ON IV .?SITY OF CALIFORNIA SAN DIEGO presented to the LIBRARY UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA SAN DIEGO by FRIENDS OF THE LIBRARY Dr. and Mrs. Russell Raitt donor PRIVATE LIBRARY J. E. WISHART. CULTURE AND RELIGION. CULTURE AND RELIGION IN SOME OF THEIR RELATIONS. r J. C. \SHAIRJ, f RIHOIPAL 01 THB UNITED COLLEGE OF ST. SALVATOB AND ST LRONARD, ST. ANDEEW3. [Reprinted frum the Edinburgh Edition.) BOSTON: HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY. KtoercUie Press, 1890. CONTENTS. MM L THK AIM OF CULTURE ITS RELATION TO RE- LIGION 13 II. THB SCIENTIFIC THEORY OF CULTURE . . 45 III. THE LITERARY THEORY OF CULTURE . . 74 IV. HINDRANCES TO SPIRITUAL GROWTH . . 104 V RELIGION COMBINING CULTURE WITH ITSELF . 133 Nona . 1TI PREFACE TO THIRD EDITION. WHEN I first sent these Lectures to the press I had no expectation that they would awaken so much interest as they seem to have done. This interest, I know, is mainly due to their attempting to deal with what an honored correspondent calls " the sub- ject of the day." Still I am not insensible to the kind way in which they have been noticed in many public prints not to men- tion approvals of private persons, worthy of all regard. Valuable such testimonies are, when sincerely and spontaneously given. It is something more to have learnt that there are young men, here and there, who, need- ing help, have thought they found some in this small book. Though the public criticisms passed on it have been, in the main, commendatory, per- haps beyond its desert, one or two objections 65 PREFACE TO THIRD EDITION. have been urged against it, on which I should wish to say a word ; for these, if made in a fair spirit, are always suggestive. A writer in the last number of the " North British Review " (alas ! that it should have been the last) charges me with having mis- represented Professor Huxley. And in proof of this charge he quotes from some other portion of that eminent writer's works, words which seem to modify, if not contradict, the view I have given of his opinions. In an- swer, I have to say that my second lecture the one which deals with Professor Hux- ley's theory was delivered, and, if I mis- take not, published, before the fuller expo- sition of his views contained in his "Lay Sermons " was given to the world. I had be- fore me but one isolated lecture by Professor Huxley which had appeared in " Macmil- lan's Magazine." This, and this only, I pro- fessed to examine ; and I submit that the ac- count I have given of that lecture is a fair representation of it, and no distortion. If the author has by other writings modified the riew set forth in the lecture which I criti- cised this is just what might be expected, PREFACE TO THIRD EDITION. 6c when a writer of so wide and varied ability, combining in so rare measure metaphysical with physical knowledge, came to reflect on the other sides of the large problem, which the lecture in question had settled in too exclusive and peremptory a way. But with these other writings I was not concerned, even had they been, when I wrote, accessi- ble. I should certainly greatly regret and try to amend what I have written, if it could be shown that I have done injustice to that one portion which alone I professed to ex- amine. The writer in the " North British " says that it is not -fair to treat Professor Huxley as a Materialist. I am not aware that I have done so. Indeed, I never attempted to set- tle under what " ism " he should be ranked, because I cannot see that such modes of clas- sifying men in any way forward the ends of candid inquiry. And had I wished to clas- sify him in such a way, I had not the means of determining what class he belonged to. A Saturday Reviewer takes the same ob- iection as the writer in the " North British." Here, again, my reply is, that I was exam- Qd PREFACE TO THIRD EDITION. ining one lecture, not the whole works of Professor Huxley, and that in my examina- tion I have given a fair account of all I at- tempt to deal with. I desire to repeat that I have not called, and had no right to call Professor Huxley a Materialist. The Saturday Reviewer further charges me with want of clearness in my conception of the scope and aims both of Culture and Religion, with confounding rather than discriminating their relative spheres. It may be that my views on this matter are not so clear as they might be, or at least not so clearly brought out, but I must oanfesa that two or three careful perusals of the Re- viewer's somewhat lengthy remarks have not made my views any clearer. As I have looked in vain for some newer light from the remarks both of the North British and the Saturday Reviewer, I feel constrained to abide by the definitions and distinctions of Culture and Religion which I have given in my lectures until a better expositor ap- pears. Both these writers agree in the remark that Culture is a religion for this world, and PREFACE TO THIRD EDITION. 6 Religion a culture for the next. This is one of those gnomes which sound wise, but are really hollow. Even if this world were all, there are many, and these the highest and loveliest things, which Culture without Re- ligion could never engender. Purity, disin- terestedness, reverence, these, the finest fruits of the Spirit, could not come to full maturity in any soul but one which lived habitually as in the Divine presence, and under the power of the world to come. And are not these the qualities which are needed, not only to fit a man for the next world, but even to make him all that it is best to be even in this world ? If this is so if man cannot be what he ought to be, even for this, without taking account of a future life, does not this prove that all attempts to divide these two by any sharp demarca- tion are futile ? And is there not here a Strong argument for the reality of a future life, when we find that the best cannot be attained in this life if we lose faith in that other ? The highest qualities of the human soul cannot be based on a belief which is a ielusion. f PREFACE TO THIRD EDITION. In the fourth lecture something has been said on the difficulty which the trained log- ical intellect, used to form clear, distinct notions of things, finds in reconciling it- Belf to the dimness and indistinctness that necessarily belongs to the deepest religious ideas. To know our own ignorance, both that which comes from our individual weak- nesses, and that arising from the necessary limits of human thought, is a very whole- some knowledge. It may no doubt be used as an argument to stifle honest search and to cover mental indolence. Forgetfulness of it, on the other hand, leads to at least as great evils of an opposite kind, self-con- ceit, shallowness, irreverence. And it is to this side that the pendulum swings at pres- ent. Amid man's triumphant achievementa in the world of sense, there is at present little feeling of man's necessary ignorance with regard to the things that far more nearly concern him little of the fruita ^hich naturally accompany such a feeling ''humility, sobriety, resignation." In the io-called intellectual world, such qualities! ore regarded as belonging to a bygone age PREFACE TO THIRD EDITION. 6$ fit only for old women and childrei . " Man the measure of all things " seems the motto of modern thought, as truly as ever it -was of old Protagoras. And so we see many applying this measure to all subjects, and as though they had dropped their plumb-line to the bottom of the universe, denying that it has anywhere a place for Miracle. In the moral and religious sphere of things the same tendency is everywhere apparent. Men, making themselves, their own feelings, needs, aspirations, intuitions the centre, by these proceed to measure the nature of God, his dealings with man, his revelation of Himself. Hence it quickly comes that what- ever does not fit into our nature, whatever truth of Revelation, or even of Natural Re- ligion, does not make a direct appeal to our understanding, feelings, or conscience, and produce some manifest effect on these, is discarded. All mystery is rejected ; what- ever seems to us isolated, disjointed, or in- explicable is pared away and all relig- .ous truth is rounded off into an intelligible fcystem, of which man and his needs are the interpreting key. Tried by this measure, it 6 h PREFACE TO THIRD EDITION. may be doubted whether even the truths of so-called Natural Religion would remain. For our best notions of right and wrong, even our finest feelings, are as inadequate to explain the facts of God's Providence which we see, as they are to measure the greatest mysteries of Revelation which we do not see. He who in religious things desires to think truly, not to say reverently, cannot too soon learn that he must be content to Bee in part and to know in part, to find a true link here, and another there, but must not expect in this life to connect them into one completed chain. This is a very old truth, so old that it sounds a commonplace. It is not the less a truth which some of the voices loudest at the present hour are doing their best to preach down. So ineradicable, however, is it in the nature of things, that, though forgotten, it cannot be destroyed, and must soon or late reassert itself. Nothing said in these Lectures is intended to deny, that it is well that the whole fron- tier where religious belief meets with the methods and results of science, and with the results of criticism, should be resurveyed PREFACE TO THIRD EDITION. 6l wid, where there is need, readjusted. It cannot, however, be that the essence of our religion must, as some speak, be remoulded and reconstructed at the bidding of thes modern methods. To hear some speak, it would seem as if the time had come when the God in whom Christians have hitherto believed must now give place to a system of laws, or to one great universal Law, and Christ Himself to some sublimated essence of morality. As one reads or hears such things there comes to mind the words read long ago, which Ne- ander quoted from the letters of Niebuhr, " Again and again have I said that I know not what to do with a metaphysical God ; ? and that I will have no other but the God of the Bible, who is heart to heart. Who- ever can reconcile the metaphysical God with the God of the Bible may try it ; but he who admits the absolute inexplicability of the main point, which can only be approached by asymptotes, will never grieve at the im- possibility of possessing any system of relig- ion," words more needed in this country now than when they first appeared more than thirty years since. Bj PREFACE TO THIRD EDITION. Perhaps the main point which these Leo tures have tried to show may be said to be this, that in forming a true judgment on religious subjects, it is before all things nec- essary that a man be in some real measure religious. Whatever other knowledge may be or may not be present, this one must be, if the judgment formed is to be worth any- thing. The absence of this requirement in a man renders his religious judgments of no account, however great his powers and how- ever large his knowledge. It may perhaps be said this is a vicious circle. To form true religious judgments, you say a man must first be religious. But before he can be religious, must he not first have found right religious beliefs ? And this implies patient inquiry and laborious thought. But all who are used to moral inquiries know that the occurrence of such seemingly vicious circles is no strange thing in that region of thought. Aristotle said, To form virtuous habits you must first per- form virtuous actions ; and yet he also held that in order to do a virtuous act you must be already in the same degree virtuous. PREFACE TO THIRD EDITION. 6 It is then true that the man who would think truly on spiritual things must first be spiritually-minded. And to be so, to rise above the absorption in things seen, the tyranny of the world's ways, and the heart' natural averseness to self-denying godliness, this is not easy. If it takes much and long labor for a man to be a good physicist, or critic, or philosopher, it surely requires not less, though a different kind of endeavor, to become really Christian in aim and spirit. But to hear many speak it would seem as if to be a philosopher or critic was the hard thing, to be the Christian was easy and nat- ural, and came, as it were, by instinct. As against this common view, and at the risk of being accused of sermonizing, it must be said, that he who would attain to religious truth and life must be prepared for much severer and more continued effort in the spiritual, than this world's learning demands in the intellectual region. Men of learning und study are forever tempted to begin at the intellectual side of things, and from that to try to work their way to the possession of full-formed Christian convictions. It is a Ql PREFACE TO THIRD EDITION. vain dream, though, perhaps, nothing but trial and failure will convince most men that it is so. But when all has been thought and said, this is the issue to which it comes. Are we to make modern thought and feeling our fixed standard, and to pare down the words of Christ and his Apostles to fit into this ? Or are we to make Christ's words, and those of his Apostles, spiritually apprehended, our centre and standard, and in the light of these to look at all things, by these to try the modern world, and all its ways ? There are but these two alternatives, and one cannot doubt which of them the true Christian will choose. ST. AKDBEWS, 12di February, 187J. PEEFAOE. THIS little book is a small contribution to a great subject. The five Lectures which it contains were delivered, on five successive Saturdays of last Winter Session, to as many of the Students of the United College and others as chose to attend. They were orig- inally written with a view solely to immedi- ate delivery. The publication of them is an afterthought. It is needless to explain my reasons for publishing them, for these could neither increase nor diminish their value, whatever that may be. One object, how- ever, which I hope may be gained by publi- cation is to place them in a. permanent form before those for whom they were originally intended. As lectures, meant to be under- stood on first hearing, they are naturally in a style more popular and diffuse than might have beseemed a regular treatise. They are Vlll PREFACE. printed almost as they were spoken, with the exception of the Fifth Lecture, to which Borne passages have been added. It need hardly be said that no attempt is here made at systematic, much less at ex haustive, treatment of the subject. To have aimed at this within the space and in the form to which I have restricted myself, would have been impossible. All I have wished to do is to set forth certain views, which seem to me true in themselves, and yet likely to be passed over too lightly, or set aside too summarily, by the intellectual temper of the time. No satisfactory adjust- ment of the questions here entertained can, I believe, be reached without assigning to the spiritual side of man's being and of truth a prominence and an importance, which do not seem to have entered into the thoughts of some of the ablest advocates of Culture. Indeed, to many, and these not the most fool- ish of mankind, Culture seems then only to be worthy of serious regard when it minis- ters to faith, when it enables men to see spiritual things more truly and deeply. If t obstructs or duns the vision of these things. PREFACE. US as sometimes it does, it then ceases to have for them any value. In handling subjects on which all men have some thoughts, it is impossible exactly to determine where one's own end and those of others begin. Where, however, I have been aware that any thought or expression of thought has been suggested to me by an- other writer, I have tried to acknowlege it, either by quoting in the text some of the author's words, or by giving a quotation from his works in the Notes. Of the passages printed in the Appendix, some were directly suggestive of the thought in the text, others are merely adduced as confirmations of it. It would have been easy to have increased the number of the Notes, but they were drawn out at a place remote from libraries, and were taken only from those books which happened to be at hand. J. C. SHAIHP. September 1, 1870. OULTUEE AND EELIGION LECTURE I. TEE AIM OF CULTURE ITS RELATION TO KB- LIGION. WHEN one is called, following the prac- tice of former Principals, to lecture to the students of this College on some branch of thought or knowledge, and when, with a single restriction, it is left undefined what the subject shall be, the selection might nat- urally be supposed to give rise to some em- barrassment. But two conditions are at hand to restrict and deterrhine the lecturer's choice. One is, that he must choose some subject with which his past studies or ex- perience have made him in some degree familiar ; the other is, that the subject should be such as he may reasonably hope will either interest or benefit his hearers, if possible, do both. It seemed to me not unfitting that, on this 14 THE AIM OF CULTURE. 6rst occasion of my lecturing to you in a new capacity, I should speak on some subject of wide and general interest, which commands a view, not so much of any one department of study, as of the last and highest ends of all study. Other opportunities may be given for tak- ing up some one definite subject, historical or other, and dealing with it in detail. For this year I shall be well content if, without pretending to overtake, much less exhaust, the wide subject which I bring be- fore you, I shall be enabled to offer a few suggestions, which may be of use to some who hear me, on matters which very nearly concern them. The questions I shall have to touch on might easily be made to land us in the most abstract and speculative investi- gations. It shall, however, be my endeavor, as far as possible, to keep clear of these, and to put what I have to say in a concrete and practical shape. This I shall do both for other reasons, and especially from the convic- tion that we in Scotland, by getting hold of all subjects by the metaphysical end of them, often contrive to squeeze out of them what- ever vital sap they contain. The question what it is we aim at in men ITS RELATION TO RELIGION. 15 tal cultivation, and what relation this latter bears to religion, cannot be said to be out of place here ; for in considering these ques- tions we are brought to contemplate steadily what is the end of university life, and in what relation university life stands to the ultimate ends of life taken as a whole. If a University like this exists for any purpose, I suppose it is to promote mental culture, that is, the cultivation not merely of certain tech- nical and professional faculties, but, over and above these, of the whole man. A few years ago there would have been no need to utter a truism like this ; but we live at present in a time of intellectual revulsions. What were till lately held to be first principles are now from time to time made the butts for edu- cational reactionists to jeer at. We have lately heard it asserted by men speaking with some authority that universities and all other places of education exist for one pur- pose only, to train men for their special crafts or trades. If they do this well, they are useful ; if they do not, they are good for nothing. The belief in any ulterior end be- yond this is denied and ridiculed. Yet, in spite of the utilitarian logic of Mr. Lowe and the more humorous banter of our pres- 16 THE AIM OF CULTURE. ent Lord Rector, I must still believe that, above and beyond special professional train- ing, there is such a thing as mental culture and enlargement, and that this is an excel- lent gift in itself, apart from any gain it may bring, and that it is one main end of uni- versities to foster the desire and further the attainment of it. The man, I must still hold, is more than his trade. The spirit that is in each man craves other nourishment than the bread he wins. I do not, in saying this, forget that we have each our special work in the world to do, as lawyers, physicians, teachers, minis- ters, and the like, and that it tasks all our strength and knowledge to do it. All men, or almost all, are bound to throw themselves vigorously into some one of the known pro- fessions, and this not for food and raiment only, but as a necessary part of their moral discipline. Few, very few, there are who, even if their circumstances admit it, can dis- pense with the wholesome yoke of a profes- sion, and yet live to any good purpose. But while fully acknowledging not only the ne- cessity, but the advantage of being harnessed to some regular profession, and that to suc- ceed in this the finest edge of faculty and ITS RELATION TO RELIGION. 17 \ the most accurate technical training must be sought, I still believe there is something more than this, and greater, which must never be lost sight of, if we desire to become not mere useful machines or instruments, but complete men. The professional man who, over and above his daily duties and business relations, has learned to feel that he has other relations, wider and more permanent, with all his fellow-beings in all ages, that he is a debtor for all he has and is to a wider circle of things than that he outwardly comes in contact with, that he is an heir of all the great and good who have lived before him, is not on that account a worse work- man, and is certainly a higher and better man. It is not, then, a mere dream, but a very real aim, which they propose who urge us to seek " a fuller, more harmonious develop- ment of our humanity, greater freedom from larrowness and prejudice, more width of thought, more expansive sympathies, feelings more catholic and humane, a high and un- selfish ideal of life." These are the quali- ties which university training, if it had its perfect work, might be expected to generate And foster. And it does this by bringing 18 THE AIM OF CULTURE. young minds, while they are still plastic, into contact with whatever is best in the past his- tory of the race, with the great deeds, the high thoughts, the beautiful creations which the best men of former times have be- queathed to us. To learn to know and sym- pathize with these is the work not of one or two years, but of our whole lives. Yet the process may be said to begin here, and in a special way to belong to the university. For here, if anywhere, it is that the avenues are first opened up which lead to the great store- house of foregone humanities, here that our apprehension of these things is first awakened. But a small portion of all this richness we can take in during our short university course, not much, it may be, in a whole life-time. But it is something to have come to know and feel that these things exist, exist, too, for us, in as far as we can appropriate them, and to have had our thoughts and desires directed thitherward. When the perception of these things and the love of them have been evoked, culture lias begun, and the university life is the natural time for it. If this desire does not begin Sere, it is not often awakened afterwards. But what do we mean by this fine word ITS DELATION TO RELIGION. 19 Culture, so much in vogue at present? What the Greeks naturally expressed by their n-cuSe/a, the Romans by their humanitas, we less happily try to express by the more artificial word Culture. The use of it in its present sense is, as far as I know, recent in our language, forced upon us, I suppose, by the German talk about "Bildung." And the shifts we have been put to, to render that German word, seem to show that the thing is with us something of an exotic, rather than native to the soil. When applied to the hu- man being, it means, I suppose, the " educ- ing or drawing forth all that is potentially in a man," the training all the energies and ca- pacities of his being to the highest pitch, and directing them to their true ends. The means that it employs to attain these ends are manifold and various, as manifold as are the experiences of life. But one of the most pow- erful and characteristic instruments of culture is, as I have said, to bring young and plastic minds into contact with all that is best and greatest in the thoughts, the sentiments, the deeds of past generations of men, in order that these may melt into them and mould the 'character. But culture is not a product of mere study. Learning may be got from 20 THE AIM OF CULTURE. books, but not culture. It is a more living process, and requires that the student shall at times close his books, leave his solitary room, and mingle with his fellow-men. He must seek the intercourse of living hearts as well as of dead books, especially the companion- ship of those of his own contemporaries whose minds and characters are fitted to instruct, elevate, and sweeten his own. Another thing required is the discipline which must be carried on by each man in himself, the learning of self-control, the forming of habits, the effort to overcome what is evil and to strengthen what is good in his own nature. But to enumerate all the means of culture would be impossible, seeing they are wide as the world, and the process begins with the cradle, and, we may well believe, does not end with the grave. What, then, is the re- lation in which a university stands to this great life-process ? It may be said to be a sort of microcosm, a small practical abridg- ment of an unending book, a .compend of the past thought and cultivation of the race, reduced to the shape and dimensions best fitted to be taken in. And this abridgment or summary of the past experience of the race is applied to young minds just at the age ITS RELATION TO RELIGION. 21 which is most susceptible to receive, impres- sions deeply, and retain them permanently. Every one must observe to what a large extent the advocates of education nowadays, of the lowest as well as of the highest, agree in urging it for the moral fruits it produces. Remove ignorance, say the advocates of pri- mary education, and you put an end to crime. And though we may doubt the necessity of the alleged sequence, we gladly accept their testimony to the moral aim which all educa- tion should imply. The Culturists, again by which term I mean not those who esteem culture, (as what intelligent man does not?) but those, its exclusive advocates, who rec- ommend it as the one panacea for all the ills of humanity, the Culturists are never done insisting that it is not for its utilitarian results, not for the technical skill and information it implies, nor for the professional success it may secure, that they value culture, but for its effect in elevating the whole man. They tell us that men, in the last resort, are not formed by rules or precepts, no, nor by what are called moral principles, that men's lives and characters are determined mainly by their deal, that is, by the thing they lay to heart and live by, often without themselves being 22 THE AIM OF CULTURE. aware of it, by that which they in their in- most souls love, desire, aim at, as the best possibility for themselves and others. By the ideal, therefore, that a man loves, and by his persistency in cleaving to it, and working for it, shall you know what he really is. This ideal, whatever it be, seen and embraced, and melting into a man, constitutes his true and essential nature, and reveals itself in all he thinks and does. They tell us, and truly, that it is not the educated and refined only who have their ideal, that every man, even the most illiterate, has an ideal, whether he knows it or not ; that is, every man has some- thing which forms the ruling thought, the main desire, of his life. The beggar in his rags is not without his ideal, though that probably does not go beyond plenty to eat and drink, and a comfortable house to live in. If he be advanced a little above abject want, then perhaps his ideal is to become wealthy, respected of all men for his riches. These, though material aims, are yet none the less ideals to those who entertain them. The, Culturists, then, go on to say that, since every man must have his ideal, material and self- ish, or unselfish and spiritual, it lies mainly with culture to determine whether men shaL ITS RELATION TO RELIGION. 23 rest content with grosser aims or raise their thoughts to the higher ideals. These lat- ter, they remind us, are manifold : there is the ideal poetical, the ideal scientific, the. ideal political, the ideal philanthropic: and that which of these, or other such like, a man shall set before him must be determined by his inborn bias and temperament, his natural gifts, and his outward circumstances. There are diversities of gifts, and to every man his own gift. The kind and measure of gifts each man has will shape and modify the ideal which is proper to him. And each man's practical wisdom consists in truly discover- ing the ideal which naturally belongs to him- self, and in so dealing with the facts and cir- cumstances in which his lot is cast, as to reconcile by a true adjustment his inward aspiration and his outward surroundings. If, then, it be true that every man must have an ideal of some sort, and that this, be it base or lofty, rules his whole being, the Culturists tell us that it is the business of culture to waken men to the consciousness of some ideal, and to set before them true and lofty standards ; for the young especially to open up, through the manifold obstructions of sense and outward things, avenues by 24 THE AIM OF CULTURE. which the soul may catch some glimpse of the true beauty, the real good, " of that light which being compared with the light is found before it, more beautiful than the sun, and above all the orders of the stars." 1 They further tell us that it is the business of culture not only to set before men the vis- ion, but to impart to them the cunning hand which shall impress on outward things the pattern of the things seen in the mount. This culture does, by training them in the best knowledge of the time, by imbuing them with as much of the sciences and arts as they can take in and use. Without such practical training of the faculties and the hand, a man, however true his ideal, will become a mere dreamer, powerless to effect anything. And life is so complex, the materials we have to deal with so various and intractable, that it needs long and severe discipline of the facul- ties to give a man the chance of working his way towards his ideal through the numberless hindrances that surround him. We see, then, that culture, according to the claim put in for it by its most ardent ad- vocates, is said to do two things : first, it seta before a man a high ideal end to aim at, * Note I. ITS RELATION TO RELIGION. 25 tvhich shall enter into and control his life ; secondly, it trains all the faculties, all the in- ward powers and outward instruments, hand, eye, ear, so as to enable him in some measure to realize that ideal end, and over- come the obstructions that lie between him and it. Such is the claim which is put in by the Culturists. And, after what I have said at the commencement, you will believe that I shall not gainsay it. True as far as it goes, it is, however, far enough from being an adequate account of the whole matter. Before quitting this subject, let me but add one word in defense of those who speak of ideal aims. Very practical or cynical persons are fond of sneering at these. They make merry, as it is easy to do, with those who, in their phrase, keep vaporing about ideals. What have we, or most men, they say, to do with ideals ? Let us leave them to the rapt poet, the recluse thinker, the dreaming vis- ionary. It is the actual, the hard facts of life that we have to deal with ; to push our way in the world, maintain the struggle for existence, immersed in the tangible and ma- terial, hemmed in by, often nigh crushed be- neath, imperious circumstances. Enough Tor us if we can battle through them, without 26 THE AIM OF CULTURE. being overpowered. Ideals! let us leave them to those who have wealth and leisure ; they are among the luxuries, not the necessi- ties of life. For us we have enough to do to make something of the real. To make something of the real ! Yes, that's it. But how are we to make anything of the actual unless we have some aim to direct our efforts, some clew to guide us through its labyrinths ? And this aim, this clew, is just what is meant by the Ideal. You may dislike the word and reject it, but the thing you can- not get rid of, if you would live any life above that of brutes. An aim, an ideal of some sort, be it material or spiritual, you must have, if you have reason, and look before and after. True, no man's life can be wholly occupied with the ideal, not even the poet's or the philosopher's. Each man must ac- quaint himself with numberless details ; must learn the stuff that the world is made of. and how to deal with it. Even Phidias and Michael Angelo must study the nature of the ough block they have to hew. Not even the most ethereal being can live wholly upon sunbeams, and most lives are far enough removed from the sunbeams. Yet sunshine jght, is necessary for every man. And riS S3LAT10N TO RELIGION. 27 though most are immersed in business, 01 battling all life through with tough conditions, yet, if we are not to sink into mere selfish animality, we must needs have some master light to guide us ; " something that may dwell upon the heart , though it be not named upon the tongue." For if there be some- times a danger lest the young enthusiast, through too great devotion to an abstract ideal, should essay the impossible, and break himself against the walls of destiny that hem him in, far more common is it for men to be so crushed under manhood's burdens, that they abandon all the high aims of their youth, and submit to be driven like gin-horses " Round the daily scene Of sad subjection, and of sick routine." The Culturists, then, speak truly when they tell us that every man must have some ideal, and that it is all-important that, while the mind is plastic, each should form some high aim which is true to his own nature, and true to the truth of things. It has been well said that youth is the season when men are engaged in forming their ideals. In mature age they are engaged in trying to impress them on the actual world. And culture pro- fesses to effect that men shall fix their aims 28 THE AIM OF CULTURE. high and true, and be equipped with the knowledge, skill, aptitudes, required for car- rying them out successfully. But the question now occurs, which has probably suggested itself ere now to some who hear me, What does religion say to all this ? We had thought it had been religion which set forth the ends of life, and supplied the motives and the power for striving to- wards them. But now it seems that there is some rival power, called Culture, which claims for itself these architectonic functions which we had hitherto thought belonged of right to Religion. In the language of Aristotle, which of these two is the architectonic or master-art which prescribes to all the other arts and occupations of life their functions, as the master-builder prescribes their duties to his workmen ? Or are Culture and Religion really rival powers ? are they to be regarded as in any way antagonistic to each other? And if not, what are their mutual relations ? in what way do they meet and act on each other ? This is the question with which I shah 1 have to deal more or less, now leaving it, now returning to it, throughout these f -ectures. ITS RELATION TO RELIGION. 29 One thing is obvious, that, however much the end of life, as laid down by religion, may diverge from the view taken by culture, yet religion will have nothing to say against the assertion that life must be ruled by an aim which shall be ideal. For what can be more ideal than that which religion sets before us ? " Seek ye first the kingdom of God." " Be ye perfect, even as your Father in heaven is perfect." Let this, then, be clearly understood, that whether we look at life from the side of Culture or from that of Religion, in either case we must be guided by an ideal light, which is, indeed, the only real and powerful guidance. Now as to the relation in which these two stand to each other : Culture proposes as its end the carrying of man's nature to its highest perfection, the developing to the full all the capacities of our humanity. If, then, in this view, humanity be contemplated in its totality, and not in some partial side of it, Culture must aim at developing our humanity in its Godward as- pect, as well as its mundane aspect. And it must not only recognize the religious side of lumanity, but if it tries to assign the due 30 TEE AIM OF CULTURE. place to each capacity, and assign to all the capacities their mutual relations, it must con- cede to the Godward capacities that para- mount and dominating place which rightfully belongs to them, if they are recognized at all. That is, Culture must embrace Religion, and end in it. Again, to start from the side or point of view of religion: The ground of all relig- ion, that which makes it possible, is the rela- tion in which the human soul stands to God. This relation is the root one, and determines what a man really is. As a Kempis says, "What thou art in the sight of God, that thou truly art." The practical recognition of this relation as the deepest, most vital, most permanent one, as that one which em- braces and regulates all others, this is relig- ion. And each man is religious just in pro- portion as he does practically so recognize this bond, which binds him to his Maker. If, then, religion be this, it must embrace culture : first, because it is itself the culture of the highest capacity of our being; and secondly, because, if not partial and blind, it must acknowledge all the other capacities of man's nature as gifts which God has given ITS RELATION TO RELIGION. 61 and given that man may cultivate them tc the utmost, and elevate them by connecting them with the thought of the Giver, and the purpose for which He gave them. We see, then, that religion, when it has ita perfect work, must lead on to culture. If this view be true, culture and religion are not, when rightly regarded, two opposite powers, but they are as it were one line with two opposite poles. Start from the manward pole, and go along the line honestly and thoroughly, and you land in the divine one. Start from the divine pole, and carry out all that it implies, and you land in the manward pole, or the perfection of humanity. Ideally considered, then, culture must culminate in religion, and religion must expand into cul- ture. So it ought to be, so, we sometimes imagine, it might be. But it requires little knowledge of history, and a very small ob- servation of men, to convince us that so it has not been in the past, so it is not now. Goethe, the high-priest of culture, loathes Luther, the preacher of righteousness. The earnestness and fervor of the one disturb and offend the calm serenity which the other loves. And Luther, likely enough, had he een Goethe, would have don 3 him but scant mstice. S'2 THE AIM OF CULTURE. Mr. Arnold figures to himself Virgil and Shakespeare accompanying the Puritan Pil- grim Fathers on their voyage to America, and asks if the two poets would not have found the company of such men intolerable. If, however, the two poets instead of the Pu- ritan exiles had been thrown into the society of St. Paul and St. John, would they have found their society much more to their mind ? These sharp contrasts suggest some questions not easy to answer. It is no use smoothing them over by commonplaces about the one-sidedness of all men, and the limita- tions of our nature. When, however, we think over it, we can see some reasons which make the combination of the two things dif- ficult, so difficult that it is only in a few, and these rarely gifted natures, that they have both coexisted in any high degree. Take the case of a man who has not had a religious home and childhood, but has begun with cul- ture. It is easy to see that such a one, when from his scientific investigations and philosophical reasonings, or aesthetic ideals, he turns his thoughts for the first time towards religious truth, will come in contact with an order of things that is alien to the ways of Jiought and repugnant to the modes of feel- ITS RELATION TO RELIGION. 33 ing engendered in him by culture. The practical thought of God is something so dif- ferent from the apprehension of any trath of science or philosophy, and puts the mind into such a different posture from any to which these have accustomed it, that the mere man of culture will feel that for such contemplation he either requires new facul- ties, or must make a new use of the old, and likely enough he will give it up in despair. Again, the account which Christianity gives of human nature, even if we avoid all exag- geration, is not one that readily falls in with the habits either of the scientific or of the poetic mind. The mystery of evil, as its working is described in the Epistle to the Romans, and man's need of redemption, his helplessness until succored by a strength higher than his own : these are truths that do not easily find a place in any system of ordered evolution such as science delights to trace, rather they are yawning gaps that come in to baffle and perplex all the scien- tific methods. Nor are they less alien to im- aginations that have been fed on the great poetic creations", for these lend themselves -eadily to the pantheistic idea of evil as a necessary step on the road to good, rather 34 THE AIM OF CULTURE. than to the Christian view of sin. In short, the transition from the objects on which cul- ture dwells to those on which religion dwells is the passage from a region m which hu- man thought, human . effort, human self-de- velopment, are paramount, to a region in which man's own powers are entirely subor- dinate, in which recipiency, not self-activity, is the primary law of life, and in which the chief worker is not man, but God. To put the matter forcibly, let me quote the words of a venerable writer still living : l " It is impossible," he says, " to look into the Bible with the most ordinary attention without feeling that we have got into a moral atmosphere quite different from that which we breathe in the world, and in the world's literature. In the Bible God is presented as doing everything, and as being the cause and end of everything ; and man appears only as he stands related to God, either as a revolted creature or as the subject of Divine grace. Whereas in the world, and in the books which contain the history of the world, according to its own judgment, man appears to do every- thing, and there is as little reference to God as if there were no such Being in the uni *erse." i See Note II. ITS DELATION TO RELIGION. 35 These words point to a great but real op- position, to a vast hiatus not to be gainsaid or passed by, the difference between the point of view of the Bible and of ordinary lit- erature, the opposed aspects that life wears, according as we accept the religious interpre- tation of the world or the secular interpreta- tion of it. No doubt it is the great end of Christianity to heal this long-standing discord, to do away the ancient opposition between things divine and things human, to reconcile all true human learning, not less than human hearts, to God. That in every age Christian- ity has done so in some measure, history is the witness. That it has yet much to do, vast tracts of thought to reclaim and spiritu- alize, before the reconciliation is complete, if it is ever to be complete, this is but too apparent. It may help to make the whole matter clearer, if, before concluding, we cast our eye Backward to the sources whence first issued these two great streams of tendency that 'ong since, more or less combined, and now compose the main current of civilization. Of culture in its intellectual side, of those tnental gifts which have educated the civil- 86 THE AIM OF CULTURE. ized world, and moulded thought to what it is, Greece, you all know, is the birth-land. It was there that these gifts sprang to light, and were matured before they were spread abroad and became the inheritance of the na- tions. The first father, the Apostle of civil- ization, as he has been called, was Homer. For several centuries the poems of the old minstrel floated about orally, intrusted only to men's memories. But when the Athenian prince gathered together his scattered frag- ments, and reduced them to writing, " the vagrant ballad-singer " was, as it were, en- throned as the king of minstrelsy, and " in- vested with the office of forming the young mind of Greece to noble thoughts and bold deeds." 1 Henceforth to be read in Homer became the first requirement of an educated gentleman. And as time went on there fol- lowed in due succession all the order of the poets. Didactic, lyric, tragic, comic poetry, each of these in Greece first came to light, and there, too, found its consummate form, Hesiod, Pindar, jEschylus, Sophocles, Aris- tophanes, these followed in the train of Homer, and, though subordinate to him, be- me likewise the teachers of the Greek i Note III. ITS RELATION TO RELIGION. 37 youth. On poetry followed history, with Herodotus for the father of pictorial, Thu- cydides of philosophic, history. And as his- tory came from the consciousness of political life, so also did oratory, which was one of its younger products. And when ail these intellectual forms had nearly completed themselves, last of all, as the maturest creation of Hellenic mind, came philosophy, philosophy with its countless names and variety of phases, but with Socra- tes, Plato, and Aristotle standing in the fore- front, for all time " the masters of those who know." No one who looks back on that marvelous fertility, that exhaustless variety of the rarest gifts of thought, the product of so small a land and so few centuries, the wonder of which only increases the more we contemplate it, can believe that it was intended to begin and end in the land which gave it birth, that these words of sayers and thinkers had ful- filled the end they were designed for when they had delighted or instructed only the men who first heard them. No; the idea must force itself on every one who really re- flects or it that this inexhaustible richness