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THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 PRESENTED BY 
 
 PROF. CHARLES A. KOFOID AND 
 
 MRS. PRUDENCE W. KOFOID 
 
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Digitized by the Internet Archive 
 
 in 2007 with funding from 
 
 IVIicrosoft Corporation 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/beliefsaboutmanOOsavarich 
 
BELIEFS ABOUT MAN 
 
 M. J. SAVAGE 
 
 " From God, down out of heaven, 
 
 John saw " the city " fair 
 Descend in gorgeous vision, — 
 
 A city of the air. 
 By human labor founded 
 
 On rock-hewn truths below. 
 To God, up toward the heavens, 
 
 I see " the city " grow. 
 
 BOSTON: 
 
 George H. Ellis, 141 Franklin Street. 
 
 1884. 
 
Copyright, 
 
 1882, 
 
 By GEORGE H. ELLIS 
 

 ©etiication 
 
 Believing that the best hope of any future salvation lies along the line 
 
 of taking this world at its best, and doing what one can to 
 
 make it better, the author dedicates this book 
 
 THOSE WHO STAHD READY TO "LEHD A HAHD" 
 
 ivi3632^9 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 I. Preface, ... vii 
 
 II. Sonnets : 
 
 The Old "Gospel," viii 
 
 The New Gospel, ix 
 
 III. What is Man? i 
 
 IV. The Origin of Man, 17 
 
 V. The Problem of Sin and Salvation, .... 34 
 
 VI. Is Man Free? 49 
 
 VII. The Motive Forces of Human Life 63 
 
 VIII. The Law of Progress 80 
 
 IX. The Earthly Outlook, • 98 
 
 X. Is Death the End? 114 
 
 XI. Note to Chap. VI., 129 
 
PREFACE 
 
 I HAD in mind last year one book, to be called God and Man. 
 But the one book has become two. Belief in God was published 
 in book form last spring. Now comes its companion, Beliefs about 
 il/ia«, asking that "the twain" — always one in intention — may 
 be " joined together " in the hand and thought of the reader. 
 
 I need hardly add that these discourses claim only to be essays 
 — attempts — at treating themes, each one of which is worthy of 
 a volume by itself. Believing that the humble path of " the scien- 
 tific method " is the only one that promises to lead any\vhere, I have 
 tried to avoid the highway of assumption, and to keep my feet 
 upon the solid ground of verifiable knowledge. 
 
 It is perhaps proper for me to say that these sermons were all 
 spoken in the ordinary course of my Sunday morning work, and 
 are now published from stenographic reports. 
 
 Boston, Dec. ig, 
 
 M. J. S. 
 
THE OLD "GOSPEL' 
 
 A MOVELESS silence through the deeps of space. 
 As yet time is not ; for nor earth nor star 
 Swings its fixed changes, or marks off afar 
 
 Or light or shadow to a watching race. 
 
 Filling the void, and " moving on the face 
 Of the great deep," three gods forever are, — 
 Three gods in one, — and to their will no bar 
 
 In all the universe finds any place. 
 
 They in " eternal council " what shall be 
 For God's sole glory fix ; so to display 
 
 His goodness and his justice. Thus, the stage 
 
 Of earth and time is built, that worlds may see 
 Man's tragic comedy, as runs away 
 The tide of smiles and tears age after age. 
 
 II. 
 
 Opens the scene in Eden. Man appears ; 
 And then " the serpent " coiling round "the tree 
 Of good and evil," — both "ordained" to be, 
 
 Thus to unroll the drama of the years. 
 
 Cast out, the slave of lying hopes and fears, 
 Man wanders in the dark, and seeks to see 
 " The way of life." But no one " finds " save " he 
 
 To whom 'tis given," though sought " with care and tears." 
 
 A " blood-bought " " few are chosen." All the rest 
 Down dark ways stumble to the lost abyss, 
 Where unavailing woe is all their doom. 
 
 But there aloft the " little flock " is blest. 
 
 God's "glorious grace" assures their narrow bliss; 
 And "glorious justice " lowers in nether gloom. 
 
 Dbcbmbbr, i88i. 
 
WHAT IS MAN? 
 
 I BEGIN this morning a series of discourses concerning 
 Man. I shall have to make this first one more or less 
 abstract and theoretical, dealing with first principles, with 
 what on the one hand may strike you as commonplace 
 and unimportant ; on the other hand, with those things that 
 may seem to you so theoretical and far away as to be, if not 
 difficult of comprehension, still hardly able to thrill you with 
 any feeling of interest. And yet work like this always has 
 to be done. Before a train of cars, lighted, decorated, fra- 
 grant with flowers, full of a happy company, with laughter 
 and song, can rush in its speed across the country, there 
 must first be the dull, drudging work of laying out the way, 
 building the road-bed, laying down the ties and rails, and 
 driving spike after spike to hold things in their places. So 
 in the treatment of any great subject like this there must 
 first be well-prepared work, the laying down of first princi- 
 ples, taking our starting-point, making our definitions, set- 
 tling where we are and how we are to begin. 
 
 I wish, however, to say this one thing in recognition of 
 your generous response to me in the years that are past : I 
 feel glad and proud to know that I have always had the most 
 generous response from this congregation when I have asked 
 of them the hardest things. This by way of introduction. 
 
 The story is related of the German philosopher, Schopen- 
 hauer, that, as he was walking the street one day with his 
 
2 Beliefs about Man. 
 
 head down, profoundly meditating on some deep theme of 
 man or the universe, some one, engaged in the practical busi- 
 ness of life, having no time to spare for philosophy, came 
 into violent collision with him on the sidewalk. Angry, as 
 such a man would be, thus stopped by one whom he sup- 
 IDOsed to be some old, self-absorbed man carelessly crossing 
 his way, he broke out with the words, "Who are you?" 
 The old philosopher, looking up kindly in his face, said, 
 *'Ah, friend, I would give the world to the man who would 
 answer me that question." 
 
 This, then, is the great question of the world, — Who are 
 you ? Who am I ? If I could answer this there would be 
 no mystery left for me in the universe. You remember 
 how beautifully the poet Tennyson, in words that I have 
 quoted to you more than once, addresses the " flower in the 
 crannied wall," and declares that if he could understand 
 this flower, root in all, and all in all, he would know what 
 God is and what man is. Much more, then, may we say : If 
 I could answer the question. Who are you, who am I ? I 
 should be able to understand the flower in the crannied wall; 
 I should be able to understand the infinite mystery of the 
 universe. You will readily understand, then, that I do not 
 expect this morning to be able satisfactorily and completely 
 to answer this question, What is man? All I can attempt, 
 or all any man in the present state of knowledge can attempt, 
 is simply to indicate the limits of knowledge and of igno- 
 rance, to say what we know, what we do not know ; to say, in 
 this direction there is no use for farther search, it is decided 
 that nothing more there can be known ; this way is the line 
 of inquiry that promises future developments, the path toward 
 which, then, we should set our investigating feet. This is all 
 that we can undertake. 
 
 Man, — who is he ? If we are to have a comprehensive 
 
What is He? 3 
 
 grasp of our subject, we must look at man not as he is here 
 in Boston, not merely at the Newtons, the Miltons, or the 
 great religious geniuses : we must look back and down. We 
 must see man in his lowest as well as in his highest develop- 
 ment; bearing in mind, however, that our last and highest 
 definition of him must be formed not from man at his worst 
 or in his rudiments, but man at his highest and best. If I 
 wish to give a definition of an oak, or a picture .of it, that 
 shall be comprehensible, that shall make one understand 
 what I mean when I use that word, I do not simply confine 
 myself to the definition of an acorn, or the first shoot spring- 
 ing above the sod, or even to the growing shrub and young 
 tree. I will see if I can find an oak a century old, with its 
 branches spreading wide ; one that has wrestled with the 
 storms of a hundred years; one that has drunk in the sun- 
 light of a hundred blue-skyed summers. I will find an oak 
 that has become a mighty tree, and will say, — whatever may 
 be the abortions, whatever may be the failures along the 
 path, — That is an oak. And so we have a right to say of a 
 man. Study the Bushman of Africa, if you please, or the 
 Digger Indian of California, or the lowest, poorest elements 
 of the race ; study him as a criminal ; study him as con- 
 tented in luxury ; study him in whatever state of civilization 
 you please ; but at the last it is this highest type that consti- 
 tutes the man. We look to Socrates, we look to Buddha, to 
 Newton, to Jesus, — the highest spirit of them all, — and say, 
 That is a man. 
 
 But we must bear well in mind that there are these ex- 
 tremes. Man includes those away down there, the naked 
 savage living in the woods or hiding in caves, and the man 
 up here who has constructed the grandest architecture, built 
 the finest palaces of the world. It is man, scratching some 
 rude image on the surface of a smooth bone, the first begin- 
 
4 Beliefs about Man. 
 
 ning of that creative faculty which at last culminates in a 
 Raphael, in a Michel Angelo, in the highest development 
 of pictorial art. It is man down there, shaping with infinite 
 toil some crude, repulsive image that hardly looks human; 
 it is man up here, carving the Venus of Milo and the Apollo 
 Belvedere. Man down there, worshipping a stick or a stone 
 or a lizard ; or here, worshipping in the cathedral of Cologne 
 or Saint Peter's ; or, higher yet than any human art can go, 
 giving utterance to those sublime spiritual truths of Jesus 
 that picture man as capable of thinking of God as the infi- 
 nite and eternal spirit. Man down there, cruel, more cruel, 
 more pitiless than any wild beast of the earth ; man up here, 
 suffering, dying through hours of lingering torture, submit- 
 ting to this for the sake of the cruel and barbaric element in 
 humanity that puts him to death, — dying for love of him 
 who kills for hate ; dying with words of compassion and pity 
 on his lips for this other side of his same nature that shows 
 itself so fiendish and cruel. Man down there, not able per- 
 haps to count the fingers on his two hands; man up here, 
 with the keennest and most far-reaching instruments of the 
 mathematics of the civilized world, measuring the stars, 
 working out complicated problems of astronomy, the very 
 mechanical performance of which shall keep him through the 
 tireless labor of years. These extremes in all departments 
 of life you must keep in mind. You must learn the possi- 
 bility of all these contrasts. 
 
 All this, do I say? Unspeakably more ; for man is not 
 yet complete, not yet has he attained his growth. There 
 is in him this aspiring, onward-looking ideal that demands an 
 eternity for its results. Down here, a worm of the dust ; up 
 there, a spirit, who dares to think he is a child of the Infinite 
 Spirit, who dares to hope that his future career shall run par- 
 allel with his who is himself the Ancient of Days. 
 
What is He? 5 
 
 Now, what is this creature, man ? If we could accept the 
 old, traditional explanation of him, it would all be very sim- 
 ple. We should know that certain problems were closed and 
 could not be opened ; and we should no longer attempt to 
 thrust our keys of investigation into the wards of those locks 
 that an infinite power had made inaccessible. The tradi- 
 tional story is given you in Genesis : that God, six thousand 
 years ago, created man out of the dust, and breathed into 
 him a soul. Although it does not appear in the transla- 
 tion, and I suppose the majority of readers are unacquainted 
 with the fact, yet it is a fact that this word soul means no 
 more as applied to Adam than it does to any of the lower 
 animals. It is precisely the same word in the original He- 
 brew. So this does not seem to settle much for us after all. 
 
 The story, then, is that man was created six thousand 
 years ago out of the dust, and a soul put inside of him ; and 
 that he was created for the express purpose, after a period of 
 probation, of being translated to heaven, to fill up the ranks 
 that were broken by the rebellion and fall of those that were 
 cast out when Satan lifted his impious arm against omnipo- 
 tence. But we cannot accept this story as anything more 
 than a myth or legend. We have no accredited word of 
 explanation that answers for us our question. We must then 
 follow the humbler course of modern science. We must 
 look at man, ask our questions, and see if we can get answers 
 that we can verify as true. 
 
 If a being should come to this planet from some other 
 world, and should look over the inhabitants, from the lowest 
 forms of life up to man, he would at the first glance, most 
 certainly and most unhesitatingly, say that, whatever else 
 man might be, he was an animal ; and here must be our 
 starting point. 
 
 Whatever else man is, he is an animal ; an animal in every 
 
6 Beliefs about Man. 
 
 passion, instinct, faculty, and quality of being. He is one 
 with the poor relations that are about and beneath him. He 
 shares with the animal world a much larger part of his nat- 
 ure than the most of us are accustomed to think. 
 
 Let me, for example, glance over a few points, that we may 
 see wherein man differs from the animals of the earth. Ani- 
 mals beneath man think ; they reason ; they suffer ; they en- 
 joy ; they hope ; they fear ; they dream ; they imagine ; they 
 love ; they hate ; they are capable of self-sacrifice ; they are 
 capable of a devotion that leads even to death itself for 
 the objects of their love. They share with man almost all 
 those faculties that we think of as highest and most human. 
 
 Where, then, is the distinction ? We shall find a distinc- 
 tion that is intellectual, that is moral. But, as to whether 
 this distinction is one of degree or of kind, I for one shall 
 not attempt to settle. I do not know, and I do not know 
 of any one who does know, whether this difference between 
 the animal and man is absolutely a difference of kind or 
 whether it is simply of degree. At any rate, this much is 
 true : that there is a wider gulf to-day between the highest 
 man on earth and the lowest than there is between this 
 lowest man and the highest animal. Precisely what the 
 nature of this gulf is I do not feel competent to decide ; and 
 certainly I shall not dogmatize concerning what I do not 
 know. It is quite possible, however, that a difference of 
 degree may be so great as to amount to what we call a dif- 
 ference in kind. 
 
 But there are these marked distinctions. Animals, so far 
 as we know, are incapable of abstract thought. A dog is 
 able to tell a red object from a black one ; but we have no 
 reason to suppose that he thinks redness or blackness, as 
 qualities abstracted from the things that are black or red. 
 
 Here, then, is one marked distinction, and, if you appreciate 
 
What is He? 7 
 
 intellectual differences, one that is nothing else than an im- 
 mense gulf of separation. 
 
 Then, so far as we know, no member of the animal world 
 is self-conscious as a man is,, saying, " I am I." He does 
 not look out over the rest of the world, intellectually dis- 
 tinguishing it from himself, and laying out lines of thought 
 and the directions in which it is possible for him to study 
 and know. 
 
 Another grand distinction, another immense gulf of sep- 
 aration, consists in this ; that there is no member of the 
 animal world, so far as we are aware, that is capable of 
 voluntary self-improvement. A bird will build a nest after 
 a certain pattern, according to the place where it is located. 
 Give him a better place to build it, and he will build a better 
 nest. Give him better materials, and he will produce a 
 better result. But a bird never yet started out on a mission 
 of creating a new set of surroundings, of improving the world 
 he lived iw, or voluntarily changed this or that, so that his 
 whole environment might be improved. 
 
 No animal yet, so far as we know, is capable of looking 
 back and saying, " We originated away down there, and we 
 have arrived at this point of progress, and are still capable 
 of going on and on." Here, then, are these intellectual 
 distinctions. 
 
 What is there in the moral region ? I believe that ani- 
 mals have at least the rudiments of that which we call 
 morality among men. But they are not capable, so far as 
 we know, of distinguishing the abstract right and the wrong; 
 of thinking that this is right and that this wrong, and that 
 this is so because of certain results that flow from them. 
 This abstract conception of right and wrong lifts man in- 
 finitely above any other animal of the world. 
 
 In the religious sphere there is another distinction. I be- 
 
8 Beliefs about Man. 
 
 lieve that the animal world sliows some of the lowest traces 
 of that which we call religious in faculty and feeling. The 
 animal looks up to its master with a sense of dependence, 
 with a feeling of admiration, with a readiness to obey his 
 higher will and law ; but man is infinitely beyond that. He 
 recognizes not simply something admirable above him, not 
 a power and law only, but a reasonableness and goodness in 
 this power and law, and he idealizes and personifies it. He 
 recognizes it as a power living in the universe, manifesting 
 itself in all its forces and forms. He is able to give it a 
 name ; and to say of this ideal power and law, " It is God "; 
 to feel a consciousness of the mysterious connection and 
 sympathy between that and himself, and to say : *' I am a 
 part of this power and law. He is God ; and I am son of 
 God. I partake of his nature, worshipping not through fear 
 any longer, but because he is worshipful, good, loving, and 
 true." 
 
 No matter whether these points can be scientifically de- 
 monstrated or not : I am only outlining facts of thought and 
 feeling. 
 
 Man is a being, then, whom these things lift unspeakably 
 above any other creature with which we are acquainted in the 
 miiverse. Now then, leaving this point, wherein we have at- 
 tempted to distinguish between man and the lower forms of 
 the animal world, let us raise another question which is cen- 
 tral and important. 
 
 Perhaps you may be surprised that I raise it at all. You 
 have been accustomed very likely to accept the traditional 
 explanations, without caring much as to what they meant 
 and where they would lead you. Has man a soul } Or, to 
 put it more philosophically, is man a unity or a duality or a 
 trinity ? Am I one, or am I two, or am I three ? Have I 
 a body and a soul ? Or have I a body, a soul, and a spirit, 
 
What is He? 9 
 
 as some philosophers say ? Let us look at this whole ques- 
 tion for a moment. 
 
 Here, again, if we accept the traditional explanations, we 
 need not trouble ourselves. But, as I have told you, the 
 account of the creation of man in Genesis does not answer 
 any question for us, for the very word which means soul as 
 applied to Adam is the same word which is used of the 
 lion and the jdog. It means simply the principle of life. 
 St. Paul has a theory, which he carries out in his letters, 
 that man is threefold in his nature, — body, soul, and spirit. 
 He shares with the animal the body and soul, and has for 
 his own peculiar possession the spirit, the divine and immor- 
 tal part. Church philosophy, in its attempts to deal with 
 this matter, has never, so far as I know, applied the scientific 
 method of looking for facts. But how natural these ques- 
 tions are, how easily they spring up in everybody's mind, 
 may be illustrated by the fact that I have been asked oftener 
 than almost anything else concerning evolution. How, if 
 man has been developed from the animals, did he get his 
 soul, and at what time did he get it .<* I shall not enter upon 
 this discussion to-day, but speak of it as showing how vital 
 it is in popular thought. 
 
 Ecclesiastical philosophy has had three great theories as to 
 the origin of the human soul ; and these theories have been 
 held one after another, by this school of thinkers or tliat, 
 almost solely with reference to its agreement with this or 
 that doctrine of sin. For example, it has been one of the 
 most prevalent beliefs of the world that the soul of man is 
 pre-existent and eternal, and that this soul takes possession 
 of the body, or is incarnated, at the time of birth. Most 
 Christian philosophers have surrendered this belief, because 
 it does not accord with the doctrine of the inheritance of 
 sin from Adam, the doctrine of total depravity. 
 
lO Beliefs about Man. 
 
 This idea was prevalent, in the ancient world. It was 
 held by Plato that the soul of man is eternal ; that it lived 
 in other spheres, in other worlds, before it was bom into 
 these humble scenes. Many held that this coming into the 
 body was a degradation. This, too, was the Platonic idea, — 
 that, because of some sin in the previous life, the soul was 
 imprisoned in this body, and by and by it will escape from 
 it, and go back to its native home. 
 
 Another theory is that of Creationism, or the belief that, 
 at the time of birth, or some time previous to that, God 
 creates a soul for each individual, and incarnates it in the 
 body at the time of birth. 
 
 A third theory is that known as Traducianbm, — that is, 
 that the soul is inherited from the father. This has been the 
 common belief of the Church, because it falls in easily with 
 the doctrine of inherited sin and evil, and accords well with 
 the headship of Adam, and the fall of man in him. 
 
 This is a brief outline of the views that have been held. 
 The point of importance to us, and the only one we care to 
 follow, is whether we are to think of ourselves as double in 
 our nature, or whether we are one. I, for one, do not believe 
 that I have a soul. If there is any truth in this doctrine, the 
 soul is not something I have, it is something I am. 
 
 People go around the country asking if you have looked 
 after the sa\dng of your soul, as if it were a piece of prop- 
 erty that you could get out a policy of insurance on and be 
 at rest about; as if it were something you carried w4th or 
 had about you. If it is anv-thing, the soul is the self. 
 
 Is there any proof that there are tvvo of us, or three of us, 
 or is there only one ? It is very convenient for the purposes 
 of study to group human nature according to the faculties. 
 Mental philosophers di\dde man's nature into the intellect, 
 the emotions, and the will. They say that it is the intellect 
 
What is He? il 
 
 that thinks, the emotional part that feels, and the will that 
 decides. We divide ourselves off into all sorts of ways for 
 this practical purpose. We say the nerves feel, the eye sees, 
 the ear hears, the brain thinks, the heart loves, the soul as- 
 pires and worships. What we need to remember, however, 
 is that these divisions are purely arbitrary. There is no 
 more reality in them than there is in the lines of latitude and 
 longitude on the map, which are drawn for the convenience 
 of the scholar in his first lessons in geography. If you go 
 travelling over the world, you find no lines of latitude or 
 longitude. If you look from the top of a mountain, the 
 landscape is all one piece of the earth. You may see hill, 
 valley, brook, lake, mountain, but these divisions are purely 
 arbitrar}' : it is but one piece of the planet. So concerning 
 ourselves. We are not to think of ourselves as trinities or 
 dualities, but as unities. It is not my brain as something 
 separate from me that thinks : I think. It is not my heart 
 that feels : I feel. It is not my nerve that suffers : I suffer. 
 It is not my ear that hears : I hear. It is not the retina that 
 sees: I see. 
 
 And so I believe that we are not to regard ourselves as 
 having a soul or having a spirit We are to regard our nat- 
 ures as a unit. I have not a,ny soul to be saved. If I am 
 lost, if I am astray, if I am out of the right path, I must find 
 myself or be found. / must be brought back into the right 
 way. I have no soul that I can insure and then forget, put- 
 ting it into the hands of the church, of the minister, of the 
 ecclesiastical body, while I go about my worldly occupations, 
 feeling that they will take care of it There is no //. There 
 is only one, and that is myself. 
 
 Now, we come to the last question that I shall ask of your 
 patience to consider this morning ; but it is the deepest and 
 
12 Beliefs about Man. 
 
 highest and most important one of all : that is concerning 
 the nature of this self. 
 
 I am one ; but what is this one ? Is it one body or one 
 soul ? Is it spirit ? This is the great question that deter- 
 mines the place of man in the universe. 
 
 There have been attempts, and there are attempts being 
 made to-day, by those who hold the materialistic theory of 
 the universe, to explain man simply as a piece of mechan- 
 ism ; to explain thought, feeling, aspiration, worship, all 
 those internal and high faculties and qualities, as the results 
 of the molecular movements of the nerves and of the brain 
 and the different physical parts of which he is composed. 
 They say that just as the fragrance of a flower is, in some 
 mysterious, inexplicable way, caused by the constituent ele- 
 ments of that flower itself, as a collection of material 
 particles, so man flowers out into all that is beautiful, and 
 exhales as fragrance in worship and aspiration toward God. 
 But that is all. It is all a mere matter of the change of 
 elements of which the body is composed. This was the 
 belief, for example, of many of the Indian philosophers, the 
 belief of Buddha himself concerning man. He is the result 
 of the parts of which he is composed, said he ; and, when 
 you take those parts to pieces, there is nothing left but the 
 parts. If you take a chariot to pieces, taking off the wheels, 
 and separating part from part, there is no chariot left. So 
 there are many philosophers and scientists who tell us that, 
 when death has torn down the body of man and separated 
 it, part from part, and it has mingled with the dust of the 
 earth, there is nothing of him left, because he was the result 
 of this mechanical arrangement of parts. 
 
 It is not my purpose here to touch on the immortality of 
 the soul. I leave that out of account, and only deal with the 
 question whether materialism is capable of explaining man. 
 
W/iat is Hef 1 3 
 
 Can materialism explain the facts? That is the simple 
 question. And the answer, I believe, you will be glad to 
 hear, — whether you have agreed with me in everything I 
 have said or not, — you will be glad to know that I am able 
 to say this morning that the best scholarship of the world 
 has settled it that no theory of materialism by any possibility 
 can explain a man. Not only that: it does not even ap- 
 proach the promise of an explanation of him. 
 
 What is there about a man that it cannot explain ? I can 
 trace the movement of the molecules of which this body is 
 composed, from the time I touch this desk, along the lines of 
 the nerves up into the brain. I can calculate what goes on 
 there, the movements of all these little infinitesimal particles. 
 I can determine something concerning the nature of these 
 movements as they are connected with thought and feeling ; 
 but the one thing that cannot be determined is that there is 
 any causal connection between the thought or the feeling 
 and the movement of the molecular particles of the brain 
 by which the thought shall find an explanation in those 
 movements. 
 
 Here is where materialism utterly fails. It cannot possibly 
 explain the fact that I feel the touch of that desk, and am 
 conscious of that sensation. 
 
 Not only that, but materialism also fails to explain the 
 fact that man is self-conscious. How is it that one particle 
 of matter should be able to rise up and look another particle 
 of matter in the face, and say, /see //. What makes the 
 distinction between the / here and the // there ? No theory 
 of materialism has ever yet shown itself capable of answer- 
 ing these questions. 
 
 There is one more which it cannot explain, and that is this 
 wonderful thing that I call personal identity. What is it up 
 here in this brain, what is it anywhere in this body, that 
 
14 Beliefs about Man. 
 
 makes me capable of remembering, and of saying, I was the 
 one who ten years ago was in California ; I was the one who 
 last year went through Europe ; who at such a time suffered 
 under such a sorrow ; I was the one who on another occa- 
 sion was thrilled with love, with hope, with some marvellous 
 revelation of beauty? We know that the particles that 
 compose this body are in perpetual flux. There is no more 
 stability about your body or mine than about Niagara Falls. 
 The only difference is that the particles that compose one 
 change more rapidly than those of the other. But since I 
 have stood here my body has been passing through the most 
 wonderful transformations. Particles that were a part of me 
 are so no longer, and particles that formed no part of me are 
 so now. With every breath, I take in new materials ; and 
 constantly old and worn-out material is being exhaled from 
 every pore. Look at Niagara, and you know there is not 
 a drop of water present that was there an hour ago ; yet 
 Niagara is there, year after year. You can explain that, 
 because it is a current in a fixed place, held in by rocky 
 banks, and fed by certain streams. But man is not fixed. 
 There is no fixed source or changeless walls for the material 
 particles that keep up this wondrous form. Yet I know 
 that there is this marvellous change going on in me every 
 hour of my life. I have had three, four, five different 
 bodies, since I was a little boy by mother's knee. Yet I 
 was the one who played round mother's knee. I was the 
 one who went with my brother into the mysterious woods, 
 that were my first outlook into infinity; the one who in 
 those old days lay on my back beneath the trees, and looked 
 lip at the clouds flitting across the sky, up at the evening 
 stars that came out one by one, and wondered over the 
 mystery of the universe. I am the one who learned to 
 pick out from the great mass of humanity this one and that 
 
Wkat is He? 15 
 
 for a friend, who at last chose one as a companion for life, 
 in love, to make her a part of myself. I am the one who has 
 borne these experiences of years ago ; but yet there is not a 
 particle of this body as it stands here to-day which went 
 through any of those experiences. 
 
 How is it, then, that I am the same ? No theory of mate- 
 rialism can possibly explain this great mystery, this wonder, 
 that my thoughts, my feelings, my separate emotions, the 
 experiences I go through with to-day, are linked together in 
 one. I have an emotion this minute, another five minutes 
 hence, and all through the day my life is made up of isolated 
 and separate sensations. Where is the thread that binds 
 them all in one, so that I can say. These are all mine ? Ma- 
 terialism cannot explain it. 
 
 Though we cannot tell what that thread is, yet it is possi- 
 ble that I am essentially what I mean when I say " spirit." 
 And it is possible on this theory to give a comprehensible 
 and rational picture of the world. Although from the mate- 
 rialistic stand-point I cannot understand the fact that I think 
 and feel, yet from the stand-point that I am essentially 
 thought and feeling I can form a rational theory of the mate- 
 rial universe. 
 
 There is no time this morning to even hint how this is 
 done. I simply make this assertion, supported by the best 
 philosophy, thought, and science of the world, and say, as the 
 last outcome of our discussion, that, up to the present point 
 in the progress of human knowledge, it is utterly unphilo- 
 sophical, utterly unscientific for a man to be a materialist; 
 while the best scholarship of the world tells him that he must, 
 for the present at any rate, think of himself as essentially 
 what we mean when we say "spirit." 
 
 Man, then, is the animal who has developed a conscious- 
 ness of himself, the animal who has learned to improve his 
 
1 6 Beliefs about Man, 
 
 surroundings, to think of his origin, to dream of his destiny. 
 Man is the animal who has risen to such a thought of him- 
 self as to be able to say, I have done wrong, I ought to do 
 right, recognizing thus the moral law in its sweep through 
 the universe. Man is the animal who has risen to the con- 
 ception of the kinship that binds to him all the forms of life 
 on the globe, and who feels ever growing in his heart the 
 sense of this kinship. He is the one being who is con- 
 sciously beneficent. Man is the animal who, above all ma- 
 terial welfare, above all moral considerations, has learned to 
 think, as he looks out over this universe, of the great mys- 
 tery that lies hidden at its heart. He alone has been able to 
 think that this mysterious power is essentially a good power, 
 because the universe grows ever toward that which is better, 
 age after age. He has been able to think of this power as 
 holding some mysterious relationship to that which he feels 
 himself to be. 
 
 Man, then, is the animal who has been able to sweep 
 through all this experience until at last he stands on the 
 highest summit of attained civilization, never for a moment 
 dreaming that he is at the end, but ever looking on to some- 
 thing further and higher that is before ; believing there is 
 infinite possibility of progression because he believes in an 
 infinite life at the heart of things, and because he believes 
 in a kinship that binds him to this infinite life. Man, then, 
 is the animal that has learned to think of himself, to think 
 of right, to think God ; and has ended by thinking that he 
 is a son of God. 
 
THE ORIGIN OF MAN. 
 
 It goes without sa5dng that, if one is to improve the condi- 
 tion of mankind, he must first understand something correctly 
 concerning the elements of human nature, and the forces and 
 laws by which it has come to be what it is. If you give a 
 man your watch to put in order, he must be one who knows 
 something about the mechanism of the watch, the principles 
 on which it runs, so that he can discover what it lacks, and 
 be able to supply it. And yet there are a great many people 
 in the world — few I hope here — who, listening to me this 
 morning, would say : " All very well for a lecture, but that is 
 not a sermon. It is not a proper thing for a Sunday morn- 
 ing." If I should spend an hour in outlining and drawing 
 lessons from the creation, as it is written in Genesis, they 
 would think that that was sacred, that that was preaching. 
 In other words, a man who relates and draws lessons from 
 unfounded human traditions and legends is popularly re- 
 garded as treating sacred themes in a proper manner on a 
 sacred day ; while he who humbly and sincerely, looking at 
 the facts of the world, attempts to detail things of eternal 
 truth, as manifested in the nature of things, he, they say, is 
 talking science, he is lecturing, he is secular. You know very 
 well that I believe nothing of the kind ; but, even were it so, 
 I can do no otherwise. I must be secular ; I must lecture. 
 Let others treat sacred themes, and preach. 
 
 The theme we have in hand, then, this morning is to trace. 
 
1 8 Beliefs about Man. 
 
 if we can, the origin of man. Wliere did he come from and 
 how ? What are the principles underlying his development ? 
 We want to find out first what man is ; how he has come to 
 be what he is ; then to notice his imperfections, and discover, 
 if we may, by what process they can be helped. We want 
 to notice how far he is developed, and then discover, if pos- 
 sible, by what means he may be made to develop further and 
 higher still. 
 
 Let us be perfectly clear, however, as to the point that we 
 are after this morning. I do not propose to attempt the im- 
 possible. I shall not then look after the ultimate origin of 
 anything. Suppose, for example, I could discover the "miss- 
 ing link " about which so much has been said and written, 
 connecting man with the animal world beneath him. Sup- 
 pose I could go further still, down and down and down, to- 
 ward the very origin of life itself, and find the first little globule 
 of protoplasm, inorganized, distinguished from dead matter 
 only by the fact that this little drop is not dead. Suppose I 
 could go further than that, and trace the development of the 
 one out of the other, and prove the theory of spontaneous 
 generation to be true : what then .'' I would be no nearer 
 the ultimate origin of things than I was when I started out. 
 Eternity would still be beyond me, and still would the ques- 
 tion rise, whence came the material out of which this living 
 matter was developed ? By what process did it come 1 Who 
 made it ? Did it make itself 1 Did it always exist ? If it 
 did not always exist and did not make itself, who did make 
 it ? And, if some being made that, then I should have the 
 same questions again concerning this being. Did he exist 
 always ? If not, did he make himself ; and, if not, who did 
 make him ? And then the same questions again concerning 
 the new being, and so on and on forever. The question then 
 of the ultimate origin of anything, though we may put it into 
 
Origin of Man. 19 
 
 words, is, if you will consider it carefully, simply unthink- 
 able. It is inconceivable. We may as well, first as last, recog- 
 nize the fact that we must think within the limits of our own 
 human nature. We cannot overleap the boundaries of the 
 horizon. We must stand where we are, and look out as far 
 as we can, investigate as much as possible. But to suppose 
 the human mind will ever be able to solve the ultimate origin 
 of anything seems to me simply a delusion. We shall at- 
 tempt, then, nothing so ambitious as this. 
 
 We are here : we are what we are. There was a time in 
 the history of this planet when we were not here, when the 
 world was occupied only by lower forms of life. There 
 was a time when these lower forms of life even were not 
 here, when there was not one living, breathing thing upon 
 the planet. Sometime, somewhere, somehow, man came to 
 be. The problem before us then is simply to answer the 
 question how. 
 
 You are familiar with the traditional story to which I 
 alluded last Sunday. Six thousand years ago, Adam, a 
 perfect, complete, typical man, was created and placed in a 
 garden. Human life then was very long. Men lived three, 
 five, eight hundred, or a thousand years. Two thousand 
 years passed away, or nearly that, when the world had be- 
 come so wicked that the Lord could endure it no longer, 
 and he drowned them all, — all, with the exception of eight 
 persons, Noah, his wife, his three sons and their wives, who 
 floated in an ark above the universal ocean, and when it sub- 
 sided found themselves on the summit of a mountain in Asia. 
 These eight came forth from the ark a little more than four 
 thousand years ago ; and from that little beginning, within 
 that limit of time, the entire world has developed as it is to- 
 day. This is the traditional theory. Why can we not accept 
 it ? I will give you in brief some hints why we cannot. 
 
20 Beliefs about Man. 
 
 In the first place, we cannot accept this story for the simple 
 reason that we have traced it and found it to be an unau- 
 thentic legend. It did not even originate with the Hebrews 
 who have given us our Bible. We have found out that they 
 imported it late in the history of their career from Babylon. 
 It was not original even with the Babylonians. They derived 
 it from the Akkadians, a people who had developed a wide- 
 spread civilization in the valley of the Euphrates before 
 Babylon itself was built. We have traced the story, and found 
 it not to be history, but a legend that the early Hebrews, 
 Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and Moses himself, knew nothing 
 about. It came into Israel about the time of the captivit}^, 
 brought with them probably on their return from their 
 sojourn in Babylon. 
 
 Another reason. We find arguments against it in the 
 ruins left of ancient civilizations. Go to Egypt, and there 
 alone are arguments writ in stone that make it simply im- 
 possible for us to believe any such story as this concerning 
 the origin of the human race. We find there a highly 
 wrought, completely developed civilization, — empire, litera- 
 ture, religion, language, everything that marks a high and 
 wide-spread culture. We find it when ? We find it in full 
 career further back than the historic date of the flood itself, 
 as it comes to us in these chapters of Genesis.* The ruins 
 of those old civilizations, of which this may be taken as an 
 illustration and specimen, forbid our believing that this can 
 be accepted as a true account of the history of man. 
 
 Another argument we find in language. The stor}^ is, as 
 we find it in Genesis, that all mankind spoke one common 
 speech until the Tower of Babel was built, and then the Lord, 
 in his wrath, to frustrate the plans of the ambitious men who 
 
 * Note. — Sir John Lubbock, in his Jubilee Address before the British Association, 
 says the Pyramids are probably six thousand years old. 
 
Origin of Man. 21 
 
 thought to erect a tower high enough to scale heaven, scattered 
 them over the face of the earth, and confused their tongues, 
 and from that — which also occurred about four thousand 
 years ago — have come all the different languages of the 
 human race. 
 
 Now, as a matter of fact, the science of language, as 
 developed within the last fifty years, makes it impossible for 
 any man who is intelligent or acquainted with facts to believe 
 that any such a thing was possible. We can group together 
 the languages of the world, and find that they fall under 
 a few grand divisions. Many of the languages of Europe, 
 our own, the Latin and Greek, all run back to our Aryan 
 forefathers in Asia. Even in regard to this, we cannot get 
 back to the source ; but we have gone as far as the time of 
 Babel, and we find the very language we speak there in its 
 rudiments. Yet we are not at the spring. We can trace 
 back the Turanian, the Semitic, and these different families, 
 but find no trace of their coming together. It is as if you 
 followed up three or four different rivers, under the impres- 
 sion that they came from one common spring, and yet, going 
 hundreds and hundreds of miles, find them no nearer to- 
 gether than when you started, so that you are compelled to 
 believe that the common source- is, at any rate, far, far away. 
 So we can trace back the languages spoken on the earth 
 beyond the time of Babel itself, and no trace of their coming 
 together. Indeed, the facts of the science of language, in- 
 stead of permitting us to believe that the human race did 
 speak one language at the first, compel us rather to believe 
 the direct opposite : that from innumerable dialects, spring- 
 ing up naturally all over the earth, there has been a con- 
 solidation, until at last out of them have come a few, great, 
 strong, living languages, capable of growth and of absorbing 
 these lesser forms and divergencies of speech. And those 
 
22 Beliefs about Man. 
 
 best versed in the history of this development tell us that 
 there is hardly a question that the outcome is to be a prac- 
 tical unity ; a few, two or three possibly, great languages 
 being common to the civilized world, and the one that is to 
 be most wide-spread of all, our own. 
 
 . There is one other argument that makes it impossible for 
 us to hold this theory, and that is the problem of race devel- 
 opment. If we believe this old story, what must we accept.'* 
 We must accept something so hard that no scientific Darwin- 
 ian would dare to propose it to the intelligence of the world. 
 We must believe that inside of four thousand years the negro 
 of Africa, the Chinaman, the North American Indian, the 
 Hottentot, the Patagonian, the Lapp, the Caucasian, all the 
 different types or races on earth, have sprung from one 
 family of Shemites. And yet we go to Egypt, and we find a 
 refutation of the possibility of so wild and absurd a dream. 
 We find on monuments of Egypt, reaching back to the time 
 of the flood itself, outlines of negroes as clearly developed 
 in type as they are to-day. We find also the Asiatic and the 
 Egyptian types. So we know these divergencies of race are 
 at least older than the time of the flood, older than the 
 tower of Babel, older than any age which the Bible permits 
 us to hold. And yet men who hold that these tremendous 
 changes have been wrought out by natural processes inside 
 of four thousand years object to the Darwinian theory, be- 
 cause they say the world has not existed long enough for all 
 these marvellous developments to have taken place. They 
 object to a very slight wonder, and ask us to believe an im- 
 possibility. 
 
 Running thus briefly over these arguments, let me come to 
 comparatively modern times, and show you how the problem 
 has SDrung up within the last hundred years. 
 
Origin of Man. 23 
 
 Geology you know to be a very modern science ; but it has 
 revolutionized the thought of man concerning the world in 
 which we live, until we know that, by processes and forces at 
 work everywhere around us, this old earth has been devel- 
 oped into its present condition through periods of indefinite 
 and unimaginable time. The six thousand years theory has 
 been stretched and stretched and stretched, by the pressure 
 of facts, until, like a dilated soap-bubble, it has burst and 
 vanished into air. Even those who try to hold still to the 
 inspiration of Genesis have been compelled to change the 
 " days " of the Bible to periods of uncounted ages. 
 
 Now comes the new science of palaeontology ; that which 
 deals with the fossil remains of plants and animals that are 
 discovered in the rocky strata under our feet. What are 
 the facts in regard to this? The question was started in 
 Europe by the discovery of some marine shells in the Alps, 
 along the pathway of the journey between France and Italy. 
 Marine shells in the Alps ! Do you wonder that theology 
 started ? It must explain these things. And, unless it could 
 explain them in someway consistent with its traditional story, 
 the discovery of these fossil shells would be destined to 
 revolutionize the thought of the world. How did they come 
 there ? Theology said the flood brought them. When that 
 was disproved, it said they were freaks of nature. When 
 that was disproved, it said the devil made tliem to mislead 
 the thoughts of men. And, when they could hold that no 
 longer, they said God made them as a mere pleasantry, as a 
 sort of imitation of the things that really existed. Voltaire, 
 having no intimation of the decisions of modern science, 
 said, No, the flood didn't bring them there : they were simply 
 dropped by pilgrims from France to Rome. No, said science, 
 — and its answer is that which the intelligence of the world 
 to-day accepts as unquestioned, — these are genuine remains 
 
24 Beliefs about Man. 
 
 of marine shells ; and they were deposited there in precisely 
 the same way that sea-shells are deposited to-day. The 
 place where these were found has been under the sea. And 
 this made the revolution in the thought of the civilized world 
 of which I have spoken, because the sea had never been 
 there in any historic time. This stretched the thought of 
 man back and back, opening up a vista of myriads of ages ; 
 and it placed the origin of life far beyond the six thousand 
 years in the dim distance of unimagined time. 
 
 The science of palaeontology, then, has settled it that the 
 fossils which are discovered in the rocks are really the re- 
 mains of creatures that were once alive and in their natural 
 element and condition ; that they were placed there, and 
 covered up in the process of the deposition of sediment, 
 precisely as shells and bits of leaves and twigs are being 
 covered up on the seashore to-day, by layers of sand being 
 washed over them and hiding them away, in what, in future 
 ages, will be rocky strata, to be dug up again and uncovered. 
 What does all this mean ? What are the necessary inferences 
 from things like these ? It means that life has been on this 
 planet millions and millions of years. 
 
 The wise men that have developed this science for us have 
 found out another thing: that there is a natural development 
 in the structure and complexity of the forms of life from 
 those that are found lowest in the rock to those that approach 
 nearest the position of man. That is, that these rocks have 
 been laid dov>'n one on the top of the other. If I should 
 begin liere to pile up newspapers and place between them 
 leaves and twigs, and then more newspapers, and then an- 
 other layer of organic forms, and so on, you would know 
 perfectly well that the one at the bottom was the oldest, or 
 the one first placed in position. That is the argument of 
 common-sense. All these marvellous results have been thus 
 
Origin of Man. 2$ 
 
 developed. We know what are the lowest and what are the 
 highest. We find the simplest forms of life lowest, and we 
 find a constant development in structure and complexity as 
 we approach the position of man. It appears, then, like a 
 process of development at first sight. It is as natural as the 
 development of an oak out of an acorn, or from the first 
 twig that shoots above the soil. 
 
 Again, there are places in this rock record where there 
 are blanks, as though in this book I should tear out here 
 twenty-five leaves, and here fifty, and here another number, 
 leaving the book a fragment. And yet, suppose I should do 
 that, and you should pick it up, not knowing how it came so, 
 you would feel perfectly certain that originally all the leaves 
 were there, would you not ? No man would be so foolish as 
 to make a book, and number it for a few pages consecutively, 
 and then leave out a few pages. You would say the natural 
 inference was that in the first place the book was complete. 
 Or suppose you should go into my library and find Gibbon's 
 History of Rome in twelve volumes, or rather find seven or 
 eight volumes, and the others missing, and the places where 
 they had stood vacant. Would you not feel perfectly sure 
 that in the first place I had the full set ? I would not have 
 bought a mutilated copy. Originally, they were all there, 
 though some may be lent or on the library table. 
 
 Another illustration. Suppose I should find between here 
 and Worcester a series of milestones, with one and two miss- 
 ing. I begin and count from three. Three, four, five, and six 
 are there, then five or six stones are missing. Again, between 
 twenty and thirty, five or six are missing : then they run on 
 up to forty. Would not you say, — finding these spaces thus 
 distributed, and yet finding the same number of miles pre- 
 cisely in the spaces as where the series are complete, — would 
 you not say that originally all the forty were there, and that 
 
26 Beliefs about Man. 
 
 in some way the others had been thrown down, displaced, or 
 carried away ? Something precisely similar to this is found 
 in the rock record from the lowest, simplest forms up to man, 
 — at the bottom the simplest form, and man at the top, the 
 completion, the flower and fruitage of the tree of life. But 
 we find breaks ; and we are not able at present, with any 
 organic remains discovered, to bridge over these breaks. 
 The inference is that these missing- forms were there at the 
 start, but that, in the ten million changes that have passed 
 over the old earth in its history, these records have been 
 wiped out. Why, the wonder is not that these organic re- 
 mains are now and again missing : the marvel rather is that 
 we find the record so nearly complete. The result, then, of 
 rational thought on the subject, compels intelligent men to 
 believe that this rock record originally was complete, that 
 down below were simple forms, followed by more complex 
 ones until we come to man. 
 
 Now, the question is. Do these different forms of life repre- 
 sent special acts of creation 1 Was a very simple form of 
 life created and then wiped out of existence, and then an- 
 other created and that wiped out, and then another, a little 
 higher, and so on, by innumerable acts of separate creation ; 
 or did they develop one from the other ? The facts are such 
 that every intelligent student has already decided that the 
 theory of the development of one form from another is the 
 only one that is consistent with the facts and acceptable to 
 the rational mind. 
 
 To make the argument very simple, suppose I should take 
 a crab-apple, and prove to you, what all intelligent people 
 know, that this crab was originally the only apple in the 
 world, and then show you all the marvellous forms of the 
 apples that have some way come into existence since that 
 time, would you be inclined to accept the fact that they all 
 
Origin of Man. 2/ 
 
 developed from the crab-apple, or would you believe that 
 they were specially created ? We know that this is a process 
 of development. Every gardener knows that he can develop 
 new forms of almost any plant or shrub or fruit. Then, by 
 what we know, passing from the known to the unknown, we 
 argue, as every rational man must, that there has been a 
 process of development of life from the lowest to the highest, 
 through all the ages. But now the question comes, and here 
 is the point where many scientific men, and almost all theolo- 
 gians, hesitate. They grant the development of all these 
 forms of life until you come to man. Shall we include him 
 in this process, or shall we say there must have been some 
 new power manifested here ? What we call Nature, what I 
 believe to be God, in and working through the laws of things, 
 is capable of developing all these wondrous forms until we 
 come to man. Now, they say there must have been a special 
 act of creation in order to account for him. Why? They 
 can give no reason that is, to me, worthy of serious thought. 
 It is very largely, with a great many, a matter of egotism. 
 They do not like to feel that they have so many poor rela- 
 tions. They do not like to feel that they are organically 
 connected with the animals, way down to the first globule of 
 protoplasm. They say : " I am a man. I am superior to all 
 the rest of the world, and God must have made me in a 
 different fashion from that which he used in all the other 
 marvels of the universe.*' That is a little lingering trace of 
 egotistic prejudice, nothing else. 
 
 There is another feeling. They say : " If I shall grant 
 that man has been developed from the animal world, why, I 
 may wake up some morning and find that I am nothing but 
 an animal." But this you must keep in mind : Whatever 
 theory you accept as to how you came here on earth, or how 
 you came to be what you are, the simple fact will remain for- 
 
28 Beliefs about Man. 
 
 ever that you are what you are, and nothing else. No theory 
 as to how you came here will change your nature one single 
 iota. Is there any necessity, then, for calling in some other 
 power, some new manifestation of the creative ability to jDro- 
 duce this wonderful result, — man? As I had occasion to 
 tell you last Sunday, man shares almost every faculty of his 
 whole nature with the animal world beneath him. It has 
 been discovered that you cannot possibly find the border 
 line, for example, between the animal and vegetable world. 
 There are forms concerning which the wisest living cannot 
 tell whether they are animal or vegetable. They put them 
 sometimes on this side of the line and sometimes on that. 
 You cannot find the exact line between the animal and 
 vegetable, any more than between day and night. It passes 
 through a gradation of twilight that rubs out all marks and 
 lines. No man has found the line between the animal and 
 the human. There is such a gradual transition from one to 
 the other that it is impossible to tell whether it is anything 
 more than a difference of degree. 
 
 Let us look straight in the face this problem as to the 
 origin of man. There are just three thinkable theories that 
 an intelligent man can hold. We may think that man was 
 created out of nothing, or out of the dust beneath our feet. 
 That is one theory, the popular one, the theory of the Church. 
 Another theory is that man may have been born from an- 
 cestors very much unlike himself ; as if, for example, a bird 
 were hatched from the spawn of a fish, or as though a rose 
 were developed out of some wayside shrub that never bore a 
 flower. That is a theory of which you can think. The third 
 theory is that man was born from ancestors somewhat differ- 
 ent from, but very much like, himself, — for example, to recur 
 to an illustration I have already made familiar to you, as 
 though we assume, what we know, that a pippin was devel- 
 oped from a crab-apple, — an apple, though considerably un- 
 
Origin of Man. 29 
 
 like itself, still, in all essential peculiarities and particulars, 
 more like than unlike. 
 
 Let us glance at these, and see which one we must accept. 
 The creation theory says man was created suddenly, out of 
 the dust of the earth. Try to get a picture of that in your 
 mind. God, of course, according to the theory, is invisible, 
 although Genesis tells us that he came down and walked in 
 the garden. We are to think then of the bare ground and 
 the blank air. Not a man on earth, not a man having ever 
 been on earth ; then suddenly, in an instant, where there was 
 simply the bare ground and the blank air, a full-grown man ! 
 That is the creation theory, though hardly worthy the name 
 of a theor)% because a theory professes, at any rate, to deal 
 with and explain facts. But consider for a moment that 
 there does not exist on the face of the earth one single frayed 
 rag or shred of proof that anything ever came into being 
 in such a fashion as that. You remember how the little boy 
 posed his father by asking him whether God could do every- 
 thing, and, when he told him he could, the boy asked if God 
 could make a two-year-old colt in fifteen minutes. The 
 problem of making a two-year-old colt in fifteen minutes is 
 very simple compared with that of making a full-grown man 
 in no time. It is enough then to say, in regard to this, that 
 there does not exist in the world one single particle of proof 
 that any such thing ever occurred. 
 
 Take the next theory,, that man was born from parents 
 much unlike himself. Again, we must say that there is not 
 the slightest proof on the face of the earth that anything ever 
 came into existence in that way. Trace it all the way 
 through the vegetable and animal kingdoms, clear down to 
 the lowest forms, and we find that the antecedent parent 
 form is substantially like that which it has produced. There 
 may be variations. There are variations, many of them. No 
 
30 Beliefs about Man. 
 
 child is precisely like its father or its mother ; and yet it is 
 very much like both of them in all essential particulars, dif- 
 fering only here and there in minor matters. Now, then, I 
 repeat, there is no proof that anything in the world ever came 
 into being after the fashion which this theory indicates. 
 
 What have we left.? That man was born from parents 
 with which he was genetically connected, very much like 
 himself, slightly unlike. What is this theory ? This is noth- 
 ing more nor less than Darwinism. What about the proof 
 of this ? All the proof we have, whether complete or not, — 
 find as many missing links as you please, find as many breaks 
 in the evidence as you will, — all the proof we have is that 
 living forms, both vegetable and animal, have come into 
 existence, and do come into existence in precisely this way. 
 
 The intelligent world, then, is placed in this position. 
 There are three possible theories as to the origin of man : 
 two are utterly lacking in proof; the other one, whatever 
 defects there may be in the evidence, has at least some 
 proof, has indeed a good deal of proof. Which of the three, 
 then, must an intelligent man accept ? I believe the day will 
 come, yea, now is, when the .man who expresses his disbelief 
 in this theory of the origin of man will be doing one of two 
 things, — either he will be impeaching his own knowledge of 
 facts, or impeaching his power to judge as to the value of 
 proof. 
 
 Now for two or three results or lessons springing out of 
 our theme. I have touched on one already ; but it is so im- 
 portant that I wish to touch on it again. Men argue against 
 this scientific theory of the origin of man, because they fear 
 that, somehow or other, something vital, something precious 
 in their natures, is gomg to be endangered. But just think, 
 friends ! Here is an oak-tree. Suppose we get around it 
 and fight about the way, the process, by which it has come to 
 
Origin of Man. 31 
 
 be an oak. When we have done that, and got through, it is 
 an oak iust the same, isn't it ? Your theory or mine does not 
 change its nature a particle. And so in regard to our man- 
 hood : we are men, no matter where we came from, no matter 
 through what stages of development we have arrived at our 
 present position. We are what we are : no matter if once all 
 the life on the earth was a little globule of inorganized pro- 
 toplasm, no matter if beyond that there was nothing living, 
 no matter if out of that we have been developed, still are not 
 those words of Shakspere relevant and beautiful as ever : 
 " What a piece of work is a man ! How noble in reason ! 
 how infinite in faculties ! in form and moving, how express 
 and admirable ! in action, how like an angel ! in appre- 
 hension, how like a god " .? Still it is true that his thoughts 
 wander through eternity, looking before and after. Still it is 
 true that Shakspere lived and wrote, that the poets have 
 given us their grand creations. Still it is true that Jesus 
 walked in the villages of Galilee, teaching his beautiful 
 parables and everlasting truths ; that he defied the orthodoxy 
 of Jerusalem in the interest of the new and grander definition 
 of man. Science, civilization, literature, the achievements of 
 man, are; no matter by what process they came to be. 
 
 One other point. The future destiny of man remains just 
 where it was, no matter what theory we hold of his origin. 
 A great many people are afraid that, if they admit the truth 
 that they have been developed from the lower forms of life, 
 they are going to lose their souls and their hope of immortal- 
 ity. If we are made out of the dust, where did we get our 
 immortal souls? Suppose I was developed out of some 
 lower form of animal life, is there any more mystery about 
 the soul than on the other theory ? I am what I am, on 
 either theory. If I am destined to survive the shock of 
 death and to continue in my full career, then that is true, no 
 
32 Beliefs about Man. 
 
 matter where I came from. If it is not true, no theory of 
 creation will help the matter at all. I, for one, no matter 
 what theory men may hold in regard to this, should not be 
 ready to give up my hope. Since some power has showed 
 itself capable of making me what I am, is it any greater 
 wonder or mystery to suppose and hope that this same power, 
 whatever it may be, shall also be able to continue the exist- 
 ence which it has given ? I am lost in the wonder that I 
 exist. It is no more wonderful to me that I may continue to 
 exist. 
 
 I saw an article only a day or two ago in a prominent 
 paper, saying, that the theory of evolution is atheistic. Evo- 
 lution does not undertake to explain the ultimate origin of 
 anything. It simply discusses the question how. The the- 
 ory of evolution is neither theistic nor atheistic. It does not 
 touch that question. It leaves it just where it was before, to 
 be settled on other grounds. 
 
 Another question is as to whether this theory is consistent 
 with devoutness, with piety, with religion, that which men 
 treasure in their minds concerning the great mystery of 
 life and death and eternity. It seems to me so strange that 
 men should raise questions like these. Religion is a fact. 
 It has been developed in every age, under all circumstances, 
 in every clime. It has proved itself to be an essential part 
 of human nature. Is a theory of the universe going to 
 change us so completely as all^ that 1 
 
 Consider one more point. Men seem to think that they 
 do God honor by clinging to a theory as to how he produced 
 certain results. I feel that I do God greater honor by 
 humbly looking after the facts, by not presumptuously say- 
 ing, " O God, it cannot be that thou didst so and so : this 
 other must have been thy way of working." I feel that I 
 honor God most by humbly and reverently finding out his 
 
Origin of Man. 33 
 
 ways, accepting and rejoicing in them, and remembering this 
 one thing, that nothing can be piously true, nothing can be 
 religiously true, which is scientifically false. This universe, 
 if it be the work of one will, one life at its heart, must be 
 like a web with one pattern running through it all. It is one 
 law, one element, one God ; and we cannot be religious while 
 we cling to false traditional human conceptions as to how 
 God did this and that, and refuse to accept the truth of his 
 own testimony as revealed in the work of his own hands. 
 
 When will the world learn this lesson ? Time and time 
 again through the history of the Church, during the last two 
 hundred years, this writer, that writer, and another, have 
 been put on the "Index" and excommunicated for teaching 
 just such truths ; for truths they have proved to be. Yes, 
 the Church, time after time, has flung its defiance in the face 
 of God, and condemned those who have uttered his own 
 eternal truths. Let them beware lest by repeating again 
 that old, age-long tragedy and farce, lest by putting Darwin 
 and Spencer in the " Index Expurgatorium," and excommuni- 
 cating them, they find, as so often before, that it is God him- 
 self they have put in the " Index," that it is God himself they 
 have attempted to cast out of the temple in which they claim 
 to worship him. 
 
Sin and Salvation. 
 
 Sin and Salvation, — these two words suggest the thought 
 of a law broken, of a penalty following the transgression of 
 that law, and of some deliverance, either from the transgres- 
 sion itself, from the penalty of that transgression, or from 
 both. 
 
 And these idea — law, transgression, penalty, deliverance, 
 in some one of their thousand kaleidoscopic forms — will be 
 found at the heart of every religion, of every philosophy in 
 all the world. It is the problem which faced primeval man. 
 It is the problem which has been studied all the way up the 
 ages. It is the problem which faces us to-day. It is the 
 problem which will continue to face us until that ideal condi- 
 tion, which we call the kingdom of God, shall have come in 
 its perfection on earth. 
 
 If we take our stand by the side of the lowest barbarian, 
 and see him afraid of or trying to conciliate his fetich ; if we 
 see him laying food as an offering on the grave of some 
 old chief or ancestor and praying, " Here we bring thee 
 food : be good to us, and help us " ; if we take our stand in 
 that ancient civilization of Mexico, and see thousands of 
 human beings slain by the priests as an offering to their 
 cruel gods ; if we see the mother casting her child into the 
 sacred Ganges ; if we see the follower of Doorga, in India, 
 committing a hideous murder, under the supposition that 
 he is thereby winning favor with ^he cruel goddess; if we 
 
Sin and Salvation. 35 
 
 stand in that awful vale of Gehenna, outside of the sacred 
 city, and hear the drums beat to drown the cries of the 
 innocent children burned in the arms of the red-hot idol, 
 Moloch ; if we go up the holy hill and stand in the tem- 
 ple, and hear the hymns and prayers ascend, and see the 
 countless victims slaughtered in the attempt to appease an 
 offended deity or to wash away the sins of his worshippers ; 
 if we stand with Jesus himself, as he talks with the Samari- 
 tan woman, and hear him outlining the conditions of deliv- 
 erance from human evil, and reconciliation with that God 
 who is an infinite and omnipresent spirit; if we come 
 down the ages, and see the crowds kneeling in cathedrals, 
 or pilgrims toiling on their way to far-off, sacred shrines ; 
 if we sit beside the Quaker in his silent worship, waiting, 
 as he does, for the moving of the spirit ; if we stand in the 
 presence of gorgeous rituals and ceremonies ; if we come 
 to our own simple and severe form of worship, and study 
 of these serious themes : in all these cases, we are look- 
 ing upon this wonderful phenomenon, — man in his different 
 stages of development, in different conditions, attempting 
 to solve this one problem of sin, suffering, salvation. 
 
 The same truth meets us, if we look over the various at- 
 tempts of the world to outline a perfect philosophy of things, 
 from the first crude efforts in the dim distance of prehistoric 
 time. If we look at the result of the work of Aristotle, if 
 we read Plato, if we come down the ages to Spinoza, and 
 then on to our own time, and open the last volume of Herbert 
 Spencer, again we find this same wondrous thing going on, 
 — man attempting to solve these old, age-long problems of 
 the world. 
 
 These, again, are the problems that have inspired the 
 mightiest and sublimest flights of the world's poesy. It 
 was the problem that Job dealt with in one of the grandest 
 
36 Beliefs about Man. 
 
 poems of ancient times. Some phase or form of this prob- 
 lem engaged the thought of blind old Homer. It was this 
 thought that pursued and led on Dante, in his pilgrimage 
 through the various rounds and circles of the Inferno^ as he 
 climbed the mountains of the Furgatorio^ as he stood wrapped 
 in the beatific vision of the Faradiso. This was the prob- 
 lem that Milton had in mind, when, as he says, he attempts 
 to rise " to the height of this great argument," that he may 
 *' assert eternal Providence, and justify the ways of God to 
 men." 
 
 This is the problem of Faust. And the multitudinous 
 minor singers of the world, like the forest songsters in the 
 morning, that wake and answer the first sweet cry, all give 
 utterance to the wail of the world's sorrow or the paean of 
 the world's great hope. 
 
 This problem, then, of sin and salvation, which the world 
 has been working at these thousands of years, shall we dare 
 to think that we can solve it this morning, in an hour ? Only 
 one thing encourages us to attempt so mighty a theme. A 
 little child on his father's shoulder may be able to see further 
 than the one who lifts him up. A dwarf on a mountain-top 
 may be able to gain glimpses and outlooks that are utterly 
 hidden from the tallest giant in the valley. Balboa discov- 
 ered the Pacific, not because he was mightier and grander 
 than thousands of his fellow-men, but because he was the first 
 who, in his wanderings, climbed to that mountain peak in 
 Darien, and from there saw spread out before him that mar- 
 vellous new world. And so, not because we are wiser, but 
 because we are able to climb to the high peaks of outlook 
 of philosophy, of science, that the world's struggle and toil 
 have heaped up century after century, we, though small in 
 our intellectual stature, may be able to gain glimpses of the 
 solution of some of these problems that the wisest and 
 
Sin and Salvation. 37 
 
 greatest of the past sought for in vain. Let us then put the 
 problem simply and clearly before us. 
 
 Men suffer. Why 1 Men are burdened with the conscious- 
 ness of sin which they seek to throw off, that they may be 
 free. Why ? What is the explanation of these strange, mys- 
 terious facts .-* 
 
 I want to ask you to follow me while, as briefly as possible, 
 I show you how men have looked at this question, and how 
 natural it is that they should look at it as they have. I will 
 give you a principle which you can apply to all the religions 
 and all the philosophies of the world. 
 
 If we stand by the side of the lowest barbaric man, trying 
 to feel with his feelings and to look out over the universe 
 through his eyes, we shall be able to understand perhaps 
 why he gave the answer, that we know he did, to the first 
 problem of the world. He knew nothing of any power in 
 this universe except such as he imagined in the likeness of 
 himself. He therefore peopled the world with ten thousand 
 invisible forms, gods of the clouds, of the stars, of the sun, 
 of the moon, of the rivers, of the trees, of the mountains. 
 And these gods were to him either good or evil, according as 
 they helped or hurt. And so the sun as the source of life, 
 the sun as the giver of light, the sun as the glad bringer of 
 day, was a good being. When it scorched the deserts, when it 
 dried up the earth, when it brought pestilence on its beams, 
 then it was an evil power. So, too, he feared the lightning as 
 an evil thing. He trembled before the cold, before hunger 
 and disease, and the ten thousand forces about him that 
 seemed inimical to his welfare and happiness. He inter- 
 preted all that he called evil in his life by referring it to some 
 one of these invisible, mighty, malignant powers that, in some 
 way, he had offended. The problem with him was, How 
 shall I be able to gain the good-will of this power? You 
 
38 Beliefs about Man. 
 
 will see that this is the principle that runs through all the 
 religions of the world, and explains them all. They are 
 man's theories of the universe and of the powers that govern 
 it, and his attempts to come into right relations with these 
 powers, so that they may be friends, and not enemies ; so that 
 they may help, and not injure him. 
 
 And precisely this problem, only with such a change as our 
 change of thought necessitates, is the one that we have to 
 solve. What is the effort of modern science except an at- 
 tempt to find out the nature of the forces that encompass us, 
 and to bring ourselves into such relations with them that they 
 shall help instead of hurt ? The principle remains the same, 
 and must remain the same forever. It is only a difference of 
 interpretation, determined by the intelligence of man. When 
 man had grown so as to conceive the grand principle of 
 monotheism ; when he had come to think that instead of 
 there being a hundred or a thousand different gods, some 
 good, some bad, some indifferent, there was only one, and 
 that one their God, their Father, their Friend, an Almighty 
 Being, — when this conception had taken possession of man's 
 mind, you will very easily see it necessitated a grand change 
 in the interpretation of the problems of sin, suffering, and 
 salvation. Men would reason of necessity like this : " Why 
 should we sin against and disregard the will of a loving, 
 good, and perfectly wise God, one who knows always what is 
 best ? On the other hand, why should a loving God and 
 Father and Friend, an Almighty Being, make us suffer? 
 Why should he torture us t Why should he lay burdens of 
 sin and suffering upon us, that crush out the life, that kill 
 hope, that lead to despair, that make us wish for death ? " 
 
 You will see that the moral nature of man, developed to 
 this stage of perfection, would demand that he must find 
 some cause outside of this perfect God, if possible. He 
 
Sin and Salvation. 39 
 
 would say a perfect God must have made things perfect at 
 the first ; so it was inevitable that there should grow up a 
 dream of a primeval Eden. Man, they said, must have 
 started in a Paradise ; and it cannot be God's fault that he 
 did not remain there. He must voluntarily have committed 
 some offence against the Most High that produced this con- 
 dition of sorrow and evil. 
 
 Out of this kind of reasoning sprang the doctrine of the 
 fall. The fall of man, so long as it was accepted, seemed 
 to promise a solution of all these great problems that had 
 weighed upon men's hearts. But let us now briefly state two 
 or three reasons why to-day it is simply impossible to accept 
 any such solution. 
 
 In the first place, suppose there was a fall, who would be 
 responsible for it ? Not Adam certainly. No argument, no 
 train of reasoning, can by any possibility shift the responsi- 
 bility from — let me say it reverently — God himself. Did 
 He not make Adam? Did He not place him in circum- 
 stances where He knew he would fall ? And all the time He 
 might have made it otherwise. He might have circumstanced 
 him so that he would not have fallen and would not have 
 sinned. The responsibility must come back to God himself. 
 This doctrine, in its implications, is not only irrational, but 
 utterly immoral. For one of its darkest aspects lies just here : 
 that it throws the burden, not only of the curse of sorrow 
 and of death, but of sin itself, upon the innocent ; if I may 
 be pardoned such a contradiction in terms, in order to state 
 that which is true in thought. Take, for example, the case of 
 the unborn child. He does not ask to be born. He comes 
 into a world already blighted, thrust here by the power that 
 created the universe, born of a parentage already depraved 
 and corrupted, born the inheritor of disease, possibly of 
 idiocy or insanity, with a tendency to crime so strong that no 
 
40 Beliefs about Man, 
 
 power of human effort or human surroundings shall be able 
 to stem the current and ward off the terrible result. The 
 innocent, on this theory, suffer for the guilty, and suffer per- 
 chance more than the guilty themselves. And this theory, 
 according to the common conception, is darkened by pro- 
 longing the result of the fall even to infinity ; so that un- 
 born millions, for the sin of one, are doomed to cross this 
 earth amid tears and sorrows and wrongs innumerable, living 
 a life of torture only as a prelude to an eternity unspeakably 
 worse. 
 
 Another point, which of itself would be sufficient to set 
 the matter aside as the solution of our problem, is that it has 
 been discovered, beyond a question, that no such thing as 
 a fall of man has ever taken place. It is a tradition, a 
 legend, a myth, unhistoric, without one particle of basis in 
 fact. Instead of man's having been in a higher position and 
 having fallen from that to where he is to-day, we are rather 
 to think of him as originally lower than the lowest type of 
 man with which we are acquainted, and through uncounted 
 ages, and by slow accretions of moral power and intelligence, 
 climbing gradually up to his present position, where he looks 
 upward to something as yet only to be dreamed. We cannot 
 accept, then, the fall of man as a solution of this problem of 
 suffering and sin. 
 
 Let us for a moment put aside all these theological and 
 traditional conceptions, and try to look the matter simply in 
 the face from the scientific stand-point of to-day, and see if 
 we can suggest a possible solution. 
 
 And first as to the problem of suffering. I, for one, cannot 
 conceive the possibility of a being so constructed as to be 
 able to feel the sensation of pleasure and yet not liable to 
 feel the sensation of pain. The very possibility of feeling 
 joy or ecstasy or hope or love of necessity implies the 
 
Sin and Salvation. 41 
 
 possibility of feeling their opposites. I cannot even under- 
 stand how we should have a conception of joy, were there not 
 a background of sorrow as a contrast to help us to a defini- 
 tion. If, for example, I had always been perfectly happy all 
 my life, and had never seen anything but perfect happiness, 
 I should not even know that I was happy. I should have no 
 materials out of which to construct a definition of pleasure or 
 of pain. Contrast is essential to consciousness. 
 
 Once more. I believe that pain, all that pain which is 
 necessary in the world, is a good, and not an evil. I shall 
 not enter into a discussion of the problem whether God might 
 have created us differently, or whether we might have been 
 developed differently here. But, taking us as we are, it seems 
 to me perfectly clear that a little thought is able to show that 
 pain is a good and not an evil. Every individual existence 
 in the world is surrounded by conditions that we call laws, 
 which constitute this individuality. If I had a blackboard 
 here and should draw a circle, and then break it at any one 
 point, the circle would be destroyed. I have broken the law 
 of the circle, and the circle is no more. You cannot have a 
 river without a bed and banks and water, — the water flowing 
 over the bed between the shores. Break these conditions 
 anywhere, and the river is destroyed. So with ourselves. 
 We are surrounded by certain conditions, certain laws which 
 constitute us what we are, individual men and women. Now 
 it is a contradiction in terms, that God himself cannot help, 
 to say that I can break the law of physical health, and still be 
 healthy. If I break a law of physical health, the result must 
 follow. If I break a law of mental sanity, I must become 
 insane ; and Omnipotence, even, cannot ward off the result 
 
 Now, then, think of this : that pain is simply nothing more 
 nor less than the index of a broken law, whether of the 
 body or of the mind. In society, anywhere, it means that 
 
42 Beliefs about Man. 
 
 the conditions of righteousness, the conditions of health, the 
 conditions of well-being, the conditions of happiness, have 
 been transgressed. There is no pain on the face of the 
 earth that does not find right there its explanation. Now 
 suppose that we could break the conditions of life and still 
 have no suffering. Take the case of a little child. Sup- 
 pose it did not hurt the child to cut itself with a knife, or 
 to burn itself in the fire, or to eat that which is injurious, 
 would there be one child in ten millions that would grow up 
 physically unmutilated ? How many of them would grow up 
 at all ? Pain is simply a signal, a warning, set up on the 
 limits of the laws of our individuality, telling us to overstep 
 those laws at our peril. And, if it be true, as we know it is, 
 that so many men are habitually breaking the laws of health, 
 breaking the mental and moral conditions of right living in 
 spite of the penalty and the suffering, how many, think you, 
 would keep those laws, if the penalty and the suffering could 
 be abolished ? We shall be able to abolish pain just as fast 
 and as far as we learn the conditions of right living. But, 
 until we do learn those conditions, and obey them, pain will 
 exist ; and its scorpion whip will lash us into the right way, 
 driving us on toward better and nobler conditions of life 
 Pain, then, I believe, is not an evil. It is a signal, a benefi- 
 cent guide, telling us the way of life, and warning us not to 
 depart from it. 
 
 Now let us look at the question of sin. The consciousness 
 of sin, they tell us, is a sign that we have offended God, 
 that he is angry with us. It is the foreshadowing of punish- 
 ment. It is an indication of the fall. But, instead of telling 
 us that we are lower than we once were, it seems to me that 
 the fact that man has a consciousness of sin is the grandest 
 element of all his grand humanity. It is that in which I 
 read the noblest and most wonderful lesson of hope j for 
 
Sin and Salvation. 43 
 
 what does it mean ? Did you ever see an animal conscious 
 of sin ? Do dogs and horses meditate over their past life, 
 and say: "I did so and so, and the result of it was evil. I 
 regret that I did it, I must now pursue a nobler course ? " 
 Do they look forward and say, " We must create around us 
 conditions favorable to nobler life, we must be better dogs 
 and better horses " ? Do they look up and on, and see 
 heights of attainment that lure them to something grander, 
 in the way of the development of their nature, than they 
 have yet attained ? If such a thing were possible, would we 
 not say at once, Here is the germ of something unspeakably 
 wonderful, and these creatures beneath us are manifest- 
 ing the possibility of incalculable development ? When man 
 stands half-way up a height, on the brink of an abyss, look- 
 ing down and saying, "I came from there : there is even 
 now danger that I may slip, and fall back to that condition " ; 
 and he shrinks from the edge of that abyss with horror, and 
 looks up and sees peak after peak, mountain height after 
 mountain height, each one overtopping the last, until they 
 fade away into the infinite blue, and feels an aspiration 
 toward those heights, an impulse to climb, and says, " There 
 is my destiny, and no one knows how far it reaches beyond 
 what any one can see " : do you not feel that, when man can 
 say this, he thus declares himself capable of advancement, of 
 infinite progression ? If you could conceive a race of men 
 stationary, men who had never been any worse than they are 
 now, men who never by any possibility could be better than 
 they are now, you would never find them troubled by any 
 sense of sin. It is only the man who is capable of being 
 something more, wiio sees an ideal, and is inspired by it to 
 pursue it, who talks of sin. And this, friends, will explain 
 what I have many times heard spoken of as a curious prob- 
 lem in moral psycholog)', — that the best people are just the 
 
44 Beliefs about Man. 
 
 ones that are weighed down with the heaviest consciousness 
 of sin. 
 
 It explains Paul, noble, heroic, grand soul as he was, when 
 he says, "I am the very chief of sinners." Why? You see 
 a little boy sitting down with his pencil and slate, and mak- 
 ing the image of some animal or drawing a tree, in such a 
 fashion that the name of the object has to be written under 
 it, so as to show what it means. If you find him contented 
 with his work, you do not feel that the germ of an artist is 
 there. And so it is consistent with the grandest attainment 
 of artistic genius to find a man a master in the world of art, 
 and still dominated by an ideal so far beyond his highest 
 achievement that he feels as though all he had done were 
 nothing ; and he says : " Artistically, I have not attained. I 
 only look forward, I dream, I hope." This was what Newton 
 meant, when he spoke of himself as a little child gathering 
 pebbles on the seashore, while the infinite ocean of truth 
 lay unexplored, stretched out before him. 
 
 The consciousness of sin, then, means that we are all chil- 
 dren of the Infinite, that we are capable of treading our yes- 
 terdays underneath our feet, that we are capable of making 
 our very sins stairways for climbing : it means an infinite out- 
 look, a hope for an eternal future. 
 
 Now, then, in accordance with the thought I have already 
 given you, let me outline my conception of salvation. We 
 have talked of sin and suffering. What do we mean when 
 we speak of salvation ? You will readily understand that 
 I do not believe we need to be saved from any wrath of 
 God. That expression we may still use, if we please, as a 
 figurative, poetic expression, just as we speak of an angry 
 sunset or a threatening aspect of the sky. It has no other 
 meaning. God is not angry with us; He is not out of 
 patience ; He is not out of temper with us in the least. If 
 
Sin and Salvation. 45 
 
 He is, only Himself is to blame, for who made the universe 
 and started it on its career ? Nor do we want to be saved 
 from the devil. What is he ? Simply, man's poetic personifi- 
 cation of the adverse forces of his life. Satan is man's 
 adversary. The devil everywhere has been thus named. 
 That is, he has been the figurative embodiment of the differ- 
 ent obstacles man meets and has to overcome in the path- 
 way of his progress. We do not need to be saved from hell. 
 There is no hell, save that very real one of sin, of sorrow, of 
 suffering, of wrong, of corruption, out of which we are all 
 attempting to struggle, day by day, and out of which we are 
 trying to lift the world. 
 
 We do not need to be saved from any fall, for there has 
 been no fall. What, then, do we mean by the word "salva- 
 tion"? And here let me say, if I use any of these words 
 again, I use them with a figurative meaning only. I believe 
 that all the terms that have been developed in the history 
 of these old schemes of the universe and of man ought to 
 be, as far as possible, discarded from our living thought. 
 
 As there has been no fall, so there is no need of any atone- 
 ment in the theologic sense. There is no need of any deliv- 
 erance from the fall in the theologic sense. There is no 
 need of any incarnation in the theologic sense. There is no 
 need of any substituted suffering in the theologic sense. I 
 believe that the words " Saviour," " salvation," " Messiah," all 
 these terms that belong to these Oriental forms of thought, 
 ought to be displaced by those that thrill and are alive with 
 the real thought of to-day. There is no need any longer for 
 these terms. And I believe that no one man, no one being, 
 in all history, has a right to the exclusive name of Saviour. 
 With all reverence for God and for whatever he has made 
 sacred in the history of the past, I must dare to differ from 
 the apostle when he says, " There is none other name under 
 
46 Beliefs about Man. 
 
 heaven given among men whereby we must be saved." I 
 believe there are a thousand names. Every man who has 
 lived out a grand ideal, who has uttered a grand thought, 
 who has done a grand deed, who has become an inspiration 
 to thought, an impulse to the moral life of his age, all these 
 in their spheres, and to the extent of what they have done, 
 are the world's saviours. These are the forces that lift 
 humanity and push onward the car of its progress. 
 
 The word " salvation " then will be changed, and in its place 
 there will come in the word "education," — not education in 
 the narrow sense of what we get in the schools, but education 
 in that broad sense which defines it as being a leading out, 
 a development of all the possibilities and capabilities of 
 our being; and which deals with our surroundings, bring- 
 ing us into right relations with them. 
 
 We are saved then, physically, when we have learned to 
 keep the laws of our body, and are well ; mentally, when we 
 have learned the laws of thought, when we have learned to 
 weigh evidence and look over the world calmly in search of 
 truth. We are saved morally, when we have learned and are 
 guided by the laws of man's mind and body, when we have 
 learned to stand in right relations to our fellow-men and the 
 universe about us. There is no salvation, there is no concep- 
 tion of salvation, higher, grander, better than that ; for what 
 can there be better or finer than a complete man t 
 
 Whoever is saved in this sense is saved forever. We 
 believe in one God, one law everywhere. If, then, I am right 
 in my relations here, and trained in all my capacities, fitted 
 to dwell in whatever surroundings I am placed, then I am 
 ready for any world, for any sphere where the providence of 
 Cod may place me. 
 
 By what means, then, shall this salvation be wrought ? Not 
 by belief in any atonement; not by prayer simply; not by 
 forgiveness. Do you know, friends, we are often deluded by 
 
Sin and Salvation. 47 
 
 that word "forgiveness"? God himself cannot forgive you, 
 in the sense of blotting out the natural and necessary results 
 of your deeds. These you must suffer, as a grand tree with 
 a limb lopped off or its trunk wounded by the blow of an 
 axe, can only outgrow its wounds, developing strength in 
 spite of them, leaving them behind as an incident of the 
 past. We are to be saved through knowledge, through a 
 development of self-control, through the subduing of our 
 passions, those forces that would lead us astray. We are to 
 be saved by following motives which, when fairly under- 
 stood, will lead us all to choose the way of wisdom, which 
 is the way of pleasantness and the path of peace. 
 
 And then mental rest, the sense of deliverance from sin, 
 how shall we attain that ? We shall attain it when we have 
 come into such accord with God and with the universe, with 
 the conditions of our life, as no longer to bear them simply 
 as a burden, but to rejoice in them as the conditions of a 
 possible noble life. When we see these conditions all around 
 us, and accept them heartily ; when we learn to place the 
 forces of this universe beneath us as help and inspiration, 
 thus feeling ourselves one with the great Power that guides 
 and moves the world, — we shall rest in peace, not as having 
 attained, but as doing the best we can to-day, and reaching 
 on toward something higher' and better to-morrow. 
 
 Let us, then, be reconciled to these necessary conditions 
 of our life. To fight against them is as if an eagle should 
 wish to abolish the air, when all the time these currents, with 
 which now and then he has to struggle, are the resisting 
 medium which becomes the lever for his mighty wings, that 
 lift him in his flight as he soars in the face of the sun. So, 
 by reconciling ourselves to these conditions of life that we 
 think burdensome, by accepting them, living nobly in rela- 
 tion to them, they shall become the very conditions of peace 
 and of endless advance. 
 
4S Beliefs about Man. 
 
 Peace, — it is not stagnation. 
 Nor simple, aimless rest : 
 
 'Tis tireless movement onward, 
 Impelled by some high quest. 
 
 Peace, — 'tis an eagle sweeping 
 Far o'er some mountain height, 
 
 Who turns the air's resistance 
 To motion and delight. 
 
 Peace, — 'tis a mighty steamship. 
 Steel-ribbed, with heart of fire. 
 
 Which laughs the storm to rainbows, 
 Too strong to stay or tire. 
 
 Peace, — 'tis a brooklet running 
 From overflowing springs. 
 
 Which purer grows by running. 
 And still, while running, sings. 
 
IS MAN FREE? 
 
 In the second book of his Paradise Lost, Milton pict- 
 ures for us a conference of the infernal powers. They have 
 heard that a new world, and a new being called man, have 
 been somewhere created ; and they are trying to fix upon one 
 of their number to go and seek out this new work of God 
 recently become their enemy. And after Satan, their prince, 
 has volunteered to undertake this difficult task, and has left 
 them to carry it into execution, the poet pictures those that 
 remain behind as dispersing this way and that to occupy their 
 thought and time until his return. Some of them engage in 
 games, after the fashion of the old Olympic ; some of them 
 practise at the tournament, as it came to be called in later 
 years; some of them start on a voyage of exploration to 
 find out what sort of a place this hell is which is henceforth 
 to be their home. And then the poet says : — 
 
 " Others apart sat on a hill retired, 
 
 In thoughts more elevate, and reason'd high 
 Of providence, foreknowledge, will, and fate, 
 Fix'd fate, free-will, foreknowledge absolute, 
 And found no end, in wand'ring mazes lost." 
 
 I take it that we are to regard this abyss, and this con- 
 fusion of thought, and this discussion of fate, free-will, and 
 foreknowledge as representing the abysses of the poet's 
 own imagination, and as setting forth his conception of the 
 
 * See note at end of volume, page 129. 
 
50 Beliefs about Man. 
 
 condition in which these great philosophical themes stood in 
 his day. Not only have these infernal powers, as depicted in 
 the poet's imagination, discussed these great questions ; but 
 you are aware that they have been themes for the theologian, 
 for the philosopher, for the scientist, in all ages. I do not 
 undertake the hopeless task of settling that which the world 
 still continues to hold in debate. Only must I give you, as 
 clearly as I can, some reasons for holding what seems to me 
 to be the true theory concerning this question of the free- 
 dom of man. 
 
 There have been four great types of thought concerning it. 
 Three of them I do not propose to discuss at any length, 
 except as that discussion may be incidental to my treatment 
 of the fourth. Yet I must at least name and outline them as 
 I pass them by. 
 
 There have been men who have believed in what they have 
 called fate. There have been those who believed that they 
 themselves were "men of destiny," led, guided, or impelled by 
 some invisible, undefinable force that created their careers, 
 and determined before they were born that they should be 
 what they were. This fate has generally been held as an 
 impersonal, undefined power. The old Greeks and Romans 
 spoke of Father Jove himself as being subject to its sway. 
 The gods of Olympus were not supreme, for fate reigned 
 over them. This fate was not a deity supreme over the gods 
 that sat on Olympus : it was simply that mysterious force that 
 seemed so many times to thwart all the previsions of man 
 and to determine destiny in spite of all that man could do. 
 
 The next theory that I shall notice is that which is very 
 familiar to you all, by name at least, whether you have ever 
 taken the trouble to understand it or not, — the doctrine of 
 predestination. Practically, in its working among men, it is 
 substantially the same as the doctrine of fate, only there is 
 
Is Man Free? 51 
 
 this difference : the theologians who hold this doctrine do 
 not speak of an impersonal, indefinite power, but of a per- 
 sonal will, a God who, before the worlds were made, deter- 
 mined that out of all possible universes he would create this 
 one ; out of all possible kinds of beings, to inhabit this 
 world, he would create man. He determined that he would 
 create him just as he did, for a specific purpose ; that he 
 would place him in the garden of Eden ; he would so situate 
 him that he would fall, and out of that fall would issue all 
 the facts of the world just as they have appeared in all these 
 unfolding centuries of time. This is the doctrine of predes- 
 tination, — that God, before anything was, determined " what- 
 soever Cometh to pass." 
 
 Some theologians, more tender-hearted than logical or 
 consistent, have attempted to evade the harsher side of the 
 doctrine by saying that God determined the good, but only 
 permitted the evil. But, when you take into consideration 
 the fact that, on this theory, God created the universe, that 
 he made man just what he was, knowing definitely just what 
 he would do, and placed him in just the circumstances where 
 he did place him, foreseeing all the time that these results 
 would follow from the causes that he had started, you will 
 very easily see that it is tender-heartedness and not logic, 
 that draws any such distinction. The responsibility of the 
 world as it is, on the theory of predestination, cannot be 
 evaded or shifted. It goes back ultimately to him who de- 
 termined it. 
 
 There has been another class of theologians, who, though 
 tender-hearted toward sin and suffering, as it came before 
 them in actual life, have been — although it seems strange 
 to think of it — logically consistent in carry-ing out this doc- 
 trine. Dr. Emmons, the famous Massachusetts theologian 
 of the last century, carried it so far as to declare that, at any 
 
52 Beliefs about Man, 
 
 particular period of the history of the world, God creates 
 and determines just precisely the amount not only of good 
 and of happiness that shall exist, but also the sin, the crime, 
 and the sorrow ; that he is the active, efficient agent in the 
 arm of the man that strikes a blow that results in a murder, 
 just as much as he is in the arm and heart of the good 
 Samaritan that binds up the wounds and sores of humanity. 
 And Dr. Gardner Spring, the eminent theologian of New 
 York, also carried it out to this same logical result. Once, 
 when a friend asked him why he supposed there were not 
 more converts to the church, he answered consistently, " I 
 suppose God converts just as many people as he wants con- 
 verted." This is logical predestination. I shall not stay to 
 discuss it. 
 
 The third is the theory of free-will. Perhaps you will be 
 surprised that I speak of this as one of those simply to be 
 outlined and passed by ; and yet such is the position to which 
 all the thought and study of years have compelled me. What 
 do we mean by free will ? For we must have a clear and 
 distinct conception of it in our minds before we are fitted to 
 judge whether or not it holds good as a philosophy of man. 
 I am now conscious of being free to do as I please-. I can 
 continue speaking, or I can stop and go into my study. I 
 can choose what thought I will utter next, I can pursue one 
 line of argument or another. But this does not express the 
 doctrine of free-will. If I say, " Yesterday, I might have 
 done something that I did not do, provided I had wished to 
 do it," I am not giving utterance to the doctrine of free-will; 
 I am only expressing what all of us believe. And yet I pre- 
 sume large numbers of people think they are giving expres- 
 sion to the doctrine of free-will when they say, " I am con- 
 scious of the power to do as I please " ; but that is not it at 
 all. The question is whether, back of the willing, you have 
 
Is Man Free? 53 
 
 power spontaneously to evolve and develop choices them- 
 selves. Sir William Hamilton, the great Scotch metaphysi- 
 cian, says, before the doctrine of free-will can be main- 
 tained, it must be proved not only that a man can do as he 
 wills, but that he can will as he wills. I know not whether I 
 can make myself clear on this very subtle point. The ques- 
 tion is as to whether the will is an independent power that 
 originates choices, that spontaneously expresses itself, with- 
 out being determined by motives, by the surroundings, or by 
 the character of the man who chooses. Let us put our- 
 selves in the attitude that the common mind must be in con- 
 cerning it. Suppose a barbarian for the first time in his life 
 should see this clock, here in the church before us. He 
 might suppose at first sight, as the hands go around and it 
 strikes the hour, that it was a living being, the hands mov- 
 ing as an expression of the will of this mysterious power. 
 There is nothing apparent on the clock face that determines 
 that the hands shall move just as they do. But, if you take 
 the face off and show him what are the forces at work that 
 determine that the hands shall move thus and so, you have 
 given him a new view of the whole question. 
 
 I say, I have power to do as I please. But suppose there 
 is another power back of my consciousness that determines 
 that I shall please to do so and so, then what ? Free-will, 
 then, in any proper use of language, does not say merely that 
 I am free to do as I please, but must say, I am free to please 
 as I please, that I am free to originate choices. If the free- 
 dom of the will means anything, it means that the will is 
 an independent, spontaneous, self-acting power. And that I 
 cannot hold. 
 
 I come now to the next theory, and the one which all my 
 study and thought has compelled me to hold, — the scien- 
 tific doctrine of necessity. This, as you will see, is not fate, 
 
54 Beliefs about Man, 
 
 neither is it predestination. It is something quite distinct 
 and apart by itself. 
 
 Now, in order that we may proceed clearly with the un- 
 folding of our subject, I must ask you to get clearly in mind 
 a definition of the will. What do we mean when we talk 
 about it ? For convenience of discussion, as I have before 
 said, we map off and divide up this one human nature of 
 ours ; and we say that the imagination makes excursions into 
 the unknown, the heart feels, the brain thinks, and the will 
 determines. But a little thought will convince you that this 
 is simply a mental division for convenience of conversation. 
 It does not represent any real distinction in human nature 
 itself. It is not a something in me that wills. 
 
 My will is not a driver on a stage-coach, sitting on the box, 
 holding the reins of my nature in his hand, and deciding that 
 I shall go this way or that. No such dominant power rules 
 over the faculties of my being. The will is simply the utter- 
 ance of myself. It is not a "will " that determines, /de- 
 termine. In other words, the will is only the majority vote, 
 so to express it, of the individual. It is the resultant of the 
 sum total of forces that constitute me wdiat I am^ and that 
 play upon me on every side. Analyze it a little, and see. 
 There is somewhat about me that constitutes what I call my- 
 self. A large part of this element — I know not how much 
 — has been derived by inheritance from my ancestors. I 
 have modified this in a thousand ways by my own thoughts, 
 words, and actions. Then I am placed in a certain environ- 
 ment of circumstances. I would like to do this, or I would 
 like to do that; but here comes in a deterrent force, that 
 says, " If you do so and so, such and such an unpleasant re- 
 sult will follow." Friends dissuade me from following this 
 path, and say, "I prefer you shall do something else." 
 And so there play upon me these forces. Pleasant and un- 
 
Is Man Free? 55 
 
 pleasant probabilities appeal to me. The wishes of friends, 
 public opinion, popular applause, the desire to do good, the 
 wish to be useful to my fellow-men, — all these ten thousand 
 forces play upon me ; and, as a final result, I decide in a 
 particular case, " I will do so and so." Now, when I have 
 made that decision, you are right in saying that I have willed. 
 There is no other will that has determined it. There is no 
 metaphysical power in me that has decided how I shall act. 
 /have decided that I will follow such a course. This, I take 
 it, is the rational definition of what is meant by the will. 
 
 Now let us look at the doctrine of necessity. It means 
 simply an extension over the realm of human nature of the 
 law of cause and effect. It means that nothing happens with- 
 out a cause in me, or in you, any more than it does any- 
 where else. We know, for example, that the stars over 
 our heads follow certain determined courses, keeping to a 
 certain order, because of certain forces acting on them. 
 Their movements are orderly and intelligent. In regard to 
 the inorganic world underneath our feet, we also recog- 
 nize everywhere perfect order. Cause and effect hold good 
 there. In the realm of the vegetable world, among the 
 grasses, the flowers, and the trees, we trace perfect order. 
 We know, if we plant a grain of corn, corn will grow from 
 it. The conditions being what they should be, we can count 
 on certain results following from certain causes. In the 
 animal world, we find precisely the same thing, the law of 
 cause and effect prevailing ever^'where. The doctrine of 
 necessity extends this principle over the whole realm of man, 
 and says man is not an irrational being ; he acts under the 
 influence of causes, is governed by motives, by considera- 
 tions that lead him this way or that. You know perfectly well 
 that, if the world were not governed by the laws of cause 
 and effect, there would be no possibility of study, there 
 
$6 Beliefs about Man. 
 
 would be no possibility of organizing sciences. You could 
 never know anything. Suppose that I could not count on 
 the properties of iron remaining what they are, what would 
 be the use of building an iron bridge ? Next week, it might 
 become wood or some brittle metal, and utterly fail to meet 
 the calls I should make upon it. So in every department. 
 The world would be insane : it would be one wild chaos of 
 chance and disorder, unless this law of cause and effect held 
 everywhere. I believe it holds good in human nature as 
 well as everywhere else. This is the scientific doctrine of 
 necessity. 
 
 Let us consider two or three objections against necessity 
 and in favor of what is popularly called free-will ; and later 
 we will consider two or three points that look the other way. 
 
 Men are accustomed to say that there is no use arguing 
 about the question of free-will, for it is a doctrine of com- 
 mon-sense : every man knows he is free. But we know also 
 that common-sense has been a great many times mistaken 
 in the history of this world. Common-sense, — what does it 
 mean ? It means simply that stock of intelligence which has 
 become portable in the crowd, and can be passed from hand 
 to hand like current coin. It means the stock of common 
 opinions that are held by the majority. And many and 
 many a time, as Huxley has said, common-sense is only 
 another name for *' common ignorance." It needs to be 
 supplemented, now and again, by a little sense that is not so 
 common. Common-sense teaches us, even to-day, that the 
 world is flat. It taught that for thousands of years, and it 
 took a great while to argue into the common-sense of the 
 crowd the belief which is now established beyond question. 
 Common-sense teaches us every day that the sun rises in the 
 east and sets in the west ; and yet we know that it is not 
 true. If a man had never seen any other effect of the power 
 
Is Man Free? 57 
 
 of the sun except the melting of wax exposed to its rays, 
 he would say that it was the quality of heat to melt sub- 
 stances. But, if he put wet clay in the sun and saw its effect 
 on that, he would say that it was the quality of the sun's heat 
 to make things hard and dry. Common-sense teaches us to- 
 day that we tell whether a surface is rough or smooth by 
 looking at it ; but we know that we do not. The question is 
 determined by touch ; and the skilful painter will produce 
 effects with his brush so carefully and perfectly imitating 
 nature that you cannot tell whether the surface is rough or 
 smooth until you feel it. Common-sense teaches us that 
 color inheres in the thing we look at. Yet we know per- 
 fectly well that the same fabric which was blue by daylight is 
 green by gaslight. Thus, we often find that we have to revise 
 our observations and experiments, and reform them by the 
 aid of senses that are rare, and developed only among those 
 minds that are gifted and trained to the exercise of special 
 powers. Common-sense then is not entirely a safe guide in 
 the matter of the will. 
 
 They say also, " If man is not perfectly free, why do 
 you punish anybody for crime, why do you blame anybody 
 for anything that he does ? " You are aware perhaps — if not, 
 it is true — that barbaric man was inclined always and in- 
 stinctively to abuse and beat and punish anything that hurt 
 him. He did not question whether the power that hurt meant 
 to do so or not. Children, too, — little barbarians as they 
 are, all of them, at the outset, — illustrate precisely this same 
 quality. A child abuses or beats his playthings when of- 
 fended with them, simply under the influence of this passion 
 that hates what hurts or displeases, without reasoning as to 
 whether the object is responsible or not. I can remember, 
 when I was a little boy, standing with one of my brothers by 
 the stove in the old farm-house, getting warm before going to 
 
58 Beliefs about Man. 
 
 bed, when accidentally he burned himself; and under this 
 impulse, so common among children, he seized a stick of 
 wood and began to beat the stove until he broke it in his 
 anger. This illustrates the power of this passion. In the 
 Middle Ages, it was common for a king to vent his wrath on 
 any messenger who brought him bad tidings, although he 
 knew perfectly well that the bearer was not responsible. I 
 take it that we are not yet civilized enough to have outgrown 
 this impulse. If a man commits a crime, without raising 
 the question as to the degree of his responsibility, as to 
 whether he inherited a tendency to crime, whether he is 
 more or less guilty than we would be in like circumstances, 
 we visit on him our wrath and vengeance. I believe, when 
 the world is civilized, this whole conception oi punishing Ysxtn 
 will be outgrown, will fade out of the world's jurisprudence, 
 and will remain in language only as a survival of a more 
 barbaric time. We have no right to take vengeance, no 
 right to measure out by our imagination the supposed 
 degree of any man's guilt, and then adjust our torture to fit 
 the degree of our anger. What right have we then .? We 
 have only the right of personal and social self-protection. 
 Suppose there is a tiger loose in the streets of Boston. It 
 is an instinct of the tiger-nature to kill and to devour. 
 You know that he is not responsible, that he is no more 
 to blame than a hurricane. Yet you take your measures to 
 protect yourself against him, even to the extent of taking 
 his life. If there is an overflow of the Mississippi River and 
 thousands of acres are submerged, the river is in no degree 
 responsible for the damage it does ; but we build levees and 
 dikes to keep back the destructive power. An avalanche is 
 not responsible for sliding down the mountain-side ; yet the 
 Alpine traveller takes measures for self-protection against its 
 force. 
 
Is Man Free? 59 
 
 So our theory of the will cannot make us helpless in the 
 presence of crime. We have the right and the duty of self- 
 defence. No matter whether a man is insane, or whether he 
 is simply criminal, as we call it, all we need to-day and all 
 we have a right to do is to see to it that he shall not work 
 harm to society. And, if it be needful that he be put out of 
 the way, we have the right even to that extent. This, then, is 
 no argument against the necessity of human action. 
 
 Let us consider another objection which is supposed to 
 be conclusive. If I act under law, if my will is deter- 
 mined by what I am and by the motives that influence me, 
 why do I ever feel remorse ? It seems to me perfectly natural 
 that this feeling should spring up. Have we not seen the 
 mother, whose little child has died, who wrings her hands and 
 almost breaks her heart, and who says : " Oh, if I had 
 only known ! If I had only done so and so, I might have 
 warded off this calamity ! " And yet reflection convinces 
 even her that she did the best she could under the circum- 
 stances, with the wisdom she possessed. But all her logic 
 does not turn back the tide of feeling that sweeps over her 
 desolated heart. She mourns and regrets and sorrows still. 
 You remember those pathetic words of Whittier's at the close 
 of "Maud Miiller": — 
 
 " For of all sad words of tongue or pen, 
 The saddest are these, — It might have been." 
 
 If what ? If Maud Miiller and the judge and the circum- 
 stances and a thousand things had been what they were not. 
 And yet every one knows that, if we could go back and re- 
 produce exactly the same circumstances, and put the people 
 in those circumstances, just as they were at that moment, 
 they would act precisely the same again. I feel remorse, I 
 feel sorrow for what I did that injured another's life, just as 
 
6o Beliefs about Man. 
 
 I regret any ill result of something I have done ; yet I know- 
 that put me back into yesterday, just what I was yesterday, 
 seeing things as I did, feeling things as I did, under the in- 
 fluence of the motives that played upon me yesterday, and I 
 should necessarily do what I did yesterday. 
 
 I believe that this remorse may be carried too far, not only 
 in a philosophical sense, but even so as to work moral injury. 
 What is the use of remembering the past, except as it becomes 
 a motive power in controlling the future ? It was very subtle 
 wisdom in the author of the Pilgrim's Progress to picture the 
 most terrible foe of the Christian life in the person of Giant 
 Despair, who is the mightiest enemy that " Christian " meets 
 all the way from the City of Destruction to the Celestial City. 
 And what does it mean ? Simply that when despair, hope- 
 lessness, has taken possession of the heart of man, there is 
 nothing left for him to do but to die. 
 
 Ruin, and only ruin, stares him in the face. Despair there- 
 fore may be carried to a destructive degree. We should 
 remember the mistakes of yesterday, not by sitting down 
 with mournful face and broken heart and wailing out our life 
 over them ; we should remember them only as motives and 
 mainsprings for some grander deed to-morrow, remember- 
 ing the mistake, so as not to commit it a second time. Re- 
 morse, the fear of punishment, the fear of evil results ; these 
 are valuable only as they become motive forces determining 
 what we shall do next. 
 
 I must now pass by these, and turn to the positive side 
 of the question. The doctrine of necessity, then, it seems to 
 me, has every argument, every logical method, every fact in 
 human history, in its favor. As I said a moment ago, unless 
 man is under the law of cause and effect, there is no use in 
 trying to study ; there is no possibility of a science of poli- 
 tics, a science of society, of ethics, of any science of any- 
 
Is Man Free? 6i 
 
 thing human. For, no matter what a man's character might 
 be, there would be no possible way of counting on what he 
 might do next, if the will is uncaused and in that sense free. 
 The will is not free because I can do as I please. I must 
 feel as I look back at the past that I did what I did necessa- 
 rily, being what I then was. So that, as I have already said, 
 for me to say I might have done differently from what I did, 
 in coming here this morning, seems to me an absurdity. I 
 might have gone somewhere else, had I wanted to ; but I did 
 not. Under the engagements that controlled me, played on 
 by the motives that determined my actions every moment of 
 my life, I did what I did; and in precisely the same cir- 
 cumstances I should do it again. 
 
 There is another thing that seems to me conclusive. Did 
 you ever think that, if the will is spontaneously free, there 
 would be no such thing possible as human character ? What 
 is character .? What do I mean when I say, " There is an 
 honest man ; there is a man who tells the truth, whom I can 
 trust every day of my life " ? I mean this. By his actions, by 
 his choices, by the whole course of his life, he has built up 
 and cemented a certain type of manhood that I can count 
 on every time. But no such thing as this would be possible, 
 if the will were a spontaneously acting force, not deter- 
 mined by the laws of cause- and effect. Of none of you, 
 my most intimate friends, who may have been honest all 
 your life long, if the will is not under the law of cause and 
 effect, have I any assurance that you may not commit 
 a burglary to-morrow. That you have told the truth a 
 thousand times is no assurance that you will tell it the one 
 thousand and first time. But I say you have built up a 
 character. This character is a determining power, directing 
 the course of the will, so that I can count on an honest 
 man's being honest all the time, a truthful man's being true, 
 
62 Beliefs about Man, 
 
 2L pure man's being pure. If I know a man all through, I 
 can tell what he will do. I could not tell, however, if the 
 will were spontaneously free, if there were no laws of 
 human conduct. 
 
 One more point. It is only because I believe that the 
 will of man is not free, in this sense, that I have courage to 
 work for the deliverance of the world from wrong. Why is 
 it that we seek out poor children from the Five Points and 
 the slums of the North End, and place them in what we call 
 pure surroundings, under good influences, where they will feel 
 the love and care of tliose who will stand to them in the 
 place of father and mother, where they may go to school, 
 learn something, and be able to see specimens of manhood 
 that will give them a sense of the dignity of their own 
 natures ? Why do we seek sanitary reform as bearing on the 
 morals of the community ? Why do we build school-houses, 
 erect churches, and establish the ten thousand influences with 
 which we surround human nature, to instruct, to elevate, and 
 lead it into the right way ? For the simple reason that we 
 believe in the law of cause and effect as bearing on human 
 nature. It would all be unutterably absurd, if the will were 
 free, independent and spontaneous in its action. What 
 would be the use of taking a child from the influences that 
 tend downward ? If the will is free it has the power to do 
 right under one set of circumstances as well as another. 
 
 If motives do not determine character, why seek to sur- 
 round men by good motives } Why do we try to get a man 
 accustomed to drink to his own hurt to sign the pledge.? 
 Why do we bring him into the society of people who have 
 taught themselves self-control ? Because we know if he is 
 in the presence of liquor, and is under no restraint, no mo- 
 tive to abstain, he will drink. But we know that if he is a 
 man of truth, if he is man enough to stand by his word, and 
 
Is Man Free? 6^ 
 
 if he has said he will not drink, he will keep his pledge. So 
 with any man placed in temptation, who will fall every time 
 he is so placed, we foresee this and surround him with in- 
 fluences toward good, because we believe, deep-down in our 
 hearts, that it is character and motive that determine the 
 will, that lead men to pursue this or that course of conduct. 
 When we admit this doctrine of necessity as controlling 
 human life and character, then we shall have a leverage 
 that will hold, by which we can lift society and the world. 
 And, as a matter of fact, there is no benevolent, reform, or 
 philanthropic society on earth that does not proceed on the 
 assumption that this doctrine is true. 
 
 There is not a man nor a woman on the face of the earth 
 that, other things being equal, does not desire that which 
 seems to him conducive to his own highest welfare and 
 happiness. There is not a society that does not desire its 
 own welfare and happiness. If this is a sane and righteous 
 universe, then keeping the laws of this universe must tend 
 toward the welfare and happiness of the individual and of 
 society. If, then, we believe that men are governed by 
 motives, all we need to do to lift up and save mankind is to 
 make them wise enough to know that following their own 
 eternal desire for welfare and happiness will lead them 
 into the ways of truth and right. 
 
 The doctrine of necessity gives us this leverage. It gives 
 us motive power, it gives us a way to work, it gives us confi- 
 dence that our work will not be without its appropriate 
 results. 
 
THE MOTIVE FORCES OF HUMAN LIFE. 
 
 At the close of my discourse last Sunday morning, I came 
 to the conclusion that humanity, like all other departments 
 of the world, is orderly, is under law, controlled by motives 
 that are intelligible and that can be calculated. Taking 
 now the next logical step in dealing with our great theme, we 
 are brought face to face to-day with two great questions : 
 What are the motives that control men? And are these 
 motives right and adequate to produce human progress and 
 perfection ? 
 
 As we study the inorganic world, whether we make it 
 include the stars over our heads or simply the elemental 
 forces of the planet which we inhabit, we discover every- 
 where that powers are at work that are intelligible, that are 
 orderly, and that these powers are competent to produce 
 grand and beautiful results. For example, as we look at the 
 law of gravitation, we see how beautifully it works, how 
 efficient it is, what perfect order results from it. As we 
 study the movements of the tides, the laws of the winds, the 
 rains, the powers of chemical attraction and affinity, the laws 
 of crystallization, — as we look all over the world and see 
 those forces at work which have shaped our planet and 
 brought it into its present condition, that have lifted up and 
 then sculptured the mountains, that have scooped out the 
 valleys, created our lake basins, marked out the watercourses 
 
Motive Forces. 65 
 
 for our great rivers, — everywhere we find perfect order and 
 beautiful results. And we find these powers to be good, 
 efficient, capable of producing the desired ends. 
 
 If we take a step above the inorganic world and enter the 
 vegetable kingdom, we find precisely the same thing true 
 here. There is order, there is power. And this power is 
 good, relative to that which it is desired to produce by it ; 
 and it results in forms of beauty and use. Who thinks to 
 criticise a rose } That mysterious force that has lifted the 
 little stem above the soil, that bids it grow and develop to its 
 perfect size and shape, and form that delicate leaf, tinted as 
 no artist on earth could paint it, and then makes it fragrant, 
 to delight the senses of all living creatures, — who can crit- 
 icise the power that is there at work .? It is right and it is 
 competent to the perfection of these results. 
 
 Take another step. As we come up into the animal king- 
 dom, we find the same thing holds true. There is order, 
 there is law, there is a power at work ; and the power is a 
 good power, producing the proper results, the perfection of 
 the animal world. We never think of bringing questions of 
 perfect or imperfect, of right or wrong, in here. The eagle 
 poising his mighty wings, floating through the air, flying in 
 the face of the sun or over his mountain crag, is a piece of 
 work that only fills us with a sense of power and with admi- 
 ration ; and, if he preys upon some smaller species, we never 
 think of criticising him for it as though he were doing wrong. 
 He is only fulfilling a law of his own nature. He is doing 
 that which, judged by the eagle's standard, is right, and can 
 be no otherwise. And so of every other thing below man 
 that flies or creeps, or walks or runs, or lives, on the surface 
 of the earth. 
 
 But as we take one step more into the region of humanity, 
 at first this principle does not seem to hold. We find what 
 
66 Beliefs about Man. 
 
 we call sin, wrong, disorder, evil ; and our first impulse is to 
 criticise the motive forces which are at work in humanity. 
 We are inclined to one of two opinions, either that these 
 motive forces are wrong, or else that they are inadequate : 
 they do not produce the results that we think we have a 
 right to expect of them. We perhaps criticise the world in 
 the vein and spirit of Heber, where he says of that beautiful 
 
 Eastern land, — 
 
 " Every prospect pleases, 
 And only man is vile " ; 
 
 or we say with Byron, — 
 
 " All, save the spirit of man, is divine." 
 
 The line of demarcation is popularly drawn between all 
 the rest of the universe and man. We have a feeling that 
 the motive forces that control him are either wrong or in- 
 adequate. 
 
 These, then, are the two great questions that face us. We 
 want to find out what these motive forces are, and why they 
 do not produce the same results of perfection and order that 
 are observable in all other parts of the universe. 
 
 First, what are the motive forces that control human life } 
 For our purpose, they may be roughly divided into two grand 
 classes, the internal and the external. There is first to be 
 considered the inherent nature of man, that which he is by 
 virtue of the fact that he is a man ; that which he is as the 
 result of inheritance ; the capital stock of thoughts and feel- 
 ings and impulses and tendencies with which he is born into 
 the world. These internal conditions of nature and inheri- 
 tance are modified again by the man's own individual feeling 
 and thinking and acting. That is, I was born so and so; 
 but since that time, in the years that have passed, I have 
 modified my nature in a thousand various ways by my own 
 actions, impulses, and thoughts. This, then, is one side. 
 
I 
 
 Motive Forces. 67 
 
 As we look out over the world, we have to take account of 
 all those things which constitute the conditions of human life, 
 — the country in which a man is born, the race to which he 
 belongs, the climate, the type of civilization, the grade of 
 civilization, the particular degree of culture that immediately 
 surrounds him, the influences whether good or bad, the re- 
 ligious thought and tendency of the time, the business op- 
 portunities, and all the ten thousand things that make up the 
 external conditions of his life. 
 
 Man, then, is shaped by these internal and external forces. 
 To give a little more definiteness, I may consider these 
 motives all as one, and speak of that which I have classed 
 as external simply as the conditions or limitations or incite- 
 ments to activity, while I find the impulses all within. 
 
 There is, when you analyze deeply, when you resolve all 
 the multifarious manifestations of life, all the impulses of 
 man, into their simplest forms, but one grand motive which 
 plays a conspicuous part in the development of human life, — 
 that is, the one never-resting force of hunger, or desire. Man 
 is simply a bundle of appetites. He is one grand thirst with 
 a thousand mouths. He desires life ; he desires happiness ; 
 he desires the gratification of all his passions ; he desires the 
 free play of all his impulses ; he desires love ; he desires 
 power ; he desires fame, honor, the respect of his fellow-man. 
 You see him reaching out this way, reaching out that, ever 
 seeking to possess something he has not, or to become some- 
 thing he is not, — one great impulse that reaches out for its 
 appropriate satisfaction. And the external world, in this 
 view of it, we only look upon as the field in which all this 
 hunger may feed, as the theatre on which all these impulses 
 may act and play their part, as the conditions of satisfaction, 
 the limitations of desire. 
 
 Now, to illustrate clearly what I mean, let us compare man, 
 
68 Beliefs about Mait. 
 
 from this stand-point, with a plant. Take any plant you 
 please, — shrub, flower, or fruit-bearing tree, — and what it 
 will become is determined by two things. In the first place, 
 by its inherent nature. If it be a rose-bush, no soil, no sun, 
 no change of air, during the lifetime of this one single plant, 
 can turn it into any other kind of shrub. If it is a heliotrope, 
 you cannot transform it suddenly into a geranium. What it 
 is is determined by its own inherent nature. Whether it 
 shall be all that it is capable of becoming is dependent 
 entirely on its external surroundings, upon the kind of soil 
 in which you plant it, upon sunshine, upon rain, upon dew, 
 upon cultivation, and care. If you take a plant that was 
 born and fitted to develop to its finest in the tropics, and 
 transfer it to the far north, or up close by the snow-line on 
 the Alps, it can never become what, by its nature, it is fitted 
 to be. If you take an Alpine flower and plant it under the 
 tropics, it can never develop as it would in its native home. 
 So there must be the combination of these two things, — first 
 the nature of the plant, and then the conditions of its devel- 
 opment. 
 
 Precisely these two forces are the ones that play upon the 
 development of this marvellous human nature of ours. No 
 possible amount of training can produce an essential change 
 of nature in man. No conceivable amount of schooling 
 could have converted Milton into Newton. No change of 
 circumstances could have made Newton the author of Para- 
 dise Lost or could have enabled Milton to compose the 
 Frincipia. The man who has no musical ability, no natural 
 taste or faculty in that direction, cannot become a master of 
 song, simply by spending his life in conservatories, and train- 
 ing the poor feeble faculty of which all men possess the 
 rudiments. 
 
 On the other hand, a man with the mightiest genius in any 
 
Motive Forces. 69 
 
 one direction may have his whole career thwarted by the 
 lack of appropriate circumstances, — as a rose, fitted to 
 produce a gorgeous flower and the finest incense of fra- 
 grance, can be dwarfed or stunted or killed by surround- 
 ings that are unfitted to bring out that which is finest and 
 sweetest in it. 
 
 So I suppose it to be true, as we look back over the his- 
 tory of the world, that we are at liberty to say there have 
 been thousands of possible generals and mighty leaders of 
 the world, that have played no part in histor)'. There have 
 been thousands of possible poets who have never sung their 
 songs. There have been thousands of possible orators who 
 have never swayed listening assemblies by their magnetic 
 words. If our war of the Rebellion had not come just when 
 it did, if it had been postponed twenty years, we should 
 never have heard of the mighty statesmanship of Abraham 
 Lincoln, we should never have heard of the deeds that made 
 Grant the foremost general of his time. And yet both these 
 men would have been, so far as their inherent natures were 
 concerned, all that they since became. 
 
 These two forces, then, work together to produce the grand 
 results of our human life, — the inherent nature or tendency 
 and the external condition. 
 
 That which controls man, then, is this one hunger to which 
 I have referred, the hunger along the line of his impulses, 
 along the line of his essential nature ; for you will generally 
 find a man naturally hungry for that which he can do, for 
 that which he can become. He desires and struggles to at- 
 tain. The outside world gives him opportunity, or crushes 
 out the possibility by its adverse circumstances. It is not 
 simply poetry, then, when Gray, in his " Elegy written in a 
 Country Churchyard," speaks of the " mute inglorious Mil- 
 tons," of the " Cromwells " never heard of, and of the " vil- 
 
JO Beliefs about Man. 
 
 lage Hampdens " never known beyond the playgrounds of 
 their childhood. We hunger, we thirst, and we do what 
 we can. 
 
 Let us see whether these natural impulses, this desire for 
 money, for fame, for love, all these appetites that tingle and 
 hunger after their appropriate satisfactions, all these aspira- 
 tions of the mind, all these dreams and ambitions that lead 
 and lure us on, are right ; whether, if we guide and train 
 them, they are competent to produce the result of a perfect 
 world. 
 
 Here, I must place before you the two great antagonistic 
 theories of human nature that, in some form or other, have 
 dominated the world. All the philosophies, all the religions 
 of men, have been shaped and colored by one or the other of 
 these grand theories of human nature. I shall call them the 
 Oriental and the Occidental^ for the reason that nearly all 
 of the Oriental religions and philosophies have taken for 
 granted the one, while our modern Occidental theories are 
 beginning to repudiate and cast this away, and look at men 
 from the other stand-point. 
 
 Now, what is this Oriental theory? It is that man is essen- 
 tially all wrong. His desires, his impulses, his propensities, 
 are corrupt and depraved. It is this theory which has given 
 us our doctrine of the fall of man and of total depravity. It 
 is this which speaks of the world as blighted, and which talks 
 about worldliness (that is, being interested in the affairs 
 of human life) as an evil. It is this that John had in mind 
 when he said, " Love not the world, neither the things that 
 are in the world." This leads Paul to say that "the carnal 
 mind is enmity against God." It is this that teaches us that 
 he who loves the world must be an enemy of God. It is this 
 that tells us to crucify the body and crush out our natural 
 appetites, feelings, and desires. It is this theory that pro- 
 
Motive Forces. yi 
 
 duces monasticism and asceticism in all its forms. This 
 made men feel that, in order to please God, they must deny- 
 all the natural passions and instincts of their nature ; that the 
 perfect saint was the one who said no, to every human im- 
 pulse, who denied human pleasure, human property, human 
 love, even that of wife and child ; who fled from all those 
 things that are naturally so attractive and beautiful to us, 
 thinking them wiles of the evil one ; and who believed that if 
 they retired to some cave or monastic cell and whipped and 
 punished, and starved and tortured themselves, until they 
 had crushed out everything natural, that they thus came 
 very near to God, and when at last they had broken down 
 or beaten through the walls of this body, which they called 
 their prison-house, and escaped, that then, for the first time, 
 they would be free and akin to the divine, linked with the 
 nature of that which is highest and best. 
 
 It is this philosophy which dominated a large part of the 
 speculations of Plato. It is this which lies at the root of the 
 great religion which to-day is believed by one-third of man- 
 kind, the Buddhist ; for Gautama teaches his followers that 
 all evil springs from the fact that men have desires, — in 
 other words, if men never desired anything, they would 
 never be disappointed, there could never be any suffering, 
 any want. And he teaches them that the way toward sal- 
 vation is to crush and kill out every wish. The philosophy 
 is that of repression and extinction of everything natural 
 and human. If that is accomplished, men will perhaps 
 rise to that condition where they shall care for nothing, be 
 anxious for nothing, the region of perpetual calm, that is 
 never disturbed by the ripple of an emotion. Attain this 
 condition, and you are on the border land of Nir\-ana, the 
 Buddhist heaven, which so far as we can understand, means 
 that we are on the border of — nothing, of extinction. 
 
72 Beliefs about Man. 
 
 This is the theory of human life which has dominated 
 Christendom, which has given color to the history of the 
 Church. And you are perfectly well aware how the prevail- 
 ing orthodoxies of the day tell us that everything natural in 
 man is wrong. We go astray, they say, from the moment we 
 are born. We cannot wish or think or feel any good thing ; 
 and, if we are ever to come near to God, all these natural 
 desires and impulses must be subdued. We must have our 
 natural heart taken away, and a new heart substituted in its 
 place. We must learn to hate the things that we naturally 
 love, we must learn to love the things that we naturally 
 hate. 
 
 This is the theory that underlies the theological doctrine 
 of " conversion " in all the churches to-day. It is that man 
 in his natural estate is something helpless, something hateful 
 to God, something in opposition to everything that is right ; 
 that he needs a radical change, must tear all these natural 
 impulses up by their roots and plant something else in their 
 stead. 
 
 Out of this theory has sprung the doctrine of endless dam- 
 nation ; for Edwards, our famous New England theologian 
 and metaphysician, was only logically and consistently carry- 
 ing out this belief, when he pictured, as he did, a man, hon- 
 est, perhaps noble, kind and true in his home, as being 
 potentially at enmity with God, a viper. He draws, as per- 
 haps you will remember, that horrible picture of God hold- 
 ing a man over the flames of perdition until the innate 
 devilishness of this human nature is developed, and it 
 becomes a viper in its hate, and turns and spits its venom 
 in the very face of God 1 It is this theory of human 
 nature which underlies the conception of man as being all 
 wrong, naturally selfish and evil, needing to be utterly 
 changed before he can be brought into accord with the 
 will and law of (/od. 
 
Motive Forces. 73 
 
 This I have called the Oriental theory, because, so far as 
 we know, it was born in the Orient, and came to us through 
 the Oriental religions and philosophies, from which we have 
 borrowed the still prevalent theories of our day. 
 
 On the other hand, there is the theory of man which is 
 held by the scientific leaders and teachers of the world 
 to-day, — that theory which treats man, equally with all the 
 rest of the creation, as naturally good and right ; that teaches 
 that man ought to desire just what he naturally does desire ; 
 that it is not wrong for him to love this beautiful world that 
 is our mother, and on whose breast we live and from whose 
 bosom we draw all that makes life fair and lovely. It teaches 
 that it is not wrong for a man to desire wealth ; that it is not 
 wrong to desire the good-will of his fellow-men, honor, fame, 
 position, and the respect of those that are about him. 
 
 This Occidental theory teaches that man needs no reversal 
 of the ordinary motives that govern him ; that he does not 
 need to have them torn up by the root ; that his heart is 
 naturally right. It does not need to be taken away from him 
 and another put in its place. That which he does need is 
 direction, education, the control of the motives that are 
 natural and that already exist; and then this education, direc- 
 tion, and control are capable of producing just as fair and 
 orderly and beautiful results in human nature as are pro- 
 duced in the other departments of the world. 
 
 The question for us to decide, then, is between these two 
 theories, which of them we must hold. Let me outline what 
 seems to me the natural, logical result of the working of these 
 native forces of human life. 
 
 Let us suppose a man to be what we ordinarily, though 
 falsely, call selfish, dominated by what he thinks is best for 
 him ; to be governed by self-love. Take such a man as that, 
 educate him, make him wise, let him learn the results of 
 
74 Beliefs about Man. 
 
 human experience here in this life, and what sort of a man 
 will he become ? 
 
 If all the world were governed by these motives, and were 
 educated, made wise enough to learn the principle of self- 
 control, what kind of a world would it produce ? That, it 
 seems to me, is the question for us to settle, in order that we 
 may decide whether we can hold this natural theory of man 
 or not. 
 
 Now suppose man to be governed simply by the desire to 
 get the best things that are possible for himself, that he de- 
 sires to become as complete a man as he can, to get all the 
 satisfaction out of human life that he is able, what sort of a 
 life would such a man as that lead ? Will he find that this 
 grand motive power, this shaping, controlling force, will be- 
 come modified in any very serious way by the experiences of 
 life? In the first place, he will discover that there are a 
 great many things in the world that he naturally desires, or 
 that he would naturally take, in the satisfaction of some one 
 of his appetites, that are injurious to him. Just precisely as 
 the lower animal world has learned that there are some arti- 
 cles of food that are poisonous and some nutritious, and 
 has therefore learned to eschew the one and seek out the 
 other ; so man, governed simply by the desire to please him- 
 self, will find, as the result of his experience, that he cannot 
 afford to indulge indiscriminately as he passes through the 
 world. He finds that there are a thousand fruits that are 
 sweet to the taste and pleasant to the eye, that are desirable 
 and attractive, which at the same time are in their results 
 deadly. He discovers growing all along the pathway of 
 human life that which has come to be figuratively set forth as 
 "Dead Sea fruit," "apples of Sodom," that turn to ashes in 
 the mouth, to bitterness and even death itself as they are 
 eaten. Man, then, governed simply by this impulse of self- 
 
Motive Forces. 75 
 
 love, learns to let these things alone, to pass them by and 
 choose that which is really good, and which lifts up and helps, 
 which gives pleasure with no sting of sorrow after it. This, 
 if he learns perfectly the lesson of life, will be the result 
 without bringing into play any other motive than that of 
 self-love. 
 
 Consider another way in which his action will be modified. 
 As he goes on through life, he will not only learn that some 
 things are in their nature deadly, but he will learn that all 
 things, however fair, however sweet, however well fitted to 
 build up his nature, may become injurious through excess. 
 Too much honey satiates and cloys. Too much study inca- 
 pacitates the brain. Too much exercise fails to develop mus- 
 cular power, but rather weakens. Too much food destroys 
 the very object of eating food at all, and cripples the digest- 
 ive functions. Too much drink, of even that which may be 
 healthful in itself, floods and injures instead of helping on 
 the natural processes of life. So too much enjoyment ener- 
 vates, vitiates, and degrades a man's faculties and powers. 
 Too much of what commonly goes by the name of religion 
 may be just as harmful as too much intoxicating drink or too 
 much pleasure. Too much art culture, too much devotion 
 to any department of human life, may overweight and over- 
 balance human nature, and throw life out of its proportion, 
 and produce results precisely contrary to what a wise self- 
 love seeks. 
 
 This same man, governed by the principle of self-love, 
 would learn another thing: that he must live with other 
 people ; that he must get along with other men and women 
 in this world, with those who are governed by precisely the 
 same motives that control and lead him. At first, he is apt 
 to feel that everything which he wants, if used or taken by 
 anybody else, is just so much taken away from him. This is 
 
7^ Beliefs about Man. 
 
 precisely the attitude of the ignorant and barbaric mind. 
 Take two tribes, for example : they cannot both occupy the 
 same hunting-ground. They naturally consider each other 
 enemies, and fight. If there is an opportunity to gain food 
 or a place for fishing, the first impulse is that one must have 
 the exclusive right, and the other must be kept away as an 
 enemy. But what is the lesson of human experience t Is it 
 not precisely the reverse? Suppose I am governed by no 
 higher motive than the desire of getting the most possible 
 out of life : I do not want to own all the land in the world, for 
 in that way I should push far away from me all neighborhood 
 and all human association ; and I am just as hungry for that 
 as I am for land. Suppose I can control all the property in 
 the city, and pauperize everybody else : I cripple the very 
 movement of civilization that makes the city of Boston a 
 pleasant place of residence ; I destroy the very end that I 
 had in view. Suppose I should accumulate around myself 
 all the books of the world, and take possession of all the 
 intelligence ; suppose I could borrow or seize from your 
 brains and memories all that you know, and put it into the 
 circuit of my own brain, would I be gaining a desirable end .'* 
 I should rather be isolating myself, making myself alone in 
 the universe ; for there would be no one with whom I could 
 communicate, no one who would understand me, no one 
 between whom and myself there could be an interplay of in- 
 telligence. If I spoke, there would be no one to listen. I 
 learn then true wisdom. I learn that my own happiness, my 
 own intelligence, are furthered and lifted up by increasing 
 the finest intelligence of the world. If I gather to myself all 
 the brightness, I become like a lone star in the heavens, all 
 its beams radiating until they are lost in the abyss, and no 
 other planet, no other tiniest orb, to catch one ray and send 
 it back again, to reflect the brightness and gladness of the 
 
Motive Forces. 'jj 
 
 central beams. Men learn by experience that, if they wish to 
 be healthy, they cannot disregard the health of the world. 
 
 If I sit in a palatial residence on some high hill-top, sur- 
 rounded by trees, made beautiful by all the landscape gar- 
 dener's art ; if I sit by my window as the breeze comes in 
 and fans my cheek, it is not enough that everything within 
 the limits of my estate shall be in perfect sanitary condition. 
 The breezes blow around the world ; and, if I wish them to 
 come to me laden with inspiration and health, I must see to 
 it that the world is healthy. If I have no other motive than 
 my own well-being, I dare not, if I am wise, disregard the 
 welfare of the farthest tribe on the face of the earth. 
 
 I have carried these illustrations far enough to bring before 
 you the principle I wish to emphasize as the one important 
 point of my discourse. I believe that these common, nat- 
 ural appetites, tastes, feelings, hopes, fears, that are the con- 
 trolling motives of human life, are right, every one of them. 
 There is not a part or passion that is not in its intent divine. 
 There needs no reversal of human character. There needs 
 no uprooting of human motives. There needs no "conver- 
 sion," in the theological sense. These motives, — what are 
 they ? They all resolve themselves into one grand hunger, — 
 hunger for life; for more life; for a broader, deeper, higher 
 life. And, if there be nothing but that hunger, and there 
 be along with it a growing wisdom, the result of human 
 experience, there needs no other force to develop this world 
 into a perfect kingdom of God. 
 
 There is no gulf, then, such as I referred to at the outset, 
 between human nature and all other nature. There is sim- 
 ply, — because of man's being left to choose and to be gov- 
 erned by his own reason or unreason, by his wisdom or his 
 ignorance, — there is simply a liability to a thousand mistakes 
 and a thousand follies*. Man is liable to pursue some course. 
 
yS Beliefs about Mmt. 
 
 thinking it leads to heaven, only to find that it ends in de- 
 struction. He is liable to become the victim of some abnor- 
 mal appetite, for the lack of a wise, powerful self-control. 
 He is apt to go astray; but, in order to produce the perfect 
 result, there needs only wisdom, direction, self-control. 
 There needs only that I develop an ability to hold myself in 
 check, to look out over the world and to choose this or that ; 
 to know what is best, and fix upon that. If I were only 
 wisely selfish, I should do that every time. 
 
 I will close by guarding one point. Perhaps you will say 
 in your heart : " This is downright selfishness. There is 
 nothing noble here. It is all poor and mean." But consider 
 for a moment. I had occasion not long ago to draw the 
 distinction between self-love, between the motive power that 
 impels us to choose that which we regard as good and that 
 which goes by the name of selfishness, as an evil. I must 
 draw that again now. If I am free, I cannot help choosing 
 that which I regard as best for me, under the circumstances 
 and at the time. No human being can help it. The motive 
 impulse must spring from my own heart. It cannot spring 
 from any other. If I see a person suffering and reach out 
 my hand and give freely of my own money to assist, still it is 
 my feeling that leads me to do it. I may call it sympathy 
 instead of self-love, but I do that which I choose to do, and I 
 can do no other. Now, as to the distinction between selfish- 
 ness, as an evil, and this principle of choosing the best, of 
 which I have spoken. Selfishness, as an evil, means that I 
 am willing to take a pleasure or an advantage at the cost of 
 the welfare of somebody else. There is no other meaning 
 to the selfishness that is wrong save that. The man who is 
 willing to become richer, to become more powerful, to do 
 anything that he conceives to be to his own advantage, and 
 as a result leaves another man or woman lower than before, 
 
Motive Forces. 79 
 
 that man is selfish. And right there is the heart of infamy 
 in human conduct. But this is not choosing that which is 
 best for yourself. In the long run, human experience tells us 
 the man who takes advantage of the weakness of somebody 
 else is not doing the best for himself. He is injuring him- 
 self unspeakably more than he is injuring his victim. So, 
 instead of contradicting the principle that I have outlined, it 
 only tends to confirm it. 
 
 I believe then that the forces, the powers, that are at work 
 in human nature to-day, do not need uprootal or change. 
 They only need instruction. They only need guidance, self- 
 control. Then out of the present chaos and disorder will 
 come infinite peace ; and the perfect city of God, instead of 
 coming down from God out of heaven, will begin right here 
 in the dust at our feet, and will rise stone by stone until its 
 walls are complete, and its domes and spires are lifted into 
 the sunny air, and all its streets and homes are filled with 
 the happy and perfected children of humanity, who are the 
 children of God. 
 
 Note. — In my main discussion above, I have kept myself to the stand- 
 point of a wise self-love. I have done this for the sake of clearness, 
 and to emphasize the fact that this force alone would necessarily lead to 
 what we call unselfish care for others. I wish to add now to this the 
 statement that love, sympathy, and even heroic self-devotion to others, 
 are just as natural to man as are the opposite feelings. 
 
THE LAW OF PROGRESS. 
 
 On consulting the dictionary of Dr. Worcester as to the 
 meaning of the word "progress," I found that he gave the 
 following definition : " The act of progressing or going for- 
 ward." But this did not help me a great deal, for the simple 
 reason that he failed to define what was meant by "going 
 forward." Which way is forward, when we are talking about 
 the movements of mankind ? Of course, any particular phi- 
 losophy, religion, nationality, school of thought, reform, will 
 hold to and attempt to defend the belief that progress is 
 carrying out its own ideas, advancing along the line of its 
 own hopes and purposes. But, if we take this for a definition, 
 we shall find we are involved at once in inextricable confu- 
 sion and helpless contradiction. Progress for the woman 
 suffragist is one thing : Dr. Bushnell calls it " the reform 
 against nature." Progress for the republican, that which we 
 glory in, is looked upon as decay, disintegration, disaster for 
 humanity, from the stand-point of the monarchist. That 
 which we call religious progress is scouted as evil and 
 destructive to man by those who hold to theories of super- 
 naturalism. Progress for the American on this continent, 
 that which means invading the wilderness, taking possession 
 of his hunting grounds, is looked upon by the Indian as the 
 destruction of his home and the decay of all which he regards 
 as valuable in life. We shall have to go further than this, if 
 we wish to find an adequate and satisfactory definition. 
 
The Law of Progress. 8 1 
 
 Herbert Spencer, as quoted by Mr. Bagehot, says it is " an 
 increase of adaptation of man to his environment." This 
 may be adequate and accurate as far it goes ; but it does not 
 go far enough to complete the circle. Adaptation to a man's 
 environment will either lift him up or degrade him, accord- 
 ing to whether his environment is higher or lower than 
 his present condition. Take a man already in declining 
 health and transfer him to a region infested with malaria, 
 with a fever-stricken atmosphere, or where the germs of 
 some fatal disease lie hidden, and then produce " an increas- 
 ing adaptation " between him and that kind of environment, 
 and it certainly does not mean progress towards physical 
 vigor or increase of the length of life. It means rather 
 decay, or progress downward toward disease and death. 
 
 In spite, however, of the difficulty that we find at the out- 
 set as to a definition, we do find that the experience of 
 man on earth has somehow brought into the consciousness 
 and feeling of all those nations that claim to stand at the 
 head, supreme in power, supreme in knowledge, supreme in 
 happiness, — we do find, I say, practically a general convic- 
 tion that there is such a thing as progress, and that the world, 
 at however slow a pace, is advancing toward something higher 
 and better. The creed of the civilized world is really summed 
 up in the familiar couplet of Tennyson : — 
 
 " Yet I doubt not through the ages one increasing purpose runs, 
 And the thoughts of men are widened with the process of the suns." 
 
 And the conviction that there is in this, which men call 
 progress, something desirable, finds its expression in another 
 line of the same poet, where he makes the speaker say, — 
 
 " Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay." 
 
 That is, a man may live more in a few years spent in the 
 midst of those nations which we call civilized and progres- 
 
82 Beliefs about Man. 
 
 sive than he could by lengthening out to almost any extent 
 the mere fact of existence among those that are stagnant or 
 decaying. 
 
 We shall get at an approximately correct, or sufficiently 
 correct, conception of what progress means, if we, however 
 briefly, glance at a few mental pictures of some contrasts 
 between those nations that are barbaric and those that we call 
 civilized. If we look first at the differences of their mere 
 physical conditions and surroundings, we see barbaric man 
 a wild, naked savage in the woods ; at first without fire, with- 
 out clothing, save that which he strips from the trees or robs 
 from the backs of their owners, the wild beasts of the forest; 
 without any adequate means of supplying himself with food ; 
 without weapons of defence against the wild beasts that are 
 about him ; standing abjectly fearful and helpless in the 
 presence of the great elemental forces of the world ; afraid 
 of the lightning ; afraid of the dark j afraid of the cold ; 
 tormented with hunger ; swept off by pestilences ; helpless 
 in the presence of these great formless and therefore terrific 
 powers, that he thinks of as beings like himself, only heart- 
 less and cruel. Then picture civilized man with an average 
 length of life almost double ; with unspeakably more means 
 of comfort ; dwelling in houses that are palaces ; surrounded 
 with everything that can appeal to and supply the wants of 
 his nature ; in great communities ; in growing cities with 
 their paved highways ; with the means of communication 
 which he has developed, — railroads, telegraphs, telephones, 
 all the ten thousand appliances of the civilized world. 
 
 Then, when you leave the physical condition and come up 
 to the mental, what an expansion, what an enlargement of 
 man is here ! A larger and more complex brain ; school- 
 houses, newspapers, libraries, art galleries, museums, all 
 those institutions that correspond to and represent the 
 
The Law of Progress. 83 
 
 mental development of the world. On the one hand, man, 
 developed into such a godlike power over the problems of 
 the universe that, as if he were a very god, he holds the sea 
 in the hollow of his hand, and weighs the mountains in scales 
 and the earth in a balance. He takes up the isles as though 
 they were a very little thing, and measures the orbits of the 
 suns. He even describes accurately their bulk and composi- 
 tion, and weighs the planets as an apothecary weighs his tiny 
 grains. At the other end of the scale, this man, unable to 
 count perhaps beyond the fingers of one hand ; with a brain 
 smaller than that of the civilized man ; with little power of 
 thought; no prevision ; staring dumbly, perchance, at the 
 great wonders of the universe, with an ox-like impassibility, 
 instead of that reverent awe with which the civilized man 
 faces the great facts that are everywhere about him. 
 
 Then, when you come to consider the differences in his 
 moral characteristics ; when you look over the world and see 
 the reformatories, the asylums, the hospitals, that represent 
 the tenderness of man toward the unfortunate, the sick, the 
 poor ; all the external institutions and appliances that come 
 under that one grand word "benevolence," — a word utterly 
 unknown and unthought of, when man was at the outset of 
 his career, — you become assured of the fact that there has 
 been a marvellous change ini the decrease of hate and the 
 growth of love, a decrease of fear and a growth of trust. If I 
 had time to analyze only these two facts, thus so simply stated, 
 I should be able to sum up in them the entire moral progress 
 of the world. Man has learned to hate less and love more. 
 He has learned to fear less and to trust more. These two 
 grand facts, like a double rainbow, span the whole arch that 
 represents the moral progress of man from the lowest to the 
 highest. Man, strong, self-centred, self-controlled, able to 
 look out over and to control the forces of the world, is no 
 
84 Beliefs about Man. 
 
 longer afraid of them. They are his allies, his friends. He 
 is no longer afraid of ferocious wild beasts or ferocious wild 
 men. He is able to look other races in the face, and discern 
 the fact of brotherhood. So hate dies out, and fear dies out ; 
 and trust, — that self-poised calm with which man faces the 
 problems of the civilized world, — and love, — that bond that 
 binds communities and nations together by the tender tie of 
 sympathy, that makes men feel, each one of them, " I am a 
 man, and nothing that is human is indifferent to me," — these 
 rise to the kingship of his life. These facts mark man as a 
 morally progressive being. 
 
 It needs only a word to indicate man's religious progress, 
 from the day when he stands in the presence of hideous, 
 cruel gods, as he deems them, surrounding him on all hands, 
 that he must propitiate with suffering and tears and blood, to 
 that period in the history of the world where Jesus utters 
 the thought that God is " Our Father," one who sends his 
 rain equally on the evil and the good, and bids his sun shine 
 on the just and on the unjust. From that time to this — for 
 this later thought is only as yet beginning to be incorporated 
 in the heart and life of man — there is a stretch of religious 
 progress that means emancipation and help, and love and 
 peace, and endless hope. 
 
 The New York Nation said two or three years ago (I 
 quote from memory, not verbally) that the difference between 
 the hut of the barbarian and a modern lady's drawing-room 
 marked the entire advance of human civilization \ and if you 
 draw mental pictures of the two, and see what is implied in 
 the contrast, you will see how profound is this generalization. 
 All the contrasts that I have run over so briefly you will find 
 indicated in this one phrase. The modern woman, cultured, 
 refined, developed, surrounded by everything that can appeal 
 to and satisfy her wants, physical, mental, moral, spiritual, — 
 
The Law of Progress. 85 
 
 with a calm facing of the universe, with an outlook toward 
 an endless future, — this is that which stands for what we 
 imply when we talk about human progress. 
 
 Now consider for just a moment what we mean by the 
 advantages which the civilized world has over the uncivilized. 
 Take for instance a nation like England or like the United 
 States, not by any means ideally perfect as yet, but in which 
 there is the largest development of physical life, of freedom, 
 of intelligence, of self-culture, of mental development, of 
 moral advance. What is the advantage such a nation has 
 over a barbaric people? In the first place, bring them to- 
 gether on the field of battle, and the civilized shatters the 
 uncivilized at the first contact. The civilized world is might- 
 ier than the uncivilized. The modern man lives longer. He 
 has more physical comfort. He has larger development 
 of body as well as of brain. The old idea that men are 
 dwindling and becoming puny as the ages go on, that civili- 
 zation dwarfs the individual, is only a curious mistake. I 
 went through the tower of London a year and a half ago, 
 and I looked at the armor of the old kings and the famous 
 heroes of English history. And it is my firm conviction 
 that, although I am not a very large man, there was hardly 
 a suit of armor there that I could possibly have worn. 
 
 In short, then, the civilized man lives longer, and he lives 
 more. He is stronger, and comes out ahead in all contests, 
 be they physical, mental, or moral. His larger internal 
 development calls for and creates corresponding external 
 conditions. Thus, all that we mean by governments, socie- 
 ties, arts, sciences, literatures, come into being. The general 
 result is an infinitely richer and more complex world, and an 
 infinitely finer, higher, and completer man, to inhabit, to 
 enjoy, and still further to develop it. 
 
 Then there is this mental superiority, this ability to lock 
 
86 Beliefs about Man. 
 
 out over the world and control its forces, and thus anticipate 
 the future. There is an increase of enjoyment. There is 
 an increase of everything that the human heart naturally 
 desires. Now let us see if we can get at the heart of this. 
 Let us see what it means. 
 
 What is progress ? Progress is nothing else than growth. 
 In scientific phrase, it is an " advance from the homogeneous 
 to the heterogeneous." In plain language, it is an advance 
 from the simple to the complex, from the less to the more. 
 Let us take the case of a plant or flower, and I will illus- 
 trate, without leading you astray, precisely what I mean. 
 
 You hold a little seed in your hand. It is very small, but 
 you know that wrapped up in there is a capacity for what you 
 call growth, unfolding, development. It needs only appro- 
 priate conditions, — soil, sunshine, rain, air, room. Give it 
 these, and there comes up first a tiny little blade through the 
 soil : this divides into two ; it grows ; it branches ; it throws 
 out twigs on every side ; leaves burst forth ; then it flowers ; 
 and at last it crowns itself with fruitage that holds in its heart 
 the seeds of other and endless new developments. This is 
 what we mean by progress in plant life, the fact of growth. 
 
 There is, however, another side to it. What do we mean 
 when we speak of the development of all the apples of earth 
 from the crab-apple ; when we hear of the new and finer 
 developments of pear or grape.'* What does the horticult- 
 urist mean when he talks about producing a finer rose than 
 was ever seen before? He means the development of some 
 one kind until it becomes more than it ever was before in all 
 the qualities that compose it. It has more leaves, — doubled, 
 tripled, quadrupled ! it has more color, a deepening of the 
 tints or a larger variety of tinting; more fragrance, and a 
 finer quality of fragrance. And a precisely similar thing is 
 what we mean by human progress. The lowest type of man 
 
The Law of Progress. Sy 
 
 who stood on the farthest border that separates manhood 
 from the animal world was the seed, holding in himself " the 
 promise and the potency" of all that the world has become. 
 
 It needs then for progress these two things, — an innate 
 capacity for unfolding; then soil, sunshine, rain, room for 
 development. 
 
 Now let me raise the question whether there is any neces- 
 sary law of human progress. It is a strange question when 
 you come to analyze it ; and it seems to me a little curious 
 that there should be so much confusion of thought in regard 
 to it. Is there any necessity for human progress ? 
 
 Yes and no. 
 
 There is a necessity for the progress of the race. There 
 is no necessity for the progress of any one nation or of any 
 one individual. The whole matter will be made perfectly 
 clear, if you will let me recur to the illustration of- the flower. 
 There are so many conditions that are favorable to plant life 
 in this world, and so many seeds, that we say it is a practical 
 necessity that there should be plant life, and that it should 
 develop and unfold itself more and more. But there is no 
 necessity for any particular plant or flower to unfold, or for 
 any particular variety to continue to live. 
 
 There are then two things necessary : the seed, the innate 
 tendency to germinate and develop ; and the conditions for 
 development, — the soil, sunshine, rain. You may have the 
 one without the other ; but unless you have both there can 
 be no development. 
 
 I believe then that, in the words of Pascal, one of the 
 greatest thinkers of the world, we are to think of " the entire 
 succession of men through the whole course of ages " as 
 being substantially " one man, always living and incessantly 
 learning." The race must live, the race must go on. 
 Necessity compels it. It is progress, or die. For Nature, 
 
SS Beliefs about Man. 
 
 with her great problems, stands ever, like the ancient fabled 
 sphinx, beside the pathway of human life, propounding her 
 riddles to man. If he answers them, there is the reward of a 
 larger life. If not, he is mercilessly devoured. 
 
 Man can solve the problems of life, and he must ; and this 
 constitutes progress. This is true of man, considered as the 
 entire race. In spite of what brilliant writers and speakers 
 may tell us of " lost arts," I do not believe there are any lost 
 arts of great value. I believe that Emerson was truer in his 
 thought, when he said, 
 
 " One accent of the Holy Ghost 
 The heedless world hath never lost." 
 
 I do not believe that the advancing march of man has ever 
 dropped in the roadwa}^, trampled down, and left behind any- 
 thing really essential to its farther advancement. Mankind 
 has not progressed with equal stejD through all the ages. 
 There are periods, whole ages, when it seems to be standing 
 still. We know that some of the greatest inventions, those 
 that have revolutionized the world, — gunpowder, printing, 
 steam, — were dropped in the soil of nations thousands of 
 years ago ; but the conditions of their growth were not there, 
 and so they came to nothing. 
 
 Neither are we to consider that the human race is really 
 making no progress, because it seems to be standing still. 
 Did you ever look upon the growth of a century-plant ? 
 Week after week, month after month, and year after year, it 
 seems practically to be almost standing still. But it is all 
 the time gathering force, gathering increment of power and 
 life and material in its broad, thick leaves \ and at the last, 
 when the years have gone by and the time is ripe, in a few 
 days it shoots up its stalk, and in a few hours blossoms into 
 marvellous beauty. And so the human race seems some- 
 times to have come to a halt. Yet in these silent, mighty 
 
The Law of Progress. 89 
 
 ages when everything seems asleep, when literature is dis- 
 couraged, and religion feels that the world is going to decay, 
 it is only gathering forces, which by and by shall reveal 
 themselves in a grand advance, some mighty enlargement of 
 human life, opportunity, intelligence, and power. 
 
 There is then, I say, this necessity for the advance of the 
 race as a whole ; but there is no necessity for the advance of 
 any particular nation, or any particular man. The whole 
 question turns upon whether the conditions of progress are 
 complied with by the nation or the man. 
 
 Now, what is the force that lies at the heart of humanity, 
 that constitutes the eternal impetus toward progress ? What 
 is the power — to use that illustration again, that is so fitting 
 that it will follow me all through the morning — at the heart 
 of the seed, the tendency, that no man can explain, to burst 
 its enclosure and grow ? As at the heart of the seed, so at 
 the heart of man there is an endless thirst, a deathless 
 hunger to become more, to reach out on every side ; and, as 
 the plant, for the water supply that is far away, will send 
 down and out its rootlets, hunting for it with almost a human 
 intelligence through the dark pathways of the soil ; or as the 
 plant in a cellar or under a stone will reach out and seek for 
 the tiniest ray of light that may come through some crevice ; 
 or will attempt to heave off and tumble down the obstruc- 
 tion that hinders its rise, — so ever in the case of humanity. 
 There is a mental, spiritual hunger and thirst in man to be- 
 come more than he is, he hardly knows how or why. He 
 reaches out after those things that he desires, and thirsts for 
 the satisfaction of every appetite. It makes no difference 
 whether or not you can prove that there is any practical 
 result to come from this deathless pursuit. A man does not 
 reason when he is hungry. He is simply hungry, and he 
 stretches out his hand for food. So you may prove ever so 
 
QO Beliefs about Man. 
 
 conclusively to the navigators and investigators and dis- 
 coverers of the world that there would be no practical use 
 ever subserved by mapping out the interior of Africa. But 
 they will go on until every part of that land, till every bit of 
 this round world, is as familiar as are the streets of Boston. 
 In spite of wreck, disaster, and tragedy, over and over again, 
 they will continue to knock at that icy gateway of the north, 
 until the flag of some nation is hoisted on the pole. There 
 is a deathless thirst in man to engage all his faculties, to 
 accomplish all that is possible, to achieve all that his hand 
 can grasp. 
 
 There are wise philosophies, there are religions, that tell 
 man he is all wrong in this incessant hungering and thirsting 
 for what they declare to be impossible ; that the true way to 
 find peace and contentment is by repression. As though 
 you were to go to a horticulturist and tell him the true way 
 to get the perfect flower is by repression, — not to give quite 
 enough soil or sunshine, to clip off the aspiring leaves and 
 twigs, to hold it back and down ! But he will tell you that 
 the true way is to give every one unlimited opportunity, then 
 to select and cultivate the best. So, though men tell us that 
 the true way to find heaven is to crush out and repress all 
 the natural human tendencies of men, though they tell us 
 that peace can only be found in their extinction, yet I believe 
 that Tennyson has rung out the truer note and the healthier 
 
 creed, — 
 
 " Whatever crazy sorrow saith, 
 No life that breathes with human breath 
 Has ever truly longed for death. 
 'Tis life, of which our nerves are scant, 
 O life, not death, for which we pant, 
 More life and fuller that we want." 
 
 And just here, as illustrating the true nature of man and 
 how to treat him as a help toward progress, I will read to 
 
TJie Laiv of Progress. 91 
 
 you a paragraph from a paper by Prof. William James, the 
 brother of the novelist whom you all know so well. 
 
 " Man's chief difference from the brute lies in the exuber- 
 ant excess of his subjective propensities, his pre-eminence 
 over them simply and solely in the number and in the fan- 
 tastic and unnecessary character of his wants, physical, 
 moral, aesthetic, and intellectual. Had his whole life not 
 been a quest for the superfluous, he would never have estab- 
 lished himself as inexpugnably as he has done in the neces- 
 sary. And, from the consciousness of this, he should draw 
 the lesson that his wants are to be trusted ; that, even when 
 their gratification seems farthest off, the uneasiness they occa- 
 sion is still the best guide of his life, and will lead him to 
 issues entirely beyond his present powers of reckoning. 
 Prune down his extravagance, sober him, and you undo him." 
 
 Progress means trusting human hunger of every kind and 
 in every direction, and opening wide the field for all human 
 experiment. This hunger of man, this tendency to develop 
 being given, he only needs intelligent guidance and oppor- 
 tunit}'-, and progress naturally follows. Anything, however, 
 which obstructs his way or turns him aside into some false 
 path, will result in stagnation or decay. The problem for 
 him to solve is this, — to learn the real nature of the forces 
 with which he has to deal, and then how to make them friends, 
 helpers to his growing life. This implies both self-develop- 
 ment and control of the external world. 
 
 Two main dangers threaten him : first, that some false or 
 imperfect theory of the universe — scientific, philosophic, or 
 religious — may lead him astray; and, second, that some tyr- 
 anny, external, as of a chief, a political organization, a king, 
 or internal, as of a system of thought or a religious fear, 
 may stand in the way and hinder his advance. 
 
 I have time left only for a few specimen illustrations of 
 
92 Beliefs about Man. 
 
 what seem to me the conditions and the line of human prog- 
 ress. If you place yourself in the condition of early man, 
 you will find that the first step that' he needed to take was to 
 learn how to combine. One man alone is helpless. Men 
 organized and co-operating sympathetically together are able 
 to subdue the earth. It is as when a party of adventurous 
 climbers wish to explore the summits of the Alps ; they dare 
 not risk this alone ; nor do they simply make up a party, 
 each walking by himself. But they tie themselves together, 
 so that the weak may be helped by the strong ; so that he 
 who stands on the edge of imminent peril may be drawn 
 back to a place of safety ; so that all may go up or down 
 together. A bundle of rods, as we have learned from the old 
 fable, is always stronger than a single rod \ and it does not 
 matter either what kind of a cord it is that binds them to- 
 gether. The first problem, then, was the art of combination. 
 The union might be compelled by the hand of a ruthless 
 despot or a merciless chief. It might have been the fiction 
 of a common ancestor, untrue in fact, but mighty as an idea. 
 It might have been the possession of a common worship ; 
 and, so far as this is concerned, it made no difference whether 
 the God were good or bad, merciful or cruel. The body of 
 men who came together and were held together by some 
 common bond was mightier than a thousand fragments of 
 tribes, where each one was for himself: just as the phalanx 
 of Alexander, few in number, but elbow to elbow and 
 shoulder to shoulder, foot by foot, marched through the 
 myriad Asiatics who were not thus combined. The first 
 step, then, was the finding some common bond. 
 
 Then what ? Here came in that danger to which man- 
 kind is perpetually exposed, — the danger of learning to love 
 and worship something that once was helpful, after its uses 
 are all outgrown. So a nation comes to worship its des- 
 
The Law of Progress. 93 
 
 potism or monarch, or the family of the man that first made 
 it illustrious. Thus it perpetuates the despotism until it be- 
 comes an incubus. So, in after years, men come to reverence 
 the religion which was their first bond, in such a fashion that 
 it stands squarely in the way of their taking a farther step of 
 progress. They bow in blind reverence to that which was 
 once useful, though now it be outgrown : as though a child, 
 learning to walk by the aid of its baby-jumper, should come 
 at last to estimate the service it once rendered him so highly, 
 come to love it so warmly, come to reverence or fear it so 
 strangely as not to dare to change it, and thus limit the entire 
 development of his life to the capability of his baby-jumper. 
 
 This is what men are constantly doing. They do it so- 
 cially, politically, morally, religiously. Something aided them 
 once, and they will keep it forever. They dare not go be- 
 yond it. Forgetting the principle, they only stick in the form. 
 
 What each man needs is to regard the fact of being bound 
 together, not the instrument that binds. Revere government, 
 not a despotism, not any particular form of dynasty. Wor- 
 ship religion, not a religion. The problem of progress will 
 be found in the case of man, just as in the case of a tree, 
 when there is cohesive power enough to hold together and 
 expansive freedom enough to permit growth. What man 
 needs in politics, art, science, religion, everywhere, is to learn 
 to love and worship and care for this principle of co-opera- 
 tion, so that men can combine, but to hold it loosely enough 
 so that there can be growth. 
 
 The principles already advanced contain by implication 
 that which I shall make my next step, in the illustration of 
 this great theme. The progress of man on earth has kept 
 pace, step by step from the beginning until now, with the 
 decay of supernaturalism. What does this mean ? It means 
 simply this : that supernaturalism, in all its forms, is false, as 
 
94 Beliefs about Man. 
 
 a theory of the universe ; and that man progresses only along 
 the lines of a true theory. As I have already said, the condi- 
 tions of progress are that men shall learn the real nature of 
 the forces at work in the world and with which he has to 
 deal ; for only thus can he learn how to deal with them so 
 as to make them his servants. Take two or three specimen 
 illustrations. 
 
 So long as men believed that it rested on the will of a 
 supernatural power as to whether they should be supplied 
 with food or not, rather than on a correct understanding of 
 the laws of agriculture, just so long they were liable to wast- 
 ing famines, that devastated whole districts and nations. 
 Famine was looked on as the judgment of a god ; but the 
 gods ceased to punish men by famine, when they learned the 
 conditions of good harvests, when they learned to store pro- 
 visions, and to establish means of communication, one nation 
 with another, so that the supply, which is always a surplus 
 somewhere, may flow to the place where it is needed. 
 
 There was no progress in medicine, so long as disease was 
 regarded as the infliction of an angry deity, to be cured with 
 prayers, amulets, sacrifices, and charms. When men began 
 to learn that health and disease depend on natural and con- 
 trollable forces, then they began to study those forces, so as 
 to have some little power in the way of prevention and cure. 
 Medicine, to be sure, has not made any very great progress 
 yet ; but every step it has made has been away from super- 
 naturalism toward an appreciation of the laws of nature. 
 
 And so, in government, no progress toward freedom, 
 toward the real development of man, has ever been made, 
 except away from the idea of the divine right toward the 
 human right. Those governments that have claimed to be 
 theocracies, or where the kings or the ruling force pretended 
 to be the arm and expression of the will of God, have in all 
 
The Law of Progress, 95 
 
 ages been the worst governments on the face of the earth. 
 It is only as human equity and human rights have come to 
 be recognized, that the world has grown merciful, just, and 
 kind. 
 
 So long as men believed that earthquakes were visitations 
 of God, of course it did not make any difference whether 
 they lived in one part of the world or another, or whether 
 they built one kind of structure or another. There was no 
 use in conforming to natural laws, since the gods could do 
 as they pleased. 
 
 So you will find, in every department of life, that progress 
 has been away from the supernatural toward the natural. 
 This only means that man has been looking in the wrong 
 direction for God. 
 
 " Waiting for storms and whirlwinds, 
 And to see a sign appear, 
 We deem not God is speaking in 
 The still, small voice we hear." 
 
 So long as he looks in the wrong direction, he does not find 
 him. We find God, who is the heart and life of all men, 
 in the nature of things, in his laws of the world. And this 
 is that naturalism which is not atheism, which is not agnosti- 
 cism, which is not a going away from religion and the divine, 
 but which really discovers it, and is thus the real finding and 
 the real worship of God. 
 
 But yet, while it is not wise to hug our mistakes forever, it 
 was perfectly natural that man should make this mistake at 
 first. For human progress, in all departments of thought 
 and life, necessarily leads through three different phases. At 
 first, man looks out over the universe, or that little part that 
 is accessible to him, and observes what he supposes to be 
 facts. He philosophizes and reasons about them to the best 
 
96 Beliefs about Man. 
 
 of his ability : with the light he has, he explains them after a 
 certain way. And this is what is called, in scientific phrase, a 
 hypothesis. By and by, he accumulates a thousand facts that 
 his first explanation will not explain ; and he finds that his 
 original hypothesis was wrong. As years go by, he discovers 
 so many new facts that his old hypothesis cannot account for 
 that his first explanation has to be given up entirely. His 
 theory is shattered, and he is all afloat without any rational 
 conception of things. When passing through one of these 
 transitional phases, men know not what to believe : doctors 
 are contradicting each other at every turn ; and people look 
 about hopelessly for something fixed, some place of rest. 
 (We are passing through such a transition in the department 
 of religion to-day.) After enough facts have been gathered, 
 there comes a true explanation which finds a place for them 
 all, a stable ground on which to stand with a possibility of 
 endless unfolding and development. 
 
 Precisely this process has been gone through with in re- 
 gard to man's thought about the universe. First, the Ptole- 
 maic system was adopted : the world was the centre around 
 which the stars revolved. Men reasoned as well as they 
 could with the facts at hand. But by and by there came an 
 accumulation of facts that this theory could not explain, and 
 it had to be given up. Then there were years of transition, — 
 a time when a new conception was coming in ; and at last we 
 have the Copernican theory, which is able to find a place for 
 every sun and every system, every galaxy, every wandering 
 comet, every asteroid, every star. We need not change it 
 again ; for, if we go on to study till we have ranged the whole 
 sidereal universe, it will go with us and give us a framework 
 for our facts forever. 
 
 Precisely these steps man has to take in religion, in 
 science, in philosophy, in art, in every department of human 
 thought. 
 
The Law of Progress. 97 
 
 In conclusion, then, the conditions of progress are : first, 
 this universal hunger, this tendency to grow ; then the feed- 
 ing of this hunger with truth, and the giving unlimited oppor- 
 tunity, room, and range, for endless expansion. 
 
 We have then to lay special emphasis, as absolute con- 
 ditions of progress, on two things, — freedom and knowledge. 
 The tendency is here, deathless. It only wants room to ex- 
 pand, and guidance in that expansion, that it may develop in 
 accordance with the laws of the universe, which are the laws 
 of God. 
 
 To sum it all up, then, in another fragment of Tennyson : — 
 
 " Let knowledge grow from more to more, 
 And more of reverence in us dwell ; 
 That mind and soul, according well, 
 
 May make one music as before, 
 
 But vaster." 
 
THE EARTHLY OUTLOOK. 
 
 No POET of the modern world has so written himself into 
 the struggles, the problems, and the achievements of civiliza- 
 tion as has Tennyson. Keeping this fact in mind, it will not 
 seem strange to you if I refer to him once and again by way 
 of illustration of these great themes. And so I shall begin 
 this morning by reading to you two or three stanzas from 
 the opening of his poem called " Locksley Hall " : — 
 
 Here about the beach I wander'd, nourishing a youth sublime 
 With the fairy tales of science, and the long result of Time ; 
 
 When the centuries behind me like a fruitful land reposed ; 
 When I clung to all the present for the promise that it closed ; 
 
 When I dipt into the future far as human eye could see ; 
 
 Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be. 
 
 We have spent six Sunday mornings in looking over the 
 past and considering in their broad outlines some of the 
 facts and promises of the present. This morning and next 
 Sunday morning, we are to dip into the future " far as human 
 eye can see," and try to discern the "vision of the world, 
 and all the wonder " that will be. We confine ourselves to- 
 day to the earthly outlook. Next Sunday, we will consider 
 the question of man's outlook for the future beyond the pres- 
 ent life. 
 
The Earthly Outlook. 99 
 
 Whether a man shall take a hopeful view of the present 
 and of the future will depend very largely upon his tempera- 
 ment, the circumstances of his past life, or perhaps only 
 upon his passing mood. We all pass through hours of de- 
 pression, when the good of our life, if we can be cheery 
 enough to confess that there has been any, seems to belong 
 to the past, and we have very little hope of the future. In 
 another mood, however, when the blood runs briskly through 
 the veins, the heart beats vigorously, and we are thrilled with 
 the sense of life and power, all the past, however good it 
 may have been, seems to us very poor in comparison with 
 those achievements which we dream of in the days and 
 years that are to come. And, as this is true of the indi- 
 vidual, so precisely is it true of tribes, of nations, of races. 
 There are periods in the life of this race or that, when all the 
 good of the world seems to be behind them ; and they fancy 
 themselves as having come down into the low, barren levels 
 of the world, with only dreariness before them and a gulf 
 of catastrophe at the end. In another mood of mind, some 
 other nation, or perhaps this same race, may have felt the 
 vigor of achievement and the possibility of good that it could 
 accomplish, and has stood looking forward, with eyes raised, 
 with eager face, and thought bent on the fair skies of the 
 future, on the outlines of the great civilization which it felt 
 that it had the power some day to bring out of the region of 
 dreamland and build on the solid ground of fact. Some- 
 times, we find that these two lines of thought, the backward- 
 looking and the onward-looking, have run parallel to each 
 other within the limit of the same national consciousness. 
 For example, suppose we go to the ancient Greeks, and ask 
 what they thought in regard to the past and future of the 
 world. We should find in answer two lines of tradition. 
 In the first place, bound up with that famous old Prometheus 
 
lOO Beliefs about Man. 
 
 myth, we find the Grecian poets and writers speaking of the 
 time in the distant past when man was weak, helpless, ab- 
 ject, a pitiable being leading a pitiable existence, weak in 
 himself and despicable in the eyes of the happy Olympians. 
 Pitying their condition, Prometheus steals the sacred fire of 
 the gods from heaven, and bestows it upon man as a precious 
 boon ; and out of this and the power that it gives him to meet 
 and shape civilization was born all the grand things that he 
 has achieved and all that he hopes to attain in the future. 
 Running right along side by side with this Prometheus myth, 
 we find another way of looking at the world. Other poets, 
 orators, religionists, tell us that the world began with a 
 golden age ; when the gods themselves reigned and lived 
 on earth in familiar intercourse with man ; before there was 
 any war, any sickness, any disease, any trace of the poor 
 condition into which the world has fallen. This golden age 
 was succeeded by the silver age, that by the age of bronze, 
 each one poorer and lower than the preceding, until after 
 the intercalation of the heroic period, that for a little time 
 recalled the glorious dreams of the past, there came the 
 present age of iron, an age that is hard, hopeless, poor, in 
 which men are afflicted, in which there are war and disorder 
 and turmoil, and men look forward only to catastrophe at 
 the end. We find these two myths, these two ways of look- 
 ing at the world, running parallel with each other inside the 
 mental consciousness of Greece. 
 
 We find a similar thing among the Hebrews. Israel, like 
 Greece, at first looked back to the far past, regarding them- 
 selves as a body of slaves in Egypt, then escaping and wan- 
 dering for years in the wilderness, at last conquering for 
 themselves a home in Palestine, then rising higher and 
 higher to the heroic period of David. Afterward come the 
 prophets, who do not speak at first of the golden past. They 
 
TJie Earthly Outlook. lOi 
 
 sing of a period of millennial glory in the future, when the 
 evils of the world will have been left behind. Later than 
 this prophetic outburst, we find for the first time in the 
 words of Ezekiel, borrowed by him, and through him and 
 the men of his time, introduced into the thought and relig- 
 ious life of Palestine, this contrary dream of the world, this 
 picture of Eden, and the belief that man started out perfect 
 and complete, and has fallen from that state into his present 
 miserable and low condition. 
 
 We find then, I say, these two ways of looking at the world; 
 but, in the main, Christianity, that stream of tradition to which 
 we belong, of which we are a part, has inherited this latter 
 view of the universe. It has been wrought in with the very 
 fibre of its theology and its scheme of salvation, that the world 
 started on the verge of heaven and is sliding down to the 
 verge of the abyss. 
 
 What are the facts of the case ? Leaving tradition aside 
 and studying the past of man as carefully as we may along 
 the lines of his old development up to his present condi- 
 tion, to what may we expect him to come, and what achieve 
 in the future ? Instead of being the inhabitants of a world 
 that is old, weary, worn out, and ready to go to sleep, we are 
 the inhabitants of a world young, fresh, with the kindling 
 fire of youth in its eyes and the growing vigor of manhood 
 in its arm. The shadows of wrong and sin, the pain of dis- 
 ease and suffering, — all these shadows that now and again 
 darken the thresholds of our homes, — these are not the 
 gathering twilight of evening : they are rather the remaining 
 unlifted shadows of the dawn. The world is in its fresh, 
 first morning. The sun indeed is up. His light has gilded 
 the summits of the higher mountain peaks of the world here 
 and there. The loftier plains lie bathed in its golden ra- 
 diance ; but the lowlands of the earth, its valleys, its deep 
 
I02 Beliefs about Man. 
 
 abysses, its wildernesses, are still in the darkness, not of the 
 coming night, but of a retreating morning. Humanity is 
 only a young Hercules in his cradle as yet, but like Her- 
 cules endued with the immortal vigor that is to be devel- 
 oped by and by, and which even now, in his baby hands, has 
 been able to strangle, one after another, many of the ser- 
 pents of darkness and barbarism, of suffering and wrong, 
 that have threatened his young existence. But the great 
 labors that are to cleanse the earth and fit it for the habita- 
 tion of the perfect man, the wanderings over the world to 
 redeem and lift it up, these are all before him. 
 
 It would be a curious subject of inquiry, had we the means 
 for getting at it, to find out how many people in England 
 and America have been really and seriously troubled in their 
 minds by Mother Shipton's prophecy that the world would 
 come to an end in 1881. It would be interesting to know 
 how many have been afraid that the world might be on the 
 verge of its ruin ; how many have been in the state of mind 
 of Madame De Stael in regard to ghosts, — not believing in 
 them, but afraid of them, nevertheless. It is curious and at 
 the same time sad to see how, in the present half-civilized, 
 superstitious condition of the world, even among those that 
 are the best and most enlightened, any fraud, if it be only 
 wild enough and foolish enough, can gain currency and in- 
 fluence. What are the facts in regard to the condition and 
 prospects of our planet ? How long may we expect that the 
 solid earth will be solid underneath the advancing tread of 
 its growing civilization ? 
 
 The future of this earth, like the future of a little child, 
 depends on its nursing mother, the sun. That far-off orb in 
 the heavens, a million and a half times larger than the whole 
 mass of our planet, holds us in its arms, and nourishes us 
 into life and beauty and happiness. How long may we 
 
The Earthly Outlook. 103 
 
 then expect to continue in our present circuit, dancing about 
 this bright orb and drinking in its life and glory ? 
 
 Helmholtz, and those who have given special attention to 
 this subject, tell us that, according to the present processes 
 at work in the sun, we may expect it to continue its present 
 relations to the earth for at least some millions of years. So 
 that, practically, humanity has before it infinite time in which 
 to accomplish its mighty achievements and to turn its dreams 
 into realities. 
 
 The next question we need to raise is whether the earth, 
 with its natural resources, may be expected to furnish an 
 adequate supply for the ever-accumulating, heightening, and 
 broadening demands of humanity, as it becomes more and 
 more civilized in the future. To this question, we may say, 
 on the basis of the best authority that exists at the present 
 time, that the resources of the earth are practically inexhaus- 
 tible, and that man is endowed with a competent power to 
 develop and control these resources, so that they shall keep 
 step with his ever-advancing needs. 
 
 Now then, with this basis underneath our feet, let us look 
 at a few of the great problems that need to be solved before 
 humanity approaches this ideal completeness. And let us 
 ask whether these problems can be solved by the power 
 which we know to exist already in man. 
 
 The first problem is that old prime question of the world, 
 that met humanity on the very threshold of its existence and 
 that has not been completely solved as yet, — the problem 
 of subsistence. If you think of it for a moment and esti- 
 mate the relation in which the simple question of food and 
 clothing stands to all the higher development of the race, 
 you will be able to see very easily that this is the first prob- 
 lem of civilization. Man must conquer the means of sub- 
 sistence ; he must make subsistence easy ; he must tread 
 
104 Beliefs about Man. 
 
 hunger and want and poverty underneath his feet and be 
 able to keep them there, and to forget these lower hungers 
 because they are so easily satisfied, before he can be re- 
 leased, set free from this grinding power that holds him face 
 to face with the dust, before he can be free to remember 
 that he has a brain and a heart and a soul, before he can be 
 free to unfold all those higher, finer qualities that make up 
 our complete definition of a man. The wild beast of the 
 forest simply roars for his prey, hungers when he does not 
 find it, devours it ravenously when he does, and then sleeps ; 
 waking up to go through the process again, and sleep again. 
 This is the animal life, bound to the dust, simply competent 
 to achieve the one result of bare existence. Until man rises 
 above this, he cannot rise very much above the animal. Is it 
 possible for him to achieve this triumph ? I believe that it is. 
 I believe that the resources of the earth are sufficient. I be- 
 lieve that the growing intelligence of man will prove itself 
 efficient to deal with this great question. I believe that the 
 time shall come when poverty and grinding want and hunger 
 shall be things of the past, so far away that the humanity of 
 that happy time shall only remember tliem as a distant tradi- 
 tion, as we recall the cave-dwellers and our barbaric ancestors 
 before they had discovered fire and the first rude implements 
 with which they began their conquest over the world. 
 
 I think if you estimate the period that has been covered 
 by civilization as contrasted with the period preceding that, 
 and if you look carefully at what man during this brief pe- 
 riod has already achieved, you will find your heart beating 
 high with hope and expectation, you will feel that there is no 
 problem of the world too hard for this wonderful being to 
 solve. 
 
 How long has man been here on the planet ? The best 
 authorities tell us the very lowest estimate we should make 
 
The Earthly Outlook. 105 
 
 is one hundred thousand years, that a reasonable estimate 
 is two hundred thousand years, and many of those most com- 
 petent tell us we must stretch it even longer than that. 
 
 How long has he been called civilized ? A brief four or 
 five thousand years in all ; for the very beginning and the 
 very condition of civilization were two grand discoveries, the 
 process of smelting iron ore and the discovery of the pho- 
 netic alphabet. Iron put a weapon in man's hands for subdu- 
 ing external nature. The alphabet became wings to set his 
 mind and soul free, a medium through which to express and 
 embody the development of all this higher, divine side of 
 his nature. And these two, iron and the alphabet, are the 
 t\vo grandest factors in the history of man's civilization. 
 We have known them only four or five thousand years. Yet 
 by no means think that humanity was standing still during 
 the ninety-five thousand or the one hundred and ninet}'-five 
 thousand years. Its progress was only very slow, until man 
 grasped at last in his growing hands the implements of 
 progress. 
 
 Since that time, progress has been in geometrical ratio. 
 Each achievement has been a new step on which to stand, 
 from which to grasp some higher and grander thing. When, 
 then, we conceive the entire length of the life of man on the 
 earth, and how much he has done within the last four or five 
 thousand years, which to the whole period is only as a few min- 
 utes in a long day, we may not hope anytliing that shall seem 
 extravagant, we may dream and believe that man shall at last 
 be able to solve these great questions and to put these evils 
 under his feet. 
 
 I believe that with the coming of this time there will be 
 a new development of the relation in which individuals shall 
 stand to the sources of the earth's supply, from which comes 
 all our wealth. I believe that there will be, along with this 
 
io6 Beliefs about Man. 
 
 progress of man, an intelligent, self -limitation of the popula- 
 tion of the earth, so that it shall keep step with the possi- 
 bility of the noblest subsistence. I believe that the intelli- 
 gence and power of man are perfectly capable of dealing with 
 all these great matters. Man will then develop in all the 
 higher directions now represented by philosophy, art, science, 
 morality, religion, social refinement, and political wisdom. 
 
 When poverty has been abolished, as believe me it will be 
 in the future, what next ? 
 
 I wish you to understand that as I discuss these great 
 points, one after another, I am not saying that one of these 
 questions will be settled, and then the next one, as I treat 
 them. I must deal with them one after another, but they will 
 all grow and develop together, just as we know in the past 
 all the great elements that constitute human civilization have 
 been growing side by side in harmonious association. 
 
 The next step after the abolition of hunger and want will 
 be the practical abolition of disease and pain. Not that 
 they may ever be entirely wiped off from the face of the 
 earth ; but I believe that they may be reduced to so slight 
 a minimum that they shall not be regarded as a burden or 
 terror any more. Only enough shall remain to give us a 
 background against which to define health and life and joy. 
 What is disease t What is pain ? They are simply indica- 
 tions and necessary results of broken laws of nature. And 
 these laws are discoverable by the intelligence of man, and 
 man is competent to keep them. What hinders then that 
 this great question shall be solved at last, and these evils 
 that have afflicted and affrighted the world sent into the 
 darkness and f orgetfulness of the past t 
 
 Why, just think of it for a moment! How long has it 
 been since the baleful power of superstition has permitted 
 man to study the nature of disease and pain, and treat them as 
 
The Earthly Outlook. 107 
 
 natural things ? Why, within fifty years, — yes, within twenty- 
 five years, — physicians have been persecuted by the Protes- 
 tant Church for the discovery and the use of ether, because 
 it was supposed to interfere with the judgments of God in 
 sending suffering and pain to humanity. It is even less 
 than two hundred years since the civilized world has been 
 permitted to study disease and pain in their relation to nat- 
 ural law and as something that could be comprehended or 
 done away with. The supernatural theory of these things 
 has dominated the brain and heart and fear of man. He 
 has not dared to study them, lest he should incur the wrath 
 of the unseen God. All that medicine has achieved, except 
 that which has come by happy accident, has been achieved 
 within a very few years. When the intelligence of man has 
 fittingly developed, and the whole wide field of cause and 
 effect is thrown open, it is not too much to say that there is 
 not a disease that afflicts the world to-day that may not be 
 traced to its cause, and there is not a cause that is not 
 largely under intelligent human control. We may then look 
 forward to the practical abolition of disease and pain. 
 
 We shall not abolish death ; ijor do I believe that, were we 
 wise enough to see through the blinding tears into its real 
 meaning, we should desire to do so. But we shall add to 
 the length of life on earth, so that each child that is bom 
 shall be permitted to taste of the feast and see the beauty 
 of life ; to pass through the cycle of human experience ; and 
 then, having drunk the cup to the dregs, the only thing left 
 will be, like a tired child at night, to close his eyes and go 
 quietly to sleep. 
 
 After that what? Man will be able to abolish tyranny 
 and war and to achieve a world-wide human freedom, human 
 self-control, human affinity and brotherhood. The time will 
 come that Tennyson in this same " Locksley Hall " foresaw, 
 
io8 Beliefs about Man. 
 
 when there shall be one " parliament of man, the federation 
 of the world." 
 
 What is it that stands in the way of this to-day ? Let us 
 glance at it, and see if the difficulties are intelligible and re- 
 movable. What has kept nations apart ? What has kept 
 up this misunderstanding, hatred, these feuds, that have 
 drenched the world with blood and so long jDostponed the 
 day of individual freedom and self-development ? The causes 
 are perfectly intelligible. If you will read all history, you will 
 find that men have hated each other just in proportion as 
 they have been unacquainted with each other. Find the 
 barriers that have separated peoples, and you will find the 
 cause of misunderstanding, enmity, hate, tyranny, and war. 
 
 First, mountain-chains, which were practically impassable 
 in ancient times ; wide wastes of sea and ocean that were 
 impassable to their feeble, childish navigation ; next, lan- 
 guages that separated them, though they stood face to face ; 
 tribal and race traditions, customs, habits, ways of thinking 
 and feeling growing out of their isolation ; the fiction of 
 descent from some common ancestor on the part of each sep- 
 arate tribe, and the inheritance from its supposed ancestor 
 of his ancient feuds and hatreds toward his enemies ; and 
 most potent of all, perhaps, religious differences, the belief 
 that each tribe was ruled by a god who cared for that tribe 
 alone, and who hated not only the alien tribe, but the god of 
 the alien tribe, — these were the walls of separation between 
 races and nations. 'And, when some of these beliefs were 
 outgrown, the belief that the god of one particular tribe hated 
 the nation that did not worship him after the particular fash- 
 ion popular there kept people apart. It became man's deep- 
 est religious duty to hate anything that was alien : and as late 
 in the history of the world as Plato, you find him commend- 
 ing the Athenians, as though it were a virtue, because they, 
 
The Earthly Outlook. 109 
 
 above almost all other people on the face of the earth, hated 
 anything foreign, regarding anything beyond the limits of 
 their own city and nation as barbaric. It lingers still with 
 us in the kind of distrust and dislike we have toward other 
 people for no better reason than that they do not do things 
 as we are accustomed to do them ; forgetting that they have 
 the same cause of enmity toward us because we do not do 
 things as they are accustomed to do them. 
 
 That this religious hatred was bitterest of all you see in 
 one of the Psalms. I do not know whether David was its 
 author or not ; but, whoever it was, he represented the senti- 
 ments of his time. " Do not I hate them that hate thee ? I 
 hate them with perfect hatred : I count them mine enemies." 
 It is these misunderstandings, these misconceptions and dif- 
 ferences that have kept people apart. You will recall an 
 incident repeated more than once in the revolutions of 
 France, as well as in other places, where the people in their 
 revolution stood face to face with the soldiery made up of 
 the people themselves ; and, as the soldiers looked the people 
 in the face and recognized them as brothers and friends, they 
 refused to fire upon them, though at the orders of the king 
 himself. The moment they recognized the bond of common 
 brotherhood, that moment they felt that the cause of the 
 people was their cause arid they could fight them no more. 
 When this state of feeling and thinking has become univer- 
 sal, when the nations have flowed together and mingled in 
 one, when they have looked each other in the face and 
 have felt heart beat to heart, eye flash to eye, pulse throb to 
 pulse, and hand-clasp meet in hand-clasp, no longer will they 
 be willing to butcher each other for the whim of kings or 
 governments, or to rectify fantastic frontiers and national 
 boundaries. They will recognize that deeper element of 
 humanity that makes the world one. When the people rise 
 
no Beliefs about Man. 
 
 in their intelligence and create an ideal government, that 
 government will simply have the general superintendence of 
 affairs too large for individual hands to manage, the self-pro- 
 tecting power of the whole that looks after the personal in- 
 terest of each one. When the government shall be reduced 
 to that, all wars shall cease and the nations shall be one peo- 
 ple, the children of one Father in heaven. 
 
 As one of the grandest conditions of this, the time will 
 come when there will be one grand metropolitan, cosmo- 
 politan language spoken on the face of the earth. 
 
 To illustrate what I mean ; there was a time, after the break- 
 ing up of the Roman Empire, and before the modern nation- 
 alities in Europe had become established, when there were 
 several duchies or provinces in what is now the kingdom of 
 France, each one speaking its separate dialect ; and, so far as 
 the power or fitness of either one of these dialects to become 
 the supreme language of France was concerned, they stood 
 on the same level. But political and social reasons decided 
 that Paris should be France, and so the dialect of Paris be- 
 came the language of France, and the others were reduced 
 to the secondary position of dialects, ox patois. Precisely the 
 same process is going on, on a world-wide scale ; and the one 
 language that seems destined to be metropolitan is the Eng- 
 lish. It is already the language of the world's commerce. 
 With English speech, a man can travel around the world to- 
 day with greater ease than with any other tongue. The 
 forces at work will not absolutely displace and cause to die 
 out all other languages, but will make this one the grand 
 language of the civilized world, and by means of it bring all 
 the different races of men into an ability to know each other 
 and to correspond with each other with the utmost freedom. 
 
 The external barriers, the mountain chains, — where are 
 they now ? Tunnelled, levelled. Where are the seas and 
 
The Earthly Outlook. iii 
 
 oceans? Even the Atlantic and the Pacific have become the 
 common ferries of the civilized world. The old fictions of 
 tribal ancestry have died out in the presence of greater 
 knowledge ; and religious disputes are becoming no longer 
 the serious things they once were, of rack and thumb-screw 
 and stake. They are only coarse, rough words at the most, 
 in newspapers. 
 
 The world, then, is coming to mutual acquaintance and a 
 knowledge of itself. Only one other theme must I touch on 
 by itself, and that — because of its intrinsic importance — 
 what we may expect to be the religion of the world. 
 
 Every religion is recognized as having two sides. One face 
 looks heavenward, and deals with the great problem of God 
 himself. The other looks earthward, toward man, and deals 
 with the relations which man sustains to that which we call 
 morality. Morality, in the increasing knowledge of the 
 world, will come to be settled as a science, concerning which 
 there can be no intelligent dispute. The break of Luther 
 with the see of Rome was the first great step in the modern 
 world toward that to which we are to come in the domain of 
 theology. There are questions of ultimate truth in theology 
 that, since they are infinite and we are finite, must forever be 
 beyond us. In what relation will the future of the civilized 
 world stand to these problems "i It will stand in the presence 
 of them calmly, admitting the perfect freedom of the broadest 
 speculation, and without attaching any penalty, governmental 
 or social, on account of the speculative views that man may 
 hold concerning questions about which the wisest can know 
 so very little. The future religion of the world will resolve 
 itself into goodness, charity, love toward man, mutual help- 
 fulness and service; toward the universe, admiration, wor- 
 ship, awe so profound that man will not dare to speak 
 
112 Beliefs about Man. 
 
 rashly, nor to charge with crime one who sees these great 
 problems in another light than that in which they appear to 
 himself. 
 
 We may, I believe, picture to ourselves, as the probable 
 future, the whole external world subdued to man and turned 
 into a garden. We may picture the development of innu- 
 merable new sciences, new arts, new forces, new powers 
 that we do not even dream of to-day. We have not attained 
 one-half the mastery of the mightiest power already in our 
 hands. There is not an engine in the world to-day that does 
 not waste a great part of the fuel which it consumes and of 
 the steam which it generates. The power of the world can 
 be doubled therefore even here. But, beyond question, new 
 powers, new discoveries, are to be made that shall give man 
 unlimited control of the earth. An American poet little 
 known, unknown by myself except for that wonderful poem 
 on "Steam " which he has written, makes the steam say, — 
 
 " And soon I intend you may go and play, 
 While I manage this world by myself." 
 
 I believe that powers as yet undreamed of are to be 
 developed, that shall enable the world to be released, not 
 merely that men may go and play, but that they may become 
 all that it means to be a man. 
 
 The world turned into a garden, human life prolonged ; 
 evil and sorrow and hunger largely put under foot, out of 
 sight, and forgotten ; mankind as one family, with one 
 Father in heaven, at peace, in mutual helpfulness, in right 
 relations to each other ; to that we may look forward. In 
 giving the crowning fact of all, I wish to close, as I began, 
 with a passage beautiful as poetry, profound as science, wise 
 as philosophy, from Tennyson, as he outlines what will be 
 
The Earthly Outlook. 113 
 
 the future relation in which man and woman will stand to 
 each other: — 
 
 "Not like to like, but like in difference : 
 Yet in the long years liker must they grow ; 
 The man be more of woman, she of man ; 
 He gain in sweetness and in moral height. 
 Nor lose the wrestling thews that throw the world ; 
 She mental breadth, nor fail in childward care. 
 Nor lose the childlike in the larger mind: 
 Till at the last she set herself to man, 
 Like perfect music unto noble words ; 
 And so these twain, upon the skirts of Time, 
 Sit side by side, full-summ'd in all their powers, 
 Dispensing harvest, sowing the To-be, 
 Self-reverent each and reverencing each. 
 Distinct in individualities. 
 But like each other ev'n as those who love. 
 Then comes the statelier Eden back to men : 
 Then reign the world's great bridals, chaste and calm : 
 Then springs the crowning race of humankind. 
 May these things be ! " 
 
 Note. — When shall " these things be " } Not in their completeness 
 for many ages yet. But the seed is planted, and the stalk is up. It is a 
 matter of time only when the blossom and fruit shall appear. Slow 
 growths last the longest. As compared with the past, a few thousand 
 years more are not long to wait. 
 
IS DEATH THE END? 
 
 It is very difficult for men to argue while the heart aches 
 or with eyes dimmed with tears. And if we do not feel the 
 pain tugging at our hearts to-day, if our eyes now are clear 
 and able to reflect the light that is in the sky above us, still 
 is it not true, in the case of every one of us, that we have 
 had these times of heartache, these hours of dimmed eyes 
 when we could not see ? And can we put all these memories 
 away from us so completely as to enable us to treat a matter 
 like this dispassionately in the clear light of reason, unbiassed 
 by any prejudice or fear or hope ? Are not these desires of 
 ours, these longings, these precious bitter-sweet memories of 
 the past, like some outside influence that deflects the needle 
 from the pole ? And, if we will find the direction of the true 
 north, must we not discover some way of isolating the needle, 
 so that it will tremble toward its true direction ? These out- 
 side forces that do thus deflect the needle are a part of the 
 very problem itself; but, to find out their real worth, we 
 must isolate the needle if possible, and then measure the 
 difference between the north and the point of its deflection. 
 So if we will estimate rightly the force of these passions, the 
 hopes and fears that sway us, and that sweep over us in such 
 mighty power, we must, if we can, look at them objectively, 
 estimate them, measure them, weigh them, see what they are 
 
Is Death the End? 115 
 
 and how much they mean. Let us, then, this morning look 
 our problem as clearly as we can in the face. 
 
 I do not know how it may be with you, but I, for one, can 
 have no sympathy with that common saying, that I hear on 
 every hand, " If there be no future life, then this one is all 
 a mockery and a sham," — that this is not worth while. Of 
 course this must be a matter of personal feeling only. I 
 cannot answer for you; but for myself I wish to put it on 
 record that in despite of all life's tears, with all its heart- 
 aches, with all its disappointments, with all its poverty, with all 
 its sorrows, — and pardon me if I say that of these I have borne 
 a full share, — with all these, this life seems to me so full of 
 mystery, so wondrous, so grand, that, whatever the future 
 may have in store for me, I would not have it that I had not 
 been. This brief look at the wonderful light of the blue sky ; 
 this hour of marvel at the stars of night ; this bending over 
 the mystery of a flower or blade of grass, and seeing there 
 the infinite might and power pushing itself up in infinitesi- 
 mal forms of beauty, grace, and fragrance ; this clasping the 
 hand of friend, if it be only for an hour; this feeling the 
 throb of human love, if only for a little while, — all these, I say, 
 seem to me so wondrous, so grand, that I rejoice and am 
 thankful every day that I live. And if, at the end, it is only 
 saying good-by to it forever, still even with my last breath 
 I would say, " I am glad that I have been there even this 
 little while." 
 
 Another preliminary point : we are told on ever}- hand, we 
 hear it echoed from pulpit and platform, it is uttered through 
 newspapers and reviews, it is talked on the street, it is used 
 as a cry of warning, and with it men shout, " Halt ! " to the 
 march of human intelligence, — we are told that the progress 
 of scientific thought and investigation is leading the world 
 down toward the darkness of materialism, the abyss of noth- 
 
Il6 Beliefs about Man. 
 
 ingness. And they cry out to us that, if we wish to keep the 
 precious hopes of the past, we must retrace our steps and 
 come back again into the old circles of faith and ecclesiastical 
 trust. I wish to say again, concerning this, that I believe 
 nothing of the kind. I wish to say reverently, simply, but 
 with all the earnestness I can in the utterance, that, even were 
 it so, I would not have the old past, or go back one step. 
 For better, infinitely better, say I, is materialism, the dearest 
 hopes being quenched in utter nothingness, than that which 
 the old ecclesiastical Orthodoxy of the world dares to hold 
 up in the face of human intelligence, offering it to us as a 
 gospel, — "good news." Is it good news that you and I and 
 a few of us, perhaps, shall attain immortality and bliss, but 
 that others, the larger part of humanity, or call it the lesser 
 part, or reduce it to a million, ten thousand, one thousand, 
 one hundred, a single human soul, that this soul shall find 
 eternity to be only an everlasting wail ? Is that " good news " 
 that can be given to a waiting, hungering world in terms like 
 these t Better, I say, any other alternative that the human 
 imagination can conceive. Better that the world lose all 
 respect for order and law, and hold one high carnival of 
 crime, that it plunge into woes and sorrows that stretch them- 
 selves out to the very crack of doom, if it last a million years ; 
 and then, if there may be nothing at the end, there is hope as 
 compared with that which they dare tell us is the gospel. 
 Better anything rather than the wail and the cry and the 
 heartache and the bitter hopelessness that stretch on until 
 the millions of ages are only minutes in their timeless tread. 
 Better no future than a misnamed gospel promise like this. 
 
 One other point as preliminary. We must bear in mind 
 clearly the nature of the problem that we are discussing this 
 morning. We must have a clear definition of what we mean, 
 and have a right to mean, by the word "knowledge," so that 
 
Is Death the End? wj 
 
 we may not be disappointed with the result of our investiga- 
 tion. 
 
 We mean by knowledge that which can be investigated 
 and verified as a part of human experience. Nothing that 
 transcends the experience of humanity either as being above 
 our reach, or as being (for the present) beyond our reach, 
 can, in any proper sense of the term, be called knowledge. 
 
 Now, then, if there be another life, if death be not the 
 end, but if at the same time this other life be something 
 higher than the present, under conditions which as yet we 
 cannot experience or imagine, as manhood transcends child- 
 hood ; if it be something beyond our present reach, like a 
 horizon under which no ship has ever sailed, like a country 
 unvisited, a sea unexplored ; then, Avhatever we may think or 
 hope or believe, whatever we may have reason to think or 
 hope or believe, still we cannot as yet properly call it knowl- 
 edge. Suppose, for example, that one comes to me, and 
 makes the claim that he is from that other shore. But he is 
 here nov/ as a part of this present earthly experience of mine. 
 I cannot go over beyond to verify his report. How can I es- 
 tablish the fact that he has really been there ? How can I 
 establish the fact, by what he claims, that there is any such 
 country ; for, while he is here, he is not there ; and it may be 
 never has been ? I speak of tliis only to suggest the difficul- 
 ties that surround the investigation of a tlieme like this. 
 And yet, whether we shall be able to call it demonstrated 
 knowledge or not, we need to consider carefully how much 
 may be represented by those two little words, " faith " and 
 " hope." We need to draw a clear dividing line between that 
 which goes by the name of faith and that which we may truly 
 call a scientific faith. Faith, in the popular language, as it is 
 used many and many a time, means nothing more nor less 
 than simple credulity, accepting a statement without evidence. 
 
Il8 Beliefs about Man. 
 
 Not such is the faith to which I refer, — the faith that is the 
 substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen, 
 the faith that the scientific man holds in regard to that which 
 he has not yet been able to demonstrate ; which is separate 
 from knowledge, but which moves along the line of the 
 knowledge of the past, which stands on the highest peak of 
 the present attainment, and, in accordance with all the prin- 
 ciples that have given us the grand demonstrations that we 
 have already attained, simply looks forward and anticipates 
 that which it may expect to realize. To illustrate what I 
 mean, take the faith of Columbus in regard to the New 
 World. He was not able to prove it. No man in that day 
 could demonstrate the rotundity of the earth; but there were 
 reasons of this kind, and of that kind, reasons here and rea- 
 sons there, that led the wisest of the ancient world, of all the 
 ages down to the time of Columbus, to speculate, to hope, 
 believe and prophesy that some day it would be demonstrated. 
 And in this faith, not in an unreasoning faith, not in cre- 
 dulity, but in the light of what was known and following along 
 the rays of that light, out into the darkness Columbus sailed. 
 He was not a fanatic, he was not a credulous man. But, in 
 the light of all the past, he sailed on into an unveiled future, 
 and discovered the New World. Even then, the question of 
 the world's shape was not settled. 
 
 It was only when Magellan, that grandest navigator of all 
 the world, believing in the prophecy of the shadow, ventured 
 to sail out and round and beyond the known, with the daring 
 purpose of circumnavigating the globe, even when the Church 
 declared to him that he would be lost, and his sailors muti- 
 nied, and the wise men called him a fool, and told him there 
 was nothing there, that he would be lost in the wide wastes 
 of darkness and never reach his home again, — it was only 
 then that he attained the demonstration. That shadow had 
 
Is Death the End? 119 
 
 a great meaning at its heart. He had noticed that the 
 shadow of the earth during an eclipse of the moon is round j 
 and this indicating shadow led him on until he turned it 
 into a magnificent fact. Thus we, not unreasoning, not 
 credulous, simply standing on the farthest verge of attain- 
 ment, launch ourselves on the unknown, and sail toward 
 demonstration. 
 
 I believe that, though we may never be able to demon- 
 strate the truth, still it is best as it is. The order of human 
 growth and progress is a wise one, — first that which is natural, 
 afterward that which is spiritual; beginning here in the 
 present and completing this, then leaping out into that 
 which is beyond. 
 
 In the ages of the world, when there has been the clearest 
 and most perfect confidence in a future life, this life has been 
 little benefited by it. . I have read you some words from the 
 Egyptian Book of the Dead. Go back for a moment into 
 that ancient Egypt, and see the time when there was the most 
 explicit and most earnest and unquestioning faith in the 
 future life, more earnest, perhaps, than the world has ever 
 seen, before or since, there or any other where. So unques- 
 tioning, so real was it that one of the first things that a newly 
 married groom and bride provided for was the disposition of 
 their bodies after death. Death dominated every thought. 
 It meant to them another life beyond that which we call 
 death ; but it so dominated the present that this life was all 
 crushed out and ancient Egypt was one dreary, desolating 
 tyranny, — tyranny in government, tyranny in society, tyranny 
 in religion. The future blotted out the present, and made it 
 poor and mean. 
 
 So in the Middle Ages, during the "ages of faith," as they 
 are called by the Catholic Church, there never has been a 
 time, except perhaps in ancient Egypt, when this world has 
 
120 Beliefs about Man. 
 
 been less cared for than then. Men dreamed so much of the 
 future, and cared so much for being ready for the future, that 
 this world was left practically out of account. And this evil 
 was increased by that pernicious faith, not yet outgrown, that 
 the next world is to be secured by a line of conduct utterly 
 divorced from the development of this. So long as men be- 
 lieve in a future eternal life ; so long as they believe, as they 
 must if they believe at all, that it is of infinite importance 
 as compared with the present ; and that the way to get ready 
 for that world is to scorn this one, so long this world will 
 continue to be what it has been called, a vale of tears. But 
 let men believe in that future life, cherishing it as a hope 
 in their hearts, as a grand outlook, but carry along with it 
 the faith that it means only the culmination, the completion, 
 the coronation of a noble life lived here, then the two, not 
 divorced from each other, shall stand in the relation of man- 
 hood to childhood. By completing and rounding out nobly 
 the life that is given us here, we shall grow naturally into 
 the eternal life. 
 
 Now, then, let us face the problem frankly and squarely, 
 and see if we know anything about it ; or what the facts we 
 do know naturally lead us to think. I shall pass by nearly 
 all the old and common arguments on the subject, not say- 
 ing that they are of no worth, casting not one breath of 
 slight upon them, simply telling you to keep them, cherish 
 them in your hearts if you find they give you strength 
 or comfort you, using them not as separate from those I 
 shall offer you, but as buttressing them and giving them 
 additional support. 
 
 The old Hebrew poet puts the problem so forcibly that I 
 want to give you his words : "There is hope of a tree, if it 
 be cut down, that the tender branch thereof will not cease. 
 Though the root thereof wax old in the earth, and the stock 
 
Is Death the End? I2i 
 
 thereof die in the ground, yet through the scent of water it 
 will bud, and bring forth boughs like a plant. ... If a man 
 die, shall he live again } " That is the question. But here 
 the old writer, it seems to me, misses the main point of our 
 discussion. Cut down a tree, and let the rains of spring come 
 down upon it, and the sunshine fall about the roots, and a 
 new shoot will come up and a new tree develop ; but it is not 
 the old tree. It is another. One of our American poetesses, 
 Mrs. Whitney, has sung to us beautifully in regard to the fact 
 that God does not give us strange flowers every year, but 
 that the old familiar faces look into ours every spring. And 
 she fondly clasps to her heart the sentiment that it is the 
 same old violet that is here. But it is not the violet of last 
 spring. It is a violet that never was here before, and never 
 will be again. It seems to me we can get very little hope 
 from that class of comparisons. Carried out logically, they 
 only prove that this body of man, when it disintegrates and 
 crumbles into dust, is not annihilated ; that it will spring up 
 another year, perhaps in the grasses over our graves or in 
 flowers by and by. Perhaps these same particles may re- 
 appear in another human body, but it will not be /. I gather 
 no hope therefore from comparisons like these. 
 
 Now, what is the fact as demonstrated to us by the best 
 science of the age ? What do we know 1 We know that mat- 
 ter is never annihilated : we know that force is never annihi- 
 lated. Matter and force are eternal. They may take on 
 their million varied Protean forms summer after summer, age 
 after age ; but matter remains the same, force remains the 
 same. If I take a crystal and break it to pieces, tearing 
 asunder the fragments that make up its beautiful form ; if I 
 crush it and grind it into powder ; if I turn it into vapor and 
 drive it off into the air, — still with competent instruments I 
 could gather out of the air again the very identical elements 
 
122 Beliefs about Man. 
 
 that entered into its composition. What was crystal re- 
 mains, only in other forms. And so force remains. Whatever 
 changes it may pass through, it never ceases to be. But I do 
 not want simply to have it proved to me that the particles 
 that compose this body are never to be annihilated. The 
 question is. Shall I continue to think, to love, to feel, to hope ? 
 Shall I pass through this great change called death, and shall 
 I be I, five minutes or a year after friends gather about 
 this body, and say, " He is gone " ? That is the question 
 that we want settled, if it may be. 
 
 Now have we any light on it .? If we have nothing very 
 positive, we have some very powerful negative considerations. 
 I wish to give you some of the grandest attainments of the 
 world as bearing on this great question. 
 
 I have said that science can explain a tree. Science can 
 explain a crystal. Science can explain a flower, even to its 
 perfume. It can tell me all the particles remaining, all the 
 forces remaining, all the gases remaining, after it is dissolved. 
 Science has been trying for ages to explain man after this 
 same fashion. But here, according to the testimony of the 
 wisest men in the world, science has come to a halt. It has 
 to face a problem that reaches into the fathomless mystery of 
 the infinite. 
 
 I touch this desk. A sensation is started in my nerves, 
 runs up the nerves toward the brain, and I think of the desk, 
 and I notice its hardness, its color. As a result of that 
 thought, I make some other motion, or give utterance to 
 the same through words. And so here is a chain of cause 
 and effect running from the desk through my brain, and im- 
 mediately thereafter finding utterance in speech, — a perfect 
 chain of physical motion. But I have thought, I have felt, 
 in connection with the movements of these molecular parti- 
 cles that constitute my brain. Can science explain the fact 
 
Is Death the End? 123 
 
 that I have thought, that I have felt, that I have been con- 
 scious, that I have had an emotion ? No : here is the gulf on 
 the edge of which all human knowledge pauses and confesses 
 it cannot cross. This chain of physical motion is complete. 
 The law of persistence of force holds good. The law of 
 molecular motion holds good ; but it does not approach an 
 explanation of thought. Thought is not one of the links in 
 this chain running through my brain. The chain is complete ; 
 the movements are all complete, with the thought left out. 
 
 Here then, — and this is the one thing most important of 
 any I shall have to offer you this morning, though it be diffi- 
 cult for me to make it perfectly clear, — here is the one thing 
 that science has demonstrated to us ; more than all ecclesias- 
 ticisms, more than teachers or churches have ever attained 
 unto. Science has demonstrated that that which is essen- 
 tial in man no scientific method can explain. Here, then, is 
 this ly this consciousness, this thought, this feeling, this 
 hope, this love, that do not enter into the problem of molec- 
 ular motion at all. Mr. Huxley tells us that perhaps some 
 time science will be able to find the exact "mechanical 
 equivalent '* of a thought ; but he tells us also that, if it does 
 find that, it will not find the thought. Mr. Tyndall tells us 
 that we know no more to-day in regard to this problem of 
 the relation of the soul and- body, from the scientific stand- 
 point, than was known in prescientific ages. 
 
 This, then, is the thing that science has demonstrated ; and 
 here is ground whereon to take our stand, — a basis on which 
 to found our most magnificent hopes. That which makes the 
 essential thing in me, my thought, my love, my feeling, my 
 hope, that is no part of that which the scientist can explain 
 according to the laws of matter and motion. Here, then, is 
 ground on which to rest. Here is a field of infinite possi- 
 bility. And remember that it is science, this much berated, 
 
124 Beliefs about Man. 
 
 much-abused science, that has given us this magnificent 
 result. 
 
 Now let me hasten to another point, important as bearing 
 on this great theme. 1 regard it as something of unspeaka- 
 ble worth, as relating to this subject, just the simple fact 
 exists that man believes in a future life ; that he has believed 
 this, practically, in all ages, under all skies, in all nations. 
 How does it happen that this grand belief has sprung up ? 
 If I should find a dog, or some other lower animal, thinking 
 about living after death, speculating about it, wondering if 
 he should, \Yould I not be justified in saying, we must recast 
 our definition of the animal, and put something into his 
 brain or heart that we never dreamed of before ? How does 
 it happen that this wonderful animal man, of all the produc- 
 tions of the world, dares look the grave in the face and smile 
 at death > It is the belief that he shall outface it and outlive 
 it, and be mighty beyond its power. 
 
 If you take the lowest possible conception of the origin 
 of man and say that he is created by the universe, — that is, 
 that he holds the same relation to the universe that a coin 
 does to the die that stamps it, — then you must believe that 
 for every mark in the coin there was something in the die 
 corresponding to it that created that mark. Every grand in- 
 stinct, hope, feeling, in the human heart must be accounted 
 for. They have been produced. They did not spring cause- 
 less out of nothing. If the universe made the human heart, 
 then there is something in the universe that is responsive to 
 the human heart. We know that light, for example, has 
 created the eye through long periods of time. There was 
 a time, far back in the distant past, when the rudimentary 
 eye was only a little spot, just a bit more sensitive, some- 
 where along the line of the rudimentary nerve. There was 
 no clear vision, only this rudimentary sensitiveness. 
 
Is Death the End? 125 
 
 Light called, and the eye came out to see. When that 
 process was only half complete, before there was any 
 clear vision, if there had been any competent intelligence 
 looking on and studying this problem, would he not have 
 been justified in saying that, since there was a potency 
 and promise of vision, there must be some great, creative 
 force corresponding to it ? So, through the ages, sound has 
 created the ear. There was a call from the Infinite, and this 
 curious mechanism came out to listen. At first, it was only 
 rudimentary. But if, as in the other case, when the process 
 was partially complete, and there were only indistinct mur- 
 murings instead of clear voices, had there been an intelli- 
 gence to study this problem, would he not have been justified 
 in saying there must be some great fact in the universe that 
 corresponds to this ear, that is gradually and progressively 
 creating it .? If the needle is deflected from the north, it is by 
 a power that pulls it aside : and astronomers have discovered 
 new planets that they have not seen, simply because they 
 have mathematically determined, that there must be some 
 attractive force as yet not visible to man, by the movements 
 of things that were seen. Thus, humanity, in its mighty 
 sweep through the ages, has been perpetually deflected from 
 its course and pulled toward some great eternal verity which 
 must be postulated to explain the motion. 
 
 One other line of argument. The flower, the grass-blade, 
 the tree, the animal, these all pass through the cycle of 
 their existence and are complete on this earth ; but man 
 seems to be formed after some grander pattern, so that he 
 does not reach his completeness here. In all the other 
 departments of Nature, everything seems amply qualified to 
 fulfil all the promises that she makes. Shall we not believe 
 that it must be the same with man ? 
 
 If you should go into a hot-house and find in some little 
 
126 Beliefs about Man. 
 
 circumscribed earthen vessel a growing germ of what you 
 knew was capable of becoming a mighty Norway pine, would 
 not you be justified in saying that this was not the original 
 place of development, that it was not intended to come to 
 completion here? If you, having never seen the ocean, 
 should go into a ship-yard on a little river miles away from 
 the sea, and should study the structure that was going up, 
 knowing that it could not go on the land and that there was 
 not room for it in the narrow river, would you not be justi- 
 fied in saying, " Either here is some huge blunder, or some- 
 where there is wide room and scope for this mighty thing to 
 spread its wings and sail to some far-off shore?" When you 
 see a man like Goethe, in the fulness of his powers, having 
 studied so deeply into the secrets of nature, dying with the 
 words upon his lips, "More light": when you see a man like 
 Newton, in that often-quoted comparison, speaking of him- 
 self as a little child gathering pebbles on the seashore while 
 the infinite ocean lay before him : do you not feel compelled 
 to say, "This manhood that only grows and grows, but never 
 culminates here, is a prophecy of a place where there shall 
 be room for this mind that wanders through eternity, for this 
 heart with its infinite capacity for love ? " 
 
 You would not feel satisfied, nor should I, to treat this great 
 question, and leave out of account the facts reported as true 
 in all ages, and now in this modern world represented in a 
 more marked degree in that which is known by the name of 
 Spiritualism. There is a great body of testimony stretching 
 back into the distance of antiquity ; testimony not confined 
 to any religion, to any nation, to any race ; testimony, not of 
 the poorest and most ignorant, but equally of the wisest men 
 of all ages and times, to the belief that there have been at 
 least occasional breakings through from some other sphere, 
 or glimpses on this side of that other sphere. There is an 
 
Is Death the End? 127 
 
 amount of testimony so respectable that, were it given in evi- 
 dence of anything else in the world, we should never dream 
 of doubting it. Yet concerning so stupendous a fact as that 
 we do doubt, and perhaps as yet, and for a time, we must. I 
 have no sympathy with those who speak of these great mat- 
 ters with contempt. I do not feel that I know. There are 
 testimonies from such men as Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes 
 and Dr. Edward H. Clarke as to glimpses and visions of the 
 dying ; there are testimonies from all the ages covering this 
 general field, — mixed up, it is true, with delusion, with palpa- 
 ble fraud, with all sorts of follies, that make one pause, hesi- 
 tate, and question : yet I believe there is so large a mass of 
 evidence here that it cannot be brushed aside contemptu- 
 ously by any man. Some day, it must be sifted, to see if 
 there be a residuum of fact as its basis. Will you not be 
 glad if there be ? Most certainly shall I ! And yet so 
 anxious am I not to be deceived in regard to these high 
 things that still I pause and wait for the competent investi- 
 gator to sift the whole and give me the gold, if there be gold, 
 in this great mass of dust and chaff. 
 
 One more question. Is there any rational theory of a fut- 
 ure life that can be held by the modern world ? If I cannot 
 answer this question positively, I am sure at least that there 
 is one theory that no reason and no science can condemn. 
 You are familiar with the fact that that which we see and 
 hear is only a very small part of this universe. We see so 
 long as the wave movements of light are a certain number 
 in a second. We hear under like conditions. But we know 
 that above and below and all around us stretch reaches of 
 this universe that no present faculties of ours enable us to 
 touch. So far then as science has anything to say on the 
 subject, this little world that we inhabit may be only like an 
 island floating on the bosom of an infinite sea of being, com- 
 
128 Beliefs about Man. 
 
 passing it on every hand, and yet unseen, unheard, unknown 
 by us. Science knows nothing that can contradict such a 
 theory. What indications there are rather lead us to think 
 it probable. In regard to these bodies of ours, — for, mark 
 you, I have no belief in spirit which means nothing^ I have no 
 belief in the old idea of the ghost as emptied of all that con-, 
 stitutes existence ; I want no such life as that ; I want no 
 life poorer, lower, than what I enjoy to-day, — not only has 
 science nothing to say against it, but there are many even 
 who accept the theory, that within this body there is another, 
 ordinarily invisible, that cannot be touched or weighed or 
 handled by the faculties we possess. There are some scien- 
 tific experiments that lead us to believe that there must be 
 between the ultimate physical particles that compose this 
 body other particles that, for the want of a better name, we 
 call ether particles, forming a body complete and perfect in 
 every function and every part. Just as science tells us that, to 
 explain this universe, v/e must postulate the ether that fills all 
 the space between the stars, so the space between the parti- 
 cles of this body must be filled with ether particles. What 
 hinders then, until the opposite can be proved, that I should 
 cherish the belief that when death comes, this body should 
 simply step forth from the crumbling ruins of my old home, 
 free, complete, fitted for that other, higher life that we may 
 trust surrounds us everywhere now, and of which, even to- 
 day, unknowing, we are a par.t4? 
 
NOTE 
 
 {Supplementary to Chapter VI., ''Is Man Free?'') 
 
 My discussion of the will — as published in pamphlet — has 
 already called out considerable criticism. It is then perhaps 
 worth while to add a few words excluded by the limits of the 
 previous treatment. 
 
 Leaving one side "fate" and "predestination," I can see but 
 two theories to choose between. One is that the will is a " spon- 
 taneous, self-acting power." The other is that, coming under the 
 law of causation, it is determined by some preceding condition, 
 external, internal, or both. Says Huxley, " A really spontaneous 
 act is one which, by the assumption, has no cause'' To assert 
 spontaneity then of human willing or acting is to say that the 
 world of mankind is chaotic or insane. Indeed, it is to assert the 
 impossible ; for we cannot conceive the uncaused. 
 
 What, then, is left? Only to hold that a man's action is always 
 determined by character and motive (external and internal) ; and 
 this is the scientific doctrine of " necessity." What I have de- 
 nied is only the "power spontaneously to evolve and develop 
 choices themselves." Tliat a man is free to choose what he pleases 
 — to choose \i\i2X he does choose — is a statement hardly worth 
 the trouble of either making or defending. If that is what is called 
 "free-will," I know of no one who will care to deny it. The ap- 
 peal is often made to consciousness. But let us see what it 
 teaches. A man is conscious of his power to choose that which, 
 on the whole, he prefers. Is he conscious of anything else ? I 
 for one, am not. 
 
 To speak anthropomorphically, I find myself compelled to think 
 of God himself as determined both by his character and by the 
 
130 Note. 
 
 circumstances. Why cannot God lie, or do wrong, or commit an 
 absurdity? Does not what He is determine his action? Is He 
 not determined by what he sees to be best ? 
 
 A friend writes, " I consider that, as long as a man is capable of 
 making or feeling a moral appeal^ he is sound on the main ques- 
 tion." To say that human nature is under the law of causation; 
 that action may be determined by motive ; this seems to me the 
 strongest way of saying that man is capable both of making and 
 feeling a " moral appeal." Why appeal, teach, enlighten, if mo- 
 tive does not determine ? What is character that does not shape 
 and control action ? 
 
 If a man becomes conscious that he has been wrong in the past, 
 of course he has the power — under an impulse springing from 
 that consciousness, now become a motive — to change his way of 
 life. Is not this what is commonly meant by free-will ? But this 
 implies no spontaneity of action : it is rather a clear illustration 
 and strong assertion of the fact that man is under the law of cause 
 and effect. 
 
THE NEW GOSPEL 
 
 The nebulous masses whirled to suns at last ; 
 
 And suns flung off their worlds. Through vapors piled, 
 The earth broke into light. Then, sun-beguiled, 
 
 The vales grew green and smiling. Mountains vast 
 
 Lifted themselves toward heaven. As ages passed, 
 Through primal ooze, through sea and jungle wild, 
 Life climbed from form to form ; until out-smiled 
 
 The hu7nan through the brutal. Long outcast, 
 
 A toilsome wanderer, the earth he trod. 
 He hid in caves ; he trembled with affright 
 At his own fancies, and the wild uproar 
 
 Of untamed elements. Then slowly God 
 
 Broke from within, and filled the earth with light. 
 Crowning man king where he was slave before. 
 
 II. 
 
 When, like the infant Hercules, man lay- 
 In earth's young cradle, even then did he, 
 With godlike vigor, many a mystery 
 
 Of dark and dread life-threatening monsters slay. 
 
 But now grown strong, 'neath his advancing sway, 
 Disease and pain, and grinding poverty, 
 Brain-shackles and the bonds of tyranny, 
 
 And fear and hate, — all these " shall flee away." 
 
 Love-crowned and knowledge-guided shall he stand, 
 Facing the future with the god-like trust 
 That good to-morrow follows good to-day. 
 
 " It doth not yet appear," — that other land; 
 But through the low-arched gateway of the dust 
 Breaks hope's glad sunrise with its deathless ray. 
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