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 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
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Cornell University Library 
 BL240 .B62 
 
 924"029" 073 876 
 
THE NEW WORLD 
 
 AND 
 
 THE NEW THOUGHT 
 
 BY 
 JAMES THOMPSON BIXBY, Ph.D. 
 
 Author of " The Ethics of Evolution," " Religion and Science as Allies." 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 THOMAS WHITTAKER 
 
 2 and 3 Bible House 
 
 1902 
 
SECOND EDITION 
 
 Copyright, 1902 
 
 by 
 
 James Thompson Bixby 
 
 THE CAXTON PRESS 
 NEW YORK. 
 
Contents. 
 
 CHAP. PAGE 
 
 I. The Expansion of the Universe and the Enlarge- 
 ment of Faith 5 
 
 II. The Sanction for Morality in Nature 30 
 
 III. The Agnostic's Difficulties and the Knowability 
 
 of Divine Realities 54 
 
 IV. The Scientific Validity of Our Religious Instincts, 98 
 V. Evolution and Christianity 116 
 
 VI. The Old Testament as Literature 137 
 
 VII. Christian Discipleship and Modern Life 163 
 
 VIII. Modern Dogmatism and the Unbelief of the Age, 180 
 IX. Union of the Churches in One Spiritual House- 
 hold 199 
 
The New World and The New 
 Thought 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 THE EXPANSION OF THE UNIVERSE AND THE ENLARGE- 
 MENT OF FAITH. 
 
 As the traveler visits the old shrines and cathedrals 
 of Europe, or the scholar delves among the mediaeval 
 treatises on astronomy or geography, he is continu- 
 ally meeting with conceptions of the world and its 
 creation of a most curious and childlike simplicity. A 
 frequently recurring group in the sculptures, mosaics, 
 stained-glass or missal paintings of the Middle Ages is 
 that which represents the Almighty in human form, 
 moulding the sun, moon, or stars, and with His own 
 hands hanging them from the solid firmament which 
 supports the upper heaven and its celestial waters and 
 which overarches the great plain of earth ; and when 
 the work of the six days is finished He is represented 
 as sitting, bent and fatigued, in the well-known atti- 
 tude of the " Weary Mercury " of classical sculpture. 
 As late as the seventeenth century, Milton, in his 
 poetic representation of the popular theology of his 
 day, does not hesitate at the most literal description 
 
 5 
 
6 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT 
 
 of how the second person in the Trinity, when the 
 hour for making the universe came 
 
 " Took the golden compasses, prepared 
 In God's eternal store, to circumscribe 
 This universe and all created things. 
 One foot He centred, and the other turned 
 Round through the vast profundity obscure, 
 And said, ' Thus far extend ; thus far thy bounds : 
 This be thy just circumference, O world.' " 
 
 The two statements in the Genesis myths, that the 
 world was made in six days and also that " God spake 
 and it was done," were both of them accepted in the 
 most literal way by the great ecclesiastical and scien- 
 tific authorities of Christendom down to the sixteenth 
 century. The contradiction of an instantaneous crea- 
 tion which lasted through six days was usually recon- 
 ciled by some explanation, like that of St. Thomas 
 Aquinas, which was adopted even by Luther and the 
 earlier Protestant Reformers, viz. : that God created 
 the substance of the world in a single moment but 
 employed the six days in separating, shaping and 
 further adorning it. As to the date of this great 
 event, it was the general verdict of both Catholic and 
 Protestant authorities down to a century or two ago 
 that it could hardly be more than 6,000 years ago. 
 
 As to the shape and dimensions of the world, the 
 prevalent ideas during the Middle Ages were marked 
 by a precision and pettiness equally crude. Follow- 
 ing unreflectingly the lead of whatever imagery the 
 Scripture presented, they insisted that the earth was 
 at creation vaulted over with a solid dome or ceiling, 
 the firmament of Genesis, above which was the celes- 
 
TEE EXPANSION OF TEE UNIVERSE 7 
 
 tial cistern, containing the waters which are above the 
 firmament. It is through apertures in this vault, " the 
 windows of heaven," that the rains are allowed to fall 
 on the earth by God and His angels ; and above it, in 
 the third heaven, or seventh as others said, is the 
 customary abode of the Almighty and His court. In 
 the curious description of the universe, based upon 
 Scripture, written in the sixth century by Cosmas In- 
 dicopleustes, which for a long while was regarded as 
 most authoritative, the ideas of the early Christian 
 theologians were summed up in a complete system. 
 As in the ninth chapter of Hebrews the world is 
 likened to the tabernacle in the desert, it must be 
 oblong in shape. Like the table of shew-bread, the 
 earth is fiat, and twice as long as broad, 400 days' 
 journey one way and 200 the other. It is surrounded 
 by four seas, at the outer edges of which rise massive 
 walls, the pillars of heaven of which Job speaks, on 
 which the vault of heaven rests. The disappearance 
 of the sun at night is caused by its passing behind a 
 great mountain at the north of the earth. 
 
 Although by the scholars of subsequent centuries 
 this naive representation of the world was much re- 
 fined and modified, yet the general conception of the 
 universe as a sort of huge house, with heaven as its 
 upper story and the earth as its lower story, prevailed 
 among the people and a large part of the world of 
 scholars, close down to the modern period. 
 
 When the sky-parlor of the heavenly host was so 
 little a way off, legends of saints and prophets caught 
 up to heaven or of angels flying down to earth, of 
 heavenly voices speaking from the upper story to 
 
8 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT 
 
 I 
 
 chosen men on the lower, or of frequent special inter- 
 ventions by heavenly powers to rescue the holy or 
 punish the wicked, would most naturally arise. Even 
 when men's conceptions began to enlarge, they still 
 remained comparatively diminutive. Certain Egyp- 
 tian astronomers, says Flammarion, calculated that the 
 sun was 369 miles distant and Saturn 492. An 
 Italian system, that the same astronomer mentions, 
 was on a somewhat more generous scale. The crys- 
 talline sphere in which the moon was set was 107,000 
 miles distant, Mercury 209,000 and the sun 3,892,000. 
 As late as the sixteenth century, Zwingli and the 
 early Protestant Reformers held to the view of the 
 church fathers that a solid floor or dome separated the 
 heavens from the earth, that above it were the waters 
 and the abode of the angels, and below it the earth 
 and man. And in the cellar of this world-house, not 
 far below the earth's crust, popular superstition, cor- 
 roborated by the authority of great poets like Virgil, 
 Dante, and Milton, located the caverns of the under- 
 world, from which imp and devil and perturbed spirit 
 came up at times to walk the earth. 
 
 To-day, how has science stretched out this baby- 
 house universe of our ancestors ! The astronomer 
 has turned his telescope on that adamantine firmament 
 and it has dissolved into thin air. The glittering 
 points that gemmed its surface have expanded into 
 enormous suns, thousands of times as large as our own 
 globe. The petty heaven of the Book of Revelation 
 12,000 furlongs or 1,379 English miles each way 
 has spread out, from that one-twentieth part or less 
 q{ the cubic dimensions which we now know our own 
 
THE EXPANSION OF TEE UNIVERSE 9 
 
 earth to have, into an immensity of space which it is 
 difficult to realize. Let us try by a few facts to give 
 some conception of its grandeur. 
 
 Milton, in " Paradise Lost," in accordance with the 
 older ideas of the size of the universe, thought that 
 nine days was an adequate length of time for the rebel 
 archangel, who was thrown out of heaven, to fall down 
 from the top of the universe and the courts of God to 
 the depths of hell. But we now know that if a steam- 
 ship, moving at the average rate, had started in 
 Columbus' lifetime for the sun, it would not have 
 reached its goal to-day. If a baby were put in an ex- 
 press train, moving at highest locomotive speed, to go 
 to our solar luminary, the baby would die of old age 
 before it could arrive there. If that locomotive went 
 onward towards our nearest fixed star, stopping 
 neither day nor night, it would take it 700,000 cen- 
 turies to get there. 
 
 The speed of a locomotive is evidently too slow a 
 standard to use as a measure among these immense 
 spaces. Let us take, then, for our imaginary courier, 
 the fastest traveler we know of, the wave of sunlight, 
 speeding 186,000 miles a second. How long would 
 it take even a beam of sunlight to reach the nearest 
 sun beyond our own ? Not less than three and one 
 quarter years; for it is no less than 20,000,000,000 
 miles away. If we should want to go to Sirius and 
 could get the same lightning courier, the waves of the 
 starlight, to take us, it would require twenty-two 
 years. To get to the pole star it would take fifty 
 years ; to pass from one end to the other of the Milky 
 Way, that great star-cluster nearest to us, it would 
 
10 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT 
 
 take a ray of light 15,000 years. To reach a star of 
 the fourteenth magnitude would require 100,000 
 years. 
 
 By the naked eye we can see some 6,000 stars, each 
 a sun, all at such immense intervals, from one another. 
 But the telescope discerns 45,000,000 stars and nebulae; 
 the photographic eye, more subtle still, might take 
 the record, it is calculated, of 160,000,000 stars. 
 There are over 1,000 nebulae which the telescope 
 resolves into swarms of stars. These are supposed to 
 be great groups, similar to our Milky Way, dimmed 
 and drawn together, apparently by the immense dis- 
 tance at which they are situated. In that case, how 
 far off are they ? Over 300 times as far as the farthest 
 suns in our Milky Way ; and it would take the nimble 
 messenger of light 4,000,000 years to get there. 
 How huge must these suns be that can send the un- 
 dulations of their light across such enormous space ! 
 Into what amazing pettiness has astronomy shriveled 
 our proud centre of the universe, and, dislodging it 
 from its former prominent position, sent it whirling on 
 its way as one of the smaller satellites in the train of a 
 central body, the sun, which, though as much larger 
 than the earth as a cart-wheel is larger than a pea, is 
 yet but one of more than 20,000,000 suns contained 
 in its own part of space, and is itself not stationary, 
 but revolving through space, with its fleet of planets, 
 at the rate of 4,000 miles a day, around perhaps some 
 still larger sun. 
 
 Verily, these infinities of space set the brain reeling, 
 in the vain effort to realize them. Let us turn, then, 
 to the changes in our estimates of the earth's duration 
 
THE EXPANSION OF TEE UNIVERSE 11 
 
 and our ideas of time. Here, again, how enormously 
 has science multiplied the numbers ! How utterly in- 
 adequate are those dates for man's first appearance on 
 the globe and the beginning of the earth that were 
 generally accepted one hundred years ago and are still 
 printed in the margin of the Bibles issued by our 
 Bible societies ! It was in the year 4004 B. c, accord- 
 ing to the great chronological authority and theo- 
 logian, Archbishop Usher, that the creation of the 
 world took place, a date settled by the authority of 
 the Holy Bible ; and Dr. Lightfoot, Vice-Chancellor 
 of Cambridge University, in the seventeenth century, 
 with still finer precision, fixed the day and hour at the 
 23d of October at nine o'clock in the morning. 
 Luther declared, on the authority of Moses, that 
 longer ago than 6,000 years the world did not exist. 
 Pope Urban VII was anxious to allow a little more 
 time to have elapsed since the creation of man ; but 
 his extreme limit was 5 199 b. c. 
 
 To-day these sixty centuries are but a handbreadth 
 of the time that science demands. Sixty millenniums 
 would hardly suffice. Science has mined in caverns 
 and found man's tools and weapons among the bones 
 of mammoths. It has deciphered hieroglyphics and 
 found arts and history already venerable before the 
 date when commentators admitted that Adam had 
 begun to breathe. As far back as 6,000 and 7,000 years 
 before Christ, among the cities and temples of Baby- 
 lonia and Egypt, man was living a civilized or semi- 
 civilized life. For the quarternary age, in the early 
 part of which unmistakable relics of man are found, 
 geology demands a period of at least 10,000 years. 
 
12 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT 
 
 For the tertiary and secondary epochs, and the im- 
 mensely thick deposits belonging to them, not less 
 than 3,000,000 years will suffice. For the primary and 
 primeval or azoic ages, not less than 17,000,000 
 years more are needed. Recall what vast beds of 
 chalk and limestone, miles in thickness, have been 
 built up by the microscopic creatures who have lived 
 and died in the primitive oceans ; how from a fiery 
 cloud the globe concentrated to a molten ball, and on 
 the molten ball formed the crust that now suspends 
 us above the still furnace-heated interior. How long 
 a time should we estimate for these seonic changes ? 
 From the experiments of the physicist, Bischoff, with 
 molten basalt and its rate of cooling to a solid state, 
 the scientists infer that for the earth to cool from the 
 2,000 degrees centigrade of the former molten state 
 down to 200 centigrade, would require at least 
 350,000,000 years. Then for the condensation of 
 our solar nebula, (originally extending beyond the 
 orbit of Neptune, i. e., 5,000,000,000 miles in diam- 
 eter), into the sun and planets, and the further cool- 
 ing down from the heated solid state to the temper- 
 ature where life could begin, additional millions of 
 years would be required; and when we recall how 
 many thousand times larger than our sun are many of 
 the solar globes, is not the chronology of the heavens 
 carried back into an antiquity, in comparison with 
 whose veritable eternity the age of those hills that of 
 old were dubbed " everlasting " seems but as a single 
 breath of a summer's insect. 
 
 Such is the amazing immensity of the universe that 
 modern science has disclosed, an illimitable extension 
 
TEE EXPANSION OF THE UNIVERSE 13 
 
 and duration before which the wing of imagination 
 grows weary, in the effort to realize even vaguely how 
 vast is its sweep. It is evident that this changed scale 
 of the physical universe must suggest to the reason of 
 man an analogous change in our view of the origin, 
 nature and destiny of man and the methods of God's 
 government. 
 
 Can we still hold man to be the aim and end of 
 creation ? Can we still think, many to-day are asking, 
 that the earth and heavens were fitted up specially for 
 his abode? that the animal world was made just 
 for his food, and the trees to shade his head from the 
 heat ? the sun to warm him by day and the moon and 
 stars to supply light to his path by night ? 
 
 Is man not shown, by this immense magnitude of 
 the universe, to be but a most ephemeral and infini- 
 tesimal insect, the spawn of the primeval slime, a 
 creature altogether too insignificant to be supposed 
 to have been specially created or specially cared for ? 
 What else but fables of man's credulous childhood are 
 those faiths that held man to be a child of God, made 
 in the divine image, or that he has been the recipient 
 of divine revelations, and that the Son of God left 
 His place by God's right hand, and choosing out 
 of all the million solar and planetary systems in space 
 this most insignificant speck, called earth, was here 
 incarnated in a human form, to supply salvation by 
 His blood to those who should enter the church He 
 should found? Science, with its searching instru- 
 ments, has investigated earth and heaven. No tele- 
 scope has caught sight in the remotest recesses of 
 any Titan king seated on a celestial throne ; no mi- 
 
14 TEE NEW WOULD AND TEE NEW TEOUGET 
 
 croscope has observed any soul within the tissues of 
 the brain ; no mining shaft has found a limbo of de- 
 parted spirits beneath the earth's crust. The fires are 
 there, but no trace of any imps or devils or ghostly 
 shades. Dust to dust is the law of life. We begin as 
 a chemical composition ; we end, when the machinery 
 runs down, as a chemical decomposition. When 
 thousands of worlds are burning out into lifeless 
 cinders, by inevitable laws of the dissipation of energy 
 and the cooling down of every warmer sphere to the 
 average temperature or, we should better say, refrig- 
 eration, of the interstellar space, some 200 degrees, 
 as it is, below zero, why should we fancy this 
 petty biped of a man should escape the general 
 death ? 
 
 Such are the questions and dilemmas, sometimes 
 put in very scoffing tones, that in the minds of a 
 large and growing class among us are daily arising, 
 and daily alienating them more and more from the 
 older views of man's origin, nature and destiny. 
 
 On the other hand, the champions of the older faith 
 maintain that in spite of this immense expansion of 
 the universe we may still look on man as the chief 
 subject of divine care and our earth as the moral and 
 spiritual centre of the universe. The rank and prac- 
 tical importance of God's creatures, or the orbs He 
 has made, do not depend, they urge, on their phys- 
 ical bigness or littleness, but on higher qualities. 
 Though the telescope and the magnitudes it has dis- 
 closed dwarf man to a petty insect, the microscope 
 gives back to man his dignity. To the Almighty and 
 Eternal a thousand years are as one day, a day as is a 
 
TBE EXPANSION OF THE UNIVERSE 15 
 
 thousand years, a world like Sirius as a drop of dew, 
 and a drop of dew as a starry constellation. Small as 
 man is, he has within him a knowledge, reason, will, 
 consciousness and creative power that put him in a 
 higher realm than any mass, however huge, of insen- 
 sate matter. No globe of brute matter has its reason 
 of existence in itself. The reason of being in all 
 material things lies outside them, in their serviceable- 
 ness to the spiritual universe. That which redeems 
 sun, moon and stars from insignificance is simply that 
 they beautify and illuminate the planet in which man 
 dwells. We may even question whether these huge 
 bubbles of matter have any real, independent ex- 
 istence ? Many of the ablest philosophers have held 
 that our very idea of space and time is relative, an 
 extract and product of our conscious experience, and 
 need not imply any outward reality. These solid- 
 seeming globes and all their material phenomena are 
 but transitory shows. They are either subjective 
 illusions or shadow pictures of the divine will, pro- 
 jected on to the screen of space, to serve as a theatre 
 for the training of souls and the chastening of man's 
 ambition; or perhaps as mockeries and humiliations, 
 to punish the presumptuous reason of the skeptical 
 scientists. 
 
 A theologian of the early part of this century, when 
 the discoveries of geology first threatened the his- 
 torical accuracy of Genesis, had the boldness and 
 keenness to explain the fossils in the depths of the 
 earth, that seemed to prove that death entered the 
 world before Adam was created, as having been 
 stirred into the fluent substance of the earth on the 
 
16 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT 
 
 creation-day, just to puzzle and discomfit the vain- 
 glorious geologist. " Who can prove," it may sim- 
 ilarly be asked, " that all these double stars and 
 nebulae and apparent magnitudes of the skies that the 
 conceited astronomers use as arguments to undermine 
 the credibility of the first three chapters of Genesis, 
 are not similar divine mockeries and judgments on the 
 too prying curiosity and overconfident reason of 
 modern man ? " Who knows but that, when God has 
 given man his appointed probation on this planet, this 
 theatre of earth and this phantasmal scenery of the 
 skies will roll together like a scroll and vanish, leaving 
 only, to survive the wreck of matter and the crush 
 of worlds, the indestructible realm of the spiritual 
 world and such souls as have accepted God's plan of 
 salvation ? 
 
 With such answering questions and assumptions are 
 all inferences from the modern change of front of the 
 universe, that would cast doubt on the validity of the 
 older theologic systems and man's unique importance 
 in the universe, often calmly waved aside. 
 
 Which then of these antagonistic groups of in- 
 ferences, drawn from the notable widening of modern 
 thought, may we the more reasonably accept ? 
 
 There is a certain measure of truth in each of them. 
 On the one hand, the radical view of modern material- 
 ists as to the transitoriness and insignificance of hu- 
 manity in our magnified universe, and the atheistic 
 inferences supposed to be demanded by the march of 
 modern science, are altogether too extreme. 
 
 If the whole universe be nothing but forms of matter 
 and its motions and functions, then it matters not how 
 
THE EXPANSION OF THE UNIVERSE 17 
 
 immense it is. A million million miles of it are as 
 meaningless and empty as a single cubic yard. If the 
 human soul have a real existence and superior nature, 
 then the intrinsic rank and capacities of the human 
 reason and conscience remain the same, no matter 
 how many thousand times the area of the stage on 
 which it plays its parts be stretched out. 
 
 One high intuition of eternal truth, one holy impulse 
 of consecration or noble moral choice, is grander than 
 a whole world of clay, more magnificent than the most 
 colossal galaxy of gas and dust. Intricate as are the 
 mechanics of nature and stupendous as is its bulk, the 
 vision of reason comprehends the most complex 
 system. But mechanical nature, on the other hand, 
 is not aware of its own marvels and quite unconscious 
 of its triumphs. The astronomic world has not ex- 
 panded faster and cannot expand faster than man's 
 mind dilates to embrace it in his thought and reduce 
 it to order. What we lose in relative importance 
 because of the enlargement of the boundaries of the 
 universe, we recover from the new revelation of man's 
 amazing capacities that is given through these trans- 
 cendent achievements of human science. 
 
 The materialist would have us bow our head in de- 
 spair because Sun and Sirius and the system of the 
 Pleiades are so gigantic. But when we remember 
 that it is " the mind of man that has measured them 
 as with a surveyor's chain and weighed them as if he 
 held them in his hand," is there not in this sweep and 
 mystery of the human intellect something too provo- 
 cative of awe and reverence to be repressed by any 
 lumps of earth however mammoth in size ? It may 
 
18 TEE NEW WORLD AND TEE NEW TEOUGET 
 
 be that when, through the telescope of science, we 
 look up at the sky, our human stature seems to shrivel 
 in the most alarming fashion. Yet, when, under the 
 optician's guidance, we look at the realms below us, 
 to what giant size do the dimensions of the human 
 frame again expand ! If the nebulae of the astrono- 
 mer belittle man, the bacteria and the atoms of the 
 microscopist equally magnify him. A cubic inch of 
 Bilin slate contains over a billion of millions of in- 
 fusorial shells, whose characteristics are still distinct 
 enough for scientific identification. Compared with 
 one of these diminutive creatures, man's bulk is as 
 large, proportionately, as a stellar system is, measured 
 against man's stature; and each corpuscle that re- 
 volves in a drop of blood within our veins may be a 
 planetary system of spheres to which the human 
 frame may be as colossal a galaxy as the Milky Way 
 appears to our astronomers. When we think of the 
 exquisite structure of these infinitesimal creatures and 
 the admirable adjustment of their organs and func- 
 tions to the needs of their life, (an adaptation which is 
 as perfect in a bacillus or vibrio as in a whale), may we 
 not believe that the power that provides so generously 
 for the million inhabitants of a drop of water will much 
 more take care for man, no matter how huge the con- 
 stellations may be, under the charge of His infinite 
 wisdom ? 
 
 Science has not diminished but multiplied the 
 proofs of the intelligibility and rationality of the uni- 
 verse. It has made plainer than ever the fundamental 
 likeness of the finite spirit that reads the great stone- 
 book and the starry hieroglyphics, with the Infinite 
 
THE EXPANSION OF THE UNIVERSE 19 
 
 Spirit that has woven with such intelligence and be- 
 neficence this marvelous web of matter and force. 
 
 If the expansion of the universe and the immu- 
 table reign of cause and effect through it all have un- 
 dermined the old argument from design, based on 
 the adaptation of special organs to special requirements 
 or conditions, it has given, instead of this " design by- 
 retail/' a " design by wholesale " far more majestic. 
 It has presented us with an all-embracing system of 
 planful reason and self-adjusting development which 
 demands for its inception and maintenance nothing 
 less than the constant life and intelligence of an 
 Omnipresent spirit. Modern science itself still puts 
 man at the head of the kingdom of life ; it holds him to 
 be the climax of the ascending evolution, apparently 
 its end and goal. When we look back on the long 
 ages through which the divine hand, by patient proc- 
 ess of evolution, was preparing for man's appearance, 
 and slowly moulding him in the womb of nature, till 
 at length the great work received its crown in the 
 emergence of the self-conscious mind, able and will- 
 ing to join hands and hasten onward, with unprec- 
 edented rapidity, the evolutionary processes, lifting 
 them to higher levels of moral and spiritual unfolding 
 than physical nature knows, does not man, then, as- 
 sume a higher dignity ? Does it not seem more prob- 
 able than ever before that his Creator did not delve 
 and model in the clay-pits of life for so many long 
 ages merely to complete a marvelous automaton, that 
 he would send back to inanimate dust with the 
 stoppage of his pulse and thus render vain all the long 
 travail of the sons ? 
 
20 TEE NEW WORLD AND TEE NEW TEOUGHT 
 
 If it be the great law of science that the fittest 
 survive, that no atom passes into nothing, but only 
 passes on to new forms and fields of activity, what 
 else in all the ascending ranks of life is the best and 
 fittest to survive, if not this truth-seeking mind, this 
 conscience, reverent of the right, this soul-personality 
 which knows itself an inseparable unity, an integer 
 more indivisible than any atom, the centre in which 
 all reasoning, memory, comparison and judgment sub- 
 sist and by which alone they are possible ? Without 
 a continuance in existence of this conscious spirit 
 which is the most consummate flower and essence of 
 the universe, that universe itself becomes a meaning- 
 less chaos and ephemeral force. 
 
 The materialistic inferences which have sometimes 
 been drawn from the grand enlargement of the world, 
 effected by modern thought, are not, then, either 
 necessary or credible. The expansion of the universe 
 has no endorsement to give to these melancholy theories 
 or that contempt for humanity which they would foster. 
 
 While this is true, there are, on the other hand, 
 very important changes demanded by the recognition 
 of our magnified universe. In the new light supplied 
 by modern scientific discoveries it is impossible that 
 our theological conceptions should remain unchanged. 
 These discoveries require us to modify very consider- 
 ably the views of God's government and the nature, 
 origin and destiny of man, that were held of old in 
 the larger churches. It is true, of course, that to the 
 divine eye our ideas of small and great, of the mo- 
 mentary and the permanent, may be interchangeable. 
 Nevertheless, this does not dismiss the notions of time 
 
THE EXPANSION OF THE UNIVERSE 21 
 
 and space as mere subjective illusions which we need 
 not regard. 
 
 Whatever be the standard of measurement, large or 
 small, there is that relative position and contiguity 
 and varied direction that constitutes space ; there is 
 that inescapable fact of a before and an after in con- 
 scious experience or successive motions, that con- 
 stitutes the essence of time. And the comparative 
 magnitudes and durations of these conditions of space 
 and time are not to be ignored in any reasonable in- 
 terpretation of the laws of the universe and man's re- 
 lations to the divine government. 
 
 Especially should it be remembered that neither 
 these vast spaces nor far prolonged periods that modern 
 science has disclosed are empty things. This is the 
 correlative discovery of science everywhere accom- 
 panying every extension of the universe, viz. : that this 
 universe teems with energy and change. 
 
 Another thing is equally to be borne in mind — that 
 all these changes are orderly and harmonious. The 
 laws of the transmutation of species, established by 
 Darwin and Wallace, show the unity of life. The 
 revelations of the spectroscope and the majestic laws 
 of the correlation of force that Grove and Joule es- 
 tablished, proving that light, heat and magnetism are 
 all variants of one another and manifestations of a 
 common force behind them, all show an essential 
 Unity, running as a scarlet web through the universe. 
 All these systems of suns are under one constitution, 
 and the luminous matter in all is substantially the 
 same. One ether extends through all as the medium 
 of communication. One gravitation guides all in their 
 
22 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT 
 
 orbits. One law of birth and growth and heredity- 
 pushes the kingdom of life steadily upward. One 
 process of organization, continuous and alike, rules 
 every galaxy and every atom. From the diffused to 
 the compacted, from the lifeless to the living, from the 
 nebula to the man, from lower to higher — such is the 
 eternal rhythm of the cosmic evolution. 
 
 Here in these words, the cosmic evolution, we have 
 named the mightiest change which science has made 
 in the last half-century. From the moment Galileo's 
 opera glasses showed the phases of Venus this law 
 was sure to be reached sooner or later. It was from 
 that day a predestined thing that the current belief of 
 Christendom of 200 years ago, in which our earth was 
 regarded as a scene of decay and moral fall and con- 
 stant supernatural intervention, should suffer change. 
 It seems almost superfluous to recall how every birth 
 or death, every comet or earthquake, every unusual 
 event, was regarded as occurring by the special inter- 
 vention of some supernatural agent, magician or saint, 
 imp or angel, devil or god, according to the respective 
 smallness or bigness, badness or goodness, of the 
 event. All this has been ejected by science from the 
 belief of enlightened men and women. Everywhere 
 law is found to reign. Lily and solar system are found 
 to unfold according to one and the same grand system. 
 The hallucinations of the senses, even the insane de- 
 lusions, are found to have their natural sources. 
 
 The world to-day is indeed found fuller than ever 
 of marvels ; but now here can anything be credited as 
 occurring in violation of law. No miracle, in the 
 sense of an interruption of the universal order to 
 
TEE EXPANSION OF THE UNIVERSE 23 
 
 benefit some favorite among the sons of men, Is 
 longer credited. The only miracles that even religion 
 to-day should know are those wonders, manifold and 
 mysterious enough, that present unusual examples of 
 subtler and deeper laws than we have as yet acquainted 
 ourselves with. The greatest of miracles to every 
 thoughtful mind is that God's forethought and uni- 
 versal plans have been so perfect, from the first day 
 that the morning stars sang together, that no subse- 
 quent interference has been needed to rectify any de- 
 fects. The astonishing freaks of power or super- 
 natural signs of a celestial mission, of which the older 
 theology made so much, have therefore lost credence, 
 and all the witches, imps and devils of the olden time 
 have vanished before this confidence in nature's un- 
 changing orderliness, like the shadows of a hideous 
 night. 
 
 When there is no longer any up or down, nor cav- 
 ernous abode of shades beneath the earth, and when 
 the azure dome of crystal, above which God held His 
 court, has been dissipated into interstellar ether, such 
 wonders as the descent of Christ into hell or His as- 
 cent to heaven to sit on God's right hand have had to 
 be turned into allegories, even if they do stand in the 
 Apostles' creed. As man has been found to be not 
 the victim of a fall, the ruin of a once perfect being, 
 but an ascending spirit, " slowly climbing with the 
 climbing world" out of early animality to his des- 
 tined inheritance as a child of God, so the old doc- 
 trines of total depravity and the need of a vicarious 
 atoner to pay for the sin of man's federal head, Adam, 
 have passed away. The perfect man in our modern 
 
24 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT 
 
 thought is not behind us but before us. The theologic 
 scheme, by which God the Father sacrificed His only- 
 begotten Son to snatch mankind out of the clutches 
 of Satan on one of the myriad specks that dot the 
 celestial ocean of space, appears, in the light of the 
 modern expansion of the universe, as the most obvious 
 relic of the infancy of thought. It is a conception of the 
 world, long ago outgrown. 
 
 Humanity has had not merely one Saviour, but a 
 thousand, each doing his part, great or small, in re- 
 generating mankind. God did more than incarnate 
 Himself in Jesus. He has incarnated Himself in all 
 humanity in proportion to the spiritual receptivity of 
 each; and every true and disinterested soul, every 
 martyr for truth and justice who has surrendered his 
 life to uplift the world or ease a brother's woe, has had 
 his glorious participation in that red blood of sacrifice 
 that slowly redeems our race from its ancient sins and 
 inveterate diseases. 
 
 The beginning of the soul on earth and its exit and 
 future career must take place by general law. The 
 origin of the soul will henceforth be conceived less as 
 a special creation than as a creative specialization of 
 the universal life, an individualization of the indwelling 
 divine Spirit in a personal form and consciousness. 
 The immortality of the soul, if it is to be credited in 
 the twentieth century, must no longer be represented 
 as a miraculous gift to a few elect individuals, a super- 
 natural regathering and reanimation of bodily sub- 
 stances and atoms, long since scattered but flying 
 together at the sound of a trumpet. On the contrary, 
 it must be regarded as a universal and regular process, 
 
THE EXPANSION OF TEE UNIVERSE 25 
 
 the natural release, at the time of the body's decay, 
 of a soul too vital, too unitary and too subtle to be 
 involved in the dissolution of its clayey tabernacle. 
 Immortality must be found to be a process in strict 
 harmony with a rational universe, the only rational 
 outcome of the universe as it unfolds to its higher 
 consummation. If man's soul is immortal, its salva- 
 tion must be under universal laws, not a thing due to 
 the accident of birth in a Christian nation or the visit 
 of some missionary with a Bible or the presence of a 
 priest with drops of holy water. The doors of possi- 
 ble immortality must be as wide open in China or Ja- 
 pan as in New York or London, — nay, as wide open 
 in Mars or any of the satellites of Sirius, if conscious 
 life has yet evolved on any of these bodies, as it was 
 in the streets of Jerusalem in the first century of our 
 era. When we think of the millions of globes, where 
 the same laws of evolution are going on and have 
 gone on for aeons as here, can we credit it that it is 
 to our own little planet that the saving mercy of God 
 has been confined ? Not alone to our earth and in 
 the flesh of its humanity has the love of God been 
 manifested and incarnated, but also, I like to think, to 
 every part of the cosmos where souls have come to 
 need it, in every abode of planetary and stellar so- 
 ciety. As evil is no longer to be thought due to the 
 malign influence of an apple-bite, or the weakness of 
 a woman, but as an incident of that government by 
 fixed law and that option of free-will that everywhere 
 prevails in the universe, so every embodied life of the 
 soul is a training in spiritual strength and upbuilding 
 to the fuller character of a mature moral nature. 
 
26 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT 
 
 " The divine judgment is not a cleaving asunder 
 of the blue dome for the descent of angelic squadrons, 
 headed by the majestic Son of God, the angry breath 
 of His mouth consuming the wicked," as theologians 
 have pictured it ; it is no spectacular drama of retri- 
 bution, winding up the scroll of the ages with sudden 
 afterclap of retribution ; but it is the constant self- 
 working of an inherent law, assimilating us more and 
 more to that infernal or celestial love to which we 
 have given our hearts. 
 
 All the punishments of the soul are means of dis- 
 cipline and growth ; all its heavenly promotions are 
 rewards of spiritual desert and fitness. Death is but 
 an incident and a necessary incident of the onward 
 progress of the spirit. So, also, the conception of the 
 departed soul as being conducted and shut up in cer- 
 tain localities, above or below, in heavenly courts or 
 infernal pits, seems a relic of this older geocentric 
 view of the universe, which no mind familiar with the 
 heliocentric structure of the heavens can very well 
 hold. Modern thought conceives of the disembodied 
 soul, rather, as possessed of the freedom of the uni- 
 verse, and carrying its own heaven and hell within its 
 happy or remorseful consciousness. 
 
 In the soul's life after death, as before death, its 
 natural course is a continued ascent. We enter the 
 spirit world, the wisest of us, as mere infants in spir- 
 itual power, to go onward, by varied experiences, 
 perhaps through many rebirths, to the youth and full 
 maturity of spiritual character. The infinity of worlds 
 and the measureless eternities of time and varied con- 
 ditions of existence, that modern knowledge exhibits, 
 
TEE EXPANSION OF TEE UNIVERSE 27 
 
 seem to me to harmonize little with the popular 
 notion that this earthly life is the only probation time 
 of the human soul. The enormity and disproportion 
 of the penalty for him who fails to meet the require- 
 ments of the current scheme of salvation seem too 
 great to be credible. The wisest of men are but little 
 children, the longest earthly life a mere tick of the 
 pendulum of eternity. The aeons of that eternity 
 belong to a Father who rejoiceth more over one sin- 
 ner that repenteth than over ninety-and-nine that have 
 never gone astray ; and I fondly dream that He will 
 try, through failure after failure and effort after effort, 
 to crown with success every case of soul-training He 
 has ever begun ; and His almighty power and unceas- 
 ing love will not in the end be defeated by the crea- 
 ture He has made. Each soul that begins to live 
 enters on a pilgrimage whose length can be measured 
 by no clock but that of eternity. Divine spark, as the 
 human spirit is, proceeding from the bosom of the 
 Divine, there is none so degraded that, in the course 
 of time, in the endless opportunities of the future, 
 he cannot rise to the level of his heavenly destiny. 
 " I do not care," as a friend of mine has said, " if 
 it takes several solar systems to do it. The soul can 
 wear out solar systems as we wear out coats." 
 
 The whole universe is God's home, and the vastest 
 constellations but a corner or two in the many man- 
 sions of the hospitable and everlasting sanctuary. 
 Everywhere, through its unending aisles, the Divine 
 Life pulses and the unswerving Love cares for all 
 His children. Steadily upward and onward they are 
 conducted, by salutary experiences, from room to 
 
28 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT 
 
 room, from realm to realm; and these huge spaces 
 and dots of flame and molten or out-burned balls of 
 fire that, to the materialist, seem such a dreary and 
 meaningless tomb, are, to the eye of faith, a grand 
 and systematic university of souls, class above class 
 and hall enclosing hall — all its courts bright with 
 growing revelations, fragrant with unwearying love 
 and tremulous with the breath and sympathy of the 
 omnipresent, indwelling God. 
 
 It has been charged that the reconstructions which 
 modern inquiry have made diminish reverence, foster 
 skepticism and are inimical to religion. But for faith 
 to be panic-struck because this earth of ours has 
 shriveled to the minuteness of a mustard seed is a 
 most unreasonable alarm. So much more glorious this 
 cosmic Igdrasil, on whose stem of life this mustard seed 
 is borne aloft ! So much more adorable the Divine 
 Fulness that spread out these teeming fields, whose 
 centre is everywhere and circumference nowhere ! 
 
 Yes, immensely more glorious ; unless, forsooth, you 
 fancy these titan dimensions and myriad processes too 
 great a task for any mind or personality, even that 
 of the Infinite, to direct or order. " How, then," as 
 Martineau asks, " has your mind, as learner, managed 
 to measure and know it, at least enough to think it to 
 be something beyond thought ? " 
 
 And if it is too great a task for conscious mind — 
 the highest faculty we know, — too great even for a 
 mind of divine compass to order and superintend it, 
 then how much more is it beyond the possibilities of 
 anything else to account for that wonderful harmony 
 which the cosmos so plainly exhibits ! 
 
THE EXPANSION OF THE UNIVERSE 29 
 
 The fact is that these reconstructions of modern 
 science do not touch the substance of religion. They 
 only shift its forms and really enlarge its sway and 
 dignity. Put the case we have been discussing 
 squarely before any intelligent Christian, so that he 
 can see its full significance, and who would prefer to 
 go back to the cosmic baby-house of Cosmas Indi- 
 copleustes and Thomas Aquinas ? Who would vault 
 in again the immensity of space to restore Dante's 
 little heaven ? Who would cut down to six ordinary 
 evenings and mornings the activity of Him who in- 
 habiteth eternity and has been forever at His work of 
 evolution ? Who would relinquish the confidence and 
 hope inspired by the unswerving progress of that 
 single divine purpose that links the ages together ? 
 
 For, whatever science has wrenched from the hand 
 of faith, she has given her back triple and quadruple 
 gifts. The vigorous probing that science has brought 
 to nature has not removed any of its wonderfulness, 
 any of its perfections, has not in any way robbed 
 man of his highest hopes or lessened his dignity ; but 
 it has disclosed new marvels behind those that first 
 struck man's attention ; it has made the universe more 
 august and yet more homelike. It has not emptied 
 the world of spiritual force, but filled it with the 
 presence of one All-inclusive Wisdom, one Infinite 
 Power and Eternal Love, from the firm yet tender 
 embrace of whose perfect order we can never fall. 
 
 " That God which ever lives and loves, 
 One God, one law, one element, 
 And one far-off divine event, 
 To which the whole creation moves." 
 
CHAPTER II. 
 
 THE SANCTION FOR MORALITY IN NATURE. 
 
 The old proverb calls it " an ill wind that blows 
 nobody good." Conversely, there are few good winds 
 that do not, at first, or in certain ways, blow ill to 
 somebody. Every fertilizing shower interrupts some 
 one's promenade, or spoils somebody's hat. Every 
 new and better road pulls down somebody's fence. 
 So the reconstruction of thought and faith which the 
 progress of modern knowledge has made, beneficent 
 as it has been, has caused great perplexity to many 
 minds, and set not a few quite adrift on a shoreless 
 sea of doubt. In the turmoil of opinions not only 
 hollow traditions and baseless credulities have been 
 assailed, but also the most legitimate authorities. Those 
 naturally skeptical or iconoclastic, use the new dis- 
 coveries as clubs to batter down the best established 
 principles of morality and religion. A conspicuous 
 recent sufferer from this tendency is the great law of 
 Evolution, which the labors of Darwin and Spencer, 
 Wallace and Romanes have so strongly confirmed. 
 
 The four great facts on which the law of evolution 
 rests are very simple. Living creatures, in the first 
 place, multiply so fast that there would be neither 
 food nor room for more than a small part, were all to 
 survive. Secondly, every living thing born into the 
 world varies slightly from every other. Thirdly, all 
 30 
 
TEE SANCTION FOB MORALITY IN NATURE 31 
 
 living beings inherit, more or less, the peculiarities of 
 their parents. In the fourth place, the selection of 
 those that survive is determined by their fitness to 
 meet the struggle for existence, or to please their 
 mates. These four facts appear, to scientific minds, 
 no less evident and elementary than innocent in their 
 bearings and august in their monitions. 
 
 But when the popular mind, hearing that these are 
 now accepted truths of modern knowledge, begins to 
 handle and apply them to daily life, what are its 
 practical deductions ? To our surprise we find it in- 
 ferred that evolution is a process where merciless com- 
 petition and cruelty are the honored rule, that nature 
 is a field where every creature struggles, and must 
 struggle, for himself alone; that, therefore, such 
 struggle is properly the rule to-day ; that might is the 
 only right which nature knows, and that the weak go 
 to the wall, where they had better go. 
 
 It is not the ignorant only who adopt these con- 
 clusions, but also learned savants who have been 
 prominent advocates of the evolution theory. One 
 of its American champions, Mr. Van Buren Denslow, 
 some years ago, rebuking Mr. Spencer for not carry- 
 ing out to its logical result the teachings of the 
 doctrine of development, maintained that moral rules 
 are merely " doctrines established by the strong for 
 the government of the weak. The prompting to steal 
 and lie is as much a prompting of nature with the 
 weak, as the commandments prohibiting those acts 
 are naturally urged on the weak by the stronger ones, 
 who wish to keep the weak in subjection." 
 
 Similarly, the German philosopher, Nietzsche, in his 
 
32 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT 
 
 "Zur Genealogie der Moral," traces the genesis of 
 present morality in the following manner : At the 
 beginning of civilization, " a herd of blond beasts of 
 prey, free from every social restraint, ranged about, 
 exulting in murder, rapine, torture, and incendiarism, 
 and made slaves of the lower races." Their own 
 qualities, cruelty, pride, joy in danger, and extreme 
 unscrupulousness (to-day reckoned bad qualities) — 
 were then the good qualities. Their slaves and sub- 
 jects naturally abhorred these qualities of their op- 
 pressors, and gave the place of honor to those qualities 
 that ameliorated their own sufferings, — pity, self- 
 sacrifice, patience, diligence, and friendliness. When, 
 at length, this slave-morality, through the victory of 
 Christianity and democracy, got the upper hand, the 
 primitive morality was inverted; the naturally bad 
 qualities were regarded as good, and the native in- 
 stincts of man that incite to selfishness and cruelty 
 were condemned as evil. Although Nietzsche's theory 
 of the origin of the virtues is quite opposite to that of 
 Mr. Denslow, he agrees with him in considering morals 
 not as universal laws, but as the edicts and utilities of 
 a class. 
 
 Equally surprising, were the declarations of 
 Professor Huxley in his last volume of collected 
 essays, " Evolution and Ethics," in which his 
 singular Romanes Lecture was still further cham- 
 pioned and given a permanent place among his 
 works. After painting in the blackest of colors the 
 injustice of the world, and roundly scoring the un- 
 moral character of the cosmic order, he appeals to the 
 logic of facts as proving that "the cosmos works 
 
THE SANCTION FOB MORALITY IN NATURE 33 
 
 through the lower nature of man, not for righteous- 
 ness, but against it." With especial severity he criti- 
 cises the fallacies, as he would brand them, of evo- 
 lution. As the unmoral sentiments have been evolved, 
 no less than the moral, " there is, so far, as much 
 natural sanction for the one as for the other." " The 
 thief and the murderer," he bluntly says, " follow 
 nature as much as the philanthropist." Cosmic evo- 
 lution is " incompetent to furnish any better reason 
 why what we call good is preferable to what we call 
 evil than we had before." Professor Huxley contends 
 that " for man's successful progress as far as the savage 
 state, he has been largely indebted to those qualities 
 which he shares with the ape and the tiger." But 
 with the changed conditions of man's later life, these 
 serviceable qualities of the earlier time have become 
 defects. " Civilized man would gladly kick down the 
 ladder by which he has climbed. In fact, civilized 
 man brands all these ape and tiger promptings with 
 the name of sins. He punishes many of the acts 
 which flow from them as crimes, and in extreme cases 
 he does his best to put an end to the survival of the 
 fittest of former days by axe and rope." " The cosmic 
 progress has no sort of relation to moral ends." " The 
 imitation of it by man is inconsistent with the first 
 principles of ethics." 
 
 The ethical progress of society to-day, Professor 
 Huxley concludes, " depends not on imitating the 
 cosmic progress, still less in running away from it, 
 but in combating it." The microcosm should pit 
 itself against the macrocosm, and " social progress 
 means a checking of the cosmic progress at every step 
 
34 TEE NEW WORLD AND TEE NEW TEOUGET 
 
 and the substitution for it of another which may be 
 called the ethical progress." 
 
 Such, in substance, is the string of pyrotechnical 
 paradoxes through which the eminent English Evo- 
 lutionist gave the scientific and philosophic world 
 as lively a shock as it has for a long time experi- 
 enced. 
 
 Have nature and evolution, then, no sanction for 
 morality? What are we to think of these modern 
 Jeremiads of certain evolutionists, which seem to come, 
 now from the lips of a resurrected Schopenhauer, now 
 from those of a third century Manichaean, and which 
 have made all the old-time dualists and supernaturalists 
 ask with wondering glee, " Is Saul, also, among the 
 prophets ? " 
 
 The question has very important bearings. For, 
 if morals and nature be in antagonism ; if evolution be 
 a process whose law is selfishness and cruelty, or at 
 least without sanction for righteousness and helpful- 
 ness, then, both the cause of evolution and that of 
 rational ethics are weighted with grave objections; 
 and advanced science joins its voice with ancient 
 dogmatism in declaring the world a realm divided 
 against itself. 
 
 If, on the other hand, we can find our ethical 
 instincts rooted in the whole realm of vital nature, and 
 developed step by step with the ascent of life, then 
 science and faith will be harmonized, and we shall see 
 that the fundamental verities and duties are right, not 
 simply because revelation or intuition has taught 
 them, but that they have been taught because the ex- 
 perience of the world has shown them to be right, 
 
TBE SANCTION FOR MORALITY IN NATURE 35 
 
 and the irresistible instincts of our vital being proclaim 
 them afresh in every succeeding generation. 
 
 Professor Huxley and the other critics who would 
 stigmatize evolution as a cruel and selfish process, and 
 who like to describe the world as a vast battle-field, 
 where the carnage goes on without cessation, and the 
 weak are systematically left at the mercy of the strong, 
 make the error of bisecting nature. They drop out 
 of view the better and larger half of it, the end and 
 consummation of the process, and then condemn the 
 whole because of their own partial observation. They 
 are like a man who should cut an apple-tree in two at 
 the trunk, and then blame the roots because they bore 
 no fruit. The process of evolution should be judged, 
 not by its roots, by what appears in its lower, rudi- 
 mentary forms and crude beginnings, but by its whole 
 sweep and final outcome. It is the mature form, most 
 of all, that presents the characteristic genius of plant 
 and animal. The real nature of an oak-tree is not 
 best discerned in the folded cotyledons, or the initial 
 swellings of the acorn, or the rootlets that first push 
 out from the shell. Acorn and rootlets are but parts 
 and expressions of that evolutive potentiality, that 
 generic idea, which is only to be completely under- 
 stood when we gaze at the full-grown monarch of the 
 forest. 
 
 So, to discern the real character of the cosmic evo- 
 lution and the authentic teachings of nature, we 
 should not separate the inorganic realm from the 
 organic, nor the animal from the human plane of 
 development, nor hold up the brutal warfare of the 
 carnivora and the ravin and ruin of the competing 
 
36 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOVGHT 
 
 rivals of the Saurian ages as exemplifications of 
 nature's character and lessons. We must recognize 
 the animal and the human species as parts of one 
 divine system, the end and fruit of which are even 
 more significant than its crude beginnings. In the 
 highest moral and spiritual forms and forces attained 
 in the process of evolution, we should recognize the 
 ampler and clearer manifestations of that vital spirit 
 and divine power which works and unfolds itself 
 through all the varied levels of creation. If civiliza- 
 tion and science and human morality really constitute 
 an " artificial world," as Professor Huxley asks us to 
 believe, " antagonistic to the general constitution of 
 the universe," how can we look for anything but 
 defeat when the microcosm pits itself against the 
 macrocosm ? How, indeed, could the higher life of 
 humanity ever have won a victory or reached the ele- 
 vation that it has attained ? 
 
 The contrary position is evident. Precisely because 
 human science and morality have been in harmony 
 and alliance with the secret laws and higher forces of 
 the universe, they have made the progress that we 
 know. 
 
 The term nature, properly used, means the whole 
 of creation, not its lower half; and the great victory 
 of modern science has been precisely to show that 
 man is as much a part of nature and under nature's 
 laws as the vegetable or the animal kingdom. If 
 humanity and human life are not a part of nature, 
 then the laborious researches and boasted achieve- 
 ments of Darwin, Spencer, and Romanes have gone 
 for naught. If humanity and human life, on the other 
 
THE SANCTION FOB MORALITY IN NATURE 37 
 
 hand, are constituent parts of nature, nature's teach- 
 ings are to be found, not simply in the fiery volcano or 
 the devouring leopard, but also in the generous hand 
 that rescues from danger, and the pitying care that 
 binds and heals the sufferer's wounds. Animal evo- 
 lution culminates in human evolution, and human 
 evolution culminates in the unfolding and perfection 
 of the spiritual nature. As the end and fruit is indis- 
 putably moral, by what logic shall we declare that the 
 process and law are devoid of ethical import ? 
 
 In the next place it is worthy of notice, and a most 
 proper plea in mitigation of the charges made, that those 
 parts and actions in nature, which are most criticised as 
 evil, are never ends in themselves, but merely means 
 and intermediate steps to the goal of good. This fierce 
 competition in the multitude of living beings ; this de- 
 vouring of insect by bird and mouse, and destruction of 
 bird and mouse by cat and hawk, and the wiping out 
 of the species unfitted to maintain themselves in the 
 painful struggle, — each of these processes is useful to 
 the higher ends towards which the current of life 
 moves. It is this that fills each nook with life, makes 
 the mole conquer the underworld of the ground and 
 the bird the realm of air, and makes each living 
 species strive and develop itself to the utmost. It is 
 this that sharpens the eyes of the lynx and the hear- 
 ing of the deer, and gives swiftness to the antelope and 
 the horse. It is this that moulds dull sensation into 
 these varied and marvelous instincts of bee and moth, 
 and, as the struggle goes on, leads rigid instinct up to 
 flexile cunning and adaptive intelligence ; and, among 
 the higher animals, develops in each race, according 
 
38 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT 
 
 to its peculiar dangers or opportunities, emotions of 
 fidelity or sympathy, faculties of memory or attention, 
 of song or reason ; and in man, at length, constitutes 
 mind and conscience the controlling powers, and 
 makes success in the battle of life the prize of courage, 
 perseverance, mutual devotion, and self-sacrifice. Al- 
 though on the lower levels the stern law of natural 
 selection produces the grasping parasite and the vo- 
 racious reptile, and in the early stages gives the ad- 
 vantage to the hard and selfish, yet, as the evolution 
 continues, this very " Moloch of natural selection," as it 
 has been called, refines and elevates its products age 
 by age. It annihilates the ferocious monsters of the 
 reptilian age ; it reduces the barnacle to immobility; it 
 makes the slave-holding ant helpless and the human 
 slave owner a fossil of the past. It breeds out of the 
 ferocious wolf-tribe the affectionate and devoted dog, 
 and allows no people to survive unless that people 
 makes justice and neighborly assistance and good-will 
 the recognized laws of its national life. Each layer of 
 olden slime and blood is a fertilizing alluvium which 
 produces the later glory of spiritual blossom and of 
 righteous, kindly fruit. 
 
 Moreover, a closer study of nature shows even more 
 than this. It shows that, even in the lower and rudi- 
 mentary stages of life, there is an altruism contem- 
 poraneous with the egoism of evolution. There is 
 " a struggle for others," as Professor Drummond has 
 well phrased it, conjoined with the struggle for self, 
 constantly restraining selfishness, often dominant over 
 it even in low ranks of life, and in the larger and higher 
 families of the natural kingdom always preponderant. 
 
\TBE SANCTION FOB MORALITY IN NATURE 39 
 
 A superficial acquaintance with the facts of evolu- 
 tion brings out as its prominent features such traits as 
 struggle, selfishness and cruelty. But a deeper and 
 keener study shows that from the outset of life there 
 have been principles of super-fecundity and overflow 
 present, and there have been instincts of solidarity 
 and sympathy involved that irresistibly carry the 
 individual beyond the circle of his own interests. 
 In the simplest cell which, in obedience to the 
 expansive tendency of life, splits into two, or 
 forms, with its excess of protoplasm, the nucleus 
 of a new cell, the philosophic eye beholds the 
 germ of the moral law and the promise of the beati- 
 tudes. Wherever vitality is at its best, it is character- 
 ized by a constant overplus of production beyond the 
 needs of self-maintenance, and therefore an overflow 
 of the fountain of being that carries its current beyond 
 the bounds of self and commingles the waters of life. 
 Altruistic giving is the inseparable correlate of this 
 vital over-production. A certain disinterestedness and 
 outgoing of largess and sympathy is as characteristic of 
 healthy life as for the mother of a new-born babe to give 
 her milk to the babe. In the sacred unity and natural 
 bond that keeps the ocean in its bed and holds the parent 
 sheep to the duty of suckling her helpless lambkin, we 
 see the germ of that moral necessity that blossoms in 
 a Socrates' conscience or a Christ's self-sacrifice. 
 
 Professor Huxley presents the cosmic struggle for 
 existence as demanding the opposite conduct from 
 goodness and virtue: not self-restraint, but ruthless 
 self-assertion, and the characteristic qualities of ape 
 and tiger. By this he must mean, if his argument is 
 
40 THE NEW WORLD AND TEE NEW THOUGHT 
 
 to be effective, such qualities as those of cruelty, 
 voracity, thievery, and wantonness. On the contrary, 
 even the tiger's survival and success demanded from 
 him self-restraint and care for others. Had this self- 
 assertion and devouring appetite been indeed " ruth- 
 less," and not checked themselves in the presence of 
 his mate and his cubs and been ready to share his 
 booty with them, his line would have perished with 
 the first generation. Did the apes not associate them- 
 selves in bands, combining their forces for mutual as- 
 sistance and defense, how could this species of crea- 
 ture, so comparatively weak physically, destitute of 
 tusks, fangs, horns, or armor, have sustained itself 
 against its far more powerful enemies? It is not 
 merely in the human species, but also throughout the 
 whole realm of life below, that altruism and social 
 bonds manifest themselves ; self-will at due times and 
 occasions represses itself; and if it will not voluntarily 
 yield and curb its excesses, then it is sternly enforced 
 to do so by an inexorable Nemesis. 
 
 Foremost among these factors that enforce co- 
 operation and more or less of altruism, are those cen- 
 tral facts in the animal kingdom, sex and infant weak- 
 ness. Above the very lowest orders of existence, no 
 animal and few of the higher plants can reproduce 
 their species without a mate, nor can the young sur- 
 vive without parental care. Reproduction is no less 
 fundamental to life than nutrition. And if the neces- 
 sity of feeding themselves is the sure producer of 
 egoism in all forms of flesh and blood, the necessity 
 of pleasing their mates and taking care of their young 
 just as surely fosters altruism. 
 
THE SANCTION FOR MORALITY IN NATURE 41 
 
 Of course we should not attribute to the animal 
 mother the same affection and conscious self-denial 
 that characterize a human mother. But throughout 
 every realm of natural history, above the microscopic, 
 there are instincts that carry the individual beyond 
 his own needs, and often quite contrary to his own 
 ease, comfort, and self-preservation ; because they are 
 demanded by the race. The universal conditions of 
 reproduction, are, first, giving ; and, next, self-sacrifice. 
 See, in the case of the flowers, how the anther gives 
 to the stigma the fertilizing pollen that through micro- 
 scopic gateways penetrates to the inmost heart of the 
 pistil ; how, with the first beginning of the seed, the 
 petals begin to wither, turning into the germs the sap 
 on which they might have lived, and packing around 
 each tiny germ the stores of starch and albumen 
 which shall feed their hunger when the sun calls them 
 forth to life with the spring. " Every flower in the 
 world," Henry Drummond well says, " lives for others. 
 It sets aside something costly, a gift to the future, 
 brought into the world and paid for by its own de- 
 mise. Every seed, every egg, is a tithe of love." 
 Paternity implies a regard for another, more or less 
 permanent. Maternity is synonymous with self- 
 sacrifice. 
 
 As we look through the annals of natural history, 
 what curious and even romantic details are beheld grow- 
 ing from these fruitful roots ! We see the sand-wasp, 
 that never beholds its offspring, nevertheless laboriously 
 laying up for its grubs a provision of fresh food in a 
 sealed storehouse ; the paternal pipe-fish, carrying the 
 eggs of its offspring about in a pouch till they are 
 
42 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT 
 
 hatched; the father-nightingale, feeding the mother 
 regularly while she is sitting on the nest ; the indig- 
 nant gander, valorously protecting its little brood 
 against the intrusive stranger ; the mother lioness, in- 
 tercepting with the shield of her own body the lance 
 which threatens her cub, — what resplendent and 
 touching testimonies do the annals of science furnish 
 to refute the calumny that the cosmic order is one 
 solely or chiefly of ruthless self-assertion ! 
 
 No doubt, this parental love was in the beginning 
 crude, narrow, and hard. Evolution had to give it 
 long and patient polishing before the bitter buds, the 
 dwarfish, crumpled cotyledons, became the lovely and 
 stately blossoms of disinterested and unswerving af- 
 fection that we admire to-day. But the important 
 thing to notice is that the moral germ was there; 
 something unique in its kind and divine in its possi- 
 bilities. As Professor Romanes has well said : " The 
 greatest of all distinctions in biology, when it first 
 arises, is thus seen to be in its potentiality rather than 
 in its origin. The distinction between a nature that 
 can and a nature that cannot possess moral power is 
 capital." Once established in the world, this altruistic 
 bud was sure to increase and sweeten. Loveless 
 parents meant neglected, stunted dying offspring. 
 But the loving father and mother saved and improved 
 their offspring and made more loving descendants. 
 The fostering affection, however little it matters not, 
 was bound to be preserved and accumulated by that 
 best of bankers, heredity, at compound interest. Each 
 succeeding family in this royal line is richer in the 
 elements that make for progress. The little group of 
 
TEE SANCTION FOR MORALITY IN NATURE 43 
 
 father, mother, and offspring act together, and are 
 stronger for their union. New forces of sympathy, 
 brotherhood, and devotion spring up within the holy 
 circle ; and in the family, evolution gains a new in- 
 strument and ally, a daily generator and guardian of 
 the social and moral forces through which human 
 progress is attained. 
 
 All these parental feelings, it may be urged, how- 
 ever, are but enlargements and prolongations, so to 
 speak, of self. The offspring belongs to the mother, 
 and her care of it has, therefore, nothing properly dis- 
 interested about it. Outside this family circle can we 
 find in the system of nature any examples of mutual 
 help, any instances of truly disinterested sympathy and 
 cooperation ? 
 
 Most assuredly we can. He who cannot see them, 
 but perceives in the cosmic order only a gladiatorial 
 pit, either has only a meagre knowledge of natural his- 
 tory, or wilfully closes his eyes to its nobler chapters. 
 
 At the dawn of animate existence, every life was 
 probably a single cell, as we still see in the case of the 
 amoeba and other protozoa. But this self-sufficiency 
 leads to nothing in evolution. For the development 
 process to advance, it must resort to the cooperative 
 principle. So we have compound plants and flowers ; 
 the colonies and groups in which the lower animals 
 club together their forces ; the communal life of the 
 polyps, the sponges, and the bees, where each member 
 or group takes up its respective share of labor for the 
 public good ; one set drawing in the food, a second 
 digesting it, assimilating and storing it away ; a third 
 producing buds, seeds or eggs. 
 
44 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT 
 
 As we direct our glance a little higher up the ladder 
 of life, we see a still more interesting casfe 01* mutuat 
 aid in those notable interchanges of good services be- 
 tween blossom and insect, to which we owe all that is 
 beautiful and fragrant in the floral world. In its in- 
 most heart the flower spreads a banquet of honey, and 
 marks the road to it with showy or conspicuous petals 
 or some sweet perfume, that even at night will guide 
 the insect guest to the nectar. As each bee or moth 
 or butterfly helps itself from the table of its floral host, 
 it pays for all it takes by carrying the fertilizing pollen 
 to the neighboring flower, and ensuring the preserva- 
 tion and multiplication of the species that has fed it. 
 Thus plant and insect develop together. Those plants 
 survive and multiply most that hide their honey and 
 pollen best from hostile marauders, but leave some 
 clue to guide their insect helpers. The bee and the 
 moth quicken in intelligence and helpfulness, because 
 those who make the most skilful go-betweens will 
 best feed themselves and best propagate the plants 
 that will feed their descendants. 
 
 Even on this low range in the animate world, it is 
 evident that " those creatures succeed best who, in 
 fulfilling their own life, also compass the good of 
 other beings." The farther and higher we pursue our 
 investigation, the more numerous and striking are the 
 illustrations of this reciprocity and helpfulness. The 
 beetles assist each other in rolling up the pellets of 
 manure in which they bury their eggs. Many cater- 
 pillars weave tents in common. Beavers combine to 
 cut down logs and build their dams and communal 
 huts. Wolves, wild-dogs, and jackals do their hunting 
 
THE SANCTION FOR MORALITY IN NATURE 45 
 
 in packs. Rabbits, sheep, chamois, and rooks give 
 each other signals of danger. 1 Among bees, the 
 neuters, who never become mothers, watch over the 
 eggs and cocoons as if these were their own. The 
 agricultural ants sow in common, and harvest and 
 store their crops in granaries to use in common, for 
 general sustenance. According to Forel, the funda- 
 mental feature in the life of many species of ants is the 
 obligation of every ant to share its food, already 
 swallowed and digested, with every member of the 
 community who may apply for it. If an ant which 
 has its crop full is too selfish to regurgitate a part of 
 it for the use of a hungry comrade, it will be treated 
 as an enemy. 
 
 The instances of sympathy and self-sacrificing kind- 
 ness among animals are as numerous as they are in- 
 teresting. Sir James Malcolm personally told Professor 
 Romanes of a monkey on shipboard, who, when its 
 companion monkey fell overboard, threw to it a cord, 
 the other end of which was tied around its own body. 2 
 Mrs. Olive Thorne Miller, in a recent lecture, told of a 
 cedar-bird that she had known to take charge of a 
 nest of young robins whose parents had been killed, 
 and to bring up the brood of orphans with motherly 
 care. Mr. Belt tells of a number of cases where he 
 has seen ants that had been buried under clay or 
 pebbles released by their neighbors, often with great 
 labor. 3 When seals, buffaloes or deer are attacked, 
 the males put the mothers and young and weak of the 
 
 1 Darwin, Descent of Man, p. ioo. 
 
 8 Romanes, Animal Intelligence, p. 475. 
 
 'Naturalist in Nicaragua, 1874, p. 26. 
 
46 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT 
 
 herd in the least exposed place, and go to the front to 
 meet the enemy. 1 
 
 Thomas Edward, the Scotch naturalist, having 
 wounded a tern, or sea-swallow, so that it could not 
 fly, saw it lifted up by two unwounded comrades and 
 carried out to a rock in the sea beyond his reach. 2 
 
 The weasel, which, as Rev. J. G. Wood relates, 
 came to pick up and carry away an injured comrade ; 
 the rats, who led a sightless comrade by a straw ; 3 the 
 blind pelican, who was fed by neighbors on fish 
 brought many miles ; * the gander that guided his 
 blind comrade about by gently taking her neck in his 
 bill ; s the old baboon, who came down from his place 
 of safety on the hill to force his way through a pack 
 of dogs and carry off a young baboon that had re- 
 mained behind in peril, 6 — these instances of tender 
 feeling and generous deeds might be called the de- 
 lightful romances of natural history, were it not that 
 every .one of them is a well-attested fact. They are 
 only a few among many similar cases. 
 
 The scientific skeptic may object that none of these 
 incidents affords proof of conscious self-devotion in 
 the animal world, but only of a blind instinct. Among 
 human beings we should certainly call them altruistic 
 — nay, moral. Why should we reckon them uncon- 
 scious and egoistic when occurring among animals ? 
 
 1 Thomson, Passions of Animals, p. 306, and Darwin, Descent of 
 man, p. 101. 
 
 a Romanes, Animal Intelligence, p. 275. 
 3 Seelenleben der Thiere, p. 64. 
 
 * Darwin, Descent of Man, p. 102. 
 
 * Romanes, Animal Intelligence, p. 272. 
 6 Darwin, Descent of Man, p. 101. 
 
THE SANCTION FOR MORALITY IN NATURE 47 
 
 But if they are illustrations of the action of blind in- 
 stinct, then all the stronger is the disproof of the 
 charge that nature has no sanction and command ex- 
 cept for self-interest. All the stronger is the proof 
 that there is an innate tendency, rooted in the consti< 
 tution of nature and all social things, that irresistibly 
 expresses itself in sympathetic impulses and self-saoi 
 ficing kindnesses. 
 
 Finally, we may notice that nature, instead of frown, 
 ing down and repressing this altruistic tendency, ha* 
 constantly favored and sanctioned it. It has, indeed, 
 been the very channel of the higher evolution of life. 
 If we run over the names of the commoner and more 
 numerous tribes of animals, the birds, deer, gophers, 
 seals, kangaroos, antelopes, mice, and rabbits, or, going 
 lower down, bees, ants, and grasshoppers, almost all 
 are gregarious animals. The social animals have an 
 immense preponderance over the unsocial. The car- 
 nivora, whose cruel self-seeking Professor Huxley 
 presents as the type and condition of success in the 
 competitions of nature, are relatively very few in num- 
 ber. They are the exceptions, not the normal type, 
 any more than the train-robber and the Tammany 
 "pantata" are typical Americans. Almost every- 
 where these species are dying out. ' ' The dragons of 
 the prime," who " tear each other in their slime," and 
 who have been presented as the true type of nature, 
 " red in tooth and claw," lie in their fossil cemeteries, 
 eternal witnesses to the judicial sentence which nature 
 has pronounced upon them and their ways. Never in 
 the annals of zoology was there such a Waterloo (as 
 Mr. Fiske has well called it) as these giant Saurians 
 
48 TNE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT 
 
 met. Among the carnivora that still survive it is 
 evident that, in spite of their terrible claws, or fangs, 
 and their strength and agility, these depredators and 
 enemies of their fellows are everywhere falling behind 
 in the race of life. Neither their natural weapons 
 nor their terrible energy of self-seeking are equal, as 
 aids to survival and multiplication, to the mutual help 
 and greater intelligence of the social animals. Dar- 
 win's dictum, that " those communities which included 
 the greatest number of the most sympathetic members 
 would flourish best," is found to be the fact and law 
 of animal evolution. 
 
 Professor Huxley charges that man, having pro- 
 gressed because of those qualities which he shares 
 with the ape and the tiger, now that he has become 
 civilized and moralized would kick down the ladder by 
 which he mounted. On the contrary, it has never 
 been by tigerish cruelty, or a monkey-like wanton- 
 ness, selfishness, or malicious mischievousness, that 
 man has reached his superior position. These quali- 
 ties, on the contrary, have arrested the progress of ape 
 and tiger. Man has gone above them because of his 
 larger share of the altruistic and social impulses, and 
 the mutual help and cooperative industry which have 
 tided the feeble over periods of weakness, and stimu- 
 lated intelligence and skill as nothing else has done. 
 
 So far from primitive man being a solitary, blond 
 beast of prey, his hand against every man, whose 
 fundamental instinct was cruelty and injury to others, 
 as Nietzsche portrays him, the discoveries of arch- 
 aeology show, on the contrary, that the earliest men 
 we know were already social beings and united in con- 
 
THE SANCTION FOR MORALITY IN NATURE 49 
 
 siderable communities. The kitchen-middens of 
 quarternary man, discovered and investigated by 
 Steenstrup, have a thickness of three metres in some 
 places, and must have been formed by a very numer- 
 ous horde of men. " The piles of horses' bones at 
 Solutre," says Max Nordau, in his work on Degenera- 
 tion, " are so enormous as quite to preclude the idea 
 that a single hunter, or even any but a very large 
 body of allied hunters, could have collected and killed 
 such a large number of horses in one place. As far 
 as our view penetrates into historic time, every dis- 
 covery shows us primitive man as a gregarious animal, 
 who could not possibly have maintained himself, if he 
 had not possessed the instincts which are presupposed 
 in life in a community, viz., sympathy, the feeling of 
 solidarity, and a certain degree of unselfishness. We 
 find these instincts already existent in apes." 
 
 " The splendid beast of prey," whom the worship- 
 pers of self would present as the typical human type, 
 is not only pernicious to the species, but, as Dr. 
 Nordau points out, 1 is pernicious to itself also. " It 
 rages against itself; it annihilates itself. The biolog- 
 ical truth is that constant self-restraint is a necessity 
 of existence, as much for the strongest as for the 
 weakest. It is the activity of the highest human 
 cerebral centres. If these are not exercised, they 
 waste away ; i. e., man ceases to be man ; the pre- 
 tended ' over-man ' becomes sub-human, — in other 
 words, a beast. By the relaxation, or breaking up of 
 the mechanism of inhibition in the brain, the organ- 
 ism sinks into irrecoverable anarchy in its constituent 
 'Nordau, Degeneration, p. 431. 
 
50 THE NEW WORLD AND TEE NEW TSOUGHT 
 
 parts ; and this leads, with absolute certainty, to ruin, 
 to disease, madness, and death, even if no resistance 
 results from the external world against the frenzied 
 egoism of the unbridled individual." 
 
 In these social and altruistic impulses of the higher 
 orders of animal life, the philosophic investigator sees 
 plainly the great uplifting causes of vital evolution. 
 This social and altruistic life is conditioned upon the 
 rudimentary moral sense of the species. 
 
 Unless, in the members of a group of birds, there 
 is an incipient sense of justice, which leads them to 
 respect the tid-bit which a neighbor has found, or to 
 chastise together the member who has lazily and self- 
 ishly appropriated the nest of a fellow bird, the social 
 group would quickly fall to pieces. All naturalists 
 who have studied gregarious species, have noticed 
 amongst them a certain sense of personal rights and 
 the duty of just dealing with their fellow-members in 
 the group. The dogs in Constantinople have each 
 their special street or alley, the invasion of which they 
 resolutely resist. The prairie-dog and the beaver have 
 their respective resting-places, which their comrades 
 respect. 
 
 Even in the animal kingdom, we thus find the moral 
 disposition to exist in a more or less developed form. 
 When we reach the human sphere, that which especially 
 characterizes its progress is the greater and greater re- 
 striction of selfish and unmoral competition by the 
 growing sense of sympathy and justice in the com- 
 munity. Even among barbarians, the qualities that 
 make a tribe the fittest to survive are not merely 
 strength of body, ferocity of disposition, and keen- 
 
THE SANCTION FOR MORALITY IN NATURE 51 
 
 ness in taking advantage of one's fellow, but rather 
 the possession of trustworthy, helpful, and loyal dis- 
 positions. Take a tribe of savages, among whom 
 robbery, murder, licentiousness, cannibalism, and in- 
 fanticide prevail. Is it not plain, from the nature of 
 the case, that such tribes are not likely to leave abun- 
 dant offspring ? Is it not the testimony of all travelers, 
 that such tribes are decaying tribes, yearly diminish- 
 ing, tribes on whose head nature has already pro- 
 nounced sentence ? 
 
 When, from the low state of morals among certain 
 Australian and African savages, it is argued that we 
 have here the proof and illustration of the general 
 absence of moral qualities in primitive humanity, the 
 real sequence of cause and effect is reversed. It is, 
 on the contrary, precisely because such tribes have 
 been deficient in average moral quality, that they have 
 failed to march upward on the road of civilization 
 with the rest of mankind, and have fallen into these 
 bog-holes of savage degradation. It is only when 
 humanity is spurred on by conscience to the faithful 
 discharge of great duties, that our race develops to 
 the full stature of its manhood. 
 
 Natural history, archaeology, and biology all com- 
 bine their testimony to show the error of that view 
 which denies to nature any moral lesson or tendency, 
 and sees in evolution simply a cruel and selfish strug- 
 gle. The sympathetic instinct and moral necessity 
 that man feels belong to no artificial world opposed to 
 the great order of the universe. They are rooted 
 deep in those same natural bonds and sacred unities 
 which, wherever red blood flows in the veins, have 
 
52 THE NEW WORLD AND TEE NEW THOUGHT 
 
 conditioned the very continuance of the species on 
 the faithful discharge by each generation of their duty 
 to others besides themselves. Vice and injustice are 
 ever destroying themselves. The more single-eyed 
 is selfishness, the more likely it is to starve itself to 
 death. It is a matter of simple scientific observation 
 that the preponderance of selfishness among a family 
 or a people, and the decay of that family or people, 
 go together. The predominance of egotism is a 
 physiological sign that the vitality of the species is 
 exhausted ; the family instinct dies out, and the indi- 
 viduals lose their ability to experience normal and 
 natural love, and cease to perpetuate themselves. 
 
 As Dr. Nordau has pointed out : " We possess an 
 unfailing means of determining the exact degree of 
 vital energy in a given species, race or nation, in the 
 proportion between the egotism and altruism of the 
 individuals contained in it. The larger the number 
 of beings who place their own interests higher than 
 all the duties of solidarity and the ideals of the de- 
 velopment of the species, the nearer is the species to 
 the end of its vital career. While, on the other hand, 
 the more individuals there are in a nation who have 
 an instinct within them, impelling them to deeds of 
 heroism, self-abnegation, and sacrifice for the com- 
 munity, the more potent are the vital energies of the 
 race" ("The Conventional Lies of Civilization," 
 p. 270). 
 
 The best of social fertilizers, then, are affection and 
 sympathy. Virtue has a self-propagating power. 
 Self-sacrifice, emptying the soul of the dregs of self- 
 ishness, and filling it with the living water of the 
 
THE SANCTION FOB MORALITY IN NATURE 53 
 
 Eternal Spirit, makes harvests bourgeon and ripen, 
 wherever its irrigating stream spreads abroad. Morality 
 is no invention of priests, statesmen, or philosophers. 
 It is an irresistible growth of the human heart, the 
 fairest blossom, the age-long victory and product of 
 that Divine Life of the universe that has ever moved 
 onward from chaos to cosmos, from carnal to spiritual. 
 That lustrous march is no drama of red-toothed 
 carnage, but a patient ascent through successive 
 planes of wider and more intimate cooperation, fusing 
 individuals in families, families in tribes, tribes in na- 
 tions, and nations in the universal family of God's 
 children, in which Jew and Greek, male and female, 
 black and white, must have their equal right and 
 place before the tribunal of Christian equity and 
 sympathy. The highest efflorescence on the century- 
 plant of cosmic life, the message of nature, as of 
 Scripture, is Love. 
 
 The universe is God's unfenced and all-inclusive 
 communion table; and every act of humane minis- 
 tration, every helpful hand stretched out to the weak 
 or fallen is a sacred rite in its holy Eucharist. 
 
CHAPTER III. 
 
 THE AGNOSTIC'S DIFFICULTIES AND THE KNOWABILITY 
 OF DIVINE REALITIES. 
 
 At the threshold of the investigation of the special 
 problems presented by the relations of science to re- 
 ligion there lies the preliminary question : What can 
 we know in religious things, and how ? 
 
 This is properly a question of pure metaphysics, 
 with which science has nothing to do, and there ought 
 not to be upon this point any conflict between the 
 scientific and the religious world. Science may 
 properly declare what she has learned and how 
 she has learned it. But when she proceeds to de- 
 termine what and how alone it is possible to know 
 anything, and engages in analyses of consciousness, in 
 investigations of the laws of thought, and clumsily 
 would spin again, over the eyes of faith, the subtle 
 logical webs of Hume and Kant, then it is evident 
 that science has strayed into the realm of metaphysics 
 and is trying " her prentice hand " upon the problems 
 of philosophy. 
 
 Nevertheless, though but an interloper and a 
 neophyte herself in this field, or rather just for this 
 reason, science has of late assumed absolute authority 
 in the domain of the knowable, and has summarily 
 ordered religion into close confinement. The brilliant 
 successes of modern science, — rivalling all wonders of 
 54 
 
THE AGNOSTIC'S DIFFICULTIES 55 
 
 the romancers, seven-leagued boots, lamp of Aladdin, 
 wand of fairy, or what not, — these marvelous achieve- 
 ments have made her believe that her favorite methods 
 are the only ones by which anything is to be known. 
 He who would build up solid structures of fact, not air- 
 castles of thought, must work, science tells us, by observa- 
 tion, induction, and verification. He must concern 
 himself, so science orders, only with what is discernible 
 by sense, and must ignore the suprasensible. All that 
 we can know is phenomena. Realities can never be 
 reached. Things in themselves are far beyond our 
 knowledge. The idea of immaterial spirit must be 
 assigned, as Vogt commands, to a place among specu- 
 lative fables. Substance, essence, soul, — these are but 
 high-sounding terms which cover so many chimeras. 
 Certainly, it is urged, it is not for man to know God. 
 It is not for the finite to think to find out the Infinite. 
 All conceptions involving infinity, — such as creatio^ 
 self-existence, eternity, absolute reality (Herbert 
 Spencer labors at length to show in his First Prin- 
 ciples), — involve the inconceivable; and though by 
 our familiarity with the sounds we may think we un- 
 derstand them, they are really but " pseudo-ideas, 
 symbolic conceptions of the illegitimate order." " The 
 power which the universe manifests is utterly inscru- 
 table," a conclusion to which Professors Huxley and 
 Tyndall gave repeated and emphatic " Amens." 
 When the question is asked, " Who made the uni- 
 verse ? " Professor Tyndall replied, " As far as I can 
 see, there is no quality in the human intellect which is 
 fit to be applied to the solution of the problem. It 
 entirely transcends us." 
 
56 THE NEW WORLD AND TSE NEW THOUGHT 
 
 Science thus denies to religion a foothold in the 
 realm of the knowable. The objects which she would 
 worship are banished into an impenetrable darkness, 
 and all that is left for her is to cover her head and 
 veil her face before the mysterious realm. In the 
 solemn emotions of the heart she may indulge herself 
 freely, if she likes; but she must not presume to 
 fashion the vague thought of that which she reveres 
 into any definite shape. She must not venture to 
 speak of that which she adores as if it were in any 
 sense known to her. " The only language concerning 
 the divine," as Renan says, " that does not degrade 
 God is silence." 
 
 There is in this attitude a semblance of a deeper 
 religiousness. Spencer calls it " the true humility " ; 
 Renan characterizes it as " the effect of a profound 
 piety, trembling lest it blaspheme." But it is in truth, 
 the subtlest and most dangerous attack on religion. 
 The old-fashioned atheism said bluntly, " There is no 
 God," and the extremity of its folly was its own 
 refutal. The infidelity of to-day says, " Whether or 
 not there is any God, we can know nothing at all 
 about Him, and so ought not to waste our time by 
 taking Him into consideration. If it pleases you, 
 however, to embrace with the deepest longings of 
 your nature this blank mystery; if, debarred from 
 knowing, you find consolation nevertheless in the 
 exercise of your creative faculties, in fashioning the 
 mystery in accordance with your words, why then," 
 say Tyndall and Huxley, " do so ; only have regard 
 enough for propriety and the exclusive prerogatives 
 of science to confine your worship to that of the 
 
THE AGNOSTIC'S DIFFICULTIES 57 
 
 silent sort at the altar of the unknown and the un- 
 knowable." 
 
 Practically, there is little difference between this 
 theory of spiritual nescience and outright denial of 
 spiritual existence. The assurance that we are, and 
 must always remain, in dense ignorance of spiritual 
 things kills the hope of heaven and the reverence for 
 the divine. It takes from conscience its authority, 
 and withers every religious emotion. Who can wor- 
 ship an absolute darkness, an utter silence? If the 
 absolute reality be utterly inscrutable there is no 
 reason to think of it under one aspect more than any 
 other. It may as likely be cruel as kind, contemptible 
 as venerable, vile and treacherous as majestic and 
 faithful. If we ought to revere it, there ought to be 
 something in it cognizable as worthy of reverence. 
 Why, if it be utterly unknowable, should we not hate 
 it as rightly as love it, despise it instead of adoring 
 it? To make God a name sweeter, grander, more 
 venerated than all others, it must be more than a 
 piece of blank paper. To build that temple of re- 
 ligion where songs of praise and thanksgiving, aspi- 
 rations for a better life, hopes of a brighter and eternal 
 home and vows of solemn consecration spontaneously 
 spring from the heart and ascend worthily and not in 
 bitter mockery, we need other material than an eye- 
 blinking fog-bank. 
 
 That know-nothingism in religion, then, which cer- 
 tain scientific cliques would establish, has not the first 
 shred of a claim to be considered its best friend. As 
 little claim has it to be founded on truth or clear 
 ideas. It is true enough that no sense-observation 
 
58 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT 
 
 can show us spiritual things. But neither does sense 
 restrict itself to the horizon of the visible, the tan- 
 gible, and the sensible. Tyndall justly speaks of " that 
 region inaccessible to sense, which embraces so much 
 of the intellectual life of the investigator." When 
 that which the microscope fails to see is regarded as 
 non-existent, " then I think," he says, " the micro- 
 scope begins to play a mischievous part," and he 
 proceeds to point out many cases where structure and 
 structural changes must be believed to exist although 
 the microscope can make nothing of them. 
 
 As it is in mineralogy and biology, so it is in 
 chemistry, thermo-dynamics, and optics. What is the 
 whole of these, as systematized sciences, built upon ? 
 Upon the assumption of the existence of the mole- 
 cule, the atom, and the ether. Yet of these units of 
 matter how many have been isolated, separately 
 weighed, measured, or touched? Of their ceaseless 
 motions how many have been felt or seen ? Of this 
 omnipresent ether, some eleven trillion times, or more, 
 as extensive as ordinary matter, how many particles, 
 what smallest quantity, has been observed ? Not one. 
 The largest molecule, it is calculated, is a thousand 
 times smaller than any particle the microscope can 
 separately discern and the ether is immensely subtler 
 even than this. 
 
 Again, let the scientist tell us, why it is that in any 
 case that he chooses of outward observation, he trusts 
 the report of his senses as assuring him of any out- 
 ward fact? You assume, for example, that when 
 your senses observe or verify anything, then you have 
 something you can confide in. Why so? Do you 
 
THE AGNOSTIC'S DIFFICULTIES 59 
 
 say that you have learned from experience on other 
 occasions that the impressions of your senses are 
 correctly conformed to the permanent something im- 
 pressing them ? But in reality this does not establish 
 the permanent something as outside of yourself. It 
 may be, perhaps, only a coherent abiding group of 
 subjective sensations. In reality no experience of the 
 correctness of the sense upon other occasions, how- 
 ever many, suffices to show that it was not wrong in 
 this. A certain antecedent and a certain consequent 
 may have been connected for a hundred million of 
 times, and yet the next time (a possibility of which 
 Mr. Babbage's calculating machine furnishes an actual 
 instance) the consequent may be different. So far 
 from this trust in our senses being furnished by 
 experience, it is what always does and must precede 
 experience. It is what alone makes experience pos- 
 sible and shows it to be applicable. As Professor 
 Huxley has acknowledged, this trust in the veracity 
 of our senses at the very moment that we make the 
 sensory observations is but an assumption, and when 
 that moment has passed, it is but an " unverifiable 
 hypothesis." x Why, then, do we make such an as- 
 sumption, such an "unverifiable hypothesis"? Be- 
 cause of the mental need, because it is an intuition of 
 our reason, or, as Professor Bain calls it, " the fore- 
 most of the instinctive tendencies of the mind." 
 Again, before the physicist considers that he really 
 understands the object that he has found, before he 
 has any true scientific knowledge of it, he feels that 
 he must classify it, refer its phenomena to some law 
 
 1 Pojrular Science Monthly, March, 1875, p. 576. 
 
60 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT 
 
 in accordance with which it takes place, some force 
 that has produced it. Why is this ? Again it must 
 be answered, it is from a mental need, the instinct of 
 natural order, of constant derivation of effect from 
 cause. 
 
 It is the intuitive principle, then, that in science 
 supplies the cement that binds the loose fact-grains of 
 observation into coherent and valuable structures. 
 The lowest stories of the scientific temple cannot be 
 built up without this, and the higher still more demand 
 it. The discerning physicist must recognize that the 
 grandest victories of science are those which it has 
 won by the aid of the imagination beyond the bounds 
 of the visible. Geometry, e. g., is throughout a work 
 of mental architecture, grounded upon and guided by 
 pure mental insight of space. Had geometrical truths 
 required for their acceptance demonstration from ob- 
 servation we should have known hardly a single prop- 
 osition. An exact right-angle has no existence as 
 matter of experience. A perfect sphere is unattain- 
 able in practice. Arithmetic, algebra, astronomy, are 
 ideal constructions, resting on the metaphysical con- 
 ception of number, and nowhere conforming to ex- 
 actly ascertained fact. In electricity, magnetism, 
 thermo-dynamics, the subtile analyses of modern in- 
 vestigators have banished altogether the former the- 
 ories of material fluids, and substituted the concep- 
 tion of invisible forces. The power that moulds the 
 crystal, that attracts the magnet, that moves along 
 the electric wire, can be seen only by the mental eye. 
 Observed facts form, of course, the starting-point of 
 knowledge, but they do not constitute its limit 
 
THE AGNOSTIC'S DIFFICULTIES 61 
 
 Reason is not to be chained around the ankle with re- 
 torts and balances, like a convict with ball and chain. 
 The wise savant must admit, as the distinguished 
 Bertholet expressly has done, that "there may be 
 something else to conceive, without knowing it ex- 
 perimentally, than connections of phenomena, and 
 that outside the limits where positive science asserts 
 itself it may be possible, without excess of mysticism, 
 to perceive the outlines, and to trace the sketch of a 
 certain ideal science where first principles, causes, and 
 ends find their place, and legitimately support it." 
 " It is not," in truth, as Caro has well said, " the new 
 fact which constitutes a discovery." It is " the idea 
 which attaches itself to the fact. Facts are neither 
 great nor little in themselves. The grandeur is in the 
 idea which marshals them. Those who make dis- 
 coveries are those who present us with a new idea 
 which puts old or petty facts in a striking light. 
 And this comes not so much from an induction as 
 from an instinctive fore-feeling of the order of nature. 
 So far from the mind being a blank tablet, learning 
 everything from experience, the fact is that expe- 
 rience is only fruitful when it is guided by something 
 that goes before and beyond facts, which solicits them, 
 which, impelled by the momentum of the innate idea, 
 interrogates nature, compels it under its urgent 
 catechizings to deliver up its secret, revealing as a 
 reality of nature the law hitherto but dreamed of by 
 the thinker." 
 
 Even in the scientific domain, then, comparatively 
 little can be known unless the external vision be sup- 
 plemented by the inward sight and the sense-percep- 
 
62 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT 
 
 tion be enlarged by the mental intuition. And in the 
 religious world it is by the same means that we learn 
 those spiritual phenomena, — personality, free-will, 
 sense of duty, — and those grand ideas, right and 
 wrong, infinity, perfection, and divinity, that are the 
 ineradicable roots of faith and piety. Not only is 
 there more than one road to the land of knowledge, 
 but he who would reach its richest mines, its grand- 
 est spiritual truths, must take the road of spiritual 
 discernment. Science has failed to find them, and 
 declared them undiscoverable, simply because it has 
 traveled on the wrong path and used the wrong in- 
 struments. To seek to learn the presence of the 
 moral law by an electrometer, or to test for the exist- 
 ence of the soul with litmus paper, or to discover God 
 by the spectroscope, is as fruitless a quest, and fruitless 
 for the same reason, as to seek to taste a sound, or to 
 verify the beauty of the Sistine Madonna by making 
 a chemical analysis of the pigments used upon it. In 
 such cases the failure to observe the objects searched 
 for does not demonstrate their non-existence, but 
 simply the application to the inquiry of wrong 
 methods. Against the failure of the sense to dis- 
 cover anything, I put the success of the spirit. Not 
 till the perfume of the rose is disproved by the inabil- 
 ity of the eye to see it ; not till spherical geometry 
 is shown false by the undiscoverability in nature of 
 a perfect circle or by the absence of any absolute 
 verification of the theorems concerning it, may the 
 negative testimony of outward observation avail aught 
 against the positive testimony of the religious facul- 
 ties. 
 
THE AGNOSTIC'S DIFFICULTIES 63 
 
 But intuition and instinct, we shall be told, are full 
 of illusions, and moreover have no safeguard such as 
 verification affords to observation. There is no 
 method by which we can test them, to distinguish the 
 false from the true, — if there be any true. And so 
 far from having a divine origin, and testifying legiti- 
 mately to eternal and universal truths, they are, in 
 reality, like our prejudices and our tastes, products of 
 human experience. Our intuitions are thus subject to 
 the same conditions as our experience, and give no 
 absolute truth. The axioms of geometry, as Pro- 
 fessor Helmholtz has shown, though necessary truths 
 to us, may be false in another sphere. Imagine be- 
 ings living and moving on the surface of a sphere, 
 able to perceive nothing but what is on the surface, 
 insensible to all else. The axioms of Euclid would 
 not there be valid. The axiom, for instance, that 
 there is only one shortest line between two points 
 would not, on such a sphere, be the truth. For be- 
 tween two diametrically opposite points an infinite 
 number of shortest lines, all of equal length, could be 
 drawn. Similarly, other axioms and propositions of 
 our geometry would no longer hold good. 
 
 Now, what shall we say to this? We willingly 
 admit that not unfrequently what are mere prejudices 
 or ungrounded prepossessions, pass themselves off or 
 are mistaken, for genuine intuitions. We admit that 
 intuitions are not, at the first, mature or purified from 
 other elements, and that it takes great carefulness to 
 disentangle and discriminate them from the other 
 things with which they are involved. They come 
 into the world not as full-formed powers, but rather 
 
64 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT 
 
 as the capacities and potentialities of mental life. 
 Only gradually do these embryo faculties unfold, and 
 while experience is not their cause, it is undoubtedly 
 the occasion and condition of their development. 
 Between their adult and their rudimentary phase 
 there is as wide a difference as between the grown 
 bird and the egg. That the manifestations of the 
 human intuitions should vary or should sometimes, 
 especially among savage tribes, be absent altogether, 
 is, then, no evidence against their trustworthiness or 
 reality. If they sometimes delude us, it is but the 
 same thing that the senses do. Scarcely a week 
 passes, even with persons of intelligence, in which 
 there is not more or less illusion of the perceptive 
 faculties. 
 
 But these observations of sense you say are verified 
 by other observations of the same sense or other 
 senses, or, if illusions, are corrected by their disagree- 
 ment with such other observations. But what veri- 
 fication have intuitions ? The same I answer as your 
 perceptions. When you have verified one perception 
 by another, what do you verify your verification by ? 
 If it has no verification, how is it any better, guarantee 
 than the preceding perception ? If it has a verifica- 
 tion, what is it — another perception ? something out- 
 side of itself, or in itself? As long as verification is 
 sought in further observations, in corroborations not 
 self-evident, we must continue our search for some 
 more valid verification. We can stop only when we 
 come to some self-evident truth, which needs no ex- 
 ternal buttress. We always do rest, and can only 
 rest, our perceptive verifications at last in some intui- 
 
THE AGNOSTIC'S DIFFICULTIES 65 
 
 tion. " Intuition has no verification ; and conse- 
 quently no safeguard," do you say ? I reply : " It is 
 its own verification and safeguard. Verification itself 
 is preceded and conditioned upon it." 
 
 How, then, if we are cut off from perceptive cor- 
 roboration, can we distinguish between a false and a true 
 intuition ? The test is found in mental analysis. The 
 guarantee of true intuitions is their simplicity, irre- 
 ducibility, ultimateness, universality, above all, their 
 necessity. The best criterion of a truth, as Herbert 
 Spencer declares, is " the inconceivability of its nega- 
 tion," and the mark of reality is " inexpugnable per- 
 sistence in consciousness." There are conditions 
 under which the intuitions may not be applicable. In 
 a world of two dimensions the axioms of geometry 
 of three dimensions would not of course hold true. 
 But this does not prove that the axioms and demon- 
 strations of Euclid are false ; only that conditions may 
 be conceived in which they would not apply. The 
 axioms and demonstrations are true eternally, even 
 though nowhere in nature should be found the con- 
 ditions in which they could be applied and realized. 
 
 Here we are met by the objections of the evolution- 
 ist school, that these intuitions are really but prod- 
 ucts of the experience of the race, — mental habits 
 formed by association and consolidated by inheritance, 
 and thus ingrained in the cerebral structure of each 
 descendant, — so that on the application of the ap- 
 propriate stimulus, the ideas of the man of to-day are 
 given the same forms as they had in his ancestor. 
 
 As regards this I would remark, in the first place, 
 that it is an explanation quite inconsistent with the 
 
66 TEE NEW WORLD AND TEE NEW TEOUGET 
 
 main theory, the evolution hypothesis, of those who 
 offer it. The law of evolution is the ascent from the 
 lower to the higher, from the simple to the more 
 complex, from the instinctive to the rational. But ac- 
 cording to this theory the habits and powers which 
 are now involuntary and unconscious were formerly 
 more voluntary and conscious. The earlier faculties 
 of animals, for example, were the higher, and their 
 present state a degeneration. Why do we give to the 
 instincts of the bee, the wasp, the beaver, a special 
 place in our thoughts, rather than suppose them to be 
 ordinary exercises of the conscious reason of the 
 creature ? Because the knowledge which the opera- 
 tions of instinct exhibit, the acquaintance with phys- 
 ical and physiological laws, and even with the mental 
 qualities and dispositions of other animals which it 
 displays, and the processes of reasoning by which ad- 
 vantage is taken of them, do not seem to us attribu- 
 table to the conscious mind of the animal without 
 absurd incongruity with the limited intelligence of the 
 creature in other respects. But the absurdity is just 
 as great or greater to attribute it to the conscious 
 knowledge and reasoning of the same species in 
 earlier generations. It is true enough that in man 
 many actions become instinctive and mechanical as 
 the result of a previous intellectual operation of the 
 self-conscious or reasoning kind. But the idea that 
 instinct in all other animals has the same origin, the 
 Duke of Argyll rightly calls " a dream due to the ex- 
 aggerated anthropomorphism of those very philoso- 
 phers who are most apt to denounce this sort of error 
 in others. . . . The theory of experience assumes 
 
THE AGNOSTIC'S DIFFICULTIES 67 
 
 the preexistence of the very powers for which it pro- 
 fesses to account. The very lowest of the faculties 
 by which experience is acquired is imitation. But the 
 desire to imitate must be as instinctive as the organs 
 are hereditary by which imitation is effected." Then 
 follow in their order all the higher faculties and ideas, 
 such as those of space, time, law, purpose, cause, by 
 which the lessons of experience are put together into 
 an ordered whole. Every step in this process sup- 
 poses the preexistence of powers and tendencies an- 
 terior to experience, instinctive and innate. As 
 Herbert Spencer himself has truly said, " Those who 
 contend that knowledge results wholly from the ex- 
 periences of the individual, fall into an error as great 
 as if they were to ascribe all bodily growth and struc- 
 ture to exercise, forgetting the innate tendency to 
 assume the adult form." But to assign it all to the 
 experience of the individual's ancestors equally neg- 
 lects the main-factor in the case, the innate tendencies 
 not only of physical structure but of mental habit, 
 that must have preexisted before these creatures could 
 have learned anything at all from experience. 
 
 So, too, he who explains our natural beliefs as mere 
 unmeaning agglutinations from the lower elements of 
 our experience, formed by the association of ideas, 
 commits the error of overlooking the significant fact 
 involved in those laws of association themselves. 
 " For the very idea of association/' as has been well 
 pointed out, supposes a guiding impulse. How can 
 we classify without a standard of classification ? How 
 can we connect without channels of connection? 
 Laws of association are but the manifestation of pre- 
 
68 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT 
 
 determined associating tendencies or principles in the 
 mind. Did not these exist, a man would be no more 
 capable of learning from experience than an oyster is. 
 But let us grant for the moment the truth of the 
 hereditary experience theory, and see what comes 
 of it. Suppose we trace our instincts and intuitions 
 back to the consolidated experience of our ancestors. 
 Let us say that we think with the intelligence, not 
 only of the individual, but of the whole race, from the 
 earliest epoch of savage life down to the present. 
 Then, if you wish, grant the further hypothesis of the 
 evolutionist, that the man is the child of lower, ape- 
 like forms, and these of still lower, and thus trace the 
 race down to some simple ascidian or jelly-fish. Then 
 resolve life into the happy combination of physical 
 forces, and mind into the product of nervous action 
 under the influence of the surrounding universe of 
 matter. What then ? If the mind is but a part and 
 product of the universe of matter, then the laws of mind 
 are but the laws of matter released and transformed. 
 They are the laws of mind on this higher stage of ex- 
 istence, because of old they were the laws of matter in 
 the lower stage. Our fundamental forms of thought, 
 our universal instincts and necessary intuitions point, 
 then, to universal facts of nature which engendered 
 them. Instead of being subjective merely, or possibly 
 delusive, they must correspond to the objective facts 
 of nature to which their existence is due. They bear 
 sure witness to the existence in the cosmic environ- 
 ment about them, of all those great principles, forces, 
 and truths to which they are the natural and necessary 
 self-adjustments. We know things, that is, as they 
 
THE AGNOSTIC'S DIFFICULTIES 69 
 
 are; our knowledge of the universe, given in our 
 universal instincts and necessary intuitions, though 
 quite a limited knowledge, is true as far as it goes. 
 
 But if we may trust to those instincts and intuitions 
 which testify to the existence of spiritual things suffi- 
 ciently to accept such order of existence as a fact, can 
 we know any more than the bare fact of such ex- 
 istence ? Is not the whole nature of spiritual things, 
 it is urged, shrouded in inscrutable mystery? The 
 infinite, the divine, things in themselves, are not these 
 beyond the possibility of knowledge to finite minds ? 
 Now it is true that the limits of our knowledge are 
 very narrow, and also that within these narrow limits 
 our knowledge is very imperfect. In truth, there is 
 nothing that we know completely. Our bosom friend 
 is a foreign kingdom to us. We have touched at most 
 but at a port or two along the shores of his spiritual 
 realm. There are multitudes of inlets hidden from us 
 — vast provinces of his life and being which our most 
 adventurous explorations have never reached. Even 
 the most familiar object, the grass-blade, the drop of 
 water, the simplest crystal, has something about it that 
 is unknowable. To explain any one of these com- 
 pletely we must know the whole cosmos. Especially 
 is this so in the religious realm. For, as Strauss has 
 truly said, " there is nothing profound without mys- 
 tery." Grander and brighter than all other truths, as 
 spiritual truths are, their shadows naturally are equally 
 pronounced. We shall always remain ignorant of much; 
 probably we shall remain ignorant of even the greater 
 part of what relates to the origin and history of the uni- 
 verse, the character, nature, and relations of God and the 
 
70 THE NEW WOULD AND TEE NEW THOUGHT 
 
 soul. Nevertheless, to maintain that the darkness here 
 is total is just as much of an error as to maintain that all 
 is light. Though we cannot know divine things with 
 complete fulness, we may yet know them in part. 
 Though human intellect cannot fathom to the bottom 
 the depths of spirit, nor follow out to infinity the divine 
 curve, yet it can drop the plummet of thought deep 
 enough to know whether this sacred mystery can be 
 any form of matter or blind force; or whether it must 
 be thought to be something higher. It can trace out 
 a section of the infinite hyperbola sufficient to show 
 whether the curve run by chance or law, towards the 
 irrational or the rational, the evil or the good, the 
 impersonal or the personal. 
 
 The boundary of the knowable, in the first place, is 
 not a rigid, immovable limit. It gives to the pick of 
 the scientist, to the probe of the philosopher, to the 
 clearer eye of the seer. One age leaves it at a differ- 
 ent place from that where it found it. If the realm 
 of the unknown is never to cease to surround that 
 of the known, it is not because no incursions can be 
 made into it, but because, however much it gives up, 
 its infinity is inexhaustible. It is a path that, though 
 knowable in front as well as behind, is yet so bound- 
 less that, though the discoverer go on and on, he will 
 still find ever lengthening vistas of the unexplored to 
 invite him further still. 
 
 In the second place, it should be noticed that he 
 who pronounces God absolutely unknowable erects 
 his own inability as a bound for all attainments, and, 
 moreover, as Martineau has pointed out, he implicitly 
 attributes to that which he exalts as infinite and un- 
 
THE AGNOSTIC'S DIFFICULTIES 71 
 
 limited a very restricting limitation and incapacity, 
 viz., the inability to make himself known. For, evi- 
 dently if there is no possibility of God's being known 
 by man, then on the side of God there must be an 
 equal impossibility of His making Himself known. 
 To assert this seems to me to be a gross presump- 
 tion rather than the humble and modest attitude that 
 it has been reckoned. A genuine humble-mindedness 
 would qualify even the confession of its own ignorance 
 and inability with a doubt of that. The true agnostic 
 ought rather to speak of God as one of the Hindu 
 Upanishads speaks of Brahma, " Whosoever knows 
 this truth, I do not know that I do not know him, he 
 knows him." 
 
 In one sense the inconceivable is incredible. That 
 which contradicts our reason is certainly not to be 
 believed; for it cannot be even thought. In one 
 sense the infinite is inconceivable, — it is unpicturable, 
 that is, by the imagination, it is unrealizable by the 
 wildest fancy. When the world-conquering ape, in 
 the Chinese fable, aspired to subdue heaven also, 
 Brahma held out his hand, and bade him leap over it. 
 Over eye-wearying plains, over range after range of 
 snow-clad summits the ape flew in his mighty bound, 
 and alighted on the loftiest mountain peak that he had 
 ever beheld. But, lo ! it was but one of Brahma's 
 fingers. So, in our mightiest flights of intellect, we 
 can pass over but a finger's breadth of the divine. 
 
 Nevertheless, the inconceivable, in another sense, 
 namely, that which overpasses our finite faculties not 
 by contradiction, but by immensity, is certainly cred- 
 ible, is, indeed, absolutely necessary to thought. The 
 
72 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT 
 
 idea of the infinite, though not to be pictured, is one 
 clearly thinkable. This infinity of immensity, that 
 which is more than any finite, is a quite positive idea. 
 Its vastness in quantity may debar us from enclosing 
 it in our thought, but it does not prevent our grasping 
 enough of it to know its quality. It may not be en- 
 tirely comprehended ; but it is not unintelligible in its 
 essential characteristics. Magnitude and nature are 
 different things. Because one cannot be encompassed 
 in thought, we are not therefore utterly ignorant of 
 the other. I cannot comprehend in my thought this 
 immense ocean of air in which we live, and by which 
 we breathe. Nevertheless, I know its nature, its 
 chemical constituents, its pressure, elasticity, fluidity, 
 and other mechanical properties, and I know that 
 they are essentially the same in every part of the im- 
 mense atmospheric sea that envelops the globe. Sup- 
 pose the immensity of the air actually infinite instead 
 of merely immensely beyond our comprehension, 
 would its nature be any the less knowable ? Take the 
 infinite space that our reason compels us to believe in, 
 and while our minds are unable, evidently, to realize 
 its extent, yet can we think of it in any part, even at 
 infinity, as anything else than space, — possessed of 
 the same three dimensions, and capable of holding ex- 
 tended objects? Take a cylinder. Prolong it in 
 thought to infinity. Though we cannot by utmost 
 stretch of our imagination follow it there, yet we know 
 that at infinity it would still keep all the character- 
 istics of a cylinder, and none others. A section made 
 at right-angles to the axis would always be a circle. 
 Similarly with a trait or attribute of the divine ; its 
 
THE AGNOSTIC'S DIFFICULTIES 73 
 
 enlargement to the infinite scale does not change it 
 into something else. Infinite power we know is still 
 power ; infinite wisdom without doubt is still wisdom. 
 Love in the divine is not something entirely unknow- 
 able, but the sweetest and fullest form of affection. 
 Spiritual things are not exalted by immensity or in- 
 determinateness, but by perfection of character. 
 God's infinitude is not exclusive, separating Him from 
 His creation, but rather inclusive. Our knowledge is 
 not so much erroneous as inadequate. We may 
 trust it not only for what it tells, but for the direction 
 in which it points us. 
 
 It seems to be thought that somehow that which 
 we cannot or do not know must be necessarily an- 
 tagonistic to what we do know, and puts it all in 
 doubt. But that which must always remain unknown 
 certainly cannot upset our present knowledge ; it can do 
 nothing to us that should frighten us, or unsettle our 
 minds. And that which, though not yet known, may 
 hereafter be brought within the field of our knowl- 
 edge must, through that very possibility of being 
 known, have harmonious relations with our present 
 knowledge. We can come to understand the un- 
 known only as we can find in it some likeness to the 
 already known. The new knowledge will modify the 
 old ; it may add to it ; but it will not be totally dis- 
 similar or contradictory. This is the experience of 
 all growth in knowledge hitherto, that the same order 
 holds, new truths being unfolded from the old, not 
 blankly opposing it. And we may rightly presume 
 it for the remainder. " Doubt ought not to be thrown 
 upon an intuition or a demonstration," as George 
 
74 TEE NEW WORLD AND TEE NEW TEOUGET 
 
 Henry Lewes has justly said, in his " Problems of Life 
 and Mind," " merely because it is an intuition or a 
 demonstration of one item in the great whole itself. 
 If we can resolve an equation of the first or second 
 degree, this absolute certainty is not disturbed because 
 there are equations of the sixth degree which surpass 
 our powers. . . . The existence of an unknown 
 quantity does not affect the accuracy of calculations 
 founded on the known quantities of the element." 
 Certainly, from the mere possibility, if there be such 
 a possibility, of an upsettal of our present ideas (some- 
 time or somehow ; no one pretends to say when or 
 how) no sensible man should discard all the solidly 
 grounded truths already attained. The logical vice 
 involved in the argument of Spencer and the agnostic 
 school in general is, in fact, the very one that savants 
 and logicians have blamed theologians for falling into. 
 The agnostic school, it will be found, always starts 
 with some, generally with a great many, assumptions 
 as to the infinite and absolute, — what they are, and 
 what they imply, — and from these they reason down 
 towards the finite and the created, and because they 
 find in this process of analysis, comparison, and 
 logical development many inconsistencies and incon- 
 ceivabilities, they leap to the conclusion that the ulti- 
 mate Reality is in every respect unknowable, and that 
 those attributes of power, wisdom, love, righteousness, 
 with which humanity, as the result of its experience 
 and intuition, has invested the divine are all delusive ; 
 that, in short, we have no justification in assigning to 
 the First Cause any attributes whatever. The agnostic 
 thus turns his own inability to argue down correctly 
 
THE AGNOSTIC'S DIFFICULTIES 75 
 
 from the infinite into an accusation of the impossi- 
 bility of the theist's arguing up from the finite towards 
 the infinite. Mathematics, however, show that argu- 
 ments from the infinite to the finite are rarely, if ever, 
 trustworthy, while arguments from the finite up to the 
 infinite are often sound and valuable. Because the 
 agnostic, by inverting the proper method of reason- 
 ing as regards the infinite, gets himself into trouble, 
 does it at all follow that no valid results can be at- 
 tained by the theist when he employs the right 
 method ? 
 
 In point of fact, however much men of science 
 object to the use of the infinite, they themselves use it 
 freely; in many departments they cannot proceed 
 without it. In geometry the conceptions of the line, 
 circle and sphere ; in mathematics the passage from 
 the axioms of uniform motion to other forms of 
 motion ; in algebra the calculus, the mightiest instru- 
 ment of mathematical investigation, — all these require 
 as indispensable the conception of the infinitely small, 
 and reasoning upon it. Astronomy and geology, on 
 the other hand, lead us to the correlative infinitude, 
 the infinitely large. Especially do those who belong 
 to the materialistic school, and scout most contemptu- 
 ously the idea of any infinite when presented by 
 theism, make without scruple the most confident as- 
 sertions of the infinite in their own hypotheses. 
 Strauss, Vogt, Buchner, Haeckel, each lays down, as 
 fundamental principles of his system, the eternity of 
 matter and the immortality of force. Even Herbert 
 Spencer cannot get along without using the idea of 
 the infinite. Though he has branded all ideas which 
 
76 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT 
 
 involve infinite self- existence as pseudo-ideas, and con- 
 sequently condemned all forms of theism, pantheism, 
 and materialism as inevitably involving such illegiti- 
 mate conceptions, no sooner has he laid theology, as 
 he imagines, in ruins, and swept off the debris, and 
 gone about his own system of thought-building, than 
 he puts in again the same old condemned corner- 
 stone ; he tells us that matter was uncreated and in- 
 destructible, and that force always persists in abso- 
 lutely unchanged quantity, — ideas which necessarily 
 involve infinite duration both in the past and the 
 future. And, more than this, the principle of thought 
 by which science extends its reasonings beyond the 
 finite is just the same as that by which religion claims 
 to know the character of the divine, viz., that what is 
 true up to a limit is true at the limit. 
 
 But is not our knowledge confined to the relative ? 
 it will still be urged. Can we know God in Himself? 
 Can we think of the Absolute without determining and 
 conditioning Him? Can we think of the divine 
 except in the colors of the thinking self? Doubtless 
 we cannot. But this, again, is a condition of all our 
 knowledge. We can know no one in himself, out of 
 his relations to us. We know a friend only by the 
 various manifestations of his personality, his looks, 
 tones, actions. And these must come into some con- 
 nection with ourself. We cannot know a grain of 
 corn in its inmost nature, irrespective of its appear- 
 ance to us. We know it only by the phenomena that 
 it manifests, its shape, hardness, color, taste. More- 
 over, these manifestations must be manifestations to 
 our special senses, our individual mind. What they 
 
TEE AGNOSTIC'S DIFFICULTIES 77 
 
 are or may be independent of our sensibility we can 
 never know. Whatever perception we have, the per- 
 ceiving subject is mingled with it, and a factor in the 
 product, and that perception is such only as the nature 
 of our faculties allows it to be. Without eyes we can 
 know no color, without ears, no sound, and the range 
 of colors, the gamut of sounds, is such only as the 
 structure of those organs allows. 
 
 Now all this is true enough, and instead of this 
 mystery of the absolute and this veil of the relative 
 being death-sentences of faith, they are as innocent as 
 any principle of knowledge that can be found. All 
 that this famous difficulty amounts to saying is, that 
 if we take away all that we can know of any object we 
 cannot know what is left ; and this self-evident law of 
 all things applies also to God, that we cannot know 
 Him more fully or know Him by any different way 
 than we know all other things. 
 
 This, I say, is true enough. But about it has gath- 
 ered a huge penumbra of notions that are not true, 
 that do not follow. It does not follow, as is inferred, 
 that because our knowledge is relative to us it is 
 therefore deceiving. Why may not the relative be 
 real and true ? Is there anything that necessarily con- 
 fines genuineness, actuality, or substantiality to that 
 which does not come into relation with us ? Why is 
 all this to be attributed to that mental air-castle — 
 " the thing in itself," or to the relations of things to 
 other minds rather than to their relations to our 
 minds ? What reason have we for assuming reality to 
 be that which cannot appear, or which appears to 
 other minds or in other relations than to us ? " If 
 
78 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT 
 
 reality is inscrutable, then," as Lewes asks, " by what 
 right can we affirm it different from the manifested 
 things ? " I maintain that all things are known by 
 their relations, for the simple reason that all things 
 exist only in relations. I maintain that the relative, 
 the phenomena that appear to us, are not mere 
 phantasms, but parts of the great real. A man stubs 
 his toe against the curbstone. The sensation within 
 him is a real thing, the stone is a real thing. Doubt- 
 less it is something more than what he feels it to be ; 
 but it is at least this, in this relation. It may be 
 thought of without reference to its present conditions, 
 but it is just now, in reference to those conditions, 
 precisely what he feels it to be. Remove it, and the 
 whole equilibrium of the cosmos would feel the 
 change. 
 
 And moreover the realities, so far from being made 
 unknowable to us by our relations to them, are re- 
 vealed through those relations. To infer that we can 
 know only the relations, never the things; that we 
 can become acquainted only with appearances, never 
 with substances ; and that we have no reason to be- 
 lieve in the existence, or to believe anything about 
 the nature of things and substances, is another fallacy. 
 Relations have no existence unless there are things 
 to be related ; and if the things are entirely unknown, 
 their relations must be also unknown. Appearances 
 are impossible unless there is something to appear. 
 And moreover through the relations themselves comes 
 a knowledge of the things related. In the very ap- 
 pearances we learn of the substances appearing. My 
 desk, for example, manifests itself to my touch as 
 
THE AGNOSTIC'S DIFFICULTIES 79 
 
 hard and smooth ; to my eye as of a certain shape and 
 color; to the ear, if it be vigorously struck, as pos- 
 sessed of a certain resonance. These phenomena and 
 relations to my sensitive self, speak of something 
 which has power to impress me with these sensations ; 
 they speak of something that abides, that I cannot 
 banish by thinking it away — something that affects a 
 photograph plate very much as it affects my eye; 
 something that when I shut my eyes to it or go away 
 from it, waits for my return in the very same group 
 of appearances till I return. These qualities speak 
 of some substantial unity in which they centre, some 
 reality to which they belong, and whose nature, as it 
 is in reference to me, is shown by them. Herbert 
 Spencer arguing for our knowledge of matter, main- 
 tains that though we know only the relative reality 
 yet that that stands in such a fixed relation to the 
 absolute reality that knowledge of one is tantamount 
 to knowledge of the other. " The conditioned effect 
 standing in indissoluble relation with the uncondi- 
 tioned cause and equally persistent with it, so long as 
 the conditions persist, is to the consciousness supply- 
 ing those conditions equally real, . . . and for 
 practical purposes is the same as the cause itself." 
 This is true, and true for all phenomena, for all reali- 
 ties. And in accordance with this principle, I claim 
 that so far from the ultimate Reality, the divine, being 
 inscrutable, we have no mean knowledge of it. We 
 have knowledge not only of its existence, but of its 
 nature. We know it as we know matter or force, as we 
 know a magnet, a rose, a bird, — by its action upon 
 us, by its manifestations to our faculties, " by the per- 
 
80 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT 
 
 sistent impressions which are the persistent results of 
 a persistent cause." God is in the manifestations of 
 Himself which He presents in His created things, as 
 well as in that mysterious essence behind the mani- 
 festations. God is in the known as well as in the 
 unknown. 
 
 If the ultimate Reality be utterly unknowable, as 
 Mr. Spencer says, then any manifestation of it would 
 be impossible, or would be meaningless. The abso- 
 lute Reality would be a blank to all intelligence. To 
 make any predicate of it whatsoever would be illegiti- 
 mate. Yet Mr. Spencer himself assigns attributes to 
 the Unknowable. He speaks of it as eternal, omni- 
 present, as active, as a power, and as a cause. Pro- 
 fessor Tyndall calls God, " the power that makes for 
 righteousness, intellectual as well as ethical." Here 
 certainly is a good deal asserted about the character 
 as well as about the existence of the absolute Reality, 
 and in terms, moreover, derived from conscious ex- 
 perience. By what reasoning process have these 
 terms been attributed to the Supreme Existence? 
 Nay, by what reasoning process has its Existence 
 been known or affirmed? "By our mental obliga- 
 tion," to answer in words that Mr. Spencer himself 
 has employed, " to regard every phenomenon as a 
 manifestation of some power." By that constitution 
 of our minds by which thought cannot be prevented 
 from passing behind appearance, and trying to con- 
 ceive a cause behind. But surely if this reasoning 
 process is good to show us so much of the divine, it 
 is good to show us much more. Every phenomenon 
 of the universe is a real and true manifestation of the 
 
THE AGNOSTIC'S DIFFICULTIES 81 
 
 action and character of the supreme Cause. As the 
 nature of oxygen, though tasteless to the tongue, 
 odorless to the nose, invisible to the eye, not to be 
 grasped by the hand, is yet known to us by the 
 effects which it is still capable of, both mechanically 
 and chemically, so can we know the God who is Him- 
 self unobservable by any sense, through His constant 
 actions and effects in the world. 
 
 By studying these phenomena of the creation, then, 
 we may learn the character of the Creator. The 
 cosmos reveals that order which gives it its name. 
 Steady laws in regular movement, in harmonious 
 coordination carry on its manifold operations. Con- 
 densing nebula, whirling cyclone, swinging tides, all 
 have their place and their rule. The Power from 
 which this order is the outcome, we may then know 
 as orderly. 
 
 Again, the cosmos manifests itself as a unity. To 
 the first glance the world, indeed, seems a hurly-burly 
 of contending powers, a conglomerate of a thousand 
 different substances, laws, and existences. But as 
 science, with its closer scrutiny examines it, the 
 apparent discords melt away. The complex resolve 
 themselves into combinations of the simple. The 
 antagonisms reveal themselves as but efforts at stable 
 equilibrium and coherences. Through the whole 
 gamut of matter — yes, and of life, with all its num- 
 berless forms and grades — is discovered the harmonic 
 note. Energies and laws converge to one focus. 
 Forces correlate and transform themselves one into 
 the other, till under the outward diversity we can 
 recognize but a single ultimate power. All manifesta- 
 
82 TEE NEW WORLD AND TEE NEW TEOUGET 
 
 J 
 
 tions of the supreme thus resolving themselves into 
 unity, can we not feel sure that the supreme Cause, 
 however many modes of manifestation it may have, 
 is itself one ? 
 
 Again, let us survey the history of the world, the 
 succession of living organisms, the path of human 
 events. Is there not in these appearances another at- 
 tribute of the ever-appearing clearly shown — the at- 
 tribute of life? Nothing remains inert, but all is 
 full of movement. Nothing remains stagnant, but is 
 ever pushing forward, climbing up, unfolding. If 
 sometimes there seems retrogression, it is but the back- 
 ward curve of the spiral, to mount and enlarge still more. 
 Species rise above species in an ascending hierarchy. 
 The new age stands above every olden time. The proc- 
 ess of the years brings with it widening to every power, 
 more and more perfection to every form. Has this spon- 
 taneous activity and continual process of adjustment 
 towards higher and higher levels, this unfolding evo- 
 lution, or in plain terms, growth, (the grand discovery 
 of modern science) nothing to tell us of the nature 
 of the power that is behind it ? Does it not, in fact, 
 indicate at the heart of this self-moving universe, that 
 which alone can move itself, that which alone can grow, 
 namely a Life, the vital energy of the first cause ? 
 
 Moreover, this order and progress in the universe, 
 if we fully understand it, is arranged according to in- 
 tellectual conceptions, exhibits systematic plans and 
 purposes. Means combine to promote ends. The 
 thoughts of the mathematicians are reproduced in the 
 laws of plant and planet. All parts and processes 
 move towards the fulfilment of one grand design, a 
 
THE AGNOSTIC'S DIFFICULTIES 83 
 
 greater and greater perfection. The developing proc- 
 ess, as it runs up from the insensate to the sensitive, 
 from the instinctive to the rational, causes more and 
 more intelligence to shine forth in the world. If 
 mind in unconscious nature be denied, no one can 
 deny its manifestation in the conscious parts of nature, 
 animal and human mind. And this manifested in- 
 telligence permeating the world, this mind blossom- 
 ing forth from the central life, must bespeak (on the 
 lowest physical view of its origin) that central life as 
 also intelligent. 
 
 Again, in the harmonious lines and forms of nature, 
 blushing blossom and majestic mountain-mass, glow- 
 ing sunbeam and checkered leaf-shade, we see a 
 beauty that supplies an exquisite gratification. In the 
 fruit and grain prepared in summer for our winter 
 food, in the treasures of metal and fuel and precious 
 stones built and stored for us in the bowels of the 
 earth, in the million provisions for the comfort and 
 happiness of every creature, in all these admirable 
 adaptations that disclose themselves most exquisitely 
 to those who examine most carefully, there is shown 
 the grand sweep of the universe towards the good, the 
 beneficent. Even in the bitter we find the sweet 
 hidden ; through struggle and sorrow we are led to 
 higher success. By bane and by bruise we are con- 
 ducted to the abiding blessedness. Can we behold all 
 these tokens of blessedness and love, and rationally 
 say that they tell us of no benevolence, that they sug- 
 gest no love in that Being whose power goeth forth 
 so benignantly in space and time ? 
 
 Once more, survey those visible things that especially 
 
84 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT 
 
 manifest the invisible. Observe the moral, and spiritual 
 elements of the world, the instincts of the right, the 
 authority of moral law. Watch the invincible tide that 
 sweeps towards justice, the remorse that chastises the 
 guilty, the serene peace that rewards the pure-hearted. 
 Consider the aspirations of the holy, the grand visions 
 of the seer, the saint's consciousness of divine commun- 
 ion. The mother counts her own life nothing if she may 
 save her babe. The patriot makes way for liberty over 
 his spear-pierced body. The martyr goes unwaver- 
 ingly to the stake rather than be disloyal to truth. 
 These grand illustrations of the nobleness of human- 
 ity which age to age renews, their elements lying 
 latent in every soul, are not they facts of the cosmic 
 evolution ? Are not they manifestations of the ulti- 
 mate Reality as truly as any other phenomena ? Are 
 they not as rightly significant of its nature? Yes. 
 As the picture shows the artist's sense of beauty, as 
 the symphony exhibits the composer's musical taste 
 and capacity, as the judge's administration of justice 
 discloses his discernment of right and faithfulness to it, 
 and as the father's self-sacrifice reveals his paternal 
 love, so through the rectitude, justice, love, faithful- 
 ness, and holiness manifested in mankind's noblest 
 representatives do we know in the Creator of man a 
 rectitude, justice, love, and holiness bright enough to 
 give the moral images, which, even but dimly reflected 
 on the mirror of human nature, so glorify it. Not 
 that these qualities in us adequately represent the at- 
 tributes of the divine, but rather that on their lower 
 level they correspond to them, they shadow forth 
 something of the brighter reality. That in the Su- 
 
THE AGNOSTIC'S DIFFICULTIES 85 
 
 preme there must be an intelligence at least as wise 
 as our highest wisdom, a goodness at least as much 
 and as good as our best, a real equal to our highest 
 ideal and our loftiest aspiration — this is the necessary- 
 inference from the manifestation of those qualities in us. 
 
 Here, then, by those very methods of observation, 
 generalization, and inductive inference by which 
 physical science is built up, we can know something, 
 not merely of the existence, but of the nature and at- 
 tributes of the ultimate Reality, manifested in the 
 universe. But if science may not admit this sketch 
 of the divine character as affording any absolute or 
 complete knowledge of it, it must at least logically 
 admit it as sufficient relative knowledge, good as far 
 as it goes, good as its own knowledge of the force 
 and matter and motion that it talks so confidently of; 
 good as these are for " good-working hypotheses " ; 
 nay, as the only hypotheses that will work. 
 
 The attributes with which theologians have usually 
 invested the divine — such as infinity, eternity, omnis- 
 cience, flawless holiness and absolute perfection and 
 independence, are indeed, more or less unpicturable 
 and unverifiable and quite metaphysical. 
 
 It is well to admit this. 
 
 Suppose then we should relinquish any claim 
 to a knowledge of them, and thus avoid all the im- 
 possibilities of knowing God, founded upon them, of 
 which the agnostic makes so much. Suppose we 
 claim only for the God of our worship a range as 
 wide as the known universe, a duration no more vast 
 than the oldest star-dust, a force as subtle merely as 
 the cosmic energies, a manifested presence simply as 
 
86 TEE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUQHT 
 
 grand, mysterious, noble, and beneficent as the uni- 
 versal life in which we live and move and have our 
 being, — surely, we have still left a Being divine enough 
 to demand our most reverent worship. I am not con- 
 cerned to vindicate against the doubter any of the 
 metaphysical attributes which he claims prevent us 
 from knowing God or believing in .Him. If they hold 
 him back from belief in God, I would say to him, 
 " Let them go." We have still left within our knowl- 
 edge and before our eyes the witness of a power and 
 an intelligence enough, and vastly more than enough, 
 to thrill us with awe, to quicken us to praise, and to 
 command us, if we would win any success or true 
 blessedness, to conform our will to that mightier will 
 that governs all. 
 
 That is the short and simple answer to these meta- 
 physical quandaries of the agnostics which are so 
 often regarded as insuperable barriers to faith in the 
 divine. We not only can know a Being worthy of 
 our worship, cause of all that comes into existence, a 
 Being of dimensions and duration to which we can 
 put no bounds ; but we do know such a Being. The 
 agnostic knows Him already just as much as any one 
 else. Only he calls that Being " Nature," not God, 
 and speaks of it as if it were an independent power. 
 
 But seriously to regard nature and God as two sep- 
 arate powers or to think of the forces of the world as 
 something independent of God is to abandon mono- 
 theism and go back to polytheism. It is not only 
 poor theology, but poor science and poor philosophy. 
 When men separate God from the forces that are His 
 ©wn energies, from the laws which are His own habits 
 
THE AGNOSTIC'S DIFFICULTIES . 87 
 
 of action, and from the material manifestation which 
 is His own body, and then try to prove His exist- 
 ence, no wonder they hunt from room to room of the 
 boundless mansion of earth and sky, and can find no 
 separate God visible within the field of their telescope. 
 But let us begin by recognizing space as His 
 stature, eternity as His life, and each vibrating stream 
 of light and heat that bridges the interstellar spaces as 
 the throbbing pulses of the cosmic organism ; then 
 we find that that divine face, as Browning says, 
 
 " Far from vanish, rather grows, 
 Or decomposes but to recompose, 
 Become my universe that feels and grows." 
 
 The question, then, becomes much simplified. The 
 superhuman power, practically eternal and infinite, is 
 before our eyes, besetting us on every hand. As 
 Herbert Spencer, in the name of science, says, " Amid 
 the mysteries that remain the more mysterious the 
 more they are thought of, there will remain (to the 
 scientist) the one absolute certainty that he is ever in 
 the presence of an infinite and eternal energy from 
 which all things proceed." 
 
 So much is admitted to-day by modern science. 
 The question is narrowed down to the alternative, Is 
 this eternal power that fills all space an inanimate and 
 unconscious power or a living and a conscious power ? 
 
 Now to this question the agnostic again interposes, 
 " It is impossible to know." Mr. Ingersoll recom- 
 mends to us the answer of the Indian to the mis- 
 sionary who was urging upon him the Christian faith. 
 The Indian took a stick and made a little circle in the 
 
88 TEE NEW WORLD AND TEE NEW TEOUQET 
 
 sand, and said, " That is what Indian knows." Then 
 he made a larger circle round that, and said : " That 
 is what white man knows. But out here, outside of 
 the circle, Indian knows just as much as white man." 
 
 That was undoubtedly a very clever stroke, — for an 
 Indian. But for a white man to adopt it as conclusive, 
 as Mr. Ingersoll does, shows a surprising ignorance of 
 what the white man of this nineteenth century has 
 accomplished. It is the glorious victory of modern 
 science to have demolished such limitations on its 
 knowledge. The Indian's knowledge covers the small 
 valley in which he lives. The white man's extends 
 not only to the larger state or hemisphere where he 
 has traveled, but to provinces where he has never 
 been, where no man has ever been. No man has ever 
 seen the north pole or the other side of the moon ; 
 yet we are as practically certain of their existence and 
 character as if we had been there. We have discov- 
 ered gases that no sense has directly observed, rays 
 of the spectrum invisible to the eye, suns that no tele- 
 scope has seen, yet whose courses and times of revo- 
 lution and velocity through the sky the astronomer 
 has carefully noted, calculated and verified. And in 
 these unobserved suns of the stellar depths the man 
 of science feels certain that the laws of heat, light, 
 chemic affinity, mathematics, and geometry, are the 
 same as here. Below, in the smallest germ, science 
 finds force, law, growth, and rationality. Above, in 
 the grandest and most distant solar systems, force, 
 law, growth, and rationality again are manifested. 
 And in whatever still undiscovered galaxies may lie 
 trillions of leagues beyond, whose existence is not yet 
 
THE AGNOSTIC'S DIFFICULTIES 89 
 
 either known or suspected, the same principles, we 
 feel certain, will still rule there as here. As to that 
 which it is impossible for us ever to know, we can of 
 course say nothing. That, however, can in nothing 
 affect or concern us. But that which, although it is as 
 yet unknown, is conceivably knowable, must be recog- 
 nized, by virtue of that knowability, as owning the 
 dominion of those principles by which alone things 
 are knowable. 
 
 Whatever, then, lies outside the circle of our abso- 
 lute knowledge does not interfere with the practical 
 certainties of theistic faith. The reason is that this 
 modern science of the white man of the nineteenth 
 century has found out that the whole universe is 
 woven out of the same material and spiritual web. 
 The domain of knowledge — not merely present knowl- 
 edge, but potential knowledge — is one coherent with 
 itself and with what is already known. The cosmos 
 is a unity, from end to end. The molecules of hydro- 
 gen and sodium in these double suns that the spec- 
 troscope informs us of, though the telescope cannot 
 separate them, vibrate in unison with the sodium 
 flames of our own earth. The same laws of gravita- 
 tion that draw the falling penny that you toss up in 
 the air back to the ground, wheel the farthest galaxies 
 around their hidden astronomic centres, and the 
 youngest, mistiest nebula of the skies is proceeding 
 on the same path of evolution by which our own 
 planet has ripened to its present condition. The 
 various stages and realms of nature are not exclusive 
 of one another, but inclusive, enclosing one another 
 like the nest of concentric shells which make up a 
 
90 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT 
 
 conjurer's ball. The vegetable kingdom includes the 
 inorganic ; the animal kingdom includes the vegetable ; 
 the human includes the animal and all below it. And 
 so the divine, we may feel sure, however higher and 
 grander than the human, will not be wanting in what 
 forms the glory of man. 
 
 Of course, we cannot wholly know God's nature ; 
 but as little can we know ourselves, and yet be wholly 
 ignorant of Him. The divine attributes are loftier and 
 more numerous than the human. But, by the law we 
 have just stated, they are not alien and without rela- 
 tion to the human, but inclusive of the human. 
 Whatever higher qualities God has, He is at least as 
 wise, at least as just and good, as the human children 
 He has brought into being; and, even as to that 
 higher and mysterious centre of Divinity which is ever 
 to remain a mystery, we may at least feel sure of this, 
 — that the direction in which it lies is the direction of 
 man's own highest powers, not that of the inferior and 
 more meagre qualities of dead matter. 
 
 This is the simple course of reasoning by which the 
 religious thinkers of to-day feel sure that the grand 
 universe about them is no wheel-work of unconscious 
 machinery, but the organism of a boundless Life and 
 superior Reason. The universe is permeated with 
 order. All its forces and laws are unitary. It is ever 
 climbing forward, pushing upward, growing and un- 
 folding. 
 
 This order and growth proceed according to ideal 
 laws and conceptions, exhibit intelligible plans and 
 purposes. The laws of the arrangement of the leaves 
 on the stem and of the planets wheeling about their 
 
THE AGNOSTIC'S DIFFICULTIES ' 91 
 
 solar centres conform to one and the same mathe- 
 matical formula. The grand current of the universe 
 is ever towards the righteous and the beneficent. The 
 history of man exhibits a steady moral progress. The 
 course of evolution progressively exalts conscious 
 personality and strengthens the foundations of justice, 
 suppresses the lower and carnal, and refines, diffuses, 
 and enthrones in power the spiritual. 
 
 How do these qualities thus steadily emerge more 
 and more in nature and man, unless they exist in their 
 cause ? We can have no appearance unless there is 
 something to appear. No blossom is evolved unless 
 there is a seed, — a cause from which it is evolved. 
 These phenomena of nature and man manifest, then, 
 the action and character,, of the supreme Cause. At 
 the heart of this self-moving, growing universe, there 
 must be that as has been already suggested, which 
 alone can initiate motion, can grow, — namely, a Life ; 
 a life vast and all-powerful enough to produce what 
 we see that it does produce. And this universal Life 
 cannot work with such wondrous intelligence, justice, 
 and beneficence, it cannot be imagined stirring us to 
 love and righteousness as it does, unless there were in 
 it an intelligence, rectitude, and loving kindness equal 
 to our own loftiest aspirations. Surely, when we feel 
 ourselves commanded with such an unconditional im- 
 perative to do our duty and to love our neighbor that 
 even life itself must be sacrificed to obey it, we cannot 
 believe that it is from any being himself loveless or 
 from any force or power itself immoral and insensate 
 that we should have been charged with such insistent 
 duties. 
 
92 TEE NEW WORLD AND TEE NEW TEOUGET 
 
 The facts of the world, then, seem plainly to point 
 to intelligence and benevolence, so high and wide that 
 we can fix no bounds to them, as characterizing the 
 supreme source and life of the world. 
 
 But here the agnostic interposes with fresh dif- 
 ficulties. If God be good, how comes it that justice is 
 so often thwarted, that innocence is not a perfect 
 shield, that famines like that of India to-day are per- 
 mitted to occur ? 
 
 In the problem of evil we have a serious difficulty, 
 — the oldest and gravest difficulty to belief in a God 
 worthy of our worship. But, while it is a difficulty, 
 the difficulties on the other side, in rejecting the idea 
 of any divine causation or any beneficent purpose, are 
 far greater. If the source from which humanity 
 springs be but dead mechanism, destitute of goodness, 
 whence came this human pity ? Mr. Ingersoll's own 
 indignant protest against such a doctrine as that of 
 eternal hell or against the unmerited sufferings of the 
 innocent, — this and every other manifestation of 
 human compassion and indignation against wrong, 
 such as our skeptics and agnostics are so often found 
 expressing, are the strongest presumption of the divine 
 goodness and righteousness. Can God have put this 
 instinct of the lawful desert of virtue, of the injustice 
 of purposeless, unmerited suffering, into His children's 
 hearts, and no similar feeling be in His own heart ? 
 Does the agnostic really fancy that in himself there is 
 a tenderness of soul superior to that of his Creator ? 
 Or, if he insist still in arguing on the materialistic 
 basis, does he really believe that he has a sense of 
 justice and impulse of good will beyond all that this 
 
THE AGNOSTIC'S DIFFICULTIES 93 
 
 great universe that moulded and cradled him pos- 
 sesses, so that, if the universe could but wake up to 
 consciousness for a moment, it would be astonished at 
 the new and superior attributes that this human pygmy 
 has attained to ? That would, indeed, be most colos- 
 sal conceit. But, if we are not to puff ourselves out 
 with such arrogance, then we must trust that there is 
 some satisfactory explanation to this problem of evil, 
 dark as it seems, — an explanation entirely consistent 
 with God's goodness. 
 
 And we can, in fact, see no little way into the 
 enigma. Evil is only incidental, the scaffolding, 
 shavings, and rubbish, as it were, of nature's building, 
 all to be removed or utilized later on. No nerve is 
 made on purpose to ache. The pain is but the danger- 
 signal, to warn against more serious injuries. Disease, 
 decay, and death are the accompaniment of laws 
 that promote or guard life, — the autumn dropping of 
 the leaves on the great cosmic tree, to prepare for the 
 new growth and beauty of a more glorious spring- 
 time. Man's passions, though the source of so large 
 a part of his miseries, are yet the motor powers of all 
 his social and moral progress, the channel of life, the 
 physical basis of love and of all that is most precious 
 in existence. 
 
 Another great part of so-called evil is relative. 
 Yesterday it was a good eagerly grasped. To all 
 those below us in the social scale it is still a coveted 
 boon. To the infinite vision, perhaps, that hardship 
 which it works for us is but a blessing in disguise, a 
 spur to drive us on to a still higher good. Again, 
 take out of the world all the evil that is due to human 
 
94 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT 
 
 agency, and how large a part would be gone ! But 
 all this is plainly incidental to a greater good, — to our 
 moral freedom and our ability to learn from experi- 
 ence and be trained up in moral and spiritual excel- 
 lence. Mr. Ingersoll himself has said, " If man could 
 not suffer, the words ' right ' and ' wrong ' would never 
 have been spoken." Is the insentient creature, then, 
 better than the moral man ? Not so. The develop- 
 ment of man's moral character, the refining of his 
 spiritual personality, the development of pity and 
 sympathy, virtue and self-sacrifice, would all have 
 been impossible in a world where evil was unknown. 
 Would that have been a better world than this ? I 
 believe it would have been a worse world, — certainly, 
 a far inferior world to this. Its peace would have 
 been the peace of death. The development of the 
 human soul is worth more than all the pain it costs, 
 worth all the mistakes and sins through which it is 
 reached. It is only in the furnace of affliction that 
 the purest gold of character is refined. And no one 
 who has ever borne suffering aright, who has under- 
 stood its purpose as a process of spiritual purification 
 and perfection, has complained that it was incom- 
 patible with God's love to His children. To the ma- 
 terialist who says " Death ends all," it may seem ex- 
 cessive and useless. But where there is faith in a 
 future life for which this is the training school, where 
 there is believed to be an eternity of life in which God 
 can make up to each soul for all it has suffered, and 
 bring all this ooze and mud of earth to its purposed 
 blossoming in a heavenly clime, there this cloud of 
 evil turns out its silver lining before the eye ; and we 
 
THE AGNOSTIC'S DIFFICULTIES 95 
 
 rejoice to see how " from seeming evil " God is ever 
 " educing good, and, better yet again, in infinite 
 progression." 
 
 The great poet of English idealism has well spoken 
 of " truths that wake to perish never." 
 
 Amongst these eternal possessions of the human 
 heart the foremost of all is the faith in the Divine 
 Existence. Religion need have no real fear that that 
 grand thought shall suffer any permanent eclipse. It 
 is the light of all our seeing ; and they who think they 
 deny Him but thrust aside some imperfect conception 
 of Him, only to vindicate the Divine essence under 
 some other guise. 
 
 " I'm an atheist, thank God ! " cried a blundering 
 boaster of his irreligion. And most denials of Deity 
 testify in the very same breath to a like unconscious 
 faith in the Inevitable One. If we cannot grasp Him, 
 it is because He clasps us. If we cannot see Him, it 
 is because He is the all-enveloping medium of mortal 
 vision. If we fancy our prayers needless, it is because 
 He has loved and blessed us already too much beyond 
 our deserts. And in the very sigh of the weary soul 
 that cannot find Him, He returns to assure us that we 
 cannot lose Him, even if we would. 
 
 It is true that all our inductions from observation, 
 all the generalizations and inferences that nature 
 authorizes, still fall short of giving us the attributes 
 and the measure of the truly divine. 
 
 We may reach by such scientific methods, to be- 
 lief in a cosmic being who is indefinitely immense, 
 but not infinite; inconceivably enduring, but not 
 eternal; wonderfully wise, but not omniscient; pure 
 
96 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT 
 
 as our purest ideal, but not absolutely perfect ; vastly 
 superhuman, but not supernatural; grand and ma- 
 jestic, indeed, but still limited and finite. For, as we 
 discern this Being only by His manifestations in the 
 universe, we have no right to attribute to Him any- 
 thing beyond the measure experienced in that universe ; 
 and nowhere in the actual universe can we discern 
 that which is absolutely unlimited, absolutely exempt 
 from liability to imperfection. What warrant, then, 
 have we for that infinitude, eternity, omniscience, and 
 perfection that constitute the really divine attributes 
 of God? 
 
 Yes, I admit that the physical universe manifests 
 nowhere these highest attributes of the divine. The 
 knowledge of them is not to be drawn from the con- 
 templation of nature. These are given, not by obser- 
 vation or logical inference, but by intuition and 
 spiritual suggestion, the more direct vision of the 
 soul that sees beyond the boundary of actual or 
 possible experience into the realm of pure truth. It 
 is the straighter entrance into the mind, and the clear 
 recognition by consciousness of that revealing light 
 which God imparts to humanity. The warrant of the 
 validity of these intuitions is the same that warrants 
 the lower intuitions on which science is based, viz., 
 their irrepressible existence, "their persistency in 
 consciousness " ; " the inexplicability of their arising 
 or continuing in our belief, unless corresponding to 
 realities " (to use Spencer's criterion) ; " the complete 
 satisfaction which is thus given to the needs of the 
 intellect " (to use Tyndall's test). If our ultimate and 
 necessary belief in the persistence of force, the inde- 
 
THE AGNOSTIC'S DIFFICULTIES 97 
 
 structibility of matter, and the uniformity of nature 
 be good proof of these basic laws of science (and re- 
 member : they are the only proof there is of them) ; 
 if the inexpugnable consciousness of the existence of 
 an ultimate reality behind appearance establish that 
 grand truth (as Herbert Spencer tells us it does, and 
 founds his whole system of evolution on it); if the 
 fulfilment of the desire of the reason which the lumi- 
 niferous ether gives should be accepted as good evi- 
 dence for its reality (as Professor Tyndall tells the 
 world it should) ; why is not the same kind of proof 
 valid evidence for these spiritual truths, these higher 
 attributes of the divine nature? Certainly, no one 
 who accepts the current theories or the established 
 principles of science can rightly object to the 
 reasoning. 
 
 And if by the rigid methods of induction, starting 
 from the widest observation and proceeding by the 
 most rigorous logic, we can lay the scientific founda- 
 tions of religion in the existence of a Being incon- 
 ceivably immense and enduring, grand as the universe, 
 beneficent and pure as our highest ideal, wise and 
 majestic beyond all standards of human wisdom or 
 material majesty, then we have all that is needed for 
 humanity's worshipful instincts ; and we may properly 
 expand this divine ideal in the glow of imagination to 
 that infinite and absolute plenitude of eternal per- 
 fection that is required for the complete satisfaction 
 alike of the adoring heart and the thinking reason. 
 
CHAPTER IV. 
 
 THE SCIENTIFIC VALIDITY OF OUR RELIGIOUS 
 INSTINCTS. 
 
 In the history of religion there is nothing more 
 astonishing, both to its friends and its foes, than the 
 ineffectiveness of the heaviest argumentative bombard- 
 ments in driving out faith in spiritual things from the 
 stronghold of popular belief. When the agnostic 
 peruses some new critique of the theistic argument or 
 the latest examination of the belief in a future life, he 
 throws his hat in the air in exultation, confident that 
 the superstition cannot survive such another fatal ex- 
 posure, and timid Christians themselves turn pale with 
 apprehension of the coming downfall of the church. 
 But when, the nine days' wonder over, the new dia- 
 lectical or scientific cannonade has passed by, the flag 
 of Christian trust and hope is seen floating as jubi- 
 lantly as ever over the ancient walls. The wise come 
 to a recognition of the truth that it was not chiefly by 
 logical or scientific scaling-ladders that man has 
 mounted to the heights of religious conviction, and 
 therefore that it avails little to pull them away. 
 
 That from which religion ever wells up afresh from 
 age to age is the spiritual capacity of humanity, 
 sensitive to the subtile touches of the unseen world 
 and the indwelling divine life. The laws of thought, 
 within whose narrow circle logic is confined, make it 
 
VALIDITY OF OUR RELIGIOUS INSTINCTS 99 
 
 difficult, if not impossible, to prove satisfactorily not 
 a few of the propositions of theism. Nevertheless the 
 forces of feeling and the tides of life, which are ever 
 pressing us over the logical boundary-lines towards the 
 Infinite, keep the sacred beliefs of religion perennially 
 alive. Against all the subtilties of the dialecticians, 
 in the face of all the discoveries of the scientists, the 
 heart makes its undying protests. However little, in 
 strictness of logic, we may be able to prove, the faiths 
 of our higher nature remain with us, and we say, with 
 England's poet laureate : 
 
 " I think we are not wholly brain, 
 Magnetic mockeries ; not in vain 
 Like Paul with beasts, I fought with death ; 
 
 " Not only cunning casts in clay ; 
 
 Let science prove we are, and then 
 What matters science unto men ? 
 At least to me, I would not stay. 
 
 " Let him the wiser man who springs 
 Hereafter, up from childhood shape 
 His action like the greater ape ; 
 But I was born to other things." 
 
 Such is the flat defiance of the heart to the worst 
 that logical analysis or physical investigation can do. 
 
 Now, to the scientific man this seems sheer senti- 
 mentalism. In his opinion we have no business (the 
 religious man no more than any one else) to introduce 
 the agitations of the emotions to disturb the con- 
 clusions of the intellect. " Every one," says BUchner, 
 " may, of course, have convictions of the heart ; but to 
 mix them up with philosophical questions is unscien- 
 
100 TEE NEW WORLD AND TEE NEW TEOUGET 
 
 tific." The only question that the scientific world 
 will admit as pertinent, in reference to the acceptance 
 of a theory, is the question of its truth or falsehood. 
 If a theory accords with reason or experience, then it 
 is true and is to be accepted. If it does not so accord, 
 then it is not true, and is to be rejected. The ques- 
 tion of its pleasantness or unpleasantness to one's 
 tastes, prepossessions, or instincts is not to be consid- 
 ered for a moment. 
 
 Now, to this demand for the pure truth, the simple 
 fact, I entirely assent, and I say that religion also 
 must assent. Truth is her sovereign, quite as much 
 as that of science. It is " they that are of the truth," 
 said Christ, that " hear my voice." The true Christian 
 disciple is known by his allegiance to the genuine and 
 the real, by the earnestness with which he seeks to 
 conform his thought and faith to the actualities of the 
 world. For a people that calls itself Christian to 
 make pleasant falsities the objects of its worship, and 
 " make-believe " the staple of its religion, would be 
 the saddest spectacle the sun anywhere could shine 
 upon. Truth, however distasteful, is better than the 
 sweet poison of delusion. 
 
 I accept truth, then, i. e., the evidence of the facts, 
 as the one thing which should determine our faiths. 
 But does this require that we should straightway dis- 
 miss all the instincts of the heart as incompetent to 
 testify at all in religious things, and admit to the judi- 
 cial balances only stone fossils and iced syllogisms ? 
 Grant that truth is the one decisive thing, and the 
 question arises at once : What is truth, and how can 
 you determine it ? The moment that you advance to 
 
VALIDITY OF OUS RELIGIOUS INSTINCTS 101 
 
 the determination of this question : " What is truth ? " 
 you must recognize that there are many questions in 
 which the accord or the discord of the theory with 
 our native constitution is a most weighty considera- 
 tion in determining what truth is. 
 
 Facts are, indeed, what we must follow ; but lumps 
 of matter and vibratory motions, pressed plants and 
 ticketed beetles are not the only facts in existence. 
 The inextinguishable longings of the human soul, 
 from which religions spring, are also facts, and as 
 good testimonies and signs in determining truth as 
 bug or polyp is. Even in relation to a spider or a bee, 
 statements in regard to their form, weight, color, and 
 other material characteristics are not the only scien- 
 tific facts of importance. The naturalist must record, 
 as matter of equal or greater gravity, their mental 
 qualities, the tastes of the one for insect prey, of the 
 other for honey ; the instinct of the one to spin its 
 webs, of the other to build and stock its cells ; the 
 varied impulses that move each in their different ways 
 of providing for the perpetuation of their respective 
 species. 
 
 So, in regard to man, a knowledge of his immaterial 
 characteristics is still more essential to a full scientific 
 knowledge of him than a knowledge of his material 
 qualities. His desires and longings ; those higher im- 
 pulses that move him to acts which are incompre- 
 hensible, if his being is interpreted as a purely ma- 
 terial one; those universal intuitions which are the 
 very condition of observation and the justification of 
 all reasoning, yet which pass quite beyond the strict 
 boundaries of either logic or empiricism, these are the 
 
102 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT 
 
 most important of all facts about him. And not only 
 are they facts, but they are facts that speak of more 
 than the character of their possessor. They are facts 
 that disclose also the nature of the world in which he 
 lives, and the nature of the beings with whom he is 
 connected. 
 
 Recall for a moment a few analogies. The building 
 propensity which urges the tamed beaver, kept in a 
 house, to strive continually to construct dams, would 
 assure us, (did we never directly observe the fact), of 
 the flowing stream, which is the creature's native 
 haunt. The groping of the new-born lamb for the 
 mother's dugs speaks plainly of the food there, meet 
 for the satisfaction of its craving. The sexual appetite 
 implies the answering sex; and the bird's nest-building 
 and brooding instinct is prophetic of the coming gen- 
 eration, and correspondent to its needs. Every part in 
 nature, having been moulded by the whole, speaks of 
 that whole, and bids us believe that whatever is needed 
 as its complement exists somewhere and somehow. 
 If no telescope had yet revealed Neptune, neverthe- 
 less, the need of that additional planet to explain the 
 perturbations of Uranus would assure astronomers of 
 its existence. When an Agassiz discovers, on the 
 summit of some mountain, thousands of miles from 
 the sea, the remains of creatures with gills and fins and 
 swimming-bladder, he is sure of the existence in that 
 region, at some past period, of the lake or sea to whose 
 aquatic environment these organs are correlated. Why 
 so ? Simply because these creatures needed this watery 
 element for the use of the organs with which we see 
 them endowed. 
 
VALIDITY OF OUB RELIGIOUS INSTINCTS 103 
 
 This is the customary method of scientific reasoning, 
 a guiding principle of discovery in nature, viz., that 
 nowhere in the world do we find a permanent general 
 need in a living species unless there exists some supply 
 adjusted to it. There is not a naturalist who thinks 
 of disputing this, or who, if he did, could make a step 
 of progress in his knowledge of ancient times. 
 
 Now, this same law holds in the realm of human exist- 
 ence. Whatever needs man's soul feels, whatever im- 
 pulses are native to his spirit, whatever insights his spirit- 
 ual vision can attain to, give evidence as to the real na- 
 ture of the world in which he was developed and the real 
 agency of the operations going on about him, equally 
 significant and valid as the laws which the senses indi- 
 cate or to which the reason testifies. 
 
 But just here the scientific objector would doubtless 
 interpose, and ask us if we are acquainted with the 
 epoch-making work of Mr. Darwin and Mr. Spencer, 
 and if we think that, in view of their discoveries, this 
 argument still has force. Mr. Darwin and Mr. Spencer, 
 our scientific friends assure us, have shown conclusively 
 that instinct and intuition are mere products of multi- 
 tudinous ancestral experiences, accumulated and fused 
 into these seemingly different things by the combined 
 action of habit, association of ideas, and heredity. 
 Though in the individual they may seem innate, in 
 the race they are not so, but are results of its experi- 
 ence ; they are developments of low, gross impulses, 
 and therefore are not worthy to be taken as witnesses 
 to the fundamental truths of religion. 
 
 Suppose we grant this origin of our cravings, 
 instincts, and intuitions. Let our highest intuitions 
 
104 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT 
 
 and aspirations, all the most delicate forms of the con- 
 scious life of to-day, be regarded as but the accumu- 
 lated principal and interest of all that has been felt or 
 known by every organism in the ascending line, from 
 the primordial life-cell up to man. Grant all this, and 
 what is the consequence? Does it overthrow the 
 validity of our instinctive feelings and intuitive ideas ; 
 or, rather, does it not solidly establish them ? 
 
 For what are the principles ruling in this develop- 
 ment of the soul ? First and foremost, the principle 
 of adjustment of the inner to the outer, of the mental 
 to the material. The very definition of life given by 
 Herbert Spencer is, " the continuous adjustment of 
 internal relations to external relations." We dis- 
 tinguish between a live object and a dead one, 
 Spencer points out, by noticing whether a change in 
 its conditions will be followed by a change in the 
 object itself. Stir it with a stick, or shout at it, and 
 its immobility or its action tells us whether it is inani- 
 mate or animate. In the living organism, not only is 
 there always some response to the outside world and its 
 events, but there is a fitting response. The rumina- 
 ting organs correspond to a flora of herbs and grass. 
 The stinging contractile power of a polyp's tentacles 
 corresponds, says Spencer, to the sensitiveness and 
 strength of the creatures serving it for prey. Accord- 
 ing to the need for more varied and more rapid 
 adjustment of the internal relations to the outer 
 relations, the inward organs are more and more com- 
 plicated and efficient. The degree of life varies as the 
 degree of correspondence, from the seaweed in its 
 simple environment up to infinitely complex man, in 
 
VALIDITY OF OUR RELIGIOUS INSTINCTS 105 
 
 his infinitely varied circumstances. Wherever there 
 is a gap between the inner and the outer relations, 
 there the organism modifies itself to fit the circum- 
 stances, and to close up the gap. The touch of nature 
 upon the living creature, and the response of life to 
 that physical impress, moulds the two into harmony. 
 The fur-clad northern animal sheds its fur in the south. 
 The creature from a warm climate, thinly clad or 
 naked, develops, in a colder zone, a warmer clothing. 
 The greyhound, brought to the rarefied air of the 
 Mexican table-land, unable in the first generation to 
 exert itself as usual without panting and exhaustion, 
 in the second generation unfolds a new breathing 
 capacity, and regains the speed, characteristic of the 
 species. Spencer's and Darwin's works form a treasury 
 of illustrations of this continual adjustment of the or- 
 ganism to its environment. It is the very condition 
 of the creature's existence, says Mr. Darwin, that he 
 shall exactly fit himself to the world about him. Death 
 to his species, in the struggle for existence, is the sure 
 penalty for not thus fitting himself to the facts of the 
 world. He cannot carry any load of useless organ or 
 faculty, or the extra weight will cause him to lose the 
 race. As soon as an organ is no longer of use, it 
 begins to shrivel and tends to degeneration and 
 extinction. Mr. Darwin challenged the production 
 of an instance where any organ, absolutely without 
 use in the struggle for life, continued for any length 
 of time to be fully developed. 
 
 Such, then, is the first great principle that governs 
 in the evolution of life, viz., that life is constantly and 
 necessarily correspondent to the universe without. 
 
106 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT 
 
 Now, apply this to the question of religion, and what 
 is its bearing ? Only a new and stronger confirmation 
 of our position, that the innate idea bespeaks an ob- 
 jective reality corresponding to it. The persistent 
 inward state, the constant moral and spiritual needs 
 of man, his ever-renewed beliefs (whatever they are), 
 inform us of the persistent outward fact to which they 
 are correlated. For did the external reality not exist, 
 the inward adjustment never would have arisen. Or, 
 if by some chance it had come into existence, then, 
 having no correspondent object to sustain, renew, and 
 keep it true, it must, under the influence of the 
 equilibrating tendencies, either pass away or shift its 
 form, until it reached a state of natural equilibrium 
 with its environment. 
 
 Or, take the other great principle of the develop- 
 ment theory, that of descent or heredity. Suppose, 
 as this theory asks us to believe, that our religious 
 intuitions and our moral sense are only refinements of 
 our social instincts ; and that these are but modifica- 
 tions of lower brute impulses ; and these, again, have 
 been derived and transformed, somehow, out of the 
 attractions, repulsions, and other activities common to 
 all matter and force. Nay, we will suppose the truth 
 even of Professor Huxley's theory, that we are really 
 only automata, that our feelings, thoughts, and aspira- 
 tions are necessary results of the sum of motions of 
 matter and impulses of force in the midst of which 
 they arise. We will look upon that which we call the 
 soul as formed gradually from the necessary interaction 
 of nature's energies ; not as an existence of a different 
 kind and substance, but only a subtler product of the 
 
VALIDITY OF OUR RELIGIOUS INSTINCTS 107 
 
 cosmic forces, risen thus to consciousness. What fol- 
 lows, then ? Is the logical result not this, that if we 
 inherit from the material world itself, its laws must be 
 registered not only in our bodies but in our minds ? 
 Our consciousness, on this theory, is but the liberation 
 of the dumb life and reason of the cosmos. The laws 
 of the mind are its laws, precisely because they were 
 beforehand the laws of that greater whole, nature, of 
 which mind is but a more specialized part. A con- 
 stant association in the heart's instincts and wants im- 
 plies a constant association in the outer world. 
 
 The logical connection is a necessary one. For on 
 this automaton theory of the mind no free-will can 
 disturb the necessary and proper conclusion. The 
 general laws of the mind, the universal beliefs of man, 
 whatever they are, must result from the primitive facts 
 of the universe, with as little chance of error as in the 
 calculations of a calculating machine from the data 
 with which it starts. 
 
 If, then, this human sensibility of ours, the first 
 conscious expression of the hidden life forces of the 
 universe, should shrink from such an idea as that of a 
 personal God, and turn instinctively to views such as 
 are offered us by the materialists, then, I admit, we 
 ought to reject religion as false and accept atheism as 
 true. But if, on the contrary, this inner force of 
 nature, when liberated and expressed in the conscious- 
 ness of humanity, with one general voice should be 
 found confessing its natural belief in a creative mind ; 
 if, in its heart of hearts, it feels daily the need for such 
 an object of worship and trust, and recoils with an 
 unconquerable aversion from every godless theory, 
 
108 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT 
 
 then we have, in such testimony of the heart, sound 
 logical proof of the facts to which these instincts of 
 the heart correspond. They testify to the existence, 
 as facts in the encircling universe, of those grand 
 realities which, by iterated and reiterated impressions 
 on the plastic organization of man, have stamped upon 
 it these ineffaceable ideas. If the thought of infinity 
 is indispensable in the ideal world, then it is an essen- 
 tial element in the real world. If we feel universally 
 a power within ourselves, urging us to righteousness, 
 then we know there is a power, not ourselves, working 
 for that same righteousness. 
 
 Do we find faith in a perfect wisdom impressed on 
 the sensitive tablets of our souls ? Then there is im- 
 plied, in that grand cosmic die that formed the im- 
 press, an equally infallible intelligence. Do we find, 
 again, within the evolved microcosm, man, an insati- 
 able hunger for a fuller love and an imperative need 
 of a more helpful sympathy than man can give? 
 Then we may be sure that without, in the macrocosm 
 that evolved the human miniature, there is the divine 
 affection corresponding thereto. 
 
 To ask, then, in regard to any theory proposed for 
 our acceptance, whether or not it is in harmony with 
 our natural instincts, is not an illogical sentimentalism, 
 but a consideration of real weight in deciding whether 
 or not it is to be accepted as true. The instincts of 
 the heart, the intuitions of the mind, the aversions and 
 longings of the soul, afford indications, not to be over- 
 looked by any careful reasoner, as to the great realities 
 in the cosmos which have shaped and moulded them. 
 The latest scientific theories, instead of invalidating 
 
VALIDITY OF OUB RELIGIOUS INSTINCTS 109 
 
 such testimony, approve its competency. Let us, 
 then, turn to human nature, and see what its testimony 
 really is. 
 
 Is human nature adapted to atheism or to theism ? 
 Do materialistic theories or religious convictions best 
 satisfy the human heart ? These questions need but a 
 brief consideration, so preponderantly do the facts all 
 lie on one side. The whole history of humanity testi- 
 fies to its religious tendencies and adaptations, and the 
 violence to its highest instincts which every anti- 
 religious system offers. In every human soul there is 
 a thirst for something above all that the senses can 
 give. There is an attraction to the infinite and per- 
 fect, and a groping after the sight and knowledge of 
 it. The dimmest shadows of this Infinite Being fill 
 man with awe and reverence. Impelled by sacred im- 
 pulses, often scarcely understood, but still urging him 
 on, man bows in worship to the holy mystery. As 
 the schoolhouse exhibits man's desire for knowledge 
 and the court-house his sense of justice, so the edifice 
 of prayer and praise, holiest structure in every land, 
 witnesses to the religious instinct in man. It matters 
 not what different forms these may have, the stone 
 circle of the Druid or the Pagoda of China, the mosque 
 of Islam or the cathedral of Christianity ; they all give 
 testimony to the same worshipping instinct. 
 
 It will be objected, perhaps, that this religious wave 
 is but a mere product of superstition, arising from ig- 
 norance of the laws of nature, and fear engendered by 
 them. 
 
 If it be a superstition, it is one shared by the most 
 enlightened philosophers and men of science. A 
 
110 THE NEW WORLD AND TEE NEW TEOUGBT 
 
 Bacon, a Leibnitz, a Pascal, a Locke, each has been its 
 champion. A Herschel, a Newton, a Liebig, an 
 Agassiz, a Faraday, each has owned its sway. It is 
 the testimony of Professor Maudsley, a man by no 
 means prejudiced in favor of religion, that " there is 
 hardly one, if, indeed, there be even one, eminent in- 
 quirer who has denied the existence of God, while 
 there is notably more than one who has evinced a 
 childlike simplicity of faith." 
 
 There are, of course, some individuals and probably 
 in the lowest ranks of humanity there may be one or 
 two whole tribes (although the latest investigations 
 tend to disprove this), without any trace of the relig- 
 ious sentiment. So there are men who are color 
 blind. So there are tribes who cannot count above 
 ten, or discern the simplest musical discords or con- 
 cords. But this does not prove the non-existence of 
 color, harmonies of sound, or distinctions of number. 
 It shows only in these men the undeveloped state of 
 their natures and faculties. Neither do the few excep- 
 tions to the grand hymn of praise and prayer, lifted 
 by man to God, disprove at all the native adaptation 
 of man to religion, and his need of it. The worst un- 
 believers have yet had their beliefs. Accepted forms 
 of theologic statements have been rudely uprooted by 
 them, but the irrepressible religious sense has blos- 
 somed in each with some new faith of the man's own. 
 
 The Jew who was excommunicated in Holland as 
 the most negative of infidels was but so " intoxicated 
 with God," as wiser minds afterwards saw, that he could 
 walk in no narrow ecclesiastical path and see the Di- 
 vine under no one nor threefold form. The represent- 
 
VALIDITY OF OUR RELIGIOUS INSTINCTS 111 
 
 ative scoffer of the eighteenth century, leader and 
 mouthpiece of the disbelief of the French Revolution, 
 built at his home in Ferney a chapel with the inscrip- 
 tion ; " Deo erexit Voltaire." The anathematized 
 Tom Paine begins that " Age of Reason " which has 
 been called a very Gospel of Unbelief, with this out- 
 spoken creed : " I believe in one God and no more 
 and I look for happiness beyond this life." 
 
 Auguste Comte reasoned out a grand scheme which 
 he called The Positive Philosophy, recognizing only 
 phenomena, their coexistence and succession, and 
 ruling out of court the very existence of God or the 
 soul as the idle fancies of the world's childhood. But 
 when he had finished it, — lo ! one day he met a 
 woman who awoke the heart slumbering within him. 
 His beloved Clotilde revealed to him a law higher 
 than self-interest, the law of love and worship ; and he 
 had to graft on to his system such sort of religion as 
 was still possible after the immortal and the infinite 
 had been ruled out. A makeshift Deity was impro- 
 vised out of " Collective Humanity," and two hours a 
 day, divided into three private services were to be 
 spent in the adoration of this " Grand Being," under 
 the form of a mother with her child in her arms. 
 The image of the fair idol, dress, posture, everything, 
 was to be brought distinctly to mind, and the whole 
 soul was to be prostrated in her honor. 
 
 With such chaff will the spirit of man seek to sat- 
 isfy its spiritual hunger when legitimate food is 
 denied it ! 
 
 Suppose that we knew two young men, starting out 
 on the career of life, in the flush of youthful energy. 
 
112 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT 
 
 One of them has a clear, strong faith in the immortal 
 soul within him and the all wise and all holy God 
 above, and has determined to live as these beliefs dic- 
 tate to him that he should live. The other is destitute 
 entirely of religious faith and has made up his mind, 
 also, to act in accordance with his Atheistic opinions. 
 
 Of which would any one have the brightest expecta- 
 tions? Which life, by its usefulness, its contented- 
 ness, its integrity and nobility would show itself in 
 conformity with the laws and forces of nature ? 
 
 In such a situation, is there any uncertainty as to 
 the verdict ? 
 
 Suppose a statesman, founding a new state, should 
 take as its foundation stones, principles like these : 
 " No belief in God or a future state is to be tolerated 
 under this government ; no worship of any superhu- 
 man being is to be allowed ; all efforts at spiritual per- 
 fection, or the gratification of the religious sentiments, 
 are to be as far as possible suppressed; men must 
 remember that they are but more-developed brutes, 
 and each must look out for his own gratification and 
 the furtherance of his self-interest." Who would be 
 wild enough to expect to make a nation live and pros- 
 per on such a basis ? As Robespierre told the French 
 Jacobins with reference to this very point : " If there 
 were no God in existence, it would be necessary to the 
 national well-being to invent one." 
 
 Or take but a few of the common test experiences 
 of life. When the sobbing wife looks upon the grave 
 of the beloved partner of her life ; when the young 
 man is sore beset by the seductions of unlawful pas- 
 sion ; when the martyr to truth sees the blazing pyre 
 
VALIDITY OF OUB RELIGIOUS INSTINCTS 113 
 
 staring him in the face, unless he will forswear his 
 honest convictions — which is it that in such crises best 
 meets the needs of the heart ? Which is it that re- 
 sponds to any man's sense of fitness or justice ? To 
 know that this world is the kingdom of an Almighty- 
 God, whose attributes are those of wisdom, love, and 
 holiness, a God who will conquer finally all evil, help 
 the struggling, and reward the upright, if not here, 
 then in a more blessed hereafter; or, on the other 
 hand, to believe that " the universe is simply an end- 
 less coil of antecedents and consequents, unwinding 
 from the drum of time by unchangeable law ; a mon- 
 strous engine of matter and force, grinding on re- 
 morselessly, caring not whom it kills, utterly unguided, 
 unheeding, unknowing " ? Can any one doubt which 
 of these answers alone corresponds to the native in- 
 stincts of man ? Can any reasonable mind be uncer- 
 tain as to which answer is adjusted to the characteristic 
 features of humanity, which have been impressed on 
 the heart of man by the grand seal of nature ? 
 
 Some half century ago a German writer published 
 a piece of verse which began in this way : " Our 
 hearts are oppressed with the emotions of a pious 
 sadness at the thought of the ancient Jehovah who is 
 preparing to die." 
 
 The verses were a dirge upon the death of the liv- 
 ing God, who was soon, as the author believed, to 
 perish from the belief of reason ; and the author, like 
 a well-educated son of the nineteenth century, be- 
 stowed a few poetic tears upon the obsequies of the 
 eternal. 
 
 There are men at the present day to whom likewise 
 
114 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT 
 
 there is no longer any God, and who do not even 
 affect the politeness of making any lament, but openly 
 exult over their discovery. 
 
 But ah ! if that should indeed be true ! What a 
 funeral pall would it throw over human life ! How 
 would it strip existence of its highest aspirations and 
 sweetest consolations ! 
 
 Science and culture I know, have given us wonder- 
 ful gifts and have made marvelous discoveries. 
 
 But what thoughtful man will dare to say that they 
 have so taken the place of faith in providing for man 
 that religion is of no more use, in these modern days ? 
 
 What thoughtful man will say that either modern 
 culture or modern science can fill the hearts of its 
 votaries with more sincere joyfulness than the hearts 
 of David or Paul or the humblest true Christians have 
 held? 
 
 What thoughtful man will dare to say that any or 
 all of our modern inventions, our patent appliances 
 and boasted sources of enlightenment can do more to 
 make a household contented, or can turn out better, 
 sweeter, higher-minded men and women than religion 
 with its old-fashioned beliefs and principles ? 
 
 And if science and culture cannot do this, — most 
 certainly they can never take the place of religion. 
 
 Remove science and all its admirable discoveries 
 from our modern world, and humanity would indeed 
 be thrust far backward on the path of progress, in 
 straits of daily inconvenience, thoroughly uncomforta- 
 ble even to imagine. 
 
 But expel religion from the world and humanity 
 would miss something still more indispensable. Hu- 
 
VALIDITY OF OUR RELIGIOUS INSTINCTS 115 
 
 manity would suffer the most irreparable of all losses. 
 It would lose the ideals which led it on, the strength 
 in which it faced difficulties and obloquies ; the hopes 
 that have consoled it in every trial and bereavement. 
 
 There are moments certainly in every one's life when 
 those, fullest stocked with learning, feel themselves as 
 benighted as the most illiterate ; when they look in 
 vain to all their science and culture to furnish a gleam 
 of light or hope to illuminate the gloom. 
 
 Hear the confession of a German satirist (who had 
 thrown as many bitter mockeries at religion as any 
 man of his generation) in regard to his personal ex- 
 periences as he stood at the bedside of his dying 
 mother. 
 
 " I thought over," said Heinrich Heine, " all the 
 great and the little inventions of man, — the Doctrine 
 of Souls, Newton's System of Attraction, The Uni- 
 versal German Library, the Genera Plantarum, the 
 Calculus Infinitorum, the Magister Matheseos, the 
 Right and the Oblique Ascension of the Stars and 
 their Parallaxes ; but nothing would answer. And 
 she lay out of reach, lay on the brink and was going, 
 and I could not even see where she would fall. Then 
 I commended her to God, and went out and composed 
 a prayer for the dying, that she might read it. She 
 was my mother ; and she had always loved me so 
 dearly ; and this was all that I could do for her." 
 
 " We are not great ; and our happiness is that we can 
 believe in something greater and better." 
 
 Such is the indispensable need of God felt by the 
 human heart, even by such inveterate jesters as a 
 Heine. 
 
116 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT " 
 
 Such are the religious instincts of man, not to be 
 denied without working deepest misery and mischief. 
 Now, whichever of the two opposite theories of the 
 formation of these natural needs and instincts we 
 adopt; whether we say, as the theist has formerly 
 done, that they are formed by God Himself, or 
 whether we take the position of the evolutionists, that 
 they are formed by the persistent moulding power of 
 nature over the individual, by the reiterated impres- 
 sions upon successive generations of the surrounding 
 universe (continuous correspondence with which is 
 the very condition and essence both of life and mind) 
 — on either theory it is impossible to believe that 
 these God-desiring impulses are contradictions of the 
 reality of nature. Can it be thought for a moment, 
 that these inborn affirmations of the soul within man, 
 and of the over-soul without him, are organized 
 delusions on the part of nature, are falsehoods per- 
 sistently renewed by the universe in the formation of 
 every fresh organism ? To believe that were suicidal 
 to all reasoning, to every system of thought. But if 
 that be incredible, if that cannot be accepted, there is 
 no alternative except to recognize in this universal 
 outcry of heart and flesh for the living God, in this in- 
 stinctive faith in spiritual things, ever springing up 
 afresh, however much it may be trampled upon, a sure 
 attestation of the infinite and eternal realities cor- 
 respondent to them. 
 
CHAPTER V. 
 
 EVOLUTION AND CHRISTIANITY. 
 
 In the life and letters of Charles Darwin there is a 
 memorandum copied from his pocket note-book of 
 1837, to this effect. " In July, opened my first note- 
 book on Transmutation of Species. Had been greatly 
 struck with the character of the South American 
 fossils and the species on Galapagos Archipelago." 
 
 These facts, he says, were the origin of all his epoch- 
 making views as to the development of life and the 
 work of natural selection in evolving species. 
 
 His first suspicions that species were not immutable 
 and made at one cast, directly by the fiat of the 
 Creator, seemed to him, at the outset, he says, 
 " almost like murder!' 
 
 To the greater part of the church, when in 1859 
 after twenty years of work, in accumulating the proofs 
 of his theory, he at last gave it to the world, it seemed 
 quite as bad as murder. 
 
 It is very interesting now, to look back upon the 
 history and career of the Darwinian theory in the last 
 forty years ; to recall, first, the fierce outcry and de- 
 nunciation it elicited ; then, the gradual accumulation 
 of corroboratory evidence from all quarters in its 
 favor ; the accession of one scientific authority after 
 another to the new views ; the softening little by 
 little, of ecclesiastical opposition ; its gradual accept- 
 
 117 
 
118 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT 
 
 ance by the broad-minded, alike in theological and 
 scientific circles ; then in these recent years, the ex- 
 altation of the new theory into a scientific and phil- 
 osophic creed, wherein matter, force and evolution 
 constitute the New Trinity, which unless the modern 
 man piously believes, he becomes anathematized and 
 excommunicated by all the priests of the new dog- 
 matism. 
 
 In the field of science, undoubtedly, evolution has 
 won the day. Nevertheless, in religious circles, old 
 time prejudices and slow conservatism, clinging to its 
 creeds, as the hermit crab clings to the cast off shell 
 of oyster or clam, still resist it. The great body of 
 the Christian laity, looks askance on it. And even in 
 this progressive American country, one of the largest 
 and most liberal of American denominations not long 
 ago tried and condemned one of its clergy for heresy, 
 on account of the publication of a book, in which the 
 principles of evolution are frankly adopted and applied 
 to Christianity. For a man to call himself a Christian 
 evolutionist, is, (we have been told by high orthodox 
 authority) a contradiction in terms. 
 
 I think it is safe to say to-day, that evolution has 
 come to stay. It is too late to turn it out of the man- 
 sions of modern thought. And it is therefore a vital 
 question, " can belief in God and the soul and divine 
 revelation abide under the same roof in peace ? Or 
 must Christianity vacate the realm of modern thought 
 and leave it to the chilling frosts of materialism and 
 skepticism ? 
 
 Now, if I have been able to understand the issue 
 and its grounds, there is no such alternative, — no such 
 
EVOLUTION AND CHRISTIANITY 119 
 
 incompatibility between evolution and Christianity. 
 There is, I know, a form of evolution and a form of 
 Christianity which are mutually contradictory. There 
 is a form of evolution which is narrowly materialistic. 
 It dogmatically asserts that there is nothing in exist- 
 ence but matter and physical forces and the iron laws 
 according to which they develop. Life, according to 
 this school, is only a product of the happy combi- 
 nation of the atoms ; feeling and thought are but the 
 iridescence of the brain-tissues ; conscience but a 
 transmuted form of ancestral fears and expediencies. 
 Soul, revelation, providence are nothing but illusions 
 of the childish fancy of humanity. Opposed to this 
 materialism and fighting with all the intensity of those 
 who fight for their very life, stands a school of Chris- 
 tians who maintain that unless the special creation of 
 species, by Divine fiat, and the frequent intervention 
 of God and His angels in the world be admitted, re- 
 ligion has received its death wound. According to 
 this school, unless the world was created in six days, 
 and Joshua commanded the sun to stand still, and 
 Hezekiah turned the solar shadow back on the dial, 
 and Jesus was born without human father, and unless 
 some new miracle will interfere with the regular course 
 of law, of rain and dew, of sickness and health, of 
 cause and effect, whenever a believer lifts up his voice 
 in prayer, — why then, the very foundations of religion 
 are destroyed. 
 
 Now, of course, between a Christianity and an evo- 
 lutionism of this sort, there is an irreconcilable con- 
 flict. But it is because neither of them is a fair, 
 rational or true form of thought. When the principle 
 
120 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT 
 
 of evolution is properly comprehended and ex- 
 pounded ; when Christianity is interpreted in the light 
 that history and philosophy require, the two will be 
 found to have no difficulty in joining hands. Though 
 a purely naturalistic evolutionism may ignore God; 
 and a purely supernatural religion may have no room 
 for evolution, a natural religion and a rational evolu- 
 tion may yet harmoniously unite in a higher and more 
 fruitful marriage. Let us only recognize evolution by 
 the Divine Spirit, as the process of God's working in 
 the world, and we then have a theory which has a 
 place and a function, at once for all that the newest 
 science has to teach and the most venerable faith 
 needs to retain. 
 
 In the first place, evolution is not itself a cause ; it 
 is no force in itself. It has no originating power. It 
 is simply a method and law of the occurrence of 
 things. Evolution shows that all things proceed, 
 little by little, without breach of continuity ; that the 
 higher ever proceeds from the lower ; the more com- 
 plex ever unfolds from the more simple. For every 
 species or form, it points out some ancestor or natural 
 antecedent, from which by gradual modification, it has 
 been derived. And in natural selection, in the influ- 
 ences of the environment, in sexual selection, use and 
 disuse, sterility, and the variability of the organism, 
 science shows us some of the secondary factors or 
 conditions of this development. But none of these are 
 supposed by it to be first causes or originating powers. 
 What these are, science itself does not claim to declare. 
 
 Now, it is true, that this unbroken course of de- 
 velopment, and this omnipresent reign of law are in- 
 
EVOLUTION AND CHRISTIANITY 121 
 
 consistent with the theological theories of supernatural 
 interventions that have so often claimed a monopoly 
 of faith. But independent of all scientific reasons, — 
 on religious and philosophical grounds themselves, 
 this dogmatic view is no longer to be accepted. For 
 if God be the God of all-seeing wisdom and foresight 
 that reverence conceives Him to be, His work should 
 be too perfect from the outset to demand such changes 
 of plan and order of working. The great miracle of 
 miracles, as Isaac Taylor used to say — is that " Provi- 
 dence needs no miracles to carry out its all perfect 
 plans." 
 
 But if, I hear it asked, — if the huge machine of the 
 universe thus grinds on and has ever ground on, 
 without interruption ; if every event is closely bound 
 to its physical antecedent ; life to cell ; mind to brain, 
 man to his animal ancestry and bodily conditions, — 
 what other result will there be than an inevitable sur- 
 render of materialism? When Laplace was asked by 
 Napoleon, on presenting to him his famous essay on 
 the nebular hypothesis of the origin of the stellar 
 universe — *' Why do I see here no mention of the 
 Deity," — the French astronomer proudly replied — 
 " Sire, I have no need of that hypothesis." Is not 
 that the natural lesson of evolutionism, — to say that 
 God is an hypothesis, no longer needed by science, 
 and which progressive thought, therefore, better dis- 
 miss ? I do not think so. Old time materialism dis- 
 missed the idea of God because it dismissed the idea 
 of a beginning. The forces and phenomena of the 
 world were supposed eternal and therefore a Creator 
 was unnecessary. But the conception of evolution is 
 
122 THE NEW WOULD AND THE NEW THOUGHT 
 
 radically different. It is a movement, that demands a 
 motor force behind it. It is a movement moreover, 
 that according to the testimony of modern science, 
 cannot have been eternal. The modern theory of 
 heat and the dissipation of energy requires that our 
 solar system and the nebula from which it sprang 
 should have had a beginning in some finite period of 
 time. The evolutionary process cannot have been 
 going on forever; for the amount of heat and the 
 number of degrees of temperature and the rate of 
 cooling, are all finite, calculable quantities, and there- 
 fore the process cannot have been going on for more 
 than a certain finite number of years, — more or less 
 millions, say. Moreover, if the original fire-mist was 
 perfectly homogeneous, and not impelled into motion 
 by any external force, it would never have begun to 
 rotate and evolve into planets and worlds. If per- 
 fectly homogeneous, it would have remained always 
 balanced and always immobile. To start it on its 
 course of rotation and evolution, there must have been 
 either some external impelling power, or else some 
 original differentiation of forces, for which again some 
 cause, other than itself must be supposed. For the 
 well-known law of inertia forbids that any material 
 system that is in absolute equilibrium should spon- 
 taneously start itself into motion. As John Stuart 
 Mill admitted — " the laws of nature can give no 
 account of their own origin." 
 
 In the second place, notice that the materialistic 
 interpretation of evolution fails to account for that 
 which is most characteristic in the process ; the steady 
 progress it reveals. 
 
EVOLUTION AND CHRISTIANITY 123 
 
 Were evolution an aimless, fruitless motion, rising 
 and falling alternately, or moving round and round in 
 an endless circle, the reference of these motions to the 
 blind forces of matter, might have perhaps a certain 
 plausibility. But the movements of the evolution 
 process are of quite a different character; they are 
 not chaotic ; they are no barren, useless circlings back 
 to the same point, again and again. They are progress- 
 ive ; and if often they seem to return to their point 
 of departure, we see, on close examination, that the 
 return is always on a higher plane. The motion is a 
 spiral one, ever advancing to loftier and loftier ranges. 
 
 Now this progressive motion is something that no 
 accidental play of the atoms will account for. For 
 chance builds no such rational structures ; chance 
 writes no such intelligent dramas, with orderly be- 
 ginning, crescendo and climax. Or if some day, 
 chance builds a structure with some show of order in 
 it, to-morrow it pulls it down. It does not move 
 steadily forward with permanent constructions. 
 
 The further science penetrates into the secrets of 
 the universe the more regular seems the march of 
 thought presented there; the more harmonious the 
 various parts ; the more rational the grand system 
 that is discovered. " How the one force of the uni- 
 verse should have pursued the pathway of evolution 
 through the lapse of millions of ages, leaving traces 
 so legible by intelligence to-day, unless from begin- 
 ning to end the whole process had been dominated by 
 intelligence," has well been said to pass the limits of 
 conjecture. The all luminous intelligibility of the 
 universe is the all sufficient proof of the intelligence 
 
124 TEE NEW WORLD AND TBE NEW THOUGHT 
 
 of the cause that produced it. In the annals of sci- 
 ence there is nothing more curious than the prophetic 
 power which those savans have gained who have 
 grasped this secret of nature — the rationality of the 
 universe. It was by this confidence in finding in the 
 hitherto unexplained domains of nature what reason 
 demanded, that Goethe, from the analogies of the 
 mammalian skeleton discovered the intermaxillary 
 bone in man; and Sir William Hamilton from the 
 mathematical consequences of the undulation of light 
 led the way to the discovery of conical refraction. 
 
 A similar story is told of Professor Agassiz and 
 Professor Pierce, the one, the great zoologist, the 
 other the great mathematician of Harvard University. 
 Agassiz, having studied the formation of radiate ani- 
 mals and having found them all referable to three 
 different plans of structure, asked Professor Pierce, 
 without informing him of his discovery, how to exe- 
 cute all the variations possible, conformed to the 
 fundamental idea of a radiated structure around a 
 central axis. Professor Pierce, although quite ignorant 
 of natural history, at once devised the very three 
 plans, discovered by Agassiz, as the only fundamental 
 plans which could be framed in accordance with the 
 given elements. 
 
 How significantly do such correspondences speak 
 of the working of mind in nature, moulding it in con- 
 formity with ideas of reason. Thus to see the laws 
 of thought exhibiting themselves as also the laws of 
 being seems to me a fact sufficient of itself to prove 
 the presence of an overruling mind in nature. 
 
 Is there any way of escaping this obvious conclu- 
 
''EVOLUTION AND CHRISTIANITY 125 
 
 sion ? The only method that has been suggested has 
 been to refer these harmonies of nature back to the 
 original regularity of the atoms. 
 
 As the drops of frozen moisture on the window 
 pane build up the symmetrical frost-forms, without 
 design or reason, by virtue of the original similarity 
 of the component parts, so do the similar atoms, 
 without any more reason or plan, build up the har- 
 monious forms of nature. 
 
 But this answer brings us face to face with a 
 third significant problem, a still greater obstacle to 
 materialism. Why are the atoms of nature thus regu- 
 lar — thus exactly similar, one to another ? Here are 
 millions on millions of atoms of gold, each just alike. 
 Millions and millions of atoms of oxygen, each with 
 the same velocity of movement, the same weight, size 
 and chemical properties. All the millions on millions 
 of atoms on the globe are not of infinitely varied 
 shape, weight, size, quality ; but there are only some 
 seventy different kinds ; and all the millions of one 
 kind are substantially alike, so that each new atom of 
 oxygen that comes to a burning flame does the same 
 work and acts in precisely the same way as its fellows. 
 
 Did you ever think of that ? If you have ever 
 realized what it means, you must recognize this uni- 
 formity of the atoms, billions and billions of them as 
 like one another as if run out of the same mould, as 
 the most astonishing thing in nature. 
 
 Now, among the atoms, there can have been no 
 birth, no death, no struggle for existence, no natural 
 selection to account for this. What other explanation, 
 then, in reason is there, than to say as those great 
 
126 THE NEW WOULD AND THE NEW THOUGHT 
 
 men of science, Sir John Herschel and Clerk Max- 
 well (who have in our day, most deeply pondered this 
 curious fact) have said, — that this division of all the 
 infinite host of atoms in nature into a very limited 
 number of groups, all the billions of numbers in each 
 group precisely alike in their mechanical and chemical 
 properties, gives to each of the atoms " the essential 
 characters, at once of a manufactured article and a 
 subordinate agent." 
 
 Evolution cannot then be justly charged with ma- 
 terialism. On the contrary, it especially demands a 
 divine creative force as the starter of its processes 
 and the endower of the atoms with their peculiar 
 properties. The foundation of that scientific system 
 which the greatest of modern expositors of evolu- 
 tion has built up about the principle of development (I 
 mean, of course, Herbert Spencer's Synthetic Phi- 
 losophy), is the persistence of an infinite, eternal and 
 indestructible force, of which all things that we see 
 are the manifestations. 
 
 The evolution theory is indeed hostile to that phase 
 of theology which conceived of God as a being out- 
 side of nature. To suppose, as many of the camp- 
 followers of the evolution philosophy do, that the 
 processes of successive change and gradual modifica- 
 tion which have been so clearly traced out in nature, 
 relieve us from the need or right of asking for any 
 anterior and higher cause of these processes ; or that 
 because the higher and finer always unfolds from the 
 lower and coarser, therefore there was really nothing 
 else in existence at the beginning than these crude 
 elements which alone we see at first: and that 
 
EVOLUTION AND CHRISTIANITY 127 
 
 these gross, sensuous facts are the only source and 
 explanation of all that has followed them, — this is 
 a most superficial and inadequate view. For this ex- 
 planation, as we have already noticed, furnishes no 
 fountain head of power to maintain the constant up- 
 ward-mounting of the waters in the world's conduits. 
 It furnishes no intelligent directions of these streams 
 into ever wise and ordered channels. To explain the 
 higher life that comes out of these low beginnings, we 
 must suppose the existence of spiritual powers, unseen 
 at first, and disclosing themselves only in the fuller, 
 later results, the moral and spiritual phenomena that 
 are the crowning flower and fruit of the long process. 
 When a thing has grown from a lower to a higher 
 form, its real rank and nature is not shown by what it 
 began in, but by what it has become. Though chem- 
 istry has grown out of alchemy and astronomy out 
 of astrology, this does not empty them of present 
 truth or impair at all their authority and trustworthi- 
 ness to-day. Though man's minds have grown out 
 of the sensations of brutish ancestors, that does not 
 take away the fact that he has now risen to a height 
 from which he overlooks all their mists and sees the 
 light which never was on sea or land. The real be- 
 ginning of a statue is not in the rough outline in 
 which it first appears, but in the creative idea of the 
 perfect work which regulates its whole progress. 
 
 So to discern the real character and motor power 
 of the world's evolution, we must look, not to the 
 beginnings, but to its end ; and see in the latest stages 
 and its highest moral and spiritual forms and forces, — 
 not disguises of the earlier stages, but ampler mani- 
 
138 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT 
 
 festations of that divine power and purpose which is 
 the ever-active agent, working through all the varied 
 levels of creation. 
 
 The evolution theory is, indeed, it must be acknowl- 
 edged, hostile to that phase of theology which con- 
 ceives of God as a being outside of nature; which 
 regarded the universe as a dead lump, a mechanical 
 fabric where the Creator once worked, at the im- 
 mensely remote dawn of creation ; and to which again 
 for a few short moments, this transcendental Power 
 stooped from His celestial throne, when the successive 
 species of living beings were called into being, in 
 brief exertions of supernatural energy. But this 
 mechanical view of God who, as Goethe said, 
 " only from without should drive and twirl the uni- 
 verse about," what a poor conception of God, after all, 
 was that ; — not undeserving the ridicule of the great 
 German. 
 
 Certainly, the idea of God which Wordsworth has 
 given us, as a power, not indefinitely remote, but ever 
 present and infinitely near, — 
 
 " A motion and a spirit which impels 
 All thinking things, all objects of all thoughts 
 And rolls through all things." 
 
 is a much more inspiring and venerable thought. This 
 is the conception of God that Paul has given us ; " the God 
 in whom we live and move and have our being " ; this 
 is the conception that the Book of Wisdom gives us, — 
 " the Divine Spirit who filleth the world." And to 
 this conception of God, evolution has no antagonism ; 
 but on the contrary, throws its immense weight in its 
 favor. 
 
EVOLUTION AND CHRISTIANITY 129 
 
 Evolution in fact, instead of removing the Deity 
 from us, brings Him close about us ; sets us face to 
 face with His daily activities. The universe is but the 
 body of which God is the soul ; " the interior Artist," as 
 Giordano Bruno used to say, who from within, moulds 
 His living shapes of beauty and power. What else in 
 fact is evolution but the secular name for the Divine 
 Indwelling; the scientific alias for the growth and 
 progressive revelation of the Holy Spirit, daily putting 
 off the old and putting on the new ; constantly busy 
 from the beginning of time to this very day; inces- 
 santly moulding and forwarding His work. 
 
 Not long ago I came across the mental experience 
 of a working geologist which well illustrates this. 
 " Once in early boyhood," he says, " I left a lumber- 
 man's camp at night, to go to the brook for water. It 
 was a clear, cold, moonlight night, and very still, ex- 
 cept the distant murmuring of the Penobscot at some 
 falls. A sense of the grandeur of the forest and 
 rivers ; the hills and sky and stars came over the boy 
 and he stood and looked around. An owl hooted and 
 the hooting was not a cheerful sound. The men were 
 all asleep and the conditions were lonely enough. But 
 there was no feeling of loneliness ; for with the sense 
 of the grandeur of creation, came the sense very real 
 and strong of the Creator's presence. In boyish 
 imagination, I could see His Almighty hand, shaping 
 the hills and scooping out the valleys, spreading the 
 sky overhead and making trees, animals and men." 
 
 " Thirty years later, I camped alone in the open air 
 on the bank of the Gila. It was a clear, cold, moon- 
 light night. The camp-fire was low, for the Apaches 
 
130 TEE NEW WORLD AND TEE NEW TEOUQET 
 
 were on the war path. An owl again hooted. But 
 again all loneliness was dispelled by a sense of the 
 Creator's presence, and the night of long ago by the 
 Penobscot came into my mind ; and with it, came the 
 question : What is the difference to my mind between 
 the Creator's presence, now and then ? " 
 
 " To the heart, it was very like ; but to the mind 
 very different. Now, no great hand was shaping 
 things from without. But God was everywhere 
 reaching down through long lines of forces and 
 shaping and sustaining things from within. I had 
 been traveling all day by mountains of lava which had 
 cooled long ages ago, and over grounds, which the 
 sea, now far off, had left on its beaches ; and with the 
 geologist's habit, recalled the lava still glowing and 
 flowing, and the sea still rattling its pebbles on the 
 beaches. But now, I knew it was by forces within the 
 earth that the lava was poured out, and that the waves 
 which rolled the pebbles were driven by the wind and 
 the wind by the sun's heat. And the forces within 
 the earth and the heat within the sun came from still 
 further within. Inward, always inward, the search for 
 the original energy and law, carried my mind ; for He, 
 whose will is the source of all force, and whose thought 
 is the source of all law is on the inside of the universe. 
 The kingdom of God is within you " (James E. Mills). 
 
 Now this change from the boyish idea of God 
 creating things from without, to the manhood's view 
 of God, creating and sustaining all things from within, 
 is, indeed as this working geologist so well says, " the 
 essential change which modern science has wrought 
 in the habit of religious thought." 
 
EVOLUTION AND CHBISTIANITT 131 
 
 From Copernicus to Darwin, every important step 
 in the development of science has cost the giving up 
 of some idea of God creating things, as man shapes 
 them, from without, and has illustrated the higher idea 
 of a God, reaching His works from within. " Every 
 step has led towards the truth that life and force come 
 to the forms in which they are clothed, from God by 
 the inner way; and by the same way, their law comes 
 with them ; and that the forms are the effects of the 
 force and life, acting according to the law." 
 
 Now, this is certainly a most noble, uplifting con- 
 ception of the world. But how, perhaps you ask, can 
 we find justification for such a view of the Divine 
 Spirit as indwelling in nature ? 
 
 Now when we consider this question, we find that 
 one of the phases of the evolution philosophy that has 
 been a chief source of alarm is precisely the one that 
 lends signal support to this doctrine of Divine In- 
 dwelling. 
 
 Evolution especially excites aversion, because it 
 connects man so closely with nature ; our souls are 
 traced back to an animal origin; consciousness to 
 instinct, instinct to sensibility and this to lower laws 
 and properties of force. By the law of the correlation 
 of forces, our mental and spiritual powers are regarded 
 as but transformed phases of physical forces, con- 
 ditioned as they are on our bodily states and changes ; 
 and the soul, it is said, is but a child of nature, who is 
 most literally its mother. 
 
 To many minds this is appalling. But let us look 
 it candidly in the face and see its full bearing. We 
 will recall in the first place, the scientific law : no life 
 
132 THE NEW WORLD AND TEE NEW THOUGHT 
 
 but from preceding life. Let us recollect next the 
 dictum of mechanics : no fountain can rise higher than 
 its source. The natural corollary and consequence of 
 this is — no evolution without preceding involution. 
 If mind and consciousness come out of nature, they 
 must first have been enveloped in nature; resident 
 within its depths. If the spirit within our hearts is 
 one with the force that stirs the sense and grows in 
 the plant ; then that sea of energy that envelops us is 
 also spirit. 
 
 When we come to examine the idea of force, we 
 find that there is only one form in which we get any 
 direct knowledge of it, only one place in which we 
 come into contact with it; and that is in our own 
 conscious experiences ; in the efforts of our own will. 
 
 According to the scientific rule always " to interpret 
 the unknown by the known, not the known by the 
 unknown," — it is only the rational conclusion that 
 force elsewhere is also will. Through this personal 
 experience of energy, we get, just once, an inside 
 view of the universal energy, and we find it to be 
 spiritual ; the will-force of the infinite Spirit, dwelling 
 in all things. That the encircling force of the uni- 
 verse can best be understood through the analogy of 
 our own sense of effort, and therefore is a form of will, 
 of spirit, is a conclusion endorsed by the most eminent 
 men of science, such as Huxley, Herschel, Carpenter 
 and Le Conte. 
 
 There is therefore no real efficient force but spirit. 
 The various energies of nature are but different forms 
 or special currents of this Omnipresent Divine Power. 
 The laws of nature are only the wise and regular 
 
EVOLUTION AND CHRISTIANITY 133 
 
 habits of this active Divine will ; physical phenomena 
 are but projections of God's thought on the screen of 
 space ; and evolution is simply the slow, gradual un- 
 rolling of the panorama on the great stage of time. 
 
 In geology and paleontology, evolution is not 
 directly observed, but only inferred. The process is 
 too slow ; — the stage too grand for direct observation. 
 There is one field and only one where it has been 
 directly observed. This is in the case of domestic 
 animals and plants under man's charge. Now, as 
 here, where alone we see evolution going on, it is 
 under the guidance of superintending mind, — it is a 
 justifiable inference that in nature, also, it goes on 
 under similar intelligent guidance. 
 
 Now, it is the observation of distinguished men of 
 science that we see precisely such guidance in nature. 
 There is nothing in the Darwinian theory, as I said, 
 that would conduct species upward rather than down- 
 ward. To account for the steady upward progress we 
 must resort to a higher cause. We must say with 
 Asa Gray — " Variation has been led along certain 
 beneficial lines, like a stream along definite and useful 
 lines of irrigation." We mustsay with Professor Owen : 
 " A purposive route of development and change, of 
 correlation and interdependence, manifesting intelli- 
 gent will, is as determinable in the succession of races 
 as in the development and organization of the individ- 
 ual. Generations do not vary accidentally, in any 
 and every direction ; but in preordained, definite and 
 correlated courses." 
 
 This judgment is one which Professor Carpenter has 
 also substantially agreed with, declaring that the his- 
 
134 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT 
 
 tory of evolution is that of a consistent advance along 
 definite lines of progress, and can only be explained 
 as the work of a mind in nature. 
 
 The old argument from design, it has been fre- 
 quently said of late, is quite overthrown by evolution. 
 In one sense it is : i. e., the old idea of a special pur- 
 pose and a separate creation of each part of nature. 
 But the divine agency is not dispensed with by evo- 
 lution ; it is only shifted to a different point of appli- 
 cation; it is transferred from the particular to the 
 general, from the fact to the law. Paley compared 
 the eye to a watch, and said it must have been made 
 by a divine hand. The modern scientist objects that 
 the eye has been found to be no hand-work. It is the 
 last result of a complicated combination of forces ; the 
 mighty machine of nature, which has been grinding at 
 the work for thousands of years. Very well — but the 
 modern watch is not made by hand, either ; but by a 
 score of different machines. But does it require less, 
 or more intelligence to make the watch in this way ? 
 Or if some watch should be discovered that was not 
 put together by a human hand, — but formed by an- 
 other watch, not quite so perfect as itself, and this by 
 another watch, further back, — would the wonder and 
 the demand for a superior intelligence as the origin 
 of the process be any the less ? Rather would it be 
 greater. The further back you go and the more gen- 
 eral and invariable and simple you suppose the funda- 
 mental laws to have been that brought all things into 
 their present form, then it seems to me, the more 
 marvelous becomes the miracle of the eye, the ear, 
 each bodily organ when recognized as a climax to 
 
EVOLUTION AND CHRISTIANITY 135 
 
 whose consummation each successive stage of the 
 world has contributed. How much more significant 
 of progressive intelligence than any special creation is 
 this related whole, this host of co-ordinated molecules, 
 — this complex system of countless interwoven laws 
 and movements, all driven forward, straight to their 
 mark, down the vistas of the ages, to the grand world 
 consummation of to-day ! What else but Omniscience 
 is equal to this ? 
 
 All law, then, we should regard as a divine opera- 
 tion, and all divine operation, conversely, obeys law. 
 Whatever phenomena we consider as specially divine 
 ought to be most orderly and true to nature. Relig- 
 ion, as far as it is genuine, must therefore be natural. 
 It should be no exotic, no foreign graft, as it is often 
 regarded, but the normal outgrowth of our native in- 
 stincts. Evolution does not banish revelation from 
 our belief. Recognizing in man's spirit a spark of the 
 divine energy, "individuated to the power of self- 
 consciousness and recognition of God: — tracing the 
 development of the spirit embryo through all geologic 
 time till it came to birth and independent life in man, 
 and humanity recognized itself as a child of God," the 
 communion of the finite spirit with the infinite is per- 
 fectly natural. This direct influence of the spirit of 
 God on the spirit of man ; in conscience speaking to 
 him of the moral law ; through prophet and apostle 
 declaring to us the great laws of spiritual life and the 
 beauty of holiness — this is what we call revelation. 
 The laws which it observes are superior laws, — quite 
 above the plane of material things. But the work of 
 revelation is not therefore infallible or outside the 
 
136 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT 
 
 sphere of evolution. On the contrary, one of the 
 most noticeable features of revelation is its progressive 
 character. In the beginning, it is imperfect, dim in 
 its vision of truth, often gross in its forms of expres- 
 sion. But from age to age it gains in clearness and 
 elevation. In religion, as in secular matters, it is the 
 lesson of the ages, that "the thoughts of men are 
 widened with the process of the suns." 
 
 How short-sighted, then, are they who seek to com- 
 press the broadening vision of modern days within 
 the narrow loopholes of mediaeval creeds. " There is 
 still more light to break from the words of Scripture," 
 was the brave protest of Robinson to the bigots of his 
 day. And as we say amen, to that, we may add — 
 "yes; and more light still to come from the whole 
 heavens and the whole earth." If we wish to see that 
 light and receive the richest rewards of God's reveal- 
 ing word, we must face the sun of truth and follow 
 bravely forward. 
 
 As we look back upon the long path of evolution 
 up which God's hand has already led humanity ; as 
 we see from what lowliness and imperfection, from 
 what darkness and grossness God has led us to our 
 present heritage of truth and spiritual life, may we 
 not feel sure, that, if we go forward obediently, loyal 
 to reason, we shall find a new heavens and more 
 glorious, above our head ; a new earth and a nobler 
 field of work beneath our feet ? 
 
CHAPTER VI. 
 
 THE OLD TESTAMENT AS LITERATURE. 
 
 In an age long past there lived a wonderful artist, 
 whom men called the Divine Sculptor, so grand and 
 beautiful were the productions of his chisel. 
 
 He had carved many previous forms of beauty ; but 
 one day, he found a huge tusk shed by some mam- 
 moth ; and sculpturing from it a perfect foot and leg, 
 he vowed that it should be the beginning of a statue, 
 entirely carved in whitest ivory. 
 
 It was only very slowly that the statue grew ; for it 
 was only at long intervals that suitable pieces of ivory 
 were found. But bit by bit, the legs, body, arms and 
 head were built up, until at last, after many long 
 years, the artist completed his cherished work. 
 
 It was a form of rarest nobility, and instinct with 
 highest aspiration, albeit full of childlike simplicity 
 and ingenuousness. It represented the genius of his 
 nation, robed in quaint antique garments, posed in the 
 most natural of attitudes, with finger pointing upward 
 to heaven and look of devout rapture. No passer-by 
 could fail to be filled with admiration for this master- 
 piece of art. 
 
 But, anon, war broke out ; invaders poured into the 
 land ; and the owners of the precious statue for 
 safety's sake, dismembered it and hid it away in the 
 ground. 
 
 137 
 
138 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT 
 
 Long centuries rolled by ere it was discovered again 
 and disinterred. Now, it lay in fragments, soiled with 
 the stains of earth and water and the ravages of time. 
 
 Its discoverers revered it as a divine image and pro- 
 ceeded to put together its separated members in such 
 form as they believed a divine image should have. 
 To put the various members in their natural places 
 would make a mere human image of it, they thought. 
 So, to avoid such dishonor and make it into as super- 
 natural an image as possible, the legs were inserted in 
 the armpits, the arms at the middle of the back, the 
 ears were stuck in the eye-sockets, the feet where 
 the ears should have been, and the head was made 
 to sprout from below the breasts. And all the people 
 bowed down to it ; and as they knelt about it, they 
 covered up its ivory surface still deeper with paint and 
 tinsel and tawdry gilding, and worshipped it as a God. 
 And, indeed, it was of a certainty, like nothing ever 
 seen on the earth nor in the skies above nor the waters 
 beneath the earth. 
 
 So passed many long ages, till the monstrous con- 
 glomeration had become sacred with the holiness of a 
 vast antiquity. 
 
 But at length there arose a man as wise as he was 
 bold, who in long and patient studies examined care- 
 fully the curious image. He scraped away the dust 
 and grime of time and the tawdry gilding with which 
 the statue had been overlaid, and discovered the beau- 
 tiful pure ivory that was hid beneath. And by com- 
 paring the various parts, he learned their normal 
 arrangement and the original human shape in which 
 they had been moulded by their great artificer. And 
 
THE OLD TESTAMENT AS LITERATURE 139 
 
 calling his fellow-citizens together, he begged them to 
 cleanse the precious statue of its meretricious paint 
 and excrescences and rearrange the bodily members 
 and parts after a natural model so that the noble form 
 under which the genius of the race had been por- 
 trayed might stand once more before them. 
 
 But alas ! he found himself at once stigmatized as 
 an impious infidel and blaspheming iconoclast, who 
 denied the sanctity and beauty of the Divine Being, 
 whose legs grew from his shoulders, whose feet issued 
 from his ears, and whose head sprouted below his 
 breast. And in their rage, the multitude took up 
 stones and stoned the poor man till his life-blood ran 
 out on the ground before the image; and as they 
 stoned him, they shouted : " Our ancient image is not 
 human ; it is divine." 
 
 And as the unlucky reformer fell beneath the mis- 
 siles, he raised his voice and said : " You stone me 
 to-day. But the time will surely come when your chil- 
 dren shall see that it is as I say. Where I fall, an- 
 other shall stand and show you more clearly that it is 
 not I, but you who would degrade this beautiful 
 statue. Another and yet another shall come to show 
 you what a monster you have made of this master- 
 piece and what a marvel of natural grandeur and grace 
 you may bring out of this misshapen image if you 
 will but rearrange it according to the dictates of reason 
 and the type of nature. You say it is divine and 
 therefore it cannot be human. But I say that it is 
 precisely because it is so perfectly human that it is 
 divine, — far diviner and grander than you have ever 
 dreamed. And the grandchildren of you who to-day 
 
140 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT 
 
 are pelting me to death shall then build out of these 
 same death-dealing stones, a monument in my honor, 
 before the restored and purified statue of the genius 
 of your people." 
 
 And all the people screamed again with rage and 
 threw another volley of stones that silenced forever 
 the unfortunate martyr. 
 
 Nevertheless, in the age of their grandchildren, it 
 happened even as the martyr had predicted ; and out 
 of the stones was built a famous monument. And 
 when the sacred image stood again before the people's 
 eyes, in all its original nobility and naturalness of 
 form, all the nation wondered how blind their grand- 
 fathers could have been to adore the misshapen 
 image. 
 
 He that hath ears to hear, let him hear what the 
 Spirit of Truth hath to say here and now to the 
 Christian Church. 
 
 The parable just related, as the reader has doubtless 
 guessed, is intended to illustrate the treatment which 
 the Bible has received at the hands of men. Like the 
 statue of my fable, this literary embodiment of the 
 genius of the Hebrew race has also been dismem- 
 bered, mangled, and distorted by mistaken piety, and 
 covered thick with the cheap gilding of an imaginary 
 supernaturalism. Because it was believed to be the 
 Word of God, credulous reverence has shut its eyes to 
 all recognition of its human origin, and sought to 
 
THE OLD TESTAMENT AS LITERATURE 141 
 
 eliminate from it all natural traits and elements. And 
 when the higher criticism in these latter days, has 
 essayed to restore to it its original symmetry and 
 natural beauty, and to make manifest in its noble 
 humanity its true divineness, — all the guns of ortho- 
 doxy have been trained in furious cannonade upon 
 these alleged profanations of the Word of God. 
 
 In spite of this ecclesiastical fusilade, we may safely 
 predict that it is only a question of time, and that, no 
 distant time, when the Old Testament shall be looked 
 upon as literature. Hitherto that is precisely the one 
 light in which it has not been regarded. 
 
 In the popular faith the Old Testament has been 
 looked upon as everything else but literature. It has 
 been regarded as a magazine of dogmas ; as a scientific 
 treatise, making the investigations of geology and bi- 
 ology superfluous ; as an infallible moral code, any one 
 of whose precepts overruled all the instincts of mercy 
 or the intuitions of conscience ; as a heavenly double 
 acrostic, every word filled with threefold significance, 
 natural, spiritual and celestial ; in short, as a specimen 
 of supernatural penmanship, all its parts equally 
 authoritative and flawless. The result has been to 
 give the Bible an artificial and formal air, to separate 
 it from the living world of reality, to obscure and be- 
 fog its natural excellences, and to fill it with uncalled 
 for difficulties. 
 
 It is lamentable, indeed, to recall the many incon- 
 sistencies and incredibilities which the traditional view 
 has needlessly raised up, transmuting lyric metaphors 
 into scientific marvels, traditions of later days into 
 contemporaneous records, romances into autobiog- 
 
142 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT 
 
 raphies, poetry into prose, parables into predictions, 
 and love songs into mystic allegories. 
 
 When the Pentateuch is claimed to be throughout 
 written by Moses himself, all the Psalms by David, 
 and the whole Old Testament to have been so divinely 
 inspired as to be infallible, with what plain contra- 
 dictions and insoluble entanglements are we brought 
 face to face ? It is these especially that have drawn 
 upon the Bible the jeers and ridicule of the unbelievers 
 and the keen thrust of every skeptic. They have led 
 to the " mistakes of Moses " being paraded up and 
 down the land, and flouted and riddled with the most 
 cutting wit and the bitterest of mockeries. And they 
 have seduced the pious-minded, who were not alto- 
 gether irrational, to a further wrong to the Bible ; viz., 
 to the most desperate attempts to warp and twist the 
 sacred texts so as, somehow, to reconcile the conflict- 
 ing passages. 
 
 But when we look upon the Old Testament as 
 literature, we are no longer tempted to torture in this 
 way the simple statements of these ancient writers. 
 Our only ambition is to find out what they really 
 meant. And we are not diverted from a consider- 
 ation of their essential truth or nobleness, and put into 
 an antagonistic, flaw-picking attitude by extravagant 
 claims for them of a character that they themselves 
 never pretended to possess. Give a young man, for 
 example, the Book of Jonah to read as a part of God's 
 infallible word, and how soon will his reason (naturally 
 led to give a careful test to any such momentous claim) 
 run against the snags of the whale and the gourd and 
 the other marvels of the story, and the whole attention 
 
TEE OLD TESTAMENT AS LITERATURE 143 
 
 be fixed on these, either to ridicule and reject or to 
 defend and explain them away ! Meanwhile the 
 real lesson of the book, the broad tolerance and for- 
 givingness of spirit, the omnipresence and universal 
 love of God, that it aimed to inculcate, is altogether 
 neglected. But present the book simply as a piece 
 of ancient literature, an old legend current among the 
 Hebrews, or a parable invented to enforce a lesson, and 
 how easily is all the supernatural part of the story seen to 
 be only the imaginative framework and embellishment 
 of its noble religious lesson, no more affronting com- 
 mon sense or diverting attention from the spiritual 
 teaching involved than do the giants and marvels in 
 " Pilgrim's Progress " prevent the reader of that from 
 appropriating the similar moral lessons therein con- 
 tained ! 
 
 Again, to look upon the Old Testament as literature 
 gives it a worth and an interest which it has failed to 
 obtain under the traditional view. As a piece of 
 divine penmanship, as a flawless fetich before which 
 reason was devoutly to close its eyes, much of it was 
 useless. Forbidden to criticise or discriminate, the 
 only refuge was in ignoring altogether large parts of 
 the Bible, and leaving their pages (after the first read- 
 ing from cover to cover, which pious tradition de- 
 manded) henceforth unopened. For here was passage 
 after passage, which we were assured was just as 
 sacred and true as anything else, from which we could 
 obtain no food for either the mind or the heart. Here 
 were palpable antagonisms of statement, impossible to 
 harmonize; badly joined seams where earlier docu- 
 ments were patched together; coarse traditions that in 
 
144 THE NEW WORLD AND TEE NEW THOUGHT 
 
 any other book would be suppressed as indelicate; 
 ritualistic details and ceremonial formalities of a 
 thoroughly peurile and impractical character, at least 
 for our day and generation ; barbarous revenges and 
 imprecations, claiming the direct command of un- 
 doubted inspiration of the divine. How many such 
 blots as these burdened the sacred text ! But, when 
 we recognize the Old Testament as literature, all these 
 things become not only interesting, but valuable. 
 These clumsy sutures of the earlier documents are 
 precious as fine gold and sweeter than the honeycomb 
 to the Biblical critics. These palpable discrepancies 
 of the accounts and the partisan or sectional bias dis- 
 closed by each are the precious seals identifying the 
 different documents and authors ; and the very scien- 
 tific mistakes and moral imperfections that we find, are 
 the water-marks of date and country, the incontestable 
 proofs of their antiquity; and even the very crudest 
 fancies and most barbarous legends, wholly inadmis- 
 sible to the witness-box of history, are welcomed as 
 priceless relics of that primeval mythologic age in 
 which all religion and history began, and are the best 
 of evidence that the Jewish religion had the same 
 natural origin as all other faiths. What can the Bible 
 reader who accepts it all as one infallible Word of God 
 do with such passages as that where Jehovah is said to 
 " walk in the garden in the cool of the evening " ; 
 where the Elohim (using the polytheistic plural) say : 
 " Let us make man " ; " Behold, the man is become as 
 one of us " ? How is the pious believer in the in- 
 fallibility of the Bible to explain the graven and 
 molten images; the ephods and teraphim which as 
 
THE OLD TESTAMENT AS LITERATURE 145 
 
 late as Samuel's time were a part of the equipment of 
 a priest of Jehovah ; the household idols which David 
 kept in his house ; the golden bulls worshipped down 
 to Jeroboam's day ; the relics of serpent-worship, in the 
 brazen serpent which, as late as the reign of Hezekiah, 
 was an object of veneration among the Israelites ; and 
 the vestiges of devil-worship even, in the goat carried 
 into the wilderness as a propitiation to the demon 
 Azazel, disguised in our version under the name 
 of the scapegoat, — what, I say, on the traditional 
 theory of the Old Testament, can be done with these 
 survivals of old nature worship and beast worship left 
 in its pages, except to pass over and forget them as 
 quickly as possible ? But, when the Old Testament is 
 recognized as literature, they become the most sig- 
 nificant footmarks of the slow upward progress of 
 Hebrew faith, confirming the account, which an- 
 thropology and the history of religions in general 
 have given, of the successive stages of man's spiritual 
 pilgrimage. 
 
 And this leads us to notice the new vividness and 
 human interest which the sacred record gains when 
 its similarity of origin with other books is recognized. 
 
 There is a somewhat familiar but instructive story 
 of a boy who, on receiving a letter from a young 
 companion at Malta, speaking of his visit to the place 
 of St. Paul's shipwreck, exclaimed, " Why, father, did 
 that happen in this world ? " 
 
 So to many a pious reader the incidents and char- 
 acters of the Old Testament are never realized as 
 actual occurrences and " flesh-and-blood " persons, 
 but they always stand before the imagination, as the 
 
146 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT 
 
 old painters distinguished their saints, with a halo of 
 supernatural light about their head and the stiffness 
 and unreality of so many wooden images in all their 
 limbs. 
 
 But now, when we study these records as literature, 
 we soon catch sight of a host of significant little hints, 
 showing that these old priests and prophets were men 
 of like passions such as we are, and that the notable 
 incidents in their careers had their springs in the 
 social forces, political exigencies, or personal motives 
 of an actual, breathing world. 
 
 Take the figure of David, as the man after God's 
 own heart, and author of all the Psalms, as church 
 tradition has presented him to us. Certainly, this is a 
 most inconsistent and artificial figure. But the David 
 whom the new criticism shows, the chief of a band of 
 outlaws who by his military exploits rises to the 
 throne, brave and generous towards his friends, but 
 unrelenting and vindictive towards his foes, and un- 
 scrupulous in removing those who stood in his ambi- 
 tious pathway, — a nature at war with itself, holding 
 within him in constant struggle the typical virtues and 
 vices of a society just passing over from barbarism to 
 semi-civilization, — this David is an exceedingly natural 
 and interesting character. 
 
 Or take the book of Job. Looked at as an au- 
 thoritative revelation in explanation of the misfortunes 
 of the righteous, it is certainly very unsatisfactory. 
 If we consider it as a direct revelation from God to 
 explain the origin of evil and the calamities of the 
 righteous, that explanation amounts substantially to 
 this, — to refer them to the wiles of Satan and the 
 
THE OLD TESTAMENT AS LITERATURE 147 
 
 capricious permission of the Almighty, before whose 
 power man should be dumb ; and it omits altogether 
 from the answer the Christian solution of a future 
 personal life for which this life is the training. 
 
 As the instruction of a divine revelation, this is 
 terribly crude and disappointing. But, looking at Job 
 as literature, we have in it the most poignant depiction 
 of a soul in agony ; the most powerful presentation 
 of the struggling forces of doubt, despair, indignant 
 virtue, invincible faith in divine goodness, pathetic 
 humility, and the self-abnegating devotedness that can 
 cling to the Divine Hand even when all hope of per- 
 sonal happiness has vanished, that we have in any 
 book, ancient or modern, East or West. We may 
 discuss to the end of time whether there ever was an 
 historic Job who lived in the land of Uz, or whether 
 the book is a pure fiction ; but, surely, we cannot 
 doubt that this picture of Job on his ash-heap, pierced 
 to the heart by the unjust suspicions of his pretended 
 friends, and pouring out his heart (as the strong gusts 
 of passion, at their cruel impeachment of his innocency, 
 and the billows of his own unbearable agony sweep 
 to and fro), in such scornful denials of personal trans- 
 gression, such appeals to his divine Judge, such 
 dread misgivings, now of God's justice, now of his 
 own righteousness, and at last finding peace in a child- 
 like resignation to the divine will, however bitter, — 
 surely, we cannot doubt that this wondrous representa- 
 tion of bitterest spiritual struggle came from a heart 
 that had itself been in the deep waters, and had to 
 tread the wine-press of grief alone. And, if we date 
 its composition in the dark days of the eighth century, 
 
148 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT 
 
 when the old faith of Israel in Jehovah's earthly re- 
 wards to His faithful servants was given such a wrench, 
 when the Northern kingdom had gone down in ruins, 
 and the terrible invasions of the Assyrians swept over 
 their land, like so many tornadoes, respecting neither 
 just nor unjust, and poor King Hezekiah lived, as 
 Renan vividly says, " like a bird on a twig," watching 
 which way to fly the next minute, — then the social 
 and political setting of the picture makes it not 
 merely a personal experience, but a national experi- 
 ence and a national enigma that are thus movingly 
 set before us. 
 
 Thus does the literary view of the Old Testament 
 humanize it, and endow it with heightened power and 
 influence over its readers. And, as it takes on a 
 more graphic life, there comes with this, simultane- 
 ously, a disclosure of more denned individuality and 
 an affluence of national genius, not before suspected. 
 When the Old Testament is regarded as a single con- 
 tinuous Divine Oracle, the tendency, of course, is to 
 overlook as much as possible all diversities of author- 
 ship or style, because all must be equally divine, 
 equally perfect. But, when it is viewed as literature, 
 the varied contents of this sacred collection of the 
 national remains are hailed with pleasure, and it be- 
 comes quite astonishing how many-sided the Israelite 
 genius was. There were not simply the recognized 
 three or four kinds of books, — law, prophecy, history, 
 and psalmody, — but almost every kind that any modern 
 encyclopaedia of English or German literature would 
 exhibit ; allegory in Jotham's parable ; the drama in 
 Job ; satire in Ecclesiastes ; an opera or cantata in 
 
THE OLD TESTAMENT AS LITERATURE 149 
 
 Canticles ; ethnographic tables of the revelations of 
 nations; didactic poems, as in Proverbs; national lyrics, 
 as in a dozen or more of the Psalms ; primitive sagas and 
 war-songs, as in the patriarchal legends and in the songs 
 of Moses and Deborah ; fragments of epics, as in the 
 remnants of the Wars of Jehovah and the Book of 
 Jashar ; snatches of popular ditties, like the Song of 
 the Well and the Sword Song of Lamech ; historical 
 romances, like Daniel and Esther ; novels with a pur- 
 pose, like Jonah; political polemics and orations, 
 such as some of the prophetical writings may quite 
 properly be called. Such is the remarkable variety in 
 the contents of the Old Testament that we find in it, 
 when viewed as literature. 
 
 Or look through the lens of Biblical criticism at 
 writers of the same class, among whom we have here- 
 tofore supposed little diversity because all were in such 
 a peculiar way the mouthpieces of the divine inspira- 
 tion. I mean the prophets. Notice how enigmatic 
 and vaguely figurative are some of them ; how confi- 
 dent and precise in their predictions, a second class ; 
 and how much shrewder and more nearly accurate in 
 their forecasts, a third class. And it is by no means 
 those who were most bold and self-assured in their 
 predictions whom history has most confirmed. 
 
 What an interesting diversity of personal character- 
 istics and literary style distinguishes them, as we fol- 
 low down the stream of history ! Notice the rustic 
 figures of speech and pastoral simplicity of the first 
 two, — Amos and Hosea, — a style straightforward, 
 sententious, and pregnant with compressed feeling. 
 In Micah, also, we have another " man of the people," 
 
150 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT 
 
 terse and strong of utterance, denouncing in scathing 
 terms the wrongs suffered by the poor of Israel at the 
 hands of the rich and noble. 
 
 In Isaiah we meet with a genius of different type, 
 familiar with the best society of the times and with 
 international politics, possessed of a glowing wealth 
 of imagination and vividness of illustration, clothed in 
 a diction of dignified splendor and energetic elegance. 
 
 In Nahum and Habakkuk we have two more ardent 
 spirits, pouring out their impassioned thoughts in the 
 boldest of imagery. What dramatic power, especially, 
 is there in that " Pindaric Ode " of Habakkuk's, as it has 
 been called, where he looks forth from his watch- 
 tower to see what the Lord will show him, and de- 
 scribes with such majesty of thought and diction the 
 vision of the woes drawing nigh to his people ! 
 
 As we come down to the times of the Babylonish 
 captivity, we hear the deepened tragedy of Israel's fate 
 reverberating in the melancholy cadences of its great 
 writers ; in the artless pathos of Jeremiah's voice so 
 broken with patriotic tears ; and in the sombre im- 
 agery and weird allegorical figures of Ezekiel (though 
 often, it must be confessed, somewhat overloaded and 
 bizarre). In the impassioned rhetoric of the second 
 Isaiah in the heart-moving touches, picturesque im- 
 agery, and superbly effective personifications of this 
 great unknown prophet of the sixth century, the poet- 
 ical genius of Israel reached its climax ; and in the 
 clear, logical, and dialectic treatment of his theme in 
 Malachi, — going without any flourish right at the pith 
 of the matter, — we see that the roll of the prophets is 
 about to be closed, and that a simpler, more concise 
 
THE OLD TESTAMENT AS LITERATURE 151 
 
 and lucid school of writing is about to succeed 
 them. 
 
 And not only has the study of Biblical literature 
 brought out the individualities of the different books 
 of the Old Testament in instructive clearness, but 
 within the envelope of what had been deemed the 
 work of single authors it discovers a multiplicity of 
 hands, and points out their personal characteristics in 
 a most interesting manner. As the telescope and 
 spectrum of the astronomer have resolved what 
 seemed single stars into binary or ternary solar sys- 
 tems, so has the lens of higher criticism shown us 
 Isaiah and Zachariah to be each a double star, and the 
 Pentateuch of Moses to be a complex system of four 
 or five, or perhaps even more, noble literary suns and 
 planets. This complex composition and gradual 
 growth, throughout six or seven centuries, of the first 
 five books, not long ago ascribed to Moses alone as 
 their author, is the most notable achievement of the 
 higher criticism. It has endowed this part of the 
 Old Testament, to the eager student of truth and to 
 all spirits ambitious of disentangling knotty problems, 
 with a fascination akin to that which the authorship of 
 Junius had in the last century, or the decipherment of 
 the Assyrian hieroglyphics has in our day. Renan 
 has well compared the task, in its delicacy and diffi- 
 culty, to the decipherment of the papyri of Hercu- 
 laneum, whose pages were so imbedded and stuck 
 together into calcined blocks that, though the letters 
 might be visible, it was impossible to say to what page 
 they respectively belonged. But, as the careful un- 
 rolling and patching together of these papyri by the 
 
152 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT 
 
 classical scholars have introduced consistent order into 
 these manuscripts, so have the patient comparisons 
 and piecings-together of these Biblical documentary 
 layers and fragments by Graf and Wellhausen, and 
 especially by that prince of Biblical critics, Kuenen, 
 succeeded in building up again the ancient medley of 
 historical and legendary remains into an intelligible 
 literary structure. 
 
 Church history tells us that in the second century 
 an early predecessor of Dr. Robinson in the work of 
 gospel welding and tinkering, mortised together, out 
 of the four gospels, a harmony of the life of Christ 
 which he called the Diatessaron. Now, suppose this 
 compilation had been so successful that Matthew, 
 Mark, Luke, and John had no longer been copied in 
 their original and independent form, but had been en- 
 tirely swallowed up by the new compilation, and the 
 very memory of their separate existence been quite 
 forgotten. Suppose that the new compilation had 
 been baptized with the name " the Books of Jesus," 
 and that the Church should then have resisted as pious 
 profanation the idea that any part of this patchwork 
 calling itself the authentic history of Christ was writ- 
 ten by any one except the man of Nazareth with His 
 own hand ! Then we should have a pretty fair par- 
 allel to the way that the students of the Pentateuch 
 have been fettered, and the difficulties that they have 
 had to contend with in analyzing the so-called Books 
 of Moses. But, as no one to-day would think that the 
 fourfold gospel narrative and its complex testimony 
 would have gained either interest or historic value if 
 it had been thus superseded by Tatian's single com- 
 
THE OLD TESTAMENT AS LITERATURE 153 
 
 pilation, so no one ought to fail to see how much the 
 Pentateuch really gains in attractiveness and power by 
 this critical disinterment of the four or five separate 
 writings that have been hitherto engulfed by it. It 
 gives us that invaluable base line of measurement and 
 parallax of position only to be had where two or more 
 different points of view are found. It enables us to 
 estimate better the refraction of the lines of historic 
 fact produced by the sectional or political or ecclesi- 
 astic bias of the various writers. And it adds to the 
 illustrious group of Hebrew authors four or five no- 
 table figures, who, though unnamed, possess most 
 marked personal characteristics as well as local and 
 partisan traits. 
 
 In the earliest of these, the second Elohist, we dis- 
 cover a writer of the ninth or tenth century, b. c, 
 living in the neighborhood of Bethel or Shechem, 
 who delighted in collecting the old folk-lore and pa- 
 triarchial legends of his race, and who has given us a 
 most charming and ingenuous picture of the primitive 
 ages of humanity. Piquant and naive in style, marked 
 by a certain infantile candor and rough sublimity, 
 devotedly chronicling all the quaint myths and ethno- 
 graphic genealogies and details that he heard of; 
 with patriotic pride claiming for the ancestors of the 
 Northern tribes ancient possession of all the good 
 things of the country ; quite ignorant of any law lim- 
 iting sacrifices or altars to Jerusalem; betraying a 
 scarcely veiled polytheism on every page, — this first 
 collection of the Israelite legends, which became the 
 nucleus round which the rest of the Bible formed 
 itself, has well been compared by Renan to Homer, so 
 
154 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT 
 
 fresh and sparkling is it with the morning dew of 
 humanity's childhood. " This unknown writer," says 
 Renan, with but little if any exaggeration " has 
 created half the poetry of humanity. His stories 
 are like a breath of the world's springtime; their 
 freshness is only equaled by their crude grandeur; 
 man, when these pages were written, still lived in a 
 world of myths. Multitudes of Elohim filled the air, 
 manifested by mysterious whispers, unknown noises 
 and terrors which produced panic. Man had noc- 
 turnal struggles with them, out of which he emerged 
 wounded. Elohim appeared in triple form, and his 
 sons take unto them wives of the daughters of men. 
 Morality is scarcely born ; the mind of the Elohim is 
 capricious, sometimes absurd ; the world is very small, 
 heaven is reached by a ladder, or, rather, a pyramid 
 with steps ; messengers constantly pass from earth to 
 the empyrean. Dreams are celestial revelations, 
 visions of God" (Renan, pp. 177, 178, vol. II). 
 
 In the author of the second great stratum of the 
 Pentateuch (or, perhaps more accurately, the Hexa- 
 teuch ; for the Book of Joshua is an integral part and 
 close continuation of the first five books) we have 
 probably a man of the Southern kingdom, but of the 
 eight or ninth century, b. c, and of quite a different 
 type of mind. His genius is less unsophisticated and 
 sunny. He is a man of a sombre and austere temper- 
 ament and more philosophic cast of mind, oppressed 
 with the consciousness of the sin in the world and 
 full of forebodings of the wrath of Jehovah ; empha- 
 sizing the jealous nature and irresistible will of the 
 " I AM," greatest of all the gods ; delighting in medi- 
 
THE OLD TESTAMENT AS LITERATURE 155 
 
 tations and explanations of the origin of evil and in 
 chronicling the woes that descend upon sinful hu- 
 manity. Civilization to him is a path of decadence 
 and demoralization ; the thirst for knowledge is the 
 root of all evil ; social progress, a defiance of God's 
 laws and loss of Paradise ; the first city originated in 
 murder and transgression. As a religious creator, he 
 takes the first rank. He was the original Calvinist, 
 the spiritual father of Jeremiah, Paul, Augustine, Mo- 
 hammed, Jonathan Edwards, and all that ilk. As 
 Renan well says, " The ceiling of the San Sistine 
 Chapel, with its tremendous pictures of the awful 
 divine judge and the retributions of those who dis- 
 obey his autocratic will, is the best illustration of this 
 remarkable writer. Michael Angelo is the only artist 
 who could interpret the Jahvist ; for he is truly his 
 brother in genius " (Renan, p. 302, vol. II). 
 
 In the author of the third great stratum we find a 
 still different type of mind from either the preceding ; 
 a man of superior culture, employing a warm and 
 persuasive eloquence ; fond of stately periods ; exhib- 
 iting a decidedly purer and higher tone, both ethically 
 and religiously. The author of the patriarchal legends 
 had, as we noticed, hardly got out of the shell of 
 polytheism. The Jehovist was only in the stage of 
 Monarcho-theism, revering Jehovah as the first among 
 the gods. The Deuteronomist carries us on to the 
 next stage, — not monotheism, but monolatry, in which, 
 while the existence of other gods was still recognized, 
 Jehovah was proclaimed the unique God, the sole 
 object of worship, and thus did the world the inesti- 
 mable service of providing the next higher step in the 
 
156 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT 
 
 staircase of religion, from which the second Isaiah, 
 Jesus, and Paul mounted to that of a true monotheism, 
 in which Jehovah was not merely the only God to be 
 worshipped, but the only God in existence, the One 
 over all, in all, and through all. 
 
 It was in the seventh century, shortly before or else in 
 during the reign of Josiah, that the Deuteronomist wrote. 
 For a long time it was thought that the next great 
 contributor to this literary edifice added his notable 
 fourth story, the priestly and legal part, about the 
 same time. But, while there may have been many 
 additions made at this time, the best critics, Graf, 
 Kuenen, and Wellhausen, now put the date of this 
 priestly reviser and the most of the sacerdotal legisla- 
 tion, including also the noble proem, the Creation Ode 
 of the first chapter, as late as the time of the Baby- 
 lonish captivity, — the fifth century, b. c. This ac- 
 counts for the numerous reminiscences and readapta- 
 tions of Assyrian legend that he has introduced and 
 the absence of allusions to this priestly code in the 
 prophets of the seventh and eighth centuries. This 
 priestly reviser, sometimes called the first Elohist 
 (because he usually speaks of the divine only under 
 the name of Elohim down to the time when the reve- 
 lation of God as Jahveh is made to Moses, in Exodus 
 XII), was a native of the south, — probably a resident 
 in Jerusalem. He possessed scientific tastes; had a 
 fondness for genealogies, a more precise style ; aimed 
 to inculcate moral lessons and preserve the memory 
 of religious customs ; exhibited a mind more reflective 
 and exact ; sympathized with the southern tribes of 
 Judah and Benjamin ; avoided as far as possible the 
 
THE OLD TESTAMENT AS LITERATURE 157 
 
 anthropomorphism of the northern narrators ; and ex- 
 hibits both a higher morality and a purer theism. He 
 has encumbered his narrative, nevertheless, with a 
 most wearisome and formal mass of ceremonial details. 
 He is the ardent devotee of ecclesiastical theocracy, 
 and has not hesitated, in his enthusiasm, to map out a 
 whole priestly Utopia, an imposing air castle of sacer- 
 dotal laws, customs, events, and institutions, con- 
 structed with such precise and realistic details that for 
 ages it was held to have been a veritable part of 
 Hebrew history and experience. 
 
 And this suggests a few words upon the great gain 
 which our conception of Hebrew history and the 
 course of its literary development has made by this 
 critical reconstruction of the proper succession of its 
 various books and documents. What a travesty of 
 the literary and religious history of India should we 
 make if we presented it in the following order : first, 
 the ceremonial legislation of Manu ; next, the Vedic 
 songs and myths ; third, the subtle, speculative Upani- 
 shads ; and lastly, the practical moral reforms and 
 spiritual teachings ! But it is just such a topsy-turvy 
 picture of the course of Jewish faith and thought that 
 the traditional view of the Old Testament has given 
 us, putting its monotheism at the very beginning, 
 supposing away back in the time of Moses a most 
 minute and elaborate legislation and complicated, 
 pedantic ritual system already full blown, and present- 
 ing this as succeeded by such an epoch of political 
 and social chaos, such a period of crude morals and 
 unregulated worship, and rude, almost savage legends 
 as we find in Judges and Samuel, " when " as the 
 
158 THE NEW WOULD AND TEE NEW THOUGHT 
 
 record says, " every one did what was good in his own 
 eyes." 
 
 The history of literature and the science of com- 
 parative religion show us, in all the great civilizations 
 of Europe and Asia, the same law of literary develop- 
 ment, from the childlike to the reflective, from the 
 simple to the complex ; and also the same course of 
 religious evolution, first rude nature-worship and 
 fetichism, then, advance through idolatry and poly- 
 theism towards theism and spiritual religion. First we 
 have the diviner and the soothsayer and the bard, the 
 childlike chanter of primitive war-songs and myths, 
 next the prophet, and after him the priest. Now, the 
 traditional theory reverses this, and puts at the dawn 
 of Hebrew life and literature that elaborate sacerdotal- 
 ism which everywhere else comes only in the evening 
 of the national life. But, when we study the Old 
 Testament as literature under the microscope of the 
 higher criticism, the intellectual and spiritual evolution 
 of the Hebrew genius becomes again a natural one, 
 exhibiting the same normal succession as the national 
 consciousness of India, Egypt, Persia, and Greece. 
 Thus a new orderliness is given to the Old Testament, 
 and with it a greater intelligibleness. 
 
 And in another way also does the literary view of 
 the Bible give it a clearer comprehensibility ; namely 
 by permitting us to use sources of illumination that on 
 the traditional theory are at once ruled out. What 
 new light is supplied for understanding the Genesis 
 stories of the fall, the deluge, and the Tower of Babel, 
 when we can illustrate them by their Assyrian ana- 
 logues, if not sources ? How much more intelligible 
 
THE OLD TESTAMENT AS LITEBATUBE 159 
 
 becomes the story of Samson, when we are free to 
 recognize many of its distinctive features as derived 
 from the primitive sun-myth, of which here we have a 
 degraded survival, perhaps grafted upon some legendary 
 stock ! And, especially, what an illumination is given 
 to Solomon's Song of Songs, which in our King 
 James' version is so darkly obscured by the interpo- 
 lated headings which refer it to a mystical marriage 
 of Christ and the Church, when we accept it as a 
 pastoral cantata, commemorating the fidelity of true 
 love, unmoved by the blandishments of rank and 
 luxury ! Instead of its being a dialogue between two, 
 we must suppose, as Ewald has shown in such a 
 masterly manner, a chorus and at least three principal 
 characters ; namely, the Shulamite maiden, the shep- 
 herd lover to whom she has pledged her affection, and 
 Solomon, the king, who, captivated with her beauty, 
 has taken her from her native village to his mag- 
 nificent palace, and who thinks that by the glittering 
 prospect he opens before her, as his favorite, he may 
 induce her to abandon her rustic home and betrothed 
 husband. By her steadfast resistance to the king's 
 solicitations the loyal maid, however, at last convinces 
 Solomon of the hopelessness of his passion, and obtains 
 permission to return to the shepherd lover whom she 
 cannot forget ; and at the close of the poem the faith- 
 ful couple appear hand in hand, expressing in glowing 
 strains the superiority of genuine affection, though in 
 the humblest lot, over any union that riches or 
 position may buy. This is a meaning that nobly 
 vindicates the place which the Song of Songs has so 
 strangely, but fortunately, retained in the sacred canon. 
 
160 THE NEW WOULD AND TEE NEW THOUGHT 
 
 And this brings me to my final point, the increased 
 value of the Old Testament, — the higher claim upon 
 our admiration and our reverence that it gains when 
 viewed as literature. All its natural beauties and 
 excellences, of old so obscured by the artificial theories 
 of its supernatural dictation, now emerge to delight 
 us. What admirable character-painting is disclosed in 
 the ingenious delineations of the three great patriarchs 
 and their successors, — Joseph, Deborah, Samuel, Saul, 
 David, and Elijah ! How sharp, forceful, naive and 
 pathetic are these memorable personalities, outlined 
 often with such few but graphic strokes of the pen ! 
 Surely, nowhere else than in Shakspere himself can 
 we find such a wonderful portrait gallery of figures, so 
 diversified and full of breathing life, as we find in the 
 patriarchal legends of Genesis and the historic sketches 
 of Judges, Samuel and Kings. Or, if we can disabuse 
 ourselves of the inclination to look upon it as either 
 science or revelation, and consider it only as poetry, 
 what a splendid, inspiring ode have we in that Psalm 
 of Creation that makes the first chapter of the Bible 
 memorable ! How superb the lyric strains of many 
 of the Psalms ! What a vigorous and copious expo- 
 sition of the grandeurs of nature are given by them, 
 especially by that 103d Psalm, which as Humboldt 
 said, is " in itself an outline of the universe." What 
 persuasive springs of consolation, what powerful ethical 
 instruction, do the pages of the prophets furnish ! 
 
 I know, of course, the many dark stains that mar 
 the moral tone of the Old Testament, the grave incon- 
 sistencies of its spiritual teaching. When viewed as 
 an infallible book, a web divinely woven, all of one 
 
THE OLD TESTAMENT A3 LITERATURE 161 
 
 cloth, these stains are fatal to its claims. But, when 
 we look upon it as the spiritual history of a nation 
 feeling its way to God, it has no superior. It possesses 
 certainly that best of inspiration, the power of in- 
 spiring and uplifting its readers. Take Conway's 
 " Sacred Anthology" or Max Muller's fuller " Sacred 
 Books of the East," and compare the other Oriental 
 Scriptures with the Bible, and the more thoroughly 
 you know the literature of the rest of the world, 
 the more sure will you be that, on the whole, with 
 all its crudities and coarseness and vengefulness on 
 its head, the Bible stands far above all other 
 scriptures in purity and elevation of tone. Grant 
 that the vestiges of polygamy, slavery, idolatry, 
 witch-burning, bloody revenges, and religious per- 
 secutions may be inbedded here, like the scales of 
 hideous dragons of the slime in a slab of the Saurian 
 period. Yet they are but the marks of the outgrown 
 shells, the off-cast skins which the spiritual genius of 
 Israel successively sloughed off, and left behind it. 
 They are but the lower rounds of that heavenly ladder 
 which the religious consciousness ol the Hebrews one 
 after another trod beneath it, and rose above, as it 
 struggled slowly to the recognition and proclamation 
 of the purest religious truths known to antiquity. All 
 these relics of a lower stage of thought and conduct 
 but bear witness to the naturalness and progressive- 
 ness of the religious evolution. Nowhere else in all 
 literature is there a more striking and valuable pan- 
 orama of the development of the spiritual conscious" 
 ness of a nation. What pictures of spiritual heroism, 
 standing undaunted against all odds ; what wise counsels 
 
162 TEE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT 
 
 to youth ; what moving and uplifting outpourings of 
 devout thankfulness; what manly denunciations of 
 wrong and injustice ; what appealing strains of peni- 
 tence and devout trust ; what comfort to the bereaved 
 and support for the tempted beam from these pages, 
 as the morning stars when they sing together in their 
 Maker's honor, and make the benediction of this book, 
 in spite of all its flaws, unparalleled in the history of 
 humanity. And this benediction shall be all the 
 greater, when those who profess to reverence its lustre 
 shall no more " breathe on it, as they bow," but, freed 
 from artificial tinsel and glamour, it shall shine forth 
 in all its natural beauty, symmetry, and matchless 
 worth. 
 
CHAPTER VII. 
 
 CHRISTIAN DISCIPLESHIP AND MODERN LIFE. 
 
 Some years ago there was published in England a 
 striking story which gave the imaginary history of a 
 young Cornish carpenter, Joshua Davidson by name, 
 who takes all that he is taught in church and Sunday- 
 school with entire literalness and endeavors to act 
 accordingly. 
 
 He is assured that every word in the gospels is liter- 
 ally true ; that every command and exhortation should 
 be strictly obeyed ; that every promise may be confi- 
 dently relied upon ; and that, as Christ is set forth as 
 our pattern, He ought to be faithfully imitated. 
 
 Poor Joshua, — learning all this every Sunday and 
 from every pulpit ; and being moreover, peremptorily 
 assured of it by his rector, when, in his dawning per- 
 plexities, he ventures to question that august function- 
 ary, resolves to shape his whole life, by the standard 
 thus set up for him. Trusting in the text of Christ's 
 promise to His disciples, he ate poisonous berries and 
 nearly died in consequence. He handled serpents and 
 was greatly astonished to find himself severely bitten 
 by the vipers. And to the doctor who came to at- 
 tend him, he talked so much primitive Christianity 
 that the good man set him down as a lunatic. In fine, 
 poor Joshua, merely by trying in all sincerity, to do 
 on week days, what every Sabbath he was told our 
 
 163 
 
164 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT 
 
 pattern did, and he himself ought therefore to do, was 
 forever getting into scrapes and being bullied by his 
 teachers for really believing what they told him. 
 
 When he gets through school, he goes to London 
 and seeks to lead there, an unflinching Christian life. 
 He tries to reform a regular jail-bird, nearly gets in- 
 volved in his iniquities and is publicly beaten by the 
 ruffian. 
 
 He succeeds in rescuing a poor Magdalen, but he 
 loses his own repute among his neighbors by taking 
 her into his own house ; the only place of refuge he 
 knew of to offer her. He sets up a night school for 
 the scamps and villains who swarm in the court where 
 he lives ; but they are so turbulent that the police ar- 
 rest him as a harborer of disorderly characters. 
 
 Poor Joshua, finding his own little strength so una- 
 vailing to stem the seething tide of evil, comes to the 
 conclusion that society itself must be revolutionized 
 before Christianity can have any chance of being 
 carried out in practice. He looks into his New Testa- 
 ment and finds that the early Christians had all things 
 in common; and he leaps to the conclusion that 
 Christianity requires the equalization of classes. 
 Capital, the aristocracy of wealth and the antagonisms 
 of upper and lower classes and class distinctions, con- 
 stituted, he believed, the Upas tree that poisons 
 Christendom ; and he becomes an itinerant lecturer to 
 rouse the masses to shake off these fetters and adopt 
 socialistic principles ; and at length goes to Paris and 
 joins the Communists, fancying their communistic 
 scheme the most hopeful attempt to work out the 
 principles of Jesus. But even here, no happier lot 
 
CHRISTIAN DISCIPLESHIP AND MODERN LIFE 165 
 
 awaited him. The ruffians and fanatics of that awful 
 travesty nearly tore him in pieces, because of his ad- 
 herence to Christ ; his faithful Magdalen was shot as 
 an incendiary ; and he himself on his return to Eng- 
 land, was trampled to death by an enraged mob whom 
 he was addressing, on the ground that he was a Com- 
 munist, a republican and an atheist. 
 
 This tragic story puts in a striking light the opposi- 
 tion which I suppose, all have sometimes remarked, 
 between much of our popular preaching and the con- 
 duct, actually current in society and required by it. 
 It is a cutting satire upon the inconsistency, perhaps 
 we might say, the cowardice or dishonesty of those 
 who teach on the first day of the week that every 
 word of the Bible is to be taken with a literalness with 
 which we take no other book, and on the remaining 
 six, act like the veriest unbeliever and heathen. Nay 
 — it suggests a deeper question ; it presses upon us the 
 inquiry, — is Christianity indeed applicable to modern 
 society and our existing civilization ? Is it obligatory, 
 or is it practicable, is it wise or right to obey and act 
 out the precepts and examples of the gospel in this 
 present year of our Lord ? Or on the other hand is 
 Christianity to be reckoned an obsolete law, — a beau- 
 tiful tradition, to be kept like a rare cup of old china, 
 high up on a shelf, admiringly to be gazed upon and 
 reverenced, but never used in daily life ? 
 
 It is easy to say of such a story — " It is an extrava- 
 ganza. It presents difficulties that do not occur in 
 daily life." This is certainly true. But nevertheless 
 would it be an extravaganza, if Christians were true 
 to their professions ? Would its difficulties be inex- 
 
166 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT 
 
 perienced if the " Imitation of Christ " showed itself in 
 living men and women in our streets, instead of in 
 book covers on our tables or sermons in our pulpits ? 
 Where is the Church member in the strictest of 
 churches, who entirely imitates the examples of the 
 New Testament ? Where is he who will step on the 
 sea, trusting to be sustained like Christ and Peter, by 
 the power of faith ? Where is the Christian who be- 
 lieves it to be his precise duty to call nothing his own, 
 but to hold everything literally in common with all 
 his brother Christians ? Who to-day holds it to be his 
 Christian duty, in simple truth, like the lilies, to toil not, 
 neither to spin ; or like the ravens, to sow not, nor reap, 
 nor gather into barns ? Or if there are such Christians 
 what does our modern science and political economy 
 have to say to them ? What, indeed, is the tone of 
 current remark in Christian circles upon such pro- 
 ceedings ? Doubtless many of these inconsistencies, 
 (numbers of which will occur to every one) are not so 
 much inconsistencies of modern life with the gospel 
 requirements as with wrong interpretations which have 
 been put upon Christianity. But deducting whatever 
 incompatibilities may be traced to this source, there are 
 enough still left, to leave quite a formidable problem. 
 While, for example, He whom we call Master, promises 
 His disciples that whatsoever they ask in His name shall 
 be given to them, — physical science declares that every 
 law of nature is absolutely unchangeable, and moves 
 not to the most fervent prayer. While the New 
 Testament bids us give to him that asketh and sell 
 that which we have and give alms, our social science 
 declares that alms-giving is preeminently noxious, 
 
CHRISTIAN DISCIPLESBIP AND MODERN LIFE 167 
 
 encouraging idleness and profligacy, and helping to 
 saddle society with a brood of permanent parasitic 
 mendicants. While the gospel bids us resist not evil, 
 and to him that smites thee on the one cheek, turn 
 the other also, the whole of our military, police and 
 legal systems is a tacit repudiation of these precepts, 
 and our political experience asserts that the order of 
 our great civilized communities could not be main- 
 tained without repression of violence wherever it 
 shows its unruly head. In short, many of the instruc- 
 tions of the New Testament are (to the common sense 
 of the nineteenth century) incredible and impracti- 
 cable paradoxes. Let a Christian disciple, nowadays 
 try to act them out literally and simply. Let him for 
 example essay to cast a mountain into the sea, simply 
 by faith ; let the missionary take no money in his purse 
 nor shoes for his feet, when he starts on a journey, 
 as the seventy were commanded by Christ to do; 
 let the Christian literally pluck out the eye or cut off 
 the right hand that is concerned in any sin of his ; 
 let him, when a member of his family is sick unto 
 death, instead of calling in the doctor call in the church 
 elder to pray over him and anoint his head with oil, 
 as the Apostle James commands; and the doctors 
 would be pretty likely to send him to the insane 
 asylum. 
 
 Now, here are these unavoidable antagonisms be- 
 tween Christian duty, as the letter of Scripture gives 
 it to us, and the usages and requirements of modern 
 life. These antagonisms are becoming evident to 
 great numbers, both among the strict disciples of 
 Christ and among the ardent devotees of modern 
 
168 THE NEW WOSLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT 
 
 progress. On the one hand, many earnest Chris- 
 tians are eager to bring the Christian world back 
 to a literal acceptance and imitation of the gospel 
 teachings, as the only cure for our troubles, and would 
 turn their backs on modern society, as only Paganism, 
 because of its variation from the pattern of ancient 
 Palestinian life. A conspicuous instance of this is 
 found in the recent writings of Count Tolstoi, the 
 famous Russian author. Till middle life, an absolute 
 skeptic and man of the world and bold assailant of 
 authority, he, then, he said, made a great discovery. 
 It was that the precepts of Jesus, especially such as 
 " Resist not evil " ; " Judge not " and " swear not at 
 all" are to be taken with absolute literalness. This 
 has now become " his religion " which he is enthu- 
 siastic in urging upon the world. Till we give up 
 courts and law proceedings, armies, police and resist- 
 ance to oppression, we are not, he claims, true Chris- 
 tians. On the other hand, there is the large and fast 
 growing class of thoroughgoing rationalists and 
 worshippers of science, to whom natural selection and 
 evolution are the supreme words, and whose saints are 
 Haeckel and Buchner, Comte and Bradlaugh and Inger- 
 soll, who are more and more renouncing Christianity, 
 because it is, they believe, irreconcilable with modern 
 ideas and the laws of nature, discovered by physical 
 science. Both these parties, from opposite quarters are 
 pushing the mind of our generation more directly face 
 to face with the question, " Which shall be given up, — 
 Christian discipleship or modern thought and life ? " 
 
 Which, then, of these two antagonistic inmates shall 
 be turned out of our heart and mind ? 
 
CHRISTIAN DISCIPLESHIP AND MODERN LIFE 169 
 
 Now, those who maintain the necessity of in- 
 terpreting and following the gospel literally — if at 
 all, — I leave to themselves to take whichever horn 
 of the dilemma they choose. I leave it to them to 
 choose between the literal gospel and their daily 
 practice ; between the punctilious copying of every 
 act and the scrupulous observance of every word of 
 Christ, on the one side and the whole network of 
 modern institutions and the affirmations of modern 
 thought and experience on the other. For myself, I 
 would take a more excellent way. For I cannot 
 spare, — modern life cannot spare either the gospel 
 of Christ or the knowledge and civilization of the 
 nineteenth century. 
 
 Nor are the two when rightly interpreted, incon- 
 sistent. Both should be kept ; both may be harmon- 
 ized through that higher interpretation which is the 
 reasonable interpretation of Christianity. 
 
 The solution lies just here. The Christian life is 
 not bound up with the letter of any book. The Chris- 
 tian life is no slavish imitation of any life. To live 
 the life of Christ is not to live as He did, but as He 
 would live to-day. The gospel is not a code of con- 
 duct out of which we are to pick out texts, here and 
 there to go by ; but it is a well-spring of spiritual in- 
 fluence with which we are first thoroughly to fill our- 
 selves, and then, let our conduct flow freely therefrom. 
 
 In the first place our duty as Christians is not to 
 follow the letter of the gospel, but the spirit. " The 
 letter killeth, the spirit giveth life," is the profound 
 admonition of Paul. He who follows the mere letter 
 of the gospel may violate many of the most sacred 
 
170 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT 
 
 obligations of virtue. He may hold slaves and quote 
 to us in justification Paul's letter to Philemon. He 
 may practice polygamy and justify it by the practice 
 of the patriarchs and the omission of any prohibition 
 of it in the New Testament. Or he may (as a clergy- 
 man in England it is said, once advised a parishioner 
 who inquired of him) look on bribery as no sin be- 
 cause nowhere expressly forbidden in the Bible. Of 
 the letter of the New Testament we can never be as 
 sure as of its spirit. We must remember that the 
 gospels were not composed till forty to one hundred 
 years after the events and discourses which they 
 relate. We must remember that what was originally 
 said has been twice translated; — first from Hebrew 
 into Greek, and then from Greek into English. Espe- 
 cially we must remember that Jesus was an Oriental 
 and a popular teacher. There is more in these two 
 facts than we are apt to allow for. The Asiatic style 
 of narration is so different in its tone from the Euro- 
 pean, especially so different from our prosaic Anglo- 
 Saxon that we are almost sure to be misled. What 
 we would express abstractly, the Oriental loves to put 
 concretely. What we would say in cautious and 
 measured terms, the Eastern tongue adorns with 
 luxuriant garlands of imagery and hyperbole. Atha- 
 nase Coquerel, the eminent French preacher, has given 
 a couple of good illustrations of this. " When I was 
 in the East I visited a sheik's house. He told me that 
 every thing in that house, his own person and his own 
 family as well as his possessions were mine ; — and he 
 said this with the greatest protestations. This is ex- 
 actly as if we should say to a stranger, ' You are 
 
CHRISTIAN DISCIPLESSIP AND MODERN LIFE 171 
 
 welcome ' — it means no more. If I had understood 
 it to mean any more and on going away had taken 
 anything with me, the sheik would have shot me as a 
 thief." 
 
 " I remember," also says Coquerel, " having seen 
 two letters, — one written by a French General, the 
 other by Abd-El-Kadir, the Arab chief who fought 
 the French in Algeria. It had been decided that the 
 French general and the Arab chief should say exactly 
 the same thing in regard to some exchange of prison- 
 ers. The French general wrote two lines ; — very 
 clear, very precise, with nothing but the exact mean- 
 ing he intended to convey. But Abd-El-Kadir, mean- 
 ing to write the same thing, wrote a whole page about 
 flowers, jewels, roses, moonshine and what not." 
 
 Now this difference between the poetic genius of 
 Oriental expression and the precision which the Euro- 
 pean mind expects, must not be overlooked, and it 
 necessitates a certain reduction in interpreting many 
 of the strong declarations of the New Testament. 
 
 Again, as I hinted, we must remember that Jesus 
 was a speaker to the multitude. We must disabuse 
 our minds of that old idea that Jesus spoke primarily 
 to report from heaven to earth a body of Divinity and 
 a perfect moral code, exact and exhaustive, every 
 syllable weighed and measured so as to be a standard 
 authority and sacred oracle for all future generations. 
 We must think of him rather as aiming to fix the at- 
 tention of the lounging crowd, gathered at some street 
 corner or public square in Jerusalem ; or to rouse 
 from their sluggishness the minds of the rustics who 
 have come out on to some hilltop or by the lake-side 
 
172 TEE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW TSOUGET 
 
 to take a look at the new preacher. If he had spoken 
 in the cautious, moderate and qualified style of a 
 theological professor, he would never have caught 
 their attention. Jesus was obliged, from the nature 
 of the case, to resort to striking apothegms, — nay to 
 what literally would be paradoxes, that he might lodge 
 something in their minds that would quicken them 
 and set them to thinking. Doubtless, too, he was 
 aware of and made allowance for that curious hold- 
 back in human nature, that unwillingness that the 
 average man feels, to do in any matter exactly what 
 another man counsels him to do. Tell a boy to do 
 one particular thing and how willing you find him to 
 do anything else but that ; and if at last, he yields and 
 does do the thing he has been ordered to, — how apt 
 he is to do it in some way just a little different from 
 the way he has been commanded to do it. He seems 
 to think that by so varying from the order given him, 
 he in some way saves his own independence. And 
 men are only boys of bigger growth and show the 
 same trait by always trying to beat down their market 
 man or get ten per cent, off the price of their coal or 
 their potatoes. There is this eternal tendency in 
 human nature to do a little less than it is wanted to, 
 so that if you want to get the world a rod ahead, you 
 must command it to go a furlong. John Stuart Mill 
 in his autobiography, speaking of one of his pamph- 
 lets, " England and Ireland," says, — " It is the char- 
 acter of the British people, or at least of the higher 
 and middle classes who pass muster for the British 
 people, that to induce them to approve of any change, 
 it is necessary that they should look upon it as a 
 
CHRISTIAN DISCIPLE8EIP AND MODERN LIFE 173 
 
 middle course. They think any proposal extreme 
 and violent, unless they hear of some other proposal 
 going still further, upon which their antipathy to ex- 
 treme views may discharge itself. So it proved in the 
 present instance. My proposal was condemned. But 
 any scheme for Irish land reform, short of mine, came 
 to be thought moderate by comparison.' It was on 
 this principle, also, so I have heard Wendell Phillips 
 say, that he and the early Abolitionists urged the 
 people of the North to dissolve the Union so as to get 
 rid of the responsibility for slavery. They persuaded 
 hardly any one to go that length with them. They 
 did not expect to. But by urging that extreme, they 
 brought people up to saying, " We cannot consent to 
 give up the constitution and the Union ; but anything 
 short of that : — free territories, personal liberty bills ; 
 colored schools, — in anything of this sort we will 
 support you. And the very people gladly promised 
 this, who, if we had asked only for these lesser things 
 would have been just as unwilling to yield them." 
 
 Now Jesus, I believe, understood this trait of human 
 nature, and made it serve him ; and it is the explana- 
 tion of many of the apparent paradoxes of the gospel. 
 If he had simply bidden men, when struck on the 
 cheek, bear it with patience, he would have made 
 very slight impression on their minds and his admoni- 
 tion would have accomplished little or nothing. But by 
 bidding them " turn the other cheek, also," — he arrests 
 men's thoughts and gets them half-way to the goal he 
 has bidden them to go ; to the point, that is, of recog- 
 nizing it as a duty to bear injuries patiently, which 
 was probably in fact all that Jesus desired. So with 
 
174 THE NEW WORLD AND TEE NEW THOUGHT 
 
 the precept enjoining the disciple to go " two miles with 
 him that ask thee to go one ; " to " give up thy coat, also, 
 to him that takes thy cloak ; " — if we follow these pre- 
 cepts to the extent that common sense and a just regard 
 for our other duties limits them, we may feel that we are 
 following them as far as Jesus expected us to. Every 
 other excellence seems to be ascribed to Jesus except 
 this attribute of common sense. But he who was the 
 perfection of manhood, surely was not lacking in the 
 one thing most essential to wisdom and balance of 
 character. And as he had common sense himself, 
 he expected to find it in those to whom he spoke. 
 
 Again, we must distinguish between the circum- 
 stances of the age and country in which Christ lived 
 and our own. He spoke, — in the form of his instruc- 
 tion, — for his own time. Were he teaching now 
 among us, the form, the details of his instruction 
 would doubtless be different. For example, among a 
 simple rustic community, like that of Palestine, there 
 was not the same danger of breeding a pauper class 
 by the custom of alms-giving, as with us. It was the 
 natural way of relieving honest distress. So wealth 
 was less often won without fraud or extortion, in 
 those days. It spoke generally of injustice and op- 
 pression. It did not play, in the economy of Christ's 
 people, that useful place in the development and im- 
 provement of society that it does in modern life. 
 The social science of Palestine would hardly be the 
 same as that which England and America call for, to- 
 day. The practical methods that may have been wise 
 in Galilee, 1, 800 years ago, may not be so at all in 
 modern Christendom. We must not confound the 
 
CHRISTIAN D1SCIPLESBIP AND MODERN LIFE 175 
 
 realm of the spiritual with the realm of the material. 
 Christianity has no particular system of political 
 economy. Christianity has no special system of 
 transacting business. Christianity has no unchange- 
 able specifications of dogma or conduct, the line of 
 which it always requires its disciples to toe. It is not 
 a set of rules and precepts, but of principles. It is a 
 grand stream of vital spirit, flowing from the heart of 
 Christ, down through the centuries, infusing all insti- 
 tutions and customs, while it expands itself to the 
 breadth of the advancing age. Christianity is, indeed, 
 a religion of every-day life ; a religion of business ; a 
 religion that embodies itself in social activities. But 
 it has nowhere any special institutions, any special 
 forms ; any special acts or instrumentalities that it in- 
 sists upon. What it insists on is the feeling, the mo- 
 tive that is carried into all. That must always be 
 high and pure. Every sentiment of the Christian 
 must be noble. Every purpose must be unselfish. 
 Every beat of his heart must remember his neighbor's 
 good. Every thought must be touched with a rever- 
 ence for the Divine. Let the intellect seek what path 
 it thinks best. Only let the generous heart be the 
 driver. Let common sense conduct the affairs of so- 
 ciety and the state as she deems wisest. Only let love 
 to God and man be the end. Of every special deed, 
 true Christianity says, as Paul said of the eating of 
 meat, — " Let him that eateth, eat unto the Lord, and 
 him that eateth not, likewise unto the Lord. To his 
 own Master, he standeth or falleth." Christ is indeed, 
 the pattern which our religious aspirations should set 
 before them. But we cannot repeat all the actual 
 
176 THE NEW WORLD AND TEE NEW THOUGHT 
 
 deeds or ideas of Christ to advantage in this nineteenth 
 century, any more than we can wisely wear in our north- 
 ern climes, the loose, thin robes that Jesus wore; or use 
 sandals on our feet, instead of shoes ; or talk Aramaic, 
 as Christ did ; or image in our own faces, the personal 
 likeness that belonged to him. What we are to seek is 
 that which Paul exhorted the Philippians to attain to ; 
 " the mind which was in Christ Jesus " ; that spirit, 
 temper, enduring and inspiring character — that life, in 
 fine, " which shone " as Mr. W. R. Greg has well said, 
 " through all his actions and permeated all his sayings, 
 and which was so vital, so essential, so omnipresent and 
 so unmistakable, as to have survived through all the 
 channels and processes of transmission, — this mind of 
 Christ can alone be safely followed as his real teach- 
 ing. Doubts and disputes among Christians have 
 been endless as to the doctrine of Christ ; as to the par- 
 ticulars of what he said and did. None, we believe, 
 ever truly differed as to the tone and temper of his 
 mind or of his teaching." We may doubt the 
 wisdom and the obligation still to obey some of 
 Christ's verbal commands. We may declare that 
 he who gives to every one that asks of him, will 
 be likely only to minister to sloth and sensuality; 
 that he who turns the other cheek, also, to the fist 
 that has already smitten him on one cheek, only en- 
 courages the riot of violence and force. But we can- 
 not dispute that the spirit that these precepts incul- 
 cate is the right spirit ; that this mood of universal, 
 all-forbearing love is the only mood that can bring 
 the fallen soul to its better self ; is the only mood in 
 which even stern correction should be inflicted. 
 
CHRISTIAN DISCIPLESHIP AND MODERN LIFE 177 
 
 To have " the mind that was in Christ Jesus " is the 
 true Christian life. And that life is always feasible. 
 We cannot conceive any single form or manifestation 
 of it that may not thrive in fullest vitality in society 
 as now constituted, and find ample work in purging it 
 of its evils and developing its capabilities, without 
 seeking to overturn its foundations. " The shell of 
 verbal form," Mr. Greg has truly said, " in which 
 Christ's thoughts have come down to us, may pass 
 from the belief of man and from harmony with so- 
 ciety. The world has outgrown some ; it will, doubt- 
 less, outgrow more. But the kernel, — the spirit, — ■ 
 belongs to all time." To follow this spirit is, of course, 
 a work beset with difficulties, — as all things worth 
 getting are. And some of these difficulties, come, it 
 is true, from the very spirit of our age. To lead a 
 life that shall make our fellow-men better is not the 
 simple thing it was of old. It is beset with many 
 perplexities. Our civilization is so complex that it is 
 a difficult thing to follow out the windings of an act 
 to its real consequences in society. It is a difficult 
 thing to balance the two sides that we have learned to 
 see that there are to almost every question. The 
 Christian disciple nowadays needs the wisdom of the 
 serpent, or in spite of himself, he will fail to be 
 " harmless as the dove." But if there are these hin- 
 drances to Christian living, in modern society, — on 
 the other hand what great helps are there ! There 
 has never been a time, I believe, more full of the 
 Christian spirit. Never a time when men sought 
 more generally and more patiently how they might 
 improve the condition of society. Never a time when 
 
178 THE NEW WORLD AND TEE NEW THOUGHT 
 
 there was a more earnest desire to get at the real, at 
 the substantial, the actually helpful, — pushing one side 
 old worn out forms, perhaps with a little rudeness, but 
 with diligence and intelligence advancing towards that 
 which is truly useful to the race. Look around at our 
 public institutions, our hospitals, asylums, Social 
 Science Associations, Reform Schools, Fresh Air 
 Funds and Outings, Free Kindergartens, Lend-a-Hand 
 Societies, People's Palaces, College Settlements, Peace 
 Conferences, Working People's Clubs, and what grand 
 strides have been made within the last century towards 
 the better realization of the coming of Christ's king- 
 dom of love and peace on earth. But still — how far, 
 alas ! are we yet, from the glorious consummation. 
 God knows how much we fall short of it. But the 
 fault, I believe, lies not in the age ; nor in our institu- 
 tions, nor yet in the gospel itself. It lies in ourselves ; 
 in the pressure of the senses upon the spirit; the 
 rivalry of the flesh with the soul ; the weariness of 
 the body and the weakness of the will. Let us seek 
 to get more of the mind which was in Christ ; that 
 absolute devotion to our fellow-men and to God. Let 
 us not squander our forces, endeavoring to overturn 
 society. Let us trust that the experience and struggle 
 for existence of humanity in these many thousand 
 years that we have been on the earth, have settled 
 some of the simpler conditions of social life. Let the 
 sword go unmelted ; but let it strike only for right 
 and justice. Despise not the power of riches ; but let 
 them be used for the blessing of society. Let the 
 distinctions of property and class remain. But let 
 them be consecrated to the discharge of their respect- 
 
CHRISTIAN DISCIPLESHIP AND MODERN LIFE 179 
 
 ive duties, and to the better fulfilment of what mutual 
 love and helpfulness demands. It is a fascinating 
 vision, — the vision of the days of primitive Christian- 
 ity renewed amongst us ; the very life of Jesus in 
 Nazareth and Jerusalem, led again here, just as he 
 passed it there. But that time is gone by forever. 
 Yet that which is left to us ; the realizing of his mind 
 in every one of our lives, — taking on the new forms 
 which our larger opportunities and larger experience 
 justify, how much nobler a picture would that make ! 
 Would it not, indeed, be the realization of those 
 greater miracles which Christ himself foretold that 
 his disciples should work when his own task on earth 
 was ended? 
 
CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 MODERN DOGMATISM AND THE UNBELIEF OF THE AGE. 
 
 An eminent ecclesiastic of the Church of England 
 once characterized the present age as preeminently 
 the age of doubt, and lamented that whether he took 
 up book or magazine or sermon, he was confronted by- 
 some form of it. 
 
 This picture of our age is not an unjust one. The 
 modern mind is thoroughly wide-awake and has quite 
 thrown off the leading strings of ancient timidity. All 
 the traditions of history, the laws of science, the 
 principles of morals are overhauled and the founda- 
 tions on which they rest relentlessly probed. And 
 our modern curiosity can see no reason why it should 
 cease its investigations when it comes to the frontiers 
 of religion. It deems no dogma too old to be sum- 
 moned before its bar; no council nor conclave too 
 sacred to be asked for its credentials; no pope or 
 scripture too venerable to be put in the witness-box 
 and cross-examined as to its accuracy or authority. 
 In all the churches there is a spirit of inquiry abroad, 
 —nay, almost every morning breeze brings us some 
 new report of heresy, or the baying of the sleuth- 
 hounds, as they scent some new trail of heterodoxy ; 
 and the slogan of dogmatic controversy echoes from 
 shore to shore. 
 
 To the greater part of the church this epidemic of 
 180 
 
MODERN DOGMATISM 181 
 
 scepticism is a subject of grave alarm. Unbelief 
 seems to them, as to Mr. Moody, the worst of sins ; 
 and they consider the only proper thing to do with it, 
 is to follow the advice which the Bishop of London 
 gave some years ago, — and fling doubt away as you 
 would a loaded shell. They apparently look upon 
 Christianity as a huge powder magazine, which is 
 likely to explode if a spark of candid inquiry comes 
 near it. 
 
 Others on the contrary, fold their arms indifferently 
 and regard this new spirit of investigation as only an 
 evanescent breeze, which can produce no serious 
 result upon the citadel of faith. A third party hails it 
 with exultation as the first trumpet blast of the theo- 
 logical Gotterdamerung, — the downfall of all divine 
 powers and the destruction of the Christian superstition 
 to give place to the naked facts of scientific material- 
 ism. 
 
 What estimate then, shall we put on this tendency ? 
 
 In the first place we must recognize that it is a 
 serious condition ; that it is no momentary eddy, but 
 a permanent turn in the current of the human mind. 
 Humanity is looking religion square in the face, 
 without any bandage over the eyes, in a way it never 
 has confronted it before; and when humanity once 
 gets its eyes open to such questions, — it is in vain to 
 try and close them, before it has thoroughly examined 
 the subjects at issue. Certainly, Protestantism cannot 
 call a halt upon this march. For it was Protestantism 
 itself, proclaiming at the beginning of her struggle 
 with Rome, the right of private judgment, which 
 started the modern mind upon this high quest ; and 
 
182 THE NEW WORLD AND TEE NEW THOUGHT 
 
 Protestantism is therefore bound, in logic and honor, 
 to see it through to the end, whatever that end may 
 be. 
 
 And in the next place I believe that quest will end 
 in good. Why the champions of faith should regard 
 doubt as devil-born, rather than a providential instru- 
 ment in God's hand, is something I do not understand. 
 If doubt humbles the church and acts as a thorn in 
 its flesh, may not such chastening be providential, 
 quite as much as the things which puff it up. As 
 Luther well expressed it : — " We say to our Lord — 
 that if He will have His church, He must keep it. For 
 we cannot. And if we could, we should be the 
 proudest asses under heaven." As Attila was the 
 scourge of God to the Roman world, when God 
 needed to clear that empire out of the way, as He 
 built His new Christendom, — so may not doubt be the 
 scourge of God to this easy-going, sleepy, too credu- 
 lous piety of to-day which swallows all the husks of 
 faith so fast that it never gets a taste of the kernel ? 
 
 Yes, doubt is often the needed preparation for 
 obtaining truth. We must clear out the thorny 
 thicket of superstition before we can begin to raise 
 the sweet fruit of true religion. There are times when 
 careful investigation is rightly called for. When 
 doubting Thomas demanded to see the point of the 
 nails and to touch and handle the flesh of the risen 
 Christ, before he would believe in the resurrection of 
 his Lord, his demand for the most solid proof of the 
 great marvel was a wise and commendable one, — one 
 for which all subsequent generations of Christians are 
 deeply indebted to him. To believe without evidence, 
 
MODERN DOGMATISM 183 
 
 or to suppress doubt where it legitimately arises, is 
 both fostering superstition and exposing ourselves to 
 error and danger. What shall we say of the merchant 
 who refuses to entertain any question about the sea- 
 worthiness of his vessel, but sends her off across the 
 Atlantic, undocked and unexamined, piously trusting 
 her to the Lord ? Shall we commend him ? or not 
 rather charge him with culpable negligence ? And 
 what we say of such a merchant, seems to me just 
 what we should say of the Christian who refuses to 
 investigate the seaworthiness of that ship of faith 
 which his ancestors have left him. In astronomy, in 
 politics, in law, we demand what business the dead 
 hand of the past has on our lip, our brain, our purse ? 
 Why should the dead hand of Anselm, Augustine or 
 Calvin be exempt from giving its authority? Why 
 should their mediaeval glimpses of truth be given the 
 right to close our eyes to-day from seeing what we 
 ourselves can see and seal our lips from speaking forth 
 what we can hear of heavenly truth ? 
 
 In all other departments of knowledge, investigation 
 has brought us to a higher outlook, where we see 
 the true relations of things better than before. In all 
 other branches, God has given us new light, so that 
 we discern things more as they really are. Science 
 has risen, by making a ladder of its earlier errors and 
 by treading them under foot, has reached to higher 
 truths. The Bible itself is the growth of ages ; and 
 Christian doctrine and Christian creeds have been the 
 evolution of a still longer period. The dogmas of the 
 churches are most manifold and conflicting. Is it not 
 rather immodest and absurd for each church to claim 
 
184 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT 
 
 infallibility for its present creed and that wisdom died 
 when the book of Revelation closed the Bible, or the 
 Council of Trent or the Westminster Assembly 
 adjourned its sitting ? It seems to me that the 
 churches ought, instead, to be willing and anxious to 
 receive whatever new light God may grant them to- 
 day, and with the potent clarifying processes of 
 reason, separate the pure gold of religion from the 
 dross and alloys of olden superstition and misguided 
 judgment. 
 
 But to the modern devotees of dogma any sub- 
 jection of it to the cleansing of the reason seems 
 shocking. What, e. g., was the forefront of the offend- 
 ing of Robert Ingersoll, on account of which so large 
 a part of the religious world considered him an infidel, 
 sure to be eternally lost, than that he dared to test the 
 Bible and popular creeds by reason and freely vent 
 his matchless wit, irony and indignant eloquence on 
 those parts and interpretations that would not meet 
 the test. Or in the case of another heretic of our day 
 — a man of most reverent spirit and thorough scholar- 
 ship — never scoffing at sacred things as Colonel 
 Ingersoll did — yet on whose trail the heresy-hunters long 
 fiercely followed — for what was Dr. Charles A. Briggs 
 tried and suspended from the ministry of the Presby- 
 terian Church. And when for the sake of peace, he left 
 that denomination and sought in its stead the fold of 
 Episcopacy, for what was he still pursued with much 
 loud sacerdotal baying and barking ? Why else than 
 that he frankly admitted errors in the Bible and gave 
 to reason (by which he meant, as he explained, not 
 merely the understanding but also the conscience and 
 
MODERN DOGMATISM 185 
 
 religious instinct in man) a conjoint place with the 
 Bible and the Church in the work of salvation and the 
 attainment of divine truth ? 
 
 To the modern dogmatist, these positions seem 
 sceptical and pernicious. But to the philosopher, who 
 knows the laws of human nature and to every scholar 
 who knows the actual history of the Bible, these posi- 
 tions seem only self-evident. That in the scriptures 
 there are innumerable errors in science, mistakes in 
 history, prophecies that were never fulfilled, contradic- 
 tions and inconsistencies between different books and 
 chapters — these are facts of observation, which every 
 Biblical student knows full well. And another thing 
 every scholar knows equally well — that these original 
 autographs of the sacred writers, — for whose infalli- 
 bility the conservatives contend, — are things that no 
 one in these modern days has ever seen or can ever 
 know what they are. For the oldest of the New 
 Testament Greek manuscripts is 200 years later than 
 the age of the evangelists and the oldest Hebrew 
 manuscript of the Old Testament is 700 or 800 years 
 older than the date of composition of their latest part. 
 Granting, then, for the sake of argument, that the 
 Bible was given originally by infallible divine dicta- 
 tion, yet the men who wrote down the message were 
 fallible ; the men who copied it were fallible ; the men 
 who translated it (some of it being twice translated, — 
 first from Hebrew to Greek and then from Greek to 
 English) were fallible ; and the editors who from the 
 scores of manuscripts, by their personal comparison 
 and decisions between the conflicting readings, patched 
 together our present text, were most fallible. And 
 
186 THE NEW WORLD AND TEE NEW THOUGHT 
 
 when thus a Bible reader has got his text before him, 
 how can he understand it except by using his own 
 reason and judgment, — instruments again, most fallible. 
 
 How is it possible then, to get Bible-truth in- 
 dependently of the reason or in entire exemption 
 from error? The only way would be to say that not 
 only was the original manuscript of the Bible verbally 
 inspired ; but all its authors, copyists, editors and pious 
 readers were also infallibly inspired. As, in the old 
 Hindu account of how the world was supported, the 
 earth was said to be held up on pillars, and the pillars on 
 an elephant, and the elephant on a tortoise, and when the 
 defender of the faith was asked — " what then did the tor- 
 toise rest on?" he sought to save himself in his quandary 
 by roundly asserting that it was " tortoise all the way 
 down " ; so the defender of the infallibility of the 
 scripture has to take refuge in " inspiration all the 
 way down." But if this be so, — ought not the mod- 
 ern Biblical editors and revisers, translators and pro- 
 fessors of to-day also to be inspired, as much as those 
 of King James' day or the printers at the Bible House ? 
 and thus we reach, as the reductio ad absurdum of this 
 argument, the result that Tischendorf and Kuenen, 
 Gregory and Dr. Briggs, Dr. Preserved Smith and Dr. 
 McGiffert, the very Hebrew professors and higher critics 
 who are accused of heresy, are really themselves the 
 channels of infallible inspiration. For unless these 
 Biblical scholars of the present day are inspired and 
 providentially guided, a most essential link in the 
 chain of inspiration is missing. 
 
 The sincere investigators into the character of the 
 Bible and the nature of Christ are charged with ex- 
 
MODERN DOGMATISM 187 
 
 alting human reason above the word of God. But as 
 soon as the subject is investigated and a Professor 
 Swing or a Dr. McGiffert corroborates his interpreta- 
 tion by the scripture itself, or Dr. Briggs and Pro- 
 fessor Smith show their views to be sustained by 
 history, by philosophy, by a profounder study of 
 both nature and the Bible, — then, the ground is 
 shifted and it is maintained that it is not a question 
 whether the views are true; but whether they con- 
 form to the creed; that the catechism is not to be 
 judged by the Bible or the facts in the case ; but Bible 
 and facts are to be interpreted by the words of the 
 confession ; and if they do not agree with this, — then, 
 heresy and infidelity are made manifest. The ques- 
 tion is not whether the water of truth be found ; but 
 whether it is drunk out of an orthodox bottle, with the 
 Church's label glued firmly upon it. 
 
 But let us stop for a moment and ask whence came 
 these creeds and catechisms themselves ? What else 
 was their origin than out of the reason of man, out of 
 the brains of scholars, (quite as fallible, quite as par- 
 tisan and far less well-informed than our scholars to- 
 day) as these older scholars in former years, criticized 
 and interpreted the same scripture and nature and laws 
 of God. 
 
 Thus it is the dogmatists themselves who, in point 
 of fact, exalt the reason of man above the word of God, 
 forbidding us, as they do, to listen to the voice of God 
 in our own soul ; forbidding us to decipher the revela- 
 tions which the Divine Hand has written on the rocks 
 and trees and animal structures of his own Creation, 
 and even frowning upon that profounder study of the 
 
188 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT 
 
 scripture called the higher criticism ; and bid us accept, 
 in its stead, the man-made substitute of some council 
 or assembly of former generations, less well-informed 
 than ourselves. 
 
 There have undoubtedly been periods when the 
 doubt with which the church had to deal was mainly 
 frivolous or sensual; a passionate rebellion of the 
 carnal nature, attacking the essential truths of religion. 
 But such is not the nature of the doubt that is at 
 present occupying the public eye; such is not the 
 doubt most characteristic of our generation. It pro- 
 ceeds from serious motives. It is a doubt marked by 
 essential reverence and loyalty to truth. It is a desire 
 for more solid foundations ; for the attainment of the 
 naked realities of existence. It is a necessary incident 
 of the great intellectual awakening of our century. As 
 the modern intellect comes back on Sunday from its 
 week-day explorations of the history of Rome or the 
 myths of Greece or the religious ideas of Buddha or 
 Zoroaster, it must return to the contemplation of the 
 Christian dogmas under the influence of new ideas. 
 It will necessarily demand what better evidence the 
 law of Moses or the creed of Athanasius has than the law 
 of Manu or the text of the Zendavesta. The scepti- 
 cism of our age is not so much directed against the 
 great truths of religion as against the man-made 
 dogmas that have usurped the sacred seat. 
 
 If irreverent, scoffing scepticism were to be found 
 anywhere to-day, it would most likely be found mani- 
 fested among the throng of young men gathered at 
 our most progressive universities. But eminent men 
 connected with orthodox denominations have testified 
 
MODEBN DOGMATISM 189 
 
 that if these students are sceptical, it is because they 
 are too serious-minded and too true, to accept con- 
 victions ready-made ; to take traditional creeds instead 
 of personal beliefs ; or church formularies in place of 
 a life of devotion. 
 
 Now, to call such a state of mind irreligious or 
 infidel is most unjust. The irreligion lies rather with 
 those who make a fetish of the Bible and substitute a 
 few pet texts from it, that sustain their own private 
 opinions, in place of that divine light that lighteth 
 every man that cometh into the world. The real 
 infidels are they who reject the revelation which God 
 is making us continually in the widening light of 
 modern knowledge, and by a species of ecclesiastical 
 lynching, condemn before trial the sincere, painstaking 
 and careful scholars and reverent disciples of Christ, 
 who are so earnestly seeking after truth, — because the 
 results of their learned researches do not agree with 
 the prejudices of their anathematizers. It is with no 
 less cogency of argument than nobility of feeling that 
 Dr. Briggs replied to his assailants : " If it be heresy 
 to say that rationalists like Martineau have found God 
 in the reason, and Roman Catholics like Newman, 
 have found God in the church, — I rejoice in such 
 heresy and I do not hesitate to say that I have less 
 doubt of the salvation of Martineau and Newman than 
 I have of the modern Pharisees who would exclude 
 such noble men, — so pure, so grand, the ornaments 
 of Great Britain and the prophets of the age, — from 
 the kingdom of God." 
 
 Scepticism and religious questioning are, then, no 
 sins. They are not irreligious. But surely they do 
 
190 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT 
 
 vex the church. What shall the church do about 
 them. 
 
 In the first place we should not try to suppress 
 them. Nor should we tell religious inquirers to shut 
 their eyes and put the poppy pillow of faith beneath 
 their heads and go to sleep again and dream. They 
 have got their eyes wide open and they are determined 
 to know whether those sweet visions which they had 
 on faith's pillow are any more than illusions. Nor 
 will they be satisfied and cease to think, by having a 
 creed of 300 or 1,500 years antiquity recited to them. 
 The modern intellects that have taken Homer to 
 pieces, disinterred Agamemnon's tomb, unwound the 
 mummy wrappings of the Pharaohs, weighed the stars 
 and chained the lightnings are not to be awed by any 
 old-time sheepskin or any council of bishops. They 
 demand the facts in the case ; they desire fresh manna 
 to satisfy their heart hunger; they crave the solid 
 realities of personal experience. It is too late to-day 
 to say to the great tide of modern thought — " Thus 
 far shalt thou go and no further." The old ramparts 
 are broken through and we must give the flood its 
 course. The only spirit to meet it in, is that of frank- 
 ness and friendliness. Let us not foster in these 
 questioning minds the suspicion that there is any part 
 of religion that we are afraid to have examined. We 
 smile at the bigoted Buddhist who, when the European 
 attempted to prove by the microscope that the monk's 
 scruples against eating animal food were futile (inas- 
 much as, as in every glass of water which he drank, he 
 swallowed millions of little living creatures) smashed 
 the microscope for answer — just as if that altered at 
 
MODERN DOGMATISM 191 
 
 all the facts. But are not many of the heresy-hunters 
 in Christendom quite as foolish, in their efforts to sup- 
 press the testimony which nature and reason and 
 scholarship every day present afresh ? 
 
 Let us therefore give liberty, — yes — even sympathy 
 to these perplexed souls who are struggling with the 
 great problems of religion. 
 
 And secondly, let us be honest with them and not 
 claim more certainty for religious doctrines or more 
 precise and absolute knowledge about divine and 
 heavenly things than we have. One of the great 
 causes of modern doubt is unquestionably the excessive 
 claims that theology has made. It has not been con- 
 tent with preaching the simple truths necessary to a 
 good life ; that we have a Maker to whom we are re- 
 sponsible, a Divine Friend to help us, a Divine voice 
 within to teach us right and wrong ; that in the life 
 that is to follow this, each shall be judged according 
 to his deeds, and that in the examples of the Apostles 
 and prophets, especially in the spotless life of Jesus, 
 we have the noble patterns of the holy life set up 
 before us for our imitation ; a revelation of moral and 
 religious truth all sufficient for salvation. The church 
 has not been content with these, almost self-evident 
 truths ; but it must go on, to make most absolute 
 assertions about God's foreknowledge and foreordina- 
 tion and Triune personality ; and the eternal punish- 
 ment of the wicked, and the double nature and pre- 
 existence of Christ, things not only vague and incon- 
 sistent, but contradictory to our sense of justice and 
 right. It must go on to make manifold assertions 
 about the inerrancy and verbal inspiration of the 
 
192 THE NEW WORLD AND TEE NEW THOUGHT 
 
 Bible and the details of the future life and the fall of 
 human nature, which are utterly incredible to rational 
 minds. And the worst of it is, that all these things 
 are bound up in one great theological system, and 
 poor, anxious inquirers are told that they must either 
 take all, or none ; and so (soon coming face to face 
 with some palpable inconsistency or incredibility) they 
 not unnaturally give up the whole. Trace out the 
 religious history of the great sceptics, the Voltaires, 
 the Bradlaughs, the Ingersolls, the Tom Paines, and 
 you will see that the origin of their scepticism has 
 almost always been in a reaction from the excessive 
 assumptions of the ecclesiastics themselves. It is too 
 fine-spun and arrogant orthodoxy that is itself respon- 
 sible for half of the heterodoxy of which it complains. 
 Let the church, then, be candid and claim no more 
 than it ought to. Let it respect and encourage 
 honesty in every man in these sacred matters. The 
 church itself should say to the inquirer : you are un- 
 faithful to your God, if you go not where He, by the 
 candle of the Lord, — i. e., (the reason and conscience 
 He has placed within you) leads you. And when a 
 man in this reverent and sincere spirit, pursues the 
 path of doubt, how often does he find it circling 
 around again towards faith and conducting him to the 
 Mount of Zion. The true remedy for scepticism is 
 deeper investigation. As all sincere doubt is at bot- 
 tom a cry of the deeper faith, that only that which is 
 true and righteous is Divine, so all earnest doubt, 
 thought through to the end, pierces the dark cloud 
 and comes out in the light and joy of higher con- 
 victions. It lays in the dust our philosophic and 
 
MODERN DOGMATISM 193 
 
 materialistic idols and brings us to the one eternal 
 Power, the everlasting Spirit, manifested in all ; that 
 Spirit " whose name is truth, whose word is love." 
 
 The reader may perhaps remember the story of the 
 climber among the Alps, who having slipped off a 
 precipice, as he thought, frantically grasped, as he 
 fell, a projecting root and held on in an agony of an- 
 ticipated death, for hours, until, utterly exhausted, he 
 at last resigned himself to destruction, and let go of 
 his support, to fall gently on the grassy ledge beneath, 
 only a few inches below his feet. So, when we resign 
 ourselves to God's hand, our fall, be it little or be it 
 great, lands us gently in the Everlasting Arms that 
 are ever underneath. 
 
 Do not fear, then, to wrestle with doubt; or to 
 follow its leadings. Out of every sincere soul struggle, 
 your faith shall come forth, stronger and calmer. 
 And do not hesitate to proclaim your new convic- 
 tions, when they have become convictions. Such is 
 the encouragement and sympathy that the church 
 should give the candid questioner. 
 
 On the other hand, it may wisely caution him, not to 
 be precipitate, in publishing his doubt. Let him wait 
 until it has become more than a doubt; till it has become 
 a settled and well-considered conclusion, before he in- 
 flicts it upon his neighbor. The very justification for 
 doubting the accepted opinion, the sacredness of truth, 
 — commands caution and firm conviction that our new 
 view is something more than a passing caprice of the 
 mind, before we publish it. But when the doubter is 
 sure of this, — then, let him no longer silence his 
 highest thoughts. 
 
194 TEE NEW WORLD AND TEE NEW TEOUGET 
 
 Again, the church is justified in cautioning the 
 doubter not to be proud of his doubt as a doubt. 
 There is no more merit, it is well to remember, in dis- 
 believing than in believing; and if your opinions 
 have, as yet, only got to the negative state and you 
 have no new positive faith or philosophy to substitute 
 for the old, — you are doing your neighbor a poor 
 service in taking away from him any superstition, 
 however illogical, that sustains his heart and strength- 
 ens his virtue. 
 
 And further, let me say, — I should dislike very 
 much to have any sceptic contented with doubt. 
 Doubt makes a very good spade to turn up the 
 ground ; but a very poor kind of spiritual food for a 
 daily diet. It is a useful, often an indispensable 
 half-way house in the journey of life ; but a very cold 
 home in which to settle down in, as the end of that 
 journey. 
 
 In all our deepest hours, when our heart is truly 
 touched or our mind satisfied, — we believe. It is 
 each soul's positive faith, however unconventional or 
 perhaps unconscious that faith may be, that sustains 
 its hope, that incites its effort and that supports it 
 through the trials of life. Any doubt, even, that is 
 earnest and to be respected, is really an act of faith, — 
 faith in a higher law than that of human creeds, faith 
 in a more direct revelation, within ourselves, in our 
 own sense of justice and consistency, than is to be 
 found in any manuscript or print. 
 
 The very Atheist who in the name of truth, repu- 
 diates the word of God, is really manifesting (in his own 
 different way) the belief which he cannot escape, in 
 
MODERN DOGMATISM 195 
 
 the Divine Righteousness and its lawful claim on every 
 human soul. She was right who wrote : 
 
 " There is no unbelief. 
 And day by day and night by night, unconsciously, 
 The heart lives by that faith the lips deny ; — 
 God knows the why." 
 
 Finally — and most important of all — let us not 
 worry ourselves so much about the intellectual opin- 
 ions of men ; but look rather to their spiritual condi- 
 tion. The Church ought to think less of creed and 
 more of character. The essence of faith lies not in 
 correct conclusions upon doctrinal points ; but in 
 righteousness and love and trustful submission to 
 God's will. No scepticism concerning dogmas touches 
 the heart of religion. If that seems at all heretical, 
 let me cite good Orthodox authority. I might quote 
 Bishop Thirlwall of the Church of England, in his 
 judgment concerning Colenso's attack upon the ac- 
 curacy of the history of the Exodus in the Pentateuch, 
 — that " this story, — nay the whole history of the Jew- 
 ish people, has no more to do with our faith as Chris- 
 tians, than the extraction of the cube or the rule of 
 three." Or I might quote Canon Farrar's weighty 
 words in an article upon the true test of religion. 
 " The real question," he declares, " to ask about any 
 form of religious belief, is,: Does it kindle the fire of 
 love ? Does it make the life stronger, sweeter, purer, 
 nobler ? Does it run through the whole society like 
 a cleansing flame, burning up that which is mean and 
 base, selfish and impure ? If it stands that test it is 
 no heresy." That answers the question as aptly as it 
 
196 THE NEW WORLD AND TEE NEW THOUGHT 
 
 does manfully. And to the same effect is that notable 
 saying of Dr. Mcllvaine at the Presbyterian Presbytery 
 a few years ago, when, quoting the admission of one 
 evangelical minister that it was the Unitarian Marti- 
 neau who had saved his soul and kept his Christian 
 faith from shipwreck, he added significantly, " you 
 must first find God in your soul before you can find 
 Him elsewhere." Yes — the prime and essential thing 
 is to find God in the soul ; to worship Him in spirit ; 
 by a pure conscience ; by a loyal will ; by a heart full 
 of devotion to God's righteousness, and by love to all 
 our kind. This is to worship God in truth. And 
 what have Calvin's Five points or the composite or 
 non-composite origin of the Pentateuch, or the virgin 
 birth of Christ to do, with such worship ? If a man 
 finds evidence for them, which seems to him satis- 
 factory ; very well. But if he cannot honestly credit 
 them, — why should we shut the doors of the Church 
 against him or threaten him with excommunication ? 
 Were these the requirements that Jesus Christ laid on 
 his disciples ? Not at all. Look all through the Ser- 
 mon on the Mount, — study the Golden Rule, and the 
 Parable of the Good Samaritan, or the conditions he 
 lays down in his picture of the Last Judgment as the 
 conditions of approval by the Heavenly Judge, and 
 see if you find anything there about the infallibility of 
 scripture or the Apostolic succession or the Deity of 
 Christ or any other of the dogmas on account of 
 which the ecclesiastical disciplinarians would drive 
 out the men whom they are pursuing as heretics. 
 How grimly we may fancy Satan (if there be any 
 Satan) smiling to himself as he sees great Christian 
 
MODERN DOGMATISM 197 
 
 denominations wrought up to a white heat over such 
 dogmas and definitions, while the practical atheism 
 and pauperism and immorality of our great metropolis 
 is passed over with indifference. Sunday after Sun- 
 day, the Christian pulpit complains that the great 
 masses of the people keep away from their communion 
 tables and do not even darken their doors. Does not 
 the fault really lie in the folly — I may almost say the 
 sin of demanding of men that they believe so many 
 things that neither reason nor enlightened moral sense 
 can accept, and making of these dogmas, five barred 
 gates through which alone there is any admission to 
 heaven ? If we wish the Church to regain its hold on 
 thinking men it must simplify and curtail its creeds ; 
 it must recognize that the love of God is not measured 
 by the narrowness of human prejudice and that God's 
 arms are open to receive every honest searcher after 
 truth. Let him come with all his doubts ; provided 
 he come with a pure heart and bring forth the fruits 
 of righteousness. Let us no longer pretend that it is 
 necessary for a Christian life to know all the mysteries 
 of God. Let it no longer be thought a mark of wick- 
 edness for a man honestly to hold a conviction differ- 
 ent from the conventional standard ; but let us respect 
 one another's independent search and judgment of 
 truth. True faith consists not in any special theory 
 of God or His ways, but in the uplifting of our spirit 
 to touch His spirit and the diffusing of whatever grace 
 or gift we have received from Him, in generous good 
 will amongst our fellows. If the Christian Church is 
 to go forward successfully again in the power and 
 spirit of that Master whom it constantly invokes as 
 
198 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT 
 
 " the way ; the truth and the life " ; it must make that 
 way and life its guiding truth. It must aim constantly 
 at greater simplicity in its teaching, and a broader, 
 more fraternal cooperation in Christian work. Its 
 motto should be the motto of the early Church — " In 
 essentials, unity; in non-essentials, liberty; in all 
 things, — charity." Then shall a new and grander 
 career open before its upward footsteps. 
 
CHAPTER IX. 
 
 UNION OF THE CHURCHES IN ONE SPIRITUAL HOUSEHOLD. 
 
 Fairest of the dreams of early Christianity was the 
 dream of a single household of God, where all the 
 children of the Heavenly Father, of whatever race or 
 tongue, should be brought together into one great 
 family, in the bond of mutual love and a common 
 worship. It was the prayer of Jesus, in that last 
 tender hour with His disciples before His arrest. It 
 was the vision that inspired Paul to such heroic 
 labors ; it was the aspiring flame that rose up from the 
 hearts of the Apostles on the day of Pentecost, to call 
 down on them the Holy Spirit, in whose solvent of 
 loving sympathy Parthians and Medes, Elamites, 
 Jews and Arabians, all understood their neighbor as 
 if each spake in his own tongue. From century to 
 century, indeed, the realization of this dream has, 
 from causes too numerous to mention, constantly 
 eluded the world. Still the dream has kept its hold 
 on the human heart, and many brave attempts have 
 been made to give it earthly incarnation. The new 
 spirit of brotherhood which Jesus communicated has 
 worked as a blessed leaven ; and loud as the clash of 
 Babel voices has been at times, yet the still small 
 voice of human fellowship has kept whispering its 
 counsels of love and peace. Those who note the ebb 
 and flow of religious currents, have observed all 
 
 199 
 
200 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT 
 
 through the last quarter century a great rising in this 
 tide ; and, in the great religious assemblies connected 
 with the World's Fair at Chicago, the attendance and 
 speakers at which came from the most distant quarters 
 of the globe, that tide of common spiritual sympathy 
 rose to a height never before chronicled in history. 
 
 Unprecedented in size and material, and artistic 
 magnificence, as the Chicago Exposition was, it was 
 still more unprecedented and remarkable in its as- 
 tonishing Parliament of Religions. To get together 
 on the same platform Trinitarian and Unitarian, 
 Monotheists and Polytheists, Roman cardinals and 
 Free Religious Lecturers, Greek archbishops and 
 Protestant presbyters, Buddhist monks and Confucian 
 moralists, expounders of the Bible, the Koran and 
 the Avesta, was indeed a marvel. But when from the 
 lips of these representatives of diverse sects, whose 
 ancestors had persecuted and cursed and battled with 
 one another so bitterly ; when alike from the yellow 
 robed Buddhists or the scarlet robed Catholic, from 
 the Greek ecclesiastic in his black gown, the Hindu in 
 his red, or the Shinto in his white vestments, came 
 the same sentiments of righteousness, aspiration and 
 good-will ; and in their advocacies of their own faith, 
 earnest as they were, scarcely a word fell that could 
 give offense to those of rival faith — it seemed, indeed, 
 a new day of Pentecost, a descent of the holy dove of 
 the Spirit, beneath a rainbow of blended spiritual rays, 
 as comforting as that which foretold to Noah and his 
 sons the end of storm and wrath upon the renovated 
 earth. Every one who read the inspiring accounts of 
 these meetings, where the representatives of these 
 
UNION OF THE CHURCHES 201 
 
 varied faiths exchanged such pleasant words of amity 
 and mutual respect, must have been impelled to ask : 
 why may not this Pentecostal fellowship be main- 
 tained? Why may not Jew and Gentile, Roman and 
 Protestant, Christian and Parsee and Brahman, be 
 united, not merely for a few days, in some public 
 meeting, but constantly, in daily life, in the unity of 
 the Spirit and the bonds of peace ; and thus 
 
 "The whole round earth he bound 
 With golden chains about the throne of love " ? 
 
 There is certainly in the religious world a great 
 yearning, both conscious and unconscious towards 
 this end. There is a great Providential movement of 
 the waters, recalling the churches of the world from 
 their divisions to a new fellowship. The reasons for 
 breaking through the old sectarian fences and for bring- 
 ing together in brotherly hand-claspings those who are 
 working for common ends, are patent to every one 
 who will open his eyes. What needless divisions and 
 superfluous multiplicity of sects are there. Our last 
 United States census enumerates 143 different religious 
 denominations, each with its own special organization, 
 ritual and special belief. There are half a dozen 
 diverse varieties of Lutherans; twelve of Presby- 
 terians ; twelve of Mennonites ; thirteen of Baptists ; 
 and seventeen varied ecclesiastical stripes of Metho- 
 dists. The differences between these are of a minor 
 order ; — the race or European nation from which they 
 came, or the color of the skin of the members, or 
 some minute difference as to the use of baptismal 
 water or musical instruments, or prevenient or par- 
 
202 THE NEW WOBLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT 
 
 ticular grace. They are as near one another as 
 brothers and sisters of one family ; and yet the smaller 
 the theologic or ritual differences between them, 
 the stronger oftentimes are their antipathies and 
 aversions. Through this sectarian rivalry, little 
 villages of 1,200 or 1,500 people, only able to sustain 
 one pastor, have three, four or five meeting-houses of 
 different faiths, closed half the time. The ministers 
 receive but a quarter of the salary they should; 
 charities languish; social life is embittered; and on 
 all sides the Christian life of our smaller communities 
 exhibits a deplorable inefficiency, waste, ill-will, and 
 useless friction. John Adams once said : " This 
 would be a pretty good world if there were no religion 
 in it." Doubtless, it was these evils into which a 
 narrow and petty sectarianism so often runs, which 
 had called forth this impatient outburst. But this 
 sectarian rivalry and bigotry is really as alien to the 
 spirit of true religion as it is to that of human brother- 
 hood. The growth and multiplication of sects was, in 
 its origin, a movement in the direction of greater 
 liberty and stricter loyalty to Christ and God. 
 
 But to-day, it is becoming the greatest hindrance 
 and prejudice to the life of the soul and the health of 
 Christendom. Where men become filled with a living 
 sense of their kinship to the Eternal Spirit and to 
 each other, they come with joy to see that this kin- 
 ship is not confined to their one little church en- 
 closure. They realize the deeper agreements which 
 underlie their surface differences. They have com- 
 mon aims and are bound together by common 
 interests. They serve, in their different ways, 
 
UNION OF THE CHURCHES 203 
 
 one and the same Maker and righteous Law- 
 giver. They would all lift humanity out of the 
 ooze of vice and evil, and enthrone the spirit 
 above the flesh. In the materialism and animal- 
 ism of the world they have a common foe; 
 and in faith in the soul within and the hopes of its 
 larger and fuller life beyond the portals of death they 
 have their common encouragement and support. 
 
 Every church, therefore, that has fought earnestly 
 in this common battle has made, and is making, some 
 valuable contribution to the spiritual victory sought. 
 There is good in all the churches ; some special, 
 varied need of the human heart which each one 
 meets. The candid scholar is obliged to recognize 
 how much humanity owes to each of the great 
 branches of the Christian vine ; to the Roman for its 
 comprehensiveness, its steadfastness, its wonderful 
 government of the masses ; to Methodism for its zeal 
 and cordial warmth ; to the Episcopal for its dignity 
 and enlistment in Christian service of the aesthetic 
 sensibilities ; to the liberal Christian for his light and 
 culture ; to the Calvinist for his consistent logic and 
 stern inflexibility ; to the Congregationalist for his de- 
 fense of spiritual independency; to our latest born 
 denomination, the Salvation Army, for its ardent de- 
 votion to the rescue and salvation of those whom the 
 respectable churches usually ignore. And outside the 
 Christian pale, the great Oriental faiths have also each 
 some spiritual lesson or precious ethical impulse to 
 contribute that makes each a helpful and holy acolyte 
 in the great cathedral of the world's worship. Bud- 
 dhism has its spirit of self-renunciation and universal 
 
204 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT 
 
 compassion, that would spare the life and pain even of 
 the humblest insect. Mohammedanism has its sublime 
 submission to the divine and its scrupulous sobriety; 
 Confucianism its filial fidelity ; Parseeism its punctil- 
 ious purity, truthfulness and rectitude. 
 
 And not only has each some special excellence, but 
 in their basal chords there is a noteworthy harmony. 
 Let me quote on this point the significant declaration 
 of an eminent Roman Catholic dignitary, made at 
 Chicago. I refer to the words of Archbishop Ireland, 
 on one of the opening days of the Parliament of 
 Religions : " There is a great common ground in all 
 religions, consisting of the vital and primordial truths 
 about the infinite spiritual reality." All Christian 
 sects are united in these common Christian truths, 
 which as one sacred choir they chant in unison. And 
 even when we pass outside the Christian pale, we find 
 these fundamental truths — God, duty, immortality, the 
 authority of truth, the sacredness of love — reechoed 
 by Jew and Gentile, Parsee, Arab, Brahman and 
 Chinese in concordant strains, which as they ascend 
 to the Divine ear, doubtless blend in a single sym- 
 phony of praise and prayer. 
 
 The more carefully we study the varied religions of 
 the globe the more sure are we that none is wholly 
 false. Each has its valuable and needed truth. But 
 none, on the other hand, has the whole circle of pure 
 truth. Each but gives us a segment of it. The 
 keener our discernment of truth becomes, the clearer 
 we see how fragmentary is that single member, finger, 
 foot or eye, that any one denomination possesses. 
 The partial truth which each sect illustrates makes us 
 
UNION OF THE CHURCHES 205 
 
 long for that fuller beauty and perfection which can 
 only be secured by bringing every limb and member, 
 obscure and uncomely as it may be, into the one 
 complete body that makes the God-designed whole. 
 
 Church unity is undoubtedly therefore a desirable 
 thing. And I believe it is possible. It is more than 
 that. As noble Dr. Barrows, of the Presbyterian 
 Church, the originator and organizer of the Parlia- 
 ment of Religions, has said : " It is a necessity. It 
 is being forced upon us by the scandal and weakness 
 of schism. It is our business to make the conditions 
 of life more tolerable here below ; to bridge over the 
 chasms which separate the rich and the poor, to push 
 back the evil forces of crime, intemperance and vice, 
 that have thriven through our disunion." 
 
 The practical question next presents itself: How 
 may this be accomplished ? How may we reunite the 
 dissevered branches of Christendom ? How may we 
 bring into being that universal church, where every 
 child of God, groping for the truth or longing for 
 human sympathy, may find a spiritual home ? 
 
 For a long time now, this has been an object of 
 earnest thought, both by thoughtful individuals and by 
 many great denominations ; and no small number of 
 solutions have been proposed. The English Church 
 in the celebrated Lambeth proposals, offered as olive 
 branches of peace the Nicene creed ; the authority of 
 the scriptures ; the historic episcopate, and the sacra- 
 ments of baptism and the Lord's supper. The Roman 
 Church has a much simpler proposition ; all it asks is 
 submission to the Pope. Protestant orthodoxy has 
 suggested the Trinity, atonement and other doctrines, 
 
206 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT 
 
 agreed upon by the Evangelical Alliance. The Ethical 
 Culture societies believe a purely ethical basis would 
 unite all in a single organization, in freedom, fellow- 
 ship and character. 
 
 These various movements and proposals have each 
 failed practically to heal the divisions, or gain any 
 acceptance approaching universality. The universal 
 Church must have a broader basis than uniformity of 
 sacraments or ritual. These are material and out- 
 ward. The essence of religion is spiritual and inward. 
 It lies in that communion which needs neither plate 
 nor cup; in that sacrament of the self-surrendered 
 heart which unites the soul with its God, as firmly 
 without either wine or water as with them. The uni- 
 versal Church, again, cannot be circumscribed by limits 
 of race or nationality. Color is only skin deep. In 
 the sight of God, as Rabbi Hirsch says : " It is the 
 black heart, not the black skin, which excludes ; it is 
 the crooked act, not the curved nose, that ostracizes. 
 . . . The day of exclusive national religions is 
 past, the God of the universe should speak to all 
 mankind." 
 
 Neither can religious unity be based upon an iden- 
 tical creed. These minute and detailed confessions of 
 faith and catalogues of dogma are thorn-hedges, set 
 up for the wounding and cramping of every large 
 mind and progressive thought. A man may repeat 
 all the creeds without skipping a syllable, and say " I 
 believe " after every Article, and yet have never taken 
 the first step in the Christian life ; and another may 
 have followed in the very footsteps of Jesus ; surren- 
 dering his very heart's blood in his complete devotion 
 
UNION OF THE CHURCHES 207 
 
 to God and man ; and yet, through some intellectual 
 scrupulosity, not be able to find one of all the churches' 
 creeds that he can assent to. Our belief is not a mat- 
 ter we can change at will ; and it becomes increasingly 
 evident that uniformity of dogma should not be de- 
 manded as the sine qua non of religious fellowship. 
 As a broad-minded Methodist (Rev. Frank M. Bristol) 
 has recently said : " Christianity is becoming more 
 and more a life and a hope, and less and less a dogma 
 and a theory. To me the test is as to a man's sin- 
 cerity. When I know a man is sincere, that is enough. 
 I want his hand and. his fellowship in the common 
 work of bettering the world." 
 
 Nor, once more, have I any confidence in seeing 
 religious unity secured by ecclesiastical organization ; 
 by the swallowing up of weak sects by stronger rivals ; 
 by the voluntary surrender of modern churches to 
 that which can show the greatest flavor of antiquity ; 
 by the supersedure of the many old denominations by 
 churchly fusions ; by some brand new organization of 
 a more flexible and comprehensive nature ; or by some 
 nebulous pet phrase, that soon becomes as rigid a 
 shibboleth as any of old. The older a denomination 
 is, the more fossilized and unfit for present uses it is 
 apt to be. And the new movement that, by its de- 
 lightfully vague and elastic character, promises to 
 engulf and erase all the old churches, usually ends by 
 adding but another name to the long catalogue of 
 petty and obscure sects. As has been aptly said, 
 " A novel does not escape from being a novel by 
 dubbing itself ' The no-name series.' " Great church 
 administrations, like great political bodies, are un- 
 
208 THE NEW WOBLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT 
 
 wieldy and undesirable. To fuse into one ecclesias- 
 tical body, denominations with diverse tendencies, such 
 as the Catholics and the Quakers, the Greek Christians 
 and the Congregationalists, would be a useless experi- 
 ment. Unite them to-day, to-morrow they would fall 
 apart. Even could one church absorb all the rest, it 
 would not be desirable. In the one spiritual body as 
 in the material, a variety of members, administrations 
 and gifts is needed. Each should be developed after 
 its own special aptitude, so that thus the varying needs 
 of our many-sided human nature might be met. 
 
 What then is needed ? It is that in all should be 
 shown one and the selfsame Divine Spirit, working all 
 in harmony. In the unity of the spirit and the bond 
 of peace, let each fulfil its God-appointed mission. If 
 any one branch of Christendom is ever to absorb all 
 others ; if Christendom is ever to absorb Brahmanism, 
 or Brahmanism to absorb Christianity, — that is some- 
 thing we are not yet prepared for. 
 
 If it could be brought about to-day, it would not 
 enrich and advance the fulness of religion, but would 
 impoverish it. Protestantism has still too much to 
 learn from Catholicism and Catholicism has too much 
 to learn from Protestantism, and Christendom too much 
 to learn from the Oriental faiths, and they too much to 
 learn from us, to make it desirable yet awhile. As the 
 broad-minded Hindu, Kananda, said at the Parliament of 
 Religions : the motto on the bannef of the religions of 
 the future will be : " Help, and not fight ; assimilation, 
 not destruction ; harmony, not dissension." Or to quote 
 Christian authority, as the catholic-minded apostle to 
 the Gentiles wrote in the first century ; «« If the whole 
 
UNION OF THE CHURCHES 209 
 
 body were an eye, where were the hearing? if the 
 whole were hearing, where were the smelling ? " So 
 we may ask : if all Christians were conservatives, where 
 were progress and new growth ? If all were pioneers, 
 where were the rear-guard and the base of sup- 
 plies ? 
 
 In the midst of our nation's bitterest and bloodiest 
 sectional strife, Abraham Lincoln, in his Presidential 
 message, uttered these memorable words: "With 
 malice towards none, with charity for all, with firm- 
 ness in the right, let us strive to bind up the nation's 
 wound, to do all which may achieve a just and last- 
 ing peace among ourselves and with all nations." 
 
 It is in this spirit that the various branches of Chris- 
 tendom, the diverse members of the household of God, 
 Catholic or Protestant, Christian or pagan, should work 
 and seek each other's hands. 
 
 What, then, are the elements and demands of such 
 a unity of spirit? In the first place, all sects and 
 churches should give to each other mutual respect — 
 not mere toleration. That word tolerance is itself in- 
 tolerant ; a sign of patronizing conceit and narrowness. 
 We should give more ; we should give esteem, rever- 
 ence and fraternal consideration to every other servant 
 and worshiper of our common Father and Lawgiver. 
 When we know that a brother has earnestly and 
 honestly searched for the truth, let that be a sufficient 
 ground for our regard. Let the churches recognize 
 the value and validity of each other's ministrations. 
 By the same comity, by which a marriage in one state, 
 in accordance with its laws, is recognized also as a 
 marriage in neighbor states, — so should the baptism 
 
210 TEE NEW WORLD AND TEE NEW TEOUGET 
 
 or admission to Christian membership or ordination 
 to the ministry given by one branch of the Christian 
 Church, be recognized as good and spiritually efficient 
 by all other branches. 
 
 2. Let the attention of the churches be directed to 
 their higher ends, not their lower mechanical and 
 administrative details. Let them fix their eyes and 
 efforts on the great things in which they agree, not on 
 the little things in which they differ. As Dean 
 Stanley has so well shown, there is a common Chris- 
 tianity, in which all branches of Christendom are one ; 
 — that love of God and man, that sacredness of duty 
 and hope of heaven which is what makes the gospel 
 dear to the human heart. The points over which the 
 denominations divide, — episcopacy, immaculate con- 
 ception of the Virgin, infallibility of the Pope, baptism 
 by immersion or sprinkling, inerrancy of scripture, 
 predestination of the elect — are points about which 
 Christ cared too little ever to drop a word. One of 
 the familiar stories is of a lady who, when asked if she 
 was a Christian, said she was not sure that she was a 
 Christian, but she was certain she was a Baptist. 
 How many are there similarly who care little for re- 
 ligion, but are ardent Presbyterians, pronounced 
 Methodists, bigoted Unitarians. If we are to gain any 
 religious unity, we must reverse this. Christians must 
 remember that higher and more binding than the 
 allegiance due to presbyter, conference, synod or 
 Pope, is their allegiance to Christ and to God. Above 
 all denominational leaders — Luther, Calvin, Wesley or 
 Channing — they should put their Lord and Master, 
 Jesus ; and above all religions, Christian and Pagan, 
 
UNION OF THE CHURCHES 211 
 
 they should enthrone the loyalty to truth and righteous- 
 ness without which each loses its saving salt. 
 
 3. There are, alas, plenty of things that tend to 
 separate and divide the forces of religion ; but when 
 you scrutinize these, — be they bigotry and prejudice, 
 or envy, ambition, rivalry, the virus of party spirit, — 
 they none of them properly belong within the Church. 
 They are werewolves of irreligion that, in the guise of 
 defenders of the faith once delivered to the saints, have 
 cunningly crept in where they have no right to be, 
 and in the name of the Lord are busy pulling down 
 the work that Christ's heart was set upon. All the 
 great and eternal forces of the religious realm, on the 
 contrary, are things that should unite, not divide 
 humanity. As we promote any of these, — knowledge, 
 righteousness, brotherly love, — we are bringing in 
 to its rightful recognition the religious unity of the 
 world. 
 
 See, for example, how the spread of knowledge, 
 both spiritual and scientific, tends to unity. How 
 many of the old barriers and arbitrary interpretations 
 and blighting worship of the letter has modern Bib- 
 lical criticism swept out of the way ; and how many 
 dark cobwebs of antiquated theology, that filled pious 
 hearts with black despair, has science cleared off from 
 the windows of faith ! When Christian missionaries 
 go to the heathen with theologies almost as baseless 
 and superstitious as the heathen's own, they knock in 
 vain for entrance. The shrewd pagans say, as a clever 
 Japanese did to an orthodox missionary : " We have 
 enough devils and hells of our own to believe in al- 
 ready, without adding any foreign ones." But if our 
 
212 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT 
 
 missionaries, instead, would carry with them the light 
 of modern knowledge and diffuse our demonstrable 
 science of the universe and its laws, this would, in a 
 generation, melt away this vast ice-sheet of supersti- 
 tions and false theories which form the foundation of 
 their native idolatries and polytheisms. If we ever 
 hope to supersede Paganism by Christianity or estab- 
 lish any religious fraternity and affiliation of the two, 
 this is the path by which we must secure it. To 
 evolve and ripen the truly Catholic or Universal 
 Church, we must get illumination and sunshine from 
 all quarters. They who think that from their single, 
 personal or denominational standpoint they can see 
 the whole circumference and fix the exact position 
 and outline of absolute truth, show that they have 
 still much to learn. There is a lesson on this point 
 that the scientific world might give the Church. 
 When a great phenomenon, such as the transit of 
 Venus, takes place, no single astronomer nor any one 
 astronomical observatory is conceited enough to think 
 it can do the whole work satisfactorily, single-handed. 
 They club their resources. They portion out the con- 
 tinent, and each group of astronomers proceeds to a 
 different point of observation, before agreed upon, in 
 friendly cooperation. Then, after the observation is 
 taken, the personal equation — that is, the allowance 
 for error, in noting the time, due to the individual 
 peculiarities of each observer — is carefully allowed 
 for. Then, the various observations are compared 
 and one rectified by the others, and correction also 
 made for the latitude and longitude and state of the 
 atmosphere at each respective point of observation, 
 
UNION OF THE CHURCHES , 213 
 
 and finally the whole added and averaged. It is only 
 by such cooperation and mutual rectification of one 
 another's tendencies to error that astronomers secure 
 results that they put any confidence in. And so, be- 
 fore the religious world can demand confidence in its 
 spiritual perceptions, it must take equal care to elimi- 
 nate from them the twists and refractions of personal 
 idiosyncrasies and sectarian prejudices. It must be 
 hospitable minded and ready to accept new truth and 
 fuller light from whatever quarter it may be gained. 
 " The spirit (the Christian Union has well said) that in- 
 sists that every man shall see what every other man 
 teaches, — no more, no less, no different, — is the spirit 
 of schism. It is unchristian, and anti-Christian, be- 
 cause it is the spirit of conceit. It belittles truth ; it 
 divides and subdivides the Christian Church. It never 
 has promoted Christian union, and it never can." 
 
 The method that leads there is the opposite one 
 that encourages every soul to exercise that right of 
 private judgment which Luther vindicated, and is glad 
 to see Mount Zion pictured from just as many diverse 
 angles as possible, knowing that thus alone can a 
 complete representation of the infinite truth be ob- 
 tained. 
 
 And in the next place, as a fourth step in this 
 staircase, we should place the stone of righteousness, 
 — the practical service of our God and our fellow-men. 
 While a man's chief thought is for his own soul's sal- 
 vation, he clutches at any solitary plank that may 
 float him on the wave; but when he gets to that 
 higher view of religion that identifies the holy life 
 with the helpful life, at once he reaches out a brotherly 
 
314 „ THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT 
 
 hand to his neighbor. Jesus said that the second 
 commandment is like unto, or born of, the first ; and 
 surely no one can be trusted to love the God he has 
 not seen, if he love not the brother he has seen. 
 Where there is that enthusiasm for humanity which 
 befits the follower of Him who wished to be called the 
 Son of Man, there the interest in dogmatic hair-split- 
 ting drops to the proper subordination. When we 
 realize what the fight with evil means to-day ; what 
 Christians have got to do when they undertake vigor- 
 ously to grapple with the saloon question, the Sunday 
 question, the problem of poverty and abuse of child- 
 hood ; when we get in earnest in the work of eleva- 
 ting our race, of suppressing vice, of inspiring men 
 with a genuine love of purity and with living faith in 
 their kinship to the Eternal Spirit and to each other, 
 — then we see that we have no time for denomina- 
 tional quarrels ; we see that these common needs of 
 suffering humanity call for the united energies of all 
 the Lord's soldiers if we ever expect to establish the 
 kingdom of God on earth ; and instead of the present 
 emulation to make converts from one another or get a 
 longer list of church members, the only rivalry will 
 be a rivalry in bettering the world and an emulation 
 of each other's virtues. 
 
 For many generations the mediaeval alchemists 
 sought for a universal solvent. In the physical realm, 
 the search is a vain one. But in the spiritual realm, 
 we need not go far for it. Love is that universal 
 solvent which unloosens all bonds ; a tincture that 
 carries with it healing for every wound. With this 
 password, one should be able to pass through every 
 
UNION OF THE CHURCHES 215 
 
 interdenominational camp and army and find himself 
 everywhere a citizen of the Divine kingdom. With- 
 out love, belief, be it never so close to the creed, is 
 but sounding brass and a tinkling cymbal. And so 
 religious unity, however huge be the single organiza- 
 tion formed, however tight be the bonds of its univer- 
 sal Church, would be (when love is absent) but an 
 ecclesiastical tyranny; an iron band, fatal to every 
 growing shoot of the living vine. But where there is 
 a positive Christian love, a spirit of sympathy and 
 helpfulness to every neighbor, — what can bar out such 
 a spirit from the holy communion? Suppose that 
 your religious brethren give you only their indiffer- 
 ence or hate. You can still give them the guerdon of 
 your charity, the fragrant olive branch of your un- 
 stinted good will. There is an excellent New Eng- 
 land story of an old Puritan, who, when he was ex- 
 communicated by the Church, declined to be cut off 
 from their communion. For twenty years the good 
 old man came, whenever the Lord's Supper was ob- 
 served, bringing with him his own bit of bread and 
 draught of wine, and in his own pew communed with 
 the Church in spite of the Deacon's boycott. When 
 a man carries the Christ-spirit with him, the fellowship 
 of all the saints becomes his. Love is a communion- 
 cup, which it needs no priest to fill, and which always 
 gives the good man membership in the Church invisi- 
 ble, whatever the Church visible may say. 
 
 Such, then, are the needed seeds of religious unity : 
 — regard for essentials — not inessentials ; mutual 
 respect ; devotion to knowledge and righteousness ; 
 and above all, a broad charity and friendly sympathy. 
 
216 THE NEW WORLD AND TEE NEW THOUGHT 
 
 Without these, no ecclesiastical fusions, no hierarchical 
 organization, however extensive or compact, can give 
 a religious unity that is worth anything. The pro- 
 motion of this broad Christian spirit is the first and 
 chief step. But where these spiritual roots are planted 
 and made to grow, there they will naturally bloom 
 and bear fruit in some sort of practical fraternity ; and 
 the encouragement of such outward fellowship again 
 will foster and quicken the inward fellowship. It 
 ought to lead at once to a large measure of cooper- 
 ation. The smaller and kindred sects, whose differ- 
 ences are slight, ought to be willing to consolidate. 
 The seventeen kinds of Methodists and the thirteen 
 kinds of Baptists and the twelve kinds of Presby- 
 terians, holding beliefs and usages substantially the 
 same, might unite, one would think, without any 
 serious sacrifice, and with a great saving of needless 
 rivalry and waste. The same is true among the 
 liberal churches. The difference between Unitarians 
 and Universalists is one altogether too slight to justify 
 their continued separation and rivalship. Where the 
 kindred sects can thus honorably consolidate, let them 
 do so. They ought to do so. And where this is not 
 possible, let them try such looser methods of alliance 
 as may bring them into harmony, without sacrificing 
 what they consider essential principles. Following 
 the political example of the union of our several 
 states in the one United States, they might (without 
 abandoning their independent liberties and local or 
 special administrations) unite in federal unions, of 
 most valuable kinds. Such movements as the Evan- 
 gelic Alliance, the Pan-Presbyterian Assemblies, the 
 
UNION OF THE CHURCHES 217 
 
 Church Congresses of later years are all commendable 
 efforts in this direction. Without gaining legislative 
 authority, such Congresses carry weightier moral 
 authority and cultivate the unity of spirit and practical 
 cooperation which is so valuable to-day. Still more ex- 
 cellent, because more filled with the spirit of a genuine 
 catholicity, is the Laymen's League of our Western 
 frontier, and the Brotherhood of Christian Unity, 
 started recently in New York by Professor Seward, 
 and our Father's Church, instituted by the Rev. Page 
 Hopps, of London. In these latter, all dogmatic 
 tenets are dropped ; love to God and man under the 
 leadership of Jesus is the only creed, and orthodox 
 and heterodox alike are invited to membership. No 
 one is asked to give up his special denominational 
 connection, but for the sake of practical Christian 
 effort, they associate themselves on a perfectly simple 
 basis without regard to evangelical creeds. What 
 may be the future of these new and broader fellow- 
 ships that would stretch their lines across all denomi- 
 nations, remains to be seen. But as far as they can 
 bring Christians into helpful cooperation for the bet- 
 terment of human life, they must do good. Hence- 
 forth I hope to see all branches of Christendom peri- 
 odically meeting in some general assembly, for mutual 
 fraternity, counsel and inspiration; and the grand 
 Parliament of Religions may, I trust, prove to be but 
 the first of a series of similar conferences, a federation 
 of the religious world, both Christian and Pagan, to 
 advance the great interests they have in common. 
 But without waiting for any such imposing assem- 
 blages or new organizations, there is a work for each 
 
218 TEE NEW WORLD AND TEE NEW TEOUQET 
 
 Christian close at hand, quite as important. In all 
 our cities and towns there is a need and opportunity, 
 without more ado, for friendly co-working among all 
 sects. There are moral reforms, social problems, calls 
 of human misery, educational and philanthropic enter- 
 prises that demand the collected efforts of all Christian 
 hearts, without distinction of sect or faith. In our 
 smaller villages, certainly, steps ought to be taken 
 either for the direct union of the many poverty- 
 stricken chapels that struggle with each other for ex- 
 istence; or else for their dissolution and reconstruction 
 on some honorable basis which will provide for freedom 
 and fellowship in worship. 
 
 Whatever dogmatism or sectarian ambition divides 
 and impoverishes the forces that are battling to main- 
 tain righteousness and uplift humanity is a form of 
 anti-Christ. Whatever can bring these forces into 
 closer union and a firmer front; whatever can make the 
 people learn to think of the church as one body in 
 many members, — be it pulpit exchanges between the 
 clergy of different denominations ; city Ministerial As- 
 sociations, or State Conferences of religion, embracing 
 all denominations; union meetings for prayer or 
 thanksgiving; common communion-services, open to 
 members of all denominations of Christians, without 
 invidious distinctions, — any signal of a broader good- 
 will between the churches, erasing sectarian divisions, 
 however trivial it may be, is helping forward the prayer 
 of the Master that " they all may be one." 
 
 Of one blood, says Paul, are we all made. With 
 God, the common Father, there is no respect of per- 
 sons. One and the same heaven is the haven of peace 
 
UNION OF THE CEUBCHES V 219 
 
 and love we all seek. Back of every varied soul and 
 symbol stands the one Holy Spirit, by whose in- 
 spiration the holy men that founded each diverse 
 church spake as they were moved in their respective 
 age and land. No path of prayer but has lifted men 
 nearer God ; no creed has man framed but was as the 
 broken lispings of an infant, beside the unutterable 
 perfection of the Divine.