-n BE ii^^
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CATHOLICITY
A TREATISE ON THE UNITY OF
RELIGIONS
BY
REV. R. HEBER NEWTON, D.D,
G.P.PUTNAM'S SONS
NEW YORK AND LONDON
XTbe Ikntcfterbocfter press
1918
THE NEW YORK I
POBUC^L^BRARY |
ASTOR. LENOX
Itilden found,"
Copyright, 1918
EY
F. LIAURICE NEWTON
Ube *n(cftecbocfecr liress, "ftew Borft
EDITOR'S NOTE
Catholicity is the author's second posthumous
volume. The Mysticism of Music appeared in
191 5; the present volume would have followed
sooner had not war reading so wholly absorbed
attention as to make advisable a temporary post-
ponement of its publication. These conditions
still continuing — and the reconstruction literature
to follow will be far greater than the war reports —
there begins now a new turning on the part of the
suffering people to religious thought. Stricken
by personal or national grief, men and women are
seeking understanding, assurance and comfort.
The thesis of this book bears so directly on the
theme of universality upon which statesmen and
laymen are planning the future, that now the
volume may find its readers and help them — be,
in fact, part of their reconstruction literature.
The material here had all been given in articles,
addresses and sermons, and nearly all had found
iv Editor's Note
print in reports and magazines. Several of the
present chapters had been, in substance or in
their present form, parts of courses more fully
developed on special lines; some were addresses
before the Congress of Religions and the New York
State Conference of Religion. All had belonged
to the present sequence which Dr. Newton had
had in mind, and which he wanted to give in
book form.
The volume as it stands was, then, planned by
Dr. Newton, the title chosen, and the contents
determined — some parts definitely, some pro-
visionally. Actual work upon the editing was
started during the last year of his life. The present
editing has been completed with no changes of
material and, to the slight extent determined, no
changes in arrangement. Familiarity with the
author's thought and method made it tempting to
supplement certain passages and to undertake a
more thorough composing of the whole, as Dr.
Newton would unquestionably have done. And
the war, of which he saw only the opening months,
is prepounding questions and offering clarifications
so applicable to this discussion, that again there has
Editor's Note v
been the temptation to interpolate, as he would
have done. But respect for the greater value of
his own writing, though unedited, over attempted
betterment by any other hand led to a preference
of a slight sacrifice of finish of synthesis and style
for assurance to the reader of original authorship.
F. M. N.
CONTENTS
AFTER PAGE
I. — Christianity a Re-Baptized Pagan-
ism I
II. — The Cypher of the Cross . . 37
III. — The Witness of Sacred Symbolism
TO the Unity of Religion . . 86
IV. — Christianity the Flower of Pagan-
ism . • 109
V. — The Hidden Wisdom of Paganism —
The Open Secret of Christianity 138
VI. — Religion and Religions .
VII. — The Limits of Religious Fellowship
VIII. — The Possibilities of Common Wor
ship
IX. — Christianity in Evolution
X.— A Survival of the Fittest .
XI. — The Issues
Vll
171
198
228
258
302
335
CATHOLICITY
I
CHRISTIANITY A RE-BAPTIZED
PAGANISM
PoE did not mention the names of all the com-
pany present on that famous evening when an
Egyptian mummy came to life in the midst of the
social group, and talked so eloquently about the
industrial wonders which we moderns have im-
agined to be the discoveries of our own civilization,
but which he showed were the famihar triumphs
of the land of the Pharaohs. Suffice it to say,
without betraying any confidences, that the day
after that memorable entertainment certain of
us of that company found ourselves in the Eternal
City — by the agency of an ''Atlantic Instantane-
ous Transportation Company, Limited," which
2 Catholicity
has not yet laid its prospectus before the public,
and whose secret, a secret wrapped up in the awe
that envelops the possibilities of our ''magic
carpet" air craft, may not therefore be divulged
to the uninitiate. In this little company were
an Ultramontane Priest, a Broad Church Parson,
and a Westerner who swore by (and after) the
great prophet of America, the zVRev. Dr. Ingot-
soil, together with the resurrected Egyptian who,
in the course of the unrecorded conversation of the
preceding evening, had disclosed himself as equally
at home among the antiquities of religion. That
cultivated, traveled, cosmopolitan of the ancient
world had manifested a great curiosity concerning
the ecclesiastical rites and usages of the religion
that he found in possession of the world upon
which he had so strangely reopened his eyes; and
this extemporized jaunt was the result of that
curiosity. We were walking one of the well-
known streets of Rome on our way toward a
certain church — a church, however, which no
reader of these pages need consult his "Murray"
to locate, until he has first found and studied that
typical plant of which Goethe saw hints in the
A Re-Baptized Paganism 3
flora of Weimar — when the conversation began
that, as taken from the memoranda of one of
the party, is sketched in the brief narration
which follows : for brevity's sake, the dramatis per-
sonce being somewhat cavalierly indicated simply
as Pagan, Ecclesiastic, Broad Churchman and
Philistine.
On our way, Pagan asked what we called the
day. We told him that it was Sunday; ''which,"
observed Broad Churchman, "was set apart by
the edict of Constantine as a period of ' rest on the
venerable day of the Sun. ' " On his asking what
were the other festivals of the Church, Ecclesiastic
ran rapidly over the Kalendar, with such comments
as these from Pagan: '' 'Christmas' — our old
Saturnalia; 'Easter' — the most ancient festival
of the spring; 'Candlemas Day' — one of our joy-
ous feasts in honor of the goddess Neith, observed
as I note on the very day marked for it in your
Christian Kalendar; 'Lady Day' — the old-time
day of ' the Mother of the Gods, ' also on the same
date as our ancient festival; 'the Festival of
the Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary ' — our
Roman Festival of the Miraculous Conception
4 Catholicity
of the Blessed Virgin Juno, again upon the same
date which the ancient world observed." Pagan
wanting to know somewhat of the saints of the
Kalendar, Ecclesiastic chanced to dilate upon the
story of St. Josaphat; of which he remarked:
"Why this is none other than the legend of the
Buddha himself."
As we passed along, the attention of our friend
was drawn to various churches, and he was ob-
served to inspect the inscriptions somewhat curi-
ously; quietly remarking before one fagade, "This
looks as though the old Pagan legend had been
Christianized by very slight touches. 'To the
Divinity of St. George the Availing, the Powerful,
the Unconquered' is plainly the old inscription,
'To the Divinity of Mercury the Availing, the
Powerful, the Unconquered,' with 'Mercury'
erased and 'St. George' carved in."
The form of many of these churches attracted
Pagan's notice. "Here," he observed, "are the
old Roman basilicas, those great halls of trade
and commerce and justice, transformed into
Christian churches." Arriving at last before the
church to which we were bound, he paused to
A Re-Baptized Paganism 5
examine the external aspect. "It is cruciform,'*
he observed, ''as were many of the old world
temples. When the great temple of Serapis, in
our own Alexandria, was demolished, beneath its
foundation was discovered a cross. Your church
faces east, as did our sacred temples, to receive
the rays of the rising sun." The first thing which
arrested his attention on entering was the font
of holy water by the door. Ecclesiastic having
explained its use. Pagan observed: "We had in
many of our temples similar fonts of holy water,
with the same significance. Worshipers washed
their hands in them, on entering, admonishing
themselves to come forward with pure minds to
the service of the gods."
We then proceeded, at our friend's request, to
examine more carefully the symbolism of the build-
ing, as presented everywhere on walls and columns.
"Triangle and trefoil," he remarked, "are copied
from the ancient temples, in which they were
used to symbolize the mystery of the Divine Trin-
ity in Unity. This Dove was likewise commonly
used in the ancient churches as a symbol -of the
Divine Spirit. The Sacred Heart we had also.
6 Catholicity
Horus, the Egyptian Virgin-born Saviour was
pictured carrying the Sacred Heart upon his
breast. Vishnu and Bel were depicted in the
same manner. Those three letters *I. H. S. '
formed the monogram of Bacchus. The curious
oval frames in which I observe pictures of some
divine woman" — " Vesica piscis we call the sym-
bol," interposed Ecclesiastic — "these also were
in our temples. They assure me of what I had
already suspected, from many of the symbols
which I have observed, that very much of your
symbolism in this Christian church, however little
you may suspect it, is drawn from that most an-
cient and most curious form of religion known as
Phallicism. Your devout worshipers would surely
be astonished and possibly revolted if they knew
the original significance of these Phallic symbols.
I presume you have spiritualized them as our
devout priests had done in my time."
Pursuing our inspection of the sacred building,
we came upon a peasant woman on her knees,
counting her beads. "Such beads or rosaries,"
Pagan remarked, "were used by Buddhist monks.
There were rosaries consisting of one hundred and
A Re-Baptized Paganism 7
eight beads, sometimes made from bones of de-
parted saints; each rosary representing a special
prayer." "Ours have one hundred and fifty
beads, each one representing an Ave or Pater
noster," observed Ecclesiastic. "We had also
reliquaries," continued Pagan, "in which sacred
relics were kept, similar to these which I observe
here. In one place in India, Buddha's robe was
kept — probably quite as authentic a relic as the
'holy coat of Treves,' of which you have just told
me. I do not think, however, that your priests
have as yet come up to that magnificent relic
of the Buddha, the shadow of Gautama, which
was preserved in a certain cave, and which could
only be seen by the faithful. These amulets or
charms which your people wear are very much
like those which were in use in my time. This
church abounds in images and idols, as unfortu-
nately did our temples; and, by the way, many
of these figures are most certainly our old gods
rebaptized. That St. Peter is surely a statue of
Jupiter, with the keys in the place of the thunder-
bolt. Some of these images of your Christ seem
to be our Apollo and Orpheus renamed. This
8 Catholicity
'Black Virgin,' as you call it, which certain of
your people seem to reverence so highly, I am sure,
from the inspection that I have made of it, is noth-
ing more nor less than one of our old basalt figures
of Isis. We did not have such boxes as these
which you call ' Confessionals * ; and from what
you tell me of their uses I am very glad we did
not have them; but we had a better form of
confession: a public acknowledgment of wrong-
doing in the temples — a most salutary observance
which kings were known to be manly enough to
use."
While waiting for the chief event of the day we
rested ourselves in some of the stiff-back chairs
of the great church. Groups of monks and nuns
caught Pagan's eye, and on being informed con-
cerning them he observed : " A very old institution
this of Monasticism. Buddhism had most fully
developed it. In one city alone there were more
than one hundred monasteries and ten thousand
nuns and novices. Our own Egypt had devel-
oped quite extensively the cenobitic form of
monasticism. I am not sure but your very word
'nun' is of Eastern origin."
A Re-Baptized Paganism 9
Some casual reference having been made to the
rite of exorcism, Pagan asked for further informa-
tion concerning it. Ecclesiastic showed him a
ritual by Paul V., as revised by Benedict XIV.,
which he proceeded to compare with the Kabalistic
ritual that had been familiar to the initiates of
Judaism and Paganism; pointing out the singu-
larly close parallelisms which held between the
two forms of service, as follows:
Kabalistic ritual for the exor-
cism of salt:
"Priest-Magician blesses the
Roman ritual for the exorcism
of salt:
"The Priest blesses the salt
salt, and says: Creature of salt, and says: Creature of salt, I ex-
in thee may remain the wisdom
(of God) ; and may it preserve
from all corruption our minds
and bodies. Through Hoch-
mael (God of Wisdom) and the
power of Ruach-Hochmael (the
Holy Spirit) may the spirits
of matter before it recede. —
Amen,"
orcise thee in the name of the
living God. Become the health
of the soul and of the body!
Everywhere where thou art
thrown may the unclean spirit
be put to fight. — Amen."
At this point our friend's notice was drawn to a
shrine of Mary, in which was one of the familiar
representations of the sacred Mother and Child.
He seemed greatly pleased with this. "The
lo Catholicity ,
virgin-mother," he said, "was common to various
ancient reHgions. India had Maya, the virgin-
mother of Buddha, and Devaki, the virgin-mother
of Christna; each of Vv^hom was represented by
art in the great temples as holding her divinely
born son in her arms, in forms that might well
take the place of this Christian Mary. The Egyp-
tian I sis had the same character, and was pic-
tured after the same fashion. She was even repre-
sented, as your Mary appears, standing on the
crescent moon, with twelve stars about her head.
The artistic resemblance is so close that, unless your
historians can trace your traditional picture of
Mary quite thoroughly, it seems to me quite
probable that it was drawn bodily from our Egyp-
tian representation of Isis." In answer to a
request for further information concerning the
offices of worship addressed to the mother of God,
Ecclesiastic showed him the Litany of our Lady
of Loretto, between which and the Hindu Litany
of our Lady Nari and the Egyptian Litany of
Our Lady Isis he proceeded to institute a compari-
son, some of the more notable features of which
are as follows:
A Re-Baptized Paganism n
Litany of our Lady
Nari: Virgin.
Holy Nari, Mother of
perpetual fecundity
Mother of an incar-
nate God.
Mother of Christna.
Virgin most chaste.
Mirror of Supreme
Conscience.
Queen of Heaven and
of the universe.
EGYPTIAN
Litany of our Lady
I sis: Virgin.
Holy Isis, universal
mother.
Mother of Gods.
Mother of Horus.
Virgin sacred earth.
Mirror of Justice and
Truth.
Queen of Heaven and
of the universe.
ROMAN CATHOLIC
Litany of our Lady of
Loretto: Virgin.
Holy Mary, Mother
of divine grace.
Mother of God.
Mother of Christ.
Virgin most chaste.
Mirror of Justice,
Oueen of Heaven.
A little assemblage at the baptistery attracted
our friend's notice, and he wandered thither;
Ecclesiastic duly discoursing of the supernatural
origin and mystic powers of this sacred rite.
Pagan watched the ceremony with great interest,
and when it was over remarked: "Baptism is one
of the oldest rites of religion, and was observed
in ancient times by most nations in their myste-
ries. From the very earliest period known to
history, water was used as the outward and visible
form of a religious sacrament, the symbol of a
spiritual regeneration. Candidates for initiation
into the higher life were plunged in consecrated
water at the hands of the officiating priests. In
12 Catholicity
India, under certain forms of Brahmanism, there
was such an initiatory rite. An oath was made
by the would-be initiate, pledging him amongst
other things to purity of body. Water was then
sprinkled over him; he was invested in a white
robe; a cross was marked on his forehead and he
was given the mystic word A U M. Sometimes
this Brahmanistic baptism was performed by the
bank of a sacred river, into which the priest
plunged the candidate three tim.es; praying over
him, 'O Supreme Lord, this man is impure like
the mud of this stream ; but as water cleanses him
from this dirt, do Thou free him from his sin. '
Buddhism, in some of its forms, had a similar
ceremony. The new-born babe was dipped in
sacred water three times and a name given to it.
The ancient Persian carried his babe to the temple
shortly after its birth, and presented it to the
priest, who baptized it after a similar fashion;
the father then giving the child its name. The
Mithraic Mysteries had such a service for adults,
in which the foreheads of the initiates were signed
with the sacred sign — the cross. Our own Egyp-
tians had the same rite of baptism, and the Myste-
A Re-Baptized Paganism 13
ries of Isis thus received the initiate. This rite
was known as the * water of ablution'; and the
person mystically purified was said to be 're-
generated/ Our devout churchmen, in ancient
times, developed the same sacramentarianism
which I recognize in the words of my friend Eccle-
siastic. This holy rite was held to have a mystic
power independent of the state of mind of the
initiate; a superstitious opinion which a certain
Greek historian sneeringly rebuked thus: 'Poor
wretch, do you not see that, since these sprinklings
cannot repair your grammatical errors, they can-
not repair the faults of your life.' "
To all which Broad Churchman responded:
''What you say was confirmed by so sound an
ecclesiastical authority, in the vanguard of schol-
ars, as our own Dr. Lundy, who, in his great work
on Monumental Christianity, remarks, 'John the
Baptist simply adopted and practiced the univer-
sal custom of sacred bathing for the remission of
sins. Christ sanctioned it; the Church inherited
it from his example. ' "
Turning away from the baptistery, Pagan pro-
ceeded to descant upon the sacred sign of the cross,
14 Catholicity
which he had observed in use in the baptismal
office and which he had noticed everywhere in the
sacred building. "If you have learned archae-
ologists and numismatists, they must have told
you that the cross was a universal and world-
old religious symbol, and that it was used in most,
if not all, of the ancient sacred mysteries. Hindus,
Assyrians, Egyptians, and Romans alike employed
this sacred sign. A cross hung upon the breast
of Tiglath Pileser in a colossal tablet from Nim-
roud that was in the Museum of Alexandria.
The cross was the symbol of the Hindu god Agni,
'the Light of the World.' It was found in our
Egyptian temples, and was worn from necklaces
around the throats of our pious ladies, just as I
have observed your good women wearing it here
to-day. One of its common forms which I ob-
served here, the cross and orb, is an exact repro-
duction of a familiar Egyptian symbol, the mystic
Tau. The origin and significance of this singular
symbol was much discussed in our times. By
many it was held to have been originally a Phallic
sign, which in the gradual spiritualizing of religion
came to stand for the mystery of life spiritual
A Re-Baptized Paganism 15
rather than Hfe physical, for regeneration rather
than generation. Our occultists and mystics had
various subtle and ingenious explanations of the
higher significances of the sacred cross, which I
dare say your learned men still reproduce. ' ' Where-
upon Broad Churchman interposed again: "This
fact of the antiquity of the cross as a religious sym-
bol is clearly recognized by our modern scholars.
Bishop Colenso, in the ' Pentateuch Examined,'
writes thus:
From the dawn of organized Paganism in the East-
ern world to the final establishment of Christianity
in the West, the cross was undoubtedly one of the
commonest and most sacred of symbolical monu-
ments. ... Of the several varieties of the cross
still in vogue . . . there is not one amongst them the
existence of which may not be traced to the remotest
antiquity. They were the common property of the
Eastern nations.
And if his opinion be that of a theological 'sus-
pect,* it is amply buttressed by more orthodox
authorities. ' Chambers's Encyclopedia ' declared :
' It appears that the sign of the cross was in use
as an emblem, having certain religious and mystic
i6 Catholicity
meanings attached to it, long before the Christian
era.' Our own most orthodox presbyter, Dr.
Lundy, confesses: 'We actually find among all
the ancient nations that had astronomical systems
. . . the cross as one of their most cherished and
precious symbols. '
What more Broad Churchman might have pro-
ceeded to say was cut short at this point by the
entrance of the ecclesiastical procession, the hour
for High Mass on this great day of the year having
arrived. Pagan was quite impressed by the scenic
beauty of the pageant, and complimented Eccle-
siastic greatly on the artistic perfection which had
been reached by the "floor-manager" — his terms
became a little mixed at this point and on
the admirableness of the "properties" generally.
The pageant was so much like his familiar eccle-
siastic mise en scene that he almost felt himself
transported back to some great I sis Day at Thebes.
Turning to Broad Churchman, he asked him if
he did not remember the eloquent description of
the priestly procession on an Isis Day given by
Apuleius; or Juvenal's description of the sacred
image, "escorted by the tonsured, surpliced train."
A Re-Baptized Paganism 17
Broad Churchman, nodding assent, went on to
give the Ancient a free rendering of Dean Stanley's
account of the historic origin of the ecclesiastical
vestments which appeared in the priestly parade;
tracing surplice and alb and chasuble and cope and
all their kindred regalia to the one-time common
dress of the Roman citizen, which, as it became
antiquated, grew sacred. Pagan smiled in quiet
approval, remarking : ''The good Dean was doubt-
less right; but much of this ecclesiastical regalia
has a far more ancient origin. Your bishop's
mitre and crosier were once the high cap and
hooked staff of one of our gods. The tiara of
your Pope — who, by the way, bears himself
superbly in this sacred pageant — is a perfect copy
of that of the Dalai-Lama of Thibet. Your Pope
himself," he observed, turning to Ecclesiastic,
"is our old Pontifex Maximus; who, in his turn,
was a Western reproduction, greatly modified,
of the Grand Lama, the infallible Head of the
True Church."
The office of the Mass interested Pagan greatly,
and from time to time he interjected in respectful
whisper his comments on the proceedings. "The
i8 Catholicity
Thibetan Buddhists and the Chinese Buddhists
used musical bells in their sacred services, very
much as you are doing here. . . . Most of the
ancient temple services saw these same censers,
swinging clouds of aromatic incense before our
altars. . . . Your altar, too, stood in our temples,
though sometimes we called it the 'table.' "
At the conclusion of the office, Pagan talked at
considerable length upon the ancient sacred rite
to which the Christian Mass, he said, bore so
remarkable a resemblance. "I could almost
again fancy myself back at our ancient Mysteries.
Altar and chalice and paten, sacred bread and
wine, the sacramental feast — all these we initiates
knew quite as well as you know them. In India
the primitive Vedic religion had its sacred Soma,
which made a new man of the initiate ; from which
he was reborn ; which gave the divine power of in-
spiration and developed a spiritual nature. By
this sacrament man obtained union with his
divinity. Thibet had a sacrament of bread and
wine. Our own Egyptians, in celebrating the
resurrection of Osiris, commemorated his death by
a sacred meal; eating a wafer after it had been
A Re-Baptized Paganism 19
consecrated by the priest and had become the
veritable flesh of his flesh. This bread was re-
garded as the body of Osiris, so that our worship-
ers beheved that they ate their God. Mithraism
had also its eucharist, with ceremonies quite
similar to your Christian mysteries. This re-
semblance even extended to such a minute feature
as your round wafer; which in the Mithraic
Mysteries was an emblem of the solar disc or
Mizd — a possible hint of the etymological key to
your term Missa. When the worship of Mithra
was introduced into Rome, this sacrament of
bread and wine was celebrated in the world's
metropolis. The Greeks also had their Myste-
ries, in which there was a sacramental supper,
the most august of all their ceremonies, wherein
Ceres, the goddess of corn, gave men her flesh to
eat, as Bacchus, the god of wine, gave them his
blood to drink. The consecrated cup was handed
round, just as was done here this morning among
your clergy. We had even the same sacramental-
ism which Ecclesiastic evidently cherishes, as I
saw by his attitude during your Mass. Do you
not remember how Cicero exclaims in one place:
20 Catholicity
' Can a man be so stupid as to imagine that which
he eats to be a god?'
Observing the uneasiness of Ecclesiastic, Broad
Churchman interposed at this point saying, "This
is a deHcate subject for our priestly friend. He
would much rather that you should have observed
the judicious silence of the scholarly presbyter who
wrote 'Monumental Christianity' — in all other
matters so entirely frank, but here so prudently
reticent. But if he slides quickly over this thin
ice, others seem less careful. Of course so unsound
a writer as Renan does not weigh heavily, although
he does refer in his 'Hibbert Lectures,' delivered
under the shadow of Westminster Abbey, to the
fact that Mithraicism 'had a eucharist — a supper
so like the Christian Mysteries. ' But Ecclesiastic
may perhaps even now recall the dreadful page
of the learned Mosheim in whose utterly sound
opinions we were both so well schooled in our
alma mater of Theology, but who for once forgot
that silence is golden. 'The profound respect
that was paid to the Greek and Roman Mysteries,
and the extraordinary sanctity that was attributed
to them, induced the Christians of the second
A Re-Baptized Paganism 21
century to give their religion a mystic air, in order
to put it upon an equal footing in point of dignity
with that of the Pagans. For this purpose they
gave the name of Mysteries to the institutions of
the Gospels, and decorated particularly the "Holy
Sacrament" with that title; they used the very
terms employed in the Heathen Mysteries, and
adopted some of the rites and ceremonies of which
those renowned mysteries consisted.' "
At the conclusion of the Mass, as our little
company left the church. Ecclesiastic — who it
must be confessed had from time to time turned
away his ears in holy horror when Pagan had
been talking thus sacrilegiously, a horror that
seemed intensified when his own brother church-
man stooped to act the part of "chorus" to this
blasphemous monologue — felt moved to improve
the opportunity and speak a word in season to
the poor benighted heathen, which might perhaps
convert him so far as to make him anxious to
avail himself of the rites of the One True Catholic
and Infallible Church, while he was out for an
airing from Tartarus. The notes of this eloquent
dissertation upon the unique character of the
22 Catholicity
Catholic Church, the miraculous origin of its
rites, the supernatural powers of its priesthood,
the efficacy of its sacraments as the one means of
entering upon eternal life, and the infallibility of
its oracles, were unfortunately lost; but they can
easily be reproduced from the pages of well-known
ecclesiastical writers, or heard repeated in most
of our cathedrals. At the end of this unctuous
harangue, which had gradually risen into the
orthodox orotund, Pagan quietly asked: "If all
this be so, what do you make of this remarkable
resemblance, to say the least, between your eccle-
siasticism and our ancient paganism?" Eccle-
siastic, being a thorough-going churchman, who,
with the true invincibility of faith, however he
might strain at a gnat, was always ready to swal-
low a sound camel, replied unhesitatingly: ''Good
Abbe Hue's ' Travels in Thibet ' should never have
been placed on the ' Index. ' Your pagan rites
were certainly, as he affirmed, the counterfeits of
the true articles, palmed off upon mankind by the
ingenuity of the devil in order to bewilder men —
Satanic imitations of the One Divine Institution.
The Holy Church ought not to have gone back
A Re-Baptized Paganism 23
upon him in such a fashion. The venerable
Fathers, by whom all good churchmen swear,
anticipated his courageous utterances. Justin
Martyr, in speaking of the Mithraic rites, observed,
'which things indeed the evil spirits have taught
to be done out of mimicry. ' Tertullian, with the
same boldness of faith, declared : ' The devil, whose
business is to pervert the truth, mimics the exact
circumstances of the divine sacraments in the
mysteries of idols. Let us acknowledge the craft
of the devil. There is no other way of defending
the claims of the Church in the face of these facts.' "
Whereupon Pagan, shrugging his shoulders, smiled
and quietly observed, "So much the worse for
the Catholic Church. It is not usual for parents
to borrow the goods of their unborn children. If
the devil thus imitated the rites of the One True
Church, he must have had a most singular pre-
science to have been able to anticipate their exact
form, centuries before the True Church arose.
The fact is plain," he continued, '' that your Catho-
lic Church shares the sacred 'properties' of reli-
gion which were common to all lands and all ages.
These rites were indubitably in existence long
24 Catholicity
before Christianity was bom. The only natural
explanation is, that Christianity adopted them
from Paganism. The Church may have found it
impossible to dispossess these traditionary usages
and forms" — "As some of the Fathers confess,"
put in Broad Churchman — "or she may have
found in them fitting symbols of her own truths;
but, whatever be the interpretation of the fact,
a fact unquestionably it is, that ecclesiastical
Christianity is our old Paganism re-baptized."
He turned for confirmation of his views to Broad
Churchman, appealing to him if this was not the
recognized view of scholars even in the Church?
Broad Churchman frankly rejoined that this was
undoubtedly the judgment of dispassionate Chris-
tian scholars. "As an Egyptian," he observed,
"you will be gratified to learn what Mr. King,
a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, declares
in his work on ' The Gnostics ' :
There is very good reason to believe that as in the
East the worship of Serapis was at first combined with
Christianity, and gradually merged into it with an
entire change of name, not substance, carrying with
it many of its ancient notions and rites; so in the
A Re-Baptized Paganism 25
West a similar influence was exerted by the Mithraic
religion.
Our friend Ecclesiastic would not question the
authority of such a scholar as Baronius, yet he
writes :
It is permitted to the Church to use, for the purpose
of piety, the ceremonies which the Pagans used for
the purpose of impiety, in a superstitious religion,
after having first expiated them by consecration, to
the end that the devil might receive a greater affront
from employing, in honor of Jesus Christ, that which
his enemy had destined for his own service.
The learned Mosheim, after the words already
quoted, went on to say,
This imitation began in the eastern provinces, but,
after the time of Adrian, who first introduced the
mysteries among the Latins, it was followed by the
Christians who dwelt in the western part of the empire.
A great part, therefore, of the service of the Church
in this — the second — century, had a certain air of the
Heathen Mysteries, and resembled them considerably
in many particulars.
Our own Dr. Lundy's great book rests upon
the fact of the Pagan source of our Christian sym-
26 Catholicity
bolism. The very highest authority on the sub-
ject of Christian symbols testified: 'Their origin,
without doubt, must be traced to Paganism.' "
On hearing a churchman apparently thus give a-
way his own case, Philistine, who had been in a state
of highest delight for the last hour or two, could
no longer restrain himself ; and with a face beam-
ing with satisfaction, he recited a favorite sentence
from Renan as follows: "Almost all our supersti-
tions are the remains of a religion anterior to
Christianity, and which Christianity has not
been able entirely to root out." Whereupon,
he proceeded to launch forth in one of those pro-
found invectives against Christianity which, in the
early years of his education, he had heard served
up both hot and cold at the hands of the ^VRev.
Dr. Ingot-soil, when conducting the worship on
Sunday evenings at Booth's Theatre — tickets
50 cents; reserved seats, $1. He denounced
Christianity as a fraud of the priesthood, and ex-
coriated the Church as a poor imitation of Pagan-
ism. He talked positively about the absolute
unhistoricalness of Jesus, and discoursed learnedly
as to the Christian Sun-myth; interlarding his
A Re-Baptized Paganism 27
dissertation copiously with the opinions of Higgins
and Inman and other scholars renowned for their
good judgment and lack of prejudice. He waxed
wrothful over the folly of attending the services
of such a Church, and grew eloquent on the duty
of emancipating one's self from its childish super-
stitions, and of living up to the brand-new gospel
of three square meals a day and a "go-as-you-
please" walk over the course of life. As he closed,
quite out of breath with his own vehemence, he
turned to Pagan, confident of his approving smile.
To his unbounded surprise, however, he found
the cultivated and philosophic ancient far from
smiling at this outburst. A frown was on his
classic features and a tone of stately indignation
was in his voice as he proceeded to reply. "How-
ever widely I differ from our superstitious friend,
Ecclesiastic, I differ yet more widely from you,
my irreverent Philistine. The historic nature of
these Christian symbols makes irresistibly against
the false claims of Ecclesiasticism, undermin-
ing completely its foundation and rendering its
gorgeous superstructure wholly unsafe; but this
historic nature of the Christian symbols in no
28 Catholicity
sense invalidates the true claims of a reasonable
and historic Christianity. If antiquarians have
given you moderns the real family tree of your
religious institutionalism, the pretentiousness of
the priesthood may be subdued to a lower key —
it is vain to hope that it will be hushed to silence;
but the honest pride of the Christian religion will
be vindicated, in a far more venerable ancestry
than it had suspected, and a legitimacy will be
evidenced, as the sovereign of the soul, which
history itself attests and which the plebiscite of
humanity endorses.
"Your talk, friend Philistine, seems to me
thoroughly irrational. Granting ecclesiastical
Christianity to be a re-baptized Paganism, there
is in this nothing necessarily to its discredit. It
is old, you say. How could it be new, if it be in
any respect true? It is indeed a reproduction of
ancient forms. What else could it be, if it is a
historic development of humanity? In that it
lacks originality in its symbolism, it proves itself
the heir of the ages. Alust not religion be an evolu-
tion, as man is himself an evolution? Must not
the latest form of religion grow naturally out of
A Re-Baptized Paganism 29
the earlier forms, absorb their characteristics and
reproduce their symbolism in new phases? Must
it not have grown with the growth of man and
carry upon it still in maturity the rehcs of its
childhood days? You might well reject Christian-
ity utterly if its outward forms did not betray its
ancestry in the religions of the past. The strong-
est claim for Christianity is that it is more than
Christian, that it is human. In that you can
trace its roots back into the most ancient forms
of Paganism, you may assure the scientific spirit
of your age that it is a veritable historic evolution,
a natural selection in the sphere of religion, the
survival of the fittest, the highest expression of the
spiritual nature which man has as yet been able
to reach. The very antiquity of these rites which
we have seen in this Christian Church bespeak for
them therefore, from the historic mind and the
spiritual sense, a new and deeper reverence. As
your peasants have worshiped to-day, so the
people of our earth have worshiped through cen-
turies and millenniums. There is not a supersti-
tious rite but that loses, in the mind of the devout
man, its mere superstitiousness as he beholds it
30 Catholicity
glorified by the hallowed associations of ages, the
tender memories of generations upon generations,
who, through these outward and visible signs,
have reached forth into the mystery of the all-
encompassing darkness, feeling after God if haply
they might find Him.
"You moderns need not be over-fastidious as
to the crude origin of your rites. In what else
but crude, coarse, material conceptions could reli-
gious symbolism arise? No one need give up
any sacred symbol which he has heretofore used
because he learns even its revolting Phallic origin.
Not what the symbol meant to him who first de-
vised it, but what it means to him who now uses
it — that is its true significance. It must have
been the physical phenomena of life which first
arrested the attention of man and drew his wonder
and his worship. The physical forms of life hold
a deeper mystery, which was sure to grow on his
mind as he grew able to read them spiritually.
Physical phenomena, under the universal law of
correspondence, came to shadow realities of the
spirit sphere. Cosmic forces and laws transmuted
themselves into ethical forces and laws. This
A Re-Baptized Paganism 31
spiritual significance, lying always latent in the
core of those world-old PhalHc symbols, coming
out into light as man's consciousness has grown
more spiritual — this must be the true meaning
of these gross primitive imaginations. Even in
our ancient Paganism this process of spiritualizing
went on everywhere, with the ethical growth of
nations. Whatever the cross was originally, it
became in the higher life of antiquity a symbol of
the mystery of life spiritual and eternal, of the
sacrifice through which the Divine Power is bless-
ing man, in nature and in history, a symbol of
the very truth which your Christianity sees in
it to-day. Those world-wide, world-old symbols,
from the least up to the greatest, have always
thus signed real truths. Baptism was a natural
symbol of a spiritual purification, and it is such
still — an inevitable rite, if religion is to be sym-
bohcal at all. A Holy Supper in which the human
shall feed upon the divine life, this too is as natural
as nature. Do not your savants tell you that
which our sages saw, that there is a great order
of plants which, carrying the sign of the cross
enstamped by nature upon their forms, might well
32 Catholicity
be named Cruciferce. Were I a Christian I should
claim that Christianity was 'a republication of
natural religion.' Nor in claiming this would I
disclaim its legitimate historical character. Since
nature is one, the sign in which our ancient myste-
ries traced the deepest mystery of nature ought to
hold valid for the deepest mysteries of human life,
if man be nature's crown and consummation, and
the cosmic symbol should prove a historic symbol
in the religion which is at once natural and ethical.
All the great Saviours of humanity have brought
salvation to man in the sign of sacrifice. They
have given themselves for men. I recall how
Plato dreamed that the god who was to appear
at some time, the Word which would be heard
speaking clearly to the soul, would be fashioned
'decussated in the form of the letter X.' It is
natural to my mind that the latest and highest
teacher, the greatest Saviour, should have ended
his self-sacrificing life upon a cross, and that the
cosmic and human truths should thus blend ; that
the ideal and the historic cross, becoming one,
should become the sacred sign of Christianity.
The most striking feature of Christian religion,
A Re-Baptized Paganism 33
historically viewed, is the fact that it has gradu-
ally clarified its early rites, spiritualized its mate-
rial symbols, purified and ennobled its ideas, and
re-baptized Paganism into a new life — whose
ethical contrast with our ancient habits you can-
not half so well realize as I do.
"When I was in Egypt I worshiped the gods
under the highest conceptions vouchsafed to me,
through the noblest forms open to me. So I do
to-day, reasonably and reverently; and in so
doing, were I to tarry on earth, I should be a
Christian. But in being a Christian I should
feel that I was only a developed Pagan. We who
were admitted as initiates into the secrets of that
esoteric religion which was guarded from the
profanation of unripe ages in the Greater Myste-
ries, knew, centuries and millenniums ago, the
central articles of all forms of faith; which were
revealed to him who had eyes to see in our sacred
symbols, and which are to-day taught openly to
your riper age. The unity of God, the life to
come, the rewards and punishments of the future,
the purification of the soul from sin through suffer-
ing— these are the articles of the one true creed
34 Catholicity
of the one inner religion of all lands and ages;
which will live while man lives, facing the same
physical nature around him and the same spiritual
nature within him. All great religious symbols
are universal. There is no monopoly of sacred
symbolism. Such a scene as that which we have
beheld to-day is, when read in the light of history,
the highest possible lesson of charity."
As Pagan closed, Broad Churchman's voice
was heard as though soliloquizing: "Is not this
that which our own honest-souled scholar declares
in summing his great work on ' Monumental Chris-
tianity ' — ' Religion is essentially one in faith and
practice, under various modifications, perversions,
corruptions and developments'; and has 'had
its origin in the human mind and soul, as deriving
all their thought, hope and aspiration from some
common source of mind and soul'? Was not this
the truth which one of the venerable Fathers of
the Church taught when he spoke of the Christian
religion as having existed before Christ, only under
other names? Was not this the truth that an-
other eminent Father inculcated in his famous
words: 'There exists not a people, whether Greek
A Re-Baptized Paganism 35
or barbarian, or any other race of men, by what-
soever appellation or manners they may be dis-
tinguished, however ignorant of arts or agriculture,
whether they dwell under tents, or wander about
in crowded wagons, among whom prayers are not
offered up in the name of a Crucified Saviour to
the Father and Creator of all things'?" And
then, in sweet and solemn tones, the music of
the thought imparting its rhythm to his utterance,
he recited a passage from "The Perfect Way":
It (the Cross) was traced on the forehead of the
neophyte with water or oil, as now in Catholic Baptism
and Confirmation; it was broidered on the sacred
vestments, and carried in the hand of the officiating
hierophant, as may be seen in all the Egyptian religious
tablets. This symbolism has been adopted by and
incorporated into the Christian theosophy, not, how-
ever, through a tradition merely imitative, but be-
cause the Crucifixion is an essential element in the
career of Christ. For, as says the Master, expound-
ing the secret of Messiahship, "ought not the Christ
to suffer these things, and so enter into his glory?"
It is the Tree of Life; the Mystery of the Dual Na-
ture, male and female; the Symbol of Humanity
perfected, and of the Apotheosis of Suffering. It is
traced by "our Lord the Sun" on the plane of the
36 Catholicity
heavens; it is represented by the magnetic and dia-
magnetic forces of the earth; it is seen in the ice-
crystal and in the snow-flake; the human form itself
is modeled upon its Pattern; and all nature bears
throughout her manifold spheres the impress of
this sign, at once the prophecy and the instrtmient of
her redemption.
Amid the strains of mystic eloquence, in which
the fourfold significance of the perfect way opened
on our souls, the deepest thought of Paganism
translating itself into Christian speech, we reached
our hotel; where Pagan and Ecclesiastic left us
to arrange for an interview with the Holy Father,
in which the former hoped to interpret to him the
esoteric truths of his own religion, while the latter
sought to lay upon the dogmata of his hierarchy
the burden of his beliefs. We took our way back
to New York by the same line which had borne
us to Rome; and I found myself at home in time
for breakfast.
II
THE CYPHER OF THE CROSS
In 1645 a fast day was duly observed in London,
as interpreted by a Doctor of Theology in his
sermon on that day, because of "monsters un-
heard-of theretofore," "now common among us,"
"pleading for a toleration of all religions and
worships." Of this breed are the "monsters"
who now-a-days gather in congresses of liberal
religion. But alas! — such is the lapse of time,
and such the facilis descensus of all monstrous-
ness in religion — we to-day not only plead for a
toleration of all religions and worships. Christian,
Jewish and Ethnic of every variety; we plead
for a sympathy between all religions, for the re-
ciprocal recognition of vital truths in each other's
religion, for the beHef that the complete reUgious
truth is only to be heard when all the voices of
the soul blend their living affirmations in the
37
38 Catholicity
chorded convictions of the spirit, for the further-
ance of that unity which is the swelling out of
intellectual differences into the full-breathed har-
mony of spiritual aspirations and intuitions.
Our age makes certain the unity of the human
race. The unity of the human race carries with
it the unity of the spiritual nature of man. The
unity of the spiritual nature of man holds in it
the unity of religion — religion being the expres-
sion of the spiritual life of man, as the one human
soul fronts the mystery of the one Cosmos.
The puzzle as to the secret of the curious re-
semblances between religions is being settled now,
once for all. Plato has not stolen from Moses,
neither has Moses cribbed from Plato; Buddhism
has not smuggled into the story of Gautama the
tales of Jesus, nor has Christianity woven into
its records of Jesus the experiences of Gautama;
any more than have the Aztecs borrowed their
pyramids from Egypt, or the American Indians
their mediums from Greece, or our modern Col-
lectivists their State Socialism from Peru and
China.
As the beaver builds its dams, wherever found.
The Cypher of the Cross 39
after one architect's plans, so man houses his soul
in one and the same order of sacred architecture,
whenever and wherever he is found in one and
the same stages of human development ; varying
only as the race varies, whether in India or Greece,
Judea or Rome, England or America. This that
we have for some time seen concerning the various
great religions of civilization, the lamented Brin-
ton has demonstrated as between them all and
the religions of primitive peoples.
The differences of religion are the differences
between the pine of the Adirondacks and the pine
of Long Island — differences of soil and climate.
Or, they are the differences between the year-old
pine and the pine of a hundred years — differences
in the stage of development.
Given a similar environment, with the same age,
and one and the same ideas and ideals, intuitions
and aspirations, hopes and beliefs, laws and insti-
tutions, symbols and cults will appear, in the Hindu
and the Egyptian, the Persian and the Greek, the
Jew and the Roman, the German and the French-
man. In a larger sense than St. Vincent had
in mind, the test of Catholic truth is — that
40 Catholicity
which has been held always, everywhere and
by all.
Literally taken, of course, there is no such truth.
But the studies of our age are making clear the
existence of a body of common thoughts and con-
victions underlying all religions that have become
ethical and spiritual, which fairly well fulfills
this test of truth. This truly Catholic faith may
be read within the differing creeds of the various
religions ; as has been done by an orthodox pres-
byter of the Protestant Episcopal Church, whose
learned study of religious archaeology issues in a
presentation of the similarities of spiritual reli-
gion, which groups them all under the Articles of
the Apostle's Creed.
If such a body of beliefs there be, common to
all religions, these constitute the truly fundamen-
tal faiths of the soul.
Sacred symbolism yields perhaps the most sug-
gestive interpretation of this Catholic Faith. The
symbols of religion are world-old and world-wide.
Triangle and circle, dove and eagle, are in use
everywhere. Sacred colors have one and the
same significance in Chaldea and India and
The Cypher of the Cross 41
Greece, in Russia and Italy and America. The
priests of Kamac have told Raphael why he painted
the Madonna's robe the color of the sky. The
dramatization of religion, which we call sacramen-
tal worship, was staged by the shores of the Ganges
and the Nile, as well as by the banks of the Thames
and the Hudson. The mysteries of ancient cults
anticipated the Christian Mass. Baptism is
older than the Church. Our Easter Hymn was
sung, in a rude first-draft, in the Syrian groves
sacred to Adonis.
It might be possible to take a bird's-eye view
of this large field, but the perspective would be so
vast as to shrink out of sight all those details
which alone create a realistic impression on the
mind. Let it suffice to review in later chapters
a number of characteristically universal symbols,
and, in particular, to study here the witness of
one device of sacred symbolism to the oneness of
spiritual religion. And let that symbol be the
one ordinarily assumed to be the most distinctive
sign of the religion which is supposed to arrogate
to itself an exclusive possession of divine truth —
the cross.
42 Catholicity
The Encyclopaedia Britannica^ observes:
It is curious that a cruciform device, having divers
significations, should have occupied a prominent
position among so many sacred and mystic figures
and symbols connected with the mythologies of
heathen antiquity.
This fact is indeed curious, but it is far more
than curious — it is to the thoughtful mind pro-
foundly significant.
About the fact there can be no manner of ques-
tion. The cross is found in India, in the hands
of Brahma and Vishnu. Krishna is represented,
in a certain painting, with six hands, three of
which hold the cross. Agni, the God of Fire, has
had as his symbol, from immemorial antiquity, the
cross. The magnificent pagoda of Bindh-Madhu
at Benares, was, in its central structure, an
immense cross. The celebrated cave-temple at
Elephanta is nearly in the form of a Greek cross.
In the furthest and most sacred portion of the
temple is the Hindu triad, w4th the Crux Ansata
placed in one arm. There is, in Central India,
^ Ninth Edition. The Eleventh Edition gives the same find-
ings, but in the words of a different author.
The Cypher of the Cross 43
a region which is now desolate, but which bears
traces of an extinct civilization, where are found
monoliths resembling the Cornish crosses. To
this day, in Northern India, the cross is used to
mark the jars of sacred w^ater taken from the
Indus and the Ganges.
The Buddhists used this same symbol, habitu-
ally, under the name of the Swastika. A certain
statue of the seated Buddha shows the cross
stamped on his breast and on his hands. Chinese
Buddhism had the Lao-Tseu, or cross, as one of
its most ancient symbols. It is painted upon the
walls of their pagodas, and "on the lanterns used
to illuminate the most sacred recesses of their
temples." In Japan the Fylfot cross was the
distinguishing badge of the ancient sect of Taca-
Japonicus, or first reforming Buddaka.
Assyrian relics show this symbol to have had a
general use in the sacred art of Chaldea, from im-
memorially ancient days. The custom in mediae-
val Europe of prefixing the cross to signatures and
inscriptions of a sacred character was anticipated
in the venerable civilization of the land between
the rivers. The sculptures from Khorsabad, and
44 Catholicity
the ivories from Nimrod show well-nigh every
variety in the form of the cross. The cylinders
and seals found among the ruins of Babylonia
bear this device frequently. Tiglath-Pileser ap-
pears, in a well-known tablet, now in the British
Museum, with the cross pattei hanging from his
neck.
In Persia the religious use of the cross was fami-
liar. It appears on an ancient tomb in Susa, to
which homage is still paid, as the tomb of Daniel.
On some of the ancient monuments near Perse-
polis, ensigns or banners in the form of the cross
are still found. Mithraicism, that curious Persian
bastard, which so powerfully disputed the field
with the young Christianity, knew the use of this
sacred sign in the initiations to its mysteries.
Egypt employed this sign, constantly, in sacred
art. An early Christian historian tells us that,
in the destruction of Serapium, the famous temple
of Serapis, in Alexandris, "there were found,
sculptured on the stones, certain characters re-
garded as sacred, resembHng the sign of the
cross." Every traveler along the Nile knows the
familiar forms of this device upon the ruined
The Cypher of the Cross 45
temples. The Crux Ansata, the cross with the
circle above it, is the inseparable accompaniment
of the chief triad of the Egyptian deities, Ra,
Amon-Ra and Amon. The cross was worn as
an amulet by the people of the Nile valley. On
high festivals, the priests and worshipers ate of a
cake of flour, honey and milk or oil, stamped with
the cross.
Judea appears to have known the use of this
universal symbol. The letter Tau was sometimes
written in the form of a cross. Tradition declared
that the blood of the Paschal Lamb was sprinkled
upon the lintels and door posts of the homes of
the people, on the eve of the Passover festival,
in the form of a Tau, or cross. To this day, this
custom is said to be observed by the Jews in Corfu.
According to the Talmud, Jarchi, and Maimodides,
when the officiating priest sprinkled the blood of a
victim in sacrifice upon the consecrated breads, and
hallowed utensils, it was in the form of a cross; and
the same sign was traced in consecrated oil upon the
heads of the priests when annointed.^
The pole on which Moses was said to have lifted
* Seymour, "The Cross in Tradition, History, Art," p. 19.
46 Catholicity
up the brazen serpent, as a means of curing the
plague-stricken people in the wilderness, was sup-
posed, traditionally, to have been of this sacred
shape — ''The sign of salvation" — as the Wisdom
of Solomon called it. A feeble remnant of the
ancient Samaritans, at Nablous, still sacrifices
seven lambs, three times a year, spitted on a cross.
Everyone knows the form of the cross in the
art of Greece. Dr. Schliemann found this device
on terra cotta discs in the ruins of Troy, in the
fourth or last stratum of his excavations; dating,
as he supposes, from a period about 2500 years
B.C. In the Cypriote collection in the Metropo-
litan Museum of Art, you may look upon minia-
ture human figures with arms extended to form
this sacred sign, which, in some cases, appears also
as a seal upon the breast.
The prehistoric lake-dwellers of Italy, who dis-
appeared long before the Etrurians — themselves
preceding Roman civilization — made use of this
sacred symbol. The mausoleum of the great
Lars Porsenna, whom Macaulay has made the
schoolboys' hero, repeated thrice this religious
device. The staff of the Roman augers was
The Cypher of the Cross 47
sometimes surmounted with this symbol; and
the vestal virgins of Rome had it hung around
their necks, just as good Catholics hang it to-day.
Mr. Baring-Gould, in his charming ** Legend of
the Cross," tells us how, in 1850, he unearthed a
Gallo-Roman palace near Pau, in the South of
France, in which he found, as one of the most con-
stantly repeated devices of its decoration, the cross.
In more modern times, in Europe, we find the
mighty Thor of the Scandinavians, always repre-
sented with his huge hammer in his hand, really
holding this sacred symbol. The hammer was
in the shape of the cross.
The Druids laid out their forest temples in the
familiar shape of our great cathedrals, clearing a
cruciform space in the woods for their worship.
In the consecration of their holy oaks, they were
made cruciform, by having their branches lopped
into the desired shape.
On our own western continent, we find the same
wide-spread and ancient use of this sacred sym-
bol. Prescott tells us that, when the Spaniards
first landed in Mexico and Central America —
"They could not suppress their wonder, as they
4^ Catholicity
beheld the cross, the sacred symbol of their own
faith, raised as an object of worship in the tem-
ples of Ana-huac." On certain high festivals, the
Mexicans made crosses out of Indian corn mingled
with the blood of their sacrificial victim. These
were first worshiped and afterwards broken and
distributed among the worshipers, who ate them
as a symbol of union and brotherhood. Tau
crosses of metal were found in common use, as
amulets. White marble crosses were discovered on
the Island of Sant Ulloa. The Incas reverenced
a cross, made out of a simple piece of jasper,
which had been bequeathed to them by an earlier
people. Upon the side of one of the little hills
which skirt Pisca Bay is an immense cross, about
one hundred feet high, formed of stone, inlaid
in the rock. According to the native priests, with
the readiness of all good priests to interpret sym-
bolism usefully, this was miraculously made by
an angel to warn Pizarro from his wicked tyranny.
It is much to be feared that the angel's warning
did not sink deep enough into Pizzaro's heart.
In Paraguay, an early traveler saw — "Not only
a cross marked on the foreheads of the Abipones,
The Cypher of the Cross 49
but, likewise, black crosses woven in the red woolen
garments of many." As he notes — "A surprising
circumstance that they did this before they were
acquainted with the religion of Christ, when the
signification and merits of the cross were unknown
to them." At the extreme southerly termination
of the continent, the Patagonians tattoed this
holy sign upon their foreheads, as a custom trans-
mitted from their forefathers. Cave- temples of a
cruciform shape are not lacking in South America,
as in India. One at Mitla, the city of the moon,
was hewn out of the solid rock, 123 feet in length
and 25 feet in breadth. Upon the walls, the
figure of a perfect maltese cross is carved.
This use of the cross in South America dates
far back of the period of the Spanish Discovery —
how far no one can tell. The prehistoric peoples
who preceded the races found on the soil by the
Spaniards used this ancient symbol, as their ruins
amply testify. Palenque is supposed to have been
founded in the ninth century before the Christian
era. One of the principal buildings in that city
is a palace or temple, 280 feet long by 180 feet in
width and 40 feet in height. At the back of one
50 Catholicity
of its altars, sculptured on a slab of gypsum, is
a cross ten feet high. In Yucatan, the first
Roman missionaries wisely tried to preserve some
of the hymns of the natives, embodying their
ancient tradition. A translation, supposed to
be literal, of one of the hymns reads thus:
At the close of the thirteenth age of the world,
While the cities of Itza and Tancah still flourish,
The sign of the Lord of the sky will appear,
The Light of the Dawn will illumine the land,
And the cross will be seen by the nations of men.
A father to you will he be, Itzalanos.
A brother to you, ye nations of Tancah.
Receive well the bearded guests who are coming,
Bringing the sign of the Lord from the daybreak,
Of the Lord of the sky, so clement yet powerful.
Our North American continent witnesses the
same widespread and ancient use of this sacred
symbol. In the Mississippi Valley, rich in Indian
remains, curiously shaped pieces of metal, at
first taken for money, but now supposed to be
ornaments or medals, have been discovered marked
with the Crux Ansata. Near Natchez a medal
was dug up, in 1844, bearing a cross. One of the
most numerous of the later tribes of our Indians,
The Cypher of the Cross 5i
in their sacrifices for rain, placed their offerings
upon the figure of a cross. This use of the cross
on our continent far antedates the period of the
red Indian. It is well known that our Indians
were preceded by an earlier race, the memory of
which had perished from the land when the first
white man trod our shores. These predecessors
of the Indians had achieved a more advanced
civilization than that of their successors. The
indications of this are in the curious mounds which
still preserve the only relics of this forgotten people.
These mound-builders evidently held the cross
in homage as a religious symbol. This we know
from the fact that some of the relics unearthed
from their mounds are stamped with this device.
Many of the mounds themselves are of a cruciform
shape. One such is found near Marietta, Ohio,
and another at Tarleton, Ohio — the latter in
the form of a Greek cross. It is supposed that
these cruciform mounds are the debris of sacred
structures.
''That not a link may be wanting in the chain
which binds all nations, Jew, Gentile and Pagan,
even the islands between the western and eastern
52 Catholicity
continents are hallowed by the shadow of the
cross." The natives of the Gambier Islands tat-
tooed themselves with this emblem. The dis-
coverers of the Mulgrave Islands were received by
natives adorned with necklaces, from which crosses
were suspended. In the British Museum there
are two colossal statues from Easter Island, bear-
ing the Tau upon their backs.
Thus [as one student of the history of the cross
writes] we have completed the circuit of the globe,
and find this holy symbol, with a sacred signification,
in ages far apart, and among nations widel}^ separated,
and, for the most part, utterly ignorant of each other's
existence.
As far as we can see, the cross thus appears to
have been a world-old, world-wide sacred symbol.
Were there no light to be shed on this singular
fact of a world-old, world-wide use of the sacred
symbol which we have supposed peculiar to Chris-
tianity, the fact itself would rebuke any sense of
exclusiveness in its sacred symbolism, or in the
religious life which it expresses; and should bind
Christians into a fellowship of feeling with all,
of every name and race and color and creed, who
The Cypher of the Cross 53
have thus, through this form of art, felt after God,
"If haply they might find Him."
How did this sacred symbol come into use?
Its origin is lost in the midst of antiquity. Yet
we can surmise, with some probability, the secret
of the forge in which it was fashioned. The
oldest historical use of this symbol now known
to us is probably found in the worship of the Hindu
Agni, the God of Fire. The discovery of the use
of fire and of the secret of making it, as needed,
was one of the first steps in civilization. It
secured man against the inclemency of the weather,
and lifted him above the savagery of eating raw
food, while it opened to him the possibilities of all
mechanical improvements, and of the arts which
rest upon them. It was natural that so fierce a
power, turning into such a beneficent friend,
should receive the homage of primitive man.
Perhaps the first rude method of striking a fire
was that which is still used in some portions of
the East ; in which, by taking two pieces of wood
and arranging them in the form of a cross, and
then whirling them rapidly together, the desired
fire is obtained, through the violent friction
54 Catholicity
produced. It is this very simple piece of mechan-
ism for the production of fire which gives the form
of the symbol that is still marked on the foreheads
of the young Buddhists and Brahmins.
When our American Creeks, at their festival
of the four winds, formed a cross out of four logs,
the ends of which extended toward the cardinal
points of the compass, they gave a clew to one
natural source of this symbolism, in the mystery
of nature's order.
The cross is a pattern which would naturally
have suggested itself to primitive man as one of
the simplest and most necessary forms in nature.
He found it everywhere produced in the combina-
tions of creation. He noted it in the flowers of
the field; in which it is so common as to give a
name to an order, now known as the CrucifercB,
of which there are about eight hundred species
recognized by us. In all manner of exquisite
variations, he beheld this sign in the crystals of
the earth. The oldest of sciences is astronomy;
and a study of the skies suggested this from — as
ran the ancient Mexican hymn, ''the sign of the
Lord of the sky." The double star fashions it.
The Cypher of the Cross 55
The lines of the equinoctial circle, cutting the
Zodiac, form it. The daily meridian, intersect-
ing the equator, describes it. The most ancient
Chaldean watchers of the sky would have dis-
cerned that which Dante saw, ages after them,
in noting the heavenly orbs:
Those rays described the venerable sign
That quadrants joining in a circle make.
Bisect a circle twice, and you have this venerable
sign that ''quadrants joining in a circle make."
The cross is everywhere in nature, to the eye
of the thoughtful man.
So omnipresent and inevitable a form must, in
the mind of the thoughtful man, have assumed a
mystic significance. It must have seemed to him
to sign something secret and sacred. To divine
this mystic significance we must not merely grope
among the historic origins of the symbol, in the
lore of the archaeologist — we must mount into
its meaning in the minds of the seers and saints
of every people. "It is the flower, not the root,
which reveals the life. By their fruits ye shall
know them." The form through which the sav-
56 Catholicity
ing fire revealed itself thus appeared a mani-
festation of the God of Light. The design which
nature fashioned on every hand, in her loveliest
works, the flowers, suggested itself as a sign of
creative life. The harmonious adjustment of op-
posing forces which in the heavens draws this
figure, in all the great combinations of the skies,
taught men to find in the cross the sign of the
order of the universe.
The mystery-loving imagination of man could
not then have waited for a modern gnostic to thus
interpret this strange symbol :
It is traced by "Our Lord the Sun" on the plane of
the heavens; it is represented by the magnetic and
diamagnetic forces of the earth; it is seen in the ice-
crystal and in the snowflake; the human form itself
is modeled upon its pattern, and all nature bears
throughout her manifold spheres the impress of this
sign, at once the prophesy and the instrument of her
redemption.
In some such way as this, pondering over the
everywhere-present secret of nature, the cross
came, in the mind of man, to assume the charac-
ter of a sacred symbol, a sacramental sign of Life.
The Cypher of the Cross 57
In the Roman armies, grave offences were often
punished by decimation. When the lots were
drawn, the names of the soldiers on the roll were
marked; those who were fated to death having
the Greek Theta drawn against their names, while
those who were to live having placed by their
names the oldest and simplest form of the cross.
The Mexicans called their cross "the Tree of Life."
Life itself holds within itself an inner mystery,
a secret of transformation, in which, out of the
lower, arises a higher being, and through death
comes fuller life.
The cross thus became the symbol of life eternal,
rising out of life temporal; the sign of man's
victory over physical death, the cypher in which
was guarded, for the worthy, the doctrine of
immortality.
Life in nature, as primitive man saw, is never
overcome of death. The Sun, sinking at the close
of day beneath the waters of the western sea,
seemed to him to be swallowed up by the monster
of the deep. The bright God of Day appeared
to die. Darkness overcame the light. But lo!
with the morning, the bright God reappeared in
58 Catholicity
the East. He had conquered the powers of dark-
ness. He had passed through the underworld
of shadows. He had come to Hfe again, in his
joyful resurrection.
The joyous spring drooped and died. The fierce
heats of summer consumed his fresh life. He
faded, as the autumn leaves withered and fell to
the ground. He perished at the touch of frost,
and was buried in the snowy shroud of winter.
Through long months he tarried in the cold grave
of nature. But lo! he breaks the tomb of winter;
he comes forth upon the earth, "in verdure
clad"; and all the earth smiles at his presence,
while the fields blush into beauty at his touch
of love.
These are the oldest myths in which the imagi-
nation of the child-man read the parable of his
own destiny. Life then was imperishable. In
that it is, it will be. It must round its full cycle,
through every mood and tense of being. Death
is only an episode of life. It is the "finis" which
closes one chapter in the tale of being.
The sign of life was thus seen to be the sign of
immortality. It held the secret of the future.
The Cypher of the Cross 59
Our forefathers, therefore, far back in the misty
distances of antiquity, used the cross, the sign of
Hfe, to betoken their faith that Hfe would Hve for
evermore. The Rosetta stone, which gave our
scholars the clue to the interpretation of the
Egyptian hieroglyphs, employed the figure of the
cross with the handle as the picture-equivalent
of the Greek word for everlasting life. On the
Egyptian tombs we may still see the delineation
of Horus, the Saviour-God, raising the dead to
life, by touching the mummy with a cross — most
commonly the Crux Ansata. The ancient in-
habitants of Mexico and Central America built
their sepulchres cruciform. As already indicated,
in Italy, before the Romans occupied the land,
there was an earlier people, highly civilized in some
respects, the Etruscans; before whom, again,
there was a still more primitive race, of whom we
know scarcely anything. The remains of these pre-
historic people lie buried in the debris of their
villages and towns, which now form a part of the
soil of the land. How remote this civilization
we may judge from the fact that, in some places,
we have to dig down twenty-one feet to come upon
6o Catholicity
the traces of this forgotten folk. When we have
unearthed the fragmentary traces of this remote
race, we discover that they laid their dead away
in mother earth beneath the guardianship of
the sacred sign of the cross; expressing thus
their trust that life would rise again out of the
grave.
When, then, we go, some bright spring morning,
to the city of the dead, where the mortal remains
of our dear ones rest, and observe, on every hand,
graven in the fair marble, or lifting itself in iron
above the grassy mound, the sacred sign of the
cross, we may ponder the impressive fact, that as
we have done, so our fathers have done, through
centuries and millenniums before us : placing their
dead in God's acre, "in hope of eternal life,"
whose sacramental symbol was to them, as to us,
the sign of the cross.
The cross thus became the symbol of the spirit-
ual life, rising out of life material; the sacred
sign of the higher life triumphing over the lower
life of man; the cypher in which was preserved
the secret of the discipHning pains and sorrows of
our earthly Hfe. As far back as we can trace his
The Cypher of the Cross 6i
story, man knew the painful experience which
we know to-day — the higher Hfe struggHng to free
itself from the chains of the lower nature, the
spirit striving with the world, the flesh and the
devil, — the evolution of the soul. Far back in his
story, man seems to have divined the secret of
salvation — the renunciation of the lower life to
gain the liberty of the higher life; the mortifica-
tion of the material appetites and passions, that
the spirit might rise from this death; the cruci-
fixion of the old man, which was of the earth, that
the new man from heaven might reign within.
Ages ago man thus learned the innermost secret
of peace amid the sufferings and trial of life; as
he found these pangs the means through which
the one great evolution was effected, and from the
fires of suffering the Son of man rose into the Son
of God. And all this deepest wisdom of the soul
he bodied in the sacred sign of the cross, the sym-
bol of life purifying itself through pain, the sacra-
ment of the resurrection of the spirit from the
death of the material man.
Thus we find in the earliest known religions,
the use of the cross in initiating candidates into
62 Catholicity
the higher life. In India, the man who sought the
spiritual life was baptized in the waters of the
sacred river. He was plunged into the stream,
confessing his sins, as thus signing his cleansing
of himself from the defilements of the past; and
then, as he came forth, he was clothed with a
white robe, and the sign of the cross was drawn
upon his forehead, in token of the secret wherein
he should conquer. In the Sacred Mysteries of
different lands the same use of the cross was made.
He who through long probation had fought a good
battle and shown himself a worthy soldier of the
God of Light and Purity, was received into the
inner ranks of the sacramental host of the elect
and signed with the cross. The noble hymn
of Dean Alford might, with slight verbal changes,
have been used in those pagan baptisms, with one
and the same spiritual meaning, more or less clearly
conceived; as, looking up to his Teacher and
Master, the newly baptized was taught.
In token that thou too shalt tread
The path he travel'd by,
Endure the cross, despise the shame,
And sit thee down on high;
The Cypher of the Cross ^3
Thus outwardly and visibly
We seal thee for his own;
And may the brow that wears his cross
Hereafter share his crown !
The way of holiness was to the dark-skinned
Easterners, as to us, the way of the cross. There
was to be a cross lifted in their hearts, as in ours,
on which the sacrifice of all the evil in their natures
was to be made; on which they were to offer up
themselves as living sacrifices, acceptable unto
God. To make it perfectly sure that such was
indeed the meaning of this ancient pagan use of
the cross, we find, among various peoples, our
familiar emblem of the cross rising out of the heart
— the hieroglyph of goodness.
When Dante was treading the upper skies,
amid the glories of Paradise, he saw, in the fifth
heaven, the spirits of the martyrs who died fight-
ing for the true faith; the bright constellation
of their souls forming a mystic cross, from which
there came the music which he thus interpreted:
And as a lute and harp, accordant strung
With many strings, a dulcet tinkling make
To him by whom the notes are not distinguished,
64 Catholicity
So from the lights that there to me appeared
Upgathered through the cross a melody,
Which rapt me, not distinguishing the hymn.
Well was I 'ware it was of lofty laud,
Because there came to me, "Arise and Conquer!"
The cross thus became the symbol of the life
of the elect ones of earth, who rise out of the mass
of men ; the sacred sign of the saviours of mankind ;
the cypher in which was written the secret of the
life going forth from them in salvation for the
sons of earth. The truth which the ordinary
man found, as he climbed by the way of the cross
toward the stars, was lived fully in the immortals
of earth. The men who lifted their fellows to the
higher Hfe reached down arms of help from a cross.
The saviour of a race was always "despised and
rejected," a "man of sorrows and acquainted with
grief." The throne of saving love in every land
was an altar. One of the sacred volumes of China,
the Y-King, speaking of the Holy One, declared:
"He alone can offer up to the Lord a sacrifice
worthy of him." That sacrifice, as an ancient
interpreter wrote, was no other than this: "The
The Cypher of the Cross 65
common people sacrifice their lives to gain bread ;
the philosophers to gain reputation; the nobiHty
to perpetuate their families. The Holy One does
not seek himself, but the good of others. He dies
to save the world."
He dies to save the world ! He cannot save the
world except by dying. The world makes sure
that he shall save it, by putting him to death. Is
not this the story of the man sent from God to
Greece? In the "Crito," Socrates represents the
Laws, personified, as rebuking him for the thought
of trying to avoid death by flight. He had learned
the secret of sacrifice, as the law under which alone
his saving work could be perfected. The world
would have dealt gently with the son of the king
of Kapilavastu, the heir of his wealth and power.
Shut off from every sight and sound of pain, im-
prisoned behind walls of roses, chained in garlands
of flowers, his youthful life passed in an unending
round of pleasure. The great soul, struggling to
the birth, cast off at length the bondage of the
outer life of joy; and, escaping from the palace,
the prince tore from him his royal robes and fled
to the jungle — to agonize in spirit with the great
66 Catholicity
problems of life, to meet the fierce onsets of temp-
tation, to gain at last the perfect victory of
peace, and to come forth to India as its teacher
and saviour, through the sacrifice which he had
offered unto Goodness. According to tradition,
the Buddha is reported as saying: "Let all the sins
that were committed in this world fall on me,
that the world may be delivered." Thus, in the
spirit, the gentle Gautama was truly crucified
for his people. Hebrew story gives an infinitely
pathetic picture of the great emancipator's self-
sacrificingness :
And it came to pass on the morrow, that Moses
said unto the people, "Ye have sinned a great sin;
and now I will go up unto Jehovah: peradventure
I shall make an atonement for your sin." And Moses
returned unto the Lord, and said, "Oh, this people
have sinned a great sin, and have made them gods
of gold: yet now, if thou wilt forgive their sin ... :
and if not, blot me, I pray thee, out of thy book which
thou hast written."
It need not, then, surprise us that, with this fact
of the inner life of the great souls of earth before
them, as the spiritual reality signed in the sacred
The Cypher of the Cross 67
symbol of nature, men of all lands have fashioned
the form of a crucified saviour. As wrote one of
the Fathers of the Church, Justin Martyr, who
had been a student of the philosophers of Greece:
There exists not a people, whether Greek or barba-
rian, or any other race of men, by whatsoever appel-
lation or manners they may be disguised, however
ignorant of arts or agriculture, whether they dwell
in tents or wander about in crowded wagons, among
whom prayers are not offered up, in the name of a
crucified Saviour, to the father and creator of all
things.
The bright God of Light, Apollo, appears to have
been at times represented by the Greeks as cruci-
fied. In the familiar myth Prometheus, the friend
and helper of man, who had brought down the life-
giving fire from the skies, was crucified on the
Caucasus; his arms outstretched and nailed upon
the rock. Krishna was thus pictured by the Hin-
dus as crucified, in forms that we still may study
in the art of India. In our own South America,
the Spanish visitors were surprised to find in the
temples a cross, and upon it a bleeding man, with
a face bright like that of the sun. The crucifix
68 Catholicity
itself is to be found among the relics of these
ancient religions; a sacred sign of the sacrifice
of the Teacher and Friend and Saviour, up to
whom, under different names, the people looked
as the Revealer of God.
A shallow scepticism finds in this strange fact
that which brings the flippant sneer to its lips.
Books which illustrate the venerable adage "a
little learning is a dangerous thing," write with
an air of profundity about the Sixteen Crucified
Saviours of the World; as though there were no
profound spiritual reality back of this universal
symbolism ; as though the common belief of differ-
ent races that men are redeemed from evil by sa-
viours who have undergone a real crucifixion, in
the flesh or in the spirit, was but a superstitious
dream of human fancy. The sciolists of religion
tell us that these Sixteen Crucified Saviours of
mankind all resolve themselves at length into one
world-old Sun Myth. We may grant at once the
fact, already pointed out, that this sacred symbol
was drawn primarily from nature itself; that it
was found as the mystic sign, in the skies, of the
secret through which life ruled in the universe and
The Cypher of the Cross 69
led creation ever onward and upward; but, then,
we may deny the conclusion drawn from this fact.
In the story of the bright God of Day, men did
find the drapery of imagination wherewith to
clothe the mysterious secret of the soul, the strange
spiritual reality that lived in the experience of
the great historic Teachers and Redeemers of
earth — a reality that is as historic as history.
That reality fitly draped itself in the symbolism
of nature, and thus became infinitely more im-
pressive, as leading back this mystic secret of man
into the mystery of the universal order. Nature
itself is a physical parable of spiritual reality ; the
hieroglyph in matter of the secret of spirit; a
picture-story of the life of the Son of God. In a
universe where there is a real unity we ought to
expect that the physical order should give, in
terms of physics, the secret of the spiritual order;
that we should find in the heavens the symbol of
what is to come forth in man, the flower of nature
herself. The law of correspondence insures that
we shall find the story of the soul written in picture
language in the open pages of nature ; that we shall
hear, in the whispers of the skies, the rehearsings
70 Catholicity
of the symphony of the spirit. The heavens are
the prophetic chroniclers of the great sons of God,
and when these come upon earth they Hve the
Hfe of the cross which was seen in the skies. The
secret of the soul must needs be written in
the cosmos.
The cross thus became the symbol of the divine
life rising through the human life ; the sacred sign
of the innermost secret in the Infinite and Eternal
Being; the cypher in which was cherished the
mystery that it is through sacrifice that God him-
self is redeeming and regenerating man. Nature
is a cosmic symbol of the Infinite and Eternal
Spirit. The secret which is pictured in the skies,
which is traced chemically in the crystals, which
blooms in the flowers, which comes forth as a
water-mark through every fiber of nature, which
is shrined in the soul of man, is a secret of the
Divine Being himself. It holds a mystic truth
of the essential nature of God. The Infinite and
Eternal Life is ever giving itself forth into lower
lives. The Generator of life is the Regenerator of
life — the power which is always working through
creation to lift the lower forms of being higher,
The Cypher of the Cross 7i
the will which through man is pulsing the energy
that redeems him from all evil, the Being who
is ever offering himself in every sacrifice which
brings salvation unto man. This sacrifice going
on in the Divine Being is the reality of which all
other sacrifices are but an expression, from which
all other lower sacrifices draw their inspiration.
For we know that the whole creation groaneth
and travaileth in pain together until now." This
travail of creation is none other than the travail
of God. The Divine Motherhood is bringing to
the birth the sons of God. She "shall vSee of the
travail of her soul and be satisfied.'*
Layard tells us that when a cross stands before
a name in Assyrian records it denotes a divine
personage. In one of the Egyptian representations
of Amon, the God of Life, a cross glitters on his
breast. The Hindu Krishna was none other than
"the Divine Vichnu himself"; "He who is with-
out beginning, middle or end," "being moved to
relieve the earth of her load," and incarnating
himself to perform this sacrificial oblation. This
is the meaning, probably, of one of the most re-
markable representations in the religious art of
72 Catholicity
antiquity, a Hindu picture of what Dr. Lundy calls
"a crucifixion in space" — a divine man poised in
the air, with outspread arms, as though upon a
cross, the nail-marks in his hands and feet, while
the rays of light from the unseen sun surround
him with glory. It was the dream in pagan art
of the mystery on which Plato was musing, when
he spoke of the perfect circle, which was the sym-
bol of God, as being "decussated in the form of
the letter X" — that is, signed with the sign of
the cross within. It was the vision beheld by the
great Unknown of Israel — the form of the Right-
eous Suffering Servant of Jehovah. It was the
open sight of the Christian seer; "I beheld, and
lo, in the midst of the throne stood a lamb, as
it had been slain."
Concerning this ineffable mystery, all human
speech is hushed in awe; and we must fain be
content in the silence which falls upon our souls
when we behold, as the secret of creation, the
Infinite and Eternal Being, in whose life rise the
springs of all sacrifice.
The cross was thus the ancient symbol of life,
the sacred sign of the fourfold secret of being:
The Cypher of the Cross 73
life immortal, rising out of life mortal ; life spirit-
ual, rising out of life material; life giving itself,
in the supreme sons of earth, for the redemption
of men, life flowing forth from the Infinite and
Eternal Being, as the exhaustless spring of all
sacrifice. The cross was the cypher in which was
guarded, for prepared souls, through the ages
when the mass of men were not felt to be ready
for these mysteries, the doctrines of immortality,
of regeneration, of redemption, of God's eternal
love.
Christianity, as the child born of the marriage
of Judaism and Paganism, must needs have repro-
duced these ancient truths in fresh and higher
forms. No other sign than the cross could then
have become the symbol of the religion which,
as the latest born of earth, takes up into it-
self the richest, deepest, truest religions of the
past.
The life of Jesus made these venerable faiths
the open consciousness of man. He brought
immortality to light; attesting, in his own re-
appearance from the spirit sphere, the existence
of a life beyond the grave. The son of Mary
74 Catholicity
walked our earth as the son of God, filled with the
spirit, victor over every temptation, the holy one
of the Father. He verily gave himself for us, a
sacrifice for our sins. "He was wounded for our
transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities;
the chastisement of our peace was upon him;
and with his stripes we are healed." "He gave
his life a ransom for many." In him man saw
the face of God unveiled, and knew that "God is
love." His whole life was the sign of life — the
CROSS.
Nor this, alone, in any figurative sense. In the
eternal fitness of things, it must needs have come
about that he should have been lifted up upon a
cross. It did so come about. Contrary to the
law of the land in which he died, and to the usages
of the race to which he belonged, he was crucified.
Thought and deed were welded in the death of
Jesus; the spiritual reality translated itself into
a physical fact; and the mystic man, in whom
the sacrificial life of nature, of humanity, of God,
was supremely manifest, actually died upon the
cross. "Ought not the Christ to have suffered
these things?"
The Cypher of the Cross 75
Tho' truths in manhood darkly join,
Deep-seated in our mystic frame,
We yield all blessing to the name
Of Him that made them current coin.
For Wisdom dealt with mortal powers,
Where truth in closest words shall fail,
When truth embodied in a tale
Shall enter in at lowly doors.
As the traveler looks down from Gray*s Peak
upon the grandest view w^hich this continent
affords, he beholds on one of the largest mountain
peaks the snow lying in the form of an immense
cross. "As if," so wrote Mr. Samuel Bowles,
"God had set His sign, His seal. His promise
there, a beacon upon the very center and height
of the continent, to all its people and to all its
generations."
From the study of sacred symbolism we may
well rise with the greater question: What if God
has set His sign upon the universe, has stamped
His seal in the very fabric of nature, has woven
it in the tissue of the soul of man?
When the Spanish conquerors of Mexico found
a certain native cross, which had been reverenced
76 Catholicity
for ages as a divine symbol, word was sent of its
discovery, together with a cup cut from its wood,
to the then Pope, Paul V, who received it upon
his knees, singing the hymn Vexilla Regis. So
may we receive the discovery that comes to us
from our bird's-eye sweep of the spiritual story
of man, as read in one fragment of his sacred sym-
bolism— only with a profounder hush of awe,
breaking softly into a song of deeper faith and
larger love.
The cross, then, which is supposed to be the
distinctive symbol of Christianity — that which in
the realm of religious art differentiates Christian-
ity from all other religions — proves to be the com-
mon symbol of ethical and spiritual religion, in
different lands and different ages. It is the sym-
bol known to Hindu, Chaldean, Egyptian, Per-
sian, Jew, Greek, Etruscan, Roman and Goth,
as well as to the natives of Mexico and South
America, the red man of North America and his
prehistoric ancestors, and the islanders of the
Southern seas; in which tabernacles Humanity's
deepest intuitions and aspirations, its loftiest
ideas and ideals, its most sacred hopes and faiths,
The Cypher of the Cross 11
its very heart of love. It is a cryptogram of uni-
versal religion, hiding the mystery of the oneness
of spiritual thought and life in all lands and ages.
It is not a symbol of an exclusive reHgion, but an
inclusive religion.
What is true of the cross is true of all other sym-
bols which have hallowed themselves in the reli-
gion of man as fit sacraments of the divine mystery
of life, as forms in which man can worthily lift
his worship to the Infinite and Eternal Being.
The traditional symbolism of Christianity is,
throughout, universal and human — expressive of
the unity of the spiritual consciousness of man,
revealing the one ethical interpretation of the
universe which the soul, in men of all colors and
races and creeds, when coming to itself, has ren-
dered through all time.
And this, which is true of the symbols of religion,
is, with more or less modification, true of its insti-
tutions and cults and beliefs. On the same plane
of intellectual, ethical and spiritual development,
the same institutions appear upon different soils;
through the same forms of worship, men of differ-
ent races feel after God, "if haply they may find
78 Catholicity
him"; into the same aspirations the soul every-
where strains ; toward the same forms of faith the
various creeds converge. One is the faith, the
hope, the love of man. Religions are many — Re-
ligion is one. As said St. Ambrose: " Vox eqiiidem
dissona, sed una religio.''^ In the outer vestibule
of the temple of the soul we may seem strangers
one to another as we lift our worships, in differ-
ing forms, to what seem to be different deities.
But, when the veil is lifted and we enter the holy
place, we know ourselves brothers in blood, and see
in each other's faces the light of the same faith and
hope and love. It needs but the living touch of
the Spirit to make us each hear, in his own tongue,
the words of him, of whatever race or creed, who
speaks to us the deep things of God. And this
means that the breath of the Spirit makes us all
kin, one to another. The catholicity of the cross !
It is the catholicity of all sacred symbols imagi-
native and intellectual, the catholicity of spiritual
religion.
Why should men of today, then, waste their-
moral energies and deaden their spiritual lives
by dwelling on the mental differences which neces-
The Cypher of the Cross 79
sarily separate them, by quarreling over heredi-
tary variations of soul, by mounting guard upon
the barriers which isolate one from the other?
Why should they covet the petty provincialisms
of piety, rather than the cosmopoKtanism of
character? As runs the Chinese apothegm, "The
catholic-minded man regards all religions as em-
bodying the same truths — the narrow-minded
man observes only their differences."
It is open to any one to read the story of the cross,
as of the other Christian symbols, esthetic, and
intellectual, so as simply to glorify Christianity;
finding in it the bloom of Judaism and the flower
of Paganism — as indeed should be the latest great
religion, growing from the main stem of the human
stock, into which the sap of the soul of man must
have poured. How great Christianity is can only
be discerned in the larger faith which Liberalism
teaches men to find in their old creeds and sym-
bols. It is the largeness of Humanity itself.
For such glorification of Christianity, in so far
as it is rational, is, after all, only a glorification of
the soul of man, native under the skin of Hindu
and Egyptian, Jew and Greek and Christian. It
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is the spiritual nature of man which, fronting a
spiritual Cosmos, has everywhere thus read the
cosmic cypher as a secret of the soul, and shrined
in this sacred symbol the mystic meaning of life.
Prophetically did Matthew Tyndal declare, long
ago, that Christianity is as old as creation. That
can only be in so far as it is something larger than
Christianity — in so far as it is Humanity. After
the same fashion did good St. Augustine write,
in the words too often used polemically, and so
falsely: "What is now called the Christian reli-
gion has existed among the ancients, and was not
absent from the beginning of the human race
until Christ came in the flesh, from which time
the true religion, which existed already, began to
be called Christian." "They builded wiser than
they knew." Essential Christianity is essential
Judaism, essential Buddhism, essential Hinduism
— the one spiritual religion of man. The Christ
ideal is the human ideal. Whatever the wasp of
Twickenham meant, his words were larger far than
he dreamed: "The Christian is the highest style
of man." The true Christian is simply man in
his latest spiritual development. And so the
The Cypher of the Cross 8i
term "Christian" is rapidly coming into use as
synonymous with the latest and, therefore, pre-
sumably the highest evolution of the one spiritual
nature of humanity. Professor Herron declared
in one of his prophetic lectures: "By the term
' Christian ' I mean that quality of conscience and
sympathy which suffers not a man to rest short
of some altar, however rude, on which he offers
his life in the common service, the social good."
So, then, with the Persian it may be said: "I
am at home in mosque or synagogue, in temple or
in church."
William Ellery Channing tells how, when he
had sought out all the noble teachers, Lao-Tszee
and Kung-Fu-Tszee, with Zoroaster and Buddha,
Plato and Epictetus, " hand in hand they brought
me up to the white marble steps, and the crystal
baptismal fount, and the bread-and-wine crowned
communion table — aye! to the cross in the chancel
of the Christian Temple; and as they laid their
hands in benediction on my head they whispered,
'Here is your real home.' "
This one universal spiritual religion of man —
must it not be the truth of the universe? What
6
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certitude such a study of sacred symbolism gives
to the interpretation of the cosmos which has
been thus rendered everywhere by the soul of
man! What authority of creed or council, of
patriarch or pope, can equal this authority of the
universal soul? It is the authority of the one
sovereign pontiff — Humanity.
George Eliot once said :
I think we must not take every great physicist or
other *'ist" for an apostle, but be ready to suspect
him of some crudity concerning relations that lie
outside his special studies, if his exposition strands
us on results that seem to stultify the most ardent,
massive experiences of mankind, and hem up the
best part of our feelings in stagnation.
How a light and shallow scepticism should shrink
into silence before this world-old, world-wide
unity in the spiritual interpretation of the uni-
verse! Its silly sneers die out on the lips of the
man who seriously faces the fact of such a cosmic
creed.
Such authority of "man writ large" must needs
be the authority of the Grand Man, in Sweden-
borg's noble phrase — long antedating Comte —
The Cypher of the Cross 83
by which Swedenborg meant more than the human
race, even the reaHty back of and within man,
back of and within the cosmos; the Infinite and
Eternal Energy out of which we all proceed, the
Being ''in whom we live and move and have our
being" — God. If there be any revelation of God,
is it not here, in "these massive and ardent spirit-
ual experiences of man," through which the human
soul interprets the mystery of the universe?
Shall we not trust this body of belief utterly?
Shall we not trust it, not alone for our indi-
vidual peace, but for our social salvation?
The secret of society — can it be other than the
secret of* the soul, the cypher of the cosmos? How
shall we bring order out of our social chaos, peace
out of our economic strife, the millennium of pros-
perity for all out of the civilization of favored
classes, resting on the enforced barbarism of the
masses? Let political economy toil with this
problem, as it needs must toil. Its help is sorely
needed, for wiser legislation and a saner industry
and trade. But the secret of the problem lies in
the secret of the cosmos, of which a true political
economy will be found only a provincial law, the
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law of a part of the infinite empire; and that
secret, as the soul everywhere reads it, is the cross.
"There is," as George Sand said, "but one real
virtue in the world — the eternal sacrifice of self."
The secret of social salvation will be found when
wealth and culture shall accept the Cross as the
law of life, and consecrate all powers and posses-
sions and privileges to the service of man.
The suffering world cries, in the eloquent appeal
of Victor Hugo, to every fortunate and privileged
man —
Sacrifice to the mob ! Sacrifice to that unfortunate,
disinherited, vanquished, vagabond, shocking, fam-
ished, repudiated, despairing mob. Sacrifice to it,
if it must be, and when it must be, thy repose, thy
fortune, thy joy, thy country, thy liberty, thy life.
. . . Sacrifice to it thy gold, and thy blood, which
is more than thy gold; and thy thought, which is
more than thy blood; and thy love, which is more
than thy thought. Sacrifice everything to it — every-
thing except justice.
Truly, as Shelley once wrote, "What a divine
religion there might be if love were the principle
of it, instead of belief."
The Cypher of the Cross 85
In the brotherhood of hberals, in which men,
of whatever name, who have outgrown the insu-
larities of rehgion and entered upon the cosmopoh-
tanism of character, the cathoHcity of the soul,
dare call themselves "the free men of the spirit,"
may the way be seen to leave behind all the po-
lemics of religious partisanship, and aspire after
the one spiritual religion of humanity, the faith
and the life of the Cross. Be it theirs so to free
the different religions from their swathing bands
that they may know the power of individual
redemption and of social salvation held by all
alike in their common symbol, and may teach
men to live the life of the Cross — that Via Cruets,
which is forever Via Lucis.
Ill
THE WITNESS OF SACRED SYMBOLISM
TO THE UNITY OF RELIGION
The naked truth is a rather cold and cheerless
thing. To touch our hearts, it must glow with
warmth. That it may be warm, it must clothe
itself. Religious truth thus clothes itself in insti-
tutions, in dogmas, and in symbols. The symbols
of the Christian rehgion are about us in every
church. Each church itself is such a symbol.
What is a symbol? It is an idea appealing not
so much to the reason as to the imagination; a
truth clothing itself, not in the terms of a propo-
sition, but in a picture. A symbol is something
which stands for something else ; which represents
it or presents it again in another form more easily
realized. It is a material image of something
immaterial. It is "an outward and visible sign
of an inward and spiritual grace." Because man
86
The Witness of Symbolism §7
is heart as well as mind, imagination as well as
intellect, religious truth must always appeal to
the heart and the imagination, awakening feel-
ing, kindling intuition. The imagination holds a
profoundly important place in religion. We
dwell amidst infinite and eternal mysteries, tran-
scending all clear, cold thought, outreaching the
halting steps of logic. What we cannot under-
stand, we must needs try to imagine — that is, to
image it in our minds, and, to this end, image it
before our eyes. So art takes orders in the service
of religion and helps us poor mortals apprehend
that by which we are also apprehended — the
Infinite and Eternal Power in which "we live and
move and have our being."
Nature itself is symbolic, sacramental. Each
thing is like unto some other thing. The great
Master teaches us that the kingdom of Heaven
is "like unto" — almost everything. Nature is a
vast hierarchy of lives, each successive stage of
which is an adumbration or shadowing forth of
that life which is higher than itself. Matter
images mind, flesh symbolizes spirit, nature is
the sacrament of the living God. Everything is
88 Catholicity
a visible picture of a thought. All things seen
are symbols of things unseen.
It is by a natural and necessary instinct, there-
fore, that religion consecrates art to her service,
and calls upon her, as her handmaiden, to inter-
pret to the imagination of men those mysteries
which she cannot reveal adequately to their intel-
lect. Religion, therefore, has always evolved its
sacred symbolisms. Christianity has its own rich
treasures of symbolism — treasures worthy of the
great mysteries which it enshrines for posterity.
If Christianity be a Catholic religion, capable of
developing into a truly universal religion, its sym-
bolism must be Catholic, Universal — large as
man himself. The symbols which the coming
man is to reverently use in his worship, must be
the heritage of man from the far past. They must
be the growth of humanity, for humanity.
The sacred symbols of our Christian religion
do thus disclose themselves to be the outworkings
of an immemorial antiquity, the jealously-guarded
treasures of man in many lands and many ages
of the far past.
Primitive Christianity had no sacred art, no
The Witness of Symbolism 89
religious symbols. It inherited from its mother,
Judaism, a distrust of art in religion. The deep
human craving, however, was not long in asserting
itself. Man began to crave some visible sign or
symbol of his faith and hope. The art instinct,
latent in human nature, sought expression. We
can trace the beginnings of Christian art in the
Catacombs — those subterranean places of refuge
which were the resort of the early Christians;
at once the same meeting places for these new
confraternities, which were under the ban of the
Empire, and their places for burial. Over these
rock hewn vaults, the first rude tracings of Chris-
tian art appear. The very earliest Christian
symbol apparent!}^ was the pictured form of
the Good Shepherd. That exquisite sketch of the
Master appealed with irresistible power to the
imagination of the early Christians. No other
picture which he drew left such an indelible trace
upon the hearts of his followers in those first days.
The popular religion of the first two centuries
might well be called the Religion of the Good
Shepherd. The book which corresponded most
closely to our own ''Pilgrim's Progress" — the
90 Catholicity
most popular religious book of the modern world
— was the ''Shepherd of Hermas"; which, in
the second century, was known and cherished
throughout the Roman Empire; the most widely
read book of the times; the sacred writing then
deemed to be part of the Holy Canon and one of
its choicest gems — though it has dropped out
from between the lids of our Bible and has passed
forth from the memory of the Church. "The
kindness, the courage, the grace, the love, the
beauty, of the Good Shepherd was to them, if we
may so say, prayer book and articles, creed and
canons, all in one." They looked on that figure,
and it conveyed to them all they wanted. When
these early Christians came to picture their Good
Shepherd, they found no suitable form ready at
hand in art ; and so, with the fearlessness of that
free age, bound by no superstitious traditions, in
no jealous fear of the larger human life round about
the new Church, they turned to the art of Greece,
and made use of forms which they found therein,
conspicuously, the Hermes Kriophorus. The Good
Shepherd, as we see Him in these Catacombs, is
in the bloom of youth, with a crook or a shepherd's
The Witness of Symbolism 91
staff in one hand, and on his shoulder a lamb,
which he carefully carries and holds with the other
hand. A figure not unlike this Good Shepherd
can be traced through different forms of Grecian
worship.
Sometimes the Good Shepherd of the Cata-
combs is in the dancing attitude familiar to us
from innumerable pictures of Grecian shepherds.
At other times, the form of Apollo is consecrated
to a higher use. Orpheus, charming the animals
with his sweet music, does duty for the Christ, the
sweet strains of whose Evangel so charmed their
hearts. One notable fresco is a purely Grecian
picture of Orpheus, surrounded by panels giving
various scriptural scenes. Far back of Greece,
India had its conception which was the proto-
type of the Christians' Good Shepherd— Krishna,
charming the beasts with his lute. So universal
is that thought which the Jewish poet sang, in
strains so familiar to us all — "He shall feed his
flock like a shepherd"; the antiphon in antiquity
of the forever sacred song of the Divine Man —
"I am the Good Shepherd: the Good Shepherd
giveth his life for the sheep."
92 Catholicity
Of the symbols still in use among us in our
Christianity, nearly all betray their ancient human
lineage. I remember, as a boy, in old St. Paul's
Church, Philadelphia, studying, from the rector's
pew in the front of the church, the peculiar railing
which surrounded the chancel. It was the fa-
miliar square returning within itself, in closer coils.
There was something about it that fascinated my
child-mind — I could not tell why. I divined the
secret years after, when I learned that this
familiar ecclesiastical ornament was indeed an
ancient symbol handed down from the times of
classic Greece ; in which it was the conventionalized
representation of the famous labyrinth — itself,
the symbol of the strange, mysterious, perplexing,
baffling life in which we find ourselves.
A symbol which still is used somewhat in Chris-
tendom, but which has lost its ancient popularity,
is the fish. In early Christian art it was the
sacred sign of Jesus Christ himself. Tertullian,
one of the Latin Fathers, writes: "We, little
fishes, according to our Ixthus, Jesus Christ, are
born in water; nor have we safety in any other
way than by permanently remaining in water."
The Witness of Symbolism 93
St. Augustine pointed out that if we join together
the initial letters of the five Greek words which
stand for Jesus Christ, Son of God, the Saviour,
they will make Ixthus, fish ; in which word Christ
is mystically understood, because He was able to
live in the abyss of this mortality, as in the depth
of waters, that is, without sin. This rather crude
sort of mystical imagination was very popular
in the early Church. When we trace the origin
of this symbol, we find it reaching back into pre-
Christian times. In the Talmud, the Messiah
is called Dag, that is, fish. This, at once, in
the minds of Biblical readers, brings to our re-
membrance the Dagon, the God Fish, of the early
historical books. And this connects the Jewish
and Christian symbol with one of the oldest myth-
ological stories of Chaldea. According to this
tradition, there appeared in ancient times, from
the sea bordering upon Babylonia, a strange
being whose body was like a fish, but who had,
under the fish's head, another head, and with the
feet of a man also below the tail; his voice and
language were articulate and human. He, it
was, who taught men letters, sciences and arts.
94 Catholicity
Under his instruction, they learned to build cities,
to found temples, to compile laws, and to gain
the rudiments of scientific knowledge. This
Oannes was, in truth, a mythical form of the uni-
versal human instinct, under which men rightly
attribute to some Heaven-sent Teacher and Sav-
iour their inspiration to higher life. So the simple
fish symbol of the Christ links us to the far back
pre-historic times and to the most ancient myths
of the early human soul, and to the deepest in-
stincts of man's spiritual nature.
From the very beginnings of Christian art the
Dove appears — in fresco paintings, sculptures on
gravestones or tablets, in Mosaic lamps and
glasses — as the symbol of the Divine Spirit.
As such, we still cherish it. You will still see it
frequently in our churches, painted above the
altar. In the stories of the Master, at the moment
of the opening of the self -consciousness, as he
stood in the Jordan receiving Baptism from John,
and there knew Himself to be the Christ of God,
a dove descended upon His head. The dove is
the symbol of that inspiration which guides the
counsels of kings, as well as the utterances of
The Witness of Symbolism 95
teachers. To-day, in the coronation of the Kings
and Queens of England, a Duke goes before the
Sovereign, bearing the sceptre surmounted by a
dove. Mohammed, who so strangely blended the
charlatan and the prophet, realizing the value of
symbolism to his ignorant followers, taught a
dove to perch on his shoulder, and there the bird
would remain for several hours; the followers of
the prophet seeing in the bird a heavenly messen-
ger commissioned to reveal to him the will of the
Almighty. The dove again is an ancient human
symbol of the inspiring spirit. Conspicuously
in India, Egypt and Greece, but among all reli-
gions it has been the recognized symbol of the
spirit who inspires truth and life. Tracking
the symbol back to its origins, we find here, as
always, beginnings which we do not care further
to explore — as must needs have been the case in
the symbol which arose in early days when man
himself was only slightly spiritual, was still largely
animal. But with the growth of man's spirit-
uality, the symbol took on ever deeper significance
in paganism, as in Christianity. Readers of
Ruskin will recall that magnificent description in
96 Catholicity
''The Queen of the Air" of the bird, as "the symbol
of the spirit of Hfe," which he concludes by saying:
And so the Spirit of the Air is put into, and upon
this created form; and it becomes, through twenty
centuries, the symbol of Divine help, descending, as
the Fire, to speak, but as the Dove, to bless.
The Eagle has been another familiar symbol of
our ecclesiastical art. It is the conventional form
of the Lectern which upholds the Bible. It is the
traditional symbol of St. John, the spiritual Apostle,
the traditional author of the spiritual Gospel.
Not from those predatory and ferocious qualities
which have made it the symbol of mighty states
has it come thus into use in Christian art, but
simply from the recognition that, in its might, it
is the typical creature of the air, the king of the
birds, as the lion is the king of the beasts. Again,
we find this symbolism far antedating Christian-
ity. Among all the Asiatic peoples the eagle was
the Child of the Sun, and consecrated to the Sun
God.
From the first ages of Christianity, to the present
time, the prevailing symbol of our Lord has been
The Witness of Symbolism 97
that of the Lamb. It is the accepted sign of the
Crucified One. As such, its use is habit uahy in
our churches. Here again, however, as we might
expect, since the thing signified is so deep and
vital, the very mystery of the Divine Life itself,
the symbol of it is as old as religious art, and as
widely spread as man himself, upon our globe.
The Pagan world, because it was a human world
facing the same interior mystery, fronting the
same universe with its indwelling law of sacrifice
— the Pagan world also had its idea of sacrifice
and suffering, as the secret of entering upon eter-
nal life. It, too, had its visions of the Divine
Saviour ever coming to redeem man by the sacri-
fice of Himself. In every religion this vision was
had. In every land some great form of a Divine
Saviour looms up before men — some one bearing
his cross before them, some righteous suffering
servant of Jehovah, some good man rejected and
persecuted and finally put to a cruel death. And
the symbol of this sacrificial salvation was always
the Lamb — the type of innocence and purity,
which thus, in early days, came to be the sacri-
ficial offering upon the altar, and thus grew grad-
9^ Catholicity
ually into the symbol of the sacrificial life which
is the one offering acceptable to God. The Agnus
Dei has, from time immemorial, in different reli-
gions, been the symbol of the suffering, sacrificing
Saviour, through Whom men, in different lands
felt that they were to be led unto God.
The Lion is another symbol familiar to all
students of Christian art. The lion of the tribe
of Judah, the lion who stands for the Evangelist,
St. Mark, — this is one of the most familiar figures
of ecclesiastical art. It signs or signifies the power
and strength and vigor, the masterful and ruling
qualities of the divine human life, which gathered
in the person of Jesus so supremely. Again, the
lion is an immemorially ancient religious symbol.
On the religious monuments of nearly all nations
we find the lion as a symbol of strength and vigi-
lance— often placed in temples or at their entrances,
to signify protection and returning life. An an-
cient Persian symbol of the Divine Power was
a lion with a honey-bee in its mouth — reminding
us of Samson's famous riddle. What is the Sphinx
that sits on guard near the great Pyramids, to
this day, but this same symbol — the animal with
The Witness of Symbolism 99
the lion's body and the man's head? Just as, at
the entrance of the BasiHcas of Italy, you will
see the lion stationed, so at the gates of the ancient
temples of Egypt you will find them fulfilling the
same function in symbolism — acting as the guar-
dians of the sacred places.
The sacred form of the Blessed Mother and
the Divine Child, so dear to our Christian hearts,
hallowed by immemorial use in our churches,
proves also to date from ages far back of Christian-
ity. In the ancient temples of the East, you
might have seen almost the same representation.
The Egyptian Isis was pictured holding her
infant Horus in her arms, after the same fashion.
She was even represented as our Christian Mary
appears, standing on the crescent moon with
twelve stars about her head. Even to the color-
ing of the figures the symbolism holds through the
ages. The conventional blue of our Madonna
was the color of the robe of the Egyptian Isis.
For blue has, from times immemorial, been the
color of the spiritual life. Nor need we wonder
at this antiquity of the Sacred Mother and the
Divine Child. It grew out of the recognition of
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the intrinsic sacredness of motherhood, of the
essential divineness of every new-bom child com-
ing into the worid. Could the mystery of our
human life have a nobler symbol than that which
enshrines, for our reverence, the true Mother and
the true Child? There was more than this, how-
ever, in the ancient symbol. Ancient Pagan
religions had their dream of a Divine Teacher and
Saviour coming into the world, in the same myste-
rious manner as our own Christ. The instinct
which has led to the vision of the birth of Christ,
led to the same vision of the birth of Buddha,
and of other saviours of man. So India had its
Maya, the Virgin Mother of Buddha, and Devaki,
the Virgin Mother of Christna ; each of whom was
represented by art in the great temples, as holding
her divinely born son in her arms, in forms that
might well take the place of our familiar Madonna
and the Infant Jesus.
The monogram of my own parish in New York
had its familiar and suggestive symbolism. There
was first the circle — the natural sign of unity,
infinity, eternity, perfection — God. The circle
has been this same symbol in ages far back of
The Witness of Symbolism loi
Christianity, in religions which we think of as
only Pagan. It is the natural human symbolism
for these transcendent conceptions. The trefoil
and the triangle were drawn within the enspher-
ing circle. They symbolize the mystery which
Christian dogma represents in the doctrine of the
Divine Trinity: — not a doctrine of three Gods,
but simply of a threefoldness in the one God.
These sacred signs were used in the temples of
paganism in Egypt and in India, with the same
significance. Man, in ancient times, had learned
to recognize a manifoldness in the Divine Unity.
He had learned to express this variety in unity by
the conception of God as being three in one. The
conception is thus ancient and universal, and
its symbol is as wide as the thought. Finally,
the monogram held, within these designs, the most
sacred sign of religion, the Cross.
In all our churches stand certain sacred symbols
most intimately associated with the deepest life
of man in Christianity. In every church you
will find the font and the table or the altar — the
account of the ancient derivation of which has
been given in the first chapter of this volume.
102 Catholicity
The font is the stone symbol of the rite of baptism,
itself an active symbol of the spiritual life. Bap-
tism, the symbol of initiation into the Christian
church, is far older than Christianity — it is as
old as spiritual religion in every land and under
every form. Our Christian baptism thus proves
to be the natural development of the same sacred
symbolism which suggested itself to the souls of
men in ancient times and in different lands — the
natural and necessary, the beautiful and divine
symbolism of the washing away of sins and the
entering upon a new and higher life.
The table in the chancel — when one still sees
this primitive wooden symbol of the Holy Supper
— is the outward and material sign of the rite
which is itself a symbol of an ethical and spiritual
truth — ^the communion of man with man, in holy
brotherhood; the communion of man with God,
in divine fellowship. The table — the board on
which the social supper of the Christian brother-
hood is spread, is the material symbol of the fra-
ternity which ought to exist in every Christian
church; which did once exist in every Christian
society; a veritable, real and living bond of
The Witness of Symbolism 103
brotherhood. The primitive supper of the Lord,
the Agapge or Love Feast, was an outgrowth from
the sacred social meal of the secret confraternities
of working men in the Roman Empire. In the
lodge rooms of those confraternities of labor,
stood the table — the outward and visible sign of
the social supper — around which the persecuted
societies met in secret and partook together of a
common meal in sign of their life in common.
Around this sacred table, in the Christian church,
we meet, not simply to sign and seal the commun-
ion of the saints, the fellowship of man with man,
but to sign and seal the communion of each man
with God, the fellowship of the human spirit with
the Divine Spirit. As previously pointed out,
this same symbolism prevailed in ancient times
in different forms of religion, when the lower
paganisms of nature-worship reached up into
the stress and strain of the soul, to find God, and
to become partakers of the Divine Life, — the Life
of Purity and Goodness. In all lands, and under
all religions, as man grew spiritual, his religion
became a spiritual longing — a longing of the
human spirit after the Divine Spirit. And the
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symbol of this fellowship became the symbolism
which we still cherish. The confusion of the
symbol with the truth symbolized is the danger
of all symbolism. None the less how natural
and necessary, how beautiful and divine, this
symbolism! No other has ever suggested itself
to the soul of man, so fitting, so helpful. It comes
down to us hallowed with memories of the ages.
In many of our churches, in lieu of the table,
there is the altar. A later growth in the Christian
Church, this — in part, an ecclesiastical departure
from primitive Christianity; a reproduction of
the sacerdotalism and sacramentalism common
to Judaism, and to most forms of paganism;
but, in part, also, something deeper and truer —
a natural symbolic evolution. From the begin-
ning, in the simple sacrament of the Supper of the
Lord, the memorial of the Divine Sufferer, there
was imbedded the central and essential idea of
sacrifice — as, alone, the means whereby human
fellowship is cemented; alone, the means whereby
the fellowship of man with God is perfected.
And so the symbolism of sacrifice gradually
usurped the place of the symbolism of fellowship
The Witness of Symbolism 105
and communion, and the table grew into the
altar. The altar, we find everywhere in ancient
religions. In the beginnings of every religion,
it is the outward symbol, in stone, of the super-
stitious and barbarous conception of sacrifice,
which naturally prevailed among superstitious
and barbarous people. Life was offered to the
angry god, to propitiate his favor and to buy
man's ransom from his wrath. But as man grew
more ethical and spiritual, his vision of God grew
purer and nobler, his vision of sacrifice grew sweeter
and truer. He discerned that the only sacrifice
acceptable to a righteous and living God, is the
sacrificial life of service, by which man helps his
fellow into the diviner life, and thus enters, himself,
into that divine life, the life of the God Who is
ever coming forth, not to be ministered unto,
but to minister. Thus, in every religion of an-
tiquity, in its higher forms, the initiates of the
Spirit discerned, through the altar symbolism,
the great truth of the altar life — the life surren-
dering pleasure to duty, interest to service, self
to man — to God. We repeat every Communion
Sunday, in higher, purer, more ethical and spirit-
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ual forms, the sacred symbolism of our ancestors,
whereby they expressed the deepest truth dis-
cerned by man, that the bond of brotherhood is
sealed in blood, the giving of life; that the fellow-
ship of man with God is an entering into the
divine life of service.
The vast volume of research in the study of
the sources of sacred symbolism, which through
its significances, records the common intuitions
and aspirations of mankind and shows Christianity
to be the flower of paganism, can be drawn on
further here in but a few brief surveys. Archaso-
logically and ethnically the study calls for a review
of limitless and ever increasing material. Philo-
sophically, a little touched upon suffices.
Prayer, which in the secret place of the soul,
as individual communion with God, rises above
all symbolism, into pure thought and aspiration,
cannot be thus sublimated in the great assembly.
It must needs then take on outward and visible
forms, and become the uttered prayer. It will
then, for the sake of dignity and order, call in the
aid of the highest arts, literary art and musical
art, and become thus a symbol, an outward and
The Witness of Symbolism 107
visible sign of the inward communion of the soul
with God. Our liturgies are oftentimes noble
works of literary art, and, when wedded to music,
are noble works of the highest dramatic art — music
lifting the aspiration of the soul and winging the
spirit's longings upward after God. It would
be possible to trace hints, through our liturgical
forms, of the same sources which we have seen
to exist in other symbols. If we turn to the Lita-
nies in which the Catholic saints are supplicated,
we shall find strange resemblances to the ancient
Litanies in which the pagan gods and goddesses
were supplicated. The Litany of Our Lady of
Loretto, for example, we placed, sentence by
sentence, alongside of the Hindu Litany of Our
Lady Nari, and the Egyptian Litany of Our
Lady Isis, in parallel columns, and there were
shown to be scarcely more changes in the language
than were necessitated by the change of names
from paganism to Christianity.^ Even that
touchingly simple and intensely earnest invoca-
tion in our central office of worship, so long in use
in the Christian Church, under the name of Kyrie
^ See page 1 1 ,
loS Catholicity
Eleison, Lord have Mercy upon Us, is a close re-
production of a part of the Litany to the Supreme
God, either among the Greeks or the Latins, or
both, in which, an ancient author says that,
"invoking God, we pray to Him after this manner
— Lord, have mercy upon us," Kyrie Eleison.
So inevitably does the human spirit run its
thoughts and phrases into similar moulds of form,
when it enters into similar stages of thought and
feeling.
There are other, and yet higher, symbols in
our Christianity, less material, more purely
mental. There is a literary art, as well as a
pictorial or a musical art. Literary art has been
called into service in seeking to fashion fit forms
for man's thoughts of the infinite and transcen-
dent mysteries. Then, because they transcend
all clear, cold, intellectual perception, imagina-
tion has been summoned to the service of the soul,
and has sought to image, in pictorial forms of
expression, these sacred mysteries.
IV
CHRISTIANITY THE FLOWER
OF PAGANISM
When I was a boy I had a little flower garden.
The flowers did not come forward fast enough
to suit me, and so one day I bought some roses
and tied them to sticks and thrust them into the
ground, and had my garden ripening in an hour.
Is Christianity such a garden, in which the flowers
of life and truth are merely stuck into the soil
of humanity; or is it a genuine garden in which
every bud and blossom is a real growth from the
living soil? Mormonism claims that its constitu-
tion and polity, its body of truth and system of
worship have been let down straight from the
skies. The book of Mormon was found, so runs
the legend among the devout, by the great Prophet
where an angel had left it after writing it. Is
Christianity such a body of truth and system of
109
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worship, dropped from the heavens; or is it a
genuine growth of humanity?
The claims of ecclesiasticism on this point are
famiHar enough to ears that have been well dinned
with their blatant pretensions. Our wonderful
age has made clear to candid minds the facts of
the case. Of these facts but a few more need be
touched upon to supplement the review previously
assigned to the role of "Pagan."
In its organization, Christianity is now con-
fessed by the highest authorities to have been
a natural development of pre-existing systems,
ecclesiastic, civic and political. The Church
grew out of the simplest and most rudimentary
beginnings ; following the lines of the trellis which
the Jewish Church and the Roman Empire had
reared for it. The Jewish synagogue, with its
system of administration and form of worship,
supplied the pattern for the Christian ecclesia or
Church. The hierarchal form of Christianity,
which is found most fully developed in Catholicism,
is the Jewish priestly system transferred to Chris-
tianity. The gradual consolidation of the scattered
Christian societies took shape from the mould of
The Flower of Paganism m
organization which the genius of Imperial Rome had
fashioned for its poHtical administration. Parish,
diocese and province are but the old territorial
divisions of Rome, rising into an ecclesiastical
empire as of old into a political empire. Insti-
tutional Christianity is thus a growth from pre-
existent and pagan forms of organization — whether
of the paganism of Israel or the paganism of Rome.
In its philosophical symbolisms, as well as in
its concrete symbols, Christianity stands now con-
fessed as a growth from pre-existent religions.
The Christian Church holds, as a word thrown
out at the mystery of sin, the familiar story of the
Fall in Eden. Was this new with Christianity?
On the contrary, it is now traced through many
ancient peoples, as far back as the light of history
reaches. The human mind had of necessity raised
the question of the origin of evil long before our
era, and had fashioned the parable of this mystery,
into which, as an heirloom of the ages, Christian-
ity entered. To go no further than the direct
ancestral line of Christianity the Eden parable
had been in the possession of Israel centuries
before our era, and it had been drawn by Israel
112 Catholicity
from the earlier civilization out of which the
Hebrew sprang. From the long buried ruins
of this civilization we have unearthed the records
of its religion, and read to-day on the tablets of the
Chaldean Genesis fragments of the cycle of legends
of which the poem of the Garden of Eden formed
a part. A rude outline sketch, so strangely pre-
served to us from this vast antiquity, reproduces
the unmistakable picture familiar to us in the
words of our Genesis — the sacred tree, the woman
standing beneath, reaching forth her hand to
pluck the fruit, the serpent on the other side of
the tree as though whispering in her ear — curiously
poised in the very fashion which Milton imagined,
erect in spiral form upon his tail.
Our creeds are rightly called "symbols." They
are mental transparencies, through which we look
at the unseen realities ; images of spiritual verities ;
"words thrown out at" the transcendent myster-
ies. They stand for truths which cannot stand out
into visible form in the human mind. They are
mental symbols. They too are not new but old,
not manufacturers of Christianity but growths
of humanity. The great dogmas antedate our
The Flower of Paganism 113
Christian era. They were in the world before the
Church. The Fathers were but children in the
study of these venerable beliefs.
The second paragraph of the Nicene Creed,
which concerns the personality of Jesus, the Christ,
is pure philosophy. But, it is poetic philosophy,
mystical philosophy, imaginative philosophy —
philosophy in symbolic forms, picturing what
cannot be stated in precise terms. Now every
phrase in the opening of this second section of the
Nicene Creed, has been beaten and hammered
into shape on the anvils of man's thought, in ages
anterior to Christianity. Every term employed
therein to set forth the relation of Jesus to the
universe, the cosmic aspects of Christian truth,
was fashioned before Christianity, by the philoso-
phers of Greece and of the East. Every word
thereof has been coined in the mints of ancient
philosophy, centuries before the age of Jesus.
The Christian Fathers found these words ready
fashioned, these picture words ready drawn to
use. They could not have invented new terms.
They used the old terms, to set forth the new
thought — making the old terms grow larger, to
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cover the larger new thought. The philosophy
that is therein represented, is the ancient, human,
mystic, poetic, imaginative, spiritual philosophy
of the universe.
The Christian Church has held a symbol of
the mystery of the nature of the Infinite and
Eternal Being — the most ineffable and transcen-
dent of all mysteries — the dogma of the Trinity.
Is this distinctly Christian? On the contrary,
its ancestry is unmistakably pagan. The curious
may ponder over various ancient Jewish symbolic
representations of the Trinity, which might well
enough serve for the decoration of our Christian
Churches. Greece was not without its parallel
imaginations. Egypt rejoiced in this doctrine.
At the summit of its Pantheon of divinities was
the mystic triad — Osiris, Isis and Horus. The
device familiar to students of Egyptian antiqui-
ties— a winged disc with a serpent proceeding
from the disc — was the art-symbol of the threefold
nature of Deity. The dark disc represented God
the unknown as the source of all things; the ser-
pent stood for the divine wisdom, the emanation
of the unseen God, and the wings pictured the
The Flower of Paganism 115
brooding and protecting care of the Divine Spirit.
Chaldea had a similar symbol. The mysterious
source of all things was Ilu. His first three exte-
rior and visible manifestations composed a triad,
at the summit of the hierarchy of gods: Anu, the
primordial chaos; Hea, the intelligence, or, as we
might say, the Word which animated nature and
made it fertile, which penetrated the universe,
directed and inspired it with life; and Bel, the
demi-urgus, a ruler of the organized universe.
India, most venerable of all civilizations, had the
same symbol. Every one knows of the sacred
syllable repeated by the Brahmins as the most
mystic act of worship — aum. This, among the
initiates, was written as the points of a triangle,
each sacred letter standing for one of the three-
fold manifestations of deity — thus:
A
Creation.
u
M
Preservation.
Transformation
The popular form of Brahminism recognized the
divine triad, Brahma, Vishnu and Siva, separate
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gods to the unenlightened masses, but to the
instructed man only the persons or personce, or
masks or forms of the mysterious triunity, God
the Creator, the Preserver, the Destroyer or
Transformer. "The number three forms your
essence."
It is needless to refer to other mental symbols
of Christianity for illustration of the fact that our
Christian thought is older far than Christianity;
that it was pagan before it became Christian. Dr.
Lundy shows how each separate article of the
Apostles' Creed finds artistic illustration in the
catacombs of primitive Christianity, and in the
far earher symbolism of Greece and Rome from
which the first Christians naturally drew their
conceptions. In his pages we realize the fact that
our Christian symbolism, artistic and intellectual,
is in reality the symbolism of humanity.
Such being the facts concerning our Christian
symbolism, artistic and intellectual, what con-
clusion are we to draw from them?
These facts dispose once and forever, in candid
minds, of all purely priestly claims of ecclesiasti-
cism — its claims to a monopoly of magical and
The Flower of Paganism n?
miraculous rites, and to the possession of an oracle
for the transmission of infallible and authoritative
dogmas. A baptism in which children are not
figuratively but really born again into a higher
spiritual hfe; a mass in which the faithful eat
of the very body and blood of the Son of God;
a confessional in which the penitent pours out his
tale of shame as into the ears of God, receiving as
from the lips of the Most High assurance of par-
don; priests clothed with power to work such
miracles, holding even the keys to heaven and
hell; a Church commissioned and empowered to
fashion in final forms the thought of man concern-
ing the Infinite and Eternal Mysteries; placed
in the world to impose those forms of belief upon
the reason and the conscience of man; holding
the human intellect by its apron strings so that
man may not question apart from its permission,
acknowledge truth which it does not sanction, or
think to know aught which it does not reveal —
such marvels are no longer to be received by him
who sees these institutions and beliefs flowering
out from the roots of paganism, the Church itself
no miracle, but a natural evolution.
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To reasonable men there is but one reasonable
conclusion. The priestly claims of Christianity
are as valid as the priestly claims of Buddhism
or of any other "ism." Men who borrow their
rites and dogmas must not take on airs as of spirit-
ual millionaires. I grieve ever to waste a word
over the follies and wrongs of such a fossil of reli-
gion as ecclesiasticism. But alas! in our own
Church this fossil is a fetich before which hosts
of men are still bowing in superstitious awe.
Even as I write these pages there comes to me a
description of the astonishing growth in my native
city of the ecclesiastical type of churchmanship.
In unctuous eloquence the prosperous piety of a
great Church there is described, in which, as one
of the choicest seals of his ministry, Father
has lately acquired a six hundred dollar chasuble.
"Pure religion and undefiled before God and the
Father" is then to wear surplices of finest lace
embroidered in threads of gold! This is the folly
of ecclesiasticism, but its crime one cannot measure
until he measures the turning aside of the ethical
and spiritual forces from social activities to the
driving of ecclesiastical enginery ; until he measures
The Flower of Paganism 119
the revolt of the reason of man from an infallible
Church preternaturally formulating impossible
statements of inconceivable mysteries. Full-
blown Christian Ecclesiasticism does not stop
short of the monstrous superstition which the
Hindu priesthood most frankly expressed in the
famous formula: "All that exists is in the power
of the gods. The gods are under the power of
magical conjurations. The magical conjurations
are under the control of the Brahmins. Hence
the gods are in the power of the Brahmins." And
such an ecclesiasticism is the ideal of "the ad-
vanced movement," which, crab - fashion, is
seeking in the superstitions of the past a readjust-
ment of Religion.
All this folly and crime of ecclesiasticism stands
shamed in the daylight of history, in which we
recognize the natural growth of the material and
mental symbolism of Christianity and thus see
the natural growth of the Christian Church itself.
The true readjustment of Religion is the return
through the religion about Jesus to the religion of
Jesus. That men may be free to return to the
simple, essential religion of Jesus, they must feel
120 Catholicity
the yoke of ecclesiasticism breaking from their
souls; they must stand deHvered from the bond-
age to magical rites and superstitious experiences;
enslaved no longer to infallible oracles; rejoicing
in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made them
free. There is a fine old Spartan saying which
Plutarch gives us :
Spartan: "Is it to thee or to God that I must
confess?"
Priest: "God."
Spartan: ' ' Then man stand back. ' '
Ecclesiasticism, however, is not Christianity,
thank God! Facts which make against eccle-
siasticism do not necessarily make against Chris-
tianity, but on the contrary may make for its
essential claims. Raw " come-outers " will de-
nounce Christianity as a fraud of the priesthood,
and excoriate the Church as a poor imitation of
paganism. They will wax wrathful over the folly
of attending the services of such a Church, and
grow eloquent on the duty of emancipating one's
self from its childish superstitions, and of living
up to the brand new gospel of three square meals
a day, and a go-as-you-please walk over the course
The Flower of Paganism 121
of life. Thus a raw learning may find such an
argument, which it is only too glad to use against
Christianity. Sciolists indulge in very unscientific
talk about this matter.
A certain weekly of New York criticized the
view which I am now presenting as admitting
"that the rites and at least a part of the doctrines
of the Orthodox Church are only a re-hash of those
instituted by ancient paganism." Is a flower a
re-hash of the roots? Is a man a re-hash of the
boy? Is our modern civilization a re-hash of
the Germanic and Roman civihzations out of
which it has sprung and which it has led up to
a nobler development? Our age of science, with
its general acceptance of the doctrine of evolution,
ought to have saved us from such a stupendous
misconception of history as the average " come-
out er" makes over such facts of history. What
they really prove is that Christianity is an
evolution.
As an evolution Christianity was obliged to
take up and carry along with it hosts of pagan
imaginations and conceptions, rites and usages,
thoughts and feelings; hoping gradually to vital-
122 Catholicity
ize them and transform them into its own higher
hfe. It is doubtless a lamentable fact, but it is
an inevitable one in any historic progress, that
compromises have to be made between the higher
and the lower thought of humanity. Great men
come into the world with great ideals only to find
that they cannot lift the mass to their level at a
bound, that they must gradually lead ignorance
and superstition and selfishness up to the heights
of nobler life. If the ideal cuts loose from the
actual and gets out of sight from it, it will be lost
and the actual will go on in its prosaic level, not
even seeking to mount upward. The ideal must
"slow up," must not break its couplings with the
actual, must be content to drag after it the dead
weight of all the unideal life, if man is ever to be
drawn to the skies.
The story of every great religious movement
has been one and the same. The early inspiration
has not succeeded in suddenly transforming the
mass of life; it has succeeded, however, in fixing
an ideal toward which men have slowly striven.
To keep hold of that slow upward striving, the
new movement has been obliged to accept the
The Flower of Paganism 123
average life, with its institutions and customs and
usages and symbols and notions — in short, to
sink itself for awhile in the mass as the leaven
sinks itself in the lump of dough. There is danger,
of course, that the leaven may not be powerful
enough to aerate the dough, and then the lump
will remain sodden and the yeast will have ex-
pended itself in vain. But, if it is ever to leaven
the whole lump, it must run the risk. It may
have been an evidence of declining spiritual
power in the Church, but none the less, the fact
was, as attested by history, that as the Christian
Church organized itself, it was drawn into all
manner of compromises, out of which at last
emerged a Christianity which was Christian in
the Head, but pagan in the body and feet; its
higher natures charged with the ethical and
spiritual ideal which lived in Jesus, its lower
natures following the Master afar off while tread-
ing in the ways of their heathen fathers. Pagan-
ism in this lower sense survived because the
average man continued untransformed by the
ideal of Christ. Paganism still thus survives.
Scratch the Russian and you will find a Tar-
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tar. Scratch the Christian and you will find a
pagan.
Much of our business is conducted on thoroughly
pagan principles. The statecraft of even "most
Christian kings" is unblushingly pagan. The
religion of the uneducated masses is the supersti-
tion of our heathen ancestry, re-baptized with
Christian names. It is not that we have made no
progress, but it is that what was then the thought
and feeling of the higher men has become the
thought and feeling of the average men ; and that
what were then the intellectual ideas and the
ethical ideals of the average men have been pushed
down beneath the ascending feet of humanity
and left as the ideas and ideals of the lowest
classes of our civilization. The Church of Rome
is undoubtedly chiefly pagan, but it has to deal,
for the most part, with thoroughly heathen classes,
among whom it is doing a needful and beneficent
work ; leaving to them the magical rites and super-
stitious beliefs without which they would think
that they had no religion, while it gradually edu-
cates them in the life of the Master which in due
time will deliver them from this bondage. If
The Flower of Paganism 125
any Church is prepared to justify its ecclesiastical
paganism by confessing that it ministers to pagan
classes, let it stand excused before civilization.
But if its vaunt is that it ministers to the classes
of culture, let its shame be that it ministers to
them still as though they had not been led up
out of superstition.
Christianity was not, however, wholly a sur-
render to the lower forms of paganism — it was a
victory over them in which the conqueror entered
into the possession of his conquest. The Church
retained what pleased it among the goods of the
bankrupt ancient religions, turning them to new
and higher uses. There was a noble paganism
which it was well for man not to lose and which
Christianity preserved for him. When we come
upon traces of pagan symbolism in our churches
or in our creeds, the reverent man will not turn
away from them, ashamed of -their origin. If
he be reasonable and reverent together he will
feel just as the American would feel who had
suddenly awakened to the consciousness that
he was an offshoot of a venerable and noble
family; that back of his own individual life
126 Catholicity
there was a mighty ancestral life, stately and
splendid.
It is a glory to have behind us in our Christian
institutions and symbohsms and doctrines eighteen
centuries of ancestry — but it is a far greater glory
to have behind us five or six thousand years of
traceable spiritual ancestry. It is an honor to
be rooted in one line of noble religion, to feel iden-
tified with the aspiration of such a religion as
Christianity — but it is a far greater honor to be
identified with humanity, to feel one's spiritual
rootings going as far down into the past as we
can trace our way, and reaching out through all
the ramifications of human life, sucking up into the
rare flower, which we call Christianity, the richest
forces and sweetest juices of the soul of man in
Greece and Rome, in Egypt and Persia, in Chaldea
and India. One feels consciously larger in his
religious life as he becomes aware of the fact that
he has grown out of nothing less than the universal
human soul. These institutions are infinitely
more venerable to us as heirlooms of a far back
antiquity than they could ever have been as the
manufactures of a Christian Church. The most
The Flower of Paganism 127
common and simple symbol of religious art grows
more beautiful and sacred as it gathers around it
thus the hallowed associations, not only of cen-
turies, but of thousands of years. The most
trivial and seemingly superstitious usage loses its
offensiveness and becomes an object of reverent
interest as we see generation after generation of
men feeling through these forms after God, if
haply they might find him. We, who feel ill at
ease at times within our mental symbols, may
pause still longer before we rudely tear them
down, as remembering the ages that have housed
their souls within these forms of thought. It is
almost with a thrill of reverence that I look round
upon these symbols and remember that, far back
in the dim ages which history scarcely lights, the
children of men have bowed before the same In-
finite and Eternal Mystery as worshiping through
these very forms.
There is a popular legend in Brittany concern-
ing an imaginary town called Is, which is fancied
to have been engulfed by the sea in the ages long
gone by. If you hearken to the tales of the
weather-beaten fishermen, they will tell you that
128 Catholicity
now and then, when the sea is rough, the spires
of the churches in the old town may be seen in
the waves, while during a calm their sacred bells,
chiming the hymn appointed for the day, lift
a weird music from the depths of the waters.
Thus, in the calm of our thought, we stand by the
great sea of life and from the depths in which
civilizations have gone down and religions have
been engulfed there steal upon our inner ears the
low strains of the sweet aspiring spirit-voices
which still haunt our symbols, our rites, our forms
and our faiths.
The antiquity of our Christian symbolism at-
tests a somewhat essentially true and beautiful
in these ancient forms. Time is a great win-
nowing fan. It sifts out with merciless severity
all that is unworthy. What survives is what is
upon the whole most worthy to survive. The
survival of the fittest — this is the key to historic
evolution. This key unlocks the realm of religion
as well as every other realm. A host of symbols
have been fashioned and thrown away; a multi-
tude of thoughts have been formed and then
discarded. Man has grown out of multitudinous
The Flower of Paganism 129
conceptions and imaginations. He has left behind
him on his road upward the debris of images which
he has laboriously shaped only to break them into
pieces when they have ceased to be transparent
windows into the Infinite and Eternal. The higher
forms of paganism preserved the symbols, artistic
and mental, which had thus shown themselves
worthy of being cherished.
Wisdom has not been born into the world in
our generation. Although the ancients had no
telephones and steam engines, no machine-made
shoes and cotton prints, they were by no means
fools. They thought deeply and shaped nobly
their polities and symbols and beliefs. A man
does not borrow a tattered and worn cloak. If
Christianity arrayed itself in the garments of
paganism it was because upon the whole the higher
paganism had fashioned worthy vestments for
the soul of man. The Christian Church did
wisely in copying the system of the synagogue,
as eighteen centuries of Church life has well
attested. Why do we repeat these familiar de-
vices of sacred art in our church, generation after
generation, except because they are fitting expres-
130 Catholicity
sions of spiritual truths? Why did the eariy
Christians adopt them from the pagan temples
in which they had been reared except that they
found in them better forms of thought and feeling
than any they could fashion for themselves?
When you go down into the Roman Catacombs
and see in the earliest Christian art the old Grecian
forms of Orpheus and Apollo standing for Christ,
you feel at once instinctively the natural appro-
priateness of these symbols. Those exquisitely
ideal conceptions which Grecian art had given
became the natural symbols of him in whom man
found the realization of the spell of Orpheus, and
the grace of Apollo.
When I have ceased to look upon baptism and
the eucharist superstitiously, have I then lost
my reverence for these sacred heirlooms of the
ages? On the contrary they never have seemed
to me so natural, so true, so beautiful, as symbols
of spiritual mysteries, as now they do. What more
natural symbol of spiritual cleansing than baptism
— in its original form always immersion in the
cleansing water of the stream, from which man
emerged as upon a new life? No wonder that so
The Flower of Paganism 131
many different religions fashioned this natural
symbol. If we had no baptism handed down to
us from our fathers, and if we lived near to nature
we should make such a rite for ourselves. What
more natural symbol of the spiritual communion
of man with the unseen source and spring of his
being than this sacred supper, in which we par-
take of bread that strengtheneth man's heart,
and wine that maketh him of a joyful counte-
nance, and thus outwardly sign to ourselves that
inward partaking of the life which is the bread of
strength for man and the wine of joy for his soul !
If we had no Supper of the Lord handed down to
us from our fathers, we should be constrained to
fashion anew this beautiful symbol of natural
religion. Only now this venerable symbol of
natural religion is forever hallowed with the per-
sonal association of him who reinstituted it as a
memorial of himself. I wonder with an inexpres-
sible wonder at the turning away of men from sym-
bols which are thus not only consecrated by the
use of ages, but which are intrinsically the very
sacraments of Nature. Our formulas for the
great mysteries seem to us often utterly inade-
132 Catholicity
quate, and as shaped by later ages of Christianity
they become almost caricatures of the truths they
seek to express ; but when we return to the primi-
tive symbolism of thought which early Christian-
ity received as the heir of paganism, we find forms
which are still full of meaning, exquisite poems of
spiritual truth, profound parables of the unspeak-
able realities. How full of meaning for us still
is that old story of the Fall found in our Genesis
any one may see for himself who ponders Haw-
thorne's ''Marble Faun." We can as yet find
no more fitting expression of the mystery of the
Divine Being, at once the One and the Many, than
that most ancient and venerable formula of belief
inherited by Christianity from paganism — the
Doctrine of the Trinity.
We thus gain a conception of the true historic
position of Christianity. It is no upstart religion
dispossessing the faiths of antiquity — it is their
child. Their blood beats in its veins; their spirit
breathes in its life. It is the heir of the ages. It
enters upon the possession of man's soul by right
of lineage. It is the legitimate successor of the
religions which, through ages past, have held
The Flower of Paganism i33
sway upon the earth, and the great thoughts and
imaginations of paganism have been deeded over
to it, to be held in trust for man. Christianity
is in reahty the flowering out of paganism; the
philosophy of Plato, the ethical spirit of Socrates,
the tender and pure humanity of Virgil, the
heroism of the Stoics — the best life of all the past
coming forth in it into new forms. The true
claim of Christianity upon our modern world is,
that it is a natural growth of religion, the highest
form thus far reached by the spiritual aspiration
of mankind, in the historic evolution of the race.
Christianity thus takes its place in the uni-
versal system of God's education of man. The
growth of the soul of man is an unfolding of the
Spirit of God.
If the doctrine of evolution teaches us any-
thing, it teaches us that true progress must not
dissever the present from the past. We can
readily enough fashion in theory more perfect
social institutions than those found in our civiliza-
tion, but society wisely prefers the slow and sure
method of growing our imperfect institutions out
into higher forms-. We do not want new institu-
134 Catholicity
tions or new symbols or new faiths in religion, but
the old institutions and symbols and beliefs de-
veloped further. The plant will not grow the
better for cutting its roots. Man has not lived
through the past for naught. The past must lie
beneath the present as the foundation of its
security, the source of its life. Christianity to-day
is the conservatism of religion — keeping up the
connection between the present and the past.
Religion may not rest in the present — it must
reach forward into the future. It must be pro-
gressive as well as conservative. While it roots
in the past it must throw forth its shoots of new-
growing life into the free air of heaven. The
past must not be a mould to cramp the present and
thus to stifle the future; it must simply be the
ground upon which we stand as we mount upward,
the soil from which to draw the forces of the life
which grows ever higher. Christianity, in its
present form, must not assume to be the final
fashioning of religion; it must hold itself plastic
to the forces which are growing within it to-
ward a development as yet unseen. Max Miiller
says :
The Flower of Paganism 135
The religion of the future will be the fulfilment of
all the religions of the past — the true religion of human-
ity, that which, in the struggle of history, remains as
the indestructible portion of all the so-called false
religions of mankind.
In so far as Christianity is such a survival of
the fittest in religion, the religion of the future
will probably prove to be the Christian religion
sublimated. It will be an out-putting from the
old historic stem which, in its turn, has sprung
from the main stock of humanity. All this we
learn as we look around to see in our Christian
churches the signs of the past in a present which
holds the promise and potency of the future.
We thus gain a yet higher thought. Dr. Lundy
declares the conclusion to which he had been led
by his study of the relations of Christian symbol-
ism to pagan symbolism: "Religion is essentially
one in faith and practice, under various modifica-
tions, perversions, corruptions and developments."
When the June rose opens on the bush, you know
that down to the tiniest rootlet the bush through-
out is a rosebush. Roots and stock and stem and
branches and leaves and buds are only the different
136 Catholicity
developments of one common life. Since Chris-
tianity has blossomed forth from paganism, pa-
ganism was essentially Christian. One sap runs
through the race. One blood pulses through
humanity. Religions are one and the same reli-
gion in different stages of development. The
Christian is simply the pagan educated higher — •
the pagan was the child Christian. The strongest
claim of Christianity is, that it is more than
Christian — that it is human. And that which is
essentially human is really divine.
Let us then hearken to the sum of the whole
matter in the admirable counsels of catholicity
which preface Mr. Schermerhorn's "Sacred Scrip-
tures of the World."
Whosoever doeth the will of my father who is in
heaven, the same is my brother, and my sister, and
my mother. (Saying of Jesus.)
Of a truth I perceive that God is no respecter of
persons; but in every nation he that revereth Him
and worketh righteousness is accepted with Him.
(Saying of the Apostle Peter.)
The catholic-minded man regards all religions as
embodying the same truths; the narrow-minded man
observes only their differences. (Chinese Apothegm.)
The Flower of Paganism i37
Altar flowers are of many species, but all wor-
ship is one; systems of faith are different, but God
is one. (Hindu Apothegm.)
He who is beloved of God honors every form of
Religious Faith. (Buddhist Scripture.)
Have theVeligions of mankind no common ground ?
Is there not everywhere the same enrapturing beauty
beaming forth from many thousand hidden places?
Broad, indeed, is the carpet God has spread, and
beautiful the colors He has given it. . . . There is
but one lamp in this house, in the rays of which,
wherever I look, a bright assembly meets me. . . .
O God ! whatever road I take joins the highway that
leads to Thee. (Persian Scriptures.)
To him who on these pinions has risen and soared
away to the throne of the Highest, all religions are
alike; Christians, Moslems, Guebers, Jews — all adore
Him in their several way and form. (Persian
Apothegm.)
V
THE HIDDEN WISDOM OF PAGANISM—
THE OPEN SECRET OF CHRISTIANITY
While yet the winter holds Nature in cold
concealment, we know that before many weeks
have passed the lilac bushes will stand transfig-
ured in the glory of spring. When those delicate
purple clusters come forth upon the common
looking bushes, there will be a revelation of the
inner secret of the plain, prosaic clumps by the
side of the old farm houses. Every element en-
tering into the fibers of the bush will be subli-
mated in the flower; the juices of the sap will be
spiritualized; the meaning of roots and stem and
branch and bud and blossom will come forth into
the light of open day. Then we shall say, think-
ing of the common bush of winter: "There, that
is what it was meaning all along."
History is an evolution; that is, an organic
138
Hidden Wisdom of Paganism i39
growth, whose earlier and rudimentary stages are
to be interpreted in its later developments. The
secret of religion in its wintry periods is to be
disclosed in the spring-time of the spirit.
Christianity is the flower of paganism. In
this fact we find at once the vindication of pagan-
ism and the justification of Christianity. There
was an inner hidden life of paganism, to find
which we have to go within the surface, and scratch
away the bark of institutions and symbols and
dogmas, in order that we may get at the sap
flowing in the veins of humanity. There was an
esoteric religion of the past veiled behind the exo-
teric forms of paganism; the religion of the few
back of the religion of the many ; truth as fashioned
in the understanding of the philosophers; life,
as visioned in the aspirations of the saints; the
faith and hope of the seers ; the mysteries of being
as read by the mystics.
There is an ugly look about such a statement;
as though it meant that there was a conscious and
deliberate purpose, on the part of scholars and
priests, to keep for themselves the kernel of truth
while they offered to the masses the dry husks.
I40 Catholicity
Every one remembers that masterful picture in
which the Roman augurs are preparing to feed
the sacred birds kept for the auspices, while they
can scarcely restrain their convulsive laughter
over the superstitious folly of the people to which
they owe their own comfortable keeping at the
expense of society. Doubtless this picture types
a fact in the later and decadent stages of many a
religion; but if so, the crafty priests are more to
be pitied than the honest people. I had rather
be the most ignorant peasant, creeping into the
great cathedral with a superstitious awe, and
counting my beads in devout simplicity, than the
cultivated priest who smiles behind his conscious
mummery, or the scholar in the pulpit who repeats
the dogmas in which he no longer believes, but
which he thinks the people must needs yet be
taught to trust.
I do not believe that in any vital religion there
is such conscious doubleness. I do believe, how-
ever, that there is a necessary esoteric thought
and life within the most living religion; not as a
designed monopoly of the elect, but as the reser-
vation forced upon the few by the inability of
Hidden Wisdom of Paganism 141
the many to receive the higher conceptions and
experiences.
Do you mean to deceive your boy when, stand-
ing by the window, at the close of day, you say
to him as the fiery orb disappears: "The sun has
set?" You are talking to him like a Ptolemaic
astronomer, as though you beHeved in the obsolete
theory that the sun is revolving around the fixed
earth. When your boy gets older he may possibly
accuse you of fraud in having been all the while
a Copernican astronomer, believing that the earth
revolves around the sun while the sun itself is
moving in its majestic march through the heavens.
Was there any conscious doubleness or purposed
fraud in 3^our method of instructing your boy?
If you had tried to give him the higher thought
it would have been lost upon him. To him the
sun seems to set. You give him the conception
for which he is ready, knowing full well that,
when he becomes a man, he will put away this
childish thing. Popular notions go before scien-
tific conceptions. The child can only see what
his mind can mirror; can only think what his
vocabulary of thought can translate.
142 Catholicity
Imperfect truth is often better than perfect
truth. Absolutely perfect truth is not within
our grasp, out of the realm of pure mathematics.
Truth is a matter of degrees, and men think and
believe as they are able. To-day what a contrast
religion presents under one and the same nominal
faith! How little alike John Henry Newman's
thought of the Infinite Mysteries and the thought
of the ignorant servant girl who comes to early
mass! The great cardinal would try in vain to
give her his higher ideas. No words could com-
municate those ideas to her mind. As Emerson
walked smilingly along the shady streets of Con-
cord of a Sunday morning, he had no wish to shut
himself up in his mystic thought of the Over- Soul
— but what impassable gulfs yawned between
him and his neighbors wending their way to the
orthodox meeting-houses to worship the Jewish
Jehovah.
And yet this is an age of general education.
What then must have been the contrasts of
thought in ages when the mass of people had little
or no education, when mind and conscience were
alike rudimentary, and when over those dark
•Hidden Wisdom of Paganism i43
valleys towered the mountain heights on which
walked the sages and philosophers, the mystics
and the saints? How could Socrates make the
giddy Athenian youths understand the whispers
of his daemon? He spoke the word heard within,
and they gave him the cup of hemlock. How
could the Buddha communicate to his fellow
countrymen his rapt experiences? He tried to
tell them the things he had heard and seen and
his gospel turned, in the heavy atmosphere of
the average man, into a new charter for ecclesiasti-
cal religion, and the Buddhist Church well-nigh
stifled the Divine Voice in the rubrics of the Sacred
Order. How could Jesus interpret to the dull
ears of his good Galileans the secrets of his
conversation with his Father? They overheard
once a voice from heaven speaking with him.
"The people therefore that stood by and heard it
said that it thundered ; others said, an angel spake
to him."
My conception of the inner and hidden religion
of the past is that it was the higher thought of the
philosophic minds upon the great problems of
life, the intuitions of the poet-souls, the solemn
144 Catholicity
experiences of the mystics in communing with the
unseen spheres, the pure aspirations of the saintly
natures whom God has ever sent to every people
to keep the light shining and the fire burning in
the shrine of the one true temple — humanity.
Each of these priests of Man could only well
have spoken at all as saying :
That moment that his face I see,
I know the man that must hear me;
To him my tale I teach.
When these masters wrote their works they must
needs have been sealed books to those who having
eyes see not. Thus there must have grown up
mystic writings in a tongue "not understanded
of the people" — through no fault of the writers
but only of the readers. There was doubtless
need then as now not to cast pearls before swine;
not to force truth on men's minds when unpre-
pared to receive it; not to pour in too much
light lest instead of clearer vision there should be
blindness; not to tell rashly of things that "it
was not lawful to utter."
It is certainly possible that there were secret
Hidden Wisdom of Paganism 145
Orders of Initiates, as many have imagined and
as we know to have been the fact to a certain
extent — the Neo-Platonists of Alexandria, the
Hierophants of Egypt, the Theodidaktoi of Greece,
the Rishis of India — among whom a hidden wis-
dom was kept aHve on earth. There were doubt-
less then, as there are now, priests and scholars
who were selfishly content to let the mass of men
cower beneath the clouds lying low over the dark
valleys and shiver in their chill mists, while they
sunned themselves on the mountain tops. But
where religion is living it seeks to communicate
itself. The spring that is not frozen flows forth
to water the thirsty valleys. The sun strives to
break through the clouds and flood the earth with
light and warmth. The higher thought must
needs have sought to speak itself forth, the higher
life must inevitably have tried to vitalize the con-
duct and character of the mass of men. The true
esoteric religion of antiquity must have been
ever seeking to ennoble the beliefs and purify
the lives of the people.
Thus, below the surface of the conventional
religion, in many a land of antiquity, through the
146 Catholicity
fragments handed down from the past, one can
often trace the movement of this hidden wisdom,
gathering around some fit belief or institution or
symbol, and seeking to lift the faith and worship
and life of the people higher. To accomplish
this there must have been organization; and to
keep this organization vital with the higher
thought and life there must have been in many
ages a certain secrecy. In the earlier stages of
Christianity, when its thoughts were certain to
be misrepresented and its ideals sure to be abused,
when publicity would have been quick degradation
and corruption and would have brought down the
persecuting hand of the State, we find that the
young Church instinctively fashioned a Disci-
pline of the Secret ; an Order whose secrets were
open only to the initiate ; whose rites were Myste-
ries at which none but the faithful were admitted ;
and they only through the proper watchword.
Such Mysteries appear to have grown naturally
beneath the surface of religion in many ancient
lands. Egypt seems to have had a secret cult of
Isis; Mithraicism, a later development of the
Persian religion, centered in a similar organiza-
Hidden Wisdom of Paganism i47
tion ; and Greece had, as we know, several Sacred
Mysteries. The best known, the Eleusinian
Mysteries, were celebrated annually at the end of
summer, about the 15th of September. Some
ten days were devoted to the celebration. Each
day's "services" formed part of a progressive
system of object lessons in religion, which grew
more solemn as the festival proceeded. All who
chose to come were admitted to the celebrations
of the earlier days, which formed the Lower Myste-
ries, but only the duly prepared initiates were
allowed to witness the mystic splendors of the
culminating scenes. Processions, pageants, sym-
bolic rites formed the ritual for the inculcation
of the truths which were more clearly taught
through the chanting of sacred hymns, and the
oracular utterances of mysterious words which
were never to be repeated. The artistic genius
of Greece was brought into the service of religion
in fashioning this impressive ritual, and the cele-
bration was in reality a sacred drama, advancing
through successive stages toward its culmination
in the weird scenes of the last night in a dark
cave, which no one might make public, on fearful
148 Catholicity
pains and penalties. Every device to impress the
emotional nature seems to have been carefully
studied, with a resultant intensity of feeling on
the part of the worshipers, such as has perhaps
never before or since been secured in the methods
of religion. It seems probable, also, that what
are known now as ''spiritualistic" experiences
were not lacking in the later stages of the cele-
bration, and that, in the darkness of midnight
amid the hush of awe, visions appeared to the
initiates and the unseen world seemed to open
upon them. But through all the studied pomp
of this Grecian sacrament and the eerie experi-
ences of its nocturnal assemblies, the aim of moral
and religious inspiration was never lost. How-
ever degenerate these Mysteries became in later
days, in their vital period they were such true
religious and moral forces that even Plato spoke
well of them. They kept religion spiritual and
morality ethical in Greece.
This inner religion which brooded in the clois-
tered halls of the sacred temples in the Nile valley,
and which worked for the reformation of the popu-
lar religion through the sacraments of the mid-
Hidden Wisdom of Paganism i49
night Mysteries in Greece, was substantially one
and the same faith and hope and aspiration, under
the natural variations of different lands and ages.
The inner spirit of each living religion was kindred
with the inner spirit of every other living reli-
gion. As the life mounted toward the bud, the
same processes took place, the same formations
ensued. When the flower came forth, it was the
blossoming of every bud on every bough of the
human tree. Christianity is thus the fulfilling
of this hidden wisdom of antiquity. The highest
truths of the past form its faith, the loftiest aspira-
tions of the past breathed in its life. Christianity
is the open secret of antiquity.
What then were the essential beliefs and aspira-
tions which were shrined in this esoteric religion
of antiquity?
First of all, the unity of God. The popular
religion of all forms of paganism was polytheistic.
The average man saw in the manifold forces of
Nature so many different Divine Powers. He
worshiped as many gods as he seemed to see work-
ing in Creation. The higher thought of antiquity
saw these various powers of Nature to be but forms
150 Catholicity
of One Infinite and Eternal Force ; the gods them-
selves as only personifications of the attributes
and relationships of One Divine Being. The
great religions of antiquity, in the persons of their
highest representatives, tended toward this thought
of the Unity of God; sometimes reaching it in a
clear and definite Theism, and again confusing it
in a vague and misty Pantheism.
In the Sacred Books of India we may read:
"There is One Supreme Mind which transcends
all other intelligences. It pervades the system of
worlds and is yet infinitely beyond them. He
exists by himself; He is All in all. . . . One
Living and True God." The Buddhist Scriptures
which are popularly supposed to be atheistic, thus
speak: "O Thou Eternal One, Thou Perfection
of Time, Thou Truest Truth, Thou Changeless
Essence of Change, Thou Most Excellent Radiance
of Mercy, I take refuge in Thee." A papyrus from
one of the Egyptian tombs contains this sublime
invocation: "Hail to Thee, O Ptah-tanen, great
God who concealeth his form. . . . The Father
of all fathers and of all gods. . . . Watcher
who traversest the endless ages of Eternity. . . .
Hidden Wisdom of Paganism 151
O God, architect of the world, Thou art with-
out a father, begotten by Thine own becoming;
Thou art without a mother, being born through
repetition of Thyself. . . . Heaven and earth
obey the commands which Thou hast given; they
travel by the road which thou hast laid down
for them. . . . Thou resteth, and it is night;
when Thine eyes shine forth we are illuminated."
Greece quite clearly reached this vision of One
God. "There is One Eternal God, the Cause of
all things. He is the Divine Mind, the Infinite
Wisdom; He brought Matter out of chaos into
Order, and produced the world we see. . . .
There is One Supreme Intelligence, who acts with
order, proportioned and designed; the Source of
all that is good and best." The famous Hymn
of Cleanthes is a fine expression of the lofty Theism
of Greece. From our schoolboy days we remem-
ber that immortal passage of Virgil that expresses
so clearly the Theism which Rome had learned of
Greece :
One Life through all the immense creation runs,
One Spirit is the moon's, the sea's, the sun's;
All forms in the air that fly, on the earth that creep,
152 Catholicity
And the unknown nameless monsters of the deep —
Each breathing thing obeys one Mind's control,
And in all substance is a single Soul.
Perhaps the noblest utterance of this pagan
theism which has come down to us in the hymn
of one who is known to Christians only as an
early foe of Christianity, the so-called " infidel"
Porphyry :
O God ineffable, eternal Sire,
Throned on the whirling spheres, the astral fire,
Hid in whose heart thy whole creation lies —
The whole world's wonder mirrored in thine eyes —
List thou thy children's voice, who draw anear.
Thou hast begotten us, Thou too must hear !
Each life thy life her Fount, her Ocean knows,
Fed while it fosters, filling as it flows;
Wrapt in thy light the star-set cycles roll.
And worlds within thee stir into a soul;
But stars and souls shall keep their watch and way,
Nor change the going of thy lonely day.
Some sons of thine, our Father, King of kings.
Rest in the sheen and shelter of thy wings —
Some to strange hearts the unspoken message bear,
Sped on thy strength through the haunts and homes
of air —
Some where thine honour dwelleth hope and wait,
Hidden Wisdom of Paganism i53
Sigh for thy courts and gather at thy gate;
These from afar to thee their praises bring,
Of thee, albeit they have not seen thee, sing;
Of thee the Father wise, the Mother mild,
Thee in all children the eternal Child,
Thee the first Number and harmonious Whole,
Form in all forms, and of all souls the Soul.
As touching man, the hidden wisdom of an-
tiquity taught that he was born in the skies, that
he was in his essential nature a spiritual being,
that he was destined therefore for immortality,
that this immortality would prove the natural
issue of the virtue or vice of earth, that the expe-
riences of earth were designed to be the processes
of purification through which man should free
himself from evil and reascend to God. Thus the
inner secret thought of paganism answered the
old questions of man — Whence, What, Whither.
All forms of mystic thought returned one answer
to the question of man's origin. The doctrine
of pre-existence was the secret of all poetico-
philosophic speculation. It took on fantastic
forms in many lands and as such has by us been
treated lightly ; but it was at heart always simply
154 Catholicity
the spiritual instinct which in Wordsworth's Ode
on ImmortaHty is so famihar to us all, the phi-
losophy which in the Introduction to the Gospel
according to St. John is sacred to us all. Each
man must have first been in the Divine Thought
before he is a fact of nature. ''God thought of
me and so I grew." As the ancients expressed it,
a ray of Light proceeding forth from God has
bodied itself in matter and lo! Man. This was
the intuition which kept alive in humanity the
sense of man's destiny. Spirit could not cease
to be when the material body was laid away in
the grave. Man was immortal. And this vision
of man's origin and nature kept the thought of
his destiny distinctly ethical.
Immortality was indeed an open secret in an-
tiquity; but it was not held as an ethical faith, in
the common forms of religion. Bliss was to be
secured through the favor of the gods, and their
favor was to be won by gifts. Misery was not
the shadow of sin but the cloud that gathered in
the frowns of the gods. The communion which
Greece sought with the unseen world was too com-
monly only the guidance of the oracles in the
Hidden Wisdom of Paganism i55
every-day business of life. We may see a picture
of the lower religion of antiquity as communing
with the spirit spheres in the lower ranks of modern
Spiritualism, where men and women seek to satisfy
their curiosity with uncanny experiences, gaining
from their seances a belief in an unseen world
which makes the seen world no more earnest, no
more pure.
Back of all this, high above it, there was shrined
in the minds of the sages, and burning in the hearts
of the saints, a faith in Immortality that was
thoroughly and intensely ethical. From the
Library which the Chaldean Sargon collected
in the "City of Books," to preserve the traditions
of the primitive civilization of Mesopotamia,
we draw forth to the light of day one of the
earliest verses preserved to us from the "flood of
years."
If evil thou doest,
To the everlasting sea
Thou shalt surely go.
We can best judge the ethical spirit of the inner
faith of antiquity in immortality from the records
156 Catholicity
of the land where it blossomed into a belief of the
people. From the folds of the mummy cloths
wrapping the earthly remains of the great dead
of Egypt we have taken out fragments of the
Sacred Book of the Nile valley which, pieced
together, give us the imposing funeral ritual
known as the Book of the Dead. Perhaps no
religion of earth has ever fashioned so impressive
an ethical symbolism concerning the after-life as
that which Eg3^pt shaped in this "Book of the
Dead." No unmeaning pomp and pageantry was
that of these Egyptian rites, no fulsome compli-
ments to the departed were paid by the officiating
priests, but a vivid dramatic representation of
the successive stages of the Judgment through
which the dead was already passing made the
living realize intensely that every man must give
account for the deeds done in the body. The
tombs of Egypt presented pictorially the same
visions of the hereafter. One sees now, as the
Egyptians saw centuries ago, their dead standing
before the goddess Maat, Right — Truth and
Justice; or again, the man's heart being weighed
in the balance against the image of Maat, in the
Hidden Wisdom of Paganism i57
presence of Osiris, while Horus is watching the
dipping of the scales.
One of the chapters of the "Book of the Dead,"
is entitled: ''Book of Entering into the Hall of
the Twofold Maat (Right and Wrong) ; the person
parts from his sins that he may see the divine
faces." This one hundred and twenty-fifth chap-
ter gives us the oldest known code of private and
public morality. The dead man invokes the
Eternal Righteousness as follows :
Hail to thee great god, lord of the Two-fold Maat.
... I have brought you Law, and subdued for you
iniquity. I am not a doer of fraud and iniquity against
men. I am not a doer of that which is crooked.
. . . I do not force a labouring man to do more than
his daily task. ... I do not cause hunger; I do not
cause weeping. ... I am not a falsifier of the meas-
ures in the temples. ... I do not add to the weight
of the scale; I do not falsify the indicator of the bal-
ance; I do not withhold milk from the mouth of the
suckling.
Nor is it simply the negative aspect of morality
which is thus presented as the test of the life of
the hereafter, but the dead man is represented
as proceeding to affirm the positive virtues which
158 Catholicity
are to be his defense before Maat. On the monu-
mental inscriptions we read such noble testimo-
nies of conscience in these ancient pagans as the
following :
I was just and true without malice, placing God in
my heart and quick in discerning his will. I have
come to the city of those who dwell in eternity. I
have done good upon earth. ... I am a Sahu who
took pleasure in righteousness, conformably with the
laws of the tribunal of the two-fold Right.
And again:
Doing that which is Right and hating that which
is Wrong, I was bread to the hungry, water to the
thirsty, clothes to the naked, a refuge to him that was
in want; that which I did to him, the great God hath
done to me.
It is needless to multiply illustrations from other
religions. This fine blossom is seen in the bud in
the hidden wisdom of all lands. The higher thought
and life in all religions of antiquity affirmed
less openly the same ethical faith as to the here-
after. It was to be the reaping of the harvest
whose seed was sown in the conduct of life on
earth. How this strenuous faith in the moral
Hidden Wisdom of Paganism i59
character of the hereafter was nurtured in the
souls of the masters of antiquity, it is needless
for us to inquire. The moral nature of man once
quickened and brought to the birth becomes the
prophet of the hereafter. Conscience, the voice
of God in the human spirit, is the revealer of the
things to come. The communings of these lofty
spirits with the unseen world taught them the
secrets which the duller souls of their fellows could
not have received. Could we bring to light the
secret experiences of the great souls of the past,
we should perhaps discover the truth which seems
in our age almost bursting into an open secret
concerning the relation of the seen to the unseen
world. Suffice it to say that those mystic experi-
ences of the saintly seers, untranslatable into the
tongue of the people without creating a frightful
danger, fed the consciousness of the reality of a
life beyond, and instructed men in the essential
laws of that life. These were the rapt experiences,
couched in the half -revealing, half - concealing
ritual of the mysteries, which kept aHve in the
souls of the common people a sense of the unseen
world, and a faith that it is to bring the rewards
i6o Catholicity
and punishments due to the virtue and vice of
earth. Plato writes in one place:
I must not omit to mention a tradition which is
firmly believed by many, and has been received from
those who are learned in the mysteries; they say that
the crime will be punished in the world below.
The true nature of earth's experiences followed
from this interpretation of man's origin, nature
and destiny. The secret of the soul is found
in the truth that the present life is a training
for the future life, that earth is a discipline
through which men are made ready by tempta-
tion and trial to escape hell and to gain heaven,
so that the spirit may be reunited to God, its
Source, through the new birth of death. Plato
writes in one place of the Mysteries: "They re-
deem us from the pains of hell, but if we neglect
them no one knows what awaits us." There
seems to have been quite a unanimity among
ancient writers to the effect that he who had
been initiated, had learned what would insure his
happiness hereafter. This salvation in the future
life, assured through initiation, was not however
Hidden Wisdom of Paganism i6i
attained by mere ritualistic observances, by parti-
cipation in these mystic sacraments of paganism ;
it was to be wrought in the soul on earth through
painful purifications, as pictured in the sacred
symbols which taught the initiate the true story
of the soul.
One of the most remarkable forms of these an-
cient Mysteries was that known as Mithraicism.
Little is known of this Persian cult until it ap-
peared in Rome as a secret worship, about the
beginning of the second century of our era. It
spread so rapidly and won such popularity that,
for awhile, it seemed likely to prove a serious rival
to Christianity. From the fragmentary accounts
preserved to us, we recognize in it the early Persian
conception of life as a battle between good and
evil, fashioned into symbolic forms and shrined
in the elaborate ritual of a secret Order. Mithras
was the god of the bright heaven, the god of Light.
In the natural symbolism of religion, he was there-
fore the god of Purity and Goodness. The strife
between Day and Night, between the Light and
Darkness, was a physical parable of the strife
between the powers of Good and Evil in the soul
i62 Catholicity
of man. Mithras led the forces of purity and
called men to the one great battle of earth beneath
his standard. Victory in this battle was to be
won only by sacrifice — the sacrifice which Mithras
himself is always mystically performing in the
heavens and in the soul of man. The human soul
which sprang from the Divine being, as a ray of
pure light, and descended into matter was again
to reascend and attain unity with God through
prolonged and severe asceticism. Those who
were initiated in the mysteries of Mithraicism
had to fast through a long probation, enduring
scourging and fasting, and living in strictest celi-
bacy. They were then counted as soldiers of
Mithras, and sealed with his sign upon their fore-
heads— the mystic sign of the cross. Before enter-
ing upon each successive stage of the Order, the
candidate was called upon to participate in con-
tests which symbolized the everlasting battle
between Light and Darkness; and, at the end of
each renewed strife, the victor's crown was placed
upon his brow. A beautiful natural symbolism
of the true story of the soul !
The Eleusinian Mysteries had much of the
Hidden Wisdom of Paganism 163
same character. The fundamental legend on
which the ritual was founded was "the searching
of the goddess Ceres for her daughter Proserpine,
her sorrows and her joys, her descent into Hades
and her return into the realm of light." A pure
nature-myth apparently. Nature itself, however,
is a cosmic symbol of spiritual realities, the story
of the soul written as a hieroglyph in matter, the
principles of ethics found in the lower terms of
physics. Nature itself therefore is a sacrament —
the outward and visible sign of inward and spirit-
ual truths. Such a tale as that of this nature-
myth readily translated itself, in the minds of
mystics, into a parable of man's life; the fall of
the pure spirit from the upper worlds of light into
the dark prison-house of matter, its defilement
therein, its purification through suffering, the
coming down of heavenly helpers to its aid, its
restoration to the realms of light, its re-ascent to
God. This was the spiritual truth shrined in
the dramatic ritual of the Mysteries. The final
stage in this sacramental drama, according to
Thos. Taylor, pictured the spirit's "friendship
and interior communion with God, and the enjoy-
i64 Catholicity
ment of that felicity which arises from intimate
converse with divine beings."
From what we can gather of these Mysteries,
Eleusinian, Mithraic, Dionysian, Adonian, and
probably those centering in the worship of Isis,
the main features of these sacramental rituals
were common to them all. The story of the soul
was symbolically pictured in six successive stages,
so strangely familiar to us, Baptism, Temptation,
Passion, Burial, Resurrection and Ascension.
The initiate himself, in the most solemn scene of
the mystic drama, was sometimes encoffined as
though for burial, and then raised to new life by
the hand of the symbolized God. Or, the story
of man was imaged in the story of the god whose
experiences were followed, until in hymns, which
formed the rough drafts of the very Easter Hymn
which we still sing, the worshipers burst forth in
the joyous acclaim of the risen god.
These were the truths shrined in the inner reli-
gion of antiquity: the unity of God, immortality
as the natural consequence of character upon
earth, the present life a training of the spiritual
man in the life of the son of God. In Jesus of
Hidden Wisdom of Paganism 165
Nazareth this twofold truth of the hidden wisdom
of antiquity came forth into the Hght of day; the
inner Hfe of roots and stem stood revealed in the
glory of the flower; and the secret of paganism
became the open secret of Christianity. The one
God worshiped dimly by antiquity has become
"our Father which art in heaven," seen in the
face of the Beloved Son. Immortality has been
verily brought to light in the life of the man who
walked in audible communings with the unseen
world, and who gave the one needful attestation
of a hereafter in his manifestation of himself
after death from the spirit-sphere. That life to
come is seen, through this open window of the
skies, as the natural issue of the life that now is;
unutterably blissful in its reward of noble charac-
ter, and solemn beyond the dreams of superstition
in its fruitage from vice and crime. The earth
on which Jesus lived is verily the schoolhouse of
the spirit, the scene of discipline through which
man becomes regenerate, from which the child
of earth mounts through temptation and trial
by the way of the cross unto the destiny of the
Son of God.
i66 Catholicity
These are the staple truths of essential Christian-
ity, our fundamental faiths. And these truths
are but the shadows of the Christ himself — the
reflections cast in our consciousness from the story
of the Divine Man. Augustine said, long ago,
that Jesus so lived that his life became a parable
of the life of the soul. The sacraments and doc-
trines of the Christian Church are but symbols of
that mystic life of the Christ, nor merely as of the
story of an individual who lived eighteen centuries
ago, but as the secret read in a mystic man of the
universal story of the soul. The Christ is to be
born in us and we are to become the sons of God;
and then, through those six successive stages —
Baptism, Temptation, Passion, Burial, Resur-
rection and Ascension — we are by the way of the
cross to mount into the heavens and enjoy the
beatific vision.
How strangely real becomes the familiar story
which the Church brings to us at the Lenten time !
How profoundly true to human nature this house-
hold faith in which, at our mother's knees, we
learned all unconsciously the secret of the ages.
How imperishable this one common faith of the
Hidden Wisdom of Paganism 167
human spirit! How immortal this one constant
religion of the soul of man! How shallow, in the
light of such a vision of the hidden history of man,
the scepticism which challenges this one essential,
universal, eternal religion of earth; which, grow-
ing with the growth of man, from the inner roots
of antiquity, has blossomed at last into the open
secret of the soul — the Christ !
Knowing it not perhaps, we have entered into
the heritage of the fathers; and the common
belief of Christian men is the fulfilling of the in-
nermost faith and hope and aspiration of univer-
sal humanity. No longer couched to us in the
vShadowy and confusing lines of a nature myth,
but bodied in the clear, strong, true outlines of an
historic character — behold the parable of the soul !
Are we following in the way the Fathers trod?
Are we walking in the clear light of god, our Father
in the heavens? Are our eyes raised to the splen-
did vision of immortality? Are we feeling round
us the shadows of the unseen world? Are we in
training on the earth for that life beyond? Are
we disciplining our souls through trial and temp-
tation, and fashioning thus the manhood which
i68 Catholicity
endures beyond the grave? Are we turning that
mystic ritual of antiquity into the severe reahties
of life, and, through the six stages of the regenerate
man, are we by the way of the cross going toward
the stars? Can we each say: "I live, yet not I,
but Christ liveth in me."
There is an historic poem which has well been
called ' ' one of the most earnest utterances of an-
tiquity"; a poem which has a strange pathetic
interest for us as the last voice of the sacred oracle
of Delphos. As Christianity arose gathering into
itself the spiritual forces of the past, speaking to
men as with a fresh voice out of the unseen world,
the old channels of communication between earth
and the spirit spheres ceased to pour forth mes-
sages of counsel and cheer, and the voice of the
sacred oracles of paganism grew dumb. A disciple
of the great Plotinus — one of the rarest mystics of
the ages — sought through the Delphian oracle an
answer to the question: "Where is now Plotinus'
soul?" The answer which came, the last whisper
of the Oracle, ran thus:
Pure spirit — once a man — pure spirits now
Greet thee rejoicing, and of these art thou;
Hidden Wisdom of Paganism 169
Not vainly was thy whole soul alway bent,
With one same battle and one same intent,
Through eddying cloud and earth's bewildering roar,
To win her bright way to that stainless shore.
Ay, mid the salt spume of this troublous sea,
This death in life, this sick perplexity.
Oft on thy struggle through the obscure unrest
A revelation opened from the Blest —
Showed close at hand the goal thy hope would win,
Heaven's kingdom round thee and thy God within.
So sure a help the eternal Guardians gave.
From life's confusion so were strong to save.
Upheld thy wandering steps that sought the day
And set them steadfast on the heavenly way.
Nor quite even here on thy broad brows was shed
The sleep which shrouds the living, who are dead;
Once by God's grace was from thine eyes unfurled
This veil that screens the immense and whirling world.
Once, while the spheres round thee in music ran.
Was very Beauty manifest to man;
Ah, once to have seen her, once to have known her
there.
For speech too sweet, for earth too heavenly fair!
But now the tomb where long thy soul had lain
Bursts, and thy tabernacle is rent in twain;
Now from about thee, in thy new home above,
Has perished all but life, and all but love.
And on all lives and on all loves outpoured
Free grace and full, a Spirit from the Lord,
High in that heaven whose windless vaults enfold
170 Catholicity
Just men made perfect, and an age all gold.
Thine own Pythagoras is with thee there,
And sacred Plato in that sacred air,
And whoso followed, and all high hearts that knew
In death's despite what deathless Love can do.
To God's right hand they have scaled the starry way —
Piire spirits these, thy spirit pure as they.
Ah, saint ! how many and many an anguish past,
To how fair haven art thou come at last !
On thy meek head what Powers their blessing pour,
Filled full with life, and rich for evermore!
VI
RELIGION AND RELIGIONS
Francis Bacon said: "Religion being the chief
bond of human society, it is a happy thing when
itself is well contained within the bond of unity."
The tree, starting from a seed, has unity in its
source. Growing through trunk and branches
and twigs and leaves, it develops varied forms
and functions, as expressions of its life; the life
which ever remains one in the common sap flowing
through every part of the common organism. The
whole complex life of the tree strains through this
rich variety towards the flower and the fruit, into
which every member of the organism distils its
essential life ; and lo ! there is again a oneness.
Religion, viewed from the human standpoint, as
an expression of man's spiritual life, is his effort
for the adjustment of his life with the Cosmic
Power; his thought of that Power, his feeling
171
172 Catholicity
towards It and his conduct under It. Religion,
viewed as the Hfe of the Cosmic Power manifesting
itself in the life of man, is God's self- communica-
tion to the soul of man; His guidance of man's
thought into a knowledge of Himself (theology).
His messages to the mind of man (revelation),
His stirring of man's feelings into aspiration for
the divine life (inspiration), His direction of man's
conduct into character (ethics). In either aspect
religion is one in its source, its inner nature, its
end and aim; one in the oneness of our human
nature, the oneness of the divine nature, the
oneness together of these natures of God and man.
But, as an expression of the life of man who is
himself in a process of growth, and as an expres-
sion of the life of God who is amid the processes
of self-unfolding, religion must, between the seed
and the flower, differentiate itself into the rich
variety of forms and functionings which we behold
in the manifold religions of earth; differing in its
phases with the different stages of man's growth,
the different environments of the many lands of
earth, the different civilizations of history. Each
of these religions, however, proves itself to a
Religion and Religions i73
scientific study an expression of some necessary
phase of religion; each subserves a use in the
evolution of the fruitioning religion of humanity;
each will find its permanent value preserved and
its transient uses discarded in the attained unity
of the flowering soul of man.
There can be no dispute concerning the one-
ness of the source of religion, viewed either in its
human or its divine aspect. My aim is to sug-
gest hints of the essential unity of religion even
now underlying all religions, and the ultimate
oneness toward which all religions are forth-
reaching.
The religions of Christendom resolve themselves
into varieties of the one Christian ReHgion. Be-
tween the most uncommon of the sects of the
Western world there is found that which Dean
Stanley was wont to call our "common Chris-
tianity"— the essential Christian elements. This
is to be seen alike in the Institutions, the Worships,
the Beliefs and the Life of Christendom.
What is true between the different churches of
Christianity is true also between Christianity and
other religions. Is man one in nature the world
174 Catholicity
over; the human race, despite all its vast variations,
one genus homo; the blood coursing in the veins
of Asiatics, Europeans, Africans and Americans
the same sacred ichor — as by all our scientific
research is proving to be the fact? Then is real
religion one, wherever, in the differing religions of
earth, the soul of man, seeking to adjust itself
to its cosmic relationships — to know its cosmic
source, to obey its cosmic law, to reach its cosmic
goal — looks up to God in hope and trust, looks out
to man in love. The religions of men are many;
the religion of man is one. Vary as religions may
and must under varying environments and heredi-
ties, through the varying temperaments of differ-
ent races and the varying stages of the growth of
man; emphasizing, as each must needs do, the
peculiar phase of the divine life imaged in each of
these differing human mirrors; marked, as each
necessarily is, by the errors which are the shadows
of these partial truths, yet are all but variations
of the one true religion, the life of God in the
soul of man.
So we find that the Institutions and Worships,
the Beliefs and the Life which are common to the
Religion and Religions i75
different Christian churches, are common, also,
to the different religions of humanity. Epito-
mizing our findings under these four heads, we
have the following premises for our argument for
catholicity :
Religion develops the same great Institutions in
different lands and ages, which the varying reli-
gions of men vary indefinitely.
The Church, spelled with a capital C, was an
institution of Chaldea, India and Egypt, mil-
lenniums ago, as it is of Italy and England and
America, to-day. The Buddhist felt toward his
"order" much as the Romanist feels towards his
church. A sacred ministry, a class of men set
apart for the divine ofHces of religion, would have
been found of old in Babylon and Thebes, as it
is found now in Paris and London. The Pagan
Temple was the Christian BasiHca and Cathedral,
baptized with another name. The altar stood in
the sacred spot of the heathen temple, as it stands
in the holy place of the Christian minster. Mon-
asticism developed in the East long before it arose
in the West. Monks and nuns and hermits would
have been found along the Nile valley ages before
176 Catholicity
Christendom poured its host of sad-souled ascetics
up the sacred river, peophng the hills for thou-
sands of miles. A solution of the problem finds
in these resemblances hints of the oneness of
religion, generating the same sacred institutions
among different religions.
The natural symbolism of washing had sug-
gested itself to pious souls of many lands, and
other religions than Christianity had their own
sacred lustrations. The distinctive form of sacred
washing which Christianity inherits from the
Jewish John had grown into use in widely differing
religions, as a rite of initiation into the divine life,
the symbol of renunciation of the past, the sign
of self -purification, the sacrament of the divine
forgiveness of sins. India had its well recognized
baptism. Dean Alford's noble baptismal hymn
might have been sung over the confessors of the
faith by the Ganges, as by the Thames. Mith-
raicism had a similar ceremony, as had also the
mysteries of Greece and of other lands. The
Christian Church holds its prized baptism as a
trustee for humanity, whose sacred possession it
is — the sacrament for the opening of the one
Religion and Religions ^11
spiritual life of the children of the one God in all
lands and under all religions.
The Lord's Supper, by general tradition in-
stituted by Jesus himself, was an outgrowth of the
Jewish Passover Supper. As it is observed in
the two greatest churches of Christendom, it
is far from the original institution, the simple
memorial meal of Jesus; far, also, from the early
Christian rite, the love-feast of primitive Chris-
tianity. And the difference between the mass of
the Church of Rome and the eucharist of the
Greek Church, on the one hand, and the love-feast
of primitive Christianity and the memorial meal
of Jesus, on the other hand, admeasures the in-
flowings from the surrounding pagan environ-
ment of early Christianity.
The ancestry of the Mass is to be found in the
Mysteries of Mithraicism and Greece, as well as in
the Passover of Judaism. It is the child of Isis,
as of Jehovah. The sacred mysteries of different
lands, those esoteric ethical and spiritual cults so
widely scattered among the religions of antiquity,
observed a sacred meal as a symbol of man's
communion with God — the outward and visible
178 Catholicity
sign of the inward and spiritual grace whereby
man doth partake of the very Hfe of God, and
doth nourish his being into hoHness by eating of
the bread which " cometh down from heaven, " by
drinking the wine which "maketh glad the heart
of man," whose natural symbols are in the wheat
and the grape, the choicest fruitings of the in-
dwelling life of nature. Bread and wine were
distributed to the worshipers and eaten and
drunk in reverence, with prayer and praise.
Curiously, again, the Mass even preserves the
ancient Pagan form of the sacred bread — the
unleavened wafer still to be seen on the patten
upon the altar.
All this was natural and inevitable in the sacra-
mental system of nature, through which a law of
correspondence runs; causing every form of life
to be a type, a shadow of a higher form of life;
making the fundamental function of feeding,
whereby life is conserved and increased, a symbol
of the functioning of the soul for the maintenance
and development of spiritual life, the growth in
grace of the spirit of man by assimilating the
thoughts of the divine mind and converting them
Religion and Religions i79
into character. The Christian Mass is the highest
dramatization of the mysteries of the soul — a
dramatization rehearsed centuries ago upon the
banks of the Euphrates, the Cephissus and the
Orontes. This is the glory, not the shame, of
Christianity, proving it the flowering forth of the
various religions of antiquity, whose best life,
strained into it, reappears in it.
In Worship all religions prove themselves akin.
The sacred symbolisms through which art ministers
to worship meet us in the temples of Paganism as
in the churches of Christendom. The circle, the
triangle and the trefoil were graven by Pagan
chisels on the walls of the buildings reared by
religions which thought of themselves only as
aliens and foes one to the other. For the unity of
God, signed by the circle and the triunity, the
oneness in variety of God, signed by the triangle
and the trefoil, were truths known to no one
religion alone, shared by all great religions in the
same stage of evolution. The cross, which forms
the most sacred symbol of our Christian churches,
painted above the altar, shining in brass from the
altar itself, flashing from the top of the lofty
1 80 Catholicity
steeple — this same cross would have been found
in the temples of well-nigh every religion of
the past, as its most sacred symbol. Even the
sacred buildings themselves were often con-
structed on the cruciform plan. The sleeping-
places of the dead were hallowed by the same sign
which consecrates our "acres of God"; and stone
and brass crosses cast their shadows over the
graves of Pagans, as of Christians. The cross
was to those heathen, as to us Christians, the
sacred sign of life ; of the life of man in the human
body; of the life of man escaping from the body
and rising through death into immortality; of
human life accepting the law of sacrifice under
which the superior souls of earth devote them-
selves to the saving of their fellows; of the life of
God Himself, in which all these mysteries of our
human life find their source and spring, their
ground and aim. It was the symbol of the cosmic
mystery which the Christian seer beheld, when he
saw "in the midst of the throne as it were a lamb
slain from the foundation of the world"; the
cosmic mystery which the Pagan seers beheld when
they fashioned that strangest symbol of antiquity,
Religion and Religions i8i
found in many a land, within many a religion — a
crucified Saviour hanging in the skies; the truth
now forever sacred to man, since the supreme Son
of Man died upon the cross of Calvary, embody-
ing once for all the cosmic mystery in the human
life divine.
If we turn to the inmost heart of worship, it is
to find that, as in religious symbolism, so in the
essential life of the soul, under the many religions
of men there is one religion of man. Every
rehgion, as it has grown, has grown out of rite
into reverence, out of ceremony into character,
out of the prescribed performances of priestly
piety into the prayer and praise which are the
very soul of true worship. Each may have begun
in the rituals of superstitious fear which are
recorded alike in the Levitical legislation, the
institutions of Manu and the ceremonial codes
of Chaldea; but all have evolved into the pure
passion of the soul, forever sacred to man in the
litanies of Accadia, the psalms of the Old Testa-
ment, the metrical prayers of the Vedas, the
lofty aspirations of the Upanishads, the devout
worship of the hymn of Cleanthes and the calm
i82 Catholicity
meditations of Marcus Aurelius. Prayer and
praise form the efflorescence of Hinduism, Zoroas-
trianism and the many reUgions of Egypt, as of
Christianity. When the Mohammedan worships,
he kneels upon his mat and prays, as does the
Christian. Different as the outer forms of human
prayers may be, their inner substance is one — the
desire for the knowledge of God, the hunger for
the life of God, the longing for the forgiveness of
sins and peace with God, the realization of the
oneness of man with his source and spring. To-
day, when we would enkindle our souls in public
worship, we Christians open the ancient Jewish
psalter, and are fain to pray and praise in the
words written centuries ago under the shadows of
the temple of Zion, or by the waters of Babylon.
And when we Christians would retire into the
sacred place of our being, and, shutting the door
of the senses, would be alone with God, how often
do we find the priest for this silent worship in
some ancient heathen, whose soul-communings
are immortalized in the poem or the prayer which
makes our anthologies of religion so precious to us
— the companion of our closet proving not merely
Religion and Religions 183
the Christian Augustine and A Kempis, but the
Pagan Epictetus and Plato.
On the surface of the subject, the Beliefs of
men seem bewilderingly manifold, hopelessly dis-
cordant. How many the faiths for which re-
ligions have fought ! How contradictory rehgious
beliefs one of another! What possible ground of
unity can be found for religions as dissimilar as
Hinduism, Buddhism, Zoroastrianism and the
various cults of Egypt, of Greece and of Rome?
Is not the raison d'etre of each great religion, in a
science of comparative religion, to be found in
the affirmation of some truth or truths not held
by other systems? Must not each great religion,
therefore, be dissonant with all other great re-
ligions; the more positive its affirmation the more
strident its discord in the Babel voices of the soul?
Does, then, the flute or the violin or the clarionet
merely make a discord in the cacophony of the
orchestra? Does not the master of music blend
these variant cries of the instruments into a
symphony? ''The symphony of rehgions, " Cud-
worth's great word long prior to our own Hig-
ginson, is a phrase as scientifically true as it is
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poetically fine. As "the golden tides" of the
music of the soul beat around the throne of God,
all the discords of religions harmonize in the con-
cord of religion, each truth for which men have
struggled finding its complement in some other
truth against which they have struggled, God thus
fulfilling Himself in many ways.
But there is a unity deeper than the oneness of
harmony in the variant voices of the soul. All
great rehgions pass through one general course of
evolution. In the same stages of development,
all alike will bring forth, as the same institutions
and worships, so also the same beliefs. Arrange
these different religions synchronously, in respect
to their evolution, and the same ideas will be
found in all, more or less modified. As they
grow, they grow together; over all differences of
environment and heredity, the forces of the com-
mon life of man asserting the oneness which exists
under black skins and yellow, red skins and white.
In their higher reaches they strain towards each
other. The flowering of all beliefs is in one faith
— all religions seeding down one religion. So,
beneath the variant and discordant beliefs of the
Religion and Religions 185
present the germs of the future universal religion
can even now be traced. The Cambridge School
of Platonists divined this long ago ; but how could
their fine voices make themselves heard against
the raucous cries of the age of Cromwell and Laud?
A generation or more before our day, a few widely
read but not scholarly trained thinkers caught
sight of this same vision, and laboriously spread
the unwelcome tokens of it before an unsympa-
thetic age ; earning for themselves the ill odor which
still clings to the names of Godfrey and Higgins
and their ilk. In our own day, the talented and
conservative Presbyter of the Protestant Episcopal
Church, a devoted High-Churchman and an open-
minded student, through his researches in sacred
symbolism gained glimpses of this truth ; which so
fascinated him that he pursued the clue found
unwittingly in his hands, until he laid before his
Church the results of his studies in the noble
volume entitled " Monumental Religion. " In this
epoch-marking work. Dr. Lundy, accepting the
Apostles' Creed as the norm and type of all creeds,
traced, clause by clause, the parallelisms which he
had discovered in other religions; showing that
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every article in this creed found its counterpart
in the various systems of Paganism. As a conse-
quence, this creed appeared, in a sense utterly
dwarfing the timid conceptions of the traditional
churchman, a Catholic Creed, a form of faith con-
fessed by men of all lands and ages — the symbol of
Universal Religion. Dr. Lundy might have meant
only to exalt the creed of Christendom; he suc-
ceeded in revealing the creed of Humanity.
The supreme religious functioning resumes the
experience of every lower activity, and in the Life
which is the end and aim of institutions and
worships and beliefs, we see again that, though
there are many religions, there is one religion.
As each great religion evolves, it evolves towards
character and conduct, confessing that its heart's
blood is ethical, that it is in order to grow a soul.
In its lower and rudimentary forms it may any-
where be unmoral, or even immoral; expressing
thus the immature development of human nature
in the land and age, manifesting the degeneracy
back into which life ever tends to slip, as the
propulsive forces of evolution for a period fail;
but, in its highest reaches, it is everywhere a
Religion and Religions 187
movement towards the awed recognition of God
as the Power Making for Righteousness, and to-
wards the attainment of righteousness as the true
communion of man with God. Every religion, in
growing, becomes ethical and spiritual. All re-
ligions are at one in the ideals before them, in the
goal towards which they strive. The ethical and
spiritual life, which is the common fruitioning of
all religions, is not one thing in one religion and
another thing in another reHgion. There is no
real discord between the ethics of Buddhism and
Confucianism and the religions of Greece and
Rome, no essential difference between the spirit-
uality of the Hindu and Persian and the Egyptian,
save as each naturally shows the different coloring
of race and environment upon the face of the same
soul. The ethical and spiritual life of all these
varieties of Paganism is one and the same ethical
and spiritual life which tides the soul of the
Christian.
The ideals of* character vary in varying lands,
but only as the refractions of the same light falling
in different angles on the same prism will vary.
It is one and the same light of life through all the
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variations of the spectrum. The human ideals
are one everywhere. Purity and Justice and
Truth and Temperance and Charity — these need
no translation from the speech of the Pagan to
the tongue of the Christian. There is no Hindu
purity, no Buddhist renunciation, no Chinese
temperance, no Grecian justice, no Persian truth-
fulness. The flora and fauna of the human soul
are one wherever humanity is found. Every
ethical force correlates into every other ethical
force. Goodness knows no native soil. Virtue
is at home in every land. The Ten Command-
ments form the law of Egypt and of Persia as of
Christendom. The Golden Rule proves the rule
of Hindu and Chinaman, as of the Christian. It
waited not for Jesus to reveal it. The spirit of the
Christ had already revealed it through Jewish Hillel
and Chinese Confucius and the great spirits of
well-nigh every land. The Beatitudes exigently
call upon the Buddhist as upon the Christian,
"Sursum cor da.'' Saints are of blood kin the
world over.
There is nothing alien to the truly devout
Christian in the devoutness of the Hindu Guru, or
Religion and Religions 189
of the yellow-robed saint of Japan, or of the mystic
worshiper among the Iranian mountains. When
the soul of man fronts the Infinite and Eternal
Spirit, beneath the bo tree of India or amid the
rugged fastnesses of Thibet or in the cloisters of
the Christian abbey, it is one and the same God
who is seen. Wherever we overhear the com-
munings of a soul with God, we hear in our own
tongue. In the presence of the man of the spirit,
be his name what it may, we know that he is
of our family and household of God. Is it any-
thing to us that Plotinus just missed being a
Christian, as we hearken to this his medita-
tion?
So let the soul that is not unworthy of that Vision
contemplate the Great Soul; freed from deceit and
witchery and collected into calm. Calmed be the
body for her in that hour, and the tumult of the flesh ;
ay, all that is about her calm; calm be the earth, the
sea, the air, and let Heaven itself be still. Then let her
feel how into that silent Heaven the Great Soul
floweth in. . . . And so may man's soul be sure of
Vision, when suddenly she is filled with light ; for this
light is from Him, and is He; and then stirely shall wc
know His presence, when, like a god of old time, He
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enters into the house of one that calleth Him and
maketh it full of Hght. And how may this thing be
for us? Let all else go.
One religion —many religions. One source and
spring of real religion everywhere, in all ages,
though many courses through which it flows;
ontaking different flavors and colors from different
soils, and becoming many different religions; now
poisoning itself in the miasmic marches of super-
stitious ignorance, now becoming foul and fetid
from the discharge into it of the cloaca through
which man's brutal lusts and evil passions and
cruel hatreds empty themselves; again purifying
itself under the free winds of heaven and beneath
the rays of that Sun of Righteousness ever rising
over earth "with healing in its wings. "
One inner essence, therefore, wdthin all the be-
wilderingly variant forms which religion assumes,
in different lands and in different times; as man
faces one and the same universe, finds one and the
same problems to solve, hears within him one
and the same mystic voice of the soul, sees behind
him one and the same origin, visions before him
one and the same destiny, discerns over him one
Religion and Religions 191
and the same law of life, recognizes in himself one
and the same order of evolution for the spiritual
life of man everywhere, through which it mounts
by one and the same series of stages, under all
variations of race, so that the same institutions,
worships, beliefs and life appear in different
religions at the same period of development.
One glorious burgeoning and blossoming of re-
ligion in all climes, one ideal of human life divine
rising above the souls of all the loftily striving sons
of men of every blood, one secret of cosmic con-
sciousness opening within the spirits of the wise
and the good in all countries, one life of fellowship
with man and communion with God as the end
and aim of religion throughout the ages ; in whose
blessedness all earnest and devout souls, when
illumined, do recognize each other as the children
together of the All Father.
This is the epiphany, or manifestation of God in
man, which is now rising over our earth; that
earth on which, through the centuries, men have
differed from each other, not so much in their
politics or economics as in their religions; have
fought each other, not so bitterly for the possession
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of lands and the control of trade, as for the main-
tenance of a monopoly of religion ; being held apart
in mutual animosities, persecutions and wars by
the very gift of God which should have been their
bond. of peace. Thank God for the vision of our
day, in which, while we still stand apart in our
different religions, as befits our different heredi-
ties and environments, our varying traditions and
temperaments, we know that, under these reli-
gions many, there lives one religion — the life of
God in the soul of man.
In the recognition of this revelation of our age —
the revelation coming to us at the hands of the
suspected angels whom we call Science, Com-
parative Religion, the Higher Criticism and a host
of other spirits of bad repute in the heaven of the
churches — in the recognition of this revelation, we
become conscious of the shame and sin of the
divisions which break up Christendom into sects
and denominations, not as the natural groupings
of spiritual affinities, freely interchanging and
co-operating to mutual advantage, but as the un-
naturally attempted monopolizations of the truth
and the life which are the common heritage of the
Religion and Religions i93
children of God, the Father of our Lord Jesus
Christ. In the Hght of this truth, we see the folly
and the wickedness of the standing apart from one
another which emphasizes the minor matters on
which we differ, rather than the essential matters
on which we are at one ; which makes the note of a
standing or a falling church the possession of the
accidents rather than of the substance of real
religion, the body, not the soul, of the child of
God ; which places on the green of our New England
villages a row of competing churches, each one
half -starved, with a poorly paid parson and a
poorly equipped plant, and which turns the
energies of the struggling churches of our great
cities into all sorts of wretched devices for making
both ends meet, and for filling the empty places
in the needlessly duplicated buildings, mechanical-
izing, materializing and mammonizing the religion
ostensibly served ; which leaves the business world
to learn the secret of success in concentration and
co-operation, reserving for the supreme institution
of humanity — the Church — to blunder along in
the obsolete methods of an outworn civilization, a
survival of competition in the age of the trust.
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The first moral of the truth that reHgions are many
while religion is one should set our Christian
churches to pray that prayer of their dying master
— "that they all may be one"; to pray it as men
who can themselves bring down the answer from
God, whenever they will to know their oneness in
Him and to live it forth.
In the recognition of the truth that there are
many reHgions but one religion, we open our eyes
to the folly and the crime of the present attitude
of Christendom to the other great religions of
earth; the folly and the crime which effectually
neutralize the heroic efforts of our foreign mission-
ary work. The East India treaty of 1813 con-
tained the following paragraph, known as "The
Missionaries' Charter." It reads thus:
Whereas it is the duty of this country (England)
to promote the interest and happiness of the native in-
habitants of the British dominions, and such measures
ought to be adopted as may tend to the introduction
among them of useful knowledge and of religion and
moral improvement.
The ''introduction 0} religion!'' There had
been, then, no religion in the land which had
Religion and Religions i95
produced little else but religions! There were,
then, no plants of the Heavenly Father's planting
in the soil of India, no life of God in the soul of the
Hindu, no feeling after God by his children in
Bengal and the Punjab, no graces of the spirit
grown in the lives of the children of Madras and
Bombay, no virtues blossoming forth in the saints
meditating by the shores of the Indus and the
Jumna !
We still go to India to introduce reHgion, and
then wonder that we get no warmer welcome and
achieve no greater results. Could we but go
thither to recognize the reality of the religion
growing there in such rank fertility; to say after
Paul — "Ye men of Benares, we perceive that in
all things ye are very religious"; to confess the
truths held and the life lived there as of God;
humbly to learn from the seers of India what
they have to teach us; and then, finding them thus
made ready to receive from us what we have to
teach them, to bring to them the story of the Divine
Man whose truth and life we hold in trust for the
world, bidding them find in Him what they need
of truth, what they lack of life — how different
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our foreign missionary work would be! The first
step to a successful foreign missionary work is
honestly to face the truth of the topic now be-
fore us, religion and religions — one religion under
many religions.
There came a letter a while ago from a young
minister who had been engaged for two or three
years in foreign missionary work in the East.
It was a frank and manly letter, breathing through-
out the surprise and consternation of an honest
soul who had gone upon his work believing that
Christianity held a monopoly of true religion, and
that he was to displace the false religions of the
East by introducing religion; the confession of an
honest soul who, in the face of the real religious-
ness of India, of the truths held there and the life
lived there, had awakened with a start to realize
that "in every land he that feareth God and
worketh righteousness is accepted of Him"; that
"that was the true light which lighteth every
man coming into the world"; and that we who
have seen the "great sheet let down from heaven
are thenceforth to call nothing common or un-
clean."
Religion and Religions i97
He was coming back, so he wrote, to take up the
study of Sanskrit, that he might master the sources
of Hinduism at first hand, and thus prepare
himself, humbly and wisely, to go back with a
living message to the living children of the living
God.
VII
THE LIMITS OF RELIGIOUS FELLOWSHIP
An enthusiastic cross-country rider has said
that the raison d'etre for fences is that they may be
taken gaily, on the broad back of a great hunter,
as the hounds give tongue and the huntsman's
horn is heard.
To a "meet" of souls we gather, quite conscious
that in the world spiritual fences do, alas, exist,
but joyously feeling that their truest utility is
that they call us to the heartening sport of taking
them easily ; thus to find the fields of the ecclesias-
tical small farmers proving the broad and breezy
commons of the free men of the spirit.
Fences have their uses in the world material. In
the crude stages of social evolution they are needed
to keep cows out, and com in. But the waste of
them, the labor spent on them, and the money
sunk in the ground with them ! In due process of
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Fellowship 199
social evolution a community arrives at the stage
where cows can be kept off the public roads; and,
neighbors learning to get along without robbing
each other's hen roosts and cribbing each other's
cabbages, it seems to all together that fences are
not things of beauty, and thus need not be joy-
lessnesses forever; — and, having had their day,
they cease to be.
In the world spiritual fences doubtless fulfill a
need of the primitive man. Creeds keep heretical
bulls of Bashan out of the green pastures of the
saints. Institutions shelter the grain that the
sower, going forth to sow, scatters on the human
heart — so that it may live and thrive.
As Maurice truly said, a creed secures the mental
tranquillity in which the spiritual life may unfold.
It offers a crystallizing point around which the
character may form. And, as many men have
discovered, institutions serve as the bark, pro-
tecting the sap of the tree which the Lord hath
planted. But fences grow no crops. No wheat
of God ripens on the stone walls which religion
rears. And oh! the waste of them! The money
squandered on them that might have gone into
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breadstuff s! The years of men spent in building
them and keeping them in order! Years which
might have gone into the productive labor whereby
two blades of spiritual grass should grow where
one grew before.
And so, sooner or later, the time must come in
the soul-world when the folly ol fence-building
must be seen, when the waste of it must be felt;
and fences shall fall into decay that our fields may
yield a wider harvest. Sooner or later, the day
must dawn when the enthusiasm which has spent
itself on the staking out of the claims of rival
religions, and on the armed watch over them, shall
turn into the sane and sensible spiritual labor of
a co-operative commonwealth of souls; when a
common system of irrigation shall provide conduits
for the water of life flowing forth from beneath the
throne of God, so that the most arid spot of our
dead lands, social, industrial and poHtical, shall
blossom as the rose.
So to our happy work of taking fences !
The limits of religious fellowship are the limits of
religion. According to our conception of religion,
will be our conception of its fellowship.
Fellowship 201
Religion itself is a growth. Like all the other
phases of human life, it is subject to the processes of
evolution. It is ever widening with the widening
range of human life. With this expansion the
Hmits of its fellowship expand.
As far back, perhaps, as we can trace the story
of man religiously, the family was the nucleating
center of religion. Religion was a family bond,
because it was a family rite. Marco Bozzaris was
a favorite hero of my boyhood. I loved to declaim
his famous — "Strike for your altars and your
fires!" Wholly unconscious was I then of the in-
teresting bit of history embalmed in those words.
In the house of every Greek and Roman was an
altar. On this altar there were always a few
lighted coals. It was a sacred obligation for the
master of every house to keep the fire up, night
and day. Woe to the house where it was ex-
tinguished! The fire ceased to glow upon the
altar only when the entire family had perished. An
extinguished hearth, an extinguished family, were
synonymous expressions among the ancients. It is
evident that this duty of keeping fire always upon
an altar was connected with an ancient belief. It
202 Catholicity
was not permitted to feed this fire with every
sort of wood. ReHgion distinguished among trees
those that could be employed for this use from
those which it would be impiety to make such use
of. The fire was something divine. The family
adored it, and presented to it offerings of what-
ever was believed to be agreeable to a god. The
sacred fire was the providence of the family. The
meals cooked upon it were sacredly used. They
were religious rites. Every meal was then a
lesser sacrament. The Lares and Penates were
the gods of the home. There was a "household
church."
As the religion of these primitive ages was exclu-
sively domestic, so also were its morals. Religion
did not say to a man, showing him another man:
That is thy brother. It said to him: That is a
stranger. He cannot participate in the religious
rites of thy hearth. He cannot approach the
tomb of thy family. He has other gods than thine,
and cannot unite with thee in a common prayer.
Thy gods reject his adoration and regard him as an
enemy. He is thy foe also. In this religion of the
hearth man never supplicated a divinity in favor
Fellowship 203
of other men ; he invoked him only for himself and
his. A Greek proverb has remained as a memento
of this ancient isolation of family prayer. In
Plutarch's time they still said to the egotist : You
sacrifice to the hearth. That is to say, you
separate yourself from other citizens; you have
no friends; your fellowmen are nothing to you;
you live solely for yourself and yours. This
proverb pointed to a time when all religion, housing
around the hearth, the horizon of morals and of
affection, had not yet passed beyond the narrow
circle of the family. '
So with the wider groupings of men. When
several families formed into a tribe, there became
a tribal religion, a tribal god. Jehovah was the
tribal god of Beni-Israel, the sons of Israel. He
belonged to them ; they belonged to him. All who
were the children of the common father, Israel,
were brothers one to the other, had a right to
partake in the common religion. All outside the
rites of the Beni-Israel were aliens, strangers and
enemies. There could be no religious fellowship
beyond the religious bond of the tribe.
' The Ancient City, Coulanger, page 124 ff.
204 Catholicity
Thus, as the groupings yet further enlarged,
and the gens or tribe passed on into the city, there
became a rehgion of the city. ReHgion was a civic
function, a civic bond. Plato's dream-city held its
election in its temple. We hold ours in or near the
saloon. Religious fellowship was bounded by the
walls of the city. So were moral obligations.
When cities drew together into a state, all who
were members of the same nation were included in
the state religion; had one and the same religious
rites and recognized a rehgious fellowship.
Outside the state there were only strangers,
aliens, enemies. The limits of religious fellowship
were drawn by the boundaries of the nation. Over
the river which separated two peoples, no bridge
of religious sympathy spanned. This may give us
a hint as to that singular fact of the apotheosis of
the Roman emperors. The Roman emperor was
the head of the state, and as such he was the crown
of its religion, its embodiment and personification.
Therefore he was divine and to be worshiped.
Therefore, again, to cut aloof from the religion of
the state, to refuse to worship the Emperor, was to
pass beyond the bonds of rehgious fellowship, and
Fellowship 205
so of social fellowship. Such refusal pronounced
one an alien, a stranger and an enemy. This was
the cause of the condemnation of the early Chris-
tians. Because of this they were judged to have
no religion, to be "atheists."
When Christianity arose upon the ruins of the
Roman Empire, it was a new, world-wide organiza-
tion— a new imperial state. The nations and races
of earth were drawn together into a new and higher
unity — the unity of mankind. A blood-bond
was found, uniting Jew and Gentile, barbarian,
Scythian, bond and free. " God hath made of one
blood all nations that dwell upon the earth." It
embodied, therefore, a universal religion. The
limits of its fellowship should, then, have been the
limits of mankind. But the time had not come
for such a conception of universal religion. From
the beginning, the Church proceeded to divide
itself into infinitesimal sections, schools, parties,
sects, churches. These have continued, varying,
but ever renewing themselves, down to the present
day. There are no less than three hundred and
fifty sects in Christendom. Each of these divi-
sions of Christianity is centered around some one
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special feature of Christianity. Here it is a belief
which dominates the mind of man and becomes
a synonym for Christianity. There it is a rite
which is deemed to be the very essence of the
Christian religion. A creed or an institution is the
foundation stone of each sect, each denomination,
each church of Christendom.
Theoretically, there is no denial of the truth that
the fundamentals of Christianity are beliefs which
are held in common among all Christians. Prac-
tically there is a denial of this truth. The very
fact of the existence of the sect implies that there is
something more important than our "common
Christianity," viz., our peculiar and private
Christianity. It is all very well to love and hope
and believe, but the prime thing is to observe our
ordinance, to maintain our dogma. The creed,
the institution, becomes unconsciously the domin-
ant factor of our peculiar brand of Christianity.
This may seem a hard saying, but it is true of all
of us alike. I may speak freely of my own church,
— which, despite its grave faults, I well love. Why
should we Episcopalians separate ourselves from
all other branches of Christendom, declining to
Fellowship 207
allow their ministers to officiate in our pulpits or to
minister at our altars, — except that we believe a
something vital inheres in the Apostolic order of
the Church? The Apostolic Succession is then
essential to a true Church. It constitutes the
articulus stantis aut cadentis ecclesice — the article
of a standing or a falling church. It differentiates
the divine organism from the amorphous societies
falsely called churches. As with one church, so
with all chtirches — though I desire not the in-
vidious task of further illustration.
No sect realizes this sectarianness of its belief.
God thus mercifully pardons us all, and the Christ
therefore bears with us all, sighing again : "Father,
forgive them, they know not what they do ! " But
the very fact that we are separated as Episco-
palians and Baptists and Methodists and Presby-
terians, really affirms that the one important thing
in Christianity, according to our several concep-
tions, is that which constitutes Episcopahanism,
or the Baptist church, or Presbyterianism or the
Methodist church. The limits of religion, then,
ought to be drawn around the Episcopal church,
the Methodist church, the Baptist church or the
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Presbyterian church. We may not naively ask,
as the child asked its mother — "Is God a Pres-
byterian?" We may not picture God, after the
fashion of certain mediaeval artists, as a divine
pope. But we all believe what comes perilously
close to such a childish conception.
What, then, is religion, as in the evolution of the
soul of man we now see it? I essay no philosophic
definition of religion. I am content with certain
ancient and simple definitions known to all "Pure
religion and undefiled before God and the Father is
this: to visit the fatherless and widows in their
affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the
world." "What doth the Lord, thy God require
of thee but to do justly, and to love mercy and to
walk humbly with thy God?" "Thou shalt love
the Lord thy God with all thy heart, with all thy
soul, with all thy mind, and with all thy strength.
This is the first and great commandment. And
the second is like unto it: Thou shalt love thy
neighbor as thyself." "Whatsoever ye would
that men should do to you, do ye even so to them."
"Walk in the Spirit, and ye shall not fulfill the
lusts of the flesh." "If we walk in the light, as
Fellowship 209
he is in the light, we have fehowship one with
another, and the blood (that is the life) of Jesus
Christ His Son cleanse th us from all sin."
These are the venerable and sacred definitions
of rehgion, honored by Christendom, however
neglected by it. By these definitions of religion,
and by these alone, may we draw the limits of
religious fellowship. This is not sentiment,
spiritual intuition, spiritual prophecy. These
great words depict the true reality of religion.
Wherever, then, is found a man living the Golden
Rule, walking in the vSpirit, loving God and loving
man, dealing justly, showing mercy and walking
humbly before God, visiting the fatherless and
widows in their affliction, keeping himself un-
spotted from the world; wherever is found a man
thus living ethically and spiritually, there is found
a religious man, there is to be recognized the
presence of religion, and there is to be felt the bonds
of a man, the including limits of religious fellowship.
Instead of discussing this theme abstractly,
illustrate it concretely, since religion, after all, is a
concrete matter, the life of the human soul.
Take the stories of two men widely separated
14
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from each other, and as widely separated from all
who foregather in America to discuss Christian
unity, and judge whether the limits of our religious
fellowship embrace them.
The spirit of one is embodied in a little book
entitled — "The Practice of the Presence of God,
the Best Rule of the Holy Life. " A friend reports
him as speaking thus in conversation with his
friends :
That he had always been governed by love without
selfish views; and that, having resolved to make the
love of God the end of all his actions, he had found
reasons to be well satisfied with his method. That
he was pleased when he could take up a straw from the
ground for the love of God, seeking him only and
nothing else, not ev^n his gifts. . . . That he had
long been troubled in mind from a certain belief
that he should be damned; that all the men in the
world could not have persuaded him to the contrary;
but that he had thus reasoned with himself about it:
"I engaged in a religious life only for the love of God,
and I have endeavored to act only for him; whatever
becomes of me, whether I be lost or saved, I will
always continue to act purely for the love of God.
I shall have this good at least, that till death I shall
have done all that is in me to love him." That this
trouble of mind had lasted for four years, during
Fellowship
211
which time he had suffered much, but that at last he
had seen that this trouble arose from want of faith;
and that since then he had passed his life in perfect
liberty and continual joy. . . . That when an
occasion of practicing some virtue offered, he ad-
dressed himself to God, saying, "Lord, I cannot
do this unless thou enablest me ' ' ; and that then he
received strength more than sufficient. That when
he had failed in his duty he only confessed his fault
saying to God, "I shall never do otherwise, if you
leave me to myself. It is you who must hinder my
falling, and mend what is amiss." That after this
he gave himself no further uneasiness about it. . . .
That with him the set times of prayers were not
different from other times; that he retired to prayer
according to the directions of his superior, but that
he did not want such retirement, nor ask for it,
because his greatest business did not divert him from
God. . . . That all bodily mortifications and other
exercises are useless, except as they serve to arrive
at the union with God by love; that he had well
considered this and found it the shortest way to go
straight to him by continual exercise of love, and
doing all things for his sake. . . . That the founda-
tion of the spiritual life in him had been a high notion
and esteem of God in faith, which, when he had well
conceived, he had no other care at first but faithfully
to reject every other thought that he might perform
all his actions for the love of God. That when some-
times he had not thought of God for a good while
212 Catholicity
he did not disquiet himself for it, but, after having
acknowledged his wretchedness to God, he returned
to him with so much the greater trust in him as he
had found himself wretched through forgetting him.
, . . That there needed neither art nor science for
going to God, but only a heart resolutely determined
to apply itself to nothing but him, or for his sake, and
to love him only. That all consists in one hearty
renunciation of everything which we are sensible
does not lead to God; that we might accustom our-
selves to continual conversation with him with
freedom and in simplicity. . . . That the whole sub-
stance of religion was faith, hope and charity, by the
practice of which we become united to the will of
God; that all besides is indifferent, and to be used as a
means that we may arrive at our end and be swallowed
up therein by faith and charity.
His example was a stronger inducement than any
arguments he could propose. His very countenance
was edifying, such a sweet and calm devotion ap-
pearing in it as could not but affect the beholders.
And it was observed that in the greatest hurry of
business in the kitchen (he was a cook) he still
preserved his recollection and heavenly-mindedness.
He was never hasty, nor loitering, but did each
thing in its season, with an even, uninterrupted com-
posure and tranquillity of spirit. "The time of busi-
ness, " said he, "does not with me differ from the time
of prayer; and in the noise and clatter of my kitchen,
when several persons are at the same time calling
Fellowship 213
for different things, I possess God in as great tran-
quillity as if I were on my knees at the blessed
sacrament."
These quotations are taken from the records of
one Nicholas Herman, of Lorraine, a lowly and
unlettered man, who, after having been a footman
and soldier, was admitted a lay brother among the
barefooted Carmelites at Paris in 1666, and was
afterwards known as ' ' Brother Lawrence. " Surely
this man walked with God, manifesting every sign
and token of the spiritual life which is the flower
and fruit of religion. In him truly was "pure
religion and undefiled. " The limits of religious
fellowship — must they, then, not include him?
What though he were a Roman Catholic and
others of us are staunch Protestants? We must
either deny to him essential religion, or confess
that we ourselves fail in true religion, or else sweep
him into our arms in the fellowship of souls. I for
one can never be a Roman Catholic. I differ
widely and deeply from Roman Catholicism.
Those differences seem to me serious. I must
maintain my own convictions over against what
seem to me its grave errors. But, nevertheless, I
214 Catholicity
must also recognize those differences as minor
matters in religion — the real, essential thing being
the life of the spirit; that life of the spirit which we
must reverently recognize in the barefoot Car-
melite, and therefore dare not refuse to fellowship
with him.
The other illustration is from one far removed
from Brother Lawrence, not only geographically
but in the wider spaces which heredity and environ-
ment place between him and the Roman Catholic
monk.
This son of God was born of poor parents in a
remote village of a great land far away. He was
early dedicated to religion. He became what in
the Catholic church would be called an acolyte.
It was his duty as a lad to serve the priests in their
ministrations. In the sacred building wherein he
ministered was a venerable image of the Divine
Being. Gazing reverently upon this sacred image
from time to time one idea came to possess his
mind: "Is there anything behind this image?
Is it true that there is a Divine Being in the uni-
verse? And is it true that that Being loves and
guides this universe, or is it all a dream? Is there
Fellowship 215
any reality in religion?" Day after day he
would weep and say, "Is it true that thou art,
or is it all poetry? Art thou the imagination
of poets and misguided people or is there such a
reahty?"
This thought, which was foremost in his mind,
gained in strength every day until he could think
of nothing else. He would forget his duties in the
ministry of worship. At last it became impossible
for him to fulfill those duties. He retreated to a
forest and lived there. Of this period in his life he
said long after that he could not tell how the sun
rose and set or how he lived. He forgot to eat —
forgot everything but the thought possessing him.
During this period he was lovingly watched over
by a relative, who put into his mouth the food
which he mechanically swallowed. As the evening
would draw on and the peals of the bells in the
nearby temples reached him in the forest, the music
of the chimes and the voices of the worshiping
people would make the boy very sad, leading him
to cry out : " One day is gone in vain and thou dost
not come; one day of this short life is gone and I
have not known the truth!" In the agony of his
2i6 Catholicity
soul he would sometimes press his face against the
earth and weep.
A divine madness seized the boy. Days, weeks,
months passed in this struggle of his soul. He
began to see visions. The secrets of his nature
dawned upon him. Veil after veil fell from the
infinite mystery.
A holy woman heard of him and sought him out
that she might help him. Recognizing his trouble,
she said to him : "My son, blessed is the man upon
whom such madness comes. The whole of this
universe is mad ; some for wealth, some for pleasure,
some for fame. Blessed is the man who is mad
after God." A saintly and philosophic monk
heard of him, and he, too, sought out the boy that
he might help him. He taught the lad the
philosophy underlying his sacred books, but soon
found that the pupil was in some respects wiser
than the master. He spent several months with
the boy, at the end of which he initiated him into
his monastic order and took his departure.
The lad's relatives thought that his madness
would be cured if they could get him married.
He had been betrothed at the age of eighteen. In
Fellowship) 217
her far off home, the girl had heard that her
betrothed had become a rehgious enthusiast and
that he was even considered insane. She set out
to find him and to learn the truth for herself. A
pure and noble soul, she was able to understand
his longings and to sympathize with them. She
renounced her claim upon him and bade him
continue in the life to which he had given himself,
only asking for herself that she might remain near
him to learn of him. She became one of his most
devoted disciples, revering him as a divine being.
This experience was, in the Far East, the parallel
of the touching story of St. Clara and St. Francis.
Through her revelation of womanhood, largely,
he was enabled to gain the elevation of soul whence
he could see in every woman's face only the reflec-
tion of the face of the source and spring of all
womanhood, whom men as wide apart in time and
in thought as Augustine and Theodore Parker
were wont to call ''our Mother God. " Made pure
himself, he could look upon every woman's face
as transfigured with awe and reverence. Thus he
was helped by a noble woman to cast out every
lust of the flesh.
2i8 Catholicity
The love of money was also exorcised in his
experience. The thought of worldly wealth he
abandoned when he became a monk. Hosts of his
devotees longed to bestow gifts upon him, but he
received from no one aught more than that which
sufficed for the simplest necessities of life. The
sight of money filled him with strange dread. He
long practiced a curious self-discipline. He would
take in one hand a piece of gold and in the other a
lump of earth. He would call the gold earth and
the earth gold, and then, changing the contents of
one hand into the other, he would keep up the
process until he lost all sense of the difference
between the gold and the earth. Thus, in these
two experiences he embodied the principle which is
the heart of all religion, as taught alike by Buddha,
and Marcus Aurelius, and Saint Francis, as lived
supremely in the Christ of God — the principle of
Renunciation.
His was no mere cloistered saintliness. In his
latter years he ministered as a teacher devotedly
and consumingly. But he did not begin to teach
until he himself had learned the truth. The
principle of his hfe was — first form character and
Fellowship 219
then results will come of themselves. His favorite
illustration was: "When the lotus opens, the bees
come of their own accord to seek the honey; so
let the lotus of your character be full blown and
the results will follow. "
That he won the loftiest character his revering
disciples testify. One writes of him: "I found
that man could be perfect even in the body. Those
lips never cursed any one, never criticized any one.
Those eyes were beyond the possibility of seeing
evil. That mind had lost the power of thinking
evil. He saw nothing but good." This same
disciple writes of him that, though unlettered, the
wise men from the great university in the town
near which he dwelt would throng out to listen to
him.
No wonder that to one who could thus say,
"We speak that which we do know and testify
that which we have seen, " men flocked in crowds
to still the hunger of the soul. To them he would
talk twenty hours out of the twenty-four, and that
not for one day but for weeks and months. He
would not refuse to help the humblest of the
thousands seeking his aid. A throat trouble
220 Catholicity
developed. He could not be persuaded to refrain
from teaching. "While I can speak I must teach
them." So he wasted toward the end. As the
news of his failing strength spread far and wide,
the multitudes increased, intent on hearing him
before he passed away. At last the end came.
One morning he told his disciples that he would lay
down the body that day; and, repeating the most
sacred words of the sacred book of the land, he
entered into unconsciousness, and so passed away.
One who was known well and honored deeply
in this land, who "walked with God and was not,
for God took him," said of this saint: "In the
midst of his emaciation his face retains its fullness
and childlike tenderness, a profound humbleness
and unspeakable sweetness of expression, and a
smile that I have seen on no other face that I can
remember." Speaking of his trances and ecs-
tasies, the same writer declared of this saint of
God : "That he sees something, hears and enjoys,
when he is dead to all the outward world, there is
no doubt. If not, why should he in the midst of
that unconsciousness burst into floods of tears,
break out into prayers, songs and utterances, the
Fellowship 221
force and pathos of which pierce the hardest hearts
and bring tears to eyes that never wept before
under the influence of reHgion? "
This saint of God was known in his land as
Paramhamsa Srimat Ramakrishna. He is regarded
by thousands of his fellow countrymen in India
to-day as a divine incarnation. Even in our
western world he is recognized as perhaps the
greatest saint of God in the modern world. (He
was born the 20th of February, 1835.) The men
whose testimony has been quoted were no less
eminent than Swami Vivekananda and Protap
Chunder Mozoomdar.
Did this Hindu saint not embody "pure religion
and undefiled?" Was not his religion the one
essential, pure, vital religion? An alien to us, a
man of another land, dark-skinned, brought up
under thoughts which are strange to us, differing
widely in many respects from us — is not this
"heathen" one with us, as we ourselves are truly
religious?
I do not slur over the intellectual differences
between us and him. We cannot lightly cut our
rootings in the past, out of which we have grown.
^22 Catholicity
We cannot easily change the environment which
has so largely moulded us. We do not deny the
evolution through which all ancient religions seem
to us to have led up towards Jesus the Christ of
God, and to have crowned themselves in his con-
sciousness. Yet I cannot but find in this Hindu
saint the shining of that light, which, coming to
the full in Jesus, was none the less the light ''which
lighteneth every man that cometh into the world/*
If we draw the limits of religious fellowship short
of this Hindu saint, those limits shut out religion
itself.
Here, then, we have the barefooted Carmelite of
the Catholic Church and the ascetic Yogi of the
Hindu forest, at equally opposite extremes from
us, each living essential religion, the religion which
is the life of the spirit. The limits of religious
fellowship must include them.
If we hesitate to accept this large truth on its
own authority, wondering how it squares with the
formulas of our faith, let us recall that noble
article of the oldest and simplest of Christian
creeds. "I believe in . . . the communion of
saints," the spiritual fellowship of holy souls.
Fellowship 223
And this without a single quahfying word in the
creed to Hmit this communion by any boundaries,
even of Christianity itself! And then let us
hearken to the fine exposition of this belief given
in the Sarum Manual, one of the mediaeval pro-
genitors of the offices of The Prayer Book. In
the office for the Visitation of the Sick, the parish
priest is directed thus to examine the sick man:
Dearest Brother, dost thou believe ... in the
Communion of Saints; that is, that all men who
live in charity are partakers of all the gifts of grace
which are dispensed in the church, and that all who
are in fellowship with the just here in the life of grace
are in fellowship with them in glory?
' If such concrete study of the limits of religious
fellowship is persuasive as to the principle in-
volved, we may make two applications of that
principle, — more timely for a decade ago, but
sufficiently illustrative of the present study to be
recalled.
Very remarkable bodies of representatives of
nearly all the great denominations of Christianity
in our country have met to consider the possibility
of federating the Christian churches for the
224 Catholicity
practical work of religion in our land. vSuch con-
ventions are surely a sign of the times, for which
we should give God thanks, taking courage to
strive still more earnestly for Christian union.
But one conference that met in New York City
deliberately declined to include representatives of
Unitarianism. Probably it was justified in so
doing on practical grounds. The first step towards
the federation of the churches must needs be
taken by the great evangelical bodies, and they
doubtless are not yet ready to subordinate the
intellectual tenets of Unitarianism to the ethical
and spiritual life of Unitarians. They still count
the notes of orthodoxy as of greater moment than
the fruits of the Spirit. What men think about
Christ is more important to them than what Christ
thought about man. And so the door of that great
conference was, with regretful courtesy, shut in the
face of such Christian men as Edward Everett
Hale, John D. Long and Samuel Eliot. Is not this
lamentable action of that conference a recrudes-
cence of a lower conception of religion than that
which the Christ taught and lived?
The peace of Portsmouth introduced to the
Fellowship 225
fellowship of the great nations of modern civiliza-
tion a new and strange sister among the states of
the world. Japan made good her claim to be
counted among the great powers of the world ; made
that claim good in the splendid skill and the
magnificent valor shown alike by her army and
her navy. She also made good her claim to be
treated among the Christian nations of the world —
if we will admit to Christian fellowship a people
who, if they do not hold all the ideals of Christen-
dom, at least hold many; who, composing their
ideals in ways strange to Christendom and short
of its final aim, yet hold philosophies by which a
race may live exaltedly.
Japan illustrated her religious faith in her moral
life; her faith in the supremacy of the ideal, in a
celestial over-lordship; her faith in the continued
life of those who have passed from earth; in the
soul-mastership; of her Lord Buddha; the faith
whence has flowed the forcefulness for her vic-
tories in war and for her victories, no less renowned,
in peace. Face to face with the white-skinned
Christian stands the yellow pagan, asking the due
of racial recognition, of religious fellowship.
IS
226 Catholicity
Shall she have it? Will Christendom still call
her "heathen," and patronize her pleasantly,
while it proceeds to convert her? Or will Chris-
tendom trust its own Christ enough to welcome
the light shining in her eyes, and thus make ready
for a spiritual exchange between the East and the
West of the soul-goods of each, while thus best
preparing the way for the Land of the Rising Sun
to welcome the rising of the Sun of Righteousness,
with healing on its wings? With solemn challenge
the East strikes the center of the shield of the
West, summoning it to a test of faith such as
Christendom has never known since the days of
old, when the young religion strove with the
venerable religions of the East, with Isis and
Mithra and the Mother of the gods, and found
itself in this mortal conflict.
No matter how most orthodox pastors caution,
no matter what most learned professors instruct,
we may trust the religion within us in fellowshiping
with the truly religious everywhere, in "the free-
dom of the faith."
We may need our creeds and institutions a long
while yet, but let these swathing-bands of the
Fellowship 227
infant soul be elastic. . Let them stretch as the life
swells within the soul, the life which is the love of
God and the love of man ; stretch until the mira-
cle shall be accomplished, and those whom our
intellects judge to stand outside the limits of
religious fellowship, the heart sees to be within
the bands of a man. Oh! the shame and the sin
of the waste of men and money over our petty,
parochial pieties, our devotion to creeds and in-
stitutions, our slavery to sects and churches, our
enthusiasm over the things which only separate
us; while above us all, in our pitiful blindness,
sobs the great heart of the Christ: ''That they all
may be one: as thou. Father, art in me and I in
thee, that they also may be one in us: that the
world may believe that thou hast sent me. "
VIII
THE POSSIBILITIES OF COMMON
WORSHIP
The possibilities of common worship are the
possibiHties of developed intellectual and spiritual
life. No worship in common is possible between
men who are unevolved intellectually and spirit-
ually. Undeveloped men, intellectually and spirit-
ually, must worship, if they worship at all, within
narrow limitations — the limitations of the family,
the tribe, the clan, the city, the state, the denomin-
ation, the religion. As men evolve intellectually
and spiritually they grow out of the limita-
tions which narrow and confine their worship
within social, political, and sectarian bounds —
they grow large enough to commingle their aspira-
tions and reverences in the recognition of some-
thing common below all diversities of creed and
cult. The measure of the possibility of common
228
Common Worship 229
worship is, therefore, the measure of the possibility
of common life.
It is of supreme importance for man that he
should worship somewhat and somewhere. The
final condemnation of a man before the bar of the
soul is the sentence which Emerson passed upon
Gibbon — ''The man had no vshrine. " The man
who has no shrine, no altar of reverence and
veneration and aspiration — woe betide him ! That
he should worship somewhat and somewhere,
even though within the narrowest limitations of
the narrowest mind — this is the supreme desidera-
tum for life.
In the beginning, and always in the innermost
essentials, worship, as we now understand it, —
spiritual reverence, aspiration, up-look, commim-
ion with the divine, — this must be an individual
affair, an experience of the soul within itself.
"Thou, when thou prayest, enter into the secret
place of thee, and when thou hast shut the door
upon thee pray to thy Father which is in the
secret. " The Hindoos, of whatever sectarian de-
nomination, have a common recognition of the
supreme sanctit}^ of what they call The Chosen
230 Catholicity
Path. Members of all the varying sects of India
share alike in the recognition of this supreme
function of religion. It means that each man shall,
within the silence of his own soul, meditate upon,
adore, and aspire after that ideal of life which seems
to him the truest and the highest.
Therefore, worship must always, in its innermost
essentials, be something peculiar to the individual
man. For this highest worship he needs no tem-
ple, no mosque, no synagogue, no church.
But, just because the innermost essential of
worship is individual, internal, spiritual — there-
fore, in it there is the possibility of most immedi-
ate and direct and universal fellowship. In that
myriads of Hindoos, under different sectarian
forms and within different sectarian fellowships,
alike walk, within the soul, The Chosen Path,
they therein declare the fellowship of all who
pursue this way of life. Whatever may separate
them in other respects, they are therein one — one
in the spirit.
The man, therefore, who truly worships, in the
innermost recesses of his being, worships the
innermost reality of all being — that man is partici-
Common Worship 231
Dating in the common worship, loved by all
spiritual beings who share a common spiritual life.
In this supreme ritual of the soul he must recognize
a fellowship which transcends all time, all space,
all boundaries of thought, all limitations of fellow-
ship, ecclesiastical and national and racial — must
know himself one with all who love God — the
Infinite and Eternal Goodness.
Man is, however, a social being. He cannot
live apart from all his fellows. He cannot follow
a purely individual life. "The Chosen Path"
he can walk within the innermost recesses of his
own soul. When he comes out therefrom to
commingle with his fellows he must seek some
fellowship with them, in matters spiritual as in
matters political, social, economic, and artistic —
as in all the relations of man with man. He must
seek, therefore, some common worship, out of the
necessities of a common life — whatever the limita-
tions of that common life, however small and petty
it may be.
Worship, as we first find it, historically, was
limited by the common life of the family, the tribe,
the clan, the city, the state. The members of
232 Catholicity
these ascending social groups had a common
worship. They had a common worship because
they had a common Hfe. There was a blood-bond
between the members of the group. The recogni-
tion of this blood-bond miade possible the com-
munal worship. They had the same god. The
same ritual was prescribed for the worship of this
god. The same needs were felt by all the members
of the community.
Beyond this social group there was no affiliation,
no fellowship, because there was no blood-bond.
The members of the little community were aliens
to the members of all other communities. Each
other commiunity had its own special god, its own
prescribed ritual, its own peculiar needs. The
possibilities of common worship were rigidly
confined to the common life. As the study of the
Hmits of religious fellowship has shown, there was
no dream of any fellowship beyond it.
From those ancient historic groupings, up
through all the developments of modern civiliza-
tion, the possibilities of common worship have
ever been found in the possibilities of common life.
Where common life was recognized, a common
Common Worship 233
worship has been felt to be possible. Where no
common life was recognized, there has been no
recognition of the possibility of any common
worship.
Thus, in the manifold religious divisions of our
modern world, the limitations of common worship
are precisely the limitations of the recognized
commonalty in religion, — and there has been
fellowship in thought and in spirit, the participa-
tion in a common creed and a common cult, just
in so far there has been the sense of a common
brotherhood.
As the sense of a common life grows and expands,
the sense of a possible common worship grows and
expands with it.
The little man in the little sect feels that he can
worship with his other little brothers because they
are brothers in the one true faith, in the one true
life. He cannot recognize the possibility of any
common worship between his own sect, which
holds the exclusive monopoly of divine truth and
divine life, and any other sect, which is an alien
to the household of God. As he grows out of these
swathing bands of religion, and comes to recognize
234 Catholicity
that truth is held in common by other sects and
other rehgions, that the Kfe of the soul is shared
in common by other sects and by other religions,
he grows to recognize the possibility of common
worship.
In the recognition of the common life., mental
and spiritual, there is a recognition of the common
worship open to all who share that common life.
"Howbeit, that is not first which is spiritual, but
that which is natural, and afterwards that which is
spiritual." Therefore, in the beginning, he must
have his little sect, his petty denomination — the
first social grouping; marked and bounded by
the recognized fraternities of thought and feeling,
of temperament and tradition, of education and
habit, of the whole mental and spiritual outlook.
The littlest sect, the pettiest church, the smallest
denomination, the feeblest religion, is an attempt
at something bigger than an}^ individual, an effort
for some socializing of the soul. We may look
upon its limitations and pity it; upon its narrow-
ness and condemn it. Relative to the larger life
of the spiritual cosmos, how insignificantly small
the biggest of these sects of religion seem! None
Common Worship 235
the less, each is, as already said, an effort toward
something bigger than the mere man himself. It is
an aspiration, an effort for some common worship.
The little man will be content always within
the little church. The provincial soul will need
no traveling forth from the pro-^incial sect. But
as the soul grows within the pettiest denomination,
it must reach out to other denominations — that is,
to other souls between whom and itself there is
the recognition of something common in the
spiritual life, whatever the separation of the outer
life may be. A man may be measured, always, in
his intellectual and spiritual development, by the
possibility of his reaching out from his own fold
and clasping the hands of his brother souls in other
folds. The mere sectarian, the mere denomina-
tionalist, the mere churchman will never want to
go outside of his own pen-fold. But the soul
swelling with the life of God, the recognition of
something common between all true souls, will be
ever longing for some expression of the sense of
fellowship which has awakened within him toward
his brothers — the brothers of the blood-bond of the
family of God.
236 Catholicity
So this growing soul will be glad of the oppor-
tunity of worshiping with others, under other
forms, in other rituals. As opportunity comes, he
will be thankful to forsake a while his own con-
venticle, and take part in the worship of some
other cult. The little man, when he wanders into
a strange place of worship, where other forms are
used than those familiar to himself, will see only
that which is repellent to his thought, his feeling,
only that which calls forth his pity or his aversion,
only that which prompts his harsh condemnation.
The big man, the man who has grown in his soul,
will find, before the strangest and most alien
shrine, the sense of the Divine Presence awakening
the sense of the commonalty of the soul made in the
image of the Divine, the spiritual fellowship. He
will see, below and within the forms that are alien
and repellent, something to admire, to revere, to
recognize as divine. The cockney on a specially
conducted Cook's tour will stand in St. Peter's,
with his hat upon his head, until the verger knocks
it off; stark upright while the whole throng is
kneeling on the marble floor, contemptuously
smiHng at the idolatry of these Papists, falling on
Common Worship 237
their knees at the tinkhng of the silver bell. The
grown soul will feel and act as Lowell did in
Chartres Cathedral:
I tiirned and saw a beldame on her knees;
With e3''es astraj^ she told mechanic beads
Before some shrine of saintly womanhood,
Bribed intercessor with the far-off Judge :
Such my first thought, by kindlier soon rebuked,
Pleading for whatsoever touches life
With upward impulse : be He nowhere else,
God is in all that liberates and lifts,
In all that htimbles, sweetens, and consoles:
Blessed the natures shored on every side
With landmarks of hereditary thought !
Thrice happy they that v/ander not lifelong
Beyond near succor of the household faith,
The guarded fold that shelters, not confines!
Their steps find patience in familiar paths,
Printed with hope by loved feet gone before
Of parent, child, or lover, glorified
By simple magic of dividing Time.
My lids were moistened as the woman knelt,
And — was it will, or some vibration faint
Of sacred Nature, deeper than the will? —
My heart occultly felt itself in hers,
Through mutual intercession gently leagued.
Browning teaches the same lesson in the beauti-
23^ Catholicity
ful parable of fellowship in religion called "Christ-
mas Eve." He stands in the vestibule of the
little Mount Zion Chapel as the common folk
from the vicinity crowd into it of a rainy evening.
The hopeless commonness of these people, as they
press by him out of the dripping rain into the
steamy chapel, — how vividly he pictures it! He
tries to take part in the worship, but finds nothing
appealing to him. It is all repellent to his every
taste. The droning of the hymns, the cant of
the commonplace sermon — he can stand them no
longer, and so goes forth into the night to be alone
with nature. The storm has cleared. What
wonder that the starry canopy of the boundless
heavens affects his soul in sharp contrast to the
pettiness of the surroundings in which he has just
been! He gives himself up to the communion of
his solitary soul with the Infinite Being revealed in
nature. A form lustrous and lovely he discerns
before him, recognizable at once.
He himself with his human air.
On the narrow pathway, just before.
I saw the back of him, no more —
He had left the chapel, then, as I.
Common Worship 239
Jesus had been worshiping with these common-
place folk in their commonplace ritual. Had he
left them, too, in disgust at the unspirituality of
their worship?
The scene changes. Browning finds himself
before the great basilica of St. Peter. He hears
and sees the splendors of the most ornate ritual of
earth. The Christ passes within to join the wor-
ship of the Roman Mass, as he had joined the
service of Mount Zion Chapel. Unable to worship
in the chapel conventicle, he had been left by
Jesus "outside the door."
Yes, I said — that he will go
And sit with these in turn, I know.
Recognizing the blind and selfish limitations
which had prevented him from worshiping in
Mount Zion Chapel, he aspires for something
better now :
Do these men praise Him ? I will raise
My voice up to their point of praise!
I see the error —
Again the scene changes. He finds himself
looking in upon the lecture hall of a German
240 Catholicity
university. An emaciated professor is lecturing
upon the tale of the Christmas-tide. He resolves
away the story into legend and myth. All that
which to the Christian seems most precious, most
sacred, disappears in this crucible of criticism.
The Christ who had led him, he does not find by
his side :
Can it be that he stays inside?
Is the vesture left me to commune with?
Could my soul find aught to sing in tune with
Even at this lecture, if she tried?
Once more the scene changes. He finds him-
self back in Mount Zion Chapel, on the bench,
"bolt upright, " as if he had never left it.
The Christmas Eve in that hot, close, steamy
chapel had brought him, in a dream, an experience
which, now that he found himself awake there,
taught him the lesson :
Better have knelt at the poorest stream
That trickles in pain from the strait est rift !
For the less or the more is all God's gift,
Who blocks up or breaks wide the granite-seam.
And here, is there water or not, to drink?
Common Worship 241
I put up pencil and join chorus
To Hepzibah Tune, without further apology,
The last five verses of the third section
Of the seventeenth hymn in Whitfield's Collection,
To conclude with the Doxology.
Are the possibilities of common worship to be
limited by such individual and occasional par-
ticipations in the religious services of other
denominations than our own? Do such individual
and occasional fratemizings express the limits
of spiritual brotherhood? Is there a blood-bond
between souls of different types, so real that
anything more than this is practicable? If such a
blood-bond of souls exists among those of different
names, religiously, then, surely, there are larger
possibilities of expressing this common life in a
common worship. Not merely occasionally as
individuals, but at least occasionally as churches,
we should come together in the confession of "our
common Christianity," to use Dean Stanley's
noble phrase: that confession which is best made
by a common worship — a common uplook, a
common reverence, a common adoration, a com-
mon aspiration.
16
242 Catholicity
This was the firm beHef , tlie noble dream of that
great man Dr. Muhlenburg. Not soon will his
memory pass. He was one of the greatest men
that our modern Christianity has brought forth —
at once saint and seer and statesman. Belonging
to what would be known as the High Church wing
of the Protestant Episcopal Church, so large was
his conception of Catholic Christianity, so genuine
was his recognition of the common Christianity of
all who ''profess and call themselves Christians,"
that he was unsatisfied with his own beautiful forms
of worship — he himself having been the first to
introduce the vested choir in our own American
branch of the English Church. So he tried to
establish united services on Good Friday — the day
on which Christians commemorate the dying of
their common Lord and Alaster. He wanted to
have the Holy Communion celebrated regularly
on that day, as the expression of the communion of
saints, the common life of all Christians who are
seeking the life of goodness. If we believe in
such a "common Christianity," can we not
strive for some such occasional services of wor-
ship, in which all branches of the Church of
Common Worship 243
Christ may unite in a common expression of
their spiritual Hfe?
A "common Christianity" — that is a noble
phrase, a noble thought! There is, however,
something larger and finer than it — a ''common
humanity." God "hath made of one blood all
nations of men for to dwell upon the face of the
earth." In that one blood flows the one life of
the one race. The unity of man carries with it
the oneness of the spiritual nature of man. The
spiritual nature of man carries with it the oneness
of essential religion — religion which is at once
ethical and spiritual. All men are the children
of the All-Father. All men are, in their own ways,
feeling after God, "if haply they may find him."
All men are, through different forms, expressing
this one longing of their souls to know God, which
*'is eternal life." All religions, therefore, are the
expressions of the one religious nature of man. All
religions are true, in so far as they hold truths.
They are false, in so far as they are imperfect and
undeveloped. Their unity is found in the inner
life of them all — the sap swelling through bud and
blossom upon every different branch toward the
244 Catholicity
one flowering of the tree. He who recognizes this,
and knows that all men are his spiritual brothers
in the blood-bond of the soul, he must see the
possibilities of a common worship among all who
call themselves the "friends and lovers of God."
As an expression of this recognition of spiritual
unity among men of different religions, there ought
to be at least occasional services of worship, partici-
pated in, as it were formally, by representatives of
our various great religions ; thus to testify that below
all other differences there is a common substratum
of unity, in the common aspirations and reverences.
This was the dream of a great man of England,
some centuries ago — a man at once among the
leading statesmen of his day, and among the
noblest characters of all days. In a little work
which he wrote, sketching the forms and features
of the ideal community of which he dreamed, unto
which he aspired and for which he labored in old
England, he drew this vision of the common wor-
ship of "Utopia":
There are several sorts of religions, not only in differ-
ent parts of the island, but even in every town. . . .
Yet the greater and wiser sort of them worship none
Common Worship 245
of these, but adore one eternal, invisible, infinite, and
incomprehensible Deity. , . . Those among them
that have not received our religion, do not fright any
from it, and use none ill that goes over to it. . . . He
(Utopus) judged it not fit to determine anything
rashly, and seemed to doubt whether those different
forms of religion might not all come from God, who
might inspire men in a different manner, and be
pleased with this variety.
Though there are many different forms of religion
among them, yet all these, how various soever, agree
in the main point, which is the worshiping the Divine
Essence; and therefore there is nothing to be seen or
heard in their temples in which the several persuasions
among them may not agree; for every sect performs
those rites that are peculiar to it, in their private
houses, nor is there anything in the public worship
that contradicts the particular ways of those different
sects. . . . Nor are there any prayers among them
but such as every one of them may use without
prejudice to his own opinion. . . . Both priests and
people offer up very solemn prayers to God in a set form
of words ; and these are so composed, that whatsoever
is pronounced by the whole assembly may be likewise
applied by every man in particular to his own condition.
The man who thus wrote was a Roman Catholic.
Can we not reach even now into the largeness of
his vision?
246 Catholicity
Once, at least, in our modern world, has the
vision of Sir Thomas More been realized. In the
Parliament of Rehgions, held in Chicago in con-
nection with the World's Fair, there were repre-
sentatives of nearly every great form of religion
on the earth. Well-nigh every branch of the
Christian Church was represented — the Roman
Church and the Greek Church, and every variety
of Protestantism. The great religions of the
East were represented, too: Mohammedanism,
Buddhism, Hindooism, and others. It is im-
possible to conceive of a more heterogeneous
religious gathering than was this! How wide the
intellectual differences of these representatives of
earth's religions was plainly shown in the state-
ments made upon that platform. Each of these
representatives of the great religions of the earth
was in earnest in his convictions — ready to sur-
render no one of them. Yet, in the spirit that
prevailed on that occasion — the recognition of the
common blood-bond of all souls as the children
of the All-Father — it was found wholly practicable
that all these men of various races and creeds and
cults should unite daily in one form of prayer —
Common Worship 247
' ' Our Father which art in Heaven. ' ' It was worth
all that Parliament cost, of money and of labor,
to see, once upon the earth the representatives of
well-nigh all the religions of the earth affirm thus
the possibilities of a common worship.
So, at a later date, the New York State Con-
ference of Religion early took into consideration
the subject of the possibility of common worship.
A special committee appointed urged the impor-
tance of the element of worship in the sessions
of the conference. It was felt that the wider the
intellectual differences represented in the Con-
ference the greater the need of coming together
in the spirit, for worship. Finally there resulted
a "Book of Common Worship," prepared by this
special committee, under the authorization of the
Executive Committee. The book itself includes
the choicest passages of the Old and New Testa-
ments, with a number of selections from Rabbinical
Commentaries on the Old Testament, and a
considerable anthology of the Sacred Books of the
East, representing all the great extant religions,
as well as some of the religions of antiquity;
nearly a hundred collects or short prayers drawn
248 Catholicity
from the offices of the Greek and Roman Churches,
from the "Uses" of the Church of England, and
from the Hturgies of other great Churches, together
with prayers of private individuals of all branches
of the Christian Church, orthodox as well as
heterodox, selections from the offices of the Jewish
Church, and a representation of the theistic
worship of India; and finally, some seventy-five
hymns drawn from all sources. This book was
put forth as an object-lesson in the possibilities
of common worship. It is believed that it can
be used in Conferences by all who are represented
in them. In fact it has been used, acceptably, and
has to that extent thereby been a demonstration
of the possibilities of common worship.
What can be done in one instance can be done
in other instances. Other representative gather-
ings of the varied forms of religion upon our shores
can unite in some such common worship — thus
confessing the common faith underlying all creeds,
the common life breathing through all souls.
Criticisms, of course, will be made upon this
"Book of Common Worship," and upon the
effort of which it was an imperfect expression.
Common Worship 249
The ultraconservative will turn to the Christian
collects, embodied in it, and point out the fact
that the formula usually concluding Christian
prayers is omitted. It is the wont in Christian
churches to conclude prayers with some such
expression as "in the name of Jesus Christ," or
''for the sake of Jesus Christ, " or "through Jesus
Christ." For obvious reasons, in a gathering
representing Judaism as well as Christianity, such
a form cannot be used. Is this a surrender of any-
thing vital in Christianity? Let it suffice to point
out the fact that this formula was of late growth
in Christian liturgies. The earlier liturgies either
did not have it, or only used it occasionally.
There was no standard rule as to its use. Some
of the noblest prayers of the earliest Christian
-.urgics were wholly without it — as will be seen
in the "Book of Common Worship." We return
to the primitive usage of Christianity. And, if
primitive Christianity be the nearest to original
Christianity — the Christianity of the Christ —
then surely we cannot be far wrong in following
this example. The Lord and Master of all Chris-
tians taught His disciples to pray thus: "Our
250 Catholicity
Father which art in Heaven." That prayer
concluded without the formula evolved in later
ages. If it is a formula vital to Christ's Chris-
tianity, why did He not teach it? If so unessen-
tial to Christ's Christianity, can it be essential to
our Christianity? In reality, the conception of
this Christian formula, as universally necessary,
is a total misconception of one of the great words
and thoughts of Jesus: "Whatsoever ye shall ask
in my name it shall be given you. " That does not
mean the mere repetition of the name of Christ.
As every pious Jew can tell our Christians, the
name is the symbol of his character. Then do we
pray in the name of Jesus when we pray in the
spirit of Jesus, in the light of the truth of Jesus.
To pray any otherwise than after the pattern of
the spirit of Jesus, according to the mind that was
in Jesus, that is to fail in using the name of Jesus —
that and that alone. Surely the truth of Jesus,
the spirit of Jesus, is found in a common worship
among all who are the sons of His Father and our
Father, His God and our God. So we are, in the
deepest and truest sense, praying in the name of
Jesus, when we look around among all the children
Common Worship 251
of earth and say: "Whoso doeth the will of my
Father which is in Heaven, the same is my brother
and my sister. "
The possibilities of common worship — by a
changed emphasis, we change the Hght in which
we are regarding the topic. A common worship
holds possibilities for the common life of man of
supreme importance. All earnest souls are dream-
ing of religious unity. Unity is the great generali-
zation of our age. All things are tending toward it.
Religion feels the universal trend. It is becoming
synthetic. It is drawing together, from all parts
of the earth. Christians are everywhere praying
again that prayer of their Master "that they all
may be one." Men are everywhere praying that
prayer in its largest sense — that they all, all the
children of earth, as they are children of the All-
Father, may be one. How is Christian unity to be
achieved? Surely not by working from without
in, in any scheme of ecclesiastic unification.
The lines of hopeful effort toward Christian
union are, in my judgment, three. First, in-
tellectual effort to discern the reality of that
common Christianity underlying all creeds. Every
252 Catholicity
great liberalizing factor in our modern Christen-
dom is making thus for unity — as, by winnow-
ing the temporal from the eternal in all sects, it
is driving us all back upon the essentials of faith.
Second, practical co-operation, wherein the
churches come together as facing the common
problems of social life, desiring in common to
establish the Kingdom of God, the Divine Order.
Each church is finding that the problems of in-
temperance, and impurity, and dishonesty, and
political corruption, and all the other problems
of our organic life which it faces, are faced by
every otlier church. Each church is finding itself
helpless to grapple with these problems alone.
As the churches all come to realize that in the
grappling with these problems is their true work — '■
the building up of the Kingdom of God upon earth
— they will draw together, as they are now drawing
together; waiving all differences, setting aside
all contrarieties of opinion, holding in the back-
ground all that separates them, that they may
work in common for the common need of man.
Most practical and hopeful this line of effort
toward Christian unity!
Common Worship 253
One line of effort toward Christian unity remains.
The recognition of the common spiritual life
among "all who call themselves Christians" will
lead increasingly to some form of common worship.
Whatever our differences concerning intellectual
opinions and practical philanthropy, all true souls
must feel that there is but one love of God, and
of the Christ hid in God, within them all. Ex-
pression of this in worship is the best confession of
the oneness of our spiritual life — the spiritual hfe
out of which all religions grow. The confession of
this is the confession of essential unity as already
existing — established in the very nature and con-
stitution of the soul. In the ver}^ nature of things,
therefore, all Christians find themselves one when
they can worship together. The things that di-
vide them must be the things of lesser importance :
intellectual opinions, temperamental tastes, habits
of life, etc. Until we can see eye to eye intellectu-
ally, and until we can agree enough as to what
needs to be done for the world to pull all together
in social reform — we can at least come together,
now and then, in the sublimities of a common wor-
ship, and thus confess that we are one in Christ.
254 Catholicity
The worship which is signed in the sacred sym-
bolism of the churches — this must always be the
highest effort of the human soul. Into it religion
must always strain its essential secret. The re-
ligion of the future must be more than the re-
ligion of the past. Worship must be higher
and purer, more intellectual, more ethical, more
spiritual; more an expression of the very soul of
man. A modern work on Christian Institutions,
by a presbyter of the Protestant Episcopal Church
who has done not a little to help forward the
thought and life of the Church, thus concludes:
It is possible that the Protestant world now stands
on the eve of some transition, waiting for the mani-
festation of its full content, in a consimimate act of
worship. It has been said that worship is one of the
lost arts; but if so, it is not to be found by compressing
the spiritual wealth secured by the Protestant refor-
mation, in the providence of God, into the moulds of
ages inferior to our own. Rather must we go for-
ward, taking all that the past can offer, in so far as it
can harmonize with a greater ideal, but reconstructing,
in some more comprehensive way, the worship and the
conception of the sacrifice acceptable to God. . . .
What remains to be done is to gather up in one inclu-
sive act of sacrifice, all that these modern ages have
Common Worship 255
contributed to the knowledge of God, to consecrate
and transfigure, in his sight, all that the heart and the
reason hold as inestimably dear and precious. From
this sacrifice there cannot be withheld any contribu-
tion made by the human mind toward the solution of
the mystery of existence. The sacrifice will include
every department of human interest and inquiry —
music, art and poetry, as well as science, philosophy
and theology. It will include the life of the whole
Church in every age. It will be a Christian sacrifice
for Christ Himself will be the supreme offering of
humanity to God — He in Whom are hid all the trea-
sures of wisdom and knowledge; in Whom dwelt all the
fullness of the Godhead bodily. The early Christian
Church had glimpses of such a sacrifice ; it was to be a
bloodless sacrifice, a reasonable offering, the presenta-
tion of the mind to God, with all that it discerns of
the mind of God, the true, the beautiful and the good.
"The noblest sacrifice to God," said Athenagoras in his
Apology, "is for us to know Him Who is the Creator
of the world and of man." "What, then, does God
require?" said another Christian writer of the same
period, "but the worship of the mind which is pure
and holy." This worship of the mind, wanting in
ancient ritual, has been enjoined by Christ Himself,
as when He urged the love of God with all the heart
and soul and mind. In the light of this injunction,
that the worship of the mind is essential as is the
worship of the heart, is seen more plainly the meaning
of those other words which cannot be too often re-
256 Catholicity
peated: "God is spirit, and they who worship Him
must worship Him in spirit and in truth. "
Is this all? Again, back of the common Chris-
tianity is the common humanity. What is true
of common worship for Christianity is true, in a
larger sense, of common worship for humanity.
That sacrificial worship of the future will be not
only the adoration of the intellect before the God
of truth, the love of truth itself; it will be the
adoration of the heart before the God of Love —
love, living itself forth in all service of man, as the
service of God. And the abiding sign and symbol
thereof will be this holy communion of the Chris-
tian Church, lighted up with new significances,
consecrated with new enthusiasms, hallowed with
new passions, and made the symbol of the life
itself.
Vast though the intellectual differences be be-
tween the great religions of the earth; varied as
the temperamental tastes of different races may
be; diverse as the cults and creeds of earth may
thus appear — when we come to worship, we are all
one, and we know ourselves one in that we can
Common Worship 257
worship together. Such worship together is thus
the confession of the common spiritual Hfe which
is the root and fount of all religion, out of which
all religions grow.
As Matthew Arnold said : Worship must unite,
not divide men.
Thus to worship is to answer the Christ's
prayer — Even so, are we one, O Jesus, in the life
and love of Thy Father and our Father, Thy God
and our God.
17
IX
CHRISTIANITY IN EVOLUTION
In the struggle for existence among the great
reHgions of the world in the Roman Empire,
Christianity proved to be a survival of the fittest.
That is the outer story of the success of Christian-
ity. A further and final question arises, which
may be considered first, as leading up to and inter-
preting the outer story : — How came it to pass that
Christianity thus succeeded, where other religions,
older, more thoroughly organized, better appointed
in all external provisions, failed? What was the
secret of its success in this struggle for existence?
What fitted it for this survival of the fittest?
The deepest currents of the age, through all re-
ligions, were making in one and the same direction,
towards one and the same goal; the direction in
which Christianity moved more rapidly than any
other religion.
258
Christianity in Evolution 259
Everywhere in this epoch, we see the tokens of
a profounder religious spirit working through the
heart of paganism. Julian, the brilliant and ver-
satile Emperor, is seen upon his knees before the
statues of the gods, covering them with kisses;
is found by the officials of his court preparing the
wood for the sacrifice, doing the most menial
service in honor of his divinities. Marcus Aure-
lius, the greatest of the Roman Emperors, whether
in his imperial palace or in his tent upon the shores
of the Danube, carries, through all the cares of the
court and the sterner anxieties of the army, the
hunger and thirst of a great soul after truth and
righteousness. Everywhere, through the Apolo-
gies of the great defenders of Christianity, we see
the souls of men feeling after God, if happily they
might find him.
A new and deeper moral earnestness showed it-
self on every hand. The most marked develop-
ments of this were Stoicism and Neo-Platonism —
the two movements of paganism, in its decadence,
which were breathed throughout with the loftiest
moral earnestness. As one reads the pages of
Seneca, one fancies one is hearing the echoes of
26o Catholicity
Paul. Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius reveal to
us souls bent upon the pursuit of goodness, devot-
ing life's energies to the cultivation of character.
The great group of philosophers who brought about
the new Platonism were kindred souls with the
Apostles. They, too, were ahungered and athirst
after righteousness.
Throughout the nobler portion of mankind a
deep longing seized the soul for freedom from sin.
The old superficial life of joyousness had passed
away, and, in its place, there had come a deep sense
of human sinfulness, an oppressive sense of the
bondage of evil and a longing for redemption from
it. This was what gave the Mysteries their power.
Men came to them for initiation into the life of
the spirit. They taught men to fight on earth a
battle between light and darkness, between good
and evil, and trained them to take part in that
battle.
A gentler and sweeter spirit of humanity was
spreading everywhere. The old coarse and brutal
strength of Rome was mantling itself with the
graces of kindliness. Virgil betokens this change
in the temper and spirit of the age. There is,
Christianity in Evolution 261
throughout his famiHar poetry, a sweetness as of a
new age. This kindhness of spirit showed itself
in new and striking forms of human helpfulness.
Charity awoke from its long sleep in paganism, and
stirred itself to benefit the poor, the outcast, the
friendless, the forlorn. For the first time in the
history of Rome slaves came to be treated, not
as mere chattels, but as human beings. Cato's
slaves worked in chains, like a gang of convicts in
the South. They found a sleeping place in the
stalls of the oxen. On Pliny's estates the slave
chain gang ceased to be. His slaves could ac-
quire property, and even ate at the table with his
freed men. He was not ashamed to shed tears at
the death of a slave. The law now began to take
slaves under its protection. Hadrian forbade
their arbitrary killing and provided the right of
trial for them. Children came into their rights for
the first time in Roman history. Hitherto they
were absolutely in the power of the father, who was
free to do what he pleased with them. He could
kill them at his will. He exposed them, without
compunction, when he did not care to bring them
up. And to expose a child, as it was termed, meant
262 Catholicity
simply to take the unwelcome babe and place it in
the streets, or leave it in the fields, to meet what
fate it might. This had been the custom of good
society up to this time. Such exposed children
could be treated as slaves by those who chose to
take them home and bring them up. Tragan
decreed that they should be free. Alexander
Severus allowed the father the right to reclaim his
child, provided that he repaid the expense of its
maintenance. Children began to be objects of
interest and care in the home. Philosophers
recommended mothers to nurse their children
themselves. The training of children became a
favorite theme with authors in this period. A
new tenderness towards children showed itself.
We find the thoughts of Marcus Aurelius, amid all
his anxiety about the Empire, occupied with a
"little nestling. " One searches in vain, in earlier
literature, for such a description of a grandchild.
Poor children, now, for the first time, came into
their share in the State's distribution of corn.
Orphan and outcast children began to be cared for.
Tragan provided for the care of five thousand in
Rome, and for a considerable number in other
Christianity in Evolution 263
towns. When Antoninus lost his wife, Faustina,
he thought that the best way to honor her memory
was to found an institution for the support of poor
girls; and Alexander Severus established a similar
institution in honor of his mother, Mammaea.
Private persons began to found similar charities.
Pliny endowed one in Como, with an income of
30,000 sesterces per annum — that is, about $1500.
A rich lady made provision for the support of
one hundred children in Terracina, and gave, for
that purpose, 1,000,000 sesterces — about $50,000.
Such institutions had been undreamed of in ancient
Rome. The change which was coming over the
spirit of humanity is illustrated in a relief on the
column of Tragan, which pictures the Emperor
distributing gifts to poor children. This would
have been a compliment which an earlier Roman
would have utterly failed to appreciate.
Philanthropy began to make itself felt as a force
in society. Pliny founded libraries or schools for
the towns which had claims upon him, thinking,
as he said, that thus a greater benefit would be
given to the community than through gladiatorial
shows, on which most men spent the money they
264 Catholicity
gave away for the pleasure of the people. A dealer
in healing herbs in a little town left, by will, to the
town three hundred jars of drugs and 6000 sesterces
— about $300 — in order that medicine might be
gratuitously dispensed to the poor. Upon a tomb
of this period we find the inscription — "Do good,
and thou wilt carry it with thee." That was a
novel sentiment in Roman society — though it
would have been familiar enough to the ancient
Egyptians.
A deep longing for closer and truer human fellow-
ship between classes made itself felt at this period
as never before. The bonds of brotherhood were
felt drawing men together — those bands of a man
which, alone, can unite a human society in a living
organism. As always — and this fact should be
pondered well by men and women of culture and
of wealth — as always, this sense of brotherhood
first made itself felt among the poor. It was not
the aristocrats of Rome who cherished this new
ideal of fraternity — it was the workingmen of
Rome. They founded the colleges and the koinon,
the labor unions and trade organizations and mu-
tual benefit societies of all kinds, which, at this
Christianity in Evolution 265
time, spread throughout the Empire, rapidly
gathering myriads of members. They were, one
and all, efforts of the soul of man to bind men to-
gether in a more living bond of brotherhood.
These are hints of the forces, moral and spiritual,
which were working through paganism in the
period of its decadence; signs of the direction in
which the deep currents of human life were setting
at this time. These forces were found by men to
be working in Christianity more powerfully than
in any other reHgion — hence Christianity's appeal
to them. In this direction Christianity proved to
be making more rapidly than any other religion —
hence the age threw itself upon Christianity, to be
borne forward most speedily to the haven where
it would be. Paganism was spiritualizing itself,
even as it was adying. In its last hours it became
transfigured, and the inner light glorified it. The
old form burst and the spirit passed out, not to be
unclothed, but to be clothed with the new and finer
body of institutions and symbols and beHefs which
we call Christianity.
What were the needs of man's soul, thus mani-
festing themselves in the civilization of the time,
266 Catholicity
which Christianity satisfied more fully than any
other religion, and because of which it succeeded
in the struggle for existence — proving a survival
of the fittest? Generally speaking, we may sum
these needs in the statement that paganism was
developing a longing for certitude in religion — a
desire for a clear recognition of one living and true
God, good, righteous and holy and just, the Father
of men ; a longing for a clear and assured vision of
immortality (these two already studied in connec-
tion with the Mysteries) ; a hunger and a thirst for
a truer righteousness and a deeper holiness than
was found in the world ; a quickened perception of
the great law of sacrifice, under which, the uplift-
ing of humanity is to be carried out ; a new and
deeper sense of human fellowship ; an aspiration for
a veritable human brotherhood.
Men were longing, first of all, for some certitude
in religion. Certitude was the one thing they did
not find in the many religions about them. They
failed to convince the average man with a convic-
tion that lifted him above doubt. A balancing of
probabilities was all that most men attained unto,
concerning the great questions of life. Proba-
Christianity in Evolution 267
bility is a good enough guide in ordinary matters,
but as the staff on which to lean under the trials of
life, a^ the strength by which to resist the tempta-
tions of life, as the comfort in which to meet death
itself — probability is a poor enough satisfaction for
such crises of the soul. This was the pathos of the
age, that men everywhere longing, as men in all
times must long, for some certitude, groped around
as in the dark to find only shrewd guesses and
happy divinations and learned philosophizings and
oracular messages which baffled, while alluring —
a will-o-the-wisp light, which guided men only to
disappoint them. Pilate's question bespoke the
skepticism of the age — "what is truth?" Cicero
sets forth the doctrines of the various philosophers
concerning the human soul, and adds: "Which of
these opinions may be true, a god may know;
which may be only probable is a difficult question. "
Seneca, the great Roman stoic and statesman,
sighs — "Ah! if one only might have a guide to
truth." "We will wait," Plato had said long
before, "for One, be it a god or a god-inspired
man, to teach us our religious duties, and, as
Athene in Homer says to Diomed, to take away
268 Catholicity
the darkness from our eyes." As the same great
philosopher, in a famous passage, writes again —
"We must lay hold of the best human opinion in
order that, borne by it as on a raft, we may sail
over the dangerous sea of life ; unless we can find a
stronger boat, or some word of God, which will
more surely and safely carry us."' A raft is a
poor makeshift for a shipwreck. If nothing better
is found, by all means let us take to the raft. But
none will so long for a staunch boat, as he who
clings to the raft, amid the buffetings of the great
billows. So, men, clinging as for their life, to the
best human opinion that they could gain, scan the
horizon for some strong word of God coming to
their rescue, upon which they might surely and
safely float across the waves of this troublesome
life, and find themselves in the haven where they
would be. One of the leaders of the new Platon-
ism. Porphyry, made a collection of pagan oracles
and great spiritual words, in the preface to which,
he says :
^ For this and several later quotations from philosophers of the
period, convenient reference may be made to Uhlhorn's "Conflict
oi Christianity with Heathenism,"
Christianity in Evolution 269
Those will best recognize the usefulness of this col-
lection who, in their longing for truth, have prayed
that they might enjoy a vision of the Gods, in order
that they might find rest from their doubts in teachings
which emanated from trustworthy authority.
''Rest from their doubts" — this was the great
longing of the age in religion. That they might
find rest from their doubts men had come, at
length, to feel that they must somewhere find
"teachings which emanated from trustworthy
authority. "
This was what men found, to the satisfaction
of their souls, in Christianity. They rested from
their doubts. They gained a clear vision of God.
They found a strong word of God on which they
might safely make the voyage of life. They found
a source of trustworthy authority. Wherever
one turns in the literature of early Christianity
he is impressed with this sense of the immense
relief that came to men's souls in gaining a new
and reasonable certitude where all had been
problematical before. "I know in whom I have
believed" — that is the conviction that takes pos-
session of men's souls. This is life eternal, that
270 Catholicity
they might know the only true God — this was the
new faith which was more than faith, which was
knowledge. The clouds broke over the earth.
The sun shone through the fog. Men basked in
the light of clear and certain conviction. And
the religion which brought this certitude to men
carried all men with it.
Men were longing for clearness and certitude in
their conception of God. Everywhere the world
was reaching towards one and the same thought of
God — His unity and His goodness. This was the
trend felt in every great religion of antiquity.
This was the truth, clearly seen ahead, by the few
elect souls of earth. It was plain that all the great
religions were evolving this faith. But it had been
reached by the few alone. It remained still one
of the secrets of the hidden wisdom of paganism.
The mass of men groped still in the darkness con-
cerning the unity of God and concerning His char-
acter. The mass of men were still Polytheistic,
believing in many gods. The face of God had not
cleared above the soul of man, revealing a vision
of the Eternal, Who loveth righteousness. The
children of men still felt themselves orphaned upon
Christianity in Evolution 271
the earth, feeHng after God, if, happily, they might
find Him, but not yet finding Him as the Father
of their souls.
In Christianity men found all these tendencies
of religion culminating in a clear and certain con-
ception of God as the One living and true God,
good and just and loving. Pagans turned to their
Christian friends and found them believing, with a
serene and sunny conviction, in one God, and in
that God as our Father which art in Heaven. All
the deepest spiritual longings of their souls were
promised satisfaction in this faith of the Christians.
To it they turned, with a joy that we can even now
realize as we think over their thoughts again.
The first of the Grecian philosophers to become
a convert to Christianity tells us in his writings
of his vain wanderings through the schools of the
philosophers in search of certainty and peace of
mind in the knowledge of the living God.
A stoic, under whose instruction he first placed him-
self, asserted that the sure knowledge of God, which
Justin chiefly longed for, was a subordinate question of
philosophical speculation. A peripatetic, of whom he
next inquired, demanded, after a few days, as of pri-
272 Catholicity
mary importance, that he should settle the fee. This
repelled Justin, and he went to a Pythagorean, who dis-
missed him immediately, because he had no knowledge
of music, geometry and astronomy, an acquaintance
with which the Pythagorean declared was pre-requisite
to the study of philosoph}^ since they are the means by
which the soul, absorbed in earthly things, may be
purified. Justin then turned to a Platonist, and sup-
posed that he had reached the goal, for his teacher
introduced him to the Platonic doctrine of ideas, and
the pupil already dreamed that he had become a sage
and was near to the vision of Deity. Then, walking
alone one day on the shore of the sea, he met an old
man, a mature Christian, and fell into conversa-
tion with him on divine things. The venerable man
showed him that God can be perceived only by a mind
sanctified by the Spirit of God, and so affected him
that all at once his proud dream of knowledge van-
ished. The old man, seeing his consternation, pointed
him to the Divine Word as the source of all true knowl-
edge of God, and began to tell him of Christ. Fol-
lowing these hints, Justin found in Christianity
that sure knowledge of God which he had sought for
in vain in the different schools of philosophers.'
In his lectures on "The Science of Religion,"
(page 171) Max Miiller sets forth this fact in a
very noble passage :
' Uhlhorn, pages 155-156.
Christianity in Evolution 273
In exploring together the ancient archives of lan-
guage, we found that the highest god had received the
same name in the ancient mythology of India, Greece,
Italy, and Germany, and had retained that name
whether worshiped on the Himalayan mountains, or
among the oaks of Dodona, on the Capitol, or in the
forests of Germany. I pointed out that his name was
Dyaiis in Sanskrit, Zeus in Greek, Jovis in Latin, Tiu
in German ; but I hardly dwelt with sufficient strength
on the startling nature of this discovery. These
names are not mere names; they are historical facts,
aye, facts more immediate, more trustworthy, than
many facts of mediaeval history. These words are
not mere words, but they bring before us, with all the
vividness of an event which we witnessed ourselves
but yesterday, the ancestors of the whole Aryan race,
thousands of years it may be before Homer and the
Veda, worshiping an unseen Being, under the self-
same name, the best, the most exalted name, they
could find in their vocabulary — under the name of
Light and Sky.
And let us not turn away, and say that this was after
all but nature-worship and idolatry. No, it was not
meant for that, though it may have been degraded into
that in later times; Dyaus did not mean the blue sky,
nor was it simply the sky personified — it was meant for
something else. We have in the Veda the invocation
Dyaus pilar, the Greek Zeus pater, the Latin Jupiter;
and that means in all the three languages what it
meant before these three languages were torn asunder
18
274 Catholicity
— it means Heaven-Father! These two words are
not mere words: they are to my mind the oldest poem,
the oldest prayer of mankind, or at least of that pure
branch of it to which we belong, — and I am as firmly
convinced that this prayer was uttered, that this name
was given to the unknown God before Sanskrit was
Sanskrit and Greek was Greek, as, when I see the
Lord's Prayer in the languages of Polynesia and
Melanesia, I feel certain that it was first uttered in the
language of Jerusalem. . . .
Thousands of years have passed since the Aryan
nations separated to travel to the North and the South,
the West and the East; they have each formed their
languages, they have each founded empires and phi-
losophies, they have each built temples and razed them
to the ground; they have all grown older, and it may
be wiser and better; but when they search for a name
for what is most exalted and yet most dear to every
one of us, when they wish to express both awe and love,
the infinite and the finite, they can but do what their
old fathers did when gazing up to the eternal sky, and
feeling the presence of a Being as far as far, and as
near as near can be; they can but combine the self-
same words, and utter once more the primeval Aryan
prayer, Heaven-Father, in that form which will endure
forever, "Our Father which art in Heaven."
Men were longing for certitude concerning
Immortality. It was a universal faith — but it was
Christianity in Evolution 275
a faith which failed to thoroughly persuade men
and lead them into its joy and power. The few
elite souls of earth again had satisfied themselves
of this truth, beyond a peradventure, and sunned
their souls in the light of it. But to the mass of
men it was clouded over with doubt.
In that immortal picture of the last hours of
Socrates with his disciples, Plato represents Socra-
tes asking his friends, after he had reasoned with
them concerning immortality, "What they thought
of the argument and whether there was anything
wanting." To which, Simmias replied — ''I must
confess, vSocrates, that doubts did arise in our
minds, and each of us was urging and inciting the
other to put the question which we wanted to have
answered and which neither of us liked to ask,
fearing that our importunity might be troublesome
at such a time as this. " Encouraged by Socrates,
to speak frankly of his doubts, Simmias replied —
"I dare say that you, Socrates, feel as I do, how
very hard or almost impossible is the attainment
of any certainty about questions such as these in
the present life."
The Emperor Julian writes in one place — " I am
276 Catholicity
not one of those who disbeheve the immortaHty of
the soul: but the gods alone can know; man can
only conjecture that secret."
In a once popular book of the early Church, a
kind of romance, dating from the middle of the
second century and entitled "The Clementine
Homilies," Clement of Rome is represented as tell-
ing the history of his conversion to Christianity.
From my earliest youth I thought much concerning
death, and of what may be after death. When I die,
shall I cease to exist, and be remembered no more?
Has the world been made, and what was there before
it was made? In order to learn something definite
about these and similar questions, I used to resort to
the schools of philosophers. But naught else did I
see than the setting up and knocking down of doctrines,
and strifes and contentions, and artificial reasonings
and invention of premises. Now the opinion pre-
vailed that the soul is immortal, now that it is mortal.
If the former, I was glad; if the latter, I was sorrowful.
Perceiving that opinions were deemed true or false
according to the ability of those who maintained
them, and not according to their real nature, I was
more than ever perplexed. Wherefor I groaned from
the depths of my soul. For neither was I able to
establish anything, nor could I refrain from solicitude
concerning such themes. And again, I said to myself:
Christianity in Evolution ^11
Why do I labor in vain? If I am not to live after
death I need not distress myself now while I am alive.
I will reserve my grief till that day when, ceasing to
exist, I shall cease to be sad. But if I am to exist,
of what advantage is it to me now to distress myself?
And immediately another thought came to me:
Shall I not suffer worse there than now? If I do not
live piously, shall I not be tormented like Sisyphus
and Ixion and Tantalus? And again I replied — But
there is no truth in such stories. But if there be?
Therefore, said I, since the matter is uncertain, it is
safer for me to live piously. But I am not fully per-
suaded what is that righteous thing that is pleasing
to God, neither do I know whether the soul is immortal
or mortal, nor do I find any sure doctrine, nor can I
abstain from such reasonings. What am I to do? I
will go into Egypt, and seek and find a magician, and
will persuade him with large bribes to conjure up a
soul. And so I shall learn, by ocular proof whether
the soul is immortal.
At last Clement found what he had so long
sought. Hearing of Christ and his Apostles, he
made up his mind to find them out and learn from
them. He first found Barnabas. That which
most impressed him in the preaching of Barnabas
was the fact that he did not concern himself with
the objections of the philosophers, their subtle
278 Catholicity
questions and their ridicule of his simple and il-
logical discourses, but that he calmly declared such
things as he had heard and seen Jesus do and say.
vSuch things as he had heard and seen Jesus do
and say — herein lay the power of the Apostolic
preaching.
This was the pathetic and tragic longing of the
soul of man which was met so satisfactorily in
Christianity. The pagans, thus longing for some
certitude concerning the life to come, turned to
their Christian friends and found them rejoicing
in an absolute conviction — a conviction that sus-
tained them under all the trials of life, and which
enabled them to go to the stake, not only willingly,
but joyously; which made them covet martyrdom
as the greatest gift and blessing of life. Perplexed
and doubting pagans saw these unlettered Chris-
tians thrown into the arena, to be devoured by
wild beasts, with an expression upon their faces of
serene and seraphic bliss that told the tale of the
inner certitude in which they went to meet death
hungrily. One of the first philosophically minded
pagans to become converted to Christianity was
also one of the first martyrs of the young Church.
Christianity in Evolution 279
Justin the Martyr was denounced before the pre-
fect of his city as a Christian, and was brought
before Junius Rusticus for examination. He
*' quietly explained who he was and what was his
occupation; that he had himself sought and found
the truth, and that now when any one came to
him he communicated to him the teachings of the
truth. 'Art thou not, then, a Christian?' asked
the Prefect; and Justin replied: 'Yes, I am a
Christian.' . . . The Prefect turned again to Justin,
and asked mockingly: 'Listen, thou who art called
learned, and believest that thou knowest the true
doctrines, art thou persuaded that when thou shalt
have been scourged and beheaded, thou wilt then
ascend into Heaven?' 'I hope,' replied Justin,
*to receive Christ's gracious gift, when I shall have
endured all those things.' 'Thou really thinkest,
then, that thou wilt ascend into Heaven, and there
receive a recompense? ' asked the Prefect yet more
scornfully. 'I not merely think so, but I know
and am thoroughly convinced of it,' answered
Justin." '
That this was no momentary exaltation of the
^ Uhlhom, page 290.
28o Catholicity
martyr is clear from the whole tenor of the litera-
ture of the early Church, which was pervaded with
this same serene and sunny confidence in immor-
tality. It is clear from a study of the Catacombs
— at once the meeting-places and the burial-places
of the early Christians. There, on every hand,
are still to be seen the funereal symbols of the
pagan world — -expressing, one and all, the conster-
nation and dismay, the doubt and horror, which
filled the souls of men in the presence of death.
By their side we see the new symbols of the new
faith — the carved and graven signs in the rocks of
the jo}^ and the peace in believing with which the
Christians met the same death.
Everywhere in the pagan faiths the better men
were longing for a nobler and more earnest life;
for a clearer vision of what life should be, and for
a fresh and stronger power to attain that life.
The sense of sin which was stealing across the world
had awakened a hunger and a thirst after right-
eousness, a longing for goodness, such as the ear-
lier paganism had little known. Even where there
was an intellectual knowledge of the higher ethical
life for which men were longing, as notably among
Christianity in Evolution 281
the Stoics, there was little power to realize that
nobler life. You will rxot find in Paul clearer and
stronger declarations concerning the true life of
man than you will find in Seneca, the great Roman
Stoic. But Paul's life was all of a piece — a con-
sistent whole ; a devotion of his powers to the pur-
suit and attainment of the character which he
outlined so loftily in his letters; a victory in which
he won that for which he longed. Seneca's life,
on the other hand, betrays that wretched duality
of aspiration and conduct which shows that the
moral power was lacking.
The astonishing vogue of the Mysteries is ex-
plainable only by their partial satisfaction of this
newly awakened hunger of the soul of man for a
more earnest moral life, for freedom from sin, for
the attainment of holiness.
A part of this aspiration was a longing for truer
and closer bonds of brotherhood. Realizing, as
antiquity had not done, the enormity of the class
divisions which were growing up in the Empire,
the new sweet sense of humanity reached out in
longings for fellowship and fraternity. This was
the object set before them by the secret societies
^^^ Catholicity
of workingmen throughout the Empire. To a
considerable extent the members of these Httle
brotherhoods did enter upon some truer fraternity.
But the power to spread the enthusiasm of hu-
manity seemed lacking. The great world outside
these little brotherhoods went on in the old com-
petition, in the ancient selfishness.
This longing of the soul of man was met in
Christianity. Earnest pagans, dissatisfied with
their life and clouded in their aspirations, longing
for something better but failing to find the power
to achieve it, turned to their Christian friends and
found in them the clear vision of man's true life
and the power to attain that life. The Emperor
Julian, in his attempt to restore and reform pagan-
ism, w^rites to the High Priest of Galatia urging
him to stir the priesthood of the old religion to an
imitation of the Christians. The intensely earnest
Emperor bids his High Priest see that the ministers
under him emulate the Christians in "their holi-
ness of life." The younger Pliny, writing to the
Emperor Tragan concerning the Christians in
Bithynia over which he was Governor, declares
that "they further bound themselves by an oath"
Christianity in Evolution 283
(plainly, the Baptismal vow) "never to commit
any crime, but to abstain from robbery, theft,
impurity; never to break their word nor to deny
a trust when summoned to deliver it. " Speaking
of one of the early persecutions. Dean Milman, in
his ''History of Christianity," declares ''that the
chief honors of this memorable martyrdom were
assigned to a female, a slave. Blandina shared
in all the most excruciating sufferings of the most
distinguished victims; she equalled them in the
calm and unpretending superiority to every pain
which malice, irritated and licensed, as it were,
to exceed, if it were possible, its own barbarities
on the person of a slave, could invent. She was
selected by the peculiar vengeance of the prosecu-
tors, whose astonishment probably increased their
malignity, for new and unprecedented tortures,
which she bore with the same equable magna-
nimity. . . . The wearied executioners wondered
that her life could endure under the horrid suc-
cession of torments which they inflicted. Blan-
dina's only reply was — 'I am a Christian, and no
wickedness is practiced among us.'"
The Apologies presented to the Emperors by
284 Catholicity
the first philanthropic champions of Christianity,
dwelt at length upon this singular fact concern-
ing the early Christians. Athenagoras, addressing
the heathen, pleads — ''You can find uneducated
persons, artisans and old women, who, if they are
unable in words to prove the benefit of the Chris-
tian doctrine, yet by their deeds exhibit the benefit
arising from their choice."
One of the noblest writings of the early Church
is a letter of an unknown author to a certain Di-
ognetus. It contains a classic description of the
new life of this new sect.
For the Christians are distinguished from other men
neither by country, nor language, nor the customs
which they observe. For they neither inhabit cities
of their own, nor employ a peculiar form of speech,
nor lead a life which is marked out by any singularity.
. . . But, inhabiting Greek as well as barbarian
cities, according as the lot of each of them has deter-
mined, and following the customs of the natives in
respect to clothing, food, and the rest of their ordinary
conduct, they display to us their wonderful and con-
fessedly striking method of life. They dwell in their
own countries, but simpl}^ as sojourners. As citizens,
they share in all things with others, and yet endure all
things as if foreigners. Every foreign land is to them
Christianity in Evolution 285
as their native country, and every land of their birth
as a land of strangers. They marry, as do all; they
have children; but they do not destroy their offspring.
They have a common table but not a common bed.
They are in the flesh, but they do not live after the
flesh. The}^ pass their days on earth, but they are
citizens of Heaven. They obey the prescribed laws,
and at the same time surpass the laws by their lives.
They love all men, and are persecuted by all. They
are unknown and condemned; they are put to death,
and restored to life. They are poor, yet make many
rich; they are in lack of all things, and yet abound in
all; they are dishonored, and yet in their very dis-
honor are glorified. They are evil spoken of, and yet
are justified; they are reviled, and bless; they are
insulted, and repay the insult with honor; they do good,
yet are punished as evil-doers. When punished, they
rejoice as if quickened into life; they are assailed by
the Jews as foreigners, and are persecuted by the
Greeks; yet those who hate them are unable to assign
any reason for their hatred. ^
The beliefs of the early Christians were thus
seen in definite application. Their faith found
expression in socialism — a contrast to the usages
of the times that challenged attention and respect.
Record has been made in earlier chapters of their
' "Apostolic Fathers," vol. L, page 307. — Ante-Nicene Chris-
tian Library.
286 Catholicity
development of the older custom of the secret
supper. And this the Christians adapted and
sanctified into a memorial of the Last Supper,
perpetuating a Holy Communion. The Holy Com-
munion was their true communion; the true com-
munion conceived the true commonwealth. The
idea was brought to a practice of "what's thine's
mine; what's mine's thine," and those who ob-
served could see that this was really lived. And
so it was reported: ''All that believed were to-
gether and had all things common: sold their
possessions and goods and parted them to all men,
as every man had need. " For was not their Christ
the first representative of the people? He walked
with the highest and the lowest, and was brother
to one as much as to the other ; he shared with his
fellows, nor craved possessions beyond his needs;
he lived for aims that called not for material riches ;
he preached the cause of the people, while he led
the citizens in their duties to authority and their
obligations to life. In all ways he championed the
needy, and brought all men together in a brother-
hood that builded upon love — the foundation of
commonwealth, the symbol of communion.
Christianity in Evolution 287
How did all this come about in Christianity?
There could have been but one answer to this
question, as we see from all the analogies of his-
-tory. Ethical and spiritual religions start from
a personal founder. Nature worships originate
without personal founders. They need none. They
grow out of man's recognition of the mystery
of power in Nature. They are not distinctively
ethical or spiritual. But the religion which grows
out of man's recognition of a moral power within
him, of a spiritual nature out of which he has
sprung and towards which he is to aspire — such
a religion must needs grow out of some personal
life embodying this moral earnestness and living
in this spiritual consciousness. Religions of this
kind, then, arise in a life; the life is the light of
men. So we can trace the story of all great ethical
and spiritual religions from an Abraham, a Moses,
a Zoroaster, a Buddha, a Mohammed. A living
man attains in his own spirit the consciousness of
certitude amid the infinite and eternal mysteries;
he enters into the consciousness of the Infinite
and Divine Presence; he sees, through the Valley
of the Shadow of Death, the life which lies beyond ;
288 Catholicity
he recognizes the supreme power in Hf e as the moral
law within, and enshrines that law in a fleshly
tabernacle, living, himself, as a manifestation of
that God, Who is Goodness.
There must have been a personal founder for
Christianity w^hose life constituted the new re-
ligion. If we did not find him in history we should
have to discover him. We should be absolutely
sure that he was there, as the fact out of which
Christianity arose. '
We do know of him. The whole outer body of
Christianity bears his imprint. He has enstamped
his personality upon Christianity, indelibly. The
Sacred Books of Christianity, the New Testament
writings, are full of him from beginning to end:
the story of his life in the Gospels; the exposition
of his teachings in the Epistles; the inspiration of
life which flowed from his Hfe, through every word
uttered by every Apostle and Disciple, through
' Dr. G. Stanley Hall says in his book, "Jesus, the Christ, in
the Light of Psychology": "If pragmatic is higher than either
historic or theoretic certainty and reality, we have here the very
truth of truth. There are incitations within us which give us
psychic orientation to Jesus, and even if his historical existence
were disproven, we should have to postulate some such person at
about this time, place and circumstance. "
Christianity in Evolution 289
every life lived by the followers of this Master.
The institutions of Christianity testify to him.
The Church bears his name. It is the abiding
witness to the fact that he has lived. Were there
no other attestation of his having been an histori-
cal fact, this one would amply suffice. The cen-
tral sacrament of the Church points, by tradition,
to his own personal institution. It is a personal
memorial of the founder of Christianity. The
symbolisms of the Church point to him. The
most sacred sign in our Christian symbolism is the
sign of the cross — the instrument of his crucifixion.
The two great Creeds of the Church embody, as
their central article of belief, the Church's abiding
recognition of the fact of his life.
A carpenter's son of Nazareth of Galilee so
lived that his life became the embodiment of
a new religion. Amid the infinite and eternal mys-
teries no doubt shadowed him, no cloud chilled
him, no fog perplexed him. He was serenely sure,
calmly confident, walking in an abiding certitude.
"We speak that which we do know, and testify
that which we have seen." His conviction was
more than a faith — it was a knowledge. It was
19
290 Catholicity
an immediate intuition. It was an open conscious-
ness. In him the human consciousness, which in
the rest of men has attained to self-consciousness,
opened into God consciousness. He was as con-
scious of God as the normal person is conscious of
himself.
God was to him the one living and true God;
a being infinitely pure and holy, just and good;
the Eternal who loveth righteousness; the source
and spring of our being; the moral and spiritual
perfection towards which we all aspire ; the original
of our nature, in whose image we are made; Our
Father which art in Heaven.
Death, to him, was only a step from the seen
world into the unseen; only a link between two
stages of being; only a passage down into the
valley of the shadow of death, that thus, life may
rise into the light of life. He never argued about
immortality — he assumed it as one of the certitudes
of life. His own consciousness of immortality
sealed itself in the one historic attestation of
the continuance of life beyond the grave. As he
lifted the veil which hides the other world from
our sight, and passed behind, he turned again,
Christianity in Evolution 291
and holding that veil open, showed himself to
those outside — as living still. He reappeared
after death to his disciples, and made them know
the reality of his continued existence, and in the
reality of his continued existence, the reality of
immortality for all men.
The life of goodness which all men recognize
more or less dimly, and aspire unto more or less
earnestly, he saw clearly and realized habitually.
Resisting every temptation, mastering every sin,
he won the victory over all evil and entered into
the life of holiness here upon the earth. He made
his human life one with the divine life in all good-
ness. So perfect was his life, that, in him, men
saw their ideals realized, their visions materialized,
and could frame no better description of the per-
fect human life than that it should follow in the
blessed steps of his most holy life. Breathing all
sweetness of sympathy, all gentleness of kindness,
all depth of love, he bound all men unto himself
in the bands of a man, the bonds of human brother-
hood. Men of all races, of all religions, of all
classes, of all conditions, nay, of all characters, he
recognized as one with himself in the family of the
292 Catholicity
All Father, the children with himself of our Father
which art in Heaven. To the service of his
brothers, as the child of his Father, he freely gave
his life.
It was not merely that he taught these truths —
taught men that certitude was possible, taught
men to know God as one. Our Father which art in
Heaven, taught men to know the reality of im-
mortality, taught men to know w^hat goodness is,
and that it is possible to attain unto it here on
earth — it was far more than this. Teaching, as
never man taught before, the truths of God, of
immortality, of human life; speaking, not as the
Scribes and the Pharisees, but as one having au-
thority— he taught all these truths in the only way
in which they can be persuasively taught — by
living them. He, himself, was all that he taught.
Herein was his power over men. Thus it was that,
as men came up to him and touched him, they were
thrilled with his ow^n life, and became partakers
with him of the divine nature.
In the Book of the Acts of the Martyrs, we
find the story of the first famous martyrdom,
the heroic end of Poly carp. As he stood on the
Christianity in Evolution 293
funeral pile, the venerable Christian breathed
this prayer:
Oh, Lord God Almighty, Father of Thy beloved
and blessed Son, Jesus Christ, by whom we have
received the knowledge of Thee, the God of angels and
powers, and of the whole creation and of all the race
of the righteous who lived before Thee, I bless Thee
that Thou hast counted me worthy of this day and
this hour, that I should have a part in the ntunber of
Thy witnesses, in the cup of Thy Christ.
Each organism, in growing, grows out from and
around one original germ cell. That one cell is
the basis and beginning of the whole complex life
of the developed organism. Dividing and re-
dividing itself, each additional cell renewing the
same work, all the elements of nutrition absorbed
into the miniature organism are charged with its
vitality, impressed with its characteristics, and
moulded by the form which is shrined within it —
the unseen mystery of all existence.
The story of the Christian Church repeats the
story of every organism of nature. The original
germ cell of Christianity was Jesus himself. Forth
from him, and around him, grew other cells, other
294 Catholicity
human personalities, charged with his Hfe, breathed
through and through with his spirit, moulded after
his own human form divine. In his life, a few
souls touched him and were vitalized from him.
From him they received the new truth which filled
their minds — from him, the new life which filled
their being. Each man went forth to touch others
and charge them anew with the life which he had
received from the Master. And so, on and on
again, in the successive touch of soul with soul, the
mystery of life first breathed into humanity in
Nazareth of Galilee has spread until we have our
Christianity today, eighteen centuries after Christ,
the outgrowth from his own living personality.
The Christian Church is the body which has grown
around the soul of Jesus, the Christ of God.
Every individual in that Church is a cell in the
mighty organism of which Jesus is the informing
life. We live still from his hfe; we think over his
thoughts; we breathe again his spirit. We are
vitalized, all of us, from that original germ cell of
human personality which God fashioned into such
perfect form in Nazareth of Galilee.
The difference between Christianitv and the
Christianity in Evolution 295
paganisms with which it contended, lay simply in
the fact of this one informing, vitalizing personality
which was the force in Christianity, and the ab-
sence of which was the weakness of paganism.
Despite every resemblance and parallelism — and
the resemblances and parallelisms were, as has been
seen in these studies, astonishingly close, — there
was this essential difference. Judaism held nearly
all the truths of Christianity. What it lacked was
power to realize them and apply them; a soul
breathing within its body and transforming every
member of the organism into its own nature.
What the devout Jews of the age of Jesus lacked
was the moral and spiritual power which those
their fellows found who followed Jesus as the Mas-
ter of life. Roman stoicism held so many of the
ethical truths of Christianity that we are often-
times perplexed and bafifled in reading its masters
to find men who saw so much yet did not see more ;
who knew so clearly what the right was, yet failed
so wretchedly in the power to live it and to live in
the joy of it. The new Platonism held so much of
the philosophy of Christianity that, in reading its
teachings, we seem to be reading our own Christian
296 Catholicity
philosophizings — only, with a something missing.
As one of the Neo-Platonists said when the intro-
duction to the Gospel of St. John was brought to
his knowledge — " The barbarian Platonizes. " We,
turning back to his writings and the writings of his
followers, can say — "The Grecian Christianizes."
This new Platonism held the orthodox theology of
Christianity, its conception of the Divine Logos,
or Thought-Word, clearly and fully evolved. It
could have affirmed the Nicene Creed up to the
point where we affirm — "Who for us men, and for
our salvation came down from Heaven, and was
incarnate by the Holy Ghost of the Virgin Mary."
They could have accepted the whole of the intro-
duction of the Gospel according to St. John, save
the one vital clause — "And The Word Was Made
Flesh." It was the Athanasian philosophy, but
Jesus was left out.
And leaving him out, the moral and spiritual
power was left out which was pulsing through
Christianity. Leaving this out, all else was in vain.
Wise men came to recognize that there was some-
thing lacking, and that that was the power of
a divinely human personality embodying man's
Christianity in Evolution 297
visions of goodness, living in conscious communion
with God, setting the pattern for all men, which
they might follow as their religion. And so came
the most pathetic picture of the failing paganism —
its attempt, partly a conscious imitation of Chris-
tianity, partly an unconscious impulse'out of which
grew the legend of Apollonius of Tyana ; the story,
largely mythical, of the great pagan w^ho lived
much as had the great Jew who founded Chris-
tianity. Around the person of Apollonius of Ty-
ana there grew up the pagan myth of the divinely
human One, the Son of God, working marvels,
communing consciously with his unseen Father,
healing the sick, mastering sins — doing all that
Jesus did. But it was in vain. It was only an
imitation of the reality, only an echo of the true
word of God.
What do we make of Jesus himself in the evolu-
tion of religion? Was he, too, an evolution? The
answer is both yes and no. When the fullness
of the times came, God sent forth His Son. This
classic word is the affirmation of a reality in the
thought that Jesus, the Christ of God, is an evolu-
tion. He has come, in the fullness of the times, as
298 Catholicity
the ripened flower and fruitage of the moral and
spiritual processes of development through which
humanity has been led up after God. He is the
outcome of all the yearning of the life of antiquity.
There is a false way of stating the fact that Jesus
the Christ is the fulfillment of Judaism. Our
fathers so stated this thought as to find in ancient
prophecy clear and conscious prediction of his
coming — a prediction growing ever more and more
defined, ever more and more minute. Not thus
do we look at it. But we, too, can see through the
whole story of Israel the growth of a vision of God
and the growth of a conception of man, which
together have found their perfect realization in
Jesus of Nazareth. In this most living sense He
is an evolution of Judaism — its crown and consum-
mation, its flower and its fruitage; that unto which
it yearned, that which it was struggling to bring
into being; that by which, in bringing into being,
its mission has been fulfilled.
So we do not build our thought of Jesus as the
fulfillment of ancient paganism upon a mystic
word of the Jewish writings, which pointed to him
as the desire of all nations — a reading which we
Christianity in Evolution 299
can no longer allow. But nonetheless does he
prove himself to be the desire of all nations — that
unto which all the higher religions of antiquity
reached; that thought of God, that ideal of man,
after which one and all strove. Every great re-
ligion tended in one direction. The focal point
was far beyond them all. That focal point is
found in the story of Jesus — in his truth and life.
In that truth and life we read what all were reach-
ing forward to, what no one clearly found. The
mystic aspects of paganism justify themselves in
the light of the story of Jesus. The hidden wisdom
of paganism has become the open secret of man-
kind in Him. The story of man's soul, as read
dimly in the Great Mysteries of Greece and
Egypt, is now seen clearly in the life of Jesus the
Christ. In Him we recognize the divine man in us
all, passing through that sixfold stage of spiritual
experience — through baptism, temptation, pas-
sion, burial, resurrection, and ascension into the
life of' God. Here is the suffering, dying, rising
God, the parable of whose mysterious being the
cosmos itself reads us; the hieroglyph of whose
story the soul of man pictures. The secret
300 Catholicity
of the ages is opened in the story of the
Nazarene.
Still for the generations that are to come, on
through the far future, we must needs believe that
the story of religion in our Western World is to be
the story of the continued growth of that mystic
organism whose indwelling soul is the spirit of
Jesus of Nazareth, the Christ of God.
For the individual the question of religion is the
question not of connection with the outer body of
the Church but of living personal touch with the
soul which is at the center of that body, the Christ
of God. His thought is the truth on which we are
to feed. His belief is the faith in which we are to
live. His consciousness is our certitude. His life
is our pattern. His spirit is our inspiration. To
touch Him is to thrill with the life of God. To love
Him and consecrate our lives to Him is to enter into
pure religion and undefiled before God and the
Father.
So the bond of brotherhood which the world is
striving to fashion, in which to bind up the alienat-
ing classes and races of mankind in good will and
peace, is the cord of love which that Hving heart
Christianity in Evolution 301
throws out through all the members of the body
growing round it — through each one today, if we
but let His life flow into us.
One of the most beautiful narratives of heroic
martyrdom which the early Church records is the
tale of the saintly Felicitas — a young mother who
met her doom about the beginning of the third
century. The whole story is one of exquisite
beauty and of surpassing nobleness. While she
was awaiting the execution of her sentence she
was in severe suffering — a dangerous illness seizing
her. For a moment she gave way to her sufferings.
"How then," said one of the servants of the
prison, "if you cannot endure these pains, will you
endure exposure to the wild beasts?" To which
she replied — " I bear now my own sufferings; then,
there will be one within me who will bear my
sufferings for me, because I shall suffer for His
sake."
X
A SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST
The external story of Christianity is explained in
the scientific phrase — the survival of the fittest.
This is the popular statement of the general law
by which we account for the fact that some forms
of life disappear from the earth while others are
perpetuated, alike among individuals and species
and genera. It is the law of nature that one shall
be taken and another left. Some die and others
live; some yield place to others who thrive. The
story of life is the story of a struggle for existence.
A constant effort is necessary in order to live. In
this effort one organism succeeds because it is
adapted to its environment, whereas another fails
because it has not adjusted itself to its environ-
ment. The adaptation may be, and generally
is, the result of slight, slow successive changes
wrought upon the organism in its effort to get a
302
A Survival of the Fittest 303
living out of nature. We may not argue under
this law that the organism which survives is the
best in itself, but only that it is the best under the
given circumstances — the best fitted to its con-
ditions. It may not be ideally the best, but only
practically the best. Yet the large and general
result of this struggle, and of the natural selection
of that which is fittest to survive, is an organic
ascent of life. Somehow or other out of this rude
equation there results the progress which we call
evolution. Thus nature mounts from the clam to
man. The organic change is necessary to enable
plants and animals to get a living work for higher
forms and types of life. Out of this struggle for
existence, seemingly so ignoble, there issues a
movement towards an ideal. So the survival of
the fittest becomes, speaking bye and large, a
survival of the best.
This is a universal law. We are familiar with
it as it holds over the life of plants and animals;
we know it as dominating over the struggle be-
tween nations and races. But we do not quite so
quickly realize that it holds over governments and
laws and institutions, arts and philosophies, and
304 Catholicity
all the forms of the noblest life of man. Yet is it
true that every form of human life is in continual
struggle with rival forms, and out of this clash
between ideas and institutions is evolved the pro-
gress which we call civilization.
This law holds over religions. All that goes to
the outward embodiment of religion — institutions,
rites, symbols, worships, beliefs — are thus evolved.
A multitudinous variety of more or less similar
institutions, rites, symbols, worships, beliefs, con-
tend, one with another, and that which is best
fitted to survive, survives ; and out of this survival
of the fittest there issues a survival of the best, a
progress of humanity in religion.
History reveals the fact that religions have been
in a continual struggle for existence from the
beginning of the world until now. A traveler on
the Nile, stopping to examine its fascinating temple
ruins, discovers upon them signs that one and the
same temple has been dedicated at different times
to different Gods. Built by one monarch, in
honor of some favorite deity to whom it was
solemnly consecrated and with whose name it was
signed and sealed, in a later generation a succeed-
A Survival of the Fittest 305
ing monarch has rededicated it to another god
scratching out the previous inscription and en-
graving the name of the new deity to whose honor
it has been set aside afresh. The cartouche of one
divinity is thus altered or erased to make place for
the cartouche of another divinity. In this historic
fact we have the record of the large movements of
historic religions. Successive phases of religion
contending one with the other, a fierce struggle has
gone on, out of which one has issued victor for the
time.
A similar story is told in Greece, as we all re-
member from our schoolboy studies of its mythol-
ogy. The successive dynasties of the gods of
Olympus simply stand for so many successive
forms of religion. These differing forms, antagon-
istic one to the other, struggled one with the other,
and the best fitted to survive did survive for the
time.
Israel's story tells the same tale. Before Moses
the tribes of Beni Israel had each its own god or
gods. With Moses a great revolution was wrought.
The tribal gods retired to the background, in the
Pantheon of Israel, and the central position was
3o6 Catholicity
taken by Jehovah, or Jah. Then followed gener-
ations of struggle between Jehovah, from his cita-
del in Jerusalem, and the local gods of the tribes
who reigned still in the provinces. This story is
embalmed in the historical books of the Old Testa-
ment, and is brought out vividly by our new criti-
cism. And this strife between the warring gods of
Israel is only the strife between so many different
religions, so many different religious conceptions
and ideas and beliefs. So when the prophets arose
a still higher form of religion entered the field,
contending with Jehovahism, the accepted reli-
gion of the nation. The religion of the Prophets
won the day — not without compromises and sacri-
fices. It took gradual possession of the people,
and survived because it was fittest to survive in the
enlarging mental and moral and spiritual life of
the people.
History thus shows itself to be full of the obitu-
ary notices of dead religions. Earth is strewn
with the graves of buried religions. Institutions,
once venerable, have crumbled into ruins. Rites,
once celebrated with pomp and pageantry, are
forgotten. S3^mbolisms, once sacred to men,
A Survival of the Fittest 307
are now mere curios of archaeology. Beliefs, once
vital and inspiring and commanding, are now
merely superstitions.
This story of the conflict between religions out
of which there issues a survival of the fittest is
peculiarly the story of the age in which Christianity
arose. As never before in the history of man, this
was an era of cosmopolitanism. Rome had
achieved a well-nigh universal Empire. All round
the shores of the Mediterranean the eagles of her
legions kept watch and ward. The boundaries of
her Empire stretched from Briton to Persia. Her
fleets traversed the Mediterranean, passed through
the Red Sea, circumnavigated vSpain and Portugal,
interchanging the commerce of the East and the
West. Her magnificent system of roads linked
Paris and Marseilles with Damascus and Alexan-
dria in an intricate network of* post routes, sup-
plied at frequent intervals with lodging houses and
relays of horses and every convenience for rapid
travel and interchange of letters. In the Roman
forum the golden milestone marked the center of
this magnificent Empire, forth from which, as
the hub, these road spokes branched in every direc-
3o8 Catholicity
tion, reaching to the furthest circumference of the
Empire. Roman law ruled every province. Na-
tional boundaries fell away. Race prejudices
disappeared. Along the streets of Rome might be
seen, in an afternoon's walk, the blue-eyed,
flaxen-haired barbarian of Briton, the red-haired
Frank, the swarthy Moor, the copper-skinned
Eastern, the cultivated Greek — men from every
land, each in his own provincial costume, each
speaking his own local tongue. Along the quays
of the Tiber were moored ships, bound for every
part of the known world. In this era of cosmo-
politanism, under this imperial unity, more was
interchanged between the provinces than the cus-
tom-house officers levied duty upon, and more than
the merchants invoiced. There was an exchange
not only of wares, but of ideas. Thoughts passed
freely from land to land. Greek was the polite
speech of the world as French was the polite speech
of Europe a couple of generations ago. It was the
fashion then to travel, as it is the fashion now.
The gilded youth of Rome considered his education
incomplete until he had attended the schools of
philosophy in Greece and had carried his letter of
A Survival of the Fittest 309
credit with him in a tour of the Mediterranean.
Nations who had been isolated one from the other,
races which had known one of the other, only in
the misleading light of prejudice, came to stand
face to face. Rome became the clearing house of
the world's thought. There was a cross-fertiliza-
tion of ideas going on, such as history had never
known before.
Rome was as hospitable to the different religions
of earth as she was to the various races of the world.
As all the provinces flocked to Rome, thither
trooped all the religions. In the imperial city
temples were erected to Serapis and Isis, to Mithra
and the vSun, to every deity who had a following
in the Empire — a following represented in the
imperial city. It was an age of universal toleration.
Religious freedom was all embracing. A man was
free to follow the dictates of his own conscience.
The wealthy and ardent followers of every great
religion sought to popularize that religion in the
capital of the world, hoping to make it the domi-
nant religion of the Empire. Noble Roman
ladies might be seen flocking to the temple of
Isis, and attending upon the solemn pageantry of
310 Catholicity
her worship as conducted by the white-surpHced,
tonsured priests from Egypt. The cult of
Mithra vied with the religion of I sis in attracting
the attention of those who were dissatisfied with
the official religion of the Empire. Men, ahun-
gered after ethical and spiritual life, longing to
know something of human destiny, were drawn
into the following of this Eastern religion which
appealed so strongly to all that is most earnest in
human nature. Judaism, strange as it may seem,
despite the prejudices surrounding its peculiar
people, notwithstanding the suspicion which at-
tached to a race which held itself aloof from all
other races, guarded so jealously its sacred, spiritual
treasure, and insisted so strenuously upon its
peculiar rites — Judaism, all this to the contrary,
obtained an immense following throughout the
Empire and in Rome itself. The Jews went
everywhere in the train of commerce and trade.
They formed a whole quarter in the great city of
Alexandria, numbering perhaps two hundred
thousand souls. They had their own district in
Rome, where also they formed a considerable
element of the population. In an age which was
A Survival of the Fittest 311
growingly dissatisfied with official religion, hun-
gering after some certitude in religion, longing for
some power to inspire life, Judaism, with its simple,
pure, spiritual faith, appealed strongly. It made
hosts of converts. Roman senators and Roman
matrons were, if not open perverts to Israel, at
least secret sympathizers with it. SovavSthad
become this influence of Judaism upon Rome that
at one time it promised to conquer the Roman
Empire and become the dominant religion. It
failed — because it had given birth to a daughter
whose career was destined to realize all the dreams
of its mother.
All these great and venerable religions were
competing in the free and open field of the Roman
Empire for the popular suffrage. A veritable
struggle for existence was going on between Isis
and Mithra and Jehovah and Jupiter — between
the religions for which these deities stood. Into
this arena there appeared suddenly a new and
youthful combatant. Among all these competi-
tors in the field of religion, none seemed so little
likely to win as this newest religion.
It began from the least possible beginnings. A
312 Catholicity
little handful of Jews, held in disrepute in their
own land because of their heretical tendencies,
separating themselves at first from their fellows
simply because they believed that a certain car-
penter's son, of an obscure hamlet in Galilee, was
the Christ — such was the Christian Church when
it first entered this imperial arena.
It came with all the taint of its mother, Juda-
ism, upon it. It, too, was an intolerant religion, a
religion claiming to be the one only true faith
among the many false faiths. It entered, by in-
heritance, into all the suspicion and prejudice
which the peculiarities of Judaism entailed upon
it.
It was the religion not of the wealthy, the cul-
tivated, the fashionable, but of the poor, the un-
known, the despised of earth. Its followers were
the slaves and freed men who formed the ranks
of the wage-workers of the Empire. Not many of
the mighty were called to this first following of the
new faith. Its emissaries found welcome only
among those who themselves had no recognition
from society. Its meeting places were the hospit-
able synagogues of Judaism, or the lodge rooms of
A Survival of the Fittest 313
the secret societies of workingmen, or the subter-'
ranean burial chambers of the Catacombs. When
Paul came to visit Rome his first meetings were in
some of the flats in the tall brick tenements lining
the Tiber. His audience consisted of the horny-
handed sons of toil. Jewish costermongers, Syrian
boat-men, craftsmen from the different lands
of earth, who crowded into the quarters of the
poor — these were his following. As Renan said,
most of those in his audience smelled of garlic.
Celsus, one of the most powerful opponents of
Christianity in its early days, said tauntingly, its
followers were cobblers and blacksmiths, tent-
weavers and carpenters.
At the best, in those early days,the aristocracy
of the new Church were the artisans and craftsmen
of the great industrial labor unions of the Empire.
Few philosophers or men of culture were found in
its ranks. It had, at first, no men capable of enter-
ing into controversy with the trained disputants
of paganism. It numbered among its followers no
orators, no men of literature, no poets — none of
the men whose intellectual force might carry it
forward toward success. As Celsus, in another
314 Catholicity
place, sneered, ''they were a dumb folk only bab-
bling in the corners. "
This stripling among the religions of earth, this
weakling among the great faiths, dared to enter
into contest with the giants of religion, the mighty
forces of paganism, trained through the ages, pan-
oplied with every known armor of defence that the
learning and skill of man could contrive.
In this contest Christianity found arrayed
against itself all most powerful elements of society.
The mass of the people loved their ancient tradi-
tional festivals and usages — the year filled up
with celebrations of the gods and goddesses in
whom they had been taught to believe in infancy ;
the sacred rites and ceremonies with which every
important event of life, from birth to death, was
associated, phristianity, in its first enthusiasm,
swept the field clear of all traditional customs
and usages, rites and ceremonies associated with
paganism, and thus opposed to itself one of the
strongest instincts of humanity. The average
man, then as now, hated the man who sought to
live above the common customs and to follow
standards higher than those recognized generally.
A Survival of the Fittest 315
The Puritan, even in his first fresh days of sincer-
ity, was not an ahogether lovely character to the
pleasure-loving man. And the Christian was the
Puritan of the Roman Empire. As such he was
cordially detested and earnestly hated by the
men whose own conception of life was having a
good time.
Conservatives opposed the radicaHsm of this
new religion. The conservative instinct, strong
in all ages, was particularly strong in this time
when the official piety of the Empire was pietas
toward the past, reverence towards the fathers,
an obedient following in the ways of tradition.
So the established order stood aghast at a new re-
ligion which turned away from the official altars,
disowned the piety due towards the past, foreswore
the faith of the fathers and started put with a
brand-new religion as it seemed. The Roman con-
servative felt towards Christianity much as the
good Churchman feels towards the come-outer and
the free thinker — toward the man who will not
attend church and disowns the institutions of
religion. Christianity seemed to the average man
not a religion but an irreligion. Did not these
3i6 Catholicity
Christians forsake the ahars of the Gods and re-
fuse to do homage to the ancient divinities? Did
they not deny the faith of the fathers, and turn
their backs upon the holy temples? All this was
an impiety, and therefore they seemed to- the
religious of their day to be nothing else but atheists.
This was what they were continually charged with
being. Again and again in great prosecutions the
cry arose — "Away with the atheists!" Toda}^
the tables are reversed ; and we Christians, who are
so ready to condemn agnostics and other non-
conformists as being atheists and infidels, feel
it strange to find that our progenitors were thus
charged in the days gone by.
All whose ideal was respectability turned away
from a new religion which was utterly unfashion-
able. Its followers, drawn from the hosts of
slaves and freed men who did the menial work of
civilization, found among themselves few of the
elite of earth. In those early Christian assemblies
no Roman senators, no grandames, were present;
no men of wealth and no women of culture. It
was throughout the Empire as in Israel, where the
taunt arose — Have any of the Imperial household
A Survival of the Fittest 317
embraced this new religion? Are any of the
nobility converts to this new faith? And the
great mass of men and women who longed, above
all, to be in the social swim turned away from this
upstart religion, which was only the faith of the
despised and the outcast of earth.
Vested interests opposed Christianity, with all
the power of property. The official rehgion of the
State was thoroughly organized throughout the
Empire, and represented vast plants in the form
of temples and their endowments, and vast pro-
perties in the trades that ministered to the temple
worship, and vast incomes in the salaries of the
priests of the hierarchy. Every interest concerned
in the maintenance of paganism opposed resolutely
this new religion which would have confiscated
those properties and estopped those businesses
and ended those incomes.
Culture opposed Christianity. All the learning
and philosophy and art and science of the day
stood together in the maintenance of the recog-
nized religions of the Empire. They were vener-
able with age, hallowed with associations and
mellowed with poetry. They fostered schools of
3i8 Catholicity
philosophy and were, in turn, defended by the
philosophers. The intellectual life of the age
was strong and culture was widespread. All the
cultivated classes, without exception, rallied to the
support of the various forms of paganism. On
the other hand stood this infant religion, this faith
of the plain people, among whom were found no
philosophers, no scholars, not many learned, not
many mighty. It was the taunt of the cultured
of the age that Christianity was a superstition,
a pestilent superstition. The brilliant Emperor
Julian sneeringly declared that culture was not
for the followers of the crucified carpenter. They
only needed to "beheve." There was ground
enough for these taunts. The early Christians
accepted the most impossible miracles unquestion-
ingly. They read their Old Testament literally.
The stories of the Old Testament which still offend
cultivated minds offended cultivated minds in the
Roman Empire, equally. But these stories gave
no offence to the mechanics and slaves who com-
posed the Christian Church. Celsus, the most
brilliant and able of the early antagonists of
Christianity, was never weary of poking fun at the
A Survival of the Fittest 319
blind credulity of the Christians and their stupid
superstitions.
The State opposed this new religion with all the
might of its strong arm. It is not difficult to
understand why this was so. The recognized
religion of the Empire was the official religion of
the State. It was a State religion. Conformity
to its customs formed part of the duties of citizen-
ship. These Christians, who would not burn in-
cense upon the altars of the gods, who would not
offer homage to the genius of the Emperors, who
refused any act of worship to the head of the State
— these were not only impious men but dangerous
citizens. They were not only disloyal to the faith
of the fathers — they were disloyal to the Empire
itself. This suspicion was aggravated by the
steadfast refusal of the early Christians to serve
in the army. Their opposition to war was intense.
Their belief in non-resistance was a principle.
They were the Quakers of the Roman Empire.
And whatever the tolerance of Rome, a limit was
drawn when citizens refused military service —
that service, upon which, the very perpetuities
of the Empire depended.
320 Catholicity
Yet further, the Christians, in their private
assemblages, were identified with the secret so-
cieties which were spread throughout the Empire.
Trades unions and labor organizations, incorpor-
ated under the law of the Empire, in forms per-
missible by the law, as burial societies and mutual
benefit societies, were spread far and wide, enroll-
ing a vast membership. They had become serious
factors in the State — alike by their numbers and
by their wealth. They had become objects of
suspicion to the State. Property, then as now, was
always ready to be scared by the bugaboo of social
revolution. These new, so-called religious as-
semblies, which were known to meet in the lodge-
rooms of the labor organizations and to gather
furtively in the Catacombs; these secret societies
plainly composed of the suspected workingmen —
entered into the inheritance of suspicion which
attached to all similar societies in the Empire.
The State was in constant dread of a social revolu-
tion. The attitude of the early Christians towards
property was thoroughly socialistic. Thus it came
about naturally that the State looked askance upon
them, and ere long proceeded to active opposition.
A Survival of the Fittest 321
This is the secret of the persecutions of the
Christians. Rome was tolerant without Hmit of
religion pure and simple. A man might believe
what he chose and worship what he willed, so long
as he remained a good citizen, loyal to the Empire,
and in no wise threatened property. But the
moment that property seemed to be threatened,
Rome was prepared to crush, remorselessly, its
secret foe. The story of the first three centuries is
a story of repeated persecutions. Long intervals
elapsed between the outbursts of popular wrath
and imperial enmity, but, from time to time,
circumstances re-awakened suspicion, re-excited
enmity and persecution renewed itself. Nero
began it when, after the great conflagration of
Rome, the popular hatred towards the Christians
suggested them as the natural scapegoat for this
calamity. In the Imperial gardens Christian men
and women, bound upon uplifted stakes, covered
with tar, on which cotton was scattered, were
made living torches to illumine the Imperial festiv-
ities. At first there was considerable restraint in
these persecutions, and the fact of being a Christian
was not made a criminal offence. No encourage-
Z'2'2 Catholicity
ment was given to informers against Christians.
Only when a man resolutely insisted upon denying
his duty to the State and on refusing the homage
due to the Emperor was he subjected to torture or
to death. But by degrees, as Christianity grew in
power and became, therefore, more feared and
hated, restraint was thrown off, until, at last, in
fearful paroxysms of wrath, the whole power of
the State was employed with the deliberate and
avowed purpose of crushing out Christianity itself.
Then the fact of being a Christian became a crim-
inal offence. Edicts condemned them to death
without waiting for charges against them. The
most philosophic, the noblest, the most profoundly
religious of the Emperors, Marcus Aurelius, per-
mitted persecution — doubtless on the grounds
already indicated. In these outbursts of fury
against the Christians, men, women and children
were burned at the stake, were beheaded, were
tortured, were thrown to the lions in the arena,
were enclosed in nets and then tossed by angry
bulls, were dressed in skins of wolves to be set
upon by savage dogs. Thousands and tens of
thousands were thus slaughtered in those bloody
A Survival of the Fittest 323
years. Never was a more continuous systematic
effort made to crush a religion by the power of
persecution. The result of it all was that the blood
of the martyrs was the seed of the Church.
Through all these elements of opposition Chris-
tianity survived; in spite of them all it steadily
prospered. Generation by generation it increased
mightily, until, at the end of the third century,
the battle was won. Constantine recognized it
as the dominant religion — the only religion capable
of unifying his Empire — and established it as the
religion of the State.
One final despairing effort was made after Con-
stantine to revive paganism and crush Christianity.
A group of remarkable men, intellectual, highly
educated, nobly earnest, spiritually minded, con-
secrated themselves to the renewal of the noblest
life of their forefathers. They gave themselves
to the fresh study of Plato, and to the interpre-
tation of the ancient religions in the light of his
philosophy. They developed a philosophic sys-
tem which was in all respects the parallel of ortho-
dox Christianity, save that its doctrine of the
Logos, or the Divine Thought Word, stopped
324 Catholicity
short at the culmination of the Christian truth —
that the word was made flesh and dwelt among us.
These men devoted their powers to teaching
their thought and to inspiring in men their own
high life. Most illustrious of their converts was
one of the most brilliant of the Caesars. Flavius
Claudius Julianus, better known simply as Julian,
was the nephew of the great Constantine. He was
a man of splendid intellectual gifts, some of whose
learned treatises are still extant. He was devoted
to philosophy, and found his joy, even when upon
the Imperial throne, in study. He was, at the
same time, a vigorous man of affairs, a successful
administrator and organizer. He was, moreover,
a brilliant general, idolized, deified by his soldiers.
Yet, more, he was a man of thoroughly noble na-
ture, profoundly earnest and deeply religious. He
was brought up as a Christian, but, unfortunately,
as a Christian of the court, under the influences
of the fashionable Christianity of his day. He
became learned in dogmatic controversy, but
remained ignorant of spiritual Christianity. His
natural piety led him to become a reader in the
church, and thus to enter upon the lowest grade of
A Survival of the Fittest 325
clerical orders. What he saw of the superficial
Christianity around him revolted him. As soon
as any freedom came to him in his life of practical
imprisonment under the suspicion of the Emperor,
he turned to the Greek classics with the hunger of
a starved mind. From Plato and Aristotle he
drew deep draughts of intellectual inspiration.
He became an enthusiast for Greek culture.
Neoplatonism, the new Platonism, filled his soul
with philosophy and religious enthusiasm. On
coming to the Empire he threw off the disguise of
his youth and avowed himself a follower of the
ancient religion. vSacrifices were once more offered
to the Gods of Rome, and Julian himself officiated
at the altars. He felt himself called, as by a divine
voice, to the great work of restoring the religion
of the fathers. When the Emperor set the gait,
all the court kept step. Paganism once more
became fashionable. All the power of the court
was thrown into this work of restoration. Temples
that had been turned into churches were re-dedi-
cated to pagan divinities. New temples were
built. They were richly re-endowed. The old
priesthoods were re-established. The ancient wor-
326 Catholicity
ships were everywhere renewed. More Christian
than many of the Christians, this great heathen
refused to persecute those who would not follow
him. "Blows and bodily injuries," said he, "are
not the means by which to change a man's con-
victions. " More than the restoration of paganism
did Julian seek — he sought its reformation. Him-
self a man of simplest and most abstemious life,
pure amid all the corruptions of the court, dividing
his time between the studies which he loved and
his duties as a ruler, he insisted upon holding the
renewed religion of the fathers up to his own high
standards.
If our religion [he writes to the High Priest of Gala-
tea] does not make the progress we could wish, the
blame lies with those who profess it. The Gods have
done great things for us, above our hopes and peti-
tions. But is it right that we should be satisfied with
their favors, and neglect those things which the im-
piety of the Christians has cultivated, their hospitality
to strangers, their care of the graves, their holiness of
life? We should earnestly seek all these things.
He commanded that the priesthood should be
purged of unworthy members, and prohibited all
A Survival of the Fittest Z^^^
priests from going to the theatre and frequenting
the taverns.
With a certain feverishness of zeal he journeyed
from province to province, everywhere stimulat-
ing, encouraging, rebuking, stirring men to greater
efforts. He hurried from temple to temple,
brought sacrifice after sacrifice, knelt for hours
before his Gods and covered their statues with
kisses. Then, at night, he sat in silence at his
writing table and gave vent to his bitterness and
disgust with everything. In those still hours he
wrote his works, full of brilliant wit and charged
with bitterest hatred against the Galileans and
their carpenter's son.
But all in vain. When the rhetorician Libanius
scornfully asked a Christian priest — ''What is
your carpenter's son doing now?" the priest re-
plied— "He is now making a coffin for your
Emperor." In the midst of these incessant la-
bors Jiilian was called to the East to meet a Per-
sian invasion, and died at the head of his troops
in heroic combat. Tradition among the Chris-
tians reported that his dying cry was — ''Oh, Naza-
rene, thou hast conquered." Others said that
328 • Catholicity
his last words were — "Sun, thou hast betrayed
me."
It was a splendid, brilliant effort — but it was
the effort of despair. It was a movement against
the whole trend of history. No such movement
can succeed, no matter what the brilliance of its
leader, no matter what the might of its resources.
During the reign of Julian the friends of Athana-
sius had expressed their anxiety and fear. He re-
sponded— " It is only a little cloud. It will pass. "
It passed — and with it paganism passed forever
from the Western world. It passed — and Chris-
tianity remained. In the struggle for existence
Christianity was successful.
Paganism lingered still upon the earth, but as a
ghost haunts the scenes of its old life. Pagans
remained here and there, but they were, as the
word itself indicates, Pagani, only the villagers,
the rude, unlettered, superstitious folk — the cul-
tivated people, the men and women of the great
towns and cities, having gone bodily over to
Christianity.
The same process repeated itself as Christianity
came into the presence of the religions of the north
A Survival of the Fittest 329
of Europe — the religions of the German woods, of
the fields of Briton, of the Scandinavian Fjiords.
Longfellow, in the saga of Thor and the White
Christ, tells the whole story. Thor struggled with
the White Christ, but he was defeated.
Isis and Jupiter bowed before the Christ, and
were no longer supreme. Out of the struggle of
the Titans, Christianity came forth victorious.
Putting aside all so-called supernatural claims
resulting from this victory, a purely natural claim
remains. It is inconceivable that out of such a
conflict a religion unfitted to survive should sur-
vive. That would be an exception to the universal
law of nature. It follows, then, that Christianity
conquered because it was most worthy of conquer-
ing. It was a survival of the fittest.
In such survival of the fittest there is also an
absorption into the survivor of the elements which
fed those lives that failed. In the dark forest,
where the trees crowd each other to get at the air
and sunshine, the most vital tree survives. The
weakly trees around it sicken and die — make room
for it to send its roots down into the earth and suck
up the nourishment that they would have taken
330 Catholicity
from it; make room for it to send its boughs up
into the air and absorb into its leaves the sunshine
which they would have divided with it. The suc-
cessful tree gathers into itself the lives of the un-
successful trees. It was a New Zealand belief
that when a chief slew his rival and ate him the
spirit of the dead warrior passed into the victor.
This superstition held a philosophic truth.
There is yet a higher conception of this survival
of the fittest. In the struggle for existence which
we discern in nature there is not merely the strife
between different forms of life on the same plane,
by which one lives and another dies, one survives
and another succumbs, but there is issuing, from
this struggle of individual lives, the gradual form-
ing of a new and higher order of life which follows
the universal law. Out of the survival of the
fittest individuals, by slow successive changes,
variations develop, gathering ever fresh increments
of force, until new varieties arise — new species,
genera and orders. It is in this way that physical
science accounts for the gradual evolution of life
upon the earth. The mineral world reappears
in the vegetable world, ennobled. The vegetable
A Survival of the Fittest 33 1
life re-emerges in animal life, spiritualized. Each
successive order of animal life takes up the best
elements in the order preceding it, and transfigures
them. The story of the material world is a story
of an endless series of transfigurations. In man
the whole chain of lower life re-appears in glorified
forms.
The realm of mind exhibits the same law. In
the conflict of thought the winning truth absorbs
whatever was true in the error which was defeated.
In the great philosophical systems of our century
are to be found absorbed the leading thought of
every philosopher, back to Plato and Aristotle;
yea, back to the unknown dreamers upon the
shores of the Ganges, centuries earlier. In the
great scientific system which Herbert Spencer has
given to his generation one may find the essence
of theories which have made single names illustrious
through the whole story of the march of intellect.
Find the greatest of the later religions of the earth,
the religion which has risen in the heart of civiliza-
tion, which has grappled with the most powerful of
ancient religions and mastered them, and we may
be sure that we have found that system which, in
332 Catholicity
some sense, is a synthesis of all the faiths that
preceded it. This can be affirmed without any
reference to the, so-called, supernatural claims of
Christianity, but simply and solely as the natural
law of life. Christianity could not have survived
in such a struggle without having absorbed into
itself the best elements of Roman Stoicism, of Gre-
cian Philosophy and of Eastern Mysticism.
Thus into the successful competitor in this
conflict among religions, there passed the vitality
of every perishing paganism. Christianity drew
in to itself, under the mysterious law of life, every
vital element of the faiths which it dispossessed.
It proved to have the power of adaptation by
which it absorbed and assimilated whatever in the
surrounding paganisms proved worthy of being
preserved and perpetuated. Thus, it sucked up,
out of Judaism, its highest truth, monotheism — its
belief in the one living and true God. Thus, it
drew in from paganism the sense of the omni-
presence of God in manifold forms, which was the
truth underlying polytheism ; and recognized mani-
festations or masks or forms of God, in all the
different powers and energies of nature. It drew
A Survival of the Fittest 333
from Judaism its profound moral earnestness, its
high spiritual aspiration, its longing for communion
with the living God. It drew also from paganism
these same ethical and spiritual cravings which
found manifestation in the Sacred Mysteries, and
embodied them in that hunger and thirst after
righteousness which was its peculiar distinction.
The summation of the earlier chapters finds
place here. Alike in its sacred books, its institu-
tions, its sacraments, its symbols and its creeds,
Christianity accepted from paganism all that
proved acceptable, gathered into itself all that was
vital, drew up into its own life every true idea and
noble ideal, every deep inspiration and lofty aspir-
ation, every great faith and earnest hope and sweet
charity, and became the flowering of paganism, the
efflorescence of every religion of antiquity. The
hidden wisdom of paganism, the inner and esoteric
religion of the few, became the open secret of
Christianity; the truth told in a tale which entered
in at lowly doors and became the heritage of the
common people of Christendom. And then that
sacred sign of the cross, which was to antiquity
the cypher of universal spiritual religion, conserv-
334 Catholicity
ing the four great truths of ImmortaHty, Regenera-
tion, Redemption and Divine Love, become the
chosen sign and symbol of the new reHgion, which
proclaimed to all men, far and wide, this fourfold
truth of life.
This is the outward story of the success of Chris-
tianity, the secret by which it became the heir of
the ages.
XI
THE ISSUES
How strange, in the light of this story of Chris-
tianity, seems that criticism in a once famous
book, in which the hero of the tale, at the crisis of
his experience, declares^:
I see God's purposes in quite other proportions as it
were. Christianity seems to me something small and
local. Behind it, around it — including it — I see the
great drama of the world, sweeping on — led by God —
from change to change, from act to act. It is not that
Christianity is false, but that it is only an imperfect
human reflection of a part of truth. Truth has never
been, can never be, contained in any one creed or
system !
Doubtless. But what if the one creed or system
is the outgrowth of all creeds and systems of the
ancient world? What if the part of truth con-
^ "Robert Elsmere," page 414.
335
336 Catholicity
tained in it, however imperfect as of necessity it
must needs be, is a part as large as antiquity — as
large as the cosmopolitanism out of which it has
grown? Truly, the great drama of the world
sweeps on, led by God, from change to change,
from act to act; but, in the light of this retrospect
of history, the very core of that great drama seems
to be Christianity. So far from being small and
local, then, our Christianity looms large and uni-
versal— as large as earth, as universal as man.
When a young maple on your lawn or in your
pasture shows signs of arrested life, it is a serious
matter. The sapling has but slight rootings in the
soil. Young life always sickens and dies easily.
It is no great affair to uproot the young tree and
put out a new one. When the venerable oak
seems ailing, you have no suspicion that it is dying.
You never think of cutting it down and planting
a new one. It has taken generations to grow that
noble tree. It ought to live for generations yet to
come. What it wants is some better treatment.
You dig about its roots to let the air purify and
stimulate them. You search for some parasitical
life that may be draining its strength. If it has
The Issues 337
gone too much to leafage it may need pruning.
At the worst, it may call for some heroic surgical
treatment to drive its life back upon the roots.
Those roots run out far and wide below the surface.
They insure for it a vitality corresponding to this
depth and width of rooting.
Such is the vitality of Christianity. In its
veins flows the sap of the ages, the juices of life
sucked up from those wide and deep rootings
through which it takes hold on humanity itself.
Where, then, shall we seek for any new religion,
save in a renewal of this ancient and venerable one
— itself the quintessence of all preceding religions?
What of new shall we expect in the great tree of
religion but the tippings of the ever green spires
with the tender color of a new springtide?
Of the essential nature of piety — the ancient
pietas, or reverence for the past — ^is that conserva-
tism which, conscious of all the imperfections of
a religion, itself the expression of an imperfect
humanity, does, none the less, see in it the highest
expression of that imperfect humanity yet reached,
and holds, therefore, loyalty to its institutions as
the venerable heirlooms of the ages, the sacred
33^ Catholicity
shrines in which man's soul has so jealously
guarded the secret of the universe. Though thus
wisely conservative, we who cling to the historic
forms of our venerable religion, cling to them as
expecting them to grow and enlarge under the
swelling life of the Divine Spirit within man; be-
coming thus ever more and more fit for the use of
man, more and more worthy to image the God who
is in man.
In that Christianity has grown out of the great
religions preceding it, absorbed into itself their
vital elements and become thus their reproduction
in nobler and higher forms, we can expect that as
Christianity confronts the other great religions of
the world in the continued struggle for existence,
it will prove itself capable afresh, capable of a con-
tinued survival as the fittest. Of the best in the
great religions of the East not a little has already
been absorbed into the ground which has nourished
Christianity. Of the other truths these great
religions of the East have to teach us — and they
are neither few nor trifling — may we not feel con-
fident that our venerable religion can absorb and
assimilate them and turn them into material for
The Issues 339
new growth? He who has thus seen Christianity
emerging from the conflict of the past, victor over
every greatest form of faith, must needs expect a
renewal of the story in this new age of cosmopoli-
tanism in which the great religions of the world
once more confront each other. He will welcome
every teacher from the East who comes bringing
the hidden wisdom of his orient to unveil to our
Western eyes; but he will welcome him with a
serene confidence that these truths of the East
will be taken up into the ever-growing truth of the
West — which, as the truth of progressive human-
ity, must needs be the truth of the world.
For this is the singular fact concerning Chris-
tianity: that, growing in the East and absorbing
the best of every Eastern faith, it has become the
religion of the West — that is, of the progressive
portion of humanity — and grows with its growth,
expanding with its enlargement, purifying itself
with its ennoblement, deepening with its increasing
earnestness, and still leading the leading nations
of the earth on toward the light and life of God.
The East accepts the Western civilization as the
progressive civilization of the world. So it must
340 Catholicity
needs accept the religion of the West as the reHgion
of the progressive Hfe of the world, and pour its
own best life once more into the re-growth and the
renewal of Christianity. Every great religion of
the East will bring to this renewed evolution of
Christianity something true and vital. The out-
come of this new age of cosmopolitanism will be
a new Christianity, gathering into itself once more,
as it did eighteen centuries ago, the life of the
world.
But no disguise should be made of, and no ex-
ception is here taken to, the prevalent and thought-
ful belief that serious changes are necessary in
Christianity to fit it to grow into the religion of the
future. Intellectual readjustments are needful,
in order that it may adapt itself to the new con-
ditions of our new knowledge. Ethical readjust-
ments are needful, in order that it may adapt
itself to the new conditions of our life, political,
social and economic. The whole perspective
study of catholicity is a broad aspect of these issues
— the term itself being but one guiding caption for
the trend of our search for the true way. Because
of the felt need of readjustment, and because of
The Issues 34i
the temporary and partial paralysis which always
ensues upon an epoch of transition, when Hfe is,
for the moment, arrested, the suspicion has
gotten abroad that Christianity is decadent.
How far astray such a suspicion is is seen after
a survey of the wide and deep rootings of Chris-
tianity.
Despite all these appearances of arrested life,
what other and manifold appearances there are
of deep and exhaUvStless vitality in our venerable
religion. In the intellectual life of the church we
see the most alert and earnest inquiry going on in
every field of thought, determined effort to read-
just the ancient forms of faith to the new knowl-
edge. Never in the history of Christianity has
a single generation wrought a mightier change in
the intellectual outlook of the Church than is
being wrought in the generation through which we
are passing. The minds of the thinkers in the
Church are grappling with every problem of our
new knowledge, and grappling with it successfully.
Even in our own day, in which this movement of
reconstruction has begun, we can see it so far
advanced as to prophesy the success which will
342 Catholicity
attend the effort to run the new knowledge into
the old moulds of thought — the form of sound
words handed down to us from the fathers. There
never has been a period in the history of the Church
when its intellectual vitality has been more intense
than in our own day.
Nor has there ever been a period in the history
of the Church when its philanthropic activity has
been greater than in this, our own day and gener-
ation. The enthusiasm of humanity is attacking
every evil of society, hesitating not to grapple with
the most serious evils that afflict mankind, daring
to attempt the solution of the most profound
problems which have exercised the conscience of
man through the ages. The new ideal of service
is growing within the mind of the Church, conse-
crating men and women of wealth and culture and
leisure to all forms of ministry upon their fellow-
men. Movements like that of the Salvation Army
and that of God's Volunteers, seeking and saving
that which is lost in the very spirit of Christ, attest
the undying power of the love of Jesus. Monster
meetings, such as those w^hich have been held in
our cities from the days of the inspiring guidance
The Issues 343
of Mr. Moody, to the perspiring impelling of
"Billy" Sunday, manifest undiminished interest
in the subject of personal religion. The largest
social organizations in the country are carried on,
with vast memberships and in high state of effi-
ciency, under the name of our religion — the Young
Men's Christian Association and" the Young
Women's Christian Association. Within the soul
of Christendom a new social spirit is awaking,
calling man not merely to the ministries of mercy,
but to the solemn duty of justice. In our own
generation a visibly new and higher conception of
the ethical relationships of business has asserted
itself, promising to master even the deepest pas-
sion of mankind — the love of money. The fresh
forces of the Christian spirit are making over again
every field of human helpfulness, in the spirit of
Christ ; so that we are today witnessing the growth
of a new education, a new philanthropy, a new
penology, a new political economy. In all this
we see the signs of the undying ethical vitality in
our venerable religion.
A material age, so called, may be impressed with
a material presentation of this unexhausted vital-
344 Catholicity
ity of Christianity. In the United States, "the
rehgious bodies, CathoHc, Protestant, Eastern
Orthodox, and non- Christian, had in 191 6 an
aggregate of over 40,000,000 communicants or
members. ... In 1890 the total rehgious strength
was 20,618,000, so that in twenty-six years follow-
ing the net increase has been 19,398,000 or 94 per
cent., while the gain in the population of the
country for the same period has been about 39,-
000,000 or 61 per cent. The churches therefore
gained faster than the population during this
period." ' The latest United States census finds no
complete estimate of the total money contribu-
tions for church work, but in the preceding census
the Hon. Robert P. Porter stated that it would be
"Perfectly safe to put the figure at $150,000,000. "
Such active, positive and reconstructive forces
in the intellectual and moral life of religion, are
witnessed in no other rehgion upon the face of the
earth today.
No new religion, then, is needed, but only the
old religion renewed — not the cutting down of the
* " Federal Council Year Book," 191 7, page 206.
The Issues 345
old tree, but the vitalizing of the old life which still
flows from the roots, through the trunk, to every
outermost branch and leaf ; only the quickening of
the sap within the veins, beneath the sun of a new
springtide. A religion which casts its roots out
as far and wide and deep as Christianity must
draw upon the imperishable resources of the soul
of man for the freshening forces needed in every
new stage of its development. The study of
Christianity in evolution may content us at this
point with a deepened conviction that our children
will shelter themselves beneath the shadow of the
same tree of life under which we have found rest
and sustenance.
For the quickening and utilization of its vitality
we turn again to a study of the needs of readjust-
ment of Christianity to meet the issues of the age.
In broader study suited to the open book of the
broader age, we are guided by what insight we can
bring to bear upon those same human instincts and
possibilities that are outworking through this
transitionary day as they were through the evolu-
tionary centuries that have passed. In these
findings of the day that point to the religion of the
346 Catholicity
morrow, should we expect a breakdown of the
universal law? Are we to fear greater secularism
instead of greater unity ; a self -exhausting Babel of
theological tongues instead of a self-strengthen-
ing symphony of religious convictions ; the destruc-
tive artificiality of the dark ages instead of the
constructive rationality of our age of enlighten-
ment? Rather can there be found in the outcome
the pure reward of logic and reason and spiritual
sincerity — a proved catholicity. Religion gains
strength for the future and once again becomes
man's daily life as all the studies and interests of
the day, deepening and widening, reach common
laws and a universal light. When the rationaliza-
tion of theology and the spiritual reward of
science meet there comes a cosmic understanding,
assurance and inspiration that, more and more, the
dogmatist is learning to call reason, and the very
atheist to call religion.
The dominant theological movement of the
nineteenth century was gendered by the dominant
intellectual and moral forces of that century.
Chief among these unquestionably have been
physical science, biblical criticism, the compara-
The Issues 347
tive study of religion, commerce and travel and
democracy.
The direction of the movement engendered by
the interaction of these forces is not hard to deter-
mine. All alike are working toward the ideas of
unity, universality, naturalness (the reign of law)
and progressiveness.
PhjT-sical science is disclosing the nature of the
universe as a system which is at unity within it-
self, a cosmos which is one throughout all its parts.
It multiplies vastly the varieties of life, but con-
nects them all one with another, binding the most
widely separated spheres together in one vital
unity, making all "parts of one stupendous whole."
Thus we now recognize, through spectrum analysis,
one and the same body of elements in all the worlds
of space ; magnetic attractions and radio-activities
give one and the same system of laws throughout
the stellar systems; in all forms of life we find the
same forces working everywhere in the universe.
Even do we begin to find universal appearances
or symbols for the universal principles, for the
flower forms recur through the gamut of manifesta-
tions from tiny crystal to stupendous nebulae.
34^ Catholicity
These same flower forms, procured also in the
tracings of the vibrations of tuned strings, may
verily be the written music of the spheres.
Physical science is eliminating the realm of chaos
and introducing a realm of order everywhere.
We know, now, that in the heavens above, in the
earth beneath and in the waters under the earth,
law reigns. "Wild facts, " which seem to happen,
serve to make us aware of reaches of law which
have been as yet unsuspected.
Physical science reveals to us as its most mag-
nificent generalization the doctrine of evolution;
the belief that all things are in a perpetual flux,
that nothing is fixed or final, that there is a
veritable organic ascent of life, that, from the
bioplasmic cell upward to the archangel, life is
ever in continual unfoldment toward higher forms.
The direction which these tendencies of physical
science are forcing upon the traditional theology
of Christendom is obvious. They are leading our
thought away from the differences of mankind
toward its essential unity. They are teaching us
to regard men as verily of one blood. We are dis-
cerning a common nature beneath the variant types
The Issues 349
of humanity; are recognizing one mind acting in
men of all races ; creating the same convictions in
the souls of Hindoos and Egyptians, Englishmen
and Frenchmen; stirring the same aspirations in
Persian and Greek, American and — may we yet
hope — German; waking the same reverences in
the spirit of man of all lands and of all ages.
All life being under the universal reign of law,
religious life must fit into the general scheme.
ReUgion is now seen to be the impression made
upon the spiritual nature of man by the universe
which, as it impresses itself upon his reason and
imagination, calls into being philosophy and poetry
and art and music and science. Religion is not a
re^lm beyond law — it is the highest form of the
universal law. Miracles recede into the back-
ground of our modem religious outlook. They
can only be unusual manifestations of the usual
order, glimpses into higher realms of law, opera-
tions of forces hitherto undreamed of, but which
have been always at work and which have worked
harmoniously with other and known forces.
Whatever the wonders of the New Testament may
be, they are one and the same with the wonder of
350 Catholicity
the blush of the rose and of the poise of the planets
"singing on their heavenly way." Religion is
taking on, therefore, a naturalistic aspect; not as
denying supernatural forces, but as denying simply
any extra-natural means and methods in the action
of the soul of the universe.
In an age of science the one thing which can
surely be affirmed of theology is that it is not fixed
and final. Theology, like every other product of
man's being, must be an expression of that uni-
verse, the highest generalization of which yet
reached is known to us as Evolution. Creeds that
do not change can be no true creeds. The deposit
of faith is the mud of the bottom of the river of
life, not the clear flowing waters of the stream.
The tendency of biblical criticism, as a special
form of literary and historical criticism, lies in the
same general direction with that taken by science.
It assumes, in its very existence, that the bible
is a book like other books; that, whatever else it
may be, it is a genuine fragment of human litera-
ture; that it is subject to the same general condi-
tions as all forms of literature; that it has been
evolved under the same laws as other forms of
The Issues 35 1
letters. The progress of biblical criticism sets
steadily towards conclusions which confirm this
conception out of which it grew. The bible takes
its place among other books, more and more
indisputably. It ceases to be an exception and
becomes a member of a class in literature — one,
though the highest, among the sacred books of the
world.
It is no longer a miracle — it is a part of the na-
tural order of the world of letters, whatever super-
natural influences flowed into it and still flow from
it. Its authority, therefore, is not anything
oracular, inerrant, final — it is the authority of the
truth which it utters. That authority, therefore,
is necessarily open to the challenge of criticism,
liable to a subpoena before the higher bar of
reason. The powers of the human mind are
thrown open to all new knowledge; the soul of
man receives the freedom of the city of God —
the universe.
The tendency of the comparative study of re-
ligion is in the same general direction. This
really brand-new study of our age is revealing,
beyond a perad venture, the fact that the principles
352 Catholicity
disclosed by science in its study of the physical
world are those which disclose themselves to the
scientific study of religion as governing the soul.
The great forms of Unity, Law, Progress, rise
regnant in the realm of religion.
Religions are many — religion proves to be one.
Human nature being one and the same, and the
universe confronted by man being one and the
same, human thought of the problem of the uni-
verse tends to develop towards the same forms.
Given the same stage of evolution, the same en-
vironment, and there will appear the same ideas,
institutions, ideals, beliefs, aspirations, cults and
worships. The astonishing parallelisms between
the great religions of the earth prove to be no
mere accidents, no cribbings from Moses by Plato,
no benevolent assimilations of the ideas of
Buddhism by Christianity.
There is, as we are now beginning to see, no
reality in the distinction between the true religion
and false religions, save as a matter of degrees in
development. All religions are false as they are
imperfect, or as they become corrupt. All re-
ligions are true as they develop out of their rude,
The Issues 353
primitive beginnings, toward ethical and spiritual
ideals. That in each which is vital, is true — the
truth of the one Light ''w^hich light eth every man
that comet h into the world. "
ReHgion itself is thus coming to be seen as a
natural evolution from a supernatural source.
The institutions and beliefs of Christianity form
no mere exception in a universal order — they are
the highest outcome of that universal order, the
flowering forth of the spiritual nature of man.
They have no miraculous, oracular authority.
They are not fixed and final forms. They are
naturally evolved, naturally evolving still. Their
authority over man is the authority of their reason-
ableness. The Church is divine as the State is
divine, — a real divineness, though a natural one;
imposing no tyranny, subjecting no reason, en-
slaving no conscience.
The immense international commerce and travel
brought about by the steam engine in the nine-
teenth century has not been without a profound
effect upon the thought of man, even upon his
theological thought. And this influence tends in
the same general direction with that into which
33
354 Catholicity
theology is being driven by the other intellectual
forces of our day.
The merchant and the tourist are enforcing the
movement started by the scholar in the compara-
tive study of religion. We are finding that the
heathen is also human. The heathen is the imper-
fect Christian, the Christian the evolved heathen.
All souls are proving to be of one order. We no
longer dream that virtue is a product of Christian
lands and vice of heathen soil. Wherever we
wander in our globe-trotting, under every form of
religion, we find, subject to the influences of differ-
ent environments and different stages of evolution,
the same aspirations after goodness, the same rever-
ences before the mysteries of the universe, one and
the same faith and hope and love. The petty-
parochialism of piety passes on into a universalism
of religion. The cosmopolitanism of commerce is.
correlating into the catholicity of Christianity.
The influence of democracy upon theology is
also in the same general direction. Democracy
is the succession of the demos to the throne of the^
king. External authority gives way to internal
authority. Democracy is the denial of caste, the>
The Issues 355
affirmation of the common stuff of manhood,
whether in the Brahmin or the Pariah, the noble-
man or the serf. It is the repudiation of the
right of one ehte class of mankind to monopolize
any of the good things of the earth for its own
special use; whether those good things be the
ignoble luxuries which money can buy, or those
better things of the mind and soul, "more to be
desired than gold, yea, than much fine gold," the
truths upon which man's spirit liveth. Democ-
racy is the rejection of the belief that there are
any pets of God in His earthly family — coal barons,
for whom He stores the earth with anthracite, or
elect races on whom He lavivshes the gifts of His
Spirit. It is the affirmation of the truth that all
men are *'the bairns, " as St. John phrases it, of a
just and loving Father, who shares His estate,
material and spiritual, equitably among His
children. Democracy, making away from arti-
ficial authority toward natural authority, from
privilege toward equal opportunity, from injustice
enthroned upon the universe toward the universal
reign of justice and love, is everywhere steadily,
surely, revolutionizing theology, and, in its way,
356 Catholicity
forcing on the new era which is looming large
above the horizon of earth.
The general direction of the theological move-
ment of the nineteenth century, as resultant from
the interaction of the thought forces of the century,
must now be unmistakably clear. This move-
ment is everywhere in the direction of expansion,
the pushing forward of limited, partial, narrow
conceptions into large and ever-enlarging concep-
tions,— universal, necessary, natural.
Every particular doctrine of the Reformation
Confessions, the secondary body of beliefs growing
round the true creeds of Christendom, is dropping
whatever is petty, special, particular, exclusive,
artificial, unnatural, irrational and unethical in
its dogmatic forms, and is taking on aspects which
are big, generic, universal, natural, rational and
ethical. What can not survive this process will
fall away and die. Such inversely succulent sec-
tions of our Thirty-nine Articles as these will be
missed altogether in the theology of the twentieth
century. Under the climbing life of man and his
clearing vision of God, all beliefs of the Reforma-
tion theology that have sap in them will grow out
The Issues 357
into forms shaping themselves after the order of
the universe, as we are learning to know it, rational,
sane, consistent with justice, consonant with the
goodness which in man is seen to be the shadow of
the absolute rectitude of God.
A similar process, on-going in the Catholic
creeds, will issue in a transformation of them which
need not necessarily involve any verbal changes,
but merely a realignment of their beliefs around the
new theism ; an interpretation of them in terms of
universality, naturalness, progressiveness. They
will be recognized not simply as forms of the Chris-
tian consciousness, but as something larger — forms
of the human consciousness ; not as belonging only
to the species Christianity, but to the genus hu-
manity. In them will be recognized the mystic
truths of that "hidden wisdom" which was to be
found in every land, under every system of religion.
The purely spiritual contents of the great
Catholic creeds, the forgiveness of sins, etc., will be
perceived to be the heritage of our common hu-
manity; becoming positive affirmations of faith
wherever a great religion evolves into the stage of
ethical and spiritual life.
358 Catholicity
The two fundamental doctrines of the CathoHc
creeds, the doctrine of God and the doctrine of
immortahty, will be recognized, not as the exclu-
sive possession of Christendom, but as the com-
mon possession of mankind.
The intellectual form in which the fundamental
truth of God is cast will be discerned as no mere
peculiarity of Christianity, but as the mould of
thought everywhere fashioned by the mind of man,
when that mind has attained maturity. The doc-
trine of the Trinity is even now seen to be in no
sense whatever a distinctive Christian doctrine.
It is already perceived that it antedates Chris-
tianity, that it was evolved in almost every
great religion of antiquity, that its presence in
Christendom is due to the assimilative process
under which Christian Gnosticism absorbed so
much of Eastern cosmological speculation, that
it is the necessary thought-form in which the
recognition of the variet}^ in unity of the Divine
Being must needs be cast by the human
intellect.
The doctrine of the Incarnation, the heart of the
Christian creeds, is issuing from the theological)
The Issues 359
movement of our age as no merely Christian doc-
trine, but a human truth.
It is thus coming to be seen that the idea of an
Incarnation of The Logos is as old as man's
philosophy, as widespread as his life on earth;
that it is a common heritage of humanity, a doc-
trine whose note is universality ; that it denotes no
mere exception in a universe of law and order,
but that it is the very heart of this universe, the
key to the riddle of life ; that it connotes not alone
an embodying of the Divine Being in one individual,
of one epoch of history, but that it is the symbol
of a universal process, whereby and wherein the
universe itself is the body of the Infinite and
Eternal Spirit; whereby and wherein man, as the
crown and consummation of the organic processes
of the universe, is the supreme ensouling of the
Divine Being; whereby and wherein what is true,
in differing degrees, of each man, of the greater
souls among men, is supremely true of the Supreme
Man, the Man in whom the goodness which is the
heart of the creation lives forth perfectly, so that
we reverently say of Him: "The Word was made
flesh, and tabernacled among us; and we behold
36o Catholicity
His glory, the glory as of the Only-Begotten of the
Father, full of graciousness and truth."
The Catholic creeds will thus affirm to our
children, not merely the contents of the Christian
consciousness, but the contents of the human
consciousness, as historically evolved in the pro-
cesses of the ages. They will be reverenced and
trusted as reflecting in man's thought the mystic
secrets of the cosmos, the constitution and order
of the universe. But they will be reverenced for
their real nature, not for their imagined character.
They will be taken for what they are, not for what
they are not; symbols of a knowledge which is as
natural as other human knowledge, not for oracles
of supernatural information. As " cosmic creeds"
they can never again be fancied fixed and final
forms of faith, but will, of necessity, be recognized
as pHant and plastic symbols of the fluent processes
of evolving life, opening ever new and higher
significances in "germinant fulfilments."
The historic personality who is at the heart of
the Catholic creeds will be found to have with-
stood the critical processes which threatened to
resolve it into legend and myth, and, instead of
The Issues 361
issuing as fable, to issue as fact, having the solidity
of history — the rock which thence forth never more
can be shaken. The Man Christ Jesus, in the
moral miracle of His perfect character, in the
sacramental mystery of His cosmic consciousness,
will stand forth forever as the sacred shrine of
man's hope and faith, the mercy seat of the loving
God. In Him the human ideal will continue to be
reverently seen embodied, that ideal after which
our human lives are to pattern themselves in all
loving loyalty. In His mirroring eyes coming
generations will read the secret of the universe,
and see in the power in which we live and move and
have our being, '' Our Father which art in Heaven."
The nineteenth century may have been a period
of the decline of great convictions — the twentieth
century will prove a period of the renewal and the
reaffirmation of great convictions. The central
faiths of Christendom will be found to warrant
themselves as the universal faiths of man, stand-
ing plumb upon the deep bedrock of the human
reason and conscience, buttressing on our new
knowledge in science and philosophy and art and
sociology. Man will know that he holds in these
Z^'2 Catholicity
great Christian creeds "the ardent and massive
experiences of mankind," in ''a form of sound
words, " forth from which will issue in new activi-
ties the spiritual and ethical energy for the regener-
ation of the world, the realization of the prayer of
our Master, "Thy kingdom come, Thy will be
done on earth as it is done in the heavens."
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