' 'J.', -T'-j-. ,-->—* ■ i ■ . i .■<^ a ■■".-' v> ft.t^. ^>i£. >i> -»t- «••,* ,m^ y >.v p-i .. V^,*i* fe'r*i,^i>. ::-r' •:"■'• -:■?;<- -.i^^ :•■':: ■;'>-^. rfi/V^-: •■■-,•>-;■•')■■• ^m:^' V'.--5i ■ Hi? • 'f>. . . ■ 1- ■■' GIFT OF Professor G-.R.Noyes r ^ k.(rtA/^-^^^L-dt^ /^-^.<^Ja^u^ Aj^-^iJL4y Uav^ llyy-ZMJu^i^ :/: t;iC'- ; i . '/ivSy' ■ J^<;^<.^ ^^^^ -t^^^ ^^~7^^ O-C^CK-^e^-^ /k^.g^-y^^'-^K^ "^^ €yU^^w _ K.^LyU^~. X bH^LJ^ d^ /^^ ^/t^ ^^y^t^iuL^ y>~^ C^^^..^-^^i^oe^\ .f Rl r ■prcm a pbctcgrafb cf )VIr. Cbadwich, rradc in bis study in tbe fall of 1903, by )VIr. Rctiry f)ovt )VIcorc. Chis is perhaps the last pbotograpb taken of bim. • • • • . • • * ».• *. • • • SEEING AND BEING AND OTHER SERMONS BY JOHN W. CHADWICK AUTHOR OF "the BIBLE OF TO-DAY," " THE FAITH OF REASON," 'THE MAN JESUS," "a book OF POEMS," ETC., ETC. SB) ' ' , ' ■> SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH SERIES BOSTON Geo. H. Ellis, 141 Franklin Street 1893 -^1^^' o _ GIKTQ? ^ T CONTENTS. SEVENTEENTH SERIES. Page I. Great Hopes for Great Souls i n. "A Mere Man" ^3 HI. The Constructive Achievements of the Higher Criticism -7 IV. Tempted of God -45 V. The Price of Moral Freedom 57 VI. Orthodoxy: What is it? 7i VII. Morality and Religion . . 85 VIII. The Conversion of Energy 99 EIGHTEENTH SERIES. I. Two Meanings of Religion i II. The Undiscovered Country ^5 III. Samuel Longfellow -9 IV. The Old, Old Story 47 V. The Fulness of Time 63 VI. The Unbridled Tongue 77 VII. Immortality 93 VIII. Seeing and Being m 884198 I J >. > ' ' ' , , > > ' ' ' , • , ' J , , , . ) ' J ' > . ' > ' > GREAT HOPES FOR GREAT SOULS. When the French revolutionist Condorcet was outlawed by the Revolutionary Tribunal because he dared impeach the murder of the Girondins as a crime against the State, he went into concealment in Paris, and with the uproar of the Terror daily ringing in his ears, his life in constant jeopardy, he found a quiet place in his own mind, from which he lis- tened with an imperturbable serenity to the mad tumult raging everywhere about him. Under such circumstances, he completed his great work upon the Progress of the Human Mind, concluding it with these memorable words: "Does not -this picture of the human race, freed from all its fetters, withdrawn from the empire of chance, and walking with assured step in the path of truth and virtue and happiness, present to the philosopher a sight that consoles him for the errors, the crimes, the injustice, with which the earth is yet stained and of which he is not seldom a victim ? It is in the contemplation of this picture that he receives the reward of his efforts for the progress of reason, for the defence of lib- erty. He ventures to link them with the eternal chain of the destinies of man : it is there that he finds the true recompense of virtue, — the pleasure of having done a lasting good. Fate can no longer undo it by any disastrous compensation that shall restore prejudice and bondage. This contemplation is for him a refuge into which the recollection of his persecutors can never follow him ; in which, living in thought with man reinstated in the rights and dignities of his nature, he forgets man tormented and corrupted by greed, by base fear and envy ; it is here that he truly abides with his fellows in an 2 Great Hopes for Great Souls. elysium that his reason has creaced for itself and that his love for humanity fills with the purest joy" There is nothing j-.tr^nge, unique, phenomenal in that prophecy and vision of the hunted refugee for whom " Ma- dame Guillotine " was sharpening her knife, but whose death, then close at hand, was not to stain her catalogue of miscon- ception and ingratitude and crime. In that prophecy and vision we have a single illustration of a universal law, v/hich is " Great Hopes for Great Souls." * Wherever there is a great soul, it triumphs over the misery and terror of the im- mediate present. In spite of seeming failure, or, it may be, of cruel death impending, the future large and glorious looms upon its sight. There is no unreality in that closing scene in Victor Hugo's " Ninety-Three," where till the morning breaks the prisoner Gauvain, and Cimourdain who has de- creed his death and is to be his executioner, forget their mu- tual relations and the approaching fatal hour as they seek to draw aside the curtain that conceals from them the g}orious future of mankind. The conquered, the condemned, becomes the teacher and inspirer in that solemn and transcendent hour. It is the great soul that makes the great hope, — makes it so great that it dwarfs the huge, dark failure of the present into an insignificance so absolute that it is as if it did not exist. " Be of good cheer, Brother Ridley," cried Latimer from out the flames ; " for we have lighted a candle this da}' in England which shall never be put out." The pages of history are illuminated in a thousand places by such incidents as these. What have they to do with the average, humdrum life of men and women? "Difficult duty is never far off," but difficult duty is not always interesting and dramatic. Nevertheless, all life is of a piece ; and the most dramatic episodes of history are hut the toils and sacrifices, the battles and the victories, of the humblest people on God's earth writ in some larger character. That great hopes are for great souls means that, the greater the soul, the greater is the hope, *The formula is Martineau's, but I believe the treatment is unmixedly my own. Great Hopes for Great Souls. 3 through all the hierarchic range from the most great and fa- mous that the world has ever known to the most weak and despised that have, after some sweet and noble fashion, kept the eternal law. There is always action and reaction. If the great soul makes the great hope, the great hope makes the great soul, at least the greater soul. Was never great hope yet which did not greaten him that cherished it. We are saved by hope, as the apostle said. Let a man hope for any great and noble thing, a high success in business or in art, the love of a true woman, his children's growth in every spiritual grace, the advance of some good cause, the destruction of some vested wrong, the triumph of some glorious principle, the op- portunity of an immortal life, and the strength and greatness of that hope will pass into his soul. How was it in the tur- moil of our anti-slavery days? There were men and women who would have gone all their days in the leanness of their souls but for the hope that slavery might perish in America, and that they might do something, however little, toward that blessed consummation. And, as it was, they were trans- figured. The splendor of the hope they cherished passed into their souls, and they grew in spiritual stature as the grass grows in early June on slopes that lie all open to the sun. And still, the greater the soul, the gi eater was the hope. There were men who fought all through the w^ar whose only hope was to see the rebels punished and the broken union of the States made whole. But there were others for whom such a consummation had no beauty that they should desire it, unless slavery could be destroyed. Then, too, although a great hope in the soul, organically working there, is ever an expansive force, a greatening power, a great hope in the com- munity may be only a touchstone which reveals the essential littleness and baseness of many who pretend to feel its in- fluence, to share its exaltation. There have been no better men among us than those who shaped the earlier fortunes of the anti-slavery cause. There have been no meaner men among us than those who, as it swept to victory, made haste 4 Great Hopes for Great Souls. to scramble into line, that they might sack and spoil. For, of all meanness, that is the meanest which avails itself of the triumph of a glorious cause to win a personal advantage. The great hope greatens every soul that entertains it with sincerity and truth. But there are hopes of \vhich it is almost impossible to speak as great apart from the individual soul by which they are cherished. They are great or small according as they are greatly or meanly held. The hope of an immortal life is the most striking illustration. It is com- monly spoken of as a great hope. But it is not necessarily and invariably this. Far from it. It is only great as it is greatly held ; and it has not been greatly held by all or most of those who have held it within Christian bounds, to say nothing of the millions which these bounds do not include. Could anything be smaller, more contemptible, than the hope of an immortal life involving an eternity of misery for the great majority of men ? or than the hope of this involving everlasting ^ons of idleness and stagnation ? If a smaller, meaner hope were possible, it would be one con- ditioned by the inhuman death of Jesus, as if his blood could make our record clean or make our lack of moral energy less a curse and shame. It is not strange, seeing that the hope of immortality has often been so meanly and so basely held, that many have conceived the idea that it is essentially a selfish, miserable, and demoralizing hope. But the logic of their position is no better than that of the majority, who imagine it essentially great and noble. It is great whenever and wherever it is greatly held. And it has been greatly held by many thousands — ay, and millions — in the past; and it is greatly held by many thousands, if not millions, at the present time. For is it not to hold it greatly to hold it as a hope of ever-widening knowledge, of ever-nobler service, and of ever-holier love ? Is it not to hold it greatly to hold it as a pledge that countless millions who in this present life are beaten down and marred, so that the glory of their man- hood and their womanhood is utterly obscured, will yet attain to all that they have lost or missed 1 But such great Great Hopes for Great Soids. 5 hopes as these are not for little souls. They are for souls great, with intelligence and love, and sympathy with others' misery and loss. And they greaten every soul that holds them patiently. "The Faith that makes Faithful" is the title of a little book which some of our Western friends have sent forth on a message of good will to men. It is a good title and a bet- ter book ; but the title might be turned about, so as to read "The Faithfulness that makes Faith," and it would hint a finer truth and one that gets an equal illustration in the book al- ready made. Who are the people that have faith in anything, be it labor of their hands or suffering humanity or some good cause of truth or righteousness or further life when we have finished here, if not those whose faithfulness is most earnest and enduring in those conditions and relations that are in close alliance with these various things ? It is the faithful man who has faith in his own work, whatever it may be. You cannot do anything well, or even try to do it well, with- out coming to believe in it as something worthy of the effort of an honest man. Who are the people who have most faith in the dangerous and perishing classes of society, if not those who are most faithful in their endeavors to do some- thing to abate their evil tendencies and allay their misery ? It is the people who stand off at a distance, and look at these through the big end of their opera-glass, who tell you that any endeavor to help them is a hopeless business, and that by meddling you will mar much more than you will mend. Great hopes for great souls ! Insanity and poverty and crime, — all those who have brought great souls to the battle with these things have had great hopes about them. Those who have given themselves with intelligence and gen- erous ardor to the treatment of the deaf and dumb, the blind or the insane, have never been persuaded of the hope- lessness of any of these people. "^ Who are the men here in America who have no confidence in our political future, * Read the new Life of Dorothea Dix for freshest proof of this abiding law. 6 Great Hopes for Great Souls. who believe that what with bribery and corruption, the rings and bosses, the lobby and the machine, we are fated to go down and down till we shall be a byword and a hissing among all the nations of the earth ? They are the dainty do-nothings ; and, if the things they weakly prophesy do not come true, it will not be because they have not negatively done their best to help them to this end. The men who have faith in our political future, who do not believe that bribery and corruption, that the rings and bosses, that the lobby and the machine, as they are at present organized, have come to stay, and to shame and curse and ruin us for- ever, are the men who are seeking earnestly for ways and means to make these evils less, the men who hate a policy of favoritism or corruption all the more when it is their own party that offends. And nowhere is it more apparent that it is faithfulness that makes faith, that great hopes are for great souls, than in the matter of men's hope of an immortal life. Be the soul- greatness that of intellect or affection, the faithfulness that of indomitable science or unconquerable love, the lesson is the same. To spend one's life in high endeavor to make the unknown universe and the unknown God more fully known, and, after all, to feel how little has been learned, how much remains to solve, and not to hope that death is not the end, that after that the search will still go on, and add incal- culable areas to our present boundaries of knowledge, — I do not see how this can ever be. And, as there are none to whom the sphere of the unknown is so immense as it is to those who have done most to beat its limits back, for these the hope of opportunity for further knowledge must ever be most strong and masterful. But the greatness of the immor- tal hope is not exhausted by its intellectual elements. The faithfulness that makes faith is not above the faithfulness of men's unwearying search for knowledge : it is even more the faithfulness of heans that beat in happy unison for many years. It is easy to conceive that there are those for whom the immortal years suggest more difficulties than they solve. Great Hopes for Great Souls. 7 Let annihilation cleave the Gordian knot which they have fingered at in vain ! Better eternal sleep than smote again by eyes too pure to look upon uncleanness ! But where the souls are great, where there has been constant faithful- ness, there the great hope of a renewed and glorified affection springs into life, and grows and flourishes like tropic verdure drenched with mighty rains and daily flooded by the sun's exhaustless urn. But is not the doctrine that great hopes are for great souls a doctrine of discouragement ? If this doctrine be true, must I not seem to hear a murmur coming back to me from those whom I address, — " Then they can never be for us "? You dare not think you have attained so much of knowledge or of good that the great souls account you of their company, and I approve your modesty in this. The great souls of in- tellect and knowledge are but few : the great souls of public service and heroic action are not a greater company. If great hopes are for these alone, the outlook is not so inspir- ing and encouraging as we could wish. It is better that a few should have such hopes than none. They have their re- ward ; and, moreover, something passes from them into lesser souls, something akin to their great hopes though not of equal grandeur. The great souls greaten us, and so pre- pare us for participation in the hopes they cherish and by which they are sustained. It is not as if there were only two kinds of souls, — the great and small. The smallest shade into the greatest by innumerable degrees. We are not dealing with statical, but with dynamical relations. The greater the soul, the greater the hope, is the corollary of our proposition, to which we shall do well to attend. And then, too, thank Heaven, it is not as if the greatness of men's souls were a matter wholly of their intellectual vol- ume and momentum. Pope's description of Bacon as "the wisest, brightest, meanest of mankind " may not have been entirely true, but it suggests a possible combination, and wherever it exists, no matter how magnificent the intellect, you have a little soul ; while, on the other hand, there are 8 Great Hopes for Great Souls. those who, without being wonderfully wise and bright, have so little meanness in their composition, are so large-hearted, brotherly, that to deny them greatness of soul would be as absurd as to deny grandeur to Niagara or splendor to the mountains and the sea. The miner in his bucket crying, *' Stand from under!" as he goes flying down the shaft, death not a minute off; the egg-gatherer of the Orkneys who cuts the rope above him and so welcomes death, that he may save the man above him for his wife and babes if haply, where the rope is frayed at the cliff's edge, it may still bear one man's weight ; the woman told that God had given her husband over to his evil drunken ways quietly saying, " Then I must stand him in God's stead," — these threadbare stories and a hundred more of similar character, revealing the spontaneous and innate nobilities of human life, are not stories of men and women of Baconian minds, of splendid intellectual endowments, but none the less they are stories of great souls. Such, you may think, are hardly less excep- tional than the master minds. Such as have opportunity to prove themselves members of this order, yes. Such as have proved themselves and have had their stories told are fewer still. But there are many who have never had their stories told who have approved themselves of the same stock and lineage as the most famous in the Book of Golden Deeds, and there are thousands more who needed but the opportu- nity to do as valiantly for God and man as any of the heroes of imperishable renown. The great souls are not few. They wear no badge by which you can distinguish them from other people on the street. Sometimes their clothes are of the cheapest kind and sadly overworn. But, if not the actuality, the possibility of infinite patience and heroic love, is there. It is not the dramatic moment only that brings out the quality of the great souls that walk in broad- cloth or in shoddy, equally unknown to one another and to the world at large. It is very seldom this. It is much oftener the long-drawn weeks and months and years through which the faithful watch by beds of sickness, or nurse some Great Hopes for Great Soiits. 9 feeble intellect, or try to brace some weak and tottering will. If all these could by sheer force of their spiritual greatness generate a luminous cloud, what an illumination there would nightly be upon our city streets and far out on lonely coun- try roads ! The palatial front and the shabby tenement would blaze with rival splendor. But such are not the ways of God. No faintest halo ever marked off his saints and saviours from their fellow-men. But some of them are known ; some of them to many, the most of them only to a few, but so well known to these, thanked with such tremors of their dying lips, such recognition of their dying eyes, that all the laurels of the world-famous heroes pale and wither in comparison with those that rest upon their aching foreheads like the hand of God. There is no lack of opportunity for spiritual greatness. Great souls declare themselves most frequently by doing little things in a great way. There is a great way and a little way of doing almost everything that waits the pressure of men's hands. What is it that Emerson has told us about braiding galaxies when we imagine we are only braiding mats or doing something of no possible significance ? We are doing better than that. We are braiding character, — braiding it out of our housekeeping and school-keeping, out of our buying and selling, out of our making and mend- ing. There are activities in which men engage which have no legitimacy. They will do well if out of these they do not braid a rope to hang themselves or some victim of their hideous greed. But it is never because an activity is humble, it is only because it is illegitimate, that it does not furnish opportunity for spiritual growth. It is not in marble, but in clay, that the true sculptor manifests the genius of his shaping hand. There is life-stuff as little beautiful as the sculptor's cla}', no daintier than that to work, mere mud upon the hands, out of which souls are shaped into a more dazzling beauty than the Apollo Belvidere wears, or any Venus, even the glorious creature of the little Melian farm. We often hear men talk as if the business life of modern lO Great Hopes for Great Souls. times were fatal to men's larger life. On the contrary, there is no modern life, except that of politics, which presents so grand an opportunity. That political life is often horribly degraded and that business life is often miserably selfish and depraved are propositions which have little need of proof. Hence the more need of men who, measuring their strength against the obstacles that block their way, prove themselves equal to the exigencies of the hour. It is said that Napoleon was never quite himself till the battle began to go against him. Then he put on terror and victory as a robe. To be just -and fear not in our political complica- tions, to be so just and generous in the management of one's business as to do something that will help convince the socialist and anarchist that, if they ever had an occupation, it is gone, — here is an opportunity that may well pique the courage of our bravest men, and in its seizure and improve- ment magnify their souls to the proportions of the greatest of our own or any time. Great hopes for great souls ! No matter how the great- ness comes, — from large appreciation of the scientific appre- hension of the world, from wide intelligence of the develop- ment of man through many generations, from devotion to great causes or to the maimed and miserable victims of an organization and environment all of whose dice are loaded for the throw of weakness, shame, and sin, from patient ser- vice in the humblest daily round, from strenuous opposition to the most sordid, mean, and selfish tendencies of our polit- ical and commercial life, — no matter how it comes, it will always bring with it the great hope for those for whom we work, for the great future of humanity, and for the power and blessing of an endless life. If, then, great hopes attract our admiration and desire, and we would have them for our personal possession and for the abiding peace and comfort of our hearts, we shall go about to greaten our souls by every honorable device. By any device that is not honorable it is very sure we cannot greaten them. We shall sit patiently at the feet of Science, Great Hopes for Great Souls. 1 1 and listen to the wondrous story that she has to tell. The more vast and wonderful the universe in which we live with conscious joy, the greater will be our eager and impassioned souls. I cannot understand the ill-disguised or frank con- tempt with which the religious partisan frequently waives aside the scientific aspect of the world, as if that had for us, and could have, no religious meaning whatsoever. For this, I take it, is God's world ; and, if his soul has been engaged upon it some millions and billions of years, with plastic force, to make it what it is, we shall do well, I think, to spend a little of our time in thinking his thoughts after him and endeavoring to enter into the meaning and spirit of his work. There is more of real worship in the hushed and reverent step with which we follow a Darwin or a Spencer on his majestic course than in all the formal liturgies and prayers. It is the man, sometimes, more than his thought that greatens us, — his life's unwritten poetry, or eloquence, or statuesque repose. I know of nothing that is more great- ening to the soul, save only its own constant striving for the best and honorablest things, than intercourse with the truest and the best of men, — such intercourse as is afforded us by their biographies written as Channing's or as Emer- son's by men having a providential fitness for their task. Fear not that by such intercourse you wall be debarred from doing any worthy social task. These men will shame your pleasant idleness, will bind your corselet and your greaves upon you and send you forth to battle with earth's ignorance and wrong ; will set a trumpet to your lips that you may blow " A Roland blast to flood this grim defile Till echoes pour beyond it " that shall summon other men to come and fight upon your side. .And yet another way of greatening your soul is to lay bare your spirit to the hapjoy influence of living men stronger and better than yourselves, and to theirs, also, whom death " leads enfranchised on " and whose remem- bered truth and love are laws we dare not disobev. 12 Great Hopes for Great Sotds. " Living, our loved ones make us what they dream ; Dead, if they see, they know us as we are. Henceforward we must be, not merely seem ; Bitterer woe than death it were by far To fail their hopes whose love can still redeem ; Loss were thrice loss which thus their faith could mar." The last great means of greatening our souls has been already named. It is to find the elements of greatness in the humblest tasks, to compel the opportunity for greatness from the cares and troubles and perplexities which make up the warp and woof of every fleeting day. There are no greater souls than those who know this secret of the world and who have shaped their lives according to its law. And, as their souls, so also are their hopes : for all who struggle and aspire, for all whom grievous burdens crush and maim, for all whose fond imagination pictures for them a better country, even a heavenly, wherein they shall again behokl the faces that once brightened all their w^ays. But the great soul is better than the greatest hope. (( A MERE MAN." There are some texts so obviously good that it were churl- ishness to pass them by, and not to set one now and then in the forefront of the battle. Certainly, having chosen for my subject " A Mere Man," nothing could be more natural than for me to find a text, or motto, in the Psalmist's question, *' What is man, that thou art mindful of him ? " and his answer, " Thou hast made him little lower than God." Strange, is it not ? that such a text as that should have awaited Channing's doctrine of the Dignity of Human Nature for two millenniums and half another ! True, in the King James translation it reads " but little lower than the angels " ; and the controversial ingenuity of the good old times was quite equal to contending that it meant the fallen ones. But, had the present reading, which was that of all the scholars for a long time in advance of the revision, always been the English reading, it would probably have made no difference. For though, in general, the Calvinistic theolo- gians got their theology from the Old Testament, if they found anything sweet and pleasant there, they passed it by ; and, if they found anything particularly disagreeable in the New Testament, they pounced upon it like an ant upon an aphis, quick to appropriate its limpid juice. The phrase '' a mere man " is the phrase which has oftener than any other expressed the contemptuous sense of the Trinitarian and other supernaturalists for the humanitarian conception of Jesus. There has always lurked in it a miser- able fallacy ; for into the " mere man " the orthodox con- testant has imported his own conception of humanity, and, so doing, it is no wonder that the Unitarian assertion of the 14 ''A Mere Man^ humanity of Jesus has seemed to him a great indignity. For his own conception of humanity has been the denial to it of any physical or intellectual or moral good. And tor this conception, it must be allowed, he has had the warrant of the New Testament in no half-way fashion. It has been very common among Unitarians to insist that the traditional theology of Christendom is a perversion of the New Testa- ment teachings. And so it often is, but not always. Hardly can it be shown that Augustine or Calvin painted human nature blacker than did Paul. Hardly can it be shown how any one could paint it blacker then he painted it. That Channing, more certain that his rational nature was from God than that any book was the expression of his will, and attending to his rational nature for the voice of truth as to no book whatever, clearly thought out and bravely published the Dignity of Human Nature, is not greatly to be wondered at, though it is an ample sign of the essential rationalism of his intellectual procedure. But that his Unitarian contem- poraries generally should have accepted his doctrine of human nature, while immersed in barren textuality, while thinking it necessary to find chapter and verse for their opinions, is passing strange ; and it should help us to be tolerant of those progressive orthodoxists who seek in the New Testament a warrant for their aberrations from the Westminster standards. One thing is certain : that, if the elder Unitarians imagined foolishly that Paul 'could be in- duced to testify for Channing's doctrine of the Dignity of Human Nature, there are many of the younger, and one at least whose years overlap by thirty-seven the years of Chan- ning's life, who recognize that Paul's doctrine of human nature is absolutely antagonistic to their own. The one is Martineau, in whose recent work, sent forth in the absolutely sound and sweet maturity of his eighty-sixth year, Paul's doctrine of human nature is exhibited without any least disguise ; and the nakedness of its deformity may well make the non-Revisionists of our Presbyterian assemblies say, " He has become as one of us." He has shown that theirs is the ''A Mere Maur 15 New Testament, — at least, the Pauline doctrine ; that Augus- tine and Gottschalk, Pascal and Calvin and Edwards, did not, and could not, exaggerate the utter hideousness and hope- lessness of that. The progressive orthodoxists will doubtless say, " This is the most unkindest cut of all, — just as we were giving up our Calvinism for Dr. Martineau to say that the New Testament is for it. How will the non-revising heathen rage !" But it is all right. It is just as well for the sects to go on believ- ing the traditional doctrines until they are prepared to reject them as Martineau does, not on account of their lack of Bible warrant, but on account of their intrinsic irrationality. Saint Paul is for the utter physical and intellectual and moral inca- pacity of human nature ; he has reduced its baseness to its lowest terms. But what good reason is there for setting up the opinions of Saint Paul as a standard of belief for men who are alive when he has been full eighteen centuries dead? There is none. And this perception is the most significant that appears in the ebullition of doctrinal change that is so lively at the present time. And the most surprising, the most comical, the most pathetic aspect of the matter is the endeavor of the liberals to make out a New Testament argu- ment for their liberality. It is like the scramble of men to get on board a sinking ship when the solid land is easily within the reach of their endeavor, when they would drift to perfect peace and safety in a little while. Not only in times past has the orthodox contestant im- ported his own idea of humanity, the Calvinistic idea, into the phrase " mere man," but the phrase itself is of his own invention. Those who have affirmed the simple humanity of Jesus have believed too much in humanity to qualify it with such a word as " mere," always a qualification of con- tempt, as when men talk of " mere morality," on which Emerson retorted that it was like saying, " Poor God, with nobody to help him ! " The deification of Jesus, or his exaltation to a more than human standing, has always marked the tendency to a low view of human nature, or the survival of such a view in men's general thinking, even when 1 6 ''A Mere Man.'' specifically discarded. Channing, it is true, and with him many others, long maintained the superhumanity of Jesus in connection with the Dignity of Human Nature ; but, as time went on, Channing perceived that his idea of humanity was so large that his idea of Jesus had in it all the sky-room that it wanted in which to beat its tireless pinions without mete or bound. "Not a mere man, but a man !" has been the answer of the Unitarian to those objecting to his humanitarian concep- tion of the great prophet, saint, and martyr, from whom Christianity derives the inspiration of its most beautiful com- passion and its most perfect trust. If the Unitarian has written it, he has written Man with a capital letter. The ancient Latins could have managed better if they had wished to express the same idea. They had two words, homo and vir. Homo was the generic man ; vir, the ideal man. With such distinctions possible, to say a mere homo might express something intelligible and fit. And if any should so desig- nate Jesus, or any other towering personality, we might reply, "No, not a mere homo, but a vir I'''' Having no such dis- tinction, the word " man," expressing everything from the highest of the mammalia to the being who has made possible the centuries of history, the centuries of art and science and government and religion, the centuries of discovery and in- vention and industrial thrift and skill, the towering personal- ities which tempt us to believe that they alone make up the sum of history, — having no word but " man " to express all this imperial range from depth to height, the phrase " a mere man" is for us, perhaps, as meaningless, as absurd, as any that has ever been the current coin of theological exchange. The best comment ever made on it is that of one himself " a mere man " after the canons of the traditional theology, who said, speaking in Hamlet's voice: "What a piece of work is man ! How noble in reason ! How infinite in fac- ulties ! in form and moving, how express and admirable ! in action, how like an angel! in apprehension, how like a god ! " ''A Mere Manr 1/ The "mere man" of theology is man in the entire range of his natural capacity ; man without any supernatural assist- ance, save as a world brimful of God continually assists the man who is the product of its life and law. The subject has two aspects, one static and the other dynamic. The latter is an aspect which has receiv^ed immense enhancement from the studies of anthropology and biology during the last half- century. Not to go further back than that, the antiquity of man was some six thousand years, and its first step was a fall from which no supernatural assistance had been able to help it to its feet. A finger or a toe may have straightened out, but the whole body was as prone as ever in such mire as even swine do not delight to wallow in, according to the latest prophets of their natural decency and self-respect. But within the last half-century the antiquity of man has been extended by — I choose a moderate estimate — some five hundred thousand, years. So long ago man fairly got upon his feet, and with those differences of intellectual ca- pacity from his " poor relations " which had in them a boundless possibility. But, back of that, what thousands upon thousands of years, millions on millions, went to the making of the human animal, albeit the first and lowest of his kind ! If man, in any aspect of his life, can be called " a mere man," surely it is on the dividing line so shadowy, so waver- ing, both physically and intellectually, that separates the human from the lower world. But to speak contemptuously even of such humanity is a most strange and daring com- ment on the long patience and persistency of the Infinite and Eternal Power, who probably would not have taken so much time to bring a man from the ascidian, and the ascid- ian from the insensate rock, if there had been a shorter or a better way. Accepting the account in Genesis, it would have been a different matter. Not much could be expected of a man made on the sixth day, after five days of such immense and various activity, with the inertia of the restful Sabbath sending its dreamy shadow on before. That man so made 1 8 ''A Mere Majtr % should fall at once was altogether natural. He must have had that sense of " goneness " from the start which would have made anything substantial, and especially an apple, impossi- ble to refuse. I do but jest, not at the dear and sweet old fable, which I love as well as any can, but at the after-appro- bation of the apologists, who make themselves unutterably foolish that the old legend may be impossibly and absurdly wise. In all seriousness, the dynamic aspect of humanity, man's slow emergence from the homogeneous simplicity of primordial matter, through countless intermediary forms, if there is really an omnipotent God working through all the processes of the material world, is eloquent of man's signifi- cance for the Eternal Power. And it is eloquent of man's essential greatness that from such low beginnings he could come to be at length a being of such large discourse, looking before and after, and either way seeing so much to humble him and make him proud. I tried to put my thought of this into a poem once, and this was how it came : — Thou for whose birth the whole creation yearned Through countless ages of the morning world, Who first in fiery vapors dimly hurled, Next to the senseless granite slowly turned, Then to the plant which grew to something more, — Humblest of creatures that draw breath of life, — Wherefrom, through infinites of patient pain, Came conscious man to reason and adore : Shall we be ashamed because such things have been, Or bate one jot of our ancestral pride ? Nay, in thyself art thou not deified That from such depths thou couldst such summits win ? While the long way behind is prophecy Of those perfections which are yet to be. Now let US turn from the dynamics of the matter, and look at it for a few moments statically. Take any average or ordinary man, no Shakspere or Newton^ no Raphael or Beethoven, no great or famous one of any kind, but just a good, fair, every-day human being of the kind that cross Brooklyn bridge by tens of thousands every morning to their ''A Mere Man:' 19 day's work, and come back at night a little manlier, if they have done it well. Even of such a one how well might Shakspere say, " What a piece of work is man ! " True, he has much in common with some lower types. His bony structure is part for part the same as the gorilla's, a few less bones in maturity in either case than in early life. His tissues are of the same structure : his respiratory and circu- latory functions are the same. What, then ? Is it so much the worse for man ? No, it is so much the better for the gorilla. This anatomy, this physiology, would be wonderful and beautiful if they were the anatomy and physiology of a fiend, as not unfrequently I fear they are. What a piece of work is a man ! If you have any doubts of it, take any good anatomical treatise, — that in the Encyclopedia Britannica is admirably done, — and study first the bony structure, and then see how that is clothed upon with the muscles, and how the nervous system radiates through them ; and the cellular structure of the tissues, — how wonderful that is! — and then turn to physiology, and study there the circulatory and respir- atory functions of the organism and I am sure that " mere " or any other depreciatory or contemptuous adjective for.such an organism, will hardly seem to you a thing to be endured. So studying and so considering, we find, says one for whom exaggeration is impossible, " that we are quite unconsciously bearing about in our bodily structure a laboratory of enor- mous power, which, with an energy of chemical action we can no way conceive, is turning out every day four or five gallons of its highly elaborated compounds. We find a pailful of warm blood rushing as fast as a strong man walks through innumerable arteries and veins, propelled by a muscle weigh- ing less than a pound, that shall not pause a single second in its energetic contractions and expansions for a lifetime of more than eighty years. We find a chemistry of digestion so potent [with its astonishing solvent] as in a few hours to change the beggar's crust and the epicure's banquet of fifty flavors into the same indistinguishable vital fluid. We find an electric battery to do our thinking by, made of more than 20 ''A Mere Man >> twelve hundred million cells, connected by five thousand million filaments of nerve." As with the circulatory and nervous functions, so with all the rest. We have only to look at them closely to appreciate how marvellously curious and wonderful they are. As with the wonder, so with the beauty. The sculptor has reported it in bronze and marble, the painter with his brush ; and their report is — oh, how feeble in comparison with the living, breathing, smiling, laughing actualities of form and face ! You go to the great exhibition, and a hundred faces of the visitors beguile you from the faces on the wall. But the children's portraits, — they are wonderfully fair. Yes, and on the way home from the gallery you see a dozen or a score so dainty sweet or so divinely beautiful through rags and dirt that you say in your heart you will not go to the galleries any more, but only up and down the streets and to the parks and slums. " How noble in reason," Shakspere says, " how infinite in faculties ! " and by this bridge of gold we pass from the consideration of the physical to the consideration of the intellectual and emotional and moral man. Again I say, forget the great and famous ones. Remember only the average people of the world. If there are any mere men in the world, these are they. Now, take any one of them, and note the quality of his intellectual life. Note that it is so deep that for thousands of years the philosophers, the psychologists, have been dropping their plummets into it, and have not as yet taken its gauge. How much does this mere man contribute to that vision of the world which he enjoys ! "Things are not what they seem," says Longfellow. Nay, but they are. The reality is that in which the object and the subject both unite. But how much is the object's, how much is the subject's part ? The percept and the recept mark the lowest stages of the intellectual life. These are the common stock of brute and man. That the young child has only these, bridges the intellectual gulf between the higher animals and man. Then comes the conceptual power, enabling man to think in names, and all the ranges ''A Mere Manr 21 through which comparison and judgment and reflection lead. It is only a bugbear of the intuitionist that the experien- tialist is limited to the realm of sense-perception. " The tangible processes," says Tyndall, " give direction to the line of thought ; but, this once given, the length of the line is not limited by the boundaries of the senses. Indeed, the domain of the senses in nature is almost infinitely small in compari- son with the vast region accessible to thought alone which lies beyond them." Did Dalton ever imagine he had seen an atom ? Yet his atomic theory of matter no less com- mends itself to scientific thought. Then, too, this mere man of ours has memory, that phonograph which keeps the record, sometimes for eighty years, of things impressed on it, — keeps the record of thousands and millions of things; that graphophone which gives them out again in far-off years, sometimes the words, the tones, which we would will- ingly forget. Moreover, in our mere man there is that power which we call imagination. It is not creative, as in the man of genius, the artist, the novelist, the poet ; but it is receptive. It can think their thoughts after them. They tell of Balzac that, condoling with a friend on his wife's sickness, he said, " But, to come back to the real world, how about ' Euge'nie Grandet ' ?" the last novel he had written. How real the novelist can make his world ! the poet his! All over Europe their men and women were as real to me as those of the historians and biographers. It was not Thackeray, but Colonel Newcome, for whom I looked there at the Charter House among the aged pensioners. Where Romola lived in Florence was as vital a question as where Dante lived or Savonarola. And our mere man can enter into all these things. Unable to create, as can the great ones in this sphere, he can receive into the chambers of his imagery the long and brilliant train of their creations with a full and thankful heart. How infinite in faculties this ordinary man ! What a fac- ulty he has for loving ! what a joy in being loved ! How he can love his parents, his brothers and sisters, the girl of his free choice, his wife, his children ! How he can love his 2 2 ''A Mere Man." country and his home, and the fields in which his boyish feet went wandering, and the homely sights made dear by the associations of his youth ! How he can sometimes love where wronged and outraged most abominably ! How women of this humble sort remember those whom God seems to have forgotten ! How the mother's love follows her child on every downward path ! Though he make his bed in hell, she is there to beat away the flame, to slake his torturing thirst, to woo him back to pure and noble ways. What another faculty of common men is that called con- science! How it holds the plainest, the most insignificant, as the world's judgments generally go, to duties that are immeasurably hard ! Not a day goes by, and thousands and ten thousands of these men and women do not deny them- selves as grandly as any of the famous ones of history and art, put great and threatening temptations under foot with as supreme a self-control. If houses where great deeds are done could blossom into flags, how from the humblest as from the most magnificent would every day such banners float and stream ! Or look at it in another way. Consider what the ordinary men are doing all the time. See what millions of acres they are sowing and tending for the world's food ; how they are carrying the exchange of products to and fro across the con- tinents and sea ; how they are building roads and cities ; how they are taming the rude forces of the world and har- nessing them into the service of their peace and joy. Or, instead of the immediate aspect, take the continuous. See how, agreeing that God made the world, man has made it over. Grant that the change is not in every case a beau- teous change. There are thousands of acres in Brooklyn which must have been as beautiful when Henry Hudson came to these shores as they are hideous now. We are reforming that a little, and some time we shall reform it altogether. A city in which every street and every house should be beautiful would cost no more than the vast areas of ugliness that we have now. But allowing all the change ''A Mere Many 23 from good to bad, and what a work the average man has done upon the earth ! how vast the range of his accomplish- ment ! What institutions, moreover, he has built with all the material things ; if under glorious leadership sometimes, con- tributing a glorious part ! And of all his workmanship the best is still himself. He has made over nothing else so much as man. From the hard oppositions of the world, as he has confronted them, as he has braced himself against them, he has forced a crown which to its iron adds ever costlier jewels as the centuries roll on. Historic man, though but of yesterday, has traversed a much greater distance than that traversed by prehistoric man ; and the distance made by both of these together is not less than that which separates the highest animal from the lowest man. Now, what do these things signify, — this wonderful aspect of man's physical life, this nobility of reason ; this infinity of faculties, love, conscience, will ; this achievement of the im- mediate present and the continuous past ; this world and man made over by his patient strength, — what do they sig- nify, these things, if not that the man who is sufficient for these things is no " mere " man, that no adjective of depre- ciation or contempt is suited to his powers and his perform- ance ? What is not " mere " in earth or heaven, if man so built and facultied and of such vast accomplishment can be so lightly set aside t A mere man ! No : the chatter of the theologians is drowned by the antiphony of Shakspere and the Psalmist of old time : "What a piece of work is man ! " " Thou hast made him little lower than God." But, when the theologians of the past excluded Jesus from the human order, it was not as superior to the aver- age man. It was as superior to all possible humanity. And that was right ; for Tennyson has wisely sung, " The highest is the measure of the man." Add this to all we have already seen. Add the great artists and their pict- ures and their statues ; add the great architects with their temples and cathedrals and their halls of civic pride ; add the great poets and their poems j add Homer, Dante, Shak- 24 "^ Mere Man:' spere, Milton, Keats, "him even," Wordsworth, Shelley, and Browning with the eagle's feather on his breast, and Tennyson and Lowell, and the rest of their great company. — " O Lyric love, half-angel and half-bird, and all a wonder and a wild desire," what lofty seat with them is thine ! Add the great men of science, Copernicus and Galileo, Kepler and Newton, Buffon and Linnaeus and Cuvier and Lamarck and Goethe and Lyell and Darwin and Wallace ; add the great philosophers, Plato and Aristotle, Leibnitz, Descartes, Kant, Fichte, Hegel, Spencer, Mill ; add the great captains and deliverers, the great reformers, Savonarola, Luther, Cob- den, Garrison; the great statesmen, Burke, Chatham, Wash- ington, Jefferson, Lincoln ; add the great founders of relig- ions, Zoroaster, Buddha, Confucius, Mahomet, — and why not Jesus, too ? Why not, if all the rest ? If all the rest are human, why not he ? Did he surpass the highest of all these as much as these surpass the lowest of their acknowledged kind ? And, if he did, what reason for exclusion there ? But, surely, he did not. It were sheer intellectual dishonesty or moral blindness to pretend that there is anything in the New Testament Jesus differentiating him from Channing, — for example, intellectually or morally, as Channing was differ- entiated by his character and mind from the bruiser of the slums, from the cannibal, from the inanity and brutality of many whom the social canons of the first " Four Hundred " do not rigidly exclude. A mere man ! Look at them any way you will, the words are mutually inconvertible and repellent particles. Oil and water mix more easily. Cold and heat are less opposed. Darkness and light are more agreed. Good and evil do not so contend with one another in the womb of time. Whether we take the average, generic man in the scope of his physi- cal immensity, and the range of his intellectual faculties, and the sweep of his affections, and the contrasting heights and depths of his moral nature, his struggle with temptation, his triumph over sin, — these things alone or, in addition, as we rightly may, the exceptional splendor of the world's greatest ''A Mere Manr 25 and most gifted souls, it does not matter much. The word " mere " has so little coherency with the first order of ideas, it is so utterly incongruous and absurd applied to them, that hardly can it be more so when the vision and report are ex- tended to all those whose names, in science or in art, in literature or religion, in government or reform, have shed the brightest lustre on the fame and fortune of mankind. Once let a man appreciate the dignity and glory of human- ity as they are revealed by history and science, by philoso- phy and art, by ethics and religion, and he will know that he could not show any great one, though it were him whom millions have identified with God, a more conspicuous dis- honor than to exclude him from the glorious company of the weak and strong, the famous and unfamed, the ignorant and wise, the evil and the good, who are necessary all to each, in the wholeness of a complete humanity. And he whose favorite name, self-chosen, was the " Son of Man," would be the last to wish or hope or dream of any glory for himself in which the humblest might not freely share. THE CONSTRUCTIVE ACHIEVEMENTS OF THE HIGHER CRITICISM.* When some clerical Presbyterian objected to Dr. Briggs's plea for the Higher Criticism of the Bible, " That he or any one should presume to criticise the word of God ! " he not only begged the question in debate, but put himself in evi- dence that the vulgar idea of criticism as something merely negative and depreciatory infects a good many persons for whom such a mistake should be impossible. To say a favor- able criticism is for such a contradiction in terms. And even for those who know that criticism is simply judgment and appreciation, Biblical criticism is often so much finding fault, — a process of tearing down and pulling to pieces, to which no constructive process corresponds. Such a concep- tion certainly implies the grossest ignorance of the course of Biblical criticism and the results it has so far attained, but that much of this course has had a negative character is not to be denied. Why should it be ? There is nothing in the allowance that requires apology. To find that certain things are not as they have been supposed to be is a good step towards knowing what they really are. And no maxim has been more injurious than that which formulates the absurd- ity that we should destroy nothing till we had something as good to put in its place. The incapacity for intellectual sus- pense has been the fruitful mother of a brood of feeble no- tions and hypotheses, having neither the promise of this * A paper read at the Seventh Annual Meeting of the Conference of the Middle States and Canada, held in the Lenox Avenue Unitarian Church, New York, November lo; in Brooklyn, November 14; in Boston before the Unitarian Sunday School Union, in Channing Hall, Dec. 7, 1891. 28 The Cojistructive Achievements world nor of that which is to come. " He that believeth shall not make haste," nor he that would believe in the abid- ing truth. A humble willingness to wait awhile, to go out like the patriarch not knowing whither, and not insisting that we shall know before we budge an inch, is the prime condition on \vhich Truth reveals herself to earnest minds. The temper of the pious objector of our day is too often that of the country parish which wanted a meeting-house built on the exact site of the old one, the old one not to be disturbed until the new one was completely finished. The temple of religious truth is not going to be utterly demolished, but cer- tain alterations have got to be made, if it is going to stand the brunt of wind and weather ; and they cannot be made without a good deal of demolition. When they tried to patch the central tower of Chichester Cathedral, it came down with a rush, and so filled up the church inside that there was no room for the worshippers. A good deal of crit- ical patching in our churches bids for a like result, and arsrues that a more heroic method would be better in the end. It cannot be too clearly understood that a new par- ticular affirmation, corresponding to every one that criticism sets aside, is not to be had, and the demand for it is irra- tional and absurd. To ask triumphantly, " If Moses didn't write the Pentateuch, who did " ? or " If John didn't write the Fourth Gospel, who did " ? is an exact equivalent of Mark Twain's reasoning with respect to Adam's grave : "If it wasn't Adam's grave, whose was it ? " The later criticism of the Bible has opposed a hundred sheer negations to tra- ditional opinion, which, from the nature of the case, it has not been able to make good with corresponding affirmations. Its denials of the authorship of various books to various per- sons have all this character. The attempts to follow up the denial with a new affirmation have all been vain, and this is precisely what we should expect. But this also should be borne in mind, that the negations of criticism for the most part are negations of traditional opinions about the Bible, not of its own affirmations. The of the Higher Criticism. 29 titles of the books in either Testament are merely records of traditional opinions in the main, not parts of the books them- selves. But the negations which criticism has opposed to many things, as to verbal or to plenary inspiration, have no Bible warrant, not even that of the titles, or the glosses of the chapter headings and the running titles, which have per- verted judgment to an incalculable degree. I know a Uni- tarian minister who says : " I don't care a rap for your criti- cism. I propose to take the Bible at its face value." But its face value is like that of the enamelled women whom we sometimes meet upon the street. It has been painted an inch thick with the glosses of the theologians. " To this day," said Paul, " there remaineth a veil in the reading of the Old Testament." He said that it was done away in Christ. Is it not rather true that it has been remade thicker by the Christian centuries than it ever was before, and that the New Testament has undergone a similar disguise and trans- formation ? Nine-tenths of the negation of the modern critic is negation of the glosses of interpreters and theologians that have come in between the Bible and men's eyes, and spoiled for them its actual proportions and obscured its glorious beauty. By the Higher Criticism of the Bible is meant, or should be meant, that criticism which is not merely explanatory of the text, either with reference to bringing out its meaning or to economizing its moral and religious helps, and which is still less the subjection of the Bible to the necessities of par- ticular systems of theology, of which we have had a great abundance all the centuries down. The Higher Criticism is an attempt to view the different parts of the Bible in a large and general way, to discover when the different books were written, and, if possible, by whom they were written, though this particular is of much less importance than the other ; and yet, further, their relations to their separate times, — how they were influenced by these, and what influence they had upon them, if haply in this way the line of evolution may be traced from the beginning to the end of that millennium 30 The Constructive Achievements which roughly synchronized with the literary creation of the Bible from its earliest to its latest part, — from the ninth cen- tury B.C. to the second after and inclusive. Within the limits of this criticism there is room for copious exegesis ; for Tho- reau's trout in the milk is no better circumstantial evidence than is many a text whereby there hangs a tale, though it must always be remembered that, as the trout may have been dropped into the milk-pan in the buttery, so may the special text have been the after-thought of some redactor or the in- trusion of some careless scribe. When all has been done that can be done, the external and the internal evidences sifted, the language and the style of different books com- pared, the parts of each that are not homogeneous differen- tiated by these and other tests, there must remain around the circle of our definite knowledge a photosphere of vague, uncertain light that seems to come and go. But this photo- sphere, which is the scorn of dogmatists and the despair of those whom the dead certainties of an earlier stage have cor- rupted with a passion for others equally defunct, is, perhaps, one of the most valuable contributions of the Higher Criti- cism to our treasury of spiritual gains. It keeps the schol- ars still at work, nursing the unconquerable hope for some more definite result. It nourishes a wholesome sense of in- completeness and uncertainty in the teachers and the taught, like that which Cromwell tried vainly to encourage when he said to the Westminster divines, " I beseech you, by the bow- els of the Lord, to consider it possible that you may be mis- taken." The method of Dogmatic Criticism was to begin with the most secret counsels of the Trinity and go searching through the Bible for some confirmation of those imaginary things. The method of the Higher Criticism is to begin with what is most surely known, and slowly and cautiously to work out its way from that into the adjacent region and then into the regions more and more remote. The most obvious out- come of this process is the negation and destruction of a great many traditional conceptions and the introduction of of the Higher Criticism. 31 an element of uncertainty into a great many more. Tak- ing the Old Testament books in their traditional order, we are informed that Moses did not write the Pentateuch, nor Joshua the book that bears his name, nor David the Psalms ascribed to him, — or, if any, very few, — that no more did Solomon write the Proverbs or Ecclesiastes or the Song of Songs, that Isaiah, the eighth-century prophet, wrote onlv a little more than half of the book that bears his name, Jeremiah less than the whole of his by the three clos- ing chapters and no part of Lamentations, Daniel, the prophet of the captivity, no word of the prophecy ascribed to him, Zechariah a part only of the book called after him. With these negations of traditional authorship in the Old Testament, there have been as many, if not more, of dates traditionally assigned, as of the Pentateuch to the fifteenth century B.C., and Job to a much earlier time, of the Psalms to David's and the time immediately succeeding, of the books ascribed to Solomon to his time, Daniel to the later time of the captivity, and so on. There has been a movement forward all along the line, but a few centuries here, and many there. To go into particulars would be to pass from the negative to the positive aspect of the matter, and I wish to give the negative at first full force. With the New Testament it is much the same as with the Old. There, also, the movement forward of the various books from their traditional anchorage has been strongly marked, though not without occasional recession. It has carried the Synoptic Gospels to the last quarter of the first century, and Luke, perhaps, beyond ; the Fourth Gospel to the second quarter of the second century ; Acts, also, forward ; the pastoral Epistles (to Timothy and Titus) to a much later time than Paul's, that to the Ephe- sians also to a somewhat later ; the Epistles ascribed to Peter from twenty-five to one hundred years beyond his death. With these changes of New Testament dates, there have been as many changes as to the authorship of the differ- ent books. The degrees of certainty attaching to the critical judgments here are almost as various as the books. The 32 The Constructive AcJiievemcnts maximum of certainty is"" with regard to the Epistle to the Hebrews, that Paul did not write it. That he did not write Second Thessalonians, the Epistles to Timothy and Titus, and that to the Ephesians, is less generally agreed ; also, that John did not write the Apocalypse, nor Peter and John the Epistles ascribed to them. That the Synoptic Gospels, as we have them, were not written by Matthew, Mark, and Luke is well established, as it is also, we may now say with con- fidence, that the Fourth Gospel cannot be considered John's, the conservative critics allowing this, to all intents and pur- poses, as fully, if not as frankly, as the more liberal can desire in confirmation of their own amended view. If these results were all the Higher Criticism had to show, its negative aspect would certainly deserve the contumely which its more violent opponents have heaped upon it, and the indifference and distrust of all whose spiritual appetite craves something more substantial than a mere ' Barmecide feast of empty names and dates. But in being emptied of the honors which they once held, these names have gained as much as they have lost ; and a true date is as good as a false one for any book or circumstance, however good or bad. Moreover, one must be very dull who cannot see that the negations of the Higher Criticism are not so barren as they might be by a great deal. They are a notation by which very real values are expressed. They carry in their train a host of positive results, as much more rich and full than their unqualified simplicity as are the movements of the heavens than the algebraic x by which their unknown quantities may be expressed. The main in- terest of Old Testament criticism, for example, has centred in the Pentateuch. Now, what proportion to the results attained in this department is borne by the mere negation of the authorship of Moses ? Is it one to a thousand or one to a million ? And yet the criticism of the Pentateuch has been destructive of much more than the Mosaic authorship. It has destroyed the unity of its composition. It has made the book of Deuteronomy a book by itself, dating from the of tJie HigJier Criticism. 33 closing years of the seventh century B.C., when Moses had been dead some seven hundred years. The four preceding books it has disintegrated into the Book of Covenants, an Elohistic and a Jehovistic document, another fusing these, a priestly code containing nearly all the priestly regulations of Exodus and Numbers and Leviticus, which was not fairly published till Moses had been dead nearly nine centuries, and certain interesting fragments antecedent to all these. This is destructive criticism, certainly ; but it is the same kind of destruction that goes on when a pile of bricks and lumber, most solid and symmetrical, is made into a house which guards a living home. If we could have the Pen- tateuch (the Five-fold Book), which has become the Hexa- teuch (the Six-fold Book) by the addition of Joshua, ar- ranged for ordinary reading, as it has been in the ideal constructions of Kuenen, Smith, and Driver, and their kind, it would have all the advantage over the present arrange- ment that a noble building has over the raw materials from which it is made. Thanks to the constructive achieve- ments of the Higher Criticism here, a unity that was merely formal and mechanical has become vital and organic. Every separate part is vitally related to some stage of Israel's growth in spiritual things. It reflects a changing civiliza- tion, a deeper ethical and religious consciousness, as we pass from the "Ten Commandments," all that we have from Moses' mighty heart, to the " Book of Covenants " (Exodus xxi.-xxiii. 19), from that to the Prophetic Narratives of the Jehovistic document, the story-book of which we never tire, from that to the Elohistic document, to the fusion of this with the former, to Deuteronomy (620 B.C.) and the Deuteronomic revision, and finally to the Priests' Code, and the grand fusion of this with the rest and the redaction of the whole which brought the Pentateuch and Joshua into their present shape. Nor do the constructive achievements of the Higher Criticism end with this rearrangement of the Hexateuch even so far as the Hexateuch is itself concerned. The order thus discovered is an order like to that of a great 34 TJie Constructive Achievements army, which, as it goes marching on, sweeps up into its files the wavering swarms of national allies and border States, and makes them energetic and consenting parts of its own unitary force and might. The rearrangement of the Hex- ateuch, far from ending with itself, furnishes a unifying principle of Old Testament relations, which brings the books of Samuel and Kings and Chronicles, the prophets in their chronologic order, the Psalms and other books, into harmo- nious alliance with the Hexateuch, corresponding with and illustrating one part after another of its composite unity. Thus it appears that the books of Samuel and Kings fall into line with those eighth and seventh century portions of the Pentateuch which are strongly marked with the prophetic spirit, the prophets Amos and Hosea, Isaiah and Micah, at the same time into the same place. Not without critical in- sight did the Jews name the books of Samuel and Kings " the Early Prophets," so strong in them is the spirit of the early prophets. But Jeremiah's place is with the Deuterono- mist, part prophet and part priest, and doing his best to reconcile the discordant elements ; while Ezekiel's prophecy foretold nothing else so clearly as the priestly tendency which culminated in the priestly portions of the Pentateuch after the return from Babylon, where they had been worked out, not without much ingenious and affectionate inclusion of such ritual forms as had been generally in use or had fallen into innocuous desuetude in the hurly-burly of invasion and expatriation. The Psalmists, equally with the prophets, bring their glory and honor into the Hexateuchal evolution. In lack of all external evidence for the authorship of the Psalms, our best means for determining their chronology is their relation to that evolution. Those that are most prophetic we can, with a good deal of confidence, assign to the prophetic centuries which produced the early prophets, the prophetic narratives and histories of the Pentateuch and Samuel and Kings ; those having the temper of Jeremiah and the Deuteronomist to their time ; those of a priestly cast to post-exilic times, and there the most of them belong. of tJie Higher Criticism. 35 It is a little matter to thus determine their chronology. It is not a little matter that by this determination they become to us the voice of a great congregation, and not merely the unreal pietism of an irreligious and immoral king. It is not a little matter that to the priests, whom we have habitually despised in comparison with the prophets, we are most in- debted for those parts of the Old Testament which have made it precious to innumerable hearts. To the same priests we owe the books of Chronicles and Ezra and Nehemiah, — as history prejudiced and imperfect, but as memoirs of their time most serviceable to its historians now. These books are on the best of terms with the priestly por- tions and the last redaction of the Hexateuch, as are also the prophecies of Zechariah (i.-viii.) and Malachi, while the books of Jonah and Ruth are in spirited rebellion against the narrow and exclusive policy of those who would shut Israel up in selfish isolation. In this progressive relationship of so many books of the Old Testament to the evolution of the Hexateuch, we have a constructive achievement even greater than the rearrange- ment of the Hexateuch. It substitutes for a purely mechan- ical and irrational sequence such a relation and connection that we can say " Mark how one string, sweet husband to another, Strikes each in each by mutual ordering." Immeasurable the gain of every part in interest, in vital- ity, in historical and spiritual significance, because of this living spirit of the Hexateuchal evolution in the midst of the revolving wheels of various motive, passion, ardor, exalta- tion. And there are many incidental gains which are of great importance. Could we believe that God was ever such a one as the Deuteronomist declares him to have been, might we not well say, like Prometheus : *' I reverence Thee ? Wherefore t " But even so wise a scholar as Canon Driver, whose Introduction to the Old Testament Professor Briggs has just sent forth among us, tells us that neither the in- spiration nor authority of the Old Testament is affected by 36 The Coitstnictive Achievements the criticism I have described, and which he, orthodox and conservative, accepts almost entire. But it is certain that the makers of the Pentateuch, as we have it, did not accord to it a special inspiration and authority. Speaking of the eighth-century fusion of different documents, Renan says, " It is not possible to hack about so freely a text admitted to be inspired." Of the more elaborate fusion of the fifth century the same holds good. The belief in special inspira- tion and authority was the production of a later time, and there is nothing in the process of its growth that commends it to an intelligent mind, nor to any one who is not bound to stultify himself at any cost. But it is not only the character of God that is redeemed by the criticism of Deuteronomy : it is also the character of the Hebrew people, whose slaugh- ter of the Canaanites, for which such miserable apologies have been made and which has often furnished terrible in- structions to fanatical religionists, this criticism has re- manded to an ideal sphere. It was a fancy picture, painted to encourage an exclusive and intolerant spirit, which for a time it did, and then followed a reaction. Another inci- dental gain is in the matter of Isaiah. The criticism which makes chapters xl.-lxvi. a separate prophecy, two centuries later than the rest, leaves to the prophet Isaiah all that he needs for his imperishable fame. The whole would be too much. The later portion gives us another prophet of equal, if not greater, power; and, as a voice of the Captivity, it acquires a pathos and a passion which it could not have in its old place. The book of Daniel makes a sim- ilar gain by its transference from the sixth century B.C. to the second, where it becomes the expression of that passion of revolt against the tyranny of Antiochus Epiphanes which raised the standard of the heroic Maccabees, and carried it to victory. Is it not a very real gain to the Psalms that even a criticism so conservative as that of Canon Driver cannot confidently ascribe to David a single Psalm ? Would it help the Book of Common Prayer to know that Henry VIII., the much-married, the cruel, the murderous, had written half of the Higher Criticism. 37 of it ? Had he been its reputed author, would it not help it to discover that he had no part in it, to be forever rid of that evil association, soiling at every touch ? David, take him all around and with due allowance for his time, was not a better man or king than Henry VHI.; and the criticism which denies the Psalms to his traditional claim does them a real service. As much as ever they contain "Words that have drunk transcendent meanings up From the best passion of all bygone time, Steeped through with tears of triumph and remorse, Sweet with all sainthood, cleansed with martyr fires," though not unmixed wdth baser elements, to which David would be welcome if they were his by critical right. Hence- forth they are the spiritual autobiography of Israel for eight hundred years, with here and there an accent so purely per- sonal that we feel as if we ought to veil our faces from the contrition and the agony of a troubled soul. As the name of David attracted to itself the hymns and spiritual songs of Israel, so the name of Solomon attracted its proverbial wis- dom, and perhaps the name of Job the long debate concern- ing the misfortunes and the sufferings of righteous men. In either case the gain is large which makes the individual wither, while the race is more and more. In the case of Job it sounds a truce to all the vain attempts to reconcile the speech of Elihu and the Epilogue with the remaining parts. How grandly, too, the Higher Criticism has rescued the book of Jonah and the Song of Songs from the contempt of the vulgar and the qualms of prurient prudes, and no less from the stuff and nonsense of the allegorical interpretation, and set them both on high as worthy of all honor, the one for its catholic sympathy with alien peoples, and the other for its praise of simple, faithful love, so radiantly beautiful and so passionately pure ! But these incidental gains must not detain us from that larger synthesis which is involved in the literary evolution of the Hexateuch and the books that answer to the succes- 38 The Consti'iLctive Achievements sive stages of its growth. The constructive achievement, par excellence^ of the Higher Criticism within the Old Testa- ment limits is the history of a national religious evolution from the deification of natural objects, trees, and stones to the worship of one God, not of and for Israel alone, but of the universe, and, if through Israel, y^r all mankind. From an original fetich worship, safely conjectured from the sur- vivals of a later time, Israel in Egypt went forward to the worship of great natural forms and forces, and principally of a dreadful god of fire, much like the Ammonitish Molech and the Moabitish Chemosh, whose worship was with human sacrifices and other cruel rites. This god would seem to have been worshipped under different names, one of them Yahweh j or there were different gods from which the one so named came uppermost in time. " Moses His Choice," was the title of an ancient book in which I used to read to please my grandmother, and did not please myself. I have forgotten everything except the title; but the history we are considering teaches us that his choice was Yahweh, perhaps because he was his tribal god. The name mattered little. What did matter was that he connected his worship with morality in the Ten Commandments, — not as we have them now, for Moses was no monotheist and did not object to the idolatrous worship of Yahweh. From his time to Hosea's, five hundred years, Monolatry, the worship of one god, with- out denying the existence or the power of other gods, was Israel's loftiest ideal, too lofty for habitual realization. The worship of other gods with him was commoner than the exclusive worship of Yahweh. Witness the Baal worship of the Northern tribes, and the motley worship of Solomon, Ahaz, and Manasseh. In the eighth century B.C. Israel for the first time, under the leadership of such great prophets as Isaiah and Micah, arrived at the purely monotheistic idea, that there was only one God, that he was the creator of the universe, that he was to be worshipped without any image, that he was a righteous God, and was best worshipped with the sacrifices of righteousness. Only a small minority were of iJie Higher Criticism. 39 ready for so high a truth. A century later there was a com- promise, the details of which are found in the book of Deu- teronomy. It was substantially that the true worship of Yahweh consisted of sacrifices and righteousness. Only the sacrifices must be offered in Jerusalem, and there only. The violent revolution by which this compromise was forced upon the nation was soon followed by the Captivity, a period of intense literary and religious activity, whose most signal fruit was the Priests' Code, the levitical law of Numbers and Leviticus. Not amid the thunders of Sinai, but amid the thunders of Babylon, was the law delivered; and not to Moses, but to some daring innovator, whose fame would have been fatal to his work. The compromise of Deuteronomy had come full circle. There the priests had the best of it : here they had everything their own way. But the religious evolution still went on. A loftier spirituality, a more inward righteousness, is witnessed by the later Psalms and other writings of the centuries that bring us forward to the thresh- old of the Christian era. This meagre outline is almost a travesty of that history of Israel's religious evolution which the Higher Criticism has achieved. Can these dry bones live .'' They can and do under the great master critics' magic spell. They are clothed with palpitating flesh. Their blood is warm with human love and hate and hope and fear and joy. And the history so made alive, as compared with the mechanical, traditional scheme of Israel's general decadence from, and spasmodic efforts to regain, the heights of an original revelation is full of a superb reality and an incalculable interest and inspira- tion. In the traditional chronology of the Bible there is a gulf of four hundred and fifty years between the last chapters of the Old Testament and the first chapters of the New. One of the most significant achievements of the Higher Criticism has been to bridge this gulf, partly with material brought forward from the Old Testament, partly with material taken from the Apocrypha, in many instances approving the wis- 40 The Constructive AcJiievements dom of the Roman Church in making it canonical, and partly with material from sources wholly external to the Bible and Apocrypha, that it might be fulfilled as it was written by the poet : — "Filled up as 'twere the gaps of centuries, Leaving that beautiful which had been so, And making that which was not, till the place Became religion, and the heart ran o'er With silent worship of the great of old, The dead but sceptred sovereigns, who still rule Our spirits from their urns." The beauty of this passage has not tempted me to an unlaw- ful use of it. It expresses just exactly what the Higher Crit- icism has done for the centuries between Malachi and Mat- thew. These centuries, which have been generally regarded as centuries of decadence, and of that only, it has shown to have been a period of religious growth, of deepening spirit- uality, of ever-heightening anticipation of "the mind that was in Christ." Increasing formalism there was no doubt, but increasing inwardness and spirituality even more notably. One incident of this fresh reading of the last pre-Christian centuries has been that certain books of the Apocrypha have been shown to be much more inspired than some which the Old Testament includes, if, indeed, the most inspired is that which is the most inspiring. It must be confessed that in many instances the represen- tatives of the Higher Criticism have not dealt with the New Testament with the same sincerity and courage they have manifested in their dealings with the Old. " The reason is of course obvious," says one of the authors of "Lux Mundi." " Why, what can be admitted in the Old Testament could not, without results disastrous to the Christian creed, be ad- mitted in the New." To some it is by no means obvious, for it has been given them to see that the value of evidence is not affected by the magnitude of the issues at stake. Whatever happens to the Christian creed, the Higher Criti- of tJie Higher Criticism. 41 cism has but one method for the Old Testament and New ; and, forsaking this, it becomes the lower criticism^ — not criti- cism at all in fact, but mere apologetics. So great has been the multitude of counsels that the wisdom has been often hard to find j but the Points-no-Points, which fail us as we hug the shore, come out clearly in the offing, flashing beacon lights. The grand result as to the Synoptic Gospels is that the pri- ority belongs to Mark, that Matthew comes next, and Luke the last, with intervals not long between. The allowances of the more conservative and the revisions of the more radical suggest the last quarter of the first century as the time-limit that includes them all. The interest attaching to the Fourth Gospel is hardly less central to the New Testament than that attaching to the Pentateuch is to the Old. After much pushing back and forward on the smoky field, the fight seems nearly at an end, and the victory to be with those de- nying the authorship of John. For the last twenty-five years the tendency has been strong this way, as for twenty years before, after the Rupert charge of Baur, it was the other. But the final victory has not been upon the lines of Baur's position, either in the matter of date (170 a.d. was Baur's) or character. There came a time in tunnelling Mont Ce'nis when the workmen from one end heard the click of tools which were in the hands of workmen from the other end. Some- thing like this has happened in the criticism of the Fourth Gospel. Both parties have not been working for the same re- sult. The defenders of the authenticity have been endeavor- ing to find some piece of harder rock there in the aarkness that should bar the others' way. But ledge after ledge has crumbled at their feet under their vigorous tests, until at last they hear the click of the opposing tools, — the sooner, be- cause the opposing party have come toward them a good deal further than they were led by Baur. To drop the simile, each side has been compelled to make concessions by the changing fortunes of the great debate, until at length they stand quite comfortably together on the common ground that the gospel, in its present form, was written in the sec- 42 The Constructive Achievements ond quarter of the second century ; that its long discourses are the parts farthest removed from the historic truth ; that, nevertheless, there are elements of a genuine tradition, both of fact and phrase, which may have derived its impulse from the apostle John. To this conclusion it makes no difference whether Justin Martyr did or did not know of such a gospel in the fourth decade of the second century. " The swan " upon that once much troubled lake "floats double, swan and shadow." With regard to Paul's Epistles, also, the tendency is to a more liberal allowance than the four allowed to him by Baur, — Romans, the two Corinthians, and Galatians ; the additions, First Thessalonians, Philippians, Colossians, and Philemon. If there are Gnostic elements in these, may they not be pro- phetic streaks of dawn, and not reflections of the fulness of that fierce and sultry day ? Taking these eight, we have in them the growth of Paul's ideal Jesus from a man in Thes- salonians, through the increasing grandeurs of Corinthians and Romans, until at length in the Epistles to the Colos- sians and Philippians he stands upon the utmost verge of super-angelic power and grace, where, but a step and he has crossed the mystic line which divides him from the Eternal Logos of the Fourth Gospel. Another constructive achieve- ment of the Higher Criticism has related the pastoral Epis- tles to the developments and controversies of the second century, and also those ascribed to John and Peter's sec- ond. Meantime, the Apocalypse, which was once the impreg- nable fort of John, from which the authenticity of the Fourth Gospel was battered down, is now generally given up as his, Martineau following some of the strongest Germans in the idea that it is a Jewish Apocalypse of 69 ad., or thereabout, with Christian head and tail pieces and additions of a later date. Time presses, and I cannot as I would exhibit that most significant achievement of this criticism, — the connection of the New Testament books, almost without exception, with the controversy between Judaizing and universalizing ten- of the Higher Criticism. 43 dencies, of which Peter and Paul were the actual and ideal representatives. Unquestionably, this tendency business has been overdone. But, when every proper abatement has been made from its first extravagance, it remains as central and interpretative to the New Testament as the tendency to priestly or prophetic interpretation is to the Old, like that marshalling the different books the way that they should go, fixing their order of precedence, and, like that, giving a splen- dor of dramatic interest to the whole body of literature which it never had before. The general result, we are assured, does not invalidate the essentials of the gospel history. That depends on what the essentials are. If they are the facts, whatever they may be, it does not invalidate them ; for nothing can invalidate a fact. If they are " the Christian creed " of the " Lux Mundi " people, it is so "disastrous" to them that those people may well insist that the method of Old Testament criticism can- not be safely used upon the New. For here, too, the general result is an ideal evolution, — an evolution of the nature of Jesus as conceived from time to time, beginning with the pure humanity of the Synoptic Gospels and ascending by degrees through the earlier and later Epistles of Saint Paul until it reaches its climax in the Fourth Gospel, where as the Eternal Logos, though infinitely more than man, he is not yet identical and commensurate with God. How is it pos- sible in this heel of time for any one acquainted with the idealizing tendencies of religious sentiment and of personal devotion to believe that in the last, and not in the first of these opinions, we have the more exact report ? It is only possible by wilfully disowning everything we know of such idealizing tendencies. Who can help seeing that the change in Paul's own thought was purely one of daring speculation ? If there is one constructive achievement of New Testament criticism that is more manifest than any other, it is the pure humanity of Jesus, the natural and almost inevitable relation of his thought and work to the time and place which made the circumstantial setting of his life and death. The grand achievement of Biblical Criticism is not merely 44 ^-^^^ HigJicr Criticism, a separate synthesis of Old Testament and New : it is a synthesis including both in its majestic sweep. There is no break in the development from the fetichism of the early Semites to the filial and fraternal heart on which the loved disciple leaned. And the development is as strictly human as that of any child from his first feebleness to the maturity of all his powers. Human, but not therefore any less divine; for there is nothing without God. We cannot depre- cate too much such words as Canon Driver's, when he says ■of the negative and positive achievements of the Higher Criticism, " They do not touch either the authority or in- spiration of the Scriptures." They do not, if by their author- ity is meant the weight of their established truth, and by their inspiration is meant their power to touch our hearts and quicken us to higher things. But, if they mean the authority and inspiration of a special, supernatural revelation, such inspiration and authority are pulverized by the impact of the critic's negative and positive results. And why endeavor to make it appear that it is otherwise than so ? Why stretch out the hands to save " the sifted sediment of a residuum," when a cup of blessing full to overflowing is so near.? There is a kind of atheism in the endeavor to save some special aspect of the world to God, as if all things and persons and events were not the channels of his boundless tide. The amount of Holy Scripture is not lessened, but immeasur- ably increased, when the partition walls between the Bible and all other noble literature are broken down, and we can go in and out and find pasture, never escaping from the care and guidance of that Power which saith, " All souls are ^nine." " Take heart, the Master builds again ; A charmed life old goodness hath ; The tares may perish, but the grain Is not for death. *' God works in all things; all obey His long propulsion from the night; Ho ! watch and wait ; the world is gray With morning light." TEMPTED OF GOD. It may well be doubted whether the writer of the Epistle of James — who was possibly, but not probably, James, the brother of Jesus — was justified in his confidence that no man, when he is tempted, should say he is tempted of God. His way out of the difficulty was not entirely satisfactory. His solution of the problem was, at best, but superficial : "But each man is tempted, when he is drawn away of his own lust, and enticed." The tendency of human nature to be " drawn away of its own lust, and enticed," is a tendency rooted in the fundamental ground of things. It is a tendency which we could not safely, would not willingly, forego. It is a tendency on which depend the tragedy of history and the pathos and the power of literature in no small degree. We might get along without these ; but we could not get along without the greatness and the dignity of human life, which are insepara- ble from the tendency which makes for these, inseparable from the conflict of that tendency with the better self. But there are temptations from above as well as from below ; and, even if it could be shown that all the latter are empty of divine significance, the former would remain, and would be divine temptations even by the canons of that wretched dualism which has always dominated Christian thought. It is too much the habit of our speech to talk as if all the temptations of society and the inner life were away from all the high and pure and holy things. Surely, it is not so. Surely, there are temptations to these things. Tempted of God are we, as well as of the Devil, whatever we may think about the origin of the devilish temptations in the economy 46 Tempted of God. of the universe. Tempted of good are we, as well as by the bad, — so tempted that the wonder is that anybody can be tempted by the power of lower things to take the lower road. As I think of the temptations to falseness, baseness, envy, mean and brutish sin, and, over against these, of the temp- tations to nobility and generosity, to purity and truth, to heroism and fidelity, I sometimes wonder that there is any badness in the world ; that all are not enticed by the be- seeching loveliness of virtue to abide forever in her house. Tempted of God are we by all the tender and majestic beauty of the world. I thought I never saw the world so beautiful as it was last Monday,"^ as I went from here to Boston on the train. Partly it was no doubt by sense of contrast with ouv city streets with their mad rush for all those ugly, useless things with which the Christmas time tempts the unwary purchaser ; t partly in contrast with their ever- narrowing dome of blue. A judicious critic at the Academy consoled himself with the reflection that the ladies "march- ing single in an endless file " before the pictures concealed nothing lovelier than themselves. That cannot be said of our elevated railways, nor even of the handsomest of the great commercial buildings and hotels by which we climb to heaven. But it was not by force of contrast only that my ride unrolled for me a panorama of unwearying delight. The beauty that engaged my eye and heart was not merely rela- tive, but absolute. It was in " the volleying rain " that rat- tled on the windows of the car, making all manner of ex- quisite parabolas and intersecting lines. What is there meaner than a cinder in your eye ? but how pretty those im- prisoned in their several translucent drops and whirling round with ceaseless motion ! How curious to me ! yet possibly, I thought, for one acquainted with the law of such relations, an illustration of those laws that keep the universe * Dec. 7, iSgi. t Correcting the proof of my sermon after Christmas, I am reminded that there were many pretty, useful things also, and that even the ugliest were sometimes made most beautiful by the love that gave itself with them. Tempted of God. 47 in time and tune. How beautiful, moreover, were the hurry- ing clouds, great masses of them, with outriders here and there posting across the sky ! and how beautiful the leafless trees, — so shapely in their naked strength and grace that I could not but wonder whether their beauty unadorned with summer's drapery was not adorned the most ! At least, the absence of that drapery revealed the lovely contours of the hills, and its faded splendor embrowned the nooks and hol- lows with a tone more restful than June's flashing green ; while, if my sense craved something of more positive tone, there was ever and anon the purple and the gold of grasses in the swamps and meadows and along the margin of the booming sea. What day of brightest sunshine could, I thought, compare with this ! The next day but one I had a chance to judge. There never was a brighter or a bluer day, the blueness of the overflowing streams paling, but shaming not, the blueness of the sky. Which was the lovelier, — the gray day or the gold ? In truth, I have not yet made up my mind, and think I never shall. And what is the moral of the parable ? That Nature is at any time more beautiful than words can say or heart can hold, when we come straight to her and look her fairly in the face. The great singer, questioned as to the most beautiful of operas or songs, replied, " The one I happen to be singing." So Nature's loveliest aspect is that which for the time she wears. And still I dally on the threshold of my inmost thought : Tempted of God are we by all the tender and majestic beauty of the world. Only a step, and I am safe within. For many times those days I found my- self asking how it was possible for men to build against such skies and hills and by such shining streams such miracles of ugliness as were many of the structures hous- ing their throbbing industries and their domestic peace or strife ; * and many times, if not as many, I found myself making little psalms of gratitude to those who had so *But housing oftentimes, I know, the energy which made the speed and comfort of my ride and spiritual things immeasurably pure and good. 48 Tempted of God. wrought that their houses and their barns seemed but the sweet continuance of Nature's plan, so that she gladly gave them place, and granted them, if not an equal date with Andes and with Ararat, an equal date with century-growing trees and the alluvial hills. And then I thought. But what a little part of all the boundless beauty of the world is that which I have seen in these two days and along these two centuries and a half of homely landscape back and forth, and what are "the huts where poor men lie," the sumptuous villas of their rich relations, in comparison with the lives that poor and rich build up from earth to heaven ? And, if the temptation of the beauteous world for all who build in wood or brick or stone is clear and strong to make their work so harmonize with Nature's plan that it shall not be a blot upon her loveliness, should not the temptation of God's world of beauty perfect and entire be irresistible for all men working in the imperishable materials of the intel- lectual and moral life to make their lives by their simplicity and sincerity, their noble forms of action, their lovely orna- ments of art and song, worthy such fair and glorious environ- ment as that in which they have been set ? Our senses are, we hear, the posterns by which treacherous sins come in and spoil our heavenly city. " In my flesh," said the apostle, " dwelleth no good thing." But, however it may be with the other senses, is not that which is our bountiful purveyor of the vision of all fair and perfect things a splendid portal for the welcome of our best allies, a sally-port through which our nature's banded strength may stream to victory ? So thought at least our Emerson, when he sang: — " Daily the bending skies solicit man, The seasons chariot him from this exile, The rainbow hours bedeck his glowing chair, The storm- winds urge the heavy weeks along, Suns haste to set, that so remoter lights Beckon the wanderer to his vaster home." Tempted of God are we not only by the tender and majestic beauty of the world, but by the course of human I Tempted of God. 49 history, by the seal that course has set on all nobility of word and deed. " Oh that thou wouldst rend the heavens and come down ! " the ancient psalmist prayed. But if He could, and walk our streets with us, and explain to us across our tables what he would have us do, I do not see how he could make any plainer than he has made by the course of history what are the things belonging to our peace. If the course of history does not show that the Power which is central to humanity is a Power that makes for righteousness, then is it altogether dumb. If the whole course is too stupendous for the imagination and the heart, detach from it any striking epoch, — that of the Commonwealth in England, that of our Revolutionary struggle, that of our anti-slavery struggle and our Civil War, — I do not see how men can read of such things and resist the strength of their tempta- tion to the best and honorablest things. The other day I dipped into Green's ".History of the English People" for some special fact in the last years of Elizabeth or the first of James. But I had trusted myself to a flood on which I was as helpless as if I had embarked above the rapids of Niagara and ventured out on their resistless tide. I was swept along from one decade to another with an ever quicker pulse and stormier heart, and at the end found my- self asking how it was possible for men to read of such things and resist their impulse to the generous and brave and true. The question, "Can virtue be taught?" is one that Plato asked. " Not much," we answer him, "by formal pre- cept ; plentifully by the divine contagion of the high and true in literature and living men." To breathe an atmos- phere of high nobility is to grow strong for the resistances and conquests of the moral life. And such an atmosphere bathes every height that marks the conflict of man's living spirit with the strength of old abuse and vested wrong. But it is when the great movements of history centre in great personalities that they become the temptations of God to high nobility in the most obvious and impressive way. 50 Tempted of God. " My heart leaps up when I behold A rainbow in the sky." It leaps up — oh, how much more proudly and rejoic- ingly! — when we behold the splendors of heroism and fidelity and sacrifice that enrich the firmament of history. If we would not be led into temptation to right-doing stronger than we can resist, let us avoid, as wise men would the hope- less gate, the pages which recount the histories of good and noble men, not only those of brilliant action, but those of quiet thought, — friends and aiders of those who would live in the spirit. And what volume and momentum to the temptations of the highest to its height have been added by the printed book ! I have seen many mottoes in men's libraries. One I have never seen, I think, would be the best : " Seeing that we are compassed about by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight and the sin that doth easily beset us, and let us run with patience the race set before us." " As good almost kill a man," said Milton, " as a good book ; for a good book is the precious life-blood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life." How many such look down upon us from our shelves ! Then most, it seems to me, the precious life-blood throbs in them when they make real for us the personality of the great and good. With such presences and helps, " It may be wilderness without, Far feet of failing men ; But holiday excludes the night, And it is bells within." But all men have not libraries about them, books on their shelves which clang like spear and shield to stir their pulses to a knightly temper and resolve ; and all men do not know the course of history, and feel the force of its temptations to all truth and right. All this is so ; but in the width of Christendom there are few who have not one book, the New Testament, which is the precious life-blood of one master- Tempted of God. 5 1 spirit, the story of whose great humanity, whose yearning pity, whose divine compassion, is such a temptation of God's hohness to ours as cannot be overborne or utterly obscured by all the theologians' patient arts, weaving their veils and painted tapestries between his image and our eyes. " If I be lifted up from the earth," he said, " I will draw all men unto me." Lifted up he has been by all the faithful and discerning scholarship of the modern world, by all the sturdy common sense which, without much aid of scholar- ship, has been able to disengage the man from all the wrap- pages of the dogmatists ; and, if he does not draw all men to him, it is because some have been somehow spoiled for the appreciation and the reverence and love of what is loveliest and best in human life. Not only by the outward beauty of the world and by the course of history and its great names and high examples, but as well by those whom we have personally known, men and women in whom the beauty of holiness and the beauty of helpfulness have shone with equal light. In whatever calling we are called, in whatever round of circumstance we may be set, there will be those about us truer and better than ourselves, who by the simplicity of their goodness make it shine for us with pressing invitation. All do not so. Some wear their virtue with so great a difference from these, so consciously, with such superior airs, with such dread of happiness as if that were the most deadly sin, that they make virtue questionable, if not repulsive, in our eyes. If, to be virtuous, we must be like these, then we will not be virtuous : such is the argument they lend our creed. Good men have much to answer for in every time, so much have they availed to make all goodness seem to men who balance good and ill a harsh, repellent thing. I sometimes wonder if the bad have done so much to draw these doubters to themselves as the unlovely good to drive them to the bad by their repellent force. Yet, in the midst of these, God's tempters do not fail, — the men and women who wear their goodness with such simplicity and native grace that to come near them is to be 52 Tempted of God. charmed by their benignity and to make compact with our- selves, Sucli goodness shall be ours. So it would seem that it must be; that the purity, the integrity, the tenderness, the thoughtfulness, the generosity, the self-surrender, of these tempters of God, shine with such happy light that it would be impossible for any to come near to them and not be drawn into the service of the things they love. With so many generous men in the community, who from the exer- cise of their generosity reap such noble satisfaction, it is in- comprehensible how some, and not a few, are able to resist the fascination of their joyous helpfulness, and go on earning and hoarding only for themselves, or spending only on the lines of selfish pleasure or to glut the already jaded appe- tites of their immediate families and friends. One is not sorrier for the enterprises of great pith and moment that deserve, but lack, their help than for their miserable delusion, their building on such barren rocks, when happy isles are just at hand. The temptations from beneath must be of dread- ful strength when such temptations from above do not avail to make them less than nought. But these by which God tempts us to the better way are not of feeble force. And, thank Heaven, to encounter them, we need not, some of us, go far afield ! Their healing shadows are upon the floors of chambers where we sleep, rooms where we eat our daily bread or have our evening talk. And their temptation is so sweet and strong to every noblest habit of the soul that, even while such habits seem impossible for us, we are drawn into their charmed circle ever more and more by imperceptible degrees. We often hear of the temptations of the business world, — that they were never so great before as they are now. And this is true enough ; but it is not truer of the temptations from beneath than of the temptations from above. What are a few thousands, or a few millions, more or less, compared with the noble self-esteem of those who feel themselves in honor bound to do nothing to imperil that mutual trust and confidence on which the good of all depends ; compared with realization of Tempted of God. 53 the ideal of compulsory nobility, — advantages are obliga- tions? To be tempted by such generous ideals is to be tempted of God in the great world of business with its fierce and passionate competitions and its vast, immeasurable unrest. And one has only to regard this world with a judicial mind to see that these temptations or some others to the highest and the best are of a mighty potency. Let there be any great catastrophe upon the street, the col- lapse of some long-standing house, the breaking down of some distinguished reputation, and immediately there is a chorus of the Jeremiahs, chanting a doleful lamentation over the rottenness of the commercial world. What such catastrophes do actually make apparent is the bed-rock of mutual confidence on which rest all the conventional securi- ties of the business world, and how irrefragable it generally is. Every fresh catastrophe is a fresh teaching of the abound- ing honesty of business men, contrasting with the abundance of their opportunities for irregularity, and to which they are much more in honor bound than by any artifice for its own security which the business world has yet been able to in- vent. And never do the temptations of the business man to high nobility appear so strong and irresistible, and those to fraudulent practices so weak and vain, as when a great catas- trophe brings into vivid contrast the actual depth of fallen honor and the possible heights which it has foolishly fore- gone. Such are the respect of honorable men, the esteem of noble friends, the unshamed happiness of the hearth and home, the approving voice of one's own conscience, the noble consciousness of being one of that great company through which the industrial order keeps its married calm. As gold to dirt are these compared with any prizes that the tempter from beneath can show to eager and impatient men. The temptations of the political world furnish another theme of frequent comment; and doubtless they are many and of such fascinating quality that their seduction of such men as are sometimes elected to high offices is not incon- 54 Tempted of God. ceivable. But, surely, there are temptations from above as well as from below, — temptations to honesty and ideal ends, to lofty character and consecration. Here is a man of char- acter and standing who is made mayor of a great city, or governor of a great State, or President of the United States, and immediately we hear of the temptations that he will en- counter ; and the doubt is frequently expressed whether he will be able to resist them, and to effect an honorable and honest administration. What are these terrible temptations that can so beguile men who have been known as honest gentlemen to various crookedness ? The good will of the bosses and the boys of the political machine \ perhaps some low pecuniary gain ; the prospect of continuance in office or a higher place. But what for any man, who is not already hopelessly corrupt, should be the strength of such tempta- tions compared with that of the temptations to the heights of character and social help ! And what are some of these ? To have a name among the few who have established for themselves an honorable fame instead of being nameless with the swarm who have been " neither for God nor for his enemies," or infamous with those who have preferred to drag their garlands in the mire ; to improve material condi- ditions earning so the gratitude of decent folk ; to make some juster law or polity that shall be a better monument than one of bronze or stone ; to shame a cowardly constitu- ency into honorable ways, or, failing to do that, to set over against their baseness a perennial rebuke, a name the best can conjure with until the devils have come out, albeit rending as they come. These, and such as these, are the temptations that beset the servants of the people — mayors and governors and presidents — on the right hand and the left. Tempted of God are they to these high ways, to these good things, in comparison with which their temptations from beneath are so contemptible that it would not be strange if those before content with lowest aims should find the highest none too high for them to seize and hold. But, when God would make most irresistible his tempta- Tempted of God. 55 tions to things sweet and pure or great and strong, then he embodies them not in the beauty of the natural world, nor in the course of history, nor in its greatest names, nor in the social pressures that converge to force men into high and honorable ways, nor even in the eminent goodness of our companions and our friends, but in the love which binds the hearts of its beloved to all noblest service of the good and true. " There's nothing in the world, I know, That can escape from love ; For every depth it goes below And every height above. It waits, as waits the sky Until the clouds go by, Secure when they are gone And when they stay." Men may resist the God-temptation of the most exigent nobility of word and deed ; but how can they resist the love that yearns unceasingly for their good, — nay, how can they resist the love they feel for those whose lives, as if God did beseech them, plead with them to put away all manner of unworthiness ? And when the friend whose love, our love for whom, is full of a divine persuasion, is lifted up out of our sight, then does the power of his or her temptation sometimes attain unto a rarer potency than it ever had in the old days of visible companionship. And if it was not then what it should have been, had not the attraction and compul- sion that it should have had for us, let us be glad of any afterglow that softens for us all the lights and shadows, and in the mystic silence draws us to secret haunts of memory and prayer. But happiest they who do not wait for any dis- tance between earth and heaven to enhance the attractive force of the befoved friend, but, while such a one is safe within their arms, offer the purest pledge, the sweetest sacri- fice, that love can make, — a heart devoted to all beautiful and blessed things. And now I trust that I have shown that, whatever our 56 Tempted of God. temptations from beneath, we are so tempted from above, tempted of God in all the wonderful and happy ordering of his natural and human world, that only by the most miser- able neglect of our temptations to the higher and the highest things can we fail of making such a choice as shall not only make this mortal life what it should be in spiritual power and grace, but at the same time make our assurance of another life more strong, and our entrance on its mystery such as theirs who, coming among friends of loftiest nature, find themselves untroubled and at home. THE PRICE OF MORAL FREEDOM. " With a great price obtained I this freedom," said the Roman captain. " But I was free born," said Paul. And in the two we have a brief epitome of the contrasts that appear in human life. Their speech was of the freedom of the Roman citizen. To have the freedom of that citizenship was something fine and great, as you will easily appreciate if you will pause a moment and consider what the Roman Empire was in the first century of its career, over how many lands the city of the Tiber held the shield of her protection and her flaming sword, the splendors of her constructive genius and the beneficence of her sway, and the long period of peace that she had given to the world, one of the longest in its history. No wonder men were proud if they could claim that they were born into the freedom of that city which in its political structure was coextensive with the empire in its sweep from Spain to Syria and from the coasts of Africa to those of Germany and Britain ! No wonder those who were not born citizens of that city were glad to buy its freedom with a great sum of money ! . But there is an empire in comparison with which that of the Roman city was of narrow bounds and trivial power and petty history. It includes that and every other empire that has come and gone among the chapters of its history and the illustrations of its growth and power. It is the empire of the moral life of man. To have the freedom of this empire, to be born into it, if that were possible, — what a glorious privilege were that ! If not so privileged, were any sum too great to pay for it, if haply we might have it for our own in indefeasible possession ? 58 TJie Price of Moral Freedom The Roman captain and the apostle, I have said, the one boasting himself a free-born citizen, the other that he had bought his freedom with a great sum, epitomize in brief the differences and contrasts in the empire of our moral life. Be- tween these two extremes herd the great multitude, the vast majority of men and women, neither born free nor the possess- ors of a freedom they have bought for little or for much. Time was when a liberal theology, that of our Unitarian pioneers, found in the born freedom of the apostle the type of every man's original estate. It made no allowance, or the most insufficient, for the differences of natural organization, the excellences or the deformities and limitations of our in- heritance from former generations. Each new-born baby was a new-born Adam, with no past behind him either to help him onward or retard him on his way. His will was free, unhampered by the dead men's clothes which do not soon wear out, according to the canons of our later teachings of heredity and atavism^ — the reversion of the individual to the physical or moral likeness of some far-off ancestor or racial type. For him there was the choice of Hercules on the one hand and the other — love sacred and profane, persuading him with counter-invitation ; and, he could take or leave, whichever one he would. It was a very simple and attrac- tive exposition, and it had in it one element of great advan- tage over the traditional creed. Assuring men that they were free to choose the higher and to spurn the lower things, it helped to make them so in very deed and truth ; while, for those who believed themselves " born under sin " and without any power in themselves to break its hold, it was most natural to say, " The villainy you teach me I will execute ; and it shall go hard but I will better the instruc- tion." That not more were found to act upon this hint shows how much better human nature was than Calvin said. Men who believed that the Almighty, for the praise of his glorious justice, had probably elected them to everlast- ing wickedness and shame, went on doing the best they knew year after year, more worshipful than he. The Price of Moral Freedom 59 But our early Unitarian exposition of human nature and ability, so simple, so attractive, so encouraging, has broken down under the weight of countless illustrations of the dif- ferences in men's inborn tendencies and dispositions, the differences of their opportunities as well, to which weight has been added, making the catastrophe more absolute, that of the whole mass of evolutionary principles, with their assur- ance of the shaping influence and control of an incalculable hereditary force. And so it happens that, just when the Calvinistic doctrines of depravity and election are drawing near to the extinction of even that ghostly adumbration in which they have for some time now survived their first estate, you will often find our Unitarians asking if those doctrines were not, after all, poor, clumsy symbols of things very real and terrible in our human life, — the inheritance of evil tendency, the fatal power of this, conjoined with that of baleful circumstance^ to overmaster and enslave the moral will. That some are born free they make no positive denial. Willing and glad are they to recognize that it is so, to hail the favored natures, all of whose aptitudes and instincts, tendencies and inclinations, gravitate to pure and noble things. Though mindful of certain disappointments here and there where they were least expected, volcanic erup- tions of iniquity breaking through where never a rumble of disorderly passion had been heard before, they would say, " Let not him that putteth on the harness boast himself as he that taketh it off." They would have men not too con- fident that they can take the apostle's boast of native free- dom on their lips. But that many are born into a state of slavery they have as little doubt. For them the huts of narrow, selfish aims, the manacles of evil tendency, the lash of master-passions driving them to servile tasks. Of such is the kingdom of the majority in this present life. Thank Heaven there are those " born under sin," bred to this ser- vice, who somehow have achieved the moral freedom of the world, whether by a great price which they themselves have paid for it, or by the grace of others who have redeemed 6o The Price of Moral Freedom them from their servitude with patient love, or broken its inveterate bonds with sudden force, and carried them away as with a conqueror's might to make them sharers of their joy ! The freedom of the will, as it was formerly conceived, is now a doctrine that has little reverence among the philosophi- cal and scientific. Of the doctrine of the necessitarians, as it was formerly held, the same thing can be said with equal truth. The force of circumstance is seen to be of less im- portance than the force of character in determining the choices of the will. The range of deliberate choice has been much narrowed by the psychologists, who have suc- ceeded the metaphysicians in the study of these matters, and with much more satisfactory results. And even where there is deliberation there is less frequently that effort, or even the recollection of it, which is commonly illusory, which our traditional conceptions have held to be inseparable from genuine moral actions. "The immense majority of human decisions," says Professor James, "are decisions without effort." And, while many of our teachers who are now enskyed and sainted, and some whom now we cannot but revere, would say that no decision without effort is a moral decision, the average scales of judgment do not tip that way. Nothing is more effortless than the will's determination by the clear balance of deliberation one way or another, unless it be that " reckless and exultant espousal of an energy so little premeditated that we feel rather like passive spectators cheering on the display of some extraneous force than like voluntary agents," or that sudden passage from an easy and careless to a sober and strenuous state of mind, in which the right thing, which just before seemed quite impossible for us, seems as inevitable as the gravitation of the planets to the sun. " We know what it is," says Professor James, " to get out of bed on a freezing morning, in a room without a fire, and how the very vital principle within us protests against the ordeal. Probably most persons have lain on certain mornings for an hour at a time, unable to brace themselves The Price of Moral Freedom 6i to the resolve. We think how late we shall be, how the duties of the day will suffer. We say : ' I must get up. This is ignominious,' etc. But still the warm couch feels too delicious, the cold outside too cruel; and resolution faints away, and postpones itself again and again just as it seemed on the verge of bursting into resistance and passing over into the decisive act. How do we ever get up under such circumstances ? We more often than not get up without any struggle or decision at all. We suddenly find that we have got up. A fortunate lapse of consciousness occurs ; we forget both the warmth and the cold ; we fall into some revery connected with the day's life, in the course of which the idea flashes across us, ' Hollo ! I must lie here no longer,' — an idea which, at that lucky instant, awakens no contradictory or paralyzing sugges- tions, and consequently produces immediately its appropri- ate effects." Professor James does not go on to say that we have here an abstract and brief chronicle of a good deal of our moral life, but I think he might have done so without hesitation. The warmest bed imaginable is our vari- ous self-indulgence ; the coldest possible atmosphere is that where virtuous action pleads with us for realization. The very thought of it chills our imagination to the bone. If our action had to be deliberate, should we ever have the courage to get up ? That depends upon the character of the persons whom the pronoun represents. But, happily, in life's various dilemma there is ever and anon the momentary lapse from the deliberative mood; and the first thing we know we have got up and are going about the duty of the hour, man- fashion, rather enjoying, too, the nipping and the eager air. It is not that our passions, good or evil, speak for us while we stand by and wonder. It is that our whole self has acted spontaneously, to the temporary discomfiture of our mere balancing of rival claims. And the problem of the moral life is, in good measure, how to organize and develop this whole self, so that in the critical moments of existence it shall throw itself upon the side of right and truth and love, and sweep them on to victory and peace. 62 The Price of Moral Freedom In moral theories, for the most part the freedom of the will is the sme qua nan of moral action, the indispensable desideratum. But, in truth, is not the indispensable desider- atum a will that is not free to choose the evil or the good, but the good only, — is not, in fact, so much free to choose this as bound to choose it by our whole being's gravitation to it with an irresistible momentum? "Know," said John Milton, " that to be free is the same thing as to be pious, to be wise, to be temperate and just, to be frugal and abstinent, and, lastly, to be magnanimous and brave : so to be the opposite of all these is the same as to be a slave. . . . You, therefore, who wish to remain free, either instantly be wise or cease to be fools : if you think slavery an intolerable evil, learn obedience to reason and the government of your- selves." The diagnosis here is admirable, but the remedy for the disease is a specific hard to find. That freedom of the will which is its freedom from all base solicitation, its liberty to choose the highest and the best, its boundenness thereto, is not a freedom that is a gift of nature : it is a free- dom that is an acquisition of experience, and this by no sudden burst of energy so much as by long processes of dis- cipline which store up the energy which in moments to which Heaven has joined great issues discharges itself with infallible confidence upon the better side. " With a great price obtained I this freedom." Sometimes the price is paid for us before our birth ; and then, like the apostle, we are born free. Our fathers and mothers, theirs in turn, and generations back of them have, by innumerable fidelities of thought and word and deed, by their self-denials, their frugalities, stored away the sum which purchases our manumission from the slavery of selfish passions and impure desires. Well, this is a matter over which we have no con- trol ; and so you think perhaps it has no ethical implications. As the wishes of the French lady were not consulted when she was born, so are not ours how we are born. Nay ; but, if we cannot do anything for the how of our own birth, we may do something for that of those who shall be born to us, TJie Price of Moral Freedom 63 something to file away the links of the ancestral chain, some- thing to make the price that they will have to pay to get their freedom that little less which may make all the difference in the world to them. What summons, too, is here for those who are free-born to bear considerately and compassionately with those who are less fortunate, those who are bound with passion's galling chains ! what summons to such fellow-ser- vice as shall make their bondage a less cruel yoke, and to such modesty and gratefulness as are fit for those who are well-born and have no conscious price to pay to make their freedom certain and secure ! There are no freer people in the world than hundreds who were slaves at birth to every possibility of falsehood and in- temperance and unlicensed passion, while yet no one of them can say, " With a great price obtained I this freedom." It has been obtained for them by others. They have not paid the price, but others who have surrounded them with every object and with every influence that could make virtue beau- tiful and attractive for them and vice hideous and repellent. You have read Ibsen's "Ghosts," perhaps, and shuddered at the horrible truth to which it gives dramatic form, — the truth of men's hereditary compulsion to the foulest crimes. It is a truth well worth considering ; and, ghastly as it is, we shall do well to look it fairly in the face. But there is other truth which is not less true, and which is as bright as this is dark, as beautiful as this is horrible, as full of hope as this is of despair. It is the truth that educational environment can do much to counteract the inheritance of evil tendency. No one has studied the problems of heredity more carefully than Francis Galton ; no one has made the stress of good or bad inheritance seem more inexpugnable than he. But his investigations have shown nothing clearer than that, if in- heritance is much, so also is the environment. Much that we call heredity, he says, is not heredity, but the result of contact after birth. That contact is inclusive of ten thousand hindrances and helps, from the embrace of the consump- tive mother up to the divine benignity, which, in the face of 64 TJie Price of Moral Freedom man or woman, draws the child, the growing boy or girl, the youth or maid, with cables stronger than those which swing our mighty bridge in air, to all nobility. Here is the ground and inspiration of your kindergarten work. There is no such savings-bank as this ! The more in this, the less for prisons and reformatories, and those expensive deaths by electricity to which Governor Flower thinks the gentlemen of the press, intent on lively matter for their various papers, ought not to be refused. But there are not only the free-born and those whose free- dom is obtained for them with a great price of guardianship in childhood : there are also those who, would their modesty permit, might say with the Roman captain, " With a great price obtained I this freedom," — a price of their own earning and of their own paying. Good habits are the moral earn- ings that draw compound interest in the bank of character, at a liberal rate, and full soon give the investor a sum ready for an emergency. Long ago I read somewhere or heard it said that all habits are bad habits, meaning that every action should be the independent outcome of the rational and moral life of man. If for a time this doctrine took me in its snare, I was long since converted to another, that of the psycholo- gist* who says : " Habit is the enormous fly-wheel of society, its most precious conservative agent. The great thing in all education is to make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy. It is to fund and capitalize our acquisitions, and live at ease upon the interest of the fund. For this we must make habitual, as early as possible, as many useful actions as we can, and guard against the growing into ways * Professor William James, from whose " Principles of Psychology " (Henrj' Holt & Co.) I have "lifted" all that is best in the remainder of this sermon, as the quotation- marks will duly show. Perhaps I should have let his book alone, having proved before its powerful fascination ; but, having gone to it for a special point, I could not leave it till I had read everything in it that touched my theme, and then I said, " Why should I say in any poorer fashion what he has said so well ? " Moreover, in his royal borrowing from Bain and others, he had set me a brave example. If my sermon should send my hearers and readers to Professor James's wonderful book, one of the most muscular and vascular, one of the clearest and brightest I have ever read, it would do a better service than one ser- mon out of a thousand does ordinarily. TJie Price of Moral Freedom 65 that are likely to be disadvantageous to us, as we should guard against the plague. The more of the details of our daily life we can hand over to the effortless custody of habit, the more our higher powers of mind will be set free for their own proper work. There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision, and for whom the beginnings of every bit of w^ork are subjects of express volitional deliberation. Full half the time of such a man goes to the deciding or regretting of matters which ought to be so ingrained in him as practically not to exist for his consciousness at all." To acquire good habits is to earn the price of freedom : and how are they to be acquired ? Some of the most admi- rable suggestions that I know are those which Professor James has drawn out from Professor Bain's psychology of the moral habits. For one thing, in the endeavor to acquire a new habit which we know to be desirable, or to get rid of one we know is hurtful to our characters and our perform- ance, " we must take care to launch ourselves with as strong and decided an initiative as possible. Accumulate all the pos- sible forces which shall re-enforce the right motives ; put yourselves assiduously in conditions that encourage the new way ; make engageme?its incompatible zvith the old ; * ... in short, envelop your resolution with every aid you know. This will give your new beginning such a momentum that the temptation to break down will not occur as soon as it otherwise might ; and every day during which a break- down is postponed adds to the chances of its not occurring at all." Another admirable suggestion which I find in the same treasury of psychological ideas is, " Never suffer an exception to occur till the new habit is securely rooted in your lifey " It is necessary, above all things, in such a situation," says Pro- fessor Bain, " never to lose a battle. Every gain on the wrong side undoes the effect of many conquests on the right." " Without unbroken advance," another writer says, * These Italics are mine. 66 The Price of Moral Freedom "there is no such thing as accumulation of the ethical forces possible." Hence there must be no "tapering off" of pleas- ant vices, no letting of ourselves down easily from perilous heights, no treating of our resolution to break off the evil course, none of Rip Van Winkle's genial conclusions " not to count this one," and this, and this. The teacher I am following formulates another maxim, than which for the earning of good habits I have not found a better, nor one that my own experience more happily or painfully confirms. It is : " Seize the very first possible opportwiity to act on every resolution you make, and on every emotional prompting you may experience in the direction of the habits you aspire to gain. . . . No matter how full a reservoir of maxims one may possess, and no matter how good one's sentiments may be, if one has not taken advantage of every concrete opportunity to act^ one's character may remain entirely unaffected for the better." The good intentions with which hell is paved proverbially are good intentions that have never "lost " because they have never had "the name of action." "A character," says John Stuart Mill, "is a completely fashioned will"; and a will, in the sense in which he means it, is, we are told, " an aggre- gate of tendencies to act in a firm and prompt and definite wa}^ upon all the principal emergencies of life. A tendency to act only becomes effectively ingrained in us in proportion to the uninterrupted frequency with which our actions actu- ally occur. There is no more contemptible type of human character than that of the nerveless sentimentalist and dreamer, who spends his life in weltering in a sea of sensibil- ity and emotion, and who never does a manly concrete deed." " The habit of excessive novel-reading and theatre-going will produce true monsters in this line," says our professor; "and even the habit of excessive indulgence in music, for those who are neither performers themselves nor musically gifted enough to take it in a purely intellectual way, has probably a relaxing effect upon the character." And now I will give you for what it is worth his final maxim : ^''Keep the faculty of effort alive in you by a little gratuitous effort every day. TJic Price of Moral Freedom 6y That is, be systematically ascetic or heroic in little unneces- sary points ; do every day or two something for no other reason than that you would rather not do it. . . . Asceticism of this sort is like the insurance which a man pays on his house and goods. ... If the fire does come, his having paid it will be his salvation from ruin. So with the man who has daily inured himself ... to energetic volition and self-denial in unnecessary things. He will stand like a tower when everything rocks around him, and when his softer fellow- mortals are winnowed like chaff in the blast." This doctrine has, I well remember, the confirmation of John Stuart Mill's opinion, always careful and serene. I had myself supposed that one had little need to manufacture opportunities for self-denial or strenuous volition, that they abounded in the most ordinary lives. I had supposed that, if one didn't meet them, he was dodging them. I had imagined that, if one attended manfully to the necessary self-denials of his con- dition, he would find exercise enough to brace himself for any possible encounter. But, as I have said, I give you the professor's suggestion for what it is worth. You can take it home, and weigh it carefully. These are the ethics of the physiological psychologist who is much contemned, but they are as clear and stern as any that I know. " Could the young but realize," he says, "how soon they will become mere walking bundles of habits, they would give more heed to their conduct while in the plastic state. We are spinning our own fates, good or evil, and never to be undone. Every smallest stroke of virtue or of vice leaves its never so little scar. The drunken Rip Van Winkle excuses himself for every fresh dereliction by saying, ' I won't count this time.' He may not count it, but it is being counted none the less. Down among his nerve-cells and fibres the molecules are counting it, registering and stor- ing it up to be used against him when the next temptation comes." And as it is with every base consent, so is it with every brave resistance of our will. That, also, is so much earned, so much saved, so much invested to accumulate 68 The Price of Moral Freedom capital and interest for the sum with which our moral free- dom must be bought, and with no devil's mortgage that can be foreclosed against us in some great day of account. But the whole story of the price of moral freedom is not told in this delineation of the way in which good habits are confirmed, and make spontaneous and effortless the majority of our decisions in the moral sphere. There is an intellect- ual element in the complete affair which is of great signifi- cance. "When the will is healthy," we are told, "the vision must be right, and the action must obey the vision's lead." The vision must be right ! That is the aspect of the matter we have recognized in the motto of our Church, — " The truth shall make you free." To do the right, we must be able to see things as they are. And that we cannot do while we are as full of prejudice as we often, as we generally, are. The price of freedom is the surrender of our prejudice, the con- tinual cherishing of the feeling that we may, after all, be wrong, the persistent search for what is actually true, not for mere confirmation of the opinions which for one reason or an- other we desire to hold. Aiidi alteram partem I " Hear the other side ! " Read the other side ! Study the great masters of science, and so cultivate the scientific temper ; and then, if you can, carry it over into the realm of politics and the realm of theology and the judgments of the social world. "Where there is no vision, the people perish"; and they still perish, if they are not obedient to the heavenly vision, once it has been clearly seen. For such obedience of the moral will the spontaneity of habits, formed by our persistent choices of the higher things, is all we need. Be resolutely bent to see things as they are ; launch yourself with as strong and decided an initiative as possible ; never suffer an ex- ception to occur till the good habit is securely rooted in your life ; seize the first possible opportunity to act on every noble resolution ; suspect yourself if any day goes by and there is nothing hard to do and nothing sweet and pleasant to be given up, — do all these things, and few occasions will arise which shall not find you armed and mailed and ready TJie Price of Moral Freedom 69 for the battle. Few ; and yet no antecedent preparation can make us sure that no temptation can assail us which our force of habit cannot easily disarm. And what then ? Then is the time and place for that "essential achievement of the will when it is most voluntary, — to attcjid to a difficult object and hold it fast before the mind." "A moment's thought is passion's passing knell." " When Duty whispers low, ' Thou must,' The youth replies, * I can,' " if he has the force, the energy, the strength of will, the sturdiness of effort, " to hear the still, small voice unflinch- ingly ; when the awful mandate comes, looks at its face, con- sents to its presence, clings to it, affirms it, in spite of the host of exciting images which rise in revolt against it and would expel it from the mind." " It must be held steadily before the mind until \\ fills the mind," and then the victory is won. For then as to a banner lifted up, as to the slogan which brings clansmen trooping over burn and fell, come swarming all the natural allies of virtue to her hard defence. Only attention to the thing that must be do7ie ! Yes, only that. But, in the effort after that, body and soul have sometimes parted company, and in the joy of the successful enterprise it has seemed to some as if the heavens opened, and they saw the face of God. "With a great price obtained I this freedom." So every church and every state, if they could find a voice, and every man, might say, who has deliberately attained unto a freedom that is no semblance, but a divine reality. Nor is the price too much for what it brings. It is a great sum, and it cannot be quickly earned even by the most diligent and strenuous of men. But there are many ways in which a little of it can be earned, and many mickles make a muckle here as in the heaping up of poorer stuff. And remember that the price is not all required at once ; for the most part, only a little of it at a time, though now and then such an amount as beggars . us outright. God give us grace, we helping him as best we 70 The Price of Moral Freedom can, to meet the uttermost demand. And, whether we were born free or have obtained our freedom at a great expense, let us not be content with our own liberty, but remember those in bonds as bound with them, and work and strive, if haply we may hasten somewhat their deliverance from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the chil- dren of God. ORTHODOXY: WHAT IS IT? The famous lecture upon "Snakes in Ireland," which began, "There are no snakes in Ireland," furnishes me with an admirable model for m}^ discourse this morning. There is no orthodoxy, no standard of belief, to which we can ap- peal, and say, "This is the orthos doxa,'' — i.e., the straight, the right, the correct opinion, from which any divergence is heresy. If there is any, it is the doctrine of the Roman Catholic Church ; and all Protestant churches are equally heretics in comparison with that, for they all alike deny that which constitutes its essential character, — its assumption of infallibility, and its identification of the seat of this infalli- bility with the papal throne. Whether there is any virtue in this " If," we shall see as we go on with our discussion. In the mean time, the actuality and possibility of orthodoxy have both a theoretical and an historical aspect ; and in either they are equally unreal. The theoretical aspect is not an isolated one in modern life. It is of a piece with the whole tendency of modern thought, of which nothing is more characteristic than its doctrine of the relativity of human knowledge and the relativity of all natural organisms, human relations, morals, characters, and arts. The former tendency was to the absolute in everything, to absolute dis- tinctions in everything. Everything was set off from every- thing else as absolutely different from it. We had God and man, matter and spirit, good men and bad, heaven and hell, truth and error, true religions and false, natural and re- vealed ; while in politics it must be a monarchy or a repub- lic, and one party must be wholly right, the other wholly wrong, — our side the cream of cream, the other knaves and 72 Orthodoxy : What is it? fools ; and in art, between the Classic and Romantic, there must be no half-way : it must be realistic or idealistic, one thing or the other ; and so on through the whole range of natural and human life. Nothing is clearer in the range of modern thought than that it has completely broken with these hard and fast divi- sions, separations, and antagonisms. In the duels of the arts, the sciences, the religions, and the men of force and genius who have shaped all these, Hamlet and Laertes are con- tinually changing swords. There is nothing fixed and per- manent. The old Greek philosophers, who said that every- thing is flux, seem to have had the right of it. Down among the natural forces there is a new reading of them all, which substitutes a relative for an absolute interpretation. The old cosmology said that the world was made and finished in six days ; the new cosmology, that it has been nearer six million years a-making, and that it is not finished yet. Even the children in the Sunday-schools are beginning to question whether God " can make a mountain all to once " ; and Tyn- dall, asking who chiselled these mighty and picturesque masses, finds the real sculptor in the all-conquering sun. "And it is he who, acting through the ages, will finally lay low these mighty monuments, rolling them gradually seaward, 'sowing the seeds of continents to be,' so that the people of an older earth may see mould spread and corn wave over the hidden rocks which at this moment bear up the weight of the Jungfrau " ; so that there is not the least exaggeration in Tennyson's stanza where he sings : — "The hills are shadows, and they flow From form to form, and nothmg stands ; They melt like mist, the solid lands, Like clouds they shape themselves and go." Pass from the geological to the biological world, and we have the same substitution of a relative for an absolute idea : the transmutation of species, form flowing into form, instead of the old idea that God made each separate kind outright ; the Orthodoxy : What is it ? 73 creation of man not an event, but a process involving ages measured by hundreds of millenniums. And man once made, or at least fairly on his feet and "going to be created," — like the dramatic Adam in the mediaeval play, — how relative are the distinctions in his character and in the matters that concern his life and are the fruits of his activity ! For the two kinds of men the old thinking gave us, one kind or- dained to heaven and the other kind to hell, we have about some 1,400,000,000 kinds at any given time, — as many kinds as there are people in the world. The worst have some- thing good in them, the best are not all good. And what is best, and what is worst, and what are good and bad ? The difference is a relative difference. The bad is an excess of good, the exaggeration of something which is not intrinsi- cally bad. Conscience tells men that they must do the right. It does not tell them what it is. And, in truth, it is not the same yesterday and tO:day and forever. Time was when slavery was better than butchery, and so relatively good ; when polygamy was better than the rage of indiscriminate lust ; and so on. Or take the great religions of the world : they are no longer good or bad, one good and all the others bad. They are all good and bad, each mixed of various yarn. And so, too, with the politics. There is no system absolutely good for every time and place. The divine right of kings is certainly an anachronism in our time ; and in the Imperial German play we seem to see the young emperor, far crazier than Hamlet, addressing the headless ghost of Charles I. of England, and saying, " I'll follow thee." But the divine right of kings was not always an absurdity. As against rival chiefs and barons, it signalized the necessity of central power. And in the comparative politics of modern times we must not be the dupes of words. England is mo- narchical, and America is republican ; but our government is more conservative than that of England, in the judgment of Sir Henry Maine, the first political student of his time. But there are other relative considerations less soothing to our self-esteem. Good Queen Victoria may be Queen Log, 74 Orthodoxy : What is it ? and we may depreciate the assiduity with which her sure decay and general uselessness are overlaid with gold. But is such a gubernatorial or senatorial Stork as we sometimes have on our side of the puddle so much better ? and, in view of such gigantic appropriations of the people's money to the benefit of private corporations, and the giving away of great franchises of travel which could be sold for enormous sums, as we have seen of late, is it certain that the gilded log is more expensive than our monumental brass ? But these random illustrations of the relativity of modern thought, its substitution of modification and gradation for the hard and fast, may easily be multiplied too far. They are so numerous that it would be strange if the province of theology constituted an exception to their rule. The history of thought has furnished no more gross example of the ab- solute method than the general conception of orthodoxy as something believed everywhere and always and by all who have any claim to be regarded as members of the Christian Church. And it may seem to some of you that the disinte- gration of this conception is out of all proportion with the knowledge of the course of Christian thought as it has de- veloped from its beginning on the steep hillside of Nazareth to the present time. And, indeed, it is so. It is so because of that law which Lecky elaborated in his " History of Rationalism in Europe"; namely, that, while conscious op- position may confirm the old opinion, the general enlarge- ment of the mind by processes of thought allows, compels, the old opinion to drop out of it. One need never have attended to the course of Christian history, and noted what a history of orthodoxy becoming heresy and heresy becom- ing orthodoxy it has been, while, if he has been profoundly affected by the stream of modern thought and its general transition from the absolute to the relative, it is hardly pos- sible that the absolutism of orthodoxy should have remained for him unaffected, that he should not come to feel that here also we have no definite finality, but a sliding scale, marking one height at one time or place and another at another, so Orthodoxy: What is it? 75 that the pride of orthodoxy is much abashed, if it be not humbled to the ground. And now if any one, so minded to include the absolutism of orthodoxy with that of all the other absolutisms which have abdicated in favor of the relative principle, should reso- lutely go to work to study Christian history, he would find at every stage of its advance or retrogression the amplest con- firmation of his anticipatory intuition, would '" see what he foresaw " as clear as winter stars. It was to be expected that the province of theology would be the last to keep itself uninvaded by the relative spirit, so industriously had it deceived itself with the conviction that it was " a garden sealed," a province differing not in degree only, but in kind, from every other in the realm of thought. But, while theology was musing, the fire of criticism burned, at first tended by Niebuhr and Arnold in the field of his- tory, from which it caught in time the palings of the theo- logical enclosure ; and we may now say that the whole field has been pretty much burned over, and that everywhere, in the place of the old absolute growths that stood so thick together, the principles of relativity, of variation, transmuta- tion, adaptation to environment, and so on, are springing up into a fresh and vigorous life. The assumption of orthodoxy is that it has always been the creed of Christendom. But the truth is that the New Testa- ment exhibits the infant Church torn by conflicting doc- trines to a degree which has not been surpassed at any subsequent time. Odium theologicum is not an extinct va- riety ; but not even the New York Observer often attains to such a genial latitude of abuse as the New Testament conservatives and radicals. That the heresy of one century is the orthodoxy of the next is a commonplace with students of these things. For orthodoxy to become heresy is a less common or less obvious experience. Yet nothing can be surer than that the New Testament orthodoxy, the orthodoxy of the Jerusalem apostles, headed by James, the brother of Jesus, though it seemed to be impregnably intrenched against the ^6 Orthodoxy : What is it? Pauline innovation, in the course of three centuries became the heresy of the Ebionites, the most detestable of any in the eyes of those who, holding to the heresies of the Early Church, had come into the orthodox succession. From time to time there has been a great deal of talk in Christendom about the Primitive Church and of devotion to its ideals. But the ideals actually followed have not been so very primitive. With Roman Catholics and Episcopalians they have been those of the Post-apostolic Church, with a care, even at that, not to go back too far ; while those who have gone back to the New Testament have not gone back to the primitive and orthodox party which is there revealed, but to the party obviously and confessedly heretical. Any Jewish church of our own time is nearer to the primitive Christian orthodoxy of Jerusalem than any form of modern Christianity that vaunts its orthodoxy. But, in allowing that there was a primitive Christian orthodoxy, do I not break the force of my general thesis, " There is no orthodoxy " ? Not in the sense in which that was declared : There is no standard .of belief to which we can appeal as the orthos doxa, — the straight, the right, the correct opinion for all time. There is in the New Testament a party claiming to be orthodox. But the New Testament does not support its claim. It leaves it standing side by side with the way that some called heresy, and it was not the New Testament that decided in the course of three centuries that this way should be called orthodox. And, if the standards of the Jerusalem apostles should be accepted as the final standards of orthodoxy, there would not be an orthodox Christian in the world to-day. It was a losing game for the Judaizing Christians as soon as Paul's " one heart against the flesh of all mankind " had been flung forth with all the imaginative passion of the man ; and in the course of some three centuries the game was wholly lost, and Jewish Christianity ceased to be a factor in the onward movement of events. But, even while the first debate went on, others became more prominent, and divided the victorious party into sects and factions, great and small. Orthodoxy : What is it? yj The subject of this new series of debates was the nature of Jesus, called the Christ : Was he God or man, or God and man ? and, if God and man, what was the adjustment in his nature of the human and divine ? One council after another closed and reopened and then closed again these great debates. And there was nothing in the character of these councils to suggest that special guidance of the Holy Spirit which is claimed for them by the ecclesiastical sentimental- ists of the modern world. They involved a great deal of politics, but they were not so well managed as a mid-winter convention by one-half. Harmony there was none. And I am sorry to say that the worst of all the councils was that council of Ephesus in 449 (which has been called the Rob- ber Council with good reason), and which strenuously sup- ported that doctrine of the one nature of Christ which Mr. Beecher and his successor, Dr. Abbott, have defended in our own time. When the Bishop of Seleucia said, " I worship the one Lord Jesus Christ in two persons," the monks from Alexandria cried out : " Burn him alive ! Tear him asunder ! As he divided, so let him be divided ! . . . Drive out, burn, massacre, all who hold two natures ! " The mails were tampered with ;* and a letter from Leo, Bishop of Rome, was quietly suppressed, — the only thing that was done quietly in the council, except the introducing of forged passages into the platform as finally adopted. When the final vote was taken, " a furious multitude of monks and soldiers burst into the church, driving the terrified bishops into the corners and under the tables and seats, from which they were not suffered to emerge till they had promised to sign a blank paper, which afterward was filled out." Flavian, the Patriarch of Constan- tinople, whose deposition it secured, was so beaten, kicked, and stamped on by the Patriarch of Alexandria, that he died of his injuries; and those holding Mr. Beecher's and Dr. Abbott's one-nature opinion thought that his heresy of the two natures had perished with him, but it had not. Only * Here and elsewhere the form of this narration may have been influenced unduly by current events. y^ Orthodoxy: What is it? three years later, an emperor less favorable to Alexandria having come to the fore, the council of Chalcedon reversed the action of the council of Ephesus ; and the doctrine of Eutyches and Mr. Beecher has been heretical from that day to this. But it must be confessed that the council which managed this business was a mob hardly less savage than that of Ephesus. Nevertheless, it determined the orthodoxy of Christendom from that time to this, so far as orthodoxy can be determined by the majority vote of a general council of the Church, so long as it is unrepealed. And how did it determine it? Very much as if a Republican or a Demo- cratic convention should declare itself at once for free coin- age and sound money, for the McKinley bill and a tariff for revenue only. Very much as the committee appointed to report on the revision of the Westminster Confession have advised ; namely, that the doctrines of Calvin and Arminius, — election and free will, — doctrines which two centuries and one century ago divided men as light from darkness and as heaven from hell, be arbitrarily joined together. It took the two opposing and repellent propositions, and declared them to be one ; and well may an orthodox historian say of the resulting creed, " By its repetition of positive and negative propositions, its perpetual assertion and then denial of its propositions, the mystery of the doctrine is presented, as it were, in hieroglyphics, and as if to confound the under- standing." But the main thing for you to notice in all this is that, even allowing the council of Chalcedon to have determined the orthodox doctrine of Christ, with its Hegelian union of contradictories, — " Chip, chop, chain, Give a thing, and take it back again," — there had been no orthodoxy in this particular until then. For more than two centuries after the death of Jesus it remained doubtful whether he was to be regarded as a human or a divine being; and for another century how he Orthodoxy : What is it ? 79 was at once God and man was still undecided. Thousands since then have quietly lapsed into the heretical vein, and have been none the worse for it. Some, proud of their orthodoxy, have been convicted of the heresy of Eutyches, anathematized at Chalcedon. It was so with Frederick, now Bishop, Huntington when he left our communion for the Episcopalian. He thought he was all right, and the general ignorance of the clergy did not enlighten him. But Dr. Hedge, who knew whereof he spoke, quietly informed him that he was an heretical Monophysite of the school of Eu- tyches, and that his Trinity was a Quaternity. When the same charge was brought against Mr. Beecher, he knew not "the school of Eutyches," but protested that he was edu- cated at Litchfield Academy and Amherst College. Meantime there had been much discussion as to whether Mary was theotokos^ the mother of God, and entitled to be so called; and the decision. was in the afBrmative. Of all these great controversies, the Eastern Church was the centre, though the excitement of them ramified to every quarter of the Christian world as it was then defined. In a general way, it was characteristic of the East to take things by the far end and of the West to take them by the near end, and so it was to be expected that the characteristic controversy of the West would have Man and not God for its subject, would be on human nature ; and it was so. Augustine and Pelagius were the champions of the ring, and Augustine triumphed gloriously. Or shall we say ingloriously ? He did not triumph without imperial aid ; and the doctrine which he formulated and which has been nominally orthodox from then till now was the most frightful incubus that ever sat upon the breast of Christendom, making it breathe a heavy, troubled breath. It was a doctrine at which even the fierce TertuUian two centuries before would have drawn back in hate and fear, — a doctrine which, so far from being ortho- dox, had been almost non-existent from the time of Paul to that of Augustine, — nearly four centuries. It was a doctrine which, for one reason and another, the Church found it so 8o Orthodoxy: What is it? hard to hold — total depravity, the universal imputation of Adam's sin — that it fell into general disuse; and, when revived by Luther outside and by Pascal inside the Church, it appeared as a new thing and monstrously heretical. The late Father Hecker of the Roman Catholic Paulists in New York used to gird at it as if the Roman Catholic Church had never taken any stock in it, as if it were a purely Protestant affair; and he contended that it was a miserable basis for self-government, that self-government presupposes the gen- eral healthiness of human nature. And it does ; though sometimes, I must confess, it looks as if the presupposition were not justified by the facts, our politics are so bad. But that is because the people generally are so innocent and unsuspicious, and allow themselves to be led like sheep to the slaughter by the demagogues who promise them whatever they desire. Well, here was the fifth century well advanced, and still there was much unsettled ; and what seemed settled forever would keep on getting unsettled. And out of this state of things arose the Catholic Church. It was a natural evolu- tion from the Church of the Apostles. The basis of their fellowship was repentance and renewal of the moral life. But very soon the importance of belief came to be more than the importance of a holy life. And, if there must be uniform- ity of belief, there must be one church to declare and to en- force that uniformity. It came in answer to the call ; and, characteristically, its first great triumph was over the moral sense of a great body of believers who demanded moral purity of the bishop and the priest, and declared that with- out it their functions were made void. This would never do. The function must be independent of the man, and it was so ordained ; and Dante, eight centuries later, furnished inter- esting illustrations of the working of the principle in his sev- eral popes in hell,— officially immaculate, but personally cor- rupt and damned. But, once the Catholic Church had been established, orthodoxy became at least a practical reality. It was the teaching of the Church; and what the Church did Orthodoxy: What is it? 8 1 not teach nor sanction, that was heresy. And by this rule there are no orthodox protestants ; but those who are not in the one Church are all heretics together. And if Leo XIII. should be converted to-morrow to the opinions of Colonel Ingersoll, and should publish them ex cathedra, they would be orthodox doctrine, and Colonel Ingersoll would be, willy nilly, a member of the Holy Catholic Church; and, if the pope were not ungrateful, he would be made a cardinal at once. And, if logical necessity determines the validity of any positive institution, I do not see how we can get away from the conclusion that orthodoxy is that which the one Infallible Church decrees. That is to say, without denying the truth of the major premise of the argument, which is : There must be somewhere upon earth an organ of infallible truth. The Protestant attempt to find such an organ in the Bible has been a melancholy failure. It had failed before it had begun. Out of the ashes of its failure came the Infallible Church. If the Bible had had any power to make dogma defi- nite, the Infallible Church would never have been born. The sects by scores and hundreds of the Protestant world do but repeat the chaos of the early centuries, from the despair of which the Infallible Church emerged. If there must be an infallible church, it must be one ; and that one must be the Roman Catholic Church, measured by all the glories of its history and the magnificence of its imperial sway. But can we accept as valid the major premise of the argu- ment? — There must be an earthly organ of infallible truth. That is a pure assumption ; and the best way of finding out whether or not it has any validity whatever is to take in hand the Church claiming to be such an organ, and examine its claim and see if it amounts to anything. The phrase in which the Church has generally been content to sum up the strength of her position is, " Quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus," — " That which has been believed and prac- tised always, everywhere, and by all." Now, something more than this might be demanded of an infallible church ; 82 OrtJiodoxy : What is it? but it must be confessed that a church filling this bill would practically make good her claim. But does she fill the bill ? Is hers the doctrine that is believed everywhere ? Blacken a map of the two hemispheres with the area of her unqual- ified sway, and how much of it would be without the ebon hue ! Is hers the doctrine that has been believed always ? We have seen how many centuries it took to define and crys- tallize the doctrines generally known as orthodox. We have seen that the doctrine of her own unity was a thing of slow- est growth ; while the doctrine of her infallibility was con- summated only yesterday in the decree of papal infallibility at the demand of a party called " an insolent faction " by John Henry Newman, who was afterward a cardinal of the Church. The same great writer wrote a book, " The Devel- opment of Doctrine," which was an out-and-out confession of the absurdity of the quod semper claim. He allowed that there had been development, but only he insisted on the lines of the original beliefs, which he ingeniously indicated so as to make good his theory. There was great need of such a theory; for transubstantiation was not established till the eighth century, nor the celibacy of the clergy till the eleventh, nor the doctrine of the atonement till the same, nor the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin, which means that Mary was born of Anne without original sin, till the nineteenth, Dec. 8, 1854. The note of apostolicity goes with the "everywhere and always," to which the "by all'' is only a rhetorical addition. That the Apostolic Church was any such church as the Roman Catholic is as prepos- terous as that the first outward church of the apostles was built by the same hand that rounded Peter's dome, and was the exact prototype of the world's great basilica. The note of sanctity, that which makes the Roman the Holy Catholic Church, is perhaps not worth considering after the others have so absurdly failed. But it is the note that can least of all be justified by the history of the Church. We have instead, as Martineau has written, " the orgies of the palace, the assassinations in the street, the swarm of Orthodoxy: What is it? 83 flourishing informers, the sale of justice, of divorce, of spirit- ual offices and honors, turning the holy seat into an asylum of concupiscence and passion, and startling men into the belief that Antichrist had come." And what do these things mean, if not that, even if the assumption that there must be an infallible church were per- fectly valid, the Roman Catholic Church would shout to us in ten thousand times ten thousand voices, " It is not in me " ? If there must be an infallible church, it would be more reasonable to look for it where two or three are gathered together — men and women of probity and sincerity and loving kindness — than in the vast and splendid organization of a church that has so many stains upon her garments and has done such fearful violence to the human conscience, mind, and heart. But the assumption that there must be an infallible church has no more validity than the claim of the Roman Catholic to be that church. In the broad make of things, the things that must be are ; and that there is no infallible church is proof positive that there need not be any, the Eternal being judge. And, if no infallible church, then no orthodoxy, no straight belief, any deflection from which is heresy. We are all heretics, for heresy in the root-signification of the w^ord is only choice ; and in the last analysis the dogmas of the Roman Church are as much the result of choice as those of Calvin or Wesley or Channing. The trouble with them is that they represent the choices of arrogant and overbearing majorities voting down minorities generally more intelligent and moral than themselves. No orthodoxy ! The Early Church, torn for five centuries with the conflict of opinion in every article of its belief, says, " It is not in me." The Protestant world, from one and the same Bible deducing creeds by dozens and by scores, says, " It is not in me." The Roman Church, so late in coming to self-consciousness, with her history so at variance with her pretensions, with her " development of doctrine " influenced more by superstition than by the reasonable mind, 84 Orthodoxy: What is it? may say, " It is in me " ; but her utter failure to make good those notes of unity, catholicity, universality, and sanctity, which, she declares, must mark the One Infallible Church, wrings from each saner mind the stout rejoinder, " No : it is not in thee." No orthodoxy ! And what then ? Then the free intellect ever more responsive to the solemn march and tender mystery of the world. Then not toleration, for toleration means that some are privileged to tolerate and some are not ; or, if toler- ation, toleration all around, universal liberty for each to shape his own thought to the demands of his own mind. Then, bet- ter than infallibility, the unending search for truth, the joy of its discovery, the strenuous endeavor to embody it in forms of social help and personal good. It will be long before these things are seen as best by those who fill the ranks of the established churches of the world. It is pitiful to see the " progressive orthodox," so called, assuming those superior airs which conscious orthodoxy always has put on towards those of the advance, aping the manners of the men who are for driving them into the wilderness. But those that are able to receive the new gospel of liberty, let them receive it ; and for them the heavens of truth and beauty and all spirit- ual good shall be opened, and in their breadth and height they shall be gathered to the innumerable company of those who in all ages have loved the truth for its own sake and walked in its increasing light with a courageous heart. MORALITY AND RELIGION. At the last meeting of our Unitarian Club we had a trinity of speeches which some of you heard with various degrees of admiration or dissent. But only a few of you were there, and therefore, if I take up again this morning the subject of that discussion, "Morality: Is there Anything Better?" I shall not feel that I am warming over for the majority a feast that they have had already and sufficiently enjoyed ; and, as for the others, why may I jiot presume that the discussion at the Club had the same effect on them that it had on me, that it revived their interest in a problem which has been greatly agitated in our time, but did not satisfy it wholly, — left them pondering some things and willing to hear more about them on some fresh occasion ? And why not to-day ? We had three speakers at the Club, and they were all of one opinion, — namely, that there is something better than morality ; but they wore this opinion with so much differ- ence of emphasis and illustration that it did not seem to be the same, and Miss Hultin's opinion, with which I found my- self entirely sympathetic, seemed extremely different from that of Dr. Bradford and Dr. Gottheil. It is no part of my scheme this morning to pass their different speeches in review, but I shall avail myself of them freely to bring out one point after another that I wish to illustrate and enforce. The real value of Dr. Gottheil's speech was that it was a capital illustration of a method which is very common in dis- cussions of the relative merits of morality and religion, the method of inferior definition. It can be worked both ways. Colonel Ingersoll, for example, works it just the other way S6 Morality and Religion. from Dr. Gottheil. He defines religion by its inferior limit, and Dr. Gottheil so defines morality. This is an easy way of getting your own case. But it is like going to Tupper instead of to Shakspere for poetry, to Buchanan instead of to Lincoln for statesmanship, to Butler instead of to Grant for military genius. Dr. Gottheil defined morality by its inferior limit. He defined it as mere outward conformity to those social regulations which society has stamped with its approval, as mere avoidance of the things which the State and social order have said must not be done, as where he told us that the moral people are in Sing Sing, for they do nothing wrong, they do not break any of the criminal laws nor any of the social regulations. Defining morality in this way, it was no wonder that he found something better. But that which he found better was itself morality, much more deserving of the name than that to which he gave the name ; which some of us, I am sure, would not allow to be morality at all. It is mere legality, mere prudential selfishness ; while genuine morality always carries along with it the sense of something owed to others or to a common good or to an ideal of excellence. Our dear rabbi stood before us as an opponent of morality ; but he was nothing of the sort. The thing he pleaded for, the spiritual life, inward devotion to the just, the true, the right, the good, that was morality ; and, though he called it by another name, the rose was just as sweet. 1 could have wished that every person there had come to the discussion of the evening fresh from the reading of Professor Toy's "Judaism and Christianity," because that book brings out so clearly the difference between the out- wardness of the Jewish morality, its legality, its externalism, and the inwardness of Christianity, of Jesus and Paul.* You can easily recall the things I have in mind : that terri- ble saying of Jesus, " He that looketh upon a woman to lust after her hath already committed adultery in his heart"; that comparison of the outside and the inside of the platter, of * Not that there was any sudden change ; not that there were not anticipations of the inwardness of Jesus in the prophets and the Psahns. Morality and Religion. '^j the whitened sepulchre and the dead men's bones, and all uncleanness. It was a very interesting situation, — a Jewish rabbi standing and pleading for the Christianity of the New Testament with a Christian audience. For that was just exactly what it was. The main burden of the rabbi's speech was the main burden of the New Testament. And, when I tell him so, as I mean to do, the next time we meet at our ministers' lunch, in which he regularly joins, he will not be troubled. He will say: "That is all right. Jesus and Paul were simply Jewish reformers " ; and I shall remember what I had heard him say before, that he read a part of Paul's Epistles every day, and considered the thirteenth chapter of his First Epistle to the Corinthians the most perfect utterance of the religious mind, and I shall ask him if, where that says, " Faith, hope, and love, but the greatest of these is love," the moral thing, the love, is not made " chief of all the blessed three " ? But not only did the good rabbi's speech illustrate the habit of a great many people who first define morality by its inferior limit and then disparage it as compared with spiritu- ality and religion, and not only did it plead for the New Testament Christianity against the externalism of the Jewish Law, but it illustrated one of the most dangerous tendencies of Christian theology ; and it pleaded for a morality so sub- jective in its character that the outward act was made of no account whatever. This was the antinomian pit into which Luther fell, and many after him, when he said, Feccafoi'titer^ "Sin and sin boldly, but yet more boldly have faith and be- lieve in Christ," and when he said that the worst imaginable sin committed in faith was better than any morality without it. Dr. Gottheil, in his passionate pleading for the sanctities of the inner life, said, "What a man does, — i.e., his morality, — is nothing : it is what he is that tells, that decides." To which I said, and I repeat, that such a scheme of personal salvation seems to me hardly less selfish than the scheme of orthodox theology. It makes the salvation of one's own soul the paramount thing ; and, whether the salvation is 88 Morality and Religion. from the pangs of hell or from the pangs of conscience and unsatisfied ideals, it is a selfish business. Wilberforce, al- ways evangelical, asked Clarkson if, in his engrossment in the anti-slavery conflict, he had time to think about his soul. Clarkson said he had forgotten that he had any. And, saying that, he planted himself, I am bound to think, on the right ground, — the ground that Jesus stood on when he said, " He that saveth his soul shall lose it, but he that loseth it in the good cause shall find it gloriously saved." " Look out, and not in." Time spent in analyzing motives is time that might be spent in doing something for a fellow-creature in distress. And, if there is one thing that I value George Eliot for more than for another, it is for her steady insistence that it is the effect of our actions upon others that we must always have in mind ; that Arthur Donnithorne's repentance doesn't save poor Hetty Sorrel's life from ruinous mishap ; that is all very well to rise by stepping-stones of our dead selves to higher things, but how about the dead selves of other men and women? Rather expensive stepping-stones for which they have to pay that we may rise ! Is there anything better than morality? Yes, indeed, if morality is mere selfish and prudential obedience to the so- cial and the criminal law. But such morality is not worthy of the name. Devotion to spiritual ideals is better. Devo- tion to the happiness of others, to their well-being, to their highest good, — that is the best of all. Or, if there is anything better than this, it must be something that is this and some- thing more, — the two things one, and that one thing religion. But this we shall consider further on. Dr. Bradford, the second speaker at the Club, not in the chronological, but in the logical order, gave no such depre- ciatory account of morality as Dr. Gotthei]. What Dr. Gott- heil called morality, conformity to what is legally and con- ventionally prescribed, he would not call morality, I fancy. His morality was the very thing that Dr. Gottheil praised as something better than morality ; namely, inward spiritual de- votion to the ideals of holiness and truth and love. And, Morality mid Religion. 89 again, he differed from the rabbi in his insistence that there is something better than this ; and that it is religion, — the re- ligion of belief and faith in God and the immortal life. This is better than morality, he contended, — though he used no such humble illustration, — even as a locomotive with steam in the boiler is better than a locomotive without steam, or as a ship with sails or steam is better than a ship without sails or steam. The locomotive without steam and the ship with- out sails or steam is something very handsome, very line, very symmetrical, and all that, only it will not go. It lacks motive power. That is what morality lacks without religion. That is what religion furnishes. And how does it furnish this? By making us worth saving. If men are children of God and heirs of immortality, then we can go through fire and water for them, as we would, if we had artist-souls, for the "Venus of Milo " or the " Sistine Madonna," as a man with music in his soul would for the fifth or any other sym- phony of Beethoven, if there were but one score of it, and that were in imminent danger of destruction, only in a spirit as much more energetic and devoted as an immortal child of God is more than any possible creation of the artist's hand. Now, you will certainly acquit me of the least desire to single out the opinions of a particular gentleman and scholar for your reprobation. If these opinions were peculiar to him or any individual, I should not waste a moment of your time upon them. But they are representative opinions, — representative of a wide range of thought, in which Dr. Bradford has some splendid company, that of Tennyson, for example, where he sings, — "The wages of sin is death. If the wages of Virtue be dust, ^Yould she have heart to endure for the Hfe of the worm and the fly .'"' No period of Christian history has been entirely without men to whom the moral law has seemed to rest upon the assurance of another life. Indeed, the average Christian sen- timent has been that, without such assurance, " the life which 90 Morality and Religion. now is " would have no moral character, — virtue and vice would be indifferent qualities. " If, after the manner of men," said Paul, " I have fought with beasts at Ephesus, what doth it advantage me if the dead rise not? Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die " ; and again, " If in this life only we have hope of Christ, we are of all men the most miserable." Christianity has not monopolized this way of thinking and talking. " No one," said Cicero, " without the great hope of immortality, ever offered to die for his country," though here it is quite possible and even probable that the immortality of fame is meant. But Christianity affords the most numerous and the most striking illustrations. Listen to a few out of the many taken at random and without chron- ological order. " There can be no morality," said Chateau- briand, " if there is no future state." " If you believe in no future life," said Luther, " I would not give a mushroom for your God. Then do as you like. For, if no God, so no devil and no hell. As with a fallen tree, it is all over when you die. Then plunge into lechery, rascality, robbery, and murder." "To deny immortality," said Sir Kenelm Digby "taketh away all morality, and changeth men into beasts by removing the ground of all difference in those things which are to govern our actions." And the great preacher Massillon said, " If we wholly perish with the body, the maxims of charity, patience, justice, honor, gratitude, and friendship, are empty words. Our own passions shall decide our duty." " If there be no future life," said Chal- mers, " the moral constitution of man is stripped of its sig- nificancy, and the Author of that constitution is stripped of his wisdom, authority, and honor." "Virtue," said Paley, "is the doing good to mankind in obedience to the will of God, and for the sake of everlasting happiness." And again, "The difference, and the only difference, between prudence and virtue is that in the one case we consider what we shall gain or lose in the present world ; in the other case, what we shall gain or lose in the other." But, surely, you will say, This way of thinking has not in- Morality and Religion. 91 vaded any of the more liberal minds of modern Christendom ! Surely, it has invaded some of the most liberal. Frederick Robertson was one of these ; and he said, " If the soul be not immortal, I am not certain that we can show cause why Saint Paul's life of sublime devotion was not a noble exist- ence wasted. If the soul be not immortal, Christian life — not merely apostolical devotedness — is a grand imperti- nence. With our immortality gone [this was precisely Dr. Bradford's view], the value of humanity ceases, and people become not worth living for. Why should I live like an angel if I must die like a dog ? " " If to-morrow I perish utterly," said Theodore Parker, — the last man from whom we should have expected any such sentiment, — " if to-mor- row I perish utterly, I shall care nothing for the generations of mankind. I shall know no higher law than passion. Morality will vanish." Said I not rightly that, if Dr. Brad- ford erred, he erred in splendid company ! To differ from such company may be a daring thing; and yet, if I had to choose between this order of opinion and that of those who maintain that the belief in immortality is essentially immoral, I should choose the latter without a moment's hesitation. But we cannot choose between opposing doctrines. Belief is not a matter of choice : it is a matter of evidence and con- viction. There is no evidence for the immorality of the doc- trine of immortality that is sufficient for conviction to any unprejudiced person. But I do not wonder that such a dam- aging opinion has found acceptance with many earnest souls. The doctrine of immortality is an immoral doctrine when- ever it is made indispensable to the moral life of man here in this world. It was an immoral doctrine, a doctrine pre- judicial to morality, in every personal instance I have named. The doctrine was immoral, not the men. There was more goodness in them than they gave themselves credit for. If Paul had been obliged to give up his faith in a future life, he would not have said, " Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die," but " Let us work while the day lasts." If not, so much the worse for Paul. And Robertson would still have 92 Morality and Religion. lived like an angel if he had known that he must die like a dog, though how a man who lives like an angel can die like a dog is to me inconceivable. But, then, too, I have known dogs to die embosomed in a wonder of affection of which an angel might be glad. There are various renderings of the motive power of im- mortality. The grossest is that virtue cannot be enforced without the sanctions of another life, without its penalties to warn, its promises to lure, the soul immersed in manifold, temptation. But one thing is certain. Never has civilized society attained to lower depths of degradation than in those Christian centuries when the felicities of heaven and the agonies of hell were no mere rhetoric, but just as real as monkish gingerbread and beer or as the tortures of the In- quisition. As a police agent, the belief in other-world re- wards and penalties, conceived with an appalling realism, did not avail to stay men's hands from violence, to bridle their fierce lusts, to check their meanness and rapacity, to soften their revenge and haie. And, however it has been in the past, Macbeih is but the mouthpiece of all modern thought and feeling when he says, thumbing his dagger's edge,— " If the assassination Could trammel up the consequence, and catch With his surcease, success ; that but this blow Might be the be-all and the end-all here, But here, upon this bank and shoal of time, — We'd jump the life to come." But, surely, the more liberal thinkers I have named did not find the moral value of immortality in its ability to entice the selfish and to scare the wicked from their sin. Surely, Theo- dore Parker saw as plainly as any man has ever seen that such a view demoralizes morality, contaminates virtue with selfishness. What he felt — and many with him and before and after him — was that, in losing immortality, human nature would lose its greatness, that a perishable being would not be worth working for with patience and self-sacrifice, Morality and Religion. 93 whether that being was one's self or another. But the evi- dence is overwhelming that the moral life has been lived by many who have not aspired to immortality and who have had no theistic faith. Thousands of millions of the Buddhist faith have given this evidence, — without belief in God or im- mortality, exhibiting a moral life vastly superior to the Brah- mins, with their double confidence in God and immortality. Moreover, there are thousands in the modern world without this double confidence, or either part of it, whose moral life shames that of those who talk of God as literally as of a man on the next street, and of heaven as if they had been there and explored with vulgar curiosity its every mystery. For there remains for such "the fidelity Of fellow-wanderers in a barren place, Who share the same dire thirst, and therefore share The scanty water ; the fidelity Of fellow-heirs of this small island, Life, Where we must dig and sow and reap like brothers." No theories about another world or about God or the consti- tution of our human life can alter the inexpugnable fact that we are here, with bodies sensitive to a thousand and ten thousand varying influences for good or ill, with minds thirst- ing for knowledge, hearts longing for affection, imaginations hungering for the beautiful. To make the most and best of all these is certainly worth while, whatever fate impends. And I must confess that it is to me a terrible thought that it is only the fulness and richness and splendor of life that at- tract our sympathies, or that the miseries of life must have this golden background before they can appeal to us for help and cheer. The man to whom misery does not appeal as misery, who would not alleviate a suffering or save a threat- ened life simply because it was suffering or threatened, would prove himself not only unworthy of the immortality that he demands to sanction his morality, but unworthy of the privi- leges and blessing of this present life. Shame on the man 94 Morality and Religion. whose heart does not go out as quickly to a beggar's as to a prince's child ! The motive power got for the moral train by such considerations may be enormous. The trouble is it is a motive power that wrecks the train, that brings morality to naught, that multiplies its amount at the expense of its quality. Never was lesson read more backwardly than is this of the relation of the human soul to the immortal life. We need the greatness of the soul to prove its immortality, and we cannot draw upon its immortality to prove its greatness in advance. The advocate of immortality as the sanction and the inspiration of morality sets out by denuding human life of all its characteristic strength and discharging it of all its characteristic virtue. Thus Dr. Bradford, spurning with a contemptuous heel the platform upon which he stood, said, "If the soul is no more than this platform, I will care for it no more than for this." That is plain enough. Why should he .-^ But he might as well have said, "If the sun is a leather button, its radiance shall get no praise from me," or "If the ' Sistine Madonna' is a tyro's daub, it shall not have my admiration," or " If Shakspere is a worse poet than Tupper, why should we read his plays ? " But Shakspere is not a worse poet than Tupper, and the " Sis- tine Madonna " is not a tyro's daub, and the sun is not a leather button, and the soul of man is not a wooden platform, or no more than that, but noble in reason, infinite in faculties, with thoughts that wander through eternity, with quite im- measurable capacities for knowledge, action, love. In Ten- nyson we have the same depreciation, — " If the wages of Virtue be dust, Would she have heart to endure for the life of the worm and the fly ?" Perhaps not ; but the question is not worth considering, see- ing that the wages of virtue are not dust. They are the things done, the accomplished facts, the suffering alleviated, the pain assuaged, the broken heart bound up, the wrong thing stricken down, the right thing set on high, and the Morality and Religion. 95 proud consciousness of having been a help, and not a hin- drance, to these lofty ends. " Would she have heart to en- dure for the life of the worm and the fly ? " She has no such life. Human life has none such. The life of the worm and the fly is for a day or a few days or weeks. The life of man is three and fourscore years, lengthened out sometimes well-nigh another score. And, while it lasts, it is not the life of the worm and the fly, — a little throb of tremulous sensa- tion, — but in form and moving how express and admirable, in apprehension how like an angel, in action how like a god ! And it is because man is what he is that we have for him a hope full of immortality, and a sense of his eternal sonship with the Father of all souls. No ultimate catastrophe can impeach the greatness of humanity. Whatever is, is so. Yonder great bridge or yonder lovely tower may, by some throe of nature, be a ruinous heap before to-morrow dawns. But, while the one aspires to heaven and the other swings in air, how beautiful they are! Stability does not prove per- fection ; else were the Pyramids more beautiful than the Par- thenon or the mosaics of Santa Maria Maggiore more per- fect than the splendid forms which Michel Angelo painted for a warrior pope. " If you can't go to 'eaven," said a blundering consoler to a sick man in the hospital, " you ought to be glad that there is such a place as 'ell for you to go to." But we have no such miserable dilemma in the world of human struggle, aspira- tion, hope, and fear. If we can't go to heaven, we ought to be glad that there is such a place as earth to live in for our mortal span. It is, I know, the scene of awful miseries and crushing disappointments and intolerable crimes. But it is marvellously beautiful, with its brave, overhanging firma- ment, its grass with daisies pied, its forests stretching up the mountains' sides, its vastness of old ocean's sway and moan. But there is nothing in this house " called Beautiful " so beautiful as the men and women who go in and out of all its spacious rooms, sit at its tables and enjoy the feast, in its sequestered corners have their tender passages of love, and 96 Morality and Religion. in its silent chambers their communion cup of sorrow salt with tears. In such a house, with such inhabitants, having such bodies and such souls, life is worth living, even if we have our be-all and our end-all here, if creatures who can hope so much and love so much are shut in by a wall of darkness which cannot be broken down or broken through. " For," as John Morley writes, " a man will already be in no mean paradise if at the hour of sunset a good hope can fall on him, like harmonies of music, that the earth shall still be fair, and the happiness of every feeling creature still receive a constant augmentation, and each good cause yet find worthy defenders, when the memory of his own poor name and personality has long been blotted out of the brief recol- lection of men forever." Do these things mean that the religious rendering of the world is without moral inspiration ? I doubt it very much. I doubt it none the less because I am persuaded that, if I could ever doubt the immortality of man, his mortal life would still have for me a tremendous ethical significance, morality and virtue would still be glorious homes for glorious realities, a life of purity and honor would still be infinitely preferable to a life stained with dishonor and impurity, and would still have incalculable influence on the fortunes of mankind. I doubt it none the less because I see that there is moral in- spiration in the conviction of life's awful brevity. What spur and excitation here " To crowd the narrow span of life With wise designs and virtuous deeds " ! All this may be, and still the hope of other life beyond the present's bound may have its own peculiar moral inspiration. For, while without this hope every moral obligation would still remain in full force, who shall say that the quest for knowledge is not prosecuted under more inspiring auspices the moment we believe that all we have here in this primary school is but the first instalment of a boundless acquisition; Molality and Religion. 97 that duty does not step to a diviner music the moment we beHeve that what we make ourselves through patient effort here determines into what spiritual society we enter when we leave all this behind ; that affection, which may be "all the more impetuous for being pent in limits of mortality, does not expand into a broader, calmer flow when it has sweet assurance of unending years ? Granted that not one moral obligation is created by the relation of this life to another, does not the whole of life float in a larger, more invigorating atmosphere when to the imagination it is no longer bounded by the limits of this present life ? The promise we lay hold of is no promise of reward or rest, but that of larger, more engrossing toil. " Over a few things we have faithful been : Now over many do thou give us rule, — For work, more work ; for lessons learned, to be Forever in thy school." Is there anything better than morality? Yes, the religion which, albeit morality is the larger and the better part of it, is something more than that, which gives to us the hope of immortality, not as the necessary motive of morality, but as its opportunity and inspiration, which makes that hope the balm for many a wound which draws the life-blood from our hearts, which nourishes our wonder and our adoration with the majestic order of the world, which sees in that as in a mirror the eternal countenance, which, in a God whose higher attributes are all the conquests of morality by its own ideals, finds a reciprocal action on morality that is full of help and cheer. Here is, perhaps, the most sufficient answer that can be given to the relative depreciation of morality in compari- son with religion. The best religion has to give — a right- eous God — was given to it by morality. God is the son of man. How a decline in religion would affect morality has been much discussed. How a rise in morality would affect religion is a much more important question. How a rise in morality has affected religion is the most interesting and im- 98 Morality and Religion. portant chapter in the religious life of man. It has converted the God of the imagination from a cruel and licentious king into the heavenly Father worthy of men's perfect trust and loyal obedience. There are those to whom this process seems exclusively ideal. To me it seems a voyage of discovery which has thrown open to mankind a boundless continent, — the Infinite Reality of God. And the Columbus of this voyage is no other than the moral purpose of that infinite and eternal being which is the soul of man. 1 1 > THE CONVERSION OF ENERGY. The word which will sum up the scientific achievement of the nineteenth century to an unparalleled degree, unless the years remaining have some very great discovery in store, is " transmutation." The achievement corresponding to this word has been in two related orders of phenomena, the chemical and physical ; and in one apart from these, the biological. In the former case, it is the transmutation of energy that has been discovered. In the latter, it is the transmutation of species. The two discoveries, taken sepa- rately, are of great scientific interest and value. Taken to- gether, their philosophical and religious value is immense. The books elucidating these discoveries are the most valu- able additions to " our Unitarian Literature " that have been written for the last half-century, though I have never heard that the American Unitarian Association has any of them upon its list of publications or keeps any of them for sale. But how impressively they teach the unity of the Force which has so many manifestations in the material world, — the unity of organization underlying myriads of animal and vege- table forms ! " The Lord our God is one Lord." The pebble and the star, the sunshine and the coal, the moneron and the man, all chant in unison this Unitarian confession. It is of the transmutation or conversion of energy that I wish to speak with you to day, yet not of any of those brilliant illustrations of the law of conservation which have been developed by Grove and Mayer and Faraday and Tyndall and Thomson and Joule and others, — illustrations by which it is shown that, though the total energy of any body or lOO The Conversion of Energy. system of bodies cannot be increased or diminished by any mutual action, it can be transformed into any one of the forms of which energy is susceptible, — heat into motion, mo- tion into heat, and heat or motion into electricity or light or magnetism or chemical affinity or mechanical force, and each of these in turn into any one of the others, or into all of them in various proportions. The conversion of energy of which I wish to speak has little of scientific, much of moral interest. Whether or not we have here a case of natural law in the spiritual world I shall not attempt to prove. But, if we have not an extended law, we have a striking correspond- ence. Here, as elsewhere, the natural world abounds in wonderful analogies of spiritual things, which many, like Pro- fessor Drummond, in his " Natural Law in the Spiritual World," have been inclined to overwork. Some of you, I am sure, have read the Life of Elizabeth Gilbert. The briefest summary of what she was and did will afford a very striking illustration of one form of moral con- servation, — the development of faculty through limitation and defect. She was a bishop's little daughter, whose sight was destroyed in her third year by an attack of scarlet fever, which bequeathed to her a general inheritance of ruined health. Throughout her childhood and her youth she was not unhappy, her misfortune attracting to her a great deal of sympathy and attention. It was when she came to the threshold of womanhood that the difference between her life and that of her several sisters came home to her with ago- nizing force. Then in a happy hour, after a period of in- tense depression, threatening to shake her reason from its seat, she met a noble woman who cherished the conviction that, even for women cut off from love and marriage by some superiority or defect, a useful, happy life was possible, that the energy of their thwarted instincts might be con- verted into an energy of social good. The mind of the poor sightless girl, impregnated by the stronger mind of her com- panion, conceived a hope that she might accomplish some- thing, notwithstanding her pathetic limitation. The energy > > ' ,> » > J , > > .1 J J T/ie Conversion\of :$.i),er^p \ / j.; j^i JIO,! of her sorrow and despair was gradually transmuted into an energy of sympathy and helpfulness. Advantages are obli- gations. She was blind, but she had every alleviation of her calamity that wealth could buy or love could give. There were many blind who had none of her alleviations. What could she do for these ? In a London cellar she set up a shop for the sale of baskets manufactured by the blind. This was soon outgrown ; and shortly an association was organized for carrying on the work, which in a few years could show a balance-sheet of £j,ooo. " Don't work your- self to death," a friend said to her one day. " I'm working myself to life," she answered, with a laugh. Working her- self to life ! What pregnant words ! How many that now waste themselves to death might work themselves to life if they could but convert the energy of their frivolity or their despair into the energy of some beneficent activity ! Before Elizabeth Gilbert's death, thanks to her loving zeal, there were large and well-appointed workshops in almost every city of England where blind men and women were em- ployed, where tools had been invented or modified for them, and where agencies had been established for the sale of their work. But no one who understood the course of her experience could truly say of her, " She saves others ; her- self she cannot save." She t/td save herself ; not from all pain and deprivation, but from all bitterness of spirit, from all blackness of despair. And it is not as if her case were solitary. It was very far from being so. The name is legion of those maimed and suffering people who, " like the wounded oyster, mend their shell with pearl." It often seems as if the energy needful for the supply of any functional part of a man's nature were dammed up in him by the ruin of that part, so that, unless it can be diverted into some other channel, where it will strike some other wheel and set other machinery in motion, it must spread itself abroad with ruinous desolation, either converting into vast malarious pools wide reaches of the mind and heart or hopelessly denuding them of all fair and fruit- :_02 -The CQHversion of Energy. ful earth. But the energy that is thwarted can be diverted and economized for noble ends. The thwarted energy of sight can be transmuted into quicker hearing and into nicer touch. And the principle holds good with every part. There are men who never know the strength of their reserves of aptitude and skill, of manual or intellectual ability, till they are pressed back upon them by the bayonet points of some calamity that seems about to overwhelm them, but, on the contrary, is the sign by which they conquer gloriously. A lingering convalescence sets a man to reading books that turn his thoughts to natural history, and he becomes one of the first naturalists of Europe. Within ten minutes after his eyes had been put out, by the discharge close to them of his father's gun, Henry Fawcett had determined that the political career on which he had resolved should not be forfeited by the untoward circumstance ; and his resolve was kept. And it is difficult to imagine how, with every sense complete, his political career could have been more successful than it actu- ally was ; while, in political economy, without eyesight, he perceived great laws and principles which many now, as then, cannot or will not see. Who does not know that it was Francis Ruber's ruined sight that determined the bee- li?ie of his lifelong study and investigation into the nature and the habits of the little creatures that he could no longer see. Forced into a narrower channel, the struggling river gets more deep and clear. With a man's life it is not otherwise than so. I doubt not that a thousand instances could be discovered, which would be exponental of ten thousand more, of lives shaped by the blows of adverse circumstance into instru- ments of higher good than they would otherwise have accom- plished. Where would be Milton's "song to generations," if his political ambition had been realized .'' Where Dante's glorious trilogy, if Florence had not thrust him out ? Did not the music of a deaf Beethoven have to be of a more penetrat- ing sweetness, that his soul might hear it ? Jesus, when asked, " Who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?" answered, "Neither this man nor his parents, The Conversion of Energy. 103 but that the glory of God might be revealed in him." Now, we know well enough that the physical defect of children is oftentimes the product of parental sin. But we also know that, be that as it may, the glory of God is frequently re- vealed by such defect, and no less the glory of man, in that such defect summons the unfortunate to completer self-con- trol, self-possession, and self-consecration. It were foolish to pretend to any preference for a maimed and thwarted to a complete and sovereign life. But we can be sincerely glad that it is possible for men to convert the energy of their maimed and thwarted powers into the energy of others that are entirely sound ; or, if this form of statement is objection- able, the energy of their disappointment and despair into an energy of resolve and patience and persistency that shall accomplish more with the five talents left to them than they might have acomplished with the ten of which at first they seemed to be secure. But maimed and thwarted powers are not the only circum- stances in man's average lot that produce an energy of con- scious misery and loss which is capable of transmutation into an energy of self-development and social use. Ever beauti- ful to me is the story of Richard Cobden's visit to John Bright, when the latter's wife was lying dead and the heart of the great Commoner was shattered by the dreadful blow. " There are thousands of homes in England," Cobden said, "that are full of sorrow, if different from yours, still very hard to bear, because of unjust laws which protect a few, while they impoverish many. When the first bitterness of your grief is past, you will come to me, and we will give our- selves no rest until these unjust laws have been repealed." And Bright responded to these words of generous invitation, and the thing was done. The wicked Corn Laws were re- pealed ; and the industrialism of England immediately rallied from the depression which the disease of governmental inter- ference, raging for centuries, had produced. It is not as if for every suffering heart, made sorrowful by the loss of some dear relative or friend, there were always some great cause 104 ^^^^ Conversion of Energy. at hand, like that to which Cobden and Bright consecrated their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor. But for every suffering heart there is at hand, or can be found, some noble task into the energy necessary for the doing of which it can transmute the energy of its grief and pain. For one it shall be the daily honorable strife for maintenance or competence ; for another it shall be the steady household care or the endeavor to make good to those remaining at least a part of the fidelity and wisdom that have been with- drawn ; or some high work of literature or art ; or some en- terprise of social good ; or some enthusiasm of political re- form. And let no one imagine that by such conversion of the energy of grief into the energy of labor and beneficence we wrong our dead, we make more sure that swift forgetful- ness of the departed which is more tragical than death itself. The sorrow that can be cured so easily must be a very super- ficial wound. To consecrate a sorrow is not to forget it, is not to lose its sacred presence with us, its sublime compan- ionship, the solemn radiance of its majestic face. When Mahomet was questioned by a follower what monument he should devise for his departed mother, the prophet answered, " Dig her a well in the desert." If the advice was taken, the mother was not on this account forgotten sooner than she might otherwise have been. There is never any lack of deserts in the wide stretch of human life between the moun- tainous boundaries of birth and death, wherein, if he will, a man of sorrows may dig a well, so husbanding the energy of his sorrow, to the end that weary, faint, and thirsty travellers may find a moment of refreshment there, a thought of human providential care. " What shall I do with all the days and hours That must be counted ere I see thy face ? How shall I charm the interval which lowers Between this time and that sweet time of grace ? " I'll tell thee : for thy sake I will lay hold Of all good aims, and consecrate to thee, In worthy deeds, each moment that is told Whilst thou, beloved one, art far from me. The Conversion of Energy. 105 "So may this darksome time build up in me A thousand graces which shall thus be thine, So shall my love and longing hallowed be, And thoughts of thee an influence divine." This is the true economy of grief. There is none other that is so high and good. And, whatever be the occasion of our sorrow, there is always ready for our refuge and defence this law of transmutation, this possibility of converting the energy of our sorrow into an energy of use and good. There is one book in my library which I have occasion frequently to take in hand. No duller book was ever made, and yet I always find a poem in it as I turn the arid leaves. It is Cruden's Biblical Concordance, the result of task-work which the man imposed upon himself when tortured by " the pangs of despised love," and threatened with the loss of reason by the violence of his grief. A very modest instance, but it is an illustration of the law. Savonarola furnishes another. The energy of hopeless passion has been a thousand and ten thousand times converted into the energy of public spirit, of political sagacity, of triumphant music, poetry, and art. Men learn in suffering what they teach in song. The torrents, which, if not diverted, would have scoured men's lives bare of all pleasant verdure and all fruitful soil, have been so economized that barren places — thanks to their fertilizing streams — have laughed for joyousness of flower and fruit. As with the energy of passionate sorrow and of hopeless love, so with the energy of disappointment and despair, when darling schemes have come to nought, when through the stupidity or dishonesty of others, or some lack of foresight or persistence in ourselves, the plans which seemed to promise great success and happiness fall flatter than a house of cards. " The mill-wheel of the human heart Is ever going round : If it has nothing else to grind, It must itself be ground." And how often does it grind itself away in useless dust, or io6 TJie Conversion of Energy. till it is shattered by its own monotony of senseless motion generating fervent heat, when it might be making bread of life for hungry souls ! There are men and women who, when their cherished plans have failed, permit the energy of their disappointment and foreboding to wreak itself upon them- selves in silence and apart, and the enormous strength and vitality of the human intellect are in no way more pathetically attested than by its ability to keep itself alive and regnant in the midst of such stupendous raids upon its life. But there are others who are like Antaeus in the old mythology, of whom it is related that from every fall to earth he gathered strength for the encounter. Not until the battle seems to go against them do they "put on terror and victory like a robe," converting the energy of their disappointment and humilia- tion into an energy of patience and resource that makes the miserable defeat a prelude to success more fair and glorious than was at first within the scope of their desire. " Honor to those who have - failed ! " our burly Whitman cries. Yes, if for no other reason than because those who have failed, but have refused to stay failed^ are those who have succeeded best of all. Only the brave deserve the fair. Success, the glorious maid, cannot be wooed and won in any temper less resolved than that of Browning's lover when he sings : — " Escape me, never, beloved ! So long as the world contains us both, While I am I, and you are you, I the loving and you the loth, While the one eludes, must the other pursue. " It is but to keep the nerves at strain, To dry one's eyes and laugh at a fall, And baffled get up to begin again. So the chase takes up one's life, that's all ; While, look but once from your furthest bound. At me so deep in the dust and dark, No sooner the old hope drops to the ground Than a new one, straight to the self-same mark, I shape me — ever removed." The Conversion of Energy. 107 This lover's temper does not always bring about success in love, as this world reckons. As little does it always bring about success when it is shown upon the field of practical affairs. But this at least is sure : in either case, the man is a success. He may not win the special object of his heart's desire. He does a better thing than that. He wins the grace of character, the amplitude of life, which makes of him a man indeed. The strength of obstacles which he has not overcome, but which he has resisted manfully, has passed into his heart. The man is a success. And better this result, a hundred times over, than that, while winning ever)' outward victory, the man should be a failure in himself, — a conjunction which is not infrequent in the annals of the past, nor in the experience of the latest time. There is another aspect of this matter, another illustration of this law of transmutation, the most serious of all, the most important : the energy of evil-doing can be converted into the energy of righteousness. That was not such an ab- surdity as it was perhaps considered at the time, — the remark, "If our friend [a man remarkable for moral excel- lence] were not such a good man, what a bad man he would be ! " Conversely, it might almost be said of many who are not remarkable for moral excellence, " If they were not such bad men, what good men they would be ! " They cannot do anything by halves. There is in them a fund of energy which must express itself, — if not in bad actions, then in good. To desist from evil-doing and so reach the zero-point of virtue is not sufficient for these spirits who are so strong and masterful. They are so constituted that they would rather " sin, and sin valiantly," as Luther said, than be like those whom Dante saw, whirling about the outer rim of hell, " neither for God nor for his enemies." Positive evil cannot be expelled from human natures by anything less forcible than positive good. When Buddha said, " Hatred ceases not by hatred at any time, hatred ceases by love," doubtless he had in mind men's mutual relations ; but it is just as true of the relations of the inner life. Not by hating less and less io8 The Conversion of Energy. down to the zero-point does hatred cease in human hearts, but through some counter-passion of exalted love. The vices of the centuries, for the most part, are a testimony to the feebleness of " those lesser crimes, half converts to the right," — the virtues of conventional religion. If those hardy sinners could have had presented to them the ideal of something better than a cloistered virtue, — "immortal garlands not to be run for without dust and heat," — they might have been as distinguished for their good as for their evil deeds. The proverbial expression, "The worse the sinner, the better the saint," has more of truth in it than it intends. For it intends only that the greater the sin re- pented of, the more abject will be the humiliation ; and abject humiliation was for many centuries the essential qual- ity of saintliness, and is so regarded still by many. The truth in it is that a negative and self-satisfied morality is something from which the individual and the community have more to fear than from certain outbursts of impassioned wickedness. This was the thought of Jesus when he told the Pharisees, the models of negative virtue in his time, "The publicans and harlots shall go into the kingdom of heaven before you " / and when he conceived the parable of the Prodigal Son, as if the energy of the prodigal's reaction from his evil ways was a diviner possibility than the dead- level moralism of his elder brother. Elsewhere in the Bible we read a different lesson : " He that has offended in the least has offended in all." But this is the miserable legality against which Jesus threw himself with all the energy of his sublime contempt. The fault of the adulterous woman was less heinous in his eyes than her accusers' zeal of accusation, or than the bloodless virtues of which they were so proud. For the good that was in her evil he forgave her, saying, " Go, and sin no more ! " But the principle, " He that has offended in the least has offended in all," is the principle which, embodied in society, has said to almost every sinful woman since the time of Jesus, "Go and sin still more: go and sin hell-deep." It is a principle which has been re- The Conversion of Energy. 109 buked and shamed a million times unconsciously by men and women, the aggregate of whose virtue — spite of some great offence, it may be more than one — is infinitely greater than that of others who have never done anything wrong \ no, nor for that matter, anything right, — anything not merely negative. The energy of evil-doing can be converted into the energy of righteousness. Yes, but not without the intervention of a middle term, — not self-contempt, which poisons good desire, but noble shame, which makes it pure and strong. We may not continue in sin, that grace of character may abound. "Saint Augustine, well hast thou said That of our vices we can frame A ladder, if we will but tread Beneath our feet each deed of shame." There are those who have endeavored to keep up the show of hell by the suggestion that human nature is " wax to re- ceive and marble to retain " the impression of its own evil deeds. And, where there is the consciousness of this impres- sion, there must be spiritual torment. And there are those who have opposed to the idea of divine forgiveness the idea of cause and effect. Because every effect must have its cause, every fault must have its retribution. "What's writ is writ, would it were worthier " ; but there it is forever. Something of truth there is, no doubt, in these expressions. But there is other truth which is every whit as true, and is, moreover, full of encouragement and inspiration. What's writ is writ; but something further can be written, — yes, and it can be written over that which is the record of our fault, as in the palimpsests of former times men wrote one thing above another, the page first cleansed with purifying tears. Men who have erred can so convert the energy of their consciousness of error and their noble shame into the energy of use and good that none whose good opinion is worth having will think of them less kindly or with less of admiration for the wrong that they have put away ; and, no The Conversion of Energy. better still, they shall be able to forgive themselves as freely as they would another for faults repented of and cancelled by enduring righteousness. " Oh, not the nectarous poppy lovers use, Nor daily labor's dull Lethean spring, Oblivion in lost angels can infuse To the soiled glory and the trailing wing." Even so the poet comes to the assistance of the dogmatist in his endeavor to make out that every fault in us is forever a deduction from the sum of character and the sum of happi- ness within our reach. If man were a dead mechanism, it might be so; but he is a living organism, and it is not so. Thank Heaven, there are poets who have sung a more in- spiriting and gladdening song ! " They say best men are moulded out of faults," is Shakspere's golden phrase. And it is certain not only that there are and have been better men with faults repented of, and unrepented of, than others without fleck, but also that there are and have been men much better with some very serious faults, which they must painfully remember that they would or could have been with- out such faults. For these have broken up the dull stagna- tion of their lives. They have wrought in them a noble shame whose energy they have converted into an energy of high behavior and beneficent activity. "No good is ever lost we once have seen : We always may be what we might have been." No, not exactly that, but something just as good, though different ; and something better oftentimes than if we had not gone astray; and, if something better, then something happier. But must not the evil deed be always an accusing memory "i Yes, but I can conceive that men should sometimes bless the fault by whose reactionary force they have been driven in upon their citadel of high resolve. So fight I not as one that beateth the air. If there is nothing in the range of your The Conversion of Energy. ill experience that responds to what I have affirmed, if you have always been so just and pure and kind that you have no regret or shame whose energy you can transmute into heroic purpose, into stern resolve, into a high devotion and a holy will, it is still possible that you may bring to those less fortunate, if they are so, a generous expectation that shall co- operate with what is' best in them in saving them from what is worst. Said I not truly, then, that whether or not we have in these relations of the moral life a natural law extended into spiritual things, we have at least a wonderful analogy, and one that is of various suggestion all compact ? Wide is the range of illustration. The energy of disappointment and de- spair produced by limitation and defect, the energy of sorrow for our dead, of hopeless passion and of ruinous loss, the energy of noble shame for good things left undone and ill things done, — all this can be transmuted into energy of use and good and helpful holiness, as certainly as light and heat and electricity and magnetism and chemical affinity and mechanical force can be transmuted into each other. It is a gospel of deliverance, of hope and cheer. It cannot be but that it has for some of you, has or will have some day, a meaning answering to your need. Let this great law which has so many illustrations have unimpeded scope in the economy of your joy and sorrow, peace and pain. So good shall come, if not straightway, or evidently to you at any time, yet soon or late to some one in God's world. " Not out of any cloud or sky Will thy good come to prayer or cry. Let the great forces, wise of old, Have their whole way with thee, Crumble thy heart from its hold, Drown thy life in the sea. " And ages hence, some day, The love thou gavest a child. The dream in a midnight wild, The word thou would'st not say, — Or in a whisper no one dared to hear, — Shall gladden earth and bring the golden year." TWO MEANINGS OF RELIGION. " The holiest of all holidays are those Kept by ourselves in silence and apart ; The secret anniversaries of the heart, When the full river of feeling overflows, — The happy days unclouded to their close, The sudden joys that out of darkness start As flames from ashes ; swift desires that dart Like swallows singing down each wind that blows. White as the gleam of a receding sail, White as a cloud that floats and fades in air, White as the whitest lily on a stream, These tender memories are, — a Faiiy Tale Of some enchanted land we know not where. But lovely as a landscape in a dream." We all have such holidays. The nth of September is one of mine. It brings back to me the day I went away from home to school for the first time in 1857, and the day of my first preaching here in this church and at this desk in 1864. I keep it tenderly wherever I may be. I remember how I kept it at Lugano, the delightful city on the Italian lake of that name, — how that first rainy morning here came back to me, and the faces that have vanished into the infinite azure, and the voices that are forever hushed. And a fortnight ago I kept it all day long, and especially in the evening, when I sat in the doorway of my summer tent, and looked out upon the western hills, behind which the sun had just withdrawn. The shadowed hills were backed against a sky of gold that softened upward into amber, rose, and violet, until at length it merged into the pale and then into the deeper blue. But I could hardly see the sky for the faces that shone out upon me 2 Tzvo Meanings of Religion, from the deep of memory's sunset air, — not only those that have put on immortality, but those of youth and maid that have grown stronger and better with the lapse of time, and those of very little folk who were new to earth at my first com- ing here, and who now talk politics, and vote, and love and marry, and have children of their own, and are doing the work of full-grown men and women " in this loud, stunning tide of human care and crime." And with this thinking of faces and of friends, and of the sad or joyful changes time had wrought upon our company, there came the thought of what I had done, or tried to do, as a minister of religion in these eight-and-twenty years. And, as I thought along this line, there came into my mind the two derivations of the word Religion, which have enlisted the approval and defence of different students of this matter. One set is convinced that the word comes from reiego, which means to reread ; and another set is equally convinced — and much more rationally, it seems to me — that it comes from religo, which means to bind back. This would make the original meaning of the word a ritualistic meaning, some bond of ceremony or observance ; and it is much likelier that some such meaning attached to it in the early times than that it had the meaning of rereading, which is much more ab- struse, and therefore much less likely to have been enter- tained by primitive and simple men, if those were such who first used the word religio for those things which expressed the sense of their relation to an unseen power or powers. Of course, it does not follow that, if either origin could be fixed with certainty, that certainty would fix the meaning of the word " religion " for all time. The New English Dictionary makes nothing plainer than that the meaning of words is one of the most variable of all things, and that to hold one to the original meaning of a word would be frequently embarrassing, if not absurd. " Paul, a villain of Jesus Christ," read the earlier translations of the New Testament. Villain meant servant then. Insist upon its meaning that or nothing now, and many a politician, manufacturer, merchant, editor, would Tiuo Meanings of Religion. 3 be going around without his proper designation. Then, too, religio was a Latin word ; and there is no reason why the Latin people should be intrusted for all time with the meaning of the facts we call religious, especially as they had little genius for religion. Whichever way it was, the fact is clear enough that, in its historic manifestation, religion has been at one time and another a rereading and a binding-back, justifying either derivation as a symbol of the concrete reality, whatever phil- ological science may decide. Nay, more : at one and the same time it has been both together, not in friendly unity, but in strenuous opposition. Might we not even say that at every period of history there has been a religo and a relego interpretation of religion, and a party representing each in- terpretation, — one for binding back men's thought and feel- ing, ritual and life, to some traditional standard, and another for rereading the facts of life, the lessons of experience, the mystery of the fair and teeming world ? The religo men, the traditionalists, have always been in the majority. They have been the ecclesiastical party ; the priests as opposed to the prophets, as one sees them in the Old Testament ; the Pharisees and Sadducees, as we see- them in the New Testament, opposing the free spirit of: Jesus. And Christianity had no sooner begun its course-: than the same difference began to appear within its boun- daries, — the Jerusalem party bent on binding back the nas- cent faith and worship to the Jewish law and ceremonial, and Paul as firmly bent on rereading and revising the traditional inheritance. And from that time to this the re- readers have always been the heretics, the schismatics, and the religo folk have been the people of the creeds and cate- chisms, the councils and the inquisitions. And they have put the rereaders to death with fire and sword, buried them alive in dungeons, expatriated them, despoiled them of their possessions or, when these things were no longer possible for a world which, though lame and blind, does somehow stum- ble toward the light, visited them with every manner of 4 Two Meanings of Religion. • social disability and disrespect. It is the rereaders of relig- ion that we like to read about; and, when I say "we," I mean all of us. For you will notice that, in the long run, it is the men who think for themselves who are read and thought about by the succeeding generations ; and a man cannot think for himself without being more or less hereti- cal ; even John Calvin, it appears, being more heretical concerning the doctrine of the Trinity, judged by his own standards of perfection, than Michael Servetus whom he put to death. Why, almost all the names religious people care about were heretical in their day and generation, Luther and Calvin, Baxter and Taylor, Edwards and Hopkins, Fox and Wesley, and one greater than any of these, greater than all of them, — Jesus, the son of Joseph, the carpenter of Naz- areth, the prophet of Galilee, the martyr of Jerusalem. But this, too, I would have you notice : that the relego peo- ple have often been religo people at the same time ; at the same time for rereading the documents of religion and its institutions, and for binding back the thought and purpose of the world to some venerable standard of the past. Even the most radical reformers frequently congratulate them- selves that they can claim the sanction of a venerable an- tiquity. If we may trust the account in Matthew, Jesus declared that he came not to build anew, but to rebuild the ancient verities. And all the Christian reformers in their time — Luther, Fox, Wesley, Channing, and even Parker — have honestly conceived their work to be the recovery of a primitive Christianity, and the shaping of their individual lives, and the common life of Church and State, according to its law. The late Cardinal Newman, in his attempt to re- form the Church of England, found his ecclesiastical ideal in the Church of the fourth century. He was a rereader par excellence: he would reread the Thirty-nine Articles so that they should be good Roman doctrine. But no man was ever more for binding back the present to the beliefs and ceremonies of the past. If a Father of the fourth century had written so or $o^ it was for him as if God had spoken it Two Meanings of Religion. 5 in his ear. But lie was only one of many to whom the study of religion has been the revising of a text by comparing it with old manuscripts, — the 6\de.st pf-ima facie the best. They are students of a palimpsest, where one thing has been written over another ; and what they are after is to get at the orig- inal writing, and make that a standard of belief and action, and bind back to it the faithless world. But, alas ! the dif- ferent reformers have not agreed as to the original reading ! Some of them have said it was one thing, and some have said it was another. Luther's reading is not that of Fox, nor Wesley's that of Channing or Parker. Nevertheless, it must be recognized that these reformers have generally been nearer to the original reading than the dominant churches of their respective times, and they have done well to try to hold men back to that reading, to try to shape their lives according to its law. For it is not, as our fiercer radicals and destructives some- times think, as if the past had in it no permanent elements, against which the teeth of time may break themselves, but which they cannot break. That was a very common notion just about a century ago. The policy of the French Revolutionists was not unlike that of a certain worthy whom I knew of old, who could not agree with his butcher or baker as to their score. " Wipe it all out, and begin again," said he, suiting the action to the word. And the French Revolu- tionists wiped it all out — in blood. But how soon they found the old things coming back ! What was the Committee of Safety but another Inquisition, with Marat or Robespierre for grand inquisitor. But the good lasts equally with the bad ; and it is the fool's notion of progress that each age or generation is an improvement upon each and all that have preceded it. For all our boasted civilization, what can we show, with all our industrv and wealth and vast material sue- ' ml cess, that can compare with Raphael's pictures or with Shakspere's plays, with the cathedrals of the ^Middle Age and the temples with which Athens crowned her hills, and the " shapes of lucid stone '* which they enshrined ? But the 6 Two Meanings of Religion. men who caused these things had not the comforts and con- veniences of modern life. No; but they had what, perhaps, was better, — the ability to do without these comforts and conveniences, to laugh at wind and weather, "to scorn de- lights, and live laborious days." And there are poems and other writings that have come down to us from the past that make the statues ugly and the temples dim ; and, better still, actions of such beseeching loveliness that no age can wither and no custom stale their sweet and perfect charm. Let the rereading be as brave as possible, alas for the religion that does not, whatever is reread, bind back its friends and vo- taries to words and deeds that have no merely local or tem- poral significance, but are good for every land the sun doth visit, and for every time he measures on his ceaseless round ! And now, in the light of these general reflections, let us look at our own eight-and-twenty years together, and see how they have stood related to these two meanings of relig- ion, the rereading and the binding back, and see whether the religion we have been endeavoring to foster here has had the one meaning or the other; or (if haply it has blent the two in one) whether it has done this in good proportions, and attained a good result. One thing is sure : that, if we have not done a good deal of rereading in our religion here, we have been very strangely isolated from the general drift and motion of the time. For by nothing else have these years, along which we have walked together, been so strongly characterized in the world about us as by their rereading of the natural world and human history, especially that part of the latter which transpired in Judea at the beginning of our Christian era, and for some centuries before the event of Jesus' ministry. It may be safely said that never at any time in the world's history — not forgetting such great epochs as the Protestant Revolution and the first Christian century — has such a change come over men's ideas and opinions of the most important objects of their thought. In 1864 the great work of Darwin was only five years old, and had attained Two Meanings of Religion. y only the most limited recognition of the scientific world ; while, as for the theological, it had hardly anything for it but opposition and contempt. But, when in 1880 Profes- sor Huxley wrote of " The Coming of Age of the ' Origin of Species,' " already the scientific opposition had entirely ceased, except in quarters where it did not really count ; and the theologians had for a long time been busy adjusting their old theology to the new science, and finding chapter and verse for it in the Bible, where it had only waited a few thousand years for science to discover it elsewhere with infinite patience of research, in order to break silence and declare, " Why, we have been right here in hiding all the time." The theological readjustment made necessary by the Darwin- ian doctrine, and more emphatically by the general doctrine of Evolution, of which that is a part, has not been less im- portant than that required by the changed conditions of the Copernican astronomy. . That changed the centre of human- ity. This has changed the centre of Deity. Before Coper- nicus the earth had been the centre of the sidereal s\'stem, and man the centre of the moral universe. The other stars w^ere but his evening lamps. The " scheme of salvation " took no account of any world but this. ]\Ian's centrality vanished with the Copernican astronomy. God's centrality has been established by our later science. Erewhile he " sat outside to scan The spheres that 'neath his finger circling ran." He was an external, mechanical Creator, and with the estab- lishment of the evolution doctrine he found his occupation gone. The making of the world had been by laws and processes which from the chaos to the cosmos, from the moneron to the man, had known no break or intervention from without. A God so reft of all activity threatened to vanish altogether, and did so for the more scientific and intelligent, but only straightway to reappear as the imma- nent, indwelling, and Eternal Life of all the universe of men and things. This was at first the heresy of a few, but it is 8 Two Meanings of Religioti. now the gospel of a great and ever greatening company. Long since it burst the precincts of our Unitarian churches and invaded the most orthodox, whose priests and bishops only a little while ago contended that the fossils of the various strata and the bones of extinct animals were manu- factured by the Mechanic Deity just as they are, either to see what he could do or for the trying of our faith. This wonderful rereading of the natural world and of the theological system corresponding to the mechanical con- ception of the world, for all persons capable of seeing things in their relations, with any intuitive perception of what things go together and agree and what things do not, must have implied the utter and complete inadequacy of the traditional belief in Christianity as a supernatural revelation. But this belief has been subjected not only to the indirect destruction of the new natural science and philosophy, but equally and at the same time to the direct annihilation of the new and higher criticism, which, beginning with the work of Niebuhr upon Roman history, has at length subjected the Old Testament and New to the same principles and methods of investigation, and demonstrated that neither in the form nor the contents, neither in the record nor in what is re- corded, is there a hint or sign of supernatural interference or of supernatural action, unless all natural things are at the same time supernatural, in virtue of the immianent divinity who worketh all and in all. Such having been the general record of rereading during the last thirty years, — not that the rereading began within this period, but that during it it has received a vast accelera- tion, — said I not truly that, if we have not done a good deal of rereading in our religion here, we have been very strangely isolated from the general drift and motion of the time ? But we have done a good deal of rereading ; and, if we have been isolated, it has been less and less with the advancing time, and it has never been from or by those of the rereading disposition. It was at first from and by those who strenuously opposed themselves to the new readings Two Meanings of Religion, g of the naturalists and critics. But from these we have been isolated less and less, until we have come upon a time when thousands of the most cultivated and intelligent preachers in orthodox pulpits, and professors in orthodox seminaries of learning, and laymen in well-cushioned pews, more or less openly accept the views which were anathema to them a quarter of a century back, denounced as atheism and infi- delity by the more orthodox, and even in our Unitarian churches regarded with the gravest possible suspicion less than half that time ago. In the mean time, what has been most characteristic of our position here in our modest work together has, I think, been this : that the new readings have not been a bitter medicine to us, but wine and milk ; yea, sweet as honey to our taste. Somehow, in God's good providence, it has been ordered for us that we should not strive against the dawning light, but welcome it with joyful acclamation ; that we should not en- deavor to minimize the force and meaning of the new inter- pretations, but should cheerfully take them at their full value, finding in them the deepest satisfaction and the ut- most joy and peace, God forever in the world better than one who "sitteth upon the circle of the earth, and the inhabi- tants thereof are as grasshoppers," better than any outside deity who made the world and got well rid of it some sixty centuries ago, yet must return to tinker it from time to time, his natural incarnation in humanity infinitely better than his supernatural incarnation in "Jesus, who is called the Christ," and not putting, as that does, a shameful brand on all the other mothers of the centuries and the children born to them in lawful love. And his self-revelation in all nature and all history and all human goodness, truth, and love, is better, immeasurably better, than even the Bible can contain or any course of history or lofty character it can report within its narrow bounds. Take it for what it is, — the unconscious record of a thousand years of Hebrew striving after God, — and the Bible cannot easily be prized too much ; but take it as a complete account of God's self-revelation, and it be- I o Tivo Mea n lugs of R eligion . comes a spot upon the sun, and to speak of " the Bible and nature," or " the Bible and humanity," as if here were terms of proximate significance, with the Bible in the lead, is miserable impiety. To say " the Bible and nature " or " the Bible and humanity " is like saying " the drop and the ocean," as if the drop were not a part of the ocean, as if it were not an infinitesimal fraction of the boundless whole. Yes : we have been rereaders here together all these years, and in our new reading of the world and human life and Christianity we have had great satisfaction and delight. But with the rereading has there been no binding back ? I have spoken ill what I have already spoken if I have not implied that there has been a great deal of this ; of binding back to God, not by a tether stretching back six thousand or two thousand years, and getting constantly more tenuous in the wear of time and tide, but by a present and immediate bond, as of man's body to his spirit, at each minute of the day ; the moral law, no arbitrary mandate of antiquity, but generated by a moral universe, and growing ever with its growth from age to age. Nor less has our rereading been implicitly a binding back to man, to what is manliest in him, greatest in his character and history, and so to him of Naza- reth, too long obscured by mythological fancies and theo- logical speculations, " above the heads of his reporters," to every deeper insight of the scholars shown in more engaging light, with a more human aspect, voice, and gesture, drawing all men to himself, so making good the prophecy of those words attributed to him in the New Testament : " If I be lifted up, I will draw all men unto me." But whereas the traditionalist finds in the past as such the standard of perfec- tion, or in some few years or centuries of it dissevered from the rest, and would bind men back to these as it were with cords of twisted iron, we have not so learned the better way. For us this is to search the past for whatever is most just and noble, sweet and fair, and then bind back ourselves and those we love and those whom we would help to that. And of such there is no lack. It might be extravagant to say Two Meanings of Religion. 1 1 that, if it were all recorded, " the world itself could not con- tain the books that would be written " ; but it would be safe to say that, of what has been recorded, there is enough to make up the bulk of many Bibles, and every noble thought and action in the Bible is recorded with the rest. And there is no imaginary line between sacred history and pro- fane in this inclusion. It is all sacred, equally that which exhibits the struggles and the heroisms of the soldiers and the martyrs of political liberty and political reform, and that w^hich exhibits the struggles and the sacrifices of the saints and heroes of religion. To all these I have sought to bind you back, never happier than when telling you the story of some lofty spirit, if haply I might lure you to the height which was his or her mount of vision, and breathe with you its fresh and bracing air. And how often have we, standing here, re- read the lives of our beloved friends in that mysterious light which we call death, and bound back our consciences and our affections, our reverence and our will, to the remembered truth and beauty of their lives ! Here I might make an end and none the less your thoughts would go right on to be with those who, since we parted in the early summer, have been parted from the company of earth's loftiest spirits. This is no time and here is not the place for any reading or rereading of the lives of Whittier and Curtis; and what need is there for me to seek to bind you back to them in any surer loyalty than will be the natural motion of your grieved and faithful hearts ? They were rereaders both of the old texts of politics and religion, and found in them brave new meanings for the poor, sorrow- ful, and blundering time ; and who more eloquent than they to bind men back to everything that is most noble and inspir- ing in the traditions of the past ! For these men, so different in some respects, had much in common in their lives. Curtis was, of all men, the most easily at home in any company of cultivated people, without the least assumption of that supe- riority which others willingly accorded him ; while Whittier was the shyest of the shy in social companies. But they 12 Tzvo Meanings of Religion. were very much alike in the extreme simplicity of their daily lives, in their complete indifference to all those showy and luxurious things which are so generally attractive to the mod- ern man. And, though one found in poetry and the other in oratory the most suitable organ of expression, Whittier was as eloquent in his poetry as Curtis in his orations. Each liked to sound the changes on resounding names ; and how many of Whittier's poems are ringing speeches none the less be- cause they are obedient to the laws of rhyme and rhythm ? But to this formal similarity was added one of a much deeper strain. The " winged hippogriff, Reform," invited both of them to ride. Whittier was the first to accept the invitation, naturally, as being by seventeen years the older man ; but then, too, he came a little sooner to himself after brief trial of such husks as Caleb Cushing fed to his political retainers. Whittier had been writing Abolitionist editorials and singing Abolitionist songs for twenty-five years when Curtis joined the great crusade in 1856. When the war was over and slavery had been abolished, though he and Whittier were re- formers still, they moved on different lines, — Whittier intent to tame the savagery of the traditional theology and human- ize its God, and Curtis to expose and to destroy the system of partisan reward and punishment in the civil service of the government. But, with different gifts, there was the same spirit, and each was interested heartily in the other's work. Curtis was easily first in the political reform. Had Whittier a second in the religious field .? " Let me write the songs of a people, and I do not care who makes its " — " laws," says the proverb, and I say — "theology." And I doubt if Beecher, or any of the theologians, has done so much to " ring out the old, ring in the new " and better thoughts of God and man, and life and death, and what is after death, as Whittier has done with his glad songs of faith and hope and love. Neither Whittier nor Curtis was a stranger to these walls and to the little company that gathers here from week to week. But Whittier's presence with us here was only in the Two Meariings of Religion. 13 holy spirit of his hymns and spiritual songs ; and ii has al- ways been a pleasant thought to me that, as we have sung them, our debt was not to Whittier alone, but also to Samuel Longfellow, the first minister of our society, who has done more than any one else to give the thought and feeling of Whittier currency in our churches. For you will notice that Whittier wrote few hymns as such. He wrote too easily to stop at the fourth or fifth stanza. The hymns we sing as his have for the most part been taken, here a little and there a little, from much longer pieces; and Mr. Longfellow has gen- erally done the work, and, next after him, Mr. Gannett. They are in all the hymnals, all the churches, lifting up the hearts of men to holier things. But Mr. Curtis's frequent presence with us here was not only in the spirit. How often we have crowded all these seats and aisles to hear his genial characterization and his lofty praise of men whom he admired and loved, — Thackeray, Dickens, Phillips, Sumner, Sidney, Bryant, — or some such noble plea as his " Scholar in Politics " or his " Political Morality" ! Nor could we have any feast of honor or com- memoration here without him to grace it with his presence and his speech, witnessing not more his personal kindness to you and me than his devotion to our Unitarian faith, which he ever apprehended in the broadest and the deepest way. How generous he was with us, this busiest of men ! For myself I dare not try to say how sweet and precious I have esteemed the privilege of knowing well this peerless gen- tleman, and seeing much of him in the personal relations of the social circle and his quiet home. The possibilities of human nature have been exalted to my mind by this experi- ence. I did not know before that there could be such union of the utmost strength and the most perfect gentleness in one warm and loving heart. I did not know before that one could be so great, so honored and admired, and yet so simple as to make you forget all about it when you met him face to face, nor that one could get so many wounds from faithful friends and others in the political arena, and yet show no scars. He 14 Two Meanings of Religion. was, I know, a publicist outside of politics. But no official station could have corrupted him, though it had been the highest in the land. Happy shall be the nation which he loved when its old men shall see his visions of political mo- rality, and its young men shall dream his dreams of stainless rectitude till they come true in them as they came true in him ! Whittier and Curtis ! — two more among the great im- mortals who have helped us to reread the meaning of the world, and who now as ever will bind.;back our spirits to the service of all things that are beautiful and good and true. I THE UNDISCOVERED COUNTRY. My subject is "The Undiscovered Country." That is Shakspere's phrase ; and for a text you will find one, which might, perhaps, be set more fitly at the end than at the be- ginning of my sermon, in the eleventh chapter of Hebrews, the sixteenth verse : "They desire a better country." A flood of literature is upon us concerning the discovery of America by Christopher Columbus, Oct. 12, 1492. If you would be quite certain what the landfall was on which he came that day, you should not read more than one book. Let it be John Fiske's or Justin Winsor's or Payne's or Harrisse's or Dr. Adams's, and you will be quite sure it was Samana or Wat- ling's Island or Turk Island or Mariguana, or some other of the Bahama group ; but, if you read them all, and still have a definite opinion, you will be more fortunate than I have been ; that is, if you weigh, and do not merely count, author- ities. But it does not greatly matter. It was certainly one of the Bahamas ; and, if Columbus had missed it and gone sailing on into the West, if he hadn't hit another of the many, he would soon have come to the main land, either Florida or some adjacent coast. But, if he had done this, he would not have known that it was another continent : he would have thought it was some headland of Eastern Asia or an island off its coast. He never saw the coast of North America at all, but on his third voyage he saw that of South America at the Odnoco's mouth, and never dreamed he had encountered anything bigger than Cuba or Hayti, — bigger, in fact, than all the Europe he had left behind. Now there are those who always take delight in belittling the performances of great men. If they could have their 1 6 The Undiscovered Country. way, somebody else would have done almost everything, — Bacon should have written Shakspere's plays, and Thomas Paine the Declaration of Independence, and so on. And these people are made very happy by the evidence which convinces them that Columbus did not discover America. How could he, when he never really touched the main land at all ? — when, even when he came in sight of it, he didn't dream that it was the main land \ and, when once he did find what he thought was the main land, he thought it was a part of Asia. He died, as he had lived, without the faintest possible suspicion that there was a Western Continent. And it was well for his happiness that he did so ; for he did not desire a better country than Marco Polo had de- scribed, and still less a poorer one, and to his imagination a Western Continent would have been simply a barrier be- tween him and his wished for goal. But, if the glory of discovery must be wrested from all those who do not at once lay hold of the discovered thing in its entirety, how would the roll of the discoverers shrivel in this nipping air ! For what one of them, sail he the Atlantic or Pacific or the Northern Seas, or those more mystical and enchanted seas which we call Science and Criticism and In- vention and Philosophy, has ever come at once upon the wholeness of the thing, the law, the process, the system, which rewards his patient search ? Columbus did discover America in that he discovered the outlying lands which are as much a part of its great continental system as the earth's atmosphere is of the earth, the sun's photosphere is of the sun. And the glory of his seeking and his finding cannot be in the least diminished by the mere coastwise prowlings of adventurous Icelanders five centuries before. If he had ever heard the Vinland stories, they could not have sug- gested to him the ideas that were central to his own " sail- ing straight on into chaos untried." If Columbus did not know that he had discovered a new continent, certainly Leif Ericsson had no advantage over him in this respect: the former's loss is not the latter's gain. With all honor for the The Undiscovered Country. 17 hardy Vikings of the North, and to all those into whose pas- sionate ardor of discovery Columbus entered with an equal mind, the fact remains he was " the first that ever burst Into that silent sea." And on this four hundredth anniversary of his successful enterprise our cannon cannot roar too loud, our pageants be too brave, our speech too eloquent, our various celebration too magnificent, for the proportions of his great career. The event we celebrate abounds in the most various sug- gestions for the imagination and the heart. It is four cen- turies old ; and yet, in its relation to the events preceding it and following it, it is really wonderful in its confirmation and its illustration of that evolutionary science which is the latest born of time. Columbus was, as I have said, " the first that ever burst Into that silent sea." But, if he hadn't spoken quick, he would have lost his chance. For those were times when the kingdom of discovery was suffering violence, and the violent were taking it by force. It was a time when the human spirit was reaching out on every side after things new and strange. Find, if you can, a better abstract and brief chronicle of that doing, daring time than in the account Othello gives the duke of his whole course of love. In that account we not only breathe the air of Venice, thick-spiced with Eastern gums, but the air that blew Colum- bus over-seas, — the air of brave adventure that blew every- where in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, in the revival of learning, in the discovery of America, in the Copernican astronomy, in the sculpture and the painting of the Italian Renaissance, in the Protestant Reformation, in Shakspere's lofty mind. The discovery of America by Columbus was the most characteristic incident of this live and stirring time. Looking somewhat more narrowly, it was an incident of that search for the Indies of which the utmost achievement be- fore the sailing of Columbus had been effected by Bartholo- 1 8 The Undiscovered Country. mew Diaz, who in 1487 rounded the Cape of Good Hope and sailed up the eastern coast of Africa some six hundred miles. Here was a voyage back and forth of thirteen thou- sand miles, but it did not complete the discovery of the East- ern route to India. That was left for Vasco da Gama ten years further on. To turn back from the threshold of success and seek another way, — that is the method of genius and of the lof- tiest courage. This was the method of Columbus. That the success of Bartholomew Diaz might lack nothing of impres- siveness for him, his own brother, Bartholomew Columbus, was a sailor on the Diaz fleet ; and it is a capital proof of Columbus's possession by his idea of a western route that, after his brother had shared in what was almost the discov- ery of the other, he could so inoculate him with his own madness as to persuade him to go posting off to England to see Henry VH., and get him to be the patron of a Western expedition. But the evolution of discovery is not more con- firmed and illustrated by the relation of Columbus's discov- ery to those discoveries that had preceded it than by its rela- tion to those that succeeded and made up the discovery of America in the broader sense, — the discovery of the Western Continent, and the proportions and the relations of its various parts. Until this discovery was completed America was still " the undiscovered country," from whose bourne the travel- lers who returned told stories strangely mixed of various yarn, not to say yarns, the true and false together. But before entering on the history of this process let us notice one or two of the parables that are hidden for us in the facts. Sometimes the preacher can with 'difficulty find one text for his sermon. I could find a dozen easily for this. One of them might be, " Because of his importunity." He was like "the fellow in the parable," as our friend Robert Collyer calls him, " who would have three loaves." He would have three ships and provisions for twelve months, and would take nothing less, and so went from capital to capital, from court TJie Undiscovered Coiuitry. 19 to court, offering for these advantages a new route to the Indies, as he thought, but, in fact, a whole new world. And because of his importunity he at last got what he wanted, and in this respect he bore a very close resemblance to almost all the great discoverers and inventors. They have all been heard at last because of their importunity. Their cry at midnight has been heard at last, and they have got their three loaves, their three ships, their attraction of gravitation, their oxygen, their new planet, their spectroscope, their con- servation of energy, their natural selection, and so on. Theirs is what Robert Browning called " the glory of going on." " The man who lays the first shovelful upon the earth," said Confucius, " and goes on, that man is building the mountain." Yet, whatever may be said for importunity, for the indomi- table will, for the unconquerable hope, " still clutching the inviolable shade," it may not be denied that there is an ele- ment of accident and chance in human life. " Oh, the little more, and how much it is, And the little less, and what worlds away ! " This is the theme of Hawthorne's " David Swan," of Mr. Hardy's " Tess " and his "Return of the Native"; and those powerful novels get the utmost keenness of their tragic edge from their dealings with this theme, and their recogni- tion of the part the corresponding element plays in the shap- ing of our lives. A few miles one way or the other, and Columbus might have been the discoverer of North America. A little to the left or right, and we who make shipwreck of our lives upon some barren island or some lonely reef might reach the fortunate isles. But without a longer life than that which he enjoyed and suffered hardly could Columbus have convinced himself that there was another continent. "Midmost the beating of the steely sea." The ability of a preconception to keep men off from the discovery of some splendid fact or law was never more curi- 20 The Undiscovered Country. ously exemplified than by the history of opinion as to the character of the new-found lands of South, and more espe- cially of North, America. Evolution may include a process of reversion, and it did so here. From the old maps and other data it is evident that there was, even before Columbus died, and for some years after, a tendency to allow the exist- ence of a western continent. But the original preconception — that the new land was a part of Asia — was too much for the more scholarly and scientific apprehension. A reaction set in, so resolute that, even when the general outline of South America had been pretty well made out, the parts of North America that had been discovered were still joined on to Asia by ligaments the most ingenious and absurd. Even when the immense extent of North America from north to south had been discovered, there was for a long time no ap- prehension of its corresponding breadth, and the hope could not be given up that it was only a narrow barrier in the way of that real discovery which was still the ultimate goal. We commonly imagine Hendrick Hudson's sailing in the " Half- moon " up our beautiful river as a most satisfactory business for that stout sea-sailor. It was a most unsatisfactory busi- ness. The river would keep on narrowing, when he wanted it to widen out again and let him through into the Indian Sea. Every river mouth upon our eastern coast was entered and explored with the same hope of getting through the barrier. The arctic explorations seeking a north-west passage, in our own time, are but the latest of a series which, in its beginning, rested on the inexpugnable preconception that North Amer- ica was a part of Asia or a narrow string of islands lying off its coasts. Shooting down the La Chine rapids just above Montreal, the traveller does not always know that La Chine means simply China, and that the name commemorates the hope that China had been reached at last, or the irony of those who sought for it that way in vain. And in all this what a parable we have of human thought and life! How often do men's preconceptions keep them from the higher knowledge ! Is not the history of thought, 1 TJie Undiscovered Country. 21 discovery, and invention, in good part the history of such ob- struction and defeat? — the sad rhyme of those who cling to their first fault and perish in their pride, yet not always in the way of Browning's voyagers. For they set up their "shapes of lucid stone" upon the barren rocks, when, as it proved, the isles they had set out to reach were close at hand, — " Like cloudlets faint at evening sleeping." Too often we refuse, and seek to pass as a mere barrier, the possibility which is incomparably better than our dream. We want some fresh nuance with the old order or the old creed or the old life ; and we will not see that what God has pre- pared for us is a new order, a new creed, a new life, which is infinitely better than the old, — so much better that, if we were wise, we should burn our ships, as Cortez did, and push on into the heart of the new country, and conquer it, and make its high-built towns splendid treasures all our own. Columbus discovered America in 1492. From this teach- ing of our childhood we are not going to vary, — not in " the estimation of a hair." This is true, but something else is true. He was the brave forerunner of the swarm of voy- agers that went sailing westward in the last years of the fifteenth century and the first years of the sixteenth ; and, remembering the proverb, " It is the first step that costs," and remembering, too, how much that step cost him of faith and patience, importunity and disappointment and despair, we shall not be disposed to rob his laurel chaplet of one leaf for any other brow, or to give it leaf by leaf to all of those into whose labors he entered or who entered into his. Hardly would there be enough to go round in such a dis- tribution. And what need ? For every one has his own wreath, plucked-at some time by envious hands, but never wholly spoiled ; not even Vespucci's, for whom — Amerigo, Americus, America — the continent, is named, by no fault of his, for he had as little notion as Columbus that he had dis- covered a new continent. Columbus discovered America. He did, and he did not. 22 TJie Undiscovered Country. He did not discover what he had discovered, the geographi- cal extent and the configuration of that Western Continent, among whose adjacent islands on four hardy voyages he pushed the adventurous prow of his brave little ship, and of whose proper coast he got one glimpse, and knew not what he saw. To discover America in this larger sense — larger in terms of time and space, but not in terms of spiritual greatness — was, as Mr. Payne has shown indiffer- ently well and Mr. Fiske with " sovereign and transforming grace," the business of two centuries ; every step or stage of the long process a canto in an epic of great names and lofty deeds, not without incidents of the baser sort, for which religion, or what men called religion then, was most to blame. But, surely, the discoverers of America, in discovering that, discovered something more, which was no accident or attri- bute of sea or land, — the wonder of their own great hearts, their own unconquerable wills, that passionate search for the unknown, which proves that, however it may be in our own time, the agnostic temper, which, not knowing, does not care to know, was farther from the discoverers of America than any goal they sought in the wide sea. Their temper was that man must know, and can and will ; and this temper ever made " Some coast alluring, some lone isle, To distant men, who must go there or die." To trace the steps of those two centuries of discovery and exploration, should I attempt it now, might keep you over- long. The main reason why the process was so long was that, even as the Western Continent stretched its barricade between the bold discoverers and that Asiatic India they sought, so the preconception of an uncontinented deep, and the desire to reach the Indies by a western route, stretched its barricade between them and the discovery of our western world. The discoveries of Cabot and Vespucci had no dynamic propagative energy, because they were not discoveries of what Marco Polo had mapped out for them to seek and find. It was inland exploration that did most to TJie Undiscovered Country. 23 break the spell of preconceived opinion. The first great names connected with this new departure are those of the Spaniards, Narvaez and De Soto ; but those of the French- men, Champlain and La Salle, shine with a lovelier light. The lake that bears his name is not more beautiful than was the character of Champlain, and the mountains do not rise about it with more grand nobility than his fame arises upon our minds as we traverse the wide tract of discovery between the sailing of Columbus and the return of Lieu- tenant Peary only a few weeks ago from his adventurous and successful quest. Columbus made his last voyage " to that undiscovered country from whose bourne no traveller re- turns" in 1506, and it was not till 1609 that Champlain penetrated the interior far enough to reach the lake on which he " wrote his name in water " in a fashion that should have cheered the heart of Keats when he composed his epitaph. But only ten years less, than two centuries from 1492 had passed when La Salle's voyage down the Mississippi to its mouth made sure that nothing short of continental propor- tions satisfied the claims of that new world which lay between the Atlantic and the Mississippi, and which that mighty river drained upon its western side. And not till 1748 did the Danish navigator, Vitus Bering, discovering the straits that bear his name, sever the last link that in imagination bound the New World to the Old. But to Mr. Fiske's two centuries for the discovery of America, already exceeded by some sixty years, must we not add another century, seeing that the Rocky Mountains were not discovered till 1743, and not till 1806 did Lewis and Clark accomplish the first transit of the continent, after a journey of 4,000 miles from the confluence of the Mississippi and Missouri to the mouth of the Columbia River.? Dr. Stebbins, who will preach for me next Sunday morn- ing, will leave San Francisco this evening and arrive in New York next Friday evening; and any traveller can do the same. But the first passage of the continent, reckoning from Champlain to Lewis and Clark, took only two years 24 The Undiscovered Country. short of two hundred, from 1608 to 1806. And 1806 was just three centuries from the death of Christopher Columbus. But, however the dramatic instinct may plead with us to say that now at last the discovery of America was complete, the fact remains that, except in its general outline and ex- tent, it was still an undiscovered country. Since then a thousand features of its internal geography and topography have been discovered by the heroic labors of as many hardy and adventurous men, while the sure hand of science has measured almost every river's length and almost every mountain's height. And, so far, we are only dealing with the surfaces of things. What shall we say of the discoverers whose general direction has been down into the solid sub- stance of the continent, and of what they have discovered there of coal and oil and iron and gold and silver — a good thing out of politics — and many other precious things ? And what shall we say of all the farmer folk who, on our Western prairies or along our Eastern streams, have discov- ered the resources of the soil and multiplied its bounteous yield ? And what of those whose energy has set their tur- bines in our waters, and developed all the proud, magnifi- cent, and boastful splendors of our manufacturing prosperity? Yet, could I tell aright the story of all these, how much would still remain unsaid ! For simultaneously with the discovery of our geographical and agricultural and industrial America there has gone on a process of discovery in intel- lectual and moral and spiritual things, in politics and educa- tion and religion, — a process that is not completed yet, — so that the "undiscovered country" is not yet a matter of the past. It is still undiscovered, save as a few have seen it in their dreams ; yes, and would be if they had seen what they have dreamed, for in things spiritual every new height re- veals a new horizon, every new advance a further on before. In things material, we may reach the goal at last. In things spiritual, no sooner does the wearied climber think that he has reached the top and seen all there is to see than on his ear there sounds the chiding invitation : — TJie Undiscovered Country. 25 " Nay, come up hither ! From this wave-washed mound, Unto the furthest flood-brim look with me; Then reach on with thy thought till that be drowned, Miles and miles distant though the last line be; And though thy soul sail leagues and leagues beyond, Still, leagues beyond those leagues, there is more sea." Shall we say that our political America was discovered in 1776? That was indeed a splendid stroke. It gave us a political independence as complete as that geographical in- dependence which took the physical discoverers all the way from Christopher Columbus to Vitus Bering to establish. But the years from Columbus to Champlain and from Cham- plain to La Salle, and from La Salle to Lewis and Clark, were not more wearisome than those from 1776 to 1787. Then, with the establishment of our present national Constitution, was the discovery of our political America complete ? Nay, for there loomed erelong a mountain on our view, the huge, black bulk of slavery, till which had been removed and cast into the sea there was no passage to the land of justice, peace, and true prosperity which lay beyond. The mountain was removed ; but at what cost of long debate and suffering and war ! And the Columbus then was Garrison, and the Champlain was Lincoln, and the La Salle was Grant ; and they had many followers noble as themselves, albeit of lesser fame. And, behold, our political America is the undiscov- ered country still ! Why not, when we have learned so im- perfectly the problem of municipal government ? when the spoils system still drags down three-quarters of the heaven of our civil service with its monstrous tail ? when, over and above the legitimate use of money in elections, the illegiti- mate use of it by both parties is still immense, disreputable, abominable, and not to be endured ? when, for all the just attempts on either side to change the average voter's mind, no man of life-long probity and great reputation can change his own without the base insinuation that he has sold him- self for place or salved some rankling wound .<* These are but three or four of all the questions that present themselves 26 The Undiscovered Country. the moment we encounter the opinion that the discovery of our political America is already perfect and complete. It never can be so without the toil and sacrifices of hundreds and thousands of the young men and women who are now pressing forward into the vast unknown. It will not be when they have done their best. For political perfection is an ever-flying goal. Our educational America, — that, too, is still an undiscov- ered country in good part, though here, also, there have been many brave adventurers and many hardy pioneers. Some things are pretty well mapped out already : that, if we are going to have universal suffrage, we must have universal education, and that education, to be universal, must be com- pulsory ; that there are some things every boy and girl must know ; that there are others which must be determined by the faculty that is in the student, and not by that which sits in professorial chairs ; that it is not the grammar, but the literature of the classic world we want, while the litera- ture of our own English tongue is best of all ; that the history and polity of America are more necessary to American youth than those of Greece and Rome ; that we must have moral training as well as intellectual, and that we can get this from no text-book or formal reading as we can from the great examples of history and literature and from the personal contacts of the school and college and the habitual doing of good, honest work. Until all these things are realized ideals, our complete educational discovery is still remote ; and, when they are realized, there will other shapes arise to shame our incompleteness and to beckon us to higher things. And how undiscovered our industrial America, when such things can be as those which we have seen of late, at Home- stead and Buffalo, in Tennessee and Idaho, when the liberty of the individual to employ those who wish to be employed and of these to seek employment is annulled by violence, when such monstrous inequalities exist as those we see on every side, when so often the employer has no sense that he is dealing, not merely with the abstract commodity of labor, The Undiscovered Country. 27 but with living, sometimes, alas ! with dying men and women. That better industrial country which we seek, — do any of us know just where it lies ? We know that many a river-mouth which promises to open up a highway to its shores grows narrower as we go on ; and we hear the warning of the prophet sounding in our ears, " Elsewhither for a refuge, or die here ! " But equally we know that there is a better country somewhere further on. It is still undiscovered ; but it will loom some day upon our eyes, or, if not upon ours, — " Others shall sing the song, Others shall right the wrong, Finish what we begin, And all we fail of win." And the religious America, — that, too, is undiscovered. " For they seek a better country, even a heavenly." There is nothing very heavenly in our present situation, — a hundred jarring sects, a majority of which imagine severally that theirs, and only theirs, is the accepted plan of salvation. I find the religious future of America, that better, undis- covered country that we seek, prefigured by the harmony of our United Stales. We would have no separate State abandon the traditions of its history ; but, cherishing these as generously as may be, we would have each alive and thrilling with the sense of a great common history and goal. So we would have no separate church abandon its tradition ; but we hope and trust that there will come a time when it shall be gladly recognized that Christianity is more than any sect, and religion more than Christianity or any other sepa- rate faith, and that humanity is more than religion, and sweeps into its wide embrace all earnest and inspiring souls and all who need their earnestness and inspiration. In that day shall be made good the prophecy of Lessing's Nathan, — "What makes me seem to you a Christian makes you seem to me a Jew." In that day the barriers between the sects shall offer no more obstruction to those going back and forth among them than the parallels of latitude or longitude offer to the keels that bear the interchanging products of the 28 The Undiscovered Countiy. world to their due ports, agreeable to the needs of various men. The voyage of Columbus has inspired full many a splendid song, the briefest of them all the best. Hear now its sec- ond half : — " Trust to the guiding God ; follow the silent sea. Were shore not yet there, 'twould now arise from the wave ; For nature is to genius linked eternally, And ever will perform the promise genius gave." But nature is not linked to genius so eternally and so irref- ragably as to faith and hope and love. Obedient to their promise and command, the better country which we seek, the true America of politics and education and industry and re- ligion, shall arise from out the waste of ignorance and con- flict and misunderstanding that now swells and moans be- tween us and our heart's desire. And in this quest we are discoverers all. These things will come to pass only when every individual mind and heart and will responds to the divine commands which issue forth, new every morning and fresh every evening, from deep heart of God. Just in pro- portion as the individual man and woman, youth and maid, yea, and the little child, speaks the hard word of truth and leaves unsaid the word that ought not to be spoken, cleaves to the right through good and ill-report, desires to know and follow what is simple truth, is strong and brave to raise the oppressed and fallen and to cleave the oppressor down, can sacrifice one's sect and dogma to religion and morality, and one's selfish greed or narrow patriotism to the welfare of mankind, — just in proportion as these ideals are made real, the America for which all good men should long and work and pray will lift itself above the far horizon of our hope and dream. It is of every day that dawns that Lowell sang : " Remember whose, and not how short it is ! It is God's day ; it is Columbus's ! A lavish day ! One day with life and heart Is more than time enough to find a world." 1 I I f SAMUEL LONGFELLOW. If Mr. Longfellow had never been the minister of our own society, I could not have refrained from speaking of his life and his example in some special way, so blessed is his memory in all our churches, so interesting and significant was the part he took in the religious movement of our time. He was one of a group of men of whose sympathies and aspirations it has been fulfilled as it was written, " Mark how one string, sweet husband to the other, Strikes each in each by mutual ordering." To think of one of them is to think of all of them, — Longfel- low, Johnson, Frothingham, Weiss, Higginson, and Wasson. Five of the six spoke at one meeting of the Free Religious Association ; and such " large utterance " no other day in my whole life recalls, nor such a headache as I got withal. All these sat somewhat loosely to the Unitarian tradition, Long- fellow less so than the others, except Frothingham, who began as a conservative and only gradually assumed the in- dependency of his last years, while latterly his sympathy has been almost perfect with our broadening Unitarian ways. Johnson was an independent almost from the start, and Higginson soon left the ministry, though he has been preach- ing ever since, in his own high, poetic way ; and Weiss did so at last, while Wasson through his life of pain and depriva- tion approximated to us more and more, and we to him in generous rivalry. For all the likeness of these men, their several individuality was as distinct as possible. The most unlike of all, both in appearance and in the habits of their work and thought, were Longfellow and Johnson, the two 30 Samuel Longfellow. whose mutual friendship was the most rare and perfect satis- faction of their lives. Longfellow's was the blonde complex- ion, Johnson's a swarthy hue. Longfellow was as desultory in his work as Johnson was strenuous and direct, and as spontaneous in his opinions as Johnson was resolved at every step to give a reason for the faith that was in him. Mr. Longfellow was born in Portland, Me., June 13, 18 19, the same year that gave us Lowell and George Eliot ; and he died, October 3, in the same pleasant city, which he always loved and with which he always had a bond of brotherly affection. Graduated at Harvard College in 1839, he en- gaged in private teaching until 1842, when he entered the Divinity School at Cambridge, from which he graduated in 1846, he and Johnson each having taken a year off, and so graduating with the next class to that with which they began. For that graduation Johnson wrote the noble hymn " God of the earnest heart," and Frothingham his "unum, sed leonem." " Thou Lord of hosts, whose guiding hand Hast brought us here before thy face." If his own contribution to such a songful time has been pre- served, it must have been " In the beginning was the Word," used for his Brooklyn installation, but, I think, written earlier. He entered almost immediately on the work of his first parish at Fall River, Mass., where he remained until he came to Brooklyn, in the spring of 1853. The faintest echoes of his preaching there are sweet with the habitual tenor of its life- long way. Mr. Bryant of our congregation recalls him there in 1848, upon the threshold of his work. Our own society was organized in April, 185 1. In the two following years the now venerable Dr. Peabody was called to be our minister, next James Freeman Clarke, then Horatio Stebbins, — just forty years ago, — and finally Starr King. It cannot be said of our society, as then constituted, that it " did not know what it wanted, and wasn't satisfied when it got it." It was perfectly satisfied when it got Mr. Longfellow. He preached for the first time April 16, 1853, Samuel Longfellow. 31 in the Brooklyn Athenaeum, then a brand-new building, and the handsomest in Brooklyn, not a church. His friend Johnson had sounded a trumpet before him as the hypocrites don^t. When some approved his own preaching and others heard it with alarm, he said, " There is my classmate, Long- fellow : you must hear him " ; and they did, and printed his first sermon, " The Word Preached," a vindication of the preacher's office from the standpoint of rational religion. "The pulpit," he said, "must not present a theology which contradicts clear facts of science or of human nature. It must not teach a bibliolatry which shuts its eyes to the plainest dictates of common sense and puts itself in antago- nism to reason and conscience, to the living word of God in the soul." Tolerably familiar now that manner of speech, but in 185 1 it was extremely rare. In accordance with the habit of the society, Mr. Longfellow was not called till after some months' trial ; and this morning brings us as nearly as possible, for a Sunday, to the anniversary of his installa- tion, Oct. 26, 185 1. The Sunday following the new minister took for his subject " A Spiritual and Working Church," and made a noble exposition of his idea of his own work and that of the society. Defining a church as " a society of men, women, and children, associated together by a religious spirit for a religious work," he made it clear how little faith he had in ritual or creed as an ecclesiastical bond, how much in fellow-service and a common love of truth. Accepting the designation Christian, he declared it must mean religious, or it was sectarian ; but to the designation Unitarian he objected, as seeming to found the church upon a theological doctrine. He sketched a comprehensive plan of work, some features of which have been preserved unto this day ; for example, our system of monthly collections for charitable purposes. Another feature of his plan, wholly original, "the printing and distributing of books and tracts," was not carried out in his own time. It was first made practical by Mr. Froth- ingham ; and we took it up in 1875, and since then have scattered at least 200,000 of our sermons up and down the 32 Samuel Longfellow, land, and many other churches have engaged in a like work. Mr. Longfellow's idea was not, I think, to print merely his own sermons. His modesty, if I may say so without an injurious reflection on my own, would not have permitted that. But, whereas Andrew Jackson " took the responsi- bility," I do not. Once fairly settled to his work, Mr. Longfellow's individu- ality gave form to everything he touched. He had a way of his own, a very tender, gracious way of doing everything. Never was a man less hackneyed in his methods of church work and speech and ceremonial. Did he baptize or marry people or speak beside the dead some word of comfort to the living or administer the communion service, the baptism, the marriage, the comfort, the communion, was without a prototpye. The baptism was a tender jubilee ; the marriage was no ceremony, but an inspiration ; the comfort was no service, but a psalm ; the communion was indeed that, as the minister moved about among the people, carrying the ele- ments in his own hands and breathing tender phrases of the Scriptures and his own unwritten word. And who should say which was the more inspired .? He was a thorough- going rationalist in his theology, allowing inspiration to the Bible in no special sense, and insisting on the pure humanity of Jesus as essential to his best effect upon our lives. In thought and aim he was in perfect sympathy with Theodore Parker, while differing widely from him in his methods, uniting with his religious affirmation much less of theological negation, feeling that Parker did not sufficiently • revere the reverences of other men. Parker was not so much his spiritual father as his elder brother, holding the same relation to Johnson and Higginson and Weiss and Wasson. With all these he — Longfellow — had drunk deep at transcendental fountains : of Coleridge and Carlyle and Emerson. He was a natural mystic, a high-priest, or rather poet, after the order of Thomas a Kempis and William Law and John Tauler and the Theologia Germafiica, but with an all-pervading and controlling common sense, keeping Samuel Longfellow. 35 his feet well upon the ground, however with his forehead he might brush the stars, and able to use the language Parker attributed to Jesus, — " words so deep that a child could understand them." One can see from the church records how his own sort of people, men and women, gravitated to him, how they loved him and stood by him with unalterable devotion while others fell away. But for as many as re- ceived him what a power he was of moral inspiration and of spiritual enlightenment and strength and joy ! What peace he brought into their homes, what consolation to their sor- row, what conscience to their business and politics, and " the narrow things of home " ! Life as interpreted by him was something altogether sweet and holy, tender and divine. God was not away off there outside the universe. He was its present immanent Life. He was not away off there in Judea even : he was right here in our own America, — his word not exhausted by the Bible, nor by Jesus and the apostles, but very near us, even in our hearts. There are standards of success tried by which Mr. Longfellow's preach- ing would not be called successful. It attracted no crowds, it built up no great society. Tried by the highest standards, it was a success but seldom paralleled in the history of our Unitarian churches or any others. Bulk does not measure quality and force, else were a panorama more than Raphael's Madonna, and the Pyramids more than the Parthenon, and Pollok's " Course of Time " more than the " Lycidas " of Milton, or than Keats's " Nightingale." I find no evidence that our society was originally con- ceived in a more liberal spirit than the Unitarian churches round about. But the evidences of such a spirit soon began to multiply after the settlement of Mr. Longfellow. Imme- diately after, the American Unitarian Association having smuggled some sort of creed or creedlet into its annual re- port, the society adopted a series of resolutions declaring that the fundamental principle of Unitarianism was character unmeasured by belief, and that any creed adopted by the Association could only express the creed of individuals vot- 34 Samuel Lo7igfellow. ing for its adoption. From this time, moreover, there was no distinction between " the church " of the New England polity and the congregation, the first article of the amended by-laws reading, " The pastor and congregation constitute the society, and no subscription or assent to any formula of faith shall be required as a qualification for church member- ship." Mr. Longfellow had but little strength to spare, and too much of it went to the building of this church, which coin- cided with the financial crash of 1857 : hence, perhaps, a lower roof and bigger debt than were intended at the start. The enterprise was watched over by Mr. Longfellow with affectionate solicitude. Here, as elsewhere, he broke with the tradition ; and, if not so successfully as in his pulpit min- istrations, it must be remembered that neither his plans nor the architect's were carried out. Whatever may be said of the building, the dedication sermon was entirely perfect and complete, wanting nothing. I never miss an opportunity to tell the story of that sermon as it came to me in Bridge- water, Mass., where I was then at school. It was sent by Mr. Plimpton to the good lady with whom I was boarding at the time. I remember well its lilac-tinted covers, but better still the freshness as of lilacs and all spring-like things which breathed from every line. Coming to me at a time when I was singularly sensitive to such impressions I doubt not that it had a great determining influence on my thought and life. It braced me to resist the great revival of that year, which was then upon us like a flood, and swept away nearly all my schoolmates into the orthodox church. No better sermon has ever been preached in this church, and it is just as good to-day as it was then. It was an expansion and an illustration of the glorious text, " One God and Father of all, who is above all and through all and in you all." The end was very characteristic of the man. It was the last stanza of Holmes's " Chambered Nautilus," then one of the latest inspirations of the most high God ; and for the line, Samuel Longfellozv 35 " Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast." he read, " Lift thee to heaven with a dome more vast," It was a ruinous change, no doubt; but Mr. Longfellow was not going to have anybody shut out from heaven. Better spoil a hundred stanzas than allow a hint of that ! Yes, if necessary ; but he was not obliged to use the stanza, and, besides, his thought was housed in it, as Holmes had written it, as safely as the nautilus in its shell. For all his poetry and ideality, our dear friend had a streak of literalism in his composition which sometimes marred his mending of the hymns he loved. There was great pride and comfort in the new home, — " New Chapel " Mr. Longfellow always called it, — and much satisfaction with the vesper service arranged by Mr. Longfellow, the first in use among our churches, and more simple and more beautiful than any since arranged. The hymns written expressly for the book were the product of a singularly happy inspiration, especially " Now, on land and sea descending," and " Again, as evening's shadow falls." They have all had the widest currency. Their Imes have gone out through all the earth and their words to the end of the world. But Mr. Longfellow was depressed by failing health and by the cowardice of some who did not like his "preaching politics," and so went off to safer churches, while some who stayed were full of weak regrets. June 24, i860, he preached his farewell sermon from Deut. xv. i, "At the end of seven years thou shalt make a release." It was a noble exposition of his views and feelings on the greatest themes, — God, Human Nature, Jesus, Immortality, the Bible, and the Nature of Religion. Then they were the views and feelings of a little company, now of a great and ever greatening host. It had been a ministry of wonderful refinement, beauty, tenderness, and spiritual grace. You will remember that in defining the church, in his first sermon after his installation, he said it was " a society of men, 36 Samitel Longfellow. women, and children." He did not put the children in his definition and leave them out of his habitual thought. Since Jesus took the little children in his arms and blessed them, no one has loved them more ; and some of those he blessed have never lost his benediction from their hearts. The boys, especially, were drawn and held to him by a most gentle bond, which yet was tough as steel. When, in 1876, we celebrated the twenty-fifth anniversary of our beginning, Mr. O. B. Frothingham was with us ; and in speaking of Mr. Longfellow and his ministry, he said : — He was a man of men, one of ten thousand, — a man the like of whom for mfusing a pure and liberal spirit into a church has never been sur- passed; full of enthusiasm of the quiet, deep, interior kind; worshipful, devout, reverent ; a deep believer in the human heart, in its affections ; having a perfect faith in the majesty of conscience, a supreme trust in God and in the laws of the world ; a man thoroughly well instructed, used to the best people, used to the best books and the best music, with the soul of a poet in him and the heart of a saint ; a man of a deeply, earnestly consecrated will ; simple as a little child, with the heart of a child ; perpetually singing little ditties as he went about in the world, humming his little heart songs as he went about in the street, wherever you met him. . . . He was one of the rarest men, — in intellect free as light, having no fear in any direction, able to read any book, able to appreciate any thought, able to draw alongside any opinion; hating nobody, not even with a theological, not even with a speculative, not even with a most ab- stract hatred ; he did not know in his heart what hatred meant : he loved God, his fellow-men. . . . He was always in an attitude of belief, always in an attitude of hope, brave as a lion, but never boasting, never saying what he meant to do or what he wished he could do, but keeping his own counsel and gonig a straight path, ploughing a very straight furrow through a very crooked world. He was as immovable as adamant and as playful as a sunbeam. He wrought here, as the oldest of you know, with a singleness of purpose and a singleness of feeling that knew no change from the beginning to the end. Surely, the man of whom such things could be said with truth and soberness was one whom it was good to know as pastor or as friend ; and when I think of these things, and of how I had his spirit to appeal to in so many hearts, and that of Staples, too, I wonder that my toilsome years have brought Samuel Longfellow. 37 to me so little gain, and question what the secret flaw can be in my own life that has so marred my work. It was, I think, a testimony to Mr. Longfellow's attach- ment to this society that after leaving Brooklyn he did not assume another charge till 1878, when he went to German- town, Pa., and remained five years, making the same beauti- ful impression that he made in our own city. The eighteen intervening years, less two or three in Europe, were spent in Cambridge, in his brother Henry's house. And it was in Cambridge that I saw him first, going across the college campus with three little girls, "grave Alice and laughing Allegra and Edith with golden hair," motherless girls since July, 1 86 1, when first their father felt upon his breast that " cross of snow," which, like the western mountain, from that time he always wore. Samuel Longfellow had an af- fectionate interest in the divinity students ; and, moreover, Samuel Johnson was my friend, and sent him to see me, and even after he had gone my poor old room, where Theodore Parker had " toiled terribly " in his divinity school-days, seemed strangely brightened up. After that I often saw him there, and in the fine old house, where I could make my boast that my own great-grandsire had, as one of the Marblehead regiment, been established be- fore any of the Longfellows ; and at last there came a day, in May, 1864, when I went there to show him a letter I had received from Mr. Mills, asking me to come to Brooklyn and preach for three months. If I could come with Samuel Longfellow's blessing and God-speed, I felt the battle was almost already won. He gave them heartily; and, when I was ordained the following December, he came and gave me the charge, and no charge of infantry or cavalry ever went with a more lively rush. It was an astonishment to those who had known Mr. Longfellow as one of the quietest of speakers, sometimes too quiet for the best effect. Perhaps no one was more astonished than Mr. Longfellow himself. The fact was that in the graduation sermon to mv class Dr. Hedge had come down pretty heavily on " Anti-supernatu- 38 Samtiel Longfellow. ralism in the Pulpit," and, while Mr. Longfellow's temper was not controversial, he could not allow opinions dear to him to be depreciated without rebuke. Seeing that Dr. Hedge had sent me here, it was embarrassing to have him punished at my ordination; but it was evident that Mr. Long- fellow had no choice. His task was set for him ; and how was he straightened until it was accomplished ! It was De- cember 2ist, and it was inevitable that the ringing charge should end with Lowell's summons to the endless way : — "New occasions teach new duties ; Time makes ancient good uncouth ; They must upward still, and onward, who would keep abreast of Truth ; Lo, before us gleam her camp-fires ! we ourselves must Pilgrims be, Launch our Mayflower, and steer boldly through the desperate winter sea. Nor attempt the Future's portal with the Past's blood-rusted key. " From that time to this there has been no occasion of special interest to our society to which Mr. Longfellow has not contributed some hymn or letter or address. At my own twenty-fifth anniversary in 1889 he spoke as if he knew he should not speak to us again. He sang the swan-song of his beautiful and earnest life. He expressed the essence of his life-long aspiration, hope, and dream. He pleaded for a religion of humanity, of righteousness, of piety ; a glo- rious trinity, three and yet one. " May this religion," he said, " continue to be taught and enforced here, — a religion free, yet reverent ; bold, yet not audacious ; advancing, yet not rash ; earnest, deep, sincere, using no words of mere use and custom ; consoling, bracing, cheering, — a religion at one with all knowledge, all science, all that is beautiful, true, gen- erous, and helpful to man ; which, if it gives new meanings, also gives new emphasis to the great words God, Duty, Im- mortality." There is the mark of our high calling. Just in proportion as we attain to that it will be well with us. " We shall sail securely, and safely reach The Fortunate Isles." In 1876 we celebrated the twenty-fifth anniversary of our first organization ; and at that time Mr. Longfellow not only 9 Samuel Longfclloiv. 39 wrote us a good letter, but a brave hymn, its theme the motto of our society, which he set in golden letters on the portal of our house, — " The truth shall make vou free." " We sowed a seed of faith and hope Out in the unfenced lands : Now, rooted deep and spreading fair, A living tree it stands. Nor strife nor cry has marked its growth ; But, broadening silently, Each bough that swa3-s in sunshine says, ' The Truth shall make you free.' "Its leaves have for our healing been By dews of heaven blest; Beneath its boughs our children sang. Our dear ones passed to rest. We in the shade of God have walked. Whom our own hearts could see ; And, lo ! from need of rite and creed His Truth had made us free. " From outward rule to inward law That Truth our feet still lead; From letter into spirit still, From form to life and deed! From God afar to God most near ! Our confidence is He; From fear of man or church's ban His Truth has made us free." And now let us, to the music of this noble hymn, pass to the consideration of a phase of Mr. Longfellow's activity to which, so far, I have made only incidental reference, — to the hymns he wrote and the collections of hymns he made alone or with another's help. He wrote the life of his brother Henry and that of his friend Samuel Johnson, both with perfect sympathy and delicate reserve ; and he contributed many articles of sterling worth to the Index and the Radical^ though, because of some physical or intellectual inertia, he always had to goad himself to do such things. But his best literary work was that of a hymn-writer, editor, and com- piler. Too often dubbed " the brother of the poet," an 40 Savniel Longfellow. appreciative wit once spoke of Henry in the same terms. And well he might, for in temperament and in his sympathy and appreciation Samuel was not the less poetic of the two. But, while in Henry the creative impulse was vigorous and unfailing, in Samuel it was irregular and weak. " Few verses of many years " is the apt title of a collection of his pieces that he made in 1887, and modestly distributed among his friends, without publishing it abroad. There are only forty-eight, and the most of them are hymns ; but what they lack in number they make up in quality. Of his vesper hymns I have already spoken. The first hymn he has pre- served was written in 1846, when he was in the Divinity School, for the ordination of Edward Everett Hale. It is astonishing how many of the hymns that are most precious in our churches were written by the students in that dear old hall, — Sears's " Calm on the listening ear of night " and Johnson's " Father, in thy mysterious presence kneeling," and " Lord, once our faith in man no fear could move," and many another hardly less than these. Several of Mr. Long- fellow's hymns besides those for the vesper service were written here in Brooklyn, one of them, " Out of the dark the circling sphere Is rounding onward to the light." At Nice, in i860, when he and Johnson were compiling "Hymns of the Spirit," they were both filled with the spirit; and Johnson wrote the glorious hymn " City of God, how broad and far Outstretch thy walls sublime ! " and the more glorious "Life of ages, richly poured, Love of God unspent and free " ; while Longfellow wrote, "Light of Ages and of Nations" and " One holy Church of God appears Through every age and race." The first fruit of his activity as an editor and compiler was Sainitel Longfellow. 41 the " Book of Hymns " which he compiled in the Divinity- School in co-operation with Samuel Johnson. Theodore Parker always called it the "Sam Book" or the "Book of Sams." It was published in 1848, and marked a great ad- vance both in poetical and spiritual quality on the preceding compilations. It first introduced to this country, but as anonymous, though it had been written in 1833, Newman's "Lead, kindly Light, amid the encircling gloom, but with a change in the third stanza that should never have been made. It was only one of many made by Mr. Long- fellow from first to last, and some of them have given much offence, and rightly, too ; but take them altogether, and the good he did outweighs the evil and mistake a hundred times. Few persons are aware how much he did to make for Whittier the reputation of a hymn-writer in the churches sec- ond to no other. For you will notice, as I said here a few weeks ago, that Whittier wrote few hymns as such. He wrote too easily to stop at the fourth or fifth stanza. The hymns we sing as his have for the most part been taken here a little and there a little from much longer pieces, and sometimes particular stanzas have been much altered. The hymn called "Christianity" in "Hymns of the Spirit" is taken from a poem on Democracy ; and the first stanza is almost entirely Mr. Longfellow's, — " O fairest born of Love and Light, Yet bending brow and eye severe On all which pains the holy sight Or wounds the pure and perfect ear." Incomparable the service done to Whittier and to us all by these changes, daring as many of them are ! Incomparable the service done by Mr. Longfellow's alterations generally, whatever there may be for our regret ! But concerning this whole matter Mr. Longfellow wrote to me only a few months ago ; the last letter, except one, he wrote to me, in that beau- tiful handwriting which reflected the graces of his mind and heart. He said : " It is the principle of adaptatioti to a special 42 Samuel Longfellow. use which is the only justification of changes in hymns that I can offer. It is a question of using or not using which makes it needful to change (i) some verses originally written not as hymns, yet which one wants to use as such, (2) some hymns written by persons of different beliefs from those who are to use the hymn-book, phrases in which could not be conscien- tiously said or sung by the latter, yet which from their general values of strength, fervor, or tenderness could ill be spared. Among such are the hymns addressed to ' Christ.' The many changes of this kind [addressing them to God] are the more defensible because the authors believed Jesus to be God. ... If I had been making a collection of hymns or re- ligious poetry for private reading, I should not have altered a single word." In 1864 Mr. Longfellow and Mr. Johnson published a new hymnal, " Hymns of the Spirit," which was a much richer treasury of spiritual things than its forerunner; while its entire omission of the supernatural element, of which the " Book of Hymns " had much, was a bar to its adoption in any churches but the most frankly radical. Moreover, there was in it much less specifically Christian matter ; and the hymns touching the life and character of Jesus were but few, though of the best. In these things Mr. Johnson's hand was much more evident than Mr. Longfellow's, who, nevertheless, was grieved because the new book was not adopted here. The book fell into the ground and died, but it has borne much fruit. It has been a quarry from wliich the loveliest courses of many subsequent hymnals have been hewn. Then, too, it showed the poverty of the current hymns concerning Jesus, and our radical hymnists have done something to make good the lack. In i860 Mr. Longfellow published a book of " Hymns and Tunes," which was widely used,, and by us here until we replaced it by a new edition that appeared in 1876, which differed from the first much as the " Hymns of the Spirit " differed from the " Book of Hymns." The four books have had an incalculable influence upon the hym- nology and worship of this country and Great Britain. They Samuel Longfellow. 43 have not only entered largely into all the Unitarian hymn- books, but into those of other sects, an English Episcopalian and a Scotch Presbyterian drawing on them for scores of hymns. In " The Wayside Inn " there is a description of " a theo- logian from the school of Cambridge on the Charles," which, we are assured, was not intended by Henry for a portrait of his brother Samuel ; but a better likeness of him could not be: — " He preached to all men everywhere The gospel of the Golden Rule, The new commandment given to men, Thinking the deed, and not the creed, Would help us in our utmost need. With reverent feet the earth he trod, Nor banished Nature from his plan. But studied still with deep research To build the Universal Church, Lofty as is the love of God And ample as the wants of man." The open secret of his influence was a beautiful sincerity. What the man could say he said : the priest added nothing because it was traditional or expected. On his seventieth birthday he said, "I shall ask no one to-day who does not call me ' Sam.' " If all who called him so had come, the old house would have been as full as when Glover's regiment was quartered there. But it was in speaking ^him, and not to him, that the monosyllable was used, except by the most privileged few. It meant that he was infinitely liked and trusted and admired and loved. He was the most compan- ionable of men, full of " wise saws and modern instances," always ready with a pun or an impromptu rhyme, full of sweet laughter, much travelled, and threading his conversa- tion with delightful reminiscences of the places he had seen, going about doing good in quiet, pleasant ways, laying the humblest duties on himself at all times with a cheerful heart. He was a living illustration of the truth that religion without dogma is no idle dream. He could not affirm the personal- 44 Saimiel Longfellow. ity of God ; but I have never known a man, nor read of one in books, including the New Testament, to whom God was a more Real Presence in his daily walk and conversation, in his sermons and his prayers, in the country, in the town, in all he thought and did. We hesitate to affirm the moral per- fection of Jesus ; and well we may, knowing so little of his out- ward and his inward life. But we do not question the ability of some men to do each time exactly what they think is right. We believe that there are men who do this, and that Samuel Longfellow was one of these. Our poets have been fortunate in writing songs appropri- ate to the end of life. Browning did it, and Emerson and Whittier, and Tennyson, who has just crossed the bar. And Mr. Longfellow is not a whit behind. His "Golden Sun- set " was written for his friend and mine, Charles Parsons, a lover of this place. It was suggested by a picture Mr. Par- sons painted and gave to him, if my memory has not begun to fail. The poem is a prayer, and it was sweetly answered for our friend. God grant that it may be for us ! "The golden sea its mirror spreads Beneath the golden skies, And but a narrow strip between Of earth and shadow lies. " The cloud-like cliffs, the cliff -like clouds, Dissolved in glory float. And midway of the radiant floods Hangs silently the boat. "The sea is but another sky, The sky a sea as well, And which is earth and which the heavens The eye can scarcely tell. " So, when for me life's evening hour Soft passes to its end, May glory born of earth and heaven The earth and heaven blend; "Flooded with light the spirit float. With silent rapture glow, Till where earth ends and heaven begins The soul may scarcely know." Samuel Longfellow. 45 The foregoing sermon was preached on Sunday morning, October 23, in response to the request embodied in the fol- lowing Resolutions : — The Trustees of the Second Unitarian Society of Brooklyn, having heard of the death of the Rev. Samuel Longfellow in Portland, Me., on the 3d inst., would hereby call 10 mind that from 1853 to i860 he was the beloved minister of this society, and that his ministry was character- ized by an openness of mind, a freedom from conventional- ity, a moral earnestness and spiritual fervor, which have been to us ever since "the mark of our high calling." They are happy to believe that in the course of thirty years' residence in other places he never lost his interest in this society, and that those who knew him here were always grateful for the influence of his word and life. Especially would we be glad that his beautiful hymns have brought him frequently to mind, and breathed on us his spirit of good will to men and trust in God. Resolved, That our minister be requested to make Mr. Longfellow's life and character the subject of a memorial discourse at his earliest convenience; also that a copy of these Resolutions be transmitted to Mr. Longfellow's relatives and inscribed upon the records of the society. Brooklyn, Oct. 4, 1892. The services connected with the sermon were associated with Mr. Longfellow as much as possible. The introductory sentences were of his selection, the Scripture reading was from the Apocrypha, which Mr. Longfellow was one of the first to love and read among us, when to read it occasioned the remark, " The Bible is not good enough for ///w," and the three hymns were hymns that he had written, and were as follows : — I. O Life that maketh all things new , — The blooming earth, the thoughts of men ! Our pilgrim feet, wet with thy dew, In gladness hither turn again. From hand to hand the greeting flows, From eye to eye the signals run, 4^ Samuel Lcmgfellozv. From heart to heart the bright hope glows The seekers of the Light are one, — One in the freedom of the Truth, One in the joy of paths untrod, One in the soul's perennial youth. One in the larger thought of God,— The freer step, the fuller breath, The wide horizon's grander view, The sense of life that knows no death, — The Life that maketh all things new. IL One holy Church of God appears Through every age and race, Unwasted by the lapse of years. Unchanged by changing place. From oldest time, on farthest shores, Beneath the pine or palm. One Unseen Presence she adores, With silence or with psalm. Her priests are all God's faithful sons, To serve the world raised up ; The pure in heart her baptized ones ; Love, her communion-cup. The truth is her prophetic gift. The soul her sacred page ; And feet on mercy's errands swift Do make her pilgrimage. O living Church ! thine errand speed ; Fulfil thy task sublime; With bread of life earth's hunger feed ; Redeem the evil time ! in. Now while we sing our parting psalm, With reverent lips and glowing heart, May peace from out the eternal calm Rest on our spirits as we part ! May light, to guide us every hour. From thee, eternal Sun, descend ; And strength from thee. Almighty Power, Be with us now, and to the end! THE OLD, OLD STORY. It is an older story than the theologians tell concerning Jesus that I wish to tell you this Christmas morning. And yet, perhaps, this morning is not the best I could choose for such a story; for the very name " Christmas " suggests the be- ginning of that legend which went on growing, century after century, until the theological conception of Jesus was as unlike the actual man who trod the earth of Galilee, and went teaching through her populous towns, as Pollok's " Course of Time " is unlike the simple songs that came straight from the heart of Robert Burns. If you know of any two things more unlike, then you can make a contrast of your own, and it will be a better one than mine ; for, the more unlike the things that you contrast, the better will they image forth the differ- ence between the actual Jesus and the mythological Christ, — the theological being, superhuman, superangelic, God, who in about three centuries was substituted for Jesus in the creed of Christendom and the affections of the Christian Church. And yet, strange as it may appear, while we know very little, almost nothing, about the birth of Jesus, we know a great deal about the birth and infancy, the ideal creation, of the theological being who usurped his place. I have often told you of the mediaeval play in which Adam is represented going across the stage, going to be created. Now, Christ has frequently been called the second Adam, and it is very certain that the New Testament Christ seconds the medicEval Adam in that we find him going across the New Testament stage, going to be created ; and not only so, but we find him in successive stages of creation, from the pure and then adorned 48 The Old, Old Story. humanity of the Synoptic Gospels up through the free and daring speculations of the apostle Paul, wherein he is a heavenly archetypal man, and next a cosmic principle, until at length in the Fourth Gospel he is so near the verge of god- head that, one step more being taken, he was well across the line. It is the first step which costs, the proverb says ; but this step, which was not the first nor the second, cost a great deal, — well-nigh two centuries of time, for the Fourth Gospel was written soon after 125 a.d., and the deification of the theologic Christ was consummated at the Council of Nicaea in 325 ; and a quite infinite amount of difference and debate and disputation, with much heart-burning, too, and many evil passions stirred up on the way. Every inch of that step has been preserved to us in the records of the early Christian Church, even in those tattered leaves and fragments of them which have come down to us. And we have no anger nor contempt for those who did the most to bring the change to pass. Here and there, no doubt, there were self-seeking and double-dealing and such things, from which no church has ever been entirely free. But, for the most part, the theo- logians of the second and third centuries who transformed the human Jesus into a mythological Christ, and that mytho- logical Christ into the infinite and eternal God, were ear- nest, honest men. They did the best they could under the circumstances of the time. Each hair's-breadth of the way was a necessity of the limitations of their thought, and the demand for definite opinion as a basis of church organiza- tion. And who shall say that there was not good as well as ill in the great transformation ? Who shall say that the simplicity of Jesus would have survived the strange vicissi- tudes of the first Christian centuries, that any word of Gospel or Epistle would have come down to us, any image of Jesus in the human semblance of his life, if all these had not been wrapped about in various integuments congenial to the taste and fancy of the Oriental and the Roman mind ? For, in truth, "the vast and splendid disfigurement of ecclesiastical tradition," as Mr. Curtis once called it in a The Old, Old Story. 49 phrase which was at once a compliment and condemnation, was less a distortion of the actual than a concealing of it from our view ; and, what the early theologians did, the later theologians, the later scholars and critics, have undone to a very great extent. They have rolled away the stone which the old theologians had set against the tomb, the prison, of the actual Jesus. They have said to him, " Come forth 1 " and he has rent the cerements of dogmatic repre- sentation, scattered the spices of an insane and sickly adu- lation, and come forth to walk once more among us as a brother man, with human limitations and defects, but none the less with a great human heart which dared to trust that God's could be no less, and with a passionate enthusiasm for all men and women bowed and crushed under the weight of any sorrow, misery, or sin. For all those to whom the course of modern studies of the New Testament is some- thing strange and far away, immersed as they are in many cares and troubles and anxieties, with no time for study, with no time for thought, it is nothing wonderful that there is no appreciation of the force and meaning of these studies. But that any one who has time for study and for thought, and who has followed the course of these studies, even in the most casual way, can help acknowledging that the theo- logical Christ, the second person in the Trinity, is an ideal creation of Greek metaphysics and corresponds to nothing actual in heaven or on earth, is almost as miraculous as any story that the New Testament legend has preserved. " Washington was born with his clothes on ! " said Nathaniel Hawthorne, protesting against Greenough's statue of Wash- ington, in which an army-blanket is the only drawback from the unqualified simplicity of the natural man. But suppos- ing any one who had known the Father of his Country from his infancy, and had watched his growth from stage to stage, and knew the very tailors who had made his clothes, should insist upon believing that he was born just as he was in his maturity, apparelled as he was at Germantown or Monmouth or on April 30, 1789, when he took the oath as President of 50 The Old, Old Story. the United States, over yonder in Wall Street, — such insist- ence would not, I think, be a whit more irrational than it is for any one who has studied the New Testament and early Christianity, as they can be studied in our time, to insist that the fourth-century Christ, the God-man, the infinite God, is no ideal development, clothed upon with the conceptions of Greek metaphysics, but the original Jesus of Nazareth ; see- ing that we know every step by which the simplicity of Jesus was overlaid and overborne by the vast and splendid disfig- urement of ecclesiastical tradition. That my comparison is a homely one I am well aware ; but, the homelier, the better, if so only I can make it plain how utterly preposterous ap- pears to me the dogma of the deified Christ in the face of what we know the course of deification to have been. Endeavoring to pass beyond all this and to come face to face with Jesus as he actually was in his short life, the facts appear to shape themselves into a story after this fashion : Jesus was born in Nazareth, a little town of Southern Gali- lee, about 1895 years ago, — three or four years before the beginning of the Christian era, which avowedly, but not really, is reckoned from his birth. He was one of many chil- dren of Joseph and Mary, peasant folk living in Nazareth. He was Mary's first-born child ; but quite possibly Joseph had children by a former wife, who shared with the new swarm the narrow home. The brothers of Jesus had not much faith in him during his lifetime, yet claimed a certain royalty on him after his death. The father was a carpenter ; and the young Jesus learned his trade, and followed it for many years. As for his education, it was mainly such as the hazza?i, or village teacher, could give him in the synagogue, — a learning of Old Testament texts deaconed out to the chil- dren as they sat, cross-legged, on the floor. As for his sports and pastimes, we know that he played at weddings and funerals in the market-place ; and that he made mud spar- rows, if he could not make them fly according to the fable, is easily within the bounds of probability. The time on which his boyhood fell was eager and intense. The coming The Old, Old Stoiy. 51 of the ]\Iessiah was the universal theme of conversation. The heart of Palestine was shaken with a vague unrest. Suddenly there was heard the voice of one crying in the wilderness of Judea, " Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand ! " The impassioned herald was John the Baptist, in whom the ancient prophetism, which had seemed to perish centuries before, attained a second birth. A harsh ascetic, rudely clad, his food locusts and wild honey, — a delicacy approved by certain modern travellers, — he proclaimed the speedy coming of the Messiah's kingdom, and endeavored to prepare the people by the amendment of their lives for the enjoyment of its felicity. The rumor of his preaching reached to Nazareth ; and Jesus left his carpentering and became a follower of John, receiving baptism at his hands. Whether, if John had lived and kept up his activity, Jesus would have remained contented wi.th the position of disciple- ship, we do not know. What we know is that John was seized by Herod Antipas, and put to death. Immediately upon the interruption of his ministry Jesus took up his work, not at first claiming to be the Messiah any more than John had done so, in whose preaching the idea of a personal Mes- siah entirely disappeared. But the nature of Jesus was un- like that of John. He was more social and humane. John came neither eating nor drinking. With such asceticism Jesus had little sympathy, while at the same time celibacy appears to have been with him a counsel of perfection too hard for the majority of men. Instead of retreating into the wilderness and summoning men to him, he went to them in one of the busiest centres of Galilean life, Capernaum, on the commercial road to Syria. From Capernaum he sallied out in all directions to the towns and villages about, including his own Nazareth, where his fellow-townsmen found it hard to think of him as a prophet. Out of his followers he chose twelve as his more immediate disciples, — not, w^e may be sure, in the haphazard way the Gospels represent, but not, as proved by the event, with any nice prevision of their charac- ters. 52 The Old, Old Story. For a year or more he continued his Galilean preaching, which was so little different from the best Pharisaic preach- ing of the time, especially the great Rabbi Hillel's, who was still living in the infancy of Jesus, that it may well be that we have many of his sayings and others of like quality attributed to Jesus. His own teaching was at first made up almost en- tirely of parables and ethical maxims, but we must never think of them as poured out in any such fashion as is repre- sented in the Sermon on the Mount. As he went on, his preaching aroused the enmity of the Pharisees; and then it became much more direct and vehement, and swept along in a great fiery torrent of denunciation and rebuke. Jesus, a myth ! Enveloped in mythology he was from head to foot, the more to prove his absolute reality, his magnificent virility, by the consummate energy with which he triumphs over these integuments, plunging the sword of his invective through them all, and through' the hypocrites of his own time, straight to the heart of your hypocrisy and mine and every man's self-righteousness. His relation to the organized religion of his time was not an iconoclastic one. The difference between him and the ecclesiastics of his time was one of emphasis. Their empha- sis was on Sabbath-keeping, Levitical cleanness, and so on. His was upon rectitude and compassion. Nor was it enough for him that the outward life should be correct and clean. Beyond the act he saw the disposition. A deep inwardness, an intense spirituality, was his most characteristic mark. To look upon a woman to lust after her was to commit adultery of the heart. How many saw themselves, as in a mirror, by that lightning flash ? And it was so with every aspect of the moral life. Were men keeping fast in expectation of a car- nival, or were their hearts enamoured of the good and true ? And so it was that, from being quite as much as Paul a Pharisee of the Pharisees, and looking upon these first as his guides, and next as his colaborers, he came at length to find himself arrayed against them with all the energy of his great soul, and with all the passion of his eager, flaming The Old, Old Story. 53 heart. The things they cared for most were least of all to him. The things they cared for least to him were all in all. Their characteristic trait, self-righteousness, became to him the one most deadly sin. " The publicans and harlots shall go into the kingdom of heaven before j/(?//." To these amen- ities they made such answer as a dominant ecclesiasticism always makes to those that question its authority. They called him a blasphemer, a wine-bibber, and a glutton ; they said that he was mad ; they said he had a devil ; and they set about to compass his destruction by fair means or foul. The consciousness of their enmity, and also of their bale- ful power, came home to the young prophet with appalling force. He had been full of hope and confidence. The kingdom of heaven was at hand, — a society of just men on earth. He saw Satan like lightning fall from heaven; that is to say, the bad cast out by no long and tedious process, but with immediate and sudden force. These sanguine ex- pectations soon gave place to others, dark as these were bright and cheering. The fate of John the Baptist he ac- cepted as his own, and he began to grow impatient for its consummation. With increasing opposition he asserted himself more strongly. At first he had no thought of claiming for himself the Messianic office. It may be doubted whether he asso- ciated with his idea of the coming regeneration of society the idea of a personal Messiah. John the Baptist certainly did not. Anything to the contrary is mere pious after- thought. But gradually the idea shaped itself in Jesus' mind that he was himself the Messiah. Martineau, who once agreed to this, now doubts it altogether, insisting that the whole representation of Jesus as the self-conscious Mes- siah is the reflection of a later time. But I cannot readily unlearn the lesson which I first learned at this great master's knee. There is a wonderful air of reality in that passage where, upon some lonely northern journey, trying his own heart, he sounds the minds of his apostles, asking them, " Whom do men say that I am t " They answer that the ma- 54 The Old, Old Story. jority consider him the forerunner of the Messiah's kingdom. " But whom do you say that I am ? " " Thou art the Mes- siah," says Peter. " Thou answerest well," says Jesus. " So I am." But he forbids them to disclose the fact. Now, I must beg you to remember that the Messianic con- ception, as it entered into Jewish thought and feeling in the time of Jesus, was as variable as the wind and sea. It va- ried with every prophet, with every rabbi, with particular localities, with each new claimant for the solemn and majes- tic role. There was nothing to prevent Jesus from having a conception of his own, and measuring himself thereby. It is by this that we should measure him, not by the gross mate- rialistic conceptions of his disciples and his countrymen at large. Nevertheless, his individual conception seems to have been largely formed by meditation on certain passages in the Deutero-Isaiah, notably by chapter fifty-third. When you are listening to the oratorio of "The Messiah," — to the words of it, — you are listening, for the most part, to the Mes- sianic mythology and theology in their grossest form. But when you come to the solo, " He was despised and rejected," you are very near to the reality of Jesus' inmost conscious- ness. With this key Jesus unlocked his heart, and we can do it now. On these words he shaped his vision of the things that must shortly come to pass. The Messiah of the popular imagination he certainly was not. The spiritual Messiah of his own deepest thought, his own divinest dream, his own most soaring aspiration, he just as certainly was. The mistake he made was in overrating the regenerating power of moral principle. But this is a mistake so seldom made that it is worth a thousand of the most indubitable certainties of those who never make mistakes, because they " dare not put it to the touch To win or lose it all." And now, having inwardly resolved that he was himself the Messiah, he found himself drawn with irresistible attraction to Jerusalem, the holy city of his people. Why, but that it The Old, Old Story. 55 was " one great corporation-temple," the stronghold of that arid formalism against which he had vowed eternal war? Why should he haunt the fringy edges of the fight, when he could plunge at once into the thick of it? He would go to Jerusalem, and there confront the huge ecclesiasticism of the scribes and Pharisees with his own simple thoughts of life and duty, and the great Father-love which is indifferent to everything but love and righteousness, and for the reality of which he needed no assurance other than the steady beat of his own loving heart. He knew that God was more than that ; the fountain higher than the stream. The rest is quickly told. With thousands of others from all parts of Judea, he went up to Jerusalem to attend the Passover. His journey took him east of the Jordan, across the ford at Jericho, then on to Bethany, and over the Mount of Olives down into the great ecclesiastical city ; and, as he went, especially at the last, a great crowd of Galileans fol- lowed him, shouting their faith in his Messiahship, while he, perhaps, did not realize the difference of their conception from his own. Or was it that his gentle heart could not deny itself this tribute of acclaim upon the threshold of the tragic scene which was to be the last ? Reaching the city, he at once threw his gauntlet in the teeth of the ecclesiastical religion. Going to the temple, he drove out the venders of sacrificial doves and cattle from the outer court, and for several days failed not to lift up his voice in defiance and rebuke of the prevailing formalism. The authorities, with that conceit which is universally characteristic of ecclesias- tical bodies, honestly regarded him as an impostor, and availed themselves of the treachery of Judas, the treasurer of the little company, to lay hands on him. On the eve of his arrest he kept the feast of the Pass- over with his disciples. This feast was ordinarily a joyous one, but this time it was not. The Master's mind was too intently fixed on his immediate future. For many days he had felt the coils tightening around him, and he knew that they would crush him soon. " How have I longed," he 56 The Old, Old Story, said, " to eat this Passover with you ! for I shall not eat it again till it be the true feast of redemption in the king- dom of God." Moreover, a vague suspicion haunted him that one of the twelve had gone over to the enemy. In the spirit of the ancient prophets, he engaged in a symbolic action. Breaking the bread and giving it to his disciples, he said, " Take, eat : it is my body ! " And, passing the cup, he said: "This is my blood of the covenant that shall flow for the salvation of many. Of a truth I tell you that I shall never again drink of this Paschal wine till I drink it new in the established kingdom of God." The act was perfectly spontaneous. It is probable that the broken bread and ruddy wine suddenly suggested to him his own broken body, his own streaming blood. As if the hope of his return might be denied or long delayed, he begged his followers to remem- ber him at each succeeding feast. There was no institution of the Lord's Supper. There was an act of natural human tenderness. Never was anything more simple. And, oh, the pity of it that from an action and from words so simple and humane should have come doctrines and practices more foreign to the mind of Jesus than any he endeavored to destroy ! " And, when they had sung a hymn, they went out." The hymn was the usual hymn sung upon this occasion. Then came the walk toward Bethany, and in the garden of Gethsemane the last and sharpest struggle between his natural human sensibility and the imperious exigencies of his ideal. He did himself injustice by his antithesis, " The spirit, indeed, is willing, but the flesh is weak." It was his spirit, not merely his shrinking flesh, that drew back from the impending doom. The outcome of the struggle has been well divined by the narrator of these last events: " Father, if this cup cannot pass away till I have drunk it, thy will be done ! " The little that remains had better, possibly, remain untold upon this happy day. You know how he was taken to the house of Caiphas, the high priest, and condemned to death The Old, Old Story. 57 because he had made himself amenable to the law which said that any prophet should be put to death whose teach- ings did not conform to the received traditions. Through the chill morning hours he was made the laughing-stock of brutal clowns, and buffeted by their rude hands. Taken by the Sanhedrin to the procurator, Pilate, their sentence was confirmed ; but the Roman death by crucifixion was substi- tuted for their favorite method, which was by stoning. Given their choice to release Jesus or a seditious zealot who had killed a Roman soldier in a brawl, they chose Barabbas; and Jesus went his way to die the hardest death men's cruelty had then devised. But a process, which often lasted two or three days, in his case was mercifully shortened to some six or eight hours. The sun had not yet set when the three faithful women, who alone remained when all the rest had fled, knew by the sinking of his head upon his breast that he was dead. Never was one who loved his fellow-men so much more cruelly destroyed. A decent burial was accorded him in the customary manner ; and the legend of the part which Joseph of Arimathea took in the last sad offices is too gra- cious in its probability for us to doubt its truth. "And there was Mary Magdalene and the other Mary sitting over against the sepulchre." It is quite possible that some of you may think the life of Jesus, as I have set it forth, is insufficient to account for eighteen centuries of Christian history, with their immense dogmatic and ecclesiastical developments. And why should it account for these things ? Does the stream a child may ford far up among the hills account for the Hudson or the Mississippi ? Historic Christianity is the life of Jesus plus a thousand confluents of thought and government and social organization. It is Greek metaphysics, and not Jesus, that accounts for the Nicene theology. It is the Roman Empire, and not Jesus, that accounts for Papal Christianity. To re- proach Jesus, as so many do, for all the follies and iniquities of historic Christianity, is as if one should reproach a moun- tain stream, as clear as crystal, edged with delicate flowers, 58 The Old, Old Story. for all the imperfections and impurities of a mighty river which did indeed begin its course far up among the hills, but into which a thousand storms have washed the ruin of the fields, and on whose banks men have built up their manu- factories and abattoirs, and into whose waters they have drained their towns and cities of their waste. But still, far up among the hills, the stream retains its crystal purity ; and still, for all the centuries have done to soil historic Christi- anity, the life of Jesus remains for us among the hills of Galilee as sweet and pure as ever mountain cup which all night long mirrors the quiet stars. Nor must it go unsaid that, as the mighty river, although variously soiled, is apt for uses that the upland stream cannot fulfil, even so historic Christianity, however soiled by various blood and filth, has done a mightier work than Jesus could perform, for the simple reason that it has been a flood of human life, of many times and races, blending into one glorious sweep, in its full course rejoicing many fields, and bearing many a costly freight upon its breast. It must be confessed that the actual Jesus, as we have found him in the New Testament, is very different from the theological Christ ; and it may be that few will be disposed to take the former and to let the latter- go. For the Jesus of the New Testament, in those parts of it which have least of metaphysical distortion, and with due allowance made for mythological additions, is not a god or demigod or super- angelic being or miraculous personality. He is — the man Jesus. He is every inch a man ; but such a man that in the coming ages of the world he will, I dare believe, when every superstition that invests him has been stripped away, on the basis of his simple manhood win for himself a higher place in men's regard, a warmer place in their affections, than any other who has cast his bread upon the centuries, trusting it would return to him in God's good time. Only a man ! Only a great loving heart that dared believe the Eternal Father kinder than itself! Only a man whose hatred of oppression, whose scorn of hypocrisy, and whose reprobation The Old, Old Story. 59 of self-righteousness were like lightning from the cloud ! Only a man who, when he had put his hand to the plough, would not turn back, though it was clear the deepening furrow was to be his grave ! Only a man who thought that righteous- ness and truth and love were all in all, and died in attesta- tion of the faith which not a hundred deaths could force him to forego ! Yes : he was only this. And, because he was only this, I charge you do not let the superstitious reverence of others prejudice your right and privilege to honor him with natural reverence and honest admiration. Take him for what he was, and you cannot make your churches or your homes too bright upon his yearly festival, your Christmas cheer too pure and glad to celebrate the immortal beauty of his life the transcendent purity and holiness of his ideal. As I was thinking of these things the other day, and won- dering what answer we should make if any one should chal- lenge our participation in this gladsome feast, I found my thought was going to a certain rhyme and rhythm of its own ; and I said, " I will end my sermon with these verses upon Christmas Day." And so I will : — What means for us this sacred day By all the happy children blest, So long desired it breaks in dreams The quiet of their rest ? Not ours the angels' peaceful song From heaven's height nor orient star, The magi's trackless way to guide With radiance pure and far. But still upon the inward ear That song descends with music sweet, Our hearts to cheer on darksome ways, With patience for our feet. It sings the hope of things to be Beyond the anger and the strife. When all the cruel hate shall cease, And Love be Lord of life. 6o The Old, Old Story. No fabled mystery is ours Of One who for her honor made The peasant-maid His heavenly bride ; And she was not afraid. No greater mystery we crave Than every gentle mother shows When, by God's grace, another life Within her own she knows. What need of miracle to make One Son of Man the Son of God, When all the sons of men that e'er Earth's temple-floor have trod Have but one lineage great and high, One Father who is over all The heights of heaven, the deeps of hell ; Who hears them when they call .-' Nor less if Brahm or Zeus the name Than when as God or Lord addressed : The prayer that trusts and loves the most For Him is ever best. O brother of the righteous will, O brother full of power and grace, Without one thought of fear or shame, We come before thy face ! Not ours to hail thee as the saints Of olden times, as some to-day, God, very God ; and still to us Thou art the Life, the Way. Thou art the Life : in thee we find The glory that our lives might wear Tf we for love and truth and right Could learn to do and dare. Thou art the Way ; for, still to know What goodness ever reigns above. There is no other way than thine, — To live the life of love. One God have we ! Sufficeth He For every want our souls can know; He holds us with His loving hand. He will not let us go. ■| The Old, Old Story. 6i In thee no godhead do we seek ; Yea, and no godhead can we find : Enough the loving human heart, The pure and holy mind. We love thee for thy tender love To want and sin and sorrow shown ; We reverence all thy truth and grace ; We worship God alone. Lo, in such heart we come with all Who hail thee on this sacred day In various speech ! Thou wilt not spurn Our simple gift away. THE FULLNESS OF TIME. I TRUST we are not yet so far advanced across the thresh- old of the year 1893 that my train of thought this morning* has on board nothing friendly to your aspiration or service- able to your needs. It was running very smoothly in my mind a fortnight back, when it was suddenly derailed by some derangement of the motive power. Last Sunday there was another train upon the track, but now it is clear again ; and it remains for you to judge how much of my original freight was of that perishable character which, even in such a temperature as we haye had of late, does not admit of any stoppage on the w^ay. When the year was reckoned from the 21st of March in- stead of from the ist of January, doubtless that day brought with it the same forward look that the first days of the year bring with them now, and the 20th of March the same back- ward look with which on December 31 we habitually regard the year then drawing to its close. But can it be that all the measures of our time are equally unreal, that, if our cen- turies had each a different term, — each thirty, forty, fifty years earlier than that familiar to our thought, — they would present the same accumulative and climacteric appearance which they do now, as from the nearing summit of our own we look back along the hoary peaks ? It may be so ; but it is impossible for us to take a dozen century strides backward into the past, and at each one pause and consider what was going on as each particular century neared its end, without having it borne in upon us with almost convincing weight that the centuries are no mere arbitrary measurements of life ♦January 15. The sermon was intended for January i, but Mr. Chadwick was pre- vented by sickness from preaching it. 64 ^/^^ Fullness of Time. and history, but something vital and organic, something " growing like a tree," and bearing fruit in its complete maturity as never in its youth or prime. Of course, the first stride back may breed in us an undue sense of this cumula- tive and climacteric development ; for it brings us to 1793, a year so memorable that it has become very much the fashion to drop the " 17," and say simply " '93." Few years in the world's whole history have stood out as that does, — so dark, so red, so terrible. Next Friday will be January 20, and that will be the hundredth anniversary of the execution of Louis XVI. ; and that was the beginning of the Terror which went on with ever fiercer passion until it had de- stroyed the leaders who had raised a Frankenstein they could not quell. Here, in our own America, we were mak- ing the trial trip with our new Constitution, — not the frigate, but the national craft so called, which had been launched April 30, 1789, only five days before the meeting of the States-General in France, an event in which the Revolution was as snugly folded as the oak within the acorn's tiny cup. Another century stride, and we are again confronted with a series of remarkable events. In Salem, Mass., we find all the superstition and fanaticism of the Puritan mind culminating in the delusion of witchcraft, and the awful tragedies which that delusion carried in its train. But men who could be so superstitious and fanatical could be eager and strenuous for their political rights ; and the English Revolution of 1688, which terminated the parenthesis of arbitrary power which, after Cromwell's death, included the reign of Charles II. (twenty-five years) and three years of his brother James's, had its fit correspondent in New England, where the govern- ment of Sir Edmund Andros was abolished in a summary manner. And, as if history had a passion for coincidence, it was on the 19th of April — a day which eighty-six years later would become one of the proudest in our annals, because of what was done at Lexington and Concord — that Sir Ed- mund's power was broken, and New England became once more a self-governing community. The Fullness of Time. 65 Now, take another century stride backward into the past, and where are you landed ? Sure enough, upon the deck of Admiral Drake's flag-ship, and the great Spanish Armada is coming proudly on to meet him and its doom, the very climax of the century for English history ; and about the same time — an event of much greater importance for the most of us — one William Shakspere was just starting out upon that course of play-writing which was to furnish the English mind with more food and stimulus than any other individual's work, if not than all the rest together, while across the channel the white plume of Henry of .Navarre was a sign and symbol around which were rallying the forces of a new and better time. Another century back, and where do we find ourselves ? Why, on the Santa Maria's deck with Christopher Columbus, "sailing straight on into chaos untried." We find ourselves in the full tide of the Italian Renaissance. Michel Angelo and Leonardo da Vinci have arrived at their maturity ; Raphael, in 1493, is ten years old, and Martin Luther is of exactly the same age ; and Copernicus, in whose astronomy the solar universe was to change its front, was twice as old as these. There never was a fruitfuller or more prophetic time. The discovery of the New World alone meant an oceanic civiliza- tion for one that had been potamic and thalassic ; i.e., condi- tioned by the boundaries and separations which first rivers and then seas afforded. By making the New World an ob- ject of contention among the nations of Western Europe, it was to try the strength of Holland, Spain, France, and Eng- land, and in the end to bring off the latter more than con- queror, — not because her fleets and armies were so much stronger than her enemies, but because to her belonged the genius for colonization as to no other people on the earth since the Phoenicians and the Greeks had spread their colo- nies along every habitable portion of the Mediterranean coasts. Another century stride takes us to Chaucer's England ; but, while he was musing, the fire of revolution burned. Our labor troubles of to-day are very mild compared with those 66 The Fullness of Time. which turned the realm of Richard 11. upside down, vviien Wat Tyler marched upon London with a hundred thousand men of Kent and Essex, hanging every lawyer that they met upon the way and spoiling the nobility and the clergy with a ruthless hand. Yet so it happened that serfdom was hence- forth in England doomed to perish, and the rights of labor were to be recognized and its service paid as they had never been before. For those to whom history is no mere matter of wars and fightings and political intrigues, but a matter of the people's life, the growth of their prosperity and self- respect, the history of the English people has not a better quarter of a century to show than the last quarter of the fourteenth century. And the religious interest of the period is not a whit behind, seeing that it included the last years of Wiclif and the first of Lollardry; and this means the begin- nings of the English Reformation, the creation of those ele- ments which gave to that Reformation, when it came, a depth, a seriousness, and a reality, which it could hardly have derived from the resolve of Henry VIII. to substitute a young and pretty for an old and faded wife, whether the Pope would let him or forbear. Another century stride into the past, and we come to one of the great landmarks of history, the end of the crusades, after two centuries of ups and downs. And to the careless eye the end seemed absolute defeat, leaving the matter just where it began, — the Christians driven out of Palestine at every point and the Mohammedans in complete possession. But we know to-day that the crusades, if they did not ac- complish all they hoped, or anything of that, did more and better. A dozen Holy Lands, a hundred holy sepulchres, would have been nothing to the accomplishment which was the waking of Europe from the torpor of the Middle Age, the end of feudalism, the rise of nationality, the beginnings of the Renaissance, — Greece rising from the dead "with the New Testament in her hand," with Plato and her poets, too, and with the hunger for beauty in her heart. I know that you are getting weary of this long and painful march ; but two Ihe Fullness of Time. 6/ more strides, and you may lay aside your century boots, and settle down into your normal pace. The century back from 1293 to 1 193 is not one to be taken at a stride. We should like to linger by the way; for it was the century /^r excellence of Gothic architecture, the century in which the cathedrals of Burgos and Amiens and Salisbury and Westminster si- multaneously lifted their ineffable glories into the astonished air, that had not had such beauteous things intrusted to its keeping from the beginning of the world. " Hell was moved at the coming of John," says a contemporary of that faith- less king; and in 1193 he was making a hell of England by his endeavors to usurp his brother's throne while the Lion- hearted was off on a crusade. But the last decade of the twelfth century was a very hot and stirring time, the time of Innocent HI.; — and what a blessed innocent he was, the persecutor of the Albigenses ! — the mid-point in that temporal triumph of the Papacy. of which Hildebrand furnishes the anterior and Boniface VIII. the posterior limit ! Another century back, to 1093, and William the Conqueror is but five years dead, the great Norman cathedrals, of which Durham is our best example, are going up in England, Peter the Hermit is returning from the Holy Land with all the ardors of the first crusade pent in his throbbing breast, — ardors which were soon to set ablaze all Western Europe with his fiery zeal. I do not know what luck I should have in finding confir- mation of my thesis, — the cumulative and climacteric devel- opment of the centuries — if I should go still further back. I have not even tried to think it out. But to stop where I have stopped is not an arbitrary proceeding. The Norman Conquest of England, in 1066, is for the most of us a point to reckon from, — a turning-point in history, almost as con- spicuous as the Protestant Reformation or the beginning of the Christian era. Then, too, it was in the eleventh century that men made up their minds that the world was not com- ing to an end, and that they would go to work and make it as much worse or better as they could without delay. 6S The Fullness of Time. And now do not imagine that I am completely caught in my own toils, and that, as I have gone back along the centuries, taking you with me, I have been unaware that you have been more or less sceptical of my results ; for I have not gone so fast but that here and there you have taken in the intervening times and made a note of them, of their circumstances and events, as great and as impor- tant as any I have named, as marking in its turn each century's grand climacteric. Thus, for example, as I was whisking 5^ou from the comparatively dull and stupid present back to 1793, you made the following note : " Civil War be- gins in the United States 1861, and ends 1865. Slavery abolished in rebellious States Jan. i, 1863, and in all the States by constitutional amendment February, 1865." Then, as we made our stride from 1793 to 1693, you made the fol- lowing notes: "Declaration of Independence, 1776; con- ceded by England in 1783; Wolfe's capture of Quebec in 1759, terminating the dispute of France and England for the possession of North America." And as we took the next stride back, from 1693 to 1593, you jotted down, about midway, Naseby and Worcester and Dunbar and some other famous battles, and "Charles I. beheaded Jan. 30, 1649," — events of capital importance to the history of political lib- erty in general and to that of Oliver Cromwell in particu- lar. I had an eye to these things at the time ; and, if I said nothing about them, it was not because I had learned a les- son of the Trinitarian who quoted the text of the Three Heavenly Witnesses to a Unitarian. " Why," said the Uni- tarian, "that is spurious. It isn't in any Greek MS. before the fourteenth century." " Oh," said the Trinitarian, " I knew that, but I thought perhaps you didn't." But I have not presumed upon your ignorance of the periods intervening between those on which I have endeav- ored to fix your particular regard. I have imagined you, as I have said, regarding these intervening periods in your swift course, and making a note of circumstances and events quite as important as any that have crowned each separate The Fullness of Time. 69 century's close. So much the better ; for you will remember that the subject of my discourse this morning is " The Full- ness of Time," — that is to say, how full time is of history, of great events, of " deeds of daring rectitude," and " scorn of miserable aims that end with self," and " thoughts sublime that pierce the night like stars, and by their mild persistence urge man's course to vaster issues." And while there is a tide in the affairs of men which has its ebb and flow, and while some times are dull and spiritless and others full of noble speech and God-like action, and while, without any forcing of the note, it would appear that the great periods and events of history have often coincided with the centu- ries' ripest years, yet have we here no argument to prove that in very deed and truth the centuries have a vital and organic character, a cumulative and climacteric development ; for, if we had taken any other starting-point and gone back from it by century strides, at -the end of every stride we should have found ourselves confronted by events as serious and important, by personalities as strenuous and grand, as those that have confronted us at every stage of the long receding journey that we have already made. It is not because the centuries have a cumulative and climacteric development, and flower only at the top, like famous Indian trees about which we have read ; it is because Time is so full of thought and action, purpose and resolve, so full of great events, great per- sonalities, the beginnings and the conclusions of great move- ments, changes, revolutions, that at each century stride we have found such noise and stir, such shaping and misshaping of the ends of human life. Try for yourselves : take any other starting-points, 1875, ^^ 1850, or 1825, and work your way back from that by centuries or half-centuries, and see if you do not find at every halt a busy, throbbing life, and that great events and towering personalities, although they may not be close at hand, are never far away. Oh, it is wonderful how this ant-hill which we call the earth pulses with multitudinous activity, and what a stir and bustle has been kept up from the beginning by these little creatures that run to and fro 70 The Fullness of Time. upon their various errands ! For, if you will pause and con- sider, you will perceive at once that the fullness of time which corresponds to that succession of events which we call history is hollowness and emptiness compared with that full- ness of time which has been correspondent with the actual conditions of the ever-changing world. For while those great events which we call history were taking place, — Caesar crossing his Rubicon, Xerxes shat- tered at Salamis, Charles Martel hammering the Saracens at Poitiers, William crushing Harold at Senlac, the English barons forcing Magna Charta from John's unwilling hand, the Declaration of Independence, and the Emancipation Proclamation, — while all these things have been taking place, Time, that illimitable continent, has not been filled with these alone. These alone would have rattled round in it, like the Positivist audience — " three persons and no God " — in a great London hall. For, even while these things were going on, getting accomplished in one way or another, how much more was going on, getting accomplished in some other way ! — suns rising every day and making every evening beautiful ; stars shining with their punctual light ; the incon- stant moon keeping her lovers company in their varying moods ; the old bounty going on without a word of explana- tion ; men and women telling each other the old, old story of which they never tire ; uncounted millions going forth to their work and their labor till the evening, and, with that, the aching weariness and the welcome rest ; the constant miracle of birth and mystery of death ; wonders of art and song ; science penetrating to the heavenly and terrestrial arcana with infinite patience and, at times, "great trembling of the heart." Even while the great things which we call history were getting accomplished, all of these lesser things were going on, — lesser individually, but in their aggregate how much the greater part ! And, were it not for these and such as these, what would "fill up as 'twere the gaps of centu- ries," the immense interstices and voids between the events which even the fullest of our chronological tables have set The Fidliiess of Time. yi down for our instruction ? Time was not empty in those un- recorded years. The days did not drag that brought no Marathon or PhiHppi, no Agincourt or Poitiers, no Auster- litz or Waterloo. They were full of light and beauty, love and toil, joy and sorrow, life and death. They were too short for all the labor to be done, and all the happy inter- change of lovers' gifts, and all the mothers' crooning over their sweet babes, each last the noblest offspring of all time. The thing that has been shall be, and it is. " Shines the last age, the next with hope is seen ; To-day slinks poorly off, unmarked, between j Future or Past no richer secret folds, O friendless Present, than thy bosom holds." It is a most contracted limitation of the Present which in- cludes only events of that great magnitude which marks the greatest headlands on the coast of the historian's chronology. How many of the wars and tumults that we read about with a throbbing pulse and leaping heart were the merest battles of a few kites and crows compared with that pro-slavery resolve and passion to enslave our continent, and that anti- slavery resolve and passion that the monstrous thing should not be done, which for twenty years confronted each other in the pulpit and the press and the political arena, and then for four years more on the embattled field ! Yet this whole history, in its more definite aggregation of events, has been a matter of the present time, within the lifetime of men and women who are only just beginning to grow old. Meantime there has transpired in theological circles an intel- lectual change so great that the whole history of theological opinion has nothing to compare with it in the same length of time or ten times over. We are told that the world's mate- rial wealth has been increased by a more splendid aggregate in the last century than for a dozen centuries before. And the increase of its intellectual wealth has not been less mag- nificent ; no, nor the increase of its theological intelligence and liberality. Why, here is this great Presbyterian body 72 The Fullness of Time. which, only a few years ago, we imagined as impregnable to any skyey influence of modern critical science as the ice-cap of Greenland, over which Lieutenant Peary has been sledg- ing for our entertainment and instruction, to any influence of the Northern sun ; and, behold ! it is as if that had begun to crack and heave and melt and detach great portions of itself, and send them drifting off, until, in warmer latitudes, they should be resolved into the general flood ! The case of Dr. Briggs presented so many points that there was danger of intellectual confusion in our apprehension of the matter. Take just this one : Dr. Briggs singled out Dr. Martineau as a good Christian, salvable and safe here and hereafter, notwithstanding his Unitarian and critical opinions. And how much of a heretic is Dr. Martineau ? So much of one that he is forced to the conclusion " that Christianity " (I copy his own words), " as defined or understood in all the churches which formulate it, has been mainly evolved from what is transient and perishable in its sources j from what is unhistorical in its traditions, mythological in its preconcep- tions, and misapprehended in the oracles of its prophets. From the fable of Eden to the imagination of the last trum- pet," he continues, " the whole story of the divine order of the world [as related in the traditional theology] is dislo- cated and deformed." Dr. Briggs, aware of this overwhelm- ing accusation of traditional Christianity from the pen of Dr. Martineau, nevertheless "finds no fault in the man." And in full view of this the New York Presbyterians, in their sol- emn meeting, inquiring what is the matter with Professor Briggs, answer that, if he is not perfectly sound, he is sound enough to enjoy the fellowship of the Presbyterian saints. Truly, to this complexion have we come at length : that one may entertain the most destructive criticism ever urged against traditional Christianity by a great thinker and scholar, and not be cut off from the eternal hope nor even from the visible Church. But if the " friendless Present " were not characterized by events and processes that ask no handicap for any others in The Fullness of Time. 73 the course of history, in order that they may be even with them in the race, how full the time which has contained these great events and processes would be of wonderful and pre- cious things ! How full of life ! Some fourteen hundred mill- ions of human beings alone surging up out of the mysterious background of the world since the beginning of our Civil War, as many more since Garrison said in the first number of the Liberator, " I am in earnest ; I will not equivocate ; I will not excuse ; I will not retreat a single inch ; and I will be heard." And what has this life been full of in its turn ? Of emptiness, no doubt, to a considerable extent, or of mere greedy appetites and sordid cares and trivial enjoyments, but here and there, in a few million cases, of faithful work, of un- speakable fidelity, of unmeasurable happiness and peace and joy. But the fullness of the time has not been by any means exhausted by the swarming human life. About five hundred thousand different species of plants have contributed their quota. Species, mind you! How many varieties does that mean ? There are seventy species of the golden-rod alone ; how many varieties I do not know. Of the roses there must be many more, and the apple-blossoms are the prettiest of them all. Think of the individual plant-life which these species and varieties involve ! You cannot think of it. A single dande- lion-blossom furnishes two hundred and fifty thousand pollen grains, a single peony three or four millions. There is no such prodigal as Nature in the Father's house, and every day he makes a feast for her and kills the fatted calf. The species of plants are absolutely many, but compared with the animal species they are few. There are only half a million of the former : there are two millions of the latter. And that means how many individuals 1 Again, you cannot compass it. Too many, you may think, when the census is of the house-fly or mosquito. But you should look at the matter from their point of view. Let us be glad there are so many living things to revel in the joy of life, and not grudge them now and then a drop of our own blood to cheer their tiny hearts ! 74 J^f^^ Fullness of Time. To life, add beauty. How full the days, years, and genera- tions are of this commodity ! Much of it is the beauty of life, of the plant's flowering, of the tree's handsome bole and swaying limbs and multitudinous leaves, of the iris mantling on the burnished dove, the swallow's motion and the insect's wings, of that human body in which Michel Angelo found God as nowhere else revealed, and the human face which ar- tists love, and which young men can hardly look upon and live. And still how few of all the many things which fill the continent of Time have I yet named ! The stars are in it, more than a hundred millions of them every pleasant night ; the seasons' various round ; the morning and the evening's splendors of the rising and the setting sun ; the mountains and the sea; the magnificence of the lightning and aurora; and the glorious hurly-burly of the storm. " I saw the beauty of the world Before me hke a flag unfurled ; The splendor of the morning" sky, And all the stars in company. I thought, How wonderful it is ! My soul said, ' There is more than this ! ' " And there is more, even the soul itself. " Thou gazest on the stars, my soul ; Oh, would that I could be Yon starry skies with thousand eyes, That I might gaze on thee." That would be to see something much more wonderful, much more beautiful, much more enduring, than the stars. And Time is full of soul, full of its thought, its purpose, and its love. And it is full of God. Oh, the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God ! How unsearchable are his judgments, and his ways past finding out. For of him and through him and to him are all things, to whom be the glory forever ! We hear it said that time will stanch the wounds and heal the sickness of our hearts. But time is nothing of itself. The Fullness of Time. 75 It never healed a baby's finger of its slightest hurt. But it is full of healing things, of cooling draughts for fevered hearts and brains, of balsams for our aches and miseries, of poppy and mandragora to medicine us to that sweet sleep which we owed yesterday, and of more drastic remedies to chase us of our shame and sin. It is full of nature, it is full of humanity, it is full of the divine beneficence, the eternal goodness, new every morning, fresh every evening, and min- istering wdth unfailing bounty to our bodies and our minds ; to our hearts, our consciences, our souls. And how do these considerations appeal to us individ- ually, just starting in upon another year .? Is it merely as a picture and a pageant, for the moment titillating our emotion, and then like the picture of the stereopticon that has faded from the screen t It may be so. It ought not to be so. This fullness of time ought to be a summons to us, a com- mand, an inspiration, to fill ourselves also with the fullness of God ; to see to it that the fullness of the centuries and of the current time does not shame our emptiness of thought and deed. " The universe came into existence for Tess," says her biographer, " on the day when she was born." But for the most of us it is only a little bit of it that comes into existence when we are born, and then a little more from time to time ; as much as we can appropriate. " I can see nothing on the outside," said Thoreau, in his last illness, pressing a weary forehead to the window-pane. There are those who can never see any- thing, or much of anything, on the outside ; nor on the inside, either, for that matter. Their life is vacancy ; and the full- ness of time and the munificence of nature and of God are for them as if they were not. It is sad and bad for those with whom these things are so. They are like those who, off the coast of South America, cried piteously for water to a pass- ing vessel, and the answer came back to them : " Dip it up ! Dip it up ! " for they were in that multitude of waters with which the Amazon freshens the tides of the Atlantic for a hundred eastward miles. So there are those who die of thirst when all around them are the waters of that river of Time, jG The Fullness of TUne. to whose eternal fullness the Amazon is but a silver thread, the plaything of a child. But it may be the vastness of this river over against the individual life makes the latter seem too insignificant to be of much account one way or the other. If so, remember that the Amazon and the Atlantic are but aggregations of so many individual drops of water, and that more than any actions of the greatest men these — also merely individ- uals — are the actions of the countless unremembered dead. The best of history has been made up of the contributions of men and women who have left no memorial. There is no discharge in this war. England, America, Humanity, God, expects every man to do his duty, every woman, every child. The New Year comes bringing a thousand and ten thou- sand possibilities of good and better, and of bad and worse. What shall it bring to us ? The parable has never been more aptly spoken than in those words of Emerson with which I welcomed you this morning, and to which I will now return : — *' Daughters of Time, the hypocritic Days, Muffled and dumb like barefoot dervishes, And marching single in an endless file, Bring diadems and fagots in their hands. To each they offer gifts after his will, — Bread, kingdoms, stars, and sky that holds them all. I, in my pleached garden, watched the pomp. Forgot my morning wishes, hastily Took a few herbs and apples, and the Day Turned and departed silent. I, too late, Under her solemn fillet saw the scorn." God grant that ours may be the wiser choice which wins from each fair Day, as she departs to come no more again, a happy and approving smile ! THE UNBRIDLED TONGUE. Though I have often quoted the advice of Channing to a young minister, " Never preach on any but great subjects," I have never accepted it entirely for myself. But, even if I had done so, I should not feel that I had violated it this morning in choosing for my subject "The Unbridled Tongue." I know that in simple truth, as in the language of St. James, the tongue is a little member. But a little thing may furnish a great subject. An atom is a very little thing, much smaller than the tongue. There are, as you well know, millions of atoms in the minimum visible of the microscope, in the smallest area the microscope can take into its field. But, if you imagine that the atom is a small sub- ject, you should read Dalton's " Atomic Theory," or Clerk Maxwell on the same subject, or any one of the greater books with which Dalton has been followed up. You may be sure that Bishop Butler never chose a subject that he did not think was great ; and in his only volume of sermons, one of the most precious, if not chc most precious, in the English language, he has a sermon on " The Govern- ment of the Tongue." I suppose thousands of sermons have been preached on this subject, some of them furnishing apt and striking illustrations of the sin which they deplored. When Sir Roger de Coverley asked his chaplain who would preach the next day, the chaplain answered, "The Bishop of St. Asaph in the morning and Dr. South in the afternoon," which meant that he would read the sermons of those excel- lent divines, it being his custom always to read the sermons of his betters, as many preachers since his time have done. I am by no means sure that I should not have done well to avail myself of this custom for today at least; and then 78 The Unbridled Tongue. Bishop Butler would have been your preacher, and the ser- mon would have been a better one than I can ever hope to preach. I have not seriously thought of doing this ; and, if I had, one thing would have deterred me. I have a parish- ioner who has never heard me preach, and she has requested me to preach on a certain subject, which is a part of the general subject I have chosen for my discourse this morning. This is going to be her sermon ; and in Bishop Butler's there isn't anything on that particular aspect of the matter on which she is particularly anxious I should preach. The Old and New Testaments and the Apocrypha abound in good sayings about the tongue, its uses and abuses ; and the most of them are in that line of literature which was dominant in Judea for some three or four centuries, the mid- point of which was the beginning of our era. This was the line of literature called Gnomic ; that is to say, proverbial, aphoristic. The praise of wisdom entered so largely into it that the Jewish name for it in the mass was " Chokmah," — Wisdom. The great examples of it in the Old Testament are Proverbs and Ecclesiastes, in the Apocrypha The Wis- dom of Solomon and Ecclesiasticus, which is also called The Wisdom of Jesus, the Son of Sirach ; while in the New Testament its sole representative is the Epistle of James, which, if not written by James, the brother of Jesus, was written by some one impersonating him. The teaching of the rabbis and the earlier teachings of Jesus ran very much upon this line. But with so much warmth does James ex- press himself that it is hardly to be doubted that, whoever he was and whenever he wrote, he had had such experience of loose and evil tongues that something very different from the calmness of proverbial wisdom got into and gave warmth and color to his phrase. "Behold," he says, "how much wood is kindled by how small a fire ! And the tongue is a fire, a world of iniquity among our members, which defileth the whole body, and setteth on fire the wheel of our life, and is set on fire of hell." So strong his feeling was about the matter that he declared, "If any man thinketh himself to The Unbridled Tongue. 79 be religious, and bridleth not his tongue, but deceiveth his own heart, this man's religion is vain." It is from this pas- sage that I have taken the title of my subject, " The Un- bridled Tongue." Judged by this standard, a great deal of religion would be vanity, even where there is no deliberate slander, no mali- cious misrepresentation, no wilful lying or bearing of false witness with a view to furthering our own selfish ends or compassing another's harm. Every community has enough of these things and to spare. The secret of lago did not die with him. Like George IV., he was " the father of a great many of his countrymen," and they intermarried in all nations, and their progeny is as the stars of heaven for multitude. But these things, however common, are not the faults of the unbridled tongue. The slanderer, the back- biter, the false witness, rides no runaway beast. With one firm hand upon the rein, he with the other drives his levelled spear straight for some open joint, and bears his adversary down ; no mimic tourney his, but murderous intent, and he is happiest when he can come upon his victim from behind and deal an unsuspected blow. Such wickedness is not un- common, and every day men as big-hearted as Othello, women of Desdemona's purity, are subject to its stress ; statesmen are blighted by its curse ; and humble village-folk, whose good name equally with the loftiest is the immediate jewel of their souls, discover that it has been filched by some malicious neighbor, and not enriching him has, in its going, left them poor indeed. But these are not the trage- dies of the unbridled tongue. It would have been superfluous for James to say that the deliberate slanderer or perjurer, however he might think himself to be religious, was not so. He could not think himself to be so, unless religion and mo- rality were as completely severed in his thought as in Ben- venuto Cellini's, whose prayers and homicides and adul- teries were a happy family, a society for mutual admiration. If many thousands have not so dissevered their morality and religion, it is not because the preachers have not given them 8o TJie Unbridled Touzue. ^> license to do so with their doctrine of salvation by faith alone and their contempt for the good works of morality as filthy rags. But, in setting forth the dangers and the miseries of the unbridled tongue, I shall not feel obliged to confine myself rigorously to those that were uppermost or exclusively in the mind of the New Testament writer. Evidently, he was think- ing almost, or quite entirely, of that talkativeness which the rough humor of our popular speech, that often goes straight to its mark, where that of our professional humorists fumbles in the dark, calls " talking with the mouth," meaning to imply a certain disconnection between the mouth and the mind, the tongue and the brain. There is much of this, a disposition to be talking abstracted from the consideration of what is to be said, with very little or no regard or thought of doing either good or harm. This " determination of words to the mouth " is equally the curse of our conven- tional "society" and the country-call or parish sewing-meet- ing, which has been the butt of so much cruel sarcasm and contempt. We read in the Apocalypse that upon one occa- sion there was silence in heaven for the space of half an hour; but that would not have happened if one of these talk- ative persons, whom we are now considering, had been pres- ent. To such a one " a dead pause " in the conversation is of all things the most dreadful, corpse-like thing ; and he pro- ceeds to bury it under a heap of words, indifferent to their quality, if, happily, they serve the end in view. There are some sentences of Bishop Butler on this head that are so good that I cannot find it in my heart to substitute for them my own poorer stuff. "The wise man observes," he says, ^'' that there is a time to speak and a time to keep silence. One meets with people in the world who seem never to have made the last of these observations. And yet these great talkers do not at all speak from their having anything to say, as every sentence shows, but only from their inclination to be talking. Their conversation is merely an exercise of the tongue ; no other human faculty has any share in it." The Unbridled To7io-ne. 8 1 stealing for the honest laborer or impurity for a consecrated wife, and that will kill out the habit where it has been con- tracted, as a good strong grass kills out the farmer's weeds. But for the bridling of the tongue on this particular course I must not forego what of deterrent force there is in the more serious conviction of all earnest minds, that the wicked- ness of profanity is no matter of the past, because that wickedness does not consist for us in disobedience to any positive command of God himself. There is an essay by George Eliot, called " Debasing the Moral Currency," which, I imagine, is extremely pertinent to the matter now in hand. "This," she says, "is what I call debasing the moral cur- rency, lowering the value of every inspiring fact and tradition, so that it will command less and less of the spiritual prod- ucts, the generous motives, which sustain the charm and elevation of our social existence, the something besides bread by which man saves his soul alive." Her application of this standard is entirely to the miserable buffoonery of parody and burlesque ; a fiend, she calls it, "which with lewd grin and clumsy hoof is breathing a moral mildew over the harvest of our human sentiments." I commend that essay to each one of you ; for there is great need of the doctrine that it preaches and the warning that it sounds in this our time, when even that good taste which generally controls the columns of the New York Tribune can nod so sleepily that a parody can get in on Mrs. Howe's noble and sacred " Battle Hymn of the Republic," — a parody substituting " Hill " for " God " in the refrain " For God is marching on." But what has this "debasement of the moral currency" to do with the habit of profanity, and the wickedness of that habit? Much everyway. This, too, is a debasement of the moral currency as much more injurious than the habit of buffoonery and burlesque as it is more common. We can- not take in vain the name of any person or thing that is most sacred in men's thought and feeling without depress- ing the moral and spiritual value of that person or thing. And, moreover, we are in honor bound to reverence others' The Unbridled Tongue. 89 reverence, or, if not to reverence it, to respect it, and to treat it decently. We cannot bandy names that stand with other people for great spiritual realities, as if they were but sticks and stones, without lowering our own spiritual temper. If we must swear, let it by all means be by the gods that we pretend to reverence and serve, and not by other men's. You will see, therefore, that, in speaking of the wickedness of profanity, I have not used a word which exceeds in any least degree my sincere and full conviction in regard to it. It is wicked to debase the national currency, to make coin that is a poor or worthless travesty of the genuine article. It is more wicked to debase the moral currency. We can- not soak ourselves in habits of contempt for the great things of literature and art, and be " always reverent in the right place, you know," as Clarissa put it to her friend. And we cannot indulge in the habit of profanity without losing some- thing ourselves, and robbing others of those spiritual reali- ties which are connoted by the names by which we curse and swear. I have heard the name of God so spoken that I held my breath as if there might be a theophany upon the spot, a visible presence of the Most High. And the name of Jesus ought never to be spoken without that reverence which belongs only to the greatest of mankind, and that tenderness which is for those who die in order that the truth they love may live and grow. But such tenderness and reverence and such sacred awe cannot be associated with these names where they are but the raw material of profanity, and where the names are soiled and tarnished and degraded there is less likelihood that the realities which they connote will ever be a source of peace and blessing for our hearts. There is another way of the unbridled tongue of which I can hardly trust myself to speak. It is so indelicate that to speak of it delicately is almost impossible. It is the way of " loose talk," as it is called, as if with conscious reference to the New Testament phrase, — "and bridleth not his tongue." This, too, is profane ; but what it profanes is not the holiness of any sacred name, but the holiness of sacred 90 The Unbridled Tongue. mothers, sisters, daughters, wives ; the holiness of the asso- ciations which these names suggest to every generous youth or faithful man. And the danger here is all the greater be- cause this talk is often made the vehicle of real wit; and not all can do as Abraham Lincoln did, — hold fast the wit, and let the other go as if it did not exist. We could wish that he had never looked for jewels in these swinish snouts, and we may be sure that it is not safe or wise for any average boy or man to do so. His greatness does not palliate the fault which made his greatness less. Few boys or men can get into the way of liking witty things, coming in such a questionable shape, and not later get into the way of em- bracing the foul shape which they at first could scarce en- dure. Why speak of such base things as these to those the atmosphere of whose homes is of such purity that the boy and youth can hardly understand what I am speaking of at all ? Ah ! but there are streets as well as homes ; and there are schools. And, when I was at Exeter Academy, were not the boys almost all " gentlemen's sons," so called ? and yet could any sewer of the Bowery run with fouler speech than that from which no boy could possibly escape, though he might spurn it with a contemptuous and indignant heel ? And, as it was there, is it not generally in our schools and colleges and in all our aggregations of young men t I should be glad to know that it is not. What are the remedies for this intolerable disease ? It might help a little if the boy could know how there would come a time when he would be without so much as one re- membered stain ; but there it is upon his memory, and let him cry to it as often as he will, " Out, damned spot ! " it will not go away. It might also help a little if the boy should ask himself, " What would my mother or my sister think of this?" But here, again, there is no specific for the malady. There must be a regimen of good companionship, and noble art, and books the power of whose attraction never lies in an impure suggestion or lascivious word. And I can imagine anatomy and physiology so taught that every The Unbridled Tongue. 91 student's body should be to him the temple of the Living God, which he must not defile with so much as one doubtful word. Last, but not least, is it not worth considering whether the luxurious habits of our modern life are not inimical to purity of thought and deed, whether something more frugal and severe and stoical would not give the fibre of our youth and manhood an energy of resistance against evil which it does not now possess, a strength for curbing passions which now run an unbridled course, destroying him who boasts the splendid chariot, and not him alone ? Be these things as they may, I have already said enough, perhaps too much, to show that not without ample justifica- tion did the writer, whom the Christian centuries have fondly imagined to be "James, the brother of the Lord," state himself so earnestly and strongly when he said, " If any man among you thinketh himself to be religious, and bridleth not his tongue, but deceiveth his own heart, that man's religion is vain." IMMORTALITY. It is only an unsympathetic and unsocial nature that with- draws itself willingly from the common joys and satisfactions of mankind. The social and the sympathetic will try to find something in the common thought and feeling with which they can ally themselves. Thus, when this Easter festival comes round, those who cannot find in the resurrection of Jesus from the dead any argument for the soul's immortal- ity, nor in the New Testament any evidence of the slightest weight for the fact of such a resurrection, may still keep the feast of immortality with a joyous mind. They may recog- nize that to many thousands the resurrection of Jesus is not so much the conscious ground of their belief in immortality as it is a symbol which many beautiful associations have en- deared; and, if they may not sympathize with the symbol, they may with the belief for which it stands. Those who cannot do this, if they are socially inclined, may gladly turn their thoughts into the same channel through which the common thought is streaming deep and wide. The time in- vites to thoughts of immortality, whatever they may be. The natural season would do this, were it not re-enforced by any ecclesiastical event. Life after death is the engrossing spectacle of these April days. The grass is getting green, the buds are swelling, the lovely nakedness of the trees is being softly veiled, and soon they will be clothed in living green. However dull the understanding, the heart will fi-nd in this mysterious transformation a parable of hope. At least the old-time question, "If a man die, shall he live again ? " will again assert itself, and to the exclusion of all 94 Immortality. others make itself heard and heeded to the hushed and rev- erent mind. If a man die, shall he live again ? Yes, yes, yes, yes, the answer comes at once, and not of one reiterative voice, but many different voices, — so many and so different that we cannot at first distinguish whence they come and what they are. One is the voice of the Earth Spirit. It proclaims the resurrection of the body ; or shall I say, a resurrection of the body? For, certainly, it is not that resurrection of the body, which has been a Christian doctrine for some eighteen hun- dred years, which is still the doctrine of the Churches in their simplest creed. For this doctrine of the resurrection is that our bodies which are buried in the earth shall be raised again at some last day, limb for limb, feature for feature, atom for atom, as they are laid away. But this doctrine has at all times presented many difficulties, from which, despair- ing of a solution, the believer has taken refuge in the divine omnipotence. All things are possible with God ; and he will see to it that, whatever intermediate mixture there has been, each shall be made sure of his own in the great day of his appearing. Certainly there are aspects of this belief which have a very great attraction for the affectionate and longing heart. We can imagine no faces and no forms that we would so gladly see in heavenly places as those our dear ones wore when they were with us here on earth ; and this is true, not only of the faces radiant with youth and beauty we have known and miss, but equally or more of those deep-lined with age and care and many sorrows, — not only of the forms brimful of eager life and sprightly grace, but of those bent low by many years and burdens, wasted and marred by time's remorseless hand. But such are the economies of nature that for these things we do not dare to hope. We do not hope for them in our most thoughtful hours. In these we recognize that it is the souls we see in faces that make them infinitely dear, and these we may yet see less thickly veiled than now. We are so constituted that we must compose the scenery and personal aspects of an immortal life out of the ! Immortality. 95 material which our present life affords. But the resources of the Almighty Love are not so limited as our imagination ; and, if another life shall answer to our hope, we can trust to that to clothe it in such form and feature as will satisfy our hearts. The resurrection of the body of which we are assured by that same voice of Science which forbids the former hope is the reincorporation of its elements in the vital order of the world. The minerals and gases that composed the bodies of the five hundred trillions of humanity who have come and gone upon the earth, they have been taken up into the earth's economy of vegetable and animal and human life ; and how full of gracious and poetic implications is the thought ! Now it is Omar Khayyam who interprets it for us ; and anon it is our own high-hearted Lowell, lover of all nature and human- ity with a great and equal love. The Persian sang : — " I sometimes think that never blows so red The rose as where some buried Caesar bled, That every hyacinth the garden wears Dropt in her lap from some once lovely head. " And this reviving herb whose tender green Fledges the river-lip on which we lean, — Ah ! lean upon it lightly ! for who knows From what once lovely lip it springs unseen ! " Less fanciful and of a surer essence is the modern song : — " Could we be conscious but as dreamers be, 'Twere sweet to leave this shifting life of tents Sunk in the changeless calm of Deity ; Nay ! to be mingled with the elements. The fellow-servant of creative powers, Partaker in the solemn years' events, To share the work of busy-fingeied hours, To be night's silent almoner of dew, To rise again in plants and breathe and grow, To stream as tides the ocean caverns through, Or with the rapture of great winds to blow About earth's shaken coignes, were not a fate To leave us all disconsolate." 96 Immortality. No, indeed, it were not, if the body's fate were all. How could we ask for it a better resurrection ? What stuff that •saints and heroes have been made of animates our dust! What various parts this in its turn shall play, — brown in the rsunburnt sod, bright in the multitudinous laughter of the sea, Ted ill the rose's heart, dancing along the veins of youth and •raaid for centuries to come ! How strange it is that some will be at pains to frustrate or retard this genial process of the world! that they will try by various artifice to hold the •soulless body back from participation in the 'light of setting -suns, the appealing loveliness of flowers, the storm and pas- sion of heroic blood ! I think we should do all we can to hasten this participation. Another voice that answers " Yes " to our persistent ques- tion is the voice of Fame. " Those who win me," she says, "win immortality." There have been times in the world's history when this immortality of fame has been more to men than any other, exercising a more powerful influence upon their imagination and their hope. The literature of the later Roman Republic and the Early Empire is full of talk of immortality, which, when you come to examine it, proves to have nothing to do with an immortality of conscious life, but only with the making of a name that shall go sounding on for centuries. In the " Agricola" of Tacitus one of ihe >most excellent of those bequests made to us by the ancient world, we read : " Whatever we loved in Agricola survives and will survive in the hearts of men, in the succession of the ages, in the fame that waits on noble deeds. Over many of those who have gone before, as over the inglorious and ignoble, the waves of oblivion will roll. Agricola, made known to posterity by history and tradition, will live forever." Well, he has lived so long, — for 1700 years, — thanks mainly to the eulogium of Tacitus. The Jewish mind was not superior (or inferior) to this idea. That a man's name shall no more be remembered is one of the dreadful things of the Old Testament. "The righteous shall be held in -everlasting remembrance." "Their bodies are buried in Innnortality. 97 peace, but their name liveth forevermore." We are too quick to cry out shame upon this idea as a motive power in life. It compares very favorably with the idea of the Christian Heaven rewarding with an eternity of bliss faith in the saving merits of the atoning sacrifice of Christ. To bend one's self to strenuous endeavor in the cause of truth or righteousness, to the end that one's name may be held in lasting and affectionate remembrance, is no mean or paltry attitude of the human spirit. But those who have attained to the immortality of fame have oftenest been those to whom this has not been presented as a motive for the conduct .of their life. They have done the great deed, lived the heroic life, written the divine poem, painted the glorious picture, because it seemed to them the right and fit and noble thing to do ; because, so help them God, they could no otherwise. If they had known that they could reach oblivion by no shorter path, they would have trod it without shrinking just the same. A thousand mighty names of statesmen, warriors, poets, painters, discoverers and inventors and reformers, founders and destroyers of religions, rulers and helpers of mankind- attest the high and beautiful reality of this immortality of fame. And yet how narrow its inclusion in comparison with all the swarming multitude of the countless generations of the world ! It is a brave man who dares expect this immor tality. " What hope is there for modern rhyme To him who turns a musing eye On songs and deeds and lives that lie Foreshortened in the track of time ? " A distinguished writer attempted a few years ago to make out a list of the immortal names of literature. It was not a very long one, and contained some names concerning which it was permitted us to doubt. More recently we have had presented to us a list of thirteen English poets of unassailed renown. Only thirteen ! And yet the poets seem to have 98 Imni07'tality. a stronger grip on the succeeding generations than any other class, except the founders of religions. The forgetfulness of the generations laughs to scorn the contemporary judg- ments of mankind. The excellent Southey was as sure of lasting fame as was Shakspere when he wrote, " Not marble nor the gilded monuments Of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme. " If he had ever doubted, Landor would have braced his fail- ing heart. But Emerson, writing of his visit to Wordsworth, says : " He pestered me with Southey. Who's Southey ? " He was a man whose life was a true poem and his best title to the recollection of mankind, So it has been with many thousands who imagined theirs to be immortal names. If a place in the Biographical Dictionary were the sign of fame, even then how few the famous ones would be ! How few the immortals, if such immortality were all. Still, at the best, it is a very real and noble immortality. We cannot tell how much it is to those who strove for it 'mid dust and heat, or forgot themselves into its splendor. But it is much to us. It enlarges our companionship. It gives to us some of our rarest hours. "Ever their phantoms arise before us, Our loftier brothers, but one in blood, At bed and table they lord it o'er us With looks of beauty and words of good." ^' If a man die, shall he live again ? " Another voice that an- swers, Yes, is that of Influence. It may be easily mistaken for the voice of Fame. Sometimes the two are blended into one. But, while fame is for the few, influence is for the many. May we not say, It is for all t " No man liveth to himself, and no man dieth to himself." With all fame there goes along a certain influence. The fame of the warrior incites to warlike deeds, the fame of the saint to things saintly. The fame of the discoverers makes men Colum- buses; the fame of the inventors will not let young men sleep. Immortality 99 When literary fame has kept alive the author's book, then his influence is greatly, it may be immeasurably, enhanced. But in this field there may be world-wide influence without one leaf of fame. What influence the Psalms of the Old Tes- tament, the Gospels of the New, have had on human life ! But their authors have no fame. Can there be fame with- out a name ? And we do not know who wrote the Psalms (not in a single instance), nor who wrote the Gospels. But the immortality of influence is not alone for those who have written some great thing or painted some great picture or carved a Venus of Melos, and scorned to blot or mar it with a name. It is for millions who have done no great or fa- mous thing. Fathers and mothers live before their children lives that are all integrity and purity and blamelessness and gentleness and peace. They pass away ; and their children remember all the gracious beauty of their lives, of which, perhaps, they were too little conscious when they might have done something to soothe and heal and bless their aching hearts, and they love to speak of them to their children in serene and quiet hours. So they become " the sweet pres- ence of a good diffused." The warning word which fell un- heeded from their lips, in some dim place of memory and tears, attains to life and power. But, while for the few the immortality of influence may renew itself from age to age, for the many it is only a brief extension of their mortal life. It is a pebble cast into a silent pool. Fainter and fainter from the centre grow the undulations, and then wholly fade away. It is a torch that goes from hand to hand. At each exchange it shows a less- ening flame, and at length it quite goes out. As it is easy to confound the voice of Fame with that of Influence, so it is easy to confound the voice of Influence with that of Affection, which also answers. Yes, to our great question. It is a choral answer in which blend the voices of many little children with those of older folk. The immortality of affection, like that of influence, is not gener- ally of indefinite continuance. The immortality of influence I oo Ini mortality, can be indefinitely prolonged when the influence is em- bodied in some great book or some just law, or some great discovery or invention. By the same means the immortality of affection can be indefinitely prolonged. There are many of old time and modern date " whom not having seen we love." Sometimes the art of the biographer helps us mightily to this result, he makes so real the personality of the man or woman he presents to our imagination. The quality of the personality has much to do with it. There are men of history and literature whom we admire and honor and revere, but whom somehow we do not love. Washington is one of these, and Channing is another. But we love Abraham Lincoln ; we love Theodore Parker ; we love Charles Lamb ; and Thackeray, oh, how much ! and Longfellow aud Curtis ; and Lydia Maria Child. And still the real Valhalla of affection is mainly populous for each individual with those whom he has personally known and loved. In our Father's house are many mansions. We have, each one of us, a little heaven of our own inhabited by dear ones whom we have known and loved, with whom we love to draw apart in our best hours, or when we are tired and troubled, and it is good to seem to feel their hands upon our foreheads and to seem to hear their well-remem- bered tones. This heaven of affection is pre-eminently the children's heaven. This immortality is theirs, — the chil- dren's who have gone away from us. They have no fame. Strictly speaking, they have no influence. But how the well-springs of affection bubble where they touched the earth ! The time they stayed with us in their bright tab- ernacles of soft gleaming flesh is no measure of the after- life they live in our affectionate remembrance. In the pure heaven of many a fond mother's heart there lives some little one whose earthly life was only a few months long. I know of one who only for a few short hours made piteous wail, and then lapsed into silence ; and she to whom he came kept him in mind continually, saw what he might have been in every young man's face, and drew all young men to her IiHDiortality, i o i by this subtile charm. Truly, this heaven of affection is a pure sweet heaven. One day of it is worth a century of fame. I would rather be loved as millions of men and women and little children have been in this world than have the fame of Alexander or Napoleon. This is an immortality that we can earn. We can make sure of it by our fidelities of word and thought and deed, by our tender- ness and our compassion. And, if we attain to it, we shall be companioned by the humblest and the greatest of mankind. " If a man die, shall he live again ? " There comes another Yes, this time as if from far-off centuries. What it signifies is the immortality of organic perpetuity. Its import is that to the remotest generations the life which we are living now will be a factor in the great problem of human destiny. The world has never been without some apprehension of this truth. But it has been reserved for modern science to develop and illustrate it as it has never been developed or illustrated before. It is not dependent for its force wholly upon the doctrine of heredity, about which the battle is raging with uncommon fierceness at the present time. Or- ganization is only one factor in the determination of char- acter. Social environment is another. If we bring nothing with us, we enter on a great inheritance the moment we arrive. Grant that there is no physical inheritance. Society is an organism as well as the human body. All that we say and do is registered upon this social organism, and trans- mitted to an indefinite future. And so it happens that we are begotten of the spirit of the great ones of the past. They live in all the structure of society. Their life is ploughed into the world. I am sure that there is nothing in the philosophy of Auguste Comte so well worth taking home to heart and life as this doctrine of organic social immortality, the after-life in us of those who have preceded us, the after- life we are to live in those who follow us. It is a wonderful thought. It is a thought full of inspiration. It inspires us — it should if it does not — with gratitude and high resolve. We are so different and all the world about us is so different 102 Immortality. because of those who have preceded us that we are put upon our honor to live our lives in such a sacred fashion that our after-life, not only in those who are our physical inheritors, but in the whole community, shall be something fine and sweet. A thought like this gives a pathetic interest to our most ancient ancestry, the men of the old stone age, who used such chips as they could find to serve them, the men of the new stone age who chipped the chips into more ser- viceable shapes. We feel our fellowship with these. As with these crudest things, so with the finest. The soul of the first man who blew upon a reed and heard a sound that made him blow again lives now in every organ that dissolves our being in its flood of harmony, — ay, and the soul of every man who added reed to reed until the sorrow, joy, and aspira- tion of the world had found an instrumental voice. Another instrument — the violin — furnishes at once an illustration and a type. They say the music of all playing on it enters into the very substance of the violin, and makes it full of music, and so the more responsive to the master's hand. Society is like an old Cremona. It has been played upon by countless generations ; and all the passion of their sor- row and regret, their hope and longing, their virtue and their courage, has passed into it, till it is full of music, satu- rated with the melody and beauty of the days that are no more, — hence more responsive to each new player's strong and tender hand. High heavens are these of our imperishable dust, of fame which is but for a few, of influence and affection to which the humblest may aspire, of organic social perpetuity to which for good or ill we all of us attain. But there is higher yet. It is the heaven of personal conscious immortal- ity. If a man die, shall he live again after this glorious fashion ? If not, then we will console ourselves as best we can with the immortalities that still remain to us; but it will be only a poor and miserable consolation. If all the voices of science were against it, we would still go on nursing the unconquerable hope. But the voices of science are not all Immortality. 103 against it. For one thing, the total inability of science to translate the terms of molecular action in the brain into terms of consciousness make it impossible to prove that both "house and tenant go to ground," that with the destruction of the organism there is annihilation of the soul. There is no positive help in this suggestion. It does but clear the ground. Upon the ground so cleared advances the doctrine of the conservation of energy, one of the grandest scien- tific doctrines of our time, second to none unless it be that of the origin of species by means of natural selection and the survival of the fittest. This doctrine is that, as no par- ticle of matter can ever be destroyed, so can no particle of force. Now then, as I have said before, suppose a Shakspere, tired pf the life of the metropolis, having made a snug fort- une, which he is pleasantly conscious of, and a fame world- wide and century-enduring, which he is hardly conscious of at all, goes back to Stratford with the hope of living there a quiet, comfortable life, when suddenly some malady swoops* down upon him, he dies at fifty-two, and his dust is stored away under the chancel of the noble church in which he meant to be a decent worshipper. His is the immortality of fame, beyond a doubt; his, too, the immortality of influence wher- ever his deep words are sounded by men's plummet-thought ; his, too, the immortality of affection, for we have reason to believe that he was kind and lovable ; his, too, the immortal- ity of organic social perpetuity, so deeply did he live himself into his own and all succeeding times. But here is no suffi- cient conservation of the energy that was vital in him when disease and death arrived. All this had been provided for, and still the mighty intellect remained. Shall we follow the fortunes of the body with the eye of our imagination, hoping to find in what became of that, in certain gases, certain growths of vegetable and animal life, a sufficient conservation of the energy that could produce the mirth of Falstaff, the tenderness of Cordelia, the fascinating loveliness of Juliet, the graver charms of Portia and much suffering Desdemona, the doubt of Hamlet, and the awful tragedy of Lear? To 104 Immortality. think of such a thing is to confute it utterl}^ But, if the con- servation of energy be indeed a law, if it runs all the way through the world of matter and of spirit, then somehow and somewhere the souls not only of the mighty ones of intellect and imagination, but of humbler folk whose names are soon forgotten upon earth, are enabled to resume their conscious individual life. I could as soon believe that all the energy in Shakspere or in Washington was conserved in the few pounds of minerals and gases called their "remains "as to believe that all the energy in any father or mother, whose heart has beat with pure affection, whose intelligence and will have been devoted to all loving household ministries, is conserved in that we fondly lay away where grass may grow above it and over it the birds may sing. Another scientific doctrine that advances to the encourage- ment of our hope of personal continuance is that which plays so conspicuous a part in the system of organic evolution, — the doctrine of correlated growth. In the development of animal structures there goes along with the development of special organs, parts, and functions the development of cer- tain others, adapting them to changed conditions. Now, in the spiritual life of man there goes along with the develop- ment of all that is best in his intelligence, noblest in his af- fections, grandest and sweetest in his moral life, the devel- opment of the hope of an immortal life. Here is a cor- related growth ; and, if the hope that is thus developed is not a valid hope, if it is not a solemn and majestic portent of a divine reality that we can trust with calm assurance, then have we a radical contradiction set in our moral nature, and increasing there with every higher thought and nobler act and purer purpose of our lives. It is not as if we went about deliberately to make our hope more eager; but it is made more eager in the natural order of our lives, just in pro- portion as we seek great ends, live for the imperishable things of truth and righteousness. Can it be possible that there is such a contradiction at the inmost heart of things that every higher thought or nobler act or purer purpose tends to im- Im 1710 via lity. i o 5 merse us deeper in a terrible illusion ? Are not a thousand and ten thousand voices of science blending to assert the unity, the solidarity, of universal life ? Can there be contra- diction and confusion only here where life reaches its highest level, or must there be some pre-established harmony between our hope and some sublime reality? If the almost invari- able concomitant of the noblest living is this glorious hope, then, unless Nature is radically divided against herself, this almost invariable concomitance suggests with overwhelming seriousness that the same Power which organizes in us the purest splendors of our thought and love organizes in us the hope of an immortal life, in which these splendors shall go shining on forever. Here is an element so positive in con- firmation of our hope that it seems to me to have the force of scientific demonstration. The correlation of growth is but a single aspect of the doc- trine of the survival of the fittest. I know by the "fittest" in this proposition we are to understand merely the fittest, i.e. the ablest, to^survive. But, if the significance of the doc- trine of organic evolution resolves itself into this identical proposition, it is a truism that was hardly worth the patience of Charles Darwin's fifty toilsome years. Unless this doc- trine can assure us in its widest scope of the survival of the ideally fittest, the fittest to carry on the work of evo- lution to yet grander heights of beauty, use, and joy, its intellectual magnificence is the merest mockery of its moral imbecility. Then there is more of moral worth in one New Testament sentence, which declares, "The earnest expecta- tion of the creation longeth for the manifestation of the sons of God," than in Darwin and Spencer and all our modern evolutionists together. But this, I take it, is good evolution. The development of free personality in human life has been so far the crowning work of evolution, the crowning work of God, this side of death ; and I take it that he did not blunder into it, that the creative purpose set this way before the sing- ing of the morning stars. This is no pulpit evolutionism of the transitional kind. It is the evolutionism of the most trained io6 Immortality. and eloquent disciple of the master of this school. But the survival of the fittest, I am perhaps reminded, is the survival of the species, not the survival of the individual after appar- ent death. True, very true. And, if we could be allowed the vision which we once enjoyed of Humanity upon the earth advancing endlessly to an ever greatening, never abso- lute perfection, we might be tempted to be satisfied with this. But, when science comes to tell us that an incident of evolu- tion will be the destruction of the earth and of the solar system, and finally the resolution of all the starry heavens that we see into "a gray, wide, lampless, dim, unpeopled world," she comes bringing a fresh argument for an im- mortal life of conscious personal continuance. Only so can we have any true survival of the fittest. Or does any one pretend that the fire-mist into which all things are to be re- solved will be fitter to survive than this present glorious uni- verse ? Then why did not the original fire-mist of the world survive, as fittest so to do ? No : I cannot believe that all this travail of the ages will only bring to bir^-h another form- less universe. I must believe that it has brought to birth a universe of souls whose continuous and exalted life will justify the long gestation of the world, and justify the blotting out of every star that shines in the deep vault of heaven. I cannot see why we should stultify ourselves, that we may justify the ways of God. White may be black, sweet may be sour, right may be wrong, to other faculties than ours. It is only by our own that we can judge ; and, judging by our own, "without spirit immortality," as Le Conte has said, "the cosmos has no meaning. . . . Without spirit immortality this beautiful cosmos, which has been developing into increas- ing beauty for so many millions of years, when its evolution has run its course and is over, would be precisely as if it had never been, — an idle dream, a tale told by an idiot, signify- ing — nothing." But in this general ordering of our lives it is not so much by special arguments (of which there are a hundred that I cannot name) as by the natural operation of our intellect hn mo via lity. 1 07 and our affection and our moral sense that our assurance of immortal life is quickened and enlarged. It is the privilege of intellect to abolish death to our imagination by its lofty manifestations and its insatiable hunger for the truth. We demand a future for the satisfaction of this hunger, for the survival of these lofty manifestations. It is simply impos- sible to think the death of genius. It may have lived out the full term on earth : no less we claim for it another lease beyond. The more companionship with intellect, the more faith. As we hold reverent converse with great minds, our own faith in the great future grows more strong. The more we know, the less we seem to know. We crave a boundless opportunity. Ages upon ages will not appease our hunger for the truth, once it is fairly roused. The more we make of life, the more we cry out for another with spontaneous desire. The more we love, the more immortal seem we to ourselves. The more love we see in other men and women, the more sure we are that their souls can never taste of death. There are some who love so much that, if we had never thought of immortality before, the thought would spring under their blessed feet, that never tire of going upon love's errands to the sick and sad. And, when affec- tion is most sorely tried, when graves open at our feet, though they be very little graves, they are always wide enough for entrance doors to heaven, always deep enough for artesian wells that yield us from unfathomable depths the waters of ineffable desire. But there is an operation of our souls that generates the desire and consciousness of immortality, as does not intellect or love. It is in the awful presence of the moral law that this desire and consciousness outbloom like English hedge- rows in the spring. Denounced as selfish, egotistic, they thrive upon self-sacrifice and self-denial as upon no other food. It is all that is best in us, all that is purest, all that is most just and merciful, all that is most loving and tender and kind and sweet and true, that pleads with God for ever- lasting life. Not for reward, not for rest, not for mere io8 Immortality, happiness do we so plead, but only for an opportunity to live a life proportioned to the normal make and stature of our souls. We could change "earth" to "heaven" in Brown- ing's " Easter Day," and cry, — " Be all of heaven a wilderness, With darkness, hunger, toil, distress, Only let me go on, go on ! " I have read of late, as I have read a thousand times, that, if there were no future life, our present life would lose all sacredness. But no : it would still remain for us to do the right and seek the true and love the beautiful. I cannot accept the ruling which denies the possibility of virtue to those who are so constituted that their faculties vibrating in unison have never rendered those peculiar tones which we call immortality and God. Without these beliefs life can be intensely moral, it can be packed with justice and benefi- cence. But these are not all, although they are the highest and the best. Joy is one grand constituent of a true life; and though, without a recognized belief in immortality or God, a man may be intensely moral, may display a heroism that would be impossible if his life were filled with these be- liefs, his life without them can never be so rich and full, so perfect in its symmetry, so free and joyous, as if they were his indefeasible possession. Without them he may have such joy as never fails to wait on duty bravely done ; but only with them is his path bright with sunshine, and his life a happy and triumphant song. There are those among us who find themselves unable to attain unto the glorious assurance of an immortal life, as there are others who for one reason or another, or without conscious reasoning, have no more doubt of it than of their existence here and now. Let those who are most confident hold their high faith with reverent tenderness, taking to them- selves no credit for the good which their worth has not bought. Let those who are least confident, or assured ad- versely, hold fast to their sincerity, witnessing a good con- Immortality 109 fession of their doubt, as others of their faith. If they are to meet at any time with that great Presence which has gladdened many hearts, it will not be by turning wilfully aside from their accustomed way. There may await them some divine surprise. There may yet be for them some gracious intimation. " Haply the River of Time, . . . As it draws to the Ocean, may strike Peace to the soul of the man on its breast : As the pale waste widens around him, — As the banks fade dimmer away, — As the stars come out, and the night wind Brings up the stream Murmurs and scents of the Infinite Sea." I SEEING AND BEING. In a certain union of contradictories Hegel imagined he had found the key that would unlock the philosophic riddle of the world, and his contention jumps with many things in our experience of thought and life. I remember to have read a sermon a good while ago that maintained the arith- metical thesis, "Twice one is — one." It was an assertion of the double unity of life, which finds its largest illustration in the unity of mind and matter in the eternal substance of the world. That we see what we are is a thesis fundamental to idealism, and has many interesting and important il- lustrations on the planes of moral and religious life. But, however true it is, — and that it has in it abundant and im- pressive truth I have no shadow of doubt, thanks to life's double unity, — the converse of this proposition is, or con- tains, another phase of truth worthy of our consideration. We are what we see. It is on this side of the shield that I should like to have you look with me this morning in the main, but not until we have attended somewhat to the other. It may be that the other is the more important. As a statement of our relations to the physical universe, I should say that it could easily be pushed too far, that it has fre- quently been pushed too far by philosophical idealists. It has been pushed so far that logically it has left the individ- ual alone, — himself his world, his God, his everything, — ' all these the Brocken Spectre of himself upon the void. But no : for each phenomenon there is a noumenon, a back- ground of reality. It is remote enough, incomprehensible and inviolable enough, to take away all terror from the bug- 1 1 2 Seeing and Being bear of materialism which has of late so scared the theolo- gians, whose ancient stock made it a household pet. The witty answer to the question, " What is matter ? " " Never mind," has little philosophic truth. Matter, as ordinarily apprehended, is more largely mind than it is anything else. What we are conscious of is certain affections or conditions of our minds ; not of the not-me, which determines these affections and conditions. Nature is plastic to our sensibility. We have no reason to believe that there is anything in nat- ure resembling our sensations. There are non-resembling signs of certain vibrations impinging on the eye or ear or nose or cuticle. When Emerson says, " The part our organ- ization pla3's in our sensations is too large," he is treason- able to his own philosophy. How can it be too large ? Why should we care whether the subject or the object con- tributes more to the sensation ? Why should we say that we are cheated with illusion, if the subject — the organism — contributes more. The joint result is the reality. Why should we deduct from the beauty of the sunset " the round- ing, co-ordinating, pictorial powers of the eye " 1 " If eyes were made for seeing, Then beauty is its own excuse for being," by whatever art the magic is produced. But it is not " all in your eye." I doubt not that " the rounding, co-ordinat- ing, pictorial powers " of our eyes at Chesterfield one recent summer were as good as ever ; and yet we didn't have one glorious sunset the whole summer long, while the next fol- lowing we had a dozen or a score. Idealism goes too far, it becomes insane and idiotic when it finds the total order of the world to be only an order of our apprehensions. Such a conclusion is the negation of all science. You will not convince the Agassizs and Darwins, the Newtons and the Herschels, that they have not discov- ered an order in the external world. This does not come or go with human sensibility and understanding. These are the mirrors upon which its beautiful reflections fall. The Seeing and Being 113 object is the sleeping beauty : the subject is the fairy prince who wakes her with a kiss. How beautiful is the awaken- ing! But the kiss is given in the dark. We cannot imagine what nature would be without our sensibility. We know there would be no beautiful reflection of the mountain in the lake, the trees in the still stream. We know that there would be no sound of woods or waters. What would there be ? Ah, that we cannot say ! But that we see what we are is a proposition that has still a world of truth in it when idealism has so far relented from its worst extrava- gance as to allow that there is an objective order and reality corresponding to the order of the mind. But this fascinating riddle may easily detain us over-long. There is a practical idealism to which the most stubborn opponents of the philosophical variety must heartily assent. However large or small the contribution of our physical and mental organism . to our vision of the world, the con- tribution of our individual intelligence and character is im- measurably great, so great that it is only in a very superficial and almost nominal sense that all men can be said to live in the same world, to see the same earth and skies and men and women. It is the mind, the character behind the sensu- ous perception, that makes the world one thing to one man and to another something wonderfully different. It was not that Shakspere's eyes and ears were so different from other men's that the world presented to him such a solemn and majestical, such a wonderful and beautiful appearance. To what man before Shelley had the skylark made such music as it made for him ! To what man before Keats had the nightingale made the song he heard ! Field mice and daisies were not scarce in Scotland before Burns's day, nor water-fowl and blue gentians in Western Massachusetts be- fore Bryant took his thoughtful walks abroad. The differ- ence between the poet's world and that of any ordinary dull- ish mortal is not greater than that between a Newton.'s, a Lyell's, or a Darwin's and theirs who have never been in- structed in their mysteries of the earth and sky. 114 Seeing and Being " He that doth look on glass, On it may rest his eye; Or, if he chooseth, through it pass, And all the heavens espy." It is no matter of choice whether one will have the vulgar or the scientific vision of the world; but the difference between the two is hardly less than that between a day of all-en- shrouding mist and one of all-revealing clarity. For one it is an aggregation of mere facts. For the other it is a har- mony of majestic laws, of beautiful relations, of wonderful co-ordinations. Not only intellectually, but also morally, we see as we are. The moral nature of the individual, even his conduct for the hour, is a medium that affects his vision of the world for better or for worse to an incalculable degree. The inward disposition is more definite than the outward fact. Do I speak of things of which you have no knowledge } Have you never found out for yourselves what awful truth there is in them ? Then are you indeed most happy. But you can- not all have been so fortunate. Some of you, I know, have sometimes been abroad with Nature only to miss her usual charm, only to feel her sunlight searching out your fault, her grass and flowers turning to burning clay and cinders under- neath your aimless feet, her beauty smiting you as with a mace, and all because you have brought with you a selfish, soiled, or unforgiving heart. And, when you have done your best to make amends, how quick has Nature been, like a fond mother, who has not willingly repulsed her child, to take you back again ! If such is the operation of some baser mood, how much more spoiling to our apprehension of the world about us is a habit of ignoble living ! "Who shall dwell in thy tabernacle, and who ascend unto thy holy hill ? He that hath clean hands and a pure heart ; who hath not lifted up his eyes unto vanity, nor sworn deceitfully." And it is not only in the natural world that we see as we are. With the human world it is the same. Men of base motives find base motives everywhere. There is nothing Seeing and Being 115 harder than for the average politician to imagine any one as doing anything from any other motive than his own selfish greed of place and power. " They all do it " is his miserable excuse. It is not true of God alone, it is also true of man, that to the pure he will show himself pure. But in no prov- ince of men's thoughts has the principle I am enforcing larger application than in the theological and religious. " The Ethiop's God has Ethiop's lips, Black cheeks and woolly hair ; And the Grecian's God has a Grecian face, As keen-eyed, cold, and fair." That is the smallest part of the whole story. The morality of the gods reflects the morality of men. The Hebrew Jeho- vah was a very cruel, treacherous, and immoral god, until the Hebrew people, having bettered their own morals somewhat, put him upon his honor. The compassionate Father in heaven to whom Jesus lifted up his gentle heart in perfect confidence was but the bright reflection of his own compas- sion with all sorrowing and sinful folk. Yes, we see as we are. But, however startling may be the paradox, the converse of this proposition has an important, if not equal illustration. There is action and reaction. In that seeking for adjustment which resumes the course of bio- logical development from the polyp to the hero and the saint there is mutual reaction of the organism and environment. In the doctrine of evolution there is no chapter of more ex- quisite and fascinating beauty than that which exhibits the matter of "protective resemblance," the approximation of in- sects and animals in their forms and colors to the forms and colors of their habitual environment. What twig-like insects we have seen ; what plumage, as if patched with leaf and sun ; what grasshoppers and spiders on the seashore rocks that seem to have made their clothes or armor from the lichens among which they live ! Here is not only fact, but parable. Not only insects and animals, but men and women, are what they see, take on the forms and colors of their so- 1 1 6 Seeing and Being cial or political environment, tend to become indistinguish- able from their environment for good or ill. Emerson, who was nothing if not idealist, in the same breath with his ideal- ism of the most radical type celebrates the influence of the concrete world upon the mind. " What is a farm," he asks, " but a mute gospel ?" " The chaff and the wheat, weeds and plants, blight, rain, insects, sun, — it is a sacred emblem from the first furrow of spring to the last stack which the snow of winter overtakes in the fields. . . . Nor can it be doubted that this moral sentiment which thus scents the air, grows in the grain, and impregnates the waters of the world, is caught by man and sinks into his soul. . . . Who can guess how much firmness the sea-beaten rock has taught the fisherman ; how much tranquillity has come to man from the azure sky, over whose unspotted deeps the winds forevermore drive flocks of stormy clouds and leave no wrinkle or stain ? " The world is full of gracious illustrations of this passage of the word of nature and the environment into the heart of man. What is all of Wordsworth's most characteristic poetry but a variation of this theme, — the educative force of natural sights and sounds ? It is Nature speaking in his voice who says : — " Myself will to my darling be Both law and impulse ; and with me The girl in rock and plain, In earth and heaven, in glade and bower, Shall feel an overseeing power To kindle or restrain. " She shall be sportive as the fawn, That, wild with glee, across the lawn Or up the mountain springs ; And hers shall be the breathing balm. And hers the silence and the calm Of mute insensate things. " The floating clouds their state shall lend To her ; for her the willow bend ; Seeing and Being Wj Nor shall she fail to see E'en in the motions of the storm Grace that shall mould the maiden's form By silent sympathy. "The stars of midnight shall be dear To her ; and she shall lean her ear In many a secret place Where rivulets dance their wayward round, And beauty born of murmuring sound Shall pass into her face." How was it that a boy of seventeen summers came to write "Thanatopsis," the grandest, the most nobly beautiful poem yet written in America, and yet so grave, so solemn in its majesty, that it seems to have in it no pulse of youth ? I could show you easily enough if you should ever come to Chesterfield. The next town is Cummington, and there upon a steep hillside, hard by the road, there is a simple granite obelisk which tells that here once stood the house in which the poet Bryant was born. The village graveyard was di- rectly opposite, its narrow area crowded thick with grassy mounds and humble monuments. The boy was what he saw. The companionship of this silent congregation shaped his thought. One feels, when standing there, that he is present at the birth of the great poem. The woods and waters that contributed their part to his intellectual being are not far away. The environment of youth is always formative to a degree which that of later years can seldom equal or surpass. George Eliot says, " A human life, I think, should be well rooted in some spot of a native land, where it may get the love of tender kinship for the face of the earth, for the labors men go forth to, for the sounds and accents that haunt it, for whatever will give that early home a familiar unmistakable difference amidst the future widening of knowledge." This grace was granted her in liberal measure. She, too, was what she saw. The quiet beauty of the midland counties passed into her soul, as into Charlotte Bronte's passed the lonely wildness of the 1 1 8 Seeing and Being Yorkshire moors, and into Tennyson's the watery waste of Lincolnshire, where far across the fens is heard the booming of the sea. It is not, this grace, for poets and for novelists alone. When I go back in summer to the lovely fields close to the pleasant shore where so many of my happiest early days were spent, I know that something of those fields and of that shore in me, not wholly spent or spoiled by all the interven- ing years of various toil and fret, makes answer to their pleasantness and peace. We are what we see, but hardly what we see in any casual way, — only that which we see habitually, and with the eyes of fond companionship and faithful love. " We all," said the apostle, " beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image from glory to glory." And what is the glory of the Lord if it be not the glory of all things that are ? There are none of these that we can look upon with loving eyes without receiving from them some- thing of their likeness, something of their actual beauty, strength, and grace. It is so with nature, it is so with art, it is so with books, it is so with men and women, it is so with the discovered laws and harmonies of the physical and moral world ; it is so with " the intelligible forms of ancient poets, the fair humanities of old religion " ; it is so with fair and excellent ideals of character and life. We cannot look upon these things, we cannot live in daily conversation with them, we cannot yield to them a cordial admiration, without incorporating in our spiritual substance the divinity that is in them. That was no mere fancy which Lowell put into " The Beggar," the most precious poem of his early life, in which he prays the oak, the granite ledge, the lofty pine, the brook, the violet, for something of their various good. The love of these things is a prayer ; and, as we pray, the fashion of our countenance is altered, yet more the fashion of our hearts. What forest strength there was in Bryant's character; and is for generations in his verse. What freshness of all grow- ing things, what bracing mountain air, what clearness of far shining stars, there was in Emerson, and still abides for us Seeing and Being 119 in everything he wrote ! But what is true of these is true of all. Not surelier does the bird, the butterfly, the tiger patched with sunshine and with shade, appropriate the form and essence of the things about him than do we. It is so in the natural order. It is not less so in the human and divine. One should not, I think, surround him- self with pictures that he is not willing to assimilate, into whose image he is not willing to be changed, either from glory to glory or from shame to shame. We hear much of art for art's sake, but it is not altogether possible. They reckon ill who think that they can leave the moral out. I am no lover of didactic art. If art gives us beauty, if it gives us joy, it gives us all we have a right to ask. But, Hke the kobold sticking to the household stuff, the moral goes along. It is the dignity of labor in the pictures of Jules Breton : it is the tragedy of labor in Millet's. Could one live with Rubens's pictures and not be coarsened in his nature; with Correggio's without becoming soft and sensual ; with Michel Angelo's prophets and sibyls without spiritual invigoration ; with Raphael's Madonnas without som.e increment of gentle- ness and peace t But it is the pictures that we have about us all the time that lay on us a plastic hand. Let these be chosen foolishly, and they may poison us as with zymotic germs. There are very popular pictures which must vulgarize whoever looks upon them without noble shame. There are others which do worse than this. But there are also pictures which are full of quiet and of freshening, of delicacy and refinement, of noble purity, of domestic happiness and peace. We can- not live with such and love them, and not consciously or un- awares have something pass from them into the substance of our lives. When Emerson said, "The antique sculpture is as ethical as Marcus Antoninus," he spoke simple truth. It is with books and reading as it is with art. But here we have a much more general and more potent influence. The world of art is for a few comparatively, even in the most modest reproductive way. But books are plentiful. Their I20 Seeing and Being name is legion. They are omnipresent. The most favored devotees of art are generally moulded by it less, far less, than by the shaping spirit of imagination that is in the writers and the poets. If one must choose his pictures carefully, even more carefully must he choose his books, especially the books that are to be no chance acquaintances, but the companions of his solitary hours. To be what we see, what we have loving consort with, on this plane, what privilege and blessing it may be, or what curse and doom ! To have in us something of Thackeray, his hatred of all meanness ; something of Carlyle, his hatred of all shams; something of Browning's "joy in man's life, the mere living"; some- thing of Emerson, his imperturbable serenity ; something of Shakspere, his broad humanity; something of Homer, his freshness of the morning world, — what possibilities are these ! And then there are the books which present to us the images of great men and noble women. Those whom we can appreciate and honor, reverence and love, in some high sense we are. Beholding as in a glass the glory of Garrison or Lincoln or Channing or Parker, and a hundred more, we are changed into the same image from glory to glory. If it is so with men and women whom we only see as in a glass, reflected in the mirror of a book, it is so, how much more evidently, in our habitual intercourse with living men and women ! There are those who are not famous and will never be, tiny folk compared with such mighty ones as I have named and others of their spiritual height, who because we know them, have lived with them and loved them, are more to us than any great ones of the world. Virtue is con- tinually going out of them and strengthening us, while taking nothing from their store. "Whenever you come into the room," a lady said to Emerson, " I think that I will try to make human nature seem beautiful to you." Unconsciously, and better so, we make a similar endeavor for many a friend who never wrote a line of poetry or literary prose. Seeing and Being 121 "All things through them take nobler form And look beyond the earth, The mill-round of our fate appears A sun-path in their worth. Us, too, their nobleness has taught To master our despair; The fountains of our hidden life Are through their friendship fair." It may be only a pleasing fiction that the husband and the wife grow into each other's outward likeness as they live to- gether till the years turn to silver music, and then go on if haply they may find a golden ending. It is no fiction that " in the long years liker must they grow " in attributes of mind and heart. To live with any sweetness or nobility, and love it steadfastly and long, and not take it up into our own thought and feeling, love and life, — that will be possible when fire no longer burns nor cold congeals. For spiritual com- munication is, as much as these relations, a part of the eternal order of the world. We are the ideals that we see. The parable of the Great Stone Face is as true as any Jesus spoke. The boy in Haw- thorne's story lived with it, loved it, longed for some one to come and wear its likeness; and all the time he was growing into it. That is the way with every great ideal, lifted high up above us like the face upon the mountain side. No mat- ter how the ideal may be shaped, whether from elements which we have found in literature or such as we have found in actual life, or brooding silently on our own thought, be- holding therein the glory of the Lord, we are changed into the same image from glory to glory. How far away they often seem, and how impossible attainment to their height ! But, even as "The good we long for, that we are for one transcendent minute," so the good we long for with un- wearying patience and fidelity that we become in the essen- tial structure of our souls. This doctrine has been frequently corrupted in the dreams of social and industrial reform. The equivalence of seeing 122 Seeing and Being and being is insisted on, as if the circumstance were all in all. All that we want for the redemption of humanity, these appear to say, is a wise social order. But the social order of to-day is what humanity has made it \ and, if it could be made ideal to-morrow, — humanity remaining as it is, — it would at once proceed to gravitate to a lower plane. No doubt the environment is efficient both for blessing and for bane. But the seeing that makes being, that determines character and conduct, happiness and life, is the seeing of those things that men admire and love and worship. These, whether they be natural or of men's device, — the excellent things of art or literature or life, — are the things that really make us what we are. But, let this doctrine be interpreted as largely as may be, and still it is but part, a moiety of the whole. We are what we see. Yes ; but just as certainly we see what we are. And this, if I am not mistaken, is the gold side of the shield. This is the side on which our social dreamers seldom look. In their economy the circumstance is all-important. Yet, if some great physician should appear and lay his finger on our ailing spot, it would not, I im- agine, be our ill-regulated social and industrial order: it would be our ill-regulated individual character and life. If men should cease from all dishonesty; if they should deal justly with each other, and generously, too; if they should cease from wastefulness and drunkenness, I should not be surprised if our present social and industrial order answered pretty well. That some prominent features of it, if men were strictly just, would straightway vanish, is a persuasion from which I am unable to escape. There is truth enough in either aspect of my theme for serious contemplation. In life's double unity the two are brought into a perfect mutual sympathy and co-operation. We see what we are ; and, therefore, if we desire a beautiful and satisfying vision of the world, it is for us to enlarge and elevate our being by all the noble contacts, sympathies, and endeavors of which we can avail ourselves for this end and aim. We are what we see ; and, therefore, if we desire Seeing and Being 123 to be something not unworthy the companionship of wise and holy men, it is for us, in so far as we may, to go where truth and beauty and goodness have their habitations. It is for us to bring an honest admiration to the fair things of nature and of art, the nobilities of literature and life, the splendors of ideal excellence. Then something of the im- perishable essence of these things will become the strength of our heart and our portion forever. The more we are, the better things shall we desire and seek and find. The more of such we find, the more and better we shall be. 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