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The Signs of the Times 
 
 BY 
 
 M. J. SAVAGE 
 
 He answered and said unto them, When it is evening, ye say, It 
 will be fair weather : for the sky is red. 
 
 And in the morning, It will be foul weather to day : for the sky is red 
 and lowring. O ye hypocrites, ye can discern the face of the sky ; but 
 can ye not discern the signs of the times ? Matt. xvi. 2, 3. 
 
 BOSTON 
 
 Geo. H. Ellis, 141 P'ranklin Street 
 
 1892 
 
S B3, 
 
 V> 
 
 ty*' 
 
 Copyright 
 
 By George H. Ellis 
 
 1889 
 
TO 
 
 THE INCREASING NUMBERS, IN ALL SECTS, WHO ARE COMING TO 
 
 DISCERN THE SIGNS OF THE TIMES MORE AND MORE 
 
 CLEARLY, THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED. 
 
 86130 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 I. Break-up of the Old Orthodoxy 9 
 
 II. The Roman Church 24 
 
 III. Liberal Orthodoxy 4 1 
 
 IV. Unitarianism 56 
 
 V. Free Religion and Ethical Culture ... 71 
 
 VI. Scientific Materialism 87 
 
 VII. Ingersollism 99 
 
 VIII. Religious Reaction 115 
 
 IX. Mind Cure 128 
 
 X. Spiritualism 142 
 
 XI. Break-ups that mean Advance 158 
 
 XII. The New City of God . . . 173 
 
BREAK-UP OF THE OLD ORTHODOXY: 
 
 WHY MEN DO NOT BELIEVE IT. 
 
 In taking up a series of subjects like this which I propose 
 under the general title " Signs of the Times," I have some- 
 thing far more important in mind than merely to amuse you 
 by the treatment of topics that may be uppermost in the 
 popular mind ; something more important than merely criti- 
 cising my neighbors, finding fault with or commending them; 
 something more important than the giving of lectures. It 
 seems to me that the one great thing which thoughtful, ear- 
 nest men to-day need is to understand the age in which they 
 live and of which they are a part. The influence we can 
 exert may be comparatively little, and to us, in the modest 
 estimate which we set upon ourselves, may seem so insignifi- 
 cant as to make us feel that it is hardly worth while to 
 trouble ourselves as to the direction in which this influence 
 is cast ; yet, if you think a moment, you will see that the ten- 
 dency of the age, the great trend of influence that means 
 either decay or progress, is simply the resultant of these 
 individual influences of ours. And which way the age shall 
 move is a mere question, so far as we are concerned, of the 
 majority influence, as to whether more people shall be intel- 
 ligently interested in having the world go in the right direction 
 than in the wrong. It is, then, of vast importance that we 
 comprehend, so far as may be, the age in which we live, and 
 understand the forces and the movements around us. It 
 
10 Signs of the Times 
 
 is not strange that we get confused, that we find ourselves 
 drawn this way and that, that men mistake, the eddy for the 
 main current ; for we are ourselves in the midst of this cur- 
 rent. It sometimes seems to us that we are hardly more 
 than a chip or a fragment of bark floating on the current, 
 swirled about by it, turned this way and that whithersoever 
 it will. It needs, then, that every man for himself, or else 
 some one that he can trust for him, should gain some higher 
 point of outlook if possible, should be able to look before 
 and after, should know which way the world has been moving 
 for certain centuries, so getting in mind the sweep of things, 
 being able thus to separate between the main current and 
 the eddies, and so discover which way lies the hope of man- 
 kind. It is some general work like this an attempt, as far 
 as may be, to help you comprehend what is going on, the 
 meaning of the great forces and movements of which we are 
 a part that I have in mind. It is not for speculative ends 
 or to satisfy your curiosity, but to help you know which way 
 you ought to think, which way you ought to move, which way 
 you ought to try to turn the thought and effort of others. It 
 is for some such end as this that I have undertaken the work 
 which now lies open before me. 
 
 We have not to go back very far in the history of the 
 world to find a time when substantially all the people in 
 Christendom believed about the same thing. They looked 
 out with substantially the same eyes. They had substantially 
 the same conceptions of God in their minds. They believed 
 substantially the same things about the origin, the nature, 
 and the destiny of mankind. They were at one on all main 
 points. They answered, in some rough way at least, to the 
 definition of the Catholic doctrine which has been held for 
 many years. There was this homogeneity of belief at least 
 throughout Christendom. But now what do we see ? The 
 
Break-tip of the Old Orthodoxy 1 1 
 
 Chureh, whether people were loyal to it or not, whether peo- 
 ple attended the services or not, the Church then stood for 
 and represented what were practically the common ideas of 
 all Christendom. But to-day what ? We have only to open 
 our eyes and look about us, we have only to listen to the 
 complaints that come to us from the pulpits, from the reviews, 
 from the religious and secular newspapers, to see that the 
 Church no longer holds the position which it once did in 
 either the faith or the reverence of mankind. Men used to 
 believe that the Church held the gift of salvation. The ma- 
 jority of people to-day perhaps believe nothing of the sort. 
 They believe that the Church is a good thing, that it stands 
 for certain high ideas, that it exerts a certain fine, elevating 
 influence in society. Many people believe that the doctrines 
 of the Church do really embody the one God-given plan for 
 human salvation. But there are very few people who think 
 that it is absolutely necessary to be a member of the Church 
 or even to attend church, in order to please God or to serve 
 their fellow-men. The Church, in other words, has no longer 
 any such hold as it used to have on the belief, the reverence, 
 or the practical obedience of men. There is a great break- 
 up. The fragments are moving, and taking shape in this 
 direction and that. The Roman Church itself feels the 
 change. There is a process of disintegration going on within 
 it. I shall have occasion to treat of this by and by. I only 
 call your attention to it this morning. 
 
 The old Protestant Orthodoxy is being divided into in- 
 numerable sects. That was true a hundred years ago; but 
 there is a change going on now by which one form has come 
 to be representative of Liberal Orthodoxy, a new kind of 
 Orthodoxy, which the old does not recognize. The thoughts 
 that it stands for are creeping into the work of foreign mis- 
 sions. They are disturbing the foundations of theological 
 
12 Signs of tJie Times 
 
 institutions. They are at work in the minds of ministers, 
 leading them to practically neglect or overlook the doctrines 
 no longer acceptable to their congregations. The human 
 element is coming forward. This great change of thought 
 has also touched Unitarianism, which we in a way repre- 
 sent. There are Free Religion, Ethical Culture, Scientific 
 Materialism, Ingersollism, Agnosticism in all its depart- 
 ments. Then, the head of man having become puzzled in 
 its attempts to solve this great universe, the heart, too, finds 
 itself hungering for spiritual food. There are signs on all 
 hands of reaction from the extreme materialistic or purely 
 agnostic tendencies ; and so people, having lost their faith, 
 are borrowing the old-time faiths of the East, and we find 
 people rushing back not only into old organizations, but im- 
 porting Theosophy, Metaphysics, Christian Science. Then 
 that heart-hungering of the world for some whisper from 
 beyond has given us Spiritualism. I simply refer to these 
 things this morning as indications of this great break-up of 
 the old beliefs. We are in the midst of the confusion and 
 the conflicting demands of a thousand people, who are tell- 
 ing us that this way or that or the other lies the hope of 
 mankind. 
 
 My purpose this morning is to help to answer the question 
 as to why this condition of things is upon us. What has 
 happened? Are the movements of which we are a part 
 to-day indications that there is nothing true, nothing certain ? 
 Do they mean the decay of religion ? Do they mean the loss 
 of faith ? Do they mean the dying out of reverence ? or do 
 they mean that mankind is ceasing to aspire, to care for spir- 
 itual satisfaction, that it is going to be content hereafter with 
 this little world, and the common business and social engage- 
 ments of life ? Does it mean a revolution against recogniz- 
 ing and acknowledging truth? Is it impiety, this lack of 
 
Break-up of the Old Orthodoxy 13 
 
 reverence for, or faith in the old churches ? Is it because 
 the world is more ignorant than it used to be ? Or, if there 
 has been an increase in knowledge, as we love to boast, has 
 there gone along with it a spiritual pride, which refuses to 
 bow the neck to God's truth merely because it does not like 
 it ? Is the world, along with its wisdom, growing morally 
 worse? What is the matter? What has happened that these 
 old faiths should be no longer believed ? 
 
 In answering these questions, I shall be obliged to re- 
 handle, in another way and for another purpose, some points 
 with which my preaching in the past years has already made 
 you more or less familiar. Yet there are some truths so fun- 
 damental, so important, and that it seems to me are so little 
 felt and appreciated by the majority of even liberal men, 
 that perhaps I should not go astray if I repeated them over 
 and over again until they had become familiarized, every-day, 
 matter-of-fact truths to the common consciousness of the 
 world. 
 
 We need to start with the thought that this race of ours 
 began in childhood, weak, helpless, ignorant, in the midst 
 of a universe that we have found to be practically infinite. 
 That is, the race began knowing nothing practically, a little 
 weak, infantile race, looking this way and that, imagining 
 something here, building up its little theories, getting its 
 ideas as best it could from its limited experience, finding 
 out that it was wrong, trying to correct its errors, to get new 
 and better thoughts. And so tentatively, through its strug- 
 gles age after age, this race of ours has been growing slowly 
 from the beginning. That is the point that you need to 
 keep in mind as the key of this whole great problem. You 
 need to remember that at first it was inevitable that the 
 child-world should have childish thoughts about the world, 
 about God, about itself, about man, about the future. So 
 
14 Signs of the Times 
 
 that instead of doing as men have been taught to do, accus- 
 tomed to do for ages, look backward for wisdom, we ought 
 to look backward for childishness. The common idea, that 
 has been almost universal for hundreds of years, that the 
 faiths and the beliefs of the old-time people, of the former 
 times, of the patriarchs, of the prophets, were somehow 
 nearer to God and nearer true than the beliefs of to-day, 
 has sprung out of the theory of things which taught us that 
 the world began in perfection and fell away from it. But, 
 since we have found out that it is not true, we must simply 
 reverse that old conception of things. We must remember 
 that the old age of the world or the mature thoughts of the 
 world, those thoughts that ought to be treated reverently 
 because of their presumed merit, those that are more likely 
 to be nearer the truth, are the thoughts of the grown-up 
 world of to-day and not the thoughts of the childhood world 
 of the olden time. Paul says, "When I was a child, I spake 
 as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child ; but 
 when I became a man I put away childish things." So the 
 world, when it was a child, spake as a child, understood as 
 a child, thought as a child ; and in the child-understanding, 
 the child-speaking, the child-thinking of the antique world, 
 is the birth of all old religions. From that day until this, 
 however, the world has been growing, growing through 
 youth, through early manhood, towards mature age. For 
 I wish you to understand that it is my serious conviction 
 that it is only here and there that some little fragment of 
 the world deserves even yet to be called civilized. The 
 people who shall be alive a thousand years from to-day will 
 look back upon and talk of the crudeness of this nineteenth 
 century, with as much grown-up compassion as we regard 
 to-day the crudeness of the Middle Ages, and with equal 
 reason. I speak of this simply to emphasize and enforce 
 
Break-up of the Old Orthodoxy 15. 
 
 this thought : that this humanity of ours is God's child, born 
 in weakness and in ignorance, but that it has been growing 
 all these ages, these thousands of years, and is yet far from 
 having got its growth. This, then, is the key that we need 
 to keep in mind. We need to remember that every religion 
 has simply been the attempt of this child-world to think the 
 truth about its world, about its God, about itself, about 
 the relation in which it stands to God. For every religion 
 the wide world over from the beginning till to-day has been 
 nothing more nor less than the attempt on the part of man 
 to get into right relations to the Unseen, the Infinite Father. 
 Every religion has made that attempt. And, if Christianity 
 be a grander religion than any that the world has ever seen, 
 it is simply because it is the religion of the most civilized 
 races, the ones that have come nearer to having true 
 thoughts about the universe and God, because it is the 
 religion of those races that have been the most highly de- 
 veloped as to morals, because they have come a little nearer 
 to the truth, not because there is anything exceptional or 
 miraculous about them, not because they stand apart in a 
 class by themselves as having the one true religion, looking 
 down upon all the others as false. 
 
 I wish now to have you keep this one thought in mind : that, 
 the farther back you go, the cruder, the more barbaric, the 
 poorer the religion you find ; and this is just what you ought 
 to expect. As a race develops, as it becomes wiser, as its 
 social experience gives it higher and better moral ideas, you 
 find religion improving. There is a nobler thought of God ; 
 he is looked upon as a better and wiser being. There is a 
 nobler conception of man ; and the attempts on the part of 
 man to come into right relation with God are wiser and bet- 
 ter and more humane. People no longer think that they can 
 please God by butchering an animal, or by butchering one of 
 
1 6 Signs of the Times 
 
 their fellow-men, or by burning one of their children in a fur- 
 nace, or by casting a baby into a sacred river. These bar- 
 baric and cruel ideas belong to barbaric and cruel times; and 
 they are left behind as the world grows wiser. 
 
 Now I wish to outline for you, for the sake of clearness 
 and consistency in the treatment of my theme, the scheme of 
 thought that the Christian world has substantially held for 
 centuries. Then I want to explain to you how inevitable it 
 has been that that scheme should be outgrown and left be- 
 hind. It is only a few hundred years, two or three hundred, 
 we need not go back of the time when the city of Boston 
 was founded to come to a period when the theory of the uni- 
 verse generally held throughout Christendom was substan- 
 tially that theory which is figuratively and poetically set forth 
 in Milton's "Paradise Lost." 
 
 Suppose I draw here, in the air, a circle. Let that repre- 
 sent the boundary of everything. Let me cut that across the 
 centre by a line that may look like an equator. In the upper 
 half of the circle is heaven, the home of God and the angels 
 and all the celestial hosts. Below, in the lower half, before 
 the world was created, was chaos. But something happened 
 in this heaven. There was rebellion there. We do not know 
 why, except that Milton guesses that, on the day when the 
 Christ, the Son of God, was selected to be placed as ruler 
 under God, a sort of vicegerent over all his creation, Satan 
 rebelled because of pride against that, and led one-third part 
 of the angels into this revolt. He was cast out, and so hell 
 came into being. It was in the lower part of this great circle. 
 If you should draw a line like an antarctic circle near the 
 bottom of this hemisphere, hell would be below that. This 
 was made the home of these rebel angels. Then God deter- 
 mined to create man to repair the loss in heaven ; and Jesus 
 was made the minister of God in this work of creation. If 
 
Break-up of the Old Orthodoxy iy 
 
 now you draw a small circle, the upper edge of which shall 
 almost touch the equator, and the lower edge of which shall 
 extend half way down to the dome of hell, you will have 
 what we are accustomed to speak of as this solar system, 
 the universe. At the centre of this is the earth, a little 
 fixed spot, though the largest body of the whole, and round 
 it nine concentric, transparent, crystal spheres. To these 
 spheres were attached the moon, the sun, the planets, and to 
 the outer one the fixed stars. These revolved, carrying 
 round the sun, moon, and planets as they moved. The one 
 object of creating this world was to make it the scene of the 
 probation of man who should be placed on it. But he had 
 not been here long before he also was seduced into revolt ; 
 and he became the object of the curse and wrath of God 
 instead of his love. Then God determined to redeem this 
 lost race ; and he sent his son in the likeness of a man to 
 live and teach and suffer and die here on this little earth. 
 Then we have the miraculous Bible, a revelation, teaching 
 man this love of God, the history of his fall, and giving 
 an account of the work and sufferings of his son, authenti- 
 cated by miracle. So you will see that the whole plan, the 
 whole scheme of doctrine, fitted this little world, this con- 
 ception of the universe which was called into being for it ; 
 and there is not one single doctrine of all the old Ortho- 
 doxy that has not come into being merely for the sake of 
 helping to deliver man from the results of this supposed 
 catastrophe brought about by his fall. This is the kind of 
 world that was believed in for hundreds of years. You will 
 notice that every religion that has ever existed from the be- 
 ginning has been fitted in this way into the kind of world in 
 which men believed. 
 
 Now, the whole orthodox scheme of salvation, with its out- 
 come of heaven for those who accept the redemption offered 
 
1 8 Signs of the Times 
 
 and of hell for those who reject it, and its eternal dura- 
 tion, all these belong to this theory of things. They are 
 all part of it. They have all come into existence because 
 men believed in a great catastrophe called the " Fall " ; and 
 this theory of things grew up as the method by which men 
 were to be delivered from its effects. Why cannot we be- 
 lieve it ? I wish to tell you of three things that have hap- 
 pened as a reason why we cannot. 
 
 I. Remembering that this was a childhood world, in which 
 childhood ideas were accepted, the first thing that we need 
 to note is that there has sprung up in the modern world a 
 science of criticism, which makes it impossible any longer 
 for men to believe that which they used to accept as per- 
 fectly credible. The story of " Robert Elsmere " is instruc- 
 tive in this direction. The book turns on this question of 
 historic criticism. The author makes Robert undertake the 
 work of writing a history of France ; and, as he studies the 
 authorities to see why men believed thus and thus in the 
 Middle Ages, he is forced to apply the same kind of princi- 
 ples that he applied to the history of France to the history 
 of early Christianity. He found that there was no reason 
 for believing in the miracles of eighteen hundred years ago 
 that was not equally cogent in favor of the miracles reported 
 during the Middle Ages, that the whole thing turned on the 
 same kind of human testimony. He found himself in a 
 world in which it was perfectly natural and easy for people 
 to believe things which in a grown-up world were no longer 
 credible. If you go down the centuries, for it is down as 
 we go towards the beginning, if you go back down the 
 centuries, you will find that people were ignorant of the laws 
 governing this universe, that they lived in an imaginary, 
 magical world. They had no intellectual difficulties con- 
 cerning the possibility of this or that happening, any more 
 
" 
 
 Break-up of the Old Orthoc 
 
 than a child has when it sits delightedly listening to a fairy 
 tale. The child has developed no philosophical, critical, 
 logical difficulties with which its imagination is disturbed; 
 but the moment that man learns what is the kind of universe 
 in which he is living, what are the forces and laws in accord- 
 ance with which the world is governed, then he suddenly 
 discovers that he can no longer believe those things which 
 he once easily believed. These principles have been applied 
 to the Bible; and we have found out that bibles grow as 
 naturally as grass and flowers, that all the religions of the 
 world have had their bibles that they look upon as miracu- 
 lous. We have found out that they have been authenticated 
 by miracles, that each has its own cycle of myth and miracle, 
 and that there is no adequate reason why we should set our 
 Christian history and Christian miracles up by themselves, 
 and say that we have reason for faith that the others have 
 not; but, in the early childhood of the world, it was per- 
 fectly natural that people should believe certain things that 
 a grown-up world cannot accept. So we found that the 
 creeds of the Church, instead of having a miraculous and in- 
 fallible origin, have sprung up, just as the Westminster Cate- 
 chism, the Presbyterian Confession of Faith, the Andover 
 Creed, and all the creeds of the world have sprung up. 
 Men have simply been feeling after the truth, as best they 
 could, in the midst of controversies and struggles ; and their 
 belief became the orthodoxy of the time. That is the way 
 every creed has grown. The application of the critical prin- 
 ciples to the ease with which they accepted these things, to 
 the growth of the Bible, to the miracle, to the creed, these 
 things have made it impossible for us any longer to accept 
 the old theory of the universe, the old scheme of super- 
 natural salvation. 
 
 II. Then something has happened in the scientific world. 
 
20 Signs of the Times 
 
 I wish I had time to outline it adequately. I must only 
 point out a few things here and there. I should class it 
 under three different heads : 
 
 i. This old theory of things told us that the world was 
 created only a little while ago ; but geology, within the mem- 
 ory of living men, think how modern that is! has dis- 
 covered that this world is millions and millions of years old, 
 proved it beyond a question. For example, we know that 
 chalk is made up of the remains of little creatures that were 
 once alive. We know that it is being deposited to-day, as it 
 was a million years ago, on the sea bottom. We know that it 
 must have taken at least a hundred thousand years to de- 
 posit the chalk cliffs of Dover, England. This only as a hint 
 in one department as to the results of geological demonstra- 
 tion. The world, then, instead of being a few thousand 
 years old is millions of years old. 
 
 2. Then there has sprung up the science of archaeology, of 
 antiquities. We have been studying the remains of human 
 life on this planet ; and what do we find ? That man, instead 
 of having been created perfect six thousand years ago, has 
 inhabited this planet two hundred, perhaps three hundred, 
 thousand years. Two hundred thousand is probably the 
 lowest limit that competent men would assign to the life 
 of man on this planet; and some have adduced very good 
 reasons for thinking that he must have been here at least 
 three hundred thousand. 
 
 3. Then comes another department, called " Biology," the 
 science of life, that which deals with the origin and nature 
 of man. It has been demonstrated beyond question that, 
 instead of man's having been created perfect, he has been 
 developed from the lower forms of life through the lapse of 
 thousands and thousands of years ; that there has never 
 been any perfect Adam ; that there has never been any 
 
Break-up of the Old Orthodoxy 21 
 
 Garden of Eden ; that there has never been any serpent, any 
 temptation of the race as such ; that there has never been 
 any fall. The very basis of the beliefs of Christendom has 
 been shattered by this science; and, instead of this little, 
 tiny universe, in which this mysterious and wonderful drama 
 of creation and probation has been going on, this heaven 
 and hell in which it has been played, we find ourselves lost 
 in an infinite universe, of which we can imagine no begin- 
 ning, boundary, or end. 
 
 III. There has been a development of the humane quality 
 in man, that which we call humanitarianism. Man has 
 grown as a moral being, so that it is morally impossible for 
 the human race, the highest and most highly developed 
 parts of it, any longer to accept as true that which it once 
 used to accept without a question. Dr. Channing used to 
 argue out the essential goodness of human nature, and say 
 that it was incredible that man should be totally depraved. 
 But it is not so much on that point that I should lay the 
 stress of moral argument. It is that, in the process of civil- 
 ization, man has grown so tender-hearted, so loving, so sym- 
 pathetic, has developed such a keen sense of that which is 
 just and fair, that it is impossible for him any longer to 
 believe in the kind of God that men used to worship without 
 a question. You will not be surprised at this, if you are 
 familiar with human history. Just think of it ! Go back to 
 only a few years before the Revolution in France, and what 
 do you find ? You find a king on the throne, jolly, good- 
 natured, selfish, thinking that the whole kingdom was made 
 for himself, so that, when they spoke of the State, he says, 
 "/ am the State"; who gives to one of his followers a 
 favorite, perhaps carte blanche authority to arrest anybody 
 that he does not like, and cast him into the Bastile, and he 
 lies there, going in a young man perhaps, and starves and 
 
22 Signs of the Times 
 
 rots year after year until he is gray and haggard and per- 
 haps insane. This does not trouble the king in his pleas- 
 ures. He does not lie awake nights thinking of the suffering 
 he has caused. This kind of cruelty, this kind of barbarism, 
 this lack of sensitive sympathy concerning the suffering of 
 others, used to be practically universal ; and the king was 
 looked upon as having a perfect right to do with his subjects 
 anything that he pleased. It was out of such a condition 
 of things, out of such social barbarism, that sprang up the 
 popular conception of God as a supreme, selfish egotist and 
 despot of the universe, who could sit on his throne and 
 arrange everything for his own glory, appointing this one 
 to heaven simply to illustrate the beauty of his grace and 
 to sing his praise forever, and that one to hell simply to 
 illustrate the severity of his own justice and his power to 
 punish with infinite cruelty. It was natural that out of that 
 social, barbaric, cruel condition should spring such a con- 
 ception of God as that. It was natural enough then that 
 men should believe it; but to-day men cannot believe it. 
 Were there no criticism to tell us that the Bible is not in- 
 fallible, to tell us of the natural origin of all religions ; were 
 there no criticism to tell us of the natural origin of creeds ; 
 were there no science to tell us that the old conception of 
 the universe was as a baby's playhouse compared to the 
 infinite majesty of what we now know to be true, to tell us 
 that man has been on this planet hundreds of thousands 
 of years; had it not been demonstrated that man has been 
 developed from lower forms of life, were these things all 
 unknown, the growing civilization of the world, the goodness 
 of the human heart, would have made it impossible for the 
 world any longer to believe in the cruel egotist sitting on 
 the throne of the universe, and governing all merely for his 
 own glory. The world is too good for that kind of a God 
 any longer. 
 
Break-up of the Old Orthodoxy 23 
 
 So you find that the churches of every name, though they 
 claim to hold the creeds, do put on one side more and 
 tnore those things that the reverence and tenderness and 
 sympathy and love and goodness of the human heart will 
 no longer bear. And so we hear men like Whittier saying, 
 
 " But still, my human hands are weak 
 To hold your iron creeds." 
 
 The revolt of the heart demands at last that the infinite God 
 of the universe should be as good as a good man. These are 
 the reasons why there is a break-up of the old Orthodoxy, 
 why men do not any longer believe in and accept it. 
 
 And what is the significance of these reasons ? Does it 
 mean that the world is less religious, less moral, less 
 reverent? Does it mean degeneracy, decay? It means 
 that this human race of ours, starting as a child, is on the 
 road towards manhood ; that it is growing, that it has grown, 
 too intelligent, too tender-hearted, too good, any longer to 
 bear the intellectual contradictions and puerilities and crude- 
 nesses and cruelties of the old theories of religion. We shall 
 find, I believe, that the world has not outgrown religion, not 
 even outgrown the Church or the church idea, but that all 
 we love, all we care for, not only remains, but is to go on, 
 becoming ever more and more. 
 
THE ROMAN CHURCH. 
 
 In the summer of 1883, I stood in the well-known church 
 of St. Paul's without, at Rome, so called because it stands 
 outside of what used to be the walls of the Eternal City. 
 This church is one of magnificent wealth and beauty. It has 
 many pillars made of very rare and valuable stones, the gifts 
 of cities, states, nations, and kings. But the one thing that 
 attracted my attention more than all the rest was a long row 
 of portraits above the painted glory of the windows, portraits 
 of the popes of the Roman Church. The series began with 
 that of Peter ; and it came down through all the ages from 
 that time until the present, leaving vacant circular spaces 
 to contain those who should occupy the papal chair in the 
 coming centuries. 
 
 This, you will note, is typical of the claim which the 
 Roman Church has always made. It stands as representa- 
 tive of the one true Church of God from the beginning until 
 now. Its claim is that it has been presided over by an un- 
 broken series of popes, reaching back to him into whose liv- 
 ing hands the Son of God himself gave the keys of universal 
 dominion both on earth and in heaven. A magnificent 
 claim ; and magnificently, we must confess, has the Church 
 endeavored to substantiate and carry out that claim. 
 
 But is the claim true ? It is a serious question on the part 
 of scholars whether Peter ever saw the city of Rome. We 
 know, beyond any question, that the old first church of 
 
The Roman Church 25 
 
 Jerusalem was a Unitarian church ; for any thought of a 
 trinity had not yet dawned upon the Church's horizon. We 
 know that there was no organization then in existence like 
 the Church at Rome. We know that its doctrines, most of 
 them, were not in existence. We know that there was no 
 bishop of that first church. We know that Peter, during his 
 lifetime, was never recognized as having any sort of primacy 
 among the apostles. If he was ever in Rome at all, and 
 this is a point worthy of your serious attention, he was 
 there as the organizer of a faction in opposition to Paul, who 
 occupied the field before him. We know that Paul was 
 there ; that he organized in Rome one of the most important 
 of all the ancient churches, that church to which he ad- 
 dressed the most important of all his epistles. We know 
 that Paul represented a new departure in the church ; that 
 he was opposed by the older apostles, by all those who be- 
 lieved that they had received the final word from the Master. 
 Paul claimed to have received a later revelation. At any 
 rate, he preached a broader, more humanitarian gospel ; and 
 if, as I said, Peter was ever in Rome, he was there at the 
 head of a faction which opposed and attempted to discredit 
 the work of that apostle who had preceded him, and not as 
 the first organizer of Christianity in .the Eternal City. 
 
 Perhaps it is worth my while at this point to raise a ques- 
 tion concerning this passage of Scripture that the Roman 
 Church has always made the basis of its claim and as estab- 
 lishing the primacy of Peter. 
 
 It seems incredible that if, in the presence of the other 
 apostles, Peter had had any such power conferred upon him 
 by him whom they all reverenced as Master, whatever their 
 theory of his nature and origin, under those circumstances 
 this primacy should not have been acknowledged at the time. 
 But we know, as a matter of historic truth, that it was an 
 
26 Signs of the Times 
 
 afterthought ; and I believe that it can be established as the 
 result of sound criticism that these verses themselves were 
 an afterthought, not part of the original gospel, but inter- 
 polated, invented, for a special purpose in after years. For 
 we have an example of such a thing, which shows clearly 
 the spirit of the age, and what the men who were reaching 
 out for power and supremacy in the ancient church were 
 capable of. There was a whole series of what claimed to be 
 the decisions and decrees on the part of the Church of Rome, 
 settling controversies that had arisen in different parts of 
 the empire ; and it is now settled beyond any sort of ques- 
 tion that almost every one of these decretals, as they are 
 called, were forged, forged for the purpose of establishing 
 the primacy of Rome, forged that they might be appealed to 
 in testimony of the fact, which then began to be claimed, 
 that Rome had always been acknowledged as the head of the 
 Christian Church. 
 
 As a matter of fact, then, we know that during the first 
 two or three centuries, before Christianity attained its 
 supremacy in the Roman Empire, it was bitterly persecuted ; 
 and during those ages of persecution the Church had no 
 desire, even if it had had the power, to make itself a grand 
 organization. Its policy was rather to hide itself out of sight 
 until the storm of persecution should blow over. And it 
 was only after the persecuting age had passed by, after the 
 conversion of Constantine, after the Church had climbed to 
 the throne, that it approached anything like the organiza- 
 tion which it represents to-day. There were only scattered 
 churches in Corinth, in Ephesus, in Rome, in the different 
 great cities of the empire, with here and there handfuls of 
 believers in the smaller places, the belief growing gradually, 
 but growing all the time, growing as the grasses and the 
 flowers grow in spring, out of sight, until the sun of pros- 
 
The Roman Church 2J 
 
 perity had risen in the sky, and they could show themselves 
 without danger of being frost-bitten and killed. 
 
 Then the Church organized itself. Then there were bish- 
 ops, claiming individual power to rule over these separate 
 churches. And very naturally the bishop of Rome and the 
 church at Rome would arrogate to themselves the suprem- 
 acy, superiority over those bishops that were at the head of 
 smaller organizations or in less important cities. The bishop 
 and the church which were at the capital of the empire would 
 naturally be looked up to as occupying at least a more signifi- 
 cant position than the bishop of any other Christian organ- 
 ization. 
 
 But the time came when the seat of empire was changed. 
 Constantine moved his capital to what for the time was 
 called New Rome, Constantinople. Then the bishop of 
 Rome, who had already begun to claim the supremacy over 
 all other churches, who had begun to claim the power to 
 settle disputes both as to doctrine and as to organization, 
 ritual, practice, disputes that might rise between churches, 
 between bishops, began to press more strongly the primacy 
 of Peter. Not that the claim did not exist before ; but he 
 emphasized it, because there was danger that the metropolis, 
 the new capital on the Bosphorus, would supersede his power. 
 But the claim had been allowed for so long on the part of 
 the neighboring churches that it was not easy to dislodge the 
 power that had been established on the banks of the Tiber ; 
 and the neighboring bishops naturally appealed in their dis- 
 putes to him who was recognized as the most important one, 
 at least in all that region. 
 
 At last the time came I pass over the steps in detail, 
 because it is not necessary that I should go into particulars 
 now, as well as because I have not time when the Roman 
 emperor sided with the Roman bishop, giving him the advan- 
 
28 Signs of the Times 
 
 tage which was so decisive at that time, of the temporal 
 power, the emperor back of the bishop. Of course, after 
 that there was no power that could dispute the claim of the 
 papal see. 
 
 This power, then, grew as the ages went by, until universal 
 Christendom submitted. No, not quite. The pope of Rome 
 has always claimed, at least in modern centuries, to represent 
 alone the Church of God ; but the whole Greek branch of 
 the Church split off from the Roman, refusing to recognize 
 its claim. It charged the Roman see with heresy, and re- 
 fused to recognize its power, so that there has never been a 
 day from the first when the claim of the Roman Church to 
 be universal, catholic in the broadest sense of the word, has 
 .ever been true. But it did assert its supremacy over nearly 
 all Europe, over nearly all that had constituted the great Ro- 
 man Empire. 
 
 Now I wish, not at all in a spirit of opposition, but as 
 sympathetically as I can, to note some features of the Roman 
 Church during its grandest days. 
 
 The Roman Church in the main rightly ruled Christendom, 
 because it summed up and represented in itself at that time 
 all the best there was in Christendom. In those ages, the 
 Church perfectly satisfied the intellect of man. There was 
 no battle then between philosophy and the Church, or be- 
 tween science and the Church, between the thoughts of men 
 and the claims of the papacy. Nearly all the intellect in 
 Europe was in the service of the Church. Science wrought 
 within the limits of her claims. Philosophy speculated only 
 within the limits of her claims. Art lived apparently only to 
 serve the Church. Music only attempted to give expression 
 to the aspirations of the Church. So that the whole intellect 
 of the time was satisfied with the Church's theories, the 
 Church's conception of the world, the Church's thought 
 
The Roman Church 29 
 
 about God, the Church's thought about the nature and origin 
 of man, the Church's thought about destiny, about all the 
 great things that concern human life. The Church's thought 
 at that time was substantially man's thought, so that it existed 
 by virtue of the grandest of all rights, the right of summing 
 up, expressing, and satisfying the thought of the world. 
 
 Not only did the Church satisfy the thought : it was the 
 natural, legitimate, fitting expression of the religious aspira- 
 tions of man. There was no emotion, no hope, no fear, no 
 worship, no prayer, that the human heart seemed capable of 
 that did not find fitting and complete utterance for itself 
 through the channels of the Church. It not only satisfied 
 man intellectually, it satisfied him religiously. 
 
 One other thing. Whatever may be true of the Church 
 to-day, we must remember that in those ages, for some hun- 
 dreds of years, the Church stood for humanity. It was the 
 grandest humanitarian organization on the face of the earth. 
 It stood for democracy. It stood for the essentially human 
 as against race, as against feudal power, as against kings and 
 emperors. 
 
 Consider for a moment the magnificent power of the 
 Church during these centuries and the magnificent way in 
 which she wielded it. Think how it stood for man. It was 
 an organization spread all over Europe, not Roman, not 
 French, not Spanish, not German, not English, simply human. 
 In her churches, kings and beggars knelt on one footing in 
 the presence of the one Supreme Being whose greatness 
 dwarfed and blotted out all our petty human distinctions. 
 Consider the educative power of the fact that at that time 
 the papal see itself was freely open, as our presidency is to- 
 day, to the lowest-born peasant in all Europe. It was not 
 an uncommon thing for a peasant to become pope. Brains, 
 character, the natural power of leadership, these in the 
 
3<D Signs of the Times 
 
 Church during those ages came to the front, so that, when a 
 man reached the papal chair, whether he was good according 
 to our standard or bad, wise or ignorant, you might be sure 
 that he was there by virtue of natural powers of leadership, 
 not because of birth or any distinction of nationality or of 
 any other type or kind of power. 
 
 The Church, then, during these ages was the great repre- 
 sentative of man. It claimed and it exerted also supreme 
 power over all kingdoms ; and, in the main, it exerted it wisely. 
 In the main, it exerted that power for the benefit of humanity. 
 It beat down the tyrant, the oppressor, him who was so mighty 
 that there was no other power in Europe that could match 
 him. It stood up for the weak and the oppressed. It was 
 the champion, the ally of man against kings, against lords, 
 against despotisms of every kind. The Church, then, in 
 these three great regards intellectually, religiously, and so 
 far as the humanities were concerned represented the best 
 there was in Europe. 
 
 Let us now note one or two things that can be said about 
 it in some other respects. The doctrines, the creeds, of the 
 Catholic Church, were substantially those which came to be 
 the creeds of Protestant Orthodoxy. And I am free to say 
 that, in many of those points wherein the papal doctrine 
 to-day differs from the orthodox Protestant, I am compelled 
 to sympathize with the Church of Rome. Let me give you 
 one or two illustrations for example. 
 
 The doctrine of the Roman Church concerning inspira- 
 tion, concerning the Bible, seems to me much more rational 
 than that of Protestant Orthodoxy. The Church claims 
 that it is not the Book primarily that is inspired. It is the 
 Church the living body of God on earth that is in- 
 spired by the presence of the Spirit of God, which is its 
 breath. It claims that the Bible is only one utterance of the 
 
The Roman Church 31 
 
 Church, of no more authority than any utterance which it 
 may give of its beliefs or aspirations to-day. 
 
 Then take the doctrine of the Catholics concerning mira- 
 cles. The Protestant claim is that there was a little time 
 during the first century when miracles were performed ; but 
 all that we have to-day by which we can authenticate them 
 or attempt to do so is a record that says that certain people 
 saw such and such wondrous things performed eighteen hun- 
 dred years ago. Who they were that performed them, who 
 saw them, or who it was that made the record concerning 
 them, of these things we are mainly ignorant. What does 
 the Church claim ? The Roman Church claims that this 
 living body of God on earth, inspired by the eternally pres- 
 ent spirit, is capable to-day, when there is occasion for it, 
 of exercising miraculous powers precisely as it did in the 
 earlier centuries ; and this seems to me of the two much 
 more the rational claim. These only as illustrations. 
 
 One other point I wish to mention, and that is the mag- 
 nificent organization of the Roman Church. Never in the 
 history of this world has there been anything to match it. 
 The only thing that in any way can be spoken of as a par- 
 allel is the wondrous organization of the Roman Empire; 
 but that was secular, political. Never has a church been so 
 wondrously, wisely organized for power, for dominion, as 
 is the Roman Church. Consider, for a moment, how strong 
 that is where all Protestant organizations are weak. It had 
 a place within its limits and a work for every man, every 
 woman, every child, who cared to consecrate himself to it. 
 The woman of fashion, weary of the world, widowed, per- 
 haps left dependent in* mid-life, had her refuge, her work, 
 and her consolation in the Church. The old soldier, weary 
 of fighting, weary perhaps of dissipation, having drunk the 
 cup of life to the very dregs, was offered an asylum in the 
 
32 Signs of the Times 
 
 Church, a place to reform, to cast off his old life, to live a 
 new life of consecration and of hope. So there was not 
 a single power, faculty, or aspiration of the human heart 
 that the Roman Church at that time did not in a measure, 
 at any rate, appeal to and satisfy. 
 
 One thing more I must mention, one service that we 
 have no right to forget. After the Roman Empire was 
 broken up, Europe was inundated, swamped, by barbarism ; 
 and to the Church we owe it that the wrecks, the fragments, 
 all that was left of the ancient learning of the world, was 
 preserved in its ark, and carried across the flood, to be 
 landed on that new continent that represents the modern 
 world. The Church was at that time the preserver of the 
 world's learning and its hope of a future. In the monas- 
 teries up in the mountains, on Mount Sinai, in deserts in 
 Asia, in the forests of Northern Europe, clear to England, 
 these pious, devoted, learning-loving monks spent their lives 
 in copying and caring for the masterpieces of ancient liter- 
 ature, keeping them for the time when Europe should wake 
 up from its long sleep and desire to quench its thirst once 
 more at these perennial fountains of living waters. And 
 just here in this service which the Catholic Church rendered 
 to the modern world lay the seeds, at any rate, of its decay. 
 For one thing you must note ; for it is so important that the 
 whole argument turns upon it. Unfortunately for the Cath- 
 olic Church, and yet it could never have been the Catholic 
 Church on any other terms, it had advanced the claim 
 of absolute infallibility. It represented God on earth. Its 
 theological utterance was the very voice of God. Its theories 
 concerning the world, concerning God, concerning the past 
 history of man and his destiny, these theories it announced, 
 not as guesses, not as speculations, not as the result of the 
 best study that could be given to the subject, but as the 
 
The Roman Church 33 
 
 undoubted and eternal truth of God. And yet what were 
 these theories ? The theory of the earth, of the heavens, of 
 the creation and nature of man, of God, the purpose in 
 creation, the method of redemption, all these things were 
 either inherited legends that had come down from an uncrit- 
 ical and ignorant barbaric past or they were the speculations, 
 the guesses, of people then living, the philosophic attempts 
 to render the best account of things that they could. But, 
 whatever their origin, the Roman Church accepted these as 
 infallible revelations of God, and committed its claim to 
 infallibility to the test of their truth. 
 
 Then what happened? This ancient learning that the 
 Church had been preserving began to be studied when the 
 old conflicts were a little lulled and the people had time for 
 thought. Schools sprang up in the East, in Spain, in Paris, 
 at Oxford, where this ancient learning was studied anew. 
 People were roused again to the interest which the old 
 Greeks had begun to show in science and in philosophical 
 speculations. Then Columbus sailed, and the flat world 
 became round. The mariner's compass was invented, gun- 
 powder came into use as a mode of warfare ; then the print- 
 ing-press followed; and the intellectual enthusiasm of the 
 world was aroused. The world had begun visibly to grow. 
 
 What was the result ? The inevitable result that the hard 
 and fast and infallible theories of the Church were burst 
 through on every hand ; and the Church began its long 
 battle, which it has kept up from that day to this, for intel- 
 lectual supremacy. It could not admit a mistake. It could 
 not change. Therefore it must fight. It must fight the dis- 
 coveries in astronomy. It must fight the new light that had 
 come into chemistry. It must fight the new physics, the 
 new geology, the new biology, the new political economy, 
 the new social ideas of the world. So it is perfectly consist- 
 
34 Signs of the Times 
 
 ent and in keeping that almost the last thing Pius IX. r 
 the first pope declared to be infallible in his own person, 
 should die just as he had launched his universal curse 
 against all modern learning and modern civilization. But, 
 mark you, it is no fault of the Church, except that the 
 Church made the mistake of claiming to be infallible. It 
 only means that the world has outgrown the Church at 
 every point, so that intellectually it no longer satisfies the 
 thought of man. New knowledge of this world, of God, of 
 man and his origin and nature, new knowledge concerning all 
 these points that the Church had declared forever settled, has 
 sprung up; and the Church with its infallible theories simply 
 cannot adopt these without suicide. It must protect its claim 
 to infallibility or accept the modern world. It is nothing less 
 than a duel to the death between the intellect of man and 
 the Roman Church. And those who believe in God and in 
 truth have very little question as to where shall lie the 
 victory. 
 
 On the other hand, the religious nature of man began to 
 expand. It desired to express itself through new rituals, 
 new creeds, to give utterance to new thoughts about God 
 and to these new and higher aspirations. It began to have 
 a better thought of God than that which had been embalmed, 
 like a mummy, in the old creeds. It began to have a better 
 thought about man, about society. So there was this revolt 
 \n the interest of this determination to be free, to utter and 
 express these grander and higher religious aspirations of 
 the world. So Luther led off half Germany; so England 
 broke away from the Catholic Church ; and so all the high- 
 est and finest thinkers of the world, with few exceptions, 
 have followed or are following their example. 
 
 Then, once more. I said that one of the grandest things 
 about the Church at the time when it held its supremacy 
 
The Roman Church 35 
 
 over everything was the fact that it stood for man against 
 tyrants and kings. The attitude of the Church has been 
 reversed, and reversed with perfect naturalness and of neces- 
 sity. The Church had claimed to be infallible, to have a 
 right to supremacy; and, when that supremacy was chal- 
 lenged, when its right was denied, then it began to reach 
 out after power to enforce its supremacy. What must it do, 
 then, but ally itself with those powers that it had once defied ? 
 It must have kings and lords and nobles at its back, holding 
 the temporal sword while it wielded the spiritual. So the 
 Church, in a perfectly natural, logical way, instead of being 
 the champion of humanity, became its tyrant ; and it has 
 played the part of repression, attempting to keep the people 
 down, ignorant, submissive to its decrees, for the last several 
 hundred years. 
 
 Through this process which has now been going on for 
 a long time, what has happened in Europe ? I wish to hint 
 at one or two things. And, if there is anybody in Boston 
 who is still trembling as to the possible plans, projects, and 
 machinations of the Roman Church, I wish he would care- 
 fully note a few historic facts. It seems to me utterly incom- 
 prehensible how any man who has an intelligent idea of the 
 history of the Catholic Church for the last five hundred 
 years can stand in any sort of awe or fear in regard to its 
 future. Why, it was only a little while ago that Rome held 
 Europe in its grasp. Where is it now? All the leading 
 thinkers, the leading people of Europe, look upon it with 
 half-contemptuous pity as an antiquated and outgrown thing. 
 
 How is it in Italy, its seat and home ? Colonel Ingersoll 
 said in an address some years ago, when he was inveighing 
 bitterly against the Church, as is his wont, that the Roman 
 Church had "reduced Italy to a hand-organ and Spain to 
 a guitar," which is substantially true. And, if Italy to-day 
 
36 Signs of the Times 
 
 is coming to be something more than a hand-organ, it is 
 because of Victor Emanuel and United Italy. It means the 
 taking away of the temporal power of the pope and the 
 establishment of the capital at Rome ; taking the education 
 of the people out of the hands of the clergy and intrusting it 
 to the secular power ; the disestablishing of monasteries and 
 seizing their revenues and lands and applying them to the 
 use of men instead of to the Church. There is no place on 
 the face of this earth to-day where Rome is weaker than at 
 Rome. And yet people are trembling with fear because, 
 apparently, they do not know history. 
 
 How is it in France ? Those who claim to know will tell 
 you that France is made up of two things, popular supersti- 
 tion and acquiescence in the rites of the churches, so far as 
 observances go, and wide and almost universal irreligion. 
 
 How is it in Spain ? I have been there this summer. 
 What is the history of the Church in Spain ? Spain used to 
 be the mightiest power on earth, and the Catholic Church 
 was at the head of its power. What is it to-day ? Even in 
 Spain, which is most Catholic of all Catholic countries, the 
 churches are rich, the people are poor. The people are ig- 
 norant, superstitious ; and this great Catholic country is so 
 weak that Europe, the great civilized nations of the world, 
 never even stop to pay it the poor compliment of asking its 
 opinion on any live subject. Spain is counted out. It lies 
 one side of the great onward march of the world. Why not? 
 The Catholics drove out the Moors with their learning. 
 They drove out the Jews with their learning and enterprise, 
 and for hundreds of years cut off the head of any man who 
 dared to give utterance to a new thought. According to its 
 own claim, that the best, the most intelligent, the most virt- 
 uous people are those who are serving the Church in official 
 capacities, for centuries it has carried out its programme of 
 
The Roman Church 37 
 
 making them celibates, and letting only the meanest, most 
 ignorant, and most superstitious and vicious people have any 
 children. What can you expect of a country after a policy 
 like that, continued for ages ? Naturally enough, the end is 
 the " guitar " and the bull-fight. 
 
 The power of Rome, then, is broken in Europe. 
 
 But what of this country ? Thousands of people are afraid 
 that it is going to be re-established here. Why? Has 
 Rome converted in America any great leaders, political, re- 
 ligious, or intellectual ? Note one thing. What the wise 
 people think in one age the common people are going to 
 think in the next. What are the wise people thinking in 
 America ? The number of Catholics is increasing in Amer- 
 ica, it is said. Of course it is, and for two causes, chiefly 
 through immigration ; and, when they reach here, these peo- 
 ple have children that they train in the Church. Is it in- 
 creasing in any other sense in this country ? When you 
 bring a man from Europe who was a Catholic before he left 
 Europe and land him in Castle Garden, you do not double 
 the number of Catholics in the world. You simply move 
 one from one place to another. If I had a pile of pebbles 
 on this platform, and should carry them from one side to the 
 other, there would be no more pebbles when I got through. 
 These are the ways in which the Catholic Church is in- 
 creasing. 
 
 Now let me attempt fairly and simply as I may to forecast 
 what probably is to be the future of the Church. The 
 Roman Church will exist perhaps some centuries yet. I do 
 not know. It will exist, and it ought to exist, so long as it 
 best satisfies the thought, the religious aspirations, and the 
 moral needs of any class in the community. The only way 
 that religions are killed is by being outgrown. They never 
 are killed by direct attack, by argument, by abuse ; and cer- 
 
38 Signs of the Times 
 
 tain persons of this city who are wasting their time and their 
 temper in the abuse of the Roman Church would do well 
 to learn this fact, that abuse of this sort only results in 
 reaction. It touches the pride, the character, the race prej- 
 udice and religious enthusiasm of the people, and welds 
 them together. Almost the only fear I have of the Roman 
 Catholics in the next few years in this country turns not 
 upon what the Roman Church itself is likely to do half as 
 much as what other people are likely to do concerning it. 
 If you only leave them free, treat them justly and fairly, 
 they are subject to all the influences of this modern world. 
 
 I would make only one exception to this general tolerance. 
 If it be true that certain priests, Jesuit or otherwise, have 
 taken a solemn oath of political allegiance to the pope of 
 Rome, while they have come here to become citizens, they 
 are guilty of perjury; and, if they engage in any external 
 acts of positive disloyalty, then I would treat them, not on 
 account of their religion at all, but on account of their crimi- 
 nal attitude towards our great country and its interests, I 
 would treat them exactly as I would any other disloyal per- 
 sons, restrain them of their liberty or banish them from the 
 land. Otherwise, leave the Roman Church to precisely the 
 same freedom that we claim for ourselves. I believe that 
 the spirit of our democratic ideas, the growing intelligence 
 of the world, the growing liberality of thought concerning 
 that which makes up the essential thing in religious life, the 
 nobler conception of God, the higher ideal of man, of soci- 
 ety, the brighter hopes for the future, these are destined 
 gradually to disintegrate the Church. It will exist, as I said, 
 for many years perhaps ; but it is going through a process 
 of change. 
 
 Take as significant the attitude of the Catholics in Ireland. 
 The pope published a bull interfering with what they re- 
 
The Roman Church 39 
 
 garded as their political rights, their attempt to gain Home 
 Rule. What did they do ? They were on the eve of revolt. 
 They said : " We will take our religion from Rome, but not 
 our politics. The pope has gone beyond the limits of his 
 rightful claim." And what did the pope do? The pope, 
 perhaps for the first time in history, explained to Catholic 
 Ireland that he did not quite mean what they had supposed. 
 Did the pope ever do that before ? Did a Catholic people 
 like the loyal, warm-hearted, enthusiastic Irish ever dare to 
 take that attitude against a pope before ? There may be a 
 few similar cases in history. But just now they are signifi- 
 cant of a temper that even the pope cannot tamper with 
 prudently. 
 
 And how is it here in this country ? I believe that nine- 
 tenths of the Catholic parents of America are in their hearts 
 as loyal to America and to the public-school system, for in- 
 stance, as we are. Now and then, under the influence of a 
 few enthusiastic leaders, they attempt to galvanize into life 
 the parochial schools ; but, when the test, the strain comes, 
 the Catholic parent says, " I take my religion from Rome ; 
 but, in the matter of educating my children and how I shall 
 vote, that is my own affair." In other words, the power of 
 the Church is weakening. It dares not assert its old-time 
 claim in its old-time way. Democracy, education, social 
 growth, those things that we mean by the world's advance, 
 are anti-Romish of necessity ; and the Church is feeling their 
 power. When a frost comes in spring and freezes over the 
 little lake or pond or river, you do not think that the glacial 
 age is coming back again. It was only a cold snap of a 
 night. You know the sun is coming north, and that spring 
 is in the air. So, let there be a Romish reaction here or 
 there, who fears ? God's sun is wheeling into the heavens, 
 and its influence is telling on all the earth. 
 
4 Signs of the Times 
 
 I know not how I can set forth my conception of the past 
 and the probable future of the Catholic Church better than 
 by comparing it, so far as the comparison will hold, to the 
 history of an iceberg. 
 
 Away up in the north, the place of eternal snows, the 
 glacier gradually flows down from the mountain and out over 
 the land until a huge fragment of ice hangs over the sea 
 The law of gravity by and by severs its connection with its 
 parent glacier, and the iceberg is free. Hard and blue and 
 towering and grand, but threatening, it drifts towards the 
 south. There is no change apparently day after day, week 
 after week, month after month. The sunshine is on it ; free 
 warm winds are blowing against its sides. Warmer waters 
 begin to surround it. If it strikes against a ship, woe be to 
 those who are sailing the seas ! But gradually a change 
 comes on it. It is honeycombed at last by the almost imper- 
 ceptible effects of those influences that are playing about it; 
 and some day, though it look almost as mighty as of old' 
 anything, a pistol-shot, a wind, a change of current, and 
 it totters and disappears, and the sea is open for the com- 
 merce and the pleasure of the world. 
 
LIBERAL ORTHODOXY. 
 
 I hesitate somewhat in electing to preach upon this 
 subject, because, as I face it, I see two dangers to which I 
 am exposed. In the first place, I must, perforce, do some- 
 thing which I am very loath to do, I must repeat myself. 
 I must take up and handle again, though from another point 
 of view and with another purpose in mind, certain points of 
 doctrine with which you perhaps regard yourselves as already 
 sufficiently familiar. My theme, however, will compel me to 
 do this, because I cannot define Liberal Orthodoxy and try 
 to tell what it is in any other way. 
 
 Then another danger confronts me. I fear lest my pur- 
 pose, my motive, in it all may be misconstrued, lest I may 
 be looked upon as an accuser of my brethren, lest I may not 
 be regarded as speaking from a stand-point of earnest human 
 sympathy. 
 
 In spite, however, of these dangers, I see not how I can 
 pass by a great theme like this. My purpose in this whole 
 course of sermons is to bring you into acquaintance first, and 
 so into sympathy, with the great phases of religious thought 
 and life that make up the present time. I wish you to 
 comprehend this age. I wish you to see what are the 
 religious forces at work, and to understand, so far as I am 
 able to teach you, which way human progress lies, what 
 you ought to help, what you ought to oppose, that we may 
 co-operate with God in helping on the coming of that " far-off 
 
4 2 Signs of the Times 
 
 divine event to which the whole creation moves." For, 
 though as I grow older I am more and more convinced that 
 the influence which any one of us may possess is com- 
 paratively small, sometimes even discouragingly small, I am 
 also convinced that, since the movement of an age depends 
 upon the majority force of the individuals that make up the 
 world at any particular time, so it is our bounden duty to 
 see as clearly as we can, and cast our influence in the 
 direction of hope and growth for man. 
 
 In introducing this theme, I must remind you once more 
 of certain things with which you are familiar, though perhaps 
 the illustrations which I use will not be repetitions of any 
 that I have used before. I want to suggest to you the great 
 change of theologic climate, so to speak, which is going on. 
 
 It is within the memory of some now living that the late 
 Abner Kneeland was arrested in Boston, prosecuted, and 
 imprisoned for his religious and theological opinions. And 
 we are glad, for the credit of our Unitarianism, that the 
 gentle, wise, strong, the foreseeing man, Channing, was the 
 one clergyman in the city who came forward for his defence, 
 not at all because he sympathized with him or believed in 
 his views, but because he believed in his right to honestly 
 hold and to honestly express his views, whatever they might 
 be. But this is the significance of the point that I have in 
 mind, that hundreds of men are holding and expressing 
 much more radical and heretical views than those maintained 
 by Mr. Kneeland, and nobody thinks of raising a question. 
 
 Something like twenty years ago, a personal friend of 
 mine, Rev. Henry Powers, was settled as a Congregationalist 
 minister in the State of Connecticut. For the first time, as 
 I believe, in history, he departed from the settled, or estab- 
 lished, usage, and invited not only the Congregationalist 
 churches, but, I think, the Universalist church of the town 
 
Liberal Orthodoxy 43 
 
 where he was to be settled to sit in the council and Rev. 
 James Freeman Clarke to preach the installation sermon. 
 This was a very hopeful sign, though it was not at all a log- 
 ical thing to do. But we are not discussing the logic of it at 
 present. We are simply noting the changes going on. He 
 was so far ahead of his time, however, that measures were 
 taken to prosecute him for heresy ; and he would undoubt- 
 edly have been so prosecuted and possibly expelled, if he 
 had not opportunely been called to Brooklyn, thus escaping 
 from the jurisdiction of his prosecutors. Only a little while 
 ago, note the change, when a Congregationalist minister 
 was to be settled in Springfield, the Unitarian and Univer- 
 salist ministers were invited to sit in the council, and, so far 
 as I know, nothing more has happened than that two or 
 three of the stricter churches that were invited declined 
 to join in the movement. But nothing like prosecution has 
 even been threatened. 
 
 I have here on my desk a book called " The Kernel and 
 the Husk." I brought it simply to hold it up to you as one 
 of the signs of the times, one of the indications of this great 
 change which is going on. It is written by Dr. Abbott, one 
 of the scholarly and critical men of the Church of England. 
 So highly is his scholarship regarded that he was the one 
 who was selected to write the critical article in regard to the 
 composition of the Gospels for the Encyclopaedia Britannica, 
 one of the most learned works in the world. All the differ- 
 ent departments are committed to the hands of specialists. 
 And what is this book, " The Kernel and the Husk " ? In 
 it, the author attempts to strip off the husk, that he may find 
 the kernel of truth. And what does he strip off ? He strips 
 off the whole story of the creation of the world, the Garden 
 of Eden, and the fall of man. He clears away completely 
 the doctrine of the Trinity. He makes Jesus a purely 
 
44 Signs of the Times 
 
 human being, born like the rest of us, dying like the rest of 
 us, the only peculiarity being that he was so completely 
 filled with the spirit of God that he is inclined to regard him 
 as having been perfect, the ideal man, worthy even of 
 worship, and to be looked upon as an authority in regard to 
 spiritual matters, but only a man. He strips away all the 
 miracles. He thinks that they are simply accretions that 
 have grown up round the central kernel of truth. And of 
 course he is no believer in any doctrine of everlasting 
 punishment. He has only a message of grand hope and 
 trust for the world. 
 
 Only a little while ago, a very significant volume was pub- 
 lished by certain ministers of the Established Church in 
 Scotland, in which they took substantially the same ground 
 occupied by Dr. Abbott. And I hold in my hand a report 
 of part of the proceedings of a great meeting held by the 
 ministers of the Established Church of England last Octo- 
 ber, in Manchester. Canon Farrar on that occasion spoke 
 in the strongest way concerning the Church's old attitude 
 on the subject of the nature and the destiny of mankind. 
 He published a volume only a few years ago, called "Eter- 
 nal Hope," in which he argued against the old doctrine. 
 He says here that this for a time brought upon him no end 
 of opprobrium j that he was looked upon in many quarters 
 as a heretic, and he says, what many would be glad to 
 forget and many go so far as to deny, that it is not long 
 since it was authoritatively taught by the whole Church 
 that those not within its fold were to look forward to a des- 
 tiny of endless material suffering; and he denounces that 
 doctrine with all the power of which he is capable, and re- 
 joices in the fact that a barbarism like that is being out- 
 grown. Canon Farrar is one of the scholars and mouth- 
 pieces of the Church of England, being connected with 
 
Liberal Orthodoxy 45 
 
 Westminster Abbey and one of its most popular preachers. 
 At this same congress, another prominent clergyman spoke 
 of this doctrine as a hideous nightmare from which the world 
 was at last beginning to awake. 
 
 You are familiar with the fact that the attendants at large 
 numbers of our churches to-day, those called " Orthodox," 
 will say to you as you meet them : " Our minister is almost 
 as liberal as yours. He no longer preaches the old doc- 
 trine of foreordination ; he does not preach the old ideas 
 about the Trinity; he does not preach everlasting punish- 
 ment any more. He is a very liberal man." Now and then, 
 they will admit, he brings out some one of the old doctrines 
 merely to let the people understand that he knows that it is 
 still in the creed, or to satisfy some who are not content with 
 the more humanitarian preaching ; but the staple of his 
 preaching, they will say, is pure humanitarianism, love to 
 God and love to man, his duty here in this world and this 
 hope for all mankind. No matter for the present whether 
 the man is logical in so preaching, whether he ought to do it 
 occupying the position he does ; I merely note the fact. 
 
 Only a short time ago, in connection with the discussions 
 with which you are familiar in the American Board as to the 
 preparation for going as a foreign missionary to the heathen, 
 one of the best known clergymen in this immediate neigh- 
 borhood made the statement that, according to the decision 
 of the American Board as to what constituted fitness for the 
 work of a missionary to the heathen, there was but one Con- 
 gregational church in the city of Boston whose minister was 
 so qualified. In other words, this clergyman in a public 
 address made the statement that every one of the Congre- 
 gational ministers of this city was a liberal orthodox, with the 
 exception of one. And I know well, by personal conversa- 
 tion with ministers here and there, how this old scheme of 
 
46 Signs of the Times 
 
 Orthodoxy is suffering a "sea-change" into something 
 "strange," whether it be "rich" or not, into something 
 unknown to the fathers and that would not be recognized 
 by them. 
 
 Now I wish to define Liberal Orthodoxy, and make it clear 
 to you just what it consists in, that we may see the meaning, 
 the tendency, the drift, and what perhaps is to be the out- 
 come. 
 
 If you study a minister who occupies at the present time a 
 Liberal Orthodox position, you will find, as I have already 
 hinted, that he is distinguished, so far as the fact of his 
 church creed is concerned, more for the things that he does 
 not preach than for anything else. The first impression that 
 he will make upon you is one of question, possibly surprise, 
 that, occupying the place he does, he no longer touches cer- 
 tain doctrines which have been recognized as a part of the 
 orthodox scheme from the beginning. He lays his whole 
 emphasis on trying to make men better; that is, as you 
 would say, he is practically a Unitarian. He is preaching 
 for this world ; he is trying to build up human society here ; 
 he is trying to make men honest, true, kind, helpful towards 
 their fellow-men. 
 
 Now, in order that I may clearly define the position of 
 men like this, I must encounter the danger of repetition. I 
 must take two or three of the great historic doctrines of the 
 Church, and let you see what they are, and then tell you the 
 position that Liberal Orthodoxy holds concerning them. 
 
 In the first place, let us look at the Bible. What was the 
 old orthodox view of the Bible ? You know well enough. 
 A hundred years ago, it was looked upon by all orthodox 
 churches as an infallible book, a revelation miraculously 
 given to the world, just as miraculously as though it had 
 been handed down by the hands of God himself out of the 
 
Liberal Orthodoxy 47 
 
 clouds, as tradition said that the tables of stone were given to 
 Moses. They believed that the words of the Bible were as 
 literally written by God as though they had been the work 
 of his fingers, as it was said the ten commandments were 
 written on tables of stone. Some of the old Puritans, soon 
 after the Reformation, went so far as to say and teach that 
 every word, letter, and every significant point that played a 
 part in the punctuation or emphasis, was inspired. You 
 will see that that was a perfectly consistent, logical doctrine. 
 The moment that a point like that is surrendered, those who 
 give it up are, as they say we Unitarians are, all at sea. But 
 it was found that this could not be held. For example, Pro- 
 fessor Park used to make a point like this. He referred to 
 the passage in John, where it describes the disciples sailing 
 over the lake near Capernaum, when Jesus is said to come to 
 them, walking on the water, after they had rowed five-and- 
 twenty or thirty furlongs. Professor Park used to say that 
 they had rowed either twenty-five or thirty furlongs; both 
 statements could not be true, and the Holy Ghost knew 
 which it was, but he chose to express himself in this indefi- 
 nite, human fashion. He used to refer to the inscription 
 placed over the head of Jesus. Even the casual reader 
 knows that these inscriptions are not alike in the different 
 Gospels. Of course there was really but one inscription ; it 
 was not both, or all three. But, of course, the Holy Ghost 
 knew which it was ; and, if there had been a verbal inspira- 
 tion, he would have reported it with precise accuracy. 
 Points like this compel a modification of the old verbal 
 theory. It was then changed into the plenary theory, 
 the theory that the Bible was all God's word, and that 
 it taught all necessary truth with no admixture of error 
 in any vital matter. This was the plenary theory of inspira- 
 tion, and this is the one declared in all the standards pub- 
 
48 Signs of the Tunes 
 
 Iishing the orthodox doctrine still concerning the Bible ; yet 
 this theory is given up by all those men who call themselves 
 Liberal Orthodox. They admit that the Bible is full of 
 errors. They admit that it has mistakes in its history ; that 
 it is wrong in its science ; that it is full of myth, legend, 
 allegory; that it is full of misconceptions, human ways of 
 looking at things. 
 
 I hold in my hand a book called "The Heart of the 
 Creeds," by an Episcopal clergyman of this city. His pur- 
 pose is to state what are the doctrines of the Church, giving 
 the historic creeds in the light of modern knowledge. He 
 does not claim to surrender any of them : he simply remoulds 
 them in the light of higher and better thought. But it is 
 one of the most curious, most naive pieces of work that I 
 have ever seen ; for there is not a single one of the doctrines 
 that is not so modified as to modify it out of existence and 
 leave something utterly unlike it in its place. He here admits, 
 what I have just said, that the Bible is full of legend, myth, 
 allegory, mistakes in history, in science, in all sorts of direc- 
 tions; but he holds that, in spite of this, it somehow and 
 somewhere contains all essential truth, all that it is neces- 
 sary for a man to know. But, the moment you take a posi- 
 tion like that, who is to decide as to what is the essential 
 religious truth that all men need to know ? It comes simply 
 to this. The moment that theory of the Bible is maintained 
 or attempted to be maintained, this is the result: men go 
 through the Bible, and select such things as they like or 
 such things as they think ought to be true, and decide in 
 their own minds that that is what God really meant to teach. 
 Of course, you will see how utterly foundationless, how ut- 
 terly illogical, is such a position ; for, the moment you accept 
 that, you have as many Bibles as there are readers. 
 
 Let us contrast the doctrine of the old creed and of 
 
Liberal Orthodoxy 49 
 
 Liberal Orthodoxy concerning the nature and condition of 
 man. You know what the old belief was, that man was 
 created perfect in the beginning and has fallen, and that now 
 he is at enmity with God, corrupt through and through, 
 incapable of doing right, a rebel against God, deserving his 
 eternal wrath, and sure to feel its infliction, unless he escape 
 in the one special way. But this book and the most liberal 
 preachers to-day teach nothing of the kind. They have 
 modified the doctrine of the fall of man until it is only an 
 allegory, a legend, a tradition, a bit of poetry. 
 
 I was talking, not a great while ago, with some one who 
 said he still believed in the fall, not in any actual fall of 
 the race, such as the Bible tells us about as occurring several 
 thousand years ago, but something like this : he believed 
 that each one of us, as we come to consciousness, wake up 
 to an experience of the fact that we are sinful beings, imper- 
 fect, that there is evil in us ; and this is the fall, a fall 
 occurring not to all of the race at once, but occurring in the 
 consciousness of each individual as he develops a knowledge 
 of right and wrong. But do you not see how utterly mis- 
 leading it is for a man to face a general congregation and 
 say to them that he believes in the fall of man and to talk 
 about the fall of man, when this is what he really has in 
 mind ? The plain matter of fact is that he has utterly sur- 
 rendered what the creeds mean when they speak of the fall 
 of man, and he has put something entirely unlike it in its 
 place. 
 
 These liberal orthodox do not believe in any total deprav- 
 ity, in any ruin of the race. They believe that we are sinful, 
 imperfect beings, we all know enough about that, that 
 we are not ideals, that we are struggling and are battling 
 against the lower nature and climbing up into the higher 
 life. This is what they mean by the doctrine of the fall. 
 
50 Signs of the Times 
 
 Come to the doctrine of the Trinity, and see what changes 
 have passed over that. I need not stop to tell you the old 
 ideas. If you care to go into it, you can look at the author- 
 itative statements I published in my book on " Religious 
 Reconstruction." The definition of the Trinity was that 
 there are three distinct and eternal personalities in the one 
 God. What, now, is the belief concerning the Trinity? I 
 do not risk contradiction in making the statement that there 
 is not a single one of these liberal orthodox preachers who* 
 believes the doctrine of the Trinity at all. I mean the Trin- 
 ity as stated and as it stands in the acknowledged authorita- 
 tive creeds of the Church. 
 
 What do they believe in place of it ? They believe in a 
 sort of threefoldness in the nature of God, just as they say 
 there is a threefoldness in man, body, soul, and spirit. 
 They say that God manifests himself now as what they call 
 the Father. Looking at him in another way, he is the Son. 
 Looking at him in a third way, he is the Spirit. Jesus, on 
 this theory, is only the manifestation of the divine in the 
 sphere of our human life. Here is not one shred left of 
 historic Orthodoxy. I have no fault whatever to find with 
 that kind of a trinity. If that is Trinitarianism, then I am 
 a Trinitarian. I not only believe in the threefoldness of the 
 nature of God, I believe in the manifoldness of the nature of 
 God, and that he manifests himself by a million personalities. 
 For what does the word " person " mean ? Originally, it 
 meant the mask of an actor. He took on a particular mask 
 standing for a special character ; and, while he wore that, 
 he represented that person. He might wear a thousand 
 masks, and present himself in a thousand personalities. 
 God in history, in the stars, in the clouds over our heads, in 
 the beauty of the dawn, in the beauty of the sunset, in the 
 history of humanity, in human love, passion, struggle, ambi- 
 
Liberal Orthodoxy 51 
 
 tion, in a million different ways, the divine manifests 
 itself. But all this is only playing with words, and to call 
 anything like this the doctrine of the Trinity is simply an 
 abuse of the dictionary. 
 
 What did they believe in regard to the atonement ? You 
 know what it was in the old time. It was a belief that man 
 was utterly lost, 2nd that an infinite penalty must be paid. 
 God's righteous law must be upheld by infinite suffering. 
 Man must be purchased by the blood of an infinite one. 
 And so the second person of the Trinity was sent forth to 
 be born, to suffer, to be put to death, that those who believed 
 in him and accepted this substitution might share in the 
 merits of this being and so be saved. 
 
 But now what ? Jesus is only a man, according to many 
 liberal orthodox. With others, he is something a little dif- 
 ferent, they hardly know what, a little more than man, 
 a little less than God, something hanging, like the kaaba, 
 that holy stone of the Mohammedans, between heaven and 
 earth, but strictly the whole of neither. Some hold an ideal 
 like this of Jesus. Others say that he is only a man ; but, 
 whatever the theory of his person or his nature, they hold 
 that his work was simply the manifestation of the love of 
 God to the race and a revelation of the universal and eter- 
 nal law of sacrifice. They say he teaches us that always, 
 not he, but we, if we wish to become divine, must accept this 
 law of sacrifice, sacrificing the lower in us ever to the higher. 
 The atonement has come to this. It is utterly unlike the old 
 doctrine in almost every respect. 
 
 One more doctrine will I notice, and that is the doctrine 
 of the destiny of man. It was a logical part of the old sys- 
 tem that those who did not accept the terms of salvation 
 should not be saved, but should suffer forever and ever. 
 But this doctrine is now either questioned or is scouted 
 
52 Signs of the Times 
 
 openly as barbaric, as unworthy of God, as subversive of the 
 very scheme of divine salvation itself ; and this not by those 
 who have left the Church, but by those who still stay in it 
 and still claim to represent and give utterance to that which 
 is the old original doctrine. 
 
 As a specimen of the kind of transformation going on, I 
 must read you one note from this " Heart of the Creeds," 
 by this Boston clergyman. It touches on the nature of 
 Jesus, but the lesson of it equally applies to any of the doc- 
 trines I have named. I wish you to notice these words very 
 carefully. " When we say of Jesus ' conceived of the Holy 
 Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius 
 Pilate, was crucified, dead, and buried, and went into the 
 place of departed spirits,' when we say this, we simply 
 mean to declare our belief in the facts of his history, what- 
 ever they are." Why should not I come back from a jour- 
 ney and report that I saw something which was black and 
 white, and then add that what I mean by saying that is that 
 the color was whatever it should be found to be ? 
 
 This is the kind of transformation through which these 
 doctrines are passing ; and I can think of nothing to illus- 
 trate it so simply and so perfectly as that brief and familiar 
 dialogue between Hamlet and Polonius. The wily courtier 
 must see things in the light of him who is his prince and 
 superior. He did not dare to contradict or disagree with 
 him, and so his eyes must see after the pattern that is cut 
 for him : 
 
 Ham. Do you see yonder cloud that's almost in shape of a camel ? 
 
 Pol. By the mass, and 'tis like a camel, indeed. 
 
 Ham. Methinks it is like a weasel. 
 
 Pol. It is backed like a weasel. 
 
 Ham. Or like a whale ? 
 
 Pol. Very like a whale. 
 
Liberal Orthodoxy 53 
 
 So these doctrines assume in shape apparently that which 
 the dominant authority for the time seems to make neces- 
 sary. 
 
 Now I am going into no wholesale, denunciation of these 
 men. I only wish you to understand their attitude and see 
 the significance of it, and note it as one of the signs of the 
 times. I shall say, and say with all the emphasis of which I 
 am capable, that it has no right to this name. It is not 
 Orthodoxy. It is no more Orthodoxy than the doctrine 
 which I represent upon this platform is Orthodoxy. I bring 
 no railing accusation against men occupying this position. 
 I do not even say they are dishonest. I only say I should 
 be, seeing things as I do, if I occupied such a position. 
 
 But there is one thing that touches the human side of men 
 in my position now and then. It is a little irksome once in 
 a while to have a man who occupies this position, who is as 
 clearly an out and out rationalist as I am, stand on a pedes- 
 tal, a little superciliously, and look down on me as a heretic 
 and outcast. It is not always altogether agreeable, and par- 
 ticularly when a man like this will confess to you, in private, 
 all these beliefs, and you know that he does not speak them 
 from his pulpit, and, when his people are round, you know 
 that he does not even speak them to you. But one can 
 afford to smile at these weaknesses, which are common 
 enough, and recognize and be glad for all the good there is 
 in this general attitude. 
 
 I wish to make one more remark about it. I cannot re- 
 gard this as having any logical basis. It certainly has no 
 basis in the Bible. It has no basis in history, no basis in 
 any scientific theory of the world, no basis in criticism. It 
 is in a position of ecclesiastical and spiritual vagabondage, 
 " without visible means of support." It is only a transition 
 stage towards something else. But, recognizing it as such,^ 
 
54 Signs of the Times 
 
 recognizing it as being what it is, then I am glad to recog- 
 nize it, glad to note its significance, glad to read in it the 
 promise of a better time. As a matter of fact, there are 
 only a few people who are really logical or who care much 
 about logic. They drift along, following, as all forces do, 
 the line of least resistance, getting on flounderingly, but get- 
 ting on; and that, after all, is the principal thing. So I 
 recognize this Liberal Orthodoxy as a sign of growth. It 
 means that the old religious life is not fixed, not hard, not 
 fast, not unchangeable. It is the same kind of prophecy 
 that we see in the spring just after the snows have gone 
 away and when the sun begins to get warm over our heads. 
 Still, the trees all look as though they had been fixed in 
 their places hard and fast forever. But some morning you 
 note a little flush between you and the far-off blue sky. You 
 can see the buds are starting, tiny leaves are opening, and 
 you know that the eternal life is mightier than the fixity 
 of all forms, and that things, whether they will or not, 
 under the impulse of the infinite wisdom, power, and love of 
 God, are growing. And so Liberal Orthodoxy is a sign of 
 growth. It means dawn. The sun is not in sight yet. The 
 tiny rays are creeping up the sky. The hilltops catch the 
 light here and there, and the shadows are beginning to stir 
 a little uneasily and lift themselves. In this period of dawn- 
 twilight, it is no wonder if people do mistake the shape of 
 the mist itself for the eternal and changeless Rock that it 
 merely clothes for the time. So, many of these beliefs are 
 only changing forms of mist. Stirred by the sun's rays, 
 they will lift themselves, and show the real beauty and glory 
 of the real world of God. 
 
 So this Liberal Orthodoxy is a hopeful sign of the times. 
 It does not mean the decay or the passing away of religion. 
 It does not mean the decay or the passing away of the 
 
Liberal Orthodoxy 55 
 
 Church. It does not mean the loss of the Bible. It does 
 not mean the loss of Jesus from his grand place in the relig- 
 ious life of the world. It does not mean the loss even of 
 religious rites and symbols. It does not mean the loss of 
 anything that is vital to the growth of man. It only means 
 that the one eternal God-life in the past is in the midst of 
 all the growth and change. It means that he reshapes 
 remoulds things age after age ; and, while they are in the 
 process of remoulding, while they are neither the thing 
 they were nor the other and better thing that they shall be, 
 they must perforce seem to us illogical, unfinished, out 
 of place in the world. But wait. " God's in his heavens," 
 God is in his world, God is over all and in all and through 
 all. 
 
 One word, however, I would speak, if I could reach the 
 ear and the heart of every Liberal Orthodox man in America 
 and Great Britain; for they are as numerous there as here. 
 It would be to remind them of the voice said to have been 
 heard by Moses as a command when he stood with his 
 people on the brink of the Red Sea, Pharaoh behind, the 
 impassable waters before, the people trembling and afraid, 
 not knowing which way to go. If I could, I would utter in 
 the ears of all the liberal orthodox people of the world this 
 command : " Speak unto the children of Israel that they go 
 forward." 
 
UNITARIANISM. 
 
 In the narrower sense of the word " Unitarian," Unitarian- 
 ism is a very ancient belief. If we take it as connoting 
 merely the unity of God, then in the line of our own spiritual 
 ancestry it is at least as old as the earliest of Hebrew 
 prophets. How much of belief in this divine unity there 
 may have been underlying the obvious idolatry of many of 
 the other religions we may not perhaps be quite certain to- 
 day ; but there are traces, at least in the esoteric thought, 
 the thought which the priests kept as their own peculiar heri- 
 tage, of many of the old religions, of this belief that God, 
 in spite of the diversity of manifestation, was really one. 
 
 The Jews were Unitarians in this sense. So were and are 
 still the Mohammedans. There is no sort of question that 
 the old first Church at Jerusalem, the first Christian Church, 
 presided over by James the brother of Jesus, was a Unita- 
 rian church ; that the churches founded by Paul were Unita- 
 rian churches. Nearly all the Christian churches for the 
 first three centuries were Unitarian. This does not mean, 
 however, that the trinitarian belief was not beginning to 
 manifest itself here and there, gathering headway for the 
 time when it should be finally declared the orthodox faith of 
 Christendom. This, as you are aware, was about the first 
 quarter of the fourth century. At that time, however, we 
 know that Unitarianism was put down, and that Trinitarianism 
 came to the front, largely from the personal influence of the 
 
Unitarianism 57 
 
 emperor himself. It is a question to-day as to which would 
 have been declared orthodox had it been left to a popular 
 vote of all the Christian churches of the time. But, after 
 Trinitarian ism was declared to be the religion of the empire, 
 of course Unitarianism in all its forms was declared a heresy, 
 and the whole effort of the Church and of the empire com- 
 bined to stamp it out. Yet Unitarianism in some form lived 
 from the beginning until to-day. Here and there throughout 
 the Middle Ages was some grand mind, some free, brave 
 man, who dared to think for himself, and dared to risk his 
 life for his thought, and to hold by the life of God's eternal 
 truth concerning this matter as fearlessly as concerning all 
 others. And in almost all cases this type of men were 
 Unitarians, handing on the torch of truth from one to 
 another across the dark waste of the Middle Ages. 
 
 Unitarianism sprang into being again as the result of the 
 freedom that came with the Reformation. And it has 
 existed in an organized form for more than three centuries in 
 South-eastern Europe, and has a vigorous and flourishing life 
 there to-day. 
 
 That which concerns us this morning, however, is the more 
 modern movement of Unitarianism, which means something 
 more than a belief in the unity of God as opposed to the 
 trinity, and which sprang up simultaneously in England and 
 in this country. Of course, we shall devote ourselves only 
 to its manifestation here. 
 
 It was inevitable that Unitarianism, this new movement of 
 religious life, should manifest itself, just as inevitable as is 
 the morning, just as inevitable as is the sprouting of the 
 grass and the blossoming of the flowers in spring; for Unita- 
 rianism is merely one indication of the fact that humanity is 
 growing. It is the result of that growth, it is an oppor- 
 tunity for the manifestation of it. It indicates that humanity 
 
58 Signs of the Times 
 
 has grown in two particulars especially ; and it is these two 
 particulars which I wish to notice. 
 
 Unitarianism indicates, in the first place, a growth of the 
 human heart, a higher manifestation of that humanity which 
 we call specifically humane, tenderness, pity, compassion, 
 love, sensitiveness to that which is right, to that which is 
 just. Unitarianism was, I think, in the beginning, more 
 than anything else a moral protest in the interest of this 
 higher and tenderer sense of justice and right. The early 
 Unitarians declared that the old scheme of doctrine which 
 was held, to be orthodox in that day was an unjust scheme ; 
 that it was not righteous on the part of God to do what the 
 creeds declared that he had done ; that it was not righteous 
 on his part to have created a world as it is said that he cre- 
 ated this, to have created man and to have subjected him 
 to temptation, to have permitted him to fall and then to 
 link with this first representative of the race his descendants, 
 all who should ever come to be born, so that they all on 
 account of that fall should be under the wrath and curse of 
 God. They said that this scheme, including the fall, the 
 method of redemption, the destiny of those who were not 
 saved, was unrighteous. The heart protested against it. 
 They could not and they would not believe it. This was not 
 because they had discovered proofs that it could not be true, 
 but because the heart of humanity had grown too tender, too 
 humane, to believe such things of the Father in heaven any 
 longer. It was said, you know, in the first place, that the 
 difference between Universalism and Unitarianism was that 
 the Universalists believed that God was too good to damn 
 men forever, while the Unitarians believed that man was too 
 good to be damned forever. I think it is nearer the truth to 
 say that the Unitarians held to both these positions. Both of 
 them sprang out of this revolt of the human heart against 
 
Unitarianism 59 
 
 these teachings concerning God and man. They declared 
 that God should be at least as good, as tender, as true, as 
 merciful as they were. They demanded that the conception 
 of goodness which was held here on earth should be the 
 conception which should be applied to God in heaven, or 
 else, they said, goodness can have no meaning. If God be 
 not good as we are, and as we expect our fellow-men to be 
 good, then in no sense that can have any meaning to us is 
 he good at all. This was the revolt of the human heart. 
 
 There was an indication of growth not only of the heart, 
 but of the intellect, the growth of the mind of man. Men 
 came to demand that religion, like everything else, like every 
 other department of human thought and life, should be 
 treated as reasonable. They declared their belief in the in- 
 tegrity of the human mind, in that reason which God has 
 given us, asserting their faith in it as the measure of the 
 reasonableness of that which was presented for their accept- 
 ance. They did not occupy the absurd position of saying 
 that they would not and could not believe anything true that 
 they could not understand. No one was ever quite so un- 
 wise as that. We believe to-day, on the basis of scientific 
 demonstration, a thousand things that we cannot under- 
 stand; but we know they are true, rationally and scientifi- 
 cally demonstrated to be true. 
 
 The early Unitarians had no idea of rejecting all mystery. 
 They simply said that they had a right to think, that they 
 had a right to subject whatever was brought to them for 
 their acceptance to the test of reason, to find out whether it 
 were proved to be true, and to reject it if it were not so 
 proved. So it was a development of the human heart and 
 the growth of human reason out of which Unitarianism was 
 born. 
 
 Think, for a moment, how right they were concerning this 
 
60 Signs of the Times 
 
 matter of the supremacy of reason. If a man stand in the 
 presence of two roads, wondering which he shall take, he 
 decides whether he will take this one or that one for some 
 reason. If there is no reason why he should take one more 
 than the other, then the whole matter hinges upon chance, 
 impulse, and there is no reason involved in the matter at all. 
 If a man accepts a reason for being a Christian, by that very 
 act he asserts the supremacy of reason. If there is no reason 
 why a man should be one thing any more than another, then 
 he may as well be a Buddhist, a Hindu, a Mormon, as to be 
 a Christian. The very minute, then, that any man assents 
 to the idea that reason is to decide his course, that very 
 minute, by implication, whether he will or not, he is a ration- 
 alist. Unitarianism, then, was born out of the higher devel- 
 opment of the heart and the mind of the world. 
 
 At first, it was traditional and textual. It did not occur to 
 the early Unitarians to question the infallibility of the Bible, 
 its authority as a divine revelation to the world. Some of 
 their early scholars, indeed, did trace here and there human, 
 fallible elements in the Old Testament ; but the New Testa- 
 ment nearly all of them practically accepted as infallible 
 authority. 
 
 It did not occur to them to question miracles, to question 
 the utterly unique, miraculous position of Jesus. Many of 
 them believed in his divinity while denying what was called 
 his deity. Many of them believed in his pre-existence, 
 that is, they were Arians, but they all believed that he was 
 miraculously sent as God's special messenger, guide, and 
 Saviour of the world. They occupied a position, then, inside 
 the New Testament. It was a battle of texts between them 
 and their opponents. This position to-day, I think, we all 
 recognize as illogical and untenable. 
 
 For what is the Bible ? The Bible is simply a great relig- 
 
Uu itarian ism 6 1 
 
 ious literature. If they could find a text that proved the 
 unity of God, their opponents could find a text which at 
 least appeared to hint the trinity. If they could find a text 
 which proved the goodness of the nature of man, their 
 opponents could find a text to teach his innate and utter 
 depravity. If they could find a text to prove the universal 
 fatherhood of God, their opponents could find a text by 
 which they could prove that he had been a Father to the 
 Jews and Christians in a peculiar sense, in which he was 
 not to the rest of mankind. If they could find a text by 
 which they could prove the eternal mercy of God, and so 
 build a basis for eternal hope, their opponents could find a 
 plenty of texts which appear to teach the endless doom of 
 the majority of mankind to endless pain. It was then, as I 
 have said, a battle of texts, an illogical and utterly unten- 
 able position. 
 
 The Bible, as I have said, was simply a religious litera- 
 ture, composed by a large number of people during a period 
 stretching at least over a thousand years. It represented the 
 opinions of a vast number of different men, so that there 
 was no consistent teaching to be found in it, as a whole, con- 
 cerning God or concerning the nature of man, concerning 
 the nature of Jesus or his mission to the world, and the 
 destiny of mankind. It was full of conflicting testimony, as 
 was natural. This phase of Unitarian life was the first step, 
 the utterance of the right of reason. 
 
 But the fathers did not fully see to what lengths that 
 assertion would logically carry them. They were not pre- 
 pared for the next step. Who ever is ? Will the world ever 
 outgrow the tendency to think that it is safe to go only as 
 far as it has gone? that the man who dares to take the 
 next step ahead is to be persecuted and put down? It is 
 disheartening to read history in the light of this thought. 
 
62 Sig?is of the Times 
 
 The great leaders of the world, the great liberators, hailed 
 by a few, persecuted by the many, at last establish their 
 grand positions ; and then their very followers treat them 
 as though they had taught the last word that God intended 
 to speak to the world, and are ready to persecute the next 
 man who in the same spirit of this divine leadership declares 
 the next word in that unfolding revelation that began when 
 life began, and that is never to end so long as there is the 
 possibility of the growth of thought. 
 
 These early Unitarians were not ready for the next move- 
 ment. It came in with Theodore Parker. I do not think 
 Parker was the inventor of it : he was its voice, its manifes- 
 tation. It was in the air. No man ever creates an epoch. 
 Rather it is the epoch which creates him, which makes him 
 its mouthpiece. Theodore Parker was one of the grandest 
 souls that ever lived, a man religious in every fibre of his 
 being from his earliest boyhood up ; a seer, reverent, truth- 
 ful, loving, tender; a man all alive to the touch of the 
 enveloping God; a God-intoxicated man; a man who saw, 
 felt, heard God everywhere. He could not believe that God 
 was done speaking to the world. He was as ready to listen 
 to his voice this morning as was the old prophet in Judaea 
 two thousand years ago. This was the kind of nature that 
 the man possessed, a nature so tender and sympathetic 
 with all men, so full of love to all mankind, that he thrilled 
 at the thought of any and every injustice, that he felt him- 
 self God-appointed to right every wrong. 
 
 Theodore Parker preached a sermon which marked an 
 epoch, on "The Transient and Permanent in Christianity." 
 This was in 1841. The result was the withdrawal of 
 fellowship from him on the part of every Unitarian minister 
 in Boston, with the exception of two. Those two names 
 ought to be mentioned reverently and in honor to-day, be- 
 
Unitarianism 63 
 
 cause they dared to stand by his side for the right of free- 
 dom of religious utterance, John T. Sargent and James 
 Freeman Clarke. This sermon, "The Transient and Per- 
 manent in Christianity," might be preached in any Unitarian 
 church to-day without raising one single word of comment 
 Indeed, it might be preached in many a so-called Orthodox 
 church without raising a ripple, so mild does it seem. But 
 it was radical at the time. 
 
 What did Parker ? He freely announced the new step 
 which Unitarianism must take by criticising the New Tes- 
 tament as well as the Old, criticising any and all Script- 
 ure not only, but applying reason to the matter of the 
 authenticity, the authorship, and the correctness of texts. 
 He announced that, from that time on, truth and truth only 
 was to be taken for authority, that there was no authority 
 above truth, that truth and truth only was the voice of God. 
 Not only then did he apply this freedom of criticism to the 
 Old Testament and to the New, but he took another step, 
 which then seemed little less than sacrilege. He dared to 
 announce his belief that Jesus was purely and simply a man, 
 natural in his birth, natural in his death, superior, supreme, 
 perhaps, over other men, but only by virtue of his openness 
 to the inpouring of the spirit of God. 
 
 He also impugned miracles, not only as touching the 
 nature and career of Jesus, but in all directions asserting 
 the divineness of the natural order of the world, asserting 
 his faith in the ability of God to govern his world by means 
 of and through this natural order, leaving no necessity for 
 magic or miracle. He recognized the miraculous in the mar- 
 vellous order of nature. He abolished by a stroke the dis- 
 tinction between the natural and the supernatural, making 
 the universe a unity, not denying that which had gone by the 
 name of the supernatural, the spiritual, and the divine, but 
 
64 SigJis of the Times 
 
 enlarging the definition of nature until it included all things 
 in heaven above and in the earth beneath. 
 
 You see how radical the change was. It was nothing 
 more nor less than setting Unitarianism free from the bond- 
 age to text, a bondage to the old-time habit, a bondage to 
 this illogical attitude, and making it free to face the great 
 facts of the universe of God and of man. 
 
 I wish now, as briefly as I can, after this little sketch of 
 what Unitarianism has been in the past, to tell you, mark 
 the distinction, not what Unitarianism is of necessity, but 
 what I am convinced it ought to be and must become. I 
 shall not attempt to define the attitude of my brethren. I 
 define merely my own. 
 
 Unitarianism has reached a point in the history of the 
 world's moral and intellectual development when it can and 
 ought to plant itself squarely on this one position, the essen- 
 tial religiousness of the natural order of the universe. It 
 must declare, it has declared, that this universe is not one of 
 creation, fall, and recovery, not one of catastrophe, but one 
 of natural order and of normal growth. The natural order 
 of this world is a divine order. The world is not secular, 
 under the wrath of God, to be redeemed and reclaimed. The 
 natural order from the beginning till to-day, and as far as we 
 can trace it running out into the future, is, as God meant it 
 to be, a divine order, appointed, led, lifted, guided, by the 
 hand of God himself. 
 
 What, then, does religion become in a universe like this ? 
 Not a scheme of salvation, not a plan of redeeming man from 
 the result of a catastrophe. It becomes a work of adjust- 
 ment, bringing man into right relation, within the limits of 
 his own nature, to his fellow-men, and in right relation to God. 
 This work is in the individual, where the faculties, powers, 
 passions, go to make up the man. It makes the man him- 
 self a divine order, to start with. 
 
Unitarianism 65 
 
 Again, it is the work of reconciling man to man, of bring- 
 ing about the perfect social order of the world. It is 
 bringing man to recognize and obey the divine laws that 
 underlie human society, and in accordance with which it 
 must be lifted up and led on toward perfection. 
 
 It brings about the reconciliation of man to the facts of 
 his environment in the physical universe and to the facts of 
 his environment in the spiritual universe, man as soul related 
 to God just as truly as the body is related to the physical 
 universe about him. Religion is the discovery of this divine 
 order in the world, and bringing men into accord with this 
 order. It means making man broader, developing the indi- 
 vidual, society, government. It means the perfection and 
 the divine mystery of all that is human, the perfection of 
 life here in this world and of course its further growth and 
 progress forever. 
 
 In the first place, in order to attain this knowledge by 
 means of which the reconciliation can be effected, it means the 
 declaration of utter, absolute intellectual freedom in religion. 
 We have heard freedom talked about a good deal in the 
 modern world, but we are apt to forget how new a thing it is. 
 Do you know, until the liberal churches of the modern world 
 were organized, there never was a religious organization on 
 the face of the earth that did not treat free thought as a sin? 
 Do you know that ? Do you know how modern this freedom 
 is ? Every religion, every pope, every council, every synod, 
 every religious organization, from the beginning till modern 
 times, has treated the free-thinker as an outcast, an enemy of 
 God and man. We want no freedom for the mere sake of 
 freedom. We want freedom, because we believe that only 
 through the result of free investigation can the truth be 
 found ; we want freedom for the sake of the discovery of 
 truth; the discovery of truth we want for the sake of the 
 
66 Signs of the Times 
 
 culture and development of man. Modern Unitarianism, the 
 Unitarianism that is to possess the future, must stand for 
 utter individual freedom. We believe there is no truth in 
 heaven or on earth, no truth in the past, no truth in the 
 present, the discovery of which will not redound to the glory 
 of God and the honor of man ; so we must be free to search. 
 
 In the next place, this position of intellectual freedom 
 puts us in a position which we ought to be proud to occupy, 
 a position that no other religious body with which I am ac- 
 quainted has, the position of religious leadership to the 
 world's intellectual leadership. There is no reason why we 
 should not be in perfect sympathy with all the intellectual 
 lights and leaders of the world ; why we should not welcome 
 all their light, all their truth, interpreting it on its religious 
 side for the uplifting of man. We are fitted, if we are brave 
 enough, strong enough, broad-minded enough, to be the re- 
 ligious leaders of the world's intellectual leaders, to take our 
 place as guides toward the future religious development of 
 mankind. 
 
 And yet this need not take away from the ministry to the 
 poor, the ignorant, the common people, the masses of men. 
 I hold a different opinion, indeed, on this point from that 
 which I hear expressed by my brethren. I do not believe 
 that Unitarianism is specially or peculiarly fitted to be the 
 religion of the masses, not because there is anything the 
 matter with the religion, but because of the lack of taste 
 for the simple and the highest on the part of the masses. If 
 you study the attitude of the uneducated masses of the world 
 in any direction, you will find that it is not towards an ap- 
 preciation of the simple, not towards an appreciation of the 
 highest. They do not choose the simplest and the finest in 
 art, in literature, or in any department. Something that 
 appeals to the love of mystery appeals to them more 
 strongly. 
 
Unitarianism 6? 
 
 There must be growth on the part cf people to be free 
 from fear and to enable them to appreciate the simple as the 
 divinest before they can be ready for the leadership of our 
 Unitarian faith. But they are coming more and more rap- 
 idly to do this, so that we need not despair of ministering to 
 all classes and conditions of men. But we can only minister 
 to them by as much as we teach them to be free, to be inde- 
 pendent, to think for themselves, and to appreciate that 
 which is best and highest. 
 
 Occupying this position, on what basis can we organize 
 ourselves ? We cannot be organized on the basis of a creed, 
 as have been all the religious organizations in the past, 
 though not at all because we object to creeds. I have no 
 objection to a hundred creeds. I am perfectly willing to 
 write one out this morning, or as soon as I have time, of 
 any length that any one can desire, giving expression to the 
 belief I hold this morning. Only this is the position of Uni- 
 tarians : we declare that the world is growing, that to-mor- 
 row a man may discover some new truth that no one knows 
 to-day, and, if he does, that is a divine truth that belongs in 
 our creed, and so the creed must be perpetually revised. 
 We do not object to creeds because we have no definite be- 
 lief, or because we are not willing to give expression to what 
 we do believe, but because we are not willing to give bonds 
 to any man that we will not learn anything new. We hold 
 ourselves perfectly free to go on to the discovery of new 
 truth in every direction. 
 
 What, then, can we organize ourselves upon ? We have a 
 sufficient basis for organization, as I claim, the basis of a 
 common purpose to find the truth, to live the truth, in the 
 conviction that this only is true religious service. This we 
 call devotion to God, loyalty to him, and loyalty to man. 
 This is the basis of all the scientific associations of the 
 
68 Signs of the Times 
 
 world. We can indeed incorporate into our creed as un- 
 changeable so much as we have demonstrated to be true 
 beyond a question. But, concerning anything beyond that, 
 we must hold it open to revision. 
 
 But suppose we organize on the basis of a common pur- 
 pose, to be truth-seekers and truth-lovers, to find all we can 
 of the laws and the life of God in the universe and incor- 
 porate that as fast as we can in the growing life of humanity : 
 then I hold that we need no other basis of organization. 
 The brotherhood of man, not, parrot-like, echoing back and 
 forth from city to city and State to State, and nation to 
 nation and hemisphere to hemisphere, the words without any 
 regard to what they meant when they were first formulated, 
 but to see that they utter a living conviction to-day, the sym- 
 pathy of men all over the world, facing forward, trusting in 
 God, trusting in the universe, trusting in the integrity of the 
 human intellect, trusting in the growth of human society ; 
 facing forward, recognizing as true all which has been dem- 
 onstrated to be true, and cheering each other on in the en- 
 deavor to discover that which is new and better than the old. 
 
 I have only one brief word of criticism on the average 
 attitude of Unitarianism in the past and as it seems to me 
 in some directions to-day. 
 
 I think I have noted a too great anxiety on the part of 
 Unitarians to minimize the difference between them and the 
 attitude of the older churches ; to try to believe that there is 
 not much difference ; to try to keep the sympathy of the 
 older churches ; to feel out for a hand-clasp from some man 
 who, if he is honest, has no business to give us a hand- 
 clasp ; to seek the patronage of the older faith ; to rejoice 
 over any token of sympathy in that direction. 
 
 Why, friends, if we are very much like the older churches, 
 then it is a crime for us to exist. We have no business to 
 
Unitariafiisjn 69 
 
 exist unless we are so much unlike them as to make a reason 
 for our coming into existence as some new thing. If I be- 
 lieved that they were doing the work that God calls for in 
 this age, I should not be in a Unitarian pulpit, and I should 
 not believe that you had any business in Unitarian pews. 
 
 My final word is the conviction that we ought to assert the 
 position to which we are called as one to which we are di- 
 vinely sent. I believe that the welfare of the world in the 
 future depends on the promulgation and the general accept- 
 ance of the idea for which Unitarianism is standing, and is 
 coming more and more to stand. There has never been any 
 catastrophe in the past calling for the kind of salvation still 
 offered by the older churches. They have misread the old 
 universe. I believe that we, for the first time in history, are 
 comprehending what kind of a universe this is, and what has 
 been the origin, the nature, and the method of growth of 
 humanity. We stand, then, for a new revelation of God's 
 truth, a new gospel to mankind. We have no right to stand 
 for anything less than this ; and, if we stand for this, we 
 should earnestly, faithfully, in most consecrated fashion, as- 
 sert this day by day. We should live for it, give for it, work 
 for it, if need be, die for it, as the grandest souls of the 
 ages have been willing to die. 
 
 If we stand for anything less than this, then this schism 
 which we have created in Christendom is wrong; and we 
 ought to go back to the old churches. But, if we do stand 
 for new life, light, leadership for mankind, for a new revela- 
 tion of God, then, not egotistically, not with self-glorification, 
 not for the sake of building up our denomination, but, like 
 a prophet burdened with the seriousness of the task imposed 
 on him, let us go forth proclaiming this new truth, not 
 ours, but God's, stand for it, work for it, live for it, day 
 by day. 
 
yo Signs of the Times 
 
 I do not believe and in the light of what I am saying 
 you will not think me illiberal in working for the support 
 of a system which you are convinced is wrong. That is not 
 the one to help. I do not believe that you have a right to 
 contribute your money to the support of schemes of thought 
 and life which you are convinced are not fitted to help the 
 world. You have little enough strength, little enough time, 
 little enough money, little enough service, to offer for what 
 you believe to be God's truth, that on which depends the 
 welfare of the world. It is not working for yourselves, for 
 your own little body : it is working for the glory of God, it 
 is working for the deliverance of the world. 
 
FREE RELIGION AND ETHICAL CULTURE. 
 
 In the year 1865, the National Conference of Unitarian 
 Churches was organized in the city of New York. Because 
 it was the occasion of the formation of the Free Religious 
 Association, I wish to read to you two or three words from 
 the constitution which the National Conference adopted. 
 You find in it the phrase, which is the only important thing, 
 "the disciples of the Lord Jesus Christ" and "the building 
 up of the kingdom of his [that is, God's] Son" ; that is, the 
 Unitarian Conference, speaking for all the Unitarians in the 
 country, put themselves in the position of being disciples of 
 the Lord Jesus Christ, and announced as the great work 
 before them " the building up of the kingdom of God's Son." 
 The Free Religious men, those who came to represent the 
 Free Religious Association, objected to this language for 
 two reasons. The objection at first sight may seem to you 
 slight and trivial, and you may question whether there was 
 sufficient reason for the Free Religious Association's coming 
 into existence ; but, whether we agree with the earnest men 
 who were foremost in that movement or not, we must recog- 
 nize the fact that they were earnest, that they were devoted, 
 that they were high-minded, and that they meant to be what 
 they charged us Unitarians with not being, logically consist- 
 ent. They said this declaring ourselves subject to the lord- 
 ship of Jesus is a limitation of perfect intellectual liberty. 
 They did not object to any one's coming to accept this lord- 
 
7 2 Signs of the Times 
 
 ship as the result of the intellectual liberty, but they did 
 object to being bound to that from the outset ; for they said, 
 and they said it, mark you, in the spirit of Jesus himself, 
 We will call no man, not even Jesus, "Master " in this sense : 
 we will be utterly free. You see, and this is the point I 
 have in mind, that they were only logically carrying out the 
 principle of perfect intellectual liberty. 
 
 They objected to it, however, on another ground. They 
 said the attitude of the ordinary Unitarian towards Jesus is 
 simply a traditional attitude, and is inconsistent with the 
 declaration that he is only a man, and savors at any rate of 
 idolatry. It is making a man the object of a reverence that 
 at least borders on divine worship, putting him between the 
 soul and the one Father, God of all. You will note that I 
 am not now uttering my own sentiments. Whether I agree 
 with them or not is entirely one side of my purpose. I am 
 attempting, as clearly and simply as I may, to outline the 
 position which the Free Religious Association then assumed ; 
 for this Association was the result of the insistence on the 
 part of Unitarians on the use of these phrases, which they 
 regarded as a limitation of human thought. 
 
 When they organized themselves, they declared their pur- 
 pose in the following words : 
 
 " The object of this association is to encourage the scien- 
 tific study of religion and of ethics, to advocate freedom in 
 religion, to increase fellowship in spirit, and to emphasize 
 the supremacy of practical morality in all the relations of 
 life. All persons sympathizing with these aims are cordially 
 invited to membership." 
 
 The Free Religious Association, then, was organized as a 
 protest against what these men regarded as a halt on the 
 part of Unitarians. They said the Unitarians are not con- 
 sistent with their principles. They have not carried them to 
 
Free Religion and Ethical Culture 73 
 
 their logical outcome. These men, I believe, were actuated 
 by the noblest religious enthusiasm, by the noblest love of 
 their fellow-men, and by the noblest loyalty to truth. 
 
 A protest, if it succeeds, dies even in the hour of its 
 victory ; for in the very act of death there is resurrection to 
 eternal life of the principles for which it stands, and that 
 come to be so universally recognized that there is no longer 
 place or use for the organization itself. It seems to me that 
 this expresses in very brief words substantially the outcome 
 of this Free Religious movement. It has been limited in its 
 range. It has organized only a few societies ; and to-day 
 those few, I think it is safe to say, are either dead or dying, 
 and the work of the Free Religious Association is practically 
 at an end. 
 
 As a recognition on the part of Unitarians of the success 
 of this protest, I wish to read just a few words from the 
 clause added to the original constitution of the National 
 Conference : 
 
 "While we believe that the preamble and articles of our 
 constitution fairly represent the opinions of the majority of 
 our churches, yet we wish distinctly to put on record our 
 declaration that they are no authoritative test of Unitarian- 
 ism, and are not intended to exclude from our fellowship any 
 who, while differing from us in belief, are in general sym- 
 pathy with our purposes and practical aims." 
 
 I read these last words to show you that practically the 
 great principles for which the Free Religious Association 
 organized itself have been recognized, and the National 
 Conference itself has declared that it means to put no limit 
 to intellectual liberty, and that it does not intend to exclude 
 from its fellowship any man who is in general sympathy with 
 its purpose and practical aims, whatever his special personal 
 attitude may be towards any claims of lordship or any dec- 
 laration that calls Jesus the only Son of God. 
 
74 Signs of the Times 
 
 This Association, if it did nothing more, has left a heri- 
 tage to free thought of certain very notable names, a galaxy 
 of stars in our intellectual firmament that it is worth our 
 while, in passing, to glance at for a moment and name. For 
 years its president was O. B. Frothingham ; and among those 
 associated in the work and who frequently stood on its plat- 
 form were men like Ralph Waldo Emerson, John Weiss, 
 David A. Wasson, F. E. Abbot, T. W. Higginson, women 
 like Lucretia Mott and Ednah D. Cheney, with a host of 
 others hardly less well known. Persons such as these we 
 are proud to honor, and proud that we have grown enough 
 so that we can work in full fellowship with them to-day, 
 however much they might have differed from us in the past, 
 however much any of us may be disposed to differ from cer- 
 tain personal opinions which any of them may hold to-day. 
 
 The Free Religious Association was a protest; and, hav- 
 ing succeeded in this protest, it has died into eternal life : 
 and there for the morning we will leave it, and turn to that 
 which, while having no definite historical connection per- 
 haps with it, we may yet regard in a certain way as its child 
 and successor, the Ethical Culture movement. 
 
 As I have already hinted, I do not mean to assert that the 
 president of the Ethical Culture Society would recognize 
 any historic connection between the movement for which he 
 stands and the Free Religious Association ; but it seems to 
 me that it is definitely and distinctly the logical carrying out 
 of one, at least, of the tendencies which were represented 
 in the older society. Many of those connected with the 
 Free Religious Association were theistic; many of them 
 were agnostic. The entire basis of the Ethical Culture 
 Society is agnosticism ; and so I believe that it represents 
 the logical outcome of that wing of the Free Religious 
 Association. 
 
Free Religion and Ethical Culture 75 
 
 I ask you now to consider with me for a moment what this 
 stands for, the excuse for its existence as put forth by its 
 representatives. I am not authorized to speak for the 
 Ethical Culture Societies of America. It is possible I may 
 use language which they would repudiate. I shall try, how- 
 ever, to be as clear, simple, and fair as I can ; and, if I 
 misrepresent, I shall be the first one to correct the misrepre- 
 sentation when it has been pointed out to me. 
 
 I am in thorough, hearty sympathy with so much in this 
 Ethical Culture movement that it is easier to praise than it 
 is to criticise. It sprang out of this fact : There are three 
 main elements of religion as it is incorporated in the great 
 historical religions and churches of the world. Churches are 
 frequently so characterized that they lay special and peculiar 
 emphasis on some one department of this rather than on 
 the others. These three elements are doctrine, ritual, and 
 conduct. The Ethical Culture men made the charge, and 
 make it perpetually by the fact that they exist, that there has 
 been too great an emphasis laid by the religions of the world 
 upon doctrine and ritual ; and they propose, for the time 
 being, to leave these chiefly out of sight, and call the world 
 back to this matter of practical conduct, on which, they say, 
 rest the entire welfare, prosperity, happiness, and future of 
 mankind. 
 
 Let us consider, for a moment, how grave the charges are 
 that can be made by these men. Consider the fact as to 
 the excessive emphasis laid on the matter of doctrine, how 
 important it has been considered, how over-important, and 
 how, on account of this importance, matters of conduct have 
 been neglected; not only neglected, but an emphasis has 
 been laid on doctrine which has led to radically wrong con- 
 duct. Matthew Arnold says that conduct is at least three- 
 fourths of life. The Ethical Culture men would say that the 
 
j6 Signs of the Times 
 
 practical purposes of life make up at least seven-eighths, that 
 is, almost the whole. Doctrine is of importance only as it 
 leads to conduct. Ritual is of importance only as it bears 
 on conduct; and, when men emphasize doctrine and put it 
 in the place of chief importance, they are wronging the 
 world. When they emphasize ritual and put it in the place 
 of chief importance, they are wronging the world. 
 
 Glance at one or two illustrations. Go back and find the 
 old warfare, bitterness, and persecution between the Jews, 
 and the Christians, a persecution that has lasted to this cen- 
 tury; and for what? Entirely from questions of doctrine. 
 When, a few years ago, the grand old centenarian saint, Sir 
 Moses Montefiore, died, a man illustrious his whole life long 
 for the sweetness and amiability of his character and the 
 magnificence and breadth of his charities, the question was 
 raised in hundreds of churches as to whether to-day he was 
 not suffering the torments of hell. Why ? For any question 
 of good character? Not at all. Simply on account of the 
 differences of doctrine between the Jew and the Christian. 
 
 There has been an age-long feud between the Greek 
 Church and the Catholic Church. No one doubts that there 
 are as good men in the Greek Church as in the Catholic, as 
 charitable, kind, loving, and patriotic and public-spirited 
 men ; yet there is a bitterness between those two churches 
 that puts a gulf between them wider than between either of 
 them and paganism. Why ? One cause is that the Catholic 
 Church holds that Jesus was made of the same substance, or 
 was of the same substance, as the Father ; while the Greek 
 theologian said he was not of the same substance, but only of 
 like substance. These questions and others like them split 
 the Greek Church and the Catholic, and created this antag- 
 onism which has lasted for centuries. 
 
 And then think of the persecutions of the Protestants on 
 
Free Religion and Ethical Culture JJ 
 
 the part of the Catholics. Nobody has ever raised a ques- 
 tion as to whether these Protestants were good and true men 
 in their character and their daily life. It was such as 
 whether they believed in transubstantiation, whether they 
 believed in this or that doctrine. And so the world has 
 fought and persecuted and hated, and rivers of blood have 
 flowed, and cities have been razed to the ground, whole pop- 
 ulations have been made homeless, simply on account of 
 these quarrels over what the Ethical Culture man is ready 
 to say nobody knows anything about or is ever likely to 
 know. And this they offer as one reason for saying, We will 
 cease utterly to have to do with these questions ; we will turn 
 to the practical matters of life. 
 
 Then take the matter of ritual. Curiously enough, men 
 and women have been trained in such a way that they will 
 lay more stress on some little form of service than they do 
 even on a doctrine or the most serious questions of character 
 and conduct. If I had time to trace the origin of these 
 ideas, you would find how natural they were, how inevitable 
 they were, in certain stages of human culture. But the Eth- 
 ical Culture men believe that the time has come when sensi- 
 ble people, at any rate, ought to know better, and ought to 
 turn to something of more importance than these questions. 
 
 Let me give you an illustration of what I mean. Go back 
 to ancient Rome, before Christianity existed, and you find 
 that, under the guidance of the priesthood, the extremest 
 emphasis was laid on such questions as this : as to just where 
 the sacrifices to the gods should be rendered ; as to precisely 
 the nature, the character, the physical peculiarities of the 
 victim; as to what kind of wood should be burned in making 
 the fire ; as to what kind of knife should be used in slaying 
 the victim ; as to just how the priest should stand in the per- 
 formance of the ritual ; as to whether he should face to one 
 
y8 Signs of the Times 
 
 point of the compass or the other. At one place in the 
 ritual the priest must stand on one foot : which must it 
 be ? He must go through certain motions and gestures. He 
 must intone the words that he pronounced in his religious 
 service in a particular way. All these matters in the ritual 
 were fixed hard and fast ; and the people came to believe 
 that the gods they worshipped would not hear their prayers, 
 would not grant the favors they desired, would not ward off 
 the calamities they feared, if there was a mistake, even an 
 unconscious mistake, in any of these little petty peculiarities 
 of the ritual, so that it became of much more consequence 
 than the character of the people. A priest might be utterly 
 unworthy in his character and yet prevail with the gods, if he 
 were exact in the ritual. But let him be the veriest saint 
 that ever lived, if he made a mistake in the pronunciation of 
 a word, in a gesture, his whole service went for nothing. 
 We have not outgrown such ideas yet, even in the Christian 
 Church. You are familiar with the fact that the city of 
 London, and since that time the city of New York, in church 
 quarters, have been convulsed by controversies that lasted 
 for years over the question as to the robe that the priest 
 should wear, whether it should be of one color, or one 
 pattern, or another. You know that the churches have quar- 
 relled over the question whether the priest in saying certain 
 prayers should face the east, take the eastward position, as 
 it is called, or whether it were permissible to face in some 
 other direction, an old relic of sun-worship surviving and 
 mighty still in Christianity. And you know also that there 
 are persons I fear they are not entirely wanting even in 
 the liberal branch of the Christian Church who place 
 more emphasis on a question of ritual of attendance at 
 church, of reading the Bible, as to just how the Sabbath 
 shall be observed than they do on some very important 
 
Free Religion and Ethical Culture 79 
 
 questions of character and conduct. I think I know certain 
 liberals in good standing who would be troubled over what 
 they would regard as an infringement of Sunday ; and yet 
 they are not troubled over the fact that they pick their 
 neighbor's character to pieces in a very slanderous way, are 
 guilty of unkindness, of uncharitableness, of hard feelings, 
 of hard speaking, guilty of a hundred things that interfere 
 with the peace, the beauty, the growth of society. But, as 
 Jesus said ages ago, they are very particular about the tithing 
 of mint and anise and cumin. Jesus did not say that these 
 were of no importance, but he said that other things were of 
 a good deal more importance. And so the Ethical Culture 
 men have said, Whatever others do, we propose to leave the 
 other world out of account for the present. They take the 
 position of Thoreau when he was dying. Parker Pillsbury 
 sat by his bedside, and said, " Henry, as you get close to the 
 border, do you see or hear anything from the other side ? " 
 And Thoreau replied, " One world at a time, Parker." This 
 is the position of the Ethical Culture men. 
 
 But let me interject a sentence here in which I express my 
 own opinions. Whether it is wise or not, and I do not be- 
 lieve it is wise, in any case this strange, contradictory 
 human nature of ours is such that it never will consent to 
 take one world at a time. And, to my mind, this is the 
 grandest thing about man, that he feels within himself throb- 
 bing, pulsing, however blindly, something that he is con- 
 vinced transcends this world ; and you will never get him 
 to take one world at a time. 
 
 But this was the position of the Ethical Culture men. 
 They said, We do not think it is worth while to fight over 
 the question whether the bread on the communion table is 
 turned into the body of our Lord or the wine into his blood, 
 while there are hundreds and thousands of people who have 
 
8o Signs of the Times 
 
 bread of no description to eat. We do not think it is worth 
 while to quarrel over the robes of priests, while thousands of 
 people are suffering for the want of the ordinary clothing of 
 life. And they carried out this idea, and said, We propose 
 to devote ourselves to the work of saving this world, to the 
 work of bringing it to a time when wars shall cease, when 
 slavery shall be no more. We propose to reform business, 
 to go into hospitals, heal the wounds, bind up the sores of 
 those who need such care. We propose, if we can, to stay 
 the flow of human tears, to heal the broken-hearted, to set at 
 liberty those that are bound. We propose to devote our- 
 selves to this world, to making it better, to lessening its 
 burden, and to helping people live right here. And they 
 said, We say nothing about any God. We do not propose 
 to talk about him. If there be none, we will try to do the 
 work that he would do if he existed. We do not propose to 
 trouble about any future life. If there be one, we shall be 
 ready for it if we try to live properly here. If there be none, 
 then we will try to make this world, while we go through it, 
 as comfortable as we can. 
 
 This is the position, then, as I understand it, and the work 
 which these men propose to themselves. 
 
 Now I wish to offer, hardly in the way of criticism, and 
 yet it is criticism when you differ from a man and tell the 
 reason why, two suggestions touching the Ethical Cult- 
 ure movement which shall constitute an explanation as to 
 why I cannot join with them. 
 
 I do not believe that they have taken a step towards 
 breadth, towards depth, towards height. I regard the Ethi- 
 cal Culture movement, as compared with the position which 
 I try to occupy to-day, as a narrow, contracted position, as 
 one bounded and hampered. I believe that I have basis, 
 ground for all that is noble and grand in the Ethical Culture 
 movement and something more. 
 
Free Religion and Ethical Culture 81 
 
 In the first place, I do not think that Ethical Culture, if 
 you confine yourself simply to that, has an adequate expla- 
 nation for its existence in an agnostic theory of the uni- 
 verse ; that is, in the theory of the universe which leaves out 
 God as the source, the author, the inspiration of the moral 
 life. I do not believe there is any adequate explanation for 
 this fine and high enthusiasm which these men possess and 
 manifest. 
 
 Let me try to make myself clear, if I can. There is no 
 difficulty, as we study human history, in tracing the origin 
 and growth of the world's ideas of right and wrong. When 
 two people stood face to face with each other, and recog- 
 nized by the power of intelligent sympathy that each had 
 equal rights, that each was capable of suffering, each was 
 capable of enjoying, that each desired to possess certain 
 things, then morality became recognized on the part of both 
 of them. As society has grown in complexity, breadth, 
 depth, height, as men have touched each other at more 
 points, they have recognized more and more the delicacy of 
 these questions of ethics, the questions of right and wrong. 
 
 If, for example, people are to live together and own prop- 
 erty, theft, of course, cannot be allowed. If they are to live 
 together and transact business, indiscriminate and universal 
 lying cannot be allowed. There must be a basis of trust in 
 society ; and it is no very difficult feat of logic for a man to 
 say, Since I live and enjoy life and would not like to be put 
 to death, therefore I have no right to put another to death 
 who also likes to live. So all these questions of practical 
 ethics are plain and easy, no matter what theory of the uni- 
 verse we have, whether there is any God or not, whether 
 there is any future life or not. These questions are plain 
 enough. 
 
 But here is the difficulty, and one that deeply concerns 
 
82 Signs of the Times 
 
 this marvellous human nature of ours. The origin of any 
 idea of right or wrong, the conception of myself as an imper- 
 fect being, the desire to grow and expand, to become some- 
 thing more and better, all this has sprung from the fact 
 that man is this curious being, the only one on earth, so far 
 as we know, who dreams, who has an ideal of something 
 finer, something more beautiful, something better than ever 
 was. Where did he get it ? Where did he get this dream ? 
 Where did he get this ideal ? Unless there be a power, a 
 life, adequate to the dream, then it is something utterly un- 
 explainable ; and if you say there is no God, and the dream 
 came somehow out of matter, earth, soil, why then you must 
 change your definition of soil. You must have a kind of 
 earth that thinks, feels, recognizes the principle of justice, 
 that can pity, that cares for peace on earth, that knows 
 what it is to be tender and kind and loving, and that can 
 blossom into a Jesus. And, when you get that, I defy any- 
 body to tell me the difference between that and what I mean 
 when I say spirit or God. If, then, man is a moral being, 
 if he dreams of something that transcends him forever and 
 makes his life an eternal pursuit, that demands something 
 that the Ethical Culturist philosophy says must be left out 
 of account because we do not know anything about it, I 
 differ from the Ethical Culture men right there. 
 
 I differ radically in another way. I do not believe that 
 the Ethical Culturist can give me any adequate reason, any 
 adequate motive, for the kind of life he wants me to live. 
 If there is no future, if, when we lie down in the dust, that 
 is the end of us, and if, after a certain length of time, this 
 whole world and all that we see are to come to an end, and 
 there is to be nothing but what we call dead matter again, 
 then on that theory of the universe there is no adequate 
 motive for the kind of moral life that the finest of these 
 
Free Religion and Ethical Culture 83 
 
 Ethical Culture men both illustrate and demand. When I 
 hear Felix Adler, for example, at his best, I think I am 
 listening to one of the old Hebrew prophets, a man in- 
 spired, a man on fire with, the noblest enthusiasm, and a 
 man who, by the way, at every third sentence, as it seems to 
 me, implies what I believe in of God and the future, and 
 denies his own premises. So much finer must I regard his 
 spiritual nature than the logic of his position. 
 
 It is true, if the world is only going to live for one day, 
 and then we are to sink into nothingness true even then 
 that it would be better for people not to steal, not to be 
 unkind, not to be cruel, not to cut each other's throats, to 
 obey the practical principles of morality ; but, if there is no 
 grand future, then I say a practical, adequate motive for 
 doing these things seems to me to be wanting. Morality 
 would last, but it would entirely change its nature. 
 
 Take an illustration. Suppose I knew that I am to live 
 just one year from to-day, and then am to die. I should 
 lay out my life on a scale adapted to that brief period. If, 
 on the other hand, I could be sure that I am going to live 
 twenty-five years more, do you not see how natural it would 
 be for me to lay out my life on another scale? It would 
 change the whole purpose, scope, and emphasis of my life. 
 So I believe, if this world is the end, it would still be better, 
 if you can get people to see it, for them to live true, noble, 
 moral, and helpful lives ; but the grandeur of the motive is 
 taken away. I think the finest thought from the agnostic 
 point of view in our literature is that wonderfully sweet and 
 beautiful " Choir Invisible " : 
 
 " O may I join the choir invisible 
 Of those immortal dead who live again 
 In minds made better by their presence : live 
 In pulses stirred to generosity, 
 
84 Signs of the Times 
 
 In deeds of daring rectitude, in scorn 
 
 For miserable aims that end with self, 
 
 In thoughts sublime that pierce the night like stars, 
 
 And with their mild persistence urge man's search 
 
 To vaster issues. 
 
 " So to live is heaven : 
 To make undying music in the world, 
 Breathing as beauteous order that controls 
 With growing sway the growing life of man. 
 
 " This is life to come, 
 Which martyred men have made more glorious 
 For us who strive to follow. May I reach 
 That purest heaven, be to other souls 
 The cup of strength in some great agony, 
 Enkindle generous ardor, feed pure love, 
 Beget the smiles that have no cruelty, 
 Be the sweet presence of a good diffused, 
 And in diffusion ever more intense. 
 So shall I join the choir invisible, 
 Whose music is the gladness of the world." 
 
 This is the song of the agnostic, the song of the Ethical 
 Culturist, as she would undoubtedly have called herself had 
 she been here. But it seems to me that here is the flame of 
 a religious fire kindled on the altar of faith in a future life; 
 for all the way through it carries the implication that some- 
 how she is to be there, rejoicing in all this glory that she has 
 helped to create. Yet, on her theory, she is to be simply 
 a memory then, and know nothing of all this grand thing 
 that came to be. 
 
 To face the matter frankly and squarely, I think we have 
 a right to ask the Ethical Culture men to tell us why. Why 
 should I do ? If there is no God, if there is no intelligence, 
 no goodness, no life in the universe, then my happiness is 
 just as important as the happiness of a man who perhaps will 
 live five hundred years from now. When he comes, if he 
 
Free Religion and Ethical Culture 85 
 
 dares to be happy, it will be just as wrong as it is for me to 
 be happy to-day. Why, then, should I go without? Why 
 should I suffer, why should I sacrifice, why should 1 crucify 
 myself to make him have a pleasant time when he is born, 
 when the end after all is that both of us will cease to be, 
 and there is nobody to know and nobody to care ? It seems 
 to me that the mainspring and motive for sacrifice are taken 
 away. Why should a man be a martyr, extinguish life itself? 
 W r hy, Ethical Culture exists simply to make life as comfort- 
 able and pleasant as possible. Martyrdom is its reductio ad 
 absurdum. It is a contradiction of the very purpose for 
 which it exists. Why should Jesus go to the cross, if that is 
 the end of Jesus, simply that somebody else might not suffer 
 the pang that was inflicted upon him ? Why should the men 
 in the East End of London to-day be quiet, orderly, well- 
 behaved, and let the Duke of Westminster, who owns almost 
 acres of the city of London, ride in his carriages and eat his 
 dinners in perfect peace, when he has never lifted a finger or 
 done one stroke of work to earn that which he enjoys and 
 for the lack of which they starve ? If there is nothing be- 
 yond, if there is no hope to buoy them up, if there is no 
 grand purpose in bearing up, why not nihilism and rebellion 
 for the sake of getting whatever of the world's enjoyment 
 they can before we all go into the dust together, and the 
 tragical farce is done ? 
 
 The Ethical Culture men say that doctrine is of impor- 
 tance only as it leads to conduct, that ritual is of importance 
 only as it leads to conduct. I say there is something more 
 important than doctrine not only, something more important 
 than ritual not only ; there is something more important 
 than conduct even. The doctrine and the ritual and the 
 conduct are means to an end, exist for something that tran- 
 scends them all. What is that something ? Life. The 
 
Signs of the Times 
 greatest men of the world have been athirst for the infinite 
 
 srtL^v 7 uf e " Hfted UP h ? this qable in- 
 
 st.nct, this insatiable thirst for the infinite life. And this 
 thirst must be satisfied. Yon must have a theory of the 
 universe that will explain it, or you have no true theory; and 
 it can be explained only when we suppose that the infinite 
 hfe of which we are children, in the silence of the soul is 
 calling to us and saying, Be ye perfect even as your Father 
 in heaven is perfect." This theory, and this alone, I believe 
 runs a line of light and rationality through the long struggle 
 of the world. I believe that the one thing for which ey 
 soul exists is to eternally thirst for and find God. 
 
 " Rivers to the ocean run, 
 
 Nor stay in all their course; 
 Fire ascending seeks the sun, 
 
 Both speed them to their source. 
 So a soul that's born of God 
 
 Pants to view his glorious face, 
 Upward tends to his abode, 
 To rest in his embrace." 
 
SCIENTIFIC MATERIALISM. 
 
 It does not seem to me at all strange that there should 
 exist, as one of the signs of the times, this fact of scientific 
 materialism. In the break-up of the old faith, men will natu- 
 rally reach out in this direction and that, trying to find some 
 consistent theory of things. For all people who think at all 
 must try to think things through far enough, at any rate, to 
 discover a place of mental rest. There are thousands in 
 the modern world who are half inclined to a materialistic 
 theory of things, but who have not thought it through to see 
 just what it means, to find out whether "they can explain 
 the more important facts of life on that theory. They are 
 confused and troubled as they try to think and believe in 
 God. The world is not governed as they would suppose it 
 would be by an all-powerful, all-wise, and all-loving being. 
 They begin to wonder whether there is any other way of ex- 
 plaining it. 
 
 Livingstone somewhere tells of a conversation that he had 
 with an old Bechuana chief in Africa, a man who must have 
 been much superior to the ordinary members of his tribe. 
 He says that the old chief said to him : Sometimes I leave 
 my kraal and go out and sit down on a stone, and think and 
 wonder. I look up to the sky, I see the clouds floating over- 
 head, and try to make out what they are, where they came 
 from, where they are going, who made them. And at night 
 under the stars I wonder what all this means : Who am I, 
 what am I, where did I come from, what is my nature, where 
 
88 Signs of the Times 
 
 am I going, what does all this scene of the world and of 
 mankind mean ? Others besides the Bechuana chief have 
 asked this question, and others besides him have been puz- 
 zled for an answer. We are far enough advanced in our 
 thought to-day to see that the answer must be in one direc- 
 tion or the other : it must be God, or it must be scientific 
 materialism, one or the other, which ? 
 
 The progress of human thought has been from the first 
 towards unity. You know that it is a part of the formula of 
 evolution to state the fact that all growth is from the homo- 
 geneous to the heterogeneous, from the simple to the com- 
 plex. This is illustrated well enough in the case of the 
 growth of the oak. Here is an acorn, perfectly simple, ap- 
 parently of similar substance all through. You plant it. 
 There comes up a little sprout first from the earth, one stem. 
 This stem divides and branches this way and that until there 
 are a thousand twigs and leaves : the growth is from the 
 simple towards the complex. 
 
 As we try to explain the meaning of life, we reverse that 
 process. We begin with the multiplicity of things, and we 
 think towards unity. We try to find some simple force, 
 power, cause, out of which all these things that we see may 
 have been developed ; and the question is whether this one 
 substance, if we can find it, is spirit or matter, God or the 
 world without God. 
 
 I wish to illustrate how, in a few departments, this process 
 of thought has been carried on. The companions of the old 
 Bechuana chief, barbaric men in all ages, have explained 
 the multiplicity of things by the multiplicity of causes and 
 powers. There have been as many gods in their imagina- 
 tions as there have been facts and forces in the world around 
 them. Thousands of things, thousands of deities as the 
 causes of those things. But the intelligent part of the world 
 
Scientific Materialism 89 
 
 has progressed far enough to see one God, one force, one 
 element, and to look for one far-off event, whether divine or 
 not, and divine or not according to the theory you hold. 
 
 The same process of seeking for unity has gone on in 
 other departments of thought. There is a multiplicity of 
 nations ; but we know that these nations, many of them, 
 have sprung from some common source. So we trace back 
 towards the twilight of the world ; and we see fewer and 
 fewer, until the conviction is forced upon us that, if God has 
 not made of one blood all nations who dwell on the face 
 of the earth, at any rate they have been developed from one 
 blood, that all peoples are one, have one essential nature. 
 So in regard to a thousand of the great facts of the world. 
 The tendency everywhere is towards unity, towards finding 
 some one common substance underlying the diversity of 
 form, towards finding some one force as the explanation of 
 the multiplicity of forces. We find this same process going 
 on in chemistry. There used to be supposed to be no end 
 of elements. Chemical investigation has reduced them to- 
 fewer and fewer. It has been found out that the diversity 
 of form, of taste, of color, of force in every direction, while 
 it exists, does not mean necessarily so wide a diversity of 
 substance, but that these various forms are the result only 
 of the various combinations of a few simple elements. We 
 cannot understand how it is, but we know the fact. We 
 know that the combination of precisely the same elements in 
 some mysterious way produces the most marked diversity of 
 result. We know that a bit of coal and a diamond are com- 
 posed of precisely the same elements. It must be some 
 curious variety of arrangement of the particles. We do not 
 know what it is that produces the difference, but they are 
 the same at bottom. So we know it is a chemical fact 
 that there are certain substances that are healthful and some 
 
90 Signs of the Times 
 
 that are deadly poison, but yet they contain the same chemi- 
 cal elements. How it is that they produce such diverse re- 
 sults we have not as yet been able to discover. One of the 
 most magnificent discoveries of the scientific world tends in 
 this direction. We talk about light, heat, magnetism, elec- 
 tricity, and they seem as different as different can be. Yet 
 we have discovered what is called the law of the transfor- 
 mation of energy. We know that all these different forces 
 are one. They are nothing else but different modes of mo- 
 tion. So the tendency, as I said, in all directions of inves- 
 tigation is towards unity. When we consider the fact that 
 the physical scientist has achieved so much, has attained 
 such wonderful results in his different departments of 
 thought, we must not wonder if he becomes a little proud, 
 apparently arrogant, if he fancies that he holds in his hand 
 the key of the explanation of everything. He has unlocked 
 so many doors that he sees no reason why he should con- 
 sider that there is any door which he cannot unlock, until it 
 be proved to the contrary. 
 
 The old Greeks speculated as to how all the universe, as 
 we see it, might have been produced as the result of the 
 movements of little atoms. Some of the Roman philoso- 
 phers speculated in the same direction ; but, when Christian- 
 ity came, it for a time absorbed into itself all the scientific 
 and philosophic minds of the civilized world, and turned 
 them aside from these paths of physical investigation. But, 
 with the growth of scepticism in these recent centuries, 
 scepticism concerning the finality of what has been called 
 divine truth, scientific men have taken up this old specula- 
 tion once more, and are beginning to discuss the question 
 whether the universe, including men, all we are and all we 
 may be, is not explicable in the light of a purely physical 
 theory of things, 
 
Scientific Materialism 91 
 
 The scientist deals with matter and force. He is ready to 
 say, Give me matter and force and unlimited time, and it is 
 conceivable how out of this may have come all we know, all we 
 see, all we hope for. Tyndall within recent years has raised 
 a discussion in both Europe and America by declaring it as 
 his opinion that matter contained within itself "the promise 
 and potency of every form of life." Right there, then, is the 
 question, Does matter contain the promise and the potency 
 of every form of life ? Has the clod beneath our feet within 
 its mysterious depth the fountain and source of the soul, our 
 dream of God and immortality ? This is the question. Only 
 if you come to the conclusion that scientific materialism can 
 explain these things, then you must remember, though 1 
 would not have that prejudice you against a careful search 
 as to just what is true, you must remember that it pre- 
 cludes any belief in God, any belief in immortality. For, if 
 life be the result of organization, then, when organization 
 ceases to exist, of course life ceases to exist with it. Gau- 
 tama believed this so far as the individual was concerned, 
 and compared himself to a chariot. A chariot is of such a 
 form and color and such construction. It moves under the 
 impulse of the appropriate power. It is what it is by virtue 
 of the relation of its parts to each other. Take it to pieces, 
 and there is no chariot any longer. So he believed that, 
 when death, when the force of disintegration, took man to 
 pieces, that man as an individual ceased to exist. 
 
 If this theory then be true, we are only the products of 
 this mysterious material force round us, just as are flowers 
 and plants. The beauty and the promise exist for a little 
 while. Then frost nips them, and they go back to dust; 
 and that is the end of the individual flower. Other flowers 
 will bloom next year ; but that flower never appeared before 
 in all the ages, and never will appear again to the end of time. 
 
92 Signs of the Times 
 
 I speak of this that you may understand the question at 
 issue, because, as I said, I think there are hundreds and 
 thousands of people who speculate carelessly and crudely in 
 this direction or that without having thought the thing through 
 to see clearly what the issue involved must be. 
 
 A man who starts with this theory of scientific materialism 
 assumes generally that he knows matter and knows force. 
 People very commonly delude themselves with this idea. 
 They know what a brick is. They know what a bowlder is. 
 They have seen a brick. They have handled it, and know 
 how solid, how hard, how real it is ; but they say, Nobody 
 ever saw a soul, nobody ever saw thought, nobody ever han- 
 dled a feeling. These they regard as evanescent, elusive, 
 shadowy, flitting, coming and going, and so, unreal. But 
 they say, I know matter. I know what that is. That is 
 something I come in contact with every day. 
 
 Here I wish to call you to consciousness of the fact that 
 just precisely the reverse of this is true. The only things 
 that any man knows, ever did know, ever can know, are the 
 facts of consciousness. I know I think, I know I feel, I 
 know I hope, I know I fear, I know I love. But what do I 
 know about this desk ? The existence of the desk is merely 
 a matter of inference. I reach out my hand, and touch what 
 I call this desk ; and I feel something that seems to me hard. 
 I feel a force that resists my pressure ; but what is it ? This 
 feeling of resistance is only a fact of my consciousness. I 
 look at it, and I see what I call shape and color; but what 
 are shape and color ? Facts again of consciousness. Sup- 
 pose I attempt to lift it. I say it is heavy. What do I 
 mean by heavy ? I mean and can only mean another fact of 
 consciousness. Something resists the pull of my muscles; 
 and the pull of my muscles is simply an expression of my 
 will. All we know directly of any force in this universe is 
 
Scientific Materialism 93 
 
 the force of the will. The source then and the root of this 
 wondrous show of things, these are only inferences from 
 facts of consciousness; so that what we really know is spirit, 
 what we really know is mind, what we really know is thought, 
 is consciousness. Suppose you take the bowlder that you 
 think you know so much about. Apply a sufficient amount 
 of heat to it, and you can make it molten ; more heat still, 
 and it evaporates as steam ; more still, and it has disap- 
 peared in the air, is absolutely lost to the cognizance of 
 every one of our senses. Where is it gone? Pursue an 
 atom. Scientific men themselves confess that they do not 
 know what an atom is ; they have never seen one. They are 
 too small to be seen or touched by the most delicate instru- 
 ment of scientific investigation. What is an atom ? Nobody 
 knows. Pursue the atom, and all you can find is what Fara- 
 day, one of the most famous chemists of the world, called a 
 point of force. What a point of force is even Faraday did 
 not know. So this matter that seems so solid, so real, so 
 simple, fades off into the infinite mystery ; and all you know 
 again are the facts of consciousness. 
 
 Suppose for a few moments we consider this matter as 
 something very real. Let us treat it in the ordinary com- 
 mon-sense way. Let us take matter made up of atoms aggre- 
 gated into molecules, and so into larger aggregations until 
 they are piled into mountains and massed into stars and 
 solar systems. If all that exists is merely the result of cer- 
 tain modifications of these atoms of matter, then what? 
 Then it seems to me that we must change our definition of 
 matter so completely as to make it identical practically with 
 spirit. For we know, as I said, that thought exists, feeling 
 exists, consciousness exists ; and we know that whatever 
 exists as a fact to be observed must have existed in the cause 
 that produces that fact, that is, the mind demands an ade- 
 
94 Signs of the Times 
 
 quate cause as the explanation of any result. If, then, mat- 
 ter is identical with soul, with thought, with feeling, with 
 fear, with love, with hope, with consciousness, then matter is 
 spirit and spirit is matter; and it is no matter which term 
 you use. 
 
 I propose now to raise two or three objections to the 
 theory of scientific materialism, objections that seem to me 
 absolutely unanswerable. If we assume that matter and 
 spirit are practically identical, then that means the death 
 of the theory of scientific materialism once for all. 
 
 Considering matter, then, in the ordinary way, it seems to 
 me utterly impossible for us, on the theory of materialism, 
 to explain the fact of life. No scientific man has ever yet 
 been able to trace the origin of the lowest form of life to 
 anything except some pre-existing form of life. Life the 
 parent of life always and everywhere. Life never yet said 
 father and mother to that which was dead. The difference, 
 then, between the smallest particle of protoplasm and the 
 smallest pinch of dust, one of them being alive and the 
 other not alive, is an impassable gulf, which cannot conceiv- 
 ably be crossed by the human mind. Indeed, the wisest 
 scientific men of the world admit this. They say that, while 
 thought corresponds to and, so far as we know, is insepara- 
 ble from certain molecular movements in the brain, that yet 
 the thought is no part of these molecular movements, does not 
 seem to be the product of them, and is utterly inexplicable in 
 the light of these movements. Tyndall himself admits I 
 have quoted him on one side, and I will now quote him, in 
 substance, on the other that the difference between feeling 
 and matter has never been explained and cannot conceivably 
 be explained, and that modern science is no nearer to the 
 solution of the problem than was the earliest man who ever 
 asked the question. Life, then, cannot be explained in the 
 light of this theory of scientific materialism. 
 
Scientific Materialism 95 
 
 One other thing it seems to me utterly impossible to ex- 
 plain on that theory, and that is the fact that men talk about 
 certain things as right and certain other things as wrong. 
 How does it happen, if man is only a temporary aggregation 
 of particles of matter, produced without any will, produced 
 without any consciousness, produced without any moral 
 sense, without his own will or consciousness or moral sense, 
 any thought of which he is the outcome, how does it happen 
 that this clod of matter should stand upon its feet and look 
 into the sky, look round over the world, and criticise other 
 aggregations of matter as good or as bad ; should look into 
 the sky and feel like demanding of some power an explana- 
 tion for what it feels to be the evils of life ? On that theory 
 there is no court to which an appeal can be sent up. No- 
 body is responsible for it ; nobody did it ; there is no mind 
 to think about it, no heart to care about it, no hand to make 
 anything better, no purpose to plan a result that shall be 
 grander. 
 
 How does it happen, then, on this theory, that the thought 
 of the distinction between right and wrong should ever 
 exist ? I will warrant that no bowlder in the field ever had 
 any accusation to bring against any other bowlder. No 
 flower ever found fault with any other flower. No wild ani- 
 mal in the woods ever had a conception of justice in the 
 relation in which he stood to any other wild animal. It is 
 only when we come up to self-conscious man that there is 
 the dawn of this grandest of all faculties, the moral sense of 
 right and wrong, the thirst for justice, the desire for the bet- 
 terment of the world's affairs. 
 
 Then there is another thing that, it seems to me, material- 
 ism utterly fails to explain ; and that is the essential fact of 
 religion, the fact of worship, the recognition of something 
 above man that seems to him admirable, that fills his soul 
 
g6 Signs of the Times 
 
 with awe, with glory, that lifts him, that thrills him with the 
 thought of the sublime. In those very familiar lines of 
 Byron you remember he says : 
 
 " There is a pleasure in the pathless woods, 
 There is a rapture on the lonely shore, 
 There is society, where none intrudes," 
 
 What pleasure, what rapture, what society, if Byron was 
 merely an aggregation of material particles, and if he stood 
 only in the presence of certain other aggregations of mate- 
 rial particles ? Why should one mass of matter look with 
 reverence and awe on matter of precisely the same kind and 
 quality ? 
 
 Then, what I have many times pointed out, but something 
 that sweeps over me more and more every time I think of it, 
 man is the only being on earth who dreams things better 
 than ever were. Where did he get the dream ? How, if he 
 is simply the product of material experience, does he tran- 
 scend that experience ? How does he create an ideal world 
 so much finer than this that he calls it the kingdom of 
 heaven ? And then, gathering all the resources of his own 
 brain and heart and imagination and enthusiasm, bring them 
 to bear on the work of realizing the kingdom of heaven ? 
 
 No, friends, these things, it seems to me, find no answer, 
 not even an approach to an explanation, in any materialistic 
 theory of the world. 
 
 Consider for a moment. Man in all ages, crude where he 
 was crude, barbaric where he was barbaric, ignorant where 
 he was ignorant, cruel where he was cruel, man in all ages of 
 necessity has dreamed God. Man in all ages has dreamed 
 soul. Man in all ages has dreamed immortal life. Now, 
 these dreams, the most flitting fancy that ever passed like a 
 cloud across the horizon of the human mind, these are 
 
Scientific Materialism 97 
 
 facts, these are realities. These are parts of human nature 
 to be accounted for, to be explained, as much as a table, a 
 bowlder, or a mountain. If there be no facts in the universe 
 corresponding in any way to these grand dreams, then how 
 were they born? No one ever saw the north pole. We 
 know indeed that what we call the north pole of the earth 
 does not point precisely towards the true north. No one 
 ever saw any true north. Yet we know there is a true north, 
 because the magnetic needle points forever towards it. The 
 needle proves the existence of the power that controls it. 
 This human heart has always pointed Godward, soulward, 
 immortalityward, justiceward, truthward. It has always 
 pointed towards these high ideals, and it seems to me abso- 
 lute demonstration that there must be somewhere in this 
 universe something adequate to these ; or else they are facts 
 without a cause. Let me look at a coin, let me examine the 
 impress of it, the figure, the words, the date, and do I not 
 know, though I never saw it, and though it may have been 
 destroyed a thousand years ago, that there was once a die 
 corresponding to them? 
 
 We stand in relation to this universe as the coin to the 
 die, and whatever is in us has been put there as a result; 
 and there must be in the universe somewhere something 
 creatively corresponding to these, something corresponding 
 to my ideal of God, my ideal of the soul, my ideal of im- 
 mortality, my dream of justice, my hope for progress, my 
 thoughts of the good and the beautiful. There must be 
 something in the universe corresponding to these to have 
 created these. 
 
 So it seems to me, after the best thought that I can give 
 to the subject, that materialism as an explanation of you and 
 me is what Mr. Fiske has declared it to be, crude science 
 and exploded philosophy. Not only is it hopeless, not only 
 
98 Signs of the Times 
 
 does it put us in the hands of an iron and careless necessity, 
 not only does it mock our dream of perfect justice on earth, 
 not only does it lay its cold hand of repression on every 
 high ideal, not only does it quench the light of human 
 dreams, not only does it turn all our ideals to folly, but it is 
 condemned in the light of the facts of human nature as un- 
 worthy the clearest and finest thought, as it is unsatisfactory 
 to the noblest hearts of the world. Not only that ; for I be- 
 lieve with those who are seeking a monistic explanation of 
 the universe that at the bottom the universe is one, that 
 thought is one, that life is one, that spirit is one as God is 
 one. And, if that be true, then dream and hope and love 
 and strive on still, for you cannot dream anything so grand 
 as the reality, you cannot imagine any high ideal of justice 
 that shall not be within grasp, you cannot have any hopes 
 too fair, you cannot have any desires too high ; for if God, 
 life, truth, love, justice, goodness, if these are the heart 
 of things, then, though it still doth not appear what we shall 
 be, we know that, in spite of our present imperfection and 
 discouragement, we shall some day "be like him." The 
 prayer of the ages will be answered that we may be perfect 
 even as our Father in heaven is perfect. 
 
INGERSOLLISM. 
 
 The ideas of which Colonel Ingersoll is at present the 
 most prominent exponent in the country are not new. I 
 suppose he would not claim that they are. Neither are his 
 methods original, except in so far as they spring out of his 
 personal characteristics and peculiarities. His ideas are 
 very largely those of Voltaire, of Gibbon, of Hume, of 
 Thomas Paine, of Thomas Jefferson, of Benjamin Franklin, 
 and of a good many other of our Revolutionary heroes. And, 
 curiously enough, they are largely the ideas of many of the 
 most intelligent Biblical critics of the modern world. Many 
 of these Biblical critics are still nominally connected with 
 the orthodox churches. Colonel IngersolPs ideas of the 
 Bible, for example, are largely shared by such men as Bishop 
 Colenso, Professor Robertson Smith, the famous Scotch 
 divine and critic, and by many another whom, if it were 
 worth while, I could name. The ideas, then, are not new; 
 but he has so identified himself in the popular mind with 
 these ideas that they have come to take his name, and so he 
 stands before the world as one of the marked Signs of the 
 Times. Perhaps it would be fair to say that these ideas are 
 his in the sense in which Hamlet belongs to Shakspere. 
 Shakspere borrowed the story and almost all its incidents ; 
 yet to-day, when we speak of Hamlet the Dane, it is not the 
 historical character, it is the creation of Shakspere, that we 
 have in mind. So, when we deal with this subject, we do 
 
100 Signs of the Times 
 
 not go back to the sources whence Colonel Ingersoll has 
 derived these ideas ; but we naturally and inevitably think of 
 him, because he has made himself their popular, prominent 
 exponent. I propose to deal with him therefore, personally, 
 only so far as is necessary to understand the Sign of the 
 Times which he represents. But he has woven his own 
 personality into his work to so large an extent that we shall 
 have to deal with this personality. What sort of a man 
 then is he ? 
 
 He is, in the first place, a prominent and successful lawyer. 
 He was an officer in the army. I first heard of him when 
 he was practising in Peoria, 111. Thence he went to Wash- 
 ington ; and he is now living in New York. I have heard 
 only one charge ever brought against him, outside of his re- 
 ligious opinions ; and that I perhaps should note very briefly. 
 I speak of this because there are those who feel that the 
 character of the man who stands as the exponent of a relig- 
 ious or, if you choose to call it so, an irreligious move- 
 ment is a large factor in that movement. It has been 
 charged upon Colonel Ingersoll that as a lawyer he became 
 connected with a cause which has left a stigma and stain 
 upon his name, his defence of two of the men who were 
 implicated in what was popularly known as the " Star Route 
 Frauds." I shall not undertake either to accuse or to defend 
 him in this matter. I confess to you I do not know enough 
 about it either to condemn or to vindicate. I only know 
 this : that I believe Colonel Ingersoll to be an earnest and 
 sincere man ; and when, some years ago in Washington, I 
 asked him about his connection with this case, he answered 
 me, even with naming indignation, asserting that, according 
 to his own conviction, the part he had played had been an 
 honorable and true part. And I know enough of him to 
 know this : if he believed that he was acting a manly part, 
 
Ingerso llism I O I 
 
 the accusations, the indignation, the howls, of a whole coun- 
 try at his heels, would only make him defend his position 
 the more tenaciously. 
 
 What else is he? He is beyond question, in my judgment, 
 the most remarkable popular orator to-day on earth. I 
 do not say in this country : I say anywhere, so far as 
 I know. I have heard the best speakers of this country; I 
 have heard some of the best speakers in England, including 
 Mr. Gladstone ; and I do not know of a man living who has 
 such mighty mastery over a popular audience as has he. 
 And the secret of his power is not far to seek. He is 
 master of expression, wonderful in his power to mould and 
 shape words to the utterance of his thought. Then he is a 
 poet. I have brought here a book of selections from his 
 utterances. I would like to read extracts illustrating the 
 points I make if there were time. I could read you little 
 bits, six or eight or ten lines, that are prose poems, not 
 only rough gems of thought, but fine-cut jewels of expression, 
 beautiful as flowers, and fragrant with lovely ideas. 
 
 Then he has what any popular orator must have, a deep, 
 high, broad sympathy with whatever is human. I shall 
 touch on this later. I only wish to say now that there is 
 nothing that touches the interests or the welfare of men that 
 does not find echo in his heart and brain. He feels with a 
 power that is simply colossal ; and this I believe to be the 
 key to his character more than anything else with which 
 I am acquainted. 
 
 He is, then, the mightiest popular orator of the world 
 to-day in my opinion, and this without any regard to the 
 subject that he touches. He is not popular merely when he 
 deals with the question of religion. The first time I heard 
 him it was a political address ; and I found myself shaken 
 with laughter and moved to tears, just as he chose to play 
 
102 Signs of the Times 
 
 upon me, quite as much as when I have heard him upon any 
 other theme. 
 
 Another quality that gives him popular power, and that he 
 possesses in an unsurpassed degree, is wit, humor, such as 
 very few other living men possess. It is not of purpose, of 
 malice aforethought, that he ridicules. The wit and the 
 humor bubble up as naturally as do the waters of a spring. 
 He does not hunt for his humorous expressions and witti- 
 cisms. I have heard him for an evening through in private 
 conversation, rippling and bubbling with humor and wit as 
 naturally as the sunshine shimmers on a summer sea. He is 
 one of the most entertaining men in private conversation that 
 I ever have seen. 
 
 These are the qualities that make him so mighty as a pop- 
 ular exponent of anything that he chooses to advocate. 
 
 Is he an honest man ? Does he believe himself to be a 
 reformer, or is he only a vulgar, cheap sensationalist, who is 
 prostituting these divine gifts to which I have referred for 
 the purpose of making money ? This is the common charge 
 that is made against him. And let me note here that this 
 is almost the only charge that is made against him, and for 
 the very significant reason that there is no other that can be 
 made, even for a moment, to stick. I claim no authority in 
 answering this : I only express an individual opinion. I be- 
 lieve, however, that he is as honest and earnest as was ever 
 John Calvin, or Richard Baxter, or Jonathan Edwards. I 
 believe he is as sincere in whatever you choose to call them, 
 his religious or his irreligious opinions, as any man that ever 
 lived or ever spoke. 
 
 Consider for a moment. Does he need to lecture on 
 religious subjects in order to get money? If he had no 
 other resources, or if he could earn thrice as much in this 
 way as in any other, and devoted himself exclusively or 
 
Ingersollism 103 
 
 largely to this, there might be some basis for the charge. It 
 is true that, if he is advertised to speak on any religious 
 subject, in almost any city in the country, without anybody 
 except his own agent to advertise the fact, with no manipula- 
 tion on the part of committee or manager, he can pack the 
 largest halls at almost any price that he chooses to charge. 
 But he is able to make money as a successful lawyer; he 
 is overrun with business. He can make money, and he does, 
 all that he wishes or needs, in other ways. He can make 
 money as a lecturer equally well, whatever his subject. 
 I came across a noteworthy slip from a newspaper, describ- 
 ing an evening spent by Mr. Abbey, the well-known theatri- 
 cal manager, at a soiree where Colonel Ingersoll had been 
 talking about Shakspere. Mr. Abbey expressed it as his 
 opinion that, if the ideas uttered that evening in private 
 conversation were embodied in a lecture, it would be the 
 grandest lecture on Shakspere that the world ever heard; 
 and, furthermore, he expressed his opinion as a business man- 
 ager by saying that he would be willing to guarantee Colonel 
 Ingersoll one hundred thousand dollars a year if he would 
 go over the country lecturing for him, and let him act as 
 his manager. So it is not simply as a religious disputant 
 that he is competent to make money enough to live on. 
 Then it seems to me that, so long as the great majority of 
 ministers feel the divine call to leave a small parish and a 
 poor salary to go to a large parish and a large salary in 
 some city, it is not quite safe for them to trust to the attempt 
 to blacken his character by charging him with being under 
 the influence of pecuniary motives. I believe, then, that he 
 is honest and sincere. 
 
 Not only this. I believe he has sacrificed, and sacrificed 
 largely, for his opinions. The story goes that, when he was 
 a lawyer in Peoria, a friend came one day into his office. 
 
104 Signs of the Times 
 
 Looking over his library, he came across a copy of Paine's 
 " Age of Reason." " How much did this cost you ? " he in- 
 quired. The answer came quick, "The governorship of Illi- 
 nois ! " Whether said or not, this is doubtless true. No 
 man in the country to-day is more conspicuously gifted with 
 all those qualities that make a man popular than is he. 
 And, in my judgment, there is no office in the gift of the 
 people, not excepting the White House itself, that he might 
 not have reasonably expected to gain, provided he had been 
 willing to even keep still. He need not have changed his 
 opinions: it would have been enough if he had done as 
 many others do, covered them up. But he has chosen to 
 pay the price of appearing what he is. In an age of so 
 much dodging and posturing for effect, let us at least appre- 
 ciate and honor the honesty that dares to speak its mind. 
 
 Now what is his religious position ? What are his antece- 
 dents ? His father was a Presbyterian clergyman. By the 
 time he was sixteen years of age, he was thoroughly conver- 
 sant with the Old Testament, and had begun that criticism 
 of it which is so familiar now to the world ; and his father 
 confessed that he did not know how to answer him. The 
 confession of his father will do very well for the confession 
 of most other people who have attempted to answer him 
 since then, so far as these points are concerned. 
 
 There is one little glimpse of his boyhood that I heard 
 him give once in a lecture, which I will attempt to repro- 
 duce, not in his own words, but in mine, showing what the 
 boy was thinking of, what the tendency of his mind was 
 even at that early time ; and there is such a sympathy with 
 that kind of boyhood in my own heart, as I look back to my 
 childish experience, that it touched me very deeply, whether 
 it will touch you or not. He said : I remember one after- 
 noon in spring. I was out in the orchard. I looked up 
 
Ingersollism 105 
 
 and saw the bright blue sky with clouds sailing across it. I 
 listened, and the air was full of bird-song. I leaned up 
 against an apple-tree that was all a-blossom over my head, 
 filling the air with fragrance. I stood there, that sunny, per- 
 fect afternoon, and thought of hell. That is what was 
 pressing upon his heart. How many times do I remember 
 a similar experience, lying on my back in the grass, watch- 
 ing the sky and the clouds, half listening to the birds, and 
 thinking eternity, eternity, eternity, until I almost swooned 
 with trying to grasp the conception, and thinking what it 
 would be to endure eternal pain ! This is the kind of 
 childhood that thousands and thousands of boys have gone 
 through in this country, and in all the past of Christendom. 
 . His father was a Presbyterian clergyman ; and it has been 
 charged against him, over and over again, that he was utterly 
 lacking in reverence, even for his parents, in attacking Pres- 
 byterianism so bitterly as he has done. I wish to give you 
 his idea of honoring his father and mother. He says : " You 
 never can honor your father by going round swearing to his 
 mistakes. You never can honor your mother by saying that 
 ignorance is blessed because she did not know everything. 
 I want to honor my parents by finding out more than they 
 did." 
 
 I think that is sufficient answer. It is exaggerated and 
 unwise honor to parents that has created China the stagnant 
 nation that it is. Suppose the human race had begun back 
 in the stone age to honor father and mother in such a way 
 as to consider it wicked to learn anything that they had not 
 known, we should be in the stone age still. The way to 
 honor father and mother is to try to make a better world for 
 their grandchildren. 
 
 We are ready now to consider the religious position that 
 this man occupies. I wish to try fairly and simply to inter- 
 
106 Signs of the Times 
 
 pret it to you as best I can. He is known, fairly I think, 
 more than for anything else, as the great red-hot antagonist 
 of those teachings of the Church which he regards as incar- 
 nate cruelty. The great thing he attacks is the orthodox 
 belief in hell, because he thinks it crushes the human heart, 
 blots out human happiness, makes people afraid to think, 
 turns the brain into a dungeon, and prevents human prog- 
 ress. 
 
 Now let me refer to what I hinted a little while ago, his 
 sympathy. This I said, and I repeat it, I look upon as the 
 key to his character and career. I have never known a man 
 more tender, more easily touched, more easily moved. He 
 is as responsive to all the movements of life and thought 
 about him as the leaves of a poplar tree to the movements 
 of the air. As an illustration, you will pardon the per- 
 sonality, some years ago, when I was preaching in Wash- 
 ington, he was living there, and he thought that I was either 
 so good or so bad I never asked him which that he de- 
 sired to come and hear me preach. He had not been into a 
 church for a good many years. He sat about four pews 
 from the front ; and, as I preached, I naturally watched him. 
 He seemed to me to have completely lost himself, to be as 
 unconscious of himself as a child at a show. Whenever 
 there was a sharp remark, a smile would play over his face; 
 and, when anything tender was said, tears would start and 
 run down his cheeks, while he was so absorbed in listening 
 that he did not rouse himself to consciousness of their pres- 
 ence even enough to wipe them away. He seemed to be an 
 instrument to be played on, as perfect in that direction as he 
 has found the hearts and brains of other people instruments 
 on which he can play. This tremendous power of sympathy 
 turns him into a flaming hatred of anything that seems to 
 him causeless, inexcusable cruelty. So this one great, hor- 
 
Ingersollism 107 
 
 rible, world-shadowing dogma of eternal hate has been the 
 one thing that he has devoted his life to fighting. 
 
 Let us note a few of the things that he believes and a few 
 that he does not believe, without special regard to logical 
 order. 
 
 What does he believe about God ? He is not an atheist. 
 He is only what Huxley and Herbert Spencer and a great 
 many of the best scientific men of the world are to-day, an 
 agnostic. You ask him if there is a God in the universe, 
 and he says, " I do not know." He only feels sure that there 
 is no such God as the one which has been set forth in the 
 creeds of the orthodox churches. He does not fight against 
 God. He fights only against certain partial, incomplete, 
 unworthy, unworshipful, cruel conceptions of God. I heard 
 him say, humorously, once : " I do not know whether there 
 is any God. I live in one of the rural districts of the uni- 
 verse, and I do not know anything about it." But he frankly 
 confesses that he can conceive of no God that satisfies either 
 his brain or his heart. So there he is an agnostic. 
 
 What about the future life? I must, whether there is 
 time or not, read you one or two brief extracts indicating his 
 ideas in regard to death ; for, leaving aside certainty of the 
 future, I know of nothing more beautiful than are these ex- 
 pressions of his. In a tribute to his own brother, he says : 
 "Life is a narrow vale between the cold and barren peaks of 
 two eternities. We strive in vain to look beyond the heights. 
 We cry aloud, and the only answer is the echo of our wail- 
 ing cry. From the voiceless lips of the unreplying dead 
 there comes no word ; but in the night of death hope sees a 
 star, and listening love can hear the rustle of a wing." 
 
 Then, again, in his remarks at the grave of a child of a 
 friend, he says, " We do not know whether the grave is the 
 end of this life or the door of another, or whether the night 
 here is not somewhere else a dawn." 
 
*o8 Signs of the Times 
 
 Again, he says : " The idea of immortality, that, like a sea, 
 has ebbed and flowed in the human heart, with its countless 
 waves of hope and fear beating against the shores and rocks 
 of time and fate, was not born of any book, nor of any creed, 
 nor of any religion. It was born of human affection ; and 
 it will continue to ebb and flow beneath the mists and clouds 
 of doubt and darkness as long as love kisses the lips of 
 death. It is the rainbow, Hope, shining upon the tears 
 of grief." 
 
 Short of knowledge of the future, I do not know of any- 
 thing in literature more sweet and beautiful than words like 
 these. He is an agnostic here, then, simply saying, " I do 
 not know " ; expressing, however, his belief that, if there be 
 any future, the only way to be ready for it is to live a noble, 
 sweet, and true life here. 
 
 What is his attitude in regard to the Bible ? According to 
 popular opinion, he is spending a large part of his public 
 life ridiculing the Bible. He has never uttered one single 
 word of ridicule for the Bible itself ! He has only ridiculed 
 certain unfounded conceptions of the Bible which he regarded 
 as standing in the way of human freedom and the progress 
 of human thought. 
 
 What is his attitude towards Jesus ? He of course does 
 not accept the theological Christ. But, had I time, I could 
 read to you from this book a loving, tender, reverent, admir- 
 ing tribute to the man Jesus of Nazareth, rejected, cast out, 
 persecuted by the same kind of bigotry whose sting his own 
 heart has felt. 
 
 What else does he teach ? What is his positive teaching ? 
 I do not know anywhere in the world grander and finer 
 teaching concerning such great topics as human liberty, 
 justice, patriotism, honesty, the character and possibilities 
 of women, the beauty of home, than his. He does not wor- 
 
Ingersollism 109 
 
 ship, as he says ; but, when he talks about worship, what he 
 means is that which I should repudiate myself. He does 
 not believe in singing hymns to or uttering words of praise 
 to an infinite being. He thinks it belittling to the concep- 
 tion of God himself to suppose that he wants that kind of 
 fulsome flattery. Again, had I Jime, I could read you glit- 
 tering sentence after sentence on this very theme of worship, 
 expressing what he means by it, worshipping that which is 
 beautiful, that which is true, that which is high, that which is 
 noble in life, the consecration to duty in the midst of dark- 
 ness, of difficulty, of sorrow. 
 
 If we leave one side the question of God and the future, if 
 we simply concern ourselves with this life here, then I hardly 
 know of any man who has voiced its duties, who has 
 expressed its poetry, who has appreciated its sublimity and 
 faithfulness more thoroughly and more completely than he. 
 
 I wish now to raise the question, which seems to me a 
 perfectly legitimate one, What is the cause of a career like 
 this of Mr. IngersolPs ? What has thrown him into such 
 extreme reaction ? I believe that he is a legitimate, nat- 
 ural, necessary outcome of the time. He is a product, 
 by repulsion, of that type of religion, of theology, which he 
 has devoted his life to antagonizing so earnestly and so 
 successfully. Given the teachings concerning God and man 
 and destiny, given the old creeds, and given a man who 
 thinks, and who has a heart to be touched, who has a sense 
 of justice, who is brave enough to speak, and you have a 
 man like Ingersoll, the natural, necessary reaction from 
 the old creed. And I am willing to put myself on record 
 as saying this, and saying it with all the emphasis of which 
 I am capable, and you know I do not agree with Mr. 
 Ingersoll concerning some of the points which I regard as 
 of unspeakable importance; must I choose between the 
 
no Signs of the Times 
 
 conception of the world, of God, of man, of destiny, set forth 
 in any of the authoritative creeds of the orthodox churches 
 of to-day and the position of Colonel Ingersoll, I would take 
 my place gladly, lovingly, tenderly, by his side, and await 
 the outcome, whatever it might be. Rather than hold such 
 a view of God, of his relation to his children, and of the 
 future, as is set forth in the old creeds, oh, I would infinitely 
 rather try to lighten human burdens for a little while here, 
 lift off the weight from some heart that was crushed, wipe 
 away a tear from some eye that was so blinded that it could 
 not see the way, do some little thing to make the world 
 better and brighter, and then sleep forever. I would thank 
 God for the dust and the worm and the darkness and the 
 utter silence infinitely more than I would thank him for his 
 heaven, with me at his right hand, while away over yonder 
 the smoke of " their torment " should " ascend forever and 
 ever." 
 
 At the risk of repeating what I may have given you before, 
 and to show that I do not hold these ideas alone, let me 
 read to you a few lines from Tennyson, of the Church of 
 England, and one of the finest poets of the modern world. 
 In his poem called "Despair," he sets forth the fact that a 
 man and his wife, who had been attending one of the dis- 
 senters' chapels in England, had come to doubt the kind of 
 God and man and destiny there preached. Having lost 
 faith in God and in the future, reaction sets in, and the man 
 and his wife agree that they will get rid of their burden by 
 committing suicide together. For that purpose they go 
 down to the sea, and walk into the waves. The woman is 
 drowned, but the husband is swept ashore, where he finds 
 the minister of the little chapel bending over him; and a 
 part of the poem is devoted to conversation between them, 
 and the man expresses his ideas and, of course, the idea of 
 
Ingersollism ill 
 
 Tennyson, as is plain enough. You would think I were 
 blaspheming, if I were not quoting: 
 
 What ! I should call on that Infinite Love that has served us so well ? 
 
 Infinite cruelty, rather, that made everlasting Hell, 
 
 Made us, foreknew us, foredoomed us, and does what he will with his 
 
 own; 
 Better our dead brute mother who never has heard us groan ! 
 
 Hell ? if the souls of men were immortal, as men have been told, 
 
 The lecher would cleave to his lusts, and the miser would yearn for his 
 
 gold, 
 And so there were Hell forever ! but, were there a God as you say, 
 His Love would have power over Hell till it utterly vanished away. 
 Ah yet I have had some glimmer, at times, in my gloomiest woe, 
 
 Of a God behind all after all the great God for aught that I know ; 
 But the God of Love and of Hell together they cannot be thought, 
 If there be such a God, may the Great God curse him and bring him to 
 naught ! 
 
 Blasphemy ! whose is the fault ? is it mine ? for why would you save 
 A madman to vex you with wretched words, who is best in his grave ? 
 Blasphemy ! ay, why not, being damned beyond hope of grace ? 
 Oh, would I were yonder with her, and away from your faith and your 
 face! 
 
 Blasphemy ! true ! I have scared you pale with my scandalous talk, 
 But the blasphemy to my mind lies all in the way that you walk. 
 
 So far Tennyson. And I utter again every word that he 
 says. For, if I were compelled to choose between a life of 
 human helpfulness here without God or hope, followed by an 
 eternal sleep and the God of the old creeds, I would not 
 hesitate long enough to give utterance to my eagerness in 
 choosing the first; and, if I have a friend on earth who 
 
112 Signs of the Times 
 
 would not choose to go with me on those conditions, I hope 
 he will never tell me so, for I could not respect him so much 
 afterwards. 
 
 And now I wish to say a few words by way of criticism 
 and to make a little more clear what I regard as the defects 
 of Mr. IngersolPs position. His defects are almost entirely 
 negative defects. I do not know one line, one word, one 
 syllable, of positive teaching on the part of Ingersoll con- 
 cerning any great question of secular interest that is not 
 noble and fine and sweet and true, as healthy as the air and 
 as fragrant as the lilies of the field. I do not know one 
 word of positive teaching concerning our life here that he 
 need wish to blot. 
 
 And his home life is as sweet as a poem. Those who 
 have had inside glimpses of his household have learned that, 
 if nothing else is worshipped there, at least he himself is 
 by his wife and children. 
 
 But it is said he has no reverence. Perhaps here it may 
 be well to quote what he says of Voltaire : " In the presence 
 of absurdity he laughed, and was called irreverent." The 
 matter of reverence is a relative one. No man reverences 
 those things that he regards as not worthy of it. And most 
 certainly no man shows more reverence for all that is hu- 
 manly worthy than does he. 
 
 And is it not well for us now and then to recognize the 
 fact that even the Bible itself, in its finest parts, puts human- 
 ity first ? Jesus teaches that so long as we are out of right 
 relation to our fellow-men we can offer no acceptable wor- 
 ship to God. (See Matt. v. 23, 24.) 
 
 And the prophet Micah puts the doing justly and the lov- 
 ing mercy before the walking humbly with God. And John 
 questions the sincerity of professed love to God where the 
 love for the brother is not apparent. Charles Sumner used 
 
Ingersollism 113 
 
 to say, speaking of the two great commandments (love to 
 God and love to man), that he was afraid he did not know 
 much about the first, but he tried to keep the second. 
 
 But I said I was going to criticise. Let me come then to 
 a few hints in that direction. I cannot regard Colonel In- 
 gersoll's philosophy of the universe as a profound philoso- 
 phy. I cannot think that he grasps it as completely as one 
 might. I believe with my whole soul in God as the neces- 
 sary key to the explanation of what is. I regard his philoso- 
 phy of evil as not profound. For if there be God, purpose, 
 outcome, then that evil which troubles the tender-hearted 
 colonel becomes a shadow, a morning mist that flees away 
 in the presence of the eternal sunrise. I cannot think his 
 philosophy of human nature, this wonderful mystery of the 
 human soul, to be profound or complete. He deals too 
 much with the surface of things. I cannot think that he 
 has estimated at their true worth the indicators that point, 
 as it seems to me, with practical certainty towards the out- 
 come over there beyond the shadow that shall redeem all 
 the littleness, all the misery, all the pain, all the cruelty, 
 all the darkness, of the past of human history. One more 
 defect I wish to mention. I think that in his lectures and 
 in his writings he makes the mistake of identifying relig- 
 ion and theology, which is only the theory of religion. He 
 finds the one so faulty and so easily overthrown that he 
 seems to imagine that religion is only a passing phase of 
 human life and is destined to vanish away. 
 
 If now any one is anxious to take away the power and 
 destroy the influence of men like Colonel Ingersoll, there 
 is one sure way. Take away the false, the untenable, the 
 absurd, the unjust, from the religious life of the time, and 
 help build a religion that is reasonable, humane, tender, and 
 true. True religion cannot be ridiculed, for it is not ridicu- 
 lous. 
 
114 Signs of the Times 
 
 And now, at the close, I wish only to say that if the colo- 
 nel is mistaken in his doubts as to a future life, I do not 
 believe he will be sorry to confess his mistake. If I meet 
 him over there, I believe that his true heart will respond to 
 everything true. As he now admires that which is admi- 
 rable, he will easily flame out into worship ; and he will be 
 the readiest to confess the limitations of his thought here, 
 and to go about fearlessly proclaiming the truth, earnestly 
 trying to perform his duty, being faithful and true to friend- 
 ship and to love as he is here below. 
 
RELIGOIUS REACTION. 
 
 In any age when there is a forward movement, whether 
 religious or otherwise, there will always be noted along with 
 it signs and movements of reaction. Perhaps it is safe to 
 say that the intensity of the one fairly gauges the intensity 
 of the other. Yet, when the representatives of this forward 
 movement note these signs of reaction, there is apt to be a 
 feeling of discouragement, a questioning as to whether the 
 progress that they believe in really exists, whether the world 
 is moving forward as fast as might reasonably be expected. 
 When we see intense activity on the part of the represen- 
 tatives of the older types of thought, when we see a schol- 
 arly and religious man like Dr. Huntington leaving the new 
 movement and going back to the old, when we see a man 
 like John Henry Newman, whose intellect and character 
 command the reverence of the world, leaving the forward 
 movement and going back to the old, it is not strange if 
 people raise the question whether they are right. People 
 say to me : Here is so and so, a good man, an earnest man, 
 a seeker of the truth, a scholar, and he is going in precisely 
 the opposite direction from what you are taking. I am ear- 
 nest, I desire to know the way, but I am not a scholar : how 
 shall I know which of you is right ? 
 
 These signs and tendencies of religious reaction, then, 
 need to be noted, to be understood, and to be assigned their 
 
1 1 6 Signs of the Times 
 
 place, so that we may comprehend what they mean and not 
 be overmuch disturbed by them. 
 
 When the children of Israel went out of Egypt, the story 
 tells us that they came in a short time to the borders of the 
 land of promise. Here they paused for a little, and ap- 
 pointed twelve trusty representatives, one from each tribe, to 
 go over and investigate the country, to find out its condition, 
 its desirability as a place of residence, and the difficulties in 
 the way of conquest; and the story goes on to tell us that, 
 in spite of the fact that they had the definite command of 
 God to go forward without fear, that this was the country 
 destined to be theirs, that they were not to be afraid of the 
 stories of giants and of impregnable fortifications, still ten 
 out of the twelve voted against that forward movement. 
 There were only two of that high faith and trust that dared 
 go forward. And I suppose it is true that the world never 
 stood on the borders of any promised land but the majority 
 voted, at first, at any rate, against the forward movement. 
 The majority is never quite up to the highest, finest, and 
 noblest things. 
 
 When I was a boy, I lived on the banks of a beautiful 
 river. I learned to love the river, and I learned to be famil- 
 iar with its habits ; and I noted the fact that in the summer 
 when the water was low, when the tide flowed on with a 
 peaceful, gentle, almost sluggish, motion, the stream was 
 always forward, or almost always. There was rarely an 
 eddy, rarely a backward current, or, if there was any at all, 
 it was so slight, it had so little force, that it could hardly 
 float a chip upon its surface. But I noted another thing: 
 in the spring-time, when the snows were melting up in the 
 mountains towards the north, when the river swelled in its 
 banks and there was a flood, when the tide was mighty and 
 resistless in its force and in its forward motion, then the 
 
Religious Reaction 117 
 
 eddies, the backward currents, were quite as marked, quite 
 as forceful. There was power enough in them sometimes to 
 seize some great tree that was floating down the stream and 
 sweep it for a time backward up the river. So I learned a 
 lesson, that the force of the eddy, the force of the back- 
 water, is in correspondence with the force of the general cur- 
 rent that sweeps onward towards the sea. 
 
 I wish to call your attention now to a few illustrations of 
 the fact that religious reaction always accompanies any great 
 time of definite and distinct forward movement. Just at the 
 time when Christianity was first becoming a force among the 
 Hebrew people, there was also along with it the most intense 
 devotion to the ritual, to the keeping of the old Mosaic order. 
 There was an activity in the old religious life such as had 
 hardly ever been seen in opposition to that which seemed to 
 threaten its permanence and to all that promised a new 
 and larger life for the world. And in the fourth century, 
 after Christianity had conquered the Roman Empire, after 
 Constantine had made it the religion of the court, the author- 
 itative religion of the State, and it seemed supreme, there 
 came, under the reign of Julian, one of his immediate suc- 
 cessors, his nephew, a wide-spread revival of the old Pagan- 
 ism such as the world had hardly seen for centuries. New 
 temples were built, old temples were repaired. Altars were 
 raised, sacrifices performed. The old rites and ceremonies 
 took on the appearance of life such as they had rarely 
 known. It seemed like the upflaring of a fire, more brill- 
 iant than ever just before going out. 
 
 When the Reformation came, wounding to the death as it 
 did the Romish Church, in connection with that movement 
 there was a grand revival of Romanism. There was a 
 marshalling of its forces, a gathering of its powers to meet 
 this threatened attack, so that Romanism never seemed 
 
Il8 Signs of the Times 
 
 more alive than it did in its opposition to the young Refor- 
 mation. And when a few years ago at Oxford the "Essays 
 and Reviews " were published, marking a sort of renaissance 
 of liberal thought, a new birth of the brain and scholarship 
 of England, there went along with it a movement that has 
 taken the name of Dr. Pusey, and the time was marked by 
 the reaction of John Henry Newman and some of the lead- 
 ing minds of the English Church. At this point of time, 
 when human thought was rousing itself to these new con- 
 quests, just then these great lights and leaders went deliber- 
 ately back and vowed their allegiance to the older faith. 
 
 So to-day we find, on the one hand, the movement of relig- 
 ious thought that promises emancipation to the world, that 
 promises a new heaven and a new earth ; yet, on the other, we 
 find books published and elaborate schemes of thought set 
 forth for the older ideas. We find men on every hand turn- 
 ing back to these, trying to prove that there is some way by 
 which they may remain loyal to the old faith, in spite of the 
 new light that is coming into the world. We find intense 
 religious activities, popular revivalism, under marked and 
 mighty leaders over the world, such as have rarely been 
 seen. We find men leaving the older types of a severe Or- 
 thodoxy because the doctrine hurts, laying the emphasis of 
 their lives not on those doctrines, but going into some form 
 of Episcopacy, some established Church, where they can lay 
 the emphasis on the rites, on the ceremonies, where they can 
 forget the doctrinal conditions, where they can lose them- 
 selves in those charitable works that absorb so much of their 
 time. 
 
 In conversation with a clergyman of the Church of Eng- 
 land last summer, I asked him about the tendency of the 
 younger thinkers in the church ; and he said that many and 
 many a man and he spoke of it as quite a general move- 
 
Religious Reaction 119 
 
 merit as the necessary and logical outcome would do one 
 of two things. They would either stop thinking, because 
 afraid to follow thought to its logical conclusion, and turn 
 their attention to the work of practical charity and human 
 service, or else they would take refuge in the High Church 
 forms and rituals, where the emphasis could be placed on 
 these things, and where they might escape from the struggle 
 and conflict of the modern world. 
 
 These are sufficient as illustrations of the tendency towards 
 religious reaction. 
 
 I wish now, if I can, to offer you, in a spirit of perfect 
 fairness and kindness towards those with whom I am deal- 
 ing, some suggestions as to causes. What is the reason for 
 this religious reaction, this going back to the older thought 
 and to what you and I are accustomed to think of as lower 
 types of religious faith and practice ? 
 
 I shall mention several causes, but I wish in the first place 
 to call your attention to one of the fundamental principles of 
 the philosophy of evolution. We are familiar with this gen- 
 eral tendency of all things to grow and to lift, and this is 
 what we mean by the doctrine of evolution. Things grow 
 from low to high, from the simple to the complex, developing 
 higher and higher. But yet the tendency to degenerate on 
 the part of these types, these forms of life that are not so 
 circumstanced as to make growth the natural and easy thing, 
 is just as much a part of evolution as is the tendency to grow 
 when all things favor development. So along with this 
 growth of things there is perpetually to be witnessed the 
 tendency towards what scientists call atavism, that is, a 
 reversion towards an older, lower form of the same thing, 
 the same growth; something that had been passed by re- 
 verted to again. 
 
 W T e find the same tendency in the animal world. After 
 
120 Signs of the Times 
 
 the higher and finer species have been developed, there will 
 be now and then a reversal of the process apparently, a 
 falling back and down, a manifestation of some one of the 
 lower forms and types of life. We find this to be a law: 
 that the highest and finest and last development in any 
 direction, vegetable, animal, human, is always of necessity 
 the least fixed, the least stable, the first to feel the effect of 
 any change of climate or condition. It is the last, highest, 
 finest bud on the tree that is the most easily frost-nipped, if 
 the weather changes or becomes unfavorable to its growth. 
 The hardier and older parts of the tree can stand it. They 
 are more fixed in their form. 
 
 We find the same precisely in regard to men. This indi- 
 vidual reason of ours by which we look over the facts of 
 life and decide as to what we should do in a given set of 
 circumstances is the last and highest development of the 
 human mind. The instinctive life, the impulsive life, we all 
 share with the animal world: this is the older, and conse- 
 quently less easily disturbed. When a man is old, for ex- 
 ample, you will find that he frequently becomes more con- 
 servative. He falls back on to the lower, older life, that 
 which he inherited, that which he was accustomed to as a 
 child. If a man becomes insane, it will be the highest and 
 finest part of his brain that will go first. The lower, the in- 
 stinctive, remains substantially the same. The automatic 
 part of him is about as it was before. So in the presence of 
 some great overmastering emotion. Let, for instance, a 
 panic take a crowd, and the reasoning faculty, the highest 
 and best part of the man, seems to be swept away; and 
 suddenly he is an animal. He is simply carried away by 
 impulse and passion and instinct. The reasoning faculty for 
 the time is broken down ; and the lower, older part of his 
 nature reasserts itself. 
 
Religions React 
 
 So we find that it is not an uncommon tI3fflg'TiJr.!>UHIe great, 
 distinguished leader, in the direction of the larger liberty of 
 the world, in his old age to become false to the grandest 
 things he ever said or did. Perhaps a man who has de- 
 spised the charlatanry of the old priesthood in his old age 
 becomes a child again, and feels too feeble to stand alone, 
 and calls in the aid of the very priest whose work he at- 
 tempted in his maturer time to overthrow; and the world 
 has been troubled by it. And sometimes this has been used 
 as a proof that the new thought was false and wrong, and 
 could not endure the stress of the last and dying hour, when 
 a man was facing the great facts of God and eternity. 
 What it means, however, is simply that his physical weakness 
 has brought about the decay, the disintegration, of the high- 
 est and finest part of his life. There is a reversal, a falling 
 back and down, upon the old, inherited, more stable part of 
 his nature, that which has long endured. 
 
 One of the finest touches of nature anywhere in Shak- 
 spere that I am familiar with is that where some one, speak- 
 ing of Falstaff when he is dying, says that he " babbles of 
 green fields." His life as a courtier and soldier and man of 
 the world was all gone. He was a child again for the time, 
 because the highest and last added element of his life was 
 undergoing a process of decay, and he was sinking back 
 into his older and lower conditions. Here, then, is one 
 reason that explains this religious reaction that we find con- 
 nected with all epochs of the world's progress. 
 
 Then there is another reason for turning back. It seems 
 very strange to me, and yet I know it is true on every hand. 
 People think that it is safe for the world to go as far as they 
 themselves go, but they think that there is some hidden 
 danger in taking a step beyond. They make themselves 
 the measure of what is proper in the way of the world's 
 
122 Signs of the Times 
 
 advance. They seem to be afraid ; and I have no question 
 that in most of the cases it is a genuine, earnest, noble 
 anxiety that the essence of the religious life is in danger, 
 if people go, as they say, too far. In many cases, it is a 
 genuine desire to save that which they believe is precious 
 to the world, and on which the world's life depends. Sup- 
 pose I think you will see the parallel that a man had 
 been born and had grown up in a room through which the 
 light entered only by the medium of colored glass or some 
 curiously constructed prism. Suppose he had never seen 
 the outside world, but had learned to love the light, to think 
 of it as coming from heaven, a precious possession by 
 means of which he could see his way, by means of which 
 he could discern forms of beauty, by means of which he 
 could look into the faces of those he loved, by means of 
 which he could read and study. He had learned to think 
 that light was a precious and blessed thing. If some one, 
 then, should come along and propose to him to open the 
 windows, to remove the glass, to take away the prism, he 
 would undoubtedly be fearful that the light itself might be 
 lost. He could not think of light as being safe in limitless 
 space, of its being lighter still out of doors : so he might 
 even fight against being released from this which was really 
 a prison-house. 
 
 Then, again, in other cases I have no doubt that the 
 influence is of that sort which makes us love the old, love 
 that to which we have been accustomed, to feel ill at ease 
 anywhere else. It is not easy for a man to come out from 
 the midst of the circumstances that have cradled him, to be 
 flung over the edge of his nest, to try his new-found wings, 
 to do it fearlessly and freely. The nest is softly lined, it 
 is comfortable, it is home. There is no place to rest in the 
 air: it is filled sometimes with rain and sleet and storm. 
 
Religious Reaction 123 
 
 No wonder that people love their nests ! To be released, 
 to be driven out into this great, wide, wild universe, people 
 feel as though they were lost. We know so very little, after 
 all, we are overwhelmed with the sense of that which is un- 
 known. We feel at home in these quieter, well-accustomed 
 places. No matter what success a man may have had in his 
 life, however beautiful his home may be, he will never cease 
 to dream of the old home where father and mother were. 
 There will seem an atmosphere about it that is lost to his 
 later experience. This atmosphere remains, and touches 
 his heart : it appeals to all that is tender and high and fine. 
 I should not respect him if it were not so. But this same 
 principle works in regard to all religious ideas. There is 
 loss, and a definite loss I feel it myself in losing that 
 intangible atmosphere of the religious life which I found in 
 my childhood, with mother teaching me what she believed 
 to be true. I would not for one instant go back ; but I can 
 imagine cases where this loving longing for the old is so 
 much stronger than the conviction of the necessity that 
 drives one out, as Abraham went forth under the call of 
 God, as to lead one to go back again for peace and for the 
 sake of finding that older association. 
 
 Then you see how one of these causes springs out 
 of another people become tired of thinking. I have 
 known many cases of persons who had started out bravely, 
 convinced, as it appeared, of the truth of the new thought, 
 the new ideas, but who became tired of wandering in this 
 wide universe. They felt that they knew so little and that 
 there was so much more that they did not know. 
 
 Then it is one of the most difficult things in the world for 
 people to rest in an unsettled state of mind. The very word 
 " unsettled " contradicts the possibility of thought of rest. 
 There are not many who can say, So much I know, but a 
 
124 Signs of the Times 
 
 million more things I do not know : I will hold my mind 
 open concerning them. It is immensely difficult. Most 
 people feel a necessity for their minds being made up in 
 regard to everything ; and it assures a sense of mental 
 relief, of rest, to give up this weary struggle of thinking for 
 one's self, of having opinions of one's own. I feel this 
 myself at times. It is a relief to be able to go to a man 
 of admitted authority, and take what he says about God and 
 about the universe, and let it go at that. Sometimes it 
 would be a relief to those who really think, who really 
 believe, who really trust God, who really appreciate the 
 grandeur of this spirit of truth-seeking, to give up the grand 
 pain of thinking. And undoubtedly this does lead many a 
 man towards religious reaction. 
 
 Then there is one other motive, and one that is mighty 
 and strong. It springs out of the very best thing in man. 
 It is his self-distrust, his modesty. He sees the whole great 
 world against him ; and the question sweeps over him 
 what wonder that it sometimes sweeps him off his feet or 
 sweeps his breath away whether there is not an immense 
 egotism in clinging to the conviction, I am right, in the face 
 of all the ages. Here is this grand consensus of the cen- 
 turies : what if a man shrink from going out and saying, I 
 am right, and yet I differ from all these ? It is magnificent 
 when a man dares to say that " one with God is a majority " ; 
 but suppose the question suggests itself to him whether it 
 be not one without God, then it is anything but a majority. 
 And we must modestly confess that nine times out of ten, 
 when a man starts out to lecture and teach the world, and 
 he is alone and the world is all the other way, the world is 
 right and he is wrong. It is well, indeed, that the world 
 does not listen to all its would-be reformers. We have only 
 to look over the surface of society to-day, and note how 
 
Religions Reaction 125 
 
 many reformers there are and how many of them would 
 reform the world in entirely different directions, to appre- 
 ciate the fact that, if the world were ready to listen to them 
 all, the result would simply be universal chaos. The world 
 is right not to listen too readily, and it is not strange if 
 now and then a man questions seriously whether it is safe 
 for him to go alone against the witness of the ages. Cardi- 
 nal Newman somewhere in his famous book I cannot 
 quote the words says, revealing the secret of his own 
 movement in this direction, that at last he has come to 
 a position where he feels safe. Undoubtedly, it was the 
 testimony of the ages that convinced him against his own 
 reason that the proper thing for him to do was to turn back 
 from the sunlight and walk towards the older shadow. 
 
 Then there is one more reason on which I. must touch 
 lightly. I do not want to lay much emphasis on it, though I 
 have no doubt that it has weight with many. I do not want 
 to emphasize it, because it is so unworthy that I do not like 
 to believe that any large number of persons are influenced 
 by it. This thing is self-interest. Take a man who belongs 
 to the Established Church of England, and what does it 
 mean ? It means millions of money ; it means social re- 
 spectability j it means heirship of the past ; it means the 
 prestige of antiquity; it means an opportunity for rising 
 through the various grades to a position next to royalty 
 itself. It means all these things in possibility. Think what 
 that must be even as an unconscious bribe, how it must 
 weigh with a man who is doubting, who is questioning as to 
 which way lies the truth. 
 
 I had a curious illustration of this idea, with a touch of the 
 ludicrous connected with it, some years ago. A minister out 
 West was talking about some questions of theology that were 
 in the air, and he expressed himself as immensely interested ; 
 
126 Signs of the Times 
 
 and at last he said that he had no doubt that the new ideas 
 were true, that he was convinced, and it seemed as though 
 here was a very hopeful convert to the new ideas in the 
 world. At last, he sat back in his chair, and said, " No, I 
 must reconsider ; for, as a matter of fact, all my sermons 
 and I have all the work of years have been written on the 
 supposition that the other theory is true, and I cannot afford 
 to throw away the work of a life to follow these new ideas." 
 This simply as an illustration in one direction. These dif- 
 ferent motives that come in must have weight in the scales 
 of the man's intellect, and help to bear down the balance on 
 the wrong side. 
 
 Now, at the last, I wish to turn back again to the hint 
 with which I began, and to call your attention to the signifi- 
 cance of these movements in the direction of religious re- 
 action. 
 
 What do they mean ? They mean that the world is mov- 
 ing, that the current is setting strong towards the future ; and 
 the power of the reaction, the force of the eddying tide, is a 
 fair indication of the force and sweep of the onward move- 
 ment. By as much, then, as you see these tendencies that 
 indicate religious reaction, by so much you may be sure that 
 religious change is in the air, and that the old is passing 
 away. 
 
 We should not, then, be discouraged if it seems to go 
 slowly, if it does not come through channels where we ex- 
 pect it to come. Still, let us be sure that it is coming, and 
 that anything which is true has God back of it as the great 
 force that is pushing it onward, and that, however slowly it 
 may come, we need not be impatient, we need not fret. We 
 should earnestly do our duty, standing in the place assigned 
 us, believing that the right must win. 
 
Religious Reaction 127 
 
 " Say not, the struggle nought availeth, 
 The labor and the wounds are vain, 
 The enemy faints not, nor faileth, 
 And as things have been they remain. 
 
 u If hopes were dupes, fears may be liars ; 
 It may be, in yon smoke concealed, 
 Your comrades chase e'en now the fliers, 
 And, but for you, possess the field. 
 
 " For while the tired waves, vainly breaking, 
 Seem here no painful inch to gain, 
 Far back, through creeks and inlets making, 
 Comes, silent, flooding in the main. 
 
 " And not by eastern windows only, 
 
 When daylight comes, comes in the light 
 In front, the sun climbs slow, how slowly, 
 But westward, look, the land is bright." 
 
MIND CURE. 
 
 That general movement which, under the name of Chris- 
 tian Science, metaphysics, faith cure, prayer cure, or what- 
 ever it may be called, is attracting so large an amount of 
 attention, is certainly one of the marked signs of the times. 
 
 If any one should question as to whether it is a fitting and 
 appropriate theme for a Sunday morning sermon, I think 
 he need only consider two facts. In the first place, this is 
 not in the minds of many of its believers merely a method 
 of curing the body : it is a method also for curing the sin and 
 evil of the soul, so that it takes on the form of a religion to 
 those who hold these features of the belief. 
 
 On the other hand, whether we agree with them in this 
 thought or not, we do know that the physical condition, 
 health or disease, does itself stand in most intimate relation 
 not only to physical comfort, but to mental, to moral, and to 
 spiritual states. If I could make all the world well, I should 
 abolish at one stroke not only pain, but most of the vice and 
 the crime of the world besides. So, when we discuss ques- 
 tions bearing upon the cure of even physical evils, we are 
 dealing with those things that are interblended with all the 
 problems of the moral and spiritual life. 
 
 I do not feel certain this morning of more than one thing; 
 and that is that in my treatment I shall thoroughly please 
 very few people. I shall not please the extreme thinkers, 
 probably, on either side. Whether I shall even succeed in 
 
Mind Cure 129 
 
 pleasing myself is an open question. But I shall try to deal 
 with the matter as fairly, as simply, as briefly as I can, as 
 it seems to me related to the deep-lying principles of human 
 nature as they have been discovered by human experience. 
 
 The movement started in its modern form in the year 1866, 
 in Lynn. Mrs. Eddy claimed to have discovered the prin- 
 ciple, although there were those who had written, thought, 
 published, on the subject before.* She has set forth her 
 theories and the claims which she has made on behalf of 
 their practical working in many books and pamphlets which 
 are open to the reading of all. Perhaps some of these are 
 familiar to most of you. It is a distinctively idealist move- 
 ment. The foremost advocates of the principle date it back 
 even to the time of Plato, and his assertion that the real 
 world was the world of ideas, and that that which we see, the 
 phenomenal world, is only a sort of shadow or reflection of 
 that. One of the prominent writers on the subject, and one 
 of the most sensible, it seems to me, is Dr. W. F. Evans, 
 author of "The Divine Law of Cure." I wish to read you 
 just a word as setting forth what he regards as the basic 
 principle of his teaching : 
 
 " The present volume is an attempt to construct a theo- 
 retical and practical system of phrenopathy, or mental cure, 
 on the basis of the idealistic philosophy of Berkeley, Fichte, 
 Schelling, and Hegel. Its fundamental doctrine is that to 
 think and to exist are one and the same, and that every dis- 
 ease is the translation into a bodily expression of a fixed idea 
 of the mind and a morbid way of thinking. If by any thera- 
 peutic device you remove the morbid idea, which is the spir- 
 itual image after the likeness of which the body is formed, 
 you cure the malady." 
 
 You see very plainly, then, the nature of the claims that 
 
 * It seems probable that she borrowed it all from Dr. P. P. Quimby, of Belfast, Me. 
 
130 Signs of the Times 
 
 are made. These, in the light of some of the claims put 
 forth by Mrs. Eddy, seem very calm and wise. 
 
 I wish to outline for you, briefly, the theory of the uni- 
 verse as held by the author, teacher, and apostle of what 
 is called Christian Science. Christian Science, by the way, 
 seems to me a curious misnomer; for, after all the study 
 that I have been able to give to it, I can find in it neither 
 science nor Christianity. 
 
 She claims that mind is the only real thing, and that there 
 is only one mind, which is God. All this external world, in- 
 cluding our bodies, are only thoughts, beliefs, shadows, 
 hardly more real than the fancies of a dream. This one per- 
 fect mind, of course, can never be sick. Sickness, then, is 
 only a belief, a fancy, of what she calls mortal mind ; for 
 the immortal, the one great mind, of course, is never de- 
 luded. But these limited mortal minds dream or fancy the 
 existence of disease and pain. They are not real ; and if 
 you can persuade people that they are not real, that they 
 are only fancies, then they quickly cease the kind of exist- 
 ence which might be asserted of them before, and pass away 
 like shadows when the sun is up. Mrs. Eddy claims that in 
 accordance with this she cures all kinds and classes of dis- 
 eases. I think she carries the matter so far as to say that 
 death itself is only a blunder that need not exist. When 
 considering a theory of the universe like this, I feel like quot- 
 ing a couplet from Byron that he wrote as a satire on the 
 extreme idealism of Bishop Berkeley : 
 
 " When Bishop Berkeley says there is no matter, 
 It is no matter what he says." 
 
 So, if we had only this philosophy of Mrs. Eddy's to deal 
 with, it would really not be worth while talking about on the 
 part of sane or rational people. But we must remember one 
 
Mind Cure 131 
 
 thing. When you have demolished a philosophy, a theory, 
 you have not thereby demolished facts, if facts there are 
 which are connected with that theory. A farmer, for ex- 
 ample, may, during a certain season, raise a very large and 
 fine crop of potatoes ; but if you ask him for his theory of 
 sunshine, and of the laws of growth by which he has pro- 
 duced these results, his answer might be the most arrant 
 nonsense ; but the crop is there. So any man may produce 
 a definite and distinct result and yet give you a very foolish 
 account as to how it was done. We must, then, separate 
 certain facts that are palpably undeniable from the foolish- 
 ness of the theories which have been connected with them. 
 
 It would not be fair to the representatives of mind cure to 
 leave this description of the beliefs of Mrs. Eddy as an 
 accurate representation of them. During the last week I 
 had a long and careful conversation, with this sermon in view, 
 with one of the best and most rational representatives of the 
 mind cure ; and I assure you that the conversation was in 
 almost every respect extremely satisfactory. She repudiates 
 entirely these foolish and fanciful notions as to there being 
 no such thing as matter, as to there being no such thing as 
 disease or pain. She freely and frankly admits the ex- 
 istence of all these ; and yet she makes the magnificent 
 claim that, though these exist, mind is king, king ever of 
 the body, king of these physical conditions, above all health 
 and all disease, and that the mind has power to cut off the 
 supply of these morbid conditions, and to rally and call back 
 the healthful forces of the system, and so dominate and rule 
 all this kingdom of the physical. This I say without indors- 
 ing or contradicting the claim that she makes. 
 
 I wish now, after having set forth thus simply the claims 
 of some persons representing this modern movement, to rec- 
 ognize a few facts. I have no sort of question that the 
 
132 Signs of the Times 
 
 followers of Mrs. Eddy have " cured " large numbers of dis- 
 eases, that Mrs. Eddy may herself have cured them. I 
 have no sort of question that diseases have been cured by 
 the believers in faith cure, in prayer cure, in every different 
 phase of this theory that you can imagine. But we cannot 
 stop here. We must recognize that cures have been effected 
 by the agency apparently of all sorts of things. You are 
 aware that for ages it was believed that the touch of a king 
 or queen of England had power to cure scrofulous disease, 
 so that scrofula was called the King's Evil. I have no sort 
 of doubt that under certain circumstances real cures have 
 been effected by the touch of a king. I have no sort of 
 question that cures recognized by his followers as miracu- 
 lous, recognized by us as perfectly natural, were made by 
 Joseph Smith, the Mormon Prophet. There are perfectly 
 authentic cases on record of his having wrought most won- 
 derful results by his touch or by prayer over those who were 
 sick. When I was in California, a man visited the place 
 where I was living, who claimed to be able to cure all dis- 
 ease by the laying on of hands. I know that people did 
 go to him on their crutches, and came away with their 
 crutches under their arms or over their shoulders. I have 
 no question as to facts like these. 
 
 Not only that : miracles such as are reported from the Mid- 
 dle Ages are being wrought to-day under the power of faith 
 by those who are devout believers in the different religious 
 systems of the world. Many and many a person has been 
 cured by the use of the water of Lourdes. There is one 
 authentic case on record where a devout believer came to 
 a regular practising physician, who had recently received a 
 little phial of water from the fountain of Lourdes, that had 
 been brought to him by a friend, as a curiosity. This woman 
 came to the physician suffering from a serious malady, as 
 
Mind Cure 133 
 
 she supposed ; and she said, If I were only able to go to 
 Lourdes, I feel sure that my disease might be taken away, 
 that the blessed Virgin would hear my prayers. The doctor 
 thought he would try an experiment, and he told her that he 
 had some water from Lourdes, and he would let her try it, 
 and very likely it would produce the result that she ex- 
 pected. But he could not find the bottle ; and, not wishing 
 to disappoint her, he took another phial and filled it with 
 water from the faucet, labelled it, and gave it to her. And 
 within a week she was well, believing that it was by the 
 favor of the Virgin that the wonderful result had been 
 brought about. 
 
 There have been cases where persons have been cured by 
 the touch of sacred relics; and, in some instances, it has 
 been found after the result had been reached that the 
 real relics had been lost, and replaced by bones of a much 
 lower degree of sacredness. 
 
 There is another instance that I have in mind, and there 
 is no sort of question about it. A physician had a patient 
 who was troubled, as he supposed, by a very serious disease 
 of the throat. The physician inserted an instrument I 
 believe some kind of a thermometer by which to test the 
 temperature of the throat. He found out that the patient 
 supposed that the doctor was administering some sort of 
 treatment. He let the patient go on with that impression ; 
 and, in a very short time, he cured the disease completely 
 with nothing but the thermometer. These cases are on 
 record by the hundred, and they ought not to surprise or 
 astonish us. They are perfectly in line with what we know 
 of the power the mind has over the body ; for the real agent 
 of cure in all these cases is not the prayer, not the relic, 
 not the thermometer, not the water of Lourdes, genuine or 
 spurious, but the mental power of the patient. 
 
134 Signs of the Times 
 
 And who shall limit this power? You are familiar with 
 its manifestation in a hundred different directions. A word 
 is whispered in some one's ear, and the face suddenly 
 blushes and is suffused with red. What does it mean ? It 
 means that a thought, a feeling, has power to stimulate the 
 action of the heart, and send the blood to the cheeks. An- 
 other word is whispered, and the cheek blanches and is pale. 
 What does that mean ? It means, again, that a thought, a 
 feeling, has had the power to send the blood back towards 
 the centre, leaving the extremities pale and chilled. A word 
 has power to stretch one fainting at your feet, has power to 
 rouse another who is almost gone, and make him leap to his 
 feet strong and thrilling with life again. What limit is there 
 to this power of the mind over its kingdom, the body ? 
 Whether it can cure or not, we know that it can kill. 
 
 I wish to give you here one or two illustrations not fanci- 
 ful, but authentic. They are on the records of the medical 
 experience of the world. 
 
 Some years ago, in France, certain criminals had been 
 condemned to death. The physicians were allowed to try 
 some experiments with them, to see the power the mind had 
 over the body. They took two or three of them, and told 
 them that they had been permitted to put them to death 
 without pain; that they would simply let them bleed to 
 death. They blindfolded the men, laid them on surgical 
 tables, telling them they would open a vein in their necks. 
 Thereupon, they simply pricked the skin, not enough to 
 draw blood, and had warm water so arranged that it would 
 fall on their throats and trickle into a basin prepared to 
 receive it ; and the men thought they were bleeding to 
 death, and they actually died under the operation. 
 
 Another test was of a like kind, also on criminals, with 
 whom the physicians were allowed to experiment. They 
 
Mind Cure 135 
 
 told the criminals that they were going to put them into 
 beds from which certain cholera patients had been removed, 
 and that they would probably take the cholera. They put 
 them into perfectly fresh beds, but warm and tumbled, look- 
 ing as though some one had just left them ; and a large pro- 
 portion of the men actually died with the cholera. These 
 are perfectly authentic cases, illustrating in the most re- 
 markable way what this power of the mind may be in cer- 
 tain instances when it is exercised upon the body. 
 
 I, wish to give you now a few illustrations in another 
 -direction, showing you what tremendous medical resources 
 there are here when they are properly explored and the laws 
 that govern them are understood. 
 
 I have studied practically the working of hypnotism upon 
 its subjects. Hypnotism is the modern name for what used 
 to be called mesmerism. It was scouted by the old physi- 
 cians, condemned by a scientific commission in France; 
 and yet it is now recognized by every competent investigator, 
 and is being put to medical use by some of the most intel- 
 ligent physicians of the world. The point is here. It is 
 supposed that the power at work is the mind of the subject, 
 and that the operator, instead of exercising some marvellous 
 control over his subject, simply suggests to him certain 
 things after he has put him into this hypnotic sleep. 
 
 What is the limit of the power that can be exercised 
 under this condition? It is apparently unlimited. I have 
 seen almost every physical sense perfectly controlled. The 
 operator suggests that the subject cannot see, and he is 
 blind. He tells him that the only sounds he can hear are 
 his own voice and the ticking of the clock; and you may 
 shout into his ear, you may make any noise you please, and 
 he is as insensible as a marble statue. I have seen a person 
 sniff ammonia with the greatest delight, because he had 
 
136 Signs of the Times 
 
 been told that it was cologne, without its producing any of 
 the ordinary effects of ammonia. I have seen a person 
 holding a little pure water in a glass, when told it was am- 
 monia and compelled to smell it, have the tears run down 
 his face, the natural effect of ammonia. I have seen a 
 person, with a little glass of pure water, thrown into a per- 
 fect ether sleep because he was told that it was ether. I 
 have seen a person who was told that his left side was para- 
 lyzed ; and I have run a pin into the back of his hand till 
 the blood followed it, and he took no more notice of it 
 than if I had run it into the cushion of his chair. The 
 moment after, when he was told that feeling had returned, 
 he was as sensitive as before. All of the physical senses 
 seem to be under the unlimited control of the mind under 
 certain circumstances and conditions. 
 
 This has been recognized by the scientific men of the 
 world. It is being used in France and Belgium and in 
 some cases in this country as one of the mightiest medical 
 forces. There are cases on record of persons completely 
 cured of their love of alcohol by it. They have been put 
 into this hypnotic sleep day after day or two or three times 
 a week for a time, and it has been impressed on their minds 
 that they were not to like the taste of alcoholic drink ; and 
 the result of it has been a natural aversion to everything of 
 the kind. Not only this, but people have been cured of 
 moral taints and vices by this process. 
 
 I might go on here all the morning telling you cases of 
 cures that I have known. I must hint one or two to show 
 you that the theory, whether it be mind cure, Christian Sci- 
 ence, faith cure, belief in the pope or Joe Smith, has appar- 
 ently nothing to do with it. It only means that you shall 
 believe in the possibility of it, believe that the thing is 
 going to be done. This seems to be the one grand requisite. 
 
Mind Cure 137 
 
 Or, in some cases, there may be no belief about it at all, but 
 only some fresh impulse, something that shall rouse the life 
 force into renewed action. 
 
 One of the leading physicians of this city told me in con- 
 versation one day that his life was saved by his being made 
 terribly angry. He was a surgeon in the army ; and he had 
 typhoid fever, and had passed the crisis and was sinking 
 gradually away. In a few hours he would undoubtedly have 
 died. There was a surgeon of a neighboring regiment, whom 
 he very much disliked, who came walking through the ward, 
 making supercilious remarks, till he stood by the cot on 
 which the sick doctor lay ; and in a very flippant fashion he 
 said that probably it would all be over with him very soon. 
 This sort of comment, by this sort of a man, roused his 
 whole nature, till he rose up with what strength he had, and 
 in no very polite language told him that he would live to 
 see the grass green over his grave yet. It only needed this 
 impulse for the life force to rally; and from that moment 
 he began to recover, and is as strong as any man in the 
 city to-day. This means simply that there needs something 
 to thrill the life forces to renewed activity. 
 
 I knew a case when I was a boy, in my old home, of a 
 woman bed-ridden for eight years. A man fell in love with 
 her, and induced her to be married. She got up and went 
 to housekeeping, had a large family, and was well for many 
 years. 
 
 I know of a man who had not walked for years who was 
 carried abroad in a wheeled chair, to see what travel could 
 do for him. He had on one occasion been taken on board 
 one of the steamers on one of the Swiss lakes, and left by 
 his attendant. As he was sitting there, a cry of fire was 
 raised. He leaped from his chair and rushed on shore, 
 forgetting that he was lame under this impulse to escape 
 from danger. 
 
 
138 Signs of the Times 
 
 What does this mean ? It means that it is the mind of the 
 person himself that is chiefly concerned, and that it only 
 needs, no matter what the influence may be, some power to 
 give this person confidence, some power to rouse the life force, 
 some power to make one feel that he can, and then the slug- 
 gish material forces obey the mind that is king. 
 
 Now, what is to be the upshot of this movement ? I be- 
 lieve that, as the years go by, the extravagant, extreme 
 claims on the part of those who advocate mind cure will be 
 gradually outgrown. And I believe this also : that the real 
 power which is here is to be recognized hereafter more and 
 more, that it is to be recognized by the regular practitioner, 
 that it is to become a part of the scientific treatment of dis- 
 ease. Every one who studies the matter knows that the 
 wisest and best doctors are using less and less medicine 
 every year, medicine in the old sense of drugs. Doctor 
 Oliver Wendell Holmes said I can repeat it without any 
 danger of hurting the drug business, because, whether true 
 or not, the world will go on after about the same fashion for 
 some time to come that, if all the drugs were cast into the 
 sea, the probable result would be that it would be so much 
 the better for men, and so much the worse for the fishes. 
 
 This is, undoubtedly, an extreme statement, made for 
 effect. But, as indicating the tendency of the regular prac- 
 tice, I would like to tell you that some years ago I was the 
 guest of the Massachusetts Medical Society at its annual 
 dinner in Music Hall. I sat at the left hand of Surgeon- 
 General Dale, a familiar name in Massachusetts and in other 
 parts of the country. In the course of conversation, he said : 
 The first, the principal thing is that you shall have perfect 
 faith in your physician. Then, if he doesn't give you too 
 much medicine, you will be likely to get along all right. 
 Every physician knows that his case is half won if he can 
 
Mind Cure 139 
 
 carry faith into the homes of his patients. And the one 
 thing he dreads more than anything else is gloomy, de- 
 spondent, discouraging surroundings on the part of nurses 
 and attendants. 
 
 When some morbid condition is set up in the system, it 
 becomes a battle between the natural force of health and 
 this morbid force of disease ; and if the physical condi- 
 tion is adequate to it, in almost all cases, whether you have a 
 physician or do not have one, the life force that is, the 
 majority force in the system will prevail, and the patient 
 will get well. 
 
 This is nothing against physicians. If I were ill, I should 
 send for a physician the very first thing possible, as I would 
 turn my watch over to the watchmaker if it needed repairs. 
 Whether he give me medicine or not, if he is a wise man 
 he will know what the difficulty is, and will give me, perhaps, 
 what is better than medicine, advice. It is the fault of the 
 people if they are drugged. Ninety-nine times in a hundred, 
 if you should call in a wise physician, if he were to give you 
 only advice, though that were all you needed, you would not 
 take it : you would send for another physician, that he might 
 give you drugs. I have known any number of physicians 
 who have given liniment, when they said the only thing the 
 patient needed was friction ; but they knew the patient would 
 not rub the part unless something were given to rub in. I 
 have heard a physician say that he gave pills that had noth- 
 ing in them relating to the disease, because he wanted the 
 person to have confidence that he was doing something for 
 him, otherwise he would send for some other physician. 
 
 As fast as the people become wise enough to co-operate 
 with the physician, they will come to recognize more and 
 more these divine laws of cure, and will help on the better 
 days when there shall be less of disease, because there is 
 
140 Signs of the Times 
 
 less of morbid mental condition out of which so large a part 
 of the disease of the world has sprung. 
 
 I wish now to close by hinting two or three points briefly, 
 as indicating what this sign of the times signifies. 
 
 In the first place, it means the growing belief of thousands 
 of people that mind is really king. It means a tremendous, 
 world-wide reaction against the old materialism. It has 
 some of the violence, some of the extravagance of reaction, 
 and no wonder. We have been told by wise men for a good 
 many years that there was nothing in the world but matter, 
 and that the soul was merely the product of matter, and its 
 plaything. What wonder that the soul should assert itself 
 at last, even to the point of declaring that there was nothing 
 else in existence but soul, and that this boastful matter was 
 only the shadow and the plaything of the mind ? It means a 
 reaction, and I believe a healthy reaction, against the ex- 
 tremes of the old materialism. 
 
 For consider how the mind, how thought, has proved itself 
 king of this old planet. Picture to yourself this world two 
 hundred thousand years ago, and then picture it to-day ; and 
 what is the difference ? Only the difference wrought by 
 thinking; that is, the power of mind to sculpture and re- 
 create the world. And the mind has no less power over 
 this physical system of ours that we call the body. You 
 know perfectly well, you recognize it in all experience, that 
 the mind sculptures the face. After years have gone by, you 
 say that a man has a wolfish, a foxy, or a bearish look ; that 
 is, this or that quality is sculptured on his face. What sculpt- 
 ured it there? Thoughts and feelings. It is merely the 
 mind manifesting itself on the countenance ; and the mind, 
 I believe, has power not only on the face, but from head 
 to foot to mould and shape our physical condition. 
 
 And here is the point we must never forget: the mind 
 
Mind Cure 141 
 
 is king, but mind has a kingdom. If you are to destroy 
 the real existence of the world and body and of matter of 
 every kind, then mind is alone in space in the midst of a 
 dream, surrounded by nothing but flitting shadows and 
 fancies. But mind is mighty over real things, over the 
 real earth and the real body. 
 
 And we must not forget that all that the mind has done in 
 reshaping this old earth of ours has been done in accord- 
 ance with the divine laws. Then recognize this force as 
 real ; but recognize the laws as real. All has been accom- 
 plished in accordance with facts, with laws, and by obedi- 
 ence to laws ; that is, obedience to God. And all that can 
 be done by the mind in curing, in lifting, in reconstructing, 
 in saving the body, must be done by recognizing the real 
 facts and forces of this physical system of ours, and by 
 studying them even more attentively. Mrs. Eddy would dis- 
 countenance the whole business of even raising the question 
 as to whether you were sick or what is the matter with you. 
 But, if the mind is to have power over the body to heal 
 and save it, we must recognize the reality of its forces, dis- 
 cover the laws of physical action in the physical frame, and 
 must achieve these grand results by obeying carefully these 
 laws. But I believe that the mind has power such as we are 
 only beginning to dream of as yet. And by and by, when 
 the soul, linked with God in love to him, in obedience to 
 him, shall have asserted itself in fitting and blessed results, 
 then that day shall come when the inhabitants of the earth 
 shall no more say, I am sick, and there shall be no more 
 pain, because the former things are passed away. 
 
SPIRITUALISM. 
 
 This is Easter morning. The story has come down to 
 us from the past that eighteen hundred and fifty-six years 
 ago, at about the rising of the sun, certain of the loving 
 friends of Jesus sought the tomb where they had laid him, 
 and found it empty. And I suppose that the vast majority 
 of people in Christendom, not having studied the subject 
 very widely, hold the opinion that that was the first Easter 
 morning of the world; that Easter is Christian, and only 
 Christian, in origin and significance. I have had the ques- 
 tion asked me a great many times as to why, not believing in 
 the physical resurrection of Jesus, I celebrate Easter at all. 
 The question betrays ignorance of the fact that the Easter 
 day and the Easter hope are older than Christianity, older 
 perhaps than any scripture, older than any organized religion 
 of the world. For this hope that 
 
 " Life is ever Lord of Death, 
 And Love can never lose its own," 
 
 is older than any religion. It is a flower born of human 
 love, and watered by the tears that have been shed on the 
 white faces of the dead. 
 
 Easter, then, is human, a human hope ; and all the chil- 
 dren of the one Father have an equal right to whatever sun- 
 shine and consolation may gather about it. 
 
 A belief that has come to be practically a religion to mill- 
 ions of people in the most civilized countries of the world 
 
Spiritualism 143 
 
 may rightly claim at least, whatever else may be said about 
 it, to be regarded as one of the " Signs of the Times." And 
 this belief is not held by the superstitious, by the ignorant, 
 by the vicious, by the socially reprobated alone. Nor does 
 it find a home among these. For better or worse, it is 
 shared by lawyers, by doctors, by ministers, by philosophers, 
 by men of science, by men in every occupation, in every 
 rank of life. There are believers among the social outcasts 
 of the world, there are believers on thrones, there are be- 
 lievers in palaces, believers among the nobility of every 
 country, believers among diplomats, those engaged in the 
 public service of their respective States. So that for better or 
 worse, as I say, we find this permeating all modern society, 
 in the high places and in the low. And it seems to me sig- 
 nificant of one of two things. It is either one of the most 
 hopeful or one of the most lamentable things in all the 
 world. If it be true, then the fact that so many in all walks 
 and ranges of life have accepted it contradicts neither the 
 brain nor the culture of its adherents. If it be only delusion, 
 contemptible, pitiful, superstition and fraud foisted upon so 
 many, then it seems to me one of the saddest commentaries 
 on what we dare to call the civilization of the nineteenth 
 century that here at a time when we had dared to think that 
 the world was coming to be fairly intelligent it is overrun, 
 fairly swamped, with what so many are disposed to regard 
 as merely a survival of old barbaric superstitions. 
 
 It seems to me, then, that it is worthy of our careful, ear- 
 nest, candid attention. If it is true, we certainly want to 
 know it. If it is false, we want to know it, not only for our 
 own sake, but for the sake of helping so many thousands 
 of people out of a pitiable delusion. Liberals, at any rate, 
 at the first blush, ought to be touched with a little feeling 
 of sympathy towards it ; for, whatever else it may be, it has 
 
144 Signs of the Times 
 
 proved itself the most remarkable, the most wide-spread, 
 the most effective solvent of the old dogmas that the world 
 has ever known. Educated people, those who have time for 
 critical thought and study, can be touched and influenced by 
 criticism, by philosophy, by science ; but here is a power that 
 has come to work through the affections as well as through 
 the intellects of men, and at whose touch the hideous and 
 horrible dogmas of the past have faded away, to give place, 
 at least in other respects, to what are rational and humane 
 ideas concerning our Father in heaven and the destiny of 
 his children. 
 
 When, however, an earnest, candid person wakes up to the 
 fact that such a thing as Spiritualism exists, and proposes to 
 study it, the chances are, unless he is more fortunate than 
 the ordinary seeker, that he will find himself face to face 
 with that which will repel him, will shock him, will disgust 
 him on every hand ; for, whether there be anything true in it 
 or not, there is no sort of question that there does exist in 
 connection with it and under cover of its name an amount 
 of palpable and intentional fraud that is simply appalling. 
 There is no question that there is connected with it and 
 under cover of its name also a vast amount of honest 
 and ignorant self-delusion. Certain strange things happen, 
 and people at once fly to the spiritualistic interpretation of 
 them, although to a more careful and conservative thinker 
 there may be no necessity whatever for any such explana- 
 tion. There is, then, this amount of fraud and delusion 
 which repels one who proposes to investigate for himself, 
 and find out what is true. Words of too severe reprobation 
 cannot be uttered for this side of the movement. But it 
 ought to be said in justice that the honest and earnest be- 
 liever deplores this state of things as much as anybody, and 
 ought not to be held responsible; but the whip of public 
 
Spiritualism 145 
 
 scorn and disapprobation should be applied to the multitude 
 of impudent and deliberate cheats, tricksters, and liars, till 
 they are whipped out of all decent human society. There 
 are those that trade like human ghouls in the bodies of the 
 dead. This business seems to me in all ways to be respect- 
 able compared with that of trading in human tears, in 
 human heart-break, in the tenderest and highest hopes of the 
 human soul. I know of nothing more utterly despicable, 
 more utterly inhuman, than this manifestation of a willing- 
 ness to make money out of the sacred hopes and fears of 
 those who are heart-broken and desolate. 
 
 There is also connected with the movement, as is charged, 
 a vast amount of immorality of every kind. I have no sort 
 of question that this charge is true. One thing, however, 
 I will not dwell upon it, ought to be hinted as an explana- 
 tion of it, as an apology for this condition of things. Always 
 in the history of the world, when there has been a general, 
 wide-spread breaking up of an old system of thought, when 
 people are feeling about for an attempted readjustment with 
 the new system, there has been this loss of a firm grip on the 
 deep realities, the ethical principles of human nature. Peo- 
 ple have lost their old motives and have not found the new. 
 It was true concerning early Christianity. There has not 
 been one single charge made against Spiritualism that was 
 not made by pagan onlookers and observers as to young Chris- 
 tianity. It was said that their love-feasts were only drunken 
 and dissipated orgies. And Paul tells us himself that on a 
 certain occasion, in the church of Corinth, the people were 
 drunken at the communion table ; so that we must remember 
 that, though these things are true, it is not the first time in 
 the history of the world that men have passed through a 
 similar phase of experience. 
 
 And while people still link themselves with the churches 
 
146 Signs of the Times 
 
 for the sake of social standing or financial gain, though they 
 do not believe its doctrines nor care for its spiritual pros- 
 perity, even modern Christianity cannot very safely throw 
 stones. 
 
 I wish now to say that any critic who proposes to con- 
 sider any great movement of human life or thought is in duty 
 bound, as a fair and honest man, to judge it from its best 
 side, to judge it at its highest. 
 
 Let us, then, consider the fact that, in spite of all I have 
 said, there is what I may perhaps properly call a Higher 
 Spiritualism, a complete system of thought, of life, of ethics, 
 of belief concerning God and man and destiny that is clearly 
 wrought out. There is a vast literature that has appeared, 
 in the last few years, setting forth belief in all these phases 
 of opinion ; and, if any one wishes to know what it means, 
 or what it claims to stand for on its higher side, he ought in 
 fairness to make himself familiar with the best of its litera- 
 ture. 
 
 I propose to define this higher Spiritualism, not to give 
 you my opinion of it, but to tell you what it claims for itself, 
 what it aims to be. 
 
 What is, then, the first grand belief ? Simply that death is 
 not an end ; that it is merely an experience, an incident in 
 the onward and upward struggle and progress of the individ- 
 ual life. It claims to have demonstrated this, to hold it not 
 as a hope, not as a belief, but as knowledge. It teaches 
 that inside these gross physical bodies there is an ether 
 body, that has grown with it, been shaped by it, adapted 
 to it, perfect in every part and faculty ; and that this ether 
 body is disengaged at death, like a germ delivered from its 
 sheath, and that it goes on, the soul taking this ether body 
 with it as a perfect equipment in every faculty for the fullest 
 expression of its higher and better life. According to this 
 
Spiritualism 147 
 
 teaching, the soul simply goes on with its power to think, to 
 remember, to love just as of old. 
 
 It further teaches that this universe everywhere is under 
 the law of cause and effect, and that we begin life hereafter 
 just as we leave it here, precisely what we have made our- 
 selves by our thoughts, our deeds, our words on earth. 
 Therefore, this other life is not peopled with ghosts, with 
 ghastly, thin and unreal beings, such as we have imagined 
 in the past: they are real folks, our fathers, our mothers, 
 our neighbors, our friends, just as we have known them 
 here, only released from these lower physical conditions, but 
 carrying with them the same kind of character, of thought, 
 of personality which they had here. 
 
 It also teaches that, under certain peculiar conditions, 
 there can now and then be manifestations of the reality of 
 that life to this life ; that sometimes there comes a whisper, 
 sometimes a hand is reached across the abyss, and that they 
 are demonstration of the fact that those we have loved and 
 that we talk of as lost are not lost, but are living as we are 
 living. 
 
 This higher Spiritualism is in perfect accord with all the 
 best scientific teaching of the world. It is in perfect accord 
 with the finest and highest philosophy of the world. It is in 
 perfect accord with the finest and highest moral principles 
 that have ever been discovered. So there is nothing that we 
 know that is contradictory to these claims of this higher Spir- 
 itualism. Therefore, whether it can demonstrate itself as 
 true or not, it is not in contradiction with any known truth 
 that science or philosophy has to offer, and is in perfect ac- 
 cord with the finest ethical teaching and the highest hopes of 
 man. So much must be said in defence of this claim of what 
 I have called the higher Spiritualism. 
 
 Now, I wish to offer a few suggestions of which you will 
 
148 Signs of the Times 
 
 see the force and drift. I speak not now as a Spiritualist. 
 I am speaking, or trying to, as a perfectly fair and sympa- 
 thetic critic from the outside. These claimed facts which 
 Spiritualists offer us as proof of that which they declare to 
 be true are not new facts. What is called modern Spiritual- 
 ism itself is less than half a century old, but these general 
 manifestations of a certain class and kind of facts have been 
 reported down from the very dawn of human history. In 
 the household of old Dr. Phelps, of Connecticut, father of 
 Professor Phelps, of Andover, there were unquestionably 
 certain manifestations of abnormal power that have never 
 yet found any explanation, unless indeed they can find it 
 here. In the home of the Wesleys there were similar man- 
 ifestations continued for a long period. From almost every 
 nation, every religion, every age, there come to us these 
 stories of abnormal, unusual occurrences ; things that usually 
 the people have called miracles, that they were not able to 
 explain. Now here is the point that I wish to emphasize. 
 Are these stories, hundreds of them, told by the gravest and 
 most reliable writers and historians of the world, are they 
 true ? They certainly are not conscious falsehoods. Do 
 they mean that the people who reported these things in all 
 ages were so little to be relied on that they should be con- 
 stantly liable to this sort of delusion from the beginning of 
 the world until now ? I simply wish to say this : if I may 
 believe in the central thought of modern Spiritualism, that 
 fact would run a line of light, a line of sanity, back up the 
 ages through every religion, through every nation, through 
 every tribe, and would give me an added respect for the 
 ability of the average man to observe and tell the truth. It 
 would explain a thousand things that now are inexplicable. 
 It would explain not only the Bible, but the Scriptures of 
 all ages, and the writings of grave old Roman writers, like 
 
Spiritualism 149 
 
 Livy, and almost all writers of ancient times. Brush them 
 one side, and put them down with scorn to the credulity of 
 man, and we must believe, what I do not like to believe, that 
 men have been too credulous in all these ages. To believe 
 that there was a kernel of truth in their reports would give 
 an added respect for human nature. 
 
 Here also might be found a rational explanation of the 
 ancient oracles, and of such claims as that made by Soc- 
 rates concerning the daimott that was his constant attendant 
 and teacher. 
 
 Then what a light it would throw upon the whole Bible ! 
 For the Bible looked at from the stand-point of the rational- 
 ist is nothing but a spiritualistic book from beginning to 
 end. Its entire significance is in its Spiritualism. It is full 
 to running over with it from one cover to the other. Must 
 we put everything there down to the wildest kind of delu- 
 sion ? Must we not, unless there is some ground for these 
 beliefs ? I would like to believe something a little more to 
 the credit of these reporters. 
 
 Let me indicate to you one kind of influence it would have 
 on my thinking. I do not believe at all in the physical res- 
 urrection of Jesus of Nazareth. On the testimony contained 
 in the New Testament, I see little cause for believing even 
 in his spiritual reappearance. The testimony of the New 
 Testament concerning the resurrection of Jesus, if it were 
 paralleled by testimony in a court of justice, would not be 
 accepted, for it is simply the anonymous testimony of people 
 whom we cannot cross-examine as to certain very strange 
 and wonderful things that happened nearly two thousand 
 years ago. One of the strangest things to me is to find peo- 
 ple who believe in these stories told in the New Testament, 
 but who do not believe the modern ones. For the modern 
 ones are of precisely the same kind, and have this advantage 
 
1 50 Signs of the Times 
 
 over the old: that they have the living testimony of hun- 
 dreds and thousands of credible men and women, while 
 the old stories are no more credible on their own account 
 than the modern ones, and have no evidence that would be 
 allowed if it were standing simply alone. 
 
 In view and here is what I have in mind in view of 
 this, if I may be permitted to believe in the visible spirit 
 appearance of any modern man who has died, why then it 
 would be perfectly easy and rational for me to believe that 
 Paul saw Jesus on the way to Damascus. It would not seem 
 a supernatural fact, but a perfectly natural occurrence. 
 
 And here let me remove one common prejudice. Spirit- 
 ualism makes no demand on us that we believe the super- 
 natural. At most, it is only a question of words. A spiritual 
 world, if it exists, is as natural as the physical world. All 
 the mightiest forces are invisible, but not therefore super- 
 natural. 
 
 I want to mention to you, also, a thought which strikes me 
 as being of a great deal of importance, as springing out of 
 the doctrine of evolution, as to these modern wonders; for 
 evolution reaches from the beginning to the end, and there 
 is no sort of reason to suppose that its force is spent, but 
 every reason to suppose the contrary. Note one thing of 
 vast significance. The lowest forms of life, worms and 
 fishes, occupy a horizontal position. They have very little 
 development of brain, very simple nervous systems. The 
 force of evolution has tended ever to lift from the horizontal 
 plane up through higher forms of life, reptile, bird, mammal, 
 till you have man perpendicular, standing on his feet, with 
 immense development of brain and nervous power. Does 
 evolution stop there ? No, it has left the physical, ages ago. 
 It is not producing marked changes in the structure of the 
 body, but it seizes on the brain and the intellectual power, 
 
Spiritualism 151 
 
 and raises that. It seizes on the moral, the ethical nature of 
 man, until to-day, as I have had occasion more than once to 
 tell you, the ethical ideal is mightier than any physical or 
 intellectual force in all the world. But it did not stop there. 
 It seized the spiritual nature of man; and now it would seem 
 to me in perfect accord with the scientific doctrine of evo- 
 lution to suppose that we may reach still higher yet, that 
 there is to be a grand, a free, a wide-spread and general 
 development of the spiritual nature of man. If so, then it 
 would be in perfect accord with this teaching that there should 
 have been sporadic and occasional manifestations of this in 
 the past ages of the world, leading up to the moment of its 
 more general recognition. 
 
 One other point I must notice and emphasize a little. It 
 seems to me that a great many people are intellectually con- 
 fused as to the choice they must make between the two great 
 theories of life. There are people who put aside any claims 
 to proof in this direction or that as bearing upon the spirit- 
 ual nature of man, and yet cling to their own belief in his 
 spiritual nature illogically and without any proof whatever. 
 We are presented with two theories, and we cannot choose a 
 little of one and a little of the other. One or the other is 
 certainly true. One theory is the materialistic. In accord- 
 ance with that, human life, any intelligent life, is merely a 
 passing, transitory stage, of no more permanent existence 
 than these blossoms that now surround me. Humanity itself, 
 its brain, its heart, its life, its hope, its Jesus, its Shakspere, 
 its Buddha, all the great names of the world, are only curi- 
 ous and strange manifestations of this material world, blos- 
 soming as the plants blossom, fading as the plants fade. On 
 that theory, think a moment what it means, the world, 
 all the past of the world, is a desert, darkness, a black abyss, 
 just behind us nothing. All who have ever lived have been 
 
152 Signs of the Times 
 
 blotted out, and all that great array of figures are only fan- 
 cies of a dream. And before us what ? Night and the dark 
 again. We live, we think, we feel for a little while, and that 
 is the end. Here is this world of ours, with just a few gen- 
 erations that are now peopling it, sailing through space, and 
 this is all ; and, when one drops out, he drops into everlast- 
 ing nothingness. That is one theory. It does not com- 
 mend itself to me, either to my intellect or to my heart. 
 
 The other theory is what ? It is that spirit and life are 
 first, supreme ; that spirit shaped and controls form, that 
 form only expresses spirit. Why, I have had a dozen bodies 
 since I was born into this life. There is nothing that I know 
 of in any science to make it unreasonable to believe that 
 after the fact which we call death I may still go on clothed 
 with a body as real as is this. This theory teaches us that 
 the universe is all alive. Young, the great scientist who 
 discovered what is now the universally accepted theory of 
 light, who lived just a little after Sir Isaac Newton's time, 
 recognized as one of the most acute and profound thinkers 
 of the world, put it forth as a speculation merely, he did 
 not claim anything more, that for anything science knew 
 to the contrary we now see hints that look that way 
 there might be no end of living, pulsing, throbbing worlds 
 all around us, a spiritual system of which we are the material 
 counterpart. 
 
 At any rate, we must choose between the theory of ma- 
 terialism and a spiritualistic theory. If the spiritualistic 
 theory be true, then death is not the end. I may hope to 
 find my friends once more ; and it is quite natural that the 
 spiritual natures of certain susceptible ones of the race 
 should become developed so that they are capable of re- 
 ceiving communications from the other side from those who 
 attempt to come into such relations with them. Does that 
 
Spiritualism 153 
 
 not seem to you perfectly natural ? If there be such a thing 
 as a spiritual world, if my father is alive, if your brother, 
 sister, husband, wife, is alive, and if they are not very far 
 away, would it not be the most natural thing in the world for 
 them to try, at any rate, to reach us ? 
 
 I propose now to hint to you a few words as to the proof 
 of these claims which Spiritualists offer. One thing is sig- 
 nificant, and is immensely to the credit of this higher Spirit- 
 ualism. It does not ask anybody to believe with his eyes 
 shut. It does not ask anybody to take the statement of the 
 most truthful person on the face of the earth. It offers, or 
 claims to offer, no end of facts as proved ; and it asks you to 
 investigate, and believe or reject on the basis of these claims. 
 I say it is immensely to the credit of this higher Spiritual- 
 ism that it should put itself on this purely scientific basis as 
 being perfectly in accord with the tendencies and movement 
 of the modern world. 
 
 You are familiar in a general way with the kind of facts 
 that are offered as proof. They are spoken of lightly, some- 
 times sneered at. It has been said, Even suppose a physical 
 body is lifted up or moved by a force that has apparently no 
 connection with the muscular power of any people present, 
 I have heard this spoken of and sneered at a thousand 
 times, suppose it is, what of it ? One of the most learned 
 men of this country has given this hint as to what of it. I 
 repeat it from him. He makes this point. Everything in 
 this world, so far as we know, if let alone, tends downward 
 under the force of universal gravity. There is no power 
 known in heaven or earth that is capable of lifting even a 
 pin against this force of gravity except the power of intelli- 
 gent will. If, therefore, it should happen, if it should be 
 demonstrated, that there is any such force that is capable of 
 doing this, here would be the Rubicon, the very dividing line 
 
154 Signs of the Times 
 
 between materialism and spiritualism, absolute demonstration 
 that here is intelligent will at work. I give you this as quo- 
 tation, not verbally, but the idea, as expressing the opinion 
 of one of the most learned men in this country as to the 
 significance of such a fact, supposing it ever occurred. And 
 I say to you frankly, in passing, that I am convinced that 
 such facts have occurred and do occur. 
 
 I cannot, at this time, even hint at the many proofs that 
 the Spiritualists offer. You can find them for yourselves. 
 You may, however, be interested if I give you one or two 
 brief hints of things which have come under my own obser- 
 vation and which have filled me with most restless and eager 
 questioning. 
 
 There has been in the modern world a manifestation in 
 these last few years of certain strange powers on the part of 
 mind as already embodied, such as was not recognized or 
 given any place in science until the last half-century. As 
 I told you last Sunday, a French scientific commission inves- 
 tigated hypnotism and pronounced it all humbug. To-day 
 there is not a competent scientific man who does not recog- 
 nize its truth. There used to be once great incredulity as 
 to the existence of clairvoyance and clairaudience. To day, 
 I venture to say there is no person of competent intelligence, 
 who has investigated the matter, who does not believe that 
 these powers exist. It was once believed that there could 
 be no such thing as communication on the part of one mind 
 with another, except through the ordinary physical media. 
 The idea would have been scorned and flouted a few years 
 ago. I venture here again to say that there is probably not 
 a man of competent intelligence, who has given it careful and 
 earnest investigation, who does not believe in telepathy, or 
 mind-reading, the possibility of minds communicating with 
 each other without much regard to space, providing the con- 
 ditions and circumstances are favorable. 
 
Spiritualism 155 
 
 These do not prove Spiritualism at all ; but note this one 
 thing. It proves that there has been a tremendous increase 
 and widening of the recognition of the powers of the human 
 mind. They prove what appears to be, at least, a semi-inde- 
 pendence of the recognized physical faculties of communica- 
 tion. What kind of mind is this that can manifest itself to 
 another a thousand miles away ? Something different from 
 the old idea of mind that used to be generally entertained. 
 Phenomena like these have become so familiar to me that 
 they are no more wonderful now than the telegraph and 
 the telephone. I cannot explain the telegraph and the tele- 
 phone, but I know they are true. I cannot explain these 
 things, but I know they are true. 
 
 But one step more I will hint. Something else has oc- 
 curred in my experience which puzzles me beyond all words 
 to express. I have no place for it in any scientific theory 
 with which I am acquainted ; I do not know what to do with 
 it. In the presence of a personal friend, only two being in 
 the room, I have had communication made to me of cer- 
 tain things occurring at the very instant in another State. 
 Where did it come from ? How ? I do not know. I simply 
 know that science, according to its present development, has 
 nothing whatever to say to facts like these ; it has no place 
 to put them, and must widen its theories before it can ac- 
 count for them. Of course, if I were ready to accept all the 
 claims put forth on the behalf of modern Spiritualism, I 
 should naturally explain these facts in the light of that the- 
 ory. I frankly say I do not know of any other theory that 
 even promises an explanation. 
 
 Perfect candor and fairness compel me to say that some 
 of these communications have about them such traces of the 
 identity of the "spirits" claiming to communicate as fill me 
 with surprise. I have never counted as evidence of "spirit" 
 
156 Signs of the Times 
 
 activity anything a " medium " might tell me which I already 
 knew. I have said, This may be mind-reading. But, over 
 and over again, until it is commonplace, I have had thus 
 told me things which it was impossible the psychic should 
 ever have known. 
 
 But when, as on several occasions, I am told things that 
 neither myself nor the psychic knew, ever did know, or ever 
 could have known, so far as I could possibly discover, then 
 I know not what to say unless I am to suppose the presence 
 and activity of some invisible intelligence. But, were that 
 proved, it would still remain to prove that this intelligence 
 was once embodied as man or woman. 
 
 Here, then, I rest. I am in no hurry. The one thing, the 
 only thing that any sane man can desire is the truth. It 
 seems to me the most fool-hardy of all things for any man to 
 object to a fact. If it is a fact, then it is only folly to object; 
 for if indeed it be a fact it will remain a fact after you have 
 objected your life long. The only sane search in the world, 
 then, is for truth. I am so anxious to find the truth that I 
 cannot afford to make up my mind too readily. I must 
 pause, I must wait. I must not only think certain things 
 probable, but I must know they are true. 
 
 But this much I will say. It seems to me due to the 
 claims of this higher Spiritualism to say that, if I should 
 ever come to accept the central claim of Spiritualism, I can- 
 not see wherein it would change my belief, scientific, philo- 
 sophic, ethical, practical, one whit. What would it do ? It 
 would simply place under my feet a rock, demonstrated to be 
 a rock, instead of a hope, a trust, a great and glorious belief. 
 
 If this higher faith of Spiritualism should ever be univer- 
 sally accepted, what would follow ? It would abolish death. 
 It would make you know that the loved are not lost, though 
 they have gone before you. It would make any human life 
 
Spiritualism 157 
 
 here, whatever its poverty, disease or sorrow, worth while, 
 because of the grand possibility of the outlook. It would 
 give victory over sorrow, over heart-break, over tears. It 
 would make one master not only of death, but of life. It 
 would make him feel sure that he was building up, day by 
 day here, the character that he was to carry with him on to 
 that next higher level of the ascent that is never to cease, 
 but eternally to rise nearer and nearer to God. 
 
 I then frankly say to you friends that, while I am so anx- 
 ious to find the truth that I wish to know that the dust is the 
 end of me if it is, I would certainly rather believe that 
 it is not. I would rather believe that we are forming the 
 beginning of associations here which are to be eternal. I 
 would like not only to listen to, but to believe the whisper 
 that comes down out of the infinite light : " There shall be no 
 more death." 
 
BREAK-UPS THAT MEAN ADVANCE. 
 
 In the first sermon of the present series I considered the 
 break-up of the old faith, stating some of the reasons why it 
 can no longer be intelligently held. This morning I propose 
 to consider another phase of the question of the breaking-up 
 of the old ; namely, that which looks upon the break as the 
 condition of a larger and grander building. There are de- 
 structions which leave things waste and desolate. There are 
 other destructions which are simply preparations for some- 
 thing finer than that which has been destroyed. 
 
 You are familiar with the charge so commonly made 
 against Unitarians, against liberals of every order : that their 
 work is entirely negative, that they tear down and do not 
 build up ; that they take away, but do not give anything 
 in place of that which they take away. I propose this morn- 
 ing to consider whether the experiences through which this 
 world is passing to-day have about them anything that ought 
 to take away our heart or courage or hope, or whether they 
 be not rather something to inspire, to lift us up, to thrill us 
 with a grander courage, to take us by the hand and lead us 
 to the performance of a larger duty. 
 
 If you were to drive through the country some of these 
 warm days in spring, you would see on every hand beautiful 
 fields, where the fresh, new grass is growing, where buds are 
 unfolding into lovely flowers, and where everything seems 
 thrilling and pulsing with glad life. But here and there you 
 
UNIVERSITY 
 
 Break-ups that mean A< 
 
 would see a process that seems like a destruction of all this 
 fresh, new life of the year. The farmer is at work in his 
 fields ; and the ploughshare that he is driving comes tearing 
 along in the midst of the roots of the grasses and flowers, 
 and overturning, with its destructive power, all this fresh life 
 and beauty. But, if you can look at these things with a 
 poet's eye, as did Burns, poet and farmer both, you will 
 sympathize with the stanza in which he addresses a mouse 
 whose nest, or " housie," is overthrown : 
 
 " Thy wee bit housie, too, in ruin I 
 Its silly wa's the wins are strewin' ! 
 
 " Thou saw the fields laid bare an' waste, 
 And weary winter comin' fast, 
 An' cozie here, beneath the blast, 
 
 Thou thought to dwell, 
 Till, crash ! the cruel coulter pass'd 
 
 Out thro' thy cell." 
 
 And the same thought that cares for the tiniest form of life 
 takes into its great heart the life of the mountain daisy, and 
 he sings : 
 
 " There, in thy scanty mantle clad, 
 Thy snawie bosom sunward spread, 
 Thou lifts thy unassuming head 
 
 In humble guise ; 
 But now the share uptears thy bed, 
 And low thou lies ! " 
 
 Looked at from the point of view of the mountain daisy 
 and the mouse, the grasses and the flowers, the process that 
 is going on is destruction, and only destruction. But the far- 
 mer knows, and every observer knows, that it is something 
 more than destruction ; that it is the preparatory process for 
 a larger, sweeter life ; that it is prophecy of the harvest. 
 
160 Signs of the Times 
 
 This intimates the kind of destruction that goes on in 
 other parts of God's creation besides the fields of the 
 farmer. 
 
 The same lesson we may learn from the history of the 
 growth of this planet, this our home. Those who have made 
 a careful study of geology tell us that, ages ago, the earth 
 looked very different from what it does now. The present 
 continent then may have been beneath the sea, and that 
 which is now the ocean bottom may be made of the conti- 
 nents that were green and thrilling and throbbing with life. 
 We know that perpetually a process of wasting and wearing 
 is going on \ that the ocean is tearing down the cliffs and 
 wasting away the shore. But we know that this is not de- 
 struction that means waste : it is only the process by which 
 God builds a home for his children. Now and then a con- 
 tinent is shaken, and a chain of mountains is heaved into the 
 air. This, again, is only one of the steps of progress by 
 which the world grows, so that here, everywhere, from the 
 beginning until now, has been going on this process of de- 
 struction, this prophecy and promise of larger building. 
 
 One more illustration to show you that I am dealing not 
 with something peculiar to religion, as a great many people 
 in their thoughtlessness seem to suppose, but that we are 
 dealing with a world-wide, an age-long principle. Let us see 
 what happens in the sphere of government. 
 
 The early tribes and peoples organize themselves as best 
 they may. But we know that the first attempts at government 
 are always harsh, hard, cruel, the domination of some war- 
 chief of relentless power, or some despot who lords it over 
 his fellows. We know, also, that, when people become ac- 
 customed to the forms of government in which they have 
 been born and have grown up, they are apt to identify gov- 
 ernment itself with these forms. But what happens ? Peo- 
 
Break-ups that mean Advance 161 
 
 pie become wiser. They learn more. They desire their 
 freedom. The conditions that surround them do not favor 
 the best and noblest life that is in them. There is not room 
 for the development of the highest and finest manhood ; and 
 yet those who dominate and govern wish to retain their privi- 
 leges, and they identify these particular forms of govern- 
 ment with government itself, and so are not willing to relin- 
 quish their hold. What is going on in Russia to-day ? The 
 Czar, the nobility, are attempting to keep things as they 
 have been for ages, attempting to repress and hold down this 
 living, rising, expanding power which is in human hearts and 
 brains. So we know they are in danger of revolution every 
 moment of every day. Unless the human race can progress 
 in some peaceful, quiet, natural way, it must by revolution. 
 But when this power asserts itself, when men and women 
 declare that they will have freedom to be the best that is in 
 them, it does not mean the destruction of government. It 
 means only that the principles of a higher, finer power of 
 government are developed within their own hearts and lives, 
 and that the old form is no longer fitted to that larger life. 
 
 In the time of the French Revolution, it was perfectly 
 natural that the king and nobility, and all the adherents of 
 the old regime, should suppose that the world was coming to 
 an end, that all government was in danger, and that an- 
 archy, the destruction of all order, was at hand. And yet 
 history teaches us that it was only the people demanding 
 room to grow, room to think, room to live out their higher, 
 finer life. 
 
 Note one thing which is suggestive as parallel to what 
 is true too in religion. As the world gets wiser and bet- 
 ter, the forms of government the external display of it 
 may naturally and safely become less and less, because, as 
 the principles of government become incarnated in the 
 
1 62 Signs of the Times 
 
 hearts and lives of the people, they do not need this outward 
 display, this external pressure, to hold them in order. They 
 grow orderly like the unfolding life of a tree. 
 
 Come, now, and note the same thing going on in religion. 
 We are passing through a phase of religious life that un- 
 doubtedly means the destruction of the old order, the break- 
 ing up of the old faith. You have to go back only one or 
 two hundred years in Europe, to come to a period when the 
 Church held the life of Europe in its hands, dominated not 
 only in the airy regions of faith, but controlled the earthly, 
 or secular, matters as well. The Church was the dominant 
 power, not only in the intellectual world, in the moral life, 
 in the Church, but in the State, everywhere. To-day it has 
 lost its grasp on Europe, not showing a capacity as yet to 
 expand its life to meet the growing demands of the people. 
 It has been pushed one side and is being left behind. 
 
 In Protestant countries very much the same process is 
 going on. The Church holds no such place in the rever- 
 ence, in the thought, in the love, of the people, as it did a 
 hundred years ago. The newspaper, literature, science, art, 
 all of these, instead of being servants of the Church as they 
 once were, have taken the position of rivals ; and there are 
 thousands of people who feel as though they could get along 
 very well without the Church. 
 
 Then those who stand as representatives of the Church 
 do not preach the old dogmas, the old conceptions of things, 
 as they used to. They do not make the extraordinary claims 
 they used to. I suppose there are hardly any ministers of 
 any church to-day who will claim that it is absolutely neces- 
 sary for a man to be a member of any particular communion, 
 in order to stand in right relations with God, to be " saved." 
 This process, then, of the apparent disintegration of the old 
 faith in religion is going on. 
 
Break-ups that mean Advance 163 
 
 Let us note, for a moment, certain accompaniments of this 
 change, and see whether they can be looked upon as causes. 
 
 Is the Church, as organized religion, losing its hold on the 
 masses of men because these men do not know so much, are 
 not so wise, as they used to be ? You know very well that 
 there never was a time in the history of the world when the 
 average intelligence of men was so high as it is to-day. 
 Whatever this process may mean, it does not mean that the 
 Church has lost its hold because people are growing igno- 
 rant. People are not growing ignorant : they are wiser than 
 they were. 
 
 Are they less reverent than they used to be? I cannot 
 think so. The exhibition of irreverence here and there 
 means not that the people do not revere that which seems to 
 them worthy of reverence, but it means only that they re- 
 gard these things no longer as able to command the rever- 
 ence of their hearts as they used to. They are shifting their 
 attitude. They do not stand in the same relation to these 
 things. They do not look at them as they once did. 
 
 Does the world care less for truth now than it used to? 
 Is that the reason why it has turned away from what the old 
 churches are accustomed to speak of as God's truth ? I 
 think that every competent man who has observed the drift 
 of the world will be obliged to confess that there never was 
 a time since humanity existed when men were so eager to 
 find the truth about everything as they are to-day. Men are 
 seeking for the truth with a thirst that only the truth can 
 slake, the truth in heaven, the truth on earth, the truth of 
 the past, the truth of the present, the truth about everything. 
 Truth is the one thing in whose presence all men are ready 
 to uncover, and at whose feet all people are ready to bow. 
 
 Is it because people are not so good, morally, as they used 
 to be that religion is losing its hold upon them ? Are they 
 
164 Signs of the Times 
 
 giving up something and in the place of it taking something 
 poorer, and so as a natural result deteriorating ? Every care- 
 ful student of the world knows that there never was a time 
 in the history of man when the average love of justice, the 
 love of mercy, the love of good, noble, and humane qualities, 
 was so high as to-day. What then ? 
 
 Whatever this change may mean that we are going 
 through, it is not because of the world's growing less wise, 
 less reverent, less truth-loving, less good ; and we who love 
 religion, and believe in it, can we confess for a moment that 
 the cause of the " decay of religion " is the fact that the world 
 is growing wiser and better ? If we dare make a confession 
 like that, then it means the death of religion. Humanity is 
 not going to take one backward step in this matter of wis- 
 dom or goodness or reverence or love for truth. And if 
 religion is being outgrown by this process of humanity's 
 becoming better, then is it indeed proved to be a thing 
 that belonged only in the childhood of the race , and that 
 can be dispensed with by our grown-up manhood. 
 
 I am afraid, in order to outline my subject thoroughly and 
 as carefully as it deserves, that I may be obliged to repeat 
 some of the things I have said and possibly some illustra- 
 tions which I have used in previous years. If I do so, I do 
 it with my eyes open, and because there are some things 
 that need to be repeated and impressed upon the minds of 
 thoughtful people, in order that they may comprehend the 
 kind of world in which they are living. 
 
 I wish to raise the question as to what religion is, although 
 I have done it before, that you may see that in my opinion, 
 whatever is happening, it is not the decay of religion. 
 
 Religion has always been, from the beginning of the world 
 until now, and always must be the same thing in essence. 
 It only changes its form as men change their conceptions of 
 
Break-ups that mean Advance 165 
 
 the world, of God, of themselves. Religion is and always 
 has been the attempt on the part of men to get into closer, 
 more helpful relations with God, or with whatever power 
 they think of as manifesting itself in and governing the 
 universe. The lowest fetich worshipper recognizes a power 
 outside of him that can help or hurt him, and his religion 
 is praying or making an offering to this power, to ward off 
 his anger, if he thinks he is displeased, or to win his favor, 
 if he desres his help. And the highest and noblest Chris- 
 tian that ever lived is engaged in precisely the same effort. 
 He is trying to do what he believes God wants him to do, 
 whether it is to pray or read the Bible or sing a hymn or 
 engage in a service or preach a sermon or help an unfortu- 
 nate fellow-man or cultivate a special internal feeling or 
 state of mind. He is trying to do what he believes God 
 wants him to do, for the sake of getting into a closer and 
 more friendly relation with his God. How people will do it, 
 what form of service they will engage in, all the external 
 manifestation of the religious life, must always turn on what 
 people think about God, what they think about themselves, 
 what they think God wants them to do. 
 
 You see, then, that religion always has been one in pur- 
 pose, in essence; and you see that that essence and the 
 effort of science are precisely the same. The scientific man, 
 whether he believes in God or not, believes in a power that 
 is not himself, that is outside of him, that produces him, a 
 dower in relation to which he must live, a power that may 
 help him or hurt him ; and so the whole effort of science is 
 simply to find out the nature of this power and get into right 
 relations with it. Science has for its essential idea, purpose, 
 and aim, precisely the same thing that religion has, always 
 has had, and always must have. Religion, then, is simply 
 man's search for the secret of life. It is man trying to get 
 
1 66 Signs of the Times 
 
 into right relation with this power that folds him in its arms, 
 the power in coming into right relations with which he 
 finds life, prosperity, happiness ; the power that was here 
 before he came, and that will be here after he has passed 
 away. Religion in its very nature is eternal. So long as 
 there is a universe, so long as there is a man in the universe 
 capable of thinking about the relation in which he stands to 
 it, so long religion must remain, no matter what name it 
 wears or what form it assumes. Religion, then, is one of 
 the immortals. You may be sure, then, that the process we 
 are passing through, however many religions may die, does 
 not mean the death of religion itself. 
 
 We are ready now to note what it is that is taking place, 
 and consider whether the process through which we are pass- 
 ing is a discouraging or a hopeful one. 
 
 The first thing that has happened is such a growth on the 
 part of human intelligence as gives us an entirely new and 
 enormously expanded conception of this universe that is our 
 home. We are passing through a process of outgrowing one 
 universe and becoming gradually adapted to and at home in 
 another. And the new one is so grand in its dimensions that 
 the first feeling of those who have left the old and are look- 
 ing out into the new is of being utterly astray and alone. 
 
 Thirty-six years after this city of Boston was founded, 
 Milton took out a license in London for the publication of 
 "Paradise Lost." The idea of the universe represented in 
 Milton's poem was the old idea which the world had held for 
 hundreds of years. We talk about the " spheres " to-day ; 
 but we have iorgotten completely the most of us that 
 the meaning of that word " sphere " has completely changed 
 since Shakspere wrote it, since Milton wrote it. What was 
 the old universe ? The world, this little planet of ours, was 
 the centre ; and outside of it were ten crystalline, concentric 
 
Break-ups that mean Advance 167 
 
 spheres, just as substantial, just as real, as those globes that 
 surround the gas-jets. To these were attached the moon, 
 sun, planets ; and in the outer one were all the stars. 
 These spheres revolved, holding the planets and sun and 
 stars in their orbits. And the whole universe was not so 
 large as the at present known orbit of the moon; for it 
 took Satan and his angels only nine days and nights to fall 
 from heaven clear to the bottom of the universe, according 
 to Milton's picture. 
 
 Let me now hint a word as to how we are trying to get the 
 universe adjusted to our thought to-day. It takes light eight 
 and a half minutes to travel the 92,500,000 miles from the 
 sun to the earth. When you leave our sun, our nearest 
 neighbor, the very first star beyond our system is so far 
 away that it takes its light three and a half years to reach 
 us. And then where are we ? Standing on the threshold of 
 a universe that is infinite. In every direction open out star- 
 lighted vistas that lose themselves in measureless space. 
 This system of ours is part of the Milky Way. It is a little 
 river of light, apparently a sort of Gulf Stream, crossing the 
 ocean of the sky over our heads. Sir William Herschel 
 estimated that, as he looked at and studied the Milky Way, 
 116,000 suns passed across the field of his telescope in fifteen 
 minutes. On another occasion 258,000 crossed the field of 
 his telescope in forty-one minutes. Think what a change 
 of thought two centuries have wrought concerning this house 
 of God that is our home ! 
 
 And is it any loss ? Think of the immeasurably grander 
 world of which we are inhabitants. 
 
 Then what must we think of God ? Can we have the old 
 ideas any longer, of God just a little way over our heads, 
 sitting on a throne, sending out angel messengers to see how 
 things are with us down here on our little earth, and receiv- 
 
1 63 Signs of the Tunes 
 
 ing their reports as a king would send out a messenger to 
 some distant province and receive his message on his return ? 
 
 Now where and what is God ? Where is he not ? We may 
 well use the bold poetry of the Israelitish writer, and say 
 that he weigheth the stars as the dust of his balance, he 
 taketh up the isles as a very little thing. Suns a thousand 
 times larger than ours attest his power in the far-off deeps 
 of heaven. But he is not there alone. I hold in my hand 
 the tiniest flower that has opened this morning ; and I need 
 all of God to explain to me its petals, its tinting, its fra- 
 grance. I look into your eyes ; and God looks out of them, 
 out of the love, the intelligence, of your souls, into mine. 
 God is not on a throne ; but he is everywhere, the life, 
 power, grace, tenderness, care, of the world, infinitely nearer 
 to us than he used to be when we thought that we could 
 send up a prayer, and he would send down an angel to 
 hear what we wanted, by his hand minister to our necessities. 
 It is God himself that ministers to our necessities every wak- 
 ing and every sleeping hour of every day and every night, 
 God, all of God, all his wisdom, all his love, all his care, 
 holding us in his arms, leading us by his hand with a tender- 
 ness and a grace as complete as though it were all he had to 
 do. This is the God that we are trying to think to-day. Is 
 there any loss about it ? Infinite gain, rather, to those who 
 wake up to and appreciate what the growing intelligence of 
 the world signifies. 
 
 Then, with this new universe and this new God, we must 
 have a new conception of humanity, not the wreck and ruin 
 of a modern creation, man young, indeed, compared with 
 the stars, young, indeed, compared with the planet itself, his 
 home, but man unspeakably older than our minds are cap- 
 able of comprehending. Man has been here on this planet 
 perhaps two hundred thousand years. He began in the 
 
Break-ups that mean Advance 169 
 
 lowest animalism and barbarism, and he has been climbing 
 up a stairway whose steps were tears and heartache and 
 blood ; but not these only, joy, also, and hope and love. He 
 has been climbing up by every process that has made him 
 more a man, until to-day he is king of the planet, learning 
 more and more of God's great secrets, grasping more and 
 more the forces we call natural, but which are only the pres- 
 ent living God, coming into closer relation with God at every 
 step, being helped by him to a wider, higher, larger life, 
 man not fallen, man ascending from the beginning, man to 
 ascend still until the end shall I say ? No, friends, though 
 we cannot comprehend it, and the words mean nothing to 
 us, there is no end. Out through the darkness, out through 
 the clouds that seem to mark the limit of life, we are begin- 
 ning to learn that he goes on, his whole self, as he has de- 
 veloped until the moment that he disappears from our sight,, 
 climbing on and up Godward, precisely the same as when 
 here. Our whole conception, then, of the nature of this man 
 and how to deal with him has been changed, changed by 
 our learning God's truth about him, that is all. It is not 
 a lower conception, not a loss, but an unspeakable gain. 
 
 And, then, we are getting a larger and finer idea of God's 
 revelation to the world. He did not send one little book to 
 one little people and leave all the rest of his children, all the 
 nations, the races, of the world, to stumble and fall in dark- 
 ness. We believe to-day that he has sent under every sky, 
 to every tongue and people, just so much light as they were 
 capable of receiving, and that he is leading them on grad- 
 ually, slowly, through the ages, for the Infinite Power in 
 infinite time is in no haste, leading them on to a grander 
 perception of the ever grander truth. We are learning to 
 think of all truth, whatever its source or however it comes to 
 us, as so many sentences in the ever-growing book of God. 
 
17 Signs of the Times 
 
 We have changed, then, our entire conception of the uni- 
 verse, of God, of man, of revelation, of destiny. And these 
 changes have come about not as the result of any deteriora- 
 tion. The old ideas are crumbling, being disintegrated, not 
 because of ignorance, not because of immorality, not because 
 of infidelity, as it is used in a sneering sense of any unbelief. 
 The world's infidelity means simply a larger belief. We are 
 outgrowing these old ideas, and finding out that they are not 
 large enough to match the universe of God. 
 
 What, then, ought to be the duty of men ? To trust in 
 God and love their fellow-men, not a duty of fear, not a 
 duty of hesitancy, not a duty of looking back with regret. 
 We may have our sentiment, if we will, about the things that 
 the world has loved and cherished so long. I should think 
 less of any man who had no sentiment about his boyhood ; 
 but I should think less still of him if he had so little appre- 
 ciation of his manhood that he wished to go back and be a 
 boy again. Reverence the things that pertain to the child- 
 hood of the race, love them, deal with them tenderly, as with 
 old associations, but recognize the fact of your growing man- 
 hood and womanhood, and turn bravely, grandly, with a 
 magnificent faith in God, to the day-dawn. I do not believe 
 this world is hastening to decay. We are only emerging 
 from the morning twilight, not descending into the evening. 
 God's great day and humanity's great day are still ahead 
 of us. 
 
 What, then, of the duty and work of the Church ? Is the 
 Church to become less and less as time goes on ? We shall 
 change our emphasis in regard to many things. A great 
 many rites and ceremonies and services that have been re- 
 garded as vital will lose all their meaning to us for the 
 simple reason that we have outgrown them. The advancing 
 Church, in the light of the advancing knowledge of the 
 
Break-ups that mean Advance 171 
 
 world, will find grander sanctities, grander rites and services, 
 grander songs, to match a grander world and a grander God. 
 There shall be no less of reverence, of sacredness, of any of 
 the fine, sweet, high things that make up the duty and glory 
 of the religious life. 
 
 And the Church will become organized, I believe, by and 
 by into something more magnificent than the past has ever 
 dreamed of. Science, philosophy, literature, poetry, paint- 
 ing, sculpture, music, all these things were once ministers 
 and servants of the Church. They shall be again ; for, when 
 humanity has grasped the idea that religion is the grandest 
 concern of the human brain as well as of the human heart, 
 that it means the science of all life in this world and forever- 
 more, then the Church will organize itself round these mag- 
 nificent ideas, and will call into its service once more all 
 science, all literature, all art, all music, all poetry, and so 
 assert and make good its claim to the utmost reverence and 
 love of all mankind. 
 
 And now, as illustrating my faith, I wish to give you what 
 I think is a noble expression of this whole line of thought, 
 put into form by our beloved Unitarian poet, Oliver Wendell 
 Holmes : 
 
 The waves unbuild the wasting shore ; 
 
 Where mountains towered, the billows sweep, 
 Yet still their borrowed spoils restore, 
 
 And raise new empires from the deep. 
 
 So, while the floods of thought lay waste 
 
 The old domain of chartered creeds, 
 Its heaven-appointed tides will haste 
 
 To shape new homes for human needs. 
 
 Be ours to mark with hearts unchilled 
 
 The change an outworn age deplores ; 
 The legend sinks, but faith shall build 
 
 A fairer throne on new-found shores. 
 
172 Signs of the Times 
 
 The star shall glow in western skies 
 That shone o'er Bethlehem's hallowed shrine, 
 
 And once again the temple rise 
 That crowned the rock of Palestine. 
 
 Though scattered far, the flock may stray : 
 His own the Shepherd still shall claim, 
 
 The saints who never learned to pray, 
 The friends who never spoke his name. 
 
 Dear Master, while we hear thy voice 
 
 That says, " The truth shall make you free," 
 
 Thy servants still by loving choice, 
 Oh, keep us faithful unto thee ! 
 
THE NEW CITY OF GOD. 
 
 Under the figure of a garden of plenty and peace or of 
 a golden age or of a perfect city, humanity has always been 
 dreaming of an ideal condition for the race. But it is one 
 of the marked signs of the present time that these dreams 
 are coming to be something more than dreams. They are 
 not merely in the air to amuse the idle fancies of a leisure 
 hour, not something thought of hardly as a possibility, but 
 only as a beautiful thing, if it might be. In the modern 
 world, these dreams of the ideal have come to be motive 
 forces. They are watchwords, they are rallying cries. People 
 believe more than they used to in the possibilities of human 
 progress. They believe that these dreams can be brought 
 down out of the sky, and organized as realities under the 
 forms of human society. 
 
 Since this is so, it seemed to me that I could do no more 
 fitting thing in the last of this series than to consider a little 
 some of these dreams, try to find out which way the forces 
 of the world are moving, so that we may co-operate, if possi- 
 ble, with those forces, and help on the realization of human- 
 ity's age-long and long-deferred hope ; for we need to know 
 which way the forces of the world are moving, apart from any 
 conscious or purposed endeavor of our own. If I believed, 
 as many loud-voiced reformers seem to, that the universe up 
 to the present time had been all wrong, wrong from first to 
 last, that things were deteriorating, that things were perpet- 
 
174 Signs of the Times 
 
 ually changing to the worse, then I, for one, should have no 
 heart even to attempt the deliverance of the world. Unless 
 the infinite forces are with us, what avail all our puny attempts 
 to construct an ideal earth ? Our only hope is in the faith 
 that there has been advance from the beginning, that we are 
 advancing forward and upward to-day ; and the only thing 
 that we can do is to find out which way God is moving, 
 and, instead of playing the part of obstruction and hindrance, 
 do what we can to co-operate, help on, hasten a little, the 
 coming 
 
 " Of that far-off divine event 
 To which the whole creation moves." 
 
 I ask you to consider a few typical examples of this dream 
 of the ideal as it has been indulged in, in the past, so that 
 you may see the changed conceptions of our modern thought 
 as to how these things are to be brought about. 
 
 And, first, I call your attention to the dream of John on 
 Patmos. It is evident that he had no conception of any 
 natural social good order here in the world. The earth was 
 under the control of him who is called in the New Testament 
 "the god of this world," the evil power. Humanity was 
 in a hopeless condition, so far as itself was concerned. 
 So John's dream is of an ideal divine, perfect city, not built 
 on the earth, not the result of any human endeavor, but 
 miraculously let down out of the heavens. His idea was 
 that humanity could be saved only by divine interposition 
 from without. He had no conception of humanity's achiev- 
 ing its own deliverance, of there being any divine force in 
 humanity working to the natural production of any realiza- 
 tion of his dream. 
 
 A few ages later, we come to the time of Augustine, the 
 great intellectual work of whose life was the book from 
 
The New City of God 175: 
 
 which I have taken the hint of my subject, "The City of 
 God." The Roman empire was crumbling, hastening to its 
 decay. Augustine conceived the idea of the Church as a 
 divine order miraculously constructed, miraculously created, 
 which was to be built upon the ruins of the empire, and so 
 be the embodiment of an ideal political and social as well 
 as religious order. But his dream proved to be only a 
 dream, never to be realized ; for that Church which he saw 
 growing until it mastered and controlled the whole earth is 
 to-day weaker than it has ever been for a thousand years,, 
 and so evidently a thing of the past that its bitterest enemy 
 need not stand in terror of it any more. 
 
 For a series of centuries after the time of Augustine, all 
 the kings of Europe put forth the claim that they ruled by 
 divine right. They tried to encircle their corrupt, selfish, 
 oppressive, tyrannous crowns with a halo of divine glory, 
 setting themselves up as the ministers of God for the organi- 
 zation of human society. But all these dreams have faded, 
 and become a thing of the past. 
 
 One more attempt was made, which, on account of its 
 peculiar significance, I need to note. When the Puritans 
 and the Pilgrims fled from persecution on the other side the 
 sea, and came to our dear old New England, they came with 
 the avowed intention, the clear thought out purpose, of es- 
 tablishing here a divine political and social order, nothing 
 less than a theocracy, a kingdom of God on earth. No 
 one but "saints," church members, were to have any control 
 in political affairs. No one but church members might vote - r 
 and, when laws were passed, these laws were, according to 
 their understanding, only translations of the divine law as 
 recorded in the only infallible Book, translations of God's 
 law into the statutes of our old Commonwealth. And how 
 far did their dream succeed ? It succeeded only in making 
 
176 Signs of the Times 
 
 itself a sad lesson of cruelty, of narrowness, bigotry, perse- 
 cution, that meant anything but freedom, anything but the 
 development of perfect individuality, anything but peace and 
 
 joy- 
 
 At the present time, you have only to read the reviews and 
 the newspapers, you have only to listen to public addresses 
 on every hand, to be made aware of the fact that there 
 are definite, earnest attempts being made to realize a half- 
 dozen different, antagonistic, mutually exclusive dreams of 
 a perfect social order. On the one hand, men are at- 
 tempting to bring about a condition of anarchy ; that is, 
 a condition not necessarily, according to their ideas, of 
 social disorder, but merely of utter individual freedom, the 
 abolition of all social constraint. Some of the earnest 
 advocates of these ideas really believe that most of the evils 
 of society to-day are the result of misguided and foolish 
 attempts to control individual action instead of leaving men 
 and women to act out the natures with which they are 
 endowed. On the other hand, you will note that there are 
 those who hold a precisely contrary theory, the Socialists, 
 Nationalists, who believe that there is too much individual 
 freedom already. If their ideas could be carried out, they 
 would make all of us simply fragments, parts, of a great 
 social machine, where there should be very little of individ- 
 ual initiative, very little of individual liberty of any kind, 
 but where every man, woman, and child should live not for 
 himself or herself, but only for this ideal organism that is 
 spoken of as society, or the nation. 
 
 Then there is Tolstoi with his dream of a social order, to 
 bring about which he is engaged in the writing and publish- 
 ing of books and pamphlets, making use of his great influ- 
 ence in every direction. 
 
 There is William Morris, the poet, the artist, the socialist, 
 
The New City of God 177 
 
 whom I had the pleasure of visiting and talking with in 
 London last summer, who has, on the other hand, his ideal, 
 and is as earnest as any missionary propagandist in all the 
 world ; who, with all his culture, all his artistic ability, all 
 his power and influence of every kind, goes into the streets 
 day after day, evening after evening, preaching what he 
 believes to be the gospel of the new society to any chance 
 crowd that he may gather to listen to his words. 
 
 All these movements, then, are going on, showing the rest- 
 lessness of humanity at the present time, restive under 
 imperfect conditions, restive under its burden of disease, of 
 poverty, of crime, haunted by the ideal of a better state, and 
 beginning to believe that it is in the power of men to radi- 
 cally change and better their conditions. They are not 
 dreaming only any longer, but making their dreams motive 
 force for earnest endeavor. 
 
 I wish now to attempt as well as I can in the time that 
 is mine to give you some hints concerning what I believe 
 to be the ideal condition of the race, concerning what seems 
 to me to be the divine methods as they are apparent in the 
 history of the past, and so to give you some hints as to 
 hopeful directions in which we may put forth our efforts to 
 turn the dreams of our enthusiasm into reality in the days 
 that are to come. 
 
 What would be an ideal condition of humanity ? I do 
 not want that city that John dreamed of, even if it were pos- 
 sible. In the first place, you will note the great change that 
 has come over our thought. No one any longer believes that 
 this new condition of humanity is to come by any divine in- 
 terposition, suddenly wrought among us, from without. We 
 all now believe in evolution, in human growth, in the possi- 
 bility of a development from our present condition into 
 something that is higher and better. The main body of the 
 
178 Signs of the Times 
 
 churches, indeed, apparently has given up the possibility of 
 bringing about such a condition of affairs in this world. 
 They have postponed their dream to that mysterious country 
 that lies beyond the border-land of death. But, on the part 
 of those of us who believe that a better condition can be 
 brought about here, let us try to see what that better con- 
 dition is. It may not seem to you half as gorgeous as the 
 picture of the Apocalypse, but let us try to put in plain words 
 just what we would all desire for mankind if we could have 
 our way. 
 
 We would not need to change the surface of the earth a 
 great deal. This earth of ours is fair enough, sweet enough, 
 beautiful enough, good enough. But we would like to reach 
 such a condition of society as that wherein every man, every 
 woman, every child, might have opportunity for what? 
 Opportunity, in the first place, and there are millions on 
 the earth to-day who do not have this opportunity, to live 
 healthful physical lives. This is the first, the basis, the 
 foundation of all. If we could realize our kingdom of 
 heaven, we would have first, then, such a condition of things 
 as would enable all persons to live healthy physical lives. 
 
 Next, we would have mankind released from their overbur- 
 den of drudgery : we would not abolish labor if we were wise, 
 but we would abolish too much labor. For, mark you, if 
 humanity is ever to rise to anything above the animal, it 
 must be by finding time, leisure to study, to develop, to grow, 
 to culture one's self. What do any of us mean by living ? 
 We would not give a snap of our fingers for bare existence 
 with its contents left out. When we talk about living, we 
 mean food, clothing, shelter, that are at least comfortable, 
 healthful conditions for the body, time enough to cultivate 
 our love of music, to develop at least some taste for art, for 
 beauty of form and color, for the lovely things of human life ; 
 
The New City of God 179 
 
 time enough to think, to study and cultivate the brain, to 
 find out what is true and what is false, to understand some- 
 thing, at least, of this wondrous world home of ours, to know 
 something of the past and of the pathway by which this race 
 of ours has come to be what it is to-day. We mean, then, a 
 little wealth, enough to release us from day-long drudgery, 
 time for cultivating these higher sides of human nature, 
 these things that we think of as peculiarly manly and 
 womanly. For, if you stop to think of it for a moment, you 
 will see this fact : that, in a condition of the world in which 
 every man and woman should be compelled to labor all his 
 or her waking hours merely for subsistence, anything like a 
 human life would be impossible. It would only be working, 
 eating so that you could work, sleeping so that you could 
 work, the drudgery of a mere animal existence. There must 
 be accumulated capital, there must be leisure, before men 
 and women can rise out of the animal stage and live in the 
 human. This, then, is our ideal condition of the world ; and 
 what do we need finer and better? A world where we 
 could all live healthfully, where we should have opportunity 
 to cultivate all the higher, finer sides of our nature, opportu- 
 nity to live for music and literature, opportunity to think, to 
 study, to remember, and to forecast, opportunity, in short, 
 to lead a human life. 
 
 This, then, being our ideal, let us consider for a little as 
 to whether the world is actually moving towards that. Mr. 
 George has said in his wonderfully interesting book, " Prog- 
 ress and Poverty," that the rich are getting richer and the 
 poor are getting poorer; that is, that the common people 
 are getting worse off all the time. I do not believe that any 
 one can intelligently study the history of the last fifty years 
 without being convinced that there never was a time in the 
 history of the world when the common people were so well 
 
i8o Signs of the Times 
 
 off as they are to-day ; that, even under the present oppres- 
 sions and along present lines, they are growing better and 
 better off every year. But that is not enough. We would 
 like to hasten it if we might. I speak of this because, if I 
 were not convinced of this, I should have no heart or hope 
 to endeavor to make things better than they are. 
 
 What, then, is the condition of the world ? For, if we are 
 to learn anything about the future, we must learn that lesson 
 from the past. We must find out the lines of progress along 
 which the world has been moving, and then see if we can 
 hasten the process a little. 
 
 Millions of years passed by between the fire-mist in 
 which our solar system began and the time when this won- 
 derful earth of ours, mountain-pillared, cloud-canopied, with 
 its green fields and its waters glinting in the sunlight, be- 
 came a fitting home for man. When it was ready, man 
 appeared, not man perfect, but man developed, as I be- 
 lieve, by natural processes out of the lower forms of animal 
 life ; developing as naturally as the flower, and, mark you, 
 just as divinely as the flower; for the natural to my thought 
 is divine. Weak and ignorant, man had to learn by expe- 
 rience ; for there is no other way in which a finite being can 
 learn. Carry it in mind all the way through discussions like 
 this, that the one purpose of God in this mysterious life of 
 ours, the one supreme purpose, is the development of a 
 soul ; and the development of souls has not been waiting all 
 these ages until we get a perfect earth and a finished condi- 
 tion of society. That process is going on all the time ; and, 
 if the schooling is not finished here, there is time enough 
 and room enough in God's infinite universe to complete it in 
 his own time and in his own way. So let us not think that 
 all the time is wasted because our ideals are not yet realized. 
 
 Man has been developed physically, how? By strug- 
 
The New City of God 181 
 
 gle. This world has been a gymnasium for the physical 
 development of man. He has been developing mentally, 
 how? Through struggle, through mistakes, through falling 
 and rising again. This world has been a school-house in 
 which man has been morally cultured and developed, how ? 
 After precisely the same method as that by which he has 
 been developed physically and intellectually. People seem 
 to think that the existence of evil is somehow a great mis- 
 take, no part of God's plan, something utterly unlike any- 
 thing else. But I am unable to see how. mankind could 
 have been developed morally except through this struggle 
 with evil, through making mistakes and falling and rising 
 again. So here along these lines mankind has been devel- 
 oping through all these ages. 
 
 Not only in these ways has man developed, but in political 
 ways, from the time when there was no freedom, when men 
 were subject to the caprice of successful war-chiefs, down 
 through the Middle Ages, when a man was hardly anything 
 but a means of power in the hands of the robber barons, to 
 a time when, in the words of Theodore Parker, quoted and 
 made memorable by Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg, we 
 are " a government of the people and for the people and by 
 the people." You see that the growth, the political develop- 
 ment of the people, has been from the very first towards the 
 growth of the individual and more freedom of action for the 
 individual. I emphasize that because I shall have occasion 
 to recur to it. 
 
 There has also gone on a social development parallel 
 to this of the physical and political, towards that form of 
 society in which the individual shall count for more and 
 more, and be less under the domination of the social influ- 
 ences that tend ever to repress any movement of individual- 
 ity and growth. 
 
1 82 Signs of the Times 
 
 Parallel to this is the growth in the industrial life of the 
 world. At first, the drudgery of the world was done by- 
 slaves and slaves alone, no freedom in it whatever. There 
 was no power of moving from place to place, no choice of 
 masters or of tasks. We have not reached the ideal indus- 
 trial condition of the world yet, but every step of progress 
 from the first has been towards industrial liberty for the 
 individual ; and they who talk about the wage-system as a 
 system of slavery, as being as bad as that which it super- 
 seded and of things as going from bad to worse, are either 
 ignorant or grievously misrepresent the past. The tendency 
 I believe to be, in every direction, not towards a socialism 
 that shall repress individual action, but towards another kind 
 of socialism, in which individualism, individual liberty, indi- 
 vidual initiative, shall have the largest, the freest, and the 
 most unimpeded course. 
 
 What has been attained through a large part of the his- 
 tory of the social development of the past has been the 
 result of what science calls natural selection, which may 
 mean to our minds a blind process, a struggle between 
 individuals in which the strongest comes out ahead. But 
 we have reached a point where it is possible for us to intro- 
 duce another force, a conscious human selection. We have 
 gone far enough, and have become wise enough, so that we 
 can do something towards creating for ourselves better condi- 
 tions. You know that science talks a great deal about the 
 influence of environment ; and that is wise. There is a con- 
 stant tendency on the part of all things to be adapted to and 
 shaped by their surroundings. The lower world is helpless 
 in the hands of this force. A bird is able to build a better 
 nest, if you give it a better place and better materials out of 
 which to construct it ; but man can do more than that. Man 
 can create new and better and higher conditions, so as to lift 
 in that way the level of the individual and social life. 
 
The New City of God 183 
 
 What and how much can we do ? Not a great deal, but 
 we can do a little. We cannot make this development very 
 rapid ; and I believe that the thing we need to guard against 
 at the present time is the thought that we can do things 
 suddenly, that we can bring about a perfect condition of the 
 world in only a little while ; because just as soon as we 
 delude ourselves with thoughts like this we are only laying 
 up for ourselves bitter disappointment and a loss of courage 
 to do the something that is possible. 
 
 In the first place, we can, by social agreement, make 
 knowledge universal. He who is ignorant is the victim of 
 his surroundings. It is only he who knows the forces with 
 which he deals who is capable of controlling them and mak- 
 ing them serve him. The next generation ought not to 
 come without every man and woman who is to compose it 
 possessing that accumulated stock of knowledge which the 
 world has in its possession, all that should enable it to 
 avoid the mistakes, the blunders, of the past, and so control 
 and lift the circumstances that are to surround it. 
 
 What else can we do ? I believe there is a hint of truth 
 at least in that for which Mr. Henry George is contending. 
 I believe that the natural resources of the earth ought, as 
 rapidly as possible, to be freed from the monopolies of pri- 
 vate and individual ownership, at least to the extent of giv- 
 ing every man all possible opportunity. 
 
 To illustrate what I mean. Go to England, and there 
 you find a man who never did a stroke of work in his life, 
 who never, in the slightest degree, added to the welfare of 
 the world, possessing and keeping for his own private be- 
 hoof, in an unproductive condition, thousands and thou- 
 sands of acres of land. On the other hand, such a condi- 
 tion of poverty as led Mr. William Morris to say to me that 
 there were five hundred thousand people in London to-day 
 
184 Signs of the Times 
 
 who do not know what they are going to eat to-morrow. 
 There ought to be such a condition of things as to make it 
 unprofitable for any man to control the natural resources of 
 the wealth of this world unused. So far as possible, every 
 man ought to have opportunity to use these springs of 
 wealth and prosperity that no man made, but which are the 
 gift of God to all the world. I am perfectly well aware that 
 every attempt to bring about this condition of things is sur- 
 rounded by a thousand difficulties. There are inherited and 
 vested wrongs not only, but inherited and vested rights, 
 that must be regarded. If this man has not earned his 
 thousands of acres, he is not to blame for having been born 
 into their possession. It is a manifestly difficult and deli- 
 cate task, but something can gradually be done in this direc- 
 tion by which eventually the natural resources of the world 
 may be thrown wide open as an opportunity for every man. 
 
 One other thing can be done. This will seem to many a very 
 slight thing at first; and yet, in the light of what I have said, 
 you ought to appreciate its immense significance. We can, 
 we ought, we must, shorten the hours of labor for those who 
 depend on their daily labor for their bread. Why must we ? 
 For the simple reason that no man can by any possibility 
 cultivate himself in those things which make manhood un- 
 less he have at least a little time. The world's work can 
 be done, not only as much as is being done, but more than 
 is done now. More wealth can be created than is being 
 created, and still shorter hours of labor be assigned to those 
 whose daily life is drudgery for bread. Some things in this 
 direction are possible. 
 
 Now, at the last, what is the outcome of it all ? The out- 
 come, as I have said, is that the tendency of all growth from 
 the beginnings of life on this earth have been, according to 
 the formula of Mr. Herbert Spencer, from the homogeneous 
 
The New City of God 185 
 
 to the heterogeneous, from sameness towards variety, from 
 the social mass towards the individual. So that I believe, if 
 we can learn anything from the history of the past as to 
 what is going on to-day, it is that the outcome of evolution is 
 to be an emphasizing and lifting up higher and a broaden- 
 ing of the range of individual life. The outcome of progress 
 is not to be a solid mass of machinery with the individual 
 only a cog or a spoke in the wheel. It is to be the develop- 
 ment of millions on millions of perfected individualities. 
 And all this dream of a perfect society out of imperfect 
 units is absurd on the face of it. You cannot build a per- 
 fect house of imperfect bricks ; neither can you construct 
 perfect society of imperfect individuals. The first step 
 towards the perfect society is the perfecting of the individual 
 life. 
 
 This does not mean the abolition of competition. It is 
 possible to make competition appear to be a very hard, ugly, 
 cruel thing. But look at it for a moment. Competition 
 means not only the cheapening of products, it means not 
 only a perpetual pressure towards discovering new and better 
 things : it means the sharpening of the individual faculty 
 and power. It is the development of the individual life. 
 And for whose good is it ? I hear those who are socialists 
 denouncing competition, as though it were the invention of 
 the evil one and had come from the pit. For whose good is 
 competition ? It is for the benefit of every man, woman, and 
 child in the world except those who are manufacturing or 
 dealing in the same material. And it is an injury to them 
 only, looked at as manufacturers and dealers. But they are 
 also consumers. Looking at them as consumers, it is for 
 their good. I do not believe that competition is evil or 
 wrong, for it seems to me to be God-ordained ; for it has ex- 
 isted from the first, and every step of progress has come 
 under the influence and guidance of competition. 
 
1 86 Signs of the Times 
 
 Where, then, is the principle of socialism to come in? 
 Just here. What is a perfect individual, developed to his 
 utmost, alone ? Take your perfect individual : let him be a 
 speaker, and he depends on his audience ; let him be a 
 painter, and he depends on somebody else so trained that 
 he can love beauty and appreciate pictures ; let him write a 
 book, and he depends on some one being cultivated enough 
 to buy and read and appreciate his book; let him manu- 
 facture or invent something for human use, and he is depend- 
 ent for his very life on somebody to buy and use the product 
 of his manufacture or invention. So, when we have attained 
 this perfection of the individualities of the world, springing 
 out of that very condition of individual perfection that has 
 come as the result of free competition, there must exist the 
 most perfect ideal of socialism ; that is, the natural, mutual 
 interdependence of all these perfected individualities. So 
 socialism and individualism, competition and co-operation, 
 are no more contradictory than are the forces centripetal 
 and centrifugal that hold the planets in their magnificent 
 orbits. I believe that it is under the play of both these 
 forces that are to come the perfect individual and the perfect 
 society. 
 
 When we have realized our " city of God " here on earth, we 
 shall have attained what the churches have always held out 
 before themselves as their one ideal and aim, we have pre- 
 pared ourselves for death. For, if we are developed as com- 
 pletely as may be into the image and after the ideal of God, 
 why, then, we are ready for any condition to which we may 
 be called in the days that are to come. 
 
 Where, then, are we to look for our ideal city ? Not in the 
 heavens, but growing, by processes of natural development, 
 here upon the earth. 
 
The New City of God 187 
 
 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 towards the heavens, 
 
 I see the City grow. 
 
 Let us, then, consecrate ourselves to the service of our fel- 
 low-men, to the service of God, and to labor towards the 
 realization of this age-long hope of the world. 
 
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY 
 
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