en-bloc theory of nationality makes the 
 government responsible for the opinion and de- 
 portment of every citizen, on the good old-time 
 principle—explicitly invoked by Washington 
 and the fathers, with quotations from Vattel 
 
 95 
 
The Religion of Democracy. 
 
 and the pundits — that theqgovernment is sov- 
 ereign and the people subject, which is contrary 
 to the fact as we understand it at the present 
 day. Hence have come all the complexities of 
 our neutrality laws, whereby the courts have 
 arrived at length at the conclusion, worthy 
 of the casuistry of mediaeval schoolmen, that, 
 whereas, an American patriot may with a clear 
 conscience arm and -equip a ship in an Ameri- 
 can port and sail away and sell it to a bellig- 
 erent — providing ahvays he do it strictly in the 
 way of trade, and to turn a penny — it is, on the 
 other hand, a felony to furnish a hod of coal if 
 you do it for love of a cause. 
 
 IV. — The logic of national solidarity is a 
 Chinese wall with stupidity and stoppage of 
 the mail. Certainly without such helps it be- 
 comes impossible to keep peace between the na- 
 tions. National solidarities, when they are per- 
 mitted to meet, are mutually repellent and 
 antagonistic. Loj^alty becomes a synonym for 
 moral lawlessness, the welter and confusion of 
 irrational war. Beati possidentes is the law^ 
 of nations, and diplomacy is a ruthless game. 
 There is room in this world for not more than 
 one sovereign and interiorly stolid state; but 
 as suspicion breeds suspicion, so this sovereign- 
 
 96 
 
The Religion of Democracy. 
 
 ty acd solidarity begets a monster to destroy 
 it. In America the natural gravitaticn of 
 State sovereignty is to United States soveveign- 
 ty ; thence the road would lie to Anglo-Saxon- 
 dom or Pan-Americandom, and so forth, until 
 half the world should fall heavily upon the 
 other half, and everything that is precious 
 should be broken to pieces. After that we 
 might begin the round again, and so on— -world 
 without end. But since this sovereignty of State 
 cannnot love its enemies it never can save the 
 
 world. 
 
 Democracy pays only a passing and provi- 
 sional respect to the metes and bounds of na- 
 tionalities. Blood is truly thicker than water; 
 the nations are all of one blood, and rivers and 
 oceans cannot divide them. 
 
 The people will have governments, as many 
 as may be convenient and for as long a time as 
 they are useful to defend the lives of the weak 
 and the property of the poor, to arrest the rob- 
 bers, run the mails, and make the cities glori- 
 ous; but the people will not have sovereign gov- 
 ernments for long. There was perhaps a time 
 when devotion to the tribe was the way of the 
 soul, leading to virtue and the humanities. 
 Perhaps there was a time when the worship of 
 a piece of land to the disparagement of the rest 
 
 97 
 
The Religion of Democracy. 
 
 of the earth was economizable to moral ends. 
 But that is past; it is not good — it is not in 
 honesty possible to follow a tribe after one has 
 met and known the brave men and sweet 
 women of other tribes. And now there can be 
 no holy or unholy ground, since after all we 
 have left the sepulcher of the man of the mod- 
 ern world in the hands of the unbelievers. 
 
 The augurs of the political superstition may 
 take their rolejau serieux; but the people nudge 
 one another as they pass them in the streets. A 
 few more battles fought from habit and momen- 
 tum, and European armies that confront each 
 other with so grim and threatening an aspect 
 will laugh out loud at the credulity of their 
 masters, and fling themselves into each other's 
 arms. 
 
 V. — The democracy of the new day does not 
 despise government as such, or hold it under 
 suspicion. It is not to be defined by any of the 
 traditional theories of political liberty. It does 
 not accept the doctrinaireism of Thomas Jef- 
 ferson, nor does it philosophize with Stuart 
 Mill. The liberty for which it strives is not a 
 negation, the mere absence of restraint; it ia 
 the expansion and elevation of life in the real- 
 ization of beauty and justice. And it would 
 
 98 
 
The Relig-ion of Democracy. 
 
 cook the people's food and wash their clothes 
 by law, if liberty and justice should require it. 
 It feels DO shrinking from the use of force; its 
 God is the God of energy and insistence, and 
 His compulsions are in their way as good as His 
 gifts and graces. 
 
 Democratic government is the concurrence of 
 the most forceful and effective persons in so- 
 ciety to the ends of beauty and justice. So 
 long as the most forceful persons do not care 
 for these things but prefer glory and privilege, 
 democratic government is impossible, and we 
 are left to the rule of an aristocracy of politi- 
 cians and promoters, the dreariest aristocracy, 
 on the whole, that the world has ever seen. 
 Yet unquestionably these are, as yet, the most 
 forceful persons, else they would not have their 
 
 way. 
 
 Not what he can get by it, but what he would 
 cheerfully lose for it, is the measure of a man's 
 love of justice, and myriads of justice-seekers 
 for the sake of the profits could never found or 
 enforce a democratic government. They are 
 wax in the hands of the politicians and promo- 
 ters, because their spokesmen can be bought. 
 Money rules because men are for sale. The 
 gist of democratic government is the self-gov- 
 erning of the governors, and the warrant of 
 
 99 
 
The Religion of Democracy. 
 
 their office is voluntary servitude. They 
 must share the privation and exposure of the 
 workers, and the spring of their power shall be 
 that they breed in the people a love of justice. 
 The people will love justice when they see jus- 
 tice — when they behold the beauty of it in the 
 faces of men who prefer it to a privilege. The 
 sovereignty of the people can be borne only by 
 men who are of the people — men who will not 
 have anything that all others may not have on 
 the same terms. 
 
 VI. — Strictly speaking, democracy is the de- 
 spair of politics and the destruction of politi- 
 cians. The body of politics is privilege. Since 
 civil government began one class has always 
 preyed upon another, and that through the exer- 
 cise of privilege legally guaranteed. The prob- 
 lem of the politicians has always been very 
 simple in principle, although exceedingly com- 
 plex in its practical presentment because of the 
 infinite variation of circumstances. The prob- 
 lem is : How to make the social privileges co- 
 incide with the natural powers; or, in other 
 words: How to so arrange matters that the so- 
 cial advantages shall tranquilly rest with those 
 who have the natural power to maintain them. 
 
 If the sense of justi<3e could be wholly elimi- 
 
 100 
 
The Religion of Democracy. 
 
 natedfrom the human soul the problem of prac- 
 tical politics would be vastly simplified— the 
 most stable state being that which is most sor- 
 did. But the sense of justice never has been 
 eliminated, not even from the souls of politi- 
 cians, and so the political problem, though 
 commonly admitting of some kind of tempo- 
 rary adjustment, has become increasingly dif- 
 ficult, with the rise and prevalence of the mod- 
 ern spirit. 
 
 Among what are called the progressive peo- 
 ples, the natural powers have never even for a 
 moment been made to exactly coincide with the 
 social privileges, because with the people the 
 natural powers are in perpetual flux and 
 change. Kature, in its long, slow processes, is 
 on the side of justice, and so is forever bring- 
 ing both privileges and politics to confusion. 
 The most successful politicians are those most 
 sensible of this flow of things; and they have 
 devised systems adaptive and flexible, pro- 
 claiming in one form or another a career for 
 talent, by which is meant a progressive appor- 
 tionment of privileges according to the muta- 
 tions of power. But the intrinsic justice of 
 things has outwitted even these, through the 
 operation of the principle, little regarded by 
 politicians, that privilege is in its very nature 
 
 101 
 
The Religion of Democracy. 
 
 weakening, that it tends to giddiness and ab- 
 straction, taking the vef^ve and veracity out of 
 men and rendering them incapable of dealing 
 effectively with the world as it really is. 
 
 However, by one turn and another, by shift 
 and compromise, and high exercise in a deli- 
 cate art of balancing, the politicians have kept 
 the saddle and have arrived upon the present 
 scene. The point is that the continuation of 
 their career depends upon the perpetuation of 
 pri^vilege. The destroyers of privilege shall 
 unhorse the politicians and put an end to poli- 
 tics, clearing the way for a business-like admin- 
 istration by an improved kind of business men. 
 
 But privilege is the passion of the mob. The 
 strength of it is not only in the oppressors, but 
 also in the madness and folly of the oppressed. 
 The'soui of it is sentimentality, the impostures 
 of Chauvinism, sectionalism and party loyalty, 
 the repulsion for labor, and the desire to escape 
 from the reality of the world. The destroyers 
 of privilege must then be of stout fiber to hold 
 the people to veracity, tough campaigners for 
 whom a knapsack and a canteen will easily 
 suffice. The administrators of democratic gov- 
 ernment must be canny men, craftsmen, ar- 
 tists and men of affairs, that can fix their minds 
 upon the concrete, cut through the wilderness 
 
 102 
 
The Religion of Democracy. 
 
 of fine sentiments, and bureaucratic formulas, 
 and get things done. 
 
 VIL— Democratic government is the stand- 
 ing together of a multitude of men who could 
 each stand alone. Its business is to balk the 
 mob of the fraudulent gains of a sordid good- 
 fellowship and to brace them to moral independ- 
 ence. As the scheme of the creation is the in- 
 tegrating of free souls out of the soul of God, 
 and as God thrusts forth his child and veils His 
 own face with ever thicker veils, waiting with 
 infinite restraint for the man to act from within 
 himself in original love, so democratic govern- 
 ment must reflect the austerity of God ; must 
 break up the solidarity of passion and pelf to 
 the ends of unanimity— the voluntary co-opera- 
 tion of free persons. This austerity of govern- 
 ment is in its nature temporary and provisional; 
 its best success is to make itself unnecessary ; 
 but while it lasts it is force. It is a fond say- 
 ing that government derives its just powers 
 from the consent of the governed. Just gov- 
 ernment exists by the force of the self-govern- 
 ing in repression of the unjust. When the 
 governed consent to justice government will 
 have served its time and can pass into the free 
 and unanimous co-operation of the people. 
 
 103 
 
The Religion of Democracy. 
 
 To say that government in America is 
 corrupt is to say that it is soft. It must be 
 steel-fibered if it would get its work done and 
 pass into fraternity. The mob would make it 
 an alma mater, a tender providence. And so 
 we are ruled by sentimentality and the stomach 
 — which is plutocracy. 
 
 VIII. — So long as the shibboleths of democ- 
 racy are on every tongue, rich men cannot com- 
 mand the mass of the people in their own per- 
 sons as rich men, surrounded as they are by 
 the externals of luxury and privilege. If they 
 rule they must do it by deputy. The necessary 
 form of plutocracy is the rule of a supreme 
 good fellow — a boss. The deputy must stand 
 close to the majority and greet the children in 
 the street. There must be in him a mixture of 
 shrewdness and simplicity — shrewdness to fol- 
 low, with unerring instinct of profit, the intri- 
 cate lines of a thousand interests and simplicity 
 that he may seem even to himself a kind of 
 great-heart Robin Hood mulcting the rich for 
 the sake of the poor, whereas his real ofiSce is 
 the opposite of that. 
 
 The government is corrupt because the people 
 are thralled in the traditional sentiment of gov- 
 ernmental sovereignty. It is because they try 
 
 104 
 
The Religion of Democracy. 
 
 to make the State a nourishing mother— which 
 in the nature of things it cannot be— that it be- 
 comes instead a sort of vampire. The people 
 would get justice if they loved justice; it is 
 because they love privilege that they are plun- 
 dered. The government is cruel and violent 
 because it is weak and sentimental. We have 
 called in the police to compel each other to do 
 good, and so we are bullied with bludgeons. 
 It is necessary to discredit the political theories 
 of Caius Gracchus, to abolish the public cir- 
 cuses and the bread dole, in order that the peo- 
 ple may not starve. 
 
 The only hope of municipal or other govern- 
 mental reform is that the people shall come to 
 believe in God and to hate and destroy privi- 
 lege. But the people will not submit to be re- 
 buked for their love of privilege by pampered 
 men and representatives of a caste. 
 
 Crusades by scribes and doctors against the 
 publicans and'harlots, the gilded league of schol- 
 ars in politics listed in bustling combat against 
 the Prince of the Power of the Air— these 
 things make passing contribution to the gen- 
 eral fund of humor, but they do not help the 
 people to refrain themselves or to believe in 
 God. 
 
 105 
 
The Religion of Democracy. 
 
 IX. — Tragic comedy of the Tagal trench I 
 On one side stand the valiant little brown men, 
 newly wakened, starting up out of ages of sleep, 
 bearing stubborn, formidable arms to defend the 
 Natural "Rights of Men and the resounding prin- 
 ciples of the French Revolution a centurj^ be- 
 hind the clock ! On the other side thirty thou- 
 sand, and ever more and more, ingenuous boys 
 out of Yankeedom, suckled in these same theo- 
 ries and bred manfully up in the willful gospel 
 of pick-and-choose, are shooting in a grim, 
 nonchalant, disengaged way — not because they 
 approve the action, but because of supposed 
 irresistible, divine decrees uttered out of some 
 Rocky Mountain Horeb. In the background are 
 a great many rapt patriots in prayer, not a few 
 marketmen and promoters, pressing for the in- 
 terests of civilization — and an English poet 
 singing psalms. Still farther in the back- 
 ground in clear air, stand a million men or so 
 who do not wholly misunderstand. These are 
 tracing out a thesis fraught with amazement 
 and discomfiture for the conservative and com- 
 placent classes who make war for the extension 
 of commerce and the enlargement of property 
 rights. 
 
 The thesis is that since it is to be admitted 
 that God did not give the Philippine Islands to 
 
The Religion of Democracy. 
 
 the Filipinos, to tbe exclusion of the general in- 
 terests of the human race, so also it is to be 
 asserted that all material possessions, even in 
 Europe and America, are held subject to the like 
 considerations. It is coming to light in an un- 
 expected way that property is not the datum and 
 foundation of society but the institution and 
 creature thereof. It appears that the whole 
 earth and the seas belong not to the rich, to the 
 capable or the legitimate, but to men, to human- 
 ity, and that the supreme source of human law 
 is not nature or necessity, but a certain sublime, 
 sweet reasonableness wherein alone it is pos- 
 sible for individuals to escape from their awful 
 isolation and to meet and understand one an- 
 other. 
 
 The nineteenth century has wrought for the 
 rights of property and the sovereignty of 
 states. Its grand preoccupation has been the 
 attempt to define the individual soul inmate- 
 rial terms^ to draw in the dust with a firm fin- 
 ger a sr.ored cincture around a Person. The 
 transcendental sovereignty of State and the 
 Sinaitic sacredness of property are pious inven- 
 tions made in the interest of this mathematical 
 definition of the soul— there was need of a Firm 
 Finger, and of Indelible Dust! The twentieth 
 century is to disclose the individual in bis 
 
 107 
 
The Religion of Democracy. 
 
 original and eternal franchise. It will be seen 
 that liberty does not rise up out of the ground, 
 but is born from above; that it is not derived 
 from a definition, and does not depend upon 
 stage machinery. 
 
 The Tagal trench is the last ditch of doctri- 
 naire democracy — the fainting century sinks 
 down here on the edge of the utmost West. 
 Here the empire of property plunges to the 
 verge. This tangle of contradictions at the place 
 where the sun both ends and begins his course 
 is the interrogation mark with which the pass- 
 ing century punctuates its period. The twen- 
 tieth century must answer with the proclama- 
 tion of a new affirmative. 
 
 Over against the rights of property and the 
 sovereignty of nationalities, the new century 
 will proclaim the rights and sovereignty of the 
 soul. There are no natural rights of men that 
 can stand against the spiritual rights of men. 
 It shall be shown that prop('.rty does not exist 
 in the nature of things; that no man can own 
 anything by mere natural rights — no, not his 
 own body. That property is authentically an 
 attribute of the regenerate, creative soul, and 
 that the only good title is one written in fur- 
 therance of the eternal equality and justice. 
 
 In the negation of all natural rights, the 
 
 108 
 
The Religion of Democracy. 
 
 Right is disclosed ; in the denial of every defini- 
 tion of liberty, liberty breaks its bonds and en- 
 ters into its infinite f ranch isement, and out of 
 the unmeasured assertion of a man's obligation 
 to universal society for the very texture and 
 quality of his flesh and bones, is born the sov- 
 ereign, individual souL 
 
 109 
 
The Religion of Democracy. 
 
 CHAPTER YII. 
 
 THE WORLD OF NEWS. 
 
 I. — The evangel of democracy shall convince 
 the people of the independence and self-gov- 
 ernment of God. The slavishness of the world 
 has made it hard to believe that God is free; 
 and the proclamation of the freedom of God 
 shall be the enfranchisement of the people. 
 
 It is a servile kind of science— the science of 
 lawyers and pedagogues — that makes God sub- 
 ject to laws ; who, then, is the God of God? Let 
 us worship Him! 
 
 The final guarantee of liberty is the assur- 
 ance in the people that the government of the 
 soul is of the soul and for the soul. The deep- 
 est thing in the religion of democracy is the be- 
 lief in the universality of the miraculous. The 
 defect of the miracle theories of the old 
 regime is that they are aristocratic ; they make 
 miracles a privilege and a monopoly, and God 
 a kind of Stuart king breaking the constitution 
 
 110 
 
The Relig-ion of Democracy. 
 
 for the pleasure of his courtiers and the confu- 
 sion of the commons. In their assertion of lib- 
 ert}' they do not go far enough to amount to 
 more than mutiny and whim. They show the 
 traditional miracles as flashes of light that 
 serve but to make the darkness felt. If God 
 has only so much of liberty, then Fate is strong 
 Indeed. 
 
 The modern world claims the miraculous on 
 an infinitely greater scale. The progress of 
 modern science is the confusion of all the ac- 
 cepted classifications and the abrogation of all 
 the established laws. It is perceived that every- 
 thing in nature runs and flows. There is no 
 such thing as finished formulas, and every dis- 
 covery is held open for revision. It is onlv the 
 sciolist that would say a last word. Tho prog- 
 ress of science is the repeal of ecclesiastical 
 dogma, because it is the repeal of all dogma— 
 the dogma of physics as of metaphysics. 
 
 Out of the widening experience and research 
 one persuasion grows and strengthens, rising 
 into a song of revelation and a profession of 
 faith. It is discovered that everything is rea- 
 sonable, that everything has relation to every 
 other thing, that everywhere is rhythm, and 
 measure, that the world answers back to the 
 unity of the mind, and is sane. 
 
 Ill 
 
The Religion of Democracy. 
 
 You will not say as a man of science that 
 gravitation will remain to-morrow just what 
 it is to-day, but only that you are persuaded 
 that if God changes that he will change every- 
 thing else in proportion. And doubtless, if the 
 soul of a child should stand in the way the 
 planets would pause and gravitation would 
 turn out. God will have a care that the mill 
 shall grind only ashes and bones. 
 
 II. — The happiness of the age is the discov- 
 ery that this is a world in which there is news. 
 What pedant shall say that the laws of the 
 universe are now just what they were in the 
 former age of steam, or when the ichthyosaurus 
 paddled the secondary seas? Who knows any- 
 thing about that? It is an extremely improba- 
 ble surmise obviously designed to put God into 
 a corner. It is prompted by the theological 
 habit which is still strong among us. More 
 likely the laws are different every day — if only 
 to meeken the pedants and freshen the morn- 
 ing. Enough to know that God does not put 
 to intellectual confusion a living man facing 
 the living world. 
 
 It is the mournfulest Calvinism to say that 
 the universe of to-day was necessarily involved 
 in that of the day before yesterday, or neces- 
 
 112 
 
The Religion of Democracy. 
 
 sarily evolved out of it. The theory of evolu- 
 tion which happens at this moment to be most 
 widespread, should be preached only with a 
 snufae, or in a Genevan gown. The logic of fa- 
 talism is despotism; left to itself the current 
 dogma of predestinarian evolution would balk 
 the hope of democracy and destroy the liberties 
 of the earth. But it is not left to itself ; the 
 spirit of the age protests. .... ;, 
 
 The exaltation of the modern spirit is m the 
 assurance that there is always a better world at 
 hand The axioms of yesterday are not the 
 axioms of to-day. At last it becomes possible 
 to believe in the utter efEacement of an evil and 
 the forgiveness of a sin. The barnacled insti- 
 tutions of society break loose from their moor- 
 ings and are committed to the very streana of 
 change We shut the book of statics, and at^ 
 tend only to the dynamic laws, the principles 
 of an illimitable orderliness and beautifulness 
 and the demands of a progressive justice that ' 
 reaches to tho uttermost love. If anybody says: 
 -Let us stop here, this is the final right of the 
 matter,- he becomes to-morrow an obstacle 
 and a clog. It is perceived that every truth, 
 the propagation of which is endowed and estab- 
 lished is a folly on its face, and necessarily 
 false. Pay as you go, is the principle of health, 
 
 113 
 
The Religion of Democracy. 
 
 and if the preaching will not pay its keep, and 
 if nobody stands ready to give money and life 
 for it, then l^t it rest; it is not true to-day. 
 This year's fruit must be nourished from this 
 year's sap. The charter of every association 
 that shall be other than a hindrance and a dis- 
 couragement must be worded in the future 
 tense, and the getting together of good people as 
 such is degrading and a public nuisance, 
 
 III. — In a world in which the phenomenal 
 life of men is held by so slight a tenure, and is 
 constantly exposed to mishaps and the assaults 
 of enemies, it is impossible for a man to be a 
 minister of justice if he is afraid to die. The 
 world is managed at last by the most fearless, 
 by the people that are most deeply rooted in 
 the substratum of things, and least afraid of 
 accidents. A civilization of exquisite refine- 
 ment, with all the appliances of wealth and 
 culture, lies at the mercy of the barbarians 
 across the border, if the citizens are more 
 afraid of death than the barbarians are. And 
 a luxurious and skeptical aristocracy is easily 
 brought to confusion by the uprising of a peo- 
 ple that believe in God. The final test as to 
 which of two things shall remain standing and 
 which shall fall, is which can offer the more 
 
 114 
 
The Religion of Democracy. 
 
 martyrs — for which do men in greater num- 
 bers stand ready to give their lives? 
 
 The conventional statement of the case is 
 that the world is ruled by force, which is true 
 enough in a way ; but it is equally and more 
 especially true that the world is ruled by faith. 
 For the power behind the throne of force is 
 fearlessness— which is faith described by a ne- 
 gation. 
 
 The universe does not drift aimless, and the 
 great issues are not settled wrong. If the bar- 
 barians conquered Rome, it was because there 
 was more faith and fearlessness in Goth and 
 Vandal than there was on the other side ; and 
 because the coarsest kind of faith seems to be 
 worth more to the general uses than the finest 
 kind of satire. In the long rnn the economy 
 of the world is an economy of courage, and the 
 heaviest battalions are heaviest because they 
 are willingest to die. In their origin aris- 
 tocracies have generally owed their power to 
 their pluck, and they have kept their places as 
 long as they have been more ready than the 
 majority to put their lives in pawn — but not 
 much longer. 
 
 Civilization finds its life in losing it. Its 
 organs do their work well in the degree in 
 which they take the eternal for granted and are 
 
 115 
 
The Religion of Democracy. 
 
 moved by fearlessness of death and disregard 
 of the inevitable risks and losses. The har- 
 mony and grandeur of material structure, the 
 common conveniences, the elegance of living 
 and the charm of civic beauty, these it appears 
 can be got not by a soft and sensuous people 
 rapt in the pursuit of happiness, but only by a 
 people of blood and iron, v^hose happiness does 
 not depend upon their conveniences, and who 
 do not shrink from death. 
 
 It thus becomes evident that the groundwork 
 of civilization is in the unseen, and that the 
 Master-builder of the City of Justice is Fear- 
 lessness of Death. 
 
 This fearlessness is the beginning of science 
 and art. It makes the engines of manufacture 
 and war; it can plow, build ships and rail- 
 roads, and plan new social constitutions. It is 
 the awe and majesty of human life — the mys- 
 tery and the magnificence; it makes and super- 
 sedes the rituals of all religions, and it creates 
 the great poems and pictures. 
 
 IV. — From this standpoint it is seen that 
 neither Rome nor any other sectarian church is 
 qualified to set up that universal spiritual power 
 that is to exalt the world. The faith that can fur- 
 nish the energy of such an enterprise must be of 
 
 116 
 
The Religion of Democracy. 
 
 ■^Jd 
 
 the elemental kind, the faith of warriors, artists 
 and explorers, the faith of laborers and of illit- 
 erate and primitive men, the faith of Jesus— 
 and of children. 
 
 The work of the Church in the days of its in- 
 dispensable usefulness, its moral glory, was to 
 bring this brooding, latent faith to clear and 
 deliberate consciousness, that it might know itr 
 self and comprehend its destiny and that it 
 might, in the maturity of strenth, grapple with 
 the faithlessness, the moral cowardice, of the 
 antique civilizations and put them to perpetual 
 
 shame. . j ii x 
 
 The drift of antiquity was to put death out 
 of sight, and to degrade that elemental faith 
 that is exercised in fearlessness of death. It 
 sophisticated the primary life-issues and ob- 
 scured the significance of the primary facts of 
 existence, as that one must labor and that one 
 must die. The antique world did not very seri- 
 ously occupy itself with social reforms or the 
 practical achievement of Justice, though its lit- 
 erature teems with classics of Utopian specula- 
 tion Its passion was to escape from the world 
 of death and labor into a realm of harmony 
 and justice that was all too exclusively ideal. 
 
 Over against this futile aspiration the 
 Church raised up a working faith. But the 
 
 117 
 
The Religion of Democracy. 
 
 Child of the Church was greater than its foster- 
 mother; the Church could not itself fulfill the 
 promise of its faith. The ground plan of the 
 Church was not grand enough to contain and 
 accomplish that conscious, catholic faith whose 
 root is in the elemental trustfulness of a bar- 
 barian or a child, and whose fulfillment is uni- 
 versal, social revolution and the establishment 
 of civilization upon new and spiritual founda- 
 tions. The Church was incapable of such an 
 achievement because its framework, its polity, 
 cultus and discipline were wrought and elabo- 
 rated in contravention of the primordial princi- 
 ple of faith. Catholicism, as an institution and 
 system, was irreconcilable with Catholicism as 
 a moral ideal and a world-reforming purpose 
 —for the sufficient reason that the institution 
 and system were made of the stuff of the old 
 world that so needed to be reformed. The cul- 
 tus and dogma of Catholicism were an outcome 
 of Greek culture and Roman law ; the system 
 was conceived and worked out under the influ- 
 ences that had created, and that continued to 
 permeate the old world secular society, which 
 were in a general sense derived from the idea 
 that a man must make the most of himself—- 
 the idea in fine of the self-made man. 
 
 The scheme of Catholicism furnished a sys- 
 
 113 
 
The Religion of Democracy. 
 
 tern of delicate devices for improving and puri- 
 fying one's own soul and reaching up to God. 
 It was grounded in the prepossession that the 
 divinest attitude of the human spirit ia as of one 
 that stands tiptoe on the earth with hands and 
 eyes strained upward to a diviner world— 
 which was also the prepossession of Greek cul- 
 ture. Catholicism could not conquer or com- 
 prehend the earth because of its profound moral 
 abstraction ; its aim was not directed toward 
 the earth, but toward heaven. Its strained ef- 
 fort to attain to the ideal became a corrup- 
 tion and scandal in the flesh, and an apostacy 
 from that elemental faith of plain men, which 
 takes God for granted and goes forth to set 
 things right upon the earth. 
 
 v.— In the Renaissance, the naive faith of 
 primitive Christianity became conscious that 
 the ecclesiastical cultus was an obstacle. The 
 essential faith of the Church made ready to 
 break its barriers and to undertake the radical 
 conversion of the society and the conquest of 
 the world. Faith was quickened into self-con- 
 sciousness by the antagonism of its opposites, 
 and rose up into the strength of the modern 
 spirit. The revival of letters was not a return 
 to Greece, but a conversion of Greek learning 
 
 xx9 
 
The Religion of Democracy. 
 
 i3 
 
 to the uses of faith and to the ends of a modern 
 civilization which claims all history and 
 achievement, and rejoices in all, and whose fra- 
 ternity reaches back. 
 
 The characteristic attitude of the faith of 
 modernity is that of one with firm-set feet and 
 forth-right eyes intent upon the beautilessness 
 of the world. Religion is ceasing to be thought 
 of as an aspiration after the divine, and is com- 
 ing to be nothing but sheer trust in God despite 
 all difficulties, a conception that seems both 
 primitive and unsophisticated, and also final 
 and scientific. The cultus of the churches, 
 their casuistries and spiritual calisthenics, their 
 elaborate means of grace and their striving, 
 rapturous prayers are of the old world — Hel- 
 lenic, without the measure and sincerity of the 
 Greek, and Hebraic without the sobriety and 
 realism of the Jew. They are the old world 
 minus what made the old world livable. The 
 spring of their intricate perversions is the feel- 
 ing that something — anything — everything 
 must be done to find out what the will of God 
 is; whereas the desire of God through tbe ages 
 seems to be that a man should come at length 
 to have a reasonable will of his own. This is 
 an idea that seems hardly to have dawned upon 
 the ecclesiastical mind, although the life of the 
 
 l;vO 
 
The Religion of Democracy. 
 
 secular world is aglow with the feeling that 
 liberty is a reality, that a liviog man can con- 
 ceive and execute designs that contain an ele- 
 ment of utter and absolute originality, and 
 that God will back up a good plan, even though 
 he may not have furnished, and indeed would 
 not furnish the specifications in advance. 
 
 The consciousness of freedom grows apace. 
 It is no longer possible to believe that God is 
 the author of the confusions of history or the 
 fearful iniquities of social institutions. We 
 perceive that we are jointly responsible with 
 Him for the present condition of the universe. 
 It appears that the providence of God is lim- 
 ited to making the best of every emergency so 
 far as may be done consistently with the liberty 
 and responsibility of men. And it by no means 
 follows that He established the existing 
 churches, states, law-codes, and commercial 
 customs because they exist. 
 
 Not only is it true that the world as it stands 
 to-day is not a theocracy, but it appears that 
 theocracy is not a thing to be desired— that God 
 will not have it so. The revelation of history 
 and of all experience is that God will not reign 
 over the people, but has set His heart upon it 
 that through faith in Him the people shall 
 reign over themselves. 
 
 1^1 
 
The Religion of Democracy. 
 
 The beginning of history is in theocracy ; but 
 democracy is the consummation. And all the 
 intermediate stages of confusion and bewilder- 
 ment, of misery and disappointment, are, it 
 would seem, better in the eyes of God, and 
 more desirable than the sway of unquestioned 
 goodness, and the smooth obedience of a puppet 
 world. 
 
 VI. — The reasonable object of devotion is dis- 
 closed not as a thing recondite and obscure, but 
 as the most obvious thing and what might have 
 been expected. The business of a man is to 
 carve into the substance of this visible world 
 the most excellent thing that — in the face of the 
 scanned and sifted facts— he can clearly think. 
 Probably there is nothing too good for God, 
 and everything is plastic to fine art and reform. 
 Though stupidity and fear beset the path with 
 difficulties, and make it bristle with menace, 
 still it is reasonable to insist that the thing most 
 practical is that w^hich is most humane, most 
 exalted and most just. It is hard to reform a 
 jail without getting into it, or to take off a tea 
 tax without a revolution ; there is an inertia of 
 well-meaning dullness that seems like fatality 
 — like the slow crunching of a traveler's bones 
 in the crack of a glacier. 
 
The Religion of Democracy. 
 
 But the traveler journeys on, for the traveler 
 is the soul. 
 
 VII. — It is a superficial judgment that this 
 is a sordid and God-forgetting age, because it 
 is occupied with questions of board and clothes, 
 and bent upon getting them settled right. If 
 the people were sordid and had lost faith in the 
 eternal justice, they would not risk their half 
 loaf on the dangerous chance of getting a whole 
 one. It has been finely said that a gentleman is 
 one who stands ready to lay down his life for 
 little things, and that is the temper of democ- 
 racy. 
 
 If the people are willing to risk everything 
 for the sake of a circumstance, it is because they 
 have an unformulated faith in the reality of 
 those everlasting arms that sustain defeated 
 causes. The feeling that is abroad that one may 
 afford the luxury of living and dying for a de- 
 cency, comes of a perception, more or less clear, 
 that this visible flow of things is a kind of hier- 
 oglyph of an eternal order, and that justice and 
 beauty written in this wax are somehow graven 
 in an adamant, and so are worth while. 
 
 It becomes an impertinence to expatiate upon 
 the misery of the poor— implying that an evil 
 thing might stand if only it were not iutolera- 
 
 123 
 
The Religion of Democracy. 
 
 ble. The right moment of reform does not fall 
 at the limit of endurance. We "will not be 
 ruled by sheer, infidel necessity; it is enough 
 that the thing is wrong. 
 
 It is the greatness of the age that it is en- 
 grossed in economics; that it sees in tangible 
 things wrought by the labor of men, sacra- 
 mental values, and the materials of religion. 
 This is the beginning of a new order of 
 things more beautiful and joyous than has 
 yet been seen on the earth; for how was it 
 possible to make the earth glorious while the 
 poets and artists stood gazing into heaven? 
 Now at length, after thousands of years of wist- 
 ful longings for another world, there is hope 
 that we may accept the situation and take time 
 to put the earth in order. It is not because this 
 earth is all, but because it is not all, and we 
 can afford to be liberal, and because democ- 
 racy has found a standing ground in the eter- 
 nal from which it can exert a tremendous lever- 
 age upon all the old social snags. 
 
 To bring justice and beauty upon the earth 
 in wisdom, freedom and fearlessness of death, 
 that is the whole ritual and service of the reli- 
 gion of the incarnation. Its theology is that a 
 man is a son of God, and that his work is world- 
 making as God's work is. 
 
 124 
 
The Religion of Democracy. 
 
 VIII.— That spiritual power— independent 
 and universal— which was the longing of the 
 Middle Ages, shall fulfill itself in the sover- 
 eignty of the peoples of the world, focused in 
 the heart of that people which has most of faith 
 in God, and is noost magnanimous for justice. 
 This is the plain vocation of the people of the 
 United States; there is to-day on the earth no 
 other people that can exemplify on a grand and 
 convincing scale the spiritual and sacrificial 
 principle of popular sovereignty. 
 
 It is said that the road of territorial exten- 
 sion and governmental aggrandizement would 
 be a new departure for the American people ; 
 but that is only superficially and technically 
 true. That road is a smooth, easy declivity, 
 trodden hard by all the world before us, a road 
 with whose trend we are ourselves, after all, 
 sufficiently familiar. The ideals that make for 
 bigness of government and vastness of territory 
 are the air we have breathed for a generation; 
 the matter of the exact frontier limit is a mat- 
 ter of detail, mainly interesting from the point 
 of view of professional politics and traditional 
 consistency. If the old ideals were to continue 
 with us, it would be unimportant whether or 
 not they should be applied to another island or 
 two. The rise and fall of nations is in the rise 
 
 125 
 
The Religion of Democracy. 
 
 and fall of the spirit that actuates them, and is 
 little affected by accidents of polity. 
 
 The matter of supreme interest to universal 
 history is whether America, having come to 
 the parting of the ways, shall choose according 
 to the old world fatality, the greatness of a gov- 
 ernment, and the expanded egotism of patriotic 
 pride or shall choose in unprecedented self- 
 denial the freedom of the peoples beyond her 
 boundaries. The latter way, and not the way 
 of a greater government, is a new departure 
 — a way fresh with the dew of the world's 
 morning, trodden by many persons from time 
 to time, but never yet by a people. 
 
 The choice is exigent. We cannot pause at 
 the parting of the ways and decide against both 
 alternatives. In the laws of morality every- 
 thing moves for better or worse. To settle back 
 as we were is the one thing utterly impossible. 
 The test that is to be required of the nation that 
 would be the leading spirit in the moral empire 
 of democracy is that it shall be willing to seem 
 less in order that other peoples may be more. 
 
 The rise of democracy as a universal spirit- 
 ual power would follow upon the rise of a na- 
 tion disinterestedly devoted to the cause of lib- 
 erty, a nation that should escape from itself, as 
 no nation has yet done, and live out into the 
 
 X2G 
 
The Religion of Democracy. 
 
 world. The basis of self-government at last is 
 simply self-denial, and the universal spiritual 
 power would be established on the day that a 
 great nation should set its face steadfastly to- 
 ward the City of Sacrificial Love. 
 
 But democracy is greater than any nation; 
 it may be balked, delayed, defeated ; but it is 
 unconquerable. The very life of the modern 
 world is in it, and though to-day only the chil- 
 dren should understand its secret it would cer- 
 tainly prevail. 
 
 It may be that the nation which is to be the 
 master spirit must be gathered out of the whole 
 family of nations — a kinship of justice and 
 equality, a comradeship whose hands reach 
 round the world. 
 
 The states grow hard and brittle, and the earth 
 growls small. The orhis terrarum bounded 
 by the equator to-day is smaller and easier to 
 compass than it was when it surrounded only 
 the Mediterranean lake. The difficulty is not to 
 compass it. When the whole earth pays tribute 
 to one's daily meals it is hard to keep up the 
 parochial illusions. The endeavor to consider 
 the affairs of one country without reference to 
 the affairs of other countries becomes a labored 
 abstraction, and a kind of trifling. 
 
 Certainly there is not a fence in the world 
 
 127 
 
The Religion of Democracy. 
 
 that will staod much pressure. Commerce is 
 on the side of universal democracy, and it is 
 irresistible in the long run, and will not miud a 
 custom or a prejudice any more than the tide will 
 mind a king. By and by, after the boundar es 
 have ceased to serve the money-lords and men 
 of bonds, who dominate the councils of what is 
 called the Concert of Powers, these will pool 
 their interests and wipe out, all the frontiers — 
 unless the people shall have arrived before 
 them, and destroyed the boundaries for other 
 purposes. Everywhere the hearts of the people 
 are achiijg with the expectation of release and 
 liberty; the way is prepared for the apostolate 
 of the religion of democracy; it cannot be long 
 before its priestless temples shall rise. 
 
 IX. — It is not that we are to look forward to 
 a finished and perfect social order. Perfection 
 is a hope that all nature exists to discourage; 
 and the charm of a beautiful thing or of a just 
 deed is that it is of infinite suggestion and eas- 
 ily transcends itself — leading one on and on. 
 
 What may be said of the religion of the incar- 
 nation is not that it will change the world to 
 happiness in a day, but that it will defeat the 
 tendency to collapse and drav; the world out of 
 that endless, desperate cycle of glory and decay 
 
 128 
 
The Religion of Democracy. 
 
 which hitherto has claimed the nations like a 
 fate, and tumbled all the clond-piercing Bahel- 
 towers in the dust; and that it will lay inde- 
 structible foundations for a civilization of im- 
 measurable and endless improvement. 
 
 The death of nations is in morbid ideality, an 
 ideality that feeds upon itself and forgets to 
 live. The aristocracies perish because they be- 
 come self-cultivating and cease to be creative, 
 and the governments are overthrown because 
 they dream of empire and neglect the common, 
 economic facts. 
 
 The religions of the world in general have af- 
 forded no availing remedy for this bathos of 
 history, this chronic tendency to anticlimax, 
 but have often tended rather to precipitate dis- 
 aster. At times they have seemed to infect the 
 earth like virulent diseases, because they have 
 spent themselves in stimulating their devotees in 
 spiritual culture and have despised art and re- 
 form. The unanimous persuasion of the spir- 
 itual specialists of every age and country that 
 God is all in all, and is therefore exclusively 
 responsible for things as they are, has been the 
 assurance of the fatalism of the privileged 
 classes, and has done more than the lusts of 
 the flesh to discourage repentance and prepare 
 the great social calamities. 
 
 129 
 
The Religion of Democracy. 
 
 To be sure it has been the usual teaching of 
 these specialists that religion includes ethics 
 and requires that a man shall do right. But 
 since this right has been systematically distin- 
 guished from the mere candid promptings of 
 an unsophisticated mind, and has alwaj's been 
 referred back to the will of God ; and since the 
 will of God is, by the premises, mainly to be 
 gathered from the established order, it becomes 
 difficult to escape from the vicious circle, and 
 difficult to find in what goes by the name of 
 ethics a standing ground from which to execute 
 reform. 
 
 Conceivably the world might have escaped 
 from this fatal round by the use of prayer. It 
 might have been God's way to furnish to such 
 as should applj'^specific intimations and detailed 
 designs of what a man should do — or he might 
 at least have provided the priests wnth such pat- 
 terns, to be by them given out in piecework to 
 the faithful. Men have had such hopes; 
 church polities have been built upon them, a^:id 
 doubtless there are many pious people that ex- 
 pect their daily messages, and perhaps receive 
 them. Yet it is evident that, in general, the 
 sanest saints do not expect them, and that for 
 the ordinary run of things God does not furnish 
 men with diagrams of duty. It is clear that, in 
 
 130 
 
The Religion of Democracy. 
 
 the main, He has thrown the world upon its 
 own conscience, and that He is not, and will 
 not be, all in all. 
 
 Of course the vast perversions of religion are 
 not to be attributed wholly, or even principally, 
 to the priests; and it is to be borne in mind that 
 even in the most perverted religions there has 
 always been an unpriestly element of simple 
 love and joy, and the desire for what is beauti- 
 ful. But the general account of all the priestly 
 establishments, so far as they have been priest- 
 ly, is that they have been the institutionaliza- - 
 tions of the faithlessness of men, in view of the 
 practical difficulties of living. 
 
 At their best they have furnished consola- 
 tions for the lack of faith, and at their worst 
 they have provided systematic devices for doing 
 away with the felt need of it. If one would but 
 believe something a little hard to credit, or do 
 something a little hard to do, accept a creed, 
 burn an offering or buy an indulgance, nothing 
 else should be required and the sacrifice should 
 be accounted faith. 
 
 The theory that a man may save his soul by 
 accepting an incomprehensible proposition in 
 divinity is not Protestantism, but a poisoning 
 of the wells of Protestantism. And scarcely 
 i^incQ the world began has orthodozy for oi^e 
 
 131 
 
The Religion of Democracy. 
 
 moment made common cause with faith, or 
 struck with her a single venturesome blow for 
 love and justice. 
 
 X. — Over against the rabble and jargon of 
 what are called the religious faiths, democracy 
 lifts up its voice for faith. The faiths with 
 their stubborn theologies, their forbidding sac- 
 raments and their special unctions, are con- 
 victed of intellectual vanity and spiritual pride; 
 they build partition walls, foment discords, and 
 excomm.unicate souls; but faith excludes no 
 one. Faith can transcend all the boundaries 
 of races, nations, classes, sects, and find terms 
 of expression for the oneness of human interests 
 — the vast orderliness of the moral universe. 
 
 XL — Pass around the world at night over the 
 sleeping cities and the wide, silent lands — New 
 York, Chicago, Pekin, Calcutta, Paris, the 
 farms, the innumerable dwellings scattered over 
 the steppes and prairies; note the pause and 
 suspense, the prostration of myriads of souls. 
 This is the immemorial common prayer, the old- 
 est ritual of faith, the original and universal 
 sacrament. Dreams are the distemper of sleep, 
 but the subconscious deeps of it are, it would 
 seem, the recuperation of faith and the intimacy 
 
 132 
 
The Relis'ion of Democracv^ 
 
 & 
 
 of God. Out of sleep the timeless man comes 
 forth into time to accomplish the incarnation. 
 The program of valiant enterprise is to do what 
 seems good in the morning, and the perfection of 
 faith is an utter confidence in the resources that 
 are withdrawn behind the veil of sleep and 
 death. 
 
 The illusion of culture and pride is that sleep 
 is the weakness and death the overthrow of 
 life; but the discovery of humility and faith is 
 that sleep and death are the ground in which 
 life grows. 
 
 Day by day, sunward, in vast procession — 
 yet each going alone — the millions of the world 
 pass through the gates of sleep into the universal 
 sanctuary. Herein is a catholic communion 
 without schism , under this serene dome are no 
 divisions of interest. 
 
 Day by day, a universal spiritual concord is 
 typed in the unanimity of deep, dispassionate 
 sleep. The day comes and the day's work is 
 to press upon the striving, conscious world, the 
 fulfillment of this prophecy, to cast into con- 
 crete images, wrought in the stuff of nature, the 
 cool, sane promptings of receptive sleep. 
 
 133 
 
The Religion of Democracy. 
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 THE CASTE OF GOODNESS. 
 
 I. — The modern man is standing at a point 
 of view from which it would seem to be possi- 
 ble for the simplest to see that the dream of the 
 yonth of Lamennais, the dream of Pope Leo 
 XIIL, is indeed a dream. Democracy cannot 
 make terms with any kind of ecclesiastical 
 trust or spiritual monopoly. The life of Lamen- 
 nais is a tragic demonstration of this impossi- 
 bility as his "Book of the People" and *'Words 
 of a Believer" are among the earliest disclos- 
 ures of the spiritual meaning of democracy. 
 
 It is said in Europe that the Pope has canon- 
 ized democracy, but it is a one-sided wooing; 
 democracj" will never canonize the Pope. Yet 
 it salutes in him the most consistent represent- 
 ative of the old regime — the hero of the dying 
 world. 
 
 The Roman Church as an institution and 
 reasoned system antagonizes at every point the 
 
 134 
 
The Religion of Democracy. 
 
 witness cf the modern spirit. Rome is fatalist, 
 skaptic and pessimist clear through — except for 
 glorious miracles. Modernity, with its matter- 
 of-fact assurance that a man does really choose 
 his way and achieve his own designs, its confi- 
 dence in the possibility of science and its fixed 
 persuasion that it is a good thing to be alive on 
 any terms whatever, turns away from Rome 
 with a shrug, and does not stop to argue. As 
 for the multitudinous Protestant and sectarian 
 churches they are things of incredible mys- 
 tification, having but one aspect in common— a 
 genius for compromise and self-contradiction. 
 It is true that the inner spirit of Protestantism 
 is nothing other than the modern spirit; but 
 Protestant ecclesiasticism a^ it stands is a jun- 
 gle of impossibilities — a disastrous attempt to 
 put new wine into old bottles. Protestantism 
 has shone clear and illustrious only in those 
 times when for a moment it has forgotten its 
 corporate privileges and launched itself boldly 
 into the secular world — as in the rise of the 
 Dutch Republic, or the planting of the New 
 England colonies. For the destruction of 
 spiritual monopolies is the logic of Protestant 
 ism, whereunto it is pressed by an irresistible 
 necessity. 
 
 135 
 
The Religion of Democracy. 
 
 II. —The mediaeval Church is the placenta 
 of the modern world. It has been indispensa- 
 ble to the generation of the new social order, 
 but it becomes noisome and an offence with the 
 birth of the modern and spiritual conception 
 of secular society. Within the body of the 
 Roman Empire, whose law was fatalism, skep- 
 ticism and pessimism reduced to system and 
 statute, the ancient Church was formed— out of 
 Roman and imperial materials, to hold the 
 germ of modernity — the principle that a man 
 may be the son of God. 
 
 Back of the blank negations of the Roman 
 civilization there lay a long history of moral 
 discomfiture. Rome was the ordered embodi- 
 ment of the disappointment of Greek liberty 
 and culture— the stubborn desperation of the 
 self-made man. It is to be noted that Greek 
 liberty could stand without self-contradiction 
 o? a qualm, face to face with chattel slavery, 
 modern liberty cannot do that. This marks a 
 world-wide distinction between two different 
 things. The ground of the former was in tem- 
 poral circumstances, the ground of the latter is 
 in the eternal constitution of the soul. Liberty 
 to the Greek was an accomplishment; to the 
 modern man it is a primordial right. There is 
 a Stoic saying that a brave man is in a way 
 
 136 
 
The Religion of Democracy. 
 
 superior to God, for God owes it to his mere 
 nature that He is not afraid, but man to bis 
 own acbieTement. Such a saying might stand 
 as a symbol of the top-loftiness, the moral gid- 
 diness and the predestined failure of that lib- 
 erty and culture of Greece upon the ruin of 
 which Rome laid out her flinty roads, and de- 
 ployed her legions. 
 
 Rome had settled it that after all a man was 
 but a man — chair a plaisir et chair a canon. 
 But in the body of this death and discourage- 
 ment, the Roman Church was a thing formed 
 out of the substance of the dying to gestate the 
 soul of the modern world. For the soul of the 
 modern world is the idea of liberty, not as some- 
 thing to be accomplished at the end of life, but 
 somethiug to be claimed in the beginning, de- 
 spite adverse possessions and every vested inter- 
 est—the idea of inalienable rights and the mys- 
 tery and awe of a co-creatorship with God, and 
 a joint responsibility. The Church was the 
 stuff of the old social regime impregnated with 
 the miracle of the divinity of a man — a marvel 
 which contains the promise and prophecy of 
 that universality or the miraculous, or univer- 
 sality of moral freedom, which is the religion 
 of democracy and in the realization of which 
 both the old social order and the ancient Church 
 are now to pass away. 
 
 137 
 
The Religion of Democracy. 
 
 That the Church in its historical conception 
 cannot be the embodiment of the Holy Spirit of 
 Emancipation or its perpetual vehicle, that it 
 is, and must be in the nature of things only a 
 scaffolding destined to be destroyed, grows day 
 by day more evident. The vertigo and motor- 
 paralysis of the Protestant churches, their in- 
 ability to move, even by the smallest advances 
 toward that church -unity, 'for which they so 
 imanimously pray — this spectacle is the tinal 
 exhibit of the proof that Protestantism and the 
 Protestant churches are contradictory terms. 
 The only unity, of any hope or any value, is to 
 be sought out in the open air of common secu- 
 larity. The sectarian church that would be 
 most forward to the goal of the unity and com- 
 pany of faithful men, must make auto-da-fe 
 of everything that makes it a spiritually priv- 
 ileged corporation must strive, and be shriven 
 of every note and character, of every habit of 
 mind and posture of soul that belongs to the 
 caste of goodness and the tradition of a dying 
 world. Into the fire of the sacrifice must go not 
 only the hierarchical pretensions, and the fond 
 imaginations of sacramentalism, but also the 
 V caput mortum of Hellenic theology, the intellec- 
 tual vagaries of liberalism, and a thousand 
 other ancient follies and clerical conceits; for ail 
 
 138. 
 
The Religion of Democracy. 
 
 these things are of the hody, and quality of the 
 ancient Church, and must pass with the pass- 
 ing of the old world to which that Church be- 
 longs. 
 
 Ill _The Church as it stands to-day is not 
 merely a cumberer of the ground; it is an ob- 
 stacle to faith, and a preventer of goodness. Its 
 smoking lamps make the darkness murky, and 
 its weakness and incompetency grow to what 
 is worse. It obscures the spiritual aim of de- 
 mocracy, reduces liberty to a sentiment and 
 equality and fraternity to an affected fellow- 
 ship or a mutual benefit. Its envious and pal- 
 try divisions thwart the hope of social unanim- 
 ity it precipitates a crystallization of society 
 in terms of emotion, intellect and taste, and so 
 scatters the conscience and paralyzes the will. 
 
 The Church was the bearer of faith only 
 so long as it remained inknit in the very body 
 and texture of the old secular society. When 
 faith grew up out of the old world and took the 
 field in the struggle fur civil liberty, it was 
 commissioned to become the informing and all- 
 penetrating power of a new world, and there 
 was no longer any moral meaning in the ancient 
 ecclesiastical system. It served only to encyst 
 the principle of faith and keep it out of the gen- 
 
 139 
 
The Religion of Democracy. 
 
 eral circulation. The Church became a rival 
 and a hindrance to the spiritual common- 
 wealth. 
 
 Before that broadening of the horizon that 
 came with the Renaissance and the Reforma- 
 tion, the Church's ordered scheme of special 
 miracles shone as an open rift in the black 
 dome of fate that had settled down upon the 
 ancient world. The miracles of the Church 
 were a standing witness to the liberty of the 
 spirit in the midst of a world of immutable and 
 cruel law. Its very superstitions and ex- 
 cesses were as a corrosion of the hard armor of 
 the old fatalism, skepticism and pessimism, and 
 there was no anchorite, or cenobite, no pilgrim 
 or palmer, that did not pay tribute to the mod- 
 ern world, and serve the cause of liberty. But 
 the time came when the Christian program, 
 as represented by the Church, became no longer 
 credible. Its stubborn assertion of an outworn 
 theory became a denial of conceptions that were 
 infinitely more inspiring as they were more 
 easy to understand. A profounder moral expe- 
 rience and a larger synthesis brought men to a 
 pass where they must either conceive the whole 
 world as instinct with miraculous freedom, or 
 else must altogether deny the possibilty of free- 
 dom and sink back into the old despair. The 
 
 140 
 
The Religion of Democracy. 
 
 arrival at this juncture was the signal for what 
 is called the Reformation, which should have 
 been much more than a reformation, and would 
 have been if the reformers had believed a little 
 more in their mission and kept close to their in- 
 spirations. The plain logic of "private judg- 
 ment" and ** justification by faith" was the 
 complete discrediting of all established spirit- 
 ual oracles and the effacement of the ancient 
 corporate Church. If the old Church system 
 was only corrupt and needed healing, the Ref- 
 ormation was the greatest crime in history, 
 and the reformers were indeed, as the Roman 
 historians say, very devils of discord. The Ref- 
 ormation is justified only as being in spirit 
 and intent a revolution and the putting away 
 of a dead thing. The social convulsions that 
 followed, the moral welter and confusion, the 
 age-long harassment of sectarian rivalries, the 
 fierce, intestine wars, the brooding pestilence 
 of cant and the belittling of God — these things 
 came of the Reformation, not because it was 
 wrong but because it was not thorough; it 
 left the people still looking for a privileged cor- 
 poration. The new presbyters were the old 
 priests, after all, and their affirmation of the 
 lesser creed became the denial of the greater. 
 The faith of the Protestant churches mocked 
 
 141 
 
The Religion of Democracy. 
 
 the faith of the modern world. For more than 
 four hundred years they have been minimizing 
 their professions, with the fission of their bod- 
 ies, until now they are incredible because they 
 claim so little. Their demands upon the confi- 
 dence of men have reached the most tenuous 
 extreme. Their faith verges to infidelity, and 
 the people turn doubting from their altars to 
 cheer in the streets the name of Jesus. 
 
 IV.— The simple truth is that the churches 
 are in danger of forgetting the very meaning 
 of faith. What they now call by that name is 
 for the most part not faith at all. If other than 
 a hereditary prejudice or a social concession, it 
 is a persuasion that comes at the end of an ar- 
 gument, or a feeling that follows an emotional 
 stir. Faith could abide in the Church only so 
 long as it took its church for granted ; when the 
 Church became itself an object of faith, faith 
 was turned to a philosophy, or an infatuation. 
 When the Church ceased to be in some sense 
 coterminous with secular society, it lost the one 
 thing of value that it contained— lost the origi- 
 nality and ingenuousness of faith — lost the kind 
 of faith that forgets itself and removes moun- 
 tains by intending heart and mind upon the 
 mountains, the faith of the Maid of Orleans 
 
 14^ 
 
The Religion of Democracy. 
 
 ftnd St. Francis of Assisi, which is precisely 
 the most modern and democratic kind. The 
 faith of a sectarian church— in which description 
 Rome, as represented in the modern world, must 
 certainly be included— is but the ritual of a cult, 
 the shibboleth of a pious caste, or the philosophy 
 
 of a school. — 
 
 The faith that is an adventure of the soul, 
 and an originating moral energy can get no 
 gain or succor from the sectarian churches. 
 The genetic kind of faith which is the very 
 breath of the modern spirit, which is the spring 
 of science and of humanizing enterprise, which 
 believes in spite of doubt, that this unintelligi- 
 ble world is at bottom reasonable, confronting 
 the antagonisms of classes and nations with a 
 fixed assurance that there is a justice that is 
 best for all, making the strong the willing 
 slaves of the weak, and convincing the people 
 of the equality of souls— the faith that is pre- 
 paring the triumph of democracy, creating a 
 new and inspiring literature and clearing the 
 way for a commerce that shall claim the mar- 
 kets for the man— this faith is not bred in sec- 
 
 taiian churches. 
 
 And no reform of the sects will avail to pro- 
 duce such faith, no revival of their spirits, no 
 purification, disinfection or purgation. The 
 ' 143 
 
The Religion of Democracy. 
 
 quickeDing of the desire to improve their spir- 
 itual condition would but intensify the evil. It 
 is necessary to unchurch the churches before 
 they can serve the common cause of souls. 
 Their existence is a contradiction, and their 
 safet}^ is to turn against themeslves. 
 
 144 
 
The Religion of Democracy. 
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 
 THE RISE OF A DEMOCRATIC CATHOLIC 
 
 CHURCH. 
 
 I.— The religious trusts are bankrupt, and 
 the caste of good-ness and truth is ripe for dis- 
 solution; but the Church in its original char- 
 ter rises to the emergency of the world. The 
 societies founded in particularism, exclusion 
 and monopoly give place to a Catholic Church 
 founded in the universal and the eternal, and in 
 the essential and permanent characteristics of 
 the human spirit. The churches of the past have 
 been only types and symbols foreshowing— 
 sometimes in glorious and inspiring parable, 
 sometimes in distorted and monstrous carica- 
 ture—the Church catholic and democratic 
 which is to comprehend the design of the uni- 
 versal spiritual revolution and establish the 
 people in the beginnings of liberty. It has taken 
 nearly nineteen hundred years for a cathoxic 
 church to become a possibility. 
 
 Catholicism is the taking in of the last man 
 
 145 
 
-Vr 
 
 The Religion of Democracy. 
 
 with confidence that for him, too, as well as for 
 the rest, life has meaniog and is reasonable; it 
 is the taking in of the whole cosmos with confi- 
 dence that it is all of one piece and hangs to- 
 gether to the last detail; it is the taking in of 
 every human interest of body and soul in faith 
 that the base and servile can be subdued to lib- 
 erty, art and joy, and finally it is the embrac- 
 ing of all the ages in the belief that they have 
 mutual and independent significance and a cum- 
 ulative purpose. One has but to turn the 
 pages of history with the most casual hand to 
 perceive that the conception of such a Catholi- 
 cism was impossible to any of the ages that 
 have gone by; while the most cursory survey of 
 the contemporary world will show that such a 
 Catholicism is both the passion and the convic- 
 tion of the age in which we live. 
 
 The Church that is in the making transcends 
 every human device and institution ; its estab- 
 lishment is not in the imagination and inven- 
 tion of men, but in the reality and persistence 
 of God. The Churches of the past have gener- 
 ally professed a superhuman constitution. But 
 it is evident that they have, without exception, 
 sprung out of limited and mortal ideas, since 
 they have scattered the people, rejected or ig- 
 nored the expanding vision of the world, sepa- 
 
 146 
 
The Religion of Democracy. 
 
 rated the sacred from the secular, and broken 
 the continuity of the ages. At last, after many 
 failures of pride and the discrediting of innu- 
 merable theories, the divine and royal humility 
 is compelling its lesson upon the hearts of men. 
 There will arise a Church that is not the prod- 
 uct of a theory, but that grows out of the liv- 
 ing presence of God— resting not upon special 
 revelations or particular ideas, but upon the 
 axioms of faith. 
 
 The Churches of the past might conceivably 
 have been the inventions of priests and princes; 
 it is possible to imagine that they might have 
 existed even though there were no God. But 
 the Church of the modern expectation is 
 frankly impossible if there be no God. It is 
 possible for men to get together on the basis of 
 a sacramental theory or a proposition in divin- 
 ity, whether the theory or the proposition be 
 true or false; but it is not possible for men 
 to get together on the ground of the eternal 
 reasonableness and justice, unless indeed 
 there be an eternal Reasonableness and Jus- 
 tice to whom they all alike have access. 
 The religion of democracy is effacing the 
 guide-lines and diagrams of traditional au- 
 thority, committing to oblivion the ground 
 plans of the ancient Churches. Therein it in- 
 
 147 
 
The Religion of Democracy. 
 
 curs a fearful and magnificent risk. If 
 God does not exist, the result of ifc all can be 
 only weltering anarchy and the ruin of the 
 world. On the other hand, if God be real, we 
 shall now behold unveiled the demonstration of 
 His undeniable glory. 
 
 II. The ecclesiology of a democratic Catholi- 
 cism is the ultimate form of social organization. 
 The Church is to stand as the ecumenical de- 
 mocracy, the international republic of humani- 
 ty in the day when the superstition of State sov- 
 ereignty shall become incredible and the huge, 
 meaningless political aggregates shall lose their 
 strength. The strength of the wrangling em- 
 pires is in their mutual jealousy and fear — a 
 relic of the feudal tradition and the old ethnic 
 isolation. Commerce and communication are 
 steadily relaxing the sinews of international 
 war. Already the profounder antagonisms are 
 not those that separate nations, but those that 
 separate classes. Men are drawn together in 
 these days not by the blood- bond, but by una- 
 nimity in ideals; as the new social order is 
 born not of the flesh but of tbe spirit. The 
 hulks of empire may rot by the sea for a time, 
 but the life and motion will go out of them 
 with the rise of the tide of catholic democracy. 
 
 148 
 
The Religion of Democracy. 
 
 The Church is the people organized in lib- 
 erty. Its motive and design is the constitution 
 of a universal society in unconstrained equal- 
 ity, the creation of a world-wide civilization in 
 the spirit of art— in a word, it is the realization 
 in the flesh of the Eternal Life. Surely, in 
 such an enterprise the sword of State must bear 
 a subordinate and diminishing part. 
 
 The law of the State is static; it is merely 
 provisional and conservative— it is not fit for art 
 or for any high and venturesome enterprise or en- 
 deavor. Half the cruelties of history have 
 come of a monstrous and abnormal knight- 
 errantry of governments. The sword is good 
 for pruning, but it cannot make things grow. 
 
 The State is the disciplinary arm of the 
 Church ; regarded as an end in itself, or as an 
 object of devotion, it is an imposture and a de- 
 lusion. The use of government is to furnish 
 certain of the mechanical and material condi- 
 tions for the growth of art and the humanities; 
 and this work it can faithfully and effectually 
 do only when it shall be strictly subordinated 
 to the superior and wider social organization 
 representative of the uncompelled ambitions 
 and devotions of the people. 
 
 Governments to be strong must be not large 
 but small in extent of territorial jurisdiction. 
 
The Religion of Democracy. 
 
 The success aud progress of governments in 
 this generation has been mainly limited to mu- 
 nicipalities. The ideal and poetic aspiration 
 of the new century will express itself in the cre- 
 ation of splendid and cosmopolitan cities, the 
 soul of which shall be the Universal Church. 
 The tendency of the current of imperialism is 
 to parochialize the universe — to make the 
 whole earth Slav or Saxon, on the pattern of 
 the village commune or the town meeting. 
 The promise of Catholicism is the opposite of 
 that. It would universalize the parish, bring- 
 ing the All of things to bear upon the local and 
 provincial — planting the universitj^ at every 
 crossroads. 
 
 The Church will have institutions and archi- 
 tecture. It will convert the old cathedrals and 
 build new ones. The great things of mediae- 
 val Catholicism were for the future; the cathe- 
 dral that was a forum of public meeting, a gal- 
 lerj^ of arts, a guildhall of handicrafts, a school 
 of letters, and a possession of everybody — 
 prophesied of democracy. And with the awa- 
 kening of the European peoples it is certain that 
 those glorious buildings, fallen now into 
 mournful abstraction, shall be reclaimed by the 
 artists and the workers, and redeemed to the 
 living world. It is not less to be expected that 
 
The Religion of Democracy. 
 
 the cathedrals of Europe will yield suggestion 
 for other and different fanes and minsters in 
 Western lands, buildings which will he naaied 
 not for the seat of a bishop, but for the standard 
 of a people— each a pledge of hospitality for all 
 travelers, a shrine and statehouse of democracy 
 and a nerve center of civilization. 
 
 III. — All things grow from the seed— noth- 
 ing is created out of nothing. The future comes 
 out of the past, and the seed is not quickened 
 except it die. The new Church will come out 
 of the old Church, when the seed is ready for 
 the furrow — when a little podded sect stands 
 ready in its heart to die. 
 
 Three notes and signs, which characterize — 
 yes, constitute— the existing sects, will charac- 
 terize and constitute the Church of the future 
 by their unprecedented absence. The three es- 
 sential notes of a sect are the attempted estab- 
 lishment of the sacred in separation from the 
 secular, of good people in separation from bad 
 people, and of true propositions in separation 
 from false. The rise of the new Catholicism is 
 in the dawning conviction that these distinc- 
 tions, in so far as they are pregnant and fruit- 
 ful, are self -vindicatory, and do not need to be 
 institutionalized or established. The risk of 
 
 x«^. 
 
The Religion of Democracy. 
 
 losing the eternal things in the temporal things, 
 of contaminating the good by the touch of the 
 evil, of missing the reality through too earnest 
 a regard of the phenomenon — this is the intrin- 
 sic and inevitable risk of faith, the trial and 
 task of those who would live in the real world 
 and build the City of the Soul. It is the faith 
 of the religion of the Incarnation that the risks 
 are not losses ; that it is good to break the bar- 
 riers and live out dangerously into the world. 
 
 The Church shall discover the eternal in the 
 flesh. It shall understand that civilization is 
 the sum of all sacraments and the supreme and 
 most intimate test of the spirits of men. It 
 shall see in the problem of labor and bread the 
 involute of every spiritual and eternal issue. 
 The Church shall engross itself in materials, in 
 the humanities, the courtesies and the arts. 
 It shall work a new orientation of the com- 
 mon law, shifting the legal point of view from 
 property to persons, destroying the fetish of 
 capital and denying the capitalist a hearing 
 save as a member of the fraternity of work. 
 
 It shall be disclosed that God has so framed 
 this tangible world that it will respond only to 
 the communion and unanimity of men — balking 
 and confusing all science and art, all labor and 
 commerce save such as is accomplished in love 
 
The Religion of Democracy. 
 
 and faith. The building of the world-city will 
 be seen to be the goal of history — unattainable 
 save through mighty regenerations and re- 
 demptions. The nations hitherto have been the 
 serfs of nature, ascirpti glebce, thralled and 
 cumbered in the clod. The earth has possessed 
 the people, and history has been mainly a gloss 
 upon economics. The program of the new era 
 is to put the people in possession of the earth — 
 to put the whole people in possession of the 
 whole earth. 
 
 So much for the first note of the resurgent 
 Church — its sacred and eternal secularity. 
 
 Secondly, the Church will utterly shatter the 
 caste of goodness and definitely abandon the at- 
 tempt to mark a distinction between good per- 
 sons and the bad. Its sacraments must be of- 
 fered to all the humble and child-hearted with- 
 out any kind of stipulation of conformity or 
 faintest implication of special sanctity. The 
 Church will refuse to exercise what is called 
 spiritual discipline, and it will jealously guard 
 its offices from the imputation of being particu- 
 larly pious. 
 
 For to be particularly pious is not merely 
 Pharisaic, it is flat paganism; it savors of 
 the siege of Troy and the platitudes of Greek 
 philosophers; it is flying in the face of Chris- 
 
 153 
 
The Religion of Democracy. 
 
 tianity and making the clergy and all the com- 
 municants a jest. 
 
 According to Christianity, goodness is not a 
 thing for which a man ought to be publicly 
 marked and praised, but a thing for which he 
 should be privately congratulated. Christian- 
 ity has no economy of certificated virtues; it 
 does not deal in medals and diplomas. It sets 
 up no model, pattern, paragon or celestial fash- 
 ion-plate. Its ideal goodness is ineffably good 
 because, with unfaltering sweetness and 
 strength, it confounds itself incontinently in 
 the bad. 
 
 The Church will regard itself as constitution- 
 ally coterminous with secular society. The 
 point is not that the Church will strive to reach 
 the very low and bad people — it has been try- 
 ing to do that for a long time with curious and 
 confused results; the point is that at last the 
 dead -set to save souls will be abandoned; and 
 instead of keeping up the haggard, wear}- 
 chase, the Church will simply assume both the 
 pursuers and the pursued — regarding them all 
 alike as equal constituents of the common- 
 wealth of souls. 
 
 The religion of democracy takes in all the 
 people without exception, not because it is in- 
 different to moral and spiritual distinctions, 
 
The Religion of Democracy. 
 
 and not because it holds that men are naturally- 
 good or even that everybod}^ is sure to be saved. 
 It is not because it makes light of the eternal 
 and tragic issue between Jerusalem and Baby- 
 lon, but because it would give its whole soul to 
 that issue, that it has written upon its doorposts 
 and the footpace of its altar: Judge not. 
 Unto this last and He was made sin. 
 
 And, in the third place, the Church will 
 abandon the attempt to truss up and underpin 
 the Truth, and will, on the contrary, repose in 
 quiet strength upon those sills and girders of 
 the universal frame which have been or here- 
 after shall be discovered. It will appear that 
 the Truth is not a sacred deposit to be kept in 
 a box under guard of priestly seneschals, but a 
 living, tremendous Thing— able to take care of 
 Itself as well as of all who will trust it. Such 
 is obviously the case with the truth of physics; 
 so it is also with the truth of metaphysics. 
 
 If what is called a lie will wear as well as 
 the truth in the long run, it cannot be a lie. 
 The truth at last must be proved in experience; 
 there is after all no other credible proof. That 
 an unbroken succession of mutes, dervishes and 
 fakirs— or of prebendaries, deans and curates- 
 have sworn to a thing for a thousand years m 
 
 no proof. 
 
 X65 
 
The Religion of Democracy. 
 
 It is time to take off the handicap from her- 
 esy, and to absolve the shackled clergy from 
 their vows. Time was when the idea of the 
 Church as the prop and pillar of the truth was 
 credible enough— perhaps indispensable to the 
 gestation of the modern world. Given the pro- 
 found philosophical and practical skepticism of 
 ancient society, it was perhaps impossible for 
 the truth of a spiritual democracy to get credit 
 otherwise than as a miracle of special revela- 
 tion, imposed and guaranteed from without, and 
 neither to be proved nor disproved by ordinary 
 experience. But the rising spirit of Christian- 
 ity, coming to clear utterance in the Renais- 
 sance and the Reformation, and to general ac- 
 ceptance in the subsequent times, has reduced 
 that conception of the Church to hopeless ana- 
 chronism. It is the faith of the modern world 
 that the common mind, standing over against 
 the common universe, can in hunger and thirst 
 after reasonableness understand somewhat of 
 reality. And it is coming to be perceived 
 by the people that, as a corps of physicians 
 sworn to a particular scheme of therapeutics, 
 would stand convicted of moral and intellectual 
 levity and would be disqualified for the prac- 
 tice of their profession, so the sworn preachers 
 of the churches are disqualified to preach. 
 
 150 
 
The Religion of Democracy. 
 
 The preachers seem to be retained in a spe- 
 cial interest and mortgaged to the platitudes. 
 The people long for the disengaged accents of 
 an unmufBed man. It is necessary to freely 
 differ from the Apostles in order to recommend 
 the things they stood for. And if the people 
 do not believe that a God may be the son of 
 man or a man the son of God, it is largely be- 
 cause they have been told so only by people who 
 seemed to be obliged to say so. 
 
 Most of the clergy are in a difficult case, for 
 they really do believe all the inspiring things 
 that they have promised to believe; they must 
 therefore continue to lie under the imputation 
 that they say what is proper to say. But for 
 the rest the remedy is easy — it had been good 
 for Herod to break his vow and save the life cf 
 a prophet. 
 
 The attempt to unify the churches by soft 
 diplomacies and compromises, the search for a 
 minimum creed to meet the requirements of the 
 most attenuated mind, the letting go of the 
 facts by which the people must live or die, for 
 the sake of sociability — all this is one of the 
 pitifulest spectacles that these times present. 
 
 Dire obstacles to the new Catholicism are 
 those amiable clergymen who would trade off 
 the law of gravitation for the sake of getting 
 
 157 
 
The Religion of Democracy. 
 
 everybody to agree. Catholicism cannot be got 
 out of compromise. And the new Catholicism 
 is simply thoroughgoing Protestantism with 
 all the loyalty to truth and the devotion to 
 great ideas for which that word historically 
 stands. 
 
 The Protestant Catholic Church shall be the 
 spring and energy of science and art and of all 
 education. The University shall at last arise. 
 Sown in the days of Alcuin and Abelard, the 
 chivalry of science and art shall come to its 
 flower. The disclosure of the free and demo- 
 cratic constitution of the great mediaeval uni- 
 versities of Oxford, Paris and Bologna comes 
 as a surprise to those whose ideas of a univer- 
 sity have been formed on the model of Harvard 
 and Yale, and the like prim high schools and 
 knowledge shops of modern Europe. But the 
 mediaeval schools, like the modern, were sti- 
 fled in Aristotle and doted on dead things; the 
 University is in the future, awaiting the rise of 
 a democratic Catholicism. 
 
 The soul of the University is the passion for 
 the Eternal. It risks its life continually upon 
 the reality of the ideal. It does not principally 
 exist to teach — everj^thing else in the world 
 exists to teach; the University exists to discover 
 and to create. It seizes upon the eternal ele- 
 
 158 
 
The Religion of Democracy. 
 
 meets of things and transmutes them into art 
 and history. It summons the youth and faith 
 of the nations to the infinite and arduous labor 
 of the Revolution. It requires of its children 
 the most perfect purity and self-denial. For 
 no one whose soul is knotted with lust or fear, 
 no prurient glory-seeker, no trap-setter to catch 
 distinction, no one afraid to die in his working 
 clothes as a common man, can be an artist, a 
 man of science and a civilizer. 
 
 jy.— The name of ihe hour is Opportunity. 
 The real office of prophets is to see that the 
 thing come true. The hearts of the people ev- 
 erywhere are aglow with expectation for the 
 coming of justice and beauty upon the earth; 
 but what of that? It is not by expectation that 
 the Idea becomes a Fact— this miracle is 
 wrought by faith. It is by faith that a man 
 gives body to a shadow, and existence to that 
 which otherwise would not have been. 
 
 It is not yet settled what kind of a century this 
 new era shall be— God, I think, has not decided, 
 and will not decide. It is not decided whether 
 the City of the Soul shall rise now, or after a 
 while. God was always ready and waiting. 
 He has waited a long time. 
 
 There is no Destiny— there is only Opporta- 
 
 159 
 
The Religion of Democracy. 
 
 liity and an infinite waiting for the coming 
 of the poets and the artists who shall rejoice in 
 Life on any terms, hearing the singing in the 
 heart of God and sending hack a brave antiph- 
 onal across all the deserts and wildernesses of 
 the world. 
 
 THE END, 
 
 1.' / 
 
 ^ITY ; 
 
 
 160 
 
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