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• • • 
 
 • . • 
 
 • * 
 
 
 ».• *. 
 
 • • • 
 
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 withdrawn from the empire of chance, and walking with 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 
 
 <b 
 
 ^^Oh that you ivoidd altogether hold your peace^^ he quotes from 
 Job j " and it should be your wisdomJ' " Remember likewise," 
 he says, " that there are persons who love fewer words, an 
 inoffensive sort of people, and who deserve some regard, 
 though of too still and composed tempers for you. Of this 
 number was the Son of Sirach ; for he plainly speaks from 
 experience when he says, ^As hills of sand are to the steps of 
 the aged, so is one of many words to a quiet maji.^ ... It is in- 
 deed a very unhappy way these people are in : they in a 
 manner cut themselves out from all advantages of conversa- 
 tion, except that of being entertained by their own talk. . . . 
 But, if we consider conversation as an entertainment, as 
 somewhat to unbend the mind, as a diversion from the cares, 
 the business, the sorrows of life, it is of the very nature of 
 it that the discourse be mutual. . . . Attention to the contin- 
 ued discourse of one alone grows more painful often than 
 the cares and business we come to be diverted from," 
 
 It does not seem to me, however, that in these considera- 
 tions, and those additional to them in the discourse of the 
 good bishop, there is enough allowance made for a certain 
 nervous volubility, — an affection which is not uncommon, 
 and which afflicts the most timid and retiring people to a 
 pre-eminent degree. It is their device to save themselves 
 from the horrors of self-consciousness. They wrap them- 
 selves in w^ords to hide the nakedness of their individual 
 personality from the common view. They rattle on as if 
 a moment's pause would be the signal for them to be turned 
 loose, like Godiva in the story, without any banishment of 
 vulgar gazers from the streets, and wdthout the glory of her 
 hair. It is very certain that there are such people, and that 
 they call for pity rather than for blame. Their case is very 
 different from that of those who talk and talk because they 
 must be attracting attention to themselves, or they are 
 miserable. 
 
 If even such a habit as that of these persons ended with 
 itself, it would not deserve the stern disapprobation of the 
 New Testament writer nor the serious attention I am giving 
 
82 The Unbridled Tonsrnc 
 
 <b 
 
 to it here. But it does not end in itself. When a?tything 
 7'-ather thaft silence is the rule, the stream of talk cannot very 
 long run clear of any but the most trivial or indifferent 
 matters. It will very soon drag in the gossip of the town, 
 the personal affairs and characters of neighbors, relatives, 
 and friends, the secrets that have been intrusted to us, and 
 our own that we had better keep. The dread of being dull 
 and tame is whip and spur to the unbridled tongue ; and so 
 the plain fact is decorated and distorted until its original 
 semblance is entirely gone. Mythology is no ancient busi- 
 ness altogether. It is as alive and rampant in our own 
 time as in any period of the past. But, alas ! it not only 
 idealizes men and women up, but also down, and this much 
 oftener than the other! It often seems to us, where we 
 know the truth concerning this or that social matter, and are 
 confronted by some image of it as distorted and colossal as 
 the spectre of the Brocken in comparison with the traveller 
 projecting it, that some one in the transformation scene 
 must have done some lying of the tallest kind. But it is 
 not necessary to suppose this. It is only necessary to sup- 
 pose that one here and another there has improved a little 
 
 — a very little — on the story as it came to him ; this quite 
 unconsciously. " Keep the ball a-rolling !" cried the polili- 
 cal enthusiasts ; and, from a snow-ball that a boy could 
 throw, it became a bulk to crush a man. " Keep the ball 
 a-rolling ! " cry the unbridled talkers, and, from a mere 
 nothing to begin with, their snow-ball gathers various dirt, 
 as if it were rolled along the car-tracks of our city as they 
 have been of late, until at length some man, and oftener 
 some woman, is crushed to death — socially, if not morally 
 
 — under the monstrous weight of the accumulated bulk of 
 mere infinitesimal exaggerations. 
 
 Better, perhaps you think, a briefer diagnosis of this 
 miserable disease, and some remedial suggestions. But it 
 ought to be a remedial suggestion to look upon the matter 
 honestly and see it as it is. The danger is never greater 
 than when the public mind is generally engrossed with some 
 
The Unbridled Tongue. 83 
 
 lamentable affair of sexual immorality. Then all the ordi- 
 nary barriers of discretion and reserve are broken down and 
 children young and old are caught in the melee and trodden 
 underfoot and crushed into the mire of talk that cannot 
 touch them but to stain. Then the anxiety to maintain our 
 side, whichever it may be, drives us to wilful blindness of 
 the things we do not wish to see and to gross exaggeration 
 of the things we actually know. To look on on such a field 
 and fray ought to be the best possible corrective for the 
 habit of unbridled speech. But, in truth, we cannot trust to 
 any such specific for the remedy of an evil that is so per- 
 sistent and so epidemic. There will always be unbridled 
 tongues where the narrowness of culture and the perversity' 
 of taste compel absorption in the petty round of personal 
 affairs. Do not imagine that I am pleading for the conver- 
 sion of our social intercourse into a solemn and majestical 
 occasion for the discussion of the most fundamental prob- 
 lems that affect, but not too obviously, our mortal life. When 
 I am taking mine ease in my inn or looking out lazily upon 
 the western hills, I inwardly resent the conduct of a friend 
 who proposes to discuss with me the foundations of the 
 universe, — whether or not they are entirely sound. Enough 
 for me, just then, that the chair I sit in has a comfortable 
 seat and four serviceable legs. The foundations of the uni- 
 verse must wait for some more convenient season to be 
 tried. But there are times when it is good to brace our- 
 selves against a friend in manly struggle over some problem 
 of the outward universe or the inner life ; and, for the rest, 
 our talk is not shut up to the alternatives of the most 
 weighty and the most frivolous matters. The best defence 
 against the trivialities of social talk, that soon run out into 
 the slush of gossip and the mire of scandal-mongering and the 
 like, is a well-trained, well-ordered mind, — a mind, a memory, 
 full of the good things of literature and art and song. It is 
 the vacant mind that is the devil's work-shop in this business. 
 Those who are conversant with the best books or even with 
 the ephemeral products of the time, those who love music, 
 
84 The Unbridled Tongue. 
 
 pictures, who are engaged in public enterprises of great 
 pith and moment, if now and then they are surprised into 
 unbridled speech, have in their general course a security 
 against it for which they cannot be too glad. 
 
 But, though this aspect of my theme invites to fuller illus- 
 tration, I must break away from it into another, that de- 
 scribed by John Henry Newman in one of the most remark- 
 able and impressive sermons that he ever preached as " un- 
 real talk." There is plenty of such talk. The words get 
 away from the meaning sometimes, like a horse that has got 
 away from the wagon. We wreck ourselves upon expres- 
 sion ; and, forgetting that w^ords are the counters of wise men, 
 the money of fools, we heap them up as if, knowing them to 
 be but copper coin, we could make payment with them for 
 honor, love, obedience, troops of friends. Consider the 
 effusiveness of social protestation, — women who do not care 
 a nickel for each other falling into each other's arms with 
 mutual kisses, as if that currency could be debased to any 
 extent and still keep its value in the exchanges of all loving 
 hearts. To shape the phrase upon the thing is required of 
 the true poet. But life is more than poetry ; and every man 
 should be of Milton's temper when he determined that his 
 own life should be a true poem, a mystic, unfathomable 
 song. To this end we should shape our words upon our 
 feelings, our convictions, our emotions, and have done with 
 that effusiveness, that "gush," — how often are the common 
 words the best ! — which is not only false and lying in its im- 
 mediate character, but futile for the deceit which it intends, 
 while it reacts upon the mind and character of the purveyor 
 with deleterious and disintegrating force. In our social 
 amenities, in our aesthetic admirations, and in our emotional 
 religiousness, let us cultivate that habit of understatement 
 which Emerson so dearly loved. The Old Testament com- 
 mand, "Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God 
 in vain," was not, I believe, so much a command against 
 what we call profane swearing as against too lightly taking 
 the name of the Eternal on the lips ; and Jewish custom went 
 
The Unbridled Tongue. 85 
 
 so far in its obedience to this interpretation that the name of 
 the Jewish God became "the ineffable name," a name not 
 to be spoken, and how it should be spoken ceased to be a 
 matter of knowledge among men, the vowels of the name 
 Jehovah being supplied from some other designation of the 
 Almighty. This was a foolish business no doubt ; but was it 
 not a more commendable extreme than that which is so 
 common in our modern world, — a free and easy use of the 
 great name once ineffable, or some corresponding name, that 
 cheapens it for the imagination and the heart ; a use much 
 oftener rhetorical than it is religious. 
 
 And these considerations bring me to that part of my sub- 
 ject which has been particularly assigned to me by my re- 
 mote parishioner, who is sorely troubled by the habit of pro- 
 fanity as practised generally about her, and particularly by 
 those in whom her personal interest is very great. This is 
 another habit of the unbridled tongue. Not that all pro" 
 fanity comes under this head. Men have been known to 
 swear with great deliberation ; unable, they imagined, to 
 secure in any other way the emphasis they wished, and felt 
 that they must have, for what they had to say. Of these was 
 Wendell Phillips, when, telling how a fugitive slave had been 
 treated in his own State and city, he substituted another word 
 for "save " in the majestic formula, "God save the Common- 
 wealth of Massachusetts ! " A friend assures me that we 
 have cursing, and not swearing, here, and also in Governor 
 Flower's expression of indifference to the votes, and in the 
 emphatic refusal of the President-elect to give any pledges 
 in advance of his election to the Tammany Ring. Such nice 
 distinctions I cannot consider here, nor the morality of such 
 ebullitions of men generally self-controlled as that of Wash- 
 ington at Monmouth, when with "the sword of his mouth" 
 he clove in twain that rascally and traitorous adventurer. 
 General Charles Lee. The habit of profanity is a habit of 
 the unbridled tongue. I do not mean that it is altogether 
 motiveless. Unbridled speech is seldom merely for the love 
 of talking. It is also for the love of being heard ; of being 
 
S6 2he Unbridled Tonsrue 
 
 'i:i 
 
 an object, and the object, of attention for the time being. 
 There are men and women, and especially young people, 
 many of whom get over it, the tenure of whose existence is 
 to their imagination the social consciousness that they are on 
 the scene. The habit of profanity is nourished by the same 
 shallow source, which, although it is so shallow, never yet 
 ran dry. It is nourished also by the desire and passion to 
 seem bright and smart, which are peculiarly an affection of 
 those who are not so ; and, then, sometimes we have not only 
 an unbridled tongue, but, as it were, the reins are thrown upon 
 its back and the whip is laid on, and the driving is like that 
 of Jehu in the day of battle. The worst example in this kind 
 I ever knew was a young man in Harvard College, the 
 variety and ingenuity of whose profanity would have been in- 
 comprehensible if his father had not been the rector of the 
 Church of the Advent in Boston, then of all High Churches 
 in the land the very highest. For it is noticeable that, with 
 the decrease in the number of things conventionally sacred, 
 the range of the vocabulary of profanity is curtailed. We 
 never hear in Protestant communities those curious profani- 
 ties with which Shakspere's heroes swear : " Byrlakin," for 
 example, — /.«?, "by our ladykin," our little lady, the Virgin ; 
 and " Odsbodikins," — i.e., "By God's little body," the tran- 
 substantiated eucharistic bread. 
 
 It is evident that any judgment of profanity, any criticism 
 and condemnation of it from the standpoint of rational re- 
 ligion, must be widely different from the judgment, criticism, 
 condemnation, of it that pertain to the traditional standpoint. 
 I remember well that in my boyhood I heard a sermon in 
 which profanity was held up as worse than theft or murder 
 or adultery. " For does it not," asked the impassioned 
 preacher, " take precedence in the decalogue of the com- 
 mands against those things ? " It does come before them in 
 the order of the commandments, but that this implies prece- 
 dence in the degree of its importance there is no sufficient 
 proof. The same evidence would make keeping the Sab- 
 bath holy of more importance than the moral virtues which 
 
The Unbridled Tongue. 8y 
 
 the later clauses of the decalogue prescribe. When I was in 
 Charleston, 5.C., in 1865, I remember that in old St. 
 Michael's Church a shot or shell had gone through a wooden 
 tablet in the chancel, on which the Ten Commandments had 
 been written, and had broken all of those relating to men's 
 moral duties, while leaving quite intact those setting forth 
 their duties to God ; and I remarked that those which had 
 been broken were those for which our Southern brethren had 
 cared the least. That was because theirs was a primitive 
 society, and in every primitive society the duties of worship 
 antedate and overtop the duties of the social order. Even, 
 then, if the commandment, "Thou shalt not take the name 
 of the Lord thy God in vain," did not refer to the careless 
 use of the Divine Name rather than to what we call profan- 
 ity, no precedence given to it in the Old Testament would 
 as such avail for us. But, this being so, it does not follow 
 that this habit of the unbridled tongue is one to which we 
 can afford to be indifferent, or which we can dismiss as 
 merely vulgar, silly, and inane. It is all of these. How 
 intensely vulgar, how profoundly silly and inane, one can 
 discover anywhere where young men are loafing round. Let 
 young men who do not wish to be vulgar, who do not wish 
 to be silly and inane, set a watch at the door of their lips. 
 Our golden youth sink to the level of the loafers of the 
 slums, when they permit themselves their desecration of the 
 use of sacred names. But here, again, the negative prohibi- 
 tion must be re-enforced by positive helps. " Out of the 
 abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh," says the prov- 
 erb ; but in this business of profanity the mouth speaketh, 
 for the most part, out of the emptiness of the head. And 
 it is because our golden youth are oftentimes as empty- 
 headed as the youth who are at the furthest possible social 
 remove from them that they emulate their smartness in this 
 vulgar style. Knowledge, culture, intelligence, reading, 
 something sound and sweet and good to think about and 
 talk about, — these are the prophylactics that will make the 
 habit of profanity as impossible for the youth or man as 
 
88 The Unbridled Tonsrnc 
 
 'i> 
 
 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. By either 
 path we cannot miss the way. 
 
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