The new world and the new thought

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THE NEW WORLD

AND

THE NEW THOUGHT

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BY
JAMES THOMPSON BIXBY, Ph.D.

A uthor of
The Ethics of Evolution, ^^ ^'Religion and Science as Allies**
"The Open Secret**

Boston, Mass.

THE BEACON PRESS

25 Beacon Street

1915

SECOND EDITION

Copyright, 1902

by

James Thompson Bixby

THE BEACON PRESS
BOSTON

Contents.

CHAP. PAGB

I. The Expansion of the Universe and the Enlarge-
ment OF Faith 5

II. The Sanction for Morality in Nature 30

III. The Agnostic's Difficulties and the Knowability

OF Divine Realities 54

IV. The Scientific Validity of Our Religious Instincts, 98
V. Evolution and Christianity 116

VI. The Old Testament as Literature 137

VII. Christian Discipleship and Modern Life 163

VIII. Modern Dogmatism and the Unbelief of the Age, 180

IX. Union of the Churches in One Spiritual House-
hold 199

The New World and The New
Thought

CHAPTER I.

THE EXPANSION OF THE UNIVERSE AND THE ENLARGE-
MENT OF FAITH.

As the traveler visits the old shrines and cathedrals
of Europe, or the scholar delves among the mediaeval
treatises on astronomy or geography, he is continu-
ally meeting with conceptions of the world and its
creation of a most curious and childlike simplicity. A
frequently recurring group in the sculptures, mosaics,
stained-glass or missal paintings of the Middle Ages is
that which represents the Almighty in human form,
moulding the sun, moon, or stars, and with His own
hands hanging them from the solid firmament which
supports the upper heaven and its celestial waters and
which overarches the great plain of earth ; and when
the work of the six days is finished He is represented
as sitting, bent and fatigued, in the well-known atti-
tude of the " Weary Mercury " of classical sculpture.
As late as the seventeenth century, Milton, in his
poetic representation of the popular theology of his
day, does not hesitate at the most literal description

5

6 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT

of how the second person in the Trinity, when the
hour for making the universe came

«* Took the golden compasses, prepared
In God's eternal store, to circumscribe
This universe and all created things.
One foot He centred, and the other turned
Round through the vast profundity obscure,
And said, ' Thus far extend ; thus far thy bounds :
This be thy just circumference, O world.' "

The two statements in the Genesis myths, that the
world was made in six days and also that " God spake
and it was done," were both of them accepted in the
most literal way by the great ecclesiastical and scien-
tific authorities of Christendom down to the sixteenth
century. The contradiction of an instantaneous crea-
tion which lasted through six days was usually recon-
ciled by some explanation, like that of St. Thomas
Aquinas, which was adopted even by Luther and the
earlier Protestant Reformers, viz. : that God created
the substance of the world in a single moment but
employed the six days in separating, shaping and
further adorning it. As to the date of this great
event, it was the general verdict of both Catholic and
Protestant authorities down to a century or two ago
that it could hardly be more than 6,000 years ago.

As to the shape and dimensions of the world, the
prevalent ideas during the Middle Ages were marked
by a precision and pettiness equally crude. Follow-
ing unreflectingly the lead of whatever imagery the
Scripture presented, they insisted that the earth was
at creation vaulted over with a solid dome or ceiling,
the firmament of Genesis, above which was the celes-

TEE EXPANSION OF THE UNIVERSE 7

tial cistern, containing the waters which are above the
firmament. It is through apertures in this vault, " the
windows of heaven," that the rains are allowed to fall
on the earth by God and His angels ; and above it, in
the third heaven, or seventh as others said, is the
customary abode of the Almighty and His court. In
the curious description of the universe, based upon
Scripture, written in the sixth century by Cosmas In-
dicopleustes, which for a long while was regarded as
most authoritative, the ideas of the early Christian
theologians were summed up in a complete system.
As in the ninth chapter of Hebrews the world is
likened to the tabernacle in the desert, it must be
oblong in shape. Like the table of shew-bread, the
earth is flat, and twice as long as broad, 400 days'
journey one way and 200 the other. It is surrounded
by four seas, at the outer edges of which rise massive
walls, the pillars of heaven of which Job speaks, on
which the vault of heaven rests. The disappearance
of the sun at night is caused by its passing behind a
great mountain at the north of the earth.

Although by the scholars of subsequent centuries
this naive representation of the world was much re-
fined and modified, yet the general conception of the
universe as a sort of huge house, with heaven as its
upper story and the earth as its lower story, prevailed
among the people and a large part of the world of
scholars, close down to the modern period.

When the sky-parlor of the heavenly host was so
little a way off, legends of saints and prophets caught
up to heaven or of angels flying down to earth, of
heavenly voices speaking from the upper story to

8 TEE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT

chosen men on the lower, or of frequent special inter-
ventions by heavenly powers to rescue the holy or
punish the wicked, would most naturally arise. Even
when men's conceptions began to enlarge, they still
remained comparatively diminutive. Certain Egyp-
tian astronomers, says Flammarion, calculated that the
sun was 369 miles distant and Saturn 492. An
Italian system, that the same astronomer mentions,
was on a somewhat more generous scale. The crys-
talline sphere in which the moon was set was 107,000
miles distant, Mercury 209,000 and the sun 3,892,000.
As late as the sixteenth century, Zwingli and the
early Protestant Reformers held to the view of the
church fathers that a solid floor or dome separated the
heavens from the earth, that above it were the waters
and the abode of the angels, and below it the earth
and man. And in the cellar of this world-house, not
far below the earth's crust, popular superstition, cor-
roborated by the authority of great poets like Virgil,
Dante, and Milton, located the caverns of the under-
world, from which imp and devil and perturbed spirit
came up at times to walk the earth.

To-day, how has science stretched out this baby-
house universe of our ancestors ! The astronomer
has turned his telescope on that adamantine firmament
and it has dissolved into thin air. The glittering
points that gemmed its surface have expanded into
enormous suns, thousands of times as large as our own
globe. The petty heaven of the Book of Revelation
12,000 furlongs or 1,379 English miles each way
has spread out, from that one-twentieth part or less
gf the cubic dimensions which we now know our own

THE EXPANSION OF THE UNIVERSE 9

earth to have, into an immensity of space which it is
difficult to reaHze. Let us try by a few facts to give
some conception of its grandeur.

Milton, in " Paradise Lost," in accordance with the
older ideas of the size of the universe, thought that
nine days was an adequate length of time for the rebel
archangel, who was thrown out of heaven, to fall down
from the top of the universe and the courts of God to
the depths of hell. But we now know that if a steam-
ship, moving at the average rate, had started in
Columbus* Hfetime for the sun, it would not have
reached its goal to-day. If a baby were put in an ex-
press train, moving at highest locomotive speed, to go
to our solar luminary, the baby would die of old age
before it could arrive there. If that locomotive went
onward towards our nearest fixed star, stopping
neither day nor night, it would take it 700,000 cen-
turies to get there.

The speed of a locomotive is evidently too slow a
standard to use as a measure among these immense
spaces. Let us take, then, for our imaginary courier,
the fastest traveler we know of, the wave of sunlight,
speeding 186,000 miles a second. How long would
it take even a beam of sunhght to reach the nearest
sun beyond our own ? Not less than three and one
quarter years; for it is no less than 20,000,000,000
miles away. If we should want to go to Sirius and
could get the same lightning courier, the waves of the
starlight, to take us, it would require twenty-two
years. To get to the pole star it would take fifty
years ; to pass from one end to the other of the Milky
Way, that great star-cluster nearest to us, it would

10 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT

take a ray of light 15,000 years. To reach a star of
the fourteenth magnitude would require 100,000
years.

By the naked eye we can see some 6,000 stars, each
a sun, all at such immense intervals from one another.
But the telescope discerns 45,000,000 stars and nebulas ;
the photographic eye, more subtle still, might take
the record, it is calculated, of 160,000,000 stars.
There are over 1,000 nebulae which the telescope
resolves into swarms of stars. These are supposed to
be great groups, similar to our Milky Way, dimmed
and drawn together, apparently by the immense dis-
tance at which they are situated. In that case, how
far off are they ? Over 300 times as far as the farthest
suns in our Milky Way ; and it would take the nimble
messenger of light 4,000,000 years to get there.
How huge must these suns be that can send the un-
dulations of their light across such enormous space !
Into what amazing pettiness has astronomy shriveled
our proud centre of the universe, and, dislodging it
from its former prominent position, sent it whirling on
its way as one of the smaller satellites in the train of a
central body, the sun, which, though as much larger
than the earth as a cart-wheel is larger than a pea, is
yet but one of more than 20,000,000 suns contained
in its own part of space, and is itself not stationary,
but revolving through space, with its fleet of planets,
at the rate of 4,000 miles a day, around perhaps some
still larger sun.

Verily, these infinities of space set the brain reeling,
in the vain effort to realize them. Let us turn, then,
to the changes in our estimates of the earth's duration

THE EXPANSION OF THE UNIVERSE 11

and our ideas of time. Here, again, how enormously
has science multiplied the numbers ! How utterly in-
adequate are those dates for man's first appearance on
the globe and the beginning of the earth that were
generally accepted one hundred years ago and are still
printed in the margin of the Bibles issued by our
Bible societies ! It was in the year 4004 b. c, accord-
ing to the great chronological authority and theo-
logian. Archbishop Usher, that the creation of the
world took place, a date settled by the authority of
the Holy Bible ; and Dr. Lightfoot, Vice-Chancellor
of Cambridge University, in the seventeenth century,
with still finer precision, fixed the day and hour at the
23d of October at nine o'clock in the morning.
Luther declared, on the authority of Moses, that
longer ago than 6,000 years the world did not exist.
Pope Urban VII was anxious to allow a little more
time to have elapsed since the creation of man ; but
his extreme limit was 5199 b. c.

To-day these sixty centuries are but a handbreadth
of the time that science demands. Sixty millenniums
would hardly sufifice. Science has mined in caverns
and found man's tools and weapons among the bones
of mammoths. It has deciphered hieroglyphics and
found arts and history already venerable before the
date when commentators admitted that Adam had
begun to breathe. As far back as 6,000 and 7,000 years
before Christ, among the cities and temples of Baby-
lonia and Egypt, man was living a civiHzed or semi-
civilized life. For the quarternary age, in the early
part of which unmistakable relics of man are found,
geology demands a period of at least 10,000 years.

12 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT

For the tertiary and secondary epochs, and the im-
mensely thick deposits belonging to them, not less
than 3,000,000 years will suffice. For the primary and
primeval or azoic ages, not less than 17,000,000
years more are needed. Recall what vast beds of
chalk and limestone, miles in thickness, have been
built up by the microscopic creatures who have lived
and died in the primitive oceans; how from a fiery
cloud the globe concentrated to a molten ball, and on
the molten ball formed the crust that now suspends
us above the still furnace-heated interior. How long
a time should we estimate for these aeonic changes ?
From the experiments of the physicist, Bischoff, with
molten basalt and its rate of cooling to a solid state,
the scientists infer that for the earth to cool from the
2,000 degrees centigrade of the former molten state
down to 200 centigrade, would require at least
350,000,000 years. Then for the condensation of
our solar nebula, (originally extending beyond the
orbit of Neptune, i. e., 5,000,000,000 miles in diam-
eter), into the sun and planets, and the further cool-
ing down from the heated solid state to the temper-
ature where life could begin, additional millions of
years would be required ; and when we recall how
many thousand times larger than our sun are many of
the solar globes, is not the chronology of the heavens
carried back into an antiquity, in comparison with
whose veritable eternity the age of those hills that of
old were dubbed " everlasting " seems but as a single
breath of a summer's insect.

Such is the amazing immensity of the universe that
modern science has disclosed, an illimitable extension

TEE EXPANSION OF THE UNIVERSE 13

and duration before which the wing of Imagination
grows weary, in the effort to reaHze even vaguely how
vast is its sweep. It is evident that this changed scale
of the physical universe must suggest to the reason of
man an analogous change in our view of the origin,
nature and destiny of man and the methods of God's
government.

Can we still hold man to be the aim and end of
creation ? Can we still think, many to-day are asking,
that the earth and heavens were fitted up specially for
his abode? that the animal world was made just
for his food, and the trees to shade his head from the
heat ? the sun to warm him by day and the moon and
stars to supply light to his path by night ?

Is man not shown, by this immense magnitude of
the universe, to be but a most ephemeral and infini-
tesimal insect, the spawn of the primeval slime, a
creature altogether too insignificant to be supposed
to have been specially created or specially cared for ?
What else but fables of man's credulous childhood are
those faiths that held man to be a child of God, made
in the divine image, or that he has been the recipient
of divine revelations, and that the Son of God left
His place by God's right hand, and choosing out
of all the million solar and planetary systems in space
this most insignificant speck, called earth, was here
incarnated in a human form, to supply salvation by
His blood to those who should enter the church He
should found? Science, with its searching instru-
ments, has investigated earth and heaven. No tele-
scope has caught sight in the remotest recesses of
any Titan king seated on a celestial throne ; no mi-

14 TEE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT

croscope has observed any soul within the tissues of
the brain ; no mining shaft has found a limbo of de-
parted spirits beneath the earth's crust. The fires are
there, but no trace of any imps or devils or ghostly
shades. Dust to dust is the law of life. We beein as
a chemical composition ; we end, when the machinery
runs down, as a chemical decomposition. When
thousands of worlds are burning out into lifeless
cinders, by inevitable laws of the dissipation of energy
and the cooling down of every warmer sphere to the
average temperature or, we should better say, refrig-
eration, of the interstellar space, some 200 degrees,
as it is, below zero, why should we fancy this
petty biped of a man should escape the general
death ?

Such are the questions and dilemmas, sometimes
put in very scoffing tones, that in the minds of a
large and growing class among us are daily arising,
and daily alienating them more and more from the
older views of man's origin, nature and destiny.

On the other hand, the champions of the older faith
maintain that in spite of this immense expansion of
the universe we may still look on man as the chief
subject of divine care and our earth as the moral and
spiritual centre of the universe. The rank and prac-
tical importance of God's creatures, or the orbs He
has made, do not depend, they urge, on their phys-
ical bigness or littleness, but on higher qualities.
Though the telescope and the magnitudes it has dis-
closed dwarf man to a petty insect, the microscope
gives back to man his dignity. To the Almighty and
Eternal a thousand years are as one day, a day as is a

THE EXPANSION OF TEE UNIVERSE 15

thousand years, a world like Sirius as a drop of dew,
and a drop of dew as a starry constellation. Small as
man is, he has within him a knowledge, reason, will,
consciousness and creative power that put him in a
higher realm than any mass, however huge, of insen-
sate matter. No globe of brute matter has its reason
of existence in itself. The reason of being in all
material things lies outside them, in their serviceable-
ness to the spiritual universe. That which redeems
sun, moon and stars from insignificance is simply that
they beautify and illuminate the planet in which man
dwells. We may even question whether these huge
bubbles of matter have any real, independent ex-
istence ? Many of the ablest philosophers have held
that our very idea of space and time is relative, an
extract and product of our conscious experience, and
need not imply any outward reality. These solid-
seeming globes and all their material phenomena are
but transitory shows. They are either subjective
illusions or shadow pictures of the divine will, pro-
jected on to the screen of space, to serve as a theatre
for the training of souls and the chastening of man's
ambition ; or perhaps as mockeries and humiliations,
to punish the presumptuous reason of the skeptical
scientists.

A theologian of the early part of this century, when
the discoveries of geology first threatened the his-
torical accuracy of Genesis, had the boldness and
keenness to explain the fossils in the depths of the
earth, that seemed to prove that death entered the
world before Adam was created, as having been
stirred into the fluent substance of the earth on the

16 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT

creation-day, just to puzzle and discomfit the vain-
glorious geologist. " Who can prove," it may sim-
ilarly be asked, " that all these double stars and
nebulae and apparent magnitudes of the skies that the
conceited astronomers use as arguments to undermine
the credibility of the first three chapters of Genesis,
are not similar divine mockeries and judgments on the
too prying curiosity and overconfident reason of
modern man ? " Who knows but that, when God has
given man his appointed probation on this planet, this
theatre of earth and this phantasmal scenery of the
skies will roll together like a scroll and vanish, leaving
only, to survive the wreck of matter and the crush
of worlds, the indestructible realm of the spiritual
world and such souls as have accepted God's plan of
salvation ?

With such answering questions and assumptions are
all inferences from the modern change of front of the
universe, that would cast doubt on the validity of the
older theologic systems and man's unique importance
in the universe, often calmly *waved aside.

Which then of these antagonistic groups of in-
ferences, drawn from the notable widening of modern
thought, may we the more reasonably accept ?

There is a certain measure of truth in each of them.
On the one hand, the radical view of modern material-
ists as to the transitoriness and insignificance of hu-
manity in our magnified universe, and the atheistic
inferences supposed to be demanded by the march of
modern science, are altogether too extreme.

If the whole universe be nothing but forms of matter
and its motions and functions, then it matters not how

TEE EXPANSION OF THE UNIVERSE 17

immense it is. A million million miles of it are as
meaningless and empty as a single cubic yard. If the
human soul have a real existence and superior nature,
then the intrinsic rank and capacities of the human
reason and conscience remain the same, no matter
how many thousand times the area of the stage on
which it plays its parts be stretched out.

One high intuition of eternal truth, one holy impulse
of consecration or noble moral choice, is grander than
a whole world of clay, more magnificent than the most
colossal galaxy of gas and dust. Intricate as are the
mechanics of nature and stupendous as is its bulk, the
vision of reason comprehends the most complex
system. But mechanical nature, on the other hand,
is not aware of its own marvels and quite unconscious
of its triumphs. The astronomic world has not ex-
panded faster and cannot expand faster than man's
mind dilates to embrace it in his thought and reduce
it to order. What we lose in relative importance
because of the enlargement of the boundaries of the
universe, we recover from the new revelation of man's
amazing capacities that is given through these trans-
cendent achievements of human science.

The materialist would have us bow our head in de-
spair because Sun and Sirius and the system of the
Pleiades are so gigantic. But when we remember
that it is " the mind of man that has measured them
as with a surveyor's chain and weighed them as if he
held them in his hand," is there not in this sweep and
mystery of the human intellect something too provo-
cative of awe and reverence to be repressed by any
lumps of earth however mammoth in size ? It may

18 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT

be that when, through the telescope of science, we
look up at the sky, our human stature seems to shrivel
in the most alarming fashion. Yet, when, under the
optician's guidance, we look at the realms below us,
to what giant size do the dimensions of the human
frame again expand ! If the nebulae of the astrono-
mer belittle man, the bacteria and the atoms of the
microscopist equally magnify him. A cubic inch of
Bilin slate contains over a billion of millions of in-
fusorial shells, whose characteristics are still distinct
enough for scientific identification. Compared with
one of these diminutive creatures, man's bulk is as
large, proportionately, as a stellar system is, measured
against man's stature; and each corpuscle that re-
volves in a drop of blood within our veins may be a
planetary system of spheres to which the human
frame may be as colossal a galaxy as the Milky Way
appears to our astronomers. When we think of the
exquisite structure of these infinitesimal creatures and
the admirable adjustment of their organs and func-
tions to the needs of their life, (an adaptation which is
as perfect in a bacillus or vibrio as in a whale), may we
not believe that the power that provides so generously
for the million inhabitants of a drop of water will much
more take care for man, no matter how huge the con-
stellations may be, under the charge of His infinite
wisdom?

Science has not diminished but multiplied the
proofs of the intelligibility and rationality of the uni-
verse. It has made plainer than ever the fundamental
likeness of the finite spirit that reads the great stone-
book and the starry hieroglyphics, with the Infinite

TEE EXPANSION OF THE UNIVERSE 19

Spirit that has woven with such intelligence and be-
neficence this marvelous web of matter and force.

If the expansion of the universe and the immu-
table reign of cause and effect through it all have un-
dermined the old argument from design, based on
the adaptation of special organs to special requirements
or conditions, it has given, instead of this " design by
retail," a " design by wholesale " far more majestic.
It has presented us with an all-embracing system of
planful reason and self-adjusting development which
demands for its inception and maintenance nothing
less than the constant life and intelligence of an
Omnipresent spirit. Modern science itself still puts
man at the head of the kingdom of life ; it holds him to
be the climax of the ascending evolution, apparently
its end and goal. When we look back on the long
ages through which the divine hand, by patient proc-
ess of evolution, was preparing for man's appearance,
and slowly moulding him in the womb of nature, till
at length the great work received its crown in the
emergence of the self-conscious mind, able and will-
ing to join hands and hasten onward, with unprec-
edented rapidity, the evolutionary processes, lifting
them to higher levels of moral and spiritual unfolding
than physical nature knows, does not man, then, as-
sume a higher dignity ? Does it not seem more prob-
able than ever before that his Creator did not delve
and model in the clay-pits of life for so many long
ages merely to complete a marvelous automaton, that
he would send back to inanimate dust with the
stoppage of his pulse and thus render vain all the long
travail of the aeons?

20 TEE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT

If it be the great law of science that the fittest
survive, that no atom passes into nothing, but only-
passes on to new forms and fields of activity, what
else in all the ascending ranks of life is the best and
fittest to survive, if not this truth-seeking mind, this
conscience, reverent of the right, this soul-personality
which knows itself an inseparable unity, an integer
more indivisible than any atom, the centre in which
all reasoning, memory, comparison and judgment sub-
sist and by which alone they are possible ? Without
a continuance in existence of this conscious spirit
which is the most consummate flower and essence of
the universe, that universe itself becomes a meaning-
less chaos and ephemeral force.

The materialistic inferences which have sometimes
been drawn from the grand enlargement of the world,
effected by modern thought, are not, then, either
necessary or credible. The expansion of the universe
has no endorsement to give to these melancholy theories
or that contempt for humanity which they would foster.

While this is true, there are, on the other hand,
very important changes demanded by the recognition
of our magnified universe. In the new light supplied
by modern scientific discoveries it is impossible that
our theological conceptions should remain unchanged.
These discoveries require us to modify very consider-
ably the views of God's government and the nature,
origin and destiny of man, that were held of old in
the larger churches. It is true, of course, that to the
divine eye our ideas of small and great, of the mo-
mentary and the permanent, may be interchangeable.
Nevertheless, this does not dismiss the notions of time

THE EXPANSION OF THE UNIVERSE 21

and space as mere subjective illusions which we need
not regard.

Whatever be the standard oi' measurement, large or
small, there is that relative position and contiguity
and varied direction that constitutes space ; there is
that inescapable fact of a before and an after in con-
scious experience or successive motions, that con-
stitutes the essence of time. And the comparative
magnitudes and durations of these conditions of space
and time are not to be ignored in any reasonable in-
terpretation of the laws of the universe and man's re-
lations to the divine government.

Especially should it be remembered that neither
these vast spaces nor far prolonged periods that modern
science has disclosed are empty things. This is the
correlative discovery of science everywhere accom-
panying every extension of the universe, viz. : that this
universe teems with energy and change.

Another thing is equally to be borne in mind — that
all these changes are orderly and harmonious. The
laws of the transmutation of species, established by
Darwin and Wallace, show the unity of life. The
revelations of the spectroscope and the majestic laws
of the correlation of force that Grove and Joule es-
tablished, proving that light, heat and magnetism are
all variants of one another and manifestations of a
common force behind them, all show an essential
Unity, running as a scarlet web through the universe.
All these systems of suns are under one constitution,
and the luminous matter in all is substantially the
same. One ether extends through all as the medium
of communication. One gravitation guides all in their

22 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT

orbits. One law of birth and growth and heredity
pushes the kingdom of life steadily upward. One
process of organization, continuous and alike, rules
every galaxy and every atom. From the diffused to
the compacted, from the lifeless to the living, from the
nebula to the man, from lower to higher — such is the
eternal rhythm of the cosmic evolution.

Here in these words, the cosmic evolution, we have
named the mightiest change which science has made
in the last half-century. From the moment Galileo's
opera glasses showed the phases of Venus this law
was sure to be reached sooner or later. It was from
that day a predestined thing that the current belief of
Christendom of 200 years ago, in which our earth was
regarded as a scene of decay and moral fall and con-
stant supernatural intervention, should suffer change.
It seems almost superfluous to recall how every birth
or death, every comet or earthquake, every unusual
event, was regarded as occurring by the special inter-
vention of some supernatural agent, magician or saint,
imp or angel, devil or god, according to the respective
smallness or bigness, badness or goodness, of the
event. All this has been ejected by science from the
belief of enlightened men and women. Everywhere
law is found to reign. Lily and solar system are found
to unfold according to one and the same grand system.
The hallucinations of the senses, even the insane de-
lusions, are found to have their natural sources.

The world to-day is indeed found fuller than ever
of marvels ; but now here can anything be credited as
occurring in violation of law. No miracle, in the
sense of an interruption of the universal order to

THE EXPANSION OF THE UNIVERSE 23

benefit some favorite among the sons of men, is
longer credited. The only miracles that even religion
to-day should know are those wonders, manifold and
mysterious enough, that present unusual examples of
subtler and deeper laws than we have as yet acquainted
ourselves with. The greatest of miracles to every
thoughtful mind is that God's forethought and uni-
versal plans have been so perfect, from the first day
that the morning stars sang together, that no subse-
quent interference has been needed to rectify any de-
fects. The astonishing freaks of power or super-
natural signs of a celestial mission, of which the older
theology made so much, have therefore lost credence,
and all the witches, imps and devils of the olden time
have vanished before this confidence in nature's un-
changing orderliness, like the shadows of a hideous
night.

When there is no longer any up or down, nor cav-
ernous abode of shades beneath the earth, and when
the azure dome of crystal, above which God held His
court, has been dissipated into interstellar ether, such
wonders as the descent of Christ into hell or His as-
cent to heaven to sit on God's right hand have had to
be turned into allegories, even if they do stand in the
Apostles' creed. As man has been found to be not
the victim of a fall, the ruin of a once perfect being,
but an ascending spirit, " slowly climbing with the
climbing world" out of early animaHty to his des-
tined inheritance as a child of God, so the old doc-
trines of total depravity and the need of a vicarious
atoner to pay for the sin of man's federal head, Adam,
have passed away. The perfect man in our modern

24 TEE NEW WOBLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT

thought is not behind us but before us. The theologic
scheme, by which God the Father sacrificed His only-
begotten Son to snatch mankind out of the clutches
of Satan on one of the myriad specks that dot the
celestial ocean of space, appears, in the light of the
modern expansion of the universe, as the most obvious
relic of the infancy of thought. It is a conception of the
world, long ago outgrown.

Humanity has had not merely one Saviour, but a
thousand, each doing his part, great or small, in re-
generating mankind. God did more than incarnate
Himself in Jesus. He has incarnated Himself in all
humanity in proportion to the spiritual receptivity of
each ; and every true and disinterested soul, every
martyr for truth and justice who has surrendered his
life to uplift the world or ease a brother's woe, has had
his glorious participation in that red blood of sacrifice
that slowly redeems our race from its ancient sins and
inveterate diseases.

The beginning of the soul on earth and its exit and
future career must take place by general law. The
origin of the soul will henceforth be conceived less as
a special creation than as a creative specialization of
the universal life, an individualization of the indwelling
divine Spirit in a personal form and consciousness.
The immortality of the soul, if it is to be credited in
the twentieth century, must no longer be represented
as a miraculous gift to a few elect individuals, a super-
natural regathering and reanimation of bodily sub-
stances and atoms, long since scattered but flying
together at the sound of a trumpet. On the contrary,
it must be regarded as a universal and regular process,

THE EXPANSION OF THE UNIVERSE 25

the natural release, at the time of the body's decay,
of a soul too vital, too unitary and too subtle to be
involved in the dissolution of its clayey tabernacle.
Immortality must be found to be a process in strict
harmony with a rational universe, the only rational
outcome of the universe as it unfolds to its higher
consummation. If man's soul is immortal, its salva-
tion must be under universal laws, not a thing due to
the accident of birth in a Christian nation or the visit
of some missionary with a Bible or the presence of a
priest with drops of holy water. The doors of possi-
ble immortality must be as wide open in China or Ja-
pan as in New York or London, — nay, as wide open
in Mars or any of the satellites of Sirius, if conscious
life has yet evolved on any of these bodies, as it was
in the streets of Jerusalem in the first century of our
era. When we think of the millions of globes, where
the same laws of evolution are going on and have
gone on for aeons as here, can we credit it that it is
to our own little planet that the saving mercy of God
has been confined ? Not alone to our earth and in
the flesh of its humanity has the love of God been
manifested and incarnated, but also, I Hke to think, to
every part of the cosmos where souls have come to
need it, in every abode of planetary and stellar so-
ciety. As evil is no longer to be thought due to the
malign influence of an apple-bite, or the weakness of
a woman, but as an incident of that government by
fixed law and that option of free-will that everywhere
prevails in the universe, so every embodied life of the
soul is a training in spiritual strength and upbuilding
to the fuller character of a mature moral nature.

26 THE NEW WORLD AND TEE NEW THOUGHT

" The divine judgment is not a cleaving asunder
of the blue dome for the descent of angelic squadrons,
headed by the majestic Son of God, the angry breath
of His mouth consuming the wicked," as theologians
have pictured it ; it is no spectacular drama of retri-
bution, winding up the scroll of the ages with sudden
afterclap of retribution ; but it is the constant self-
working of an inherent law, assimilating us more and
more to that infernal or celestial love to which we
have given our hearts.

All the punishments of the soul are means of dis-
cipline and growth ; all its heavenly promotions are
rewards of spiritual desert and fitness. Death is but
an incident and a necessary incident of the onward
progress of the spirit. So, also, the conception of the
departed soul as being conducted and shut up in cer-
tain localities, above or below, in heavenly courts or
infernal pits, seems a relic of this older geocentric
view of the universe, which no mind familiar with the
heliocentric structure of the heavens can very well
hold. Modern thought conceives of the disembodied
soul, rather, as possessed of the freedom of the uni-
verse, and carrying its own heaven and hell within its
happy or remorseful consciousness.

In the soul's life after death, as before death, its
natural course is a continued ascent. We enter the
spirit world, the wisest of us, as mere infants in spir-
itual power, to go onward, by varied experiences,
perhaps through many rebirths, to the youth and full
maturity of spiritual character. The infinity of worlds
and the measureless eternities of time and varied con-
ditions of existence, that modern knowledge exhibits,

THE EXPANSION OF THE UNIVERSE 27

seem to me to harmonize little with the popular
notion that this earthly life is the only probation time
of the human soul. The enormity and disproportion
of the penalty for him who fails to meet the require-
ments of the current scheme of salvation seem too
great to be credible. The wisest of men are but little
children, the longest earthly life a mere tick of the
pendulum of eternity. The aeons of that eternity
belong to a Father who rejoiceth more over one sin-
ner that repenteth than over ninety -and-nine that have
never gone astray ; and I fondly dream that He will
try, through failure after failure and effort after effort,
to crown with success every case of soul-training He
has ever begun ; and His almighty power and unceas-
ing love will not in the end be defeated by the crea-
ture He has made. Each soul that begins to live
enters on a pilgrimage whose length can be measured
by no clock but that of eternity. Divine spark, as the
human spirit is, proceeding from the bosom of the
Divine, there is none so degraded that, in the course
of time, in the endless opportunities of the future,
he cannot rise to the level of his heavenly destiny.
" I do not care," as a friend of mine has said, " if
it takes several solar systems to do it The soul can
wear out solar systems as we wear out coats."

The whole universe is God's home, and the vastest
constellations but a corner or two in the many man-
sions of the hospitable and everlasting sanctuary.
Everywhere, through its unending aisles, the Divine
Life pulses and the unswerving Love cares for all
His children. Steadily upward and onward they are
conducted, by salutary experiences, from room to

28 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT

room, from realm to realm ; and these huge spaces
and dots of flame and molten or out-burned balls of
fire that, to the materialist, seem such a dreary and
meaningless tomb, are, to the eye of faith, a grand
and systematic university of souls, class above class
and hall enclosing hall — all its courts bright with
growing revelations, fragrant with unwearying love
and tremulous with the breath and sympathy of the
omnipresent, indweUing God.

It has been charged that the reconstructions which
modern inquiry have made diminish reverence, foster
skepticism and are inimical to reHgion. But for faith
to be panic-struck because this earth of ours has
shriveled to the minuteness of a mustard seed is a
most unreasonable alarm. So much more glorious this
cosmic Igdrasil, on whose stem of life this mustard seed
is borne aloft ! So much more adorable the Divine
Fulness that spread out these teeming fields, whose
centre is everywhere and circumference nowhere !

Yes, immensely more glorious ; unless, forsooth, you
fancy these titan dimensions an*d myriad processes too
great a task for any mind or personality, even that
of the Infinite, to direct or order. " How, then," as
Martineau asks, ** has your mind, as learner, managed
to measure and know it, at least enough to think it to
be something beyond thought ? "

And if it is too great a task for conscious mind —
the highest faculty we know, — too great even for a
mind of divine compass to order and superintend it,
then how much more is it beyond the possibilities of
anything else to account for that wonderful harmony
which the cosmos so plainly exhibits !

THE EXPANSION OF THE UNIVERSE 29

The fact is that these reconstructions of modern
science do not touch the substance of rehgion. They
only shift its forms and really enlarge its sway and
dignity. Put the case we have been discussing
squarely before any intelligent Christian, so that he
can see its full significance, and who would prefer to
go back to the cosmic baby-house of Cosmas Indi-
copleustes and Thomas Aquinas ? Who would vault
in again the immensity of space to restore Dante's
little heaven ? Who would cut down to six ordinary
evenings and mornings the activity of Him who in-
habiteth eternity and has been forever at His work of
evolution ? Who would relinquish the confidence and
hope inspired by the unswerving progress of that
single divine purpose that Hnks the ages together ?

For, whatever science has wrenched from the hand
of faith, she has given her back triple and quadruple
gifts. The vigorous probing that science has brought
to nature has not removed any of its wonderfulness,
any of its perfections, has not in any way robbed
man of his highest hopes or lessened his dignity ; but
it has disclosed new marvels behind those that first
struck man's attention ; it has made the universe more
august and yet more homelike. It has not emptied
the world of spiritual force, but filled it with the
presence of one All-inclusive Wisdom, one Infinite
Power and Eternal Love, from the firm yet tender
embrace of whose perfect order we can never fall.

** That God which ever lives and loves,
One God, one law, one element,
And one far-oft" divine event,
To which the whole creation moves."

CHAPTER II.

THE SANCTION FOR MORALITY IN NATURE.

The old proverb calls it " an ill wind that blows
nobody good." Conversely, there are few good winds
that do not, at first, or in certain ways, blow ill to
somebody. Every fertilizing shower interrupts some
one's promenade, or spoils somebody's hat. Every
new and better road pulls down somebody's fence.
So the reconstruction of thought and faith which the
progress of modern knowledge has made, beneficent
as it has been, has caused great perplexity to many
minds, and set not a few quite adrift on a shoreless
sea of doubt. In the turmoil of opinions not only
hollow traditions and baseless credulities have been
assailed, but also the most legitimate authorities. Those
naturally skeptical or iconoclastic, use the new dis-
coveries as clubs to batter down the best established
principles of morality and religion. A conspicuous
recent sufferer from this tendency is the great law of
Evolution, which the labors of Darwin and Spencer,
Wallace and Romanes have so strongly confirmed.

The four great facts on which the law of evolution
rests are very simple. Living creatures, in the first
place, multiply so fast that there would be neither
food nor room for more than a small part, were all to
survive. Secondly, every living thing born into the
world varies slightly from every other. Thirdly, all
30

THE SANCTION FOB 3I0RALITY IN NATURE 31

living beings inherit, more or less, the peculiarities of
their parents. In the fourth place, the selection of
those that survive is determined by their fitness to
meet the struggle for existence, or to please their
mates. These four facts appear, to scientific minds,
no less evident and elementary than innocent in their
bearings and august in their monitions.

But when the popular mind, hearing that these are
now accepted truths of modern knowledge, begins to
handle and apply them to daily life, what are its
practical deductions ? To our surprise we find it in-
ferred that evolution is a process where merciless com-
petition and cruelty are the honored rule, that nature
is a field where every creature struggles, and must
struggle, for himself alone; that, therefore, such
struggle is properly the rule to-day ; that might is the
only right which nature knows, and that the weak go
to the wall, where they had better go.

It is not the ignorant only who adopt these con-
clusions, but also learned savants who have been
prominent advocates of the evolution theory. One
of its American champions, Mr. Van Buren Denslow,
some years ago, rebuking Mr. Spencer for not carry-
ing out to its logical result the teachings of the
doctrine of development, maintained that moral rules
are merely " doctrines established by the strong for
the government of the weak. The prompting to steal
and He is as much a prompting of nature with the
weak, as the commandments prohibiting those acts
are naturally urged on the weak by the stronger ones,
who wish to keep the weak in subjection."

Similarly, the German philosopher, Nietzsche, in his

32 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT

" Zur Genealogie der Moral," traces the genesis of
present morality in the following manner : At the
beginning of civilization, " a herd of blond beasts of
prey, free from every social restraint, ranged about,
exulting in murder, rapine, torture, and incendiarism,
and made slaves of the lower races." Their own
qualities, cruelty, pride, joy in danger, and extreme
unscrupulousness (to-day reckoned bad qualities) —
were then the good qualities. Their slaves and sub-
jects naturally abhorred these quaHties of their op-
pressors, and gave the place of honor to those qualities
that ameHorated their own sufferings, — pity, self-
sacrifice, patience, diligence, and friendliness. When,
at length, this slave-morality, through the victory of
Christianity and democracy, got the upper hand, the
primitive morality was inverted ; the naturally bad
qualities were regarded as good, and the native in-
stincts of man that incite to selfishness and cruelty
were condemned as evil. Although Nietzsche's theory
of the origin of the virtues is quite opposite to that of
Mr. Denslow, he agrees with him in considering morals
not as universal laws, but as the edicts and utilities of
a class.

Equally surprising, were the declarations of
Professor Huxley in his last volume of collected
essays, *' Evolution and Ethics," in which his
singular Romanes Lecture was still further cham-
pioned and given a permanent place among his
works. After painting in the blackest of colors the
injustice of the world, and roundly scoring the un-
moral character of the cosmic order, he appeals to the
logic of facts as proving that " the cosmos works

THE SANCTION FOB MORALITY IN NATURE 33

through the lower nature of man, not for righteous-
ness, but against it." With especial severity he criti-
cises the fallacies, as he would brand them, of evo-
lution. As the unmoral sentiments have been evolved,
no less than the moral, " there is, so far, as much
natural sanction for the one as for the other." " The
thief and the murderer," he bluntly says, " follow
nature as much as the philanthropist." Cosmic evo-
lution is " incompetent to furnish any better reason
why what we call good is preferable to what we call
evil than we had before." Professor Huxley contends
that " for man's successful progress as far as the savage
state, he has been largely indebted to those qualities
which he shares with the ape and the tiger." But
with the changed conditions of man's later life, these
serviceable quaHties of the earlier time have become
defects. *' CiviHzed man would gladly kick down the
ladder by which he has chmbed. In fact, civilized
man brands all these ape and tiger promptings with
the name of sins. He punishes many of the acts
which flow from them as crimes, and in extreme cases
he does his best to put an end to the survival of the
fittest of former days by axe and rope." " The cosmic
progress has no sort of relation to moral ends." " The
imitation of it by man is inconsistent with the first
principles of ethics."

The ethical progress of society to-day. Professor
Huxley concludes, " depends not on imitating the
cosmic progress, still less in running away from it,
but in combating it." The microcosm should pit
itself against the macrocosm, and "social progress
means a checking of the cosmic progress at every step

34 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT

and the substitution for it of another which may be
called the ethical progress."

Such, in substance, is the string of pyrotechnical
paradoxes through which the eminent English Evo-
lutionist gave the scientific and philosophic world
as lively a shock as it has for a long time experi-
enced.

Have nature and evolution, then, no sanction for
morality? What are we to think of these modern
Jeremiads of certain evolutionists, which seem to come,
now from the lips of a resurrected Schopenhauer, now
from those of a third century Manichsean, and which
have made all the old-time dualists and supernaturalists
ask with wondering glee, " Is Saul, also, among the
prophets ? "

The question has very important bearings. For,
if morals and nature be in antagonism ; if evolution be
a process whose law is selfishness and cruelty, or at
least without sanction for righteousness and helpful-
ness, then, both the cause of evolution and that of
rational ethics are weighted with grave objections ;
and advanced science joins its voice with ancient
dogmatism in declaring the world a realm divided
against itself.

If, on the other hand, we can find our ethical
instincts rooted in the whole realm of vital nature, and
developed step by step with the ascent of life, then
science and faith will be harmonized, and we shall see
that the fundamental verities and duties are right, not
simply because revelation or intuition has taught
them, but that they have been taught because the ex-
perience of the world has shown them to be right,

THE SANCTION FOB MORALITY IN NATURE 35

and the irresistible instincts of our vital being proclaim
them afresh in every succeeding generation.

Professor Huxley and the other critics who would
stigmatize evolution as a cruel and selfish process, and
who like to describe the world as a vast battle-field,
where the carnage goes on without cessation, and the
weak are systematically left at the mercy of the strong,
make the error of bisecting nature. They drop out
of view the better and larger half of it, the end and
consummation of the process, and then condemn the
whole because of their own partial observation. They
are like a man who should cut an apple-tree in two at
the trunk, and then blame the roots because they bore
no fruit. The process of evolution should be judged,
not by its roots, by what appears in its lower, rudi-
mentary forms and crude beginnings, but by its whole
sweep and final outcome. It is the mature form, most
of all, that presents the characteristic genius of plant
and animal. The real nature of an oak-tree is not
best discerned in the folded cotyledons, or the initial
swellings of the acorn, or the rootlets that first push
out from the shell. Acorn and rootlets are but parts
and expressions of that evolutive potentiality, that
generic idea, which is only to be completely under-
stood when we gaze at the full-grown monarch of the
forest.

So, to discern the real character of the cosmic evo-
lution and the authentic teachings of nature, we
should not separate the inorganic realm from the
organic, nor the animal from the human plane of
development, nor hold up the brutal warfare of the
carnivora and the ravin and ruin of the competing

36 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT

rivals of the Saurian ages as exemplifications of
nature's character and lessons. We must recognize
the animal and the human species as parts of one
divine system, the end and fruit of which are even
more significant than its crude beginnings. In the
highest moral and spiritual forms and forces attained
in the process of evolution, we should recognize the
ampler and clearer manifestations of that vital spirit
and divine power which works and unfolds itself
through all the varied levels of creation. If civiliza-
tion and science and human morality really constitute
an " artificial world," as Professor Huxley asks us to
believe, " antagonistic to the general constitution of
the universe," how can we look for anything but
defeat when the microcosm pits itself against the
macrocosm ? How, indeed, could the higher Hfe of
humanity ever have won a victory or reached the ele-
vation that it has attained ?

The contrary position is evident. Precisely because
human science and morality have been in harmony
and alliance with the secret laws and higher forces of
the universe, they have made the progress that we
know.

The term nature, properly used, means the whole
of creation, not its lower half; and the great victory
of modern science has been precisely to show that
man is as much a part of nature and under nature's
laws as the vegetable or the animal kingdom. If
humanity and human life are not a part of nature,
then the laborious researches and boasted achieve-
ments of Darwin, Spencer, and Romanes have gone
for naught. If humanity and human life, on the other

THE SANCTION FOB BIORALITY IN NATURE 37

hand, are constituent parts of nature, nature's teach-
ings are to be found, not simply in the fiery volcano or
the devouring leopard, but also in the generous hand
that rescues from danger, and the pitying care that
binds and heals the sufferer's wounds. Animal evo-
lution culminates in human evolution, and human
evolution culminates in the unfolding and perfection
of the spiritual nature. As the end and fruit is indis-
putably moral, by what logic shall we declare that the
process and law are devoid of ethical import ?

In the next place it is worthy of notice, and a most
proper plea in mitigation of the charges made, that those
parts and actions in nature, which are most criticised as
evil, are never ends in themselves, but merely means
and intermediate steps to the goal of good. This fierce
competition in the multitude of living beings ; this de-
vouring of insect by bird and mouse, and destruction of
bird and mouse by cat and hawk, and the wiping out
of the species unfitted to maintain themselves in the
painful struggle, — each of these processes is useful to
the higher ends towards which the current of Hfe
moves. It is this that fills each nook with life, makes
the mole conquer the underworld of the ground and
the bird the realm of air, and makes each living
species strive and develop itself to the utmost. It is
this that sharpens the eyes of the lynx and the hear-
ing of the deer, and gives swiftness to the antelope and
the horse. It is this that moulds dull sensation into
these varied and marvelous instincts of bee and moth,
and, as the struggle goes on, leads rigid instinct up to
flexile cunning and adaptive intelligence ; and, among
the higher animals, develops in each race, according

38 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT

to its peculiar dangers or opportunities, emotions of
fidelity or sympathy, faculties of memory or attention,
of song or reason ; and in man, at length, constitutes
mind and conscience the controlling powers, and
makes success in the battle of life the prize of courage,
perseverance, mutual devotion, and self-sacrifice. Al-
though on the lower levels the stern law of natural
selection produces the grasping parasite and the vo-
racious reptile, and in the early stages gives the ad-
vantage to the hard and selfish, yet, as the evolution
continues, this very" Moloch of natural selection," as it
has been called, refines and elevates its products age
by age. It annihilates the ferocious monsters of the
reptilian age ; it reduces the barnacle to immobility; it
makes the slave-holding ant helpless and the human
slave owner a fossil of the past. It breeds out of the
ferocious wolf-tribe the affectionate and devoted dog,
and allows no people to survive unless that people
makes justice and neighborly assistance and good-will
the recognized laws of its national life. Each layer of
olden slime and blood is a fertilizing alluvium which
produces the later glory of spiritual blossom and of
righteous, kindly fruit.

Moreover, a closer study of nature shows even more
than this. It shows that, even in the lower and rudi-
mentary stages of life, there is an altruism contem-
poraneous with the egoism of evolution. There is
" a struggle for others," as Professor Drummond has
well phrased it, conjoined with the struggle for self,
constantly restraining selfishness, often dominant over
it even in low ranks of life, and in the larger and higher
families of the natural kingdom always preponderant.

,THE SANCTION FOR MORALITY IN NATURE 39

A superficial acquaintance with the facts of evolu-
tion brings out as its prominent features such traits as
struggle, selfishness and cruelty. But a deeper and
keener study shows that from the outset of life there
have been principles of super-fecundity and overflow
present, and there have been instincts of solidarity
and sympathy involved that irresistibly carry the
individual beyond the circle of his own interests.
In the simplest cell which, in obedience to the
expansive tendency of life, splits into two, or
forms, with its excess of protoplasm, the nucleus
of a new cell, the philosophic eye beholds the
germ of the moral law and the promise of the beati-
tudes. Wherever vitality is at its best, it is character-
ized by a constant overplus of production beyond the
needs of self-maintenance, and therefore an overflow
of the fountain of being that carries its current beyond
the bounds of self and commingles the waters of life.
Altruistic giving is the inseparable correlate of this
vital over-production. A certain disinterestedness and
outgoing of largess and sympathy is as characteristic of
healthy life as for the mother of a new-born babe to give
her milk to the babe. In the sacred unity and natural
bond that keeps the ocean in its bed and holds the parent
sheep to the duty of suckhng her helpless lambkin, we
see the germ of that moral necessity that blossoms in
a Socrates' conscience or a Christ's self-sacrifice.

Professor Huxley presents the cosmic struggle for
existence as demanding the opposite conduct from
goodness and virtue: not self-restraint, but ruthless
self-assertion, and the characteristic quaHties of ape
and tiger. By this he must mean, if his argument is

40 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT

to be effective, such qualities as those of cruelty,
voracity, thievery, and wantonness. On the contrary,
even the tiger's survival and success demanded from
him self-restraint and care for others. Had this self-
assertion and devouring appetite been indeed *' ruth-
less," and not checked themselves in the presence of
his mate and his cubs and been ready to share his
booty with them, his line would have perished with
the first generation. Did the apes not associate them-
selves in bands, combining their forces for mutual as-
sistance and defense, how could this species of crea-
ture, so comparatively weak physically, destitute of
tusks, fangs, horns, or armor, have sustained itself
against its far more powerful enemies? It is not
merely in the human species, but also throughout the
whole realm of life below, that altruism and social
bonds manifest themselves ; self-will at due times and
occasions represses itself; and if it will not voluntarily
yield and curb its excesses, then it is sternly enforced
to do so by an inexorable Nemesis.

Foremost among these factors that enforce co-
operation and more or less of altruism, are those cen-
tral facts in the animal kingdom, sex and infant weak-
ness. Above the very lowest orders of existence, no
animal and few of the higher plants can reproduce
their species without a mate, nor can the young sur-
vive without parental care. Reproduction is no less
fundamental to life than nutrition. And if the neces-
sity of feeding themselves is the sure producer of
egoism in all forms of flesh and blood, the necessity
of pleasing their mates and taking care of their young
just as surely fosters altruism.

THE SANCTION FOB MORALITY IN NATURE 41

Of course we should not attribute to the animal
mother the same affection and conscious self-denial
that characterize a human mother. But throughout
every realm of natural history, above the microscopic,
there are instincts that carry the individual beyond
his own needs, and often quite contrary to his own
ease, comfort, and self-preservation ; because they are
demanded by the race. The universal conditions of
reproduction, are, first, giving ; and, next, self-sacrifice.
See, in the case of the flowers, how the anther gives
to the stigma the fertilizing pollen that through micro-
scopic gateways penetrates to the inmost heart of the
pistil ; how, with the first beginning of the seed, the
petals begin to wither, turning into the germs the sap
on which they might have lived, and packing around
each tiny germ the stores of starch and albumen
which shall feed their hunger when the sun calls them
forth to life with the spring. " Every flower in the
world," Henry Drummond well says, " Hves for others.
It sets aside something costly, a gift to the future,
brought into the world and paid for by its own de-
mise. Every seed, every Qggy is a tithe of love."
Paternity implies a regard for another, more or less
permanent. Maternity is synonymous with self-
sacrifice.

As we look through the annals of natural history,
what curious and even romantic details are beheld grow-
ing from these fruitful roots ! We see the sand-wasp,
that never beholds its offspring, nevertheless laboriously
laying up for its grubs a provision of fresh food in a
sealed storehouse ; the paternal pipe-fish, carrying the
eggs of its offspring about in a pouch till they are

42 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT

hatched ; the father-nightingale, feeding the mother
regularly while she is sitting on the nest ; the indig-
nant gander, valorously protecting its little brood
against the intrusive stranger ; the mother Honess, in-
tercepting with the shield of her own body the lance
which threatens her cub, — what resplendent and
touching testimonies do the annals of science furnish
to refute the calumny that the cosmic order is one
solely or chiefly of ruthless self-assertion !

No doubt, this parental love was in the beginning
crude, narrow, and hard. Evolution had to give it
long and patient polishing before the bitter buds, the
dwarfish, crumpled cotyledons, became the lovely and
stately blossoms of disinterested and unswerving af-
fection that we admire to-day. But the important
thing to notice is that the moral germ was there;
something unique in its kind and divine in its possi-
bilities. As Professor Romanes has well said : •' The
greatest of all distinctions in biology, when it first
arises, is thus seen to be in its potentiahty rather than
in its origin. The distinction 'between a nature that
can and a nature that cannot possess moral power is
capital." Once established in the world, this altruistic
bud was sure to increase and sweeten. Loveless
parents meant neglected, stunted dying offspring.
But the loving father and mother saved and improved
their offspring and made more loving descendants.
The fostering affection, however little it matters not,
was bound to be preserved and accumulated by that
best of bankers, heredity, at compound interest. Each
succeeding family in this royal line is richer in the
elements that make for progress. The little group of

TEE SANCTION FOR MORALITY IN NATURE 43

father, mother, and offspring act together, and are
stronger for their union. New forces of sympathy,
brotherhood, and devotion spring up within the holy
circle ; and in the family, evolution gains a new in-
strument and ally, a daily generator and guardian of
the social and moral forces through which human
progress is attained.

All these parental feelings, it may be urged, how-
ever, are but enlargements and prolongations, so to
speak, of self. The offspring belongs to the mother,
and her care of it has, therefore, nothing properly dis-
interested about it. Outside this family circle can we
find in the system of nature any examples of mutual
help, any instances of truly disinterested sympathy and
cooperation ?

Most assuredly we can. He who cannot see them,
but perceives in the cosmic order only a gladiatorial
pit, either has only a meagre knowledge of natural his-
tory, or wilfully closes his eyes to its nobler chapters.

At the dawn of animate existence, every life was
probably a single cell, as we still see in the case of the
amoeba and other protozoa. But this self-sufficiency
leads to nothing in evolution. For the development
process to advance, it must resort to the cooperative
principle. So we have compound plants and flowers ;
the colonies and groups in which the lower animals
club together their forces ; the communal life of the
polyps, the sponges, and the bees, where each member
or group takes up its respective share of labor for the
public good ; one set drawing in the food, a second
digesting it, assimilating and storing it away ; a third
producing buds, seeds or eggs.

44 THE NEW WOULD AND THE NEW THOUGHT

As we direct our glance a little higher up the ladder
of life, we see a still more interesting case oi' mutuai
aid in those notable interchanges of good services be-
tween blossom and insect, to which we owe all that is
beautiful and fragrant in the floral world. In its in-
most heart the flower spreads a banquet of honey, and
marks the road to it with showy or conspicuous petals
or some sweet perfume, that even at night will guide
the insect guest to the nectar. As each bee or moth
or butterfly helps itself from the table of its floral host,
it pays for all it takes by carrying the fertilizing pollen
to the neighboring flower, and ensuring the preserva-
tion and multiplication of the species that has fed it.
Thus plant and insect develop together. Those plants
survive and multiply most that hide their honey and
pollen best from hostile marauders, but leave some
clue to guide their insect helpers. The bee and the
moth quicken in intelligence and helpfulness, because
those who make the most skilful go-betweens will
best feed themselves and best propagate the plants
that will feed their descendants.*

Even on this low range in the animate world, it is
evident that " those creatures succeed best who, in
fulfilling their own life, also compass the good of
other beings." The farther and higher we pursue our
investigation, the more numerous and striking are the
illustrations of this reciprocity and helpfulness. The
beetles assist each other in rolling up the pellets of
manure in which they bury their eggs. Many cater-
pillars weave tents in common. Beavers combine to
cut down logs and build their dams and communal
huts. Wolves, wild-dogs, and jackals do their hunting

THE SANCTION FOR 3I0RALITY IN NATURE 45

in packs. Rabbits, sheep, chamois, and rooks give
each other signals of danger. ^ Among bees, the
neuters, who never become mothers, watch over the
eggs and cocoons as if these were their own. The
agricultural ants sow in common, and harvest and
store their crops in granaries to use in common, for
general sustenance. According to Forel, the funda-
mental feature in the life of many species of ants is the
obligation of every ant to share its food, already
swallowed and digested, with every member of the
community who may apply for it. If an ant which
has its crop full is too selfish to regurgitate a part of
it for the use of a hungry comrade, it will be treated
as an enemy.

The instances of sympathy and self-sacrificing kind-
ness among animals are as numerous as they are in-
teresting. Sir James Malcolm personally told Professor
Romanes of a monkey on shipboard, who, when its
companion monkey fell overboard, threw to it a cord,
the other end of which was tied around its own body.^
Mrs. OHve Thorne Miller, in a recent lecture, told of a
cedar-bird that she had known to take charge of a
nest of young robins whose parents had been killed,
and to bring up the brood of orphans with motherly
care. Mr. Belt tells of a number of cases where he
has seen ants that had been buried under clay or
pebbles released by their neighbors, often with great
labor. ^ When seals, buffaloes or deer are attacked,
the males put the mothers and young and weak of the

1 Darwin, Descent of Man, p. loo.

2 Romanes, Animal Intelligence, p. 475.
'Naturalist in Nicaragua, 1874, p. 26.

•46 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOVGHT

herd in the least exposed place, and go to the front to
meet the enemy.^

Thomas Edward, the Scotch naturalist, having
wounded a tern, or sea-swallow, so that it could not
fly, saw it lifted up by two unwounded comrades and
carried out to a rock in the sea beyond his reach.^

The weasel, which, as Rev. J. G. Wood relates,
came to pick up and carry away an injured comrade ;
the rats, who led a sightless comrade by a straw ; ^ the
blind pelican, who was fed by neighbors on fish
brought many miles ; * the gander that guided his
blind comrade about by gently taking her neck in his
bill ; ^ the old baboon, who came down from his place
of safety on the hill to force his way through a pack
of dogs and carry off a young baboon that had re-
mained behind in peril, ^ — these instances of tender
feeling and generous deeds might be called the de-
lightful romances of natural history, were it not that
every one of them is a well-attested fact. They are
only a few among many similar cases.

The scientific skeptic may object that none of these
incidents affords proof of conscious self-devotion in
the animal world, but only of a blind instinct. Among
human beings we should certainly call them altruistic
— nay, moral. Why should we reckon them uncon-
scious and egoistic when occurring among animals ?

1 Thomson, Passions of Animals, p. 306, and Darwin, Descent of
man, p. loi.

3 Romanes, Animal Intelligence, p. 275.
3 Seelenleben der Thiere, p. 64.
* Darwin, Descent of Man, p, 102.
' Romanes, Animal Intelligence, p. 272.
« Darwin, Descent of Man, p. 10 1.

THE SANCTION FOR MORALITY IN NATURE 47

But if they are illustrations of the action of blind in-
stinct, then all the stronger is the disproof of the
charge that nature has no sanction and command ex-
cept for self-interest. All the stronger is the proof
that there is an innate tendency, rooted in the consti>
tution of nature and all social things, that irresistibly
expresses itself in sympathetic impulses and self-sacri'
ficing kindnesses.

Finally, we may notice that nature, instead of frown,
ing down and repressing this altruistic tendency, has
constantly favored and sanctioned it. It has, indeed^
been the very channel of the higher evolution of life.
If we run over the names of the commoner and more
numerous tribes of animals, the birds, deer^ gophers,
seals, kangaroos, antelopes, mice, and rabbits, or, going
lower down, bees, ants, and grasshoppers, almost all
are gregarious animals. The social animals have an
immense preponderance over the unsocial. The car-
nivora, whose cruel self-seeking Professor Huxley
presents as the type and condition of success in the
competitions of nature, are relatively very few in num-
ber. They are the exceptions, not the normal type,
any more than the train-robber and the Tammany
"pantata" are typical Americans. Almost every-
where these species are dying out. ' * The dragons of
the prime," who " tear each other in their slime," and
who have been presented as the true type of nature,
" red in tooth and claw," lie in their fossil cemeteries,
eternal witnesses to the judicial sentence which nature
has pronounced upon them and their ways. Never in
the annals of zoology was there such a Waterloo (as
Mr. Fiske has well called it) as these giant Saurians

48 TNE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT

met. Among the carnivora that still survive it is
evident that, in spite of their terrible claws, or fangs,
and their strength and agility, these depredators and
enemies of their fellows are everywhere falling behind
in the race of life. Neither their natural weapons
nor their terrible energy of self-seeking are equal, as
aids to survival and multiplication, to the mutual help
and greater intelligence of the social animals. Dar-
win's dictum, that " those communities which included
the greatest number of the most sympathetic members
would flourish best," is found to be the fact and law
of animal evolution.

Professor Huxley charges that man, having pro-
gressed because of those qualities which he shares
with the ape and the tiger, now that he has become
civiUzed and moralized would kick down the ladder by
which he mounted. On the contrary, it has never
been by tigerish cruelty, or a monkey-like wanton-
ness, selfishness, or malicious mischievousness, that
man has reached his superior position. These quali-
ties, on the contrary, have arrested the progress of ape
and tiger. Man has gone above them because of his
larger share of the altruistic and social impulses, and
the mutual help and cooperative industry which have
tided the feeble over periods of weakness, and stimu-
lated intelligence and skill as nothing else has done.

So far from primitive man being a solitary, blond
beast of prey, his hand against every man, whose
fundamental instinct was cruelty and injury to others,
as Nietzsche portrays him, the discoveries of arch-
aeology show, on the contrary, that the earliest men
we know were already social beings and united in con-

THE SANCTION FOR MORALITY IN NATURE 49

siderable communities. The kitchen-middens of
quarternary man, discovered and investigated by
Steenstrup, have a thickness of three metres in some
places, and must have been formed by a very numer-
ous horde of men. " The piles of horses' bones at
Solutre," says Max Nordau, in his work on Degenera-
tion, " are so enormous as quite to preclude the idea
that a single hunter, or even any but a very large
body of allied hunters, could have collected and killed
such a large number of horses in one place. As far
as our view penetrates into historic time, every dis-
covery shows us primitive man as a gregarious animal,
who could not possibly have maintained himself, if he
had not possessed the instincts which are presupposed
in life in a community, viz., sympathy, the feeling of
solidarity, and a certain degree of unselfishness. We
find these instincts already existent in apes."

" The splendid beast of prey," whom the worship-
pers of self would present as the typical human type,
is not only pernicious to the species, but, as Dr.
Nordau points out,^ is pernicious to itself also. " It
rages against itself; it annihilates itself. The biolog-
ical truth is that constant self-restraint is a necessity
of existence, as much for the strongest as for the
weakest. It is the activity of the highest human
cerebral centres. If these are not exercised, they
waste away ; i. e.y man ceases to be man ; the pre-
tended ' over-man ' becomes sub-human, — in other
words, a beast. By the relaxation, or breaking up of
the mechanism of inhibition in the brain, the organ-
ism sinks into irrecoverable anarchy in its constituent

* Nordau, Degeneration, p. 431,

50 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT

parts ; and this leads, with absolute certainty, to ruin,
to disease, madness, and death, even if no resistance
results from the external world against the frenzied
egoism of the unbridled individual."

In these social and altruistic impulses of the higher
orders of animal life, the philosophic investigator sees
plainly the great uplifting causes of vital evolution.
This social and altruistic life is conditioned upon the
rudimentary moral sense of the species.

Unless, in the members of a group of birds, there
is an incipient sense of justice, which leads them to
respect the tid-bit which a neighbor has found, or to
chastise together the member who has lazily and self-
ishly appropriated the nest of a fellow bird, the social
group would quickly fall to pieces. All naturalists
who have studied gregarious species, have noticed
amongst them a certain sense of personal rights and
the duty of just dealing with their fellow-members in
the group. The dogs in Constantinople have each
their special street or alley, the invasion of which they
resolutely resist. The prairie-dog and the beaver have
their respective resting-places, which their comrades
respect.

Even in the animal kingdom, we thus find the moral
disposition to exist in a more or less developed form.
When we reach the human sphere, that which especially
characterizes its progress is the greater and greater re-
striction of selfish and unmoral competition by the
growing sense of sympathy and justice in the com-
munity. Even among barbarians, the qualities that
make a tribe the fittest to survive are not merely
strength of body, ferocity of disposition, and keen-

THE SANCTION FOB MORALITY IN NATURE 51

ness in taking advantage of one's fellow, but rather
the possession of trustworthy, helpful, and loyal dis-
positions. Take a tribe of savages, among whom
robbery, murder, licentiousness, cannibalism, and in-
fanticide prevail. Is it not plain, from the nature of
the case, that such tribes are not likely to leave abun-
dant offspring ? Is it not the testimony of all travelers,
that such tribes are decaying tribes, yearly diminish-
ing, tribes on whose head nature has already pro-
nounced sentence ?

When, from the low state of morals among certain
Australian and African savages, it is argued that we
have here the proof and illustration of the general
absence of moral qualities in primitive humanity, the
real sequence of cause and effect is reversed. It is,
on the contrary, precisely because such tribes have
been deficient in average moral quality, that they have
failed to march upward on the road of civilization
with the rest of mankind, and have fallen into these
bog-holes of savage degradation. It is only when
humanity is spurred on by conscience to the faithful
discharge of great duties, that our race develops to
the full stature of its manhood.

Natural history, archaeology, and biology all com-
bine their testimony to show the error of that view
which denies to nature any moral lesson or tendency,
and sees in evolution simply a cruel and selfish strug-
gle. The sympathetic instinct and moral necessity
that man feels belong to no artificial world opposed to
the great order of the universe. They are rooted
deep in those same natural bonds and sacred unities
which, wherever red blood flows in the veins, have

52 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT

conditioned the very continuance of the species on
the faithful discharge by each generation of their duty
to others besides themselves. Vice and injustice are
ever destroying themselves. The more single-eyed
is selfishness, the more likely it is to starve itself to
death. It is a matter of simple scientific observation
that the preponderance of selfishness among a family
or a people, and the decay of that family or people,
go together. The predominance of egotism is a
physiological sign that the vitality of the species is
exhausted ; the family instinct dies out, and the indi-
viduals lose their ability to experience normal and
natural love, and cease to perpetuate themselves.

As Dr. Nordau has pointed out : " We possess an
unfailing means of determining the exact degree of
vital energy in a given species, race or nation, in the
proportion between the egotism and altruism of the
individuals contained in it. The larger the number
of beings who place their own interests higher than
all the duties of solidarity and the ideals of the de-
velopment of the species, the nearer is the species to
the end of its vital career. While, on the other hand,
the more individuals there are in a nation who have
an instinct within them, impelling them to deeds of
heroism, self-abnegation, and sacrifice for the com-
munity, the more potent are the vital energies of the
race" ("The Conventional Lies of Civilization,"

p. 270).

The best of social fertilizers, then, are affection and
sympathy. Virtue has a self-propagating power.
Self-sacrifice, emptying the soul of the dregs of self-
ishness, and filling it with the living water of the

THE SANCTION FOB MORALITY IN NATURE 53

Eternal Spirit, makes harvests bourgeon and ripen,
wherever its irrigati ng stream spreads abroad. MoraHty
is no invention of priests, statesmen, or philosophers.
It is an irresistible growth of the human heart, the
fairest blossom, the age-long victory and product of
that Divine Life of the universe that has ever moved
onward from chaos to cosmos, from carnal to spiritual.
That lustrous march is no drama of red-toothed
carnage, but a patient ascent through successive
planes of wider and more intimate cooperation, fusing
individuals in famihes, families in tribes, tribes in na-
tions, and nations in the universal family of God's
children, in which Jew and Greek, male and female,
black and white, must have their equal right and
place before the tribunal of Christian equity and
sympathy. The highest efflorescence on the century-
plant of cosmic life, the message of nature, as of
Scripture, is Love.

The universe is God's unfenced and all-inclusive
communion table ; and every act of humane minis-
tration, every helpful hand stretched out to the weak
or fallen is a sacred rite in its holy Eucharist.

CHAPTER III.

THE agnostic's DIFFICULTIES AND THE KNOWABILITY
OF DIVINE REALITIES.

At the threshold of the investigation of the special
problems presented by the relations of science to re-
ligion there lies the preliminary question : What can
we know in religious things, and how ?

This is properly a question of pure metaphysics,
with which science has nothing to do, and there ought
not to be upon this point any conflict between the
scientific and the religious world. Science may
properly declare what she has learned and how
she has learned it. But when she proceeds to de-
termine what and how alone it is possible to know
anything, and engages in analyses of consciousness, in
investigations of the laws of thought, and clumsily
would spin again, over the eyes of faith, the subtle
logical webs of Hume and Kant, then it is evident
that science has strayed into the realm of metaphysics
and is trying " her prentice hand " upon the problems
of philosophy.

Nevertheless, though but an interloper and a
neophyte herself in this field, or rather just for this
reason, science has of late assumed absolute authority
in the domain of the knowable, and has summarily
ordered religion into close confinement. The brilliant
successes of modern science, — rivalling all wonders of
54

THE AGNOSTIC'S DIFFICULTIES 55

the romancers, seven-leagued boots, lamp of Aladdin,
wand of fairy, or what not, — these marvelous achieve-
ments have made her believe that her favorite methods
are the only ones by which anything is to be known.
He who would build up solid structures of fact, not air-
castles of thought, must work, science tells us, by observa-
tion, induction, and verification. He must concern
himself, so science orders, only with what is discernible
by sense, and must ignore the suprasensible. All that
we can know is phenomena. Realities can never be
reached. Things in themselves are far beyond our
knowledge. The idea of immaterial spirit must be
assigned, as Vogt commands, to a place among specu-
lative fables. Substance, essence, soul, — these are but
high-sounding terms which cover so many chimeras.
Certainly, it is urged, it is not for man to know God.
It is not for the finite to think to find out the Infinite.
All conceptions involving infinity, — such as creation^
self-existence, eternity, absolute reality (Herbert
Spencer labors at length to show in his First Prin-
ciples),— involve the inconceivable ; and though by
our familiarity with the sounds we may think we un-
derstand them, they are really but " pseudo-ideas,
symbolic conceptions of the illegitimate order." " The
power which the universe manifests is utterly inscru-
table," a conclusion to which Professors Huxley and
Tyndall gave repeated and emphatic " Amens."
When the question is asked, " Who made the uni-
verse ? " Professor Tyndall replied, " As far as I can
see, there is no quality in the human intellect which is
fit to be applied to the solution of the problem. It
entirely transcends us."

56 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT

Science thus denies to religion a foothold in the
realm of the knowable. The objects which she would
worship are banished into an impenetrable darkness,
and all that is left for her is to cover her head and
veil her face before the mysterious realm. In the
solemn emotions of the heart she may indulge herself
freely, if she likes ; but she must not presume to
fashion the vague thought of that which she reveres
into any definite shape. She must not venture to
speak of that which she adores as if it were in any
sense known to her. •* The only language concerning
the divine," as Renan says, " that does not degrade
God is silence."

There is in this attitude a semblance of a deeper
religiousness. Spencer calls it '* the true humihty " ;
Renan characterizes it as " the effect of a profound
piety, trembling lest it blaspheme." But it is in truth,
the subtlest and most dangerous attack on religion.
The old-fashioned atheism said bluntly, " There is no
God," and the extremity of its folly was its own
refutal. The infidelity of to-day says, " Whether or
not there is any God, we can know nothing at all
about Him, and so ought not to waste our time by
taking Him into consideration. If it pleases you,
however, to embrace with the deepest longings of
your nature this blank mystery ; if, debarred from
knowing, you find consolation nevertheless in the
exercise of your creative faculties, in fashioning the
mystery in accordance with your words, why then,"
say Tyndall and Huxley, " do so ; only have regard
enough for propriety and the exclusive prerogatives
of science to confine your worship to that of the

THE AGNOSTIC'S DIFFICULTIES 57

silent sort at the altar of the unknown and the un-
knowable."

Practically, there is little difference between this
theory of spiritual nescience and outright denial of
spiritual existence. The assurance that we are, and
must always remain, in dense ignorance of spiritual
things kills the hope of heaven and the reverence for
the divine. It takes from conscience its authority,
and withers every religious emotion. Who can wor-
ship an absolute darkness, an utter silence? If the
absolute reality be utterly inscrutable there is no
reason to think of it under one aspect more than any
other. It may as Hkely be cruel as kind, contemptible
as venerable, vile and treacherous as majestic and
faithful. If we ought to revere it, there ought to be
something in it cognizable as worthy of reverence.
Why, if it be utterly unknowable, should we not hate
it as rightly as love it, despise it instead of adoring
it? To make God a name sweeter, grander, more
venerated than all others, it must be more than a
piece of blank paper. To build that temple of re-
ligion where songs of praise and thanksgiving, aspi-
rations for a better Hfe, hopes of a brighter and eternal
home and vows of solemn consecration spontaneously
spring from the heart and ascend worthily and not in
bitter mockery, we need other material than an eye-
blinking fog-bank.

That know-nothingism in religion, then, which cer-
tain scientific cliques would establish, has not the first
shred of a claim to be considered its best friend. As
little claim has it to be founded on truth or clear
ideas. It is true enough that no sense-observation

58 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT

can show us spiritual things. But neither does sense
restrict itself to the horizon of the visible, the tan-
gible, and the sensible. Tyndall justly speaks of " that
region inaccessible to sense, which embraces so much
of the intellectual life of the investigator." When
that which the microscope fails to see is regarded as
non-existent, " then I think," he says, " the micro-
scope begins to play a mischievous part," and he
proceeds to point out many cases where structure and
structural changes must be believed to exist although
the microscope can make nothing of them.

As it is in mineralogy and biology, so it is in
chemistry, thermo-dynamics, and optics. What is the
whole of these, as systematized sciences, built upon ?
Upon the assumption of the existence of the mole-
cule, the atom, and the ether. Yet of these units of
matter how many have been isolated, separately
weighed, measured, or touched? Of their ceaseless
motions how many have been felt or seen ? Of this
omnipresent ether, some eleven trillion times, or more,
as extensive as ordinary matter, how many particles,
what smallest quantity, has been observed ? Not one.
The largest molecule, it is calculated, is a thousand
times smaller than any particle the microscope can
separately discern and the ether is immensely subtler
even than this.

Again, let the scientist tell us, why it is that in any
case that he chooses of outward observation, he trusts
the report of his senses as assuring him of any out-
ward fact? You assume, for example, that when
your senses observe or verify anything, then you have
something you can confide in. Why so ? Do you

THE AGNOSTIC'S DIFFICULTIES 59

say that you have learned from experience on other
occasions that the impressions of your senses are
correctly conformed to the permanent something im-
pressing them ? But in reality this does not establish
the permanent something as outside of yourself. It
may be, perhaps, only a coherent abiding group of
subjective sensations. In reality no experience of the
correctness of the sense upon other occasions, how-
ever many, suffices to show that it was not wrong in
this. A certain antecedent and a certain consequent
may have been connected for a hundred million of
times, and yet the next time (a possibility of which
Mr. Babbage's calculating machine furnishes an actual
instance) the consequent may be different. So far
from this trust in our senses being furnished by
experience, it is what always does and must precede
experience. It is what alone makes experience pos-
sible and shows it to be applicable. As Professor
Huxley has acknowledged, this trust in the veracity
of our senses at the very moment that we make the
sensory observations is but an assumption, and when
that moment has passed, it is but an " unverifiable
hypothesis."^ Why, then, do we make such an as-
sumption, such an "unverifiable hypothesis"? Be-
cause of the mental need, because it is an intuition of
our reason, or, as Professor Bain calls it, " the fore-
most of the instinctive tendencies of the mind."
Again, before the physicist considers that he really
understands the object that he has found, before he
has any true scientific knowledge of it, he feels that
he must classify it, refer its phenomena to some law

1 Popular Science Monthly ^ March, 1875, p. 576.

60 TEE NEW WOELD AND THE NEW THOUGHT

in accordance with which it takes place, some force
that has produced it. Why is this ? Again it must
be answered, it is from a mental need, the instinct of
natural order, of constant derivation of effect from
cause.

It is the intuitive principle, then, that in science
supplies the cement that binds the loose fact-grains of
observation into coherent and valuable structures.
The lowest stories of the scientific temple cannot be
built up without this, and the higher still more demand
it. The discerning physicist must recognize that the
grandest victories of science are those which it has
won by the aid of the imagination beyond the bounds
of the visible. Geometry, e. g.y is throughout a work
of mental architecture, grounded upon and guided by
pure mental insight of space. Had geometrical truths
required for their acceptance demonstration from ob-
servation we should have known hardly a single prop-
osition. An exact right-angle has no existence as
matter of experience. A perfect sphere is unattain-
able in practice. Arithmetic,* algebra, astronomy, are
ideal constructions, resting on the metaphysical con-
ception of number, and nowhere conforming to ex-
actly ascertained fact. In electricity, magnetism,
thermo-dynamics, the subtile analyses of modern in-
vestigators have banished altogether the former the-
ories of material fluids, and substituted the concep-
tion of invisible forces. The power that moulds the
crystal, that attracts the magnet, that moves along
the electric wire, can be seen only by the mental eye.
Observed facts form, of course, the starting-point of
knowledge, but they do not constitute its limit-

THE AGNOSTIC'S DIFFICULTIES 61

Reason is not to be chained around the ankle with re-
torts and balances, like a convict with ball and chain.
The wise savant must admit, as the distinguished
Bertholet expressly has done, that " there may be
something else to conceive, without knowing it ex-
perimentally, than connections of phenomena, and
that outside the limits where positive science asserts
itself it may be possible, without excess of mysticism,
to perceive the outlines, and to trace the sketch of a
certain ideal science where first, principles, causes, and
ends find their place, and legitimately support it."
" It is not," in truth, as Caro has well said, " the new
fact which constitutes a discovery." It is *' the idea
which attaches itself to the fact. Facts are neither
great nor little in themselves. The grandeur is in the
idea which marshals them. Those who make dis-
coveries are those who present us with a new idea
which puts old or petty facts in a striking light.
And this comes not so much from an induction as
from an instinctive fore-feeling of the order of nature.
So far from the mind being a blank tablet, learning
everything from experience, the fact is that expe-
rience is only fruitful when it is guided by something
that goes before and beyond facts, which solicits them,
which, impelled by the momentum of the innate idea,
interrogates nature, compels it under its urgent
catechizings to deliver up its secret, revealing as a
reality of nature the law hitherto but dreamed of by
the thinker."

Even in the scientific domain, then, comparatively
little can be known unless the external vision be sup-
plemented by the inward sight and the sense-percep-

62 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT

tion be enlarged by the mental intuition. And in the
religious world it is by the same means that we learn
those spiritual phenomena, — personality, free-will,
sense of duty, — and those grand ideas, right and
wrong, infinity, perfection, and divinity, that are the
ineradicable roots of faith and piety. Not only is
there more than one road to the land of knowledge,
but he who would reach its richest mines, its grand-
est spiritual truths, must take the road of spiritual
discernment. Science has failed to find them, and
declared them undiscoverable, simply because it has
traveled on the wrong path and used the wrong in-
struments. To seek to learn the presence of the
moral law by an electrometer, or to test for the exist-
ence of the soul with litmus paper, or to discover God
by the spectroscope, is as fruitless a quest, and fruitless
for the same reason, as to seek to taste a sound, or to
verify the beauty of the Sistine Madonna by making
a chemical analysis of the pigments used upon it. In
such cases the failure to observe the objects searched
for does not demonstrate their non-existence, but
simply the application to the inquiry of wrong
methods. Against the failure of the sense to dis-
cover anything, I put the success of the spirit. Not
till the perfume of the rose is disproved by the inabil-
ity of the eye to see it ; not till spherical geometry
is shown false by the undiscoverability in nature of
a perfect circle or by the absence of any absolute
verification of the theorems concerning it, may the
negative testimony of outward observation avail aught
against the positive testimony of the religious facul-
ties.

THE AGNOSTIC'S DIFFICULTIES 63

But intuition and instinct, we shall be told, are full
of illusions, and moreover have no safeguard such as
verification affords to observation. There is no
method by which we can test them, to distinguish the
false from the true, — if there be any true. And so
far from having a divine origin, and testifying legiti-
mately to eternal and universal truths, they are, in
reality, like our prejudices and our tastes, products of
human experience. Our intuitions are thus subject to
the same conditions as our experience, and give no
absolute truth. The axioms of geometry, as Pro-
fessor Helmholtz has shown, though necessary truths
to us, may be false in another sphere. Imagine be-
ings living and moving on the surface of a sphere,
able to perceive nothing but what is on the surface,
insensible to all else. The axioms of Euclid would
not there be valid. The axiom, for instance, that
there is only one shortest line between two points
would not, on such a sphere, be the truth. For be-
tween two diametrically opposite points an infinite
number of shortest lines, all of equal length, could be
drawn. Similarly, other axioms and propositions of
our geometry would no longer hold good.

Now, what shall we say to this ? We willingly
admit that not unfrequently what are mere prejudices
or ungrounded prepossessions, pass themselves off or
are mistaken, for genuine intuitions. We admit that
intuitions are not, at the first, mature or purified from
other elements, and that it takes great carefulness to
disentangle and discriminate them from the other
things with which they are involved. They come
into the world not as full-formed powers, but rather

64 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT

as the capacities and potentialities of mental life.
Only gradually do these embryo faculties unfold, and
while experience is not their cause, it is undoubtedly
the occasion and condition of their development.
Between their adult and their rudimentary phase
there is as wide a difference as between the grown
bird and the Qgg. That the manifestations of the
human intuitions should vary or should sometimes,
especially among savage tribes, be absent altogether,
is, then, no evidence against their trustworthiness or
reality. If they sometimes delude us, it is but the
same thing that the senses do. Scarcely a week
passes, even with persons of intelligence, in which
there is not more or less illusion of the perceptive
faculties.

But these observations of sense you say are verified
by other observations of the same sense or other
senses, or, if illusions, are corrected by their disagree-
ment with such other observations. But what veri-
fication have intuitions ? The same I answer as your
perceptions. When you have verified one perception
by another, what do you verify your verification by ?
If it has no verification, how is it any better guarantee
than the preceding perception ? If it has a verifica-
tion, what is it — another perception ? something out-
side of itself, or in itself? As long as verification is
sought in further observations, in corroborations not
self-evident, we must continue our search for some
more valid verification. We can stop only when we
come to some self-evident truth, which needs no ex-
ternal buttress. We always do rest, and can only
rest, our perceptive verifications at last in some intui-

TEE AGNOSTIC'S DIFFICULTIES 65

tion. ^' Intuition has no verification ; and conse-
quently no safeguard," do you say ? I reply : " It is
its own verification and safeguard. Verification itself
is preceded and conditioned upon it."

How, then, if we are cut off from perceptive cor-
roboration, can we distinguish between a false and a true
intuition ? The test is found in mental analysis. The
guarantee of true intuitions is their simpHcity, irre-
ducibility, ultimateness, universality, above all, their
necessity. The best criterion of a truth, as Herbert
Spencer declares, is " the inconceivability of its nega-
tion," and the mark of reality is " inexpugnable per-
sistence in consciousness." There are conditions
under which the intuitions may not be apphcable. In
a world of two dimensions the axioms of geometry
of three dimensions would not of course hold true.
But this does not prove that the axioms and demon-
strations of Euclid are false ; only that conditions may
be conceived in which they would not apply. The
axioms and demonstrations are true eternally, even
though nowhere in nature should be found the con-
ditions in which they could be applied and realized.

Here we are met by the objections of the evolution-
ist school, that these intuitions are really but prod-
ucts of the experience of the race, — mental habits
formed by association and consolidated by inheritance,
and thus ingrained in the cerebral structure of each
descendant, — so that on the application of the ap-
propriate stimulus, the ideas of the man of to-day are
given the same forms as they had in his ancestor.

As regards this I would remark, in the first place,
that it is an explanation quite inconsistent with the

66 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT

main theory, the evolution hypothesis, of those who
offer it. The law of evolution is the ascent from the
lower to the higher, from the simple to the more
complex, from the instinctive to the rational. But ac-
cording to this theory the habits and powers which
are now involuntary and unconscious were formerly
more voluntary and conscious. The earlier faculties
of animals, for example, were the higher, and their
present state a degeneration. Why do we give to the
instincts of the bee, the wasp, the beaver, a special
place in our thoughts, rather than suppose them to be
ordinary exercises of the conscious reason of the
creature ? Because the knowledge which the opera-
tions of instinct exhibit, the acquaintance with phys-
ical and physiological laws, and even with the mental
qualities and dispositions of other animals which it
displays, and the processes of reasoning by which ad-
vantage is taken of them, do not seem to us attribu-
table to the conscious mind of the animal without
absurd incongruity with the limited intelligence of the
creature in other respects. But the absurdity is just
as great or greater to attribute it to the conscious
knowledge and reasoning of the same species in
earlier generations. It is true enough that in man
many actions become instinctive and mechanical as
the result of a previous intellectual operation of the
self-conscious or reasoning kind. But the idea that
instinct in all other animals has the same origin, the
Duke of Argyll rightly calls " a dream due to the ex-
aggerated anthropomorphism of those very philoso-
phers who are most apt to denounce this sort of error
in others. . . . The theory of experience assumes

THE AGNOSTIC'S DIFFICULTIES 67

the preexistence of the very powers for which it pro-
fesses to account. The very lowest of the faculties
by which experience is acquired is imitation. But the
desire to imitate must be as instinctive as the organs
are hereditary by which imitation is effected." Then
follow in their order all the higher faculties and ideas,
such as those of space, time, law, purpose, cause, by
which the lessons of experience are put together into
an ordered whole. Every step in this process sup-
poses the preexistence of powers and tendencies an-
terior to experience, instinctive and innate. As
Herbert Spencer himself has truly said, " Those who
contend that knowledge results wholly from the ex-
periences of the individual, fall into an error as great
as if they were to ascribe all bodily growth and struc-
ture to exercise, forgetting the innate tendency to
assume the adult form." But to assign it all to the
experience of the individual's ancestors equally neg-
lects the main-factor in the case, the innate tendencies
not only of physical structure but of mental habit,
that must have preexisted before these creatures could
have learned anything at all from experience.

So, too, he who explains our natural beliefs as mere
unmeaning agglutinations from the lower elements of
our experience, formed by the association of ideas,
commits the error of overlooking the significant fact
involved in those laws of association themselves.
" For the very idea of association," as has been well
pointed out, supposes a guiding impulse. How can
w^e classify without a standard of classification ? How
can we connect without channels of connection ?
Laws of association are but the manifestation of pre-

68 TEE NEW WOULD AND THE NEW THOUGHT

determined associating tendencies or principles in the
mind. Did not these exist, a man would be no more
capable of learning from experience than an oyster is.
But let us grant for the moment the truth of the
hereditary experience theory, and see what comes
of it. Suppose we trace our instincts and intuitions
back to the consolidated experience of our ancestors.
Let us say that we think with the intelligence, not
only of the individual, but of the whole race, from the
earliest epoch of savage life down to the present.
Then, if you wish, grant the further hypothesis of the
evolutionist, that the man is the child of lower, ape-
like forms, and these of still lower, and thus trace the
race down to some simple ascidian or jelly-fish. Then
resolve life into the happy combination of physical
forces, and mind into the product of nervous action
under the influence of the surrounding universe of
matter. What then ? If the mind is but a part and
product of the universe of matter, then the laws of mind
are but the laws of matter released and transformed.
They are the laws of mind on this higher stage of ex-
istence, because of old they were the laws of matter in
the lower stage. Our fundamental forms of thought,
our universal instincts and necessary intuitions point,
then, to universal facts of nature which engendered
them. Instead of being subjective merely, or possibly
delusive, they must correspond to the objective facts
of nature to which their existence is due. They bear
sure witness to the existence in the cosmic environ-
ment about them, of all those great principles, forces,
and truths to which they are the natural and necessary
self-adjustments. We know things, that is, as they

TEE AGNOSTIC'S DIFFICULTIES 69

arc; our knowledge of the universe, given in our
universal instincts and necessary intuitions, though
quite a limited knowledge, is true as far as it goes.

But if we may trust to those instincts and intuitions
which testify to the existence of spiritual things suffi-
ciently to accept such order of existence as a fact, can
we know any more than the bare fact of such ex-
istence ? Is not the whole nature of spiritual things,
it is urged, shrouded in inscrutable mystery? The
infinite, the divine, things in themselves, are not these
beyond the possibility of knowledge to finite minds ?
Now it is true that the Hmits of our knowledge are
very narrow, and also that within these narrow limits
our knowledge is very imperfect. In truth, there is
nothing that we know completely. Our bosom friend
is a foreign kingdom to us. We have touched at most
but at a port or two along the shores of his spiritual
realm. There are multitudes of inlets hidden from us
— vast provinces of his life and being which our most
adventurous explorations have never reached. Even
the most familiar object, the grass-blade, the drop of
water, the simplest crystal, has something about it that
is unknowable. To explain any one of these com-
pletely we must know the whole cosmos. Especially
is this so in the religious realm. For, as Strauss has
truly said, *' there is nothing profound without mys-
tery." Grander and brighter than all other truths, as
spiritual truths are, their shadows naturally are equally
pronounced. We shall always remain ignorant of much;
probably we shall remain ignorant of even the greater
part of what relates to the origin and history of the uni-
verse, the character, nature, and relations of God and the

70 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT

soul. Nevertheless, to maintain that the darkness here
is total is just as much of an error as to maintain that all
is light. Though we cannot know divine things with
complete fulness, we may yet know them in part.
Though human intellect cannot fathom to the bottom
the depths of spirit, nor follow out to infinity the divine
curve, yet it can drop the plummet of thought deep
enough to know whether this sacred mystery can be
any form of matter or blind force; or whether it must
be thought to be something higher. It can trace out
a section of the infinite hyperbola sufficient to show
whether the curve run by chance or law, towards the
irrational or the rational, the evil or the good, the
impersonal or the personal.

The boundary of the knowable, in the first place, is
not a rigid, immovable limit. It gives to the pick of
the scientist, to the probe of the philosopher, to the
clearer eye of the seer. One age leaves it at a differ-
ent place from that where it found it. If the realm
of the unknown is never to cease to surround that
of the known, it is not because no incursions can be
made into it, but because, however much it gives up,
its infinity is inexhaustible. It is a path that, though
knowable in front as well as behind, is yet so bound-
less that, though the discoverer go on and on, he will
still find ever lengthening vistas of the unexplored to
invite him further still.

In the second place, it should be noticed that he
who pronounces God absolutely unknowable erects
his own inability as a bound for all attainments, and,
moreover, as Martineau has pointed out, he implicitly
attributes to that which he exalts as infinite and un-

THE AGNOSTIC'S DIFFICULTIES 71

limited a very restricting limitation and incapacity,
viz., the inability to make himself known. For, evi-
dently if there is no possibility of God's being known
by man, then on the side of God there must be an
equal impossibility of His making Himself known.
To assert this seems to me to be a gross presump-
tion rather than the humble and modest attitude that
it has been reckoned. A genuine humble-mindedness
would qualify even the confession of its own ignorance
and inability with a doubt of that. The true agnostic
ought rather to speak of God as one of the Hindu
Upanishads speaks of Brahma, " Whosoever knows
this truth, I do not know that I do not know him, he
knows him."

In one sense the inconceivable is incredible. That
which contradicts our reason is certainly not to be
believed ; for it cannot be even thought. In one
sense the infinite is inconceivable, — it is unpicturable,
that is, by the imagination, it is unrealizable by the
wildest fancy. When the world-conquering ape, in
the Chinese fable, aspired to subdue heaven also,
Brahma held out his hand, and bade him leap over it.
Over eye-wearying plains, over range after range of
snow-clad summits the ape flew in his mighty bound,
and alighted on the loftiest mountain peak that he had
ever beheld. But, lo ! it was but one of Brahma's
fingers. So, in our mightiest flights of intellect, we
can pass over but a finger's breadth of the divine.

Nevertheless, the inconceivable, in another sense,
namely, that which overpasses our finite faculties not
by contradiction, but by immensity, is certainly cred-
ible, is, indeed, absolutely necessary to thought. The

72 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT

idea of the infinite, though not to be pictured, is one
clearly thinkable. This infinity of immensity, that
which is more than any finite, is a quite positive idea.
Its vastness in quantity may debar us from enclosing
it in our thought, but it does not prevent our grasping
enough of it to know its quality. It may not be en-
tirely comprehended ; but it is not unintelligible in its
essential characteristics. Magnitude and nature are
different things. Because one cannot be encompassed
in thought, we are not therefore utterly ignorant of
the other. I cannot comprehend in my thought this
immense ocean of air in which we live, and by which
we breathe. Nevertheless, I know its nature, its
chemical constituents, its pressure, elasticity, fluidity,
and other mechanical properties, and I know that
they are essentially the same in every part of the im-
mense atmospheric sea that envelops the globe. Sup-
pose the immensity of the air actually infinite instead
of merely immensely beyond our comprehension,
would its nature be any the less knowable ? Take the
infinite space that our reason compels us to believe in,
and while our minds are unable, evidently, to realize
its extent, yet can we think of it in any part, even at
infinity, as anything else than space, — possessed of
the same three dimensions, and capable of holding ex-
tended objects? Take a cylinder. Prolong it in
thought to infinity. Though we cannot by utmost
stretch of our imagination follow it there, yet we know
that at infinity it would still keep all the character-
istics of a cylinder, and none others. A section made
at right-angles to the axis would always be a circle.
Similarly with a trait or attribute of the divine ; its

THE AGNOSTIC'S DIFFICULTIES 73

enlargement to the infinite scale does not change it
into something else. Infinite power we know is still
power ; infinite wisdom without doubt is still wisdom.
Love in the divine is not something entirely unknow-
able, but the sweetest and fullest form of affection.
Spiritual things are not exalted by immensity or in-
determinateness, but by perfection of character.
God's infinitude is not exclusive, separating Him from
His creation, but rather inclusive. Our knowledge is
not so much erroneous as inadequate. We may
trust it not only for what it tells, but for the direction
in which it points us.

It seems to be thought that somehow that which
we cannot or do not know must be necessarily an-
tagonistic to what we do know, and puts it all in
doubt. But that which must always remain unknown
certainly cannot upset our present knowledge ; it can do
nothing to us that should frighten us, or unsettle our
minds. And that which, though not yet known, may
hereafter be brought within the field of our knowl-
edge must, through that very possibility of being
known, have harmonious relations with our present
knowledge. We can come to understand the un-
known only as we can find in it some likeness to the
already known. The new knowledge will modify the
old ; it may add to it ; but it will not be totally dis-
similar or contradictory. This is the experience of
all growth in knowledge hitherto, that the same order
holds, new truths being unfolded from the old, not
blankly opposing it. And we may rightly presume
it for the remainder. " Doubt ought not to be thrown
upon an intuition or a demonstration," as George

74 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT

Henry Lewes has justly said, in his " Problems of Life
and Mind," ** merely because it is an intuition or a
demonstration of one item in the great whole itself.
If we can resolve an equation of the first or second
degree, this absolute certainty is not disturbed because
there are equations of the sixth degree wdiich surpass
our powers. . . . The existence of an unknown
quantity does not affect the accuracy of calculations
founded on the known quantities of the element."
Certainly, from the mere possibility, if there be such
a possibility, of an upsettal of our present ideas (some-
time or somehow ; no one pretends to say when or
how) no sensible man should discard all the solidly
grounded truths already attained. The logical vice
involved in the argument of Spencer and the agnostic
school in general is, in fact, the very one that savants
and logicians have blamed theologians for falling into.
The agnostic school, it will be found, always starts
with some, generally with a great many, assumptions
as to the infinite and absolute, — what they are, and
what they imply, — and from these they reason down
towards the finite and the created, and because they
find in this process of analysis, comparison, and
logical development many inconsistencies and incon-
ceivabilities, they leap to the conclusion that the ulti-
mate Reality is in every respect unknowable, and that
those attributes of power, wisdom, love, righteousness,
with which humanity, as the result of its experience
and intuition, has invested the divine are all delusive ;
that, in short, we have no justification in assigning to
the First Cause any attributes whatever. The agnostic
thus turns his own inability to argue down correctly

THE AGNOSTIC'S DIFFICULTIES 75

from the infinite into an accusation of the impossi-
bihty of the theist's arguing up from the finite towards
the infinite. Mathematics, however, show that argu-
ments from the infinite to the finite are rarely, if ever,
trustworthy, while arguments from the finite up to the
infinite are often sound and valuable. Because the
agnostic, by inverting the proper method of reason-
ing as regards the infinite, gets himself into trouble,
does it at all follow that no valid results can be at-
tained by the theist when he employs the right
method ?

In point of fact, however much men of science
object to the use of the infinite, they themselves use it
freely; in many departments they cannot proceed
without it. In geometry the conceptions of the line,
circle and sphere ; in mathematics the passage from
the axioms of uniform motion to other forms of
motion ; in algebra the calculus, the mightiest instru-
ment of mathematical investigation, — all these require
as indispensable the conception of the infinitely small,
and reasoning upon it. Astronomy and geology, on
the other hand, lead us to the correlative infinitude,
the infinitely large. Especially do those who belong
to the materialistic school, and scout most contemptu-
ously the idea of any infinite when presented by
theism, make without scruple the most confident as-
sertions of the infinite in their own hypotheses.
Strauss, Vogt, Buchner, Haeckel, each lays down, as
fundamental principles of his system, the eternity of
matter and the immortality of force. Even Herbert
Spencer cannot get along without using the idea of
the infinite. Though he has branded all ideas which

76 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT

involve infinite self-existence as pseudo-ideas, and con-
sequently condemned all forms of theism, pantheism,
and materialism as inevitably involving such illegiti-
mate conceptions, no sooner has he laid theology, as
he imagines, in ruins, and swept off the debris, and
gone about his own system of thought-building, than
he puts in again the same old condemned corner-
stone ; he tells us that matter was uncreated and in-
destructible, and that force always persists in abso-
lutely unchanged quantity, — ideas which necessarily
involve infinite duration both in the past and the
future. And, more than this, the principle of thought
by which science extends its reasonings beyond the
finite is just the same as that by which religion claims
to know the character of the divine, viz., that what is
true up to a limit is true at the limit.

But is not our knowledge confined to the relative ?
it will still be urged. Can we know God in Himself?
Can we think of the Absolute without determining and
conditioning Him? Can we think of the divine
except in the colors of the thinking self? Doubtless
we cannot. But this, again, is a condition of all our
knowledge. We can know no one in himself, out of
his relations to us. We know a friend only by the
various manifestations of his personality, his looks,
tones, actions. And these must come into some con-
nection with ourself. We cannot know a grain of
corn in its inmost nature, irrespective of its appear-
ance to us. We know it only by the phenomena that
it manifests, its shape, hardness, color, taste. More-
over, these manifestations must be manifestations to
our special senses, our individual mind. What they

THE AGNOSTIC'S DIFFICULTIES 77

are or may be independent of our sensibility we can
never know. Whatever perception we have, the per-
ceiving subject is mingled with it, and a factor in the
product, and that perception is such only as the nature
of our faculties allows it to be. Without eyes we can
know no color, without ears, no sound, and the range
of colors, the gamut of sounds, is such only as the
structure of those organs allows.

Now all this is true enough, and instead of this
mystery of the absolute and this veil of the relative
being death-sentences of faith, they are as innocent as
any principle of knowledge that can be found. All
that this famous difficulty amounts to saying is, that
if we take away all that we can know of any object we
cannot know what is left ; and this self-evident law of
all things applies also to God, that we cannot know
Him more fully or know Him by any different way
than we know all other things.

This, I say, is true enough. But about it has gath-
ered a huge penumbra of notions that are not true,
that do not follow. It does not follow, as is inferred,
that because our knowledge is relative to us it is
therefore deceiving. Why may not the relative be
real and true ? Is there anything that necessarily con-
fines genuineness, actuality, or substantiality to that
which does not come into relation with us ? Why is
all this to be attributed to that mental air-castle —
" the thing in itself," or to the relations of things to
other minds rather than to their relations to our
minds ? What reason have we for assuming reality to
be that which cannot appear, or which appears to
other minds or in other relations than to us ? "If

78 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT

reality is inscrutable, then," as Lewes asks, " by what
right can we affirm it different from the manifested
things ? " I maintain that all things are known by
their relations, for the simple reason that all things
exist only in relations. I maintain that the relative,
the phenomena that appear to us, are not mere
phantasms, but parts of the great real. A man stubs
his toe against the curbstone. The sensation within
him is a real thing, the stone is a real thing. Doubt-
less it is something more than what he feels it to be ;
but it is at least this, in this relation. It may be
thought of without reference to its present conditions,
but it is just now, in reference to those conditions,
precisely what he feels it to be. Remove it, and the
whole equilibrium of the cosmos would feel the
change.

And moreover the realities, so far from being made
unknowable to us by our relations to them, are re-
vealed through those relations. To infer that we can
know only the relations, never the things ; that we
can become acquainted only with appearances, never
with substances ; and that we have no reason to be-
lieve in the existence, or to believe anything about
the nature of things and substances, is another fallacy.
Relations have no existence unless there are things
to be related ; and if the things are entirely unknown,
their relations must be also unknown. Appearances
are impossible unless there is something to appear.
And moreover through the relations themselves comes
a knowledge of the things related. In the very ap-
pearances we learn of the substances appearing. My
desk, for example, manifests itself to my touch as

THE AGNOSTIC'S DIFFICULTIES 79

hard and smooth ; to my eye as of a certain shape and
color; to the ear, if it be vigorously struck, as pos-
sessed of a certain resonance. These phenomena and
relations to my sensitive self, speak of something
which has power to impress me with these sensations ;
they speak of something that abides, that I cannot
banish by thinking it away — something that affects a
photograph plate very much as it affects my eye;
something that when I shut my eyes to it or go away
from it, waits for my return in the very same group
of appearances till I return. These quahties speak
of some substantial unity in which they centre, some
reality to which they belong, and whose nature, as it
is in reference to me, is shown by them. Herbert
Spencer arguing for our knowledge of matter, main-
tains that though we know only the relative reality
yet that that stands in such a fixed relation to the
absolute reality that knowledge of one is tantamount
to knowledge of the other. " The conditioned effect
standing in indissoluble relation with the uncondi-
tioned cause and equally persistent with it, so long as
the conditions persist, is to the consciousness supply-
ing those conditions equally real, . . . and for
practical purposes is the same as the cause itself."
This is true, and true for all phenomena, for all reali-
ties. And in accordance with this principle, I claim
that so far from the ultimate Reality, the divine, being
inscrutable, we have no mean knowledge of it. We
have knowledge not only of its existence, but of its
nature. We know it as we know matter or force, as we
know a magnet, a rose, a bird, — by its action upon
us, by its manifestations to our faculties, " by the per-

80 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT

sistent impressions which are the persistent results of
a persistent cause." God is in the manifestations of
Himself which He presents in His created things, as
well as in that mysterious essence behind the mani-
festations. God is in the known as well as in the
unknown.

If the ultimate Reality be utterly unknowable, as
Mr. Spencer says, then any manifestation of it would
be impossible, or would be meaningless. The abso-
lute Reality would be a blank to all intelligence. To
make any predicate of it whatsoever would be illegiti-
mate. Yet Mr. Spencer himself assigns attributes to
the Unknowable. He speaks of it as eternal, o^nni-
presenty as activey as a poweVy and as a cause. Pro-
fessor Tyndall calls God, " the power that makes for
righteousness, intellectual as well as ethical." Here
certainly is a good deal asserted about the character
as well as about the existence of the absolute Reality,
and in terms, moreover, derived from conscious ex-
perience. By what reasoning process have these
terms been attributed to the Supreme Existence?
Nay, by what reasoning process has its Existence
been known or affirmed ? " By our mental obliga-
tion," to answer in words that Mr. Spencer himself
has employed, " to regard every phenomenon as a
manifestation of some power." By that constitution
of our minds by which thought cannot be prevented
from passing behind appearance, and trying to con-
ceive a cause behind. But surely if this reasoning
process is good to show us so much of the divine, it
is good to show us much more. Every phenomenon
of the universe is a real and true manifestation of the

THE AGNOSTIC'S DIFFICULTIES 81

action and character of the supreme Cause. As the
nature of oxygen, though tasteless to the tongue,
odorless to the nose, invisible to the eye, not to be
grasped by the hand, is yet known to us by the
effects which it is still capable of, both mechanically
and chemically, so can we know the God who is Him-
self unobservable by any sense, through His constant
actions and effects in the world.

By studying these phenomena of the creation, then,
we may learn the character of the Creator. The
cosmos reveals that order which gives it its name.
St-eady laws in regular movement, in harmonious
coordination carry on its manifold operations. Con-
densing nebula, whirling cyclone, swinging tides, all
have their place and their rule. The Power from
which this order is the outcome, we may then know
as orderly.

Again, the cosmos manifests itself as a unity. To
the first glance the world, indeed, seems a hurly-burly
of contending powers, a conglomerate of a thousand
different substances, laws, and existences. But as
science, with its closer scrutiny examines it, the
apparent discords melt away. The complex resolve
themselves into combinations of the simple. The
antagonisms reveal themselves as but efforts at stable
equilibrium and coherences. Through the whole
gamut of matter — yes, and of life, with all its num-
berless forms and grades — is discovered the harmonic
note. Energies and laws converge to one focus.
Forces correlate and transform themselves one into
the other, till under the outward diversity we can
recognize but a single ultimate power. All manifesta-

82 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT

tions of the supreme thus resolving themselves into
unity, can we not feel sure that the supreme Cause,
however many modes of manifestation it may have,
is itself one ?

Again, let us survey the history of the world, the
succession of living organisms, the path of human
events. Is there not in these appearances another at-
tribute of the ever-appearing clearly shown — the at-
tribute of life? Nothing remains inert, but all is
full of movement. Nothing remains stagnant, but is
ever pushing forward, climbing up, unfolding. If
sometimes there seems retrogression, it is but the back-
ward curve of the spiral, to mount and enlarge still more.
Species rise above species in an ascending hierarchy.
The new age stands above every olden time. The proc-
ess of the years brings with it widening to every power,
more and more perfection to every form. Has this spon-
taneous activity and continual process of adjustment
towards higher and higher levels, this unfolding evo-
lution, or in plain terms, growth, (the grand discovery
of modern science) nothing .to tell us of the nature
of the power that is behind it? Does it not, in fact,
indicate at the heart of this self-moving universe, that
which alone can move itself, that which alone can grow,
namely a Li/c, the vital energy of the first cause?

Moreover, this order and progress in the universe,
if we fully understand it, is arranged according to in-
tellectual conceptions, exhibits systematic plans and
purposes. Means combine to promote ends. The
thoughts of the mathematicians are reproduced in the
laws of plant and planet. All parts and processes
move towards the fulfilment of one grand design, a

THE AGNOSTIC'S DIFFICULTIES 83

greater and greater perfection. The developing proc-
ess, as it runs up from the insensate to the sensitive,
from the instinctive to the rational, causes more and
more intelligence to shine forth in the world. If
mind in unconscious nature be denied, no one can
deny its manifestation in the conscious parts of nature,
animal and human mind. And this manifested in-
telligence permeating the world, this mind blossom-
ing forth from the central life, must bespeak (on the
lowest physical view of its origin) that central life as
also intelligent.

Again, in the harmonious lines and forms of nature,
blushing blossom and majestic mountain-mass, glow-
ing sunbeam and checkered leaf-shade, we see a
beauty that supplies an exquisite gratification. In the
fruit and grain prepared in summer for our winter
food, in the treasures of metal and fuel and precious
stones built and stored for us in the bowels of the
earth, in the million provisions for the comfort and
happiness of every creature, in all these admirable
adaptations that disclose themselves most exquisitely
to those who examine most carefully, there is shown
the grand sweep of the universe towards the good, the
beneficent. Even in the bitter we find the sweet
hidden ; through struggle and sorrow we are led to
higher success. By bane and by bruise we are con-
ducted to the abiding blessedness. Can we behold all
these tokens of blessedness and love, and rationally
say that they tell us of no benevolence, that they sug-
gest no love in that Being whose power goeth forth
so benignantly in space and time ?

Once more, survey those visible things that especially

84 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT

manifest the invisible. Observe the moral, and spiritual
elements of the world, the instincts of the right, the
authority of moral law. Watch the invincible tide that
sweeps towards justice, the remorse that chastises the
guilty, the serene peace that rewards the pure-hearted.
Consider the aspirations of the holy, the grand visions
of the seer, the saint's consciousness of divine commun-
ion. The mother counts her own life nothing if she may
save her babe. The patriot makes way for liberty over
his spear-pierced body. The martyr goes unwaver-
ingly to the stake rather than be disloyal to truth.
These grand illustrations of the nobleness of human-
ity which age to age renews, their elements lying
latent in every soul, are not they facts of the cosmic
evolution ? Are not they manifestations of the ulti-
mate Reality as truly as any other phenomena ? Are
they not as rightly significant of its nature? Yes.
As the picture shows the artist's sense of beauty, as
the symphony exhibits the composer's musical taste
and capacity, as the judge's administration of justice
discloses his discernment of right and faithfulness to it,
and as the father's self-sacrifice reveals his paternal
love, so through the rectitude, justice, love, faithful-
ness, and holiness manifested in mankind's noblest
representatives do we know in the Creator of man a
rectitude, justice, love, and holiness bright enough to
give the moral images, which, even but dimly reflected
on the mirror of human nature, so glorify it. Not
that these qualities in us adequately represent the at-
tributes of the divine, but rather that on their lower
level they correspond to them, they shadow forth
something of the brighter reality. That in the Su-

THE AGNOSTIC'S DIFFICULTIES 85

preme there must be an intelligence at least as wise
as our highest wisdom, a goodness at least as much
and as good as our best, a real equal to our highest
ideal and our loftiest aspiration — this is the necessary-
inference from the manifestation of those qualities in us.

Here, then, by those very methods of observation,
generalization, and inductive inference by which
physical science is built up, we can know something,
not merely of the existence, but of the nature and at-
tributes of the ultimate Reality, manifested in the
universe. But if science may not admit this sketch
of the divine character as affording any absolute or
complete knowledge of it, it must at least logically
admit it as sufficient relative knowledge, good as far
as it goes, good as its own knowledge of the force
and matter and motion that it talks so confidently of;
good as these are for " good-working hypotheses " ;
nay, as the only hypotheses that will work.

The attributes with which theologians have usually
invested the divine — such as infinity, eternity, omnis-
cience, flawless holiness and absolute perfection and
independence, are indeed, more or less unpicturable
and unverifiable and quite metaphysical.

It is well to admit this.

Suppose then we should relinquish any claim
to a knowledge of them, and thus avoid all the im-
possibilities of knowing God, founded upon them, of
which the agnostic makes so much. Suppose we
claim only for the God of our worship a range as
wide as the known universe, a duration no more vast
than the oldest star-dust, a force as subtle merely as
the cosmic energies, a manifested presence simply as

86 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT

grand, mysterious, noble, and beneficent as the uni-
versal life in which we live and move and have our
being, — surely, we have still left a Being divine enough
to demand our most reverent worship. I am not con-
cerned to vindicate against the doubter any of the
metaphysical attributes which he claims prevent us
from knowing God or believing in Him. If they hold
him back from behef in God, I would say to him,
" Let them go." We have still left within our knowl-
edge and before our eyes the witness of a power and
an intelligence enough, and vastly more than enough,
to thrill us with awe, to quicken us to praise, and to
command us, if we would win any success or true
blessedness, to conform our will to that mightier will
that governs all.

That is the short and simple answer to these meta-
physical quandaries of the agnostics which are so
often regarded as insuperable barriers to faith in the
divine. We not only can know a Being worthy of
our worship, cause of all that comes into existence, a
Being of dimensions and duration to which we can
put no bounds ; but we do know such a Being. The
agnostic knows Him already just as much as any one
else. Only he calls that Being « Nature," not God,
and speaks of it as if it were an independent power.

But seriously to regard nature and God as two sep-
arate powers or to think of the forces of the world as
something independent of God is to abandon mono-
theism and go back to polytheism. It is not only
poor theology, but poor science and poor philosophy.
When men separate God from the forces that are His
own energies, from the laws which are His own habits

THE AGNOSTIC'S DIFFICULTIES , 87

of action, and from the material manifestation which
is His own body, and then try to prove His exist-
ence, no wonder they hunt from room to room of the
boundless mansion of earth and sky, and can find no
separate God visible within the field of their telescope.
But let us begin by recognizing space as His
stature, eternity as His life, and each vibrating stream
of light and heat that bridges the interstellar spaces as
the throbbing pulses of the cosmic organism ; then
we find that that divine face, as Browning says,

" Far from vanish, rather grows,
Or decomposes but to recompose,
Become my universe that feels and grows."

The question, then, becomes much simplified. The
superhuman power, practically eternal and infinite, is
before our eyes, besetting us on every hand. As
Herbert Spencer, in the name of science, says, " Amid
the mysteries that remain the more mysterious the
more they are thought of, there will remain (to the
scientist) the one absolute certainty that he is ever in
the presence of an infinite and eternal energy from
which all things proceed."

So much is admitted to-day by modern science.
The question is narrowed down to the alternative. Is
this eternal power that fills all space an inanimate and
unconscious power or a living and a conscious power ?

Now to this question the agnostic again interposes,
" It is impossible to know." Mr. Ingersoll recom-
mends to us the answer of the Indian to the mis-
sionary who was urging upon him the Christian faith.
The Indian took a stick and made a little circle in the

88 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT

sand, and said, " That is what Indian knows." Then
he made a larger circle round that, and said : " That
is what white man knows. But out here, outside of
the circle, Indian knows just as much as white man."

That was undoubtedly a very clever stroke, — for an
Indian. But for a white man to adopt it as conclusive,
as Mr. Ingersoll does, shows a surprising ignorance of
what the white man of this nineteenth century has
accomplished. It is the glorious victory of modern
science to have demolished such limitations on its
knowledge. The Indian's knowledge covers the small
valley in which he lives. The white man's extends
not only to the larger state or hemisphere where he
has traveled, but to provinces where he has never
been, where no man has ever been. No man has ever
seen the north pole or the other side of the moon ;
yet we are as practically certain of their existence and
character as if we had been there. We have discov-
ered gases that no sense has directly observed, rays
of the spectrum invisible to the eye, suns that no tele-
scope has seen, yet whose courses and times of revo-
lution and velocity through the sky the astronomer
has carefully noted, calculated and verified. And in
these unobserved suns of the stellar depths the man
of science feels certain that the laws of heat, light,
chemic affinity, mathematics, and geometry, are the
same as here. Below, in the smallest germ, science
finds force, law, growth, and rationality. Above, in
the grandest and most distant solar systems, force,
law, growth, and rationality again are manifested.
And in whatever still undiscovered galaxies may lie
trillions of leagues beyond, whose existence is not yet

THE AGNOSTIC'S DIFFICULTIES 89

either known or suspected, the same principles, we
feel certain, will still rule there as here. As to that
which it is impossible for us ever to know, we can of
course say nothing. That, however, can in nothing
affect or concern us. But that which, although it is as
yet unknown, is conceivably knowable, must be recog-
nized, by virtue of that knowability, as owning the
dominion of those principles by which alone things
are knowable.

Whatever, then, lies outside the circle of our abso-
lute knowledge does not interfere with the practical
certainties of theistic faith. The reason is that this
modern science of the white man of the nineteenth
century has found out that the whole universe is
woven out of the same material and spiritual web.
The domain of knowledge — not merely present knowl-
edge, but potential knowledge — is one coherent with
itself and with what is already known. The cosmos
is a unity, from end to end. The molecules of hydro-
gen and sodium in these double suns that the spec-
troscope informs us of, though the telescope cannot
separate them, vibrate in unison with the sodium
flames of our own earth. The same laws of gravita-
tion that draw the falling penny that you toss up in
the air back to the ground, wheel the farthest galaxies
around their hidden astronomic centres, and the
youngest, mistiest nebula of the skies is proceeding
on the same path of evolution by which our own
planet has ripened to its present condition. The
various stages and realms of nature are not exclusive
of one another, but inclusive, enclosing one another
like the nest of concentric shells which make up a

90 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT

conjurer's ball. The vegetable kingdom includes the
inorganic ; the animal kingdom includes the vegetable ;
the human includes the animal and all below it. And
so the divine, we may feel sure, however higher and
grander than the human, will not be wanting in what
forms the glory of man.

Of course, we cannot wholly know God's nature ;
but as little can we know ourselves, and yet be wholly
ignorant of Him. The divine attributes are loftier and
more numerous than the human. But, by the law we
have just stated, they are not alien and without rela-
tion to the human, but inclusive of the human.
Whatever higher qualities God has. He is at least as
wise, at least as just and good, as the human children
He has brought into being; and, even as to that
higher and mysterious centre of Divinity which is ever
to remain a mystery, we may at least feel sure of this,
— that the direction in which it lies is the direction of
man's own highest powers, not that of the inferior and
more meagre qualities of dead matter.

This is the simple course of reasoning by which the
religious thinkers of to-day feel sure that the grand
universe about them is no wheel-work of unconscious
machinery, but the organism of a boundless Life and
superior Reason. The universe is permeated with
order. All its forces and laws are unitary. It is ever
climbing forward, pushing upward, growing and un-
folding.

This order and growth proceed according to ideal
laws and conceptions, exhibit intelligible plans and
purposes. The laws of the arrangement of the leaves
on the stem and of the planets wheeling about their

THE AGNOSTIC'S DIFFICULTIES 91

solar centres conform to one and the same mathe-
matical formula. The grand current of the universe
is ever towards the righteous and the beneficent. The
history of man exhibits a steady moral progress. The
course of evolution progressively exalts conscious
personality and strengthens the foundations of justice,
suppresses the lower and carnal, and refines, diffuses,
and enthrones in power the spiritual.

How do these qualities thus steadily emerge more
and more in nature and man, unless they exist in their
cause ? We can have no appearance unless there is
something to appear. No blossom is evolved unless
there is a seed, — a cause from which it is evolved.
These phenomena of nature and man manifest, then,
the action and character of the supreme Cause. At
the heart of this self-moving, growing universe, there
must be that as has been already suggested, which
alone can initiate motion, can grow, — namely, a Life ;
a life vast and all-powerful enough to produce what
we see that it does produce. And this universal Life
cannot work with such wondrous intelligence, justice,
and beneficence, it cannot be imagined stirring us to
love and righteousness as it does, unless there were in
it an intelligence, rectitude, and loving kindness equal
to our own loftiest aspirations. Surely, when we feel
ourselves commanded with such an unconditional im-
perative to do our duty and to love our neighbor that
even life itself must be sacrificed to obey it, we cannot
believe that it is from any being himself loveless or
from any force or power itself immoral and insensate
that we should have been charged with such insistent
duties.

92 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT

The facts of the world, then, seem plainly to point
to intelligence and benevolence, so high and wide that
we can fix no bounds to them, as characterizing the
supreme source and life of the world.

But here the agnostic interposes with fresh dif-
ficulties. If God be good, how comes it that justice is
so often thwarted, that innocence is not a perfect
shield, that famines Hke that of India to-day are per-
mitted to occur ?

In the problem of evil we have a serious difficulty,
— the oldest and gravest difficulty to belief in a God
worthy of our worship. But, while it is a difficulty,
the difficulties on the other side, in rejecting the idea
of any divine causation or any beneficent purpose, are
far greater. If the source from which humanity
springs be but dead mechanism, destitute of goodness,
whence came this human pity ? Mr. Ingersoll's own
indignant protest against such a doctrine as that of
eternal hell or against the unmerited sufferings of the
innocent, — this and every other manifestation of
human compassion and indignation against wrong,
such as our skeptics and agnostics are so often found
expressing, are the strongest presumption of the divine
goodness and righteousness. Can God have put this
instinct of the lawful desert of virtue, of the injustice
of purposeless, unmerited suffering, into His children's
hearts, and no similar feeling be in His own heart ?
Does the agnostic really fancy that in himself there is
a tenderness of soul superior to that of his Creator ?
Or, if he insist still in arguing on the materialistic
basis, does he really believe that he has a sense of
justice and impulse of good will beyond all that this

THE AGNOSTIC'S DIFFICULTIES 93

great universe that moulded and cradled him pos-
sesses, so that, if the universe could but wake up to
consciousness for a moment, it would be astonished at
the new and superior attributes that this human pygmy
has attained to ? That would, indeed, be most colos-
sal conceit. But, if we are not to puff ourselves out
with such arrogance, then we must trust that there is
some satisfactory explanation to this problem of evil,
dark as it seems, — an explanation entirely consistent
with God's goodness.

And we can, in fact, see no little way into the
enigma. Evil is only incidental, the scaffolding,
shavings, and rubbish, as it were, of nature's building,
all to be removed or utilized later on. No nerve is
made on purpose to ache. The pain is but the danger-
signal, to warn against more serious injuries. Disease,
decay, and death are the accompaniment of laws
that promote or guard life, — the autumn dropping of
the leaves on the great cosmic tree, to prepare for the
new growth and beauty of a more glorious spring-
time. Man's passions, though the source of so large
a part of his miseries, are yet the motor powers of all
his social and moral progress, the channel of life, the
physical basis of love and of all that is most precious
in existence.

Another great part of so-called evil is relative.
Yesterday it was a good eagerly grasped. To all
those below us in the social scale it is still a coveted
boon. To the infinite vision, perhaps, that hardship
which it works for us is but a blessing in disguise, a
spur to drive us on to a still higher good. Again,
take out of the world all the evil that is due to human

94 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT

agency, and how large a part would be gone ! But
all this is plainly incidental to a greater good, — to our
moral freedom and our ability to learn from experi-
ence and be trained up in moral and spiritual excel-
lence. Mr. Ingersoll himself has said, '' If man could
not suffer, the words ' right ' and ' wrong ' would never
have been spoken." Is the insentient creature, then,
better than the moral man? Not so. The develop-
ment of man's moral character, the refining of his
spiritual personality, the development of pity and
sympathy, virtue and self-sacrifice, would all have
been impossible in a world where evil was unknown.
Would that have been a better world than this ? I
believe it would have been a worse world, — certainly,
a far inferior world to this. Its peace would have
been the peace of death. The development of the
human soul is worth more than all the pain it costs,
worth all the mistakes and sins through which it is
reached. It is only in the furnace of affliction that
the purest gold of character is refined. And no one
who has ever borne suffering aright, who has under-
stood its purpose as a process of spiritual purification
and perfection, has complained that it was incom-
patible with God's love to His children. To the ma-
terialist who says " Death ends all," it may seem ex-
cessive and useless. But where there is faith in a
future life for which this is the training school, where
there is believed to be an eternity of life in which God
can make up to each soul for all it has suffered, and
bring all this ooze and mud of earth to its purposed
blossoming in a heavenly clime, there this cloud of
evil turns out its silver lining before the eye ; and we

THE AGNOSTIC'S DIFFICULTIES 95

rejoice to see how " from seeming evil " God is ever
" educing good, and, better yet again, in infinite
progression."

The great poet of EngHsh ideaHsm has well spoken
of " truths that wake to perish never."

Amongst these eternal possessions of the human
heart the foremost of all is the faith in the Divine
Existence. Religion need have no real fear that that
grand thought shall suffer any permanent eclipse. It
is the light of all our seeing ; and they who think they
deny Him but thrust aside some imperfect conception
of Him, only to vindicate the Divine essence under
some other guise.

" I'm an atheist, thank God ! " cried a blundering
boaster of his irreligion. And most denials of Deity
testify in the very same breath to a like unconscious
faith in the Inevitable One. If we cannot grasp Him,
it is because He clasps us. If we cannot see Him, it
is because He is the all-enveloping medium of mortal
vision. If we fancy our prayers needless, it is because
He has loved and blessed us already too much beyond
our deserts. And in the very sigh of the weary soul
that cannot find Him, He returns to assure us that we
cannot lose Him, even if we would.

It is true that all our inductions from observation,
all the generalizations and inferences that nature
authorizes, still fall short of giving us the attributes
and the measure of the truly divine.

We may reach by such scientific methods, to be-
lief in a cosmic being who is indefinitely immense,
but not infinite ; inconceivably enduring, but not
eternal ; wonderfully wise, but not omniscient ; pure

96 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT

as our purest ideal, but not absolutely perfect ; vastly
superhuman, but not supernatural ; grand and ma-
jestic, indeed, but still limited and finite. For, as we
discern this Being only by His manifestations in the
universe, we have no right to attribute to Him any-
thing beyond the measure experienced in that universe ;
and nowhere in the actual universe can we discern
that which is absolutely unlimited, absolutely exempt
from hability to imperfection. What warrant, then,
have we for that infinitude, eternity, omniscience, and
perfection that constitute the really divine attributes
of God?

Yes, I admit that the physical universe manifests
nowhere these highest attributes of the divine. The
knowledge of them is not to be drawn from the con-
templation of nature. These are given, not by obser-
vation or logical inference, but by intuition and
spiritual suggestion, the more direct vision of the
soul that sees beyond the boundary of actual or
possible experience into the realm of pure truth. It
is the straighter entrance into the mind, and the clear
recognition by consciousness of that revealing light
which God imparts to humanity. The warrant of the
validity of these intuitions is the same that warrants
the lower intuitions on which science is based, viz.,
their irrepressible existence, "their persistency in
consciousness " ; " the inexplicability of their arising
or continuing in our behef, unless corresponding to
realities " (to use Spencer's criterion) ; " the complete
satisfaction which is thus given to the needs of the
intellect " (to use Tyndall's test). If our ultimate and
necessary belief in the persistence of force, the inde-

THE AGNOSTIC'S DIFFICULTIES 97

structibility of matter, and the uniformity of nature
be good proof of these basic laws of science (and re-
member : they are the only proof there is of them) ;
if the inexpugnable consciousness of the existence of
an ultimate reality behind appearance establish that
grand truth (as Herbert Spencer tells us it does, and
founds his whole system of evolution on it); if the
fulfilment of the desire of the reason which the lumi-
niferous ether gives should be accepted as good evi-
dence for its reality (as Professor Tyndall tells the
world it should) ; why is not the same kind of proof
vahd evidence for these spiritual truths, these higher
attributes of the divine nature? Certainly, no one
who accepts the current theories or the established
principles of science can rightly object to the
reasoning.

And if by the rigid methods of induction, starting
from the widest observation and proceeding by the
most rigorous logic, we can lay the scientific founda-
tions of religion in the existence of a Being incon-
ceivably immense and enduring, grand as the universe,
beneficent and pure as our highest ideal, wise and
majestic beyond all standards of human wisdom or
material majesty, then we have all that is needed for
humanity's worshipful instincts ; and we may properly
expand this divine ideal in the glow of imagination to
that infinite and absolute plenitude of eternal per-
fection that is required for the complete satisfaction
alike of the adoring heart and the thinking reason.

CHAPTER IV.

THE SCIENTIFIC VALIDITY OF OUR RELIGIOUS
INSTINCTS.

In the history of religion there is nothing more
astonishing, both to its friends and its foes, than the
ineffectiveness of the heaviest argumentative bombard-
ments in driving out faith in spiritual things from the
stronghold of popular belief. When the agnostic
peruses some new critique of the theistic argument or
the latest examination of the belief in a future life, he
throws his hat in the air in exultation, confident that
the superstition cannot survive such another fatal ex-
posure, and timid Christians themselves turn pale with
apprehension of the coming downfall of the church.
But when, the nine days' wonder over, the new dia-
lectical or scientific cannona-de has passed by, the flag
of Christian trust and hope is seen floating as jubi-
lantly as ever over the ancient walls. The wise come
to a recognition of the truth that it was not chiefly by
logical or scientific scaling-ladders that man has
mounted to the heights of religious conviction, and
therefore that it avails little to pull them away.

That from which religion ever wells up afresh from
age to age is the spiritual capacity of humanity,
sensitive to the subtile touches of the unseen world
and the indwelling divine life. The laws of thought,
within whose narrow circle logic is confined, make it
98

VALIDITY OF OUR RELIGIOUS INSTINCTS 99

difficult, if not impossible, to prove satisfactorily not
a few of the propositions of theism. Nevertheless the
forces of feeling and the tides of life, which are ever
pressing us over the logical boundary-lines towards the
Infinite, keep the sacred beliefs of religion perennially
alive. Against all the subtilties of the dialecticians,
in the face of all the discoveries of the scientists, the
heart makes its undying protests. However little, in
strictness of logic, we may be able to prove, the faiths
of our higher nature remain with us, and we say, with
England's poet laureate :

" I think we are not wholly brain,
Magnetic mockeries ; not in vain
Like Paul with beasts, I fought with death ;

*' Not only cunning casts in clay ;

Let science prove we are, and then
"What matters science unto men ?
At least to me, I would not stay.

« Let him the wiser man who springs
Hereafter, up from childhood shape
His action like the greater ape ;
But I was born to other things."

Such is the flat defiance of the heart to the worst
that logical analysis or physical investigation can do.

Now, to the scientific man this seems sheer senti-
mentalism. In his opinion we have no business (the
religious man no more than any one else) to introduce
the agitations of the emotions to disturb the con-
clusions of the intellect. *• Every one," says Biichner,
" may, of course, have convictions of the heart ; but to
mix them up with philosophical questions is unscien-

100 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT

tific." The only question that the scientific world
will admit as pertinent, in reference to the acceptance
of a theory, is the question of its truth or falsehood.
If a theory accords with reason or experience, then it
is true and is to be accepted. If it does not so accord,
then it is not true, and is to be rejected. The ques-
tion of its pleasantness or unpleasantness to one's
tastes, prepossessions, or instincts is not to be consid-
ered for a moment.

Now, to this demand for the pure truth, the simple
fact, I entirely assent, and I say that religion also
must assent. Truth is her sovereign, quite as much
as that of science. It is " they that are of the truth,"
said Christ, that " hear my voice." The true Christian
disciple is known by his allegiance to the genuine and
the real, by the earnestness with which he seeks to
conform his thought and faith to the actualities of the
world. For a people that calls itself Christian to
make pleasant falsities the objects of its worship, and
" make-believe " the staple of its religion, would be
the saddest spectacle the sun anywhere could shine
upon. Truth, however distasteful, is better than the
sweet poison of delusion.

I accept truth, then, i. e.y the evidence of the facts,
as the one thing which should determine our faiths.
But does this require that we should straightway dis-
miss all the instincts of the heart as incompetent to
testify at all in religious things, and admit to the judi-
cial balances only stone fossils and iced syllogisms ?
Grant that truth is the one decisive thing, and the
question arises at once : What is truth, and how can
you determine it ? The moment that you advance to

VALIDITY OF OUR RELIGIOUS INSTINCTS 101

the determination of this question : " What is truth ? "
you must recognize that there are many questions in
which the accord or the discord of the theory with
our native constitution is a most weighty considera-
tion in determining what truth is.

Facts are, indeed, what we must follow ; but lumps
of matter and vibratory motions, pressed plants and
ticketed beetles are not the only facts in existence.
The inextinguishable longings of the human soul,
from which religions spring, are also facts, and as
good testimonies and signs in determining truth as
bug or polyp is. Even in relation to a spider or a bee,
statements in regard to their form, weight, color, and
other material characteristics are not the only scien-
tific facts of importance. The naturalist must record,
as matter of equal or greater gravity, their mental
qualities, the tastes of the one for insect prey, of the
other for honey ; the instinct of the one to spin its
webs, of the other to build and stock its cells ; the
varied impulses that move each in their different ways
of providing for the perpetuation of their respective
species.

So, in regard to man, a knowledge of his immaterial
characteristics is still more essential to a full scientific
knowledge of him than a knowledge of his material
qualities. His desires and longings ; those higher im-
pulses that move him to acts which are incompre-
hensible, if his being is interpreted as a purely ma-
terial one ; those universal intuitions which are the
very condition of observation and the justification of
all reasoning, yet which pass quite beyond the strict
boundaries of either logic or empiricism, these are the

102 THE NEW WORLD AND TEE NEW THOUGHT

most important of all facts about him. And not only
are they facts, but they are facts that speak of more
than the character of their possessor. They are facts
that disclose also the nature of the world in which he
lives, and the nature of the beings with whom he is
connected.

Recall for a moment a few analogies. The building
propensity which urges the tamed beaver, kept in a
house, to strive continually to construct dams, would
assure us, (did we never directly observe the fact), of
the flowing stream, which is the creature's native
haunt. The groping of the new-born lamb for the
mother's dugs speaks plainly of the food there, meet
for the satisfaction of its craving. The sexual appetite
implies the answering sex; and the bird's nest-building
and brooding instinct is prophetic of the coming gen-
eration, and correspondent to its needs. Every part in
nature, having been moulded by the whole, speaks of
that whole, and bids us believe that whatever is needed
as its complement exists somewhere and somehow.
If no telescope had yet revealed Neptune, neverthe-
less, the need of that additional planet to explain the
perturbations of Uranus would assure astronomers of
its existence. When an Agassiz discovers, on the
summit of some mountain, thousands of miles from
the sea, the remains of creatures with gills and fins and
swimming-bladder, he is sure of the existence in that
region, at some past period, of the lake or sea to whose
aquatic environment these organs are correlated. Why
so ? Simply because these creatures needed this watery
element for the use of the organs with which we see
them endowed.

VALIDITY OF OUR RELIGIOUS INSTINCTS 103

This is the customary method of scientific reasoning,
a guiding principle of discovery in nature, viz., that
nowhere in the world do we find a permanent general
need in a living species unless there exists some supply
adjusted to it. There is not a naturalist who thinks
of disputing this, or who, if he did, could make a step
of progress in his knowledge of ancient times.

Now, this same law holds in the realm of human exist-
ence. Whatever needs man's soul feels, whatever im-
pulses are native to his spirit, whatever insights his spirit-
ual vision can attain to, give evidence as to the real na-
ture of the world in which he was developed and the real
agency of the operations going on about him, equally
significant and valid as the laws which the senses indi-
cate or to which the reason testifies.

But just here the scientific objector would doubtless
interpose, and ask us if we are acquainted with the
epoch-making work of Mr. Darwin and Mr. Spencer,
and if we think that, in view of their discoveries, this
argument still has force. Mr. Darwin and Mr. Spencer,
our scientific friends assure us, have shown conclusively
that instinct and intuition are mere products of multi-
tudinous ancestral experiences, accumulated and fused
into these seemingly different things by the combined
action of habit, association of ideas, and heredity.
Though in the individual they may seem innate, in
the race they are not so, but are results of its experi-
ence ; they are developments of low, gross impulses,
and therefore are not worthy to be taken as witnesses
to the fundamental truths of religion.

Suppose we grant this origin of our cravings,
instincts, and intuitions. Let our highest intuitions

104 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT

and aspirations, all the most delica.te forms of the con-
scious Hfe of to-day, be regarded as but the accumu-
lated principal and interest of all that has been felt or
known by every organism in the ascending line, from
the primordial life-cell up to man. Grant all this, and
what is the consequence? Does it overthrow the
validity of our instinctive feelings and intuitive ideas ;
or, rather, does it not solidly establish them ?

For what are the principles ruling in this develop-
ment of the soul ? First and foremost, the principle
of adjustment of the inner to the outer, of the mental
to the material. The very definition of Hfe given by
Herbert Spencer is, " the continuous adjustment of
internal relations to external relations." We dis-
tinguish between a live object and a dead one,
Spencer points out, by noticing whether a change in
its conditions will be followed by a change in the
object itself. Stir it with a stick, or shout at it, and
its immobility or its action tells us whether it is inani-
mate or animate. In the living organism, not only is
there always some response to the outside world and its
events, but there is a fitting response. The rumina-
ting organs correspond to a flora of herbs and grass.
The stinging contractile power of a polyp's tentacles
corresponds, says Spencer, to the sensitiveness and
strength of the creatures serving it for prey. Accord-
ing to the need for more varied and more rapid
adjustment of the internal relations to the outer
relations, the inward organs are more and more com-
plicated and efificient. The degree of life varies as the
degree of correspondence, from the seaweed in its
simple environment up to infinitely complex man, in

VALIDITY OF OUR RELIGIOUS INSTINCTS 105

his infinitely varied circumstances. Wherever there
is a gap between the inner and the outer relations,
there the organism modifies itself to fit the circum-
stances, and to close up the gap. The touch of nature
upon the living creature, and the response of life to
that physical impress, moulds the two into harmony.
The fur-clad northern animal sheds its fur in the south.
The creature from a warm climate, thinly clad or
naked, develops, in a colder zone, a warmer clothing.
The greyhound, brought to the rarefied air of the
Mexican table-land, unable in the first generation to
exert itself as usual without panting and exhaustion,
in the second generation unfolds a new breathing
capacity, and regains the speed, characteristic of the
species. Spencer's and Darwin's works form a treasury
of illustrations of this continual adjustment of the or-
ganism to its environment. It is the very condition
of the creature's existence, says Mr. Darwin, that he
shall exactly fit himself to the world about him. Death
to his species, in the struggle for existence, is the sure
penalty for not thus fitting himself to the facts of the
world. He cannot carry any load of useless organ or
faculty, or the extra weight will cause him to lose the
race. As soon as an organ is no longer of use, it
begins to shrivel and tends to degeneration and
extinction. Mr. Darwin challenged the production
of an instance where any organ, absolutely without
use in the struggle for life, continued for any length
of time to be fully developed.

Such, then, is the first great principle that governs
in the evolution of life, viz., that life is constantly and
necessarily correspondent to the universe without.

106 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT

Now, apply this to the question of reUgion, and what
is its bearing ? Only a new and stronger confirmation
of our position, that the innate idea bespeaks an ob-
jective reality corresponding to it. The persistent
inward state, the constant moral and spiritual needs
of man, his ever-renewed beliefs (whatever they are),
inform us of the persistent outward fact to which they
are correlated. For did the external reality not exist,
the inward adjustment never would have arisen. Or,
if by some chance it had come into existence, then,
having no correspondent object to sustain, renew, and
keep it true, it must, under the influence of the
equilibrating tendencies, either pass away or shift its
form, until it reached a state of natural equilibrium
with its environment.

Or, take the other great principle of the develop-
ment theory, that of descent or heredity. Suppose,
as this theory asks us to beUeve, that our religious
intuitions and our moral sense are only refinements of
our social instincts ; and that these are but modifica-
tions of lower brute impulses ; and these, again, have
been derived and transformed, somehow, out of the
attractions, repulsions, and other activities common to
all matter and force. Nay, we will suppose the truth
even of Professor Huxley's theory, that we are really
only automata, that our feelings, thoughts, and aspira-
tions are necessary results of the sum of motions of
matter and impulses of force in the midst of which
they arise. We will look upon that which we call the
soul as formed gradually from the necessary interaction
of nature's energies ; not as an existence of a different
kind and substance, but only a subtler product of the

VALIDITY OF OUR BELIQIOUS INSTINCTS 107

cosmic forces, risen thus to consciousness. What fol-
lows, then? Is the logical result not this, that if we
inherit from the material world itself, its laws must be
registered not only in our bodies but in our minds ?
Our consciousness, on this theory, is but the liberation
of the dumb life and reason of the cosmos. The laws
of the mind are its laws, precisely because they were
beforehand the laws of that greater whole, nature, of
which mind is but a more specialized part. A con-
stant association in the heart's instincts and wants im-
plies a constant association in the outer world.

The logical connection is a necessary one. For on
this automaton theory of the mind no free-will can
disturb the necessary and proper conclusion. The
general laws of the mind, the universal beliefs of man,
whatever they are, must result from the primitive facts
of the universe, with as little chance of error as in the
calculations of a calculating machine from the data
with which it starts.

If, then, this human sensibility of ours, the first
conscious expression of the hidden life forces of the
universe, should shrink from such an idea as that of a
personal God, and turn instinctively to views such as
are offered us by the materialists, then, I admit, we
ought to reject religion as false and accept atheism as
true. But if, on the contrary, this inner force of
nature, when liberated and expressed in the conscious-
ness of humanity, with one general voice should be
found confessing its natural belief in a creative mind ;
if, in its heart of hearts, it feels daily the need for such
an object of worship and trust, and recoils with an
unconquerable aversion from every godless theory,

108 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT

then we have, in such testimony of the heart, sound
logical proof of the facts to which these instincts of
the heart correspond. They testify to the existence,
as facts in the encircling universe, of those grand
realities which, by iterated and reiterated impressions
on the plastic organization of man, have stamped upon
it these ineffaceable ideas. If the thought of infinity
is indispensable in the ideal world, then it is an essen-
tial element in the real world. If we feel universally
a power within ourselves, urging us to righteousness,
then we know there is a power, not ourselves, working
for that same righteousness.

Do we find faith in a perfect wisdom impressed on
the sensitive tablets of our souls ? Then there is im-
plied, in that grand cosmic die that formed the im-
press, an equally infalHble intelligence. Do we find,
again, within the evolved microcosm, man, an insati-
able hunger for a fuller love and an imperative need
of a more helpful sympathy than man can give ?
Then we may be sure that without, in the macrocosm
that evolved the human miniature, there is the divine
affection corresponding thereto.

To ask, then, in regard to any theory proposed for
our acceptance, whether or not it is in harmony with
our natural instincts, is not an illogical sentimentalism,
but a consideration of real weight in deciding whether
or not it is to be accepted as true. The instincts of
the heart, the intuitions of the mind, the aversions and
longings of the soul, afford indications, not to be over-
looked by any careful reasoner, as to the great realities
in the cosmos which have shaped and moulded them.
The latest scientific theories, instead of invalidating

VALIDITY OF OUR RELIGIOUS INSTINCTS 109

such testimony, approve its competency. Let us,
then, turn to human nature, and see what its testimony
really is.

Is human nature adapted to atheism or to theism ?
Do materialistic theories or religious convictions best
satisfy the human heart ? These questions need but a
brief consideration, so preponderantly do the facts all
lie on one side. The whole history of humanity testi-
fies to its religious tendencies and adaptations, and the
violence to its highest instincts which every anti-
religious system offers. In every human soul there is
a thirst for something above all that the senses can
give. There is an attraction to the infinite and per-
fect, and a groping after the sight and knowledge of
it. The dimmest shadows of this Infinite Being fill
man with awe and reverence. Impelled by sacred im-
pulses, often scarcely understood, but still urging him
on, man bows in worship to the holy mystery. As
the schoolhouse exhibits man's desire for knowledge
and the court-house his sense of justice, so the edifice
of prayer and praise, holiest structure in every land,
witnesses to the religious instinct in man. It matters
not what different forms these may have, the stone
circle of the Druid or the Pagoda of China, the mosque
of Islam or the cathedral of Christianity ; they all give
testimony to the same worshipping instinct.

It will be objected, perhaps, that this religious wave
is but a mere product of superstition, arising from ig-
norance of the laws of nature, and fear engendered by
them.

If it be a superstition, it is one shared by the most
enlightened philosophers and men of science. A

110 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT

Bacon, a Leibnitz, a Pascal, a Locke, each has been its
champion. A Herschel, a Newton, a Liebig, an
Agassiz, a Faraday, each has owned its sway. It is
the testimony of Professor Maudsley, a man by no
means prejudiced in favor of religion, that " there is
hardly one, if, indeed, there be even one, eminent in-
quirer who has denied the existence of God, while
there is notably more than one who has evinced a
childHke simplicity of faith."

There are, of course, some individuals and probably
in the lowest ranks of humanity there may be one or
two whole tribes (although the latest investigations
tend to disprove this), without any trace of the relig-
ious sentiment. So there are men who are color
blind. So there are tribes who cannot count above
ten, or discern the simplest musical discords or con-
cords. But this does not prove the non-existence of
color, harmonies of sound, or distinctions of number.
It shows only in these men the undeveloped state of
their natures and faculties. Neither do the few excep-
tions to the grand hymn of praise and prayer, lifted
by man to God, disprove at all the native adaptation
of man to religion, and his need of it. The worst un-
believers have yet had their beliefs. Accepted forms
of theologic statements have been rudely uprooted by
them, but the irrepressible religious sense has blos-
somed in each with some new faith of the man's own.

The Jew who was excommunicated in Holland as
the most negative of infidels was but so " intoxicated
with God," as wiser minds afterwards saw, that he could
walk in no narrow ecclesiastical path and see the Di-
vine under no one nor threefold form. The represent-

VALIDITY OF OUR RELIGIOUS INSTINCTS 111

ative scoffer of the eighteenth century, leader and
mouthpiece of the disbeUef of the French Revolution,
built at his home in Ferney a chapel with the inscrip-
tion ; " Deo erexit Voltaire." The anathematized
Tom Paine begins that " Age of Reason " which has
been called a very Gospel of Unbelief, with this out-
spoken creed : " I believe in one God and no more
and I look for happiness beyond this life."

Auguste Comte reasoned out a grand scheme which
he called The Positive Philosophy, recognizing only
phenomena, their coexistence and succession, and
ruling out of court the very existence of God or the
soul as the idle fancies of the world's childhood. But
when he had finished it, — lo ! one day he met a
woman who awoke the heart slumbering within him.
His beloved Clotilde revealed to him a law higher
than self-interest, the law of love and worship ; and he
had to graft on to his system such sort of religion as
was still possible after the immortal and the infinite
had been ruled out. A makeshift Deity was impro-
vised out of " Collective Humanity," and two hours a
day, divided into three private services were to be
spent in the adoration of this " Grand Being," under
the form of a mother with her child in her arms.
The image of the fair idol, dress, posture, everything,
was to be brought distinctly to mind, and the whole
soul was to be prostrated in her honor.

With such chaff will the spirit of man seek to sat-
isfy its spiritual hunger when legitimate food is
denied it !

Suppose that we knew two young men, starting out
on the career of life, in the flush of youthful energy.

112 TEE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT

One of them has a dear, strong faith in the immortal
soul within him and the all wise and all holy God
above, and has determined to live as these beliefs dic-
tate to him that he should live. The other is destitute
entirely of religious faith and has made up his mind,
also, to act in accordance with his Atheistic opinions.

Of which would any one have the brightest expecta-
tions ? Which life, by its usefulness, its contented-
ness, its integrity and nobility would show itself in
conformity with the laws and forces of nature?

In such a situation, is there any uncertainty as to
the verdict ?

Suppose a statesman, founding a new state, should
take as its foundation stones, principles like these :
" No behef in God or a future state is to be tolerated
under this government ; no worship of any superhu-
man being is to be allowed ; all efforts at spiritual per-
fection, or the gratification of the religious sentiments,
are to be as far as possible suppressed ; men must
remember that they are but more-developed brutes,
and each must look out for his own gratification and
the furtherance of his self-interest." Who would be
wild enough to expect to make a nation hve and pros-
per on such a basis ? As Robespierre told the French
Jacobins with reference to this very point : " If there
were no God in existence, it would be necessary to the
national well-being to invent one."

Or take but a few of the common test experiences
of life. When the sobbing wife looks upon the grave
of the beloved partner of her life ; when the young
man is sore beset by the seductions of unlawful pas-
sion ; when the martyr to truth sees the blazing pyre

VALIDITY OF OUR RELIGIOUS INSTINCTS 113

staring him in the face, unless he will forswear his
honest convictions — which is it that in such crises best
meets the needs of the heart ? Which is it that re-
sponds to any man's sense of fitness or justice ? To
know that this world is the kingdom of an Almighty
God, whose attributes are those of wisdom, love, and
hoUness, a God who will conquer finally all evil, help
the struggling, and reward the upright, if not here,
then in a more blessed hereafter; or, on the other
hand, to beHeve that " the universe is simply an end-
less coil of antecedents and consequents, unwinding
from the drum of time by unchangeable law ; a mon-
strous engine of matter and force, grinding on re-
morselessly, caring not whom it kills, utterly unguided,
unheeding, unknowing " ? Can any one doubt which
of these answers alone corresponds to the native in-
stincts of man ? Can any reasonable mind be uncer-
tain as to which answer is adjusted to the characteristic
features of humanity, which have been impressed on
the heart of man by the grand seal of nature ?

Some half century ago a German writer published
a piece of verse which began in this way : " Our
hearts are oppressed with the emotions of a pious
sadness at the thought of the ancient Jehovah who is
preparing to die."

The verses were a dirge upon the death of the liv-
ing God, who was soon, as the author believed, to
perish from the belief of reason ; and the author, like
a well-educated son of the nineteenth century, be-
stowed a few poetic tears upon the obsequies of the
eternal.

There are men at the present day to whom likewise

114 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT

there is no longer any God, and who do not even
affect the politeness of making any lament, but openly
exult over their discovery.

But ah ! if that should indeed be true ! What a
funeral pall would it throw over human Hfe ! How
would it strip existence of its highest aspirations and
sweetest consolations !

Science and culture I know, have given us wonder-
ful gifts and have made marvelous discoveries.

But what thoughtful man will dare to say that they
have so taken the place of faith in providing for man
that religion is of no more use, in these modern days ?

What thoughtful man will say that either modern
culture or modern science can fill the hearts of its
votaries with more sincere joyfulness than the hearts
of David or Paul or the humblest true Christians have
held?

What thoughtful man will dare to say that any or
all of our modern inventions, our patent appliances
and boasted sources of enlightenment can do more to
make a household contented, or can turn out better,
sweeter, higher-minded men and women than religion
with its old-fashioned beliefs and principles ?

And if science and culture cannot do this, — most
certainly they can never take the place of religion.

Remove science and all its admirable discoveries
from our modern world, and humanity would indeed
be thrust far backward on the path of progress, in
straits of daily inconvenience, thoroughly uncomforta-
ble even to imagine.

But expel religion from the world and humanity
would miss something still more indispensable. Hu-

VALIDITY OF OUB RELIGIOUS INSTINCTS 115

manity would suffer the most irreparable of all losses.
It would lose the ideals which led it on, the strength
in which it faced difficulties and obloquies ; the hopes
that have consoled it in every trial and bereavement.

There are moments certainly in every one's life when
those, fullest stocked with learning, feel themselves as
benighted as the most illiterate ; when they look in
vain to all their science and culture to furnish a gleam
of light or hope to illuminate the gloom.

Hear the confession of a German satirist (who had
thrown as many bitter mockeries at religion as any
man of his generation) in regard to his personal ex-
periences as he stood at the bedside of his dying
mother.

" I thought over," said Heinrich Heine, " all the
great and the little inventions of man, — the Doctrine
of Souls, Newton's System of Attraction, The Uni-
versal German Library, the Genera Plantarum, the
Calculus Infinitorum, the Magister Matheseos, the
Right and the Oblique Ascension of the Stars and
their Parallaxes ; but nothing would answer. And
she lay out of reach, lay on the brink and was going,
and I could not even see where she would fall. Then
I commended her to God, and went out and composed
a prayer for the dying, that she might read it. She
was my mother ; and she had always loved me so
dearly ; and this was all that I could do for her."

" We are not great ; and our happiness is that we can
believe in something greater and better."

Such is the indispensable need of God felt by the
human heart, even by such inveterate jesters as a
Heine.

116 THE NEW WORLD AND TEE NEW THOUGHT "

Such are the religious instincts of man, not to be
denied without working deepest misery and mischief.
Now, whichever of the two opposite theories of the
formation of these natural needs and instincts we
adopt; whether we say, as the theist has formerly
done, that they are formed by God Himself, or
whether we take the position of the evolutionists, that
they are formed by the persistent moulding power of
nature over the individual, by the reiterated impres-
sions upon successive generations of the surrounding
universe (continuous correspondence with which is
the very condition and essence both of life and mind)
— on either theory it is impossible to believe that
these God-desiring impulses are contradictions of the
reality of nature. Can it be thought for a moment,
that these inborn affirmations of the soul within man,
and of the over-soul without him, are organized
delusions on the part of nature, are falsehoods per-
sistently renewed by the universe in the formation of
every fresh organism ? To believe that were suicidal
to all reasoning, to every system of thought. But if
that be incredible, if that cannot be accepted, there is
no alternative except to recognize in this universal
outcry of heart and flesh for the living God, in this in-
stinctive faith in spiritual things, ever springing up
afresh, however much it may be trampled upon, a sure
attestation of the infinite and eternal realities cor-
respondent to them.

CHAPTER V.

EVOLUTION AND CHRISTIANITY.

In the life and letters of Charles Darwin there is a
memorandum copied from his pocket note-book of
1837, to this effect. " In July, opened my first note-
book on Transmutation of Species. Had been greatly
struck with the character of the South American
fossils and the species on Galapagos Archipelago."

These facts, he says, were the origin of all his epoch-
making views as to the development of life and the
work of natural selection in evolving species.

His first suspicions that species were not immutable
and made at one cast, directly by the fiat of the
Creator, seemed to him, at the outset, he says,
" almost like murder^

To the greater part of the church, when in 1859
after twenty years of work, in accumulating the proofs
of his theory, he at last gave it to the world, it seemed
quite as bad as murder.

It is very interesting now, to look back upon the
history and career of the Darwinian theory in the last
forty years ; to recall, first, the fierce outcry and de-
nunciation it elicited ; then, the gradual accumulation
of corroboratory evidence from all quarters in its
favor ; the accession of one scientific authority after
another to the new views ; the softening little by
little, of ecclesiastical opposition ; its gradual accept

117

118 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT

ance by the broad-minded, alike in theological and
scientific circles; then in these recent years, the ex-
altation of the new theory into a scientific and phil-
osophic creed, wherein matter, force and evolution
constitute the New Trinity, which unless the modern
man piously believes, he becomes anathematized and
excommunicated by all the priests of the new dog-
matism.

In the field of science, undoubtedly, evolution has
won the day. Nevertheless, in religious circles, old
time prejudices and slow conservatism, clinging to its
creeds, as the hermit crab clings to the cast off shell
of oyster or clam, still resist it. The great body of
the Christian laity, looks askance on it. And even in
this progressive American country, one of the largest
and most liberal of American denominations not long
ago tried and condemned one of its clergy for heresy,
on account of the publication of a book, in which the
principles of evolution are frankly adopted and applied
to Christianity. For a man to call himself a Christian
evolutionist, is, (we have been told by high orthodox
authority) a contradiction in terms.

I think it is safe to say to-day, that evolution has
come to stay. It is too late to turn it out of the man-
sions of modern thought. And it is therefore a vital
question, " can belief in God and the soul and divine
revelation abide under the same roof in peace ? Or
must Christianity vacate the realm of modern thought
and leave it to the chilUng frosts of materialism and
skepticism ?

Now, if I have been able to understand the issue
and its grounds, there is no such alternative, — no such

EVOLUTION AND CHRISTIANITY 119

incompatibility between evolution and Christianity.
There is, I know, a form of evolution and a form of
Christianity which are mutually contradictory. There
is a form of evolution which is narrowly materialistic.
It dogmatically asserts that there is nothing in exist-
ence but matter and physical forces and the iron laws
according to which they develop. Life, according to
this school, is only a product of the happy combi-
nation of the atoms ; feeling and thought are but the
iridescence of the brain-tissues ; conscience but a
transmuted form of ancestral fears and expediencies.
Soul, revelation, providence are nothing but illusions
of the childish fancy of humanity. Opposed to this
materialism and fighting with all the intensity of those
who fight for their very life, stands a school of Chris-
tians who maintain that unless the special creation of
species, by Divine fiat, and the frequent intervention
of God and His angels in the world be admitted, re-
ligion has received its death wound. According to
this school, unless the world was created in six days,
and Joshua commanded the sun to stand still, and
Hezekiah turned the solar shadow back on the dial,
and Jesus was born without human father, and unless
some new miracle will interfere with the regular course
of law, of rain and dew, of sickness and health, of
cause and effect, whenever a believer lifts up his voice
in prayer, — why then, the very foundations of religion
are destroyed.

Now, of course, between a Christianity and an evo-
lutionism of this sort, there is an irreconcilable con-
flict. But it is because neither of them is a fair,
rational or true form of thought. When the principle

120 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT

of evolution is properly comprehended and ex-
pounded ; when Christianity is interpreted in the light
that history and philosophy require, the two will be
found to have no difficulty in joining hands. Though
a purely naturalistic evolutionism may ignore God;
and a purely supernatural religion may have no room
for evolution, a natural religion and a rational evolu-
tion may yet harmoniously unite in a higher and more
fruitful marriage. Let us only recognize evolution by
the Divine Spirit, as the process of God's working in
the world, and we then have a theory which has a
place and a function, at once for all that the newest
science has to teach and the most venerable faith
needs to retain.

In the first place, evolution is not itself a cause ; it
is no force in itself. It has no originating power. It
is simply a method and law of the occurrence of
things. Evolution shows that all things proceed,
little by little, without breach of continuity ; that the
higher ever proceeds from the lower ; the more com-
plex ever unfolds from the more simple. For every
species or form, it points out some ancestor or natural
antecedent, from which by gradual modification, it has
been derived. And in natural selection, in the influ-
ences of the environment, in sexual selection, use and
disuse, sterility, and the variability of the organism,
science shows us some of the secondary factors or
conditions of this development. But none of these are
supposed by it to be first causes or originating powers.
What these are, science itself does not claim to declare.

Now, it is true, that this unbroken course of de-
velopment, and this omnipresent reign of law are in-

EVOLUTION AND CHRISTIANITY 121

consistent with the theological theories of supernatural
interventions that have so often claimed a monopoly
of faith. But independent of all scientific reasons, —
on religious and philosophical grounds themselves,
this dogmatic view is no longer to be accepted. For
if God be the God of all-seeing wisdom and foresight
that reverence conceives Him to be, His work should
be too perfect from the outset to demand such changes
of plan and order of working. The great miracle of
miracles, as Isaac Taylor used to say — is that " Provi-
dence needs no miracles to carry out its all perfect
plans."

But if, I hear it asked, — if the huge machine of the
universe thus grinds on and has ever ground on,
without interruption ; if every event is closely bound
to its physical antecedent ; Hfe to cell ; mind to brain,
man to his animal ancestry and bodily conditions, —
what other result will there be than an inevitable sur-
render of materialism ? When Laplace was asked by
Napoleon, on presenting to him his famous essay on
the nebular hypothesis of the origin of the stellar
universe — " Why do I see here no mention of the
Deity," — the French astronomer proudly replied —
" Sire, I have no need of that hypothesis." Is not
that the natural lesson of evolutionism, — to say that
God is an hypothesis, no longer needed by science,
and which progressive thought, therefore, better dis-
miss ? I do not think so. Old time materialism dis-
missed the idea of God because it dismissed the idea
of a beginning. The forces and phenomena of the
world were supposed eternal and therefore a Creator
was unnecessary. But the conception of evolution is

122 THE NEW WOBLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT

radically different. It is a movement, that demands a
motor force behind it. It is a movement moreover,
that according to the testimony of modern science,
cannot have been eternal. The modern theory of
heat and the dissipation of energy requires that our
solar system and the nebula from which it sprang
should have had a beginning in some finite period of
time. The evolutionary process cannot have been
going on forever; for the amount of heat and the
number of degrees of temperature and the rate of
cooling, are all finite, calculable quantities, and there-
fore the process cannot have been going on for more
than a certain finite number of years, — more or less
millions, say. Moreover, if the original fire-mist was
perfectly homogeneous, and not impelled into motion
by any external force, it would never have begun to
rotate and evolve into planets and worlds. If per-
fectly homogeneous, it would have remained always
balanced and always immobile. To start it on its
course of rotation and evolution, there must have been
either some external impelling power, or else some
original differentiation of forces, for which again some
cause, other than itself must be supposed. For the
well-known law of inertia forbids that any material
system that is in absolute equilibrium should spon-
taneously start itself into motion. As John Stuart
Mill admitted — " the laws of nature can give no
account of their own origin."

In the second place, notice that the materialistic
interpretation of evolution fails to account for that
which is most characteristic in the process ; the steady
progress it reveals.

EVOLUTION AND CHRISTIANITY 123

Were evolution an aimless, fruitless motion, rising
and falling alternately, or moving round and round in
an endless circle, the reference of these motions to the
blind forces of matter, might have perhaps a certain
plausibility. But the movements of the evolution
process are of quite a different character; they are
not chaotic ; they are no barren, useless circlings back
to the same point, again and again. They are progress-
ive ; and if often they seem to return to their point
of departure, we see, on close examination, that the
return is always on a higher plane. The motion is a
spiral one, ever advancing to loftier and loftier ranges.

Now this progressive motion is something that no
accidental play of the atoms will account for. For
chance builds no such rational structures ; chance
writes no such intelligent dramas, with orderly be-
ginning, crescendo and climax. Or if some day,
chance builds a structure with some show of order in
it, to-morrow it pulls it down. It does not move
steadily forward with permanent constructions.

The further science penetrates into the secrets of
the universe the more regular seems the march of
thought presented there; the more harmonious the
various parts ; the more rational the grand system
that is discovered. " How the one force of the uni-
verse should have pursued the pathway of evolution
through the lapse of millions of ages, leaving traces
so legible by intelligence to-day, unless from begin-
ning to end the whole process had been dominated by
intelligence," has well been said to pass the limits of
conjecture. The all luminous intelligibility of the
universe is the all sufficient proof of the intelligence

124 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT

of the cause that produced it. In the annals of sci-
ence there is nothing more curious than the prophetic
power which those savans have gained who have
grasped this secret of nature — the rationahty of the
universe. It was by this confidence in finding in the
hitherto unexplained domains of nature what reason
demanded, that Goethe, from the analogies of the
mammalian skeleton discovered the intermaxillary
bone in man; and Sir William Hamilton from the
mathematical consequences of the undulation of light
led the way to the discovery of conical refraction.

A similar story is told of Professor Agassiz and
Professor Pierce, the one, the great zoologist, the
other the great mathematician of Harvard University.
Agassiz, having studied the formation of radiate ani-
mals and having found them all referable to three
different plans of structure, asked Professor Pierce,
without informing him of his discovery, how to exe-
cute all the variations possible, conformed to the
fundamental idea of a radiated structure around a
central axis. Professor Pierce, although quite ignorant
of natural history, at once devised the very three
plans, discovered by Agassiz, as the only fundamental
plans which could be framed in accordance with the
given elements.

How significantly do such correspondences speak
of the working of mind in nature, moulding it in con-
formity with ideas of reason. Thus to see the laws
of thought exhibiting themselves as also the laws of
being seems to me a fact sufficient of itself to prove
the presence of an overruling mind in nature.

Is there any way of escaping this obvious conclu-

^EVOLUTION AND CHRISTIANITY 125

sion ? The only method that has been suggested has
been to refer these harmonies of nature back to the
original regularity of the atoms.

As the drops of frozen moisture on the window
pane build up the symmetrical frost-forms, without
design or reason, by virtue of the original similarity
of the component parts, so do the similar atoms,
without any more reason or plan, build up the har-
monious forms of nature.

But this answer brings us face to face with a
third significant problem, a still greater obstacle to
materialism. Why are the atoms of nature thus regu-
lar— thus exactly similar, one to another ? Here are
millions on millions of atoms of gold, each just alike.
Millions and millions of atoms of oxygen, each with
the same velocity of movement, the same weight, size
and chemical properties. All the millions on millions
of atoms on the globe are not of infinitely varied
shape, weight, size, quality ; but there are only some
seventy different kinds ; and all the millions of one
kind are substantially alike, so that each new atom of
oxygen that comes to a burning flame does the same
work and acts in precisely the same way as its fellows.

Did you ever think of that ? If you have ever
realized what it means, you must recognize this uni-
formity of the atoms, billions and billions of them as
like one another as if run out of the same mould, as
the most astonishing thing in nature.

Now, among the atoms, there can have been no
birth, no death, no struggle for existence, no natural
selection to account for this. What other explanation,
then, in reason is there, than to say as those great

126 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT

men of science, Sir John Herschel and Clerk Max-
well (who have in our day, most deeply pondered this
curious fact) have said, — that this division of all the
infinite host of atoms in nature into a very limited
number of groups, all the billions of numbers in each
group precisely alike in their mechanical and chemical
properties, gives to each of the atoms " the essential
characters, at once of a manufactured article and a
subordinate agent."

Evolution cannot then be justly charged with ma-
terialism. On the contrary, it especially demands a
divine creative force as the starter of its processes
and the endower of the atoms with their peculiar
properties. The foundation of that scientific system
which the greatest of modern expositors of evolu-
tion has built up about the principle of development (I
mean, of course, Herbert Spencer's Synthetic Phi-
losophy), is the persistence of an infinite, eternal and
indestructible force, of which all things that we see
are the manifestations.

The evolution theory is indedd hostile to that phase
of theology which conceived of God as a being out-
side of nature. To suppose, as many of the camp-
followers of the evolution philosophy do, that the
processes of successive change and gradual modifica-
tion which have been so clearly traced out in nature,
relieve us from the need or right of asking for any
anterior and higher cause of these processes ; or that
because the higher and finer always unfolds from the
lower and coarser, therefore there was really nothing
else in existence at the beginning than these crude
elements which alone we see at first : and that

EVOLUTION AND CHRISTIANITY 127

these gross, sensuous facts are the only source and
explanation of all that has followed them, — this is
a most superficial and inadequate view. For this ex-
planation, as we have already noticed, furnishes no
fountain head of power to maintain the constant up-
ward-mounting of the waters in the world's conduits.
It furnishes no intelligent directions of these streams
into ever wise and ordered channels. To explain the
higher hfe that comes out of these low beginnings, we
must suppose the existence of spiritual powers, unseen
at first, and disclosing themselves only in the fuller,
later results, the moral and spiritual phenomena that
are the crowning flower and fruit of the long process.
When a thing has grown from a lower to a higher
form, its real rank and nature is not shown by what it
began in, but by what it has become. Though chem-
istry has grown out of alchemy and astronomy out
of astrology, this does not empty them of present
truth or impair at all their authority and trustworthi-
ness to-day. Though man's minds have grown out
of the sensations of brutish ancestors, that does not
take away the fact that he has now risen to a height
from which he overlooks all their mists and sees the
light which never was on sea or land. The real be-
ginning of a statue is not in the rough outline in
which it first appears, but in the creative idea of the
perfect work which regulates its whole progress.

So to discern the real character and motor power
of the world's evolution, we must look, not to the
beginnings, but to its end ; and see in the latest stages
and its highest moral and spiritual forms and forces, — ■
not disguises of the earlier stages, but ampler mani-

128 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT

festations of that divine power and purpose which is
the ever-active agent, working through all the varied
levels of creation.

The evolution theory is, indeed, it must be acknowl-
edged, hostile to that phase of theology which con-
ceives of God as a being outside of nature; which
regarded the universe as a dead lump, a. mechanical
fabric where the Creator once worked, at the im-
mensely remote dawn of creation ; and to which again
for a few short moments, this transcendental Power
stooped from His celestial throne, when the successive
species of living beings were called into being, in
brief exertions of supernatural energy. But this
mechanical view of God who, as Goethe said,
"only from without should drive and twirl the uni-
verse about," what a poor conception of God, after all,
was that; — not undeserving the ridicule of the great
German.

Certainly, the idea of God which Wordsworth has
given us, as a power, not indefinitely remote, but ever
present and infinitely near, — *

" A motion and a spirit which impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thoughts
And rolls through all things."

is a much more inspiring and venerable thought. This
is the conception of God that Paul has given us ; " the God
in whom we Hve and move and have our being " ; this
is the conception that the Book of Wisdom gives us, —
" the Divine Spirit who fiUeth the world." And to
this conception of God, evolution has no antagonism ;
but on the contrary, throws its immense weight in its
favor.

EVOLUTION AND CHRISTIANITY 129

Evolution in fact, instead of removing the Deity
from us, brings Him close about us ; sets us face to
face with His daily activities. The universe is but the
body of which God is the soul ; " the interior Artist," as
Giordano Bruno used to say, who from within, moulds
His living shapes of beauty and power. What else in
fact is evolution but the secular name for the Divine
Indwelling; the scientific alias for the growth and
progressive revelation of the Holy Spirit, daily putting
off the old and putting on the new; constantly busy
from the beginning of time to this very day; inces-
santly moulding and forwarding His work.

Not long ago I came across the mental experience
of a working geologist which well illustrates this.
" Once in early boyhood," he says, " I left a lumber-
man's camp at night, to go to the brook for water. It
was a clear, cold, moonlight night, and very still, ex-
cept the distant murmuring of the Penobscot at some
falls. A sense of the grandeur of the forest and
rivers ; the hills and sky and stars came over the boy
and he stood and looked around. An owl hooted and
the hooting was not a cheerful sound. The men were
all asleep and the conditions were lonely enough. But
there was no feeling of loneliness ; for with the sense
of the grandeur of creation, came the sense very real
and strong of the Creator's presence. In boyish
imagination, I could see His Almighty hand, shaping
the hills and scooping out the valleys, spreading the
sky overhead and making trees, animals and men.''

" Thirty years later, I camped alone in the open air
on the bank of the Gila. It was a clear, cold, moon-
light night. The camp-fire was low, for the Apaches

130 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT

were on the war path. An owl again hooted. But
again all loneliness was dispelled by a sense of the
Creator's presence, and the night of long ago by the
Penobscot came into my mind ; and with it, came the
question : What is the difference to my mind between
the Creator's presence, now and then ? "

" To the heart, it was very like ; but to the mind
very different. Now, no great hand was shaping
things from without. But God was everywhere
reaching down through long lines of forces and
shaping and sustaining things from within. I had
been traveling all day by mountains of lava which had
cooled long ages ago, and over grounds, which the
sea, now far off, had left on its beaches ; and with the
geologist's habit, recalled the lava still glowing and
flowing, and the sea still rattling its pebbles on the
beaches. But now, I knew it was by forces within the
earth that the lava was poured out, and that the waves
which rolled the pebbles were driven by the wind and
the wind by the sun's heat. And the forces within
the earth and the heat within the sun came from still
further within. Inward, always inward, the search for
the original energy and law, carried my mind ; for He,
whose will is the source of all force, and whose thought
is the source of all law is on the inside of the universe.
The kingdom of God is within you " (James E. Mills).

Now this change from the boyish idea of God
creating things from without, to the manhood's view
of God, creating and sustaining all things from within,
is, indeed as this working geologist so well says, " the
essential change which modern science has wrought
in the habit of religious thought."

EVOLUTION AND CHRISTIANITY 131

From Copernicus to Darwin, every important step
in the development of science has cost the giving up
of some idea of God creating things, as man shapes
them, from without, and has illustrated the higher idea
of a God, reaching His works from within. " Every
step has led towards the truth that life and force come
to the forms in which they are clothed, from God by
the inner way ; and by the same way, their law comes
with them ; and that the forms are the effects of the
force and Hfe, acting according to the law."

Now, this is certainly a most noble, uplifting con-
ception of the world. But how, perhaps you ask, can
we find justification for such a view of the Divine
Spirit as indwelling in nature ?

Now when we consider this question, we find that
one of the phases of the evolution philosophy that has
been a chief source of alarm is precisely the one that
lends signal support to this doctrine of Divine In-
dwelling.

Evolution especially excites aversion, because it
connects man so closely with nature ; our souls are
traced back to an animal origin ; consciousness to
instinct, instinct to sensibility and this to lower laws
and properties of force. By the law of the correlation
of forces, our mental and spiritual powers are regarded
as but transformed phases of physical forces, con-
ditioned as they are on our bodily states and changes ;
and the soul, it is said, is but a child of nature, who is
most literally its mother.

To many minds this is appalling. But let us look
it candidly in the face and see its full bearing. We
will recall in the first place, the scientific law : no life

132 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT

but from preceding life. Let us recollect next the
dictum of mechanics : no fountain can rise higher than
its source. The natural corollary and consequence of
this is — no evolution without preceding involution.
If mind and consciousness come out of nature, they
must first have been enveloped in nature; resident
within its depths. If the spirit within our hearts is
one with the force that stirs the sense and grows in
the plant ; then that sea of energy that envelops us is
also spirit.

When we come to examine the idea of force, we
find that there is only one form in which we get any
direct knowledge of it, only one place in which we
come into contact with it; and that is in our own
conscious experiences ; in the efforts of our own will.

According to the scientific rule always " to interpret
the unknown by the known, not the known by the
unknown," — it is only the rational conclusion that
force elsewhere is also will. Through this personal
experience of energy, we get, just once, an inside
view of the universal energy, and we find it to be
spiritual ; the will-force of the infinite Spirit, dwelling
in all things. That the encircling force of the uni-
verse can best be understood through the analogy of
our own sense of effort, and therefore is a form of will,
of spirit, is a conclusion endorsed by the most eminent
men of science, such as Huxley, Herschel, Carpenter
and Le Conte.

There is therefore no real efficient force but spirit.
The various energies of nature are but different forms
or special currents of this Omnipresent Divine Power.
The laws of nature are only the wise and regular

EVOLUTION AND CHRISTIANITY 133

habits of this active Divine will ; physical phenomena
are but projections of God's thought on the screen of
space ; and evolution is simply the slow, gradual un-
rolling of the panorama on the great stage of time.

In geology and paleontology, evolution is not
directly observed, but only inferred. The process is
too slow ; — the stage too grand for direct observation.
There is one field and only one where it has been
directly observed. This is in the case of domestic
animals and plants under man's charge. Now, as
here, where alone we see evolution going on, it is
under the guidance of superintending mind, — it is a
justifiable inference that in nature, also, it goes on
under similar intelligent guidance.

Now, it is the observation of distinguished men of
science that we see precisely such guidance in nature.
There is nothing in the Darwinian theory, as I said,
that would conduct species upward rather than down-
ward. To account for the steady upward progress we
must resort to a higher cause. We must say with
Asa Gray — " Variation has been led along certain
beneficial lines, like a stream along definite and useful
lines of irrigation." We must say with Professor Owen :
" A purposive route of development and change, of
correlation and interdependence, manifesting intelli-
gent will, is as determinable in the succession of races
as in the development and organization of the individ-
ual. Generations do not vary accidentally, in any
and every direction ; but in preordained, definite and
correlated courses."

This judgment is one which Professor Carpenter has
also substantially agreed with, declaring that the his-

134 TEE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT

tory of evolution is that of a consistent advance along
definite lines of progress, and can only be explained
as the work of a mind in nature.

The old argument from design, it has been fre-
quently said of late, is quite overthrown by evolution.
In one sense it is : i. e.y the old idea of a special pur-
pose and a separate creation of each part of nature.
But the divine agency is not dispensed with by evo-
lution ; it is only shifted to a different point of appli-
cation ; it is transferred from the particular to the
general, from the fact to the law. Paley compared
the eye to a watch, and said it must have been made
by a divine hand. The modern scientist objects that
the eye has been found to be no hand-work. It is the
last result of a complicated combination of forces ; the
mighty machine of nature, which has been grinding at
the work for thousands of years. Very well — but the
modern watch is not made by hand, either ; but by a
score of different machines. But does it require less,
or more intelligence to make the watch in this way ?
Or if some watch should be. discovered that was not
put together by a human hand, — but formed by an-
other watch, not quite so perfect as itself, and this by
another watch, further back, — would the wonder and
the demand for a superior intelligence as the origin
of the process be any the less ? Rather would it be
greater. The further back you go and the more gen-
eral and invariable and simple you suppose the funda-
mental laws to have been that brought all things into
their present form, then it seems to me, the more
marvelous becomes the miracle of the eye, the ear,
each bodily organ when recognized as a climax to

EVOLUTION AND CHRISTIANITY 135

whose consummation each successive stage of the
world has contributed. How much more significant
of progressive intelligence than any special creation is
this related whole, this host of co-ordinated molecules,
— this complex system of countless interwoven laws
and movements, all driven forward, straight to their
mark, down the vistas of the ages, to the grand world
consummation of to-day ! What else but Omniscience
is equal to this ?

All law, then, we should regard as a divine opera-
tion, and all divine operation, conversely, obeys law.
Whatever phenomena we consider as specially divine
ought to be most orderly and true to nature. Relig-
ion, as far as it is genuine, must therefore be natural.
It should be no exotic, no foreign graft, as it is often
regarded, but the normal outgrowth of our native in-
stincts. Evolution does not banish revelation from
our belief. Recognizing in man's spirit a spark of the
divine energy, "individuated to the power of self-
consciousness and recognition of God: — tracing the
development of the spirit embryo through all geologic
time till it came to birth and independent life in man,
and humanity recognized itself as a child of God," the
communion of the finite spirit with the infinite is per-
fectly natural. This direct influence of the spirit of
God on the spirit of man ; in conscience speaking to
him of the moral law ; through prophet and apostle
declaring to us the great laws of spiritual life and the
beauty of holiness — this is what we call revelation.
The laws which it observes are superior laws, — quite
above the plane of material things. But the work of
revelation is not therefore infallible or outside the

136 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT

sphere of evolution. On the contrary, one of the
most noticeable features of revelation is its progressive
character. In the beginning, it is imperfect, dim in
its vision of truth, often gross in its forms of expres-
sion. But from age to age it gains in clearness and
elevation. In religion, as in secular matters, it is the
lesson of the ages, that *' the thoughts of men are
widened with the process of the suns."

How short-sighted, then, are they who seek to com-
press the broadening vision of modern days within
the narrow loopholes of mediaeval creeds. " There is
still more light to break from the words of Scripture,"
was the brave protest of Robinson to the bigots of his
day. And as we say amen, to that, we may add —
"yes; and more light still to come from the whole
heavens and the whole earth." If we wish to see that
light and receive the richest rewards of God's reveal-
ing word, we must face the sun of truth and follow
bravely forward.

As we look back upon the long path of evolution
up which God's hand has already led humanity ; as
we see from what lowliness and imperfection, from
what darkness and grossness God has led us to ouf
present heritage of truth and spiritual life, may we
not feel sure, that, if we go forward obediently, loyal
to reason, we shall find a new heavens and more
glorious, above our head ; a new earth and a nobler
field of work beneath our feet ?

CHAPTER VI.

THE OLD TESTAMENT AS LITERATURE.

In an age long past there lived a wonderful artist,
whom men called the Divine Sculptor, so grand and
beautiful were the productions of his chisel.

He had carved many previous forms of beauty ; but
one day, he found a huge tusk shed by some mam-
moth ; and sculpturing from it a perfect foot and leg,
he vowed that it should be the beginning of a statue,
entirely carved in whitest ivory.

It was only very slowly that the statue grew ; for it
was only at long intervals that suitable pieces of ivory
were found. But bit by bit, the legs, body, arms and
head were built up, until at last, after many long
years, the artist completed his cherished work.

It was a form of rarest nobility, and instinct with
highest aspiration, albeit full of childlike simplicity
and ingenuousness. It represented the genius of his
nation, robed in quaint antique garments, posed in the
most natural of attitudes, with finger pointing upward
to heaven and look of devout rapture. No passer-by
could fail to be filled with admiration for this master-
piece of art.

But, anon, war broke out ; invaders poured into the
land ; and the owners of the precious statue for
safety's sake, dismembered it and hid it away in the

ground.

137

138 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT

Long centuries rolled by ere it was discovered again
and disinterred. Now, it lay in fragments, soiled with
the stains of earth and water and the ravages of time.

Its discoverers revered it as a divine image and pro-
ceeded to put together its separated members in such
form as they believed a divine image should have.
To put the various members in their natural places
would make a mere human image of it, they thought.
So, to avoid such dishonor and make it into as super-
natural an image as possible, the legs were inserted in
the armpits, the arms at the middle of the back, the
ears were stuck in the eye-sockets, the feet where
the ears should have been, and the head was made
to sprout from below the breasts. And all the people
bowed down to it ; and as they knelt about it, they
covered up its ivory surface still deeper with paint and
tinsel and tawdry gilding, and worshipped it as a God.
And, indeed, it was of a certainty, like nothing ever
seen on the earth nor in the skies above nor the waters
beneath the earth.

So passed many long ages^ till the monstrous con-
glomeration had become sacred with the hoHness of a
vast antiquity.

But at length there arose a man as wise as he was
bold, who in long and patient studies examined care-
fully the curious image. He scraped away the dust
and grime of time and the tawdry gilding with which
the statue had been overlaid, and discovered the beau-
tiful pure ivory that was hid beneath. And by com-
paring the various parts, he learned their normal
arrangement and the original human shape in which
they had been moulded by their great artificer. And

THE OLD TESTABIENT AS LITERATURE 139

calling his fellow-citizens together, he begged them to
cleanse the precious statue of its meretricious paint
and excrescences and rearrange the bodily members
and parts after a natural model so that the noble form
under which the genius of the race had been por-
trayed might stand once more before them.

But alas ! he found himself at once stigmatized as
an impious infidel and blaspheming iconoclast, who
denied the sanctity and beauty of the Divine Being,
whose legs grew from his shoulders, whose feet issued
from his ears, and whose head sprouted below his
breast. And in their rage, the multitude took up
stones and stoned the poor man till his life-blood ran
out on the ground before the image; and as they
stoned him, they shouted : " Our ancient image is not
human ; it is divine."

And as the unlucky reformer fell beneath the mis-
siles, he raised his voice and said : " You stone me
to-day. But the time will surely come when your chil-
dren shall see that it is as I say. Where I fall, an-
other shall stand and show you more clearly that it is
not I, but you who would degrade this beautiful
statue. Another and yet another shall come to show
you what a monster you have made of this master-
piece and what a marvel of natural grandeur and grace
you may bring out of this misshapen image if you
will but rearrange it according to the dictates of reason
and the type of nature. You say it is divine and
therefore it cannot be human. But I say that it is
precisely because it is so perfectly human that it is
divine, — far diviner and grander than you have ever
dreamed. And the grandchildren of you who to-day

140 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT

are pelting me to death shall then build out of these
same death-dealing stones, a monument in my honor,
before the restored and purified statue of the genius
of your people."

And all the people screamed again with rage and
threw another volley of stones that silenced forever
the unfortunate martyr.

Nevertheless, in the age of their grandchildren, it
happened even as the martyr had predicted ; and out
of the stones was built a famous monument. And
when the sacred image stood again before the people's
eyes, in all its original nobility and naturalness of
form, all the nation wondered how blind their grand-
fathers could have been to adore the misshapen
image.

He that hath ears to hear, let him hear what the
Spirit of Truth hath to say here and now to the
Christian Church.

The parable just related, as the reader has doubtless
guessed, is intended to illustrate the treatment which
the Bible has received at the hands of men. Like the
statue of my fable, this literary embodiment of the
genius of the Hebrew race has also been dismem-
bered, mangled, and distorted by mistaken piety, and
covered thick with the cheap gilding of an imaginary
supernaturalism. Because it was believed to be the
Word of God, credulous reverence has shut its eyes to
all recognition of its human origin, and sought to

THE OLD TESTAMENT AS LITERATURE 141

eliminate from it all natural traits and elements. And
when the higher criticism in these latter days, has
essayed to restore to it its original symmetry and
natural beauty, and to make manifest in its noble
humanity its true divineness, — all the guns of ortho-
doxy have been trained in furious cannonade upon
these alleged profanations of the Word of God.

In spite of this ecclesiastical fusilade, we may safely
predict that it is only a question of time, and that, no
distant time, when the Old Testament shall be looked
upon as literature. Hitherto that is precisely the one
light in which it has not been regarded.

In the popular faith the Old Testament has been
looked upon as everything else but literature. It has
been regarded as a magazine of dogmas ; as a scientific
treatise, making the investigations of geology and bi-
ology superfluous ; as an infallible moral code, any one
of whose precepts overruled all the instincts of mercy
or the intuitions of conscience ; as a heavenly double
acrostic, every word filled with threefold significance,
natural, spiritual and celestial ; in short, as a specimen
of supernatural penmanship, all its parts equally
authoritative and flawless. The result has been to
give the Bible an artificial and formal air, to separate
it from the living world of reality, to obscure and be-
fog its natural excellences, and to fill it with uncalled
for difficulties.

It is lamentable, indeed, to recall the many incon-
sistencies and incredibilities which the traditional view
has needlessly raised up, transmuting lyric metaphors
into scientific marvels, traditions of later days into
contemporaneous records, romances into autobiog-

142 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT

raphies, poetry into prose, parables into predictions,
and love songs into mystic allegories.

When the Pentateuch is claimed to be throughout
written by Moses himself, all the Psalms by David,
and the whole Old Testament to have been so divinely
inspired as to be infallible, with what plain contra-
dictions and insoluble entanglements are we brought
face to face ? It is these especially that have drawn
upon the Bible the jeers and ridicule of the unbelievers
and the keen thrust of every skeptic. They have led
to the " mistakes of Moses " being paraded up and
down the land, and flouted and riddled with the most
cutting wit and the bitterest of mockeries. And they
have seduced the pious-minded, who were not alto-
gether irrational, to a further wrong to the Bible ; viz.,
to the most desperate attempts to warp and twist the
sacred texts so as, somehow, to reconcile the conflict-
ing passages.

But when we look upon the Old Testament as
literature, we are no longer tempted to torture in this
way the simple statements of these ancient writers.
Our only ambition is to find out what they really
meant. And we are not diverted from a consider-
ation of their essential truth or nobleness, and put into
an antagonistic, flaw-picking attitude by extravagant
claims for them of a character that they themselves
never pretended to possess. Give a young man, for
example, the Book of Jonah to read as a part of God's
infallible word, and how soon will his reason (naturally
led to give a careful test to any such momentous claim)
run against the snags of the whale and the gourd and
the other marvels of the story, and the whole attention

THE OLD TESTAMENT AS LITERATURE 143

be fixed on these, either to ridicule and reject or to
defend and explain them away ! Meanwhile the
real lesson of the book, the broad tolerance and for-
givingness of spirit, the omnipresence and universal
love of God, that it aimed to inculcate, is altogether
neglected. But present the book simply as a piece
of ancient Hterature, an old legend current among the
Hebrews, or a parable invented to enforce a lesson, and
how easily is all the supernatural part of the story seen to
be only the imaginative framework and embellishment
of its noble religious lesson, no more affronting com-
mon sense or diverting attention from the spiritual
teaching involved than do the giants and marvels in
" Pilgrim's Progress " prevent the reader of that from
appropriating the similar moral lessons therein con-
tained !

Again, to look upon the Old Testament as literature
gives it a worth and an interest which it has failed to
obtain under the traditional view. As a piece of
divine penmanship, as a flawless fetich before which
reason was devoutly to close its eyes, much of it was
useless. Forbidden to criticise or discriminate, the
only refuge was in ignoring altogether large parts of
the Bible, and leaving their pages (after the first read-
ing from cover to cover, which pious tradition de-
manded) henceforth unopened. For here was passage
after passage, which we were assured was just as
sacred and true as anything else, from which we could
obtain no food for either the mind or the heart. Here
were palpable antagonisms of statement, impossible to
harmonize; badly joined seams where earlier docu-
ments were patched together; coarse traditions that in

144 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT

any other book would be suppressed as indelicate;
ritualistic details and ceremonial formalities of a
thoroughly peurile and impractical character, at least
for our day and generation; barbarous revenges and
imprecations, claiming the direct command of un-
doubted inspiration of the divine. How many such
blots as these burdened the sacred text ! But, when
we recognize the Old Testament as literature, all these
things become not only interesting, but valuable.
These clumsy sutures of the earlier documents are
precious as fine gold and sweeter than the honeycomb
to the Biblical critics. These palpable discrepancies
of the accounts and the partisan or sectional bias dis-
closed by each are the precious seals identifying the
different documents and authors ; and the very scien-
tific mistakes and moral imperfections that we find, are
the water-marks of date and country, the incontestable
proofs of their antiquity; and even the very crudest
fancies and most barbarous legends, wholly inadmis-
sible to the witness-box of history, are welcomed as
priceless relics of that primeval mythologic age in
which all religion and history began, and are the best
of evidence that the Jewish religion had the same
natural origin as all other faiths. What can the Bible
reader who accepts it all as one infallible Word of God
do with such passages as that where Jehovah is said to
"walk in the garden in the cool of the evening";
where the Elohim (using the polytheistic plural) say :
" Let us make man " ; " Behold, the man is become as
one of us " ? How is the pious believer in the in-
fallibility of the Bible to explain the graven and
molten images; the ephods and teraphim which as

THE OLD TESTAMENT AS LITERATURE 145

late as Samuel's time were a part of the equipment of
a priest of Jehovah ; the household idols which David
kept in his house ; the golden bulls worshipped down
to Jeroboam's day ; the relics of serpent-worship, in the
brazen serpent which, as late as the reign of Hezekiah,
was an object of veneration among the Israelites ; and
the vestiges of devil-worship even, in the goat carried
into the wilderness as a propitiation to the demon
Azazel, disguised in our version under the name
of the scapegoat, — what, I say, on the traditional
theory of the Old Testament, can be done with these
survivals of old nature worship and beast worship left
in its pages, except to pass over and forget them as
quickly as possible ? But, when the Old Testament is
recognized as literature, they become the most sig-
nificant footmarks of the slow upward progress of
Hebrew faith, confirming the account, which an-
thropology and the history of religions in general
have given, of the successive stages of man's spiritual
pilgrimage.

And this leads us to notice the new vividness and
human interest which the sacred record gains when
its similarity of origin with other books is recognized.

There is a somewhat familiar but instructive story
of a boy who, on receiving a letter from a young
companion at Malta, speaking of his visit to the place
of St. Paul's shipwreck, exclaimed, " Why, father, did
that happen in this world ? "

So to many a pious reader the incidents and char-
acters of the Old Testament are never realized as
actual occurrences and " flesh-and-blood " persons,
but they always stand before the imagination, as the

146 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT

old painters distinguished their saints, with a halo of
supernatural light about their head and the stiffness
and unreality of so many wooden images in all their
limbs.

But now, when we study these records as literature,
we soon catch sight of a host of significant little hints,
showing that these old priests and prophets were men
of Hke passions such as we are, and that the notable
incidents in their careers had their springs in the
social forces, political exigencies, or personal motives
of an actual, breathing world.

Take the figure of David, as the man after God's
own heart, and author of all the Psalms, as church
tradition has presented him to us. Certainly, this is a
most inconsistent and artificial figure. But the David
whom the new criticism shows, the chief of a band of
outlaws who by his military exploits rises to the
throne, brave and generous towards his friends, but
unrelenting and vindictive towards his foes, and un-
scrupulous in removing those who stood in his ambi-
tious pathway, — a nature at .war with itself, holding
within him in constant struggle the typical virtues and
vices of a society just passing over from barbarism to
semi-civilization, — this David is an exceedingly natural
and interesting character.

Or take the book of Job. Looked at as an au-
thoritative revelation in explanation of the misfortunes
of the righteous, it is certainly very unsatisfactory.
If we consider it as a direct revelation from God to
explain the origin of evil and the calamities of the
righteous, that explanation amounts substantially to
this,— to refer them to the wiles of Satan and the

THE OLD TESTAMENT AS LITERATURE 147

capricious permission of the Almighty, before whose
power man should be dumb ; and it omits altogether
from the answer the Christian solution of a future
personal life for which this life is the training.

As the instruction of a divine revelation, this is
terribly crude and disappointing. But, looking at Job
as hterature, we have in it the most poignant depiction
of a soul in agony ; the most powerful presentation
of the struggling forces of doubt, despair, indignant
virtue, invincible faith in divine goodness, pathetic
humility, and the self-abnegating devotedness that can
cling to the Divine Hand even when all hope of per-
sonal happiness has vanished, that we have in any
book, ancient or modern, East or West. We may
discuss to the end of time whether there ever was an
historic Job who Hved in the land of Uz, or whether
the book is a pure fiction ; but, surely, we cannot
doubt that this picture of Job on his ash-heap, pierced
to the heart by the unjust suspicions of his pretended
friends, and pouring out his heart (as the strong gusts
of passion, at their cruel impeachment of his innocency,
and the billows of his own unbearable agony sweep
to and fro), in such scornful denials of personal trans-
gression, such appeals to his divine Judge, such
dread misgivings, now of God's justice, now of his
own righteousness, and at last finding peace in a child-
like resignation to the divine will, however bitter, —
surely, we cannot doubt that this wondrous representa-
tion of bitterest spiritual struggle came from a heart
that had itself been in the deep waters, and had to
tread the wine-press of grief alone. And, if we date
its composition in the dark days of the eighth century,

148 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT

when the old faith of Israel in Jehovah's earthly re-
wards to His faithful servants was given such a wrench,
when the Northern kingdom had gone down in ruins,
and the terrible invasions of the Assyrians swept over
their land, like so many tornadoes, respecting neither
just nor unjust, and poor King Hezekiah lived, as
Renan vividly says, '' like a bird on a twig," watching
which way to fly the next minute, — then the social
and political setting of the picture makes it not
merely a personal experience, but a national experi-
ence and a national enigma that are thus movingly
set before us.

Thus does the literary view of the Old Testament
humanize it, and endow it with heightened power and
influence over its readers. And, as it takes on a
more graphic life, there comes with this, simultane-
ously, a disclosure of more defined individuality and
an affluence of national genius, not before suspected.
When the Old Testament is regarded as a single con-
tinuous Divine Oracle, the tendency, of course, is to
overlook as much as possible all diversities of author-
ship or style, because all must be equally divine,
equally perfect. But, when it is viewed as literature,
the varied contents of this sacred collection of the
national remains are hailed with pleasure, and it be-
comes quite astonishing how many-sided the Israelite
genius was. There were not simply the recognized
three or four kinds of books, — law, prophecy, history,
and psalmody, — but almost every kind that any modern
encyclopaedia of English or German literature would
exhibit; allegory in Jotham's parable; the drama in
Job ; satire in Ecclesiastes ; an opera or cantata in

THE OLD TESTAMENT AS LITERATURE 149

Canticles ; ethnographic tables of the revelations of
nations ; didactic poems, as in Proverbs ; national lyrics,
as in a dozen or more of the Psalms ; primitive sagas and
war-songs, as in the patriarchal legends and in the songs
of Moses and Deborah ; fragments of epics, as in the
remnants of the Wars of Jehovah and the Book of
Jashar ; snatches of popular ditties, like the Song of
the Well and the Sword Song of Lamech ; historical
romances, like Daniel and Esther ; novels with a pur-
pose, like Jonah ; poHtical polemics and orations,
such as some of the prophetical writings may quite
properly be called. Such is the remarkable variety in
the contents of the Old Testament that we find in it,
when viewed as literature.

Or look through the lens of Biblical criticism at
writers of the same class, among whom we have here-
tofore supposed little diversity because all were in such
a peculiar way the mouthpieces of the divine inspira-
tion. I mean the prophets. Notice how enigmatic
and vaguely figurative are some of them ; how confi-
dent and precise in their predictions, a second class ;
and how much shrewder and more nearly accurate in
their forecasts, a third class. And it is by no means
those who were most bold and self-assured in their
predictions whom history has most confirmed.

What an interesting diversity of personal character-
istics and literary style distinguishes them, as we fol-
low down the stream of history ! Notice the rustic
figures of speech and pastoral simplicity of the first
two, — Amos and Hosea, — a style straightforward,
sententious, and pregnant with compressed feeling.
In Micah, also, we have another " man of the people,"

150 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT

terse and strong of utterance, denouncing in scathing
terms the wrongs suffered by the poor of Israel at the
hands of the rich and noble.

In Isaiah we meet with a genius of different type,
familiar with the best society of the times and with
international politics, possessed of a glowing wealth
of imagination and vividness of illustration, clothed in
a diction of dignified splendor and energetic elegance.

In Nahum and Habakkuk we have two more ardent
spirits, pouring out their impassioned thoughts in the
boldest of imagery. What dramatic power, especially,
is there in that " Pindaric Ode " of Habakkuk's, as it has
been called, where he looks forth from his watch-
tower to see what the Lord will show him, and de-
scribes with such majesty of thought and diction the
vision of the woes drawing nigh to his people !

As we come down to the times of the Babylonish
captivity, we hear the deepened tragedy of Israel's fate
reverberating in the melancholy cadences of its great
writers ; in the artless pathos of Jeremiah's voice so
broken with patriotic tears ; and in the sombre im-
agery and weird allegorical figures of Ezekiel (though
often, it must be confessed, somewhat overloaded and
bizarre). In the impassioned rhetoric of the second
Isaiah in the heart-moving touches, picturesque im-
agery, and superbly effective personifications of this
great unknown prophet of the sixth century, the poet-
ical genius of Israel reached its climax ; and in the
clear, logical, and dialectic treatment of his theme in
Malachi, — going without any flourish right at the pith
of the matter, — we see that the roll of the prophets is
about to be closed, and that a simpler, more concise

THE OLD TESTAMENT AS LITERATURE 151

and lucid school of writing is about to succeed
them.

And not only has the study of Biblical literature
brought out the individualities of the different books
of the Old Testament in instructive clearness, but
within the envelope of what had been deemed the
work of single authors it discovers a multiplicity of
hands, and points out their personal characteristics in
a most interesting manner. As the telescope and
spectrum of the astronomer have resolved what
seemed single stars into binary or ternary solar sys-
tems, so has the lens of higher criticism shown us
Isaiah and Zachariah to be each a double star, and the
Pentateuch of Moses to be a complex system of four
or five, or perhaps even more, noble literary suns and
planets. This complex composition and gradual
growth, throughout six or seven centuries, of the first
five books, not long ago ascribed to Moses alone as
their author, is the most notable achievement of the
higher criticism. It has endowed this part of the
Old Testament, to the eager student of truth and to
all spirits ambitious of disentangling knotty problems,
with a fascination akin to that which the authorship of
Junius had in the last century, or the decipherment of
the Assyrian hieroglyphics has in our day. Renan
has well compared the task, in its delicacy and diffi-
culty, to the decipherment of the papyri of Hercu-
laneum, whose pages were so imbedded and stuck
together into calcined blocks that, though the letters
might be visible, it was impossible to say to what page
they respectively belonged. But, as the careful un-
rolling and patching together of these papyri by the

152 TEE NEW WORLD AND TEE NEW TEOUGET

classical scholars have introduced consistent order into
these manuscripts, so have the patient comparisons
and piecings-together of these Biblical documentary
layers and fragments by Graf and Wellhausen, and
especially by that prince of Biblical critics, Kuenen,
succeeded in building up again the ancient medley of
historical and legendary remains into an intelligible
literary structure.

Church history tells us that in the second century
an early predecessor of Dr. Robinson in the work of
gospel welding and tinkering, mortised together, out
of the four gospels, a harmony of the hfe of Christ
which he called the Diatessaron. Now, suppose this
compilation had been so successful that Matthew,
Mark, Luke, and John had no longer been copied in
their original and independent form, but had been en-
tirely swallowed up by the new compilation, and the
very memory of their separate existence been quite
forgotten. Suppose that the new compilation had
been baptized with the name "the Books of Jesus,"
and that the Church should then have resisted as pious
profanation the idea that any part of this patchwork
calling itself the authentic history of Christ was writ-
ten by any one except the man of Nazareth with His
own hand ! Then we should have a pretty fair par-
allel to the way that the students of the Pentateuch
have been fettered, and the difficulties that they have
had to contend with in analyzing the so-called Books
of Moses. But, as no one to-day would think that the
fourfold gospel narrative and its complex testimony
would have gained either interest or historic value if
it had been thus superseded by Tatian's single com-

THE OLD TESTAMENT AS LITERATURE 153

pilation, so no one ought to fail to see how much the
Pentateuch really gains in attractiveness and power by
this critical disinterment of the four or five separate
writings that have been hitherto engulfed by it. It
gives us that invaluable base line of measurement and
parallax of position only to be had where two or more
different points of view are found. It enables us to
estimate better the refraction of the lines of historic
fact produced by the sectional or political or ecclesi-
astic bias of the various writers. And it adds to the
illustrious group of Hebrew authors four or five no-
table figures, who, though unnamed, possess most
marked personal characteristics as well as local and
partisan traits.

In the earliest of these, the second Elohist, we dis-
cover a writer of the ninth or tenth century, b. c,
living in the neighborhood of Bethel or Shechem,
who delighted in collecting the old folk-lore and pa-
triarchial legends of his race, and who has given us a
most charming and ingenuous picture of the primitive
ages of humanity. Piquant and naive in style, marked
by a certain infantile candor and rough sublimity,
devotedly chronicling all the quaint myths and ethno-
graphic genealogies and details that he heard of;
with patriotic pride claiming for the ancestors of the
Northern tribes ancient possession of all the good
things of the country ; quite ignorant of any law lim-
iting sacrifices or altars to Jerusalem; betraying a
scarcely veiled polytheism on every page, — this first
collection of the Israelite legends, which became the
nucleus round which the rest of the Bible formed
itself, has well been compared by Renan to Homer, so

154 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT

fresh and sparkling is it with the morning dew of
humanity's childhood. " This unknown writer," says
Renan, with but little if any exaggeration " has
created half the poetry of humanity. His stories
are like a breath of the world's springtime; their
freshness is only equaled by their crude grandeur;
man, when these pages were written, still lived in a
world of myths. Multitudes of Elohim filled the air,
manifested by mysterious whispers, unknown noises
and terrors which produced panic. Man had noc-
turnal struggles with them, out of which he emerged
wounded. Elohim appeared in triple form, and his
sons take unto them wives of the daughters of men.
Morality is scarcely born ; the mind of the Elohim is
capricious, sometimes absurd ; the world is very small,
heaven is reached by a ladder, or, rather, a pyramid
with steps ; messengers constantly pass from earth to
the empyrean. Dreams are celestial revelations,
visions of God " (Renan, pp. 177, 178, vol. II).

In the author of the second great stratum of the
Pentateuch (or, perhaps more* accurately, the Hexa-
teuch ; for the Book of Joshua is an integral part and
close continuation of the first five books) we have
probably a man of the Southern kingdom, but of the
eight or ninth century, b. c, and of quite a different
type of mind. His genius is less unsophisticated and
sunny. He is a man of a sombre and austere temper-
ament and more philosophic cast of mind, oppressed
with the consciousness of the sin in the world and
full of forebodings of the wrath of Jehovah ; empha-
sizing the jealous nature and irresistible will of the
*' I AM," greatest of all the gods ; delighting in medi-

THE OLD TESTAMENT AS LITERATURE 155

tations and explanations of the origin of evil and in
chronicling the woes that descend upon sinful hu-
manity. CiviHzation to him is a path of decadence
and demoralization; the thirst for knowledge is the
root of all evil ; social progress, a defiance of God's
laws and loss of Paradise ; the first city originated in
murder and transgression. As a religious creator, he
takes the first rank. He was the original Calvinist,
the spiritual father of Jeremiah, Paul, Augustine, Mo-
hammed, Jonathan Edwards, and all that ilk. As
Renan well says, "The ceiHng of the San Sistine
Chapel, with its tremendous pictures of the awful
divine judge and the retributions of those who dis-
obey his autocratic will, is the best illustration of this
remarkable writer. Michael Angelo is the only artist
who could interpret the Jahvist ; for he is truly his
brother in genius " (Renan, p. 302, vol. II).

In the author of the third great stratum we find a
still different type of mind from either the preceding ;
a man of superior culture, employing a warm and
persuasive eloquence ; fond of stately periods ; exhib-
iting a decidedly purer and higher tone, both ethically
and religiously. The author of the patriarchal legends
had, as we noticed, hardly got out of the shell of
polytheism. The Jehovist was only in the stage of
Monarcho-theism, revering Jehovah as the first among
the gods. The Deuteronomist carries us on to the
next stage, — not monotheism, but monolatry, in which,
while the existence of other gods was still recognized,
Jehovah was proclaimed the unique God, the sole
object of worship, and thus did the world the inesti-
mable service of providing the next higher step in the

156 THE NEW WORLD AND TEE NEW THOUGHT

staircase of religion, from which the second Isaiah,
Jesus, and Paul mounted to that of a true monotheism,
in which Jehovah was not merely the only God to be
worshipped, but the only God in existence, the One
over all, in all, and through all.

It was in the seventh century, shortly before or else in
during the reign of Josiah, that the Deuteronomist wrote.
For a long time it was thought that the next great
contributor to this literary edifice added his notable
fourth story, the priestly and legal part, about the
same time. But, while there may have been many
additions made at this time, the best critics, Graf,
Kuenen, and Wellhausen, now put the date of this
priestly reviser and the most of the sacerdotal legisla-
tion, including also the noble proem, the Creation Ode
of the first chapter, as late as the time of the Baby-
lonish captivity, — the fifth century, b. c. This ac-
counts for the numerous reminiscences and readapta-
tions of Assyrian legend that he has introduced and
the absence of allusions to this priestly code in the
prophets of the seventh and eighth centuries. This
priestly reviser, sometimes called the first Elohist
(because he usually speaks of the divine only under
the name of Elohim down to the time when the reve-
lation of God as Jahveh is made to Moses, in Exodus
XII), was a native of the south, — probably a resident
in Jerusalem. He possessed scientific tastes ; had a
fondness for genealogies, a more precise style ; aimed
to inculcate moral lessons and preserve the memory
of religious customs ; exhibited a mind more reflective
and exact; sympathized with the southern tribes of
Judah and Benjamin ; avoided as far as possible th©

THE OLD TESTA 3IENT AS LITERATURE 157

anthropomorphism of the northern narrators ; and ex-
hibits both a higher moraHty and a purer theism. He
has encumbered his narrative, nevertheless, with a
most wearisome and formal mass of ceremonial details.
He is the ardent devotee of ecclesiastical theocracy,
and has not hesitated, in his enthusiasm, to map out a
whole priestly Utopia, an imposing air castle of sacer-
dotal laws, customs, events, and institutions, con-
structed with such precise and realistic details that for
ages it was held to have been a veritable part of
Hebrew history and experience.

And this suggests a few words upon the great gain
which our conception of Hebrew history and the
course of its literary development has made by this
critical reconstruction of the proper succession of its
various books and documents. What a travesty of
the literary and religious history of India should we
make if we presented it in the following order : first,
the ceremonial legislation of Manu ; next, the Vedic
songs and myths ; third, the subtle, speculative Upani-
shads ; and lastly, the practical moral reforms and
spiritual teachings ! But it is just such a topsy-turvy
picture of the course of Jewish faith and thought that
the traditional view of the Old Testament has given
us, putting its monotheism at the very beginning,
supposing away back in the time of Moses a most
minute and elaborate legislation and complicated,
pedantic ritual system already full blown, and present-
ing this as succeeded by such an epoch of political
and social chaos, such a period of crude morals and
unregulated worship, and rude, almost savage legends
as we find in Judges and Samuel, "when" as the

158 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT

record says, " every one did what was good in his own
eyes."

The history of literature and the science of com-
parative religion show us, in all the great civiHzations
of Europe and Asia, the same law of literary develop-
ment, from the childlike to the reflective, from the
simple to the complex ; and also the same course of
religious evolution, first rude nature-worship and
fetichism, then, advance through idolatry and poly-
theism towards theism and spiritual religion. First we
have the diviner and the soothsayer and the bard, the
childlike chanter of primitive war-songs and myths,
next the prophet, and after him the priest. Now, the
traditional theory reverses this, and puts at the dawn
of Hebrew life and literature that elaborate sacerdotal-
ism which everywhere else comes only in the evening
of the national life. But, when we study the Old
Testament as literature under the microscope of the
higher criticism, the intellectual and spiritual evolution
of the Hebrew genius becomes again a natural one,
exhibiting the same normal succession as the national
consciousness of India, Egypt, Persia, and Greece.
Thus a new orderliness is given to the Old Testament,
and with it a greater intelligibleness.

And in another way also does the literary view of
the Bible give it a clearer comprehensibility ; namely
by permitting us to use sources of illumination that on
the traditional theory are at once ruled out. What
new light is supplied for understanding the Genesis
stories of the fall, the deluge, and the Tower of Babel,
when we can illustrate them by their Assyrian ana-
logues, if not sources ? How much more intelligible

THE OLD TESTAMENT AS LITERATURE 159

becomes the story of Samson, when we are free to
recognize many of its distinctive features as derived
from the primitive sun-myth, of which here we have a
degraded survival, perhaps grafted upon some legendary
stock ! And, especially, what an illumination is given
to Solomon's Song of Songs, which in our King
James' version is so darkly obscured by the interpo-
lated headings which refer it to a mystical marriage
of Christ and the Church, when we accept it as a
pastoral cantata, commemorating the fidelity of true
love, unmoved by the blandishments of rank and
luxury ! Instead of its being a dialogue between two,
we must suppose, as Ewald has shown in such a
masterly manner, a chorus and at least three principal
characters ; namely, the Shulamite maiden, the shep-
herd lover to whom she has pledged her affection, and
Solomon, the king, who, captivated with her beauty,
has taken her from her native village to his mag-
nificent palace, and who thinks that by the glittering
prospect he opens before her, as his favorite, he may
induce her to abandon her rustic home and betrothed
husband. By her steadfast resistance to the king's
solicitations the loyal maid, however, at last convinces
Solomon of the hopelessness of his passion, and obtains
permission to return to the shepherd lover whom she
cannot forget ; and at the close of the poem the faith-
ful couple appear hand in hand, expressing in glowing
strains the superiority of genuine affection, though in
the humblest lot, over any union that riches or
position may buy. This is a meaning that nobly
vindicates the place which the Song of Songs has so
strangely, but fortunately, retained in the sacred canon.

160 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT

And this brings me to my final point, the increased
value of the Old Testament, — the higher claim upon
our admiration and our reverence that it gains when
viewed as literature. All its natural beauties and
excellences, of old so obscured by the artificial theories
of its supernatural dictation, now emerge to delight
us. What admirable character-painting is disclosed in
the ingenious delineations of the three great patriarchs
and their successors, — Joseph, Deborah, Samuel, Saul,
David, and Elijah ! How sharp, forceful, naive and
pathetic are these memorable personalities, outlined
often with such few but graphic strokes of the pen !
Surely, nowhere else than in Shakspere himself can
we find such a wonderful portrait gallery of figures, so
diversified and full of breathing life, as we find in the
patriarchal legends of Genesis and the historic sketches
of Judges, Samuel and Kings. Or, if we can disabuse
ourselves of the inclination to look upon it as either
science or revelation, and consider it only as poetry,
what a splendid, inspiring ode have we in that Psalm
of Creation that makes the first chapter of the Bible
memorable ! How superb the lyric strains of many
of the Psalms ! What a vigorous and copious expo-
sition of the grandeurs of nature are given by them,
especially by that 103d Psalm, which as Humboldt
said, is " in itself an outline of the universe." What
persuasive springs of consolation, what powerful ethical
instruction, do the pages of the prophets furnish !

I know, of course, the many dark stains that mar
the moral tone of the Old Testament, the grave incon-
sistencies of its spiritual teaching. When viewed as
an infallible book, a web divinely woven, all of one

THE OLD TESTAMENT AS LITERATURE 161

cloth, these stains are fatal to its claims. But, when
we look upon it as the spiritual history of a nation
feeling its way to God, it has no superior. It possesses
certainly that best of inspiration, the power of in-
spiring and uplifting its readers. Take Conway's
'' Sacred Anthology" or Max Muller's fuller " Sacred
Books of the East," and compare the other Oriental
Scriptures with the Bible, and the more thoroughly
you know the literature of the rest of the world,
the more sure will you be that, on the whole, with
all its crudities and coarseness and vengefulness on
its head, the Bible stands far above all other
scriptures in purity and elevation of tone. Grant
that the vestiges of polygamy, slavery, idolatry,
witch-burning, bloody revenges, and religious per-
secutions may be inbedded here, like the scales of
hideous dragons of the sHme in a slab of the Saurian
period. Yet they are but the marks of the outgrown
shells, the off-cast skins which the spiritual genius of
Israel successively sloughed off, and left behind it.
They are but the lower rounds of that heavenly ladder
which the religious consciousness of the Hebrews one
after another trod beneath it, and rose above, as it
struggled slowly to the recognition and proclamation
of the purest religious truths known to antiquity. All
these relics of a lower stage of thought and conduct
but bear witness to the naturalness and progressive-
ness of the religious evolution. Nowhere else in all
literature is there a more striking and valuable pan-
orama of the development of the spiritual conscious-
ness of a nation. What pictures of spiritual heroism,
standing undaunted against all odds ; what wise counsels

162 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT

to youth ; what moving and uplifting outpourings of
devout thankfulness; what manly denunciations of
wrong and injustice ; what appealing strains of peni-
tence and devout trust ; what comfort to the bereaved
and support for the tempted beam from these pages,
as the morning stars when they sing together in their
Maker's honor, and make the benediction of this book,
in spite of all its flaws, unparalleled in the history of
humanity. And this benediction shall be all the
greater, when those who profess to reverence its lustre
shall no more " breathe on it, as they bow," but, freed
from artificial tinsel and glamour, it shall shine forth
in all its natural beauty, symmetry, and matchless
worth.

CHAPTER VII.

CHRISTIAN DISCIPLESHIP AND MODERN LIFE.

Some years ago there was published in England a
striking story which gave the imaginary history of a
young Cornish carpenter, Joshua Davidson by name,
who takes all that he is taught in church and Sunday-
school with entire literalness and endeavors to act
accordingly.

He is assured that every word in the gospels is liter-
ally true ; that every command and exhortation should
be strictly obeyed ; that every promise may be confi-
dently relied upon ; and that, as Christ is set forth as
our pattern. He ought to be faithfully imitated.

Poor Joshua, — learning all this every Sunday and
from every pulpit ; and being moreover, peremptorily
assured of it by his rector, when, in his dawning per-
plexities, he ventures to question that august function-
ary, resolves to shape his whole life, by the standard
thus set up for him. Trusting in the text of Christ's
promise to His disciples, he ate poisonous berries and
nearly died in consequence. He handled serpents and
was greatly astonished to find himself severely bitten
by the vipers. And to the doctor who came to at-
tend him, he talked so much primitive Christianity
that the good man set him down as a lunatic. In fine,
poor Joshua, merely by trying in all sincerity, to do
on week days, what every Sabbath he was told our

163

164 TEE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT

pattern did, and he himself ought therefore to do, was
forever getting into scrapes and being bulHed by his
teachers for really believing what they told him.

When he gets through school, he goes to London
and seeks to lead there, an unflinching Christian life.
He tries to reform a regular jail-bird, nearly gets in-
volved in his iniquities and is publicly beaten by the
ruffian.

He succeeds in rescuing a poor Magdalen, but he
loses his own repute among his neighbors by taking
her into his own house ; the only place of refuge he
knew of to offer her. He sets up a night school for
the scamps and villains who swarm in the court where
he lives ; but they are so turbulent that the police ar-
rest him as a harborer of disorderly characters.

Poor Joshua, finding his own little strength so una-
vailing to stem the seething tide of evil, comes to the
conclusion that society itself must be revolutionized
before Christianity can have any chance of being
carried out in practice. He looks into his New Testa-
ment and finds that the early Christians had all things
in common; and he leaps to the conclusion that
Christianity requires the equalization of classes.
Capital, the aristocracy of wealth and the antagonisms
of upper and lower classes and class distinctions, con-
stituted, he believed, the Upas tree that poisons
Christendom ; and he becomes an itinerant lecturer to
rouse the masses to shake off these fetters and adopt
socialistic principles ; and at length goes to Paris and
joins the Communists, fancying their communistic
scheme the most hopeful attempt to work out the
principles of Jesus. But even here, no happier lot

CHRISTIAN DISCIPLESHIP AND MODERN LIFE 165

awaited him. The ruffians and fanatics of that awful
travesty nearly tore him in pieces, because of his ad-
herence to Christ ; his faithful Magdalen was shot as
an incendiary ; and he himself on his return to Eng-
land, was trampled to death by an enraged mob whom
he was addressing, on the ground that he was a Com-
munist, a republican and an atheist.

This tragic story puts in a striking light the opposi-
tion which I suppose, all have sometimes remarked,
between much of our popular preaching and the con-
duct, actually current in society and required by it.
It is a cutting satire upon the inconsistency, perhaps
we might say, the cowardice or dishonesty of those
who teach on the first day of the week that every
word of the Bible is to be taken with a literalness with
which we take no other book, and on the remaining
six, act like the veriest unbeliever and heathen. Nay
— it suggests a deeper question ; it presses upon us the
inquiry, — is Christianity indeed applicable to modern
society and our existing civilization ? Is it obligatory,
or is it practicable, is it wise or right to obey and act
out the precepts and examples of the gospel in this
present year of our Lord ? Or on the other hand is
Christianity to be reckoned an obsolete law, — a beau-
tiful tradition, to be kept like a rare cup of old china,
high up on a shelf, admiringly to be gazed upon and
reverenced, but never used in daily life ?

It is easy to say of such a story — " It is an extrava-
ganza. It presents difficulties that do not occur in
daily life." This is certainly true. But nevertheless
would it be an extravaganza, if Christians were true
to their professions ? Would its difficulties be inex-

166 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT

perienced if the '' Imitation of Christ " showed itself in
Hving men and women in our streets, instead of in
book covers on our tables or sermons in our pulpits ?

Where is the Church member in the strictest of
churches, who entirely imitates the examples of the
New Testament ? Where is he who will step on the
sea, trusting to be sustained like Christ and Peter, by
the power of faith ? Where is the Christian who be-
lieves it to be his precise duty to call nothing his own,
but to hold everything literally in common with all
his brother Christians ? Who to-day holds it to be his
Christian duty, in simple truth, like the liUes.to toil not,
neither to spin ; or Hke the ravens, to sow not, nor reap,
nor gather into barns ? Or if there are such Christians
what does our modern science and political economy
have to say to them ? What, indeed, is the tone of
current remark in Christian circles upon such pro-
ceedings ? Doubtless many of these inconsistencies,
(numbers of which will occur to every one) are not so
much inconsistencies of modern Hfe with the gospel
requirements as with wrong interpretations which have
been put upon Christianity. But deducting whatever
incompatibilities may be traced to this source, there are
enough still left, to leave quite a formidable problem.
While, for example, He whom we call Master, promises
His disciples that whatsoever they ask in His name shall
be given to them, — physical science declares that every
law of nature is absolutely unchangeable, and moves
not to the most fervent prayer. While the New
Testament bids us give to him that asketh and sell
that which we have and give alms, our social science
declares that alms-giving is preeminently noxious,

CHRISTIAN DISCIPLESHIP AND MODERN LIFE 167

encouraging idleness and profligacy, and helping to
saddle society with a brood of permanent parasitic
mendicants. While the gospel bids us resist not evil,
and to him that smites thee on the one cheek, turn
the other also, the whole of our military, police and
legal systems is a tacit repudiation of these precepts,
and our political experience asserts that the order of
our great civilized communities could not be main-
tained without repression of violence wherever it
shows its unruly head. In short, many of the instruc-
tions of the New Testament are (to the common sense
of the nineteenth century) incredible and impracti-
cable paradoxes. Let a Christian disciple, nowadays
try to act them out literally and simply. Let him for
example essay to cast a mountain into the sea, simply
by faith ; let the missionary take no money in his purse
nor shoes for his feet, when he starts on a journey,
as the seventy were commanded by Christ to do;
let the Christian literally pluck out the eye or cut off
the right hand that is concerned in any sin of his ;
let him, when a member of his family is sick unto
death, instead of calling in the doctor call in the church
elder to pray over him and anoint his head with oil,
as the Apostle James commands ; and the doctors
would be pretty likely to send him to the insane
asylum.

Now, here are these unavoidable antagonisms be-
tween Christian duty, as the letter of Scripture gives
it to us, and the usages and requirements of modern
life. These antagonisms are becoming evident to
great numbers, both among the strict disciples of
Christ and among the ardent devotees of modern

168 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT

progress. On the one hand, many earnest Chris-
tians are eager to bring the Christian world back
to a literal acceptance and imitation of the gospel
teachings, as the only cure for our troubles, and would
turn their backs on modern society, as only Paganism,
because of its variation from the pattern of ancient
Palestinian Hfe. A conspicuous instance of this is
found in the recent writings of Count Tolstoi, the
famous Russian author. Till middle life, an absolute
skeptic and man of the world and bold assailant of
authority, he, then, he said, made a great discovery.
It was that the precepts of Jesus, especially such as
"Resist not evil"; "Judge not " and " swear not at
all" are to be taken with absolute literalness. This
has now become " his religion " which he is enthu-
siastic in urging upon the world. Till we give up
courts and law proceedings, armies, police and resist-
ance to oppression, we are not, he claims, true Chris-
tians. On the other hand, there is the large and fast
growing class of thoroughgoing rationalists and
worshippers of science, to whom natural selection and
evolution are the supreme words, and whose saints are
Haeckel and Biichner, Comte and Bradlaugh and Inger-
soll, who are more and more renouncing Christianity,
because it is, they believe, irreconcilable with modern
ideas and the laws of nature, discovered by physical
science. Both these parties, from opposite quarters are
pushing the mind of our generation more directly face
to face with the question, " Which shall be given up, —
Christian discipleship or modern thought and life ? "

Which, then, of these two antagonistic inmates shall
be turned out of our heart and mind ?

CHRISTIAN DISCIPLESEIP AND MODERN LIFE 169

Now, those who maintain the necessity of in-
terpreting and following the gospel literally — if at
all, — I leave to themselves to take whichever horn
of the dilemma they choose. I leave it to them to
choose between the literal gospel and their daily
practice ; between the punctilious copying of every
act and the scrupulous observance of every word of
Christ, on the one side and the whole network of
modern institutions and the affirmations of modern
thought and experience on the other. For myself, I
would take a more excellent way. For I cannot
spare, — modern life cannot spare either the gospel
of Christ or the knowledge and civihzation of the
nineteenth century.

Nor are the two when rightly interpreted, incon-
sistent. Both should be kept ; both may be harmon-
ized through that higher interpretation which is the
reasonable interpretation of Christianity.

The solution lies just here. The Christian Hfe is
not bound up with the letter of any book. The Chris-
tian life is no slavish imitation of any Hfe. To live
the hfe of Christ is not to live as He did, but as He
would Hve to-day. The gospel is not a code of con-
duct out of which we are to pick out texts, here and
there to go by ; but it is a well-spring of spiritual in-
fluence with which we are first thoroughly to fill our-
selves, and then, let our conduct flow freely therefrom.

In the first place our duty as Christians is not to
follow the letter of the gospel, but the spirit. " The
letter killeth, the spirit giveth life," is the profound
admonition of Paul. He who follows the mere letter
of the gospel may violate many of the most sacred

170 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT

obligations of virtue. He may hold slaves and quote
to us in justification Paul's letter to Philemon. He
may practice polygamy and justify it by the practice
of the patriarchs and the omission of any prohibition
of it in the New Testament. Or he may (as a clergy-
man in England it is said, once advised a parishioner
who inquired of him) look on bribery as no sin be-
cause nowhere expressly forbidden in the Bible. Of
the letter of the New Testament we can never be as
sure as of its spirit. We must remember that the
gospels were not composed till forty to one hundred
years after the events and discourses which they
relate. We must remember that what was originally
said has been twice translated; — first from Hebrew
into Greek, and then from Greek into English. Espe->
cially we must remember that Jesus was an Oriental
and a popular teacher. There is more in these two
facts than we are apt to allow for. The Asiatic style
of narration is so different in its tone from the Euro-
pean, especially so different from our prosaic Anglo-
Saxon that we are almost supe to be misled. What
we would express abstractly, the Oriental loves to put
concretely. What we would say in cautious and
measured terms, the Eastern tongue adorns with
luxuriant garlands of imagery and hyperbole. Atha-
naseCoquerel,the eminent French preacher, has given
a couple of good illustrations of this. " When I was
in the East I visited a sheik's house. He told me that
every thing in that house, his own person and his own
family as well as his possessions were mine ; — and he
said this with the greatest protestations. This is ex-
actly as if we should say to a stranger, ' You are

CHRISTIAN DISCIPLESHIP AND 3I0DEEN LIFE 171

welcome ' — it means no more. If I had understood
it to mean any more and on going away had taken
anything with me, the sheik would have shot me as a
thief."

" I remember," also says Coquerel, " having seen
two letters, — one written by a French General, the
other by Abd-El-Kadir, the Arab chief who fought
the French in Algeria. It had been decided that the
French general and the Arab chief should say exactly
the same thing in regard to some exchange of prison-
ers. The French general wrote two lines; — very
clear, very precise, with nothing but the exact mean-
ing he intended to convey. But Abd-El-Kadir, mean-
ing to write the same thing, wrote a whole page about
flowers, jewels, roses, moonshine and what not."

Now this difference between the poetic genius of
Oriental expression and the precision which the Euro-
pean mind expects, must not be overlooked, and it
necessitates a certain reduction in interpreting many
of the strong declarations of the New Testament.

Again, as I hinted, we must remember that Jesus
was a speaker to the multitude. We must disabuse
our minds of that old idea that Jesus spoke primarily
to report from heaven to earth a body of Divinity and
a perfect moral code, exact and exhaustive, every
syllable weighed and measured so as to be a standard
authority and sacred oracle for all future generations.
We must think of him rather as aiming to fix the at-
tention of the lounging crowd, gathered at some street
corner or public square in Jerusalem ; or to rouse
from their sluggishness the minds of the rustics who
have come out on to some hilltop or by the lake-side

172 THE NEW WOULD AND THE NEW THOUGHT

to take a look at the new preacher. If he had spoken
in the cautious, moderate and quahfied style of a
theological professor, he would never have caught
their attention. Jesus was obliged, from the nature
of the case, to resort to striking apothegms, — nay to
what literally would be paradoxes, that he might lodge
something in their minds that would quicken them
and set them to thinking. Doubtless, too, he was
aware of and made allowance for that curious hold-
back in human nature, that unwillingness that the
average man feels, to do in any matter exactly what
another man counsels him to do. Tell a boy to do
one particular thing and how willing you find him to
do anything else but that ; and if at last, he yields and
does do the thing he has been ordered to, — how apt
he is to do it in some way just a little different from
the way he has been commanded to do it. He seems
to think that by so varying from the order given him,
he in some way saves his own independence. And
men are only boys of bigger growth and show the
same trait by always trying to beat down their market
man or get ten per cent, off the price of their coal or
their potatoes. There is this eternal tendency in
human nature to do a little less than it is wanted to,
so that if you want to get the world a rod ahead, you
must command it to go a furlong. John Stuart Mill
in his autobiography, speaking of one of his pamph-
lets, " England and Ireland," says, — " It is the char-
acter of the British people, or at least of the higher
and middle classes who pass muster for the British
people, that to induce them to approve of any change,
it is necessary that they should look upon it as a

CHRISTIAN DISCIPLESHIP AND MODERN LIFE 173

middle course. They think any proposal extreme
and violent, unless they hear of some other proposal
going still further, upon which their antipathy to ex-
treme views may discharge itself. So it proved in the
present instance. My proposal was condemned. But
any scheme for Irish land reform, short of mine, came
to be thought moderate by comparison.' It was on
this principle, also, so I have heard Wendell Phillips
say, that he and the early Abolitionists urged the
people of the North to dissolve the Union so as to get
rid of the responsibility for slavery. They persuaded
hardly any one to go that length with them. They
did not expect to. But by urging that extreme, they
brought people up to saying, " We cannot consent to
give up the constitution and the Union ; but anything
short of that : — free territories, personal liberty bills ;
colored schools, — in anything of this sort we will
support you. And the very people gladly promised
this, who, if we had asked only for these lesser things
would have been just as unwilling to yield them."

Now Jesus, I believe, understood this trait of human
nature, and made it serve him ; and it is the explana-
tion of many of the apparent paradoxes of the gospel.
If he had simply bidden men, when struck on the
cheek, bear it with patience, he would have made
very slight impression on their minds and his admoni-
tion would have accomplished little or nothing. But by
bidding them " turn the other cheek, also," — he arrests
men's thoughts and gets them half-way to the goal he
has bidden them to go ; to the point, that is, of recog-
nizing it as a duty to bear injuries patiently, which
was probably in fact all that Jesus desired. So with

174 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT

the precept enjoining the disciple to go " two miles with
him that ask thee to go one ; " to " give up thy coat, also,
to him that takes thy cloak ; " — if we follow these pre-
cepts to the extent that common sense and a just regard
for our other duties limits them, we may feel that we are
following them as far as Jesus expected us to. Every
other excellence seems to be ascribed to Jesus except
this attribute of common sense. But he who was the
perfection of manhood, surely was not lacking in the
one thing most essential to wisdom and balance of
character. And as he had common sense himself,
he expected to find it in those to whom he spoke.

Again, we must distinguish between the circum-
stances of the age and country in which Christ lived
and our own. He spoke, — in the form of his instruc-
tion,— for his own time. Were he teaching now
among us, the form, the details of his instruction
would doubtless be different. For example, among a
simple rustic community, like that of Palestine, there
was not the same danger of breeding a pauper class
by the custom of alms-giving,* as with us. It was the
natural way of relieving honest distress. So wealth
was less often won without fraud or extortion, in
those days. It spoke generally of injustice and op-
pression. It did not play, in the economy of Christ's
people, that useful place in the development and im-
provement of society that it does in modern life.
The social science of Palestine would hardly be the
same as that which England and America call for, to-
day. The practical methods that may have been wise
in Gahlee, i, 800 years ago, may not be so at all in
modern Christendom. We must not confound the

CHRISTIAN DISCIPLESHIP AND MODERN LIFE 175

realm of the spiritual with the realm of the material.
Christianity has no particular system of political
economy. Christianity has no special system of
transacting business. Christianity has no unchange-
able specifications of dogma or conduct, the line of
which it always requires its disciples to toe. It is not
a set of rules and precepts, but of principles. It is a
grand stream of vital spirit, flowing from the heart of
Christ, down through the centuries, infusing all insti-
tutions and customs, while it expands itself to the
breadth of the advancing age. Christianity is, indeed,
a religion of every-day life ; a religion of business ; a
religion that embodies itself in social activities. But
it has nowhere any special institutions, any special
forms ; any special acts or instrumentalities that it in-
sists upon. What it insists on is the feeUng, the mo-
tive that is carried into all. That must always be
high and pure. Every sentiment of the Christian
must be noble. Every purpose must be unselfish.
Every beat of his heart must remember his neighbor's
good. Every thought must be touched with a rever-
ence for the Divine. Let the intellect seek what path
it thinks best. Only let the generous heart be the
driver. Let common sense conduct the affairs of so-
ciety and the state as she deems wisest. Only let love
to God and man be the end. Of every special deed,
true Christianity says, as Paul said of the eating of
meat, — " Let him that eateth, eat unto the Lord, and
him that eateth not, likewise unto the Lord. To his
own Master, he standeth or falleth." Christ is indeed,
the pattern which our religious aspirations should set
before them. But we cannot repeat all the actual

176 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT

deeds or ideas of Christ to advantage in this nineteenth
century, any more than we can wisely wear in our north-
ern cHmes, the loose, thin robes that Jesus wore ; or use
sandals on our feet, instead of shoes ; or talk Aramaic,
as Christ did ; or image in our own faces, the personal
likeness that belonged to him. What we are to seek is
that which Paul exhorted the Philippians to attain to ;
" the mind which was in Christ Jesus " ; that spirit,
temper, enduring and inspiring character — that life, in
fine, " which shone " as Mr. W. R. Greg has well said,
" through all his actions and permeated all his sayings,
and which was so vital, so essential, so omnipresent and
so unmistakable, as to have survived through all the
channels and processes of transmission, — this mind of
Christ can alone be safely followed as his real teach-
ing. Doubts and disputes among Christians have
been endless as to the doctrine of Christ ; as to the par-
ticulars of what he said and did. None, we believe,
ever truly differed as to the tone and temper of his
mind or of his teaching." We may doubt the
wisdom and the obligation -still to obey some of
Christ's verbal commands. We may declare that
he who gives to every one that asks of him, will
be likely only to minister to sloth and sensuality ;
that he who turns the other cheek, also, to the fist
that has already smitten him on one cheek, only en-
courages the riot of violence and force. But we can-
not dispute that the spirit that these precepts incul-
cate is the right spirit ; that this mood of universal,
all-forbearing love is the only mood that can bring
the fallen soul to its better self ; is the only mood in
which even stern correction should be inflicted.

CHRISTIAN DISCIPLESHIP AND MODERN LIFE 177

To have " the mind that was in Christ Jesus " is the
true Christian Hfe. And that Hfe is always feasible.
We cannot conceive any single form or manifestation
of it that may not thrive in fullest vitality in society
as now constituted, and find ample work in purging it
of its evils and developing its capabilities, without
seeking to overturn its foundations. " The shell of
verbal form," Mr. Greg has truly said, " in which
Christ's thoughts have come down to us, may pass
from the belief of man and from harmony with so-
ciety. The world has outgrown some ; it will, doubt-
less, outgrow more. But the kernel, — the spirit, —
belongs to all time." To follow this spirit is, of course,
a work beset with difficulties, — as all things worth
getting are. And some of these difficulties, come, it
is true, from the very spirit of our age. To lead a
life that shall make our fellow-men better is not the
simple thing it was of old. It is beset with many
perplexities. Our civiHzation is so complex that it is
a difficult thing to follow out the windings of an act
to its real consequences in society. It is a difficult
thing to balance the two sides that we have learned to
see that there are to almost every question. The
Christian disciple nowadays needs the wisdom of the
serpent, or in spite of himself, he will fail to be
" harmless as the dove." But if there are these hin-
drances to Christian living, in modern society, — on
the other hand what great helps are there ! There
has never been a time, I believe, more full of the
Christian spirit. Never a time when men sought
more generally and more patiently how they might
improve the condition of society. Never a time when

178 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT

there was a more earnest desire to get at the real, at
the substantial, the actually helpful, — pushing one side
old worn out forms, perhaps with a little rudeness, but
with diligence and intelligence advancing towards that
which is truly useful to the race. Look around at our
public institutions, our hospitals, asylums. Social
Science Associations, Reform Schools, Fresh Air
Funds and Outings, Free Kindergartens, Lend-a-Hand
Societies, People's Palaces, College Settlements, Peace
Conferences, Working People's Clubs, and what grand
strides have been made within the last century towards
the better realization of the coming of Christ's king-
dom of love and peace on earth. But still — how far,
alas ! are we yet, from the glorious consummation.
God knows how much we fall short of it. But the
fault, I believe, lies not in the age ; nor in our institu-
tions, nor yet in the gospel itself. It lies in ourselves ;
in the pressure of the senses upon the spirit; the
rivalry of the flesh with the soul ; the weariness of
the body and the weakness of the will. Let us seek
to get more of the mind which was in Christ ; that
absolute devotion to our fellow-men and to God. Let
us not squander our forces, endeavoring to overtur,n
society. Let us trust that the experience and struggle
for existence of humanity in these many thousand
years that we have been on the earth, have settled
some of the simpler conditions of social life. Let the
sword go unmelted ; but let it strike only for right
and justice. Despise not the power of riches ; but let
them be used for the blessing of society. Let the
distinctions of property and class remain. But let
them be consecrated to the discharge of their respect-

CHRISTIAN DISCIPLESEIP AND 3I0DERN LIFE 179

ive duties, and to the better fulfilment of what mutual
love and helpfulness demands. It is a fascinating
vision, — the vision of the days of primitive Christian-
ity renewed amongst us ; the very life of Jesus in
Nazareth and Jerusalem, led again here, just as he
passed it there. But that time is gone by forever.
Yet that which is left to us ; the realizing of his mind
in every one of our lives, — taking on the new forms
which our larger opportunities and larger experience
justify, how much nobler a picture would that make !
Would it not, indeed, be the realization of those
greater miracles which Christ himself foretold that
his disciples should work when his own task on earth
was ended?

CHAPTER VIII.

MODERN DOGMATISM AND THE UNBELIEF OF THE AGE.

An eminent ecclesiastic of the Church of England
once characterized the present age as preeminently
the age of doubt, and lamented that whether he took
up book or magazine or sermon, he was confronted by-
some form of it.

This picture of our age is not an unjust one. The
modern mind is thoroughly wide-awake and has quite
thrown off the leading strings of ancient timidity. All
the traditions of history, the laws of science, the
principles of morals are overhauled and the founda-
tions on which they rest relentlessly probed. And
our modern curiosity can see no reason why it should
cease its investigations when it comes to the frontiers
of religion. It deems no dogma too old to be sum-
moned before its bar; no council nor conclave too
sacred to be asked for its credentials ; no pope or
scripture too venerable to be put in the witness-box
and cross-examined as to its accuracy or authority.
In all the churches there is a spirit of inquiry abroad,
— nay, almost every morning breeze brings us some
new report of heresy, or the baying of the sleuth-
hounds, as they scent some new trail of heterodoxy ;
and the slogan of dogmatic controversy echoes from
shore to shore.

To the greater part of the church this epidemic of
180

MODERN D0G3IATIS3I 181

scepticism is a subject of grave alarm. Unbelief
seems to them, as to Mr. Moody, the worst of sins ;
and they consider the only proper thing to do with it,
is to follow the advice which the Bishop of London
gave some years ago, — and fling doubt away as you
would a loaded shell. They apparently look upon
Christianity as a huge powder magazine, which is
likely to explode if a spark of candid inquiry comes
near it.

Others on the contrary, fold their arms indifferently
and regard this new spirit of investigation as only an
evanescent breeze, which can produce no serious
result upon the citadel of faith. A third party hails it
with exultation as the first trumpet blast of the theo-
logical Gotterdamerung, — the downfall of all divine
powers and the destruction of the Christian superstition
to give place to the naked facts of scientific material-
ism.

What estimate then, shall we put on this tendency ?

In the first place we must recognize that it is a
serious condition ; that it is no momentary eddy, but
a permanent turn in the current of the human mind.
Humanity is looking religion square in the face,
without any bandage over the eyes, in a way it never
has confronted it before; and when humanity once
gets its eyes open to such questions, — it is in vain to
try and close them, before it has thoroughly examined
the subjects at issue. Certainly, Protestantism cannot
call a halt upon this march. For it was Protestantism
itself, proclaiming at the beginning of her struggle
with Rome, the right of private judgment, which
started the modern mind upon this high quest ; and

182 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT

Protestantism is therefore bound, in logic and honor,
to see it through to the end, whatever that end may
be.

And in the next place I believe that quest vi^ill end
in good. Why the champions of faith should regard
doubt as devil-born, rather than a providential instru-
ment in God's hand, is something I do not understand.
If doubt humbles the church and acts as a thorn in
its flesh, may not such chastening be providential,
quite as much as the things which puff it up. As
Luther well expressed it : — " We say to our Lord —
that if He will have His church. He must keep it. For
we cannot. And if we could, we should be the
proudest asses under heaven." As Attila was the
scourge of God to the Roman world, when God
needed to clear that empire out of the way, as He
built His new Christendom, — so may not doubt be the
scourge of God to this easy-going, sleepy, too credu-
lous piety of to-day which swallows all the husks of
faith so fast that it never gets a taste of the kernel ?

Yes, doubt is often the* needed preparation for
obtaining truth. We must clear out the thorny
thicket of superstition before we can begin to raise
the sweet fruit of true religion. There are times when
careful investigation is rightly called for. When
doubting Thomas demanded to see the point of the
nails and to touch and handle the flesh of the risen
Christ, before he would believe in the resurrection of
his Lord, his demand for the most solid proof of the
great marvel was a wise and commendable one, — one
for which all subsequent generations of Christians are
deeply indebted to him. To believe without evidence,

MODERN D0GMATIS3I 183

or to suppress doubt where it legitimately arises, is
both fostering superstition and exposing ourselves to
error and danger. What shall we say of the merchant
who refuses to entertain any question about the sea-
worthiness of his vessel, but sends her off across the
Atlantic, undocked and unexamined, piously trusting
her to the Lord ? Shall we commend him ? or not
rather charge him with culpable negligence ? And
what we say of such a merchant, seems to me just
what we should say of the Christian who refuses to
investigate the seaworthiness of that ship of faith
which his ancestors have left him. In astronomy, in
politics, in law, we demand what business the dead
hand of the past has on our lip, our brain, our purse ?
Why should the dead hand of Anselm, Augustine or
Calvin be exempt from giving its authority? Why
should their mediaeval glimpses of truth be given the
right to close our eyes to-day from seeing what we
ourselves can see and seal our lips from speaking forth
what we can hear of heavenly truth ?

In all other departments of knowledge, investigation
has brought us to a higher outlook, where we see
the true relations of things better than before. In all
other branches, God has given us new light, so that
we discern things more as they really are. Science
has risen, by making a ladder of its earlier errors and
by treading them under foot, has reached to higher
truths. The Bible itself is the growth of ages ; and
Christian doctrine and Christian creeds have been the
evolution of a still longer period. The dogmas of the
churches are most manifold and conflicting. Is it not
rather immodest and absurd for each church to claim

184 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT

infallibility for its present creed and that wisdom died
when the book of Revelation closed the Bible, or the
Council of Trent or the Westminster Assembly
adjourned its sitting ? It seems to me that the
churches ought, instead, to be willing and anxious to
receive whatever new light God may grant them to-
day, and with the potent clarifying processes of
reason, separate the pure gold of religion from the
dross and alloys of olden superstition and misguided
judgment.

But to the modern devotees of dogma any sub-
jection of it to the cleansing of the reason seems
shocking. What, e.g.^ was the forefront of the offend-
ing of Robert Ingersoll, on account of which so large
a part of the religious world considered him an infidel,
sure to be eternally lost, than that he dared to test the
Bible and popular creeds by reason and freely vent
his matchless wit, irony and indignant eloquence on
those parts and interpretations that would not meet
the test. Or in the case of another heretic of our day
— a man of most reverent spirit* and thorough scholar-
ship— never scoffing at sacred things as Colonel
Ingersoll did — yet on whose trail the heresy-hunters long
fiercely followed — for what was Dr. Charles A. Briggs
tried and suspended from the ministry of the Presby-
terian Church. And when for the sake of peace, he left
that denomination and sought in its stead the fold of
Episcopacy, for what was he still pursued with much
loud sacerdotal baying and barking? Why else than
that he frankly admitted errors in the Bible and gave
to reason (by which he meant, as he explained, not
merely the understanding but also the conscience and

MODERN DOGMATISM 185

religious instinct in man) a conjoint place with the
Bible and the Church in the work of salvation and the
attainment of divine truth ?

To the modern dogmatist, these positions seem
sceptical and pernicious. But to the philosopher, who
knows the laws of human nature and to every scholar
who knows the actual history of the Bible, these posi-
tions seem only self-evident. That in the scriptures
there are innumerable errors in science, mistakes in
history, prophecies that were never fulfilled, contradic-
tions and inconsistencies between different books and
chapters — these are facts of observation, which every
Biblical student knows full well. And another thing
every scholar knows equally well — that these original
autographs of the sacred writers, — for whose infalli-
bility the conservatives contend, — are things that no
one in these modern days has ever seen or can ever
know what they are. For the oldest of the New
Testament Greek manuscripts is 200 years later than
the age of the evangelists and the oldest Hebrew
manuscript of the Old Testament is 700 or 800 years
older than the date of composition of their latest part.
Granting, then, for the sake of argument, that the
Bible was given originally by infallible divine dicta-
tion, yet the men who wrote down the message were
fallible ; the men who copied it were fallible ; the men
who translated it (some of it being twice translated, —
first from Hebrew to Greek and then from Greek to
English) were fallible ; and the editors who from the
scores of manuscripts, by their personal comparison
and decisions between the conflicting readings, patched
together our present text, were most faUible. And

186 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT

when thus a Bible reader has got his text before him,
how can he understand it except by using his own
reason and judgment, — instruments again, most fallible.

How is it possible then, to get Bible-truth in-
dependently of the reason or in entire exemption
from error ? The only way would be to say that not
only was the original manuscript of the Bible verbally
inspired ; but all its authors, copyists, editors and pious
readers were also infallibly inspired. As, in the old
Hindu account of how the world was supported, the
earth was said to be held up on pillars, and the pillars on
an elephant, and the elephant on a tortoise, and when the
defender of the faith was asked — " what then did the tor-
toise rest on ? " he sought to save himself in his quandary
by roundly asserting that it was " tortoise all the way
down " ; so the defender of the infallibility of the
scripture has to take refuge in " inspiration all the
way down." But if this be so, — ought not the mod-
ern Biblical editors and revisers, translators and pro-
fessors of to-day also to be inspired, as much as those
of King James' day or the pointers at the Bible House ?
and thus we reach, as the reductio ad absurdiim of this
argument, the result that Tischendorf and Kuenen,
Gregory and Dr. Briggs, Dr. Preserved Smith and Dr.
McGiffert, the very Hebrew professors and higher critics
who are accused of heresy, are really themselves the
channels of infallible inspiration. For unless these
Biblical scholars of the present day are inspired and
providentially guided, a most essential link in the
chain of inspiration is missing.

The sincere investigators into the character of the
Bible and the nature of Christ are charged with ex-

MODERN DOGMATISM 187

alting human reason above the word of God. But as
soon as the subject is investigated and a Professor
Swing or a Dr. McGiffert corroborates his interpreta-
tion by the scripture itself, or Dr. Briggs and Pro-
fessor Smith show their views to be sustained by-
history, by philosophy, by a profounder study of
both nature and the Bible, — then, the ground is
shifted and it is maintained that it is not a question
whether the views are true ; but whether they con-
form to the creed ; that the catechism is not to be
judged by the Bible or the facts in the case ; but Bible
and facts are to be interpreted by the words of the
confession ; and if they do not agree with this, — then,
heresy and infidelity are made manifest. The ques-
tion is not whether the water of truth be found ; but
whether it is drunk out of an orthodox bottle, with the
Church's label glued firmly upon it.

But let us stop for a moment and ask whence came
these creeds and catechisms themselves ? What else
was their origin than out of the reason of man, out of
the brains of scholars, (quite as fallible, quite as par-
tisan and far less well-informed than our scholars to-
day) as these older scholars in former years, criticized
and interpreted the same scripture and nature and laws
of God.

Thus it is the dogmatists themselves who, in point
of fact, exalt the reason of man above the word of God,
forbidding us, as they do, to listen to the voice of God
in our own soul ; forbidding us to decipher the revela-
tions which the Divine Hand has written on the rocks
and trees and animal structures of his own Creation,
and even frowning upon that profounder study of the

188 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT

scripture called the higher criticism ; and bid us accept,
in its stead, the man-made substitute of some council
or assembly of former generations, less well-informed
than ourselves.

There have undoubtedly been periods when the
doubt with which the church had to deal was mainly
frivolous or sensual ; a passionate rebellion of the
carnal nature, attacking the essential truths of religion.
But such is not the nature of the doubt that is at
present occupying the public eye; such is not the
doubt most characteristic of our generation. It pro-
ceeds from serious motives. It is a doubt marked by
essential reverence and loyalty to truth. It is a desire
for more solid foundations ; for the attainment of the
naked realities of existence. It is a necessary incident
of the great intellectual awakening of our century. As
the modern intellect comes back on Sunday from its
week-day explorations of the history of Rome or the
myths of Greece or the religious ideas of Buddha or
Zoroaster, it must return to the contemplation of the
Christian dogmas under the influence of new ideas.
It will necessarily demand what better evidence the
law of Moses or the creed of Athanasius has than the law
of Manu or the text of the Zendavesta. The scepti-
cism of our age is not so much directed against the
great truths of religion as against the man-made
dogmas that have usurped the sacred seat.

If irreverent, scoffing scepticism were to be found
anywhere to-day, it would most likely be found mani-
fested among the throng of young men gathered at
our most progressive universities. But eminent men
connected with orthodox denominations have testified

MODERN D0G3IATISM 189

that if these students are sceptical, it is because they
are too serious-minded and too true, to accept con-
victions ready-made ; to take traditional creeds instead
of personal beliefs ; or church formularies in place of
a life of devotion.

Now, to call such a state of mind irreligious or
infidel is most unjust. The irreligion lies rather with
those who make a fetish of the Bible and substitute a
few pet texts from it, that sustain their own private
opinions, in place of that divine light that lighteth
every man that cometh into the world. The real
infidels are they who reject the revelation which God
is making us continually in the widening light of
modern knowledge, and by a species of ecclesiastical
lynching, condemn before trial the sincere, painstaking
and careful scholars and reverent disciples of Christ,
who are so earnestly seeking after truth, — because the
results of their learned researches do not agree with
the prejudices of their anathematizers. It is with no
less cogency of argument than nobility of feeling that
Dr. Briggs replied to his assailants : " If it be heresy
to say that rationalists like Martineau have found God
in the reason, and Roman Catholics like Newman,
have found God in the church, — I rejoice in such
heresy and I do not hesitate to say that I have less
doubt of the salvation of Martineau and Newman than
I have of the modern Pharisees who would exclude
such noble men, — so pure, so grand, the ornaments
of Great Britain and the prophets of the age, — from
the kingdom of God."

Scepticism and religious questioning are, then, no
sins. They are not irreligious. But surely they do

190 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT

vex the church. What shall the church do about
them.

In the first place we should not try to suppress
them. Nor should we tell religious inquirers to shut
their eyes and put the poppy pillow of faith beneath
their heads and go to sleep again and dream. They
have got their eyes wide open and they are determined
to know whether those sweet visions which they had
on faith's pillow are any more than illusions. Nor
will they be satisfied and cease to think, by having a
creed of 300 or 1,500 years antiquity recited to them.
The modern intellects that have taken Homer to
pieces, disinterred Agamemnon's tomb, unwound the
mummy wrappings of the Pharaohs, weighed the stars
and chained the lightnings are not to be awed by any
old-time sheepskin or any council of bishops. They
demand the facts in the case ; they desire fresh manna
to satisfy their heart hunger; they crave the solid
realities of personal experience. It is too late to-day
to say to the great tide of modern thought — " Thus
far shalt thou go and no further." The old ramparts
are broken through and we must give the flood its
course. The only spirit to meet it in, is that of frank-
ness and friendliness. Let us not foster in these
questioning minds the suspicion that there is any part
of religion that we are afraid to have examined. We
smile at the bigoted Buddhist who, when the European
attempted to prove by the microscope that the monk's
scruples against eating animal food were futile (inas-
much as, as in every glass of water which he drank, he
swallowed millions of little living creatures) smashed
the microscope for answer — just as if that altered at

MODERN D0G3IA TISM 191

all the facts. But are not many of the heresy-hunters
in Christendom quite as foolish, in their efforts to sup-
press the testimony which nature and reason and
scholarship every day present afresh ?

Let us therefore give liberty, — yes — even sympathy
to these perplexed souls who are struggling with the
great problems of religion.

And secondly, let us be honest with them and not
claim more certainty for religious doctrines or more
precise and absolute knowledge about divine and
heavenly things than we have. One of the great
causes of modern doubt is unquestionably the excessive
claims that theology has made. It has not been con-
tent with preaching the simple truths necessary to a
good life ; that we have a Maker to whom we are re-
sponsible, a Divine Friend to help us, a Divine voice
within to teach us right and wrong ; that in the life
that is to follow this, each shall be judged according
to his deeds, and that in the examples of the Apostles
and prophets, especially in the spotless life of Jesus,
we have the noble patterns of the holy life set up
before us for our imitation ; a revelation of moral and
religious truth all sufficient for salvation. The church
has not been content with these, almost self-evident
truths ; but it must go on, to make most absolute
assertions about God's foreknowledge and foreordina-
tion and Triune personality ; and the eternal punish-
ment of the wicked, and the double nature and pre-
existence of Christ, things not only vague and incon-
sistent, but contradictory to our sense of justice and
right. It must go on to make manifold assertions
about the inerrancy and verbal inspiration of the

192 TEE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT

Bible and the details of the future life and the fall of
human nature, which are utterly incredible to rational
minds. And the worst of it is, that all these things
are bound up in one great theological system, and
poor, anxious inquirers are told that they must either
take all, or none ; and so (soon coming face to face
with some palpable inconsistency or incredibility) they
not unnaturally give up the whole. Trace out the
religious history of the great sceptics, the Voltaires,
the Bradlaughs, the Ingersolls, the Tom Paines, and
you will see that the origin of their scepticism has
almost always been in a reaction from the excessive
assumptions of the ecclesiastics themselves. It is too
fine-spun and arrogant orthodoxy that is itself respon-
sible for half of the heterodoxy of which it complains.
Let the church, then, be candid and claim no more
than it ought to. Let it respect and encourage
honesty in every man in these sacred matters. The
church itself should say to the inquirer : you are un-
faithful to your God, if you go not where He, by the
candle of the Lord, — i. e.^ (the reason and conscience
He has placed within you) leads you. And when a
man in this reverent and sincere spirit, pursues the
path of doubt, how often does he find it circling
around again towards faith and conducting him to the
Mount of Zion. The true remedy for scepticism is
deeper investigation. As all sincere doubt is at bot-
tom a cry of the deeper faith, that only that which is
true and righteous is Divine, so all earnest doubt,
thought through to the end, pierces the dark cloud
and comes out in the light and joy of higher con-
victions. It lays in the dust our philosophic and

MODERN DOGMA TISM 193

materialistic idols and brings us to the one eternal
Power, the everlasting Spirit, manifested in all ; that
Spirit " whose name is truth, whose word is love."

The reader may perhaps remember the story of the
climber among the Alps, who having slipped off a
precipice, as he thought, frantically grasped, as he
fell, a projecting root and held on in an agony of an-
ticipated death, for hours, until, utterly exhausted, he
at last resigned himself to destruction, and let go of
his support, to fall gently on the grassy ledge beneath,
only a few inches below his feet. So, when we resign
ourselves to God's hand, our fall, be it little or be it
great, lands us gently in the Everlasting Arms that
are ever underneath.

Do not fear, then, to wrestle with doubt ; or to
follow its leadings. Out of every sincere soul struggle,
your faith shall come forth, stronger and calmer.
And do not hesitate to proclaim your new convic-
tions, when they have become convictions. Such is
the encouragement and sympathy that the church
should give the candid questioner.

On the other hand, it may wisely caution him, not to
be precipitate, in publishing his doubt. Let him wait
until it has become more than a doubt; till it has become
a settled and well-considered conclusion, before he in-
flicts it upon his neighbor. The very justification for
doubting the accepted opinion, the sacredness of truth,
■ — commands caution and firm conviction that our new
view is something more than a passing caprice of the
mind, before we publish it. But when the doubter is
sure of this, — then, let him no longer silence his
highest thoughts.

194 TEE NEW WORLD AND TEE NEW TEOUGET

Again, the church is justified in cautioning the
doubter not to be proud of his doubt as a doubt.
There is no more merit, it is well to remember, in dis-
believing than in believing ; and if your opinions
have, as yet, only got to the negative state and you
have no new positive faith or philosophy to substitute
for the old, — you are doing your neighbor a poor
service in taking away from him any superstition,
however illogical, that sustains his heart and strength-
ens his virtue.

And further, let me say, — I should dislike very
much to have any sceptic contented with doubt.
Doubt makes a very good spade to turn up the
ground ; but a very poor kind of spiritual food for a
daily diet. It is a useful, often an indispensable
half-way house in the journey of life ; but a very cold
home in which to settle down in, as the end of that
journey.

In all our deepest hours, when our heart is truly
touched or our mind satisfied, — we believe. It is
each soul's positive faith, however unconventional or
perhaps unconscious that faith may be, that sustains
its hope, that incites its effort and that supports it
through the trials of life. Any doubt, even, that is
earnest and to be respected, is really an act of faith, —
faith in a higher law than that of human creeds, faith
in a more direct revelation, within ourselves, in our
own sense of justice and consistency, than is to be
found in any manuscript or print.

The very Atheist who in the name of truth, repu-
diates the word of God, is really manifesting (in his own
different way) the belief which he cannot escape, in

MODERN DOGMATISM 195

the Divine Righteousness and its lawful claim on every
human soul. She was right who wrote :

" There is no unbelief.
And day by day and night by night, unconsciously,
The heart lives by that faith the lips deny ; —
God knows the why."

Finally — and most important of all — let us not
worry ourselves so much about the intellectual opin-
ions of men ; but look rather to their spiritual condi-
tion. The Church ought to think less of creed and
more of character. The essence of faith lies not in
correct conclusions upon doctrinal points ; but in
righteousness and love and trustful submission to
God's will. No scepticism concerning dogmas touches
the heart of religion. If that seems at all heretical,
let me cite good Orthodox authority. I might quote
Bishop Thirlwall of the Church of England, in his
judgment concerning Colenso's attack upon the ac-
curacy of the history of the Exodus in the Pentateuch,
— that " this story, — nay the whole history of the Jew-
ish people, has no more to do with our faith as Chris-
tians, than the extraction of the cube or the rule of
three." Or I might quote Canon Farrar's weighty
words in an article upon the true test of religion.
" The real question," he declares, " to ask about any
form of religious belief, is : Does it kindle the fire of
love ? Does it make the life stronger, sweeter, purer,
nobler ? Does it run through the whole society like
a cleansing flame, burning up that which is mean and
base, selfish and impure ? If it stands that test it is
no heresy." That answers the question as aptly as it

196 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT

does manfully. And to the same effect is that notable
saying of Dr. Mcllvaine at the Presbyterian Presbytery
a few years ago, when, quoting the admission of one
evangelical minister that it was the Unitarian Marti-
neau who had saved his soul and kept his Christian
faith from shipwreck, he added significantly, " you
must first find God in your soul before you can find
Him elsewhere." Yes — the prime and essential thing
is to find God in the soul ; to worship Him in spirit ;
by a pure conscience ; by a loyal will ; by a heart full
of devotion to God's righteousness, and by love to all
our kind. This is to worship God in truth. And
what have Calvin's Five points or the composite or
non-composite origin of the Pentateuch, or the virgin
birth of Christ to do, with such worship ? If a man
finds evidence for them, which seems to him satis-
factory ; very well. But if he cannot honestly credit
them, — why should we shut the doors of the Church
against him or threaten him with excommunication ?
Were these the requirements that Jesus Christ laid on
his disciples ? Not at all. Look all through the Ser-
mon on the Mount, — study the Golden Rule, and the
Parable of the Good Samaritan, or the conditions he
lays down in his picture of the Last Judgment as the
conditions of approval by the Heavenly Judge, and
see if you find anything there about the infallibility of
scripture or the Apostolic succession or the Deity of
Christ or any other of the dogmas on account of
which the ecclesiastical disciplinarians would drive
out the men whom they are pursuing as heretics.
How grimly we may fancy Satan (if there be any
Satan) smiling to himself as he sees great Christian

MODERN DOG3IATIS3f 197

denominations wrought up to a white heat over such
dogmas and definitions, while the practical atheism
and pauperism and immorality of our great metropolis
is passed over with indifference. Sunday after Sun-
day, the Christian pulpit complains that the great
masses of the people keep away from their communion
tables and do not even darken their doors. Does not
the fault really lie in the folly — I may almost say the
sin of demanding of men that they believe so many
things that neither reason nor enlightened moral sense
can accept, and making of these dogmas, five barred
gates through which alone there is any admission to
heaven ? If we wish the Church to regain its hold on
thinking men it must simplify and curtail its creeds ;
it must recognize that the love of God is not measured
by the narrowness of human prejudice and that God's
arms are open to receive every honest searcher after
truth. Let him come with all his doubts ; provided
he come with a pure heart and bring forth the fruits
of righteousness. Let us no longer pretend that it is
necessary for a Christian life to know all the mysteries
of God. Let it no longer be thought a mark of wick-
edness for a man honestly to hold a conviction differ-
ent from the conventional standard ; but let us respect
one another's independent search and judgment of
truth. True faith consists not in any special theory
of God or His ways, but in the uplifting of our spirit
to touch His spirit and the diffusing of whatever grace
or gift we have received from Him, in generous good
will amongst our fellows. If the Christian Church is
to go forward successfully again in the power and
spirit of that Master whom it constantly invokes as

198 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT

" the way ; the truth and the life " ; it must make that
way and Hfe its guiding truth. It must aim constantly
at greater simplicity in its teaching, and a broader,
more fraternal cooperation in Christian work. Its
motto should be the motto of the early Church — " In
essentials, unity ; in non-essentials, liberty ; in all
things, — charity." Then shall a new and grander
career open before its upward footsteps.

CHAPTER IX.

UNION OF THE CHURCHES IN ONE SPIRITUAL HOUSEHOLD.

Fairest of the dreams of early Christianity was the
dream of a single household of God, where all the
children of the Heavenly Father, of whatever race or
tongue, should be brought together into one great
family, in the bond of mutual love and a common
worship. It was the prayer of Jesus, in that last
tender hour with His disciples before His arrest. It
was the vision that inspired Paul to such heroic
labors ; it was the aspiring flame that rose up from the
hearts of the Apostles on the day of Pentecost, to call
down on them the Holy Spirit, in whose solvent of
loving sympathy Parthians and Medes, Elamites,
Jews and Arabians, all understood their neighbor as
if each spake in his own tongue. From century to
century, indeed, the realization of this dream has,
from causes too numerous to mention, constantly
eluded the world. Still the dream has kept its hold
on the human heart, and many brave attempts have
been made to give it earthly incarnation. The new
spirit of brotherhood which Jesus communicated has
worked as a blessed leaven ; and loud as the clash of
Babel voices has been at times, yet the still small
voice of human fellowship has kept whispering its
counsels of love and peace. Those who note the ebb
and flow of religious currents, have observed all

199

200 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT

through the last quarter century a great rising in this
tide ; and, in the great reHgious assembhes connected
with the World's Fair at Chicago, the attendance and
speakers at which came from the most distant quarters
of the globe, that tide of common spiritual sympathy-
rose to a height never before chronicled in history.

Unprecedented in size and material, and artistic
magnificence, as the Chicago Exposition was, it was
still more unprecedented and remarkable in its as-
tonishing Parhament of ReHgions. To get together
on the same platform Trinitarian and Unitarian,
Monotheists and Polytheists, Roman cardinals and
Free Religious Lecturers, Greek archbishops and
Protestant presbyters, Buddhist monks and Confucian
moralists, expounders of the Bible, the Koran and
the Avesta, was indeed a marvel. But when from the
lips of these representatives of diverse sects, whose
ancestors had persecuted and cursed and battled with
one another so bitterly ; when alike from the yellow
robed Buddhists or the scarlet robed Cathohc, from
the Greek ecclesiastic in his bkck gown, the Hindu in
his red, or the Shinto in his white vestments, came
the same sentiments of righteousness, aspiration and
good-will ; and in their advocacies of their own faith,
earnest as they were, scarcely a word fell that could
give offense to those of rival faith — it seemed, indeed,
a new day of Pentecost, a descent of the holy dove of
the Spirit, beneath a rainbow of blended spiritual rays,
as comforting as that which foretold to Noah and his
sons the end of storm and wrath upon the renovated
earth. Every one who read the inspiring accounts of
these meetings, where the representatives of these

UNION OF THE CHURCHES 201

varied faiths exchanged such pleasant words of amity
and mutual respect, must have been impelled to ask :
why may not this Pentecostal fellowship be main-
tained ? Why may not Jew and Gentile, Roman and
Protestant, Christian and Parsee and Brahman, be
united, not merely for a few days, in some public
meeting, but constantly, in daily life, in the unity of
the Spirit and the bonds of peace ; and thus

*'The whole round earth be bound
With golden chains about the throne of love " ?

There is certainly in the religious world a great
yearning, both conscious and unconscious towards
this end. There is a great Providential movement of
the waters, recalling the churches of the world from
their divisions to a new fellowship. The reasons for
breaking through the old sectarian fences and for bring-
ing together in brotherly hand-claspings those who are
working for common ends, are patent to every one
who will open his eyes. What needless divisions and
superfluous multiplicity of sects are there. Our last
United States census enumerates 143 different religious
denominations, each with its own special organization,
ritual and special belief. There are half a dozen
diverse varieties of Lutherans ; twelve of Presby-
terians ; twelve of Mennonites ; thirteen of Baptists ;
and seventeen varied ecclesiastical stripes of Metho-
dists. The differences between these are of a minor
order ; — the race or European nation from which they
came, or the color of the skin of the members, or
some minute difference as to the use of baptismal
water or musical instruments, or prevenient or par-

202 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT

ticular grace. They are as near one another as
brothers and sisters of one family ; and yet the smaller
the theologic or ritual differences between them,
the stronger oftentimes are their antipathies and
aversions. Through this sectarian rivalry, little
villages of 1,200 or 1,500 people, only able to sustain
one pastor, have three, four or five meeting-houses of
different faiths, closed half the time. The ministers
receive but a quarter of the salary they should;
charities languish; social Hfe is embittered; and on
all sides the Christian life of our smaller communities
exhibits a deplorable inefficiency, waste, ill-will, and
useless friction. John Adams once said : " This
would be a pretty good world if there were no religion
in it." Doubtless, it was these evils into which a
narrow and petty sectarianism so often runs, which
had called forth this impatient outburst. But this
sectarian rivalry and bigotry is really as alien to the
spirit of true religion as it is to that of human brother-
hood. The growth and multiplication of sects was, in
its origin, a movement in the direction of greater
liberty and stricter loyalty to Christ and God.

But to-day, it is becoming the greatest hindrance
and prejudice to the life of the soul and the health of
Christendom. Where men become filled with a living
sense of their kinship to the Eternal Spirit and to
each other, they come with joy to see that this kin-
ship is not confined to their one little church en-
closure. They realize the deeper agreements which
underlie their surface differences. They have com-
mon aims and are bound together by common
interests. They serve, in their different ways,

UNION OF THE CHURCHES 203

one and the same Maker and righteous Law-
giver. They would all lift humanity out of the
ooze of vice and evil, and enthrone the spirit
above the flesh. In the materialism and animal-
ism of the world they have a common foe ;
and in faith in the soul within and the hopes of its
larger and fuller life beyond the portals of death they
have their common encouragement and support.

Every church, therefore, that has fought earnestly
in this common battle has made, and is making, some
valuable contribution to the spiritual victory sought.
There is good in all the churches ; some special,
varied need of the human heart which each one
meets. The candid scholar is obliged to recognize
how much humanity owes to each of the great
branches of the Christian vine ; to the Roman for its
comprehensiveness, its steadfastness, its wonderful
government of the masses ; to Methodism for its zeal
and cordial warmth ; to the Episcopal for its dignity
and enlistment in Christian service of the aesthetic
sensibilities ; to the liberal Christian for his light and
culture ; to the Calvinist for his consistent logic and
stern inflexibility ; to the Congregationalist for his de-
fense of spiritual independency; to our latest born
denomination, the Salvation Army, for its ardent de-
votion to the rescue and salvation of those whom the
respectable churches usually ignore. And outside the
Christian pale, the great Oriental faiths have also each
some spiritual lesson or precious ethical impulse to
contribute that makes each a helpful and holy acolyte
in the great cathedral of the world's worship. Bud-
dhism has its spirit of self-renunciation and universal

204 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT

compassion, that would spare the life and pain even of
the humblest insect. Mohammedanism has its sublime
submission to the divine and its scrupulous sobriety ;
Confucianism its filial fidelity ; Parseeism its punctil-
ious purity, truthfulness and rectitude.

And not only has each some special excellence, but
in their basal chords there is a noteworthy harmony.
Let me quote on this point the significant declaration
of an eminent Roman Catholic dignitary, made at
Chicago. I refer to the words of Archbishop Ireland,
on one of the opening days of the Parliament of
Religions : " There is a great common ground in all
religions, consisting of the vital and primordial truths
about the infinite spiritual reality." All Christian
sects are united in these common Christian truths,
which as one sacred choir they chant in unison. And
even when we pass outside the Christian pale, we find
these fundamental truths — God, duty, immortality, the
authority of truth, the sacredness of love — reechoed
by Jew and Gentile, Parsee, Arab, Brahman and
Chinese in concordant strains*, which as they ascend
to the Divine ear, doubtless blend in a single sym-
phony of praise and prayer.

The more carefully we study the varied religions of
the globe the more sure are we that none is wholly
false. Each has its valuable and needed truth. But
none, on the other hand, has the whole circle of pure
truth. Each but gives us a segment of it. The
keener our discernment of truth becomes, the clearer
we see how fragmentary is that single member, finger,
foot or eye, that any one denomination possesses.
The partial truth which each sect illustrates makes us

UNION OF THE CHURCHES 205

long for that fuller beauty and perfection which can
only be secured by bringing every limb and member,
obscure and uncomely as it may be, into the one
complete body that makes the God-designed whole.

Church unity is undoubtedly therefore a desirable
thing. And I beheve it is possible. It is more than
that. As noble Dr. Barrows, of the Presbyterian
Church, the originator and organizer of the Parlia-
ment of Religions, has said : " It is a necessity. It
is being forced upon us by the scandal and weakness
of schism. It is our business to make the conditions
of hfe more tolerable here below ; to bridge over the
chasms which separate the rich and the poor, to push
back the evil forces of crime, intemperance and vice,
that have thriven through our disunion."

The practical question next presents itself: How
may this be accomplished ? How may we reunite the
dissevered branches of Christendom ? How may we
bring into being that universal church, where every
child of God, groping for the truth or longing for
human sympathy, may find a spiritual home ?

For a long time now, this has been an object of
earnest thought, both by thoughtful individuals and by
many great denominations ; and no small number of
solutions have been proposed. The English Church
in the celebrated Lambeth proposals, offered as olive
branches of peace the Nicene creed ; the authority of
the scriptures ; the historic episcopate, and the sacra-
ments of baptism and the Lord's supper. The Roman
Church has a much simpler proposition ; all it asks is
submission to the Pope. Protestant orthodoxy has
suggested the Trinity, atonement and other doctrines,

206 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT

agreed upon by the Evangelical Alliance. The Ethical
Culture societies believe a purely ethical basis would
unite all in a single organization, in freedom, fellow-
ship and character.

These various movements and proposals have each
failed practically to heal the divisions, or gain any
acceptance approaching universality. The universal
Church must have a broader basis than uniformity of
sacraments or ritual. These are material and out-
ward. The essence of religion is spiritual and inward.
It lies in that communion which needs neither plate
nor cup ; in that sacrament of the self-surrendered
heart which unites the soul with its God, as firmly
without either wine or water as with them. The uni-
versal Church, again, cannot be circumscribed by limits
of race or nationality. Color is only skin deep. In
the sight of God, as Rabbi Hirsch says : " It is the
black heart, not the black skin, which excludes ; it is
the crooked act, not the curved nose, that ostracizes.
. . . The day of exclusive national religions is
past, the God of the univer-se should speak to all
mankind."

Neither can religious unity be based upon an iden-
tical creed. These minute and detailed confessions of
faith and catalogues of dogma are thorn-hedges, set
up for the wounding and cramping of every large
mind and progressive thought. A man may repeat
all the creeds without skipping a syllable, and say " I
believe " after every Article, and yet have never taken
the first step in the Christian life ; and another may
have followed in the very footsteps of Jesus, surren-
dering his very heart's blood in his complete devotion

UNION OF THE CHURCHES 207

to God and man ; and yet, through some intellectual
scrupulosity, not be able to find one of all the churches'
creeds that he can assent to. Our belief is not a mat-
ter we can change at will ; and it becomes increasingly
evident that uniformity of dogma should not be de-
manded as the sine qua 7ion of religious fellowship.
As a broad-minded Methodist (Rev. Frank M. Bristol)
has recently said : " Christianity is becoming more
and more a life and a hope, and less and less a dogma
and a theory. To me the test is as to a man's sin-
cerity. When I know a man is sincere, that is enough.
I want his hand and his fellowship in the common
work of bettering the world."

Nor, once more, have I any confidence in seeing
religious unity secured by ecclesiastical organization ;
by the swallowing up of weak sects by stronger rivals ;
by the voluntary surrender of modern churches to
that which can show the greatest flavor of antiquity;
by the supersedure of the many old denominations by
churchly fusions ; by some brand new organization of
a more flexible and comprehensive nature ; or by some
nebulous pet phrase, that soon becomes as rigid a
shibboleth as any of old. The older a denomination
is, the more fossilized and unfit for present uses it is
apt to be. And the new movement that, by its de-
lightfully vague and elastic character, promises to
engulf and erase all the old churches, usually ends by
adding but another name to the long catalogue of
petty and obscure sects. As has been aptly said,
** A novel does not escape from being a novel by
dubbing itself 'The no-name series.'" Great church
administrations, like great political bodies, are un-

208 TEE NEW WORLD AND TEE NEW TEOUGET

wieldy and undesirable. To fuse into one ecclesias-
tical body, denominations with diverse tendencies, such
as the Catholics and the Quakers, the Greek Christians
and the Congregationalists, would be a useless experi-
ment. Unite them to-day, to-morrow they would fall
apart. Even could one church absorb all the rest, it
would not be desirable. In the one spiritual body as
in the material, a variety of members, administrations
and gifts is needed. Each should be developed after
its own special aptitude, so that thus the varying needs
of our many-sided human nature might be met.

What then is needed ? It is that in all should be
shown one and the selfsame Divine Spirit, working all
in harmony. In the unity of the spirit and the bond
of peace, let each fulfil its God-appointed mission. If
any one branch of Christendom is ever to absorb all
others ; if Christendom is ever to absorb Brahmanism,
or Brahmanism to absorb Christianity, — that is some-
thing we are not yet prepared for.

If it could be brought about to-day, it would not
enrich and advance the fulijess of rehgion, but would
impoverish it. Protestantism has still too much to
learn from Catholicism and Catholicism has too much
to learn from Protestantism, and Christendom too much
to learn from the Oriental faiths, and they too much to
learn from us, to make it desirable yet awhile. As the
broad-minded Hindu, Kananda, said at the Parliament of
Religions : the motto on the banner of the religions of
the future will be : " Help, and not fight ; assimilation,
not destruction ; harmony, not dissension." Or to quote
Christian authority, as the catholic-minded apostle to
the Gentiles wrote in the first century : " If the whole

UNION OF THE CHUBCEES 209

body were an eye, where were the hearing? if the
whole were hearing, where were the smelHng ? " So
we may ask : if all Christians were conservatives, where
were progress and new growth ? If all were pioneers,
where were the rear-guard and the base of sup-
plies ?

In the midst of our nation's bitterest and bloodiest
sectional strife, Abraham Lincoln, in his Presidential
message, uttered these memorable words: "With
malice towards none, with charity for all, with firm-
ness in the right, let us strive to bind up the nation's
wound, to do all which may achieve a just and last-
ing peace among ourselves and with all nations."

It is in this spirit that the various branches of Chris-
tendom, the diverse members of the household of God,
Catholic or Protestant, Christian or pagan, should work
and seek each other's hands.

What, then, are the elements and demands of such
a unity of spirit? In the first place, all sects and
churches should give to each other mutual respect —
not mere toleration. That word tolerance is itself in-
tolerant ; a sign of patronizing conceit and narrowness.
We should give more ; we should give esteem, rever-
ence and fraternal consideration to every other servant
and worshiper of our common Father and Lawgiver.
When we know that a brother has earnestly and
honestly searched for the truth, let that be a sufficient
ground for our regard. Let the churches recognize
the value and validity of each other's ministrations.
By the same comity, by which a marriage in one state,
in accordance with its laws, is recognized also as a
marriage in neighbor states, — so should the baptism

210 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT

or admission to Christian membership or ordination
to the ministry given by one branch of the Christian
Church, be recognized as good and spiritually efficient
by all other branches.

2. Let the attention of the churches be directed to
their higher ends, not their lower mechanical and
administrative details. Let them fix their eyes and
efforts on the great things in which they agree, not on
the little things in which they differ. As Dean
Stanley has so well shown, there is a common Chris-
tianity, in which all branches of Christendom are one ;
— that love of God and man, that sacredness of duty
and hope of heaven which is what makes the gospel
dear to the human heart. The points over which the
denominations divide, — episcopacy, immaculate con-
ception of the Virgin, infallibility of the Pope, baptism
by immersion or sprinkling, inerrancy of scripture,
predestination of the elect — are points about which
Christ cared too little ever to drop a word. One of
the familiar stories is of a lady who, when asked if she
was a Christian, said she was not sure that she was a
Christian, but she was certain she was a Baptist.
How many are there similarly who care little for re-
ligion, but are ardent Presbyterians, pronounced
Methodists, bigoted Unitarians. If we are to gain any
religious unity, we must reverse this. Christians must
remember that higher and more binding than the
allegiance due to presbyter, conference, synod or
Pope, is their allegiance to Christ and to God. Above
all denominational leaders — Luther, Calvin, Wesley or
Channing — they should put their Lord and Master,
Jesus ; and above all religions, Christian and Pagan,

UNION OF THE CHURCHES 211

they should enthrone the loyalty to truth and righteous-
ness without which each loses its saving salt.

3. There are, alas, plenty of things that tend to
separate and divide the forces of religion ; but when
you scrutinize these, — be they bigotry and prejudice,

or envy, ambition, rivalry, the virus of party spirit,

they none of them properly belong within the Church.
They are werewolves of irreligion that, in the guise of
defenders of the faith once delivered to the saints, have
cunningly crept in where they have no right to be,
and in the name of the Lord are busy pulling down
the work that Christ's heart was set upon. All the
great and eternal forces of the religious realm, on the
contrary, are things that should unite, not divide
humanity. As we promote any of these, — knowledge,
righteousness, brotherly love, — we are bringing in
to its rightful recognition the religious unity of the
world.

See, for example, how the spread of knowledge,
both spiritual and scientific, tends to unity. How
many of the old barriers and arbitrary interpretations
and blighting worship of the letter has modern Bib-
lical criticism swept out of the way ; and how many
dark cobwebs of antiquated theology, that filled pious
hearts with black despair, has science cleared off from
the windows of faith ! When Christian missionaries
go to the heathen with theologies almost as baseless
and superstitious as the heathen's own, they knock in
vain for entrance. The shrewd pagans say, as a clever
Japanese did to an orthodox missionary : " We have
enough devils and hells of our own to believe in al-
ready, without adding any foreign ones." But if our

212 TEE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT

missionaries, instead, would carry with them the light
of modern knowledge and diffuse our demonstrable
science of the universe and its laws, this would, in a
generation, melt away this vast ice-sheet of supersti-
tions and false theories which form the foundation of
their native idolatries and polytheisms. If we ever
hope to supersede Paganism by Christianity or estab-
lish any religious fraternity and affiliation of the two,
this is the path by which we must secure it. To
evolve and ripen the truly Catholic or Universal
Church, we must get illumination and sunshine from
all quarters. They who think that from their single,
personal or denominational standpoint they can see
the whole circumference and fix the exact position
and outline of absolute truth, show that they have
still much to learn. There is a lesson on this point
that the scientific world might give the Church.
When a great phenomenon, such as the transit of
Venus, takes place, no single astronomer nor any one
astronomical observatory is conceited enough to think
it can do the whole work satisfactorily, single-handed.
They club their resources. They portion out the con-
tinent, and each group of astronomers proceeds to a
different point of observation, before agreed upon, in
friendly cooperation. Then, after the observation is
taken, the personal equation — that is, the allowance
for error, in noting the time, due to the individual
peculiarities of each observer — is carefully allowed
for. Then, the various observations are compared
and one rectified by the others, and correction also
made for the latitude and longitude and state of the
atmosphere at each respective point of observation,

UNION OF THE CHURCHES . 213

and finally the whole added and averaged. It is only
by such cooperation and mutual rectification of one
another's tendencies to error that astronomers secure
results that they put any confidence in. And so, be-
fore the religious world can demand confidence in its
spiritual perceptions, it must take equal care to elimi-
nate from them the twists and refractions of personal
idiosyncrasies and sectarian prejudices. It must be
hospitable minded and ready to accept new truth and
fuller hght from whatever quarter it may be gained.
" The spirit (the Christian Union has well said) that in-
sists that every man shall see what every other man
teaches, — no more, no less, no different, — is the spirit
of schism. It is unchristian, and anti-Christian, be-
cause it is the spirit of conceit. It belittles truth ; it
divides and subdivides the Christian Church. It never
has promoted Christian union, and it never can."

The method that leads there is the opposite one^
that encourages every soul to exercise that right of
private judgment which Luther vindicated, and is glad
to see Mount Zion pictured from just as many diverse
angles as possible, knowing that thus alone can a
complete representation of the infinite truth be ob-
tained.

And in the next place, as a fourth step in this
staircase, we should place the stone of righteousness,

the practical service of our God and our fellow-men.

While a man's chief thought is for his own soul's sal-
vation, he clutches at any solitary plank that may
float him on the wave; but when he gets to that
higher view of religion that identifies the holy life
with the helpful life, at once he reaches out a brotherly

214 ^ THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT

hand to his neighbor. Jesus said that the second
commandment is hke unto, or born of, the first ; and
surely no one can be trusted to love the God he has
not seen, if he love not the brother he has seen.
Where there is that enthusiasm for humanity which
befits the follower of Him who wished to be called the
Son of Man, there the interest in dogmatic hair-split-
ting drops to the proper subordination. When we
realize what the fight with evil means to-day ; what
Christians have got to do when they undertake vigor-
ously to grapple with the saloon question, the Sunday
question, the problem of poverty and abuse of child-
hood ; when we get in earnest in the work of eleva-
ting our race, of suppressing vice, of inspiring men
with a genuine love of purity and with Hving faith in
their kinship to the Eternal Spirit and to each other,
— then we see that we have no time for denomina-
tional quarrels ; we see that these common needs of
suffering humanity call for the united energies of all
the Lord's soldiers if we ever expect to establish the
kingdom of God on earth ; ^nd instead of the present
emulation to make converts from one another or get a
longer list of church members, the only rivalry will
be a rivalry in bettering the world and an emulation
of each other's virtues.

For many generations the mediaeval alchemists
sought for a universal solvent. In the physical realm,
the search is a vain one. But in the spiritual realm,
we need not go far for it. Love is that universal
solvent which unloosens all bonds ; a tincture that
carries with it healing for every wound. With this
password, one should be able to pass through every

UmON OF THE CHUECEES 215

interdenominational camp and army and find himself
everywhere a citizen of the Divine kingdom. With-
out love, belief, be it never so close to the creed, is
but sounding brass and a tinkling cymbal. And so
religious unity, however huge be the single organiza-
tion formed, however tight be the bonds of its univer-
sal Church, would be (when love is absent) but an
ecclesiastical tyranny; an iron band, fatal to every
growing shoot of the living vine. But where there is
a positive Christian love, a spirit of sympathy and
helpfulness to every neighbor, — what can bar out such
a spirit from the holy communion? Suppose that
your religious brethren give you only their indiffer-
ence or hate. You can still give them the guerdon of
your charity, the fragrant olive branch of your un-
stinted good will. There is an excellent New Eng-
land story of an old Puritan, who, when he was ex-
communicated by the Church, declined to be cut off
from their communion. For twenty years the good
old man came, whenever the Lord's Supper was ob-
served, bringing with him his own bit of bread and
draught of wine, and in his own pew communed with
the Church in spite of the Deacon's boycott. When
a man carries the Christ-spirit with him, the fellowship
of all the saints becomes his. Love is a communion-
cup, which it needs no priest to fill, and which always
gives the good man membership in the Church invisi-
ble, whatever the Church visible may say.

Such, then, are the needed seeds of religious unity ;

regard for essentials — not inessentials; mutual

respect; devotion to knowledge and righteousness;
and above all, a broad charity and friendly sympathy.

216 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT

Without these, no ecclesiastical fusions, no hierarchical
organization, however extensive or compact, can give
a religious unity that is worth anything. The pro-
motion of this broad Christian spirit is the first and
chief step. But where these spiritual roots are planted
and made to grow, there they will naturally bloom
and bear fruit in some sort of practical fraternity ; and
the encouragement of such outward fellowship again
will foster and quicken the inward fellowship. It
ought to lead at once to a large measure of cooper-
ation. The smaller and kindred sects, whose differ-
ences are slight, ought to be willing to consolidate.
The seventeen kinds of Methodists and the thirteen
kinds of Baptists and the twelve kinds of Presby-
terians, holding beliefs and usages substantially the
same, might unite, one would think, without any
serious sacrifice, and with a great saving of needless
rivalry and waste. The same is true among the
liberal churches. The difference between Unitarians
and Universalists is one altogether too slight to justify
their continued separation and rivalship. Where the
kindred sects can thus honorably consolidate, let them
do so. They ought to do so. And where this is not
possible, let them try such looser methods of alliance
as may bring them into harmony, without sacrificing
what they consider essential principles. Following
the political example of the union of our several
states in the one United States, they might (without
abandoning their independent liberties and local or
special administrations) unite in federal unions, of
most valuable kinds. Such movements as the Evan-
gelic Alliance, the Pan-Presbyterian Assemblies, the

UNION OF TEE CHURCHES 217

Church Congresses of later years are all commendable
efforts in this direction. Without gaining legislative
authority, such Congresses carry weightier moral
authority and cultivate the unity of spirit and practical
cooperation which is so valuable to-day. Still more ex-
cellent, because more filled with the spirit of a genuine
catholicity, is the Laymen's League of our Western
frontier, and the Brotherhood of Christian Unity
started recently in New York by Professor Seward,
and our Father's Church, instituted by the Rev. Page
Hopps, of London. In these latter, all dogmatic
tenets are dropped ; love to God and man under the
leadership of Jesus is the only creed, and orthodox
and heterodox alike are invited to membership. No
one is asked to give up his special denominational
connection, but for the sake of practical Christian
effort, they associate themselves on a perfectly simple
basis without regard to evangelical creeds. What
may be the future of these new and broader fellow-
ships that would stretch their lines across all denomi-
nations, remains to be seen. But as far as they can
bring Christians into helpful cooperation for the bet-
terment of human life, they must do good. Hence-
forth I hope to see all branches of Christendom peri-
odically meeting in some general assembly, for mutual
fraternity, counsel and inspiration ; and the grand
Parliament of Religions may, I trust, prove to be but
the first of a series of similar conferences, a federation
of the religious world, both Christian and Pagan, to
advance the great interests they have in common.
But without waiting for any such imposing assem-
blages or new organizations, there is a work for each

218 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT

Christian close at hand, quite as important. In all
our cities and towns there is a need and opportunity,
without more ado, for friendly co-working among aU
sects. There are moral reforms, social problems, calls
of human misery, educational and philanthropic enter-
prises that demand the collected efforts of all Christian
hearts, without distinction of sect or faith. In our
smaller villages, certainly, steps ought to be taken
either for the direct union of the many poverty-
stricken chapels that struggle with each other for ex-
istence ; or else for their dissolution and reconstruction
on some honorable basis which will provide for freedom
and fellowship in worship.

Whatever dogmatism or sectarian ambition divides
and impoverishes the forces that are battling to main-
tain righteousness and uplift humanity is a form of
anti-Christ. Whatever can bring these forces into
closer union and a firmer front ; whatever can make the
people learn to think of the church as one body in
many members, — be it pulpit exchanges between the
clergy of different denominations ; city Ministerial As-
sociations, or State Conferences of religion, embracing
all denominations ; union meetings for prayer or
thanksgiving ; common communion-services, open to
members of all denominations of Christians, without
invidious distinctions, — any signal of a broader good-
will between the churches, erasing sectarian divisions,
however trivial it may be, is helping forward the prayer
of the Master that " they all may be one."

Of one blood, says Paul, are we all made. With
God, the common Father, there is no respect of per-
sons. One and the same heaven is the haven of peace

UNION OF TEE CHURCHES i: 219

and love we all seek. Back of every varied soul and
symbol stands the one Holy Spirit, by whose in-
spiration the holy men that founded each diverse
church spake as they were moved in their respective
age and land. No path of prayer but has lifted men
nearer God ; no creed has man framed but was as the
broken lispings of an infant, beside the unutterable
perfection of the Divine.

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