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Christianity and Modern Thought

by Henry W. Bellows · English · Gutenberg #41280 · 506,937 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Christianity and Modern Thought

Author: Henry W. Bellows
        James Freeman Clarke
        Athanase Coquerel
        Orville Dewey
        Charles Carroll Everett
        Frederic Henry Hedge
        James Martineau
        Andrew P. Peabody
        George Vance Smith
        Oliver Stearns


        
Release date: November 3, 2012 [eBook #41280]
                Most recently updated: October 23, 2024

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CHRISTIANITY AND MODERN THOUGHT ***

  CHRISTIANITY

  AND

  MODERN THOUGHT.




  BOSTON:
  AMERICAN UNITARIAN ASSOCIATION.
  1873.




  Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1872, by

  THE AMERICAN UNITARIAN ASSOCIATION,

  In the Office of the Librarian of Congress at Washington.




  CAMBRIDGE:
  PRESS OF JOHN WILSON AND SON.




INTRODUCTION.


The following discourses were delivered in Boston, at Hollis-Street
Church, on successive Sunday evenings, and repeated at King's Chapel on
Monday afternoons, during the winter of 1871-72, in response to an
invitation of the Executive Committee of the American Unitarian
Association, whose purpose was thus declared in the letter of
invitation:--

     "It is not proposed that the course shall be a merely popular one,
     to awaken the indifferent and interest them in familiar religious
     truths; but rather to meet the need of thoughtful people perplexed
     amid materialistic and sceptical tendencies of the time. Nor is it
     desired simply to retrace in controversial method the beaten paths
     of sectarian or theological debate; but rather, in the interest of
     a free and enlightened Christianity, to present freshly the
     positive affirmations of faith."

The several discourses were prepared independently, without conference
or concerted plan; and for their statements and opinions the
responsibility rests solely with their respective authors.




CONTENTS.


                                                     PAGE

  Introduction                                          v

  Break between Modern Thought and Ancient Faith
    and Worship                                         3

          By Henry W. Bellows.


  A True Theology the Basis of Human Progress          35

          By James Freeman Clarke.


  The Rise and Decline of the Romish Church            61

          By Athanase Coquerel, Fils.


  Selfhood and Sacrifice                              101

          By Orville Dewey.


  The Relation of Jesus to the Present Age            129

          By Charles Carroll Everett.


  The Mythical Element in the New Testament           157

          By Frederic Henry Hedge.


  The Place of Mind in Nature and Intuition in Man    179

          By James Martineau.


  The Relations of Ethics and Theology                209

          By Andrew P. Peabody.


  Christianity: What it is not, and what it is        231

          By G. Vance Smith.


  The Aim and Hope of Jesus                           273

          By Oliver Stearns.




THE BREAK BETWEEN MODERN THOUGHT

AND

ANCIENT FAITH AND WORSHIP.

By HENRY W. BELLOWS.


There is evidently a growing disrelish, in an important portion of the
people of our time, for professional religion, technical piety, and
theological faith. These were always unpopular with youth, and people in
the flush of life and spirits; but this was because they called
attention to grave and serious things; and youth, as a rule, does not
like even the shadow of truth and duty to fall too early or too steadily
upon it. Restraint, care, thoughtfulness, it resists as long as it can;
and none who recall their own eager love of pleasure and gayety, in the
spring-time of life, can find much difficulty in understanding or
excusing it. Of course, too, careless, self-indulgent, sensual, and
frivolous people have always disliked the gravity, and the faith and
customs, of people professing religion, and exhibiting special
seriousness. They were a reproach and a painful reminder to them, and
must be partially stripped of their reproving sanctity, by ridicule,
charges of hypocrisy, and hints of contempt. But, all the while this was
going on, the youth and frivolity of previous generations expected the
time to come when they must surrender their carelessness, and be
converted; and even the worldly and scoffing shook in their secret
hearts at the very doctrines and the very piety they caricatured. The
old relations of master and pupil describe almost exactly the feeling
which youth and levity held toward instituted faith and piety, a
generation or two since. The schoolboy, indeed, still thinks himself at
liberty to call his master nick-names, to play tricks upon him, and to
treat with great levity, among his fellow-pupils, all the teaching and
all the rules of the school. But he nevertheless sincerely respects his
teacher; believes in him and in his teachings, and expects to derive an
indispensable benefit from them, in preparing himself for his coming
career. So it was with the religion and piety of our fathers. The people
profoundly respected the creed, the elders in piety, and the eminent
saints in profession and practice, although the young had their jibes
and jests, their resistance to church-going, their laugh at sanctimony;
and the majority of people then, as now, were not fond of the restraints
of piety, or the exercises of devotion.

But the alienation to which I wish to draw your attention now is
something quite different from the natural opposition of the young to
serious thoughts; or the gay, to grave matters; or those absorbed in the
present, to what belongs to the future; or of those charmed with the use
of their lower or more superficial faculties and feelings, to the
suggestions and demands of their deeper and nobler nature. That the body
should not readily and without a struggle submit to the mind; that
thoughtlessness should not easily be turned into thoughtfulness; that
youth should not readily consent to wear the moral costume of maturity,
or the feelings and habits of riper years; that the active, fresh,
curious creature, who has just got this world with its gay colors in
his eye, should not be much attracted by spiritual visions, and should
find his earthly loves and companions more fascinating than the
communion of saints or the sacred intercourse of prayer,--all this, to
say the least of it, is very explicable, and belongs to all generations,
and hardly discourages the experienced mind, more than the faults and
follies of the nursery the wise mother who has successfully carried many
older children through them all.

It is quite another kind of antipathy and disrelish which marks our
time. It is not confined to youth, nor traceable to levity and
thoughtlessness. The Church and its creed on one side, the world and its
practical faith on the other, seem now no longer to stand in the
relation of revered teachers and dull or reluctant pupils; of
seriousness, avoided by levity; of authoritative truth, questioned by
bold error; of established and instituted faith, provoking the
criticisms of impatience, caprice, ignorance, or folly. An antagonism
has arisen between them as of oil and water,--a separation which is
neither due to period of life, nor stage of intelligence, nor even to
worth of character; which does not separate youth from maturity, the
thoughtless from the thinking, the bad from the good, but divides the
creeds, observances, and professions of Christians, from a large body of
people who insist that after a certain fashion they are Christians too,
and yet will have little or nothing to do with professions of faith, or
pious pretensions, or religious ways of feeling, talking, or acting.

Clearly, it would not do any longer to say that the worth and virtue and
influence of society, in this country, could be estimated by the number
of communicants in the churches, by the degree of credit still given to
any of the long-believed theological dogmas, deemed in the last
generation the sheet-anchors of the State. We all know hundreds of
people, who could sign no creed, and give no theological account of
their faith, whom we do not count as necessarily less worthy in the
sight of God or man than many who have no difficulty in saying the whole
Athanasian Creed. Nay, there are some millions of people in this
country, not the least intelligent or useful citizens in all cases, who
never enter a church-door. A generation or two back, you would safely
have pronounced all these absentees to be worldly, careless people,
infidels, atheists, scoffers. Do you expect to find them so now? Some,
of course, but not the majority. Indeed, you would find a great many of
these people supporting churches, to which their families go, and not
themselves; or to which others go, for whom they are glad to provide the
opportunity. They would tell you, if they could discriminate their own
thoughts, something like this: "Public worship and church organizations,
and creeds and catechisms, and sermons and ceremonies, and public
prayers and praises, are doubtless very good things, and very useful up
to a certain stage of intelligence, and for a certain kind of character.
But we have discovered that the real truth and the real virtue of what
people have been misnaming religion is a much larger, freer, and more
interesting thing than churches, creeds, ministers, and saints seem to
think it. Here is this present life, full of occupations and earnest
struggles and great instructions. Here is this planet, not a thousandth
part known, and yet intensely provoking to intelligent curiosity; and
science is now every day taking a fresh and an ever bolder look into it;
and we want our Sundays to follow these things up. That is our idea of
worship. Then, again, the greatest philosophers are now writing out
their freest, finest thoughts about our nature; and, if we go to church,
we are likely to find some fanatical and narrow-minded minister warning
us against reading or heeding what these great men say; and it is a
thousand times fresher and grander and more credible than what he says
himself! Why, the very newspapers, the earnest and well-edited ones,
contain more instruction, more warning, more to interest the thoughtful
mind, than the best sermons; and why should a thinking man, who needs to
keep up with the times, and means to have his own thoughts free, go
where duty or custom makes it common to frown upon inquiry, doubt, and
speculation,--to shut out knowledge and testimony, and stamp a man with
a special type of thinking or professing?"

For there are, you observe,--in justice to these thoughts,--these two
instructors to choose between in our generation. Here is the Church,
with its ecclesiastical usages and its pious exhortations; its Sunday
school for the children; its devotional meeting in the week, and its
Sunday teaching and worship,--all acknowledged as good for those that
like them, and are willing to accept what people thought or believed was
true a hundred or five hundred years ago; and here is the modern press,
with the wonderful profusion of earnest and able books, cheap and
attractive, and treating boldly all subjects of immediate and of
permanent interest; and here are the reviews, quarterly and monthly,
that now compress into themselves and popularize all that these books
contain, and furnish critical notices of them; and then, again, here are
the newspapers, wonderful in variety and ability, that hint at, suggest,
and bring home all the new and fresh thoughts of the time. And the
marvel is, that most of these books, reviews, papers, are in the
interest of, and seem inspired by, something larger, freer, fresher,
truer, than what the churches and the creeds are urging. Thus church
religion and general culture do not play any longer into each other's
hands. If you believe what the men of science, the philosophers, the
poets and critics, believe, you cannot believe, except in a very general
way, in what the creeds and churches commonly profess. Accordingly, the
professors in college, the physicians, the teachers, the scientists, the
reformers, the politicians, the newspaper men, the reviewers, the
authors, are seldom professing Christians, or even church-goers; and if
they do go to church from motives of interest or example, they are free
enough to confess in private that they do not much believe what they
hear.

Assuming that this is a tolerably correct account--although doubtless
exaggerated for pictorial effect--of the existing state of things among
the reading and thinking class of this country, what is the real
significance of it? Is it as new as it seems? Is it as threatening to
the cause of religious faith as it seems? Reduced to its most general
terms, is it any thing more or other than this? The faith and worship of
this generation, and the experience and culture of a portion of this
generation, have temporarily fallen out; and, as in all similar
quarrels, there is, for the time, helpless misunderstanding, mutual
jealousy and misrepresentation. The faith and piety of the time
pronounce the culture, the science, the progressive philanthropy, the
politics, the higher education and advanced literature, to be godless
and Christless; and the culture of the age retaliates, perhaps, with
still greater sincerity, in pronouncing the faith and worship of the
time to be superstitious, antiquated, sentimental, and specially fitted
only to people willing to be led by priests and hireling ministers.

Now, if this were a quarrel between experience and inexperience, between
good and bad, between truth and falsehood, it would be easy to take
sides. But faith and knowledge have both equal rights in humanity.
People who are sincerely in love with knowledge and science and
philosophy are not thereby made enemies of God or man; certainly are not
to be discouraged and abused for their devotion to practical and
scientific truth, their search for facts, their interest in the works of
the Creator, even if they are not possessed of what the church properly
calls faith and piety. And, on the other hand, however shocked
established faith and piety may naturally be by the handling which
religion and its creeds and worship receive from modern inquisitors,
ought the deeper believers to be seriously alarmed for the safety of its
root or its healing leaves, on account of the shaking which the tree of
life is now receiving? However slow science and culture may often show
themselves to be in recognizing the fact, can any reasonable and
impartial mind, acquainted with history or human nature, believe that
faith itself is an inconstant or perishable factor in our nature? prayer
a childish impulse, which clear-seeing manhood must put away? the
conscience, not the representative of a holiness enthroned over the
moral universe, but an artificial organ, which social convenience has
developed, much like the overgrown liver in the Strasburg goose? In
short, who that considers the part that faith and worship have played in
the history of the race, can doubt their essential and permanent place
in human fortunes? The question of _some_ religion, of _some_ worship,
for the people, does not seem debatable. The only alternative among
nations has been a religion in which mystery, awe, and fear prevailed,
clothing themselves in dread and bloody sacrifices, or else a religion
in which more knowledge, more reason, more love, embodied themselves in
a simpler and gentler ritual. The nations have had only a choice--not
always a wholly voluntary one--between terrific superstitions and more
or less reasonable religions. Christianity has prevailed in civilized
nations, since Constantine, by accommodating its theological dogmas and
external ritual to the needs of successive eras; beginning with coarser
and more heathenish symbols, and running itself clearer and more clear,
as the mind and taste and experience of the race have developed
"sweetness and light." But does this make Christianity only a human
growth, and so predict a coming decay, which many seem to think has
already begun? On the contrary, the decisive fact about Christianity is,
that, while its intellectual history is changing, its early records are
in form fixed and permanent, and that its real progress has been
uniformly a return towards its original simplicity. Other faiths
develop. It is we who develop under Christianity, and are slowly changed
unto the original likeness of Christ. Christ's statements, Christ's
character, Christ's words, do not become antiquated. We are not called
upon to explain away, as superstitions of the time, any of the _certain_
words he said, or thoughts he had, or commandments he left. True, there
are critical embarrassments about the record, and room enough to
question how it was made up; and we cannot always trust the reporters of
that age, or our own. But when we get, as we certainly do get in
hundreds of cases, at Christ's own words; or when we really see--as by a
hundred vistas, through all the _débris_ and rubbish of the age, we may
see--the true person and bearing and spirit of Jesus, we behold, we
recognize, we know, a Being who, transferred to this age, and placed in
the centre of the choicest circle of saints and sages whom culture and
science and wisdom could collect, would bear just the same exalted
relation of superiority to them that he did to the fishermen and
publicans and kings and high-priests and noble women and learned rabbis
of his own day. We should not hesitate, any more than they did, to call
him Master and Lord; to say, "To whom else shall we go? Thou hast the
words of eternal life."

Those, then, who fear that true culture, that science or philosophy
boldly pushed, that learning and logic impartially applied,--whether in
studying God's method in creation, or his method in revelation,--can
injure permanently faith and piety, or endanger Christianity, as a
whole, must either think the religious wants of man very shallow or very
artificial, or the providence of God very easily baffled, and the
harmony of his word and works very badly matched. If there be in nature
or in man, in earth or in our dust, in chemistry, astronomy,
anthropology; in geology, the language of dead eras; or in language, the
geology of buried races, any thing that disproves the existence and
providence of a living God, the holiness and goodness and
trustworthiness of his character; the moral and religious nature of man,
his accountableness, his immortality; the divine beauty and sinless
superiority of Jesus Christ, and the essential truth of his
religion,--by all means let us know it! Why should we allow ourselves
to be beguiled by fables and false hopes and make-believes? But the
faith of religious experience, the confidence of those who know and love
and have become spiritually intimate with the gospel of Jesus Christ, is
usually such that they would sooner mistrust their senses than their
souls. They have found a moral and spiritual guidance, a food and
medicine in their Christian faith, which enables them calmly to say to
criticism, to science, to culture, "We do not hold our faith, or
practise our worship, by your leave, or at your mercy." Faith leans
first on the spiritual nature of man, and not on demonstrable science.
It would not be faith, if it were only a sharper sight. It is insight,
not sight. It springs from its own root, not primarily from the
intellect. As we love our wives and children with something besides the
judgment, or the logical faculty, so we love God with the heart, and not
with the understanding. We stand erect, with open eyes, when we are
seeking truth; we fall on our knees with closed eyelids, when we are
seeking God! Religion is not the rule of three, but the golden rule; it
is not the major and minor premises and copula of logic, but the sacred
instinct of the soul, which Jesus Christ has satisfied, and guided, and
owned, and directed, in an inestimable way.

But when faith and worship have taken this true and independent tone,
let them not join the foolish bigots, who think that because faith rests
on other foundations than science, therefore it owes nothing to science
and culture, and can wholly separate its fortunes and future from them.
True, _faith_ and _culture_, religion and science, in spite of their
general and permanent agreement and connection, when they cannot get on
honestly together, had better for the time separate; for they embarrass
each other, and it is in their insulation that they sometimes ripen and
prepare in separate crucible elements that are ultimately to blend in a
finer compound than either ever knew before. Thus faith, driving science
and culture out of her cell, and closing the doors on fact and
observation, wrapt in devotion, has sometimes caught visions of God
through her purely spiritual atmosphere, which sages in their
laboratories have never seen. The great religious inspirations have not
come from scholars, but from seers; from men of soul, not men of sense.
"How knoweth this man letters, having never learned?" said his
contemporaries of Christ. Well, he knew no letters, but he had what
letters never teach,--divine wisdom! He knew God, that end of knowledge;
he knew man, that last of philosophy. Faith therefore often recruits
itself in a temporary divorce from science, just as Romanism profitably
drives her priests into periodical retreats for prayer and exclusive
meditations on God and Christ. It is beautiful to study even those
humble and uninstructed Christian sects, whose simple and implicit faith
is protected, yes, and exalted, by their providential indifference to
science or unacquaintance with speculative difficulties. It is not their
ignorance that kindles their devotion, but it is faith's vitality, which
in certain exceptional natures and times beams and glows most purely,
fed only on its own sacred substance. When you have reached the inner
kernel of a true Moravian, or even a true Catholic heart, and found a
solid core of faith, unsupported by any other evidence than that which
the Scripture described in the words, "Faith is the substance of things
hoped for, the evidence of things not seen," you have gone far towards
fathoming the holiest secret in our nature, the well of living water.
And, on the other hand, how much better, both for faith and science,
that science should, at a time like this, go without religious ends into
physical or metaphysical pursuits, investigate, inquire, test, question,
in absolute independence of theological or spiritual results. It is only
when thus free and bold and uncommitted that her testimony is worth any
thing. Think of Newton, meditating and exploring the solar system, in
the simple love of truth, without let or hindrance from ecclesiastical
intermeddlers, and compare him with Galileo, lifting his telescope under
the malediction of the priesthood of Rome.

No: let science be as free as light, as brave as sunbeams, as honest as
photography! Encourage her to chronicle her conclusions with fearless
and unreproached fidelity. She will doubtless make many things which
have been long associated with religion look foolish and incredible. But
it is only so religion can shed some husks, and get rid of some
embarrassments. It is, in short, only just such assaults and criticisms
from science and experience that ever induces religion to strain out the
flies from her honey; to dissociate what is accidental in faith from
what is essential and permanent. And, when science and culture have
gathered in the full harvest of this wonderful season of discovery and
speculation, we may expect to find faith stripped of many garments, now
worshipped, which ignorance and fear put upon her for protection and
defence; but really strengthened in substance, by the free movements
allowed her lungs, and the dropping of the useless load upon her back.
Then, too, science and philosophy will again resume their places at the
feet of the master-principle in our nature, until again driven away, by
new disagreements, to return again by the discovery of a finer harmony.

Self-culture will never supersede worship, more than golden lamps
burning fragrant oils will ever supersede the sun; more than digging and
hoeing and planting will supersede sunshine and rain from heaven.
Self-culture? Yes: by all means, and in any amount, but not as an end.
When people look to ornamental gardening for the crops that are to feed
the famine-smitten world, and not to the pastures and prairies, as they
lie in the light of the common sun, they will look to self-culture for
the characters, the hearts, the souls that glorify God and lift and
bless the world. "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart,
and thy neighbor as thyself." That is the irrepealable law of growth.
"Seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all other
things shall be added unto you." Worship, faith, duty, devotion to God,
Christ, humanity, to justice, freedom, truth,--these, and not
self-culture, have lifted the race and the world. Learn, acquire,
cultivate, improve, develop yourselves, by art, music, reading,
languages, study, science, experience, but do it all in seeking to know
and love and serve God and man. Seek to know Christ, and you will learn
more, indirectly, than though you sought all knowledge without this
thirst. Seek to know God, and you shall find all science and culture
healthful, sacred, harmonious, satisfying, and devout.

The break between modern thought and ancient creeds and worship, thus
considered, though serious, and worth the utmost pains to heal, by all
arts that do not conceal or salve over, without curing the wound, is not
permanently discouraging to earnest and well-considered Christian
faith. Nor are all the signs of the times one way. For--after all that
has been said about the restless and dissatisfied condition of the
critical and conscious thought of the time, and the scepticism of the
learned, or the speculative class, or of the new thinkers born of the
physical progress of the age, and the decay of worship in the literary
and artistic, the editorial and poetical circles--it remains to be said,
that, leaving this important and valuable body of people aside,--not
badly employed, and not without personal warrant for their doubts and
withdrawal from positive institutions,--there remains a mighty majority,
on whom the Christian religion and historical faith and the external
church have a vigorous and unyielding hold; whose practical instincts
and grand common-sense and hereditary experience anchor them safely in
positive faith, while the scepticism raves without and blows itself
clear, and passes over. Christianity first addressed itself to common
people, not to avoid criticism, but to secure the attention of the moral
affections and the spiritual powers, instead of the meaner
understanding. It has lived on the heart and conscience and needs and
yearnings of the masses, from and to whom practical wisdom and fixed
institutions and simple faith always come and always return. Common
sense is not the sense that is common, but the sense that is _in_
common. And popular faith is not the faith of private ignorance massed,
but of that wisdom which alone enables ignorant people to find a basis
for feelings and actions that all feel to be beyond and above their
private ignorance or self-will. The common people were the first to hear
Christ gladly: they will be the last to hear any who deny him.

It is easy to exaggerate the decline of modern faith, and to misread the
tendencies of the time on which we have been dwelling. Thus, paradox
though it seem, it were just as true to say that more people are
deliberately interested in Christian faith and worship to-day than at
any previous era in the history of our religion, as to asseverate that
more people doubt and regret it than ever before. Both statements are
true; and they are reconciled only by the fact that it is only in this
century that the claims of faith and worship have been popularly
debated, or that the people were expected or allowed to have any
independent opinion about them. The general soil of our humanity is for
the first time surveyed and sown; and it is found that, with more
_wheat_ than ever, there are also more _tares_. With more intelligent
and convinced worshippers, there are more wilful or logical neglecters
of worship; with more genuine believers, more sceptics; with more
religious activity, more worldliness. Without an army in the field,
there will be no deserters; without a common currency of genuine coin,
no counterfeits; without a formidable body of affirmers, few deniers.

The positive institutions of Christianity decline in one form, to spring
into new life in other and better forms. Doubtless, fourfold more money
is expended to-day upon temples of worship than in what have been
falsely called the ages of faith,--rather the ages of acquiescence.
Religion does not decline as a costly interest of humanity with the
progress of doubt, freedom, intelligence, science, and economic
development. It is a permanent and eternal want of man, and is always
present, either as a vast, overshadowing superstition, or as a more or
less intelligent faith. Nowhere has it a stronger hold on society than
in free America, which false prophets, with their faces to the past,
muttered was about to become its grave. This busy, delving, utilitarian
country, without a past, denied the influence of ruins and the memory of
mythic founders, a land without mystery or poetry,--how could so tender
and venerable a sentiment as reverence live in its garish day? how so
sweet a nymph as Piety kneel in its muddy marts of trade, or chant her
prayers in its monotonous wilderness, ringing with the woodman's axe or
the screeching saw? But now delegates of all the great religious bodies
in the Old World are visiting America, for religious instruction and
inspiration. Nowhere, it is confessed, is there to be found a people so
generally interested in religion, ready to make so great sacrifices for
it, or so deeply convinced that its principles and inspirations are at
the root of all national prosperity. Nowhere do churches and chapels
spring up with such rapidity, and in such numbers; nowhere is the
ministry as well supported, or its ministers as influential members of
society; nowhere do plain men of business and intelligence, I do not say
of science and philosophy, participate so freely in religious worship.
And since all political compulsion has been taken off from the support
of religion, and it has been made purely voluntary, its interests have
received even more care. There is little doubt that the decline of
religious establishments, the decay of priestly authority, the complete
withdrawal of governmental patronage, the discrediting of the principle
of irrational fear, the dispersion of false dogmas, the clearing up of
superstition, the growth of toleration and charity, instead of weakening
true faith or lessening public worship, will greatly increase and
strengthen both. For it is not man's ignorance, weakness, and fears,
that lead him most certainly to Christian worship and faith. There is a
worship and a faith of blindness and dread; but they have no tendency to
develop a moral and spiritual sense of the character of God, or the
character becoming man, or to survive the spread of general intelligence
and mental courage. If thought, if courage of mind, if inquiry and
investigation, if experience and learning and comprehensive grasp, if
light and sound reason, and acquaintance with human nature, tended to
abolish a living God from the heart and faith of man, to disprove the
essential truths of Christianity, or to make life and the human soul
less sacred, aspiring, and religious, the world would be on its rapid
way to atheism. But I maintain that science itself, philosophy and free
inquiry, however divorced from religious institutions and dogmas, were
never so humble, reverential, and Christian as since they partly
emancipated themselves from theological or ecclesiastical censure and
suspicion. For ages science knelt to religion as she went to her
crucible or laboratory, like the sexton passing the altar in a Catholic
cathedral, and with as little thought or feeling as he, simply to avert
censure, while she pursued inquiries she knew would banish the
superstition she pretended to honor. Faith and knowledge were at
opposite poles; religious truth and scientific truth, finally and
permanently amenable to different standards. How dishonoring to religion
was this distrust of light and knowledge! how faithless in God, this
faith in him which could not bear investigation! how compromising to
Christianity, the sort of trust which refuses as blasphemous the
application of all the tests and proofs which are required in the
certification of every other important conviction! Religious faith rests
on the spiritual nature; but its basis is not less real for being
undemonstrable, like the axioms of mathematics. That is not real faith
which dares not investigate the grounds of its own being. It is
irreverent to God, to affirm that he does not allow us to try his ways;
to demand proofs of his existence and righteous government; to ask for
the credentials of his alleged messengers; to doubt until we are
rationally convinced. If the artificial feeling that faith is opposed to
reason; religious truth to universal truth; that belief in unseen things
is less rational or less capable of verification than the radical
beliefs of the senses,--if these prejudices were sound, or not the
reverse of true, the world would be on its inevitable way to universal
infidelity and godless materialism. But is that the tendency of things?
Is it that religion is growing _less_ mystic? or only science more so?
Have not real and affecting mysteries been very much transferred for the
time from theology to philosophy, from the priest to the professor? I
doubt very much whether men of science are not more truly on their knees
than men of superstition, in our days. Never did such candor, such
confessions of baffled insight, such a sense of inscrutable wisdom and
power, such a feeling of awe and dependence, seem to prevail in science
as now, when so many theologians are raising the eyebrow, and seeking to
alarm the world at what they call the atheism of the most truth-loving,
earnest, and noble men. I would sooner have the scepticism--reverent and
honest and fearless--of these solemn and awed inquisitors in the inner
shrines of nature, than the faith of self-bandaged priests, who are
thinking to light the way to heaven with candles on the mid-day altar,
or to keep faith in God alive only by processions in vestments of purple
and gold.

Nor has Christianity any thing permanently to fear from the disposition
which now so largely prevails, to separate it from its accidents, its
accretions, and its misrepresentations. The days have not long gone by
when men were counted as entitled to little respect, if they did not
wear side-swords and bag-wigs. You recollect how our Benjamin Franklin
surprised, shocked, and then delighted all Europe, by appearing at the
court of France in plain citizen's clothes? Religion, too, has had her
court-dress, and her sounding court-titles, and official robes, and
circuitous ceremonies. The world has felt horror-stricken whenever any
brave and more believing spirit has ventured to ask the meaning of one
of these theological tags and titles. But how much less wholesome is
living water, if drunk out of a leaf, or the palm of one's hand, than if
presented on a salver, in a curiously jewelled flagon, by a priest in
livery? How much has theological ingenuity of statement and systematic
divinity, which it takes the study of a life to understand, added to the
power of the simplicity of Christ as he unfolds himself in the Sermon on
the Mount? Yet, if any one has dared to be as simple as Christ himself
was in his own faith, he has been said to deny the Lord that bought him.
It has been called infidelity, to think Christ meant only just what he
said, and was understood to say, in his simple parables. You must
believe something not less incredible and abstruse than the church
Trinity; something not less contrary to natural justice and common sense
than the church vicarious atonement; something not less cruel and
vindictive than the eternal misery of all who through ignorance, birth,
or accident, or even perversity and pride, do not hear of, or do not
accept, the blood of Christ as their only hope of God's mercy and
forgiveness, or you are no Christian. Now I hold these dogmas themselves
to be unchristian in origin and influence, although held by many
excellent Christian men. I believe that they are the main obstacles with
many honest, brave, and enlightened men in our day, to their interest in
public worship; and that millions repudiate the Church, and
Christianity, which is a different thing, simply because they suppose
her to be responsible for these barnacles upon the sacred ship. It would
be just as reasonable to hold the Hudson River responsible for the filth
the sewers of the city empty into it; or to hold the sun answerable for
the changes in its beams, caused by the colored glass in church-windows.

Christianity, the Christianity of Christ, is simple, rational,
intelligible, independent of, yet in perfect harmony,--if it be often an
unknown harmony,--with philosophy, ethics, science; true, because from
God, the God of nature as well as grace; true, because the transcript of
self-evident and self-proving principles; true, because guaranteed by
our nature; true, because of universal application, unimpeached by time
or experience. It affirms the being and authority of a righteous, holy,
and all-loving God, whom man can serve and love and worship because he
is made in his image; can know, by studying himself; and to whom man is
directly related by reason, conscience, and affections. It affirms
divine science and worship to consist in obedience to God's laws,
written on man's heart, and for ever urged by God's Spirit. It affirms
the present and persistent penalty, the inevitable consequences, of all
moral and spiritual wrong-doing and disobedience; the present and future
blessedness of well-doing and holiness. It sets forth Jesus Christ as
the Son of God and Son of Man,--appellations that, deeply considered,
really mean the same thing,--the direct messenger, representative, and
plenipotentiary of God,--his perfect moral image. It insists upon men's
putting themselves to school to Christ, honoring, loving, and following
him; forming themselves into classes,--another name for churches,--and
by prayer, meditation, and study of his life, informing their minds and
hearts, and shaping their wills in his likeness, which is the ideal of
humanity. Its clear object is to dignify and ennoble man, by presenting
God as his father; to show him what his nature is capable of, by
exhibiting Christ in the loveliness, sanctity, and power of his awful
yet winning beauty; to make him ashamed of his own sins, and afraid of
sin, by arousing moral sensibility in his heart; safely to fence in his
path by beautiful and sacred customs,--the tender, simple rites of
baptism and communion; the duty of daily prayer, the use of the
Scriptures, and respect for the Lord's Day.

Here is a Christianity without dogmatic entanglement; plain, direct,
earnest, simple, defensible, intelligible to a child, yet deep enough to
exhaust a life's study. For it is the simplicities of religion that are
the permanent and glorious mysteries that never tire. They draw our
childhood's wonder, our manly reverence, and age's unquenched curiosity
and awe. Do we ever tire of the stars, or the horizon, or the blue sky,
or the dawn, or the sunset, or running water, or natural gems? Do we
ever tire of the thought of a holy, all-wise, all-good Spirit of
spirits, our God and our Father, or of hearing of the reverence and
trust, the obedience and the love, due to him? Do we ever tire of Jesus
Christ, considered as the sinless image, within human limitations, of
God's love and truth and mercy and purity? Do we ever tire of hearing
the wondrous story of his obedient, disinterested, and exalted life and
sacrifice? or of the call to follow his graces and copy his perfections
into our own hearts and lives? Are we ever weary of hearing of the
blessed hope of immortality, with the comfortable expectation of
throwing off the burden of our flesh, and winging our way in spiritual
freedom nearer to God and the light of our Master's face? Who can
exhaust, who can add to, the real force and attraction and fulness of
those truths and promises? Truly received, they grow with every day's
contemplation and use; they fill the soul with an increasing awe and
joy; they prove only less common-place as they are more nearly
approached, more copious as they are more drawn upon, and more sacred as
they are more familiar.

It is the common, simple, universal truths that are the great,
inexhaustible, powerful, and never-wearying truths. But doubtless it
requires courage, personal conviction, and self-watchfulness, to
maintain personal piety or religious institutions under free and
enlightened conditions, when they are just beginning. When sacramental
mysteries are exploded, when the official sanctity of the ministry is
disowned, when the technical and dogmatic conditions of acceptance with
God are abandoned, when every man's right of private judgment is
confessed, when common sense is invited into the inner court of faith,
when every man is confessed to be a king and a priest in that temple of
God which he finds in his own body and soul, when real, genuine goodness
is owned as the equivalent of religion, then it is evident that the
support of religious institutions, of public worship, of the church and
the ordinances, must appeal to something besides the ignorance, the
fears, the superstitions, the traditions of the Christian world. They
must fall back on the practical convictions men entertain of their
intrinsic importance. They must commend themselves to the sober, plain,
and rational judgment of men of courage, reflection, and observation.
They fall into the same category with a government based not on the
divine right of kings, or the usages of past generations, the artificial
distinctions of ranks and classes, owing fealty each to that which is
socially above itself, but resting on the consent of the governed, and
deriving its authority and its support from the sense of its usefulness
and necessity. We have not yet achieved fully, in this country, the
passage of the people over from the Old World status of _subjects_ to
the New World status of _citizens_. We are in the midst of the glorious
struggle for a State, a national government, which rests securely on the
love and service of hearts that have created it, and maintain and defend
it on purely rational and intelligible grounds. It is so new, so
advanced, so sublime an undertaking, that we often falter and faint, as
if man were not good enough, nor reasonable enough, to be entitled to
such a government. We often doubt if we can bear the dilution which the
public virtue and good sense in our native community suffers from the
flood of ignorance and political superstition coming with emigrants from
other and coarser states of society and civil organizations. We are not
half alive to the glory and grandeur of the experiment of free political
institutions, and do not press with the zeal we ought the general
education, the political training, the moral discipline, which can alone
save the State, when it has no foundation but the good-will, the
respect, and the practical valuation of the people. But is the State or
the nation ever so truly divine as when it is owned as the voice of God,
calling all the people to maintain equal justice, to recognize universal
interests, to embody Christian ethics in public law? And despite our
local mortifications and occasional misgivings, what nation is now so
strong and firm, what government so confident and so promising, as our
own? What but freedom, fidelity to rational principles and ideal
justice, give it this strength? What is it, on the other hand, but
traditions that represent the ignorance and accidents and injustice of
former ages,--what is it but authority usurped and then consecrated,
social superstitions hardened into political creeds,--that is now
proving the weakness and peril of European nationalities, and imperial
or monarchical governments? Knowledge, science, literature, progress,
truth, liberty, become sooner or later the enemies of all governments,
and all social institutions, not founded in abstract justice and equal
rights. Yet how fearful the transition! Who can contemplate the downfall
of the French empire, and then look at the architects of the new
republic, working in the crude material of a priest-ridden or unschooled
populace, without dismay? Yet the process is inevitable. Democratic
ideas are abroad: they are in the air. They corrode all the base metal
they touch; and thrones and titles, and legalized classes, and
exceptional prerogatives, are predestined to a rapid disintegration. How
blessed the nation that has transferred its political homage from
traditions to principles; from men or families, to rights and duties;
from a compromise with ancient inequality and wrong, to an affirmation
of universal justice and right! Yet never had a people so grave and so
constant and so serious duties as we have. And there is nothing in our
principles or government that _must_ save our country, in spite of the
failure of political virtue, intelligence, and devotion, in our private
citizens. God has buried many republics, because the people were
unworthy of them. Their failure was no disproof of the principle
involved, but only an evidence that the people fell wholly below their
privileges and ideas. America may add another to this list of failures,
but can do nothing to discredit the truth and glory and final triumph of
the democratic idea. I do not believe we shall fail; on the contrary, I
have an increasing faith in the sense and virtue and ability of the
people of this country. But the success of American political
institutions depends very much on the success of the Christian and
religious institutions that match them, and are alone adapted to them.
We cannot long guarantee religious institutions, in a country of free
schools, public lyceums, unlicensed newspapers, unimpeded inquiry, and
absolute religious equality, if they do not rest on grounds of reason
and experience and sober truth. Mere authority, mere ecclesiasticism,
mere sacred usages, mere mystery, or mere dogmatism, will not long
protect the creeds and formularies of the church. They are undergoing a
species of dry-rot, like to that which the rafters of my own church
lately suffered from the confinement and unventilated bondage in iron
boxes in which their ends had been placed for greater security. They
wanted air and light, and more confidence in their inherent soundness;
and, if they had been permitted it, they would have lasted a hundred
years. It is precisely so with the Christian religion, boxed up in
creeds. It grows musty, worm-eaten, and finally loses its life and hold.
A certain timid and constitutionally religious portion of the community
will cherish any creed or usage which is time-honored; and the less
robust and decisive minds of the time will rally about what is
established and venerable, however out of date, incredible, or
irrational. But it is what is going on in the independent and free mind
of the common people, that should have our most serious regard. What is
the faith of the fairly educated young men and women who are now
springing up in America? Certainly, it is not, in the more gifted or the
most thoughtful part of it, in sympathy with any form of sacramental or
dogmatic Christianity. It is not Trinitarian; it is not biblical; it is
not technical. It is hardly Christian! It is bold, independent,
inquisitive, questioning every thing, and resolute in its rights of
opinion. It is alienated from church and worship to a great degree. It
suspects the importance of religious institutions, and reads and thinks
and worships in books of poetry and philosophy. A timid heart might
easily grow alarmed at the symptoms, and think that irreligion, and
decay of worship and fellowship in the Christian Church, were upon us.
But sad and discouraging as the present symptoms are to many, I see more
to hope than fear in these tendencies. They are a rebuke to formal and
technical theology,--to mere ecclesiasticism, to outworn ways. They are
bringing a violent assault upon the hard crust of a stifling belief, of
which the world must get rid before the gospel of Christ can emerge, and
be received in its primitive simplicity. It is the only way in which
faith is ever purified,--by doubt and denial. The gospel requires a new
statement. It must come out of its ecclesiastical bulwarks. It must
abandon its claim to any other kind of judgment than all other truth
claims and allows. It must place itself by the side of science,
experience, and philosophy, and defy their tests. It must invite the
most rigid investigation. It must claim its foundations in eternal
truth. It must prove its efficiency, not with the weak, but the strong;
not with the ignorant, but the learned; not with the bound, but the
free. And then it will recover its lost ground, and take a stronger and
diviner position than it ever had before.

This is the work that Liberal Christianity has in hand; a difficult,
slow, and often discouraging work, but one that is intensely patriotic,
intensely practical, intensely necessary. That which was the mere
fortress into which the enlightened and free-minded people of
Massachusetts fled for refuge from ecclesiastical tyranny, a
half-century ago,--Unitarianism,--is now become a recognized crusade for
religious liberty for the American people. The liberty is coming fast
enough, and surely enough; but will the worship, will the Christian
seriousness, will the fellowship of faith, will the piety that gives
aromatic beauty as well as health to the soul, come with it? If it were
not to come, liberty would be only license and secularity and
worldliness. Every firm, well-ordered, earnest and religious
congregation of the liberal faith; exhibiting stableness, order,
solemnity; doing religious work among the poor, and cultivating piety in
its own youth; making sacrifices to its own ideas, and upholding its own
worship,--is an argument of the most solid kind, an example of
contagious power, an encouragement of priceless cheer, for those who
think that Christian liberty necessarily leads to license and decay of
worship; or that Christ is less revered and loved and trusted when he is
accepted in the derived and dependent character he claimed,--the only
tenable, rational, possible character in which a century hence he can be
received by any unsuperstitious persons. We have a sacred privilege, a
glorious opportunity. We only need to show ourselves warm, earnest,
united, attached to worship, fruitful in piety, devoted to good works,
zealous for God's glory and man's redemption, sincere, humble, yet
rational and free followers of Christ, to win an immense victory for the
gospel in this inquiring and doubting age. I have no great _immediate_
hopes, but hopes beyond expression in the gracious development of
another generation. I bate not a jot of heart or hope that absolute
liberty in religion will favor the growth of piety, as much as political
freedom has favored the growth of order and peace and prosperity. Oh!
not a thousandth part the power of Christian truth and righteousness has
yet been shown in the world. The love of God, the love of man, have only
begun their glorious mission. Christ yet waits for his true throne.
Humanity is just come of age, and, with some wild festivity, is claiming
its heritage. But God is with and over it; and Jesus Christ is its
inspirer and guide. He will not lose his headship. He will be more
followed when less worshipped; more truly loved when less idolized; more
triumphant when more clearly understood! Darkness, wrath, threats,
enchantments, sacraments, prostrations, humiliations of reason,
emotional transports, affectations of belief, belief for its own
sake,--none of these things are truly favorable to Christ's kingdom or
the glory of his gospel. God is light, and in him is no darkness at all.
Christ is the Sun of righteousness. When reason, conscience, affection,
rule the world; when love and justice, and mild and tender views of life
and humanity, of God and Christ, displace the cruel terrors and
superstitions that have survived the social and political meliorations
of the age, we shall begin to see that love is the fulfilling of the
law, and liberty of thought the greatest friend of worship, the finest
result of Christ's coming, and the throne from which he commands the
whole human heart and history.




A TRUE THEOLOGY THE BASIS

OF

HUMAN PROGRESS.

By JAMES FREEMAN CLARKE.


The subject of the present lecture is "A True Theology the Basis of
Human Progress." And, in order to strike the key-note, and to indicate
the object at which I aim, I will read four or five passages from the
New Testament, which describe such a Theology in its spirit and root.

The Apostle Paul says:[1] "I count not myself to have apprehended: but
this one thing I do, forgetting those things which are behind, and
reaching forth unto those things which are before, I press toward the
mark." So he declares himself a Progressive Christian.

[Footnote 1: Phil. iii. 13.]

Again he says:[2] "We know in part, and we prophesy [or teach] in part.
But when that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall
be done away." So he declares that all intellectual statements, his own
included, are relative and provisional. He is here speaking, doubtless,
not of rational insights, but of the insight when elaborated by the
intellect into a statement; not of intuitional knowledge, but that which
comes from reflection. In regard to all such propositions, he would
accept the modern doctrine of the Relativity of Knowledge; thus cutting
up by the roots the poisonous weed of Bigotry.

[Footnote 2: 1 Cor. xiii. 9, 10.]

Again: "Brethren, be not children in understanding: howbeit, in malice
be ye children, but in understanding be men."[3] He thus requires and
authorizes a manly, intelligent Theology.

[Footnote 3: 1 Cor. xiv. 20.]

Again: "Who also hath made us able ministers of the New Testament; not
of the letter, but of the spirit: for the letter killeth, but the spirit
giveth life."[4] He here rejects the Theology of the letter, including
the doctrine of Literal Inspiration.

[Footnote 4: 2 Cor. iii. 6.]

Again: "God hath not given us the spirit of fear; but of power, and of
love, and of a sound mind."[5]

[Footnote 5: 2 Tim. i. 7.]

My Thesis to-night is not a truism; my argument is not unnecessary or
uncalled for. Nothing is more common than to undervalue the importance
of Theology; to regard it as having no bearing on life, no influence on
human progress, no causative power in regard to civilization. Mr.
Buckle, one of the most recent English philosophical historians,
contends that Theology is the result rather than the cause of national
character; that it is merely symptomatic of the condition of a people.
If they are in a good condition, they have a good Theology; if in a bad
condition, a bad one. He even thinks it owing to a mistaken zeal that
Christians try to propagate their religion, because he believes that
savages cannot become Christians. Civilization, Mr. Buckle supposes,
depends greatly upon soil, upon climate, upon food, upon the
trade-winds; but not much upon religious ideas. He says that, in
England, "theological interests have long ceased to be supreme." "The
time for these things has passed by." And this is also a very common
opinion among ourselves. Many reformers have a notion that we have done
with Theology, that we can do without it. Some men of science tell us
that Theology has nothing to do with the advance of civilization, but
that this comes from discovery in the sphere of physical science. But I
believe that the one thing which retards the progress of reform is a
false philosophy concerning God and man, a false view of God's ideas
concerning this world; and that the one thing needful for Human Progress
is a deeper, higher, broader view of God and his ways. And I hope to be
able to show some grounds for this opinion.

The religious instinct in man is universal. Some individuals and some
races possess more of it, and others less; but the history of mankind
shows that religion in some form is one of the most indestructible
elements of human nature. But whether this religious instinct shall
appear as faith or as fanaticism; whether it shall be a blind enthusiasm
or an intelligent conviction; whether it shall be a tormenting
superstition or a consoling peace; whether it shall lead to cruel
persecutions or to heavenly benevolence; all this, and more, depends on
Theology. Religion is a blind instinct: the ideas of God, man, duty,
destiny, which determine its development, constitute Theology.

The same law holds concerning Conscience and Ethics. Conscience in the
form of a moral instinct is universal in man. In every human breast
there is a conviction that something is right and something wrong; but
what that right and wrong is depends on Ethics. In every language of
man, there are words which imply ought and ought not, duty,
responsibility, merit, and guilt. But what men believe they ought to do,
or ought not to do,--that depends on the education of their conscience;
that is, on their Ethics.

Conscience, like religion, is man's strength, and his weakness.
Conscience makes cowards of us all; but it is the strong-siding champion
which makes heroes of us all. Savages are cruel, pirates are cruel; but
they cannot be as cruel as a good man, with a misguided conscience. The
most savage heart has some touch of human kindness left in it, which
nothing can quite conquer,--nothing but conscience. That can make man as
hard as Alpine rock, as cold as Greenland ice. The torture-rooms and
_autos da fe_ of the Inquisition surpass the cruelties of the North
American Indian. The cruelties of instinct are faint compared with the
cruelties of conscience. Now what guides conscience to good or to evil?
Theology, in the form of Ethics, is the guide of conscience. For, as
soon as man believes in a God, he believes in the authority of his God
to direct and control his actions. Whatever his God tells him to do must
be right for him to do. Therefore religion in its inward form is either
a debasing and tormenting superstition or a glad faith, according to the
Theology with which it is associated. And religion, in its outward form,
is either an impure and cruel despotism or an elevating morality,
according to the idea of God and Duty which guide it; that is, according
to its associated Theology.

Some persons, like Lucretius, seeing the evils of Superstition, Bigotry,
and Fanaticism, and perceiving that these have their root in religion,
have endeavored to uproot religion itself. But could this be effected,
which is impossible, it would be like wishing to get rid of the
atmosphere, because it is sometimes subject to tempests, and sometimes
infected with malaria. Religion is the atmosphere of the soul, necessary
to the healthful action of its life, to be purified, but not renounced.

Every one has a Theology, who has even a vague idea of a God; and every
one has this who has an idea of something higher and better than
himself, higher and better than any of his fellow-men. The Atheist
therefore may have a God, though he does not call him so. For God is not
a word, not a sound: he is the Infinite Reality which we see, more or
less dimly, more or less truly, rising above us, and above all our race.
The nature of this ideal determines for each of us what we believe to be
right or wrong; and so it is that our Theology rules our conscience, and
that our conscience determines with more or less supremacy the tendency
and stress of our life.

No one can look at the History of the Human Race without seeing what an
immense influence religion has had in human affairs. Every race or
nation which has left its mark on Human Progress has itself been under
the commanding control of some great religion. The ancient civilization
of India was penetrated to the core by the institutions of Brahmanism;
the grand development of Egyptian knowledge was guided by its
priesthood; the culture of China has been the meek disciple of Confucius
for two thousand years. Whenever any nation emerges out of darkness into
light,--Assyria, Persia, Greece, or Rome,--it comes guided and inspired
by some mighty religion. The testimony of History is that religion is
the most potent of all the powers which move and govern human action.

Such is the story of the past. How is it at the present time? Has
mankind outgrown the influence of religion to-day? Has the spread of
knowledge, the advance of science, the development of literature, art,
culture, weakened its power in Christendom? Never was there so much of
time, thought, effort, wealth, consecrated to the Christian Church as
there is now. Both branches of that Church, the Catholic and Protestant,
are probably stronger to-day than they ever were before. Some few
persons can live apart from religious institutions; but mankind cannot
dispense with religion, and they need it organized into a Church or
Churches.

Religion is a great power, and will remain so. But what is to determine
the character of this power? It may impede progress or advance it; it
may encourage thought or repress it; it may diffuse knowledge or limit
it; it may make men free or hold them as slaves; it may be a generous,
manly, free, and moral religion or a narrow, bigoted, intolerant,
fanatical, sectarian, persecuting superstition. It has been both: it is
both to-day. What is to decide which it shall be? I answer, its
Theology; the views it holds concerning God, man, duty, immortality, the
way and the means of salvation. Religion is an immense power: how that
power is to be directed depends on Theology.

Proceeding then with my theme, I shall endeavor to show how false ideas
in Theology tend to check the progress of humanity, and afterward how
true ideas always carry mankind onward along an ascending path of
improvement.

But first let me say that my criticism is of ideas, not of sects,
churches, nor individuals. By a true Theology, I mean neither a
Unitarian nor a Trinitarian Theology, neither a Catholic nor a
Protestant Theology. I do not mean Calvinism nor Arminianism. I have
nothing to say concerning these distinctions, however important they
may be; and I, for one, consider them important. But I refer to a
distinction more important still, lying back of these distinctions,
lying beneath them; a difference not of opinions so much as of ideas and
spirit.

By a true Theology, I mean a manly Theology, as opposed to a childish
one; a free, as opposed to a servile one; a generous, as opposed to a
selfish one; a reasonable and intelligent Theology, as opposed to a
superstitious one.

By a true Theology, I mean one which regards God as a father, and man as
a brother; which looks upon this life as a preparation for a higher;
which believes that God gives us freedom, inspires our reason, and is
the author of whatever is generous, self-forgetting, and noble. I find
something of this Theology in all sects and churches; from the Roman
Catholic at one extreme, to the Universalists and Unitarians, the
Spiritualists and Come-outers, at the other. And the opposite, the false
Theology, dishonorable to God, degrading to man, I find in all sects,
and accompanying all creeds. And if I shall show, as truth compels me to
show, that certain parties and persons are specially exposed to danger
in one or another direction, I wish distinctly to state my belief that
sincere and earnest men continually rise above the contagion of their
position, and live untainted in an atmosphere which may have in it some
special tendency to disease.

One false idea in Theology, which opposes human progress, is that
Pantheistic view of the Deity, which loses sight of his personality, and
conceives of him as a blind, infinite force, pervading all Nature, and
carrying on the universe, but without intelligence and without love.

I know indeed that many views have been accused of being Pantheism which
are not. I do not believe in a God outside of the universe. I believe
that he is one "in whom we live, and move, and have our being," one
"from whom, and through whom, and to whom are all things,"--a perpetual
Creator, immanent in his world. But this view is quite consistent with a
belief in his personal being, in his intelligent, conscious, loving
purpose. Without such a belief, hope dies out of the heart; and without
hope mankind loses the energy which creates progress. Unless we have an
intelligent Friend who governs the universe, it will seem to be moving
blindly on toward no divine end; and this thought eats out the courage
of the soul.

In some poetical natures, as in the case of Shelley, this Pantheism
takes the form of faith in a spirit of beauty, or love, or intellectual
power, pervading all things. In more prosaic minds it becomes a belief
in law, divorced from love. It turns the universe into a machine, worked
by forces whose mutual action unfolds and carries on the magnificent
Cosmos. Often this view comes, by way of a reaction, against an
excessive Personality of Will. When the Christian Church speaks of the
Deity as an Infinite Power outside of the world, who creates it and
carries it on according to some contrivance, of which his own glory is
the end, it is perhaps natural that men should go to the other extreme
and omit person, will, and design from their conception of Deity. But
thus they encounter other and opposite dangers.

A gospel of mere law is no sufficient gospel. It teaches prudence, but
omits Providence. This utilitarian doctrine, which reduces every thing
to law,--which makes the Deity only a Great Order, not a Father or
Friend,--would soon put a stop to the deepest spring of human progress.
It takes faith and hope out of our life, and substitutes observation,
calculation, and prudence. But the case of Ecclesiastes and of Faust
teaches us what comes from knowledge emptied of faith. He who increases
such knowledge increases sorrow. The unknown, wonderful Father; the
divine, mysterious Infinite; the great supernatural power and beauty
above Nature, and above all,--these alone make life tolerable. Without
this brooding sense of a Divine love, of a Heaven beyond this world, of
a Providence guiding human affairs, men would not long have the heart to
study, because all things would seem to be going nowhere. Without such a
Heavenly Friend to trust, such an immortal progress to hope, all things
would seem to revolve in a circle. Not to believe in something more than
a God of Law is to be without God in the world, is to be without hope.
And hope is the spring of all progress, intellectual progress as well as
all other. Intellect, divorced from faith, at last kills intellect
itself, by destroying its inner motive. It ends in a doctrine of
despair, which cries continually, "What is the use?" and finds no
answer. And so the soul dies the only death the soul can die,--the death
of torpor and inaction.

Another false idea in Theology, which interferes with human progress, is
that of ecclesiastical authority in matters of faith and practice. When
the Church comes between the soul and God, and seeks to be its master
rather than its servant, it takes from it that direct responsibility to
God, which is one of the strongest motives for human effort. I know that
this has always been done from a sincere desire, at any rate in the
beginning, to save men from apparent dangers. The Church has assumed
authority, in order to do good with it. It has commanded men not to
think for themselves, lest they should err. But God has meant that we
should be liable to error, in order that we should learn to avoid it by
increased strength. Therefore Christ said, "Be not called Rabbi; be not
called Masters, and call no man father on earth." His church, and his
apostles, and he himself are here, not to be masters of the soul, but to
be its servants.

The Roman Catholic Church is a great organization, which has gradually
grown up, during a thousand years, the object of which has been to
educate men in Christian faith and Christian conduct. It has sincerely
endeavored to do this. But, unfortunately, it took a narrow view of
Christian education; supposing that it meant instruction and guidance,
restraint and tuition, but not development. It has magnified its own
authority, in order to produce docility in its pupils. It has not
allowed them freedom of inquiry nor liberty of conscience. It has not
said, like Paul, "Be not children in understanding;" on the contrary, it
has preferred to keep them children, so as to guide them more easily. It
has not said, with Paul, "Stand fast in the liberty wherewith Christ has
made you free;" for it has come to hate the very name of liberty. What
is the result? You may read it to-day in France, where, as Mr. Coquerel
tells us, that Church has prevented the steady development of free
institutions. It has always supported the principle of authority in the
State, as the natural ally of authority in the Church. There are so few
republicans in France to-day, because the people have been educated by
the Church to blind submission. The priests are not to blame, the people
are not: it is the Roman Catholic Theology which is to blame. That
Theology teaches that the soul is saved by the reception of external
sacraments, and not by vital, independent convictions of truth.[6]

[Footnote 6: The proof of this may be amply found in the famous
Encyclical and Syllabus of Pius IX., Dec. 8th, 1864. In the Syllabus he
denounces as errors such propositions as the following:--

That "every man is free to embrace and profess that religion which
guided by the light of reason, he holds to be true." § 15.

That "one may well hope, at least, for the eternal salvation of those
who are in no wise in the true Church of Christ." § 17.

That "the Church has no power to employ force." § 24.

That "men emigrating to Catholic countries should be permitted the
public exercise of their own several forms of worship." § 78.

That "the Roman Pontiff can and ought to reconcile and harmonize himself
with progress, with liberalism, and with modern civilization." § 80.]

Or, if you wish another illustration of the same thing, look at New
York. Why have republican institutions in New York almost proved a
failure? Why were a few robbers able to take possession of the city, and
plunder the citizens? Because they could control the votes of the Irish
Catholics in a mass; because this vast body of voters were unable to
vote independently, or to understand the first duties of a free citizen.
And why was this? Not because the Irish are naturally less intelligent
than the New-Englanders, the English, the Germans. No; but the Roman
Catholic Church, which has had the supreme control over the Irish
conscience and intellect for a thousand years, has chosen to leave them
uneducated. Of course, the Roman Church, if it had pleased to do so,
might long ago have made the Irish nation as enlightened as any in
Europe. But its Theology taught that education might lead them into
heresy, and so take them out of the true Church, and that ignorance _in_
the Church was infinitely better than any amount of intellectual and
moral culture _out_ of it. The fatal principle of Roman Catholic
Theology--"Out of the true Church there is no salvation"--has been the
ruin of the Irish nation for hundreds of years, and has very nearly
entailed ruin on our own.

Do you wonder that the priests oppose our school system? If I were a
Roman Catholic priest, I should oppose it too. Should I run the risk of
poisoning my child's body by accepting as a gift a little better food
than that I am able to buy? And shall I risk the vastly greater evil of
poisoning its soul, by allowing it to be tainted with heretical books
and teachers in free schools? The Roman Catholic priest is consistent:
it is the Theology which teaches salvation by sacraments that is to
blame. It is a theology which naturally, logically, necessarily, stands
opposed to human progress. It says, "In order to be children in malice,
you must also be children in understanding."

When the Protestant Reformation came, it brought with it a manly
Theology. It put the Bible into all men's hands, and asserted for each
the right of private judgment and liberty of conscience. Therefore the
Reformation was the cause of a great forward movement in human affairs.
It awakened the intellect of mankind. Science, literature,
invention,--all were stimulated by it. It ran well, but something
hindered. Its reverence for the Bible was its life; but, unfortunately,
it soon fell into a worship of _the letter_. It taught a doctrine of
verbal inspiration. It forgot the great saying of Paul, "not of the
letter, but the spirit; for the letter killeth." Very soon that saying
was fulfilled. Reverence for the letter of the Bible killed the spirit
of the Bible. That spirit is as free as air. It teaches no creed, it
demands no blind acceptance of any dogma. It declares that where the
spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty. But the letter-theology has
opposed nearly all the discoveries of science and all moral reforms with
the words of the Bible. It has set Genesis against geology, and the book
of Psalms against the Copernican system. Because the Book of Genesis
says the heavens and earth were made in six days, the letter-theology
declared that the fossil shells were made in the rocks just as they are,
or were dropped by pilgrims returning from the Holy Land. Because the
book of Psalms said that "God hath established the earth so that it
shall not be moved for ever," the letter-theology denied its daily and
yearly revolution. Because Noah said, "Cursed be Canaan," the
letter-theology defended the slavery of the negro. Because Noah also
said, "He who sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed," the
letter-theology has defended capital punishment as a religious duty.
Because the Jews were commanded to rest on the seventh day, the
letter-theology forbids the Boston Public Library to be open on the
first. Becoming ever more timid and more narrow, it clings to the letter
of the common English translation, and the received text. It even
shrinks from alterations which would give us the true letter of the
Bible, instead of the false one.

Some years ago the American Bible Society appointed a committee of the
most learned scholars, from all Orthodox denominations, to correct the
text and the translation of our common English Bible, so as to make it
conform to the true Hebrew and Greek text. They were not to make a new
translation, but merely to correct palpable, undoubted errors in the old
one. They did their work; printed their corrected Bible; laid it before
the Bible Society,--_and that Society refused to adopt it_. They had not
the slightest doubt of its superior correctness; but they feared to make
any change, lest others might be called for, and lest the faith of the
community might be disturbed in the integrity of the Scriptures. Jesus
had promised them the Holy Spirit to lead them into all truth, to take
of his truth and show it to them; but they did not believe him. They
preferred to anchor themselves to the words chosen by King James's
translators than to be led by the Spirit into any new truth. So it is
that "the letter killeth." It stands in the way of progress. It keeps us
from trusting in that ever-present Spirit which is ready to inspire us
all to-day, as it inspired prophets and apostles of old. It is an
evidence not of faith, but of unbelief.

Thus, this false idea in Theology, that inspiration rests in the letter
of a book or a creed rather than in its spirit, is seen to be opposed to
human progress.

And then there is another Theology which is opposed to human progress.
It is the Theology of Fear. It speaks of hell rather than of heaven; it
seeks to terrify rather than to encourage; it drives men by dread of
danger rather than leads them by hope. Its ruling idea is of stern,
implacable justice; its God is a God of vengeance, who cannot pardon
unless the full penalty of sin has been borne by some victim; whose
mercy ceases at death; who can only forgive sin during our short human
life, not after we have passed into the other world. To assuage his
anger, or appease his justice, there must be devised some scheme of
salvation, or plan of redemption. He cannot forgive of pure, free grace,
and out of his boundless love.

Now those who hold such a Theology as this will apply its spirit in
human affairs. It will go into penal legislation, into the treatment of
criminals. It will make punishment the chief idea, not reformation.
Jesus taught a boundless compassion, an infinite tenderness toward the
sinful, the weak, the forlorn people of the world. He taught that the
strong are to bear the burdens of the weak, the righteous to help the
wicked, and that we are to overcome evil with good. When this principle
is applied in human affairs, the great plague spots of society will
disappear: intemperance, licentiousness, pauperism, crime, will be cured
radically. Society, purified from these poisons, will go forward to
nobler achievements than have ever yet been dreamed of. But this
principle will not be applied while the fear-theology prevails, and is
thought more of than that of love. The progress of human society depends
on the radical cure of these social evils, not their mere restraint. And
they can only be cured by such a view of the divine holiness and the
divine compassion as is taught by Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount and
the Parable of the Prodigal Son; showing the root of crime in sin, and
inspiring a profound faith in God's saving love.

It may seem to some persons that I go too far in asserting that a true
Theology is at the basis of human progress. They may ascribe human
progress to other causes,--to the advance of knowledge, to scientific
discovery, to such inventions as printing, the steam-engine, the
railroad, and the like. But I believe that spiritual ideas are at the
root of all others. That which one thinks of God, duty, and
immortality,--in short, his Theology,--quickens or deadens his interest
in every thing else. Whatever arouses conscience, faith, and love, also
awakens intellect, invention, science, and art. If there is nothing
above this world or beyond this life; if we came from nothing and are
going nowhere, what interest is there in the world? "Let us eat and
drink, for to-morrow we die." But if the world is full of God,--if we
come from him and are going to him,--then it becomes everywhere
intensely interesting, and we wish to know all about it. Science has
followed always in the steps of religion, and not the reverse. The Vedas
went before Hindoo civilization; the Zend-Avesta led the way to that of
Persia; the oldest monuments of Egypt attest the presence of religious
ideas; the Laws of Moses preceded the reign of Solomon; and that
civilization which joined Greeks, Romans, Goths, Vandals, Franks, and
Saxons in a common civilization, derived its cohesive power from the
life of Him whose idea was that love to man was another form of love to
God. "The very word _humanity_," says Max Müller, "dates from
Christianity." No such idea, and therefore no such term, was found among
men before Christ came.

But it may be said that these instances are from such obscure epochs
that it is uncertain how far it was religion which acted on
civilization. Let us, then, take one or two instances, concerning which
there is less uncertainty.

In the deserts, and among the vast plains of the Arabian Peninsula, a
race had slumbered inactive for twenty centuries. Those nomad-Semitic
tribes had wandered to and fro, engaged in perpetual internecine
warfare, fulfilling the prediction concerning Ishmael, "He will be a
wild man; his hand will be against every man, and every man's hand
against him." No history, no civilization, no progress, no nationality,
no unity, could be said to exist during that long period among these
tribes. At length a man comes with a religious idea, a living, powerful
conviction. He utters it, whether man will bear or forbear. He proclaims
the unity and spirituality of God in spite of all opposition and
persecution. At last his idea takes hold of the soul of this people.
What is the result? They flame up into a mighty power; they are united
into an irresistible force; they sweep over the world in a few decades
of years; they develop a civilization superior to any other then extant.
Suddenly there springs up in their midst a new art, literature, and
science. Christendom, emasculated by an ecclesiastical and monastic
Theology, went to Islam for freedom of thought, and found its best
culture in the Mohammedan universities of Spain. Bagdad, Cairo,
Damascus, Seville, Cordova, became centres of light to the world. The
German conquerors darkened the regions they overran: the Mohammedans
enlightened them. The caliphs and viziers patronized learning and
endowed colleges, and some of their donations amounted to millions of
dollars. Libraries were collected. That of a single doctor was a load
for four hundred camels. That of Cairo contained a hundred thousand
manuscripts, which were lent as freely as those in the Boston Public
Library. The College Library of Cordova had four hundred thousand. In
these places grammar, logic, jurisprudence, the natural sciences, the
philosophy of Aristotle, were taught to students who flocked to them
from all parts of Christendom. Many of the professors taught from
memory: one man is reported to have been able to repeat three thousand
poems. The Saracens wrote treatises on geography, numismatics, medicine,
chemistry, astronomy, mathematics. Some, like Avicenna, went through the
whole circle of the sciences. The Saracens invented pharmacy, surgery,
chemistry. Geber, in the eighth century, could prepare alcohol,
sulphuric acid, nitric acid, corrosive sublimate, potash, and soda.
Their astronomers measured a degree of the earth's meridian near Bagdad,
and determined its circumference as twenty-four thousand miles. They
found the length of the year, and calculated the obliquity of the
ecliptic. Roger Bacon quotes their treatises on optics. Trigonometry
retains the form given it by the Arabs, and they greatly improved
Algebra. We received from them our numerical characters. We all know the
beauty and permanence of their architecture, and much of our musical
knowledge is derived from them. They also made great progress in
scientific agriculture and horticulture, in mining and the working of
metals, in tanning and dying leather. Damascus blades, morocco,
enamelled steel, the manufacture and use of paper, the use of the
pendulum, the manufacture of cotton, public libraries, a national
police, rhyme in verse, and our arithmetic, all came to us from the
Arabs.

All this fruitful intellectual life must be traced directly back to the
theological impulse given by Mohammed to the Arab mind; for it can be
derived from no other source.

It is not quite so easy to define the precise influence on human
progress given by the doctrines of the Reformation; for, before Luther,
these were in the air. But no one can reasonably doubt that the demand
for freedom of conscience and the right of private judgment in religion
has led to liberty of thought, speech, action, in all other directions.
To the war against papal and ecclesiastical authority in concerns of the
soul we owe, how much no one can say, of civil freedom, popular
sovereignty, the emancipation of man, the progress of the human mind.
The theses of Luther were the source of the Declaration of Independence.
And modern science, with the great names of Bacon and Newton, Descartes
and Leibnitz, Goethe and Humboldt, is the legitimate child of Protestant
Theology.

It is true that printing and maritime discoveries preceded Luther. But
these inventions came from the same ideas which took form in the
Lutheran Reformation. The discovery of printing was a result, no less
than a cause. It came because it was wanted; because men were wishing to
communicate their thoughts more freely and widely than could be done by
writing. If it had been discovered five hundred years before, it would
have fallen dead, a sterile invention, leading to nothing. And so the
steam-engine and the railroad did not come before, because they were not
wanted: as soon as they were wanted they came. That which lies at the
root of all these inventions is the wish of man to communicate easily
and rapidly and widely with his brother-man; in other words, the sense
of human brotherhood. Material civilization, in all its parts and in all
times, grows out of a spiritual root; and only faith leads to sight,
only the things unseen and eternal create those which are seen and
temporal.

The two Theologies at the present time which stand opposed to each other
here are not Calvinism and Armenianism, not Trinitarianism and
Unitarianism, not Naturalism and Supernaturalism. But they are the
Theology of discouragement and fear on one side, that of courage and
hope on the other. The one thinks men must be driven to God by terror:
the other seeks to attract them by love. The one has no faith in man,
believes him wholly evil, believes sin to be the essential part of him.
The other believes reason a divine light in the soul, and encourages it
to act freely; trusts in his conscience enlightened by truth, and
appeals to it confidently; relies on his heart, and seeks to inspire it
with generous affections and disinterested love. That this Theology of
faith is to triumph over that of fear who can doubt? All the best
thought, the deepest religion, the noblest aspiration of the age, flows
in this direction. Whether our handful of Unitarian Churches is ever to
become a great multitude or not, I do not know; but I am sure that the
spirit which inspired the soul of Channing is to lead the future age,
and make the churches which are to be. It is not now a question of Unity
or Trinity, but something far deeper and much more important. While
endeavoring to settle the logical terms of Christ's divinity and
humanity, we have been led up higher to the sight of the Divine Father
and the Human Brotherhood. Like Saul, the son of Kish, we went out to
seek our father's asses, and have found a kingdom.

We have recently been told about a Boston Theology. If there is any
thing which deserves to be called a Boston Theology it is this doctrine
of courage and hope. For it is shared by all the leading minds of all
Protestant denominations in this city. Whatever eminent man comes here,
no matter what he was when he came, finds himself, ere long, moving in
this direction. The shackles of tradition and formality fall from his
limbs, his eyes open to a new light; and he also becomes the happy
herald of a new and better day.

But a better word still, if one is wanted by which to localize these
ideas, would be "The New England Theology." For in every part of New
England, from the beginning; in every one of the multiform sects, whose
little spires and baby-house churches have spotted our barren and rocky
hills, there have never failed men of this true Apostolic succession;
men believing in truth, and brave to utter it; believing that God loves
truth better than falsehood; that he desires no one to tell a lie for
his glory, or to speak words of wind in his behalf. With all our
narrowness, our bigotry, our controversial bitterness, our persecuting
zeal,--of which, God knows, we have had enough in New England,--the
heart of New England has been always free, manly, and rational. Yes: all
the way from Moses Stuart to William Ellery Channing, all along the road
from the lecture-rooms on the hills of Andover to the tribune of
Theodore Parker standing silent in the Music Hall, we have had this same
brave element of a manly Theology. This has been the handful of salt
which has saved New England. Hence it is that from the days of the early
Puritans, men and women, of Harry Vane, Mrs. Hutchinson, and Roger
Williams, who stood up for the rights of the human soul against priestly
tyranny, down through the ministers of the Revolution who went with
their people to the camp of Washington at Cambridge; down to the days of
the Beechers,--there has never failed a man in the New England pulpit to
stand up for justice, freedom, and humanity. From our bare hill-tops New
England men and women have looked up to the sky and seen it not always
nor wholly black with superstitious clouds, but its infinite depths of
blue interpenetrated evermore with the warm living light of a God of
Love. And therefore has New England been the fountain of Progress, the
fruitful parent of Reforms, "the lovely mother of yet more lovely
children."

I have quoted several striking passages from the Apostle Paul. One
expresses his longing for greater excellence, and declares that he
forgets every thing already attained, and is reaching out for better
things, for more truth and more love. Another passage calls on his
disciples to think for themselves, and be rational Christians, not
children in understanding. A third asserts that he is the minister of
the spirit of the gospel, not its letter; a fourth that his religion is
not one of fear, but of power and love and a sound mind; a fifth says,
Stand fast in freedom, and be liberal Christians; and in other places he
exhorts his brethren not to be narrow, nor bigoted; but to look at every
thing beautiful, lovely, true, and good, no matter where they find it.
But a little while before he said these things Paul himself was one of
the most narrow, and intolerant of men, opposed to progress wholly. What
made this great change in his soul? It was that he had found a true
Theology. He learned from Christ to trust simply in the divine love for
pardon and salvation. He learned that God was the God of Heathen and
Pagans as well as of Jews. He learned that no ritual, ceremony,
sacraments nor forms, but only the sight of God as a Father and Friend,
can really save the soul from its diseases, and fill it with immortal
life. A true Theology was the secret of Paul's immense progress, and of
his wonderful power to awaken and convert others. There are many who
suppose his Theology obscure and severe. But when we penetrate the veil
of Jewish language, we find it one of Freedom, of Reason, of Love, manly
and tender, generous and intelligent. And this same Theology passing in
its essence from Paul to Augustine, to Luther, to Wesley, has always
been the motive power of human civilization and human development. It
has been the friend of free thought, liberty of conscience, and
universal progress.

I mean then by a true Theology what Paul meant when he said that God
"has not given to us a spirit of fear, but of power, and of love, and of
a sound mind." I mean what he said when he declared that God had made
him a minister of the New Testament, not of the letter but of the
spirit; for the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life.

I mean the Theology which places the substance above the form; the thing
before the name; which looks at the fact, not at the label.

Let us then, brethren, who call ourselves Unitarians, be glad and
grateful for the gospel of faith and hope which we enjoy. And let us
give to others what we have ourselves received. If it be true, as we
have tried to show, that human progress depends largely on a true
Theology we cannot help mankind more than by diffusing widely that which
God has given us of his truth. Freely you have received, freely give.
You who have always lived in this community, surrounded by this mellow
warm light of peace and freedom, do not know, cannot tell, what those
suffer who have been taught from early childhood to fear God, and to
distrust his light in their soul. Do your part in spreading abroad the
beams of a better day. Give to the world that religion which is not a
spirit of fear, but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind.




THE RISE AND DECLINE

OF THE

ROMISH CHURCH.

By ATHANASE COQUEREL, Fils.


We live in a time of great and manifold changes. There is one church
that for centuries has had her principal glory in asserting that she
never has changed,--that she has at all times been exactly the same; but
now she can hardly deny that either in accordance with her own will, or
by the force of circumstances, very great changes have been wrought in
her during the last few years. This, if it is true, must change also the
nature, the system, the course of our controversy with her. The
controversy between the two churches has not always, perhaps, been quite
fair; and I should not like to be unfair to any adversary, whoever he
may be. I should not be at ease in my conscience if I thought I had been
unfair to any thing, especially to any thing religious, of whatever kind
that religion may be; because in any religion, even the most imperfect,
there is some aspiration from this earth to the sky; at least, from
human souls to what they hope or believe to be God. And especially I
could not pardon myself for being in any way unjust to that great church
which has for centuries comforted and sustained a multitude of souls,
and made them better and happier by her teachings. It is a Christian
church; and though I think that Romish Christianity has been in a very
great degree alloyed, and mixed with grave errors,--and that is exactly
what I wish to show,--yet, even under that veil of human errors, I
recognize, I acknowledge, religion, Christianity; and therefore I bow
before it.

I think, however, the changes that have taken place have not altered the
essential character of the Roman Church. I think the changes that have
happened are in conformity with the nature of that church; really were
to be expected, and have nothing absolutely new in them. We might,
perhaps, for a long time have seen them coming; and, if we had had
foresight enough, we might have seen them from the very first times of
that church. Let us try to understand exactly what she is, what she
means; let us try to see what there is under that name, "Roman Catholic
Church." She calls herself _catholic_, which means _universal_, and at
the same time she has a local name. She is for the whole world; but at
the same time she belongs to one city, and she bears the name of that
city. Why? This is the question; and though it seems only a question of
name, I think we shall find by other ways that it is a question of
facts. A second advance requires a change in our polemics with Roman
authority. A new science has been created in our time, which gives us
better means of judging and studying other churches than our own; that
science is called the comparative history of religions. In England Max
Müller, in France Burnouf, and in this country James Freeman Clarke,
have compared the history of several religions. According to that
comparative history, there are rules to be understood, to be
acknowledged, in the development of religion. One of the rules which I
think we can deduce from any comparative history of religion may be a
startling one; and I will use a very homely comparison, to make myself
perfectly understood. Have you ever seen over a shop door a sign-board,
where the name of the old shop-keeper was painted; and, when his
successor came in, he had the same board covered with a new color, and
his own name painted over the old one? But in time the new paint wore
off, so that the old name reappeared under the new, in such a way that
it became perhaps difficult to distinguish clearly which letters or
lines belonged to the old, and which to the new. If this image appears
somewhat too familiar, let me ask you if you remember what scholars call
a palimpsest. Sometimes in the Middle Ages it was difficult to find
well-prepared parchment on which to write, and there were a great many
monks who had nothing else to do--and it was the best use they could
make of their time--but write or copy the Bible or other religious
books. When they found parchments where were copied the comedies and
tragedies or other works of the heathen, they thought those were of very
little use, and they could very easily have the writing on those
parchments washed out, or covered over with white paint, in such a way
that what had been written there was no more visible. Then on those
parchments they would write the Bible, or sermons, or any document they
thought useful. But the same thing happened then that happened with the
sign-board,--the old writing reappeared after a time; the white covering
spread over the page disappeared. And thus it happens that scholars are
sometimes pondering for a long time over a page from a sermon of Saint
Augustine, or John Chrysostom, in which they find a verse from some
comedy of Terence or Aristophanes; then they have perhaps some trouble
in making out which is comedy and which is sermon, in distinguishing
exactly what of the writing is old and what is new; and they have not
always perfectly succeeded in that effort.

Now what we see in the sign-board we see also in the religion of the
different churches, when a whole multitude, at one time, pass from one
worship to another. Then, against their will, and perhaps without their
knowing it, they never come into the pale of their new church
empty-handed: they carry with them a number of ideas, and habits, and
turns of thought, which they had found in their old worship. And thus,
after a time, when the fervor of the early days is over, you find in the
new religion, or new worship, a real palimpsest: the old one is
reappearing under the new. That makes itself manifest in a good many
ways; sometimes in ways the most strange and unexpected.

If you ask me, now, remembering this rule, what means the name, "Roman
Catholic Church," I answer: Christianity absorbed into itself the Roman
empire; the Roman empire became Christian in a very few years, with a
most rapid, with a most admirable sway; souls became conquered in large
numbers; they became Christian. But afterwards it appeared that they
were not so perfectly unheathenized as they were thought to be, or as
they thought themselves: many of their heathenish habits of life,
thoughts, and customs remained even in their very worship. Thus, after
Christianity had absorbed the Roman world, it appeared that the Roman
world had penetrated and impregnated the whole of Christianity; and this
is the Roman Catholic Church. She is Christian, but she is full of the
errors and superstitions that belonged to the old Roman heathenish
world.

To understand what this means we must now try to comprehend what the old
Roman genius was. Here I ask you not to confound it with the Greek
genius, which was in many respects highly superior, but which had, at
that time, passed away in a large measure, and been replaced everywhere
by the Roman genius. What were the especial traits of character of the
Romans? The first, and a very striking one to those who have travelled
and studied in those countries, is a most vivacious love for tradition.
In Rome, at the present day, you find things that are done, that are
said, that are believed, that are liked, because they were two thousand
years ago, without the people themselves having a very clear notion of
it. Their custom--and it is born in their flesh, and in their blood--is
to look backwards, and to see in the past the motives and the precedents
for their acts and for their belief. Of this I could quote to you a
number of instances. I will choose but one. The first time I was in Rome
I stopped, as every traveller does, on the _Piazza del Popolo_. In the
midst of that square is an obelisk, and on one side of the pedestal of
that obelisk is written: "This monument was brought to Rome by the High
Pontiff, Cæsar Augustus." I went round the monument, and on the other
face of the same pedestal I read: "This monument, brought to Rome by the
High Pontiff, Cæsar Augustus, was placed in this square by the High
Pontiff, Sextus V." And then I remembered that one of those High
Pontiffs was a Roman heathen, an Emperor; and that the other was a
Christian, was a priest, was a pope; and I was astonished, at first
sight, to find on two faces of the same stone the same title given to
those two representatives of very different religions. Afterwards, I
observed that this was no extraordinary case, but that in many other
places in Rome instances of the same kind were to be found. I inquired a
little more deeply, perhaps, than some other travellers, into the
meaning of those words. I asked myself why this pope, Sextus V., and
this Emperor Augustus, should each be called "pontiff." What is the
meaning of "pontiff"? "Pontiff" means bridge-maker, bridge-builder. Why
are they called in that way? Here is the explanation of that fact. In
the very first years of the existence of Rome, at a time of which we
have a very fabulous history, and but few existing monuments,--the
little town of Rome, not built on seven hills as is generally supposed;
there are eleven of them now; then there were within the town less than
seven even,--that little town had a great deal to fear from any enemy
which should take one of the hills that were out of town, the Janiculum,
because the Janiculum is higher than the others, and from that hill an
enemy could very easily throw stones, fire, or any means of destruction,
into the town. The Janiculum was separated from the town by the Tiber.
Then the first necessity for the defence of that little town of Rome was
to have a bridge. They had built a wooden bridge over the Tiber, and a
great point of interest to the town was that this bridge should be kept
always in good order, so that at any moment troops could pass over it.
Then, with the special genius of the Romans, of which we have other
instances, they ordained, curiously enough, that the men who were a
corporation to take care of that bridge should be sacred; that their
function, necessary to the defence of the town, should be considered
holy; that they should be priests, and the highest of them was called
"the high bridge-maker." So it happened that there was in Rome a
corporation of bridge-makers, _pontifices_, of whom the head was the
most sacred of all Romans, because in those days his life, and the life
of his companions, was deemed necessary to the safety of the town.
Things changed; very soon Rome was large enough not to care about the
Janiculum; very soon Rome conquered a part of Italy, then the whole of
Italy, and finally almost the whole of the world. But when once
something is done in Rome, it remains done; when once a thing is said,
it remains said, and is repeated; and thus it happened that the
privilege of the bridge-makers' corporation, as beings sacred and holy,
remained; and that privilege made everybody respect them; gave them a
sort of moral power. Then kings wanted to be made High Bridge-makers;
after kings, consuls; later, dictators; and, later, emperors themselves
made themselves High Bridge-makers, which meant the most sacred persons
in the town.

When Constantine, who is generally called the first Christian
emperor,--but who was very far from being a real Christian,--when
Constantine became nominally a Christian, he did not leave off being the
high bridge-maker of the heathen. He remained high priest of the heathen
at the same time he was a Christian emperor; and he found means, as well
as his son after him, to keep the two functions. He acted on some
occasions as high pontiff of the heathen; on other occasions, he called
councils, presided over them, and sent them away when he had had enough
of their presence; declared to the bishops that he was in some sense one
of them, and acted to all intents and purposes as popes have acted after
him. Thus that title remained the type of whatever was most sacred in
Rome; and the bishop of Rome, when an opportunity came,--when the title
had been lost in Rome by emperors,--took it up again. And thus we see on
the same stone, at the present time in Rome, the name of a high
bridge-maker who is a heathen emperor, and the name of a high
bridge-maker who is a pope, who is the head of the Christian Catholic
Church. Thus you see an old superstition, an old local superstition,
established with a political meaning, has survived itself, has survived
centuries, has survived the downfall of heathenism, and is at the
present time flourishing. You all know that the present pope is called
_Pontifex Maximus_; it is his title; and everywhere you see, even on the
pieces of money, that Pio Nono is _Pontifex Maximus_,--the great
bridge-maker, which means the highest of all priests, of all sacred
beings. Thus has tradition, on that special spot, and in connection with
the history and with the antiquities of that spot, established an
authority unequalled anywhere else.

Though the Roman Catholic Church is special to that place, and inherits
the local habits and traditions, it pretends also to universality. This
is, again, perfectly Roman. The heathen Romans had thought for centuries
that the world was made to be conquered by them; that unity was
represented by Rome; that Rome was all in all; and at the present time
the Pope, on Thursday of every Easter week, gives his solemn blessing,
as you know, to the town first, and the world afterwards,--_urbi et
orbi_. All countries, both hemispheres, all nations, all languages, are
lost in that great unity. One town and one world, of which that town is
the capital,--that was the wish, the hope of the heathenish Romans for
centuries; and that has been the aim, the assumption of papal Rome for
centuries also. When the present Pope said, on a celebrated day, after
enumerating the great acts of his pontificate, that he had created more
bishoprics than any other pope, he was right. He has created, on his own
authority, bishoprics in Holland, in England, and in other countries;
cut out bishoprics on the map of those countries. And he did that
because, as pope, he is the spiritual sovereign of the world; because
England and Holland belong to him; because Rome is the capital of the
world; and he cuts off a part of any country, in America as well as in
Europe, in order to make of it the see or dominion of a bishop. The old
Roman idea was that nobody knew how to govern except Romans. They
assumed--and often, if an unscrupulous government was the best of all,
if a tyrannical government was the best of all, they were right--to
govern better, more wisely, and with more acute politics, than any other
nation. They said, "Other sciences, other arts, may be the share of
other nations; but our share in the great things of this world is
_government_." I hardly dare to speak Latin in an English country,
because I cannot pronounce Latin as you do; but though I pronounce it as
a Frenchman, which is, perhaps, a shade less bad than to pronounce it as
you do in England and America, you may guess what I mean when I recall
to the memory of some of you the famous lines of Virgil, where he says
what must be, in this world, the function of the Romans:--

    "Tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento;
    Hæ tibi erunt artes."

That is to say, "You Romans! remember that you are made to govern the
nations; that must be your office; all the arts come after this; this is
the special Roman art." I declare to you that at this present moment
the clergy, the cardinals, the bishops, the prelates, the court of Rome,
think, and have never ceased to think, that they are the people to
govern better than any other political body; and that the government of
the world has been providentially reserved to that town; first, in a
temporal way, for the heathen; and, secondly, in a spiritual way, for
the Christians, for the Catholic countries of the world. And as they
believe spiritual things are a great deal more important than temporal
things, they think their government is a great deal more important, and
greatly superior to any government of any kind.

Let us now turn back a little again, and try more fully to understand
what the old Roman genius was in its way of government. They governed by
laws. You all have heard about Roman law, about Roman jurisprudence. It
has been said for centuries that they were men who, better than any
other, understood the art of making laws,--very precise, full of
foresight, forgetting nothing, or few things, and giving in the most
exact terms the decisions to be enforced in all possible cases, at least
in all the cases with which they had occasion to deal. It is said also,
it has always been said, that their laws were hard; but they accepted
them, though hard: "_dura lex, sed lex_." And certainly there was
something noble and good in this respect for law, whatever the law was:
there was something just, really in the interest of nations, in this
love of law. But at that time this love of law was accompanied by the
fact that the law was exceedingly hard in a great number of cases. Yet
that hardness was in conformity with the general temperament of the
nation at that time: the Romans were hard.

I have no time to stop to show you how different they were from the
Greeks; but you remember that when the Greeks assembled in one of their
great annual festivals, they heard music, they listened to poetry, they
listened to the works of the historian; or they saw men run races, or
engage in one of those contests that were not cruel, that were only
displays of strength, agility, or training. That was the pleasure of the
Greeks in their annual festival. What did the Romans do? You all know.
They had immense amphitheatres where they assembled to see men kill one
another. Their pleasure was to see people die, to see people suffer, to
see people maimed, and weltering in their blood: that was their favorite
amusement. And ambitious men in that day secured votes by bringing
lions, hyenas, and tigers, in large numbers, to Rome, and by giving the
people the diversion of seeing those animals killing men, devouring
living men, women, and children, living Christians, often. That was the
punishment in fashion at that time: Christian men, women, and children
were killed, were devoured, were mangled before the eyes of the people,
and for their pleasure. In their hardness they had a taste for the
formal, precise execution of their law, whatever it might be.
Christianity came and swept away their abominable pleasures,--this
cruelty, which was contrary to every human feeling; but the habit of a
sort of hardness, in the infliction of the penalties of law, remained in
Rome more than it did in any other place. And this was allied to another
feeling of a different nature, but which very well connected itself with
it. I mean the Roman love for the literal in every thing. They did not
like to understand any thing as metaphorical, as poetry: they liked to
take every thing literally; and it was in consequence of this
characteristic of the Roman mind that they were able to enforce their
law. Even if the result of what the law demanded was absurd, they
maintained, for the honor of the law, that it must be literally
understood, and literally executed; and they permitted none of those
different ways of alleviating the hardships of the law that have been in
other places not only allowed, but ordered, by those in command. This is
of extreme importance. Perhaps at first sight it does not strike you so,
but it is. Remember from what country Christianity came. Christianity
came from the East, came from Asia, came from the Jews. The Apostles,
the first propagators of Christianity, were Oriental men, were Jews. I
have seen part of the Levant, I have seen those very countries, and I
can speak of it as a fact known for centuries, that the people of the
Orient never speak otherwise than by images. They do not like the
shortest way from one point to another; they make the way long. They use
flowers, and rays of light, and moonshine, or any thing else that gives
an image and color to their speech. They bring these things in
continually, whatever may be the subject they speak of.

Perhaps I may give here an illustration that will make you understand
me. I was in a house made of branches of trees, where lived a sheik. He
told me that every thing in that house, his own person, his own family,
were mine; and he said this with the greatest protestations. This is
exactly the same as if you should say to a foreigner, coming into your
house, "You are welcome." Nothing more. If, on going away, I had taken
any thing from that house, the man would immediately have shot me;
though he had given me every thing, even to his own person and his own
family; because he would have had this idea: "This man is a thief; I
have a thief in my house." If I had said, "But you gave me every thing
in the house," he would have answered me, "You come from a country where
people have no politeness. I gave you these things: that means
_welcome_, and nothing more." Thus a man of the Orient never says any
thing in the simple short way that Western nations do: they always want
some poetry, some rhetoric, some image about it. And you must remember
that many of the most admirable teachings of the Bible are in images,
are in poetry, and are extremely beautiful and eloquent by their poetry.
We are accustomed to this, so that we know that it is poetry; and we
understand it. But the Romans, accustomed to their principle, that the
law may be hard, but that law is law, and must be understood literally,
and executed literally, understood every thing literally, and in that
way they spoiled many of the great Christian truths. I will not here
quote many instances, though it would be exceedingly easy to bring them
in large numbers before you. I will take the most striking and best
known of all. When our Lord, a few hours before being separated from his
disciples, to die on the cross, gave them of the bread that was on the
table, and said, "Eat, this is my body," it was absolutely impossible
for Eastern people to misunderstand him; it was impossible for them not
to understand that he meant, "This represents my body." The idea that
what he held in the hands of his own body was his own body again; that
he gave them his own body to eat, and that he ate some of it himself
with them,--that idea could not for a moment have entered the head of
one of those who were there. And if a multitude had been there, instead
of the twelve Apostles, it would have been exactly the same. Nobody
would have understood, when the Lord said, "I am the way," or when he
said, "I am the door," that he was really, in fact, a path or a gate;
everybody knew that he meant, "I am the leader; you must come with me; I
show you the way." Everybody in the Orient understood that. But here
comes the Roman genius, taking every thing literally; and they repeat,
"He said, 'This is my body,' and this _is_ his body." They repeat: "You
Protestants do not accept the truth coming from the lips of your Master.
He says, 'This is my body,' but you Protestants say, 'No, it is not his
body, it represents his body.'" Thus it seems we are convicted of crime;
it seems we will not accept the teachings of our Lord; yet we are
perfectly true to his own meaning, to his real meaning, that could not
be misunderstood in the East, but that was misunderstood when it was
carried to Rome, a country where people gloried in taking every thing in
a literal sense. So they did with many other most beautiful and delicate
things in the Bible. The Roman genius--I cannot help saying it--had
something clumsy in it. They were like giants, having very strong arms,
and enormous hands, to take every thing, and to dominate over every
thing. But any thing very delicate, very poetic, like flowers from the
East, they could not touch without the flowers being broken and faded,
losing their charm and their color. That was their way of treating many
of the most beautiful things of the Bible, which they did not
understand; which they made absurd or repulsive, by taking in a literal
sense what was said, and ought to be taken, in a spiritual sense. They
acted exactly as we should, if we received an Oriental letter and
understood as literal every thing contained in it.

I will give another instance to make this clear. I remember having seen
two letters, written one by a French General, and another by
Abd-el-Kader, the chief of the enemies of the French in Algeria. These
letters were intended to convey identically the same thing; that is to
say, that some prisoners on one side were to be exchanged for the same
number of prisoners on the other side. It had been decided that the
French General and the Arab chief should say the same thing. I have seen
both. The French General writes two lines; very clear, distinct, and
polite, with nothing but the exact meaning he wanted to convey. But
Abd-el-Kader, meaning to write the same thing, writes a whole page,
about flowers, and jewels, and roses, and moonshine, and every thing of
the kind. His intention was to say exactly the same thing, to convey
identically the same meaning; but these things, translated from one
language to another, pass, as a celebrated German scholar says, "from
the Shemitic to the Japhetic; from the poetic language of the sons of
Shem, to the precise language of the sons of Japhet." This has been the
fault of the Roman Catholic Church in many dogmas, in many points of
very high importance: the sons of Japhet could not understand what the
sons of Shem meant. They thought they understood it, when they were
entirely in error, and gave to it a meaning altogether different from
what was intended.

I must add, that what helped them along in this belief of things, taken
in a literal sense, was Roman superstition. In that town, and in Italy,
have always prevailed the strangest superstitions. The most celebrated
Romans, men whose wisdom and whose glory have filled the world, if they
met, when they went out of their house in the morning, a hare in the
way, re-entered their house on the instant, and renounced any thing they
had to do, because meeting a hare was ominous of misfortune, and any
thing they should undertake that day would result in their confusion or
misfortune. When they put their foot in the wrong way, the left before
the right, or the right before the left, on the stone at the entrance of
a house, they stopped there and returned to their house, because every
thing they should do in that house would prove unfortunate, since they
had made a mistake in putting the wrong foot foremost when they entered
the house.

So there were a multitude of superstitions. You know when they were to
decide the greatest questions of peace or war, they consulted their
sacred chickens. They gave them grains of wheat, and if the chickens ate
it, or if they refused to eat it, or if they ate it too fast, or if the
chickens let fall a grain of wheat from their mouths,--these signs meant
that war would be successful, or that it would not be, and they decided
according to these whether there should be a war or not. And those great
magistrates, who were sometimes men of the greatest eminence, like
Cicero, were augurs. You know what Cicero says, "Two of us cannot meet
without laughing;" because they knew that their auguries were utterly
worthless, but the multitude thought they were true. So the Romans were
superstitious to the highest degree, and they have never ceased to be
so. There is superstition in the marrow of their bones. Many Romans are
ready to believe any thing to-day, at the present moment. I shall allude
to a single fact. They all believe devoutly in the evil eye; that there
are people who, if they look at you, will bring upon you some horrible
misfortune, disease, or death. They believe this so fully, that they
have a gesture, representing with their fingers a pair of horns; and,
when they meet any one who is supposed to have the evil eye, they
endeavor, in a secret way, to make that sign, to prevent misfortune from
coming upon them. It is believed, in Rome, that the present pope, who is
to them God on earth, who is to them the successor and vicar of Jesus
Christ, that he, as a man, has the evil eye. And when he passes through
the streets of Rome, a great many women, devoutly kneeling before him,
with their heads almost in the dust, craving to receive his blessing, as
he passes in his carriage, will, under their aprons, make this sign, to
preserve themselves from the effects of the evil eye. This is no
disparagement to his person; they think that the poor man cannot help
it; that there is no ill will in it; that it is fate; he has the evil
eye.

I could cite many other instances of this superstition; perhaps it will
be enough to refer to one more, and one that disgusted me completely. It
is the worship with which they surround the _Santo Bambino_. There is on
the Capitoline Hill a church that was formerly a heathen temple, and
which has kept an old name, "_Ara C[oe]li_," or "altar of Heaven." In
that church, the Franciscan monks keep a very ugly doll. This doll is
said to have been sculptured out of one of the olive-trees on the Mount
of Olives, and then Saint Luke is supposed to have painted it over.
Saint Luke must have been the painter of the poorest daubs that ever
were in the world, and the angels who took it to him must have been very
far from being connoisseurs of painting. This doll is covered with
diamonds, emeralds, sapphires, and other precious stones, of greatest
price. It is kept in a box on the altar, and, when you ask to see it,
the monks pray before the door, they light tapers, they produce the box,
and then the box is opened, and you see the hideous little wooden image.
Now, this _Santo Bambino_ is supposed to have healing properties. He
heals people, when they are rich enough to pay a good salary to him; he
is not a physician who heals for nothing. He has a magnificent carriage
of his own, and servants with his own livery; and, when any rich man
wants to be cured by him, the _Santo Bambino_ goes in his own carriage
to the man's house, carried on the knees of Franciscan monks, and cures
the patient,--if he can. Such is the belief of the country. But I could
not see any very great difference between that doll and the idols that
the old Romans had, and used in the same way. The idea is this: they
suppose that the _Santo Bambino_ represents Christ as a little child.

Not only were the old Romans superstitious, but we know, by historical
testimony coming from the heathen themselves, that at the time when
Christianity appeared there was an increase of superstition; there was a
general feeling of a want of something definite, something like a sort
of atonement; and at that time all sorts of ceremonies, all sorts of
bloody sacrifices, were introduced from Syria, from Libya, from the most
remote countries, and the Romans tried to find for their consciences
some satisfaction in those rites. For instance, you all know they had a
custom of having their sins expiated by means of what they called
_taurobolium_. A man had a grave dug in the ground, and then over that
grave was put a marble slab, with a great many holes in it, like a
sieve. In that grave the man stretched himself at full length, and over
the marble slab a bull was killed, in such a way that the blood fell
through the holes into the grave. When the bull was taken away, and the
marble slab was lifted, the man rose out of that grave perfectly covered
with the blood of the bull, entirely bathed in that blood. Then he was
supposed to be a new man, supposed to be washed of all his sins. He
believed that from that moment the anger of the gods had passed to the
bull, and that the blood of the bull had been shed instead of his own.
We find in Ovid, one of the poets of the time, the prayer of a man for
whom was about to be offered up the sacrifice of the black hen. He asks
the gods to take the heart of the hen instead of his own, the fibres of
the hen's body instead of the fibres of his own body. The poor black hen
was sacrificed in the most cruel way they could find; she must suffer as
long as possible, because then the anger of some god who was supposed to
pursue the man found full satisfaction. The ferocity of the god had
ample satisfaction in the torture of the poor black hen, and the sins of
the man were expiated. Then there was superstition upon superstition,
because, when the mangled remains of the unfortunate hen were thrown
into the street, if any person unconsciously put his foot on that body,
then he became the inheritor of the crimes of the first man, and of the
anger of the gods. They had a special name for those bloody remains of
the sacrificed fowl: they called them _purgamentum_, because they
thought that such a sacrifice purged a man of his sins. As nobody dared
lift or touch the body of the victim, they put a fence around it; and,
as long as there remained on the ground in the streets of Rome a vestige
of the poor bird, nobody would tread on that place; and the fence was
put there to prevent this. These were the superstitions of that time;
and Plutarch wrote a treatise to which he gives the title
[Greek: Deisidaimonia], which is translated very often by the word
"superstition;" but it means more than that, it means "terror of the
gods." It means that feeling which was more and more prevailing in the
Roman world, that the gods were to be feared; that there was anger in
heaven; that the earth could not defend itself against the bad will of a
supernatural power. We can very well understand that when Christianity
was preached to those people they were happy to take that religion of
hope, that religion of regeneration and sanctification. It was to them a
marvellous deliverance to be out of that old doctrine and in the new
one. But they carried with them many habits of thought, many things
which were inherent in the ancient religion. Among those things was the
habit of multiplying the divine being. They had been for a long series
of centuries polytheists, believing in many gods. With their
superstitious fears, they were always afraid there were not gods enough.
That was saying a good deal, for they had more than 30,000 of them at
the time of Christ. It was recognized that nobody could even know them
all by name.

Again you will excuse me if I use here a very familiar illustration to
make the leading thought of polytheism understood.

You know that in fairy tales the fairies are always called in to the
festival at the baptism of the infant child. The intention is to invite
them all, but there is always one forgotten; and that one curses the
child in some way or other; and then all the gifts of all the good
fairies cannot prevent the child from suffering, at least for a time,
from the bad will of the one that has been forgotten. This involves the
essential idea of polytheists. They had always the thought that all the
good gods whom they worshipped could not prevent any malevolent one who
had been neglected from hurting them; and they were always in search of
that one. They were always making altars "to the unknown god or gods,"
to be certain in that way to include them all. They were constantly
asking what gods were worshipped in such a country, in such a place; and
if it was a god that was not known among them, straightway they prepared
a place for his worship. They said, "He has no existence, very likely;
but if he has, if he lives, then we must sacrifice to him, to prevent
his spoiling the happiness that the other good gods wish to give us." So
there was an incessant adding to the immense number of gods. At the time
of Christ, they had so many of them that, from the time a grain of corn
was put into the ground to the time the harvest commenced, they had nine
different deities who in succession took charge of the corn that had
been put into the ground, and thus it passed from one god to another.
Nine of them were necessary while the grain was in the ground. Thus,
when the heathen became Christians, they had been in the constant habit
of adding gods to their heaven, of adding good men to their gods, and
also men not good, but whom they feared,--for all the emperors were made
gods the moment they died, so that one of them, who was rather a wit,
when he was dying said, "I feel that I am becoming a god." The heathen
had become so habituated to this that, when they became Christians, they
continued very naturally to multiply the number of the objects of
worship. They soon ceased to make the slightest difference between
Christ and the Father. In good time they unconsciously put Mary, the
mother of Christ, above Christ; now, without ever having this intention,
they put, in fact, Mary above the Father. And so on, adding always a new
god to a new worship, and always making the new worship as binding and
as efficacious as possible, to satisfy that polytheistic craving. They
did not understand their error in keeping between the infinite God and
themselves an immense number of minor deities. This craving was
unwholesome, but very sincere. That unconscious wish to multiply gods
and make saints has continued to this day; and no pope has canonized so
many saints as the present one, who is always trying to show that he
does more in this way than any of his predecessors.

This will suffice to give you an idea of what the old spirit of Rome
was, the whole tendency of the Roman mind, and what was brought by them
into the church. I must now ask you to go in imagination with me to the
tomb of one of those old Romans, who were not burned, according to the
custom of that period, say the Scipios. Suppose one of the Scipios taken
out of his tomb; and bring him into a Roman Catholic Church: do you
think he will be very much astonished? He will be astonished at one
thing,--by the crucifix, the image of the crucified Son of God. That was
completely contrary to the Roman ideal and their habit of thought. But
all the other things he will see will not astonish him at all. He had
seen them all his life in his own time. You believe, perhaps, that the
shape of a Roman Catholic Church at Rome will astonish a pagan? Not at
all. Cato had given the Romans the pleasure of enjoying, for the first
time, a portico with three ranges of columns, the middle aisle being
broader than the others; and at the end was what we call an apse, but
the ancients a conch. The end was rounded off, and thrown into the form
of a semi-circle, and the tribunal for the prætor or judge was placed in
that half-circle at the end. This portico was called a _stoa basilica_,
and the first Roman Christian churches were built on that plan.
Afterwards, the idea came of making the church in the shape of a cross;
and then a smaller basilica was placed across the other, forming the
transept of the church. But those long ranges of columns remained, with
the same wide space in the middle, and narrower aisles on either side.
The basilica was the form of public buildings most in fashion in Rome at
that time. There the gothic style was never popular. Even now, of four
or five hundred churches in Rome, only one, the Minerva, is gothic. When
Christian architecture was born, Christian architecture accepted the
heathen plan.

In the new church, in that _basilica_, what do we find? We find holy
water at the door. That was exactly what you found in the pagan temple,
only it was called lustral water. In the temple, my Scipio, who goes
with me, recognizes all his old habits of thought, all the old emblems
of his religious devotion. He sees a number of statues, or images; but
he has seen those all his life. There is not only a central shrine, but
there are small chapels. The saints have a golden circle round their
heads: Christians call it the _aura_, the ancients called it the
_nimbus_; but it was exactly the same thing. They had it around the
heads of their deities in painting and sculpture, and so on. There are
censers and there are tapers burning there; and there are all the
ornaments a pagan was accustomed to see in his temple. All those things
had been kept, had been re-established, and the pagans had brought them
with them into the Catholic churches. When I went for the first time to
Naples, the man who showed me the museum there showed me feet, legs, and
arms, hands, eyes, and ears, in stone. He said, "These are _ex voto_."
People who were ill gave to some of the gods, the ones they chose, these
things as marks of gratitude for having been cured. The cicerone told
me, "You see, sir, it is exactly the same thing we have in our
churches." And so it is. In all the churches in Naples and Rome, and in
the Roman Catholic churches all over Spain and France, you see, in wax,
in gold, in silver, and in stone, such legs and arms, eyes and ears. It
is exactly the same thing. The heathen man said to his god, "I will pay
you by this mark of honor and gratitude, by this mark of your power and
your glory, if you cure me." The Roman Catholic says exactly the same
thing to a saint, to the Virgin, sometimes to Jesus, and very rarely to
God.

I cannot mention here all the other details, like funeral services at
the end of the year, like funeral chapels, like many other institutions
that exist in the Roman Catholic Church, that are practised every day in
it, and that are exactly the same, so far as religious ideas go, as were
practised in the pagan churches. But I must add something of more
consequence than that, about the worship of human beings, and especially
of the worship of the Virgin Mary. It was nothing new to the Pagans to
worship a woman, and especially to worship a virgin. That was one of the
ideas the most familiar to their devotion. In Rome they had the temple
of Hestia or Vesta, who was supposed to be a virgin; and she had around
her nuns who were pledged to live in celibacy, and punished by death if
they did not remain true to their vow. In Greece it was the same thing
with Pallas. Perhaps you all know that in Athens, the largest, most
perfect, and most beautiful of the Greek temples--immensely superior to
any edifice I ever saw in any country--is called the Parthenon, which
means the Virgin Temple. That temple is the temple of Pallas,--Athene,
or Minerva,--who was the principal deity of Athens. Thus that idea was
perfectly familiar to them, and they only kept it, and brought it with
them into Christianity.

I have spoken of monks. You must not believe that the monks are by any
means a Roman Catholic invention. In the East there have been monks in
all times and in all religions. It seems to have been a special habit or
taste of the people of the East to give some men no other business, no
other work to do, but to live in solitude, and pray for them; and some
men have always, in those very hot countries, where it is exceedingly
tiresome to work, liked to live in perpetual prayer better than any
other more fatiguing labor. We find the monk in all times and countries
in the East, then in the West; and he has been imported from paganism
into Christianity, like all the rest. I do not believe there is a
religion more completely contrary to the monastic feeling than the
religion of Christ. I do not think there was ever a type more radically
contrary to the type of the monk, than the figure of Christ as we find
it in the Bible. However, that old monkish spirit of the Orient was
always known to the Romans from the beginning; for they had priests and
monks from the time their city began. That spirit has, like other
things, been smuggled into the Church, though it was contrary to the
spirit of Christianity.

I must recall one last rite of great importance. Both the old Romans and
the old Jews had, as a principal part of their worship, the rite of
sacrifice. The origin of it was simply this: that men in the first place
possessed nothing but flocks, and they gave to God one head of their
flock, one sheep, or one bull, as being the only riches they had to
give. Before they had houses, before they had garments, before they had
any other thing,--money they were very far from having,--men had to eat,
and they had flocks because they wanted to have meat to eat; and thus
they gave to God the only necessity of life to them, the only thing they
understood the importance of. And they gave him the whole animal, not
reserving to themselves any part of it, in some cases; in other cases, a
part of it only, making a meal of the rest for themselves. To give a
part to God was one essential element of their worship, the rite of
sacrifice; and we find that the rite grew out of that, and nothing else.
It was a habit deeply rooted in the Roman mind, and at the same time
already familiar to the Jews; and when those Christians who had been
Jews spoke of Christ to the Romans, they could not prevent that Roman or
Jewish habit from taking double force, and double space in religion.
What happened? It happened that the old Romans and old Jews wanted a
sacrifice; wanted to give something to God; wanted a victim; and then
came this strange fact, very easy to understand however, of which we
find traces in the first days of Christianity,--that there was no better
victim to offer to God than Christ. When they had identified completely
Christ with the Father, then there was no greater victim to offer to
God than God himself. Therefore, they had a sacrifice that is called
"the mass." You know the official name is "sacrifice of the mass." It
consists in this. The priest takes the host, which is merely bread,--it
is nothing but a little flour and water, made into bread,--he pronounces
the consecrating words; then, after he pronounces them, there is no
bread, there is no flour; instead of the bread, instead of the flour,
there is Jesus Christ. According to the Council of Trent, that _is_
Jesus Christ, his body, his blood, his soul, and his divinity; it is
Jesus Christ; is perfect God. And this has been, by an old Roman
Catholic writer, very clearly expressed in these three words: "The
priest, what is he? what does he do? _Creatus Creatorem creat._" He is a
creature who creates the Creator. After that comes the second great part
of the sacrifice of the mass. There is God, and the priest sacrifices
God to God. And how? _Sacrificat manducando._ That is to say, according
to the formal explanation, he sacrifices God by eating God. This is the
sacrifice of the mass. If the Roman mind had not been accustomed, as I
have shown you, to superstition, to all literalism, to the love of the
law and the letter, even when the law or the letter was absurd, they
would not easily have accepted all this; but with their turn of mind,
with their way of taking things, that was exactly what they wished for,
and that was what they adopted. Not at once: it was very long in
elaborating itself. It was so completely, I cannot say otherwise, so
completely absurd, that it required a great deal of time to make it so
precise; but they attained to that at last, and they could not but do
so. See, then, what a man the priest is. He has before him bread, and he
makes God; he afterwards sacrifices God; he is almost a God himself. At
the moment when he makes God, he seems to be superior to God; at the
moment when he sacrifices God, by eating him, he seems superior to God.
Thence comes the immense power of the priesthood, of priestcraft. And as
if this were not enough, in the mass, as you know, the priest has not
only the host, but he has the wine, the cup. The other members of the
church have not the cup, because they must not be equal to the priest
even in the communion; even in the act of uniting themselves with God.
Laymen cannot arrive at the height of glory to which the priest arrives;
they must eat the host when it is given to them, but they cannot touch
the cup; that is reserved to the priest, a sort of heavenly, or divine,
or godlike character. Even as the Romans had respected their old
bridge-makers, their old _pontifices_, their old priests, whom they
considered the bulwarks of their town, they respected afterwards the
priests of the Roman Catholic Church. So the mass was established, with
all its consequences.

This is not all. I must explain exactly how a part of the heathenish
religion answered, in the time of Jesus, the wants of the heathen better
than the more natural religion of the Christians. At the time of Christ,
many Romans did not believe in thirty thousand gods and in all the
absurd and indecent history of those thirty thousand deities, but they
had a form of worship that had become purer and purer. They had what
they called "Mysteries." In Greece, and in Rome also, there were
"Mysteries." These were ceremonies in which great philosophic and
religious lessons were given. There exists a very touching letter from
Plutarch to his wife, written at the time he lost his only daughter, and
when they were in the deepest affliction and desolation. He writes to
his wife, who was separated from him at that time, a very kind and
loving letter, trying to give her comfort and hope. He says to her,
"Remember the beautiful things we have seen together in the Mysteries of
Bacchus." You must not believe, as many would at first believe, that the
Mysteries of Bacchus were nothing but drunkenness and disorder: they
were something else. They were like the Mysteries of Ceres, the Goddess
of Corn, and like the representations, in other cases, of the
immortality of the soul. They were a sort of tragedy in which, less by
word than by singing, and by acting especially, was shown to men that,
when the body is interred in the ground, the soul lives, and the soul
shall rise to fulness of life. A grain of wheat hidden in the ground
remained hidden there for weeks before coming to life. That was the
emblem of the new life of immortality. Now, this teaching, good in
itself, true in itself, but given in dramatic images, was at that time
the very best, soundest, most human, and most natural part of
heathenism. And then it happened that Mysteries were acted, not only in
the heathen churches, but in Christian churches; that the history of
Christ, that the death of Christ, that the resurrection of Christ, took
the place of the resurrection of Proserpine, the daughter of Ceres, who
represented wheat and corn; and then Christianity became a sort of
subject of sacred myths, sacred plays, that were very devoutly acted,
and that kept their title of "Mysteries." As soon as we see something of
the dark ages, and what the practice of worship was, we see this same
thing. It is going on in all countries in some measure. You may see it
in the Roman Catholic churches during Easter week. You may see then
that, when Christ dies, all the lights are put out, save one very small
light, because that represents the moment when the sky was covered with
darkness at his death. And you hear in a choir some persons sing the
words of the people who screamed "Crucify him!" and others repeating the
words of Caiaphas and the words of Christ. This "Mystery," this serious,
devout play, is acted in all Roman Catholic churches. When Christ is
dead, the host is taken away from the altar, and it is carried into the
tomb, carried into some lower chapel, from which it comes back to the
great altar on Easter morning, on the day of the resurrection. That
solemn play is going on in all Roman Catholic countries at the present
time, and that is a "Mystery." Such is also the "Mystery" that was
played in Germany, at Oberammergau (Bavaria), during the last year, and
is played there every ten years. It is a devout, religious, serious,
dramatic representation of our Lord's suffering, death, and
resurrection. The mass in itself was in the beginning a Mystery; it is
often called so; it is often called in old Roman Catholic books and
often in modern ones the "Mystery of the Mass." It was a representation
of the death and sacrifice of Jesus; but the Roman Catholic spirit
coming in declared that this Mystery was not, like others, a mere
representation, a sacred play, but a reality; and according to the
doctrine proclaimed by the Council of Trent, three hundred years ago,
the sacrifice of the mass is much more than a representation of Christ's
death, of Christ's sacrifice, for he is sacrificed anew, he suffers
death really anew. And it has been declared, because some Protestant
opponents were astonished at it, that every time any priest says
mass,--and every priest must say mass at least once every day,--every
time a priest says mass, Christ suffers again, and dies again,
sacrificed by the priest for the redemption of human kind. This is the
doctrine of the mass, and this gives it a very tragic, grand, and solemn
effect in the eyes of those who believe in it. Yet this again is nothing
but Roman literalism, the Roman way of taking every thing literally.

Is all this real Christianity? At all events I have said enough, I hope,
to give you an idea of the way in which the religion of Jesus of
Nazareth, as he was called, preached by him on the hills of Galilee,--a
religion that was quite spirit, and quite truth; a religion that had at
that time no bleeding, no consecrated man, but that was alive by the
Spirit of God in the conscience and in the hearts of men,--how that
religion, purely spiritual as it was, became all the pomp, all the
exterior complications, all the dramatic intricacies of the Church of
Rome.

And here I stop to ask again, Can all this suit the urgent necessities
of our times? Is that the truth after which our souls hunger and thirst?

Now I must, before I end, say a few words to you about the late changes.
Do those changes make matters better or worse? Let us pass over ages and
centuries, and come to the present day, because I say we must make some
change in our way of resisting the Church of Rome. I must state, and
very rapidly, what these changes are. There are three of them. The first
is, that a new dogma has been established. The new dogma amounts to
this, without going into details, that Mary, the mother of Christ, was
created, at the moment she began to exist, exempt from original sin. All
human beings are guilty of Adam's sin, with one exception, and that
exception is Mary. That exception dates from the very first instant of
her existence. She never was, even in thought or in feeling, a sinner;
she is consequently out of the pale of humanity; she is not a human
being; she is more than a woman, she is something godlike from before
her birth. That is the dogma. It is not new; it was invented in Spain;
it is a Spanish, an Andalusian dogma. It was invented at a time when the
Catholics in Spain were laboring very hard to expel from their country
the Moors, the African Moslems, who were masters of a great part of
Spain, and who had more science, more art, and more literary culture
than the Christians of Spain, but who had absurd doctrines about the
family and about religion, as well you know. Nothing could displease
them more, could astonish them more, or could confound all their ideas
more, than to tell them that a woman was godlike. They thought, as all
Moslems have thought, that a woman had no soul; and here was a woman who
was a goddess before her birth, who was always a goddess. This was
something absolutely incredible to them, and it showed the great
difference between Christians and Moslems, between Spaniards and Arabs.
This became the general rule among the Spaniards of the southern part of
the country, in Andalusia especially; and when they met one another they
did not salute with words of good greeting, but for centuries it was the
habit in Andalusia, when one Spaniard met another, to say to him, _Ave
Maria purissima_, and the other answered, _Sin pecado concepida_, which
means that that dogma was proclaimed every time two persons met. This
dogma has been taken into special favor by the very powerful order of
Jesuits. They thought it was important to the church; it was putting
Mary in the highest honor, to have that dogma become the law of the
church. But up to the present century, up to last year in the Roman
Catholic Church, people could believe it or not; now the Pope has
declared that henceforth every man who does not believe that dogma is
eternally lost and damned. This he has decreed, after consulting with
some bishops, with whom he conferred about it, but declaring that he did
so of his own accord, because, as pope, he had a right to decide on
that. He said, it is no new doctrine; it has always been in the church.
As the great writer Father Perrone wrote, "That dogma has been
developing itself in the church a long time." When I saw the Church of
Rome speaking of a dogma "developing itself," I thought, This is the
beginning of the end. If they understand that dogmas develop themselves,
that they have not fallen like aerolites from the heavens, it seems to
me that that is the end of infallibility. Some people think it was the
beginning of infallibility, that it was the Pope for the first time
declaring a dogma for all men without consulting officially or legally
any one, and that when he had done this he had augmented his power. I
must remark here, that when a pope is very weak, the general rule is, he
does something extremely strong. When he is extremely weak, politically,
materially, he generally makes some great demonstration of spiritual
power. When Pope Gregorius VII. kept Henry in his shirt a whole night at
the door of the castle of Canossa without opening the door to him,
saying, "You are a sinner, do penance,"--when he did that, the Pope had
been expelled from Rome, he had lost Rome, therefore he must prove his
immense spiritual power, because his temporal power was lost. And when
the present Pope has done acts of authority greater than any other pope,
it has not been because he was strong, but because he was weak; to
remain on his throne he wanted to have the bayonets of Louis Bonaparte
to keep him in power. His own subjects would very soon have shown him a
second time the way to the frontier, if they had not been prevented by
the bayonets of that man. Thus the Pope did more towards asserting and
confirming his own power than any of his two hundred and fifty odd
predecessors. When afterwards he took a new step, it was in continuance
of this. He called a council when three hundred years had elapsed since
an [oe]cumenical council had been called. I know old Roman Catholic
families who had been waiting for centuries for the moment when an
[oe]cumenical council should assemble, to denounce before that council
the encroachments of the Pope, and to ask that the popedom be kept
within bounds for the future. Pio IX. had an [oe]cumenical council
called, and held it in his own house, in the Vatican. And there, in one
end of one of the transepts of the immense church of Saint Peter, the
Pope had himself declared infallible by the council. Thus all the other
councils which had been the hope of such persons in the church as could
not accept every word of the Pope, all those councils have been
sacrificed, have abdicated, in the last of them, at the foot of the
Pope. Now, the Roman Catholic Church has become very logically, what it
ought to become, the same thing in the spiritual world that the Roman
Empire became in the temporal world. The Roman Emperor was every thing;
there had been priests and magistrates who had great powers; then the
emperor made himself dictator, consul, tribune of the people; made
himself high bridge-maker; took upon himself all dignities. He was every
thing; and then the whole Roman Empire was one man; and sometimes it
happened that that man was a mad man like Caligula, who said, "I am
sorry that all men have not one head that I might cut it off." Such was
the unity of the Roman Empire, and we see the same fact in the Roman
Catholic Church to this extent, that there is one human brain that
thinks for all Roman Catholics in the world, and if that human brain
decides that such a thing is or is not, all other human brains must
believe it, or be damned eternally; there is no choice. This is
perfectly logical; this is not an unexpected change; this must have come
to pass. As the Pope became physically weak, the more absolute became
the necessity that this should be done. Now, he is weak, he has lost
Rome. Although it was not in my way, I passed through Rome a few months
ago for the purpose of seeing Rome free, and it was an immense joy to
see that. I had seen Rome groaning under that proud, domineering
government of the priests, who declared that their government was the
best in the world, while the whole world called it emphatically _il mal
governo_. Now I have seen it free; and I think no Bonaparte of France,
nor any French Government, nor any other government, had any right to
give up Rome to the priests, to prevent the Romans from being masters in
their own house, from being free in their own city. I must declare to
you, that if in one sense the Roman Catholic Church has lost a great
deal because she has lost that great tradition, lost that long habit of
ruling in Rome, and the high prestige that comes from it, yet the Roman
Catholic Church has gained more perhaps than she has lost in this. You
must not believe that the Roman Catholic Church is to disappear
to-morrow, or the next day: that shall not happen. There are hundreds of
thousands of souls who like better to have one man on a throne thinking
for them, taking on his conscience and his honor the question of their
salvation,--they like that better than to think for themselves; and
there will be Roman Catholic churches for a long time to come. They will
even be stronger in one sense, because that temporal power was so
exercised that it caused great weakness; and now the Pope will be
strengthened; will find more interest and sympathy, because he is a king
without a crown, a king without a throne: in his weakness he will find
new strength.

What must we do, we Protestants, in the presence of this fact? Must we
exaggerate, must we be unfair in our attacks? No. Must we go to sleep,
thinking there is nothing to do? No, not that either. We must work; we
must work steadily to give light and instruction to all. We have
here,--and I have tried in a very rapid way to give you an idea of
it,--we have here history. That is the greatest of weapons in such a
case as this. Usurpers never like history, because they know very well
that history condemns them. We must make history known, make the facts
known, and proclaim liberty and the rights of the human conscience. We
must do that over the whole world. I do not believe that Protestantism,
as it has often been said, is nothing else but Roman Catholicism
stripped of some of its abuses, and without some of its errors. It is
something else. If there were time, and I could begin now instead of
ending, I would try to show you that in the history of Protestantism,
and even before Protestantism appeared, there has always been, next to
that stream of power of Roman Catholicism, always becoming stronger and
more encroaching up to these last days, another current of protest;
there have always been men struggling for faith with liberty, who said,
"That cannot be;" who understood better the Gospel, who liked the spirit
of the Gospel, the spirit of God in Christ, better than the spirit of
Rome. For centuries their mouths may have been closed; their speaking
and teaching punished by death; but always they became more and more
numerous, and active, and vigorous; and then came the great day of
Luther. Protestantism has not been a negation, a remnant of Roman
Catholicism, the negative side of Christianity. I cannot adopt that idea
in the least. True Protestantism is full of the spirit of the Gospel; it
is the living soul of Christ in the Church, it embodies the perfect
conviction that there is truth, that there is salvation, that there is
liberty, in the Gospel, and nowhere else so completely.

Now, we must consider the Roman Catholic Church as being an organization
of power, the most dreadful, the most tyrannical, the most crushing
organization of power that ever was. It is the master-piece of Roman
genius. It has been preparing during centuries, and it has been complete
only since yesterday. It is a great organization against liberty,
against man's rights, against man's conscience, for the honor of a
church and of a man. And this we must resist, too. In my country, I
declare that the cause of all our ills, the fact that is at the basis of
all our suffering and all our misfortunes, is nothing else than Roman
Catholicism. This is against the conscience of many souls; this throws
many people into sheer Atheism, because they see no choice between
kissing the shoe of the Pope, as is done in ceremonies, and denying the
existence of God. So they deny God rather than submit to the Pope. We
must give them sound teaching, religious teaching; we must give them
the Gospel. And I came to this country to say these things to you; to
ask you to help us with all your might, and with all your heart, to do
what is necessary should be done in France to-day; what will be
necessary to be done in this country sooner or later, and what will be
necessary to be done in all countries, to show more and more that "where
is the Spirit of the Lord, there is liberty."




SELFHOOD AND SACRIFICE

By ORVILLE DEWEY.


The title which I have chosen for this discourse, is Selfhood and
Sacrifice. My purpose is, to consider what place these principles have
in human culture. I use the word, selfhood, rather than self-regard or
self-interest, because I wish to go back to the original
principle--selfhood, according to the analogy of our language,
describing the simple and absolute condition in which self exists; as
manhood does that of man, or childhood, that of a child. And I say
sacrifice, rather than self-sacrifice, because the true principle does
not require the sacrifice of our highest self, but only of that which
unlawfully hinders outflow from self.

The subject of culture has been brought before the public of late, by
Professor Huxley, and Matthew Arnold, and Mr. Shairp. I do not propose
to enter into the questions which have engaged their able pens, but to
go back to those primary and foundation principles, which I have
proposed to consider--the one of which is the centre, and the other, the
circumference of human culture,--Selfhood and Sacrifice.

It is the object of this course of lectures, in part at least as I
understand it, to discuss this subject--to discuss, _i.e._ the
principles and grounds, on which right reason and rational Christianity
propose to build up a good and exalted character. Now with regard to
what Christianity teaches, has it never occurred to you, or has it never
seemed to you, in reading the Gospels, that they appeal to
self-interest, to the desire to be saved, in a way that is at variance
with the loftiest motives? But it is appealed to, and therefore is, in
some sense, sanctioned. And yet, as if this self-interest were something
wrong, the prevalence of it in the world, the world's selfishness in
other words, is represented by many preachers, as if it were the sum of
all wickedness, the proof indeed, of total depravity. Here then, it
seems to me, whether we look at Christianity or at the teachings of the
pulpit, there is urgent need of discrimination. And there is another
aspect of the same subject, which seems to require attention; and that
is what is called, individualism--the mentally living, if not for, yet
in and out of ourselves; claiming to find all the springs and forces of
faith and culture within ourselves, to the exclusion of the proper
influence of society, of Christianity, of the whole great realm of the
past, by which we have been trained and formed; individualism, which
says, "I belong to myself, and to nobody else, and do not choose to be
brought or organized into any system of faith or action with anybody
else." This, indeed, is an extreme to which, perhaps, but few minds go;
but there is a tendency of this kind, which needs to be looked into.

Now there is a way of thinking, in matters of practical expediency, to
which I confess that I am committed by my life-long reflections; and
which has always prevented me from going to the extreme with any party,
whether in reforms, in politics, in religious systems, or in any thing
else; and that is, to look to the mean in things; to look upon human
nature and human culture, as held in the balance between opposing
principles. With this view, I shall first undertake to show that the
principle of self-regard, or of individualism, is right and lawful--is
indeed, an essential principle of culture.

There is a remarkable passage in the old "Theologia Germanica," which
hits, I think, the very point in this matter of self-regard. Speaking of
its highest man, it says, "All thought of self, all self-seeking,
self-will, and what cometh thereof, must be utterly lost, surrendered
and given over to God, _except in so far as they are necessary to make
up a person_." This personality, this stand-point, we must hold to, go
where we will.

But let me state more precisely what it is, that is here conceded, and
must be maintained; and why it is important to defend and justify it. I
call it selfhood; and the word, I conceive, is philosophically necessary
to meet the case. Because it is a principle, that goes behind
selfishness; and of which selfishness is the excess and abuse.
Selfishness calculates, overreaches, circumvents. But selfhood is
simpler. It is the instinctive, instantaneous, uncalculating rush of our
faculties, to preserve, protect and help ourselves. Selfishness proposes
to take advantage of others; selfhood only to take care of itself. It is
not, as a principle of our nature, a depraved instinct; animals possess
it. It is not moral, or immoral, but simply unmoral. It is a simple
force, necessary to our self-preservation, to our individuality, to our
personality. The highest moral natures feel it as well as the lowest.
The martyr, who gives up every thing else, holds his integrity fast and
dear. It is written of the great Martyr, that, "for the joy that was set
before him, he endured the cross, despising the shame." No being that
is not an idiot, can be divested of all care and regard for himself. And
not only does necessity enforce, but justice defends the principle. If
happiness is a good, and there are two equal amounts of it, the one of
which is mine, and the other my neighbor's, I may in strict justice,
value and desire my own as much as his. If I love his more than my own,
I go beyond the commandment. It is not worth while to put any Utopian
strain upon the bond of virtue; nay, it does positive harm.

Yet this is constantly done; to the injury of virtue, of conscience, and
of a proper self-respect. In our theories of culture, we demand of
ourselves, what is impossible, what is unjust to ourselves, what
repudiates a part of the very nature we would cultivate. We demand of
ourselves, and we suppose that Christianity demands of us, a certain
unattainable perfection,--or what we call perfection,--a sinking of
ourselves out of sight, and an absorption into the love of God and men,
quite beyond our reach: and failing of that--thinking it entirely out of
our sphere, we give up the proper rational endeavor to be Christians. We
make the highest virtue something exceptional, instead of regarding it
as a prize for us all. We imagine that some few have attained it; that
Jesus did, and that a few persons, denominated _saints_, have approached
him; but that for the common run of men, this is all out of the
question. The fact is, that Christianity is regarded by many, as an
enigma, a secret of the initiated, as an idle vision or hard
exaction--not as a rational culture. Listen to the conversation of the
mart or the drawing-room, you will find that the high Christian law is
but a mocking dream in their eyes. "Giving to him that asketh, and from
him that would borrow, turning not away, and to him that takes from us
our coat, giving our cloak also; and turning the other cheek to the
smiter;"--what is this, they say, but extravagance and fanaticism? As if
they did not know that there is such a figure of speech as hyperbole;
and that it was perfectly natural, in a society where the poor and the
weak were trodden under foot, for the greatest heart that ever was, thus
to pour out itself in pleadings for sympathy, commiseration and
kindness. But the same Master said, "It is profitable for thee--it is
better for thee," to have some of thy pleasures cut off--thine offending
hand or eye; rather _that_, than to have thy whole being whelmed in
misery.

It is really necessary in this matter, not only to vindicate
Christianity as a reasonable religion, but to vindicate human nature to
itself; to save it from the abjectness of feeling that the necessity of
self-help is an ignoble necessity. Men say, "Yes, we are all selfish, we
are all bad;" and they sink into discouragement or apathy, under that
view.

The conditions of true culture are attracting increased attention at the
present time; and it is natural that they should, when men's minds are
getting rid of theologic definitions and assumptions, and are coming to
take broad and manly views of the subject. I am endeavoring to make my
humble contribution to it; and with this view, to show, in the first
place, what part our very selfhood, both of right and of necessity, has
in it.

This principle lies in the very roots of our being; and it is developed
earliest in our nature. Before the love of right, of virtue, of truth,
appears this self-regard. Disinterestedness is of later growth. Infancy
comes into the world like a royal heir, and takes possession, as if the
world were made for itself alone. Itself is all it knows; it will by and
by, take a wider range. There is a natural process of improvement in the
very progress of life. "You will get better," says a dramatic
satirist,[7] "as you get older; all men do. They are worst in childhood,
improve in manhood, and get ready, in old age, for another world. Youth
with its beauty and grace, would seem bestowed on us, for some such
reason, as to make us partly endurable, till we have time to become so
of ourselves, without their aid, when they leave us. The sweetest child
we all smile on, for his pleasant want of the whole world to break up,
or suck in his mouth, seeing no other good in it--would be roughly
handled by that world's inhabitants, if he retained those angelic,
infantile desires, when he has grown six feet high, black and bearded;
but little by little, he sees fit to forego claim after claim on the
world, puts up with a less and less share of its good as his proper
portion, and when the octogenarian asks barely for a sup of gruel or a
fire of dry sticks, and thanks you as for his full allowance and right
in the common good of life,--hoping nobody will murder him--he who began
by asking and expecting the whole world to bow down in worship to
him--why, I say, he is advanced far onward, very far, nearly out of
sight."

[Footnote 7: Browning: A Soul's Tragedy, p. 250.]

This advancement, thus springing out of the very experience of life, I
am yet to consider, and have it most at heart to consider. It is of such
priceless worth, it so embraces all that is noble in humanity, that the
importance of the opposite principle, is liable to be quite overlooked.
Selfishness, which is the excess of a just self-regard, is the one form
of all evil in the world. The world cries out upon it, and heaps upon it
every epithet, expressive of meanness, baseness and guilt. And let it
bear the branding scorn; but let us not fail to see, though selfishness
be the satirist's mark, and the philosopher's reproach, and the
theologian's argument, the real nature and value of the principle, from
which it proceeds.

Selfhood I have preferred to call it; self-love, be it, if you please.
It is that, which satire and false criticism have misconstrued, when
they have said that love of kindred, of friends, of country, of God
himself, is but self-love. The mistake arises from that primal and vital
part and participation which ourself has in every thing that we enjoy or
love or adore. This magnificent _I_--and I emphasize it, because all
meanness is thought to be concentred in that word--this mysterious and
magnificent _I_--this that one means, when he says I--we may utter, but
can never explain, nor fully express it. There are great men in the
world, whose lives are of far more importance than mine--statesmen,
commanders, kings--but _I_--no being can feel an intenser interest in
his individuality than I do in mine; no being can be of more importance
to himself than I am to myself; the very poles of thought and being turn
upon that slender line; that simple unity, like the unit in figures,
swells to infinite multiplication; that one letter, that single stroke
of pen or type, may be varied and complicated, till it writes the
history of the world. "I think, therefore I am," said the philosopher;
but the bare utterance of the word I, yields a vaster inference. No
animal ever knew what that word means. It is some time before the little
child learns to say, I. It says, "Willy or Ellen wants this or
that--will go here or there." What is insanity, but the wreck of this
personality? The victim loses himself. And the morally insane, the
prodigal, when he returns to reason and virtue, comes to himself.

"A man's self," says Thackeray, "must always be serious to him, under
whatever mask or disguise or uniform he presents it to the public." Yes,
though it were as mime, harlequin, jester fool almost; nor could there
be a more deplorable or desperate condition for a human being, than to
account himself nothing, or nothing worth, or worthy only to be the butt
of universal scorn and contempt. From this utter ruin, every man is
protected by that mysterious and momentous personality that dwells
within him. We may be little in comparison with the general mass of
interests, little in comparison with kingdoms, little in comparison with
the swelling grandeur of thrones and empires, little in comparison with
the great orb that rolls round the sun, and bears millions of such; but
we are forever great in the sense of individual destiny. _This_ swells
beyond kingships, grandeurs, empires, worlds, to infinitude and
eternity.

There is another element in this selfhood, to be considered, besides its
conscious importance, and that is free will--itself also unmoral, but
indispensable. For imagine a rational being to be placed in this world,
_without_ free will. He can choose neither wrong nor right. He has a
conscience, but no freedom; no power to choose any thing. It is, I
think, an incongruous and impossible kind of existence; but imagine it.
Evils, troubles, temptations press against this being, and he can do
nothing; he cannot even will to resist. Could there be a condition more
horrible? No; man is a nobler and happier being than this amounts to.
Free will is put in him, on purpose to fight the great battle against
evil. He could not fight, if he could not will. He could not choose the
right, without being free to choose the wrong; for choosing one path
without being at liberty to take the other, would be no choosing. Free
will is to fight the battle. It is a glorious prerogative. And man, I
believe, is out of all proportion, happier, with this power, all its
aberrations included, than he would be without it. I am glad for my
part, that I am not passing through this world, like a car on a
railroad, or turning round like a wheel in a mill; that I can go, this
way or that, take one path or another; that I can read, or write, or
study, or labor, or do business; and that when the great trial-hour,
between right and wrong, comes, though I may choose the wrong, yet that
I _can_ choose the right. What better would there be for me than
this--what better constitution of a rational nature? I know of no better
possible.

Selfhood, then--this interest in ourselves, being seen to be right, and
the play of free will which is a part of it desirable; let us turn
finally to the useful working of the principle. You may have said in
listening to me thus far, "What need of insisting so much upon
self-regard, which we all perfectly well understand?" I doubt whether it
is so well understood; and this must be my apology. We have seen that
the principle is native and necessary to us; let us look a moment, at
its utility.

I am put in charge of myself--of my life, first of all. So strong is the
impulse to keep and defend it, that self-preservation has been called
the first law of our being. But that argues an antecedent
fact--self-appreciation. Why preserve that which we value not? We
defend ourself, because we prize ourself. We defend our life, with the
instant rush of all our faculties to the rescue. "Very selfish," one may
say; "And why does a man care so much for himself; he isn't worth it."
He can't help it. He obeys the primal bond; he is a law to himself. Is
it not well? Man's life would perish in a thousand ways, if he did not
thus care for it. The great, universal and most effective guardianship
over human life everywhere, is--not government nor law, not guns nor
battlements, not sympathy, not society--but this self-care.

I am put in charge of my own comfort, of my sustenance. I must provide
for it. And to provide for it, I must have property--house, land,
stores, means--something that must be my own, and not another's. If I
were an animal, I might find food and shelter in the common storehouse
of nature's bounty. But I have other wants; if I have no provision for
them that is my own; if some godless International League, or Agrarian
Law, could break down all the rights of property, there would be an end
to industry, to order, to comfort, and eventually to life itself.
Whatever evils, whatever monstrous crimes come of the love of gain, its
extinction would be infinitely worse.

I am put in charge of my good name, my place among men. I must regard
it. I am sinking to recklessness about virtue if I cease to value
approbation. Even the martyr, looking to God alone, seeks approval. And
good men's approbation is the reflection of that. To seek honor from men
at the expense of principle, is what the Master condemns--not the desire
of honor. It has been made a question whether the love of approbation
should be appealed to, in schools. It cannot be kept out, from there,
nor from anywhere else. If it could, if the vast network of social
regards, in which men are now held, were torn asunder, society would
fall to pieces.

Finally, I am put in charge of my virtue--of that above all. And that I
must get and keep for myself; no other can do it for me. Another may
stretch out the hand to defend me from a fatal blow; another may endow
me with wealth; another may give me the praise I do not deserve; but no
friendly intervention, no deed of gift, no flattery, no falsity, can
give me inward truth and integrity. That solemn point in human
experience, that question upon which every thing hangs--shall I do
right?--or shall I do wrong?--is shrouded in the secrecy and silence of
my own mind. All the power in the world, cannot do for me the thing that
I must do for myself. To me, to me, the decision is committed.

Now what I have been saying, is this; it is well that that self-regard,
upon which so much is devolved, should be strong; that there should be
no apathy, no indifference, upon this point; that if ever a man wanders
away into recklessness, into idleness, into disgrace, into utter moral
delinquency and lawlessness, he should be brought to a stand, and
brought back again, if possible, by this intense and uncontrollable
regard for himself--for his own well-being. I do not resolve every thing
in human nature, into the desire of well being. I do not say that the
love of life, of property, of reputation, still less of virtue, is the
same as the love of happiness; but I say that to the pursuit of all
these a man is urged, driven, almost forced, by this love of his own
well-being; nay more to the pursuit of the highest eventually, and that,
by the very laws of his nature.

Let us now turn to the other principle which I propose to discuss--that
which opens the whole field of our culture--the principle that carries
us out of, and beyond ourselves.

It has been no part of my design, in discussing the principle of
selfhood, to show the hinderance to culture, and the evil every way,
that come from the abuse of it. That will be sufficiently manifest, if
it be made to appear, that all culture and happiness are found in the
opposite direction. But if I wanted to put this in the strongest light,
I should point to the pain and obstruction which are experienced in a
diseased self-consciousness. It would be a powerful argument for that
going out of self, which I am about to speak of. Self, if it is a
necessary stand-point, is yet liable to be always in our way. A morbid
anxiety about our position, our credit with men, the good or ill opinion
others have of our talents, tastes or merits, causes more misery, I am
inclined to think, than any other form of human selfishness. See a
company of persons, inthralled with music, charmed by eloquence,
transported by some heroic action set before them; and they forget
themselves; they do not think, how they look, how they are dressed, what
others think of them, in their common delight.

The sense of this, I believe it was, that lay at the bottom of the old
Buddhist doctrine of Nirwana--_i.e._, self-oblivion. To lose this
wearisome, diseased self, seemed to Gautama, the great apostle of
Buddhism, to be the chief good. Nirwana has been taken to mean absolute
annihilation. I do not believe the Buddhists meant that; for to me, it
is incredible, that any great sect, numbering millions, should have so
totally given up the natural love of existence, and desire of
immortality; and Max Müller and others have brought that construction
of the Buddhist creed, into doubt. Individuals may go that length.
Unhappy Blanco White, tortured in body and mind, could say that he
desired no more of life, here or hereafter. A German naturalist could
say, "Blessed be the death hour--the time when I shall cease to be." But
this revolt against self and very self-existence, whether ancient or
modern, I advert to, only to show the necessity of going out from it, in
order to build up the kingdom of God within us. It is notable; it is
suggestive; but it is neither healthy, nor true to human nature. Far
truer is that admirable little poem of David Wasson's, originally
entitled "Bugle Notes," which in unfolding the blessing and joy of
existence, touches, I think, the deepest and divinest sense of things.

But let us proceed to consider the law of sacrifice--not sacrifice of
happiness nor improvement, but the finding of both, in going out from
self, to that which is beyond and above it.

A man's thought starts from himself; but if it stopped there, he would
be nothing. All philosophy, science, knowledge presuppose certain
original faculties and intuitions; but not to cultivate or carry them
out, would leave their possessor to be the mere root or germ of a man. A
line in geometry presupposes a point; but unless the point is extended,
there can be no geometry; it is a point barren of all science, of all
culture.

Every intellectual step is a step out of one's self. The philosopher who
studies _himself_, that he may understand his own mind and nature, is
but studying himself objectively; his very self _then_ lies out of
himself, and is an abstraction to him. And the mathematician, the
astronomer, the naturalist, the poet, the artist, each one goes out of
himself. His subject, his theorem, his picture it is, that draws
him--not reward, not reputation. Doubtless Newton or Herschel, when he
left his diagram or his telescope, and seated himself in the bosom of
his family, might say, "We must live; I must have income; and if public
or private men offer to remunerate and sustain me, it is right that they
should do so." But the moment he plunges into deep philosophic
meditation, he forgets all that. Nature has more than a bridal charm,
science more than golden treasures, truth more than pontifical
authority, to its votaries. Not wooing, but worship, is found at its
shrines and altars. In the grand hierarchies of science, of literature,
of art, there is a veritable priesthood, as pure, as unworldly, as can
be found in any church. It is delightful to look upon its work, upon its
calm and loving enthusiasm. The naturalist brings under his microscope,
the smallest and most unattractive specimen of organized matter, and
goes into ecstasies over it, that might seem ridiculous; but no, this is
a piece of _holy nature_--a link in the chain of its majestic harmonies.

And so every intellectual laborer, when his work is noblest, forgets
himself--the lawyer in his case, the preacher in his sermon, the
physician in his patient. Is it not true then, and is it not noteworthy,
that all the intellectual treasures that are gathered to form the
noblest humanity, all the intellectual forces that are bearing it
onward, come of self-forgetting?

Equally true is it--more true if possible, in the moral field. The man
who is revolving around himself, must move in a very small circle.
Vanity, self-conceit, thinking much of one's self, may be the foible of
some able and learned men, but never of the greatest men: because the
wider is the circle of a man's thought or knowledge, at the more points
does he see and feel his limitations. Vanity is always professional,
never philosophic. It belongs to a narrow, technical, never to the
largest, moral culture. And all the moral _forces_ in the world, are
strongest, divinest, when clearest of self. When the public man seeks
his own advancement, more than the public weal, he is no more a
statesman, but a mere politician; and when the reformer cares more for
his own opinion than for the end to be gained, the people will not
regard nor respect him. The world may be very selfish, but it will have
honesty in those whom it permits to serve it.

The truth is that the whole culture of the world, is built on sacrifice;
and all the nobleness in the world lies in that. To show that, it is
only necessary to point to those classes of men and spheres of action,
which exert the widest influence upon the improvement and welfare of
mankind. They will all be found to bear that mark.

Look, first, at the professional teachers of the world--the authors,
artists, professors, schoolmasters, clergymen. In returns of worldly
goods, their services have been paid less, than any other equal ability
and accomplishment in the world. Doubtless there have been exceptions;
some English bishops and Roman prelates have been rich; and some authors
and artists have gained a modest competence. More are doing it now, and
yet more will. But the great body of intellectual laborers, has been
poor. The instruction of the world, has been carried on by perpetual
sacrifice. A grand army of teachers--authors, artists, schoolmasters,
professors, heads of colleges--have been through ages, carrying on the
war against ignorance; but no triumphal procession has been decreed to
it; no spoils of conquered provinces have come to its coffers; no crown
imperial has invested with pomp and power. In lonely watch-towers the
fires of genius have burned, but to waste and consume the lamp of life,
while they gave light to the world.

It is no answer to say that the victims of intellectual toil, broken
down in health or fortune, have counted their work, a privilege and joy.
As well deny the martyr's sacrifice, because he has joyed in his
integrity. And many of the world's intellectual benefactors, have been
martyrs. Socrates died in prison, as a public malefactor; for the
healing wisdom he offered his people, deadly poison was the reward.
Homer had a lot so obscure, at least, that nobody knew his birthplace;
and indeed some modern critics are denying that there ever was any
Homer. Plato travelled back and forth from his home in Athens to the
court of the Syracusan tyrant, regarded indeed and feared, but
persecuted and in peril of life; nay, and once sold for a slave. Cicero
shared a worse fate. Dante, all his life knew, as he expressed it,--

    "How salt was a stranger's bread,
    How hard the path still up and down to tread,
    A stranger's stairs."

Copernicus and Galileo found science no more profitable than Dante found
poetry. Shakspeare had a home; but too poorly endowed to stand long in
his name, after he left it; the income upon which he retired was barely
two or three hundred pounds a year; and so little did his contemporaries
know or think of him, that the critics hunt in vain for the details of
his private life. "The mighty space of his large honors," shrinks to an
obscure myth of a life in theatres of London or on the banks of the
Avon.

I might go on to speak, but it needs not, of the noble philanthropists
and missionaries, often spoken of lightly in these days, because what is
noblest must endure the severest criticism; of inventors, seldom
rewarded for their sagacity and the immense benefits they have conferred
upon the world; of soldiers, our own especially, buried by thousands, in
unknown graves--green, would we fain say, green forever be the mounds
that cover them! Let processions of men and women and children, every
year, bring flowers, bring garlands of honor, to their lowly tombs!

But there is another form of self-consecration which is yet more
essential, and which is universal. And yet _because_ it is essential and
universal, the very life-spring of the world's growth; because it is no
signal benefit, but the common blessing of our existence; because it
moulds our unconscious infancy, and mingles with our thoughtless
childhood, and is an incorporate part of our being, it is apt to be
overlooked and forgotten. The sap that flows up through the roots of the
world--it is out of sight. The stately growths we _see_; the trees that
drop balsam and healing upon the nations, we _see_; the schools, the
universities, the hospitals, which beneficence has builded, we _see_;
but the stream that, through all ages, is flowing from sire to son, is a
hidden current.

It is one of the miracles of the world--this life that is forever
losing, merging itself in a new life. We talk of martyrdoms; but there
are ten thousands of martyrdoms, of which the world never hears.
Beautiful it is to die for our country; beautiful it is to surrender
life for the cause of religious freedom; beautiful to _go forth_, to
bear help and healing to the sick, the wounded, the outcast and forlorn;
but there are those who _stay at home_, alone, unknown, uncelebrated, to
do and to bear more than is ever done, in one brief act of heroism or
hour of martyrdom. In ten thousand homes are those, whose life-long care
and anxiety wear and waste them to the grave. They count it no praise;
they consider it no sacrifice. I speak not, but for the simple truth, of
that which to me, is too holy for eulogy. But meet it is, that a
generation coming into life, which owes its training and culture and
preservation to a generation that is passing away, should be sensible of
this truth--of this solemn mystery of Providence--of this law of
sacrifice, of this outflow from self into domestic, into social life,
which lies at the very roots of the world.

There is one further application of the principle of disinterestedness,
which goes beyond classes and instances such as I have mentioned, and
embraces men simply as fellow-men. Much has been said among us of late
years, and none too much, of the dangers of an extreme individualism. We
began as a religious body, in a strong assertion of the rights of
individual opinion; and we went on in that spirit for a considerable
time; till it seemed, at length, as if we were liable to lose all
coherence and to fall to pieces in utter disintegration. But a few years
ago, moving in that zig-zag line which marks all human progress, we
awoke to the dangers of the situation; and happily found that if we
could not agree upon any technical definition of Christian faith, we
_could_ combine for Christian work. The National Conference was formed;
a new impulse was given; new funds were poured into our treasury; we are
circulating books and tracts more widely than we have ever done before;
we are helping feeble churches and founding new ones, besides doing
something for missions abroad: in short, we are trying to do the work
which, in common with other Christian communions, properly belongs to
us.

But there is another movement, which I regard with equal interest, and
which promises in fact, to go deeper than any thing else we can do. I
allude to those Unions, in which, I think the city of Providence leads
the way: and in which New Bedford, Worcester, and Brooklyn have followed
the example. These associations provide a public room or rooms, well
lighted and warmed, for those who will, to resort to them; but
especially for the young, who most need good culture, entertainment and
encouragement; and in these rooms are found books, pictures, games, and
music perhaps; and classes for regular instruction may be formed, and
lectures occasionally given, or discussions held; in fact, whatever will
contribute to the general improvement and to the pleasant and profitable
passing of social evenings, may be introduced. This kind of institution
is especially adapted to our smaller cities; and may be extended to our
country villages. Our people in the country, live too much apart and
alone; and besides the direct advantages of these gatherings together, a
mutual acquaintance and a kindly feeling would be promoted, which are of
scarcely less importance.

Let me add that there is a new ideal of life, which, I think, is slowly
arising among us; and which, when it is fully carried out, I believe,
will make an impression upon society, never before seen in the world.
This is the idea of mutual helpfulness; of every man's living not to
himself, but to God, in loving and helping his kind. Helpfulness, I
say--that which Mr. Ruskin describes as the most glorious attribute of
God himself; and which has so seized upon his imagination, that he
ventures to substitute for "Holy, holy, holy is the Lord," Helpful,
helpful, helpful, is the Lord God Almighty! This will not do; but it
indicates a glorious tendency of modern thought. The old ideal of life
has been, to get together the means of comfort and enjoyment; to get
wealth, to get a fine house, to get luxuries for wassail and feasting,
or to get books and pictures; and then to sit down and enjoy all this
good estate, and transmit it to fortunate heirs, with little thought of
others--with some charities perhaps, but without taking into heart or
life, the common weal, happiness and improvement of all around.

What a millennium would it begin, if, instead of this, every man should
be thinking, just so far as he can go beyond taking care of his own body
and soul, what he can do for others--not in any merely eleemosynary way;
not merely to instruct and improve men, with the pharisaic assumption of
being better or better off than they; but by acting a brotherly part
towards them, speaking neighborly words, doing neighborly deeds,
smoothing the path, softening the lot, seeing all erring and sorrow, and
joy and worth, as if they were their own; and wherever there is any
difficulty or trial or need, to "lend a hand." Whenever such a spirit
enters into and pervades society, it will make a world, compared with
which, _our_ time will sink back among the dark ages.

In short, when is it, that a man does and is, the highest that he is
capable of? The answer is, when forgetting himself, forgetting
advantage, gain, praise, fame, he pours himself out, in intellectual or
moral, and, any way, beneficent activity. When does culture or art in
him attain to the highest? It is when going beyond all thoughts of
culture and art, he flings himself, in perfect sympathy and free
communion, into the great mass of human interests. It is so that the
greatest things have been achieved in all the higher fields of human
effort--in writing, in eloquence, in painting and sculpture and music;
and it is so, especially, that the doers of great things, have become
the noblest men. "Art for art's sake," has been the motto for culture,
with some. And to a certain extent, that is true. It is fine to work for
the perfection of the work, and without any intrusion of self. But a man
may work so, upon a theme of little or no significance to the world's
improvement or welfare. He may work so, with small thoughts, small
ideals, for which nobody cares, or has any reason to care. But so can he
not work grandly, however finished be the result. Art is for the sake of
something beyond itself. Only when it goes out into great ideals that
mingle themselves with the widest culture and improvement of men, only
when it strikes for the right, for liberty, for country, for the common
weal, does it achieve its end.

We have had literature enough, and have it now, in which the writer
seems hardly to go beyond himself--writing out of himself and into
himself--occupied with making fine sentences, without any earnest
intent; and which readers, used to feed upon the honest bread of plain
English speech, hardly know what to make of. Very fine, these sparkling
sentences may be, very beautiful, very apt to strike with admiration;
but they divert attention with surprises, or cover up thought with
coruscations. They are like gems that lie scattered upon the table; they
are not wrought into any well-woven fabric; they do not move _on_ the
subject to any conclusion.

Men may win great admiration and great fame, but not great love; though
they gain, perhaps, as much as they give. Only by writing out of the
bosom of a great humanity _to_ the great humanity, can one fill the
measure of good art or good culture. Even Goethe, of whom Professor
Seeley says, that "he found every thing interesting except the fact that
Napoleon was trampling upon Germany"--a fatal exception: even Goethe,
with all his art, his marvellous versatility and fine accomplishment,
failed to reach the highest place, either in the best self-culture, or
in men's best love. _Savant_, poet, novelist, of high mark, as he was,
he has no such place as Newton, Wordsworth, and Walter Scott, in men's
love. Schiller and Richter, I believe, are more beloved in Germany, than
Goethe.

In mere art, in perfection of style, no writers have equalled Homer and
Shakspeare. But _they_ did not say, "Art for art's sake." They had no
thought but to communicate their thought. If singular felicities appear
in their style, little eddyings of exquisitely turned conceits, as
especially in Shakspeare, they made a part of, and swept on the strong
current of their ideas. They were not introduced for their own sake, or
merely to please the writer.

It has been said that great authors are born of great occasions. Some
remarkable era, some turn or tide in human thought, or in human affairs,
have borne them on to their supreme greatness. Will not the time come,
when men shall so look into the depths of the human heart, into the
tragic or blissful experiences of all human life, that no great era
shall be necessary to make great writers?

I believe it. I believe in a perpetual human progress--progress in every
kind, material, mental, moral, religious, divine; and I greatly desire
to say a few words in close, if you will indulge me upon this point. For
I found this faith in progress, on the two principles which I have been
considering in this lecture. Selfhood obliges a man to take care of
himself. To go out of himself is the only way, in which he can
take care of himself--can take care, that is to say, of his own
improvement and happiness. In selfhood, necessary as it is, there is
no virtue, and little joy. Outflow from it--love, generosity,
disinterestedness--embraces the whole sphere of our culture and welfare.

Can there be any doubt upon either of these points--either the culture
or welfare?

Upon the culture, I say; upon what makes for human improvement. There is
evil enough in the world; but what nation or age ever approved of it?
What people ever praised selfishness, injustice, falsifying of speech or
trust? No literature ever celebrated them. No religion ever enjoined
them. No laws ever enacted them. Imagine a law that proposed to reward
villains and to punish honest men. The world would spit upon it. Imagine
a book or essay or poem or oration, that plainly set about to tell what
a beautiful and noble thing it is, to lie, to defraud, to wrong,
corrupt, and ruin our fellows. No man ever had the face to do such a
thing. No; books may have taught such things, but they never taught them
as noble things. The man never lived, that would stand up and say, "It
is a glorious thing to betray trust, or to ruin one's country, or to
blaspheme God." Men do such things, but they don't reverence nor respect
themselves for doing them.

This then being settled--and it is a stupendous fact--the right
principle about culture, being thus set up, high and irrepealable in the
human conscience and in the sentiments of all mankind--what says the
common judgment of men about the happiness or misery of following the
right? Does it say--"It is a blessed thing to be a bad man; it is good
and wise to be a base or cruel man." Does it say--"Happy is the miser,
the knave, the drunkard." No, it does not. There is temptation to do
wrong; _that_ all know; there is a notion that it may promote some
temporary interest or pleasure; there is a disposition in many, to
prefer some sensual gratification to the purer satisfactions of the
higher nature; but there is, at the same time, a deep-founded
conviction, that misery in the long run must follow sin; that the
everlasting law of God has so ordained it to _be_; and that only the
pure, the noble, the heroic, the good and godlike affections can ever
make such a nature as ours, content and happy.

Here then is another stupendous principle settled. And now, I say, this
being is a lover of happiness. He is not wise; he is not clear-seeing;
he is not good either--_i.e._, he is not fixedly and determinately good;
he is weak too; he is easily misled; he is often rebellious to the
higher laws of his nature; but--I hold to that--he is a lover of
happiness; and happiness, he knows, can never be found, but in obedience
to those higher laws. He is a lover of happines

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